The Starving Years (16 page)

A few burly cops waded through the crowd, attempting to somehow group them. The bullhorn crackled. “Children, there by the tree—children will be seen first. Anyone under eighteen, line up by the tree. One parent per child only. Anyone older than eighteen who tries to sneak in line will be fined….”

People broke from the crowd, carrying or dragging their sons and daughters. Broken bones, fevers, Javier expected issues like that. But none of the children seemed incapacitated. In fact, they were all screaming or struggling. And there was blood—lots of blood. Its source…Javier couldn’t see. It was on his blind side, and he needed to watch where he was going, and especially, to keep Nelson from keeling over.

He guided Nelson to a pocket of space among the surging people, and pulled him closer. “You’re trembling.”

“It’s just my meds. Don’t worry. Mentally, I’m unshakable. A pillar. A rock.”

A likely story, given the way he’d nearly lost it in the morgue. Javier put an arm around his waist. Nelson mirrored the move, and slipped his hand into Javier’s back pocket.

Javier rolled his eyes. Exasperating. Cute…but exasperating. “You’ve obviously mistaken this whole fiasco for a singles bar.”

“I wouldn’t know—don’t really go for the whole disco-glitter-dance party scene.” He gave a tentative squeeze. “Something tells me you don’t, either.”

A woman rushed by, clasping a toddler to her chest. She knocked Nelson into Javier, and Javier into the side of the building, and she ricocheted off them and kept on running like she hadn’t even felt it. She probably hadn’t. Nelson pressed his back into the side of the building and looked both ways to wait for another clear shot that would take them closer to the truck, and he slipped his hand into Javier’s. Javier squeezed back. “The phone number’s real,” Javier said.

Nelson squeezed harder and smiled to himself.

“What will you do now?” Javier asked.

“Go back downtown with Tim and get myself home from there. Get some sleep. Drink lots of water. Try to get my brain chemistry back to normal. Distract Bobby and his grandmother with a few hands of gin rummy while we’re waiting for Tuyet to come home.”

Javier recalled the wedding ring on Kevin’s finger. “Bobby’s biological father…is it Kevin?”

“I see you’ve been paying attention.”

“You all go back that far?”

“And farther. Kev and I enrolled in a summer grad school exchange that took us all through Asia—but we’d known each other forever. Grew up down the street from each other. Same class from kindergarten on, all the way through Post-Bacc. But that summer…that’s where we met Tuyet.”

“And Kevin couldn’t put his mark on Bobby, because he already had a child.”

Nelson tore his eyes off the crowd and regarded Javier with some surprise. “Extra credit for you.”

“You gave your mark to someone you just met who was carrying another man’s child?”

“What else was I gonna do with the damn thing? Besides, she needed it way more than I did. She was even poorer than me, so she couldn’t afford to have a bastard. Especially over there—not only heavy fines, but social stigma like you wouldn’t believe. She would’ve spent the rest of her life as a two-dollar whore. All ’cos Kevin conveniently left his wedding band in his suitcase, and one of Tuyet’s pals told her American women were all sterilized, the men all wanted babies, and all of us were filthy rich.” Nelson pulled Javier into a thin spot in the crowd, and together they gained a few hundred yards toward the place where their friends were hopefully still waiting.
 

They backed against a wall to let an ambulance scream by. “Turned out to be a win-win,” Nelson said. “My mother thinks I’m a big failure—all that education and a shit job to show for it—my dad ditched us when I was twelve. Huh. Bobby’s age. So the Phams are my family now. A pretty weird family…but what’s life without a little variety?”

He slipped his hand into Javier’s again and squeezed his fingers. “So. What’s your story?”

Javier scanned the crowd for a gap, then dragged Nelson into it without answering. His story? He hardly knew where to begin. If he could encapsulate his life into a few pithy phrases, he’d probably say he had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that would have made it sound as if he felt sorry for himself when, in fact, he was certain that every last hardship he’d faced, he’d managed to bring onto himself.

Someone slammed into Javier’s shoulder, and someone else nearly knocked Nelson off his feet—but then, all of a sudden, they were in the clear. Javier began to run, but he kept hold of Nelson’s hand. Nelson kept up with only a bit of drag, and before they knew it they were around the corner and heading toward the truck.

The back doors flew open before they even reached the vehicle, and Marianne hopped out. “What happened? Was it her?”

“It wasn’t her,” Nelson said, and he scooped Marianne up and treated her to a wobbly-kneed spin around.

“Thank God,” she said. “Oh, thank God.”

Randy gave Javier a hand up into the back of the truck. They’d collapsed a few of the boxes and covered the stacked cardboard with blankets to make a kind of bench while they were waiting. “Here’s some water,” Randy said. “It’s…cleanish. We all drank from it, anyway.” Javier sat and Randy handed him a fast food cup. He drank—and he hadn’t realized how thirsty he’d been until he did. “And there’s manna. Nothing to heat it up with, but it’s rice-flavored. Not too bad plain and cold.”

“Too bad we lost my Exotic Spices box set back by the job fair,” Marianne said. “We could’ve put some curry on it.”

Javier glanced at Tim, who was crouching in the entrance to the cab, before he took a piece of manna. “May I?”

“What? Oh, yeah, of course. I’m just sorry I…I mean, I didn’t really think about how it might taste. It had a good shelf life.”

Nelson held the foil pack out for Javier to take a slice, then took one himself, stuffed it in his mouth and swallowed it without chewing. “Preservatives. They don’t list ’em on the package, but when you see the ‘pantry packs’ like this one that don’t need any refrigeration, they’re made with nitrates, sulfides, BHA, BHT….” He popped another slice into his mouth and swallowed.

Tim said, “Is that bad?”

Nelson shrugged. “Not unless you’re sensitive to it. Sometimes I get headaches from the sulfides. They’re real strict in France, gotta label everything. But not here. Not since the Pure Food Act. Which is pretty ironic, since that’s what lets the manna makers put whatever the hell they want in their mix, as long as it’s less than point six seven percent by weight…and they can jack up that proportion by adding water.”

Javier squeezed the manna between his thumb and forefinger. It was moist, and not too springy. His mother would faint to see him eating with his hands—and not because he’d just waded through the morgue and hadn’t had anywhere to wash them. There were
manners
at stake.

He shoved the entire slice into his mouth just as Nelson had, chewed it a few times, and swallowed. The manna slid right down, as raw manna, with its smooth, soft texture, usually did. Why had Nelson needed to bring up families? That chapter of Javier’s life was over and done. The door was locked, and the key not simply thrown away, but melted down into a puddle of iron and slag. So why relive it?

“It does kinda taste like rice,” Nelson said through another mouthful.

“That’s what flavor it is,” Marianne said.
 

“No, I mean real rice.
Bà ngoai
makes it. The grain, not the flavor.”

Everyone stared at the mostly-eaten foil packet of off-white manna as if they were trying to picture it as a bunch of fussy little grains, and failing.

“Here’s the deal,” Randy said, as Nelson finished the last piece of manna. “Tim’s gonna drop me off at home while we’re up here, then swing back south and hit Marianne’s place, and then….”

Javier had no intention of going back to his empty room. He hadn’t stolen the data from a Canaan Products hard drive to go slinking back with his tail between his legs just because Tim wasn’t attracted to him offline. Although Tim had been the one to slide his tongue into Javier’s mouth…so maybe, once they were alone, he could be convinced to participate in a private celebration about whatever that hard drive contained. Javier looked at Tim and said, “The plans we made—they haven’t changed. Have they?”

Tim’s eyes darted around to see if any of his other passengers had somehow gleaned their project of exposing Canaan Products for the evil it was from the word
plans
, though of course none of them had. “Yeah. Totally. We’ll go back to my place and…get right on that.”

Randy made the “bomp-chicka-wow-wow” porno music sound, complete with “you’re gonna get it on” head motion—then laughed, clapped Tim on the shoulder, and said, “So let’s hit the road. I’m dying to rinse off in my own shower, crawl into my own bed, suck on the big bottle of tequila I keep in my freezer, and watch infomercials ’til I pass out.”

Randy rode shotgun to direct Tim to his place. Marianne sat on the makeshift cardboard bench beside Javier, then Nelson situated himself between the two of them and rested his head on her shoulder. She took his hand and stroked it. “You call me when this is all over,” he said to her. “We’ll hang out.”

“I’d like that.”

“Is it safe at your place? You can stay with me ’til it blows over if you’re alone.”

“No, I’ve got a doorman. If someone walks me in, it’ll be okay. That thing Randy said about sleeping in his own bed? I feel the same way.”

“That tequila didn’t sound half-bad, either.” Nelson dropped his other hand onto Javier’s thigh. He was persistent. Javier gave him that much.

The truck rocked over a rough patch of road and boxes shifted. It seemed that they were making good enough time, though. An hour, maybe less, traffic permitting, and Javier would be alone with Tim.

Nelson’s hand slid higher. He caressed Javier’s inseam with two fingers while he kept chatting with Marianne, perfectly innocent. “So, back at that job fair…were you trying to upgrade your job, or you’re totally out of work, or what?”

“Oh, I just have a dumb administrative assistant job. It’s boring and it just barely pays the rent. Maybe I’ll move back to Florida. I thought it would be exciting to live in New York, but it’s really just rough and mean and so expensive it blows my mind.”

Nelson shifted his hand higher still, and stroked the inside of Javier’s thigh just a few centimeters away from his balls. Javier clapped his hand over Nelson’s, and shot his mother’s best withering look. Nelson was entirely unfazed by it. He smiled a temptingly naughty smile, leaned into Javier, and whispered in his ear with his lips brushing Javier’s earlobe, “You could always come back to my place instead. I can think of all kinds of ‘projects’ for us to…work on.”

“Just because everything’s a euphemism to you doesn’t mean—”

The truck’s tires squealed, and Javier fell into Nelson hard, as boxes of manna thumped down all around them. Marianne shrieked, and Nelson folded himself around her protectively. “Hold on,” Tim called from the front, while Randy shouted, “Holy shit!”

The truck leapt back in reverse. “Roadblock…or something,” Randy called. “Cop cars and…maybe an accident? And people…fuck, I dunno, something really shit the bed.”

“It’s fine,” Tim said, “we’re fine, we’re going around it.”

Shift—forward—a huge bump, and a box fell sideways, broke open, and spilled packets of T-shirts, socks and underwear across the truck bed. “We’re on the sidewalk.” Randy sounded panicked.

“We’re fine,” Tim shouted over him.

Hardly. Javier crawled over Nelson and Marianne and the tumble of boxes to crouch in the cab entrance and see for himself. The street hurtled past in a blur. Cops, lots of cops. Riot gear. Focused on a single building—Javier recognized that building; they were only a few blocks away from his father’s work site. Public housing, with the residents milling around outside and the cops in riot gear holding them back. And dead center, two huge officers hauling a child from his mother’s arms, while the mother clung, screaming, until a solid rap to the head with a nightstick collapsed her into a crumpled heap on the pavement.
 

One cop carried the child toward a paddy wagon while the others waded into the crowd, zeroing in on a wailing man…no, wait, it was the adolescent girl beside him.

Tim executed a jerky three-point turn and now the truck faced away from the crowd. The street was just like the rest of the streets they’d encountered—completely deserted, punctuated by clusters of panicked people. Tim swung onto a side street, and braked when he spotted an orange-striped sawhorse with a pair of shotgun-wielding cops on either side. He punched it into reverse, backed onto the main artery, and tried the next street. It was blocked, too.

“Oh shit,” Randy said, quietly now, and completely dismayed.

Tim headed back toward Bellevue, but after another two blocks, stopped hard. A spike strip had been stretched across the road, and a jumble of cars with torn-out tires now blocked the route.

“They’re herding traffic back toward the projects,” Randy said.

Reverse. Turn. Now there was a spike strip behind them, too.

“There,” Javier said. He pointed to a one-way street. Tim cast around for somewhere to go, as if the realization that no matter how recklessly he was willing to drive, it might not be enough to get them out of the snare. Javier leaned toward him and repeated in a tone that was impossible to ignore, “Turn left. Now.”

Tim floored it, and flew up the street the wrong way. “Left again,” Javier said. “Now right. The construction site. There. Stop there.”

“Where?”

“The driveway.”

“But it’s locked.”

“Go. And honk your horn.”

Tim swung into the driveway and stopped inches from the chain link gate. He beeped the horn once.

“Not like that.” Javier reached over his shoulder and laid on the horn, hard. He held it there until a construction worker with a heavy two-foot pry bar in his hand emerged from the security trailer. The worker kept his distance, squinting at the old truck as if he was worried it was some kind of scam.