by Nancy Rue
Meanwhile Desmond and I went out on the Harley every day and distributed fliers. They went up in the windows of dry cleaners and T-shirt shops and bakeries in parts of the city Desmond said he’d never been to before. Like San Marco Avenue north of the historic district, where we stopped for a cupcake, and the southern strip of Avenida Menendez by the bay, where he feigned disinterest in the kids fishing off the wall, but couldn’t take his eyes off of them. It never failed to sadden me that none of those places was more than a mile from where he grew up.
On Wednesday I looked at the map and saw that the only area we hadn’t covered was the West King Street neighborhood. Chief said the hungry would smell the food and find it, but it still made sense to me to alert those whose noses might not be that keen, for various reasons. I thought about doing it before Desmond got home from school, but I knew there would be serious repercussions from that—a rip-off of my Godiva stash heading the list of possibilities. He’d been doing so well since the women left, and I didn’t want to jar that. Still, I wasn’t sure taking him back to his roots was such a good idea.
I arrived at a compromise.
“You can ride with me down to West King,” I said. “But you can’t get off the bike when I hand out the fliers. Are we clear?”
“What do I get if I’m good?” he said.
“You get me not ripping your nose hairs out with red-hot tweezers. And—we’ll stop by and see your mom.”
I watched his face as I put on my helmet. I’d been taking him to Sacrament House every other day to give Geneveve time with him, and so far he hadn’t responded with anything other than a grunt or two. I didn’t get much more than that now.
“They’re making cookies over there,” I said.
Desmond stopped with his own helmet halfway on. “She don’t know nothin’ ’bout cookin’.”
“You’ve got a point there. But at least they’re trying.”
He gave another grunt and snapped his chinstrap.
“I’ll take that as a ‘good for them!’” I said. “Let’s go deliver some fliers.”
It was late afternoon, and now that we’d switched from Daylight Savings Time to Eastern Standard, the shadows were already making their ominous way across West King Street. It was still too early for the nightlife, so I didn’t feel my usual uneasiness as we cruised in and stopped at the first still-viable place of business, C.A.R.S. Choice Auto Repair Service. I assumed—after I gave Desmond one last warning about staying on the bike and pushed through the smudgy glass door—that the ancient man behind the counter had come up with that clever acronym in his youth, some fifty years ago. The shop didn’t appear to have been cleaned in that long, and for a moment after the bell on the door stopped half heartedly heralding my presence, I thought the old man had expired on his stool and no one had noticed yet.
But he adjusted thick glasses that had been polished about the same time the front windows were done and peered at me out of the tiniest eyes I had ever seen on a human being. With his gray hair slicked straight back from his forehead, he looked like an old mole.
“Hey there,” I said. “Are you Mr. CARS?”
He remained grinless. “No. I’m Mr. Nelson.”
The embroidery on his greasy shirt pocket said “Maharry,” but I didn’t argue with him. It would be easy to forget your name if nobody had said it in a while.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t work on motorcycles,” he said.
“Oh, I’m not here for a repair—although I do have a van that could use some work.”
“We do vans.”
I didn’t ask who “we” were. So far there’d been no sign of another human being.
“I tell you what, if I promise to bring my van in next week, will you put this flier up for me?”
He eyed the paper in my hand. “What’s it for?”
“We’re feeding the homeless in the plaza on Saturday.”
“Do I look homeless to you?”
I was almost startled into saying yes. “I’m sorry—I didn’t make myself clear. I just hoped that as a businessman you’d be willing to post this in your window so your customers will know about it and come out and support the project.”
“Support it how?”
I hadn’t received this many questions anywhere else. Most of the shop owners had just told us to put it up there with the rest of the civic announcements.
“Um, sit down and share a bagel with them. Hear what they have to say. Find out how they can help them get off the streets.”
“I’d like to get them off the streets.” He wiped something wet from his weedy moustache with a slightly blackened rag. “Or at least out of my trash cans in the back. I call the cops, and sometimes they come, but they don’t do anything about it.”
“Then you should come to the plaza yourself, Mr. Nelson. Have a cup of coffee. Find out how they wound up without homes.”
“I know how.”
“Then you’re a step ahead of the rest of us.”
He narrowed the already minscule eyes at me until they all but disappeared into his head.
“It’s Maharry,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Maharry Nelson. That’s my name. And who are you?”
“Allison—just Allison.”
“You with the city?”
“No.”
“County?”
“No, sir.”
“Some church?”
I stumbled, but shook my head.
“Then you must be all right. Give me the paper—give me a couple of them.”
“You’re a prince, Maharry,” I said.
“You know why a lot of ’em’s homeless, dontcha?”
I drew in a breath and wished I’d gotten out of there before we got into “because they’re too lazy to work.”
“They get in trouble once, and after that, nobody’ll give them a chance again. I’d hire some of them, but nobody applies.”
“Oh,” I said. “Maybe you’ll find an auto mechanic if you come.”
“Is this some kinda job fair too?”
“It could be.” I hadn’t known it was going to be food for everyone and a chance to exchange ideas until I’d said it either. Chief was right. It was going to look like what it was going to look like.
“Well, I’ll let you get back to work,” I said.
And while we could both pretend he had work to get back to, I hurried out the front door. To find an empty Harley in the parking lot.
With visions of Geneveve thrown out with the garbage breaking their way into my head, I bolted for the driveway that ran beside C.A.R.S., already barking Desmond’s name. The narrow passageway was empty, as was the stretch of parking lot on the other side of the building and the sidewalk beyond that cracked its way toward the hub of bars and street corner hangouts. DearGoddearGoddearGod—where was he?
I vacillated wildly between grabbing the phone to call Chief and taking off on the bike to find Desmond—which left me standing on the curb doing neither. Okay—think like Desmond. What would he do if he got tired of sitting there waiting for me? Go across the street to Titus and try to finagle a tattoo? Slip down to the Magic Moment and beg for a beer? Go into a crack house and try to roll somebody?
I couldn’t picture any of that—because none of it was Desmond anymore, and I didn’t know it until that moment. Which meant wherever he was, he hadn’t gone there of his own will.
I groped for my phone in my bag, and then froze with my hand on it. A voice drifted from behind the building—a voice desperately trying to make “it’s all good” sound convincing.
“I ain’t playing with you, man,” another voice said. Lower, like the growl of a Doberman on a chain. “You give her the message or I will find you and I will—”
“I don’t li
ve with her no more.”
“You back with that white biker chick that tried to kill me with her—”
“They put me in foster care, dude. I don’t know nothin’ ’bout any of them.”
I heard a long hiss as I made my way down the side of the building, my back to the wall. It was followed by a laugh that sounded more like a slap in the face.
“If you in foster care, what are you doin’ down here?”
“I come down to see some ol’ friends, bro.”
The pause that followed was filled only with a sharp intake of breath I could hear from the corner of the building. I didn’t dare peek around, but I knew it was Desmond, trying not to gasp out his fear.
“You don’t got to grab me, bro,” he said. His bravado was slipping away.
“I just want to make sure you hear me, ’cause next time it’s gon’ be Sultan hisself tellin’ you—and you don’t want that.”
Before I could get my hand over my mouth to cover my own gasp, three things happened like rapid gunfire. A siren wailed into the alley behind the building, a hulking figure thundered past me and around the opposite corner into the darkness, and metal trash cans crashed to the beat of feet that were too big for somebody. Desmond ran headlong into me as he came around the corner. I clapped my hand over his mouth and half-dragged him up the driveway to the Harley.
“We’ll walk it,” I mouthed to him.
He nodded and helped me push the Classic silently out of the parking lot and a block up King before we got on and booked it all the way to Sacrament House.
I pulled up to the curb in front and let myself breathe. Desmond hadn’t started to yet.
“I told you to stay on the bike,” I said, still staring straight ahead.
“I did—till that jackal come up the street in his big ol’ O’smobile, all lookin’ out the window. I had to cut him off ’fore he saw the bike, ’cause he knows it.”
“He could have killed you.”
“Nah. He just wants me to be his little messenger nig—boy. And I ain’t doin’ it.”
“So I heard. And just so you know, I didn’t try to ‘take him out’ with my bike.”
Desmond leaned back, head flopping. “Aw, man, I was hopin’ he be tellin’ the truth about that part.”
“Okay, get off,” I said.
He did. When I stood facing him, I put a hand on each shoulder and felt the tension in his bones.
“You need to tell me what the message was that Sultan wants you to give your mother.”
Desmond’s face darkened and he tried to squirm away but I tightened my grip.
“I have to know, Desmond. This person is threatening you—I can’t just act like that’s going to go away.”
“He want her to come back, that’s all I know.”
“What’s the deal with that? Does she have something of his? Does she owe him something? What’s this hold that he has on her?”
“He owns her.”
The hatred in his eyes transfigured the boy I tutored and nagged and made peanut butter sandwiches for into a thug every bit as intimidating as the bulky shadow I’d now encountered twice in an alley. It was all I could not to drop it right there and coax the boy out again.
“What do you mean he ‘owns’ her?” I said. “Nobody can ‘own’ another human being.”
“You don’t know. Somebody got enough power to make you turn into a animal—they own you.”
I was chilled down to the sinew.
“I’m ’posed to tell her he said to come back ’cause she his property—and don’t nobody steal his property.”
“Was there a threat with it? Did he say what he’d do if she didn’t?”
Desmond’s eyes went into slits. “He don’t have to say it. It’s just there.”
I let go of his shoulders and prayed, my hands against my lips. “Okay—so do I give her the message—”
“She already know the message,” Desmond said.
But she didn’t know that Desmond was now the one in danger if she didn’t heed it. Would it do any good for her to know that? I was shaken by my own ignorance about things like this, things that kept coming up to grab me by the throat.
But Chief would know what to do. I’d managed to restrict our contact to phone calls all week, but I needed a face-to-face on this, and soon.
“Y’all comin’ in?” Geneveve called from the front porch.
Desmond’s eyes were still narrowed at me.
“We won’t say anything for now,” I whispered to him. “We’ll just go in, maybe break a tooth on a cookie, and then we’ll go home. Agreed?”
He all but dissolved into a relieved puddle on the sidewalk.
“We’re coming,” I called to Geneveve.
Desmond actually said hi to her and then blew by to follow the scent that actually did smell like warm peanut butter. It made me smile until I reached her and she latched onto my arm.
“Something wrong?” I said.
“I don’t mean to criticize what you doin’ with him,” she said. “But why was he back in the neighborhood just now?”
“How did you—”
“I can smell it on him. Just like I can smell it on you.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets so she wouldn’t see them shaking. “We were just delivering some fliers, Gen.”
“Maybe I don’t got no right to say this, Miss Angel.” I watched her swallow. “But I don’t want him nowhere near that place.”
“You have every right,” I said. “You’re his mother.”
And for the first time, she was acting like one.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The menu for our Thanksgiving dinner at my house would have impressed even my mother. The guest list, on the other hand, would have her rising from her coffin, waving the Confederate flag.
Jasmine, Mercedes, and Geneveve came over from Sacrament House, and Chief and Hank and the phantom husband, Joe, joined us. Desmond and I presided as host and hostess, although it was Hank and Joe who did most of the cooking. I’d never had spinach soufflé or pumpkin cheesecake, and they were divine.
“So have you always restricted your diet to junk food?” Hank asked me when we’d retired to the fireplace while Chief led the cleanup detail.
“No,” I said. “My eating habits are another casualty of my upbringing. My parents were complete snobs about their cuts of meat and their imported cheeses, so naturally I went in the opposite direction.”
“And cut off your nose to spite your face,” Hank said. “I’d love to see you stop letting them limit your life—but that’s just me. Personally I don’t think there’s a piece of bread on this earth that couldn’t be improved by a pat of pure, organic butter and a little fresh garlic.”
Food was also the order of the day on Saturday morning. Not long after the sun was up over the Bridge of Lions, we were in the plaza loading the tables in the pavilion at the far end of the park with piled-high platters of muffins and bagels and baskets overflowing with mangoes and bananas and Florida oranges. Hank barely had the cardboard carafes out of the back of her car when two men rolled out of the blankets in the gazebo and another crawled from under a pyracantha bush by the obelisk, eyes bloodshot but wide.
“Coffee, gentlemen?” she asked. “It’s on the house this morning.” She could have been Patrice the Hippie, ready to serve their table at the Galleon.
“That’d be nice,” said the guy with the dog.
“And what do you take in that? Cream and sugar?”
“A little cream.” He rubbed at his whiskers and smiled toothlessly. “Okay, a lotta cream.”
“You got it.”
By nine we’d served at least fifty people, not all of them from among the down-and-out. Several townies I recognized from the shops took
part, as well as a handful of tourists. And Hank wasn’t the only one who passed out the muffins and the java like she was waiting on St. Augustine’s upper crust. Jasmine, Mercedes, Geneveve; Nita, Leighanne; Rex, for Pete’s sake—their work put the team at the Café Alcazar to shame. But it was Desmond who enchanted me most.
He walked among the gathering crowd with a platter of bagels on his shoulder, stopping at the group gathered by the Civil War cannon, pausing on the steps of the gazebo, stepping over the pansy garden to get to a group seated on a blanket on the grass—all the while teasing out smiles with his running commentary.
“Bro, you just gonna eat one? You got to bulk up. It’s cold out. Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about, see, she got one muffin to enjoy here and one to go. How ’bout you, Miss Thing, you too skinny now, you got to put some cream cheese on that.”
He was audacious and charming and at times outrageous, particularly when he informed one man that he needed to put a lot of sugar in his coffee to sweeten himself up. I learned later that was his math teacher.
His interactions with the tattered, smelly, unshaven men showed him at his best. He sat next to each one and chatted about the dog or the guitar or whatever possession the man had managed to bring from his former life. He brought them seconds and thirds so they didn’t have to go back to the table, and topped off their coffee without interrupting their conversations with each other.
“Look at him,” I said to Chief. “I think he’s actually having fun.”
“Sure. He gets to be the one doing the handing out for a change.”
“You really think that’s it? Because you know, that would mean he doesn’t have a personal agenda right now. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him without one.”
That wasn’t entirely true. There was the incident three days before, behind C.A.R.S., which, with all the Thanksgiving hoopla and today’s deal, I hadn’t had a chance to tell him about.
“We need to talk at some point,” I said.
He was immediately eagle-eyeing me. “How about now?”