Trucks and cars were parked all along the opposite shore. I could see our red Ford. But no one was standing there. Mist was rising off the lake. I ran and walked halfway back before Mrs. Fando found me. She was driving out to scold her husband because he was late for work.
Folks treated me different after that. Everyone did. Everyone treated me the way Jagger used to, like I was too ugly to be alive or like I was some kind of a traitor. Even my own mother. Like I broke that ice under all those men and boys and murdered them myself. I tried to describe to them what happened and how I made it out by learning to breathe like ice but no one took me seriously. For a long time.
Then, when I was seventeen, this stranger came to town. People noticed her because she dressed so well, drove a nice car and was asking about me. She had this old torn newspaper article from way back and she said, “Is this you who survived that ice breakup?” I said yes it was. I thought she was maybe someone's girlfriend or grown daughter coming to tell me she wished I had died and her man had lived. Folks said stuff like that. But what she said was, “I think you need to come with us.” She was a recruiter. For the new army. You heard about that, I'm sure.
Yep. That's what I want you to know about me, little girl. I never told you this before. I want you to understand what I do isn't for death. All those years ago I chose life, and I've been choosing it ever since. I have some special skills is all. I can walk like water, for instance; breathe like ice. I can build things. I have seen many people die and I still choose to stay alive. Those are qualities they look for in soldiers.
What I want you to understand is that all the time since then, I think I turned partly into ice. Until you came along. You came along and thawed me out, I guess. It's like that feeling I had, when I was walking out on the ice and I thought the world was a beautiful place. I have that feeling again with you. I couldn't love you more if you were my natural born daughter. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? I bet none of this makes any sense to you at all.
Pauline leans down and kisses Alika's forehead. Alika rolls over, her bells go brrring. “Damn bells,” says Pauline. She shuts off the light. Walks out of the room.
Alika opens her eyes. She sits up. Slowly. Alika knows how to move so carefully that the bells don't ring. Alika grabs the end of one of the braids. Slowly, she twists the bell off. It doesn't make a sound. What do they think? She's stupid or something?
She has to keep herself awake for a long time. Her mama is in the forbidden room almost all night long. She keeps herself from falling asleep by remembering the pictures she saw on that wall. All those photographs of smiling children wearing backpacks. My sisters, Alika thinks.
It is already light out when she hears the forbidden door open and shut, her mother walking across the apartment to her own bedroom. When Alika leaves her room, she doesn't make a sound. The bells remain on her pillow. The first thing she notices is the smell of paint. The forbidden room is no longer red. It is white. All the pictures are gone. The worktable is folded up against the wall, beside the bookshelf. Alika can just barely see where the flag had been pasted. The paint there is a little rougher. But the flag is gone. Next to the door is her mama's suitcase, and a backpack and a camera. Alika opens up the backpack. Very carefully. She sighs at the wires. “Be one with the backpack,” she says to herself. “Breathe like ice,” she rolls her eyes.
By the time she leaves the room, it is bright out. She just gets the last bell in her hair when her mama comes in and says, “Get up now honey. Today is going to be a special day. I got you a new backpack."
Alika gets up. Her bells go brrring. She goes to the bathroom. She can just see the top of her eyes in the mirror over the sink. She changes into her yellow butterfly top and her white shorts. It's already hot. She eats a big bowl of cereal, sitting alone at the kitchen table. Her bells make little bursts of sound that accompany her chewing, which is like the sound of footsteps walking across snow her mama said. Sun pours through the white curtain on the window over the sink. After she brushes her teeth she stands in the kitchen and sings, “America, America, how I love you true. America, America the white stars and the blue."
"Okay, child. Come here now.” Alika's mama stands in the forbidden room. The door is wide open. “Look what I have for you. A new backpack!"
Alika spins. Her bells go brrring, brrring, brrring.
"Alika! Alika!” Her mama says, “Stop spinning now."
Alika stops spinning.
"Let me put this on you."
Alika looks up at her mama, the most beautiful mother in the world. “There's something you should know about me,” Alika says.
Alika's mama sighs. She keeps the backpack held out in front of her. “What is it, Alika?"
"I'm not stupid."
Alika's mama nods. “Of course you're not,” she says. “You're my little girl, aren't you? Now come here and put this thing on."
After Alika's mama buckles the backpack on her, she locks it with a little key and puts the key into her own pocket.
"Don't I need that?” Alika says.
"No, you don't,” her mama says. “Today we're doing things a little different. You get to keep this backpack. Not like the others that you had to drop off somewhere. This one is for you to keep. Your teacher will unlock it when you get to school. I gave her the extra key, okay? Now come over here. I want to take your picture."
* * * *
Alika follows the map her mother drew. “You have to take a different way to school today,” she said. Her hands were shaking when she drew it. Alika follows the wavy lines, down Arlington Avenue past the drugstore and video place, turning right on Market Street. Alika's bells ring once or twice, but her step is slow. The backpack is heavy. She has to concentrate on these new directions.
"Hey, where you going?” Rover stands right in front of her. “Ain't you supposed to be at school?"
Alika shrugs. “I'm taking a different way."
Rover shakes his head. “Are you crazy, girl? This is no place for you. Don't you know you are heading right into a war zone?"
Alika smirks. “This is what my mama wants me to do."
"You better turn around right now,” Rover says. “'Less your mama wants you dead."
Alika doesn't mind turning around, because suddenly she remembers everything. She walks back home. She doesn't feel like singing. When she gets to their building she looks up and sees that the windows are all open, even the windows in the forbidden room. She walks up the hot dark stairs. She gets there just as her mama is stepping into the hallway with her suitcase.
"Hi, Mama,” Alika says.
Alika's mama turns, her face rock, liquid, rock. “What are you doing here?"
"I forgot to hug you good-bye,” Alika says.
Her mama steps back. Then, with swift precision, she steps forward as she reaches into her pocket, pulls out the little key, and unlocks Alika's backpack. She runs across the apartment and throws the backpack out the window. Even before it hits the ground she is wrapped around Alika. They are crouched, in tight embrace. After a few seconds, she lets go.
"You all right, Mama?” Alika says.
She nods, slowly.
"I don't know what to tell my teacher about my books. What should I tell her, Mama?"
Pauline gets up, walks across the apartment and leans out the window. Scattered on the ground below is the backpack, and several large books. She is shaking her head, trying to understand what has happened, when she sees Alika, with her belled braids, skipping down the steps, walking wide around the scattered contents of her backpack. Then, with a quick look up at the window, Alika breaks into a run, her bells ringing.
Pauline turns, fast. She looks at her suitcase in the hallway, runs to it, thinking (Alika?) she will toss it out the window, but she is not fast enough.
* * * *
All the dead children are reaching for her. She tries to exhale, but there is no breath. She sinks where she steps, grabbed by the tiny, bony fingers pulling her into
the frozen depths. Rusty nails clutched in the ice children's hands pierce her skin. How quiet it is, the white silence punctuated only by the distant sound of bells. Why, that's Alika, she thinks, that's my girl. Astonished. Proud. Angry.
Alika stands, gazing at the bombed building, feeling certain there is something she has forgotten. An annoying fly, which has been circling her head, lands on her arm and Alika soundlessly slaps it, leaving a bright red mark on her skin, which she rubs until the burning stops. Then she turns and skips down the walk in this mysterious silent world, even her belled braids gone suddenly mute. An ambulance speeds past, the red light flashing, but making no sound, and Alika suddenly understands what has occurred. She has fallen into the frozen world. Surely her mother will come for her, surely her brave mother will risk everything to save her. Alika looks up at the white sky, reaches her arms to the white sun, bawling like a baby, waiting for her beautiful mother to come.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Circle by George Tucker
George Tucker contributed “Welcome to Justice 2.0” to our Jan. 2004 issue. He returns with a story that grew out of his experience working in an advertising office during the hottest phase of Miami's housing boom, when “anyone who had a heartbeat flipped three or four condos at a time.” Now that the market has cooled, he thinks this story is a bit more hopeful than it seemed then.
Mr. Tucker still lives in southern Florida but these days he works in internet marketing, where he is surely gathering material for many more stories.
At the shouts, Billy Black, carpenter's assistant second class, looked up and saw the twinkling glass cockpit of the construction crane some hundred feet overhead. His eyes flicked to the pallet-load of cement bags on the end of the crane's long cable. He saw the load tilt, lazy, as if it wanted a midair rest. A moment later something snapped and the sacks, each the size of a man's torso and weighing fifty pounds, plummeted to the earth. He sprinted toward the crash.
Some of the bags had hit the side of the Circle condominium and ripped open, scattering harmless gray powder through the air. Like a volcano, Billy thought. A few had ripped through the deal scaffolding, leaving behind nothing but ragged splinters. A crowd clustered around something and Billy pushed his way through.
One of the younger workers, Alberto, he thought, had a gash in his lower leg. Billy dropped to his knees and pulled off his belt. He slapped a man with a mustache and shouted, “Ambulance!” then wrapped the cracked leather strap around the boy's leg, just above the knee. The flow of blood, astonishingly red in the bright sun, slowed immediately.
"Hace él recupera?” someone asked. Will he be okay?
"Yo no sé,” Billy said. He couldn't look away from the blood at first. He spent a long moment remembering something he'd read about the Medieval masons’ practice of mixing the blood of a sacrificial animal with their mortar. The boy's face had gone gray, not just with cement powder but with shock. Billy sent two men after a tarp and had the boy's legs up on a sawhorse when the paramedics picked their way through the construction debris to his side.
* * * *
All in all, a good thing they were so near Jackson Memorial Hospital, Billy thought. Nearly every week, someone or other from the construction site headed to the emergency room.
"The other men hate you, you know,” said Neil Adler, the project manager. He sat behind his scarred teak desk that probably had been valuable once but now was Salvation Army material. Adler's bald head had a matte finish, as though he'd powdered it. An industrial-strength air conditioner blew iceberg-cold every hour he sat in his trailer. Of course he didn't sweat. In fact, Billy had only seen him outside when Adler was walking to or from the parking garage down the block.
Billy nodded to acknowledge Adler's words.
"Saving somebody like you did, that was a real show of cool-headedness."
"I'm sure your head is far cooler."
Adler shrugged. “Perhaps. Nevertheless.” He shuffled some papers. “Do you know why you're not a full-fledged carpenter's assistant?"
"I was unsuited for more responsibility,” Billy said. He rubbed his eyes for a moment, still seeing the scarlet blood soaking into the blasted earth. “Like you said, the other men hate me."
"But I know why. Do you?” It wasn't exactly a silence, not with the AC cranking like a passenger jet at takeoff. “I'll tell you, Black. Billy, right? You scare them."
Billy said nothing. The sweat had dried on his body some time ago and now he felt chilled.
"You never smash your thumb with a hammer. Your power tools never stop working. You talk to yourself, they say. Leave little bits of food lying around. Why is that?"
Billy stood. “Thank you for the compliments, Mr. Adler, and for letting me cool off in here. But I'm afraid I'll catch cold. I'm going back to work."
"Sit down. You're still on the clock.” There was no strength left in Adler's stooped body, but there was authority. The other men on the lot sometimes talked about Adler, the way he used to be a couple years ago, when the project started, before the heart attacks. Now his burly muscle was gone, his hair was gone, and all he clung to was the haughty habit of power. Billy didn't like it. But Adler was right—Billy was still on the clock, and it was novel to earn his wages on his ass. He eased himself into the chair.
"I wanted to know a little bit more about you,” Adler said.
"Not a lot to know."
"But some.” Adler held up a clipped-out Yellow Pages ad. “You recognize this?"
Of course he did. Billy had labored for hours over the text he'd wanted in the ad. He still remembered the exact words: Injun Billy, Authentic Seminole Shaman—fortunes told—auras aligned—curses lifted—lost items found. Billy nodded.
"So why is it that you're the only one unaffected by all this—this bad luck? These misfortunes?"
* * * *
That evening, in the long red hours before the sun finally clocked out, Billy drove his battered pickup into the Everglades, down a rarely used trail. He ignored the new No Trespassing and Property Of signs, bounced over familiar ruts, and parked where the trail ended. He slogged through a wide, muddy declivity under the arching limbs of ancient cypresses. The slightest elevation formed an island in the river of grass. Pines and other hardwoods took advantage of the drier earth to root deeply and stretch limbs toward the clear purple sky.
Billy found the nursery log under which he'd buried his grandfather, the shaman Jack Twofeathers. Mosquitoes buzzed through the thick air. A few years back, when Billy had interred his grandfather, this vast swath had been a national park. Now it was the Glades Economic Development Zone—the latest real estate free-for-all.
Billy sat on a camp stool in front of the Army-surplus pup tent that was, at present, his home. A slight breeze and the bobbing fronds of fiddlehead ferns kept him reasonably cool at night. He'd sold nearly everything he owned and was $21,084 away from the down payment he needed to buy this lot—a little less each payday. In the meantime, he squatted.
Billy lit a small fire and heated up water for a cup of coffee. He savored its bitter heat and sat, perfectly still, until the sounds of the swamp began. Alligators grunted and bullfrogs jug-rumped, and, not far away, he heard the whine of chainsaws. Is there anyplace left in the world to go and not hear machines, not hear trees falling?
Billy was a ninth-generation Miami native, born in St. Francis Hospital (now condo Aqua) on Miami Beach and raised on the west side of the county, where owls hooted and hunted and summer brushfires raged. He remembered dirt roads and trailer parks where, now, there were massive gated developments full of South American expatriates whose three-story houses clustered shoulder-to-shoulder as if in fear of the remaining sliver of wilderness.
Billy shook his head. He needed money. He needed enough for a down payment to keep his grandfather's remains from being turned up by a backhoe.
* * * *
The next day, Billy sat in a waiting room on the top floor of the Vanguard Building on Brickell Aven
ue, the financial heart of Miami. A receptionist he thought he recognized from the cover of a magazine bade him sit on something that looked more like modern art than furniture. Through a narrow window, he could see traffic, gleaming motes far below. People barely seemed to exist. Looking west, over the city, he could see the stately ranks of tall buildings marching west, to the Everglades. At this height he would've been able to see farther but a brown haze hung over the city—typical, for summer—and veiled the horizon. Billy left the view and looked through the artfully arranged brochures on the low granite tabletop.
He thought the preconstruction business strange, the idea of selling someone an apartment they'd never even seen, based completely on glossy brochures like these and promises. Castles in the air. The pages he flipped through had artists’ renderings of what the finished Circle condo should look like, what the amenities might be, the expected date construction would be finished—which was, Billy noted, two months ago. The building he'd left yesterday was only twelve stories of bare cement and rebar.
He waited long enough for his butt to go completely numb before the receptionist called him over and gave him permission to push on the heavy riveted doors that opened into the Vanguard Group's conference room.
Tall windows looked to the east and south, over the blue ocean dotted with cruise ships and the towers of lower Brickell Avenue. Somewhere far below, he thought he saw a dolphin leap out of the water. Buzzards soared past at eye level, riding the thermals and updrafts produced by the cluster of skyscrapers. Nature on one hand and man's greatest triumphs over it on the other, Billy thought.
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