by Rene Denfeld
Outside, the rain had started again. Rich was waiting for her, so hungry, too, that he felt faint. Together they walked down to skid row, looking for food and their friends. Celia wondered if butterflies savor time more because they know they will die soon. Then again, Celia knew she might die soon, too, and that didn’t make her enjoy life more.
“I saw a doctor who looked like you,” Celia told Stoner, importantly. Rich had panhandled enough money to buy them both sandwiches from the corner market, and Celia had finished hers. She kept the crumpled paper in her pocket, touching it for reassurance that she had eaten.
“Yeah?” Stoner wasn’t paying attention. He was panhandling on the corner, almost coming out of his skin with worry. Anxiety, Celia guessed. ADH-motherfucking-D. Jostling, dancing, his long legs so skinny they never met.
“Except he had like a beer belly.”
Stoner snorted. “I’ll never have one of those.”
“I bet you’re related.”
“Why?” She had his attention now. His dreamy eyes, thick with lashes, met hers. Stoner was a pretty boy. The men in the cars said that all the time. But he was pretty in a way that wasn’t just for perverts. He had those beautiful eyes, curly black hair, and golden skin. Stoner was part Puerto Rican. Puerto Ricans, he said, cross the street for each other.
“His name was Lopez. What’s your name?”
Stoner was staring at her. “Don’t be an idiot, Celia,” he said.
“Why not?” she persisted.
“We’re not all related, okay?”
“Fine.” Celia stared at the cars. Another old man gestured at her, twinkling his fingers like a fucking creep. Ignoring him, she tried to panhandle, but no one wanted to give her any money. It was always that way trying to beg as a girl. The men in suits hurried away like they were afraid to be seen talking to the merchandise. The women walked faster when she approached, like she was a disease they might carry home to their daughters. You’d think the day people would give more to the street girls, but it didn’t happen that way.
* * *
Every Friday in school, Celia was pulled out of class early. She held a ruler out and whacked the lockers as she passed. The kids weren’t allowed to use the lockers anymore. It wasn’t safe, the principal said.
She would sit in the waiting chairs with the others. There were always three or so of them. Kids on lice check. The nurse was a rude lady named Sally who blew out her nasty breath in frustration whenever she checked Celia. First she checked Celia’s head for lice, then her arms for the ringworm that kept growing in circular patches, and, finally, her wrists and legs for the angry, scratched red trails of scabies.
Your child has ____, the form note said, and the nurse would fill in the bug of the month for Celia to carry home. Please treat your child before returning him/her to school.
“Just give me the medicine,” Celia started telling the nurse, who refused. Finally it was Mrs. Wilkerson who did, sneaking it to Celia like it was some sort of contraband. She locked herself in their bathroom at home while her mom slept on the couch and rubbed the foul pink pesticides all over her naked body and scalp until she was covered in the sticky mess. She waited, head down, shivering, not thinking while the medicine worked, and then she stepped into the dirty tub and rinsed off with the old yogurt container left at the side.
Sometimes, when Celia was hungry, she would eat the plaster chunks that fell from her bedroom wall. They tasted sweet. The paint from the windowsills also tasted sweet, but Mrs. Wilkerson had told the kids not to eat the paint in their homes because it had lead in it.
Celia often dreamed of the day her mother would stop using. She would walk into the house. Her mother would look up, her face clear and bright. She would smile, and her eyes would be determined. We’re leaving Teddy, she would say happily. Tell your sister.
* * *
Munch, munch, like the sky ate the moon every night, until only a sliver remained. Like Stoner standing at the edge of the street, searching for every tablet and drop, talking about liquid acid you put in your eyes, or sticky stuff to melt into the brown liquid that made your soul flow down the streets. All that begging and hustling only to get some fix he would forget tomorrow.
Only Celia and Rich remained clean, sitting on the corner while the night spiraled out of control around them. It wasn’t out of some snotty judgment or anything like that, but more a matter of laziness or fear. If someone had come up to Celia and said, Here, she might have, despite all her promises to herself. At some point the night would be right. Then she would be like one of the junkies on the streets whose veins had all collapsed into dry little threads.
It made Celia think of how butterflies turn poison into protection. The monarch eats milkweed plants and turns them into honest-to-God cyanide, so any predator that eats it will die. Celia liked that. She wished she was capable of killing men for just a taste. She imagined what the streets would look like then. But the poison comes with a cost, she thought. The butterfly, eaten, still dies.
Chapter 20
Naomi drove into the industrial area the Aspire manager had mentioned, finding the deserted waterfront that ran next to skid row. She parked her car and walked to the edge of the decaying docks. From here she could look downriver and see the city.
It would be easy to throw a body into the river here, unseen. It would take a day or so for it to resurface, down by the bridge. It lined up.
Naomi stepped tentatively onto one of the docks. The wood was splintered, the creosote-soaked pilings mired deep in the muddy water. Feeling each board carefully, Naomi made her way out to the pier. The water sloshed over the edges of the rotting wood. She could feel how deep the river ran underneath. The channel was big and dark ahead of her.
She walked to the end of the dock and peered down into murky depths. Tangles of old rebar, sprouting like lethal rusted spears, rose from the unseen bottom. Anyone who fell over the side here was courting death, or at least a trip to the emergency room and a tetanus shot.
Naomi imagined a man carrying a body. She saw him coming out here in the dark, with only the moonlight for illumination. He carried the body to the dock and dumped it off the edge, certain the river would erase any evidence from the corpse and the current would carry it far enough away no one would know where it had been dumped.
Getting down on her hands and knees on the wet boards, Naomi examined both sides of the dock. She took her time, crawling, peering at the underboards, studying the oily pilings. More nests of the rebar rose from the gloomy depths below, like lazy venomous snakes. She assumed the rebar was from the shipping industry that once made this city—coils of shipping cables and reinforcement for pilings that had since rotted away.
She froze. There was a pale reddish glint on the end of one of the spears. It was about a foot beneath the surface, waving like the softest filaments, or mermaid floss. Pushing up her sleeve, Naomi lay down flat on the wet boards. The shockingly cold water wet her arm. She reached down for the floss, brought it to the surface with her fingers.
It was a hank of human hair.
Back on the relief of dry land, Naomi stood in the rutted dirt and pulled out her phone, ignoring the cold water running down her sleeve.
“Sean Richardson?” she asked. “You need to bring a team down to the old docks. Yes. In the industrial area adjacent to downtown. A dredge team, with divers experienced with river hazards. You are going to find more missing girls here. They’re snagged.”
She stayed only long enough to see the cars and dark vans arrive. The search and rescue boat came down the river, the divers holding on to the sides. A news copter drew a bead in the distance, but Naomi left before anyone tried to talk to her.
If Jerome had the firing range, Naomi had the boxing gym. The best was when she had real people to spar with—it seemed every town offered up at least a few curious longshoremen, teenage martial arts hopefuls, or retired prizefighters willing to go a few rounds. If she ever did settle in one place, Naomi figured, sh
e might take a few girls under her arm to train.
She found the local gym on the east side of town, near a set of train tracks and a disreputable strip of car lots. The smell was intoxicating: sweat, old leather, and the musky scent of fear. To Naomi, new fear smelled bright and hard, but fear already spent smelled entirely different, like an animal resting.
The young men—and more women, she noticed—had faces lacquered with Vaseline. The only language was the hiss of breath and the smack of the bags, and gloves hitting flesh. Naomi spoke to the woman in charge, a retired female fighter, one of the first, of pink shorts and a bannered name. Now she was just smiling, ruddy faced, a team of kids around her.
Naomi changed in a tiny bathroom where the sink was stained with spit blood, and carried her boxing bag back out by the ring that dominated the room. She warmed up, shadowboxing and hitting the heavy bags while the others snuck glances, curious about her. Then she wrapped her hands, asked the trainer to help lace her sparring gloves, and found a willing partner.
He was a young man, supremely confident at sparring with a woman. He spoke to Naomi through his mouth guard as they climbed in the ring. “You ever fought before?”
“Yes,” Naomi said, tucking in her own mouth guard with a gloved fist. “You better cross yourself.”
He thought it was a joke.
“Where did you learn to fight like that?” the woman trainer asked, after a wrung-out but satisfied Naomi climbed through the ropes several rounds later. Two hectic patches had appeared on her cheeks, but otherwise she was mostly untouched. Her eyes were clear.
“A retired fighter down in Mexico,” she answered as the trainer slipped off her gloves. “He specializes in dirty fighting.”
“I can tell. You wouldn’t last two minutes in front of the judges in this state. Poor Mikal there is going to piss blood for a week from those kidney punches.”
“He could have said stop,” Naomi said, feeling chagrined.
“Men.” The woman grinned. Her grin faded. “You looked like you were holding back, too.”
“I was.” Naomi saw images of crushed bones, smashed fingers, gouged eyes.
The trainer turned to two teenage boys behind her. “Roberto and Jason, get in the ring.” The slender boys slid through the ropes, smacking playfully at each other. “No horseplay,” she chided.
Naomi unwrapped her hands, checked all her fingers. The cotton wraps were well-worn and stained with blood. At least it wasn’t her blood. That was the rule, she thought, watching the boys lark around the ring, looking more like best friends than opponents. Mikal came and joined her, holding a cold wet towel to his bruised face. “Can you teach me some of those moves?” he asked her under his breath, during a break in the action. “Maybe another time,” Naomi answered.
One of the boys split the lip of his friend, and the two instantly stopped sparring, the hurt one leaning through the ropes. Naomi watched as the trainer reached into her fanny pack and pulled out a piece of cold metal, pressing it tight against the cut. Holding the boy’s head with firm hands, she pinched the wound shut, hard. He closed his eyes.
“I’m looking for a man,” Naomi began, and told her about the scar-faced man. Naomi described him in detail.
The trainer got a faraway look in her eyes. “Except for the blue jacket, that sounds a lot like Ray, our custodian. He’s not much of a custodian, actually. He pushes a broom here for free membership. He’s punchy.” She said this as if in apology, like it was her fault.
“What kind of punchy?” Naomi asked. She knew that there were brain-damaged boxers who were docile while others were violent, even criminally insane.
“Uhhh . . .” The trainer seemed disinclined to answer.
“Where can I find this Ray fellow?” Naomi asked, her heart beating stealthily.
“You’re not going to do him like you just did poor Mikal, are you?” The woman had a glint of mischief in her eyes, but also concern. The hurt boy lowered his head towards his coach, his skin stretched white where her fingers were holding the wound shut. A trickle of blood was on her thumb.
“Only if he deserves it,” Naomi said, almost idly. She was watching the boy, the wound, the woman. “If I had wanted to take Mikal down, I would have hit him in the body more,” she added, and caught the trainer’s knowing glance.
“Ray comes in early Monday mornings. So you’ve got a few days. And no, I don’t know where he lives. It could be behind a dumpster, for how he smells some mornings. If you’re looking for scars, he’s your man.”
The woman slowly removed her fingers. The wound had closed. “We do a lot now to prevent that kind of scarring, but you know—skin tears.”
“I know,” Naomi said, collecting her bag. “Hearts do, too.”
Back at Diane’s she found Jerome, his head bowed over Oregon Revised Statutes: Criminal Procedure, Crimes. He was sitting at the kitchen table, a plate next to him with hard pretzels, bread and butter pickles, mustards, and slices of sharp cheddar cheese. Naomi ate a piece of the cheese, looked over his shoulder. “Studying for your license?” she asked.
He looked up, saw her rosy cheeks, sweat-dampened hair.
“Work out?” he asked, closing the book.
“I found the boxing gym,” she said.
Jerome’s dark eyes caught her, warmed her. Usually after fighting, the first thing Naomi wanted was to go to bed. Love and war. Once Jerome had teased her about this, but it had not gone over well. So he stayed quiet. Their lovemaking was something neither of them discussed. He knew that for Naomi it was a sacred thing, but scary. Jerome had been her only lover outside of whatever had happened in her youth, and that was not love. What had happened to her as a child wasn’t even sex, he thought. It was grotesque and something he kept far from his mind. Making love to Naomi, he found it easy to forget what had happened to her, because in that moment she was purely herself, smiling, loving him. He had never known anyone else like her and knew he never would. She was his heart.
But their love was like a deep trench, and the vulnerability of it always threatened to pull Naomi down. So she danced with him, close and then far. He was trying to accept this. There might never be a magic moment with Naomi, a time when he could relax and feel all was well. She might always be like this, looking over his shoulder, her eyes cautious.
“I beat up this guy. I feel kinda bad about it.”
“He could have said stop.”
“That’s what I said!”
She took another chair, grinned at him. He grinned back, and they both laughed. It wasn’t all better, but it sure was closer than before. “You hungry?” he asked, thinking of the bed upstairs, pushing the plate of pretzels closer to her.
“Actually, I am,” she said.
Chapter 21
Celia was sitting outside Sisters of Mercy, scratching the bloody bandage around her leg. She had rolled up her jeans so anyone walking by could see the bandage, the blood. She knew what she was doing. She was trying to get attention. See, she wanted to say, I am hurt. Someone care.
But no one did. They walked on by, not even looking at her.
Except for Naomi. She came down the sidewalk, arms swinging, face like a lamp. It was big news on the streets, how the FBI was pulling bodies out of the river down at the old docks. Some of the street people had gone down to watch, but not Celia. She guessed next to dead bodies her spider bite wasn’t much news.
Naomi had worry on her brow, but it wasn’t the expression Celia knew would be there if any of the girls dragged out of the river were old enough to be her sister. That some would turn out to be girls Celia knew probably didn’t even occur to Naomi.
“You’re hurt!” Naomi said, crouching near Celia. She reached out, and Celia made a show of pulling away until she saw Naomi’s hands. Naomi’s hands were rough. She had scars on her knuckles—fights, somewhere along the way—and the nails were clipped short. They were hands that had known life, and this comforted Celia. She let Naomi touch her.
“I’m a
lways hurt,” Celia said, hearing how foolish that made her sound.
“Did you get cut?” Naomi asked.
“Spider bite.”
“That’s not good. That can get infected.”
Naomi quickly and professionally unrolled the bandage, peeking at the wound. The edges were raised, the hole angry and red. Celia could smell Naomi’s hair, leaning over, and the smell was like apples. Celia closed her eyes, drank in the smell. It made her think of Alyssa. Washing Alyssa’s hair with the shampoo from the dollar store, soaping it slowly, rinsing her clean with the old yogurt container at the side of the tub.
“I went to the free clinic,” Celia told her.
Naomi stopped. The concern went out of her face. She stopped paying attention to the bite, or to Celia. “I should go there,” she said. “I didn’t even think of that! The doctor might know something. I’ll put up a flyer, talk to them.”
Her hand had left Celia’s leg. Her face was empty, and it gave Celia one of her shivers. Celia could see that Naomi was thinking about her sister, but there was nothing there to remember. Naomi was missing a ghost.
“I saved the dead spider, here, on my pants,” Celia said, quickly, trying to recapture Naomi’s attention. She began unfolding the dirty cuff to show her.
But Naomi was rising. “You should keep that bandage clean,” she said, as if Celia were another adult. “Who is the doctor up there?”
“I think it’s Lopez,” Celia replied, turning away. Shutting off.