The Starving Years (30 page)

“Hey, do you know a white guy? He lives here? Do you speak English? I’m looking for his kid.”

Randy stopped yelling, Tim realized, while he’d been zed on the plastic pack of diapers getting caught on a brick, damming the flow of the water, then breaking free when the force of the water dislodged it and floating behind a car. Randy yanked Tim’s arm. A punk Asian girl with soot on her face and a pink streak in her hair who’d stopped to answer his questions had turned away from him. She walked away from him with a cell phone to one ear and the other ear plugged, shouting into the tiny receiver as she tried to get a signal.

Randy was pointing at something on the sidewalk to one side of the Red Cross tent. Maybe another tent that was being put up. Erected. Pitched. Whatever the word was.

Randy shook Tim again. Harder this time. “Hey! Are you freaking out?”

Tim looked at the gutter-river to see if he could figure out where the diapers had gone.

Randy shook him so hard his teeth rattled, and yelled in his ear, “Don’t you fucking freak out—I can’t do this alone.”

Randy, big Randy, with his bruised face and his glued-in tooth. Randy needed him. Tim blinked, took a long, slow breath, acrid with smoke and burnt plastic, and nodded. “I’m okay.”

“Okay.” Randy stared at Tim for a long moment, searching. He had very green eyes. His bruised cheekbone and jaw were nearly the same color as his irises. “Okay.”

He spun Tim around to the yards of plastic on the ground, over by the Red Cross tent. “Then let’s get over there and look. Because I can’t think of a politically correct way to say it—but I don’t think I can pick Nelson’s kid out of a bunch of other Chinese.”

“Vietnamese,” Tim said, though the word was lost among the car alarms and the wailing and the sounds of rushing water. Although maybe that was for the best, because their neighbors were probably Chinese, so maybe Randy was actually sort of right.

Randy hauled him over to the unpitched tent that wasn’t actually a tent at all, but rather a bunch of brown plastic tarps covering the sidewalk. There were more injured people than Tim had realized—so many of them were lying on the ground, waiting for the medics to see to them.

“Oh my God,” Randy said. “I can’t….”

So many people. Tim supposed it made sense that there’d be a lot of people. The apartments were small, and numerous, and most of them held multiple generations, or more than one family.

Randy let go of Tim’s arm and took a few steps toward them. He was saying something, yelling, but the sound of it was swallowed up by the sirens.

So many people waiting. Patiently waiting. So still. Sleeping. Though how they could sleep through all that noise was anyone’s guess.

How they could sleep blackened with smoke, and their limbs torn off.

Randy staggered to the gutter and vomited.

Tim stared at an empty sleeve, red with blood and black with soot. Dead. Of course. He understood it—part of him did, anyway—but most of him just thought everything going on around him was all very, very peculiar.

The sirens grew even louder, but then words formed, Randy yelling again, yelling for the children.

Tim walked away from him, stepped over the man with the empty sleeve, and began to check each body carefully. He’d only met Nelson’s Vietnamese family once, but if he concentrated, he could recall enough detail to go through and eliminate these people. A woman, too old. Another woman, too plump. Most of the Asian women on the tarp were thin, but Nelson’s mother-in-law was particularly petite. Birdlike. She’d had her hair in that tight ponytail…though of course the ponytail could have come undone. And she’d been wearing that…sweatshirt.

The Knicks sweatshirt.

“Randy?” Tim whispered.

The floaty, shock-induced bubble Tim had been lingering in came crashing down all around him at the sight of the poor woman’s face. She didn’t look like she was sleeping. Not at all.

“Randy!” he cried.

“Is that…oh no. No, no, no.” Randy hauled on Tim’s arm and dragged him out from the sea of burnt and broken corpses. Making it back to the truck was straightforward enough, but finding the key seemed to be another matter entirely. The lock pre-dated keychain power locks—you needed to insert an actual key, and turn it. Tim tried to jam a key in, and realized it wasn’t going anywhere because it was the key to his front door. His mailbox. His laundry room.

Randy snatched the keys out of his hand, found the car key and opened the door. “Are you even good to drive? Shit, we should have brought the scotch, I’d pour you a shot or two.”

“I don’t drink.”

“And I’d hold your nose and make you swallow it. Come on, snap out of it.” Randy climbed in the driver’s side, then ducked into the back. “And it never occurred to you to stock up on some normal-sized bottles of water? These water cooler things…not exactly convenient.”

Tim climbed into the cab and pulled the door shut. “Who has water at all? Me or you?”

“I’m just saying.”

Tim glanced in the rear-view and saw a disheveled man wandering up the street, stopping at every car and trying the door to see if it opened. He locked his door and pressed his forehead into the steering wheel, taking deep, cleansing breaths, in an attempt to stop seeing the very dead look on the face of Nelson’s mother-in-law every time he closed his eyes.

In the back, water glugged out of a five-gallon bottle. The door latch clicked as the wandering man tried it, and Tim flinched, but waited a moment before he raised his head to look up. The man was gone, not even noticing that there’d been someone inside the truck; he was already at the car in front of them, trying the door. Looking for something to steal, or somewhere to hide? Or maybe going through the motion for some reason he didn’t understand, because when the world turned into a bad Sunday afternoon horror movie marathon, what did anyone do?

“Here, drink this.” Randy nudged the plastic cup into Tim’s shoulder until he took it, and drank. He hadn’t realized he was thirsty. The water tasted sweet against the smoke that coated his tongue and throat. “Better?”

“Yeah, better.”
 

They both sat and stared out the windshield for a minute or two, and finally Randy said, “Did you see Nelson’s kid back there?”

Tim shook his head, no.

“Because I was talking to one of the cops,” Randy said. “He told me they took all the kids to The Tombs.”

“To
jail
?”

“That’s what he said. He said they’re sick…but not all of them. And they’re trying to get them sorted out, release the ones who aren’t, the ones who pass some kind of test, if there’s someone there to sign for them.”

“Nelson’s boy….”

“Bobby. He called him Bobby.”

The Manhattan Detention Complex was only a few blocks away. Maybe they’d taken the children there to keep them safe during the emergency. Safe from people like the guy who’d just broken into the car at the end of the block. “We’ve got to be missing something,” Tim said. “You can’t just go and sign out children.”

“They probably don’t have enough space to keep them all. I don’t know. That’s just what he said, that they’re signing out the ones who aren’t sick. Look, we know where he is. We’ve done all we can do here. Let’s go.”

“But who’s going to sign him out?” Tim said. “His mother, his grandmother—they’re all…. Who’s left?”

“We’ll get Nelson.”

“He’s tripping all over the place on his meds. We’re only a few blocks away—look, you can see it from here. By the time Nelson wakes up and we get him back down here, any freak or pervert off the street could go and….”

“All right, I get the picture.” Randy pulled out his cell phone and checked to see if it was working, shook his head, and slipped it back in his pocket. “I think it’s a long shot. But you’re right. We need to at least try.”

***

Nelson’s leg kicked a few times. Fucking jimmy-leg. Maybe he should take up tap-dancing and give it something useful to do. The sun was bright—who the hell opened his blinds? And then the sniffling and sobbing, Tuyet crying. Again.

All the explaining in the world just couldn’t bring her around to the idea that she didn’t actually need to fit in. Who the fuck cared if the airheads at work thought she was dumb? How many of them spoke two languages? And who cared what that bitter, single, middle-aged laundry lady at the end of the hall thought of their living arrangement, either?

Despite the numerous times Nelson had broken out the Vietnamese-English dictionary to try to explain why it shouldn’t matter what other people did or didn’t approve of, Tuyet still cared. It wasn’t a language thing. It was a cultural thing. And probably a gender thing, too.
 

And a frequent enough cause of distress that Nelson’s vocabulary had become pretty fluent when he murmured his soothing nonsense about it. “Don’t cry, Tuyet,” he said in Vietnamese. “You’re beautiful. Your son is awesome. Our life is good.”

“Nelson? What are you saying?”

Nelson opened his eyes—Tuyet’s thick accent had disappeared awfully fast—and then closed them again. Bright. His right leg spasmed, then his left. And the last few days came rushing back. “Marianne?”

Arms around him, girl-arms, and Marianne clasped his head to her chest and wept against the top of his head. He’d been out for maybe twelve hours. His hair was greasy and he stunk from serotonin-sweats and hookups. And she didn’t give a rat’s ass.

“Hey, hey…” he switched his comfort-mode to English with some effort. Reality still seemed a bit slippery at the moment. “You’re okay. We’re okay.”

“You’re finally awake,” she slobbered into his hair.

“More or less. Shh, c’mon. Calm down.” He ran his palms up and down her back. He couldn’t quite feel her shoulder blades the way he could with Tuyet or Bobby, but she was almost as small and frail, especially compared to the adults of the male persuasion he usually had his arms around. Her crying ebbed, but didn’t cease entirely. He turned his head to peek over her shoulder and reorient himself. “This is a new one. Where are we?”

“They put us in a backhoe.”

Nelson squelched the urge to say,
I know you are, but what am I?
since he didn’t have a dollar to spare for the cliché jar. He pushed against the back of the bucket seat just enough to get a peek out the window. The construction site looked the same as he’d remembered it, minus the yellow truck. “Where’s Tim?”

Marianne made a keening noise, then started sobbing again. Nelson’s medulla dumped some wiggy adrenaline into his system to compete with all the happy-sappy serotonin and treat his poor system to a puketastic hormone war.

Hormone. He half-remembered the manna epiphany he’d had on his serotonin-trip, and shoved it aside. “Seriously, where’s Tim?”

Marianne snuffled up her tears and spun a truly whacked story about Javier impersonating Tim, Tim and Randy taking off, and the DLR foreman stashing them in the backhoe because the cops had been in and out of the construction site all day.

“And Tim and Randy left…why?”

Marianne drew a breath to answer…and started bawling again. Nelson pulled out his VOIP phone to see if there were any emails from Bobby or Kevin. No signal. But there was a cigarette lighter in the dashboard, and the thought of someone smoking a cigarette while driving a backhoe struck him as funny—even though he was fairly certain there was absolutely nothing to laugh about. He pulled out the lighter, then configured his geeky three-way phone charger to allow car charging and stuck it in the dash.

He was itching to duck back into the office, hop online, and see what new shitstorm had kicked up since he’d swallowed the Peritriptan. But he wasn’t up to answering any cop-related questions—and not only that, but dueling tremors in his legs were raging back and forth, and the backhoe cab dipped and swayed every time he moved his head. Being a useless invalid sucked ass. And not in a good way.

He gazed out at the construction site and spotted a cheerfully plastic Canaan Products manna wrapper wind-plastered to chain link fence, and said, “I spy with my little eye…”

“How can you fool around at a time like this?”

“…something that begins with a W.”

Marianne cried for another moment or two, then lifted her head, looked around through her swollen, red-rimmed eyes, took a tremulous breath, and said, “Windshield?”

Chapter 28

Tim had heard stories about the Manhattan Detention Center from his activist friends, the type who not only handed out pamphlets on HIV awareness and legalizing gay marriage, but the type who’d chain themselves to trees, or streak into a live newscast with a cryptic protest message scrawled in lipstick across their bare ass.

They’d told him The Tombs was dehumanizing. They’d told him that the scumbags in the cells used the sinks as urinals, even though there was a toilet in every cell (conveniently located where everyone could see you using it.) They’d told him about the endless flights of stairs that make you feel like you’re going down, down, down into the bowels of the earth.

They hadn’t mentioned the aura of resigned acceptance the staff seemed to have about working there. Riot? Explosion? A sudden influx of screaming, bloody, potentially contaminated children? Just another day in the life of Lower Manhattan.

Randy and Tim had been at The Tombs, standing in a line for nearly two and a half hours…only to determine it was the wrong line.

“Are you kidding me?” Randy said.
 

The desk clerk didn’t make eye contact. She looked over his shoulder wearily, and said, “Next.”

“Ma’am,” he said, in a tone of voice that conveyed far more impatience than respect, “We’ve been here since this morning. Is there any possible way you can have us seen without standing in another one of these—”

“Next.”

“Come on,” Tim said, dragging Randy to the back of the second line. Which they stood in for three more hours. The dazed shock that had come over Tim at Nelson’s apartment had slowly dissipated, but now he needed to urinate. Badly. He didn’t dare step out of line to do it, even with Randy there to hold his place. They were deep within a maze of vinyl ropes, and there’d be no way for Tim to squeeze by the other people in line without stepping on a lot of toes…and the other people in line were easily as desperate and edgy as they were.