by Nat Kozinn
“Yo, whatever. It wasn’t that fun anyway. No reason to get your panties in a bunch. Let’s bounce, fellas,” Big H said and slowly walked down the alley, trying his best to look tough.
Big H’s cronies followed close behind their leader. Mario tried to follow, too, but his way was blocked by an arm with most of the qualities of a tree branch besides the bark. David was not letting the boy by.
“Not you,” David said sternly.
“What are you doing, man? Those are my friends,” Mario pleaded.
David didn’t say anything. He simply continued blocking Mario’s path until the punks were out of earshot. Then he finally spoke.
“Some friends. I’d hate to meet your enemies.”
“You don’t understand. That’s all part of it. If I want to roll with them, I have to let them treat me like that. They got to know I’m tough. Now they’re going to think I’m a punk bitch who had to be saved by you.”
“Whoa, watch the language. What would your mother think if she heard you talking like that?”
“She’d think she has more important crap to worry about.”
“True enough, but what about your brother? Luis is up in that apartment all alone every time I go by. He needs his older brother at home, not running around getting hit in the face with rocks. You need to be looking out for him.”
“That’s why I’m doing this. It’s rough out here. I got to make sure me and Luis are safe. If I’m a Hood Clown, nobody is going to mess with either of us.”
“Hood Clowns? Jesus Christ, you kids come up with some stupid names. What you should be doing is studying and going to school so you can get a job and help your mom out.”
“It’s Saturday.”
“I was talking in a more general sense. Now go on, and head in the opposite direction of those ‘Clowns,’” David said and shooed Mario along.
3
David lifted up the folding chair with one hand, and with the snap of his wrist, he flipped it into the flat position. Then he placed it on top of the pile of chairs balanced on his opposite shoulder. He did the wrist snap five more times until he had a pile of chairs twenty high, which he then placed in the corner of the gym that had been transformed into a dining room.
Then he went to work on the tables that covered the auditorium, using a similar wrist snap to pop the legs into place. He piled the tables on his shoulder in stacks only ten high, which he then placed in piles on the opposite side of the gym. The floor now clear, David picked up two large brooms and swept the floor bare, creating anthill mounds of food scraps, which he swept into bags and tossed into the corner.
Then he went into the church chapel. The space was serene. Shiny wooden pews led to a front with ornate metal candleholders. There was an elaborate wooden alter framed by a hand-carved wooden molding behind it. And hanging over it all was a massive iron cross only slightly worn and discolored, but in a way that conveyed history, not dilapidation. It was as if, somehow, this one room had been spared the ravages of the Plagues. He went around to the large WormLights that illuminated the chapel and unscrewed the Manna reservoirs that fed the bacteria, which produced the light.
He balanced ten of the twenty-pound reservoirs on the palm of his hand with the same deftness a veteran waiter might show while clearing dishes that weighed a fraction of what David carried. He went back through the gym, and with his free hand, he picked up the bags of refuse he had gathered and carried the whole load through a set of double doors and into a large, dimly lit kitchen.
David tossed the bags into a far corner. He took each of the Manna reservoirs and refilled them with more of the gooey, carbohydrate-filled substance from a large vat. He piled the now completely full reservoirs on a table in the corner.
He went over to the sink, where a middle-aged man with a scraggly beard was scouring a massive pot. The man worked hard, using maximum effort to clean some burnt-on remnants of the meal.
“All cleaned up out there. Need a hand, Linden?” David asked.
Linden did not say anything; he just shoved the pot toward David, who immediately went to work scrubbing. David was able to quickly scrape off the burnt-on grease. Linden went off to another corner of the kitchen to find something else to do. It was not a difficult search.
A disheveled young man in dirty clothes walked into the kitchen. His face was covered in a myriad of scratches and scabs. His hair was matted and needed to be cut. He looked to be in his twenties, but it was hard to tell for certain. Hard living had added years to his face.
“Hey there, Savior, my man. What’s cracking?” Scales said.
“Nothing much. You missed serving time again, Scales. Give me a minute to finish with this pot and I’ll go look in the pantry. I should be able to find you something, but it won’t be very tasty,” David said.
“No, man. That’s okay. I didn’t come here for food. I came here to see you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, I was thinking about what you said to me the other day. How it might do me some good to help somebody else instead of just worrying about number one all the time.”
“I remember.”
“Well, you know the kids around here ain’t got nothing to do unless they in school, and most of ’em got parents that work till late at night on top of it. That’s why they always messing around and getting into trouble. What else they gonna do?”
“The Devil makes work for idle hands.”
“What’s that?”
“Never mind,” David said and shook his head.
“I’m not sure if you know this, but I was a baller back in high school. That’s where I got the name Scales, ’cause I tipped ’em. I was the real deal. Scholarship offers, NBA scouts. You should be seeing me in my prime. I was a sight to see. But my knee got bad my senior year and never got good again, and that was the end. My career was snuffed out before it could start. But I still know how to play. I was thinking I could get some sorta league going. Get all the kids in the neighborhood involved; give ’em something to do and something to get their energy out. What do you think?” Scales said, giddy with excitement.
“That sounds like a great idea. Most kids out here love basketball already.”
“I was wondering if you’d be interested in pitching in?”
“Me? With kids…” David stammered, clearly uncomfortable. “I mean, uh, I don’t know the first thing about basketball. I mean, I used to love the Sonics before the Plagues…”
“Nah, see, I’d handle the coaching and making the rules and schedules and stuff. What I was thinking is that you could more handle the financial side.”
“Financial side?”
“Basketball is one of the cheapest sports there is, but we still gotta put up the baskets, get some balls, maybe some uniforms eventually. Hell, some of these kids probably don’t even got real shoes.”
“I’m a little tapped right now. I don’t think I can afford to buy all the kids in the neighborhood shoes.”
“Well, that’s just eventually. I would just need a little cash to get started.”
David took his hand out the pot he was scrubbing and put it on his chin. He scratched it for a few seconds before answering.
“All I’ve got is forty bucks,” he said.
“Really? That’s great. That’ll be enough for a ball, and we can just use crates for the hoops for now. That’s what we did when I was coming up.”
David reached into his pocket and pulled out two twenties. He held them out for Scales, who reached for the cash, but David didn’t let go right away.
“I can’t wait to see what you can do, Scales.”
“Oh, you’ll see, Savior. Some of the kids will be playing in college before you know it. Thank you for the funds,” Scales said and walked out of the dingy kitchen with a spring in his step.
“That was a terrible idea,” an older woman said from the recess of the kitchen.
David turned around to see Sister Berta, who was berating him with a disapproving glance perf
ected through years of scolding school children. The just-past-middle-aged woman had the stone face and modest dress befitting her position. She could have come out of a nun-making mold, which she kind of did—only it was called seminary school.
“You should have tossed that cash in the dumpster. At least there would have been a chance someone else found the money and did something productive with it,” Sister Berta said.
“You don’t think he really wants to set up the basketball league?” David asked.
“No, I’m sure he does. But then he’s going to go home and start thinking about his plan. He’ll start working on how he’s going to get the kids to sign up, if he needs their parents’ permission, where he can put the courts. Soon he’ll get overwhelmed and decide he should get high, just to calm down, and then he can work it all out. He’ll remember he has forty bucks in his pocket and that buys a few hits of Tranq. He’s going to spend the next week getting ‘calm.’ Then he’ll come back to you with some sob story and try to get more cash from you.”
“Probably. But maybe he’ll be inspired because someone finally believed in him and then he’ll turn his life around. I know that with no money and no hope there’s zero chance he’ll get his act together. At least I gave him a shot. Maybe he won’t get clean this time, or the next five times, but he will eventually, as long as someone else is on his side.”
“I admire your optimism. Unfortunately, I’ve got too many mouths to feed to waste resources on lottery tickets. I need to be careful about who I invest in. I don’t know where our next batch of Manna is coming from.”
“You’ll figure it all out, because you’ve got someone on your side,” David said with a smirk.
“Maybe so. You missed a spot,” Sister Berta said and pointed to the pot.
◆◆◆
“Spare any change, ma’am? My kid ain’t had nothing to eat for days,” a dirty young woman asked Alexis.
“Let me guess. Your kid’s name is Tranq? Sorry, junky, you’ll have to sell your sob story to someone else. I’m not buying,” Alexis said and sidestepped the young woman.
Alexis walked a few more buildings down the cracked sidewalk before stepping into a five-story office building. The building had once been a treasure with beautiful molding and large bay windows. Someone even tried to fix it up after the Plagues, only they ran out of money halfway through so only the left half of the building had been fixed up. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror that somehow displayed the ravages of time.
Alexis walked past the elevator doors, which had been boarded up for some time, and proceeded to the stairwell. She looked up, dismayed at the task before her. She took several deep breaths and began her ascent. Alexis would have made a poor Sherpa. She had to stop and rest her bones and lungs on the third- and fourth-story landings. She finally pulled up to the fifth floor. She took a minute to straighten out her clothes, flatten her hair, and take several deep breaths to give the appearance that she had handled the ordeal with aplomb. She then took out a key, unlocked the door labeled “The Seattle Times,” and stepped into the office.
The office space was so jam-packed with old furniture it looked like the floor might collapse at any moment. The newspaper had downsized offices several years back and never downsized its furniture collection to fit the new space. Desks were stacked five high in every corner. Filing cabinets were used to form makeshift cubicles, but most of those office shanties were empty. A few of the ramshackle cubicles were occupied by haggard individuals who stretched the use of the term middle-aged. They clicked away on beat-up-looking typewriters that were maintained by someone with the power to work miracles.
The walls of the office were covered in newspaper articles under glass. There were more aged, yellowed articles than space on the wall. Some of the posters were piled on top of the piles of office furniture. Alexis had the byline on more than a few.
Alexis made her way to the largest and therefore most prestigious ramshackle cubicle assembled from filing cabinets: Harry’s office. Alexis knocked on the filing cabinets at the gap in the furniture that acted as Harry’s door and then walked in.
“I got him, Harry. I got the Savior of Seattle,” Alexis said with a grin.
“You did! Have a seat,” Harry said and motioned to a paper-covered chair. “How’d you do it?”
“How do you think? I offered him money. Five hundred an hour,” Alexis said, but she chose to stand.
“Jesus Christ, five hundred? I know it was the plan, but that’s going to be tough to swing, Lexi,” Harry said while pretending to look through some papers on his desk. The budget must have been on six different sheets of paper and he must have been capable of reading the figures with just a glance.
“This is the Savior of Seattle we’re talking about. Twenty years ago, you would have been happy to add two zeros to that number,” Alexis said back calmly. She had been read the riot act before and knew the ending.
“Twenty years ago, I could have afforded it, and you wouldn’t have been willing to write the article. You would have given me one of your famous lectures on how puff pieces make Murrow roll over in his grave and stormed out of my office, slamming my door in your wake,” he said and pointed to the place where the door should have been.
“Time makes fools of us all. This is a good get, Harry. It’ll be the first interview the Savior has ever done. He never said more than two words to the press back when he was doing his thing.”
“How many hours are we talking? I only have so many organs I can sell,” Harry pleaded.
“However many I can get him to talk for. I’m imagining a whole series, Harry. If we play this right, it could get picked up by the think.Net pubs. Are you telling me we don’t need that?”
“Of course we need that, but we might go belly up before any of your grand designs come to fruition.”
“Where’s that old gambler I used to work for?”
“He’s become a bookkeeper, and an anxiety-riddled one at that.”
“How many more months do we have anyway? Wouldn’t you rather go out in a blaze of glory? We can be like a journalistic Butch and Sundance.”
“I’m not sure an interview with a has-been can be equated to fighting the Bolivian Army, but I suppose you’re right. It’s either death by a thousand cuts or we go all in. This is probably as good a hand as we’re going to get,” Harry said while wiping the sweat from his brow.
“There’s the excitement I was looking for. This is a good bet, Harry. I know I can make it work.”
“So what’s the angle?”
“I figure we start with the basics, a rundown of the early years. We’ll go through all his heroic deeds, retell the story from his angle. The fogies will eat it up. It’s some real good-ole-days type stuff. And it’ll be good because it’ll also give me a chance to get David talking and sell some papers for a few months. Then, once we’ve reminded all of our readers of what a national treasure he is, we drop the bomb, a shame piece on our own government for failing to take care of a true American hero. It’ll work, Harry. You should see how the guy lives. I wouldn’t be caught dead in that neighborhood at night. Well, that’s the only way I’d get caught there. And I peeked into his apartment when he answered the door. It was the textbook definition of a rathole. I live better off of what you’re paying me. The story practically writes itself. This is going to be a moneymaker, Harry. You’ll see.”
◆◆◆
A picture frame fell, and the sound echoed off the walls of David’s sparsely furnished apartment like it was a cavern. It was loud enough to wake him from his slumber, even over the sound of the rainstorm that was currently making sure Seattle lived up to its reputation.
He shot out of bed in an instant, popping to his feet with a jump. Whereas most people might feel fear from a noise in the night and investigate with caution, David felt no such fear. He sprinted into his living room with the reckless abandon one would expect from someone who could not be hurt.
David was so fast that M
ario did not have time to stop what he was doing. The boy was hard at work, ripping down the dozens of newspaper and magazine articles that covered the walls. The young man had obviously been at it for a few minutes, and most of the articles were down. He clutched the pile of papers to his chest as he turned toward David.
“I didn’t realize you were such a big fan, Mario,” David said flatly.
The blood drained from Mario’s face so quickly it was a wonder he did not pass out. Despite his own fear, he reacted decisively, charging toward the open window that had served as his point of entry into the apartment. Mario could not match David’s speed, though, and the giant man caught the boy by his shirt collar, jerking Mario backward. Mario dropped the journalistic mass he was carrying. The pile fell through the open window, spreading like confetti as it fell from the sky and onto the soaking wet ground.
David stuck his head out the window and watched in horror as the record of his life accomplishments fell victim to the torrential rain outside. David looked like he wanted to follow the path of his newspaper clippings. His shoulders sagged and his face drooped to a frown. Then he looked to Mario and the frown turned into an angry snarl.
“Damn it! What the hell were you doing?” David demanded as he lifted the boy up off the ground.
“Yo, get your hands off of me!” Mario demanded as he tried to struggle free, which would have required a feat of strength outside the realm of possibility for a fully grown football player, let alone a fifteen-year-old boy.
“Tell me why you did this, right now!” David growled.
“I had to show the Hood Clowns I wasn’t a little bitch who needed to be saved by some has-been. I had to show ’em you don’t mean nothing to me and I ain’t scared of you or anybody else,” Mario stammered, trying his best to sound tough even as he fumbled all over his words.
“You little punk! This is how you thank me for saving you from being humiliated? This is how you treat me after I give you food and watch out for your family?”
