Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (14 page)

“Hi, guys,” he said.

The teenagers froze, then the Anglo’s gaze took in the wire cutters in Zinc’s hand.

“Well, well,” he said. “What’ve we got here? What’re you doing on the night side of the street, kid?”

Before Zinc could reply, the sound of a siren cut the air. A lone siren, approaching fast.

The Chinese waitress looked great in her leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings. She wore a blood-red camisole tucked into the waist of the skirt which made her pale skin seem even paler. Her hair was the black of polished jet, pulled up in a loose bun that spilled stray strands across her neck and shoulders. Blue-black eye shadow made her dark eyes darker. Her lips were the same red as her camisole.

“How come she looks so good,” Sue wanted to know, “when I’d just look like a tart if I dressed like that?”

“She’s inscrutable,” Jilly replied. “You’re just obvious.”

“How sweet of you to point that out,” Sue said with a grin. She stood up from their table. “C’mon.

Let’s dance.”

Jilly shook her head. “You go ahead. I’ll sit this one out.”

“Uh-uh. I’m not going out there alone.”

“There’s LaDonna,” Jilly said, pointing out a girl they both knew. “Dance with her.”

“Are you feeling all right, Jilly?”

“I’m fine—just a little pooped. Give me a chance to catch my breath.”

But she wasn’t all right, she thought as Sue crossed over to where LaDonna da Costa and her brother Pipo were sitting. Not when she had Zinc to worry about. If he was out there, cutting off the locks of more bicycles ...

You’re not his mother, she told herself. Except

Out here on the streets we take care of our own.

That’s what she’d told Sue. And maybe it wasn’t true for a lot of people who hit the skids—the winos and the losers and the bag people who were just too screwed up to take care of themselves, little say look after anyone else—but it was true for her.

Someone like Zinc—he was an in-betweener. Most days he could take care of himself just fine, but there was a fey streak in him so that sometimes he carried a touch of the magic that ran wild in the streets, the magic that was loose late at night when the straights were in bed and the city belonged to the night people. That magic took up lodgings in people like Zinc. For a week. A day. An hour. Didn’t matter if it was real or not, if it couldn’t be measured or catalogued, it was real to them. It existed all the same.

Did that make it true?

Jilly shook her head. It wasn’t her kind of question and it didn’t matter anyway. Real or not, it could still be driving Zinc into breaking corporeal laws—the kind that’d have Lou breathing down his neck, real fast. The kind that’d put him in jail with a whole different kind of loser.

Zinc wouldn’t last out a week inside.

Jilly got up from the table and headed across the dance floor to where Sue and LaDonna were jitterbugging to a tune that sounded as though Buddy Holly could have penned the melody, if not the words.

“Fuck this, man!” the Anglo said.

He threw down the bike and took off at a run, his companion right on his heels, scattering puddles with the impact of their boots. Zinc watched them go. There was a buzzing in the back of his head. The streetlights were telling him to run too, but he saw the bike lying there on the pavement like a wounded animal, one wheel spinning forlornly, and he couldn’t just take off.

Bikes were like turtles. Turn ’em on their backs—or a bike on its side—and they couldn’t get up on their own again.

He tossed down the wire cutters and ran to the bike. Just as he was leaning it up against the railing from which the Anglo had taken it, a police cruiser came around the corner, skidding on the wet pave-ment, cherry light gyrating—screaming,
Run,
run! in its urgent high-pitched voice—headlights pinning Zinc where he stood.

Almost before the cruiser came to a halt, the passenger door popped open and a uniformed officer had stepped out. He drew his gun. Using the cruiser as a shield, he aimed across its roof at where Zinc was standing.

“Hold it right there, kid!” he shouted. “Don’t even blink.”

Zinc was privy to secrets. He could hear voices in lights. He knew that there was more to be seen in the world if you watched it from the corner of your eye than head on. It was a simple truth that every policeman he ever saw looked just like Elvis. But he hadn’t survived all his years on the streets without protection.

He had a lucky charm. A little tin monkey pendant that had originally lived in a box of Crackerjacks—back when Crackerjacks had real prizes in them. Lucia had given it to him. He’d forgotten to bring it out with him the other night when the Elvises had taken him in. But he wasn’t stupid.

He’d remembered it tonight.

He reached into his pocket to get it out and wake its magic.

“You’re just being silly,” Sue said as they collected their jackets from their chairs.

“So humor me,” Jilly asked.

“I’m coming, aren’t I?”

Jilly nodded. She could hear the voice of Zinc’s roommate Ursula in the back of her head
There are no patterns.

—but she could feel one right now, growing tight as a drawn bowstring, humming with its urgency to be loosed.

“C’mon,” she said, almost running from the club.

Police officer Mario Hidalgo was still a rookie—tonight was only the beginning of his third month of active duty—and while he’d drawn his sidearm before, he had yet to fire it in the line of duty. He had the makings of a good cop. He was steady, he was conscientious. The street hadn’t had a chance to harden him yet, though it had already thrown him more than a couple of serious uglies in his first eight weeks of active duty.

But steady though he’d proved himself to be so far, when he saw the kid reaching into his pocket of his baggy jacket, Hidalgo had a single moment of unreasoning panic.

The kid’s got a gun, that panic told him. The kid’s going for a weapon.

One moment was all it took.

His finger was already tightening on the trigger of his regulation .38 as the kid’s hand came out of his pocket. Hidalgo wanted to stop the pressure he was putting on the gun’s trigger, but it was like there was a broken circuit between his brain and his hand.

The gun went off with a deafening roar.

Got it, Zinc thought as his fingers closed on the little tin monkey charm. Got my luck.

He started to take it out of his pocket, but then something hit him straight in the chest. It lifted him off his feet and threw him against the wall behind him with enough force to knock all the wind out of his lungs. There was a raw pain firing every one of his nerve ends. His hands opened and closed spastically, the charm falling out of his grip to hit the ground moments before his body slid down the wall to join it on the wet pavement.

Goodbye, goodbye, sweet friend,
the streetlights cried.

He could sense the spin of the stars as they wheeled high above the city streets, their voices joining the electric voices of the street-lights.

My turn to go free, he thought as a white tunnel opened in his mind. He could feel it draw him in, and then he was falling, falling, falling ....

“Goodbye ....” he said, thought he said, but no words came forth from between his lips.

Just a trickle of blood that mingled with the rain that now began to fall in earnest, as though it, too, was saying its own farewell.

All Jilly had to see was the red spinning cherries of the police cruisers to know where the pattern she’d felt in the club was taking her. There were a lot of cars here cruisers and unmarked vehicles, an ambulance—all on official business, their presence coinciding with her business. She didn’t see Lou approach until he laid his hand on her shoulder.

“You don’t want to see,” he told her.

Jilly never even looked at him. One moment he was holding her shoulder, the next she’d shrugged herself free of his grip and just kept on walking.

“Is it ... is it Zinc?” Sue asked the detective.

Jilly didn’t have to ask. She knew. Without being told. Without having to see the body.

An officer stepped in front of her to stop her, but Lou waved him aside. In her peripheral vision she saw another officer sitting inside a cruiser, weeping, but it didn’t really register.

“I thought he had a gun,” the policeman was saying as she went by. “Oh, Jesus. I thought the kid was going for a gun ....”

And then she was standing over Zinc’s body, looking down at his slender frame, limbs flung awkwardly like those of a rag doll that had been tossed into a corner and forgotten. She knelt down at Zinc’s side. Something glinted on the wet pavement. A small tin monkey charm. She picked it up, closed it tightly in her fist before anyone could see what she’d done.

“C’mon, Jilly,” Lou said as he came up behind her. He helped her to her feet.

It didn’t seem possible that anyone as vibrant—as
alive—as
Zinc had been could have any relation whatsoever with that empty shell of a body that lay there on the pavement.

As Lou led her away from the body, July’s tears finally came, welling up from her eyes to salt the rain on her cheek.

“He ... he wasn’t ... stealing bikes, Lou ....” she said. “It doesn’t look good,” Lou said.

Often when she’d been with Zinc, Jilly had had a sense of that magic that touched him. A feeling that even if she couldn’t see the marvels he told her about, they still existed just beyond the reach of her sight.

That feeling should be gone now, she thought.

“He was just ... setting them free,” she said.

The magic should have died, when he died. But she felt, if she just looked hard enough, that she’d see him, riding a maverick bike at the head of a pack of riderless bicycles—metal frames glistening, reflector lights glinting red, wheels throwing up arcs of fine spray, as they went off down the wet street.

Around the corner and out of sight.

“Nice friends the kid had,” a plainclothes detective who was standing near them said to the uniformed officer beside him. “Took off with just about every bike on the street and left him holding the bag.”

Jilly didn’t think so. Not this time.

This time they’d gone free.

That Explains Poland

1

Maybe that explains Poland.

Lori’s mother used to say that. In the fullness of her Stalinism, the great hamster (as Lori called her) was convinced that every radical twitch to come from Poland and Solidarity was in fact inspired by the CIA, drug addicts, M&Ms, reruns of “The Honeymooners” (“To the moon, Alice!”) ... in fact, just about everything except the possibility of real dissension among the Polish people with their less than democratic regime. It got to the point where she was forever saying “That explains Poland!”, regardless of how absurd or incomprehensible the connection.

It became a family joke—a
proposito
to any and all situations and shared by sundry and all, in and about the Snelling clan. You still don’t get it?

Maybe you just had to be there.

2

“Listen to this: BIGFOOT SPIED IN UPPER FOXVILLE,” Lori read from the Friday edition of
The Daily Journal.
“Bigfoot. Can you believe it? I mean, can you
believe
it?”

Ruth and I feigned indifference. We were used to Lori’s outbursts by now and even though half the
clientela
in The Monkey Woman’s Nest lifted their heads from whatever had been occupying them to look our way, we merely sipped our beer and looked out onto Williamson Street, watching the commuters hustle down into the subways or jockeying for position at the bus stop.

Lori was an eventful sort of a person. You could always count on something happening around her, with a ninety-nine percent chance that she’d been the catalyst. On a Friday afternoon, with the week’s work behind us and two glorious days off ahead, we didn’t need an event. Just a quiet moment and a few beers in
la Hora

Frontera
before the streets woke up and the clubs opened their doors. “Who’s playing at Your Second Home this weekend?” Ruth asked.

I wasn’t sure, but I had other plans anyway. “I was thinking of taking in that new Rob Lowe movie if it’s still playing.”

Ruth got a gleam in her eye. “He is
so
dreamy. Every time I see him I just want to take him home and—”

“Don’t be such a pair of old poops,” Lori interrupted. “This is important. It’s history in the making.

Just listen to what it says.” She gave the paper a snap to keep our attention, which set off another round of lifting heads throughout the restaurant, and started to read.

“The recent sighting of a large, hairy, human-like creature in the back alleys of Upper
Foxville has prompted Councilman Cohen to renew his demands for increased police patrols
in
that section of the city. Eyewitness Barry Jack spotted the huge beast about I A.M. last night. He
estimated it stood between seven and eight feet tall and weighed about 300 to 400 pounds.”

“Lori ...”

“Let me finish.”

“‘While I doubt that the creature seen by Mr. Jack—that a
Big-
foot—exists,’ Cohen is quoted
as saying, ’it does emphasize the increased proliferation of transients and the homeless in this
area of the city, a problem that the City Council is doing very little about, despite continual
requests by residents and this Council member.’”

“Right.” Lori gave us a quick grin. “Well,
that’s
stretching a point way beyond my credibility.”