The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  She could see the Delaware River a few blocks away, and she headed toward it. There she sat on a bench beneath a tree and watched three men night fishing from the rocks by the shore. By the time they had gathered their rods and pails, packed them into an old truck, and left, the moon was down and the sky and the water were nearly indistinguishable. They’d left some fast-food wrappers behind, and she picked through them but found just a few pieces of soft bread and half a slice of onion. Lee had no idea what to do. Trying to steal something in what she had on would be suicide, so she returned to the bench and stayed glued to it, because getting up meant she’d need a place to go.

  A lone figure across the park was watching her. He was mostly a shadow, standing just out of the light, but she sensed him taking her in. Lee got up. When she began walking, she could feel him moving after her. She was out of breath before she even knew she’d been running, each inhale stabbing at her lungs. She slowed but didn’t look back until she’d turned a dozen corners and begun dodging pedestrians. The streets were busy here. Lee recognized the area and kept walking, afraid to leave the anonymity of the downtown crowds but afraid to stop, too. Even as the crowds thinned and the streets emptied and the blisters tore on her feet and her ankles began to scream, she kept walking. A group of drunken men spilled out of a bar, and one of them asked, “How much, little kitty?” while two of them laughed and a fourth offered Lee an embarrassed shrug. She watched them hail a cab and speed off, and she continued walking. She walked until she was hobbling.

  The man who’d been following her was gone, and Lee felt herself ease up, but with that came an almost overwhelming fatigue. With what little strength she had left, she limped to the edge of a small park, where people had laid out sheets of cardboard on the ground behind trees or bushes and were sleeping. Lee was too tired to look for a cardboard square of her own, but she found a copse of bushes with nothing occupying it but a ring of empty beer cans and a soiled magazine, and she crawled in. Shivering despite the late-night heat, feeling ants crawling across her back, the dirt against her cheek, Lee didn’t think she would sleep, but then she did. Immediately she fell into a dream in which she was floating underwater while a school of electric-blue jellyfish floated all around her, their tentacles sending electrical jolts through her skin.

  She awoke to a hand shaking her. She saw the insignia on the shoulder of his jacket first, and her body went limp, surrendering. That was it: already she’d been found and caught. She was going back. Back to solitary, probably. Then she looked up and saw that it wasn’t a cop at all, just some guy, and that the jacket was old military surplus. Really old, like World War I or something.

  “Can’t sleep here,” he said. He had a beard and dirt on his face, but he looked young, more like a guy who should be serving lattes than sleeping in a park.

  “It looked free,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

  He pointed to the circle of cans. “My sign. Everyone knows.”

  “Where can I go, then?”

  He spoke to the top of her head. “You got anything to drink?”

  Lee said nothing.

  “Any money?”

  She shook her head.

  He pursed his lips in disappointment. “Not here. Maybe you talk to the Station Master. He’ll find you something.”

  “Who’s the Station Master?”

  “Know the old Willow Steam Plant? Out in Callowhill?”

  Lee shook her head.

  “Near there. If you’re meant to find him, you’ll find him. If not, you won’t.”

  She got up, cast her eyes across the small park and its sleeping forms, and left.

  • • •

  Lee was digging through a Dumpster, pushing aside rotting vegetables and plastic bags bulging with discarded butchers’ trimmings, looking for anything edible, anything sealed, when she felt a presence behind her. Then a man’s arm wrapped around her front, and she felt the weight of him pressing her up against the Dumpster. His hand reached under her smock and began to squeeze her stomach, and her neck grew warm with his breath. When she tensed up, he tightened his grip and slowly shifted them both along until he had her up against a building, between two Dumpsters. Lee could feel his erection pushing into her back as he shifted and tried to work her pants down. She was paralyzed, too afraid to move. She tried to clench herself into something hard and impenetrable, but when she felt his finger rub up against her, something inside lost hold and she kicked back hard with her foot. He wrapped one leg around her, and she struggled, trying to squirm out from under him, suffocating under his weight, until she felt him tense up, shudder and gasp, then go limp. She hung there a moment as the man’s thick breath in her ear slowed to a steady wheeze, and then she carefully took his hand and moved it away from her. She slid out from between him and the wall. Her pants were still on. His belt was open and his top button undone, but he had never managed to get his pants down, either. She couldn’t bring herself to look at his face. Lee left, limping harder, and didn’t stop walking even as the sun was up fully and warm on the back of her neck.

  Her mouth felt swollen and dry, and the hunger turned to a stabbing pain in her stomach. Walking through Fishtown, she saw a woman leave her outdoor café table, a half-eaten breakfast sandwich still on her plate. Lee swooped it up without looking back and devoured the thing in three bites. The food was not enough and only made her feel her fatigue more strongly. She oriented herself south, toward Callowhill, because it was someplace to go.

  • • •

  The girl was dandelion thin, with curly brown hair and a pointy face that pulled all her features forward. She had a spot staked out by the 7-Eleven; a little cardboard sign beside her read FUCK YOU, PAY ME.

  The area didn’t have a lot of pedestrian traffic, and Lee wondered why the girl had set up here. A young man in a bowler hat, riding an antique bicycle with one huge wheel and one small one, rode past, winking at Lee as he did. The girl didn’t even look up. Lee tried to work up the nerve to approach her half a dozen times, each time turning back before she could get a sentence out. When the girl spoke to her, Lee was so startled she didn’t catch the words.

  The girl was digging into a black industrial trash bag held together by duct tape and didn’t look up. “I said, you can’t shake here. This is my corner.”

  “I can’t what here?” Lee understood what the girl meant, but something about the word made her want to hear the girl say it again.

  “This is my corner. My sign, my 7-Eleven, my customers. You need to go and find your own.”

  “Where?”

  The girl pulled down the bottom lid of one eye with her middle finger, laying naked a moist red crescent. The gesture was so unexpected Lee couldn’t take it personally. “Do I look like a real estate agent?” the girl said.

  When Lee sat down next to her, the girl looked at Lee like: what the fuck?

  “So this is your view?” Lee tried to smile but felt her face contort into a kind of grimace instead.

  “You look like puke,” the girl said.

  There were girls like this back in the detention center, girls sunken so far into themselves that trying to reach them was like talking down a well. When Lee looked into the girl’s eyes, she saw only burning hatred. “I just need a place to sleep,” she said.

  “So long as it’s not my corner, I don’t give a shit where you sleep.”

  Desperate, Lee pressed on. “Where do you sleep?”

  “Fuck off.” The girl shivered inside her coat, though it had gotten swampy hot through the afternoon.

  “I heard about someone called the Station Master. I heard he takes care of people.”

  “I don’t know no station master.” The girl glared hard at Lee. Lee was about to get up and let the girl be when the girl said, “What the fuck are you wearing?”

  Lee looked down at the orange cotton uniform as though just noticing it. �
�This was my sister’s,” she said, the lie coming easily and out of nowhere. “She was gonna burn it after she got out, but I think it’s cool.”

  “It’s all right.” The girl reached out to touch the sleeve, and Lee settled back down and brought her legs up under her.

  “I’ll bet you look good in orange,” Lee said.

  “I look all right.”

  “You want it?”

  The girl looked at Lee suspiciously. “Give it to me.”

  “What am I going to wear?”

  “I got a pair of jeans and a T-shirt I’ll trade you, no charge. Never let it be said Lois left a homegirl hanging.” The girl was already pulling the clothes from her bag, a dirty pair of jeans more holes than denim and a huge purple T-shirt from some sort of hospital program that said TOUGHER THAN CANCER in big orange letters across the front.

  Lee could feel the eyes of the convenience store clerk on her as she pulled the smock up over her head and replaced it with the T-shirt, which smelled like old Tater Tots. She pulled the bottoms off and handed both pieces to the girl in a ball, then pulled on the jeans.

  “I’m so tired,” Lee said. “Isn’t there someplace I could crash? Just for a night or whatever?”

  Lois was holding the smock up, reading out the number stenciled over the left breast. Her mouth opened to answer, but then her eyes drifted to something over Lee’s shoulder and she crumpled the smock into her lap and found sudden interest within her bag.

  Lee turned to see another girl behind her, looking down at Lee with her head tilted to one side. When Lee met her eyes, the girl smiled brightly. “What’s your name?” she asked. She had a swirl of blond hair pinned atop her head and silver eyes and carried herself with the erect ease of a dancer.

  Lee didn’t know why she told the girl her name, but she did.

  “That’s pretty,” the girl said, but Lee cringed inside. It was a boy’s name and not pretty at all. “Are you needing someplace to stay, Lee?”

  “Go on,” Lois said, not looking too happy about it. “Ester gonna take care of you now.”

  Ester’s eyelashes were mascaraed into thick black points that gave her the look of a Russian starlet from an age gone by. She wore an old black knit dress stretched taut like a spiderweb over a gauzy red shirt and jeans. She was so pretty Lee had trouble not staring at her. She held her hand out. Lee turned back to Lois, but Lois was done with her.

  Lee got up.

  “You must be something special,” said Ester, turning and waiting for Lee to catch up. “Lois doesn’t talk to anyone. Most of us stay clear of her.”

  Lee knew she wasn’t special, that the girl was just flattering her, though Lee couldn’t figure why. But she liked it when Ester smiled. Ester had big, horsey teeth with a friendly gap in the front that only made her more beautiful. “She just wanted something from me.”

  They came to an old brick building with all its ground-floor windows boarded up. “Where are we going?”

  Ester didn’t answer but pulled on a sheet of plywood nailed over the front entrance, which opened on hidden hinges to reveal itself as a door. Ester held it open for Lee.

  Lee could see only a dozen feet or so into a large, dark space.

  “Coming?” said Ester.

  “In there?”

  “You prefer to sleep outside?”

  Back up the street, some kids were trading dance moves, one of them gliding backward in his sneakers alongside a brown paper bag blowing down the sidewalk. In the distance beyond them, Lee could see the little lump that was Lois.

  Ester frowned thoughtfully. “We’ve got beds and food and running water.”

  What was Lee waiting for? She’d been wandering, directionless, searching for a place to stay for over a day. She wasn’t going to get another opportunity like this. She remembered a joke a pastor in the JDC had told her, something about a true believer who was drowning and kept passing up offers of help, telling them that God was going to come and save him. Lee took a step forward into the entranceway. The door shut behind her, taking most of the light with it. Ester flicked a switch, and a single bulb illuminated the space, a large lobby with a high ceiling that looked like cracked frosting on an old cake. What must have once been shopwindows were boarded up. It smelled of old hamburger grease.

  Lee followed Ester up a set of stairs at the far end of the lobby. At the top of the landing Ester turned and headed down a hallway lined with rooms with their doors removed. Most of them were empty but for a mattress, maybe a few scattered books or magazines. There were teenagers in a few of the rooms, and they turned to watch as Lee passed.

  “It used to be an office building—dentists, jewelers, shrinks, that sort of thing—before it got abandoned.”

  Lee met the eyes of a boy her age. He was lying on a bed and wearing headphones. When he smiled, his eyes were very far away. “What is this place?”

  Ester stopped at the last room at the end of the hall, the only room with a door. She licked her thumb and wiped something from Lee’s face, and Lee was aware and suddenly ashamed of what she must look like. “He’s in here.”

  “Who?”

  Ester knocked on the door. “The Station Master.”

  A man’s voice answered from the other side, and Ester opened the door. The room was bigger than the others, and furnished. Several black caps hung from a wooden hat rack. A neatly made bed on an old iron frame stood in one corner, and on a table beside it was a chess set, the pieces in mid-play. A man sat at a small wooden desk facing the wall. He didn’t turn to greet them but kept his face close to the page of a large black ledger, carefully writing in it with a fountain pen. He wore a thick brown wool suit, though it must have been eighty-some degrees in the room. In a corner was a stool with an upended bicycle wheel mounted on top. The man kept writing.

  Eventually he raised his head, capped his pen, placed it on the desk beside the ledger, closed the book, and put it in a drawer. He removed his glasses and replaced them with another pair. Finally he turned toward Lee. His small, watery eyes met hers. He had short, thick brown hair slicked back from a delicately molded face. He must have been in his late thirties. He looked her over, saying nothing. Lee felt scrutinized, as if he were looking into some part of her even she couldn’t see. The room smelled of garlic, and Lee saw a half-eaten bowl of noodles on his desk. Pangs of hunger worried at her insides, and she turned toward the window. She could see Lois on her corner at the end of the block.

  The man nodded at Ester, who gave Lee an encouraging smile and then left her there.

  “So,” the man said after Ester had shut the door, “tell me a little about yourself.”

  The man had short, nicotine-yellow fingers, but his nails were manicured and glossy.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Okay. Let’s just start with this: how did you make your way to us?”

  He had a strange effect on her. She wanted to tell the man what he wanted to hear, though she didn’t know what that was. Which put her off balance. He seemed very much aware of this effect, matching her unease with glassy tranquility.

  Lee thought about how to answer. “That girl, Ester. She found me.” Found me—why had she put it that way? It made her sound like some lost puppy.

  The man put a hand on the bicycle wheel and gently spun it. “Perhaps that is how it seems. But our residents find us, always. Because they need to in some way, sometimes in ways they don’t even know until they know.”

  Lee watched the spinning wheel. She didn’t tell the man about the guy in the park who’d told her to come and find him. “I was looking for a place to sleep, is all.”

  When he got up, Lee saw he was not much taller than she was. He crossed the room to gaze out the window beside her. “Did the correctional facility not prove adequate to your needs?”

  She looked past him to Lois, wearing the orange smock. He must have se
en the whole exchange. “That was my sister’s uniform.”

  “So if I were to call the juvenile detention center right now, they would tell me they don’t know anything about an escaped girl?”

  She mapped the man’s face for some indication of his intent. Lee was good at lying when she needed to be, but sometimes it paid to tell the truth. She said nothing.

  He was handsome until he smiled, displaying a clusterfuck of large, rabbity teeth. “Relax. We take in all kinds here. So long as you’re willing to do your part.” He took an old silver case from inside his jacket and offered her a cigarette from it, but she refused. If nothing else, the JDC had taught her never to accept anything until she could see the strings attached.

  He lit the cigarette for himself, squeezing his eyes shut as he exhaled. “Shall we get you set up?”

  • • •

  Lee’s room was diagonally across from the Station Master’s. And like all the others but his, it was doorless, with only a mattress on the floor, a blanket, and a pillow. Lee lay down on the mattress and faced the wall. The Station Master had helped her get settled, and told her before he left that she could come to him at any time, for anything at all. She tried to sleep, but soon she smelled the garlic again, as if it was in the room with her. She sat up to find Ester standing over her, holding a plate of plain noodles, like she’d seen on the man’s desk. Her hair was up, tied back with a handkerchief.

  “You must be hungry,” she said. “It isn’t much, but it will fill you up. We’ll get you a real meal at dinner.”

  Lee took the bowl without hesitation and stuffed a forkful of noodles into her mouth, not caring when the warm oil slid down her neck.

  “Hold on.” Ester pulled a packet of grated cheese from her pocket, opened it, and sprinkled it onto Lee’s plate.