I didn’t know what to say to Tony Malone after he came back.
The girl has reappeared at the end cap of aisle twelve, where the Galvanized Center is just past the nuts, bolts, screws, and nails. I can’t tell if she’s standing there and looking at something. What would a girl like that look at, I wonder.
“Mr. Richard, do you think the Fourth of July parade will include any Muslims?”
Hakim makes me jump, sneaking up behind me from the Register One side of Register Two. I fall a little, catch myself on the edge of my tall chair, and then steady up by grabbing the Plexi divider, that’s better. Hakim knew he’d snuck up on me, the shit. Now’s not the time, I should tell him.
“Mr. Richard?”
“That girl.” I indicate with a chuck of my chin the girl who’s standing still in the middle of the store, in the wide aisle back there, looking away from us. “Check on her.”
I hear Sal and Walonda coming down the stairs together from the office, and Sal’s saying something, Sal who loves to sing under her breath, especially around the holidays, who wears those chunky sweaters that she knits. Sal who’s pretty knowledgeable for a know-it-all and for a cat person. I wouldn’t have married her, I often think. Raymond, her husband, always seems unhappy. He’s a Redskins fan, although I think he used to like the Niners, and that could make a man unhappy, without someone like Big Ben to root for, a real quarterback on the Steelers in Steeler Country.
Walonda’s okay, although she doesn’t like me. She acts friendly, but when we’re alone—which doesn’t happen very often, as she only comes into the store every other Tuesday—we don’t have anything to say. I don’t think it’s a racial thing. I think I’m just the old guy who works here.
Sal and Walonda are almost at the registers, Walonda carrying the big ledger, sliding the ledger into a flat nylon bag and then opening her briefcase as she gets ready to leave, the books done.
The four of us stand there—I don’t know how to talk about what that feels like, all of us, with time kind of breathing for us.
Hakim says, “Mr. Richard thinks that girl is stealing.”
I look at Hakim.
“What girl?” Sal, of course, is ready to take charge. She likes when Frank goes to lunch, or I do, and she can rearrange my drawer.
“The girl there—” Hakim points grandly.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Mr. Richard!” Hakim fakes being outraged. There are Cheez Doodle crumbs on his red vest. That’s what he was doing.
“Hakim,” says Sal. “Go see.”
I am unsure about Maryland, where I have always lived, because of the Civil War. If I weren’t a Steelers fan, or if I liked baseball and the O’s, I would feel differently about Maryland. Maryland was a border state, with slaves, and President Lincoln had to issue all sorts of orders and decrees to get the Maryland people to fall in line. Then there was John Wilkes Booth, who shot Lincoln—he was from Maryland. The Battle of Antietam was fought in Maryland, with McClellan’s blunders allowing Lee’s inferior numbers to survive. I’ve read about that a lot. I’ve been to the battlefield and walked the lines and the creek. I was reading about it last night before bed.
It’s like Antietam when Hakim goes to check on the girl, only different. Sal, Walonda, and I stay at the registers, curious, as Hakim reconnoiters.
Maybe after the girl left was when I thought about Antietam, now I don’t know.
Hakim comes back, the look on his face different, his mouth open a little bit. He comes up to the registers and leans in very closely to speak, his breath on me, which I hate. “Mr. Richard,” he breathes. “She has a big knife. On her belt. Like inside, slid in like that. A really big knife.”
Danger is a drug, it can make feet go numb, or lips. It can make a man high, make his thoughts drivel, nothing matters that mattered. Danger makes a person not care about what happened before, we’re here now, and that’s where we are. Danger shines a light into your eyes, it’s blinding. Everything feels like it’s right now.
Hakim repeats himself in that loud whisper, like in the war movies when someone’s coming, so that Sal and Walonda can hear too: “She has a really big knife. She’s holding it. Crazy girl. We call the police.”
Walonda swipes her cell phone on and then stops. Suddenly the girl is walking toward us, her head down again, and it’s not safe. I can see a little bit more of her, over the pruning and potting display that Frank had Mark make for the summer months. I can see the girl’s left earlobe, her neck, and she’s so skinny, she’s not there. I see her slowly: I imagine everything she must feel.
Where’s Frank? I think that thought slowly too.
When the ambulance comes for me, for all of us, when Sal and Walonda are stabbed and die in each other’s arms, and Hakim, who has survived Africa, dies at Register One—he’s sure to die with a lot of noise, and with all sorts of drama—I will tell them that I was right all along. I will say to Monica, on my deathbed, as I try to hold all of my intestines in, where the girl has stabbed me, “I told you so, Monica.”
The girl is almost here.
Hakim puts his hand on my arm, above my elbow, and squeezes me, too hard. I am thinking about Hakim, how Hakim needs to live, the boy has to bring his mother and sister up from Toronto, the boy needs to grow old and get fatter on his own Funyuns in his own hardware store, the boy has to be here. Some people deserve to live more than other people.
“Mr. Richard,” Hakim says very quietly. “Mr. Richard,” he repeats.
I can’t answer.
“I must tell you something, Mr. Richard.”
The girl is upon us now, coming toward all four of us, we’re useless in this war. I’m sure her hand is on her knife.
“I am not from Ethiopia, Mr. Richard.”
“What?” I say. I don’t understand.
“I am from the Sudan. Sudanese. My father…my father…” Hakim looks like he’s crying. “My father was a bad man. My father… he has killed. He killed people, Mr. Richard. They are dead people. They are mine.”
In the military histories I read, the photos of the aftermath of battles are the worst. Sometimes, I admit it, I skip these parts, the pictures at the end of the pictures section, even though I like the books with pictures. Maybe I would not have been a good soldier. The battlefield pictures show so many people who didn’t expect to be there, thousands of dead people who always look surprised. But there’s never really a discussion of what happens in the moment danger arrives, or when it ends just like that. I guess it stops being really military history the moment it ends.
The girl shuffles by us, turning her head to look at all of us, right into me, she’s so sick and sad, and she leaves the store without speaking. I don’t know if it happens slowly or if I’m speeding up or what. Her hand was on the knife the whole time, I saw, but she never cared about us. I have never been so grateful not to matter.
Hakim squeezes my arm harder, he’s crying without making any sounds, and then I look at Sal and I start—I think I’m the one who starts it all—to laugh. All four of us begin laughing, then we are laughing hard, for our lives, we stand there like the remnants of an army, laughing, people who will never be good enough, I will never be good enough, just laughing and laughing, and it’s out of control, our laughter, the four of us standing there.
Four people laughing can make the laughter keep going. Just laughing makes one of us laugh, and catching another person’s eye sets us off again. Hakim’s face gets puffier, and the tears make his eyes go small, and I hand him a couple of tissues from my customer box, but that only makes him laugh harder, which makes me laugh harder. It’s hilarious that we all need tissues. Walonda snorts and then laughs harder, snorting is hilarious, she takes a couple of tissues, I’ve never liked Walonda this much, and Sal clutches her side, she’s got a stitch from laughing.
Then a customer comes in, a guy I recognize, and all four of us look at him, take a big breath together, sharing that breath, and then we lose it, we’re laughing
even harder, another round, and the customer smiles. Who knows what he wants, who can help him. He’s shaking his head at us.
I’m right, she was going to hurt us, but she didn’t, and that makes me laugh more. The laughter holds us together, the four of us who don’t belong together, except here with our customer, who’s laughing. The customer too. The laughter makes us safe, the laughing makes us okay, it’s life and it’s funny.
THE MISSION
Picture a little paper napkin in a diner, one of those napkins from a metal dispenser, the cheap ones. Pour water from a glass onto the napkin. Soak the paper napkin in a puddle on the countertop. The napkin turns gray when wet. Pick up the napkin and twist it tighter and tighter even though it gets mushier, until you can’t anymore. That’s me.
I’m on the bus. Christmas, the girl next to me, is asleep already, her feet stretched out on that pull-down footrest, the spring-loaded one that always snaps up and wakes me if I zone out. She was asleep before the driver finished making his dumbass announcements.
A bus is the best little universe. I love the bus, and here, finally, I get to feel alone in the cone of my own reading lamp, the light’s all mine, with my own on/off switch. It’s the only place. If my seat-mate’s a pain in the ass, I wear my earbuds and pretend I’m listening to music, move my lips like I’m singing as I stare at myself in the window. I amuse myself because it’s just me. But tonight I really have something to say—or maybe it has to be spit out. I have to tell what’s inside me, even if I’m just going over the details in my head and the words are driving the highway all night like the bus, over and over the words on the wet road, owning nothing, move along, passing through. If the words are loud, well, it’s probably about time, but if the words come quietly, so thick on my tongue that no one on the bus can hear me or understand, that will be okay too.
It’s possible that I want Christmas to hear me because she’s just a kid and she’s dying and she won’t tell anyone my secret. I’m careful that way. Maybe when she dies, she’ll take my secret away; my story will be told, finished, she’ll take it wherever the fuck dead people go, and I’ll be free. Because it’s because of her that I’m leaving Saxon Hills. Because her name is Christmas, and she made me use my safe money for two tickets, one for each of us.
Her name is Christmas. I knew when I met her that something was going to happen. She was a present for me.
We’re heading up from Lily Pons to 340 toward Frederick, where there will be another bus to another bus, and eventually a bus to Pittsburgh instead of a bus that I won’t take, the one that goes to Baltimore, to my parents’ house, where I haven’t been in three years, where there’s a life I don’t deserve lived by someone else with my name, Sarah Wasserman. She’s nineteen, like me, she’s living with her parents for the summer, Donna and Trey, she’s studying to be a nurse at Towson State, and she’s got a new boyfriend and a night job as a hostess while she volunteers part-time at the hospice off the Danton Pike. She’s a good person. She wants to have children, but she’s not sure if her new boyfriend does, and maybe he’s not the type. She won’t marry him. She feels too young for her life, anyway. She’s what didn’t happen to me.
The memory that comes back flashes in my head if I go to sleep drunk, which I do. A memory itself means nothing, and this one’s pretty vanilla, no gore or blood to wake me up. I’m sixteen. I can see the firefighter in full gear—the boots, the mask he’s got in his hand, his helmet bobbing, the mixed-up feelings in his eyes—chugging up the hill to the Seventh Street apartments to where I’m sitting on the front stoop and probably screaming. I don’t remember screaming. It’s a steep hill. He’s out of breath. He puts a hand on my shoulder as he clunks by, saying something into a walkie-talkie, asking me if I’m all right, telling me to stand somewhere else, go stand in the middle of the street, Step over there where it’s safe, Miss. There’s squawking when the other firefighters arrive a minute or an hour later. I remember each of the sounds the way I remember a song I don’t really remember, the notes playing at the same time together. But it’s the one firefighter’s face I remember most—his eyes, his panting as he arrives at the top of the hill.
For whatever reason, that’s the memory that won’t disappear, that feels the worst. Shitty things happened after, but I didn’t see: I never saw the landlord, Mrs. Cassavettes, when the EMTs brought her out on the stretcher, so I never saw how burned she was, and I never visited. Her burns weren’t fatal, just god awful, or so I was told. My parents wouldn’t let me see her.
She was burned because I had gotten hammered, because the fire in my pothead boyfriend’s apartment upstairs had started in an electrical outlet, caught the drapes and his gross old used-to-be-green couch, and became a death trap—and because when I called 911 and fell down the beaten-up stairs and ran myself through the burning hallway and rolled around outside, I gave the operator the wrong address. My address, not the Seventh Street apartments. I sent the fire department to my parents’ house, five miles away. I was too drunk to remember where I was, and they couldn’t tell by my caller ID, or from GPS, for a reason no one explained.
Her full name is Mrs. Margaret Isadora Cassavettes. Mrs. Cassavettes liked to leave her door open a little, and if she heard someone come in, she would call, “Who is it?” in a kind of singy song. She had an accent. We used to make fun of her, me and my boyfriend, Alexi. The lying douche who never spoke to me again, who went down the other way, down the fire escape, may he be in his own hell, while I pitched past Mrs. Cassavettes’ apartment, her door probably open already at 8 a.m., down the front stairs and out the door, me too drunk or too chicken or both. All I had to do was yell “Fire!” and she could have saved herself. She heard everything in the foyer.
Remember that napkin from the diner, the one all wet and twisted? Throw it out. That’s me.
Among the many bad things I have done since the fire, most are lost somewhere in the high, swirly forgetting of the last three years. Most, but not all. When I let the shitty memories get too close, the firefighter’s face on his body and other people’s bodies, there would be screaming, which got me tossed from shelters. Even in a shelter, people need to get their beauty rest—that’s a fucking joke, right? Living on the street, I was copping drugs, stealing, and sleeping with a kind of crowbar in my hand, an iron rod I found in the trunk of a car, don’t ask what I was doing there. A person doesn’t belong in the trunk of a car. But I showed that rod around, waved it at people, in case one of the creepers got a bad idea and tried to crawl into the blankets where I curled up to sleep. Until I lost the rod running from the cops one day, and then I didn’t have it.
Many of my actions over those three years will only be remembered by the people I hurt, most of whom I only stole from, which I’ve done a lot, and that’s what they’ll remember. I know. Because a bad memory can overwrite another bad memory, like a file on a computer, the original gone. Worse things always replace nice things, given enough time. Getting erased, I call it.
I thought I would forget, drown my guilt with drugs and whatever, and that I’d be poor enough to pay for my sins, like some sort of fucked-up martyr. It hasn’t worked. Being shit poor is only being shit poor. There’s nothing else to living like this, no alternative when you’re in it, no cure, nothing good happens to your conscience or your soul or whatever makes you feel bad. Not you—me. I haven’t learned anything except how to get to tomorrow. I don’t fucking know what you’ve learned.
Money’s part of the problem, that I’ve figured out, although it depends what kind of money we’re talking about, because there are different kinds of money. Most people think that money is only cash, or credit, money now or money later. But drugs are a kind of money. Drugs are something to be paid in, or paid with. A Z-Pak buys a handful of Oxy on the street, but in a parking lot in the burbs, a Z-Pak can get you a shirt from a girl’s duffel. Those are two different prices. You can shop in Memorial Park with a pair of shoes you’re willing to give up, steal a necklace and trade it fo
r a takeout thing of meatloaf—the diners in the strip malls are good for that kind of deal, the cooks who take smoke breaks out back always dumping food that isn’t theirs out the back of the kitchen. So if the same thing buys different things, and is worth a different amount in different places, then there are different kinds of money. That’s logic. It’s not just bartering, it’s money, baby. What’s it worth to you? I got it.
People want money to be money, but it’s not. Some money’s better than other money, that’s what I think. Some people are better than other people, right. Rich people’s money is worth more than poor people’s, even though that seems backwards. Gas on the corner costs less. Trust me, I know.
But I don’t know what to do with this girl on the bus, or what this trip’s going to be worth, or how some chick named Christmas fits in my story. Even with just meeting her, I’m all screwed up, and now I’m more screwed up, and it’s her fault. A girl named Christmas who doesn’t say much, who’s skinny from the chemo and whatever but won’t talk. She’s so pissed, and who can blame her. I guess that’s part of her effect on the world: she’s totally pissed, and I’m totally pissed, but her being pissed is worth something because she’s dying for real.
I met Christmas at the Farleys’ three weeks ago. I’ve been living with them since last October, almost ten months together in the old house in the woods those crazy fuckers call The Mission. They painted “The Mission” on the foundation facing the woods; you can’t see the words from the front walk, but they’re there. That’s how they like it, the Farleys, being there but not being seen yet, just planning for now.
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