He drags the pieces of himself together and wraps his arms around his knees, hugging. And from somewhere back, back before the hateful words, the clenched fists, and the fast push out of a door that held safety on one side and hell on the other—before all of those things—he remembers that there used to be arms that held him. Protected him from everything, including himself. A ghost of that whispers in his own clutching arms.
Tears reach his mouth and are tasted before he knows that he is crying. Once he notices, it comes hard and fast, pushing and shoving to get out, as though it knows it has just this one chance.
He wracks and shakes.
He turned nineteen yesterday.
Cass pats his pockets as he walks to the front entrance. A tiny key lies in the folds of a pocket. It had rolled out once while he slept, and he had lost sleep and patience finding the damn thing. But he wasn’t that bad off, some had lost blood.
He later found it between the slats of his makeshift bed.
The only new thing on the building is the padlock that Cass had bought for the warehouse’s only entrance. The tiny key opened it. Cass had robbed three people to get the money together to buy what was originally a bike lock. He saw messengers, and all of them had the same one. He figured that it must be good.
Cass removes the metal pipe that he slid through the door’s mechanism to keep it shut at night. From one end of the pipe, he unloops the chain and lock and takes the key out of his pocket.
Outside in the fading sunlight, he chains it shut and slams home the lock’s struts. Cass glares up at the setting sun and walks towards a group of other men like himself who had already started a fire in an old oil drum. That’s when he hears the crying. He hasn’t heard anything that broken since four years ago when he caught one of the older bums fucking a young runaway that had been stupid enough to think fellow victims don’t prey on each other. Cass remembers the look of fear in the kid’s eyes after Cass had beaten the rapist to death. Like his life had just gone from bad to worse. Cass had walked away disgusted.
But this crying sounds older and it lacks the grunting hiccups that accompanied the other. It is coming from around the side of the warehouse.
Christina gave up trying to stand. The torrent quality that his crying had taken makes it difficult to see. Any attempt to choke it back just made it worse.
While the tears fall vertically, the memories spanned panorama. The shouting, the hitting, the words. Learning the lesson that you were an idiot and a faggot at school and then learning the same lessons at home. You were an idiot for not being able to handle geometry and you were a faggot for painting your fingernails. You wanna be a little girl? Fine. We’ll start calling you Christina at home, not Christian. You wanna be a chick, you can be a chick, fucking little faggot.
So absorbed is Christina, that he feels, rather than sees, that somebody is standing over him. Somebody large and somebody silent. Still struggling to draw an uninterrupted breath, Christina looks up into Cass’s face. He would have collapsed farther inwards if it had been possible. This isn’t like at the club or last night. He’s sober, for one. For another, at the club, he was prepared to be used. Prepared to like it.
But this is the next morning, when he’s hungover and hurting. No safe words out here. Not that he set them up for last night, but you know, it was a possibility. Not here, with this huge scary man standing up, staring down with the most beautiful and emptiest eyes Christina has ever seen on another human.
Cass isn’t sure what he’s looking at. It’s small, like a kid, but the face has some age. Slightly built like a girl and there’s makeup, but it is also clearly male. What the fuck is it doing out here? Not a safe place for anything that looked like that. Cass could remember some people who would find a way to use it.
Christina tries to stand up again, tries to at least be on his feet when whatever was going to happen next, happens. But the ankle buckles again, and his whole leg from toes to hip rattle with a painful vibrato. As Christina falls, an arm shoots out and grabs him above an elbow. Not painfully, but not gently either, and it makes pain easy to imagine. Christina looks and Cass is holding him up with one hand. He turns and guides Christina to uncluttered ground.
Having been taken out of the scattered trash and worse, Christina finds it easier to stand without help. He looks around at the blasted buildings and warehouses that surround them like broken teeth in a beaten man’s mouth. He looks down at himself, brushes the clothes that cover him. He tries to ignore the whitish stains and the rips that are new, settles the shirt more comfortably, more for a way to figure out what to do next. The silent one next to him still hasn’t fully let go of his arm, but relaxes the grip a little.
Christina cuts his eyes at Cass, unable to keep a slight flirt from his mouth corners and eyelashes. “Where is this?” His voice forced falsetto, Christina gathers the protections that life had forced upon him little by little. Now standing and confident again.
Cass just looks at him. No expression yet.
Christina casts him a withering look, frustrated. Great, he thinks. It’s Lennie from Of Mice and Men.
Christina lowers his register and answers in the voice he inherited from his parents. “Where are we?”
“Squa—squats.” Cass’s unused voice chokes on the first syllable before allowing him the pleasure of a full word.
Oh shit, thinks Christina. This is bad—first they spend the whole night rough with me, then they fucking dump me out here. Fucking assholes going for the whole experience I guess: snatch, gang rape, and dump. Then it occurs to him that maybe he was the only one enjoying a fantasy last night. He shivers and grabs around himself, shrugging all the way out of Cass’s grip, who just lets his hands fall to his sides.
“I need to go here,” Christina says, his slim hand holding what looks like a postcard.
Cass stares at the words on the card. A few of the smaller ones jump out at him, some of the ones he knows, but mostly it might be any language for all he’s concerned.
“I can’t read,” he says, with just a hint of something in there with the gravel.
“What do you mean?”
“Forgot how.”
“Ooookay.” Christina throws up his hands, placing one on a hip, wincing when a broken nail catches on the fabric. The other hand on his cheek, Christina stands, hip shot, and says: “It’s the Old Souls Halfway House.” The card is still facing the same direction toward Cass.
“I’ve never heard of it,” Cass says.
“Fuck. Well, can you tell me where I can catch a bus?”
Cass shakes his head. “We’re too far out here for that. You’re gonna have to walk.”
Christina sighs and straightens up, looks around like some species of very dramatic waterfowl, and demands: “Which way?”
Cass points vaguely.
“What are you, some kinda fuckin’ retard?”
Cass turns slowly and looks at Christina from the direction he was pointing. Nothing changes about him, but something buried deep in Christina—something that’s maybe buried deep in all of us—tucks its tail between its legs.
“No,” Cass says, and then after a moment adds: “I’m not.”
“Right. Well, I guess I’ll just start fucking walking ...” Christina says, taking exactly one step before his ankle buckles, causing him to shrill out and drop to one hand.
“What’s the matter?” Cass asks.
“What the fuck, are you blind?”
“No.”
Christina flourishes an impatient gesture at his ankle.
“My stupid ankle is totally fucked! Help me,” he demands imperiously, extending one shattered-manicure hand. Wrist cocked at exactly 45 degrees, fingers reaching. He shrieks again when Cass pulls him to his feet as though he wants to get launched into orbit, rather than simply stand up.
“Jesus Christ! What the fuck’s the matter with you?” Christina says, shaking his arm out from his shoulder.
“Nothing,” Cass says, speaking his t
ruth.
“Can you help me find the shelter? I need to get checked out. After last night.”
“What happened last night?”
“Some guys I know kept me in a van for three hours taking turns.”
“Oh.” Cass’s features wrinkle and his tone darkens.
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, sweetheart.”
Cass shakes his head. “I’m too big for that now.”
He moves closer to Christina and ducks under the injured arm that matches the ankle. Then he straightens up a bit, allowing Christina to stand and walk.
“I’m Christina.”
“Cass.” Then thinks for a minute. “But that’s a girl’s name.”
“You have antiquated gender biases.”
“What?”
“Never mind, let’s just walk.”
Cass looks around after walking for what feels like hours, but judging from the sky and light patterns, it can only have been one.
“I’m not sure if we’re going the right way,” he says.
Christina sighs and sucks his teeth in irritation. “God. I thought this was, like, your neighborhood or something?”
“It’s not anybody’s anything.”
“Yeah, well, whatever, but I think the buildings I see up ahead are familiar.”
“Then I guess you don’t need a guide.”
Christina stops and looks at him. Cass can see his fear’s fingertips in his eyes, edging up and peeking out. The boy he had saved from the rapist had the same look in his eyes. This time though, Cass is sure he’s seen as the savior and not the bigger of two wolves fighting over a scrap.
“Let’s go,” Cass says, and walks ahead, past the shaking Christina.
“What the fuck do you mean, you’re lost?” Christina shrieks.
“Just what I said.” Cass rolls his eyes, but other than that, nothing is obvious.
“I thought this was your hood or whatever!” Christina is still shouting.
“You said that already, and what did I tell you last time?”
“I don’t fucking remember! Fuck!”
“I said it wasn’t anybody’s anything. Now stop shouting. You’re gonna draw out the wolves.” Cass looks around obviously at the buildings surrounding them that appear to be empty, or at least abandoned.
Christina does a quick head twitch look around, seeing nothing but figments of imagination in the windows. But imagination shape-shifts mice to werewolves and back again.
“Hang on,” says Cass as he walks towards a pile of slag near the stairs and doorway to one of the buildings. Nervously, Christina follows, picking his way through the trash and bottles on the balls of his feet, the heels scrabbling for purchase amid the chunks of the pavement.
Cass addresses the gray, shadow-clad heap.
“Yo, you know where there’s a shelter around here?”
Christina goggles at him. “What the fuck are you doing? There’s nobody there.”
Cass ignores him and stares at the heap.
Christina turns and decides to go it alone when a voice that seems to be using barbed wire and poisonous snakes for vocal cords speaks up.
“Da journey man would ask a queschun of him dat see all, da gospel wh’a him speak, and the scripcha wh’a him lun as a buay and now remba.”
“Uhhh, yeah,” Cass answers. “What can you tell us about the place?”
The shape shifts and twists, a head rising from the amorphous rags. Its hair (that which there is) sticks straight up or hangs in grease-shellacked hunks. Both eyes are milky, but they focus on Cass. The skin is brown, wrinkled, and desiccated like a crack-addicted walnut.
“You can’na even ’magine wh’a da cost a dis here eran’ gone need dee spendin’ of.” The face pauses and the rags shift, evoking an image of a large bird caught in an oil spill that is trying to ruffle its feathers.
Christina turns and tugs on Cass’s sleeve.
“What the fuck’s he saying? Is he Jamaican or something?”
“No. And shut up,” says Cass, eyes never leaving the living heap wedged into the corner of the stoop. As if prompted, it kicks into life again like a carnival’s automated fortune teller.
“You’a al’reddy on dee pat’, keep you’a feet tru’a and you’a purpows strang. Keep you’a ’art on you’a task an’ you’a han’ on you’a blade and you be allri’. Remba wh’a I sed. Go’an whichoo. Keep tru’a.”
“What the fuck ... ?” Christina whispers as he turns to follow Cass, who is already down the street.
“He says we’re going the right way,” Cass says over one large shoulder.
The sun sinks as the terrain of empty buildings continues strange around them. The only sounds are their heartbeats in their ears, their breath passing their lips, and their footsteps. Christina has given up trying to talk to Cass. Each question was met politely, but tersely.
Ahead of them in the street, a darkness deeper than a project hallway with a blown lightbulb detaches itself from the buildings and spaces between, or seems to rise from the paving stones. As the distance closes, Christina shrinks to Cass, who seems to swell and spread the light that is lacking. As that distance is halved and then quartered, the darkness ahead gives way to individual shapes.
Men.
And in Cass and Christina’s road.
One shape takes the angle point of what becomes a wedge-shaped blockade. That shape pushes back the hood of a Raiders sweatshirt that has seen better millennia, never mind days. The exposed face is dark like ebony and smooth like something more. Its voice is loud.
“The fuck you want here?”
Cass shifts weight to both feet and makes his normally impassive face even blanker.
“Just to pass through, we’re not here for anything.”
“Cass ...” Christina whimpers.
“Man says, pass through ’n shit, like that’s just something you do. Please. Why the fuck we shouldn’t just tax your ass?”
“We don’t have anything you want.”
“What do you got?”
“I just said, nothing.”
Christina is starting to mold to Cass tighter or perhaps to hide inside him. Cass shakes a shoulder irritably, trying to dislodge him. Christina stops sticking to him, but a hand remains, holding on to Cass’s shirt sleeve.
“Nobody has nothing ... plus, I think my man back here wants a taste of that thing you got with you ... Miss Thing over there.” He gestures first over his shoulder to a huge man in a very old bubble jacket, and then over Cass’s shoulder at Christina. Christina whimpers, but slides a hand into a pocket.
“No,” Cass says.
The leader moves forwards to Cass and gets in his face. Cass holds his ground, unmoving. The leader slowly moves a hand towards Cass’s pants pocket; a ripple goes through the mass of men behind him. Cass feels a hand searching his pocket, and when it feels like the leader has his hand good and deep, he clamps his own hand down over the wrist and holds it there. The leader tries to pull away stupidly, giving Cass the delay he needs to clamp his other hand on the back of the man’s neck and hold him while he whips his head forwards. There is a crack and a soft yielding as the man staggers back, screaming and clutching his face. Cass’s hand flies under his shirt and behind his belt buckle. He lifts out something old, and steps forwards while the leader has his eyes behind his hands. Cass slams the object into his chest. The body folds, caves, and becomes slightly less so, doing a full-on marionette slump all the way down to stillness.
Cass looks at the group, and gestures at the body.
“There’s your tax.”
The mass falls upon the body, now gone from alpha to beta, ripping and twisting, clothing stripped and pockets gone through. In the resulting chaos, Cass and Christina move on while the moon rises higher and decorates the dome of the sky.
“Cass ...” Christina trembles, voice shaking.
Cass grunts by way of answer and acknowledgment.
“Is that guy ... ?”
“I
f not just then”—Cass lifts his right hand in a fist and opens it abruptly, fingers spread—“by now for certain.”
“Oh.”
They walk.
The buildings grow less whole. If the pair could run fast enough, the city might decay around them like flip-book animation. The streetlights would fade and burst one after another. And so it seems, because light flees to hide in the shadows. Finally, each walk to the next streetlight becomes like several lights at the end of several tunnels.
In the distance something shakes and moves, passing through a pool of light like a shark moving too close to the surface. A block before it reaches the pair, it reveals itself to be a long white Cadillac.
Christina starts to slink towards the side of the road, near the buildings, when Cass shoots out a hand and wraps it around his upper arm, holding him in place.
“Don’t run, they’ll only chase.”
Christina shakes, but stands. Then when Cass prompts, they both begin walking again. Little by little the car and the pair get closer, until finally it stops moving. When their feet carries them parallel with the car, the back window rolls down with a whirring noise, morphed in the silence from a whisper to a shout. Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” sprays from the stereo.
Cass stops and holds Christina close to his side, his grip the same.
“What you got there, soldier?” a voice from inside the car asks. A voice that sounds like nothing at all.
“I don’t have anything,” Cass answers, the hand holding Christina tenses as he tries halfheartedly to bolt.
“That’s not true. I think you better put it in my car.”
“What? This?” Cass asks, shaking the arm holding Christina.
“It’d make a nice addition to my stable.”
“Since when does a pimp in this place,” Cass says, his free hand making an all-encompassing gesture, “run boys?”
Christina squawks and tries to pull free.
“I run it all, soldier, now put that pretty little piece in my car.”
Blood, Guts, & Whiskey Page 11
