Читать книгу Every Wickedness - Susan Thistlethwaite - Страница 8

All the fears

From all the years

I see the streets

I know what’s up

And down.

“What’s Up?”

James Maddox, #965

StreetWise

Wednesday, May 17, 6 p.m.

I was just about to call the police and report her missing when Kelly appeared at my front door over two hours late. Kelly is a fourteen-year-old and the daughter of Tom Grayson, a surgeon at the University of Chicago hospital and my, I guess you would say, boyfriend. We’re not lovers, not yet anyway. What other word is there?

I could see her smug expression through the leaded glass of our front door even before I yanked it open. She knew exactly how angry she’d made me, and that, of course, made me still angrier. ‘Slow down, slow down,’ cautioned an inner voice as I unfastened the deadbolt. ‘She’s a teenager. She’s manipulating you,’ it said reasonably. ‘She’s doing a damn fine job,’ I snapped back at the inner voice. A friend of mine, mother of a teenage girl, had said to me that she was beginning to favor abortion up to age fifteen. I’d thought at the time she was just overreacting. I took a deep breath and opened the door.

Kelly slouched in, hiding her breasts under a Kurt Cobain tee shirt, complete with the dates of his birth and death. Great. Well, her baggy jeans and clogs fit the grunge look. But no matter how much she slouched, she couldn’t hide that she was nearly my height, and I’m just over 6 feet tall. I’d made my peace with being a tall, blond Viking. Kelly had not, though she had lovely skin and blonde hair as well. Well, it used to be blond, now there was a streak of purple down one side. She wore it dragged back and tied with a strip of leather. This, I suppose you would call it hairstyle, was designed to show off the double pierced ears, a stud and a ring, that had been newly acquired. Tom had been stunned when she’d shown up one afternoon with the pierced ears. He was a new, full-time custodial father, his ex-wife having died in a traffic accident a few months before. He was still learning teen culture, and in this he was a slow learner. I’d tried to console him by describing all the other things she could have pierced. He had become so pale I stopped my description.

Kelly was angry at her mother for dying, angry that she’d been forced to move to Chicago and leave her friends, angry at being so tall and angry at basically everything. Her eyes were blue like Tom’s, only hers resembled lasers as she stood sullenly just inside the doorway and just looked at me. She wanted me to know how much she hated this witchy interloper in her father’s life. I knew. And my twin sons, aged six, she considered the Devil’s spawn.

I sighed and fed her my obligatory line.

“Why are you so late?”

She just shrugged while she dropped her backpack heavily onto the parquet floor of our entry.

“Dunno.”

I knew. She (and privately I agreed with her) thought she was old enough to stay home alone for the evening, but her father didn’t. Usually they compromised by having Mrs. Bronsky, their downstairs neighbor, ‘keep an eye on Kelly’ when Tom was out for the evening, or out most of the night in a long surgery. But Mrs. Bronsky was in Cleveland attending to her daughter and her new grandchild. Tom had cajoled me into letting Kelly come over while he and I went to a reception dedicating a new medical building in the hospital complex. Carol and Giles, a live-in couple, both graduate students, help me take care of the kids and try to keep up with the cooking and the cleaning. I’d known when Tom asked that it was a bad idea, and it appeared I’d been right.

“Never mind,” I forced out through my teeth. “Giles has dinner for you in the kitchen.”

“I’ve eaten.”

She addressed this snotty remark to the hat stand that graces our Victorian hall.

“Fine,” I managed. Though it wasn’t fine. Giles, a math Ph.D. candidate, who had emigrated from Senegal, did all the cooking and he took it very personally when someone didn’t eat what he had prepared.

Fortunately, my twin boys ate anything. At nearly seven-years-old they were approaching 4 ½ feet tall and climbing. I bought shoes nearly once a month.

The boys had heard the door and they came running down the hall with Molly, our Golden Retriever. Molly likes Kelly, God knows why, and she proceeded to jump up on her, wiggling with joy. Kelly swore and pushed Molly down roughly. Molly yiked, more in disbelief than in actual hurt, I thought, but Mike, my oldest by a few minutes, was hugely offended.

“Hey!” he yelled, grabbing for Molly’s collar and pulling her into a hug. He looked up at Kelly like she was Eichmann in his glass booth on trial for war crimes.

“Yeah, watch out, you stupid, clumsy ox,” contributed Sam, my less diplomatic son.

“Who’re you calling an ox, you toad!” was Kelly’s scintillating rebuttal. “And get that creature away from me!”

Kelly aimed a half-hearted kick in Molly and Mike’s direction.

“That’s enough!” I stepped between the would-be combatants and then turned to Kelly.

“You don’t want to be here. All right, you’ve made that sufficiently clear. Take your book bag off my floor and go into the den. Close the door. Stay there.”

I turned to Mike and Sam.

“Take Molly into the kitchen, and then go upstairs and do your spelling.”

Having divided, but having no illusions I had conquered, I called down the hall to Carol that Kelly had arrived. I didn’t include Giles in my announcement. A dedicated pacifist, Giles just hated conflict. His soft brown eyes, magnified by his horn-rimmed glasses, take on the look of a deer caught in the headlights whenever there is yelling. At the sound of Kelly’s loud and angry voice, I’d heard the rapid flap, flap, flap of his flip-flops as he had hurried upstairs.

Carol came down our long, narrow center hallway, her short, rounded figure topped by a mop of hair cut exactly in a bowl shape. Giles’s culinary skills at work, I always assumed. She looks like she was born swaddled by L.L. Bean. I believe everyone from Maine is required to wear corduroy clothing, and Carol is no exception. As she came down the hall toward us, her friendly, freckled face was calm, but her hazel eyes were assessing the situation.

“Kelly, let’s get you set up in the den,” Carol said. She has a lovely, clear voice, both concerned and yet authoritative. My chief fear for her in her chosen career of social work was that the overwhelming needs in our society would burn her out, leaving only a shell of concern. Making her a bureaucrat. But not yet.

For a second it looked like we were going to get away with separating the kids so I could leave in peace. No such luck. Molly, disliking calm in any form, slipped away from Mike’s grasp as he had been slowly, oh so slowly, tugging her toward the kitchen. She dashed over to Kelly and licked her hand.

“Oh, gross!” Kelly yelled, holding up her hand like she’d been scalded instead of licked.

The boys laughed heartily at this reaction, causing Kelly to yell, “You suck!” at them.

I opened my mouth to remonstrate, but Carol made shooing motions at me with her hands, looking for all the world like a young and very intelligent Aunt Bea from Mayberry. It was cowardly, but I ran for it.

Well, I ran as fast as I could wearing a full-length formal dress, a cape and red sequined Ferragamo heels. I rarely wore heels. At my height I hardly needed to add to it and I was not good at walking in them, let alone sprinting. I got out the door in record time, however, and then teetered down our brick walkway toward the sidewalk.

The screaming inside the house followed me. A couple walking by, white, conservatively dressed, middle-aged, probably prospective freshman parents, glanced up at the sound of the screaming and then shuddered. Was it just the screaming or was it also the color of my house? It was hard to tell from their quickly shuttered faces.

My old Victorian house is only two blocks from campus and when I bought it, it had been painted a drab gray that was peeling off in sections. After the kids, Giles, Carol and I had failed to do more than dab on about ten square feet of paint in several months of effort, I’d hired a professional painter and it was now red with yellow picking out the trim like the San Francisco “Painted Ladies.” This was designed as a deliberate insult to the constantly gray skies of Chicago. People noticed. From the windows of my study on the second floor, I often saw people stop and point. Well, it made it easy to give directions to my house since every other house in this row of tall, thin Victorians was either gray or brown. The kids liked it a lot. They said it was a cartoon house.

The passersby shuddered briefly and hurried on down the street. Small-town parents often looked shell-shocked after visiting Hyde Park. The recruitment office should keep them on campus.

Safely on the sidewalk in my stiletto heels, I took a couple of breaths from my diaphragm like the kids and my Tae Kwon Do instructor had us do in classes. It was supposed to increase your life force. God knows I needed to do that. My life force was running close to empty.

Despite my love of getting really dressed up, my schedule had made me want to back out of this mid-week reception thing. I really couldn’t spare the time. In addition to two kids, I worked in the Department of Philosophy and Religion as an instructor while I was supposed to be finishing my dissertation. I had cut a deal last semester to teach half-time, and I had thrown out my old dissertation and launched a new one.

Right out of college I had become a cop; that’s where I had met my future husband, Marco. But he’d been killed in a traffic stop that had gone hideously wrong, and there’d been suspicions of police misconduct in his death. I’d run as far and as fast as I could from police work. Philosophy and Religion had seemed far enough, but oddly my previous life kept catching up to me. Finally, I’d decided to quit running away from what I knew from police work, and I’d decided to dig deeply into the kinds of contradictions of power that were not only what policing was like, but it had turned out, what academic life was like as well. This had led me to work out an agreement to do some consulting for the campus police. I wasn’t really doing much of that, though, and I had made almost no progress on the dissertation re-write. In fact, right now I should probably be making notes and trying to write, not hobbling down the sidewalk swathed in sequins and satin.

I teetered along in the unaccustomed heels, vaguely registering the odd looks of passersby. You could wear nothing but a loincloth and a lot of tattoos on the campus, like the young man I’d seen escorted off the main quadrangle just last week, and not rate a second glance. But a formal length gown and cape stuck out like jeans on the Pope. That’s university culture.

University culture was not turning out to be what I expected when I chose it as a refuge from police work. It was much more violent than I had imagined. I’d sought academics like a wounded animal would seek a dark, narrow burrow as a safe, quiet place to lick its wounds, but I’d been quickly made aware that the burrow was nearly as bad as the Chicago streets. The university was ringed by urban poverty and a lot of the crime was petty theft. The surrounding poor saw the casual affluence of the whole place as both an insult to their existence and an easy target. And the students, faculty and staff were not exempt from the tendency to steal from and even inflict bodily harm on each other. In the Middle Ages in Europe, members of universities had been exempt from prosecution by civil authorities and some of that attitude still persisted. City cops were kept at arms length for crimes committed on campus, especially theft and sexual assault. The campus police had to walk a fine line between the see-nothing attitude of the administration and the outrage of the campus community when it was suddenly revealed that such and such a crime had been treated too lightly. Some administrators were trying to bridge the gap, but they were still too few.

As I turned the corner, I spotted the new guy who was selling StreetWise, the newspapers sold by the homeless or nearly homeless to work themselves out of poverty. Speaking of crime, his predecessor had just been murdered in an alley not far from campus. Jimmy Maddox, disabled veteran, recovering addict and full-time comedian, had been well-liked in Hyde Park. People were upset and angry over his death and what seemed to be the lack of police progress in the case.

By now I was approaching Jimmy’s old corner. I’d passed the guy who’d taken his place two weeks ago quite a few times on my way to and from work. I’d bought papers, but it occurred to me to stop and talk. I wanted to see if there’d been any developments in the Maddox investigation that weren’t in the Chicago papers. Since Jimmy had been one of their own, StreetWise had better updates. The paper came out twice a month and there’d be a new one today.

I’d read the new vendor’s bio in the last paper. He was 28, but seemed much younger. He was also so fair he was almost an albino. He had long, lanky hair pulled back from a thin, mousy face. His skinny limbs seemed tight, like he was wired. I had wondered, as I walked back and forth to campus, whether he was scared of his new job or if he was on something. Unlike Jimmy, this guy rarely spoke. But his mouse face was appealing, a kind of Disney mouse face.

I knew I had bills in my tiny evening bag and I approached him. The bio had included his name, Dwayne Moorehouse.

He was looking away from me down the block toward the campus. I spoke softly, sensing I might startle him.

“Dwayne, how’s it going tonight?”

His small head snapped around and he hunched his chin into his shirt, like the little turtle that, in a moment of insanity, I’d let the kids buy in a pet shop. The tiny thing had only lived a month and had rarely stuck its brown head out of the shell, much to the kids’ disappointment.

After a pause, his pale eyes glanced up at me.

“StreetWise?” he asked in almost a whisper.

“Hi, Dwayne. Yes. I’d like a paper. I read your bio in the last issue. Dwayne Moorehouse, right?”

A longer pause, then the turtle head popped out briefly for a nod, settled back in his shirt. A barely audible “yes” followed after another delay.

Gradually his shoulders relaxed a little but he was looking down. He seemed fascinated with my shoes. I decided rushing would spook him, so I just stood there. I slowly put out my hand.

“My name’s Kristin, glad to meet you.”

My hand remained solitary in the air until I pulled it back to my side. Dwayne continued staring at my shoes.

I held out the money where he could see it and he took it quickly, pulling a paper off the pile he held with a practiced motion.

I tried again.

“I’m so sorry about Jimmy.”

The narrow corners of Dwayne’s mouth had been tending up, like a smile might even appear, but when I mentioned Jimmy, the corners sagged down into a sad little droop. He looked so much like a Disney mouse I imagined I saw whiskers drooping too. Then he looked directly at me with his pale, almost unlashed eyes and nodded. For a moment, there was a flash of quick intelligence, I thought. Though was I imagining that?

I moved on, a little unsettled by meeting Dwayne. I’d gotten used to bantering with Jimmy, and except for that brief eye contact, Dwayne seemed like he might have developmental problems, or perhaps he just had a speech impediment and was consequently shy about speaking.

Well. I shook myself. Whatever problems he might have, selling papers was better than making brooms in some protected workshop, inside all day. Despite being so shy, he was out in the public, meeting people, doing a hard job. Behind me I heard “StreetWise” again.

The ordinariness of courage. It’s easy to miss it.