by Melanie Tem
Chapter 12
“You’re just like the rest of them. You think you’re such hot shit.”
Deborah had climbed up under the bridge abutment, which wasn’t easy because her feet kept slipping and the gravel hurt her knees and she didn’t want to touch the ground with her hands because who knew what disgusting stuff was on it but she had to keep her balance with the baby making her heavier in front than she ought to be. When she doubled over, the baby moved, kicked her. It already wanted to be boss. She’d show it who was boss.
She flattened herself against the riverbank as hard as she could with her stomach sticking out like that, deliberately imagining what might be there (human shit, rat shit, garbage, snot, come), deliberately making herself sick. Not sick enough. The slope was too steep and she slid backward, clawed, broke a couple of nails, and got her hands filthy. The gravel hurt where it ground into her hands and stomach and, she fantasized, into the baby. Maybe the baby would be born with gravel marks on its forehead. Or, if it was a boy, with the claw-shaped, crescent-shaped cut already on its stomach so she wouldn’t have to do it. But she knew it wasn’t a boy.
She pulled herself and the baby as far she could up into the narrow angle where the bridge was anchored into the riverbank. Probably snakes lived in here. Rats. Giant pale cockroaches. Maybe some kind of mutant street people without cocks or cunts, without souls.
Were-rats, she thought, and laughed. Were-roaches. Were-bums. She made herself imagine in great detail the baby in her womb—perfect little curved black fingernails and toenails, rosebud mouth making a tiny pocket for the tiny fangs, fur coating its developing body inside and out. Her laughter echoed from the bottom of the bridge, back and forth between the bridge and the water until it didn’t sound much like laughter. Defiantly, Deborah laughed again.
“You’re just like everybody else,” she yelled again at Julian. “You don’t understand shit!”
Julian had been standing still in one place for a long time. He did that. He stood or sat in one place for a long time, perfectly still, until she thought he was asleep or doing some weird kind of meditation thing, or dead. It drove her crazy, how quiet he could be, how peaceful.
Now he was standing with his back to the Platte River, which sparkled with all kinds of reflections from the pinkish-orange streetlights, red and yellow and white headlights and taillights and turn signals of cars, stoplights yellow and red and green and yellow again. A plane was coming in for landing, buzzing loudly; for some reason, being able to see its dull gray underbelly made her feel close to it, as if it would land in her, and there were steady white lights on its nose and red on the tips of its wings. For a minute she was sure it was going to crash and spill out all over her whatever was inside it (people, fuel, the insides of people’s luggage).
The sky was dark blue with pink. On one edge of it were the downtown buildings, a lot of them mirrored so that no matter how many times Deborah looked at them her first thought was always that maybe they were holes in the sky and something else was showing through. On the other edge were the darker, solid, red-brick buildings of the college.
If there was a moon, she couldn’t see it. Vaguely she remembered that the moon was always there and that it didn’t have any light of its own, but she didn’t know where to look for it. Even a new moon, invisible so you had to take it on faith, was still a moon. It could be anywhere and she wouldn’t know.
Her mother wouldn’t know, either. Her mother didn’t know anything, wouldn’t let herself know anything, human or wolf. Her mother was such a chicken-shit. It made Deborah livid with fury and disgust. She was not going to be like that. She would be something.
She didn’t know whether her grandmother Ruth would know or not. She used to know stuff, Deborah thought, but it was as if she hadn’t pushed hard enough for long enough. Now she’d gotten old and senile, or maybe Deborah had just grown up enough to see through her. Deborah couldn’t tell how her grandmother’s mind worked, and she just tried to stay away from her. When they did run into each other, they stared and then looked away as if they didn’t know each other, or didn’t want to.
Nana would know, but Nana wouldn’t tell her anything anymore. Nana had gotten so weird lately. She’d gone someplace Deborah couldn’t follow, turned into something Deborah couldn’t reach, although Deborah had the distinct impression that it wouldn’t take much now for her to be able to learn, at last, all the things Nana knew and was keeping secret from her.
Nana used to say that a woman’s blood and tears followed the moon the same way the oceans did. Deborah had never entirely believed that the moon way up there in the sky, some ball of rock, had anything to do with water down here on earth, and she’d never really bought that crap about blood and tears, either. A lot of times, when the old lady used to talk to her at all, she’d say one thing to make you think about something else. A test. A trick.
And, anyway, Nana didn’t have tears. None of them did.
The baby kicked. The baby made her itch from the inside out. The baby knew exactly where the moon was all the time; amniotic fluid must follow the moon, too. Deborah punched herself in the stomach, but not hard enough to do any good.
Julian was just standing there. He was so calm. And he looked like such a nerd she was embarrassed to be seen with him, even down here by the rest of the bums. His pants were too big, held up by the belt from a red flannel bathrobe, and they bagged halfway down to his knees, and even when he rolled the cuffs up two or three times they dragged. Or they were too short and his ankles showed, with no socks. A lot of the time he kept his hands folded at his waist, as if he was praying or something. His teeth were crooked and broken and brown. Deborah wondered what kind of were-thing he was, what he’d transformed from or into.
And he was always so nice. It made her furious. Always so soft-spoken and gentle. Most of the time she knew he must be thinking about somebody else when he talked to her, because he was so nice.
Nicer than she was, that was for sure. Calmer than she would ever be. He should be the one having the baby, not her.
Now he said, gently, “Oh, but you are mistaken on both counts, Deborah. In truth, I believe I understand shit rather well. And I have long since come to the conclusion that I am not very much like ‘the rest of them’ at all. However, it is quite likely that I do not fully comprehend your shit, since each person’s shit is intimate and highly individualized.”
Deborah scrabbled with both hands on the hard-packed slope and managed to come up with a small handful of dirt and gravel to throw at him. She missed, mostly. He lifted one hand a little to protect his face, but he didn’t seem especially alarmed. “This place sucks!” she yelled.
He raised one eyebrow but didn’t say anything. His bad teeth glinted unevenly like the teeth of a jack-o’-lantern, like bones.
“How long have you lived down here, anyway? Been a bum?” She meant it as a challenge, an insult. She meant the tone of it to be nasty enough to make him mad. But it came out sounding interested. She was interested. For some reason, she had this craving to know how the guy lived, how other people lived.
“I have been homeless for nearly ten years,” Julian answered, as if he were interested, too. “I have lived here, in this place, for six years. Six years the twelfth of this month, to be precise.”
“So where’d you live for the four years?”
“On the street. Literally.”
“They have shelters, you know,” she sneered.
“I did spend one night in a shelter, early on. The Good Samaritan Shelter at 23rd and Blake Street. It’s still there.”
He gestured toward downtown, as if she’d know where 23rd and Blake was, as if she’d care. She did find herself squinting in that direction, wondering what was there, who was there, wondering whether they might like her at the Good Samaritan Shelter, whether there were any fine guys, whether they knew how to take care of a baby.
Julian was still talking. He talked a lot. She’d have expected that to irritat
e her, but actually she kind of liked it. “It is administered by some caring people. They offer a respectable soup line, and over the years I have done some volunteer-work there. But I cannot live there.”
“What’s the matter?” She didn’t know quite what she was saying, but it seemed like a vulnerable spot and she went for it. “Too good for a shelter?”
“Yes,” he said. “Everyone is too good. Our system demands things of its citizens that are utterly demeaning and dehumanizing, in return for benefits that are every citizen’s due. It is not a mutually respectful system, and it is psychologically harmful to allow oneself to be part of it.”
“Well, Jesus, what’d they want you to do? Strip?”
“Virtually. They demanded personal information that it was not their business to know. For the same reason I have never applied for food stamps. I will not submit myself to their probing. I will not fill out their forms.”
“Got secrets?”
“Of course.”
There was a pause. Then, unskillfully, Deborah pressed. “Well, don’t you have a family or something? Everybody’s got a family, whether they want one or not.”
He nodded. “I do have a family. My parents live in Fort Collins. I have two older sisters, one who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and one who is a missionary currently serving in Zambia.”
“Don’t they care about you?”
“They do not understand me. Nor I them.”
“So what about a wife and kids? Don’t you have a wife and kids?” It flashed into her mind: Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he’s never even been with a woman. Maybe he’s a virgin. She looked at Julian with new interest, even came partway down the slope toward him to see what his answer would be.
“I have a wife,” he said, “and a son.”
“So why don’t you live with them? Were you mean to your wife or something? Were you a lousy father?”
“Actually,” he said thoughtfully, as if he’d thought about it a lot, “I believe I was a rather good father.”
“Then why don’t they want you?”
She was standing on the riverbank beside him now, close enough to smell his rotting teeth and the nice, comforting odor of the rest of him. He turned his face toward the river, and she was close enough, too, to see and be shocked by his tears. “I am not very much like them either,” he told her sadly. “I am not very much like anyone. Sometimes I believe I have accepted that about myself. Sometimes I am even rather vain about it. But other times I am terribly lonely.”
Deborah went to him and put her arms around him. Both surprised, they stood there quietly for a few minutes, through the whistle and rumble of a freight train, the sigh of the river, the chiming of the carillon blocks away in the D&F tower, the wail of a siren far enough away to sound like a song.
Then his arms came around her and he rested his cheek on the top of her head. She was amazed by how warm another person could be; his body heat radiated into her, eased the pain in her heart and her womb. She thought that the baby was sleeping. She thought that she herself was starting to relax, and that made her tense again, and that made her mad.
Her hands moved suggestively up and down his back, between his narrow shoulder blades, in the small of his back where the fraying belt held his pants up, and then, fast, around front to his dick that had been hidden (but not from her; she knew what she was doing) by the ballooning fly of the too big pants. He didn’t have a hard-on. Deborah frowned.
Julian caught her hands and held them tight. He didn’t hurt her or push her away from him or even let her go when she tried to pull back. But he held on to her hands, and she knew she’d have to really hurt him if she wanted to get loose.
He looked down at her, hunched his shoulders, and bent his thin neck to look right into her eyes. His soft brown eyes blazed in the dim light that kept changing whenever a car went by overhead or a traffic light turned.
Deborah was a little afraid of him, and a little embarrassed. She tried turning her head, then looked back at him, prepared to stare him down.
He said, “Deborah. I do not want you to touch me in that way again. I will not allow you to sully our relationship. Do you understand me?”
“Sully?” She laughed. Then she made her voice low and sexy; he wouldn’t know she was making fun of them both. “Oh, come on, sweetie, what you’ve really wanted all along was to get into my pants, isn’t that right? All you’ve ever really wanted from me is to get fucked. That’s what all this crap about ‘friendship’ and a ‘sanctuary relationship’ has been about, right? Julian? About fucking? It’s all been one big line.”
He had pulled her close so that their clasped hands were between them, pressing on both their hearts. She could feel his heart beating through her hands and his; her own was pounding in her ears. He hadn’t stopped gazing into her eyes. He was making her really nervous. “Deborah. I am your friend. Friendship is a rare and valuable thing. Being someone’s friend is a sacred trust. I will not allow you to corrupt and demean our friendship.”
She spat in his face. Her spittle gleamed on his rough cheek and ran down through his beard, but he didn’t even let go of her hand to wipe it off. He didn’t take his eyes off her either. She bared her teeth at him.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He nodded, smiled at her, loosened his grip.
Then, savagely, she said aloud, “Yeah, sure, I understand. You’re a crazy, disgusting old man that nobody loves, and your teeth are rotten, and you make me sick!”
Julian kept smiling. But he put one hand up quickly to cover his teeth, then as quickly put it back down.
Encouraged by this unexpected little triumph, Deborah took a deep breath, threw back her head, and yelled, “Rape! Rape! Help! He’s trying to rape me!”
Julian started, but he still held on to her. She fought, screamed, half believed he was trying to rape her. There was somebody up on the bridge; she saw the colors of their shirt and the dull flash of their face looking down. There was somebody coming along the other side of the Platte, jogging it looked like, running a dog. There were millions of people in this city, billions in this world, and none of them made any move to help her. Maybe they didn’t hear her. Maybe they didn’t know what to do. Or maybe they didn’t believe her. She was outraged.
“Rape! Rape!” she kept yelling, insisting. “He’s trying to rape me!”
Julian kept saying her name as if that would soothe her. “Deborah, Deborah,” and nothing else, as if he couldn’t think of anything else to say. It did soothe her, hearing him say her name over and over again; it did calm her. She didn’t dare let that happen.
She managed to rake the back of his knobby hand with her curved black nail. He cried out and did let her go then. He abandoned her. She’d known he would. Men were all alike. People were all alike. You couldn’t count on any of them, no matter what they said. Her daughter wouldn’t be able to count on her, either, no matter how hard either one of them tried.
Heartbroken and vindicated, Deborah scrambled down the slope, turned north, and ran full out along the river. She left him, left his stupid blood and tears, left his infuriating friendship and the sanctuary of his home under the bridge.
She followed the Platte. It was some sort of instinct, even though she couldn’t have cared less where the river stopped or started, didn’t care where she was going as long as she got away from Julian and his dangerous love. She ran, but not very fast, because Julian hadn’t made her mad enough to do her any good—she was still not much more than a pregnant teenager alone in the middle of the night. Not very surefooted, either—she kept slipping, twisting her ankles, getting her feet wet at the places where the river flowed flat over its edges. And not for very long, because she ran out of breath and her chest hurt and she had to stop running, had to just walk.
She made herself walk the way they’d been taught in that dumb self-defense class at school (as if you could ever really defend yourself anyway; as if you’d eve
r really need to) by that ugly lady (nobody’d ever want to rape her anyway).
Quick, but not in a hurry. Giving the impression that you knew exactly where you were going and you weren’t lost or scared or stoned or anything. Away from buildings and doorways, on the outer edge of the sidewalk. Mace or keys in your hand, but not a knife, not a gun, because chances were he’d use it on you.
But the truth was, of course, she didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t have anything to have keys to, no Mace, no weapons. Except herself, her own body, her own nature. So she kept her fists loose and kept testing her nails with her fingertips, especially the one on the little finger of her left hand, which was long and hard and curved as a knife blade, sharp as a knife, wicked. The nail seemed longer every time she tested it against the tender, fleshy tips of her fingers. Sometimes she thought she felt blood, she’d drawn her own blood. But when she held her hand up to her face to look, she couldn’t tell what she was seeing in this weird, changing light, what that flowing darkness was, the shadows like fur.
But not fur, not really. The underside of her skin itched, but not enough. She was mad at Julian, but not nearly mad enough.
The baby wasn’t moving. Not dead, Deborah knew, but lying in wait. Waiting for the right moment to change into something else.
Everything was so weird down here along the river. She thought it had probably been weird when the first settlers came, too, but now it was weird because of the city. She couldn’t exactly hear echoes off the banks, but sounds curved on both sides. The city was above her on both sides, but right directly above her was the sky, and below and beside her on her right was the sound of the water on stone.
She went under another bridge. Not her bridge, not the bridge where Julian lived. Sounds turned hollow. It was really dark for a few steps, and she was afraid she might step onto or off of something. It smelled damp. Somebody was there. Somebody was reaching out for her, a glowing hand with long nails. For a split second Deborah imagined it was the ghost of the bum lady she’d killed. She just kept going, didn’t stop to find out who it really was, and the ghost didn’t even try to follow her.