Lucky T (11 page)

"Where you go? You here for to work!" she said, pointing a finger at Carrie's chest.

"I was just--"

"No. No 'was just,'" Teensy said. She grabbed Carrie's arm in a surprisingly strong grip, her bony fingers cutting into her skin. "You here for to work.

You come back. Work!"

Carrie opened her mouth to protest. This was ridiculous. She wasn't in some kind of prison camp! This random woman couldn't tell her what to do. But before she could even say anything, Celia appeared at the front door of the hostel, shaking her head and laughing.

"Trying to get away so soon?" she said, wrapping her arm around Carrie's shoulders. "Don't worry, sweetie. This is going to be fun!"

"You are supposed to be hammering," Ali said as he walked by, hauling bricks.

Carrie sneered at his back as he crossed the floor of the loosely framed house. The support beams stretched up and open against the blue sky and workers hung out above, lifting boards for what would one day be the roof. The floor underneath was coarse, grainy wood and all around the base of the house the men from that morning were pouring cement.

Carrie stared at the wooden board and beam in front of her. She had less than no idea what she was doing. Prandya had handed her a can full of nails and a hammer and told her to secure the board to the wooden beam. Already she had hammered in five nails. She was sure that was enough, but she didn't know what she was supposed to do next, so she just stopped and waited for instructions. That was until Ali came by. Now she was just hammering for the sake of hammering. The last thing she wanted was to have both Doreen and that guy on her bad side.

"Can I have another stack of wood, please?" Doreen said, tossing another perfectly measured and sawed-off board onto a pile. Carrie glanced at the mound that represented Doreen's last hour of work. Each board was shorn straight and true and each was exactly the same size as the last. Who was this girl's father, Ty Pennington?

"Why don't you pace yourself, Doreen?" Carrie said, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear as she continued to hammer. "You're making the rest of us nonconstruction-inclined volunteers look bad."

Doreen straightened up from the next board she was measuring. Then she slid some L-shaped tool down to the end of the board and secured it.

Carrie didn't even know what the thing was and here was Doreen moving it around like a pro.

"Well, I don't see anyone else having any problems," she said, sniffing superiorly as she slipped the pencil out and drew another line. "Just admit that you suck at this."

"Ha! I can hammer rings around you, girlfriend," Carrie said, turning toward Doreen. Between the heat and Dor-mean's wisecracks and the confusion and the fact that she was here in India but was still being kept from her T-shirt search, Carrie had one nerve left, and it was being trampled on big time.

"Is that some sort of challenge?" Doreen asked, peering over her shoulder to make sure her mom wasn't in hearing range. "Because I'll kick you to the curb faster than Jason did."

Okay, a low blow.

"Oh, you did not just say that," Carrie growled, clutching her hammer as if it were a weapon.

"I didn't just say it, Jockstrap," Doreen snarled. "I meant it."

"You wanna go? Let's go!" Carrie yelped.

But before she could swing the hammer around like a samurai's sword, it slipped out of her hand and landed square on her flip-flopped foot.

"Ow! Oh, man! Owowowowowow!" Stars exploded before Carrie's eyes--a phenomenon she thought only occurred in cartoons. She was sure her big toe was going to explode. She jumped up and down, clutching her left foot with her right hand.

"Ow! Ow! Ow!" she cried out. Even though she was in pain, this exertion of pent-up energy felt sort of good. She brought her foot down again and Doreen's eyes widened.

"Carrie! Watch out!"

Carrie's foot hit the leg of the supply table behind her. The leg col apsed and the table buckled sideways, the top becoming a perfect slide. Every nail, screw, hammer, wrench, saw, and all the other nameless tools slid right down the tabletop, off the foundation of the house, and directly into the freshly poured cement outside. The whole thing made a loud crash, punctuated by a dozen thick plops.

And then there was silence. Carrie looked at Doreen. Doreen went pale. For a moment nobody moved. But only for a moment.

"Who did this?" a deep voice bell owed. "Who did this to the cement!?"

One of the scary guys from breakfast that morning climbed directly into the house, swinging up by the beams. The guy had muscles in places Carrie had never even thought of before. His face quivered with rage and his eyes were about to pop out of his head.

This time Carrie really did see her life flash before her eyes, and it was way too uninteresting for her to die now. She backed up quickly, limping on her foot a bit.

"Who is the genius that dumped a hundred nails into my freshly smoothed cement!?!"

The man whirled around and peered at Carrie. He looked just like the Hulk. Only not green, and his shirt wasn't ripped to shreds.

"It was you, yes?" he demanded, getting right in her face.

"Stupid prissy American girl! Why are you even here!?"

Tears of fear sprang to Carrie's eyes. She backed up again and then froze. Then she looked up and gasped. A ladder. She was standing under a ladder.

"Oh, no," she said quietly. "Oh, nonononono."

She stared at the Hulk. This was it. This was definitely how she was going to die.

"And now she is going to cry, is that it?" the man demanded. "Go ahead, prissy girl! Cry!"

"Now, now, now, Taj!" Prandya called out, hustling over and getting in between Carrie and Mr. Crazy McScarington.

Celia was there momentarily as wel , stepping protectively in front of Carrie.

"I'm sure the girl didn't mean it," Prandya said.

"Who cares if she meant it?" he shouted, snapping Carrie out of her ladder-of-doom thoughts and back to her present situation. "She did it! Hours of work are ruined!"

"Carrie, you know how you wanted to get out of here this morning?" Celia whispered, tilting her head back toward Carrie.

"Yeah," Carrie said breathlessly.

"I think you should maybe do that," Celia said.

Taj broke away from Prandya and lunged in Carrie and Celia's direction, teeth bared. Carrie let out a terrified shout.

"I think you should maybe do that now," Celia added.

Carrie didn't need any more prompting than that.

She turned and jogged like a gimp through the house-in-progress, catching looks of dismay and disgust from all the other workers as she went.

"Excuse me! Do you speak English?" Carrie asked a pair of women walking toward her on the street.

"We are in a hurry," the taller woman replied, scurrying by.

"But I just have a quick question!" Carrie shouted desperately.

The women ignored her and disappeared into the thick crowd. Carrie jumped in front of a couple of businessmen, who were talking in rapid-fire Bengali. She walked backward to keep up with them.

"Do either of you know where I can find--"

The men brushed her off and walked quickly away. Shoulders slumping, Carrie spotted an elderly woman in a rust-colored sari sitting on a bench by the side of the road. And she was smiling right at Carrie. Her heart gave a hopeful leap and she walked over to the woman.

"Hi! Do you know where AJC Bose Road is?" Carrie asked.

The woman shook her head, still smiling, and replied in Bengali. Carrie sighed. If only Doreen 'wasn't such a fool, I could have brought her along to help me understand everyone.

"Thanks anyway," she said, then turned away. It was amazing how with all the people walking around, it seemed impossible to find someone who would stop long enough to help her.

The search had started out promisingly enough. The lady at Help India had been very resourceful, printing out a list of all the women's shelters they were affiliated with and not even asking why Carrie needed it. At first the ten addresses hadn't seemed too overwhelming, but as soon as Carrie had hit the street to try to find the first one, she realized she might have underestimated the difficulty of this task. Some roads had two or more street signs and others had none at all . Carrie continually consulted her map, but whenever she thought she had figured out where she was, the next street had an entirely different name than it should have according to the grid. Figuring it all out while navigating the mayhem on the street and trying not to look too helpless and confused was a lot to handle.

Carrie came to the corner of a wide road where traffic was flowing by. Everyone around her stopped to wait for the light to cross and Carrie welcomed the sudden pause in the commotion, looking around for a street sign.

"Shakespeare Saranai," she whispered, happy to note that it sounded familiar from her many scourings of the map. Saranai seemed to be another word for "street"-- that much she had picked up on. And a lot of the roads were named for famous figures like Shakespeare, Lenin, and Gandhi. She yanked out one of her maps and, thankfully, found the road. But the second she did, the light changed and the pack of people moved her into the street. Carrie struggled toward the edge of the crowd, still favoring her sore left foot, trying to stay on the corner so she could plot her next move. She was jostled and elbowed and bumped around but finally emerged near a glass-walled phone booth and leaned back against it. She took a deep breath and looked up. The sky was rapidly darkening. Not a good sign.

Carrie looked around desperately for a place to stand out of the way. Then she spotted a tiny cafe with a picture of a teacup painted on the window.

The awning was listing to the side and had a few holes in it, but the lights inside were bright and welcoming. It wasn't Starbucks, but it was good enough.

Carrie ducked inside, leaned back against the wall, and took another deep breath. There were about a hundred people per square foot of space in this city. It made San Francisco look like a ghost town.

"American, correct?"

Carrie glanced up. The older man behind the counter was smiling at her from behind wire-rimmed glasses. His brown skin was wrinkled and leathery and his gray hair was shaggy around his ears.

"How can you tell ?" she asked.

"The confused look on your pretty face," he said.

Carrie smiled. A nice guy who spoke English! Eureka!

"Can I help you with something?" the man asked.

"Actually, I'm looking for AJC Bose Road," Carrie said, unfolding her list of shelters. "Do you know where that is?"

"I know exactly where it is," the man said. "The next block that way."

He pointed in the direction Carrie had just come from and her brow furrowed. "But... I was just there," she said, now uncrumpling her map. "That's . . .

Lower Circular Road."

The man laughed lightly and shook his head. "I always feel bad for the tourists. The government, they have been changing the names of the roads for a few years now but not always changing the signs. You most likely saw one of the old signs, but Lower Circular Road is now AJC Bose Road."

"Thank you!" Carrie said giddily, shoving the map back into her bag. "Thank you so much!"

"My pleasure," the man called after her.

Carrie came to the corner and turned onto AJC Bose Road, noting that the sign did, in fact, also read Lower Circular Road. The question now was, which way to go. She looked around for building numbers to give her an idea of where she was but saw none. Like many of the other streets she had walked along today, AJC Bose seemed to defy definition. To her left was an upscale-looking furniture shop with a red-and-gold divan in the window.

Across the street was a tall, gleaming apartment building with a small , run-down-looking Laundromat right next door that had a makeshift hut leaning against its outer wall. The building on the opposite corner was a modest brick building with an elderly couple lounging on the steps.

Back home there were wealthy neighborhoods, middle- class neighborhoods, lower-class neighborhoods, enclaves of college kids, and whole blocks filled with ex-hippies. Wherever you were in San Francisco, you could pretty much predict the types of people you would see. But here everyone was mixed up together, living side by side.

It was actually kind of cool.

Okay, focus, Carrie told herself. Where are we going?

People brushed by her, walking fast, talking on cell phones, and going about their business--everyone with a destination, everyone looking as if they knew exactly where they were going. Carrie wished she could be one of them. She needed a sign. Some kind of clue as to where to begin.

Just then something on the ground to her right caught her eye. A coin lying on the sidewalk. Carrie grabbed it up in her palm. It was round and copper with some foreign writing on it. Obviously not a good luck penny, but close enough. Carrie pocketed the coin, feeling instantly more secure, and moved off to the right. It was as good a sign as any.

A few steps more brought her to an alley, the end of which was littered with cow dung. Scrunching up her nose, Carrie was about to jump over to the other side when she heard a little girl's screech. She glanced right and saw five girls in the middle of the alley, running around, playing tag.

"I'm going to catch you!" one of them shouted.

Carrie smiled. They spoke English and they obviously lived in this neighborhood. Maybe one of them could tell her where to find the shelter.

"Um . . . hi," Carrie said.

They all stopped instantly and looked up at her, wide- eyed. Suddenly Carrie realized that like any other kids in the world, they were probably trained not to talk to strangers.

"I'm not scary, I swear. I just need some help," Carrie said.

The tallest girl, also clearly the oldest, eyed Carrie warily. "Help with what?"

"Do any of you know where I can find number--"

Suddenly Carrie heard a small spatter. Something wet hit the back of her neck and for a moment she thought it was raining, but then the little girls looked up and started to laugh. There was a slight pressure on Carrie's backpack and she glanced over her shoulder, confused.