Can't Get There from Here (15 page)

Inside the blue tarp OG coughed. In his arms, Pest barked. Tears sat with the dirty orange sleeping bag draped over her shoulders. Jewel had gotten up and was running his fingers along the top of the silver car, making designs in the light snow. The man in the sheepskin coat kept looking at him as if he was worried Jewel would do something bad to the car. Maggot lit a cigarette he rolled himself. He inhaled and exhaled. His breath and the smoke came out in a white-gray cloud.

“I don’t want your help,” he said.

“We understand that, Stuart,” said the woman.

“My name’s not Stuart. It’s Maggot.”

“All right,” the woman said.

“Say it,” Maggot said.

“Mag-gut.” The woman seemed to choke on the name.

“Mercedes?” Jewel asked.

“Uh, no, it’s a Lexus,” answered the man in the sheepskin coat.

“Oh, yes, of course,” Jewel said. “Mother and Father had them in matching blue. And a Rolls. And the Ferrari.”

The man and woman scowled. The woman turned back to Maggot. “We want to make sure you don’t get sick or hurt. It’s fine if you want to stay here in New York. We can help you find a place to live.”

“I’m okay right here,” Maggot said.

The man and woman looked at the snow-covered garbage strewn around our little camp. The empty bottles, the charred, half-burned wood sticking out of the blackened garbage can. OG had a coughing fit that left him doubled over. The man and woman winced.

“At least let us take you to a doctor and have you examined,” the woman said. Her voice started to crack and her eyes got watery.

“Suppose we take you and your friends out to dinner,” the man said. “So we know you’ll get a good meal.”

“How fun,” Jewel said. “We could go to the Four Seasons. That’s my favorite. You can all be my guests. I have my own table, you know. It’s right next to John F. Kennedy Junior’s table.”

“John F. Kennedy Junior is dead, you freak,” Maggot snapped irritably.

“We’re all dead.” OG swung his arm around. “What’s the difference between this and being dead?”

Maggot’s mother took a tissue out of her pocket and dabbed her eyes. His father cleared his throat. “Is there someplace nearby where we can eat?”

Maggot took another drag on his cigarette. He looked at OG and me and Jewel and Tears. Then he got up. “I’ll go to dinner with you,” he said. “We’ll bring food back for them later.”

“Escargot for me, darling!” Jewel said.

It got dark and colder. Maggot never came
back. Inside the tarp OG crawled into his nest with Pest. Jewel rocked back and forth and talked to himself. I thought about Rainbow leaving her jacket on the pier.

“Were those Maggot’s parents?” Tears asked.

“I think so,” I said.

OG had a coughing fit in his nest. When the breeze blew outside, the newspapers and bags rustled like dry leaves.

“Didn’t he say his parents were dead?” asked Tears.

“I don’t remember,” I said.

OG coughed and spit out a glob of red. “Just a postcard punk.”

“What’s that?” Tears asked.

“Kid who pretends,” I said. “They act like they’re homeless, but they send postcards home to let their family know they’re okay.”

“I never saw Maggot send a postcard,” Tears said.

“It’s the idea of it,” said OG. “Maybe he called collect once in a while. But he left enough clues for his parents to come all the way from Colorado to find him.”

“Aspen is so déclassé,” Jewel said. “Just yuppies and old movie stars. It’s all about Whistler now. Helicopter skiing. Virgin powder and an endless vertical drop.”

“What’s virgin powder?” Tears asked.

“They sprinkle it on you and you become a virgin again,” Jewel said. “Otherwise you’re just Kleenex. Use you once and throw you away. Hold on to what’s precious, my dear.”

Tears frowned. I shook my head to show she shouldn’t take Jewel too seriously.

Tears got up.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To find a warm place to spend the night. I can’t take this no more.”

“You sure?” I asked. “I could come with you.”

Tears stood for a while, staring at the traffic.

“What about the Youth Housing Project?” I asked.

Tears didn’t answer. She walked away into the dark.

OG coughed all night. I pictured Rainbow floating face down in the river, her blond hair aswirl in the dirty green water. I thought about 2Moro half naked and strangled in the park, and Country Club’s dull gray eyes staring up at the clouds. Officer Johnson was right. Nobody survived on the street for long. There was nothing fun or cool about being cold and dirty and sick. Nothing glamorous about begging or being hungry or sleeping in a nest of garbage. I thought about those smooth clean sheets and the soft warm pillow at the Youth Housing Project.

Maggot always said living on the street was a choice.

But it wasn’t.

It was when you ran out of choices.

It was warmer in the morning. The brown
ice in the bottom of the squeegee bucket floated in a small ring of dirty water. I stood outside the library window until Anthony saw me. He came to the front door. “Hi, how are you?”

“Okay.”

“You made it through the cold snap,” he said. “I was worried about you. They say it’s going to be in the forties and fifties for the rest of the week. That should be a lot better.”

“I never thanked you for the sweater.”

“That’s all right.”

“I lost it.”

“Oh, well. It was old anyway. Where’s Nikki?”

“Who?”

“Your friend who used the phone the other day.”

“Oh, Tears. She’s around.”

Anthony gave me a funny look.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said.

“Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess.”

“Is she in trouble?”

“Not yet, but she will be soon,” I said.

“And you want to help her?”

I nodded.

“Let’s go into my office,” Anthony said, holding the door for me. “And don’t worry about Bobby.”

I followed him through the library and down the hall to his office. Anthony sat down at his desk. “Want some jelly beans?”

I held my hand out and he poured some in. The flavors were like bright colors in my mouth.

“What kind of help does she need?” Anthony asked.

“She needs to get out of here and go home, but she thinks her mom doesn’t want her.”

“Why?”

I told him about how Tears’s mom refused to believe that her stepfather touched Tears. “The thing is, she has grandparents, but she thinks she can’t bother them because her grandfather has this disease and her grandmother needs to take care of him.”

“Do you know what the disease is?”

“It makes you shake all over.”

“Parkinson’s,” Anthony said. “They have medicines now to help control that. Of course, it depends on how severe the case is. How old is Nikki?”

“Twelve or thirteen.”

Anthony winced. “Okay, let’s say she’s twelve, and we guess that her mom is in her mid- to late thirties. That could mean the grandparents are in their sixties,
which is still relatively young. I think they would at least want to know where Nikki is. Do you want me to help find her grandparents?”

“Yeah. Like, you know, on the computer.”

“Any idea where she’s from?”

“A place called a hundred.”

“A hundred?” Anthony frowned.

“Something like that.”

“Do you know the state?”

I tried to remember. I knew Tears told me. “I think it’s far away.”

Anthony wrote something down on a pad of paper. “Well, I’ll see what I can do. If I find out anything, where can I find you?”

“I’ll come back,” I said.

Lightning, aka Pest. Born in Banbury, Connecticut, breeding center. Purchased in a mall pet shop for Christmas. Considered cute for a few months, but chewed shoes and wasn’t completely housebroken. “Lost” in a park near Greenwich, Connecticut. Later turned up in New York City. Adopted by OG. Dead at 14 months. Cause of deaths malnutrition.

I went back to the bridge, hoping Tears would be there. The blue tarp lay among newspapers, rags, beer cans, and liquor bottles. The garbage can, charred black from the fires, stood empty and cold.

Jewel was sitting and rocking with his eyes closed, humming to himself. I thought I heard a rustling sound come from a pile of papers, rags, and bags. It looked like windblown garbage trapped against the base of the bridge. But the heap of garbage moved, and I thought I heard a moan. I stepped closer. A smell began to invade my nostrils. At first it was just faint. But the closer I got the stronger it grew, until I didn’t want to get any closer. I had an awful
what if
thought. The kind of thought you
didn’t want to know the answer to, but once you thought it you knew it would haunt you until you did.

Holding my breath I stepped closer and began to brush away the garbage. Some of it was tangled in long light brown hair. Each time my hand pushed away more garbage the smell got stronger. It wasn’t body odor or rotted food or poo smell. It was something else. Something worse.

And there it was. The side of a face, caked with grime and scabs. An ear with a round plastic plug stretching out the earlobe and a raw red sore inside. A closed eye crusted with dirt and dried mucous. A nose, and cracked, scabbed lips. It was OG. I reached down and touched the side of his face. The skin was cool, but not cold. Under my fingertip I could feel the pulse in his neck.

“OG?” I said.

He didn’t answer or even act like he heard me.

I turned to Jewel, who was still rocking back and forth with his eyes closed. “Wake up, Jewel. OG’s really sick. We better get help.”

“The help is downstairs,” Jewel answered. “You may ring for them.” He kept rocking.

I brushed some more garbage away from OG’s nose and mouth so that he could breathe. The smell kept getting worse. I moved another piece of newspaper away from his face. Under the paper was something brown and furry—the tip of one of Pest’s ears.

I went across the street and begged a man with a cell
phone to call 911. The police and an EMS truck came. The EMS people took away OG on a stretcher and Pest in a black bag. The police took Jewel in their car. He told them he had to get to the airport to catch a flight to Rio de Janeiro.

“There’s no one left, Maybe.”

I turned around. It was Officer Ryan. She was wearing her heavy blue coat, unzipped.

There was Tears, I thought. Or was there? She was gone. And when you went where she went you sometimes didn’t come back.

“You gonna stay here alone?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know where I was going, but I wasn’t staying there.

“Tell you what. I got about three hours left on my shift. Just before it ends I’m gonna come back. If you’re still here, maybe you’ll let me take you somewhere where you can spend the night.”

“Maybe.”

I went to the park and looked for Tears
. She wasn’t there, but Lost and his friends were.

“You seen Maggot?” Lost asked when he saw me.

“I think he went home,” I said.

“Home?” Lost made a face. “What do you mean?”

“I mean home, like where he came from.”

“How?”

“Some people came in a car. I think they were his parents.”

“Man.” Lost shook his head in disbelief. “He said his parents were dead.”

I almost told him about Rainbow. But then I didn’t. “You seen Tears?” I asked.

“Who?”

“My friend with the short black hair.”

“I seen her last night,” said the guy with the long light brown dreadlocks. “Cruising the tunnel.”

I walked over to the tunnel. Most of the kids who “worked” there waited until dark. But a few—the really desperate ones—sometimes tried during the day. Maybe Tears would be there. I didn’t know how desperate she was.

I covered most of the streets around the tunnel but
couldn’t find her. Then I started to feel hungry and decided to go to the church for some food. But the line outside the church was long again. I knew if I went over to the Youth Housing Project I could get some food, but they had a rule that you weren’t allowed to leave the house after dinner. That meant I wouldn’t be able to look for Tears later.

So I stood on line with the homeless people. They were mostly men and mostly older. A lot older. Wrinkled and gray haired and bad smelling. Me and my friends got yucky and smelled bad, too. But that was different. This was temporary for us. We weren’t going to wind up old and smelly and wrinkled like these bums.

Why?

I used to think it was because something unexpected was going to happen first. Jewel would be “discovered” and get rich, and all of us would live with him in his mansion. Or some rich guy would fall in love with Rainbow and take us away to someplace nice. Or somehow we’d just keep living on the street but never get old or sick.

Now I knew that wasn’t the reason we wouldn’t wind up like wrinkled, stinky bums.

The real reason was because we were going to die first.

Country Club, 2Moro, and Rainbow were dead. OG was close to dead. Maybe Jewel was as good as dead.

And that proved one thing.

You couldn’t live on the streets.

You could only die there.

I waited on the church line. Dinner was a ham and cheese sandwich on white bread, a paper cup of chicken noodle soup, and an apple. I ate fast and then went back to look for Tears. It got dark and I didn’t find her. Then I got tired and went to sleep in a doorway.

In the morning I went to the library. Anthony was holding the front door open for me. He must have seen me through the windows. “I found Nikki’s grandparents,” he said, sounding excited. “There’s only one place called Hundred and it’s in West Virginia. I called the public library and spoke to one of the librarians. I told her I was looking for a couple, probably in their sixties. The husband had Parkinson’s Disease and they had a granddaughter named Nikki who’d run away. The librarian called back two days later and said she’d found the grandparents. Their last name is Frimer and they’re beside themselves with worry. The librarian says they call all the time to find out if she’s heard anything more about Nikki.”