A full minute passes before he drops his cigarette to the ground and grinds it with the heel of one of his black shoes. As it dies next to the dumpster, he pulls his ski cap down so it’s covering his face. Then he creeps down the brick wall several feet and jumps up to grab the lowest rung of a fire escape ladder.
He struggles to pull it down because he’s such a feather weight, but when he finally does, he quickly climbs, hand over hand, toward a small, iron-grilled landing on the second floor. It, too, is filled with potted plants just like the one where Jan is sitting, albeit infinitely healthier. The man crouches next to the window at the back of the landing and feels around its rim. Jan remains curious. Some part of her nine-year-old brain understands what is happening. Another part whispers inside her head that what he is doing is wrong. Still, a third part—maybe even the ancient lizard-brain part—wants to see more.
Suddenly, the man stops feeling around the window and his shoulders seem to relax. In one swift motion he slides the window up. A cat jumps out, large and fluffy with white boots, and the pervy man yelps. The cat easily soars from the landing to the one next to it before jumping to a window sill.
The pervy man nervously stands and watches the cat, which by now is far out of reach. He looks around the alleyway, even staring up at Jan, presumably to see if anyone has noticed him or the cat, but the big, dying, potted plants that Jan’s father bought home from Tenzar’s Market, because the season is over and they were going to be thrown away, obscure her from view.
Meanwhile, the cat turns and stares up at Jan because it can see her perfectly. For a few long seconds it regards her with alien eyes. Finally it sits, reaches one paw up to its sandpaper tongue, and begins to lick.
Jan doesn’t like cats. She hasn’t liked them her whole life long. For that matter, she doesn’t like dogs either, or more correctly, cats and dogs seem to dislike her.
As she ponders canines and felines and their mutual disdain for her, the pervy man with the high-water pants disappears inside the window he has opened. Jan pulls herself forward with one hand on a clay pot. All that remains of the man is the open window through which he just disappeared.
Jan, her father, and brother haven’t lived in their apartment long enough to know their neighbors, but she thinks that particular landing, window, and cat belong to a man who likes to walk around his apartment with the window open, dressed only in his underwear and socks. He even waters his fire escape garden wearing tighty-whities. Jan’s father has nothing to say about that. He just tells her that there are two types of people in the world.
Them and everybody else.
Five minutes tick away while the cat continues to lick itself and Jan watches the empty window with a detached interest that would be scary if it weren’t so honest. While she watches and waits, her mind drifts to the deceased, burly owner of Rico’s Pizza who wouldn’t give her daddy a grinder for dinner because it cost five dollars and twenty-five cents and he only had five dollars and twenty-two cents.
After a while, her thoughts turn to the woman who was found hanging in the alleyway next door, all trumped up in her laundry line. Jan’s father had asked the lady out to supper and she had said no, which made Jan’s father mad. That night, when he was supposed to be eating Chinese food with the laundry lady, he sat in a chair in their apartment, staring at his wall of newspaper clippings and not talking.
The boy who fell off the bridge and into the raging Deerfield River, had shoved his middle finger into the air at Jan, her father, and her brother while they were emptying their trash into the burrito dumpster, and he was cutting through the alley on his bicycle.
“That was rude,” Jan’s father told them, and they agreed.
Presently, a figure appears at the mouth of the alley causing Jan to squint her eyes. It’s the man who likes to wear underwear and nothing else. He’s carrying a pumpkin because it’s pumpkin season and Halloween will be here soon. Jan watches as the man slowly walks down the alley, all the time looking at his fire escape ladder and the open window on the second floor.
The cat on the window sill meows and the man suddenly drops the pumpkin. It cracks on the ground just like a person’s head.
“Bootsy,” he screams, in a voice that sounds much deeper than Jan imagined it would. “Bootsy, precious. How did you get outside? I’m coming, Bootsy-Wootsy. I’m coming.”
Jan covers her mouth once more to keep from giggling. Bootsy-Wootsy? She can’t wait to tell her father.
The underwear man turns and runs down the alley, a baritone wail trailing behind him. Presently, Jan hears a commotion coming from beyond the window across the alley where the pervy man has slipped inside. There are voices and the sound of things breaking, then more voices.
Jan jumps a little when the underwear man appears at the window with his hands and his face painted red. He scrambles out onto the landing, his mouth open wide but no sound coming out. That’s because everything he has inside is pouring out of him through a ragged gash in his throat. He’s followed by the pervy man with his ski cap still over his face and one glove-clad hand holding something sharp.
The underwear man backs up against the railing of the fire escape but magically keeps going. He gurgles as he leans backwards, tips on end, and quickly falls to the alley floor. Unfortunately, his head hits the edge of the burrito dumpster first and there is a wet snapping sound as his neck turns sideways.
He comes to rest next to the metal box and next to the cracked pumpkin. His head and the pumpkin are equally split and there is a growing sea of crimson in a halo around him.
The pervy man quickly jumps back through the window and reappears holding a laptop computer and a pillowcase that seems lumpy and full. He doesn’t even look over the railing at the lifeless body in the alley. He simply opens the pillow case, drops the laptop computer into it, heaves the whole thing over his shoulder, and scrambles down the metal ladder.
Jan stands. She knows she’s risking being seen but she doesn’t often get an opportunity like this, so she immediately takes it. She reaches down and strains to pick up one of the heavier potted plants that her father brought home from Tenzar’s Market, and quietly rests the thick clay pot on the railing of the fire escape.
She carefully eyes the pervy man who is holding the pillow case and makes some obscene and brilliant calculations in her head. Meanwhile, he kicks the lifeless foot of the other man before turning and heading further down the alley.
Jan holds her breath and counts to herself. Right before the pervy man steps underneath where she has been hiding, three stories up, Jan drops the potted plant off the fire escape and watches it plummet toward the ground.
A soft ‘thunk’ accents the quiet alley. The pervy man falls down, his head broken open just like the pumpkin and just like the head of the underwear man. When he is eventually found, the savagely brutal damage brought on by Jan makes a first-year officer puke against the wall, leave the police force, and become a kindergarten teacher instead.
Before that, however, Jan’s father comes home, tired and sore from a day of hard labor. She meets him at the door, quickly grabs his big hand, pulls him to the window and out onto the fire escape. “Look,” she tells him and points down at the lifeless bodies of the two men.
“Jan,” her father exclaims, his eyes burning with satisfaction. “Did you do that all by yourself?”
Jan’s face turns a little red. “Sort of,” she admits. “The weird little guy killed the man by the dumpster” Then she puffs out her chest. “But I did him.”
For some truly bizarre reason, her father asks, “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Jan shrugs. “He seemed . . . pervy.”
Jan’s father flashes a frightening, psychotic smile. He reaches down and tousles her hair. “You’re a regular chip off the old block,” he laughs and picks her up in his arms. “But you know what? I think we’ve outstayed our welcome in Greenfield Center, don’t you?”
Jan nods her head. “Can we go to Cape Cod?” s
he asks him. “There’re supposed to be great white sharks in the water there.”
“Sharks?” her little brother exclaims, fully awake from his nap. “They eat people alive.”
“Why not?” her father tells them both, thinking about the outlying dunes of the national seashore and how burying bodies there will be easy. “Cape Cod it is.”
K is for Kieran
Who Fights in a Ring
THEY PUT US IN rings like dogs or chickens and no one blinks an eye.
They pass bets around, double fists full of money, screaming at each other while we become willing and wild to do anything for just one more day of life.
Most times they don’t give us weapons to use. All we have is our teeth and our nails, our limbs flailing and hair flying as we desperately try to murder our friends, our brothers, our sisters, all for their amusement.
Sometimes someone will toss in a blade, or a nail, or something random like an old stapler from before—anything to spice up their entertainment.
I don’t want to do this anymore. I just don’t.
There was a famous series of books from back when. I’ve never seen them but I was told the story. In them, the main character has to fight for her life against a dozen others, in a wilderness surrounded by a dome. That world, so fictional, is so close to mine, that fiction and reality have become one and the same and I know I’m going to die.
Soon.
I’m kept in a cage, naked like an animal, and sprayed with water every morning so the smell, and the sick, and the blood washes through the grate. Men with angry, booming voices inspect us while heavily decorated women with gold manacles around their wrists, chain-linked to their owners on short tethers, follow with their heads bowed and their bodies draped in gowns. The women won’t look at us for fear that the shame of this new world will make them go blind.
I want to reach through the bars and claw at their faces.
I want to hug them and call them ‘mommy’.
I want to murder them, my teeth clamping around their throats, ripping and tearing until I’m in charge of their lives instead of their men, deeming each one unworthy to take another breath.
Life wasn’t always like this—I wasn’t always like this—but the world has changed and I am nothing more than a beast.
We, human beings I mean, fell apart so quickly. After the wars, which no one expected to be race-driven, the United States was left in tatters. People segregated themselves. Blacks went south. Whites stayed in the northeast. Asians staked a claim out west. Others carved out sections in the middle of the country to call their own—and every one of them, black, white, red, yellow, drove away those who had different colored faces.
In the new order, my sister and I didn’t belong anywhere because we had no race. My mother was white with a pedigree that stretched back across time to when the Mayflower crossed the sea. My father was black and Welsh from when the British Empire still existed.
After Buckingham Palace burned and Big Ben toppled to the ground, The East Russian Isles were formed and my father fled to the states. That was right before the end and no one batted an eye that a white woman and a black man had brown children.
I was three and Bridgette was just born when the Day of Bombs tore holes throughout America and destroyed everything. We lived up in Massachusetts back then.
I don’t remember the initial war and I don’t remember what happened after. All I knew was that my sister and I were of two races and that meant we were considered mongrels without a home. We headed to the Mid-Atlantic, surviving with my black and white parents in the woods mostly, sometimes meeting others like ourselves, often fighting for our lives.
My father finally abandoned us for the Black Territories when I was eight. My mother stayed with Bridgette and me as long as she could, but living in the wild without a man broke her into pieces. The day she disappeared, we knew where she went.
She left us for New New England, the White Territories in the northeast. She fit in there but we didn’t.
By then I was ten. Bridgette was seven.
“Kieran?” she would often whisper to me as we lay in the dark underneath a lean-to or in a shallow cave, both of us starving and plotting where our next meal would come from. “Why are people so bad?”
“I don’t know,” I would tell her, because it was the truth. I didn’t. All I knew was that our skin wasn’t black, but it wasn’t white either, and that deadly combination meant that we were prime candidates for the fighting rings.
In the end, I was right.
Bridgette and I were picking apples in an orchard that was so overgrown with vines and moss that we thought we were safe. We were wrong. The orchard was a trap, and the red apples that promised to fill us up for a time were sour at best.
Bridgette fell into the covered hole first, hidden with expertly laid branches and leaves. Thankfully, there weren’t spikes on the bottom like I heard some traps had for wild boar. I don’t think I could have survived if my little sister had been impaled on one of those, screaming for help and me trying to cover her mouth to be quiet.
I practically jumped in after her, desperately trying to grab hold of her hand but failing miserably.
Both of us huddled at the bottom of that hole for two days until the adults came. Most of them were brown like us. A few had slanted eyes and kinky hair. Others were purebred but had deformities. There were whites without limbs or blacks with vitiligo. There were Asians and Latinos, each bearing the burden of somehow being different enough to be cast out of their factions.
Grabby, grubby hands hauled us out of that hole, Bridgette wailing and me crying. They tied us to the backs of horses and brought us to the rings where we were stripped and thrown into cages.
That’s where we are now.
I haven’t seen Bridgette since we came here. They keep the males and the females separate. I know why. I’m not stupid, but I won’t let my mind go there. I refuse to believe that anything has happened to Bridgette, because if something has happened to her, I’m all alone with no race, no color, and no one to save me.
I’ve fought four times in the rings since I’ve been here. Each time has made me die a little inside because each time I’ve won. With screams, and laughter, and the smell of roasting pig on the wind, I murdered a boy who was bigger than me. There was blood then, a lot, some from me and some from him.
Two days later I strangled a little girl who was smaller than Bridgette. The crowd held their thumbs down for her because it was a pitiful fight. I wanted her windpipe to cave in quickly so she wouldn’t suffer, but she kicked, and gasped, and cried for what seemed like days.
After that, I don’t know who else I killed. All I know is that I’ve survived the ring four times and that’s four times too many for me.
As I suck on a piece of soggy white bread that has been dropped through the bars of my cage by a big man with a tattooed face, one of the women in fancy gowns, brown like me, her eyes mostly staring at the dirt floor, slowly raises them and catches mine.
I stare back, vacant but defiant. There is nothing, nothing, she can do or say to change my life. There is only a cage between me and her and maybe a vague notion that if given the chance, I’ll kill her, too.
“Boy,” she whispers. Her hands are bound with gold manacles. Her man is turned the other way, inspecting someone else in another cage.
My eyes are half-lidded. I feel nothing. “What?” I say.
“Who is your kin?”
I stare down at my naked legs then up at her face. “We’re the same color,” I tell her. “Maybe you’re my mother.”
“No,” she says almost too quickly. “You know better. Women our color are sterilized.”
I take a deep breath and look sideways through the bars at a new boy in the cage next to me. He’s also brown, but he has a worse curse. The boy has a club foot that will slow him down in the rings. He’s new and I already know he won’t last a single fight.
I turn my head back and look at the b
rown woman. She’s clutching a purse in her manacled hands. “My mother is in New New England,” I tell her. “My father went to the Black Territories.”
She nods as if she understands everything about my life, from being abandoned by both parents, to caring for Bridgette, to being trapped in the apple orchard. Slowly she opens her purse, reaches one brown hand inside, and pulls out an old-fashioned fountain pen. I only know what it is because my father used to write with one on any paper he could find.
The woman cradles the pen in her hand then slips it back in her purse.
“At the rings,” she says. “In the fights. I’ll throw this to you.”
“For why?” I say, my words barely a whisper.
Her man turns and glares at me with tiny, feral eyes because he has been listening the whole time. He moves dangerously close to the bars—dangerous because I might lash out at him or scratch his face—claw at his vision. “We’ve made a bet on you,” he hisses. “You have good odds but this pen will make them even better.”
I sit on my bare rump and wrap my arms around my legs. “And what’s in it for me?” I ask, not caring who hears.
“You get to live another day,” he growls, then pulls his woman away by her gold chain. I watch them weave through the crowds and disappear into an abyss of human filth. Throughout the day other women come by with their men. Some have bruises on their faces while others seem content and happy.
That night, I sit in the dark, in my cage, and listen to the crowds roar as there are more fights in the rings. At some point, the man with the tattoo on his face comes and drags the boy with the club foot out of his cage and pushes him until he stumbles and falls.
“Move it, brownie,” he roars, and the boy scrambles to his feet. He limps away with the man cursing after him, while the rest of us watch from behind our bars, mute, because it is our future we are watching.
Little Killer A to Z Page 8