Guarding Lacey: A Smokey Dalton Story

Copyright Information

Guarding
Lacey

Copyright © 2012 by
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

First
published in
Chicago
Blues
,

edited
by
Libby Fischer Hellmann, Bleak House Books,
2007.

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright
© 2012 by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © 2012
by Andy2000soft/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All characters and
events portrayed in this book are fictional,
and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be
reproduced in any form without permission.

Table of
Contents

Guarding Lacey

Copyright Information

About the Author

Guarding Lacey

Every other morning, my dad drives me and
my cousins to school, except he’s not really my dad and they’re not really my
cousins. My dad — his name is Smokey — he says we’re family, and I
guess he’s right about that.

He sure guards us like family. When Smoke
drives I known Smoke since I was three; I just can’t get used to calling him
Dad), he lines us up like little ducklings, and makes us walk hand-in-hand into
the school.

The duckling thing is hardest in the
winter. It’s the beginning of 1970 — a decade Smoke says’ll be better
than the last one — and there’s been ice. We lose our balance if even one
person slips (and it’s usually Noreen, who’s six, and never pays attention),
and we just look plain silly.

I’m tired of looking silly, but I know
the dangers if we don’t.

Last year, the Blackstone Rangers tried
to recruit me and my cousin Keith, and Smoke, he beat up a Stone so bad they
ain’t bothered us since. Or not much, anyway. Smoke’s a big guy and now he’s
got a knife scar on his face and he can take on just about anybody. The Stones
look away when they see him. I think he scares them.

They hang in the playground and smoke
cigarettes and they watch us all, especially my cousin Lacey. Smoke says she’s
thirteen going on trouble, and he don’t know the half of it.

Our school is on the South Side, which
the news says gots the worst schools in Chicago. Smoke agrees, but he’s weird
about it; his girlfriend, Laura Hathaway, is rich and white and has what Smoke
calls clout and she says she can get me into one of them private schools and
she’d even pay for it. But Smoke says we gots to do what we can afford and we
don’t take charity from nobody, not even if it’s from someone like Laura.

Besides, he says, we got to do for
everybody, not just make one of us special, so that’s why him and my Uncle
Franklin started the afterschool program for anybody who wants to come and
really learn.

Sometimes I wish Smoke would come inside
our school though instead of staying out front. He thinks we’s safe inside, but
that’s not true. Some of the gang kids still go to classes just to cause
trouble. Last week, Li’l Dan sat in the back of history class and just snicked
his knife open and closed. I almost turned around and took it from him, but
that would get me noticed, and I been noticed enough.

Lacey and Jonathon, they say it’s worse
in the junior high part of the school, which is an attached building at the
other end. They come in with us, go down the hall, and then go through the
double doors which get locked until school’s over since the teachers don’t want
no older kids coming in and “corrupting” us younger ones. But they forget: most
of us gots brothers and sisters who’re older or friends or neighbors and we get
corrupted all the dang time.

I don’t like school much.

Especially this year, and that’s because
of Lace. I’m the only one who sees the problem, and I ain’t sure what to do.

***

Ever since she got into junior high, Lace
has been weird. I mean, she’s always been stuck-up and stuff, and she’s always
worn make-up and clothes that my Uncle Franklin don’t like at all. This year,
Uncle Franklin and Aunt Althea, they make Lacey change dang near every morning
before school, and they’re threatening to ground her.

But it won’t do no good.

Once Smoke or Uncle Franklin drops us
ducklings off at school and we get inside those dented metal doors, Lace heads
to the girls room. If she can’t smuggle her clothes out of the house, she takes
what she’s already wearing and changes it. She rolls up her skirt and tucks the
fabric under the waistband so the skirt is short and double-thick. She ties off
her shirt to show her tummy, and she puts on so much make-up you can’t see her
face at all.

Lately she’s been gluing on them fake
eyelashes and wearing hot pants like Twiggy and big ole clunky high heels. That
kinda stuff is expensive, and I know her family don’t got that kinda money.

The problem is she looks good in it too.
When Lace dresses up, she can pass for eighteen, maybe twenty. Most of her
friends look just dorky in the same clothes, but Lace looks slutty-gorgeous.
She got big tits last year and a waist and a fine ass, so she looks like a
grown-up girl, which is why Uncle Franklin is so worried, I think.

Or maybe he knows what Lace really looks
like.

When she dresses up like that, Lace looks
just like my mom.

***

I ain’t seen my mom in almost exactly two
years. She skipped January 8, 1968. I remember because that’s one week before
my birthday. When I turned ten, my mom was gone and my older brother Joe was
out toking with his buddies. That was Memphis, not Chicago, and Smoke, who was
just this guy down the block who kept an eye on me, bought me lunch and told me
I needed to get to school.

He didn’t know it was my birthday, just
like he didn’t know Mom ain’t paid the rent—again. We got
evicted—or really, I did—and that was the end for Smoke. He’d been
watching over me for a long time, making sure I studied, making sure I ate. But
the eviction, that’s when he took me in.

Mom ain’t got no idea where I am now, not
that it matters. She stayed gone from January to April, and even Smoke, who’s a
private detective, couldn’t find her (not that I think he tried real hard). Mom
ran off with one of her johns again, or maybe she knew the rent was due. She
said she was gonna send money but she never did.

Sometimes I think she’s dead. I seen a
lot of hookers before I moved to Chicago, and they get hurt lots. Knifed or
beat up or worse. Sometimes they get beat so bad they die. That last Christmas,
I was mopping up after Mom all over the apartment, she was bleeding so bad from
her female parts. I ain’t never told Smoke that. He’d give me that shocked look
like he does when I mention my mom, like he can’t believe anybody would ever do
the stuff she did.

But Mom explained it to me and Joe. She
said you have the kinda life she had, you gots to do the best you can. And if
she had it to do over she wouldn’ta chased all them boys when she was twelve
and she wouldn’ta gone with the older guys, and she wouldn’ta never had kids.

Mom, she was only a year older than Lace
when she had my brother Joe. She knew who his dad was, but she never said. Me,
my dad coulda been anyone. Sometimes my mom would take on four or five guys a
night—and that don’t count the quickies in the alley behind our
apartment.

Sometimes her pimp, this guy named Thug,
used to get her to train the new girls. He’d say he could break them in but he
couldn’t teach them the ropes. Mom was in charge of the ropes. She’d talk to
them and by the end, they’d be crying and she’d be yelling at them:
If you’re crying now, you ain’t gonna make
it. You’ll die before the year’s out. You gotta be tough.

Lacey ain’t tough and she ain’t
hooking—at least not yet. But the guys she meets in the schoolyard during
lunch ain’t junior high boys. They ain’t even high school boys. They’s men, and
they’s way too interested.

***

It’s so cold in Mrs. Dylan’s classroom
that I’m wearing my coat, and I’m glad Laura gave me real sturdy boots for
Christmas. Still, the tip of my nose is freezing and I can see my breath.

Mrs. Dylan’s going on about fractions. I
had that a long time ago, so I keep doodling on my notepad while I look out the
window.

Lace is standing underneath an archway.
The graffiti on it is mostly basic crap—Jud loves Susan, stuff like that,
but Lace’s standing under some spray-paint that says
Blackstones Are Stone Cold
. She’s wearing a miniskirt and open toed
high heel shoes and a top tied under her tits. She’s teased her hair into a afro—I
got no idea how she’s gonna get that out before we get to the afterschool
program at the church—and I can see her eye makeup from across the yard.

Her hands are cupped as she leans forward
to light a cigarette. That’s another new habit, and one I’m surprised Uncle
Franklin and Aunt Althea haven’t figured yet. Lace stinks of cigarettes most of
the time.

She’s gotta be cold, but she don’t look
cold. She looks like she’s waiting for someone, just like my Mom used to do,
only there ain’t no road here for them to drive up to, and no way for some guy
just passing by to ask her into his car so she can make a quick twenty.

I can’t tell her none of this. I swore to
Smoke I’d never talk about Memphis ever because I might slip and the secret’d
be out. And the secret’s an important one. I seen something I wasn’t supposed
to and people tried to kill me for it.

Smoke saved me, and then he brought me
here. Thanks to Uncle Franklin, we get to use his last name (and his kids all
think I’m a real cousin) and Smoke got fake i.d.s and stuff. People are
searching for me, but Smoke says we’re safe if we stay quiet.

Still I get nightmares and I know if we
slip we might gotta leave with a moment’s notice. Smoke hates it when I even
think of Memphis because then I can’t sleep and stuff.

But seeing Lacey like that, all tricked
out and me not able to say anything for fear of hurting me and Smoke, scares me
to death.

I talked to Smoke about it last fall,
when things wasn’t quite so bad. We was in the car after dropping off Lacey. He’d
seen her tricked out—well, wiping the crap off her face anyway—and
he tried to tell her what happens to girls who look like that from our part of
town, but Lace didn’t listen, not really.

After everybody got out of the car except
me and Smoke, I asked him, “You don’t think Lace’ll end up like my mom, do
you?”

He looked at me. He’s got this measuring
thing, where he can see all the way inside you, and he was doing that to me
then. He could tell I was worried.

He said, “She won’t end up like your mom.
Lacey has too many friends and family for that. But she could get hurt.”

I remembered how Mom laid in bed for days
sometimes with ice pressed on her face so the bruises would go away, or that
last Christmas, cleaning up the blood she left all over the apartment because
she couldn’t afford no doctor. I didn’t want none of that to happen to Lace.

“Some trick’ll hurt her?” I asked.

“Some
boy
’ll
hurt her. He’ll think she wants to do what your mom used to do. Lacey won’t
understand and—”

“He’ll just do her. I know,” I said real
quick because I didn’t want to think about Lace like that.

That’s when Smoke gave me that shocked
look, like he can’t believe half the stuff I know. Then he blinked, and the
look went away.