by B. E. Scully
When they met up again a few days later, they stared at each other in silence for a few minutes before Senz held up his hand in some weird combination of a peace sign and the five-fingered Vulcan greeting from Star Trek. “Live long and Nostri.”
They both burst into a laughing fit so hard Emma thought she might have to do a repeat of her squatting-in-the-rhododendrons routine right there on the bowling alley’s already long-defiled rug.
And that was it. Neither of them said another word about what had happened. They both understood that not talking about it made the secret even more dangerous. And more powerful. It was like carrying around a live grenade, knowing they could pull the pin at any time.
But instead the grenade fizzled out on its own.
A month after the story first made headlines, a scandal broke involving a handful of senators and a high-end prostitution ring. Then some reality TV star was caught on camera making a drunken speech that included a bunch of racial slurs. Between that and the latest string of summer blockbusters, people gradually forgot about babies on doorsteps and true tests of principle. Every now and then someone would stage a protest act or vigilante-style crime that would bring the story back into the news. But for the most part that summer, Nostri was forgotten.
But Emma and Senz hadn’t forgotten.
By mid-July it was too hot and smelly for dumpster diving. They spent most of their time doing not much of anything up on Cathedral Point, an isolated patch of land along a mountain ridge bordering the east side of the city. A dense canopy of old growth pines allowed in only enough light for the filtered, stained-glass effect that gave the spot its name. Adding to the atmosphere were the ruins of an old stone cottage that had gone to seed so long ago that no one could remember who had built it or why. The best thing about Cathedral Point, though, was that the only way to the top was up a mile long gravel footpath so narrow and steep that even off-road vehicles wouldn’t fit on it. The bicyclists and hikers had longer, more accessible paths and the partiers didn’t want to work that hard, so most of the time Emma and Senz had the place to themselves. That summer, Cathedral Point became their own private sanctuary.
On days when they needed a change of pace they got on a bus and rode it all the way to the end of its route, out by the interstate overpass. A ten minute walk across an overgrown field then brought them to Promise Village, where they could people-watch for hours without getting bored. It wasn’t really a village at all, just an empty patch of land owned by the state transportation department. At least, it was empty for a while after the state stopped using it to park broken and retired buses. But it didn’t take long for the homeless people to move in. Within a few months, over twenty people called the place their home, with even more coming and going as “guests” of the permanent residents. Some of the residents even erected tents and set up community spaces like the concert hall made of wooden crates or the solar shower complete with plywood privacy walls.
People started calling the place Promise Village. But most of the residents of the working class neighborhood adjacent to the village only had one promise in mind: to get rid of it. The state department had cleared it out half a dozen times, but the people came right back. The homeowners kept complaining and the state kept saying there was nothing else they could do. Then a man got on a bus less than a block from Promise Village, refused to pay his fare, and then pulled out a knife and stabbed the driver and two passengers who tried to intervene. Luckily, all three victims survived. The suspect fled before police arrived, and two days later another bus driver was stabbed coming out of an employee break room near the same bus stop. This time, the attack was fatal.
The police eventually tracked the suspect to Promise Village, where they arrested him after an hour-long stand-off. The next day, city officials called a meeting to address the neighborhood residents’ concerns.
They had a long list. “I’ve worked hard all my life to own my house, and now me and my kids can’t even take a walk around the block without being harassed!”
“Here’s the real promise of that place—heaps of trash, dirty needles, piles of human shit all over the place. Does that sound promising to you?”
“I’ll tell you one thing, if Promise Village suddenly sprang up next to those fancy neighborhoods in the south end of the city, you can bet it’d be gone in less than five minutes!”
The state department promised to clear the area and hire additional security guards to keep it that way. In response, the city’s advocacy groups began campaigning for the village to stay. Social Solutions, the biggest and most powerful among them, even put their own pro-bono lawyer on the case. Mark Jacobs was out at the encampment at least once a week, news crews in tow, vowing to make sure that “every person in our city has a safe place to call home.”
The clean-up crews had started on the refuse and makeshift shelters, but so far the people weren’t going anywhere. Neither side wanted to get the police involved, but so far neither side saw another option.
On an afternoon too hot to do anything else, Emma and Senz were sitting across the street from Promise Village, watching a man from the clean-up dismantle a tower of soda cans that someone had formed into a totem pole. After he’d gone, a man from the village came along and placed three new cans in the exact same spot.
Emma shook her head, wondering which of them was the bigger fool. “I wonder what Seneca would have to say about Promise Village.”
“Seneca would say, ‘Pity looks only at the state a person is in, not its cause.’”
“That’s not what Mark Jacobs would say.”
“Shit. You know where Mr. Advocate lives?” Emma did know, but she let Senz tell her anyway. “Way on up in the West Hills. My man drives down to this side of the river in his big ol’ fat Benz and then drives straight on back home to the non-homeless part of town. And that’s the for-real-truth of it.”
“So what, you don’t think the homeless people should be allowed to stay?”
“I ain’t sayin’ that. I’m just sayin’ that the people who shout the loudest about allowing the homeless to stay are the same ones don’t go nowhere near no real homeless people except when the news cameras are around.”
That’s when Emma got an idea. “Well, if Mr. Advocate wants homeless people to have a safe place to live, he should be willing to offer up some of his own big ol’ fat West Hills spread for just that purpose, don’t you think? Put his money where his mouth is. Practice what he preaches. Walk the walk.”
Senz’s looked at her sideways for a while and then gave her one of his crocodile grins.
Nostri was back in business.
They planned it for a Friday afternoon, between noon and one when the clean-up crew was on its longer than usual pre-weekend lunch break.
Emma was in charge of transportation. “My brother left his truck at home for the summer. According to him I’m not allowed to even look at it, but I know where he hides the keys.”
“And both your parents at work, right?”
“Yep. I figure we can make two trips without much risk of getting caught. We need at least a dozen people to make it work. If we pack it tight, we can get about eight to ten people in the back of the truck, depending on what else they bring.”
Senz rubbed his hands together, relishing the scene already. “Oh, I want them to bring all kinds of things! Tents, blankets, you name it. I want Mr. Advocate’s front lawn to look like a mini Promise Village, right down to the piles of human shit all over the place!”
If moving people across town proved to be the easy part, convincing them to be moved was somewhat trickier.
Senz and Emma argued for days about the best way to make that happen. Emma was for going into Promise Village and planning the whole thing out beforehand—finding a few of the leaders, organizing people into groups, timing out the trips.
Senz was dead-set against that approach. “See, the more time people have to sit with a thing, the more complicated they make it. It’s human nature. Think abo
ut the Baby.” After the Michelle Maynard story became a media sensation, Emma and Senz had started referring to it as ‘The Baby,’ as if it were already a major historical event. “The Baby worked out perfect because it was spontaneous. Think about it—the hardest crimes to solve are the ones where some dude just pops some other dude out of nowhere, just like that. In and out, no fuss, no muss. You start plannin’ and organizin’ and over-thinkin’, you just addin’ in about a million new things to go wrong.”
Emma still wasn’t convinced. “Okay, so what, we just go into Promise Village and yell ‘Hey, everybody, come with us!’”
“Exactly! Only you’re forgettin’ the most important part,” Senz said, cupping his hands around his mouth like a megaphone. “‘Hey, everybody, come with us! Free booze!’ See, we don’t need to do no plannin’ or convincin’ or findin’ of no leaders. We only need to worry about findin’ one type of person in Promise Village to make our plan work.”
“What type is that?”
“The type who’ll go anywhere, anytime, to any place so long as there’s free booze involved.” Senz broke into a dance move and then provided his own beat. “Ya just can’t lose if ya got the booze!”
“Okay, let’s say we get twenty people as a best case scenario. If we split a bottle among two people, that’s ten bottles. That’s a lot of alcohol.”
“Yep. And no cheapo rot-gut either. Only the good stuff for Nostri.”
Senz knew a guy who would buy alcohol for underage kids at a three-for-one exchange rate. Emma had to wipe out almost all of her summer spending money to make sure that Nostri bribed with only the best, but it was worth it.
At quarter to twelve on a scorching Friday afternoon, Emma parked her brother’s truck on a deserted side street adjacent to Promise Village. Senz was already there, leaning against a telephone pole in a strip of shade almost as lean as he was. They’d planned it out beforehand to dress in identical disguises: hair tucked under black bandanas and baseball caps, big sunglasses, and baggy clothes. No one was ever going to mix up their body shapes or skin colors, but the more non-descript they looked, the better. Taking a tip from the crime shows she watched on T.V., Emma had bought blue electrical tape and altered several of the license plate numbers on her brother’s truck, carefully transforming the “nines” into “eights” and a “C” into an “O.”
Creeping around the dark garage after her parents’ had gone to bed, she felt like a spy in an old noir film. But now, out in the daylight about ready to engage actual people in what was probably an actual crime of some kind, she felt like a sixteen-year-old kid in over her head.
Emma pulled her baseball cap low in an attempt to re-conjure the noir spy. “Okay, let’s go.”
Senz handed her a shopping bag with a bottle of vodka nestled inside. “Okay. You go.”
Emma felt her head threatening to spin around and let Evil Em loose. It was the Baby all over again—her taking all the risks while Senz sat back and did all of the supervising. “No way am I going in there by myself, Senz. I totally mean it. The Baby was one thing, but if you think I’m walking in that hellhole all by myself and yelling ‘Free Booze, follow me!’, then you truly are out of your mind.”
Senz carefully set the bag down on the sidewalk and crossed his arms. “Okay, have it your way. I’ll go. But here’s one thing to think about before I do—somethin’ you ain’t thought of ‘cause you don’t have to. Unlike you, I been hangin’ around this place long before the news media took an interest in it. In fact, it might not surprise you to know I already been inside Promise Village. In fact, there’s people know my face in Promise Village. That means if somethin’ goes wrong, the finger gonna point straight in my direction. So, yeah, let’s go.”
Emma picked the bag up off the sidewalk.
“And remember,” Senz added, “just put it out there about the booze and start walkin’. Don’t explain nothin’, don’t answer no questions. Some gonna be suspicious as all hell, some gonna hang back and wait and see. It’s the ‘What the hell, why not?’ ones we’re after.”
Emma walked fast through the entry gate with her head down. Promise Village was quiet in the afternoon heat. A row of aluminum pie pans strung across a makeshift patch of garden was clink-clanking in the breeze. Murmuring voices and eruptions of laughter came from people sitting or standing around in little clusters. A hound dog started barking from somewhere far off. Chords from an out-of-tune guitar drifted out of one of the tents. It was a Johnny Cash song, but Emma couldn’t place the name.
It suddenly occurred to her that she was alone, and no one but Senz knew where she was.
Once she found what seemed to be the approximate center of the Village, she cleared her throat and willed forth the loudest voice she could manage. “Free booze! If you want free booze and a ride across town, just follow me!”
Dead silence. The pie pans clattered. The hound dog shifted to a high-pitched whine. The guitar player hit a flat note and the chords faltered to a stop. Emma felt dizzy, too hot in the midday sun. She was surrounded by staring eyes in strange, hostile faces.
What am I doing here? Why aren’t I on the couch in the air-conditioning, watching T.V. and eating junk food?
A man stood up and came over to Emma. His eyes were hidden by mirrored sunglasses, the rest of his face by a thick tangle of mustache and beard with no discernible borders. The sun caught his sunglasses and threw flashes of light at crazy angles every time he moved his head.
Don’t faint, don’t faint, don’t faint…
The man took off his sunglasses and squinted at the bag in Emma’s hand. “What kind of booze?”
Emma pulled out a bottle of the twenty-dollar vodka that had bankrupted her summer. “And there’s more bottles just like this once we get across town.”
A woman stepped out of the crowd. “Yeah, sure—what’s the catch? What’s waiting at the end of this so-called trip?”
More voices joined in. “You some kind of crazy serial killer?”
“If so they’re makin’ ‘em younger and younger.”
And then the million-dollar-question Emma had just been asking herself: “What’re you doin’ here, girl?”
Emma shouldered her way through the crowd and started walking back toward the entrance gate. A cluster of people followed her, but Emma didn’t turn around. She forced herself to go slowly, to not look back. Once she got to Senz, everything would be all right.
But when she finally made it out of Promise Village, Senz was nowhere in sight.
She stopped right there on the sidewalk, frozen with panic. For one horrible moment she was sure Senz had abandoned her, had set her up for some terrible Nostri joke of his own. Then she looked down the side street and saw the black baseball cap slouched down in the passenger seat of her brother’s truck.
Five people had followed Emma out of Promise Village. It seemed like a long way to the truck, but once she got there, she pulled out two more vodka bottles. “Hop in back and they’re yours, with more to come once we get there.”
The last thing she needed was to drive across town with a truckload of people swigging open bottles of vodka, but she had to get them in the truck. She had to get out of here. The panic and disorientation, the heat and the creeping sense of unreality were beginning to work on her nerves.
Inside the truck, Senz was as cool and collected as ever.
He tipped his cap at Emma. “Let’s throw some dust.”
The tree-lined street where Mark Jacobs lived was even quieter than Promise Village. Emma pulled up to the end of a driveway in front of a dark brown house trimmed in white like a gingerbread cottage from a fairy tale. She parked the truck along the sidewalk, but her passengers were out of the back before she even turned off the engine. Some of them had brought along bags stuffed full of their belongings. Emma thought one of them might have even brought along a tent.
She handed over two more bottles with a promise of more to come as long as they stayed on the lawn of the gingerbread house.<
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Senz watched them filter across the neon green grass, nodding his approval. “By the time we get back with the second load, the party should be takin’ care of itself.”
By the time they got back the party was more than taking care of itself. Five more people had materialized to join the Promise Village crowd, and music was blasting from some source Emma couldn’t locate. A few of the partiers began dancing around the lawn. A neighbor from the house next door was crouched behind a potted palm tree on her front porch, staring over at the crowd and talking a mile a minute on her phone.
Emma was growing more nervous by the minute. “I doubt she’s calling her friends to come join the party, Senz. There’s no way we’re sticking around this time. We’ve got to get out of here, like, now. As in right now.”
“I agree. Get rid of the rest of the booze and then there’s only one more thing I gotta do.”
Senz reached behind the seat and pulled out a big white sign. As part of her pre-operation garage espionage, Emma had stapled-gunned the sign to a wooden stake she’d rummaged from the garden shed. Senz jumped out of the truck and stabbed the sign deep into the lush grass.
Emma glanced in her rearview mirror as she eased the truck away from Mark Jacobs’ now crowded front lawn. The sign was as impossible to miss as the message spray-painted in thick black letters: “Nostri!”
The story went viral even faster than the Baby. Mark Jacobs was sitting at his favorite café enjoying an espresso when his social media notifications started going crazy. By the time he rushed home, his front lawn had become a stand-off between over three dozen party-goers and almost as many police officers.
The news crews had arrived before he did. “Mr. Jacobs, are these people here to protest the closure of Promise Village?”
“Mr. Jacobs, your neighbors say they’re scared to leave their houses—”
“Mr. Jacobs, if the police force these people out of your yard, where will they go?”