On the way back, he heard what sounded like an argument coming from one of the bedrooms. The door was ajar, so he stood outside and peeked in. His uncles, his aunt and his grandpa were gathered around his dad.
“But I don’t need it,” Lonnie’s dad said, pushing Tío Daniel’s hand away. “Really. Me and Lonnie are doing fine.”
“Ándale, Richard, take it,” Tío Daniel insisted, holding a wad of money in his hand. “We know you’re going through a hard time right now, so Lydia, Rogelio, Armando and I chipped in two hundred dollars each to help you out.”
“No, that’s okay. I’m good. As a matter of fact, I just got a job. Starting Monday, I’ll be working at a furniture store warehouse in Marsville.”
“Really? Congratulations, man,” Tío Daniel said. “That’s awesome. I’m glad you finally found something. Still, it’ll be awhile before you get paid, and the eight hundred dollars will tide you over until then.”
“No, Daniel. I’m not gonna take your money,” Lonnie’s dad said. “But thanks for thinking about us.”
He started to walk out of the bedroom when his father muttered, “If you’d gone to school like I told you, you wouldn’t be in the bind you’re in now.”
Lonnie’s dad wheeled around, his face filled with indignation. “So you’re telling me that if I’d gone to college, Becky would still be alive? Is that what you’re telling me, Pa?”
“No, but maybe if you’d gone to college and gotten a degree, Becky might not have had to work as a security guard to help make ends meet.”
“She didn’t have to work as a security guard. It’s what she wanted to do. And I already had a job that paid me plenty of money.”
“Working as a truck driver?” his father scoffed. “Come on, Richard. Who do you think you’re kidding? You threw away a perfectly good opportunity for a real career. Everyone else went to school, and look at them now. Rogelio and Daniel are engineers, Armando’s a high school principal and Lydia’s an accountant. And what did you do? You became a truck driver, and you couldn’t even make a go of that.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Go ahead. Let the whole world know that I’m the dumb one of the family!”
“I didn’t say —”
“Yeah, you did. You think I’ve forgotten how you used to call me burro when I was little?”
“You were failing all your classes, Richard,” his father said. “Instead of studying, you’d sit in your room for hours, playing your guitar. Do you think you deserved to be praised for that?”
“I didn’t deserve to be called names! Lonnie’s not doing too good in school, but I don’t make fun of him for it.” He pointed at his siblings. “That’s why I don’t wanna live in Abilene, Pa. ’Cause all you’ll do is hold me up to them and say, ‘Look, burro, that’s what you could’ve become!’”
He stalked out of the bedroom. Seeing Lonnie standing in the hallway, he took him by the arm, making him spill his soda. “C’mon. We’re going home.”
“But I thought we were spending the weekend here.”
“We’re not spending another minute in this house. Get your jacket and let’s get outta here.”
When Rita saw them, she exclaimed, “Oh, my gatos! What happened?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Lonnie said and hugged her goodbye.
“Lonnie! Let’s go!” his dad shouted, hurrying him out of the house.
As soon as they got in the car, he tore out of the driveway, sped down Ambler Street and headed toward Interstate 20.
“I shoulda known this wasn’t gonna work,” he said.
“What wouldn’t work?” Lonnie asked.
“Coming here. I thought that as long as we were in town, I’d talk to my parents about me and you staying with them for a little while. You know, till things got better.”
“You were considering moving us to Abilene?” Lonnie asked, astounded. “But what about your new job?”
“I ain’t got no job. I only told my family that to get them off my back. The truth is, I ain’t got nothing. No job, no prospects … and pretty soon, no house.”
“Dad, what are you talking about?”
He sighed. “I ain’t got the money for the rent, buddy. I hate to tell you this, but it looks like we’re gonna have to move out of our house by the end of the month.”
“We’re moving? Where?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to see what’s out there.”
“Wait a minute,” Lonnie said. “If you knew you weren’t going to be able to pay the rent, why didn’t you take the eight hundred bucks they were trying to give you?”
“’Cause I wasn’t gonna let my brothers and sister treat me like some charity case. I was about to talk to your grandpa about us living with them, till they showed up and started getting all uppity with me. Then … well, you saw what happened.”
“So you were serious about us moving in with Grandma and Grandpa?”
“It don’t matter ’cause it ain’t gonna happen.”
“But it could. I mean, if you were to go back and apologize …”
“Forget it. I ain’t apologizing to nobody. Besides, you got your school.”
“That’s not a problem. I could easily transfer to Adair and go to school with Enrique and them.”
Lonnie hated his school. He didn’t have any close friends, except for Axel, and that relationship was going nowhere. Yvette was the only bright spot. But when he learned that she had been hanging out with Michael de Luna, the Wyatt Wrangler’s quarterback, he knew he had no chance with her.
“As soon as we get back, I’m gonna start looking for a place for us to move to,” his dad said.
“You mean to another house?”
“I don’t know.”
“An apartment?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Stop asking so many questions.”
“Dad, you need to turn back,” Lonnie said, fear now dawning inside him. “You have to apologize to Grandpa and tell him we need help. At least we’ll have a place to live.”
“Are you crazy? I ain’t gonna do that.”
“Dad, please. We can’t go homeless.”
“We’re not gonna go homeless!”
“It’s not fair! Just ’cause you don’t want to work!” Lonnie snapped.
“Watch your mouth, buddy. It ain’t that I don’t wanna work. I’m trying my best to find a job, and as soon as I do, things are gonna get better.”
“No, they’re not!” Lonnie burst into tears. “Things are never going to get better ’cause you don’t want them to. We could move in with Grandma and Grandpa right now, but you’d rather us go homeless than to do that.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, so just keep your mouth shut, okay?”
“It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“HEY, KID. C’MERE.”
Lonnie turned around and saw Moses perched on top of a boulder behind him. His legs were crossed, like a little kid in a reading circle. Lonnie started to run away, but for some reason, he didn’t feel threatened by him.
“I ain’t gonna hurt you,” Moses said, motioning him over. “I just wanna talk to you.”
Stepping away from the creek bank, Lonnie climbed up the hill and walked toward him, maintaining a safe distance, in case he decided to try something.
Moses stroked his long beard. “You got any money on you?”
“No, sir,” Lonnie lied, thinking about the thirteen dollars in his wallet.
“Sir,” Moses said quietly. “It’s been a long time since somebody called me sir. What are you doing here, anyway?”
Lonnie shrugged. “Sometimes I come to Catfish Creek to get away from things.”
“Yeah?” Moses brought down his legs. “What are you trying to get away from today?”
“Just some problems me and my dad are having.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “Me and my old man didn’t get along too good, either. Sit down, kid. Take a load off your dogs.”
Something about the sound of his voice made Lonnie feel he could trust him, so he sat on a boulder across from him. “Do you live out here?” he asked.
Moses laughed. “Naw, I live at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. I like to come to Catfish Creek on vacation.”
“You’re homeless, aren’t you,” Lonnie said matter-of-factly.
Moses stopped laughing. “What gave you your first clue, Sherlock?”
“I’ve seen you standing by the bridge at the corner of I-27 and Peyton Avenue, panhandling.”
His eyes crinkled with joy. “Ah, yeah, that’s a real sweet spot. I usually make pretty good money there.”
“How did you become homeless?” Lonnie asked. “I mean, if you don’t mind telling me.”
“You sure are a nosy parker,” Moses said. “Now, I’ll tell you what you wanna know, but information costs money.” He rubbed his fingers together. “You positive you ain’t got any on you?”
Knowing he would have to give him something in order to keep the conversation going, Lonnie pulled out his wallet and removed a dollar bill from it.
Moses made a face. “What am I supposed to do with that? Blow my nose with it? C’mon, kid. You can do better than that.” He snatched the wallet away from Lonnie and took out the rest of the money. Tossing the wallet back, he said, “Okay, what do you wanna know?”
After his aggressive behavior, Lonnie wasn’t sure he wanted to keep talking to him. But Moses had his thirteen dollars. “How did you end up on the streets?”
Moses grinned, as if he was about to answer with something sarcastic, but then his grin faded. He looked down and shook his head. “Bad decisions, kid. Bad decisions.”
“What kinds of bad decisions?”
“Bad decisions don’t come in different kinds,” he said. “Bad is bad.”
“I guess what I want to know is, what was your life like before you became homeless? Did you have a job? A family? A house?”
“Yeah, I had all those things, but I lost them all.”
“How?”
“Why are you asking me all this?” Moses asked, now sounding irritated. “You writing a book or something?”
“No, sir, but … um … well, I have to write a research paper for school, and I thought I’d pick homelessness as my topic.”
That fib seemed to calm him down. Or maybe it was that Lonnie had called him sir again.
“Okay, professor, here’s your scoop. For me, it was the drink. I started drinking when I was in high school, and I never stopped.”
“Do you, um … do you do drugs?”
Moses glowered at him. “Do I look like a druggie to you, kid?”
“No, sir. I was just asking …”
“I ain’t stupid. Like I said, I made a lot of bad decisions, but that wasn’t one of them.”
“What about your family? Were you married? Do you have children?”
“Yeah, I got a wife and a daughter somewhere, but I ain’t seen them in years.”
“What about your job? What kind of work did you do?”
Moses paused for a moment, as if he was probing his mind for a forgotten memory. “I worked at a furniture store warehouse,” he said. “Made a good living out of it, too.”
“Did you lose your job ’cause of your drinking?”
“Naw. The place shut down and everybody got laid off. But it was the drink that kept me from finding more work.” Moses looked up at the sky. The clouds had begun to grow dark and thick. “We’d better go inside before it starts to rain.”
“Inside? Where?” Lonnie asked, looking around Catfish Creek.
“C’mon, I’ll show you.”
Moses led him down to the edge of the water. Then they crossed over to the other side by stepping on large stones. They walked up a grassy hill and went through an opening in the underbrush, which looked like a long tunnel.
When they reached the end, Lonnie saw a white stone building with a wooden arched doorway, like those in storybook houses. It struck him odd that in all the times he had been to Catfish Creek, he had never noticed the building.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Welcome to the Hold, kid,” Moses said. “You wanted to know where I live. Well, this is it.” He opened the door, and a strong odor, like the smell of wet newspapers mixed with the stench of urine and feces wafted out. “Yeah, I know. It takes some getting used to,” he added, when he saw the look on Lonnie’s face.
Inside the Hold, dozens of haggard-looking homeless men, women and children wandered about, moaning and wailing, like unrepentant sinners condemned to hell. The building, empty of furniture, was littered with old mattresses, cardboard boxes and shopping carts. A gray patch of light, filled with dancing dust particles, seeped from a small window high above a wall. The only other source of light came from a metal barrel at the end of the room, crowned with flames. Several men stood around it, tossing pieces of wood inside the barrel to keep the fire going.
From the darkness, an old man with no legs rolled toward them on a wheelchair. He wore a camouflage cap and a camouflage jacket. Two plastic American flags were duct-taped to the back of his wheelchair.
“We got us a visitor, J.D.,” Moses told him. “I don’t know what his name is, though.”
“That’s okay,” the old man said to Lonnie. “He don’t know my name, either.”
“But he just called you J.D.”
“J.D.’s short for John Doe,” the old man answered with a cackle, followed by a hacking cough.
“So what’s your real name?”
“It don’t matter. I’ve gone by so many names that one’s just as good as the other.”
“I’ve seen you before,” Lonnie told him. “On Sterling Boulevard. You wheel yourself up and down the sidewalk, holding a sign that says HOMELESS VIETNAM VET.”
Moses laughed. “J.D. ain’t no Vietnam vet. He ain’t never even been in the military.”
J.D. certainly looked like a military veteran—a veteran who had fallen on hard times.
“Diabetes ate up my legs,” J.D. confessed. “But folks are more likely to give me money if they think I lost them in the war than if I tell them the truth.”
“So in other words, you’re just conning people into giving you money,” Lonnie said bluntly.
“What are you? A Polly Pureheart?” J.D. coughed again, then spat a greenish loogie on the floor. “You think I panhandle ’cause I’m trying to get rich off other folks? ’Cause I like it? Let me tell you something, sonny boy. You don’t go through life doing only the things you wanna do. You do whatever you gotta do to survive, whether you like it or not, you understand? It’s just something that’s gotta be did.”
A booming clap of thunder rattled the walls, followed by a pat-pat-pat-pat striking the roof.
J.D. cocked his head. “Sounds like it’s starting to shoot rain. C’mon, let’s go to the other side where the roof don’t leak.”
Moses took the handles of J.D.’s wheelchair and pushed him across the room while Lonnie walked behind them.
All of a sudden, a hand reached out from the shadows and grabbed his arm. A Mexican woman, wrapped in a black shawl, cried out desperately, “Ayúdanos, por favor. Mis hijos tienen mucha hambre. Please help us. My children are very hungry.”
Tugging himself away, Lonnie said, “Lo siento, pero no tengo dinero. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any money.”
More hands reached out and yanked at his clothes—tiny hands with razor-sharp claws. “¡Hambre! ¡Hambre! ¡Hambre! Hungry! Hungry! Hungry!”
Lonnie looked down and saw a pack of little kids, no older than four or five. Their jaws snapped open as they tried to sink their pointy fangs into him. “¡Hambre! ¡Hambre! ¡Hambre!”
“J.D.! Moses! Help!” Lonnie screamed, but they had disappeared into the darkness.
“¡Hambre! ¡Hambre! ¡Hambre!”
The little monsters dragged him down to the floor and crawled on top of him, biting and clawing at his face, his arms and his body.
Lonnie opened his eyes. He sat up in his bed. No, it wasn’t his bed. Where was he?
His dad’s snoring brought him back to reality. They were in a room at a place called the Twin Oaks Motel, and Lonnie was lying on the double bed next to his dad’s.
He got up to use the restroom, and then returned to bed, no longer sleepy.
The week after Thanksgiving, he and his dad moved their possessions from their house to a public storage shed that was too small to hold everything, but it was all they could afford. Whatever didn’t fit—a couch, Lonnie’s bedroom furniture, the china cabinet and the dining room set—was divided between Joe and Mario, who squeezed them inside their garages. Lonnie and his dad spent their last night at the house sleeping on the floor.
The following day, Lonnie’s dad picked him up from school and drove him to their new residence, a white stone building with brown trim. The paint was peeling off in places, and the roof looked as if it was about to cave in. The motel parking lot was cratered with pot holes, and Lonnie’s dad had to drive carefully to avoid them.
He had chosen the Twin Oaks Motel because it was the least ratty place he could find for the price. Lonnie hated to have seen what the other motels his dad scouted out looked like.
Although the outside appeared as if it was ready for demolition, their room was surprisingly decent. It had two double beds, a dresser with a TV sitting on top, a nightstand, a table with two chairs, a small fridge and a microwave. But it wasn’t home. It would never be home.
“We’re just gonna stay here for a few days, that’s all,” Lonnie’s dad said. “I promise.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Until you find a job,” Lonnie said critically.
“Look, buddy, I know you’re mad at me, and I guess you got a right to be. But I ain’t doing this on purpose. This is the best I can do right now, so don’t knock it, okay? Things are gonna get better. You just have to be patient.”
“I’ll try not to hold my breath waiting,” Lonnie muttered and walked out the door.
He was sick of him. Lonnie didn’t know what his dad’s problem was. He had been out of work for almost a year. Surely he could have found something by now. Anything! Lonnie had begun to wonder if his dad was really trying to find a job. Or could it be that he didn’t want to work. Maybe he was just plain lazy.
On the Other Side of the Bridge Page 12