When that Jacket calls out Eli’s number, Eli’s face explodes into a smile. And my chest is bursting with a hurting kind of happiness, thinking of Eli dancing in the snow with his family, and I smile right back.
When Eli’s cousin left, Eli told him, “Where you’re going, you won’t last an hour without freezing right up, and then the only thing to save you is hot chocolate so sweet and hot it burns your throat and thaws you out from the inside.” And when they said good-bye and walked through the gates, their smiles were so big, the happiness steamed right up out of them and into the sky. It snuck up our noses and ears, and we waved good-bye and we smiled and called out and breathed in that happiness. And Eli stood behind me and kept his hands on my shoulders and whispered in my ear how, one day, the two of us would be hot-chocolate chefs and world-famous ones, so that people would come from all over just to taste what we’d made. And after they had gone so far we couldn’t even make out their shadows driving away, we all of us still smiled, feeling that snow crunching between our toes, and the hot chocolate burning in our throats.
But Eli isn’t going to the snow.
“Get your stuff,” the Jacket said. “You’re moving to Alpha.”
It’s Queeny who talks first. “But that’s for the single men.”
The Jacket sniffs and doesn’t even look like he’s heard. Eli and Queeny and me, we all just look at each other, because none of it makes sense.
“I said get your stuff. You’re too old to be in Family. Now move it, boy.”
This time Queeny steps so she’s right in front of the Jacket. “Eli isn’t no man. He’s still a good five years off going to Alpha, and you know it.”
I pull on Queeny, trying to get her to step back because it’s no use the both of us getting shoved twice in two days, but the Jacket just slaps his paper on Queeny’s cheek.
“That’s not what his paper says. He was meant to move last week. And writing doesn’t lie.” But I can tell that even the Jacket knows that the paper is lying better than anyone.
Eli shrugs. All three of us are thinking the same thing. Thinking about the other boy, the one who was only nine, but his paper said he was nineteen. Everyone could see as clear as day that there was no way this kid was nineteen, but those Jackets still went and put him over in Alpha. “It’s there in black and white on the paper,” they said.
And something happens to those men when they live all together like that, without their families, without being able to work or learn or do anything, having to listen to the Jackets and their jangling keys all the time. It changes a person, Eli says. Some of those men can be real mean to a kid when they want to be.
I can see all that working its way through Eli’s brain, just the same way it’s working its way through mine, because both of us saw what happened to that boy when he’d eventually been let into Family. By then, it was too late, is all. After he tried to bleed himself out on the fence, they moved him to Ford, his brain so mushed that he wasn’t even really there.
Writing does lie. It lies all the time.
Eli shrugs at me again and smiles, trying his best not to show his scared even though I can see from the shake in his hands that he isn’t sure it will be okay, no matter what his shoulders shrug. “They should really just let us kids run things, hey, Subhi?” He grins. “More brains.” He taps his head with his finger, right up close to the Jacket’s face when he says it so there is no confusing what he means by it.
“There would at least be more ice cream,” I say. I laugh, trying to get the Jacket to think Eli is just having fun so he’ll let go of his fistful of Eli’s shirt and walk away with no more bother. “And lamb.” Now the Jacket is looking at me, so I keep talking, talking, talking. “I’ve only ever had lamb once and even though I felt kind of bad eating an animal that was only still a baby itself, it tasted just perfect. Do you remember, Eli? Do you remember, Queeny? When we had lamb? Do you remember?” I’m asking the Jacket even though I know for sure he wasn’t here that time we had lamb.
The Jacket shakes his head and lets go of Eli, cuffing him hard across the ear so that Eli loses his balance and ends up on the dirt.
“You’ve got five minutes to get your crap together. There better not be any trouble.” The Jacket looks at all three of us now, his finger pointing. Eli just grins right up at that Jacket like he’s telling the best joke Eli’s ever heard. “Because if there is so much as a pip out of you, BER-18, I’ll be moving you to Beta instead. You got that?”
Beta, where they lock you up and don’t let you out. Beta, where you don’t have anyone to look out for you at all. I tell the Jacket yes sir we’ve got that sir and they’ll be no trouble at all mister sir. Eli stands up and smiles his big smile at the Jacket and when the Jacket turns around to go, Eli blows him a kiss.
I wish Eli wouldn’t do stuff like that. It makes me want to vomit every time. But the Jacket doesn’t hear, and if he does, he keeps walking and my heart goes back to beating quietly instead of thundering my ears. I turn to Eli. “If us kids ran the world, there would be ice cream every day and roast lamb with mint sauce and potatoes once a month, and so much water that we could all drink until our stomachs were just about to burst.”
“And grilled fish with vegetables pulled straight from the ground,” Queeny adds.
“And hot-chocolate rain falling from the sky.” Eli pokes his head out of the tent and looks up to the sky to check it hasn’t already started to fall. He sticks his tongue out of his mouth and closes his eyes. “I reckon I can taste it already…” he says. Then he breathes in all the smells from the camp, long and deep through his nose—the garbage rotting in the line of trash cans just the other side of the fence, the pipe from the toilet leaking into the dirt, some vomit where someone couldn’t handle whatever breakfast was—and Eli’s imagining crumples into the dirt.
“The rain needs some work,” he says, and we all of us laugh. When Eli says that they’ll see their mistake soon enough, we start laughing again and Eli chokes on his own spit, but none of us really thinks it’s that funny.
Just when that Jacket is coming back into the tent to take Eli, I reach into my pocket and give him one of the oldest of my treasures. It’s the rock, all the way from space. Harvey taught me all about space and rocks. He said that the black and the bubbles in the rock show that it’s from a shooting star, come all the way down to earth. I give it to Eli so he can make a wish on it. I don’t tell him that I already tried a wish, but it didn’t work because my ba is still out there and we are still in here. I figure that maybe shooting-star wishes only work for certain people, and Eli, he’s the kind of person a shooting-star wish would work for.
It’s not until that night that I realize I never got to tell Eli about the girl. I try to draw a picture of the girl on the other side of the paper from The Night Sea With Creatures, but the girl looks all whispery and not quite there on the page. I try to stop thinking about Eli not being in Family with me because that blots the picture and makes it worse. Someday we’ll be together again. Just not today, is all.
Even though I can’t draw her right, I can see the girl in my head. There is something in her that makes me feel like I’ve met her before. As I’m falling asleep, I wonder if maybe my ba has sent the girl. If he has, I wish he would stop being so confusing and just send himself. It can’t be that bloody hard.
I keep on thinking of the girl and my ba sending me his treasures until my brain stops and drifts me to sleep. I keep thinking on it so I don’t have to think about Eli.
Jimmie rolls the name around her tongue. “Subhi.” She likes it. He was kind of quiet, but he seemed nice. And she liked that he talked to a rubber duck. Jimmie’s mum used to talk to her garden gnome whenever she went outside. She said they were some of the most interesting conversations she had.
Jimmie picks up the leather notebook. “Subhi can read,” she says to its cover. There’s just the slightest touch of a smile in Jimmie’s voice.
When Jimmie hears the front door op
en and Jonah’s voice singing along to the music blaring in his ears, she feels an excitement and a happiness buzz through her.
“You’re not wasting my bike money on your stupid music, are you?” Jimmie grabs Jonah’s hands and swings him around.
Jonah grunts and pushes Jimmie to the ground, chuckling as he does it.
“It’s not long until my birthday, and bikes are expensive,” she says.
“What bike? I don’t have any money for a bike, turd head.”
For a moment, Jimmie’s brain freezes. For a moment, that buzzing goes so quiet that there is just hard silence pumping in her ears. She can feel a wave of heat starting in her cheeks.
But then Jonah starts laughing so hard that the chocolate milk he’s drinking dribbles out of his open mouth and onto the floor. “You should have seen your face!” he howls.
Jimmie thinks about grabbing the milk and pouring it on his head. That’s the kind of thing that used to drive her parents nuts. They’d look at whatever disaster she’d caused and say, “Jimmie! You have to stop and think! What did you expect would happen?”
Jimmie’s mum used to call her Cyclone Jimmie. “You’re so loud and…and…chaotic! You just charge along and suck up space as you go.” She always said it with a smile, though, and a curious look like she couldn’t quite work Jimmie out and was glad for it.
But Jimmie was older now, and anyway, they didn’t have much milk left. She’d get Jonah back later. “I knew you were joking,” Jimmie says. Jonah snorts so hard that chocolate milk comes out his nose.
Jimmie makes herself a chocolate milk then, and when Jonah isn’t looking, she spits in his milk and stirs it in. She’ll tell him later, after he’s drunk it all down. He’ll think it was funny.
When Jimmie goes back to her room, she flicks through the pages of the book again, her fingers feeling the raised ink where her mum had written down all those words. A bike would get her to the fence faster. Get her to Subhi faster. Subhi, who can read and who talks to a duck.
This time, when that buzzing excitement starts up again in her legs, it doesn’t go away.
There’s a group of three boys in Family Tent One. They’re big. Almost grown to men. Mostly the rest of us all just keep well away from those boys. But there’s just so much keeping away you can do when you’re all locked in Family together.
The way Queeny tells it is that they’ve been here too long is all. She reckons they used to be just like me, except maybe not so annoying.
Harvey thinks they’re bored, is all. But I get bored and I don’t get mean the way these boys do. I won’t either, no matter how long I’m here.
Eli reckons they just aren’t worth spit.
The Jackets should have taken those boys to Alpha instead of Eli.
Eli is the only one who can keep those boys from working up to crazy. He’s the only one who can talk them into quiet. And it isn’t just because he can get them stuff without even having to swap. Those boys would listen to Eli anyway. Eli’s like that. He knows how to make people see things right.
Before Eli came to Family, when I was still little, those boys used to trap the rats. There are lots of rats here, but they mostly don’t do any harm. Sometimes at night they might try a little nibble on any fingers and toes hanging out of the bed, but they run real quick when you move. Queeny, she says she woke up one night and a rat was nibbling away at her nose. I reckon she made that up to scare me.
I told Queeny to make those boys stop their trapping, but she just told me to tell them myself and stop being such a scaredy-cat. She said if a rat was dumb enough to fall for the trap, then it deserved to die. Her face was all twisted when she said it though.
I told Harvey about the traps, but he said that anything that got rid of the rats was a good thing, and didn’t I know they carried germs and disease? I told Harvey that rats were fine, and all you had to do was ask those rats not to nibble on you and give them some rice to nibble on instead. Harvey looked at me with his eyes open wide and said that he was going to pretend he didn’t hear that and I wasn’t going to do it anymore, right? I said right, but that ruined the deal I had going with the rats, so then my fingers were in as much danger as everyone else’s.
Eli, he wouldn’t let those boys make their traps though. He couldn’t care less about the rats, but he saw my face when I heard them squeal, and then he went and told those boys that they weren’t to trap the rats anymore, like there wasn’t any way around it. He went and broke every one of their traps right there in front of them too.
Later, those boys hid behind the tents until Eli went out and then jumped him with sticks. They didn’t make the traps again though. They even said sorry to Eli, but Eli reckons that was only because they wanted to join the package delivery business.
Mostly we all just keep away from those boys. But sometimes you can’t.
I’m waiting by the fence for Eli because he didn’t come like he was meant to after breakfast yesterday, and he didn’t come the day before that either, and even though Harvey told me that Eli is doing just fine in Alpha, I won’t believe it until I’ve seen him myself.
Then I see him coming, and my smile pulls at my mouth because Harvey was right. Harvey’s always right. Eli is doing just fine. I can tell by his walk, all full of strong, that he’s got those men worked out just like he gets everyone worked out.
“Hey, little man. Where’s your shoes?”
When I don’t answer, Eli puts his hand through the fence and lifts my chin so I’m looking him in the eye. Seeing him looking at me like that, I can’t stop my eyes from watering and I wish more than anything that Eli was still in Family with me. Because Eli, he made everything okay.
“I couldn’t stop them, Eli. I tried.” My voice is all croaking and quiet. “They were just too big. They even took my pants.” I show him the rubber band bunching the sides together so the too-big ones Queeny scrounged for me can’t fall down.
“And”—I pull my face away so I’m not looking at Eli, but down at the ants scuttling around in the dirt, not a bit bothered by us—“and they took the business too. They made me show them where the stash was. Everything.”
But Eli smiles and tells me to shush. That it doesn’t matter and that he was tired of running the package delivery business anyway. “Let ’em have it. It wouldn’t have worked with me in here anyway, little bruda. I was about to come and tell you to hand it over anyhow. And who needs shoes, hey?”
It doesn’t matter that Eli is lying through his teeth, as Harvey says, because Eli, he makes everything all right.
“I guess we’ll just have to make do with stealing our own underwear and water and soap when we need it,” he says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. I’ve already decided I’m not going to bother stealing toothpaste. It doesn’t matter what Eli says. I don’t reckon good teeth are worth it.
The two of us sit down in the dirt and Eli points up at the sky, right at that sun. He doesn’t even blink to get the bright away. “Sometimes, Subhi, the sun is so burning hot that it sends these massive balls of fire straight at the earth. And the fire is so strong and hot that it could destroy the whole planet. But down here on earth, we’re protected, right? So all we see are beautiful lights that dance across the sky. People come from all over just to see those lights dance. You can’t see them from here, not ever, but someday, Subhi, you and me, we’ll go see those lights boogie through the dark, yeah?” Eli wiggles his butt in the dirt and grins. “Hey, cheer up, bud. It could be worse. They could’ve put me over in Echo and then we’d be talking to each other through the toilets instead of through the fence.” He waits for me to smile, but it’s not so funny. “I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?”
Even though I wish he would stay longer, I nod.
I don’t tell Eli that those boys are already making their rat traps again. I don’t tell Eli that after those boys took my shoes and my pants and our packages, they walked me to a trap. I don’t tell Eli how those boys pushed me right up close and showed me
a little baby rat, its eyes not even open yet, sniffing around for its maá. I don’t tell Eli how those boys said I was to kill it.
I told those boys to jam it. I told those boys that they could beat me with sticks as much as they wanted and I still wouldn’t kill a thing. I told those boys that they weren’t worth spit and then I went and broke all their traps so they’ll never build them again.
Except I didn’t. Except I couldn’t. I don’t tell Eli. And after, when I wiped that blood and fur off my hands and onto the dirt, the rats, all hidden in the shadows, watched me and shook their heads and turned away.
I don’t tell Eli any of that. Instead I say, “See ya tomorrow then,” and watch him strong walk back to his tent.
I spend the next five nights watching the sky, watching for those lights to dance. Even though Eli says we can’t see them from here, not ever, Maá always used to tell me that sometimes “not ever” can change.
It doesn’t though. Not for me.
It’s been eight nights now. Eight nights since the girl came. Eight nights of lying in my bed pretending to sleep, my breath sucking in with waiting until the breathing in the rest of the tent slows and most of the eyes have shut enough to not care if I’m in my bed or not. Eight nights of sitting outside with no Night Sea and no dancing lights and no girl, just red dirt going on and on forever and ever.
“And me,” the duck says. “Don’t forget eight nights of my sparkling wit and fascinating conversation.”
But I know that duck is as twitchy as me, waiting to see if the girl is as real as we remember her. Harvey says sometimes your brain can play tricks on your eyes—and ears too, I guess—and ever since that night I’ve been trying to work out if that girl is a trick or real.
The Bone Sparrow Page 5