Finn (18 page)

“Just like that?” James said. I nodded. “Damn,” he said.

“But I got to say goodbye,” I said. “Even if he didn’t know it was me.”

“There you go,” James said. “That’s something.”

“It was stupid.”

“What your Moms say? After.”

I had to think about that. The whole funeral was a blur. So was the party afterwards, with everybody crammed into our apartment— how my grandmother had complained about the plastic cups and the white bread and the cold cuts, about their being cheap and low class, but everyone knew she wasn’t talking about the food. That whole time, from the hospital to when we moved away, was only about two or three weeks, but I remember the feeling of living completely outside myself, having to be on constant display, and every night being so exhausted. Some nights I slept on the floor.

“I guess she sort of blames me,” I said, but James’s head was back underwater. I figured it was just as well. When James surfaced, I stayed quiet. I watched him be a fountain again. He didn’t seem to mind that I never answered his question. He hadn’t really wanted to talk in the first place.

After a while longer in the water, we were both shivering. It was time to go. James was too embarrassed to take off his clothes to wring them out, so all he could do was bunch up the edges and squeeze them. I tried to wake Silvia up, but she didn’t budge, so I just worked my clothes out from under her. I dried myself off with my pants, which wasn’t very pleasant, but at least my shirt was mostly dry when I put it on. My super short hair dried in no time.

Things seemed more normal with my clothes on. I was suddenly annoyed with James for dragging us all over the city in the middle of the night.

“Where the hell are we going?” I demanded.

“It’s close,” James said. “Just chill.” He went back down to the river. Silvia was still lying on the wall, groggy, wiping her eyes and saying, “Just leave me for a while, Chica. I have to get some rest.” I pulled her up. She was sitting on the wall like Humpty Dumpty when James came back.

“I found a sweet ride,” James said. We followed him down to the river. He had found an abandoned rowboat. I didn’t care how bad it looked. The thought of not having to walk, of just drifting, was wonderful.

“I can’t believe this piece of crap,” I said, but we were already helping Silvia in, James on one side of her, me on the other. We put her on the wide seat towards the back of the boat. Then James and I pushed the boat mostly into the river. It left a big groove in the dirt.

I climbed in and sat on the floor in front of Silvia. James gave the boat a final shove and jumped in. It floated, but sat very low. Its edges were only a few inches above the water. “Are we sure about this?” I asked. James shrugged.

“She weighs a lot,” he said.

“You’re too nice,” Silvia said. Apparently, she wasn’t too sleepy to be sarcastic. I leaned back against her legs. She rubbed my head as if I was a good luck charm. “Quit it,” I said, even though I liked the feel.

There weren’t any oars, so James used his iron rod. He pushed us away from the bank. As soon as we got underway, a puddle formed in the bottom of the boat and soaked the seat of my pants. “This thing’s leaking,” I said. James acted as if it was no big deal, but Silvia got very anxious. I guessed she was thinking of her trip across the river into America, and the way those girls had disappeared.

“The water’s only two foot deep,” James said scornfully.

“How’s the leak?” Silvia asked. I lied and said it had stopped.

It really was another world in that boat. Floating down the middle of the river gave me the feeling that nothing could touch us. The few gnarled trees on the banks reached out with their pathetic bare branches, as if they were begging for a ride. The river was its thickest here, at least a hundred feet wide, and cleaner, with lush weeds on either side. You could pretend it was the Amazon. Or the Mississippi.

James balanced himself on the front edge of the boat, curling his athletic toes around two metal cleats. I could tell he was really enjoying himself, steering us down the river, keeping a lookout. It was serious business, but every once in a while James would do something goofy, to keep us all on our toes. He liked pretending his pole was stuck in the ground and lifting himself into the air, hanging on to the pole and wiggling his legs while the boat almost left him behind. I liked his antics. Silvia hated them.

We floated down the river as if a wall of glass separated us from the world. The shore on either side of us was looking worse and worse. James warned us that we were going through a bad neighborhood. “They just as soon gut you as not,” he said. I hoped that Silvia didn’t know the verb “to gut.” From the look on her face, she understood enough.

A stinking fog rose off the water. Through it, we could begin to see signs of human life. We drifted past makeshift tents that looked as if they had been spun by insects in the nook of trees. What I thought were tree stumps or piled tires, or just heaps of garbage, turned out, often as not, to be people sleeping on the ground. You couldn’t tell if they were men or women. The junk they drew around themselves for warmth or camouflage made me think of hermit crabs.

At one bend in the river, where the ground dipped away sharply and there were little rolling whitecaps, James poled us over to shore. It was a mistake. A man rose up from the banks—looking more like a bear than a man, on account of the layers and layers of ragged clothes—screaming at us to “pay the toll.” I thought he wanted money, and I fished in my pocket for some, but James said he was just a crazy preacher. “Money’ll just encourage him,” James said, knocking away a dead branch the preacher had thrown at us like a spear.

Then there was another bend, and suddenly the elevated highway veered off to the right, the river to the left. The orange sky opened up over us, and I realized how reassuring it had been to have the concrete all around us, and the constant thrum of motors and tires overhead. We were suddenly exposed. The banks of the river grew more wild and overgrown with tall grass, cattails, and mulberry trees. Anything could be hiding there, and the river was narrowing again. The rowboat was running aground all the time, the leak in the bottom getting bigger with each jolt. At a certain point, it became impossible for James to move us forward. Without any discussion, we abandoned ship. The water only came up to my shins.

It was eerie to be ankle deep in that water, with the wind ruffling the tall grass, and to see huge ugly brick apartment buildings, lying like beached battleships on the level plain, as if the little stream we had just left behind had once been a mile wide.

“It’s the projects,” James announced. Hearing him say that gave me a little thrill. I had heard about the projects in the news, mostly in terms of drugs or shootings or building implosions. But then, after we crawled and scratched our way onto dry land, James led us towards the huge buildings. He meant to take us inside one. The windows were dark, except for the blue flicker of televisions, as if we were in the middle of an air raid and people were tuned to the news.

“Your aunt lives
there?”
I said. James nodded.

“Hope so,” he said. “Least she used to.” James suddenly crouched down and started sifting through some trash, as if he had spotted a rare and delicious mushroom. It was hard to tell where the trash ended and the ground began. “Cash money,” he said triumphantly, showing me his booty. It was a hypodermic needle, still fresh in its hospital wrapper.

T
he sight of the projects seemed to give James a boost. The closer we got to them, though, the farther back Silvia and I fell. Silvia kept telling me to just leave her behind, but it was appalling to picture her asleep on that open littered ground. James was too excited to wait up for us. In fact, he started jogging, and then, in the shadow of the building, he broke into a run.

Silvia and I picked our way through the broken glass and the mildewed mattresses, their foam spilling out like white guts. We climbed in slow motion through the barbed wire fence, which in most places wasn’t even a fence, just a series of forlorn concrete posts, many of them broken. I stepped in a busted umbrella. Its pointy little ribs bit into my ankles like rats as I worked my feet free. I screamed “Get off!” The brick building seemed to magnify every sound and throw it back at us like an insult.

James waved to us from the entrance, a battered steel door set in a wall of pock-marked metal, as if a war had been fought here and the damage had been left to commemorate the battle. James held the door open for us. It was inconceivable to me that it wasn’t locked.

The lobby—if you could call the rat maze from the front door to the elevator a “lobby”—felt like one of those check-cashing stores you see in bad neighborhoods, the kind with bulletproof glass everywhere. There was one like that near my Mom’s house. The people who worked there always looked exhausted and scared, as if they constantly expected someone to stick them up.

The lobby stank of bacon grease and pee. James was by the elevator, pressing the “up” button every few seconds. It was already lit. I was mad at him for bringing us here. I felt like calling him an idiot for pressing a lit button. Silvia was sagging against me like a stack of firewood. The elevator was taking forever. I heard laughter outside, but I didn’t want to believe it was people.

The front door flew open and slammed against its stop. A gang of boys burst into the lobby, as if the force of their laughter was a battering ram. I listened but I couldn’t understand what they were saying, not even a single word. They treated the lobby like a locker room. They were celebrating. When they saw us, the noise stopped. Their faces went blank. They crossed their arms in front of their chests and fell into some kind of pecking order, like soldiers, with the leader out front, a massively muscled boy with two gold front teeth and a green plastic earring like a shower curtain ring. The other boys formed a wall behind him, their shoulders jammed together, their faces all frozen in a row like Mount Rushmore.

James stepped away from Silvia and me, and I thought:
You treacherous runt!
But actually he was standing between us and the boys, hardening his body into an aggressive little pose, just like them. He looked so puny. In my mind, I named the green earring boy “Goliath.”

“Hello, hello,” Goliath said. He was young enough that his voice hadn’t completely changed. It amazed me that someone so young could be so in command. James didn’t say anything. Silvia wanted to, but I squeezed her hand and kept her quiet.

“Check it out,” Goliath said. “There’s a baby soldier in our house.” He came forward. The other boys didn’t move. Their bodies just got more tense. Their gleaming sneakers flexed. “You bitches got something for me?” Goliath asked. He was talking over James now, to Silvia and me.

James didn’t budge. “They with me,” he said.

“They with
him,”
said Goliath, over his shoulder. “The little man pimpin’.” Then he laughed. The other boys waited a few seconds before joining in. They weren’t sure when it was safe to start laughing. “Where you going, nigger?” he asked.

“Aunt house,” James said. “Twelfth floor. Miss Officer Debbie.”

The name startled one of the Rushmore boys. “Ain’t she the one”— he said, but Goliath cut him off.

“You Miss
Officer
Debbie’s family?” he asked. James nodded. Goliath put his hands on his hips, then broke out laughing again. “This little nigger Miss Officer Debbie’s family!” Like magic, the tension broke. The boys started up with their wrestling and celebrating again, as if Silvia, James, and I had just vanished.

The elevator came. It was enormous, the size of two parking spaces. We all filed in. There were security cameras, but the lenses had been spray-painted black. Graffiti covered the walls: mysterious symbols, body parts, weapons. There were buttons for forty-two floors. James pushed twelve. One by one, the Rushmore boys pushed the buttons for their floors, which surprised me. I had assumed they all lived together in one big apartment.

The boys behaved themselves, shoving each other and cracking jokes, but staying apart from us. They didn’t say goodbye when we got off on the twelfth floor, but there was an explosion of laughter when the elevator doors shut behind us. We burst out laughing, too, at least Silvia and I did, even though nothing was funny. James didn’t laugh, but he smiled for the first time since I met him. “Miss
Officer
Debbie,” I said, slapping the hallway’s cinderblock walls. “That was perfect!”