Just Gone

by William Kowalski

  “This is the one,” Chantay said. She walked up a stoop and grabbed the plywood over the door. It was mostly loose. You could move it just enough to get inside.

  “You let me go first,” I said. If anyone was waiting in there to do somebody harm, I wanted it to happen to me, not her.

  The place was emptier than a witch’s heart. There was a bare mattress in what used to be the living room. It had stains on it that I preferred not to look at too closely. The floor was covered in trash. It stank to high heaven. I poked all through the place, but there was no Jamal.

  “He ain’t here,” said Chantay.

  “Is there anyone around here we could ask?”

  “Uh-uh,” said Chantay. “We oughta get outa here, Mother. Nighttime is when the rats come out.”

  Even as she said that, I could hear the squeaks and the scratching of little feet. So we went back out on the street. I was out of ideas.

  “I have to call Sergeant Kosinski,” I said. “I have no choice.”

  “Who he?”

  “He’s my friend on the force.” I was dreading that conversation. It would mean a whole lot of questions. I would be in trouble, and so would Mrs. Mingus. Sergeant Kosinski himself would have a lot to answer for if it got out that he had bent the rules for me. But the safety of a little boy meant more to me than any of that.

  This was in the days before cell phones, so I had to find somewhere to call him from. But this was not the kind of neighborhood where you just knocked on a door and asked to use the phone. That was a good way to get shot.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get back to the shelter.”

  But Chantay pulled back.

  “I ain’t goin’ back there,” she said.

  “Chantay, please,” I said. “Where else are you going to go? You got nowhere.”

  “I got somewhere,” she said. “This baby has a daddy. He’s rich. He can help me.”

  “Rich, you say?” I said.

  “Yup. He got a big car with leather seats and a stereo in it. And all kinds of dudes workin’ for him. He be glad to see me. He gonna take care of me, give me a nice place to live.”

  “Sounds like a drug dealer to me,” I said. “Am I right?”

  Chantay didn’t answer me. She just looked at her shoes.

  “Now listen up, girl. No person who would take advantage of a young girl like you is gonna step up and do the right thing. You’re just a toy to him. Something to use and throw away.”

  “He loves me,” said Chantay. “He gonna give us a nice home. I won’t need no job or nothin’.”

  “Girl, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself,” I said. “You are not making sense.”

  But Chantay was already heading down the street, in the opposite direction of the shelter.

  “Chantay!” I called after her. “You can’t do this!”

  “You was supposed to help us!” she yelled. “But you just made things worse. Goodbye, Mother Angelique. I’m stayin’ far away from you.”

  “Chantay, please! I’m sorry!” I said. “I was only trying to help. Come back, please!”

  But she didn’t listen. She just kept on going.

  It was dark now. Half the streetlights didn’t work, and there was no moon that night. So I headed back home on my own.

  I could tell when it was time to let someone make their own decisions. She was way too young to understand. Just a silly girl with a head full of crazy ideas about the way the world was supposed to be. I understood. I was that silly once myself, a long time ago.

  Life had taught me some hard lessons. The hardest one was that I couldn’t teach people from my own experience. I had to let them find out for themselves. I just hoped Chantay would be strong enough to handle whatever happened to her. She had two choices, and she made the wrong one. There was nothing more I could do.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I prayed hard that night for a sign. The deal I had with Sergeant Kosinski was broken, and it was on me to tell him what had happened. But I couldn’t see what good that would do. Jamal and Chantay would be listed as missing. When the cops found them, the city would take custody. This worried me as much as anything else. I knew too much about how social services worked. Those people had their hearts in the right place, but the system was broken. Some youth homes are no better than the ghetto. The kids in there are rough as they come. The children might even have been better off on the street.

  And if they didn’t want to be found, the cops would never locate them. Which would mean that Sergeant Kosinki’s faith in me would be broken for nothing. He would have two more runaways on the books. He would have to explain to his bosses why he hadn’t followed the rules in the first place. He might even lose his job. It was all a big mess.

  So I didn’t say anything to anyone. I had to trust that the children would come back if they needed me bad enough.

  But I kept looking for them anyway.

  During my spare time, I walked up and down the streets, talking to people, asking if they had seen Jamal or Chantay. I didn’t have a picture to show anybody. There were so many kids running wild that you couldn’t tell one from another. Nobody had seen a little boy with rat bites on his face. And nobody remembered a young girl whose pregnancy was not even beginning to show.

  One day I stopped some young boys who were on their way to make some kind of mischief somewhere. They were not much older than Jamal, so I asked if they knew him. Their leader was a young fellow with dreadlocks. His voice hadn’t even changed yet, but already he had a teardrop tattooed on his face. That meant he was in a gang.

  “Who he run with?” this little Napoleon demanded. “Crips? Bloods? La Mara? Eighteenth Street?”

  “He’s not in a gang,” I said. “He’s too smart for that.”

  “Then he already dead,” the boy told me confidently. “You don’t got a gang, you got nothin’.”

  “You boys should join my gang,” I told them. “We’re the strongest gang in the world.”

  He looked suspicious.

  “What gang you talkin’ about?”

  “Our leader is the Almighty,” I said. “And there is nothing he can’t do.”

  “Yeah, I don’t wanna hear no church stuff, lady,” he said, his dreadlocks whipping back and forth as he looked at his friends. “How you gonna make money goin’ to church all the time?” He reached into his pocket and flashed me a wad of cash. “You lucky you ain’t got no purse, or I be takin’ it right now.”

  “Young man,” I said, “the wages of sin is death.”

  I gave him my best stare. He looked uncomfortable. They moved on then. But one of them, a boy so small he looked like he ought to be in kindergarten, hung back.

  “I seen that boy,” he whispered. “Jamal. I knows him.”

  “Where did you see him, love?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” said the little one. His voice was high and hoarse as he whispered. “I just seen him, that’s all. He was with that dude everyone talkin’ bout. The dude in the big hat.”

  “What dude did you say?”

  “You know. The dude carry them suitcases around all the time. One black, one white.”

  “You seen that man?” I felt a chill, even though it was high noon on a hot day. He was describing Jacky Wacky.

  The little boy nodded, his face all solemn.

  “I sees him at night sometimes,” he said, in that hoarse little voice. “Once he gave me some food. He nice to kids. But he don’t like grownups. Even though he is one.”

  “Listen, son,” I said, “you ever get hungry, you come by my shelter. You’re better off there than running with this crowd. You’re just gonna end up in trouble.”

  “Yo, Squeaks!” called the dreadlocked one from down the block. “Let’s roll!”

  “I gots to go,” said Squeaks.

  “No, you don’t, Squeaks,” I said. “There is a better way than this. Let the higher power lead you, little one. That fellow there is just gonna hurt you.”

  Squ
eaks looked at me, then at his gang, then at me again. Then he moved off down the block to join them.

  My heart broke, watching him go. He should have been in school, learning his ABCs. Instead he was learning how to stick up old ladies and run drugs for corner dealers.

  That’s life in the city.

  At the shelter one day about six months after all this, a lady named Linda Mae Johnson showed up to relieve me at the desk.

  She said, “Too bad about poor old Mrs. Mingus.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, though from the way she said it I already knew.

  “Didn’t you hear? She died at home yesterday. Nephew found her.”

  I hadn’t seen Mrs. Mingus since that day at her house. She didn’t come by the shelter anymore. I saw her a few times at church, but she didn’t wait around to talk to the minister. She just skedaddled on home right away. She must have felt some shame at what had happened. But she never came clean with me about it. As angry as I was, I never bore her any ill will. It was not my place to pass judgment on people. That was for the higher power to do.

  “Goodness,” I said. “How sad. How did she die?”

  “Strangest thing,” said Linda Mae. “They can’t tell. Didn’t look like a heart attack or a stroke. She was just sittin’ there in her kitchen. And wasn’t she pointing at the window, even though she was dead! Her hand was stuck right up in the air like it was frozen there.”

  Another chill went through me then. I am a sensible woman, but Jamal’s words came back to me, and part of me wondered if his warning had come true.

  “I never heard of anyone dying like that before,” I said.

  “Me neither,” said Linda Mae. “His work is done in mysterious ways sometimes.”

  “Amen to that,” I said.

  As a God-fearing woman, I ought not to say this. But after I heard that story, I began to wonder if maybe there wasn’t something to this Jacky Wacky story after all.

  I mentioned before that I used to hope to meet a good man someday. Not to marry and settle down with—that was not my path in this life—but just so I could know there was some goodness left in the world.

  But it seemed to me that a man would have to be strong and powerful beyond all human law to rise above the misery of this world. So I forgot about ever meeting such a man, because men like that didn’t exist.

  Or did they? A tiny seed of wonder had been planted in me. I tried to ignore it, because I felt God would not be pleased with me for thinking such things. Then again, I was just some poor middle-aged woman. What did I know of what God wanted? What did I know about anything at all?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  This was all a long time ago. Squeaks is probably dead or in jail by now, a hardened criminal. Once, though, he was a sweet little boy. And that’s how I prefer to remember him.

  Time passed. I never did find those kids. I got caught up in other people’s lives, and little by little I forgot about Jamal and Chantay.

  The city is a machine that never stops grinding. It seems to make two different kinds of people. One kind lead charmed lives in safe neighborhoods. They have lots of expensive things. Maybe they think they’re happy. I don’t know. I don’t concern myself with them, because they don’t need me.

  I care for the other kind of people, the ones who get chewed up by the machine and spit out. Their lives are broken from the very start. They come through the shelter in an endless parade. Victims, addicts, hookers, homeless people. Hungry, hurt children. These are the people I work with. These are the ones who share my world.

  I was tired all the time now. It was getting harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. I figured I was just weak in the spirit. So I prayed for strength. And I kept on doing the work I had been called to do.

  One day a woman came in. I could tell right away she was an addict. She had that crazed look in her yellowed eyes. Her hair was tangled and snarled, a wig of snakes. She was missing a couple of teeth. She could hardly walk straight. She was wearing highcut shorts and a low-cut shirt. Big spiky heels. So she was a working girl. I got ready for whatever was about to happen.

  She stood there in front of me, weaving and staring.

  “Can I help you, sister?” I said. “You need a place to stay?”

  “Don’t you know me, Mother?” she said.

  “Have we met before?” I asked.

  She cackled.

  “I guess we have,” she said. “Long time ago now.”

  I searched my memory.

  “Chantay,” I said. “Is that you?”

  “See, I knew you remembered.”

  “Chantay, how long has it been?” I did some math in my head. I had last seen her three years ago. That would make her seventeen. The woman before me now looked at least twice that age. The machine was grinding on her hard.

  “Can I get me a sandwich?”

  I took her back to one of the tables and got her a meal. Then I sat down across from her. She had a hard time eating, like it was painful for her to chew.

  “I looked all over for you, you know,” I said. “I looked high and low.”

  “Yeah, I been livin’ the good life,” she said. “Got me a penthouse and a Ferrari. All kindsa boyfriends.”

  “Chantay,” I said, “where is your baby?”

  “My…baby?” Her expression changed, and she put down her sandwich. “Why you askin’ me that?”

  “Last I saw you, you were pregnant.”

  “That seems like a million years ago,” she said. “I dunno where that baby is. Maybe you best ask Jamal.”

  “Jamal? Where is he?”

  “He out there,” said Chantay, waving her arm. “Still doin’ his crazy thing.”

  “Why would he know where your baby is?”

  “He came one night and took him,” said Chantay. “Told me I wasn’t fit to keep him. He was gonna raise him up himself. Train him in his ways.”

  “What ways?”

  “His crazy-talkin’ ways,” said Chantay. “You know how Jamal was.”

  “So Jamal is all right? He’s safe?”

  “All right? He just as crazy as ever,” said Chantay. “Talkin’ ’bout angels and demons fightin’ over the city. He seein’ things.”

  “But where has he been all this time?”

  “He been livin’ with that dude,” Chantay said. “You know.”

  “What dude?” I asked, though I knew what she was going to say.

  “The dude who wears all them raggedy clothes and the big hat,” Chantay said. “Carries them two suitcases around. Dealin’ out food and punishment.”

  “Stop it right now, Chantay,” I said. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this foolishness again.” I had forgotten the chill I felt when I learned of Mrs. Mingus’s death. My practical side had taken over again. But now I could feel that weird feeling creeping over me once more. The tiny seed of wonder that had been planted long before was still there.

  “I seen him myself, Mother,” said Chantay. “He was with Jamal that night. He told me if I didn’t give them my baby, he was gonna do the same thing to me what he done to that Mrs. Mingus lady.”

  “Are you saying you believe Jacky Wacky killed Mrs. Mingus?”

  “He opened up that black suitcase on her,” she said. She began to cry. “Just like he did to my mama. They got my baby, and they raisin’ him up in some weird place. Up in the clouds. The place where magic happens.”

  She was starting to rave now. I tried to get her to come lie down on one of the beds for a while, because she looked exhausted. But instead she went into the bathroom and locked herself in there for a good twenty minutes. When I finally jiggled the lock open, she was sitting on the toilet, quickly stuffing something back in her pocket. The air had a nasty chemical smell. I knew what that was.

  “Chantay, you have to leave right now,” I said. “You can’t be smoking crack here.”

  “Aw, c’mon,” she said. “Just a little pick-me-up.”

  “No. You must go. Or I’ll ca
ll the police.”

  I had to be strict with her, because there were other people in the shelter. Mothers and their children. I had a duty to them to keep them safe. Drugs had no place in our haven. I took Chantay by the arm and pulled her toward the door.

  “I’mma sue you for touchin’ me!” she screamed.

  “Get out, Chantay,” I said. “Come back when you’re clean.”

  I let go of her when she was out on the street again. She turned and looked at me, her eyes wide and angry. A stream of filth and gibberish poured out of her mouth. I won’t repeat it here.

  “Are you done?”

  “Jacky Wacky gonna get you too!” she said.

  “I fear only the Almighty,” I told her. “If something happens to me, it’s because it’s written in the Book. Not because of some urban legend.”

  “Goodbye, Mother!” she croaked. “You won’t see me again!”

  “You can come back anytime,” I said. “But you have to be clean. That’s the rule.”

  “You won’t see me again!” she repeated.

  And I didn’t.

  I don’t know what happened to Chantay, but I can guess. Same thing that’s happened to thousands of girls in this city. The machine just keeps grinding them until there’s nothing left.

  CHAPTER NINE

  More years passed. When you get to a certain age, time speeds up. You blink, and another year has gone by. Seems like just last week I was a little girl, walking to church with my mother. I blinked, and then I was a young woman, marching in the street with thousands of other people, demanding our rights. A few more blinks, and somehow I was an old woman, sitting in a doctor’s office. That’s how fast life moves. Blink too many times, you miss the whole thing.

  The doctor told me some bad news. Turned out that tired feeling I had wasn’t just from working too hard. There was a sickness in my body that had been growing there for years, stealing all my energy, making itself bigger. A tumor. If I didn’t get it out, it would destroy me. The doctor said he could take it out with his knife. That might give me a few more years. “No promises,” he said, “but it’s worth a try.”