Goodbye, goodbye, sweet friend, the streetlights cried.
He could sense the spin of the stars as they wheeled high above the city streets, their voices joining the electric voices of the streetlights.
My turn to go free, he thought as a white tunnel opened in his mind. He could feel it draw him in, and then he was falling, falling, falling ....
“Goodbye ....” he said, thought he said, but no words came forth from between his lips.
Just a trickle of blood that mingled with the rain that now began to fall in earnest, as though it, too, was saying its own farewell.
All Jilly had to see was the red spinning cherries of the police cruisers to know where the pattern she’d felt in the club was taking her. There were a lot of cars here cruisers and unmarked vehicles, an ambulance—all on official business, their presence coinciding with her business. She didn’t see Lou approach until he laid his hand on her shoulder.
“You don’t want to see,” he told her.
Jilly never even looked at him. One moment he was holding her shoulder, the next she’d shrugged herself free of his grip and just kept on walking.
“Is it ... is it Zinc?” Sue asked the detective.
Jilly didn’t have to ask. She knew. Without being told. Without having to see the body.
An officer stepped in front of her to stop her, but Lou waved him aside. In her peripheral vision she saw another officer sitting inside a cruiser, weeping, but it didn’t really register.
“I thought he had a gun,” the policeman was saying as she went by. “Oh, Jesus. I thought the kid was going for a gun ....”
And then she was standing over Zinc’s body, looking down at his slender frame, limbs flung awkwardly like those of a rag doll that had been tossed into a corner and forgotten. She knelt down at Zinc’s side. Something glinted on the wet pavement. A small tin monkey charm. She picked it up, closed it tightly in her fist before anyone could see what she’d done.
“C’mon, Jilly,” Lou said as he came up behind her. He helped her to her feet.
It didn’t seem possible that anyone as vibrant—as alive—as Zinc had been could have any relation whatsoever with that empty shell of a body that lay there on the pavement.
As Lou led her away from the body, July’s tears finally came, welling up from her eyes to salt the rain on her cheek.
“He ... he wasn’t ... stealing bikes, Lou ....” she said. “It doesn’t look good,” Lou said.
Often when she’d been with Zinc, Jilly had had a sense of that magic that touched him. A feeling that even if she couldn’t see the marvels he told her about, they still existed just beyond the reach of her sight.
That feeling should be gone now, she thought.
“He was just ... setting them free,” she said.
The magic should have died, when he died. But she felt, if she just looked hard enough, that she’d see him, riding a maverick bike at the head of a pack of riderless bicycles—metal frames glistening, reflector lights glinting red, wheels throwing up arcs of fine spray, as they went off down the wet street.
Around the corner and out of sight.
“Nice friends the kid had,” a plainclothes detective who was standing near them said to the uniformed officer beside him. “Took off with just about every bike on the street and left him holding the bag.”
Jilly didn’t think so. Not this time.
This time they’d gone free.
That Explains Poland
1
Maybe that explains Poland.
Lori’s mother used to say that. In the fullness of her Stalinism, the great hamster (as Lori called her) was convinced that every radical twitch to come from Poland and Solidarity was in fact inspired by the CIA, drug addicts, M&Ms, reruns of “The Honeymooners” (“To the moon, Alice!”) ... in fact, just about everything except the possibility of real dissension among the Polish people with their less than democratic regime. It got to the point where she was forever saying “That explains Poland!”, regardless of how absurd or incomprehensible the connection.
It became a family joke—a proposito to any and all situations and shared by sundry and all, in and about the Snelling clan. You still don’t get it?
Maybe you just had to be there.
2
“Listen to this: BIGFOOT SPIED IN UPPER FOXVILLE,” Lori read from the Friday edition of The Daily Journal. “Bigfoot. Can you believe it? I mean, can you believe it?”
Ruth and I feigned indifference. We were used to Lori’s outbursts by now and even though half the clientela in The Monkey Woman’s Nest lifted their heads from whatever had been occupying them to look our way, we merely sipped our beer and looked out onto Williamson Street, watching the commuters hustle down into the subways or jockeying for position at the bus stop.
Lori was an eventful sort of a person. You could always count on something happening around her, with a ninetynine percent chance that she’d been the catalyst. On a Friday afternoon, with the week’s work behind us and two glorious days off ahead, we didn’t need an event. Just a quiet moment and a few beers in la Hora
Frontera before the streets woke up and the clubs opened their doors. “Who’s playing at Your Second Home this weekend?” Ruth asked.
I wasn’t sure, but I had other plans anyway. “I was thinking of taking in that new Rob Lowe movie if it’s still playing.”
Ruth got a gleam in her eye. “He is so dreamy. Every time I see him I just want to take him home and—”
“Don’t be such a pair of old poops,” Lori interrupted. “This is important. It’s history in the making.
Just listen to what it says.” She gave the paper a snap to keep our attention, which set off another round of lifting heads throughout the restaurant, and started to read.
“The recent sighting of a large, hairy, humanlike creature in the back alleys of Upper Foxville has prompted Councilman Cohen to renew his demands for increased police patrols in that section of the city. Eyewitness Barry Jack spotted the huge beast about I A.M. last night. He estimated it stood between seven and eight feet tall and weighed about 300 to 400 pounds.”
“Lori ...”
“Let me finish.”
“‘While I doubt that the creature seen by Mr. Jack—that a Bigfoot—exists,’ Cohen is quoted as saying, ’it does emphasize the increased proliferation of transients and the homeless in this area of the city, a problem that the City Council is doing very little about, despite continual requests by residents and this Council member.’”
“Right.” Lori gave us a quick grin. “Well, that’s stretching a point way beyond my credibility.”
“Lori, what are you talking about?” I asked.
“The way Cohen’s dragging in this business of police patrols.” She went back to the article.
“Could such a creature exist? According to archaeology professor Helmet Goddin of Butler University, ‘Not in the city. Sightings of Bigfoot or the Sasquatch are usually relegated to wilderness areas, a description that doesn’t apply to Upper Foxville, regardless of its resemblance to an archaeological dig.’
“Which is just his way of saying the place is a disaster area,” Lori added. “No surprises there.”
She held up a hand before either Ruth or I could speak and plunged on.
“Goddin says that the Sasquatch possibly resulted from some division in the homonid line, which evolved separately from humans. He speculates that they are ‘more intelligent than apes ...
and apes can be very intelligent. If it does exist, then it is a very, very important biological and anthropological discovery.’”
Lori laid the paper down and sipped some of her beer. “So,” she said as she set the glass back down precisely in its ring of condensation on the table. “What do you think?”
“Think about what?” Ruth asked.
Lori tapped the newspaper. “Of this.” At our blank looks, she added, “It’s something we can do this weekend. We can go hunting for Bigfoot in Upper Foxville.”
I could tell from Ruth’s expression that the idea had about as much appeal for her as it did for me.
Spend the weekend crawling about the rubble of Upper Foxville and risk getting jumped by some junkie or hobo? No thanks.
Lori’s studied Shotokan karate and could probably have held her own against Bruce Lee, but Ruth and I were just a couple of Crowsea punkettes, about as useful in a confrontation as a handful of wet noodles. And going into Upper Foxville to chase down some big muchacho who’d been mistaken for a Sasquatch was not my idea of fun. I’m way too young for suicide.
“Hunting?” I said. “With what?”
Lori pulled a small Instamatic from her purse. “With this, LaDonna. What else?”
I lifted my brows and looked to Ruth for help, but she was too busy laughing at the look on my face.
Right, I thought. Goodbye, Rob Lowe—it could’ve been mucho primo. Instead I’m going on a gaza de grillos with Crowsea’s resident madwomen. Who said a weekend had to be boring?
3
I do a lot of thinking about decisions—not so much trying to make up my mind about something as just wondering, eque si? Like if I hadn’t decided to skip school that day with my brother Pipo and taken El Sub to the Pier, then I’d never have met Ruth. Ruth introduced me to Lori and Lori introduced me to more trouble than I could ever have gotten into on my own.
Not that I was a Little Miss Innocent before I met Lori. I looked like the kind of muchacha that your mother warned you not to hang around with. I liked my black jeans tight and my leather skirt short, but I wasn’t a puts or anything. It was just for fun. The kind of trouble I got into was for staying out too late, or skipping school, or getting caught having a cigarette with the other girls behind the gym, or coming home with the smell of beer on my breath.
Little troubles. Ordinary ones.
The kind of trouble I got into with Lori was always mucho weird. Like the time we went looking for pirate treasure in the storm sewers under the Beaches—the ritzy area where Lori’s parents lived before they got divorced. We were down there for hours, all dressed up in her father’s spelunking gear, and just about drowned when it started to rain and the sewers filled up. Needless to say, her papa was not pleased at the mess we made of his gear.
And then there was the time that we hid in the washrooms at the Watley’s Department Store downtown and spent the whole night trying on dresses, rearranging the mannequins, eating chocolates from the candy department .... Ifit had been just me on my own—coming from the barrios and all—I’d’ve ended up in jail. But being with Lori, her papa bailed us out and paid for the chocolates and one broken mannequin. We didn’t do much for the rest ofthat summer except for gardening and odd jobs until we’d worked off what we owed him.
No muy loco? Verdad, we were only thirteen, and it was just the start. But that’s all in the past. I’m grown up now—just turned twentyone last week. Been on my own for four years, working steady. But I still wonder sometimes.
About decisions.
How different everything might have been if I hadn’t done this, or if I had done that.
I’ve never been to Poland. I wonder what it’s like.
4
We’ll e’ll set it up like a scavenger hunt,” Lori said. She paused as the waitress brought another round—Heinekin for Lori, Miller Lites for Ruth and I—then leaned forward, elbows on the table, the palms of her hands cupping her chin. “With a prize and everything.”
“What kind of a prize?” Ruth wanted to know.
“Losers take the winner out for dinner to the restaurant of her choice.”
“Hold everything,” I said. “Are you saying we each go out by ourselves to try to snap a shot of this thing?”
I had visions of the three of us in Upper Foxville, each of us wandering along our own street, the deserted tenements on all sides, the only company being the bums, junkies and cabrones that hung out there.
“I don’t want to end up as just another statistic,” I said.
“Oh, come on. We’re around there all the time, hitting the clubs. When’s the last time you heard of any trouble?”
“Give me the paper and I’ll tell you,” I said, reaching for the Journal.
“You want to go at night?” Ruth asked.
“We go whenever we choose,” Lori replied. “The first one with a genuine picture wins.”
“I can just see the three of us disappearing in there,” I said. “‘The lost women of Foxville “
“Beats being remembered as loose women,” Lori said. “We’d be just another urban legend.”
Ruth nodded. “Like in one of Christy Riddell’s stories.”
I shook my head. “No thanks. He makes the unreal too real. Anyway, I was thinking more of that Brunvand guy with his choking Doberman and Mexican pets.”
“Those are all just stories,” Lori said, trying to sound like Christopher Lee. She came off like a bad Elvira. “This could be real.”
“Do you really believe that?” I asked.
“No. But I think it’ll be a bit of fun. Are you scared?”
“I’m sane, aren’t I? Of course I’m scared.”
“Oh, poop.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m not up for it.”
I wondered if it wasn’t too late to have my head examined. Did the hospital handle that kind of thing in their emergency ward?
“Good for you, LaDonna,” Lori was saying. “What about you, Ruth?”
“Not at night.”
“We’ll get the jump on you.”
“Not at night,” she repeated.
“Not at night,” I agreed.
Lori’s eyes had that mad little gleam in them that let me know that we’d been had again. She’d never planned on going at night either.
“A toast,” she said, raising her beer. “May the best woman win.”
We clinked our mugs against each other’s and made plans for the night while we finished our beer. I don’t think anyone in the restaurant was sorry to see us go when we finally left. First up was the early show at the Oxford (you didn’t really think I’d stand you up, did you, Rob?), then the last couple of sets at the Zorb, where the Fat Man Blues Band was playing, because Ruth was crazy about their bass player and Lori and I liked to egg her on.
5
By now you’re probably thinking that we’re just a bunch of airheads, out for laughs and not concerned with anything important. Well, it isn’t true. I think about things all the time. Like how hanging around with Anglos so much has got me to the point where half the time I sound like one myself. I can hardly speak to my grandmother these days. I don’t even think in Spanish anymore and it bothers me.
It’s only in the barrio that I still speak it, but I don’t go there much—just to visit the family on birthdays and holidays. I worked hard to get out, but sometimes when I’m in my apartment on Lee Street in Crowsea, sitting in the windowseat and looking out at the park, I wonder why. I’ve got a nice place there, a decent job, some good friends. But I don’t have any roots. There’s nothing connecting me to this part of the city.
I could vanish overnight (disappear in Upper Foxville on a caza de grillos), and it wouldn’t cause much more than a ripple. Back home, the abuelas are still talking about how Donita’s youngest girl moved to Crowsea and when was she going to settle down?
I don’t really know anybody I can talk to about this kind of thing. Neither my Anglo friends nor my own people would understand. But I think about it. Not a lot, but I think about it. And about decisions.
About all kinds of things.
Ruth says I think too much.
Lori just wonders why I’m always trying to explain Poland. You’d think I was her mother or something.
6
Saturday morning, bright and early, and only a little hungover, we got off the Yoors Street subway and followed the stairs up from the underground station to where they spat us out on the corner of Gracie Street and Yoors. Gracie Street’s the frontera betwe
en Upper Foxville and Foxville proper. South of Gracie it’s all lowrent apartment buildings and tenements, shabby old viviendas that manage to hang on to an old world feel, mostly because it’s still families living here, just like it’s been for a hundred years.
The people take care of their neighborhood, no differently than their parents did before them.
North of Gracie a bunch of developers got together and planned to give the area a new facelift. I’ve seen the plans—condominiums, shopping malls, parks. Basically what they wanted to do was shove a high class suburb into the middle of the city. Only what happened was their backers pulled out while they were in the middle of leveling about a square mile of city blocks, so now the whole area’s just a mess of empty buildings and rubblestrewn lots.
It’s creepy, looking out on it from Gracie Street. It’s like standing on the line of a map that divides civilization from noman’sland. You almost expect some graffiti to say, “Here there be dragons.”
And maybe they wouldn’t be so far off. Because you can find dragons in Upper Foxville—the muy malo kind that ride choppeddown Harleys. The Devil’s Dragon. Bikers making deals with their junkies.
I think I’d prefer the kind that breathe fire.
I don’t like the open spaces of rubble in Upper Foxville. My true self—the way I see me—is like an alley cat, crouching for shelter under a car, watching the world go by. I’m comfortable in Crowsea’s narrow streets and alleyways. They’re like the barrio where I got my street smarts. It’s easy to duck away from trouble, to get lost in the shadows. To hang out and watch, but not be seen. Out there, in those desolate blocks north of Gracie, there’s no place to hide, and too many places—all at the same time.
If that kind of thing bothered Lori, she sure wasn’t showing it. She was all decked out in fatigues, hiking boots and a khakicolored shoulderbag like she was in the Army Reserves and going out on maneuvers or something. Ruth was almost as bad, only she went to the other extreme. She was wearing baggy white cotton pants with a puffed sleeve blouse and a trendy vest, lowheeled sandals and a matching purse.
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