Finn

by Matthew Olshan

  Silvia screamed “No!” from behind Clark’s back. Suddenly, he was doubled over, and then he was on the ground, his hands jammed between his thighs. Silvia had kicked him right in the nads. She did it again when he was on the ground. His butt was up in the air. She just took aim and kicked him from behind. She must have hit home, because Clark started to throw up.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said. I stood over Clark, shaking. I still wanted to do something to him. The next thing I knew, I was crumpling up a twenty dollar bill and shoving it in his pukey mouth. I hoped he’d choke on it.

  When Silvia and I were safely outside, I jammed the door with the crowbar. Silvia had second thoughts about that. “What if there’s a fire?” she said. I said I hoped there would be, but then I remembered James, so I loosened the crowbar and told Silvia that they could get out in an emergency, even though I secretly doubted it. I could still hear Clark moaning and throwing up. It was sweet.

  As it turns out, we didn’t have to worry about James at all. We hadn’t gone fifty feet when he suddenly appeared.

  “Where’d you come from?” I said.

  “The hatch,” he said. “I fit right through.”

  I didn’t say anything else to James. I was still mad at him for switching sides, but I didn’t shoo him off, either. He followed Silvia and me out of the railroad yard, keeping a respectful distance. He understood he wasn’t completely welcome.

  We found a hole in the fence by the elevated highway. Before we climbed through, I stopped and took one last look at the train yard. From here, it was obvious that the California Pacific boxcars weren’t going anywhere. They were set apart from the active tracks, all by themselves on a weed-choked stretch of rail.

  We stopped for Silvia to catch her breath. She asked me why I had given Clark the money.

  “Because my mouth was too dry to spit,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sylvia was breathing in shallow gulps like a goldfish, pressing her fingers to her chest, as if her weak lungs needed some outside help. I gave her some extra time to catch her breath. “Men are pigs,” I said.

  Silvia shook her head. “Not all of them. You’ll see.”

  “Shh. Don’t talk. Just breathe,” were the words I said, but what I was really doing was apologizing for what I had put her through. After everything that had happened, she was comforting me! She could be so exasperating.

  I pulled away from her when James walked up. He didn’t have any right to see Silvia and me being so close.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “I know a place to crash,” he said.

  “I thought you lived on the trains.”

  “I was born here,” he said. “This my city.”

  Silvia looked ready to collapse. I didn’t have any better ideas, so we fell in behind James. He made us wait while he found himself a walking stick, a long piece of iron rod. He did a little pole vault with it as a test. “Come on,” he said. “It’s a ways away.”

  James led us deep into the shadows under the elevated highway as night fell. Silvia and I trudged behind him, trying to cheer each other up, but the conversation always seemed to come back to men.

  Even if it was an illusion, I felt safer under the highway. It was like walking under the belly of a long white beast asleep on its feet. The traffic overhead made a constant rough song, which I found soothing. Our path was as wide as a runway, with angled banks like a river. James called it a gutter. He said it was full of water after a big rain. A gutter was as good a name for it as any.

  James looked so small and solemn with his walking stick, like a pygmy Moses. The iron stick rang out when it hit the ground. I stayed behind with Silvia, helping her along, letting her rest her cheek on my shoulder whenever she needed to. James was always ahead. He slowed down when we fell too far behind, but he was always pushing us to move on—not with words, but with impatient taps of his rod.

  After—what, a mile? Who could tell when the concrete scenery was always identical?—but after a long time, we started passing cavernous metal pipes aimed downward at us from the banks like a firing squad. The first pipes were dry, but then we came across some that gave out a trickle of black water. Soon the puddles started. The farther we went, the larger they got, until there was so much water that we had to start walking on the angled banks. I learned how hard it is to walk at an angle. I could barely imagine what Silvia must have felt like, with the gravity working against her big belly.

  We finally hit a flat stretch, which made it easier on the ankles but slowed us down on account of all the bunched-up rusted fences, the abandoned cars, and the rest of the dangerous junk we had to climb around. The water flowing under the highway had become a real stream, with rocks and eddies and a nice gurgle.

  At a certain point, the stream became a full-blown river—sluggish, swollen with garbage, dotted with tires and dead fish, but a river, nonetheless. And all of it under the highway, matching it curve for curve. I’d been on that highway a million times and never known about the river below.

  I asked James how much farther—more for Silvia’s sake than mine. She was stopping every twenty yards to bend forward and rest her hands on her thighs. Her shoulders were drooping. She had a sour expression on her face, as if she’d been drinking from the brackish puddles. James didn’t have anything to say. I started to worry that he had lied about being a native of this city. What if he was lost?

  But he didn’t walk like a lost person. He went in a more or less straight line, climbing on top of anything in the way, banging the roofs of torched cars with his staff, as if to drive out the ghosts of burnt drivers. Or he’d run along with a wheel-stuck grocery cart, coast a few feet before the cart tumbled, and jump clear of the wreck with a whoop, always landing on his feet.

  Silvia was reaching her limit. James looked at her with disgust. He said there was a place up ahead to rest and get some water. Then he marched off at full speed and we lost sight of him for almost half an hour.

  We would have walked right past him if he hadn’t hissed at us— “Psst!”—and banged his staff. We were under an unlit section of highway, which meant that none of the usual foggy yellow light slanted down through the guardrails. It was almost pitch black. The river was high here. We were working our way along the busted-up foundation of some old brick building. I knew that because I kept bashing my toes into loose bricks. I walked ahead of Silvia, clearing the path like a soldier in a minefield.

  James kept tapping, guiding us across the old foundation. There were tall weeds everywhere. Silvia found a tick on the back of my neck. She pinched it with her fingernails and flicked it away.

  The air was fresher here. We were finally on higher ground than the expressway with its red and white streaming cars. There was a lovely splashing sound, but I was immediately skeptical, on account of all the filthy water we had seen that night. James was standing waist deep in a pool of frothy water, splashing around under—a waterfall?

  “Come on in,” he said. “Water’s nice.” I didn’t go in just yet. First I helped Silvia lie down on an old stone wall next to the water, easing her through her long series of positions, from sitting to leaning sideways, to lowering herself on her side, to rolling on her back. Her eyes fell shut along the way, like a sleeping doll’s. She made an involuntary grunt when her legs stretched out.

  “That’s good,” she said, and in seconds she was snoring. I wasn’t ready to get in the water yet, so I fussed with Silvia for a while, propping her head up off the stone with my shirt, her knees with my bunched-up pants. I dipped my hand in the water and brushed her forehead and cheeks with my fingers, as if I was painting sleep on her face. I did it more for me than for her, I suppose. It made a nice quiet moment.

  Then I was ready. I took off everything else.

  “Hey. You’re naked,” James said, but he didn’t put much energy into teasing me, and I was certainly beyond caring.

  “So call the President,” I said, and got in the water. James
moved out from under the waterfall so I could stand there for a while under its cleansing fists and just let it pound me. I didn’t even care if the water was dirty, it felt so good.

  When I was done, I moved off to the shallows, and sat there on a waterworn rock, enjoying the feeling of resting my palms on the wavy surface, as if my hands were waterbugs, the kind with the long skinny legs that never sink. It reminded me of a pool my father took me to one summer, when we lived in an oven of an apartment in the South. The pool itself was nothing—the usual bright blue hole—but I loved walking into the water on shallow rounded steps. There was a nice chrome handrail you could slide down, starting out above the water in the hot summer air and then slipping downwards, bit by bit, under the agitated surface. I used to play on those steps for hours. My father thought I was afraid of the deeper water. I let him think that, because it made him more attentive, but I actually liked playing on the steps much more than just swimming with the other kids.

  Even here, with my butt on this bare rock, with the cold city water splashing down from above, so unlike that Southern pool, I liked the shallows, that nice feeling of half in, half out. Sitting there gave me a chance to look around. The crumbly walls of the ruin were all different stones, all irregular. They looked really old, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know anything about buildings, except what Miss Bellows had explained about the ancient Romans at the beginning of the year— how they knew how to cut stones and build everything with them. But the Romans never made it to America. I think the Americans just used whatever stones were lying around.

  “What is this place?” I said.

  “Meadow mill,” James said. “It’s old.” He was sitting in the shallows, too, but keeping a distance. He didn’t look at me, I guess out of respect for my being naked. I liked that. I felt clean and powerful again, and I wanted to talk to someone, even if it was James.

  “How’d you find it?” I said.

  “Aunt used to take me.”

  Silvia sighed and shifted on the wall. For a second, I thought she was going to roll off, but even sleeping people have a sense of limits. Her arm dangled over the edge, but that was it.

  “Did you grow up around here?” I said. James pursed his lips. I could tell he didn’t want to talk, but I didn’t care.

  “Aunt had me summers,” he said.

  “My father died when I was your age,” I said. James suddenly got all tense.

  “My father ain’t dead. He just don’t want me. Mother neither,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said. I had assumed his parents were dead.

  “Ain’t your fault,” James said, dipping his head under the water. He came up with his cheeks full. He made a tiny “o” with his lips and spat an arched stream. “Pooty good,” he said, when he was all out of water.

  “Do you still have your tonsils?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I got ’em.”

  “My Dad had his, too. He got a sore throat one time. His fever came and went, but it got too high at night. He wanted to go to the doctor. My Mom wouldn’t let him. She said it cost too much.”

  “Sore throat? No big deal,” James said.

  “Yeah. By the time they took him to the hospital, the bacteria in his throat had got to his heart. He was in the hospital for a while. Then he died,” I said. I hadn’t said those words to anyone, ever, but they came easy here.

  “Just like that?” James said. I nodded. “Damn,” he said.

  “But I got to say goodbye,” I said. “Even if he didn’t know it was me.”

  “There you go,” James said. “That’s something.”

  “It was stupid.”

  “What your Moms say? After.”

  I had to think about that. The whole funeral was a blur. So was the party afterwards, with everybody crammed into our apartment— how my grandmother had complained about the plastic cups and the white bread and the cold cuts, about their being cheap and low class, but everyone knew she wasn’t talking about the food. That whole time, from the hospital to when we moved away, was only about two or three weeks, but I remember the feeling of living completely outside myself, having to be on constant display, and every night being so exhausted. Some nights I slept on the floor.

  “I guess she sort of blames me,” I said, but James’s head was back underwater. I figured it was just as well. When James surfaced, I stayed quiet. I watched him be a fountain again. He didn’t seem to mind that I never answered his question. He hadn’t really wanted to talk in the first place.

  After a while longer in the water, we were both shivering. It was time to go. James was too embarrassed to take off his clothes to wring them out, so all he could do was bunch up the edges and squeeze them. I tried to wake Silvia up, but she didn’t budge, so I just worked my clothes out from under her. I dried myself off with my pants, which wasn’t very pleasant, but at least my shirt was mostly dry when I put it on. My super short hair dried in no time.

  Things seemed more normal with my clothes on. I was suddenly annoyed with James for dragging us all over the city in the middle of the night.

  “Where the hell are we going?” I demanded.

  “It’s close,” James said. “Just chill.” He went back down to the river. Silvia was still lying on the wall, groggy, wiping her eyes and saying, “Just leave me for a while, Chica. I have to get some rest.” I pulled her up. She was sitting on the wall like Humpty Dumpty when James came back.

  “I found a sweet ride,” James said. We followed him down to the river. He had found an abandoned rowboat. I didn’t care how bad it looked. The thought of not having to walk, of just drifting, was wonderful.

  “I can’t believe this piece of crap,” I said, but we were already helping Silvia in, James on one side of her, me on the other. We put her on the wide seat towards the back of the boat. Then James and I pushed the boat mostly into the river. It left a big groove in the dirt.

  I climbed in and sat on the floor in front of Silvia. James gave the boat a final shove and jumped in. It floated, but sat very low. Its edges were only a few inches above the water. “Are we sure about this?” I asked. James shrugged.

  “She weighs a lot,” he said.

  “You’re too nice,” Silvia said. Apparently, she wasn’t too sleepy to be sarcastic. I leaned back against her legs. She rubbed my head as if I was a good luck charm. “Quit it,” I said, even though I liked the feel.

  There weren’t any oars, so James used his iron rod. He pushed us away from the bank. As soon as we got underway, a puddle formed in the bottom of the boat and soaked the seat of my pants. “This thing’s leaking,” I said. James acted as if it was no big deal, but Silvia got very anxious. I guessed she was thinking of her trip across the river into America, and the way those girls had disappeared.

  “The water’s only two foot deep,” James said scornfully.

  “How’s the leak?” Silvia asked. I lied and said it had stopped.

  It really was another world in that boat. Floating down the middle of the river gave me the feeling that nothing could touch us. The few gnarled trees on the banks reached out with their pathetic bare branches, as if they were begging for a ride. The river was its thickest here, at least a hundred feet wide, and cleaner, with lush weeds on either side. You could pretend it was the Amazon. Or the Mississippi.

  James balanced himself on the front edge of the boat, curling his athletic toes around two metal cleats. I could tell he was really enjoying himself, steering us down the river, keeping a lookout. It was serious business, but every once in a while James would do something goofy, to keep us all on our toes. He liked pretending his pole was stuck in the ground and lifting himself into the air, hanging on to the pole and wiggling his legs while the boat almost left him behind. I liked his antics. Silvia hated them.

  We floated down the river as if a wall of glass separated us from the world. The shore on either side of us was looking worse and worse. James warned us that we were going through a bad neighborhood. “They just as soon gut you as not,”
he said. I hoped that Silvia didn’t know the verb “to gut.” From the look on her face, she understood enough.

  A stinking fog rose off the water. Through it, we could begin to see signs of human life. We drifted past makeshift tents that looked as if they had been spun by insects in the nook of trees. What I thought were tree stumps or piled tires, or just heaps of garbage, turned out, often as not, to be people sleeping on the ground. You couldn’t tell if they were men or women. The junk they drew around themselves for warmth or camouflage made me think of hermit crabs.

  At one bend in the river, where the ground dipped away sharply and there were little rolling whitecaps, James poled us over to shore. It was a mistake. A man rose up from the banks—looking more like a bear than a man, on account of the layers and layers of ragged clothes—screaming at us to “pay the toll.” I thought he wanted money, and I fished in my pocket for some, but James said he was just a crazy preacher. “Money’ll just encourage him,” James said, knocking away a dead branch the preacher had thrown at us like a spear.

  Then there was another bend, and suddenly the elevated highway veered off to the right, the river to the left. The orange sky opened up over us, and I realized how reassuring it had been to have the concrete all around us, and the constant thrum of motors and tires overhead. We were suddenly exposed. The banks of the river grew more wild and overgrown with tall grass, cattails, and mulberry trees. Anything could be hiding there, and the river was narrowing again. The rowboat was running aground all the time, the leak in the bottom getting bigger with each jolt. At a certain point, it became impossible for James to move us forward. Without any discussion, we abandoned ship. The water only came up to my shins.

  It was eerie to be ankle deep in that water, with the wind ruffling the tall grass, and to see huge ugly brick apartment buildings, lying like beached battleships on the level plain, as if the little stream we had just left behind had once been a mile wide.

  “It’s the projects,” James announced. Hearing him say that gave me a little thrill. I had heard about the projects in the news, mostly in terms of drugs or shootings or building implosions. But then, after we crawled and scratched our way onto dry land, James led us towards the huge buildings. He meant to take us inside one. The windows were dark, except for the blue flicker of televisions, as if we were in the middle of an air raid and people were tuned to the news.