The Dime

by Kathleen Kent

  At the fourth corner, the molding breaks off into several fractured pieces, and under the carpet I find one thin, discolored dime. With shaking hands, I drop the dime into my underwear and try to reassemble the pieces against the carpet’s edge.

  I’m pressing the last piece into place when the door opens. I’m in the corner of the room on the far side of the mattress, my back to the door, my body shielding the damage I’ve done. I make retching noises as though I’m sick to my stomach, and I hear Tommy yell to Connie to bring in a pan.

  Scooting backward onto the bed, careful to pull the stone with me, I gag harder, trying to get Tommy’s attention away from the floor and onto me.

  “It’s the drugs,” I say, letting drool leak onto my hand cupped under my mouth. “They’re making me really sick.”

  Connie rushes into the room, bedpan in hand, and shoves it at me.

  “Don’t you get sick on the mattress,” she warns.

  I try to will myself to throw up into the pan, but there’s not enough in my stomach to comply.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Tommy turn away from the bed, study the corner of the room where I had been sitting. With the toe of his boot he taps at the carpet, then brushes it along the molding, which crumbles away from the wall like week-old bread. He looks at me and he knows in that moment that I’ve been up to something.

  “What’s this?” he asks, pointing to the corner.

  I set the bedpan down onto the mattress and meet his gaze. “I’m building a bridge to Babylon,” I say. “I was also going to fashion a crossbow, but I ran out of catgut.”

  There is a narrowing of the eyes, but he leaves the room, only to return a few minutes later with Evangeline. He shows her the molding, and she kicks at the next corner, revealing the surgical tape that had been used to hide the fruits of my probing fingers.

  Shaking her head, she says, “Rebellion.”

  “What? No long-winded Bible verse for bad carpentry?” I ask her, crossing my arms.

  They all leave the room, locking the door behind them, but soon both Tommy and Curtis return to the room with Connie following. My arms are pinioned and I’m injected with some kind of narcotic. I remain barely conscious, unable to fight as I’m lifted from the bed by Curtis, Tommy picking up the stone effortlessly and carrying it cradled in his arms.

  I’m brought into the room with the Saint Michael’s painting and tied into a chair facing it; the stone is settled roughly in my lap. The single, large window is dark behind the gauzy curtains, the overhead light more yellow, and perhaps brighter, than I remember. Or maybe it’s that any light outside of my cave seems more luminous now.

  Evangeline stands in front of me, the red-haired angel behind her, positioned so that his sword looks to be piercing the top of her head.

  I smile at her and say, drunkenly, “Oh, goody, a family reunion. Or is this an East Texas wedding?”

  There is an ugly stretch of her lips, but it’s not a true smile. She recites, “‘Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, because of the abundance of all things, therefore, you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness, and lacking everything. And he will put a yoke of iron on your neck until he has destroyed you.’”

  She pulls something out of the deep pocket in her skirt, the same skirt she wore the last time she jabbed me with a hypodermic needle. It’s a pair of scissors, the blades long and pointed.

  She directs Curtis to hold my head and brings the blades close to my face. “Hold still now, Elizabeth,” she tells me. “You don’t want me to put out an eye.”

  Pulling up a long, thick hank of my hair falling over one shoulder, she nestles the scissors close to my scalp and, with a slow, deliberate snick, cuts the hair, letting it fall onto my lap. It lies over the stone in a continuous, serpentine twist, and I remember seeing the piece of hair hacked from Lana’s scalp gently resting in Jackie’s hand.

  She picks up another hank of hair, waiting until my bulging eyes meet hers. She says, “Elizabeth, the time has come for you to decide.”

  Another length of hair is cut and falls to the floor next to the chair.

  “With your rebellion, you’ve lost two earthly things that hold great importance for you.”

  A slow, deliberate closing of the blades, and a longer section is cut free from the crown of my head.

  “Your ability to run,” she says, “and now your beautiful red hair.”

  The blades are opening and closing rapidly, and she’s recklessly scissoring handfuls of my remaining hair, some of which cling obscenely to the wool of Evangeline’s skirt. The air feels colder now, raking across my scalp, the back of my neck.

  “Eventually, with time,” she tells me, “and with your cooperation, your hair will grow back. And even the hobble can be removed if”—and here she holds the blades close to one eye—“if you obey my rules. If you don’t, what you will lose next cannot be replaced. Your family, your friends, your partner, perhaps…”

  She leaves the last few words hanging in the air. I want to lunge at her, to hurl the stone at her head so that it’ll cave in like a rotten pumpkin, but I’m bound too tightly to the chair. My head lolls forward and I feel myself falling away.

  I’m picked up and carried back to my room. The stone is settled next to the bed. The sheet is pulled up over me; the door is closed and locked.

  And then the light is extinguished.

  34

  The street outside the John Oravecz Child Care Center in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is still rain wet and tropically warm. I run my already grimy hands up and down the vertical iron window guards, which resemble medieval halberds with wicked flared points, keenly aware of the disapproving looks from the nun standing in the main doorway behind me. I’m not sure why the up-and-down movements of my hands are disturbing to her, only that they are, so I continue the stroking motions more rapidly until she hisses at me to get my attention and gives me a warning glare.

  When I turn my focus again to the end of Java Street, I see him. He walks toward me like there is no earthly barrier that could delay his progress. As I had hoped, he’s wearing his dress uniform, complete with hat, even though it’s June and well above eighty degrees, but he promised that he would.

  There are few people on the street that afternoon, but the pedestrians who do pass him smile and say hello, giving him a wider space on the sidewalk. He greets the nun warmly and asks about her mother, and she glows as if the pontiff himself is inquiring. Then he turns his attention to me.

  He kneels down so I can throw my arms around his neck, and I take in the heady aroma of tobacco, Old Spice cologne, and, because it’s beyond the a.m. of the day, the lingering ghost of Jameson Irish.

  He asks me, “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” I breathe excitedly, gratefully.

  He takes my blackened palm in his, and, after waving good-bye to the nun, we walk together down Java Street to Manhattan Avenue, where we turn south and negotiate the six blocks of low houses, shops, and apartment buildings, their facades covered in dancing graffiti, to Meserole Street and the Ninety-Fourth Precinct station house. He asks me how it feels to be six and if I’m hungry and should we stop into Rizzio’s Pizza Parlor to get a slice? I bounce on my toes, nodding dizzily, and he orders the slices, saying, as he always does, “Give us extra cheese and sauce, but hold the attitude.”

  As we eat our pizza, first folding the dough vertically in half and draining the river of grease onto a napkin, I haltingly read to Benny the day’s date and headline from the New York Times someone left on a neighboring table—“June twenty-eighth, 1984. Jack…son says Cuba offers to free twenty-six de…tained as pol…i…ti…cal prisoners”—showing him how well I’m progressing at summer reading camp.

  The man behind the counter does not take money from my uncle when we leave, saying it’s his birthday gift to Sergeant Rhyzyk’s favorite niece. And Benny smiles at me as we leave the shop, kn
owing the man would never take money from him anyway.

  We pass kids sitting on stoops, wearing tight pants, with wild, rainbow-dyed hair who are playing music loudly from a boom box.

  I shriek delightedly, telling Benny, “It’s the Police. Get it? The band is called the Police.”

  When we get to the Ninety-Fourth, Benny pauses outside for dramatic effect. It’s the first time I’ve been allowed into the station house. We walk through the double doors and the two police officers at the big receiving desk wave and call out, “Sto lat,” the traditional Polish birthday greeting meaning “one hundred years.”

  The gray-green walls, the warren of booking and interview rooms, the messy, barely contained chaos of the other officers’ desks, my uncle’s office with his big desk levered impossibly into the tiny space, all fill me with something akin to religious awe. The exhilaration of Dorothy stepping from drabness into the stridently colored and surreal world of Oz. There are two photos on my uncle’s desk: one of me and my brother and one of his wife, dead for four years.

  Officers stick their heads in to talk to their sergeant, congratulating him on his arrest of the man responsible for the shooting of two women and eight children last spring and discussing the progress, or lack thereof, of the Mets. My hair is ruffled, I’m called Annie, which I loathe, and asked if I’ve seen the new summer movies, like Police Academy. Officer Fitzgerald, a giant bear of a man feared by every truant kid in the borough, brings in sweets from the Rzeszowska Bakery. He pinches my cheek hard enough to draw tears and wishes me a happy birthday.

  Not one officer asks after my father, who also works the Ninety-Fourth. They don’t have to tell me that he’s been suspended from the force pending an investigation of the savage beating and subsequent death of a robbery suspect he arrested. My father is at home now, biding his time, but confident that he’ll soon be reinstated, for not a single brother officer in his department has stepped forward to give anything other than a sterling account of his behavior during the incident. These same officers come by our house late at night and cloister themselves in my father’s study, looks of wary self-preservation stamped onto their sweaty, worried faces, but that’s a world apart from the easy, trusting camaraderie they share with my uncle here.

  Benny tells me he has one more important surprise for me before he takes me home.

  We pass through the station doors and walk to the nearby YMCA, where I wonder if my uncle has another grand scheme planned, like a surprise party inside. But he stops at a pay phone and tells me to hold out my hand. He places into my damp palm a dime and tells me that this one thin coin is the most powerful connector on the planet.

  “It’s true,” he assures me, smiling at my puzzled face. “With a dime, a soldier at Christmastime, his arms full of presents, can call his family in the Bronx and tell them he’s just arrived at Penn Station and is about to get on the subway. A man can call his wife to ask her what kind of bread he was supposed to buy at the market. A kid can call his mom to ask her if he can hang out just ten more minutes with his hooligan friends.

  “All over this country, people can stand in one place and speak to someone else who’s miles away. Hear their voice and the sounds that surround them in that moment. A snitch can drop a dime on someone—call the station house from Lower Manhattan, ask for me, and give me information I need to catch a very bad criminal. We can take the bad guy off the streets and put him in jail, making Franklin or Greenpoint Avenue a whole lot safer to walk on at night.

  “But tomorrow,” he says, bending down so that he’s eye level with me, “that all changes.” He pulls a quarter out of his pocket. “Tomorrow, Friday, June twenty-ninth, you’ll need one of these to call your mom.”

  Benny’s not smiling now. His brown eyes have a wistful, sad quality to them, and I want to assure him that it’s not so bad. That there are quarters enough to make all the calls in the world. But somehow his explanation has imbued the dime with a whole history that I know nothing about, can never know, because it’s all passing away.

  As if reading my thoughts, he says, “It just doesn’t sound the same to say ‘drop a quarter’ on someone, does it?”

  I shake my head, wanting to throw my arms around his neck or make a silly face to get him to smile again. He stands, pulling away from me slightly, and the gulf between us is more than just feet and inches; it’s years of experiencing loss and disappointments. And the thought of adding to his disappointments is unbearable and so when he asks me if I want to make one last dime call, I grin and nod with absurd enthusiasm, and he lifts me up so that I can take the heavy receiver in one hand and drop the dime into the slot with the other. He sets me down and starts pressing the keypad numbers. It seems as though the sequence of numbers is very long, and they beep in my ear like robotic insects, but when he’s finished, I hear the distant ringing of a phone.

  It rings for a long time and when I turn to look quizzically at Benny, to ask him who I’m calling, there’s no one standing behind me. I wheel around to scan the street in the opposite direction, the receiver still in hand with its thick umbilical cable anchoring me to the box, thinking that he had seen a friend or fellow officer and moved away to talk to him. But he’s not on the sidewalk in either direction or in the street behind me or on the stoops of the town houses next to the Y. In fact, there’s no one on the streets. No pedestrians, no cyclists, no pigeons pecking the ground at my feet.

  That’s when I notice that there are no cars parked on the street either; it’s as though I’ve wandered onto an abandoned movie set, a staged copy of a Brooklyn neighborhood.

  The ringing in my ear has stopped, and a voice at the other end says, “Betty?”

  “Uncle Benny?” I wail fearfully, my heart thrashing against my ribs.

  “Betty,” he says, “we have only a few minutes before the operator comes on to disconnect us. Are you listening?”

  “Yes,” I say, my mouth an open cave of distress.

  “You know how I got that guy to admit to killing those women and children?” he asks.

  “No,” I answer, my eyes scanning the streets for any shadows moving across the pavement. I look down and see that I’m bare-legged, standing with no shoes on the glass-strewn, filthy streets of Brooklyn.

  “I got him to think I cared about him,” he tells me.

  Even though it’s summer, I’m feeling chilled, and, with a rush of shame, I realize that I’m wearing only a T-shirt and underwear. I wrap one arm across my chest in an agony of embarrassment, but I can’t let the connection with Benny go.

  “You got him to sympathize with you?” I offer, surprised at the deep tone of my voice.

  “No, no,” Benny says impatiently. “He didn’t give a damn about me. It’s not about eliciting sympathy from her. It’s about getting her to believe that you feel empathy for her.”

  Her—why is Benny saying “her” when it was a guy who was the murderer?

  “I don’t—” I start.

  “Just listen,” he says impatiently. “You’re taking the wrong tack with her. You can’t outlast her or buy time being a hard-ass. Be the apologetic, obedient daughter she’s looking for. Make her your mother.”

  “My what?”

  A cheery female voice comes onto the line. “You have thirty seconds before the call is disconnected. Please deposit another ten cents.”

  “Betty,” Benny says, his voice vibrating as though he’s standing in front of a large oscillating fan. “Do you understand what I’m telling you? She’s full-blown gonzo, but she’s a mother. Make her think you care. Get her to let down her guard, then make your move.”

  I’m desperately searching the ground for loose change, another dime to slide into the slot, but there’s nothing, not even a wad of gum on the concrete.

  “Don’t get stuck in the abyss of your own morass,” he reminds me.

  I’m unashamedly crying now, gripping the receiver hard, jamming it against my ear to catch the last of his receding voice.

  “And,
Betty,” he says from far away, laughter playing on the edge of his breath, “dimes are also good on slightly loose screws…”

  “I’m sorry. Your time is up,” the female voice intones, and the line goes dead.

  35

  My sub-mission. Not submission, the act of yielding to a superior force as the message on the stone commands, but rather an underground, covert plotting to redirect the flow of events. A basement insurrection, where the long knives of vengeance are sharpened quietly, patiently in darkened corners while Evangeline spins out her Old Testament revelations, verbal tapestries of such monstrous proportions that they would make even sleeping infants cry and feral dogs slink away in terror.

  Evangeline has spent several days—or what I think are several days, based on the sporadic periods of eating, fitful sleeping, and staggering painfully around my windowless prison room carrying a large, smooth rock in my arms—reading the Bible to me at mealtimes. None of this “Forgive thine enemy” New Testament stuff either but Bronze Age, patriarchal, split-your-skull-open threats to the little, nonbelieving peoples of the earth. The righteous slaughter of babes in arms, the crushing of whole tribes, and natural disasters to drown the world are all served up by my hostess along with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Her enthusiasm for Armageddon is endless. And standing behind her as she sits in a chair and reads to me is Curtis in his police uniform, holding the cattle prod.

  He can’t be a true, active-duty cop, as he appears at her beck and call morning and night, but the uniformed presence must come in handy in helping her to tear down the material world—as in ambushing and kidnapping real-life law enforcement officers.

  Tommy has disappeared from the house, and the only clue I have to his whereabouts is a fragment of conversation caught when Evangeline walked into my room with Curtis following behind, saying, “…finishes his run over to Shreveport.”

  She held up a cautioning hand to silence him, but I pretended not to hear. Lately I’ve been hanging my head in slack-jawed, passive apathy, a defeated slumping of my shoulders, my hands over my eyes.