The fastest way home on foot from the bodega on Union Ave. was to cut across the next street on your left, go two miles up Lincoln, and jaywalk to reach 5th St. From there, you could either take the next bus or keep walking another two or so miles.
For as long as I could remember, I’ve always walked. Even those couple of times when money was good enough to handle fare and the month’s rent, I used foot. Even now. It was quicker, more reliable. Old women asked you more questions when you were sitting down.
At around a quarter to eight, I had reached the eastside projects. Seven minutes to get to the ninth story since the elevator was out of order, put me at the door a quarter to nine, fifteen minutes later than was good for us. I strolled in slowly, and took the time to wipe my feet on the mat before opening the door. Trying to seem casual, steadying my breathing so they wouldn’t know I ran up the stairs, I stepped into darkness.
No one stirred. As I made my way to the kitchen to put up the groceries, the sickly sweet scent of cigarette smoke gave out their location in the room.
“You’re not as desperate as we’d think,” Liandra said, breaking the silence I knew I began when I walked in. Her voice so crisp, so fresh, so new to me even when I had heard it eight hours earlier over the phone.
“This is just tonight’s dinner,” I said opening the fridge then remembering it was off.
“Don’t play games with us, Milen. You know damn well we can’t be held up.” This time it was a male’s voice, Neil’s voice.
I stopped with the groceries and looked in their direction. “I had to pick up something. They close at nine, and there ain’t nothing else in here to eat.”
Liandra’s face and fiery red hair illuminated as she lit the butt and took a long drag. “I mean 8:30 when I say 8:30. Don’t think I give a damn about anything else.”
In the light, I noticed the face of Kiara, my six- year old sister, with her eyes partly closed, partly on me as she cuddled on Liandra’s lap.
“You hungry?” I asked her. I’d brought ravioli, a loaf of bread, peanut butter, and a quart of milk, enough to hold the two of us for tonight and breakfast tomorrow morning.
She nodded, sitting up, but as Liandra clicked shut the lighter, she came out of my view.
“You guys staying for dinner with us?” I betted the worst, knowing they were already ready to get up, get out of town, and make a break for the ice. I could see the starvation in Liandra’s face when she’d lit the cigar. The yellow pigment that stained her cornea and her cracked, crusted lips told me she’d been off for only a couple of hours. She was probably jittery too. I wondered for a moment how Kiara could wrap her arms around her when she was like that, why she didn’t faint from the halitosis each time Liandra opened her mouth, but just as quickly the thought passed, and I remembered I knew why.
For a couples of minutes, no one spoke. The sole sound was the fork scraping against the metal as I served ravioli into a bowl.
Finally, Neil spoke. “We stay for two minutes minimum.”
He usually took the effects easier than Liandra did and had a certain level of cool she didn’t. It would make it harder for me to negotiate a good sum.
“Two minutes to the twenty I’ve been keeping myself here,” he continued, the scent of beer was filling my air from inches away. “It drops by the second.”
“But it can’t drop too much more. We don’t got light,” I faced his direction wishing he could see my expression. “We don’t got heat. We don’t got any electricity. Damn you guys, I don’t even see how we still have this place.”
I pictured the indifference on his and Liandra’s face that moment and wondered what made them keep coming back. What tied them to Mason, NJ. There was nothing here for them but us and so nothing here they gave a damn about.
“You keeping track of time? Two minutes the most. Give me the number or I’ll decide for ya.”
There was motion from his area. I wanted to reach in the drawer on my left and pull out the flashlight I kept for times like this, but resources took from the desperation.
“Just give ‘em five twenties, Neil,” Liandra said.
“Two hundred,” I said immediately. “If you guys run off for two months again even that much won’t hold.”
Their number was low, so I doubled it to get out the most.
“We ain’t stupid, honey,” Liandra said. “You pay the light and heat-that’s about thirty or forty. The rest is food.”
“I know that’s right,” Neil said. “What’s two hundred for? You goin’ around the neighborhood?”
“Two hundred,” I repeated.
He walked past me and outside. It wouldn’t be long before Liandra followed. If he did leave money, it’d be somewhere on the counter and I wouldn’t be able to tell if it was a good amount.
I called out for Kiara to see if she followed him out to say goodbye. I can’t look back and remember a single time she hadn’t.
There was no response, which is okay, I guess, since she’s a little kid. She didn’t know any better, didn’t see the whole picture enough to see what assholes they were.
Liandra opened the door to leave but turned back and said, “Goodbye, honey.”
A rush of heated blood ran through my veins as her lips formed a smile. I could’ve thrown something right then. The can, the bowl, a knife, anything that would break her face and that ugly grin.
She turned away and left, but the heat was still there.
I imagined what the streets had in for her and Neil. Even if they managed to bank some cash in a pool hall or play out as homeless, it wouldn’t be solid enough to support much more than two night’s stay at a motel. And since Neil was such a boozehound and Liandra, a smoker, probably only one night. As far as I knew, the streets was their only income. A real job that paid honest money could never be kept up for long.
I pulled the flashlight out of the drawer, scanned it over the counter, and pocketed three fifties. Then silently, I cussed myself out. I had been right in one thing- they would pull out their weed and spirits to hold back a while. But I was wrong in the thing that mattered to us the most- they didn’t let themselves get high enough that they’d lose a clear head. I’d betted on taking advantage of the opportunity and lost it.
I’d do overtime at the service station this weekend, check if anyone was offering part-time employment, the usual. If worse came to worst, I guessed I’d see if my buddy Eric could pitch in. He’d finished getting the muffler on his vette repaired last week, so now all his allowance wasn’t going to the auto shop.
As I ate, I used the flashlight as the sole lighting. One of the first things tomorrow was the bills.
Kiara walked in from outside when I was just about done. I shined the light on her to see how things went and noticed the faint redness in her eyes and cheeks. She was tired, had been in the autumn frost for about half an hour getting what last of attention she could get from them before they disappeared for another few months or so.
She looked at me solemnly with the same dark hazel eyes I was watching her with. What had went down between her and Neil and Liandra wasn’t too hard to figure out. Silence. Silence when she raised her arms to be held. Silence was the response if she asked if they’d missed her. Silence didn’t tell her when they were coming back or why they had to be gone so long. Silence couldn’t explain why they rarely called.
The only explanation came from me, and as insufficient as it was, it was the same thing I’d been telling her since three years back when they first left. I don’t know how long she’d continue to believe it or even if she believed it now, but it was good enough for its cause, nevertheless. If she trust me when I’d told her they were gone away on “business” and sent back money time to time, and that since the “business” was so tiring, they could hardly find anytime to call and were too tired to speak when they visited, then good. If she didn’t and was confused, then good, too. I’d rather her be confused than get the real picture.
She took a seat across from me where her bowl was. It was cold straight from the can, how we’d normally eat it when there was no power, but we were used to it by now.
After a couple of minutes of taking small bites and stirring it around, she stopped and put down her spoon. “I’m not hungry, anymore.”
Her bowl was more than half full. I tried not to waste food, especially in times like now when money was tight - hell, money was always tight.
“Try to finish it,” I said.
She shook her head, and pushed it towards me, “You can have it.”
“Eat it, Kiara. You still gotta eat, no matter how you feel.”
I pushed it back and waited. After a couple of minutes of staring, she began eating again, still taking the same small bites.
“They love us, you know,” I said.
She shook her head. “I dunno. They never say.”
“Some people can’t say. It’s just said in what they do. The money, the visits- they do it all because they love us.”
Kiara chewed silently, never looking up from her bowl. She’d be fine tomorrow. I didn’t worry too much about her when she got upset after their visits. Disappointment was something she’d learn to take and move on. The most I could expect from her tonight was a couple of tears and sleeping in my room.
As I stood to go to bed, she said quietly, “Mommy and Daddy wanna be here, right? They leave so quickly only because they have to?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much.”
She was about to ask something like then why I got so worked up when they tried to leave so fast, and I knew if she did, I’d blow up and yell.
Before she could even begin, I said, “Finish up. It‘s half past midnight,” and left the room.
I’d left the flashlight on the table so she could make her way through the darkness when she was done. Here, inside my bedroom, we had the only thing power didn’t control- a battery lamp. I switched it on, kicked off my shoes, and fell onto the mattress. There were a couple of textbooks sprawled over it from when I’d studied this morning. I shoved them aside to make room and closed my eyes.
Suddenly, the whole day came racing back to me. This morning, getting Kiara on the bus, rushing to work, picking up dinner, Mom and Dad’s arrival, all of it, any part of it that was nerve-wracking, hit hard all at once. I hadn’t realized I’d had a headache until now, when I was trying to relax and everything piled on.
There was nothing going on outside that I couldn’t hear from here. Sirens blared as a cruiser tracked down an old beater, most likely a pickup with a tired engine, that raced a corner without a signal. A Hispanic truck driver was being cussed out by the owner of a liquor store who was angry about the ten-wheeler parked in the fire lane. Some kid just got jumped in the alley between the daycare and that liquor store. The thug heard the men arguing, shot right past the two, and was gone. We lived right on the corner of a night club and pizza parlor. Some people were taking on the night, getting high, buying and selling. The business was hot , especially at this hour.
I turned over from lying face up and pulled a pillow over my ears. Two people- a man and a woman- had joined the rush not so long ago with eager minds and eyes half-way open. They weren’t new to the crowd, hadn’t been new for three years or so, they’d just rolled back into what was steady. Two people, ages thirty- four and thirty-three, both much older than me, but the same age at heart. If the tables turned and they were the ones busting their ass six days a week, babysitting their little sister 24/7, they’d change in the long run.
I woke up four hours later. Kiara lie at my side, her small body curled almost into a little round ball. In her arms she clutched Bearfriend, a stuffed bear they’d gave her the day she was born, tightly to her stomach. She was talking in her sleep, but too low for me to understand any of it . The words I could make out were “mommy”, “daddy”, “hurt”, and “forgot us.”
I lied awake for about three minutes, trying to decide if I would go to work then at five or wait another hour. Waiting meant more sleep, a lighter headache, and a lesser chance of screwing something up and getting my pay docked. Waiting made more sense, but if did wait I’d have to stay later.
I looked out the window to check the weather and saw the grey brumes typical of northeastern New Jersey settled over the city. Dark skies that showed promise of rain hadn’t been active since Tuesday.
Kiara moaned as I gently shook her shoulders to wake her. She turned the opposite way and sank beneath the blankets. I thought about it first and then reached under and tickled whatever part of her my fingers found. She rolled around for a while, trying to hold back laughter, but after a few seconds, her head poked out, giggling so hard it was almost red.
“I’m headin’ off to work,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed to tie my sneakers. I’d figured I’d just get an early start so I could get off at five.
The laughing had stop, and she’d suddenly frowned and crossed her arms over her chest. “You shouldn’t have woken me up. I was having a good dream.”
“Sorry, I didn’t want the neighbors callin’ the cops when they hear a baby bawling nonstop about being left alone.”
She pulled the sheets back over her head and said in a low voice, “I wouldn’t do that.”
She had once, around the first year Neil and Liandra been gone. I’d gone to take a walk to think things over and came back to see some cops standing around the door, demanding to see our parents. I got rid of them, saying it was my fault, that I was in charge of watching her while Mom and Dad were at the store, and I’d just ran out to pick up something from a friend.
“I don‘t care, anyway,” she continued, not as low. “Don‘t do that again, Milen,”
I took the flashlight and made my way down the hall to wash up. After a few minutes, I noticed her reflection in the mirror. She stood at the bathroom doorway, her hazel eyes resting heavily on me, asking.
“You gotta pee?” I said.
She shook her head. “I need the number.”
They wouldn’t answer. We’d done it so many times before I couldn’t believe she hadn’t memorized it. Each time I’d hear one of them breathing on the other end, and they’d hang up the moment Kiara or I spoke.
“Tell me their number, Milen,” she said again, her voice rising.
I walked past her and into the kitchen. She watched me closely as I scanned the cabinets for breakfast. There wasn’t much but the stuff I’d brought yesterday. I placed the peanut butter and bead on the counter so she could reach it later on.
“I’ll be back at five,” I said. “Don’t open the door for strangers. Don’t open the door for anyone, period. Except me.”
“And Mommy and Daddy,” she quickly added.
I made a sound, sort of like a grunt or groan, so she’d know I was pissed. Then I zipped up my hoodie and stepped out into cold Jersey air.
* * *
I’ve never really memorized the way to the Dx station off 14th blvd. They had this huge sign hanging up in the sky, way above the fog, with half of the ‘x’ missing and some pigeon’s nests on the curve of the ‘D’. When it’s daylight like now, it sticks out so much just from the fact that there’s no other logo covered in that much bird s***.
I look up as I walk and can tell if I’m almost there when the odor takes over and the coos of the pigeons get louder. It’s a funny way of getting to work, I know, but since I’d started working at Dx in early summer, it’s never failed. I’d been late a couple of times, but only by a few minutes, and usually never twice in the same month.
When I was a few yards away from the lot, I could see each station occupied with a vehicle of some sort and two guys tying to handle them all. I was the third service attendant they were probably cussing out this moment.
“Eh, Angler,” one of them called. “Strip up and pump these jacks.” He waved his hand to all the autos lined up behind him.
The other guy gave me the middle finger, a sure way to get a solid tip if your filling the engine of a ‘50s Beetle driven by a old lady. I looked away, pretending not to see when she stepped out to wave her finger at him.
I didn’t know their names or much about any of them. The guys who worked here shifted hours so often it
wasn’t enough time to call it a part- time grind. I figured they got paid more for two and half hours than I did for six, though. Angelo, the Filipino man who ran this place, had this preference for employees his own brethren. I’d tried to convince him I had a little Filipino blood from my father’s side, so he‘d be more inclined to hire me. It was a stupid lie, but I ended up with the job somehow. I guess he figured if a high school dropout who he wasn’t required by law to give as much bread was willing to work long hours, then it wasn’t that much of a deal if he was Caucasian kid.
When I headed to the back to change uniform, I found him sitting in a lawn chair near the utility shed and chewing hickory tobacco. He glanced at the watch on his left wrist immediately the moment our eyes met. The kind of sensation you get from watching Saturday night wrestling is not too far from what he got when I was late. Rapid hand movements, yelling in Filipino, and spitting out pieces of tobacco throughout the fury- it felt good to know he cared where I’d been the last half hour I wasn’t pumping juice but even better to hear some silence, a sign of satisfaction for being on time.
“Where you been?” he said, anyway.
I shrugged, “It don’t matter.”
“That’s right. You on time,” he nodded slowly. “ Not my business, right?”
He didn’t want an answer, just a response, one that’d give him a chance at further conversation. I granted him another shrug, so he wouldn’t take it I was ignoring him and dock half my pay.
We got a lot of New Yorkers and college kids on their way to or from Princeton or Rutgers. I tried to be cool with all of them and backed off when they didn’t want full service, though most times they did. Whenever elderly couples pulled in, all loud and excited at seeing “the first full-service station in thirty-five years”, I pretended like I’d hadn’t heard it before and gave the update on NJ state law. A pretty college girl drove in with stupid questions about stuff like how to pump the gasoline and how her engine worked and when I flashed her a smile instead of answering, the tip was still to my satisfaction.
I thanked God for the rainstorm that started up as it neared five. There weren’t too many willing to get out their cars and so I made the most bread then.
“You’re done. Get outta here,” Angelo said. He appeared behind me sometime after the rush died down and I was leaning against the pump, watching the streets.
There were fifteen minutes left in my shift. He was a greedy, racist bastard.
“You paying me for a full eight hours,” I said, making it sound like a half- statement, half question. I didn’t have to turn around to see the sly grin of gold teeth, disappearing off his face.
“I sure as hell ain’t paying you to sit on your ass.”
He kept standing there, waiting for some kind of reaction, waiting for me to be a smart ass in return. There was so much I could have said, too. About his height- I had three inches on him-, his hair, his breath, his bad English, but I held back. In some ways he was like Neil, playing my anger against my advantage. I got better at this game every time they came around.
He started talking some more crap about how lucky I was that he had enough patience to put up with my slack and made me stick around and listen. I didn’t get the chance to make anymore tips before my shift ended.
When I’d changed and was walking off the lot, there was a honk.
A dark blue vette pulled into the station, the windows rolled down, and a young guy with crisp, ash-blonde hair and teal eyes stuck his head out. “You got time for one more, buddy?”
I shook my head. “Nah, man. You just missed me.”
“Hell, that‘s too bad. I can’t go much further. I guess I’ll have find some babe around this part of town who can get my engine revved up.”
I laughed and got in. I’ve been tight with Eric Crofton since I was eight. He and his raw humor.
“Yeah, you’ll find one soon enough,” I said. I was surprised he still took his vette down here on the eastside after what had gone down a couple of months back. Some guys from Kraftz hotwired it, and when he saw it again, you wouldn‘t believe that it’d been new. The rims were missing, the windshield wipers bent out of shape, the mufflers clogged with weed sticks. It even had a graffiti job with the gang’s signature, the letter K overlapping two circles. The deps told him it could’ve been worse. Now the car looked the better than I’d last remembered it. Polished leather, new radio, the new car scent.
He backed out the lot and drove off.
“Let’s hope she doesn’t have a boyfriend who sports grills or serpent tattoos,” Eric said. He patted the dashboard gently, sort of like it had baby-soft skin. “I spent weeks trying to get it the same, you know, man. And my parents, they don’t make shit like this easier. They gave me a job at the grille- only twenty dollars an hour- and call it more help than I really need. Yet it takes me two weeks to replace just the rims cuz I have to squeeze in hours between school,” he was running his fingers through his hair with this wild, annoyed expression on his face. A couple of days scrubbing plates at his parent’s restaurant for twenty an hour and he thinks he’s worked his ass off. I couldn’t help but smile inside.
“It’s crazy, dude,” he continued. “It’s messed up that I had to take that crap. I’m gonna kill whoever did it too, you know. They took away my time….your time,” he stopped rambling suddenly and glanced at me. It was an evaluation of how I was doing. He was the only one who knew.
“Sorry, buddy,” he said quietly.
I didn’t think I looked that bad. Normally, it didn’t show, but I guessed I missed too much sleep last night.
“I’m alright,” I said. “Just a little drained, and I need a ride home.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he pulled out his wallet and handed me three twenties. “It’s been a while since I pitched in.”
I hated going through this. It wasn’t his damn problem.
“ Well, hell, it’s not your damn problem,” I said, taking it. “Thanks, though.”
“Daniel’s throwing another kegger Friday night,” Eric said. He probably wanted to change the topic as much as I did. “I get stronger every time.”
“Maybe even strong enough to fight cirrhosis,” I said. I’m no saint. I’ve had a couple of rounds, but I never drank hard and Eric didn’t know when to quit.
Daniel was still tight with Eric, but me and him drifted apart long ago. I remembered hanging at his place all the time back when Neil and Liandra used to stick around. He dropped out of school when Eric and me were freshmen and he was a senior. But that was three years back. He was twenty-one now. I remembered having a lot of “firsts” at Daniel’s place. My first drink, my first draw, my first poker game. Daniel was somewhat of a philosopher, a hippie born in the wrong decade. The last thing I could remember was him being in jail, but maybe I was wrong. It’s been a while.
“Hey, what have I got to lose?” he said, and afterwards, I thought, that was my line.
He had too much to lose. Eric was pretty popular around Mason. He was the kind of guy you either loved or hated. There was no in between. Most loved him. Most girls, anyway. For guys, the scale was less even. There weren’t too many who wouldn’t miss the chance to bust his head with a liquor bottle. Not just the gangs, either. I could have hated him and justified it, too. Eric thought he was some kind of god. His parents had money and too many girls had told him he was hotter than the devil.
His parents had it out for him before he could walk. They saw this golden light in his future, something that made him better than anyone else’s kid. He was gonna graduate valedictorian, go on to Princeton, get a masters in law and culinary, marry some politician’s daughter and come back to Mason to help make the grille a franchise. So far with all the A‘s he made at school, he hadn’t missed a step. But Eric balanced his pride, too. He could come back down to earth.
He went to an Exxon station. They were cheaper than us and had better service. Eric was telling the attendant how much he needed when I fell asleep.
I woke up ten minutes later and he let me use his Blackberry to check up on Kiara.
“You feeling better?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said softly.
“What are you doing?”
“Reading to Bearfriend.”
She couldn’t read too well yet, she only knew stuff like ‘cat’, ‘dog’, and ‘green’.
“I’ll be home soon,” I told her. “I’ll read it to you again if you want.”
She was silent for a while. I felt it coming, although she should’ve been over the visit by now.
“Milen,” she asked. “Where do they go?”
I’d been inside their sedan a couple of times and seen maps of Atlantic City, Newark, Trenton, Asbury Park, the New York City Metropolitan Area. There was no telling. They were wherever crystal could be found.
“I wish I knew.”
“It’s not far?”
“No, it’s not far, Kiara.”
“But how do you know?” she asked, getting annoyed. “You said you don’t know where they are.”
“I know it’s real close. We’re their kids. They don’t wanna be too far away.”
I waited for her to speak. For her to say she believed it, that she believed everything I was saying.
“Just don’t worry,” I said after there wasn’t any answer.
Then I heard the dial tone.
