“They don’t want any book stores around, either. Especially ones that sell books that might remind people of what we let them take away from us. If that situation with your dad’s farm hadn’t happened, they’d have found some other way to get rid of you, Theo, eventually.”
She started the engine. “Let’s go somewhere and eat enough for six people. Somewhere nice.”
They ended up at the French Cafe. When the matre d’ got a look at Theo’s scar he grimaced and seated them next to the kitchen. Theo noticed people staring as they passed through the room, and when Jenny told Theo she would sit with the wall at her back, he knew what she was doing, and appreciated it.
When they couldn’t eat another crumb, they sat back and Jenny ordered two cognacs and a pack of cigarettes from the bar. The waiter hesitated, then said apologetically, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I can bring you a drink, but I’m afraid we can’t serve him alcohol.”
She made an explosive noise. Theo hastened to say, “That’s okay. I’d rather have coffee anyway.”
She lit her cigarette and shook out the match with an irritated gesture. “Want one? I hardly ever smoke, but I just feel like it tonight.”
“Oh, sure. If they’ll let me.” But he smiled, trying to get her to relax again. “They have great coffee here. Thanks for the dinner.”
“My pleasure,” she said loudly, glaring at the gentleman at the next table, who was eavesdropping. “You deserve it. You’ve worked your butt off this past week. I wish—” But she broke off, and he didn’t ask her what she wished. It didn’t matter any more what either of them wished.
She drank her cognac and ordered another. When that one was gone she lit a new cigarette and on the first exhale of smoke, said recklessly, “I wish this was a date.”
When Theo didn’t answer that, she took another drag and leaned over the table to speak quietly. “You know what pisses me off? I’m a virgin, Theo, and now it looks like I’ve been saving myself for that revolting pimple, Glen.”
He watched her, growing alarmed. The disappointment, anger and liquor appeared to be a dangerous mix. He started to wonder what would happen when they got back to the farm. As much as he liked her, he didn’t want to be used like that. Not under these circumstances.
When he still didn’t answer, she stubbed out the cigarette and stood up. “Let’s get out of here. I’m sick of getting stared at.”
She drove to 13th Street and headed north to get to the Interstate on-ramp. But two blocks from Douglas they saw four or five police cruisers parked all which-ways across the street, blocking the way. Uniformed cops and gray figures moved around on both sides of the street. Then Theo saw the other uniforms.
“It’s the VO’s,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The Vagrant Orphan unit. They’re after somebody, gonna take them to the orphanage.”
“Well, we’re not getting through here. Looks like it’s open past Capitol, though.” She turned and went two blocks to 11th, the next northbound street. Half a block farther a small form streaked out of the alley right in front of the truck.
Jennifer screamed and slammed on the brakes. Before she’d caught her breath Theo was out of the truck and chasing the kid they’d nearly hit. He caught up to him halfway down the alley to their east.
It was the sad, silent little boy who’d been with Surgeon. He kicked and bit, trying to escape, but Theo hunkered down with him behind a dumpster and spoke softly.
“It’s okay, kid, I’m not a cop, it’s okay . . .” and finally the boy quit struggling. Theo asked, “Did they get the others?”
The boy shook his head.
“Were you trying to get to them?”
He nodded.
“There’s a million cops down here. You would have led them right to your friends.” Theo looked back toward 11th Street. Jennifer had pulled the truck into the alley and was standing there looking for him. He stood up and waved at her to come.
“I know this kid, I mean, I met him and some friends of his who have been hiding from the VO’s. None of them want to go to the orphanage. They’ve been eating garbage and living in condemned buildings.”
“Good grief. Wouldn’t they be better off in an orphanage?”
“They don’t seem to think so.”
Jennifer looked at the ragged, panting little boy. “We could take them home. For a few days, anyway. I could feed them, the poor things.”
“You better think about that, Jennifer. You could go to prison.”
If her jaw hadn’t been so set he would have thought she was about to cry, but he knew it was anger building up when she grated, “Like I’m so free now? The day I’m too scared to help some little kids, you can shoot me, buster.”
They heard a commotion down on 11th. The chase closing in.
Theo gave the kid’s shoulders a shake. “How ‘bout it? Get out of the city for a bit? Hurry, decide!”
For a minute the boy looked like he was going to cry, then he nodded.
They got in the truck and tucked him down on the seat between them. He guided them to follow the alley east to 11th and then back to Douglas, to follow that past and under the eastbound viaduct that went over the river into Iowa. They came to a creepy area with a few old brick warehouses crouching in the shadows. He pointed to a gravel track that ran around behind one of them.
His entrance was a broken window boarded over, with one of the boards swinging loose. He darted through it and the two adults squirmed through after him.
It was dead dark inside. Boards and pipes and chunks of cement littered the concrete floor, so they moved cautiously. The kids appeared right in front of them like ghosts.
Winnie and Sissy, Surgeon, Curt and their guide stood looking at them, their eyes showing in a slant of dim orange light from the sodium street lamp out front. Theo could see the white blobs at the ends of Surgeon’s fingers; the taped-up gloves apparently never came off.
“Hi, Surgeon,” Theo said. The tallest shadow jerked, like he was surprised. “Remember me? I believe those are my jeans you’re wearing.”
The children moved away a step. “What do you want?”
“The VO’s almost got your little friend. This here is Jennifer. She’s got a farm west of Omaha. She’d like to take you guys out there for a couple of days, till the heat’s off anyway. She’s a great cook and she’ll feed you all you can eat.”
“What’s she want to do that for? She just wants workers.”
“No. That’s what she’s got me for.” He felt her move, abruptly, next to him, then subside. He went on: “She’s not too fond of the government, either. They’re going to make her marry a guy she doesn’t like.”
Jennifer cut in. “If you don’t want to go to an orphanage I don’t think you should have to. You shouldn’t have to eat garbage, either. I just want to help you kids out. Give you a break. This isn’t much of a life for you, is it.”
There was a long pause, which Sissy broke by whispering, “I’m hungry.”
Surgeon said, “Okay. For a day or two. Then you get us back to town? I don’t know anything about getting along out in the country.”
“Sure. Get your stuff.”
Winnie and Curt disappeared, leaving Sissy holding Surgeon’s hand. The kid glowered at Theo. “If this is a trick—”
“It isn’t,” Theo assured him. “I promise.”
“Why should I believe you? I took your jeans.”
“But you stopped them beating me up, too. Come on, Surgeon. You’re just kids. Couldn’t you use a break, a few good meals? You’re awful young to be a father 24 hours a day.”
The boy’s thin shoulders slumped. “Okay. It’d be okay not to have to hide for awhile.”
Winnie and Curt re-appeared with a couple of knapsacks. Jennifer led the way out to the truck. There was a tarp in the back which she spread over them to hide them.
* * *
“I’m afraid you’ll still be hiding,” Jennifer told the kids as they filed into the h
ouse. “Out here in the country everybody knows everybody else’s business. I won’t be able to keep you a secret for more than a day or two even if you stay indoors all the time.”
She settled them around the kitchen table. “Theo, rustle up something hot for them to eat while I find them some clothes, okay?”
“You bet, boss,” Theo called from the depths of the fridge. “Anybody here like stew?”
Jennifer found a lot of clothes for them to pick from, all sizes. Her mother had never thrown any of her clothes away as she grew up, and they were mostly jeans and shirts, so the boys could wear them, too. She spotted her old teddy bear and flop-eared rabbit sitting on a box. “Oh my darlings,” she thought, “do I know some little bodies who need you.
She distributed likely-sized clothes into the two extra bedrooms on the second floor: things for Curt and silent Joseph in one room, and things for Winnie and Sissy in the other. On Joseph’s pile she placed the blue-furred rabbit. In the bedside lamp’s soft glow his eyes sparkled at her. Sissy’s clothes she crowned with the bear, wrapping the sleeves of a sweater around him like a hug.
The kids were putting away their seconds and thirds of stew, with large slabs of homemade bread and milk to wash it down.
Surgeon even ate with his strange gloves on. None of the kids seemed to notice. Theo sat watching them, grinning. When it looked like they’d topped out, he leaned back and casually pulled the Dalmatian dog cookie jar across the counter. “Full? Oh, that’s too bad. You probably don’t want any cookies, then, huh?”
They quickly corrected his faulty assumption. He smiled at Jennifer over their heads. When the cookie-distribution hubbub died down in a symphony of crunching, she announced: “Okay, troop, it’s bath time. I’m going to go start the tub, and you guys decide who goes first. There are clean clothes up in the bedrooms; go pick out pajamas or whatever you want to wear to bed and bring it down to put on after you’re clean.”
They decided to bathe in ascending age order, since Sissy and Joseph were both sleepy. Winnie took them upstairs to get their pajamas. A few minutes later they returned clutching p.j.‘s and stuffed animals, regarding Jennifer with wide, almost frightened eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
Winnie spoke for them. “Are these things for them to keep? Or just for while we’re here?”
“Oh, to keep! Sure! Come here,” she gestured to the kids, who drew near, and she put her hands on their shoulders. “Now, you can have them, but only if you promise to take really good care of them. They were mine when I was little, and they’ve got lots of good love in them. They need somebody to take care of them. You have to find good names for them. Will you do that?”
Solemn nods.
“Okay, go get clean, you two.”
It took an hour and a half to get everybody bathed and ready for bed. Winnie scrubbed the smaller kids.
At last Winnie and Sissy lay snuggled under the blanket, Sissy hugging “Boom-Bear.” Curt had helped Joseph name his rabbit “Ferrari,” and the three of them slept soundly to the music of Curt’s soft snores.
Surgeon bathed last, and put on clean jeans and shirt. He went out to the kitchen where Jennifer and Theo were brewing a last cup of coffee and gleaning the crumbs out of the cookie jar.
Theo shoved a chair out for him with a foot. “So, pretty good so far, isn’t it?”
I think my stomach’s going to explode,” Surgeon said, an oblique thank you. Jennifer smiled at him. He looked at her, then at Theo, speculatively. “So . . . how do you fit in here, anyway?”
It was a challenge question, between the two males. “Darn it, why do guys always have to have a pecking order?” Jennifer groused.
Theo’s answer deflated the challenge. “She bought me at the sidewalk sale.” He let it hang in the air over the table.
Surgeon nodded. “That’s probably where I’ll end up. They’ll catch us eventually. How’d they get you?”
“They got both of us,” Jennifer said, and she told him her situation, and Theo’s. “So this is our last little party,” she finished. “I have to find someone to buy him who’ll treat him decent or he’ll have to go to prison. By January first I’ll be married to Glen.” She shuddered. “Or maybe I’ll check into one of their convents.”
“You don’t want to do that,” Surgeon said. “Believe me.”
“What do you know about them?”
“If they’re anything like the orphanages, forget it. I’ve been there. So has Curt.”
“How’d you kids get together?”
“I was living in Dodge Park down by the river. I’d check out the railroad yards every few days, sometimes there’s food or clothes the railroad guys throw out. I found Curt one night, in the woods between the tracks and the river. He broke his leg jumping off a train. He’d been in an orphanage in Utah. I guess he’d been a little troublemaker and they were shipping him to the Appalachians to work in a mine. He decided to change the plan. I took him back to my hide-out and set his leg. That was, oh, two years ago.
“Winnie’s from Des Moines. She was roaming around trying to stay alive in Hummel Park when we met her. She’d never been caught. Her stepfather . . . wouldn’t leave her alone . . . you know? And when she told her mom, her mom had her decreed an incorrigible and they were coming to get her so she took off. Hitched a ride with a trucker—just like her stepfather, she said, but at least this time she got something out of it. A ride to Omaha. So she’s been with us a year or so.
“Joseph just showed up one night. I’ve never heard him speak. He was just all of a sudden standing there at our hide-out, and who could turn him away? I called him Joseph, I had to call him something, and he accepts it, so . . . I don’t know anything about him except that it’s pretty obvious that somebody’s hurt him bad.
“Sissy. She came along last spring. Her folks must have been passing through Omaha, who knows which direction? We were downtown scrounging in the middle of the night, and there she was, standing on a street corner, all alone. Crying for her momma, scared, hungry. They just dumped her. Nice, huh?
“We’re all just garbage to them, you know? Nobody gives a damn about us but us. I gotta keep us together, and free, as long as I can. It’s no fun but at least . . .” He trailed off.
“What about you, Surgeon?” Theo asked softly. “How’d you get here?”
Surgeon chewed his lip. “My mom and dad died in a car wreck. I was ten. I’m thirteen now, tall for my age, huh? They took me to an orphanage in Chicago, one whose ‘patrons’ were a bunch of doctors in the medical center. They only took smart kids. I was real smart in science. Other kids were out kicking a football around, I was in my room cutting up road-killed squirrels, frogs, anything I could find. I was lucky. They used the other kids for psych experiments. They ran all these aptitude tests on me and found out I was maybe college level in biology, then they had me watch some surgeries, then gave me lab rats to do operations on.”
His face went sad. “They had this new technology they wanted to try out on someone. Lucky me, I was It.” He put his gloved hands on the table. With a funny tilt to his head, as though he was diffidently preparing to show them his favorite model airplane, he pulled one glove off.
Jennifer gasped and involuntarily shoved her chair back. Theo set his jaw and leaned forward, peering at Surgeon’s hand.
The last joints of his fingers, under the nails, were abnormally large, each spread out and thickened to the shape of a stack of four nickels. At each tip there was a dimple, half an inch long, looking like a lipless mouth. He hyper-extended his fingers and the mouths’ edges retracted, opening to reveal little black recesses, each studded with several brass pins.
Theo met his eyes. “Looks like you’re wired for cable,” he said. Surgeon nodded. He dug into the bottom of one of the knapsacks. He brought out a flat box in a velvet bag, stainless steel, four by eight inches by one inch deep, perforated along the sides. He snapped it open.
They didn’t understand at first what was i
nside. Ten jointed columns covered in clear plastic, packed with copper wires.
“Oh God,” Jennifer breathed, “They’re fingers!”
Surgeon had removed his other glove. Now he calmly and seriously plugged the extensions into his fingertip jacks. When he was done he held up his hands and rippled his fingers like a pianist. The extensions flexed and extended as nimbly as a Horowitz arpeggio. The tips were tiny, bullet-shaped, and covered with spongy pads.
“So what good are those things?”
“Micro-surgery.” Surgeon pulled the sponge pads off the tips and told Jennifer, “Lean over here, shake your hair down.”
She leaned over and Surgeon combed his “fingers” through her straight honey-colored hair. He locked eyes with Theo, and without looking he manipulated a strand of her hair for a minute.
He withdrew one hand with the tips of the artificial thumb and forefinger pinched together.
“Ouch!” Jennifer said, then stared at his hand. He was holding a single hair. “Good Lord! How’d you do that?”
“By feel. They’ve got pressure sensors in the ends and feedback loops.”
“They must be worth millions!”
“Probably.”
“Why’d you run away? You could be making a fortune in medicine!”
He smiled a grim smile. “Not me. I was just their guinea pig. They wouldn’t do this to anybody who already had his surgery training unless they knew it would work. Stupid me, I thought like you did, I’d be a doctor. But I’m just a kid, I’m still growing. I should have thought of that. It’d be too costly to keep re-fitting, and then I’d be competing with them. No, once I succeeded in an actual surgery—a spinal tumor—I was dead meat. The next day I was informed I’d be going to Georgia to dig peanuts the rest of my life.
The Strangers of Kindness Page 4