Suddenly, I have an idea. It’s a terrible idea and it will probably backfire. But it’s the only thing I can think of that might actually work, and once I’ve thought of it, I can’t let it go.
“I’ll be back in ten minutes. Will you still be here?”
“Reckon so.”
“I do want her stuff. I just need to go get—”
“Go on. I ain’t going nowhere.”
Doug crutches his way over to the doorway and sits down on the steps. He slides a half-smoked cigarette out of his pocket and lights it.
I get on my bicycle and pedal as fast as I can.
chapter nine
“Oh, hey. You brought back my light.”
Skunk slides the door open a little wider and turns the bike light over in his fingers before slipping it into his pocket. He’s blinking funny, and his hair’s tousled as if he just woke up from a nap. He’s wearing an old band T-shirt that makes him look like the kind of huge, soft, stuffed gorilla you win at a carnival for throwing a dart at a balloon. I know I should probably feel embarrassed about showing up at his house like this when he probably never expected to see me again, but all I can think about is getting back to the Imperial before Doug decides I flaked.
I wonder if Skunk can tell how edgy I am. I’m picking at the rubber grips on my handlebars and dancing in place like a monkey. He rubs his eyes.
“How’s the tire working out?”
“Great.”
He glances at my bike appraisingly, as if he thinks I came here to get him to fix something else. Like my squeaky brakes. Or my questionable sanity.
Before I have the chance to lose my nerve, I jerk my thumb at the van parked in the alley.
“Is that yours?”
He nods slowly, his sleepy eyes still half-closed. “Yeah.”
“Do you think you could give me a ride?”
I know it’s a long shot. I’m pretty sure I just got him out of bed, and by the looks of it, the van probably doesn’t even run. I know if some random stranger came and knocked on my door looking for a ride, I’d say hell no.
But Skunk just yawns and says, “Let me get my keys.”
He steps back into the house, sliding the door and curtains all the way shut behind him. I wonder what he’s hiding in there. Posters of naked death-metal chicks? Indoor grow-op? I try to steal a glimpse inside when he comes out, but he’s too fast for me, and all I see before the door snaps shut is a slice of hardwood floor.
“Want to put your bike in the shed?” he says.
“Hm? Oh. Sure.”
I follow him across the courtyard and wait while he unlocks the shed. When I hand him my bike, I get a shiver of anxiety, like I’m leaving an arm or a leg behind, or a baby, or a pet. As we walk to the van I resist the urge to run back and knock on the corrugated metal and say, I’ll come back for you soon, I promise.
Skunk’s van smells like cigarettes and sandalwood. The rust-colored upholstery is worn so thin it’s shiny. The stereo is too old to have a CD player, and the cup holders are full of dusty cassettes that must have been there since he bought the thing. Even though Skunk hasn’t asked for an explanation, I find myself babbling at him. Sukey. Columbia Street. Imperial Hotel.
He seems to get it.
There’s a faded sticker in the corner of the windshield with a picture of a duck that says FRIEND OF MARSHLANDS. I point to it and say something, but we’re driving down the alley and the gravel’s making a racket under the tires. Skunk says, “What?”
“Are you a friend of marshlands?” I shout.
This time, Skunk says, “Yeah,” and I flash him the devil horns because even if he’s just saying that, that’s badass.
We roll out of the alley and take a right, then left and a right again to get onto Columbia Street. I’m starting to relax a little now that we’re on our way. I hate cigarettes, but I find it oddly comforting when cars smell like them. When Sukey lived at home, she smoked Marlboro Lights out her bedroom window, and sometimes if I was good, she’d let me flick the lighter.
“This it?” says Skunk.
I look out the window. It’s taken us all of ten seconds to drive to the Imperial.
“Yeah.”
“Want me to wait here while you grab your stuff?”
I nod, fumbling with the door handle. I can see Doug through the dusty van window. He’s sitting against the wall with a couple other guys, talking. My heart bangs. I start to get out, and Skunk says, “You okay?”
The question takes me by surprise. I hang there awkwardly, my legs already out of the van and the rest of my body still inside it. I hate that question, “Are you okay?” It’s like asking someone if they think you look fat. You’re almost guaranteed to get a lie.
“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Of course I’m okay. Sorry. I’ll try to be quick.”
“No, I mean—take your time.”
He glances out the window, taking in the snaggletoothed windows of the Imperial Hotel.
I give him my best and bravest smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll be done in five minutes, tops.”
Doug and his homies are still drinking on the steps. When I walk over there, they’re caught up in an argument over whether Larry stole Fink’s cigarettes. Nobody looks at me. The guy who is apparently Fink is wearing a red ball cap that looks like it survived several cycles through a trash compactor. He has pale white skin and red hair that looks surprisingly delicate compared to the rest of his thickset body. The guy sitting next to Fink has a square chin and brown eyes and is wearing a denim jacket with fraying cuffs. The accused cigarette thief is not present. I make sure I speak loudly.
“Hey, Doug.”
He ignores me. “I’m just saying if I see that son of a bitch come around here again, I’m gonna punch his goddamn lights out,” he says to Fink.
“Hey, Doug, can you—”
“And if he says it’s a free country, I’ll say look, buddy—”
“Um, Doug?”
The guy in the jean jacket glances my way. “Doug, I think the little lady wants to talk to you.” He elbows him in the side and jerks his chin at me.
“Oh, hello!” says Doug, as if I’ve just dropped in from outer space. “You’re back.”
“I’m back.”
“And you want to ask old Dougie out on a date.”
Fink and the denim-jacket guy start laughing, wheezing through their teeth. Even though I’m grateful for Skunk’s van, suddenly I wish I had called Lukas’s mom after all—she would have come up to the door with me, and she wouldn’t have taken any shit. I square my shoulders and do my best to channel Petra Malcywyck: “Actually, I’m just here to pick up my sister’s things.”
Doug slaps the pavement beside him. “Siddown, have a drink with us.”
He holds out his Coors Light. The thought of sharing beer that’s been backwashed through Doug’s gray lips revolts me. I wonder if Skunk’s following this interaction from the van, but I’m too embarrassed to look.
“No thanks.”
“Come on. Have some fun.”
Doug floats the beer can back and forth in front of me in what is meant to be a tantalizing fashion. When I don’t take the beer, Doug loses interest and becomes reabsorbed into another conversation with his friends, this time concerning a stray dog someone in the building has adopted. They’ve named the dog Jojo, and it trembles all over unless you speak to it very, very softly.
I realize that if I don’t make a stand, I could be waiting here all day while they drink. I crouch down so my face is level with Doug’s and clamp my hand on his shoulder.
“Hey! Doug! Let’s do this and then I’ll be out of your hair.”
Fink and the other guy start giggling again. Doug gives them an exaggerated raise of the eyebrows and says, “The little lady wants me to show her upstairs.”
At the word upstairs my temples throb. I hadn’t thought about what it would be like to actually go inside. But if Sukey lived here, it couldn’t have been that bad.
“Why don’t you
give old Dougie a hand up, honey.”
He belches with so much vibrato I wonder if he’s been classically trained.
My eyes flick to the crutches leaning against the wall. Of course.
I hold out my arms. He puts down his now-empty beer can and grabs my wrists in a fireman’s hold. The warmth and dryness of his hands surprises me, like baseball mitts left out in the sun. I lean back and pull while he wriggles up on his leg, and when he’s more or less standing he clamps a hand on my shoulder to brace himself while I hand him the crutches. I adjust my footing and we almost lose our precarious balance, but we find it again and Doug gets his crutches in place under his arms and then he’s standing on his own.
For a second, we eye each other, catching our breath. Doug hop-steps over to the greasy glass door of the Imperial and pulls it open. I wait behind him, casting one last glance at the bright, sunny street before I step inside, hoping it’s what Sukey would have wanted me to do.
chapter ten
“Me and Sukey-girl were neighbors, eh. We shared a wall.”
The elevator is broken, so Doug and I are climbing the stairs to the fourth floor. The stairwell is dark, narrow, and carpeted with what appears to be pureed roadkill. So far, we are on step number twelve and making such slow progress I’m pretty sure I’ll have gray hair by the time we reach the fourth floor. He places the rubber tips of his crutches on a step, braces himself, and hoists his good leg up. This process is complicated by the fact that he is totally hammered and keeps putting his crutches at crazy angles and having to start again.
“We were real good neighbors. Sukey-girl was a sweetie pie. She gave me Snoogie. That’s my kitty cat, eh.”
As Doug rambles, I remember Sukey dabbing yellow paint on my nose: I have my own studio, Kiri. Right downtown.
Why would she lie? I would have given her my entire allowance every week. I would have given her my birthday money. I would have begged Mom and Dad to let her move back in. Anything so she didn’t have to live in a place like this.
Step fourteen. Doug plants his crutch in the middle of a half-eaten egg salad sandwich that’s lying on the step. He doesn’t notice and swings himself up anyway, then pauses to take a rest. The stale, eggy stench of the sandwich fills up the entire stairwell. Doug burps.
“Almost there, honey.”
I roll my eyes. Almost there, unless you count a million more steps full of belching, dirty jokes, and rogue egg salad sandwiches.
Doug interprets my expression correctly for once and scowls.
“What’s a matter? You got a TV show to watch?”
He squints at me reproachfully. When he looks at me like that, I do feel kind of ashamed for being impatient with an old disabled man trying to climb a million stairs on crutches, even if he is an obnoxious drunk. I bite my lip.
“Sorry. It’s just, my friend’s waiting with the van.”
“I know, curly. You got somewhere to be.”
He lifts the crutch that was on top of the egg salad sandwich and we start climbing again. The sandwich, horrifyingly, sticks to the bottom of the crutch and rides along until four steps after the second-floor landing, when it finally peels off. To make things worse, Doug clams up and proceeds in wounded silence while I drag along behind him. I never thought I’d wish for Doug to start talking, but now that he’s not, there’s nothing to distract me and I start to notice things I’d rather not notice, like the sound of a violent argument taking place a few floors above us.
Once we leave the stale sandwich behind, the stairwell smells sweet and rank, like a recycling bin full of soda cans gone syrupy in the heat. There’s trash everywhere: food wrappers; nasty, scrunched-up paper towels; shoes and clothing that look like they were dredged up from a murder scene at the bottom of a swamp. I’m pretty sure there’s been a used condom stuck to the bottom of my flip-flop for the last few steps, but I’m too afraid to look. Whatever it is, I can feel its rubbery squishiness every time I put my foot down. A door slams, and a few seconds later a woman comes storming down the stairs, swearing, an orange-green bruise on her jaw.
“Watch it, bitch,” she says as she pushes past me, although I get the unsettling impression she hasn’t seen me at all.
I wonder if Skunk’s still waiting for me. I asked him to give me a ride, not sit in his van all day while I participate in some kind of absurdist play. I should have gotten his number and called him when I was ready to go. I shouldn’t have come in here at all. The only thing keeping me going is my anticipation of what’s waiting for me at the top of the stairs: a box of Sukey’s paintings, maybe, and some of her cool clothes.
Doug grunts and pants. I try not to breathe. We make it to the third floor and start on the last set of steps. The lightbulb has burned out, and we struggle up the trash-infested staircase in watery dimness. It’s too dark to make out what’s on the steps, but I’m pretty sure the mystery condom on the sole of my left flip-flop has been joined by a mystery cigarette butt on my right.
I get a queasy feeling when we pass from the third flight of stairs to the fourth. From this point on, I’ve gone too far to turn back. It’s like that time in ninth grade leadership camp when they made us swim to an island a mile from shore. After the first twenty-five minutes, the beach was too far away to swim back to, but the island was still a green blob in the distance, and I was out there, in the open ocean, way behind the other kids, with nothing to grab on to and the bottom too deep to stand.
Tap-tap-THUMP.
Doug hoists himself up the last step and starts down the hall. The light in the hall is busted too, and the fire door is clogged with trash. The glass box that used to hold a fire extinguisher has been smashed, and there’s a greasy pay phone bolted to the wall with its receiver hanging down by a mangled cord.
Doug reaches out and brushes his fingers against a battered door.
“Sukey-girl lived right here.”
I glance at the door as we go past it. Some of the other doors on this floor are missing their knobs or have a hole in the wood where the deadbolt used to be. Sukey’s door is the only one that has all its parts. Maybe there’s a perfectly good apartment in there, where Sukey hung her bead curtain and set up her paints and easel in the corner. Maybe she lived here because it gave her a morbid kind of inspiration for her paintings. Or because no matter how dingy it was, it beat living in the same house as Dad.
Doug opens his door and goes into his room. I hover in the hallway, fingering the cell phone in my pocket, getting ready to call for help at any moment. I can hear Doug clomping around in there, knocking things over in the dark, trying to call his cat out of the shadows.
“Kit-kit-kit-kit-kit! Kit-kit-kit-kit-kit!”
I glance into Doug’s room. There’s a towel nailed over the window and no bulb in the ceiling fixture. All I can make out is a mattress piled with clothes, a few odds and ends of furniture, and a photo in the kind of cheap plastic frame you can buy at the dollar store. There doesn’t seem to be a kitchen or a bathroom. I wonder how many floors down he needs to go to use a toilet.
A moment later Doug comes back to the door carrying something in the crook of his arm. At first I think it’s some bundled-up laundry, but he hands it to me, and it’s a scruffy white cat with pale red eyes and a stump where its back right leg used to be. It meows and tries to scramble out of my arms. Doug goggles at it fondly.
“This is Snoogie. Sukey-girl found her in the alley.”
I am trying to unhook Snoogie’s claws from my shirt. She meows again and tries to climb me like a tree. She manages to get up to my shoulder, then digs in her claws parrot-style and won’t let go, surveying the world with a look of such extreme cat-paranoia I start to wonder if she knows something I don’t. Doug reaches up and strokes her affectionately.
“Snoogie’s a good cat.”
Actually, Snoogie seems like a very bad cat. But I don’t say this to Doug, whose perception has clearly been warped by love and/or cheap beer. As I watch him pet her, I start to get anxious. W
hat if I’ve come all this way for nothing? What if all he has to give me is a busted old lamp or some moldy bath towel he’s been hanging on to for five years? Maybe there’s a good reason my parents hung up on him the other times he called. My thoughts flit guiltily to my piano, sitting neglected in a dust-spangled shaft of light. Later, I promise myself.
“Hey, Doug?”
“Whassat?”
Doug isn’t listening. He’s too busy gazing at Snoogie, who is currently attempting to climb from one of my shoulders to the other by way of my head.
“Are her paintings here?”
“Say ’gain?”
Snoogie hops down to the floor and darts into Doug’s room. He finally looks at me.
“Do you have Sukey’s paintings?”
“There weren’t no paintings left at the end, nah. She got into one of her moods and started giving ’em away until there weren’t none left. She gave one to me, big yellow painting, but those crackheads came in here and stole it. You can’t have nothing nice here without someone coming around and stealing it. Hang on, I’ll grab you what I got.”
Doug closes the door halfway and disappears into the murk. I hear him banging into something, swearing, and pulling open a stuck door. I glance into the room and see him rummaging through a closet packed with garbage—actual garbage, soda cups and napkins and cigarette boxes. It’s all tumbling out around his skinny ankles in a mini avalanche of crap.
Great, I think, stepping back from the door. He’s one of those crazy hoarder people.
“Hey, Doug?” I call. “I kinda need to go.”
“Hold on, honey,” he hollers back. “I had to bury the bag real good so those crackheads couldn’t find it.”
I hear cans rattling to the floor, and a grunt of effort from Doug. “Sukey and me were like family,” he wheezes. “People got to take care of each other down here. I woulda called you’s sooner, but I’ve been sick.”
I roll my eyes. Sure. If by sick, you mean hammered.
I poke my head through the door and see Doug hauling a big black trash bag out of the closet.
Wild Awake Page 5
