by Terry Brooks
“There, now, you take your time, look it all over, fill out what you can, I’ll help you with the rest,” Della finished, straightening, taking her hand from the older girl’s shoulder. “That’s right. I’ll be right over here, you just come on up when you’re ready.”
She moved back behind the desk, giving Ross a glance and a shrug and settling herself into place with a sigh. Like all the front-desk people, she was a trained professional with experience working intake. Della had been at Fresh Start for something like five years, almost from its inception, according to Ray Hapgood, so she had pretty much seen and heard it all.
Ross moved over to stand beside her, and she gave him a suspicious frown for his trouble. “You at loose ends, Mr. Speechwriter? Need something more to do, maybe?”
“I’m depressed, and I need one of your smiles,” he answered with a wink.
“Shoo, what office you running for?” She gave him a look, then gestured with her head. “Little lady over there, she’s seventeen, says she’s pregnant, says the father doesn’t want her or the baby, doesn’t want nothing to do with none of it. Gangbanger or some such, just eighteen himself. Other girl is her sister. Been living wherever, the both of them. Runaways, street kids, babies making babies. Told her we could get them a bed, but she had to see a doctor and if there were parents, they had to be notified. Course, she doesn’t want that, doesn’t trust doctors, hates her parents, such as they are. Good Lord Almighty!”
Ross nodded. “You explain the reason for all this?”
Della gave him the glare. “Course I explained it! What you think I’m doing here, anyway—just taking up space? Who’s been here longer, you or me?”
Ross winced. “Sorry I asked.”
She punched him lightly on the arm. “No, you ain’t.” He glanced around the room. “How many new beds have come in today?”
“Seven. Not counting these.” Della shook her head ruefully. “This keeps up, we’re going to have to start putting them up in your office, having them sleep on your floor. You mind stepping over a few babies and mothers while you work—assuming you actually do any work while you’re sitting back there?”
He shrugged. “Wall-to-wall homeless. Maybe I can put some of them to work writing for me. They probably have better ideas about all this than I do.”
“They probably do.” Della was not going to cut him any slack. “You on your way to somewhere or did you just come out here to get underfoot?”
“I’m on my way to get some coffee. Do you want some?”
“No, I don’t. I got too much work to do. Unlike some I know.” She returned to the paperwork on her desk, dismissing him. Then she added, “Course, if you brought me some—cream and sugar, please—I guess I’d drink it all right.”
He went back down the hall to the elevator and pressed the button. The staff’s coffee room was in the basement along with a kitchen, storage rooms for food and supplies, maintenance equipment, and the water heaters and furnace. Space was at a premium. Fresh Start sheltered anywhere from a hundred and fifty to two hundred women and children at any given time, all of them homeless, most of them abused. Administrative offices and a first-aid room occupied the ground floor of the six-story building, and the top five floors had been converted into a mix of dormitories and bedrooms. The second floor also housed a dining hall that could seat up to a hundred people, which worked fine if everyone ate in shifts. Just next door, in the adjacent building, was Pass/Go, the alternative school for the children housed at Fresh Start. The school served upward of sixty or seventy children most of the time. The Pass/Go staff numbered twelve, the Fresh Start staff fifteen. Volunteers filled in the gaps.
No signs marked the location of the buildings or gave evidence of the nature of the work conducted within. The buildings were drab and unremarkable and occupied space just east of Occidental Park in the Pioneer Square district of Seattle. The International District lay just to the south above the Kingdome. Downtown, with its hotels and skyscrapers and shopping, lay a dozen blocks north. Elliott Bay and the waterfront lay west. Clients were plentiful; you could find them on the streets nearby, if you took the time to look.
Fresh Start and Pass/Go were nonprofit corporations funded by Seattle Public Schools, various charitable foundations, and private donations. Both organizations were the brainchild of one man—Simon Lawrence.
John Ross looked down at his feet. Simon Lawrence. The Wizard of Oz. The man he was supposed to kill in exactly two days, according to his dreams.
The elevator doors opened and he stepped in. There were stairs, but he still walked with difficulty, his resignation from the Word’s service notwithstanding. He supposed he always would. It didn’t seem fair he should remain crippled after terminating his position, given that he had become crippled by accepting it, but he guessed the Word didn’t see matters that way. Life, after all, wasn’t especially fair.
He smiled. He could joke about it now. His new life allowed for joking. He wasn’t at the forefront of the war against the creatures of the Void, wasn’t striving any longer to prevent the destruction of humanity. That was in the past, in a time when there was little to smile about and a great deal to fear. He had served the Word for the better part of fifteen years, a warrior who had been both hunter and hunted, a man always just one step ahead of Death. He had spent each day of the first twelve years trying to change the horror revealed in his dreams of the night before. San Sobel had been the breaking point, and for a while he thought he might never recover from it. Then Stef had come along, and everything had changed. Now he had his life back, and his future was no longer determined by his dreams.
His dreams? His nightmares. He seldom had them now, their frequency and intensity diminishing steadily from the time he had walked away from being a Knight of the Word. That much, at least, suggested his escape had been successful. The dreams had come every night when he was a Knight of the Word, because the dreams were all he had to work with. But now they almost never came, and when they did, they were vague and indistinct, shadows rather than pictures, and they no longer suggested or revealed or threatened.
Except for his dream about Simon Lawrence, the one in which the old man recognized him from the past, the one in which he recognized that the old man’s words were true and he had indeed killed the Wizard of Oz. He’d had that same dream three times now, and each time it had revealed a little bit more of what he would do. He had never had a dream three times, even when he was a Knight of the Word; he had never had a dream more than once. It had frightened him at first, unnerved him so that even though he was already living in Seattle and working for Simon he had thought to leave at once, to go far, far away from even the possibility of the dream coming to pass.
It was Stef who had convinced him that the way you banish the things you fear is to stand up to them. He had decided to stay finally, and it had been the right choice. He wasn’t afraid of the dream anymore. He knew it wasn’t going to happen, that he wasn’t going to kill Simon. Simon Lawrence and his incredible work at Fresh Start and Pass/Go was the future John Ross had chosen to embrace.
Ross stepped out of the elevator into the coffee room. The room was large but bare, save for a couple of multipurpose tables with folding chairs clustered about, the coffee machine and cups sitting on a cabinet filled with coffee-making materials, a small refrigerator, a microwave, and a set of old shelves containing an odd assortment of everyday china pieces, silverware, and glasses.
Ray Hapgood was sitting at one of the tables as Ross appeared, reading the Post-Intelligencer. “My man, John!” he greeted, glancing up. “How goes the speech-writing effort? We gonna make the Wiz sound like the Second Coming?”
Ross laughed. “He doesn’t need that kind of help from me. Most people already think he is the Second Coming.”
Hapgood chuckled and shook his head. Ray was the director of education at Pass/Go, a graduate of the University of Washington with an undergraduate degree in English literature and years of teaching experience i
n the Seattle public school system, where he had worked before coming to Simon. He was a tall, lean black man with short-cropped hair receding dramatically toward the crown of his head, his eyes bright and welcoming, his smile ready. He was a “black” man because that was what he called himself. None of that “African American” stuff for him. Black American was okay, but black was good enough. He had little time or patience for that political-correctness nonsense. What you called him wasn’t going to make any difference as to whether or not he liked you or were his friend. He was that kind of guy—blunt, open, hardworking, right to the point. Ross liked him a lot.
“Della sends you her love,” Ross said, tongue firmly in cheek, and moved over to the coffee machine. He would have preferred a latte, but that meant a two-block hike. He wasn’t up to it.
“Yeah, Della’s in love with me, sure enough,” Ray agreed solemnly. “Can’t blame the woman, can you?”
Ross shook his head, pouring himself a cup and stirring in a little cream. “But it isn’t right for you to string her along like you do. You have to fish or cut bait, Ray.”
“Fish or cut bait?” Ray stared at him. “What’s that, some sort of midwestern saying, something you Ohio homeboys tell each other?”
“Yep.” Ross moved over and sat down across from him, leaning the black staff against his chair. He took a sip. “What do you Seattle homeboys say?”
“We say, ‘Shit or get off the pot,’ but I expect that sort of talk offends your senses, so I don’t use it around you.” Ray shrugged and went back to his paper. After a minute, he said, “Damn, why do I bother reading this rag? It just depresses me.”
Carole Price walked in, smiled at Ross, and moved over to the coffee machine. “What depresses you, Ray?”
“This damn newspaper! People! Life in general!” Ray Hapgood leaned back and shook the paper as if to rid it of spiders. “Listen to this. There’s three stories in here, all of them the same story really. Story one. Woman living in Renton is depressed—lost her job, ex-husband’s not paying support for the one kid that’s admittedly his, boyfriend beats her regularly and with enough disregard for the neighbors that they’ve called the police a dozen times, and then he drinks and totals her car. End result? She goes home and puts a gun to her head and kills herself. But she takes time first to kill all three children because—as she says in the note she so thoughtfully leaves—she can’t imagine them wanting to live without her.”
Carole nodded. Blond, fit, middle-aged, a veteran of the war against the abuse of women and children, she was the director of Fresh Start. “I read about that.”
“Story two.” Hapgood plowed ahead with a nod of satisfaction. “Estranged husband decides he’s had enough of life. Goes home to visit the wife and children, two of them his from a former marriage, two of them hers from same. Kills her, ’cause she’s his wife, and kills his children, ’cause they’re his, see. Lets her children live, ’cause they aren’t his and he doesn’t see them as his responsibility.”
Carole shook her head and sighed.
“Story three.” Hapgood rolled his eyes dramatically before continuing. “Ex-husband can’t stand the thought of his former wife with another man. Goes over to their trailer with a gun, shoots them both, then shoots himself. Leaves three small children orphaned and homeless in the process. Too bad for them.”
He threw down the newspaper. “We could have helped all these people, damn it! We could have helped if we could have gotten to them! If they’d just come to us, these women, just come to us and told us they felt threatened and …” He threw up his hands. “I don’t know, it’s all such a waste!”
“It’s that, all right,” agreed Carole. Ross sipped his coffee and nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“Then, right on the same page, like they can’t see the irony of it, is an article about the fuss being created over the Pirates of the Caribbean exhibit in Disney World!” Ray looked furious. “See, these pirates are chasing these serving wenches around a table and then auctioning them off, all on this ride, and some people are offended. Okay, I can understand that. But this story, and all the fuss over it, earns the same amount of space, and a whole lot more public interest, than what’s happened to these women and children. And I’ll bet Disney gives the pirates more time and money than they give the homeless. I mean, who cares about the homeless, right? Long as it isn’t you or me, who cares?”
“You’re obsessing, Ray,” said Jip Wing, a young volunteer who had wandered in during the exchange. Hapgood shot him a look.
“How about the article on the next page about the kid who won’t compete in judo competition anymore if she’s required to bow to the mat?” Carole grinned wolfishly. “She says bowing to the mat has religious connotations, so she shouldn’t have to do it. Mat worship or something. Her mother backs her up, of course. That story gets half a page, more than the killings or the pirates.”
“Well, the priorities are all skewed, that’s the point.” Ray shook his head. “When the newspapers start thinking that what goes on at Disney World or at a judo competition deserves as much attention as what goes on with homeless women and children, we are in big trouble.”
“That doesn’t even begin to address the amount of coverage given to sports,” Jip Wing interjected with a shrug.
“Well, politically incorrect pirates and mat worship, not to mention sports, are easier to deal with than the homeless, aren’t they?” Carole snapped. “Way of the world, Ray. People deal with what they can handle. What’s too hard or doesn’t offer an easy solution gets shoved aside. Too much for me, they think. Too big for one man or woman. We need committees, experts, organizations, entire governments to solve this one. But, hey, mat worship? Pirates chasing wenches? I can handle those.”
Ross stayed quiet. He was thinking about his own choices in life. He had given up the pressures of trying to serve on a far larger and more violent battlefield than anything that was being talked about here. He had abandoned a fight that had become overwhelming and not a little incomprehensible. He had walked away from demons and feeders and maentwrogs, beings of magic and darkness, creatures of the Void. Because after San Sobel he felt that he wasn’t getting anywhere with his efforts to destroy them, that he couldn’t control the results anymore, that it was dumb luck if he ended up killing the monsters instead of the humans. He felt adrift and ineffective and dangerously inadequate. Children had died because of him. He couldn’t bear the thought of that happening again.
Even so, it seemed as if Ray were speaking directly to him, and in the other man’s anger and frustration with humanity’s lack of an adequate response to the problem of homeless and abused women and children, he felt the sharp sting of a personal reprimand.
He took a deep breath, listening as Ray and Carole continued their discussion. How much good do you think we’re doing? he wanted to ask them. With the homeless. With the people you’re talking about. Through all our programs and hard work. How much good are we really doing?
But he didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He sat there in silence, contemplating his own failures and shortcomings, his own questionable choices in life. The fact remained that he liked what he was doing here and he did think he was doing some good—more good than he had done as a Knight of the Word. Here, he could see the results on a case-by-case basis. Not all of his efforts—their efforts—were successful, but the failures were easier to live with and less costly. If change for the better was achieved one step at a time, then surely the people involved with Fresh Start and Pass/Go were headed in the right direction.
He took a fresh grip on his commitment. The past was behind him and he should keep it there. He was not meant to be a Knight of the Word. He had never been more than adequate to the undertaking, never more than satisfactory. It required someone stronger and more fit, someone whose dedication and determination eclipsed his own. He had done the best he could, but he had done as much as he could, as well. It was finished after San Sobel. It was ended.
�
��Time to get back to work,” he said to no one in particular.
The talk still swirled about him as he rose. A couple of other staffers had wandered in, and everyone was trying to get a word in edgewise. With a nod to Ray, who glanced up as he moved toward the elevator, he crossed the room, pressed the button, stepped inside the empty cubicle when it arrived, and watched the break room and its occupants disappear as the doors closed.
He rode up to the main floor in silence, closing his eyes to the past and its memories, sealing himself in a momentary blackness.
When the elevator stopped and he stepped out, Stefanie Winslow was passing by carrying two latte containers, napkins, straws, and plastic spoons nestled in a small cardboard tray.
“Coffee, tea, or me?” she asked brightly, tossing back her curly black hair, looking curiously girlish with the gesture.
“Guess.” He pursed his lips to keep from smiling. “Whacha got there?”
“Two double-tall, low-fat, vanilla lattes, fella.”
“One of those for me?”
She smirked. “You wish. How’s the speech coming?”
“Done, except for a final polish. The Wiz will amaze this Halloween.” He gestured at the tray. “So who gets those?”