The Orange Houses (4 page)

The elevated highway straddled the tracks. Jimmi pushed a rotting 4 x 8 plywood sheet from a cut in the track wall. At the tunnel's mouth was a wheeled garbage cart nearly filled with supplies, scavenged canned food, plastic tarps, and a car battery mounted with a flashlight. He pushed through the dark, a left here, two rights, another left. He knew the maze by heart. This was his hideout since childhood. He came to what had been the start of a subway station eighty years ago. He got the butane hotplate going, pocked a soup can with his knife and dropped it onto the heat. In the flame's light he swept sand from a patch of floor with his coat. He chalked the concrete so:

But what those girls could make together. With their gifts, they had a responsibility to do it, to create the beauty that went past paper and pen and sculpture and into the vibe. You can't describe it except to call it something like hope. He prayed Mik and Fatima would hook up until he remembered he was too mad at God to ask for anything.

Now he saw the other girl, the child suicide bomber, legless, bleeding out in front of him on the sandy subway platform. He closed his eyes but still saw her, would always see her. Why didn't he grab her as she skipped past him? Could he have stopped her from detonating that IED? What would have happened if he never signed on for overseas action, if he stayed home to be with his lady? Would he have saved his baby that night? Saved Julyssa?

He stared at his fingers, the ones that had focused a rifle sight, cocked the hammer, snapped the trigger, pulled grenade pins. He wondered if his goddam filthy hands were good for anything but ruin.

He lifted the soup can by its lip from the stove. The metal ring burned his fingers as he set it aside. He didn't care. He kept his hand on that ring until he couldn't tell if the metal was hot anymore. He turned off the stove and trembled himself into a sweaty sleep.

She set aside her sketch and thought
If a city sky . . .

She pictured herself soaring over the Bronx, clouds vaporizing, the sky empty but for the bright blue in it. She felt good for a while, then cold as she flew higher. The sky turned cobalt. Pulling her robe around her, she drifted into sleep.

 

She woke in a panic to stop a dream about a six-winged paper doll catching fire in a bomb-burned sky.

She had fallen asleep at her desk, her face greasy with night sweat. The window was open, the room damp. The only light was a dim red from her clock radio, 4:04 a.m. Her desk lamp had blown out. She was sure something evil was in the room.

She went to Mom's room. Mom was crashed out on the bed facedown, her pants on the floor. She'd conked in her Dunkin' shirt. The room smelled sad, like stale donuts.

Mik wanted to cuddle her, almost did, didn't.

She went to the main room, sank into the couch and clicked the TV to snow for the soft purple light in it. A trace of NaNa lingered in the couch cushions—street vendor perfume.

 

“Saw you scrambling this morning,” Mom said. “Finish that homework?”

“Yeah,” Mik said. It was somebody else's.

“Are your aids turned on, or are you trapped in slow motion?”

“Nice brooch.”

“Sarcasm isn't pretty on you.” Mom fussed with her hair in the hallway mirror.

WHY YOU GET DRESSED SO NICE TO WORK WHERE NOBODY APPRECIATES YOU? Mik signed.

“What?”

“I said, you look pretty, Ma.” Mik grabbed her bag and went.

 

From behind battered card tables, street hawkers begged folks to buy fruit, shish kebob, trinkets and, at the end of the block, newspapers.

The paper girl smiled when she saw Mik.

Possible causes for the scar on the girl's cheek flashed Mik's mind: a switchblade, ringed fingers curled into a fist.

She put fifty cents into the girl's sooty hand, wanted to ask her over for dinner, but the words wouldn't come.

HELLO, the girl signed.

Mik nodded. She wanted to ask the girl how she knew sign, but that would require a whachamacallit, conversation. “Nice day,” she said and signed as she hurried away.

 

Mik picked a back row spot to nap through English. She dozed with her chin propped in her hands. Her face slipped through her fingers. Her head whacked the desk. Blood dripped from her nose.

Pounding on the floor, the desks, all eyes wild, howling mouths—

Click.
Aids off. Everybody a mile away.

She read Rodriguez's lips as the old woman led her to the nurse's office. “Mika, is that alcohol on your breath?”

“Cough medicine,” Mik coughed.

 

Speech therapy: The old hippie teacher smelled like licorice and Certs, total pot cover. After, out in the hall girls flocked around a new boy. Mik clicked on her hearing aids.

“What's y'all's name?” said Shanelle, the girl fresh from juvie.

He wore his hair in dreads beaded Day-Glo orange, green, yellow. He licked his lips. “Jaekwon.”

Shanelle said, “Where y'all from?”

The bell went off—a slasher movie scream in Mik's hearing aids. Kids scattered.

“And where y'all going?” The boy grabbed Shanelle's hand to hold her back from running off to class.

Mik hurried past. Shanelle backed up hard, knocked Mik off her feet, her books spreading out over the buffed floor.

“Fat bitch,” Shanelle said. “Watch where you going.”

“You watch where
you
going,” Mik said.

Shanelle crossed her eyes, exaggerated Mik's words with a thick tongue, “Ooh wah whay
ooh
gah-in.”

The Jaekwon cat helped Mik pick up her books. He was checking out her butt, Mik noticed.

Sha's eyes narrowed. She pulled her sweatshirt zipper down to show some serious cleavage. “Jae-baby, lemme give y'all my numbuh.”

The bucktooth G pimp-limped up to Mik, helped her with her books. “What up, girl?”

“Easy, son,” this Jaekwon said. “I got it.”

Little G was nerd cute, but Jaekwon was seriously ban-gin'. That he would spend a look on Mik blew her mind. He was a total player—all that lip-licking, his cheeks sucked in like one of those no-shirt cats on the cover of the romance novels at Target. She almost laughed. He winked at her.

Shanelle flipped off Mik as a teacher clapped them to class.

 

The rain came down hard as she jumped onto the bus. Jimmi Sixes swung past on his skateboard. He skid-stopped at the ninety-nine cents store, under the awning covering the outdoor bins. From one of them he pulled a pack of colored construction paper. His clothes were soaked, rumpled. He was pale.

She made change for a dude who needed laundry quarters and got back to doodling another empty cityscape.

Joe Knows watched her from the customer side of the counter, said something.

She clicked on her aids. “Sorry Joe?”

“How long before you and Mom have enough saved up for the implant?”

“Long time.”

Joe nodded. “I been thinking about this. I been on that Internet thing, looking up the operation. I wanna pay for it.”

Mik squinted.

“You're a great kid. I wanna see you do good. It was either the surgery or art school, but I figure you're gonna get a scholarship.”

She hadn't planned on having to decide about the operation for another four or five years. She squeezed Joe's hand, shook no. She keyed her phone: BUT THANX

“Mik, what am I gonna spend it on? I got no midgets, no mortgage. C'mon. Talk to your mom about it. Will you?”

 

Shanelle whittled a stick with her box cutter while her posse tagged the handball wall with silver perma-markers. Mik pretended not to see them as she hurried past.

“Yo Dumbo,” Sha said. “Y'all best stay away from that Jaekwon. Serious. Deaf bitch. Yo, you hear me?”

Mik heard her. She kept those aids on when near danger zones like busy streets and handball courts filled with psycho chicks. She tried not to walk away too fast, pretending she wanted to go shopping instead of home. No way was she crossing Sha's path, not with her posse sharing brown-bag forties and smoking blunts.

Mik went to the paper girl's spot. The girl wasn't there. Done for the day, she was towing her empty crates uphill by way of a beat-up rack duct-taped to a wobbly skateboard. She had a few leftover papers under her arm. Mik hurried after her into the wildwood park but lost her in the path's twisting. She came to a fork and picked the wrong trail. She doubled back and found the girl far ahead, hurrying out of the park. The girl covered ground fast with those long legs. She had to stand close to six feet.

Mik called after the girl but not loud enough, chased uphill, swore to take up exercise as she sucked wind. Weed stalks spiked rubble in abandoned lots. In the fading light a methamphetamine pipe blinked. The girl disappeared around the corner of a crumbling row house, the buildings on either side boarded up and swamped with dying pest trees.

Mik found herself in an alley that opened onto a yard of cracked cement painted pink, a bright spot in the gray. A mangy old cat hunkered by the cellar door. It limped away into the weeds at the sight of Mik. She knocked, and the door opened on the first hit. Inside the small basement studio were a card table and on the floor a mattress made neatly with a red blanket. A short stack of newspapers squared perfectly against the wall. Pinned to the walls, doing handstands on the lone sill were tiny paper figurines, birds, angels, ballerinas, a soccer player upside down in a bicycle kick. All were painted with bin nail polish, sparkly black, neon red, Day-Glo green, dark blue, mystical brown glitter.

“My friend,” the girl said. She'd come from the bathroom door now swinging shut on its spring. “Do you make a habit of breaking into people's rooms?”

Mik gulped. “How do I get home from here?”

“That depends on where you live.”

“Can you walk me?”

 

“Bombs deafened some of the children back home,” Fatima said as she and Mik walked the back way along the tracks. “My sister and I watched the woman from the UN teach them sign, but only for one day before a raid split the camps. Perhaps someday when the fighting ends I will return home. For now I am so lucky to live in these beautiful United States.” Fatima stepped over a rat skipping out of the garbage. “Do you know McDonald's restaurant?”

Mik smiled.

“His fried apple cake, the fritter? Magic. Once you bite into it, all problems disappear. May I treat you?”

“Gotta get home.” The O Houses were just downhill. Mik scanned the street for Shanelle, not in sight.

“I hope I see you again.”

“Come up for dinner.” She hadn't talked this much to a stranger since she was five. What was it about this paper girl that suddenly had Mik feeling comfortable enough to initiate not just conversation but an invitation to dinner?

“Perhaps you should ask your mother first. I will go buy cake for dessert. What is your room number?”

“My apartment number?”

“You live in an
apartment
?”

The elevator surprised Fatima with its great speed. Electricity was everywhere in this enormous building, even in the hallways. The floors and walls were strong stone. Mik and her family were wealthy. Fatima's tattered clothes and sneakers and the cheap fritters she purchased half price shamed her. A chubby old woman huffed toward Mik's door from the other end of the hall. Fatima nodded.

The woman was mistrustful. “Yes?”

“I am a friend of Mik. I think.”

The woman eyed Fatima's shawl, opened the door and yelled in, “Y'all expecting a six-foot Muslim gal?”