“Not much meat, but the gravy’s good. Take some bread. Plenty of bread. Keep you warm. Oh, thank you so much, Mrs. Mendez…” Hattie squirreled the Sunkist orange meant for her alone into a layer of her garb, then winked at Jane. “They treat regular customers right here, Janey!”
Shoulder to shoulder, Jane sat with the ragged and the old and the feebleminded at one long table among many. Here for once she didn’t have to premeditate her table manners, or debate which implement accompanied which food item.
The people all around her ate as they felt like, fingers swiping pieces of bread through gravy or sweeping escaping tidbits onto forks. Jane began to see why Kevin and the other doctors at Probe had marveled over the perfection of her unfilled teeth; people here seemed mostly toothless, but they smiled at each other anyway.
“Ahhh.” Panama Hattie pushed her tray away and intertwined her fingers on the tabletop. “It’s only midday, and I don’t feel like walking that cold street again so soon, no sir, I surely don’t. Maybe we can figger a way to stay a spell—how about we see if the Painting Lady wants a new face to look at?”
Jane, appreciating her full stomach, nodded. Hattie ushered her over to a corner of the crowded room. A woman in a bright red smock, her dark hair tied with a green bow at the base of her neck, sat at an easel flecking color onto a canvas.
Jane stared, entranced. The bits of color resolved into a face, a portrait like Lynn Volker’s—only much more interesting. Jane’s eyes narrowed as the impressionistic image coalesced in her vision.
It was a young man the woman painted—there were very few young people at the House of Charity; he must have been—with Jane—one of the youngest. He wore a funny plaid scarf and a too-big wool jacket. Jane tilted her head, studying the painting over the woman’s scarlet shoulder. He had brown hair, the man, and a beard and blue eyes. And he was handsome, Jane perceived that quality in its essence for the first time. For an instant she had thought he might be Kevin, but he was much handsomer than Kevin, with a distance and sadness in his eyes that made Jane frown in wonder.
“Don’t she do a good job, the Painting Lady? She’s done me, you know,” Hattie crowed, “and she’s makin’ a real masterpiece of Gentleman Jimmy.”
Jane glanced where Hattie’s head had nodded. A man sat on a battered old church pew in the exact pose as the man in the portrait. Jane found herself looking into the same beautiful sad eyes that the Painting Lady had erected on canvas. Then Gentleman Jimmy smiled, revealing a mouthful of gaping, crooked teeth.
Jane jerked her eyes back to the painting. It had not smiled as she had expected.
“Oh, don’t Jimmy look handsome—can you do the same for Janey here? My friend Jane? She’s just new, you know.”
The woman glanced over her cheery shoulder. Jane liked her face—handsome and strong, lined in all the right places, and her smile showed lots of teeth. Little gold-and- diamond earrings twinkled in her ears and a big gold-and- diamond ring sparkled on the left hand that held the palette.
“New, I guess!” the woman said, looking Jane over carefully. Her expression softened. “I’d like to paint her, Hattie, but… she hasn’t got the face I’m after. She hasn’t lived enough, if you know what I mean. She doesn’t even look like she belongs here.”
Hattie was silent a moment. “Maybe none of us looked like we belonged here once, Mrs. Myerson. Maybe you might want to paint a ‘before’ instead of an ‘after.’”
“Hattie, I’m sorry.” Distress etched the woman’s eyes. “I don’t mean to exploit you and your friends, really. All my friends think I’m crazy to come down here—but I’ve never been happier than when I’m finding my ‘faces.’ Sit down on the pew, dear, next to Jimmy.” She nodded Jane over to the bench. “I haven’t time to do a full portrait, but I’ll manage a charcoal sketch, how’s that?”
“Oh, a sketch… that’s very artistic, Janey,” Hattie cooed.
“Yes… The woman picked up a large white tablet and a dark pencil and began dashing lines onto the drawing paper. “Several of my paintings are going on display in the Senior Citizens’ Center window this afternoon—that’s why I was rushing to finish up Jimmy. Maybe, if your sketch turns out good enough, it’ll be in the show, too. I’ll call it Girl in a Hand-me-down Hat.”
Jane smiled tentatively.
“My, what gorgeous teeth you have—Hattie’s right, you are new to the streets. But you don’t have to smile for the sketch—most of my subjects don’t smile.”
“I want to,” said Jane, remembering Lynn Volker’s photograph. “I want to smile.”
The Painting Lady shrugged her gaudy shoulders and made the pencil rasp across the pebbled paper.
“It’s your face. ,. Jane, is it? And it’s pretty interesting, after all. You look like you lost something and you haven’t discovered what it is yet.”
“Ain’t she a marvel?” Hattie set her shopping bag down and scraped a folding chair across the floor so she could sit and watch the sketch take form.
“Oh, Hattie—!” The woman laughed, an assured, tinkling sound like diamonds looked, Jane thought. “I just do my paintings, that’s all.”
The sketch was finished within an hour. Jane came to stand politely behind Mrs. Myerson’s shoulder and approve it. But she was disappointed. It wasn’t in color like Gentleman Jimmy’s, and Jane thought the hat looked a little silly. And her smile, although it was wide and showed tooth after perfect tooth, didn’t match the sunny confidence that had stretched Lynn Vblker’s lips in the photograph on her parents’ walls.
She and Hattie watched the artist pack up her works and hurry out with a good-bye wave.
“It smells here, I guess,” Hattie ruminated after she’d gone. “She didn’t say so, being polite, but her friends think she’s crazy to come here. I guess because we smell bad. I don’t notice it no more, but I guess we do.”
“You do,” Jane said. “It does smell. And some of it’s nice, and some of it’s not so nice. But all of it’s…” Jane frowned, looking as if she’d lost something and she didn’t know what yet. “—it’s… real. I feel like I’ve been here before.”
Jane gazed around the simple, thronging, reeking place and smiled happily. “Zyunsinth,” Jane greeted the heedless mob. “Zyunsinth.”
Hattie grinned back at her. “It’s not so bad, is it, dearie? You get used to it. And it’s better than being cooped up somewhere official-like.”
Chapter Twenty
* * *
The cop stopped Kevin at another big metal door.
“Emergency buttons ring the perimeter, but don’t hit one unless you’re damn sure you really need to.”
“My… cell—?” he began.
Then the door swung open with that angry, grating sound and Kevin was shoved through.
Cell, hell… Plenty of hell.
Kevin met the slow gathering stares of eight pair of eyes—bloodshot eyes in yellowed whites and Sanka-dark faces. Unfocused eyes; nervous, flickering eyes in broken pasty white faces. Yet… dead eyes, every last pair of them.
Kevin moved into their midst, sensing that clinging to the door’s metal safety would only incite his… cellmates.
The term was new; the turf alien. But he was there and had better make the best of it. If n6t, they’d see he got the worst of it.
“Look what they threw us now.”
He didn’t even try to identify the speaker, instead easing over to one of the brown-painted metal tables bolted to the floor. The seats were attached to the table’s central post, so there was no chance of hefting one to brain a fellow inmate.
Kevin knew he walked wrong, talked wrong, carried himself wrong. He was the wrong race, the wrong class, the wrong everything. Innocent. Now he knew what the word really meant.
Both tables were empty, but he sat in a chair, claiming a place among them. He didn’t dare choose one of the matching brown metal bunk beds yet. Men lay in some; others were unoccupied. He’d claim his narrow slab of space later, after his predecess
ors had revealed their choices.
A prisoner shuffled over the concrete floor in his cotton slippers to give Kevin a contemptuous once-over.
“What you doin’ in here—skinny little white boy with a flfteen-dollah haircut?”
Kevin wasn’t short and he wasn’t skinny and his haircuts cost twenty dollars.
“Yeah, what’d they get you on, DWI?” another man demanded.
They were all moving now, toward him, slow as sharks; cruising behind him, circling, smelling new blood in old waters.
Three other white guys shared the cell. One slumped on an upper bunk it must have been a sight to see him scale—an overweight hacked-out man on the wrong end of his fifties. He watched Kevin with apologetic, terrified eyes.
“Is that who they put in here, DWIs?” Kevin asked.
A stocky Hispanic man muscled like Arnold Schwarzenegger smirked. “Only if they ain’t got room. This is a high-security cell, man. You musta skipped school or somethin’. You don’t belong in here.”
“Does he?” Kevin indicated the middle-class fat man on the bunk. Better him than Kevin.
They all turned on cue to eye the other guy. “Nah. Harry’s a DWI wimp, ain’t that right, insurance salesman?” one taunted. “But he dances real good to the right music.” Sweat trickled down Harry’s cheek.
“What’re you, white boy?” another black guy asked. If the prisoners didn’t come big, Kevin concluded, they came mean.
Kevin shrugged. “Nothin’ much.”
“Don’t put yourself down, my man.” The biggest black guy sat on the lip of Kevin’s table, his massive long thigh muscles bulging out even the loose jailhouse pants. “You’re in here with us. You must be one bad dude. What’cha in for?”
“Murder,” Kevin tried. Maybe the rap would intimidate them.
“Murder.”
A big black hand crimped into the wimpy cotton of his shirtfront. Kevin felt impending physical force as he had not felt it for years, not since being a little kid and some irate adult had hovered to give him a smack. Even the cops’ rough custody seemed benign by contrast. Thunder hovered in the cell’s arid atmosphere, in the black man’s basso rumble. “Maybe we don’t want to sleep with no murderer around.”
“Hey… it’s only PC.” Kevin tried to sound inured to Probable Causes and Misdemeanors and Domestics.
The fingers uncurled as the man straightened and ambled to the other table, still eyeing Kevin. On the farthest bunk against the wall, Kevin noticed a figure rocking. The man was ageless, shapeless, classless. His features twisted into the thin-lipped grin and the slant-eyed grimace of the mental defective.
“What’s he doing in here, if this is a high-risk cell?” Kevin had to ask under the prod of professional concern. “Guy like that shouldn’t even be on the street.”
“Right on.” The big black guy turned slow as Leviathan to study the isolated figure. “Old Waldo’s looney-tunes. But the nuthouses are crowded, just like the jails. That’s why we’s all packed in here like sardines, even skinny little new fish like you.”
Kevin ignored the taunt and rose, moving to an archway. Beyond it stretched a cinder-block maze of shower cubicles, sinks, a toilet and urinal. Graffiti even decorated these inside walls, though what the inmates used to write with Kevin couldn’t guess.
He hated to do it—back to them, pecker to the hilt in porcelain—but he needed to piss so bad it was going to come out his ears if he didn’t. He stationed himself so he could glimpse the archway in the meager slice of polished metal mirror over the sink and studied the obscenities interlarded with phone numbers defacing the faceless wall.
“That must be some big thing, white boy, you gotta take that long to piss.”
“Fuck off” Kevin threw over his shoulder. His body tensed for a physical attack even as his mind forced himself to relax and flaunt the awesome hiss of his long-dammed urine. But no attack came. He rejoined the others in the main room without incident or further comment. More men sprawled on the bunks now that the mild excitement of a new arrival had faded. They still watched every move he made.
Old Waldo huddled in his corner, chewing his loose lower lip, a tear of drool caught in the corner of his wide, foolish mouth.
Harry the drunk looked soberer than a man should have to, and watched Kevin relentlessly. Kevin could read his mind. Maybe they’ll pick on you instead, Harry was thinking, hoping—and sober enough now to loathe himself for it.
Harry was stuck, Kevin realized, just like he was, stuck in jail for the long, holiday weekend. Martin Luther King’s birthday. The ironies boggled even a psychiatrist’s mind.
Kevin boosted himself atop the far bunk above Waldo; he figured no one would claim that spot. He was right.
Kevin lay back, slowly, arms behind his head so he could lift his elbows and conceal his expression while still checking the others out.
There was nothing in the room to watch except a television high on the wall opposite. A rerun of Gomer Pyle droned into their midst; Kevin’s ears finally registered the incredible reality of it. The laugh track tittered on cue. Kevin’s stomach tried to give hunger a stab, then hit a solid wall of drug hangover and gave up.
Nordstrom had given Kevin something, no doubt about that; what had Kevin given Nordstrom? He lay on the brown wool blanket and let his mind unwind, pushing away all worries of his arrest—such as what murder he was charged with, and what if they could make it stick?
The important thing was, what had he told Nordstrom that could help the PID catch Jane? He let his consciousness sink into self-hypnosis, inducing calm. It could be dangerous to make a sitting duck of himself in a place like this, but Jane might be in a tighter place, he told himself.
Foggy memories steamed up from the rock bottom of his subconscious. He had an impression of Nordstrom asking, always asking, prying. Nordstrom wanting to know. About Jane… about Julie. Kevin shuddered involuntarily as a memory took shape on his mental TV screen—him and Julie making love on the Symonses’ wine leather Chesterfield library sofa. Shit! Talk about unremembered reruns… he hadn’t thought about that, about making love with Julie at all, for years. Nordstrom, sick bastard, must have used his opportunity to feed his own delusions.
Kevin’s guts recoiled at imagining the details the psychiatrist must have gleaned in those stolen hours of uninterrupted mind-fucking. Still… maybe Nordstrom’s obsession had its uses. Better that Julie, long dead, should be sacrificed now than Jane. Jane still had her integrity, her blossoming personality intact. None of the foggy memories Kevin resurrected from his interrogation seemed to focus on Jane.
His relief drove so deep that he must have violated every instinct of self-preservation and let his long-delayed sleep take him.
A determined rattling woke him—Kevin lay disoriented, wide eyes staring at a plain white ceiling. Below him, the men lined up at a stainless steel cart to take food trays.
Kevin jumped off the bunk and cast a look at Waldo, still playing with his face in the corner—the man looked like every pathetic case Kevin had treated at State all those years ago. Inside, Kevin raged at the system that released such people to the untender mercies of life on the street. When he got out of here, he vowed, he’d look into it. For now, there was nothing he could do but slide into an empty spot at the table next to Harry.
Jail food tasted okay if you liked recycled library paste, Kevin found; the company was less appetizing. But it didn’t matter, he was too hungry to abstain. Kevin joined the others in shoveling the stuff into their mouths with baby-blunt spoons,
“What—what is your line?” Harry, the insurance salesman, asked under his breath between bites.
“I’m kinda a… salesman, too,” Kevin answered evasively.
“Who are you supposed to have murdered? Wife? Girlfriend?”
Kevin heard a weary laugh—his own. “They haven’t said yet. Cops, I guess. Maybe feds.”
“One tough dude,” the black across the table mouthed, meatloaf flecking his big whi
te teeth.
Kevin remained silent, knowing nothing had been settled yet. Maybe he had a lot more to worry about— Nordstrom’s incursions, Jane, whatever charges he faced. Right now, he worried most about making it through the night.
* * *
Twilight made the semaphores on downtown Minneapolis streets twinkle red and green like leftover Christmas tree lights.
People gathered on corners, coins clutched in mittens and gloves, to take packed buses home.
Jane, Hattie and Boomer straggled down the emptying streets, letting the buses roar by.
“How far is it, Boomer?” Hattie would holler every half block, stopping to puff and lean against a storefront. “It’s these bum pins, dearie,” she’d complain to Jane. “Old Jack Frost nipped ’em last winter. Get’s so I can’t feel where I’m walkin’—”
Jane considered her own feet. They felt fine, but that was because Kevin had bought her nice new boots in Crow Wing—and because whenever she felt the numbness overtaking her toes, she… sent… her blood rushing back into them.
“Jest a few more blocks. Come on, girls. I gotta treat.” Boomer flourished his brown paper bag.
Hattie pushed herself off the brick wall. “Gotta stay someplace. ’Sides, you’re seein’ the toney side of town, Jane. You ever been in Butler Square?”
Jane looked up at the big brick building and shook her head.
“This all used to be old warehouses. Then the rich folks turned it into shopping centers, and that’s why we have to hoof it so far to find a spot to call our own.”
Boomer was waiting for them to catch up. Cold had reddened his empurpled nose, painting it to match the sunset that was spilling over the horizon of treetops ahead of them.
“What d’you think of our town?” Boomer, never having seen Jane before, just assumed she was from someplace else.
“It’s… big.”
“Where you come from, sister?”
Jane seemed perplexed. “From a cell.”
“Oh. You been in stir. That’s bad. A young thing like you. ’Course, I get arrested every now and then.” Boomer’s head shook, making his flap-eared storm cap look like it was attempting to fly. “Warm there, though. They make you take showers and eat lots of hot food. Not a bad place, I guess, once you’re used to it. My place is better, though.”
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