Angela Sloan

by James Whorton

  I tried turning it on—nothing.

  I drove till I found a dumpster half out of sight behind a veterinarian’s office. I pitched in the remains of my beloved red shortwave set. I also tossed the bag of cigarette butts and a stack of tourist brochures that I had gathered, idiotically, from a rack at Lexington Market. Time to pitch it all. Idaho was our code word meaning diverge and wait for instructions. He had told it to me on that bench in Lafayette Square, back on that Sunday when we left D.C.—the Sunday after the arrests at the Watergate. Father’s Day, as a matter of fact. You can check the calendar. Idaho meant bug out, and that he said it in our code was proof that he knew what he was saying.

  Could it be, really, that Henry had placed a bug in our room? The thought was ridiculous, but then in my mind the picture of him shifted, and I found I could imagine it. He’d been an easy recruitment for me. Too easy, perhaps. If a child could recruit him, why not the FBI?

  For some reason I was dropping the brochures into the dumpster piece by piece, looking over them again—one for the Poe House, one for Pimlico, where I’d intended to visit. A brown envelope was in the stack, and inside the brown envelope were fourteen stiff hundred-dollar bills.

  A light rain started. I drove a long, narrow street that was lined with two- and three-story rowhouses. Each house had its stack of front steps and its square of yard only big enough to hold two lawn chairs or a planter made out of a tire. I parked and locked the Scamp’s doors.

  The city bus stopped at the corner. A man pushed himself up the street in a wheelchair. Someone called hello to him.

  Porch lights were lit, and people sat out on their steps. Windows flickered blue where television sets were on. Now and then came a laugh, a shout, or a siren. No one seemed to notice me. It was dark inside the Scamp, and I was small. Before I could sleep I seemed to sit awake on the white vinyl seat for half the night, only looking out the windows of the Scamp and thinking, thinking, thinking.

  28

  When I woke the air in the Scamp was stale. The windows were fogged, and my mouth and eyes were gummy. I wiped the windshield with my hand. The streetlights were still on, and the sky was a murky, sunless blue. I found an open donut shop and scrubbed my face and neck in the bathroom. The girl in the mirror appeared childish and lost, an urchin whose stringy blond locks you wouldn’t like to touch.

  I ate a donut, and it was good. Let me say that again. I like a plain cake donut, no glaze, no sprinkles. Other things went out of my head while I ate this donut. The outside was crisp and toasty with a tallowy aroma and hints of nutmeg. The yellow interior was soft and dense. I stood in line for a second one and enjoyed it almost as much. The name of this shop was Mister Donut.

  In the middle of eating my second donut an observation came that struck me as so important, I almost wrote it down. I didn’t, for security reasons, but I have kept it nearby in my mind. The observation was that, the night before, in the Scamp, I had nearly despaired. I had wanted to ball up and hide, a useless feeling from which nothing good can ever come. And I’d made a bad decision, sleeping in the car on a neighborhood street. Any police officer knocking on the glass could have ruined everything for me and Ray. It was time for me to rise to the business at hand.

  I needed to get out of Baltimore. Philadelphia was not a far drive. I also needed to make a call to the classified department at the Sarasota offices of the World News Digest. I would put in a signal to Ray to tell him that I was safe and awaiting instructions.

  I went into the glove compartment for a map and pulled out a slip of paper I didn’t recognize. It was a carbon from a restaurant ticket. The figure $200 was on there twice in ballpoint. That didn’t sound like any meal that Ray or I would have ordered. There were other pen scratches I couldn’t read. It was Chinese: the receipt for our Tennessee driver’s licenses. They were to have been ready today. We had forgotten.

  I had two donuts in me now and intended to do the smart thing, as soon as I figured out what that was. Here was my first thought: a driver’s license would be awfully useful to me. It was already half paid for, and also, the licenses had our pictures on them. I remembered those melancholy faces spread out on the desktop, and I did not want ours to be among them.

  Here was the other side of it. Idaho meant bug out, not leave and come back the next morning. Why have a plan if you’re not going to follow it?

  I thought it over for a long time.

  A black bird walked on its stick legs in the Mister Donut parking lot. Three cars arrived together, and the bird jumped up and shot away. The day was beginning. The people who had slept in beds were coming out for breakfast and to see what was going on. It was time for me to move, time to grow up, time to do the next thing.

  29

  I made my call to Sarasota, then went to Sears and Roebuck. I was there when they unlocked the doors. In the dressing room I pulled on a set of magenta Toughskins with stiff reinforcing patches on the insides of the knees. I added a plaid shirt, and my hair went up in a golf cap with a medallion on the peak. It was that or a football helmet.

  I drove to the alley behind Lucky Bus Tour. Spicy smoke crept out the rear door of the Golden Monkey Restaurant, along with clatters and shouts. The door was propped open with a chair. I’d been watching for two minutes, waiting for I don’t know what, when the simpleminded Chinese girl hauled a bucket out and eyed me dully.

  She emptied her bucket of kitchen scraps into the garbage. Idly I wondered what she could possibly be throwing out. It was my understanding that the Chinese chefs used everything, down to and including the claws.

  When she’d gone I walked the twenty steps to the rear door of Lucky Bus Tour. My knock was answered by the man with the tassel beard. I had interrupted his lunch. He held the door open with the toe of his slipper and continued slurping noodles while he peered at me. I showed the receipt, then removed the golf cap. He let me in.

  “Two hundred dollars,” he said.

  “Let’s see what you’ve done.”

  He brought two cards from the desk drawer. The picture of Ray gave me pause. I didn’t dwell on it just then, however.

  “So, you are nineteen,” he said. “If you ever need some work, let me know. Great pay, short hours.”

  “I will need that receipt back plus the original,” I said.

  “What original?”

  I was reminding him how carbons work when a bell dinged up front, followed by a shout in Chinese. I followed him up the corridor. Another Chinese man grabbed his arm. Out in the street, through the glass, I saw the simpleminded girl run past silently, black braids flying.

  The two men hadn’t seen her. They exited to the left, leaving me by myself.

  I went back and opened the top drawer of the desk. The original of my receipt was there on top of the pad. Simple enough. I tore it out, the carbon paper as well, and folded them in my pocket. I couldn’t help noticing half a dozen U.S. passports also in the drawer. One had belonged to a woman born in 1956. I was tempted to help myself to it but didn’t. It would be stealing. A person need not become a criminal, just because she is being hunted by the FBI. I laid two hundreds in the drawer, pushed my hair up into the cap again, and went out the way I’d come in.

  Because the alley was one-way, I had to go out the other end and wound up driving the Scamp back in front of the Golden Monkey Restaurant. It appeared the whole restaurant had emptied into the sidewalk and street. At the center of the commotion Mr. Wang, the cauliflower-cheeked man, held his hand up wrapped in a towel. The front of his shirt had a goodly amount of blood on it, I mean about the amount you would get from a few long squirts of a squeeze-type mustard container. Not a life-ending amount of blood, but more than you want to see. He was crying. His gray-haired mother darted about inside the crowd, brandishing a long cleaver and shrieking at a birdlike pitch. The cleaver blade was a dark, heavy-looking chunk of steel that would have been well suited for severing pigs’ joints or even taking down a small tree. I eased the Scamp by. Mother Wang met my e
yes and seemed to tilt the blade at me.

  I had put two blocks behind me before I looked again at the picture on Ray’s license. I was distressed because he looked awful in it. He hadn’t shaved, and that softness on his jaw which I’d hardly noticed in person made him appear haggard in the small portrait. Worse than haggard. His hair was a fringe across his forehead, and his neck wasn’t straight. The gaze coming out from under the eyebrows was wary and dark.

  I had watched him stand for that picture, but I hadn’t really seen him. He’d been sick for some time, and now he was sick and alone.

  That was a low moment, when I was looking at his picture in the Scamp.

  I had to remind myself that I was driving. I checked my hands on the wheel—ten and two—and I checked my speed. I raised my hand to the rearview mirror to adjust it. There in the back seat, looking back at me in the mirror, was the simpleminded Chinese girl.

  30

  I about jumped out of my Toughskins. I whipped the Scamp to the curb. There she was, skinny as a pup and looking very worried, but stationary.

  “Get out, Chinese,” I said.

  She twisted to look out the back window.

  “Out of my car now!” I said.

  She slid down in the seat, then farther down, so I couldn’t see her.

  I went around to the back passenger door. The slow girl was knotted up on the floor, showing only her backside and the red rubber soles of her shoes. I got my hands around one hard brown ankle, but I might as well have been trying to pull a boxwood shrub out of the ground.

  A lady police officer came to stand beside me. “Is something the matter here?” she said.

  “Of course not.”

  “You are parked in front of my fire hydrant.”

  It was true. I had even banged my leg on her fire hydrant while pulling the Chinese girl’s ankle.

  “I’ll move the car,” I said.

  “You’ll move it after I write you a ticket.” The lady police officer flipped open her pad and clicked a pen.

  “Please don’t.”

  “Sorry, Charlie.” She took a step backward and sideways to see the tag.

  That wouldn’t do. I snatched the pen from her fingers and threw it as hard as I could down the sidewalk.

  She hadn’t expected that. Quickly I got behind the wheel of the Scamp again. I snatched it into drive and kicked the accelerator, and we shot through a red light, just missing a Honda motorcycle.

  I had memorized my route out of town. The farther this Chinese girl rode with me, however, the farther I would be traceable. The thing to do was to pin five dollars to her shirt and call her a cab, if I could only extract her from the back seat.

  I saw her face in the mirror again. She wasn’t a kid. She might have been twenty-five, though it was hard to tell. “Why are you in my car?” I asked.

  “Wang mother try to keyhole me,” she said.

  The way she spoke was strangely effortful, as though the words were objects to be removed from her mouth. “I don’t know what that means,” I said.

  “You don’t know what keyhole somebody mean? Chop somebody with cleaver knife so she will die?” She made a slashing gesture.

  In the mirror I studied her hard, dark eyes. I got what she was saying now, and I got something else, too. She wasn’t simpleminded.

  31

  I interrogated her as follows.

  ME: Why did Wang’s mother want to kill you?

  CHINESE: Because I have chop Wang finger.

  ME: Why have you chopped Wang’s finger?

  CHINESE: I have chop vegetable. [She pronounced the word with its full four syllables: vedge uh tuh bow.] He have grope and fondle.

  ME: Fondling you?

  CHINESE: Yes!

  ME: You like Wang?

  CHINESE: Like?

  ME: [I made a two-handed signal.] You and Wang.

  CHINESE: No! Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Wang? [She said a hundred words in her own language.]

  ME: So when he groped you, you chopped his finger off?

  CHINESE: No, I ignore and keep on chop.

  ME: You’re saying it was an accident, then.

  CHINESE: Accident. Mother come in, Wang jump, I am chop his finger!

  ME: Okay. Very good! Now the police will be after you and me both.

  CHINESE: Nope. No police. Mother will keyhole!

  ME: Where do you want me to drop you?

  CHINESE: Drop me?

  ME: Have you got some family in town?

  CHINESE: In Taiwan.

  ME: Got your passport?

  CHINESE: Wang have passport.

  ME: In that case you have no choice but to go back to Wang. You can’t do anything without your passport.

  CHINESE: Where is you father?

  ME: What do you know about my father?

  CHINESE: Maybe you father need ID like me.

  ME: Get out of my car. No. Don’t get out. Why did you say that?

  CHINESE: Maybe, I think Wang have make false ID for you.

  ME: What do you mean, maybe you think?

  CHINESE: I have see these ID card. You are too small to drive. How old?

  ME: Nineteen.

  CHINESE: I think fourteen, maybe less. You have too small chin. That will still grow some more. You have little neck. Mm. Tell me, where is you father?

  ME: My father got those ID cards as a joke, that’s all. A practical joke.

  CHINESE: What is “practical joke”?

  ME: That’s a gag you pull around the office. Little tricks you play on your friends.

  CHINESE: Trick you friends, good idea. Why will you need false card too?

  ME: I’m part of the joke.

  CHINESE: Where are you going to right now?

  ME: Philadelphia. Look here. I will give you fifty dollars if you will get out of my car and don’t tell a soul that you’ve seen me.

  CHINESE: Fifty? Your father has paid four hundred dollar to play some funny joke on his friends.

  ME: I will give you fifty.

  She gave a small, quick nod. I pulled a bill from the brown envelope.

  ME: Have you got change for a hundred?

  CHINESE: No.

  ME: I will give you one hundred, then. You are a cunning Chinese, aren’t you? Now you’ve got to forget everything we’ve talked about.

  CHINESE: It never make sense anyway.

  I looked her over good. She had on plain black slacks, the black cloth slippers with red rubber soles, and a white double-knit top with long points on the collar. There was a grease spot on the blouse, below her ribs. I have already mentioned that her coarse black hair was in two tight braids.

  ME: Goodbye.

  CHINESE: Only, I think you should drop me in Philadelphia.

  ME: Are you serious?

  CHINESE: Mm.

  ME: What are you going to do in Philadelphia?

  CHINESE: You don’t have to think about it.

  ME: I’m not a taxi service. You’ve got money—you can take the train to Philadelphia. Or New York. They’ve got a great big Chinatown full of your people.

  CHINESE: Can’t go to Chinatown. Wang will find me there, somebody will send me back to Baltimore, and Wang mother will have me keyhole or break leg, chop off finger, something. Maybe your funny father need a housekeeper.

  ME: He won’t like your references.

  32

  I drove out the north edge of Baltimore into Harford County, spinning a new cover story as I went. To rule out any notion that Ray might take her in on charity, as the Wangs had done, I described a prisonlike boarding school to which I must return this very afternoon. The girl bunking over me had a strong odor. I hardly knew what I would say until I heard myself say it. It is exactly how one should never build a cover.

  The Chinese asked me to describe the girl’s smell further.

  “Like Comet,” I said. “She has purple bags under both eyes, too.”

  “What is Comet?”

  “A powder for cleaning sinks.”

&
nbsp; The Chinese considered. “She might have some parasite. Could be anything.”

  I laid on some business about what a miserable life it was, shut up in a dormitory with all the other odd girls, mostly petty thieves, who’d been sent away from their homes.

  “You should not complain. Father spend all that money to have you educate.”

  “School’s for suckers,” I blathered.

  “You are a bad daughter.”

  It stung me! That’s a queer side effect of putting some energy into your lie.

  We had come some miles out of the city when the Chinese blurted, “Stop car.” She got out and walked toward some trees, then doubled over, carsick. She came back and knelt at the window. I asked her was she done.

  “Done throw up,” she said.

  I passed her a box of Chiclets. She stared at a blue one on her wrinkled palm until I told her to put it in her mouth.

  She did so, then tipped her head to one side, like a highly intelligent dog will do. She chewed the blue Chiclet twice, then spun away to spit it where the beer and Sprite cans, potato chip bags, and other trash lay along the greasy, gravelly edge of the road. She stood awhile with her shoulders curved, fingertips pressed to the top of her nose. Then she got back into the Scamp.

  “Take me someplace that have cigarette,” she said.

  That was easy. From the glove compartment I gave her a nearly full pack of Raleighs with a matchbook tucked down under the cellophane. To light the match she held it stationary and struck the book against it, instead of the reverse, as every other person I have ever seen strike a match has done.

  “I will stay here,” she said. She got out of the car.

  Was it that easy? I wished I had thought to ply her with cigarettes earlier. “I don’t mind driving you to a bus station,” I said.

  She wagged her thumb.

  “Fine,” I said. Hitchhiking is risky for most girls, but in light of Wang’s finger I was more concerned for whoever picked her up.

  I tossed the pack of Raleighs out the window to her. It flipped through the air until she clapped her small, neat hands together on it.