Lucretia and the Kroons

by Victor Lavalle

  Louis scratched his chin. “I don’t believe it.” He looked at her directly. He had small, intelligent eyes. When they were younger he could basically stare at her until she admitted to a lie. He tried to do it now but his power over her had diminished now that she was twelve.

  “Lunch,” she said again, and nothing more.

  Louis nodded once, as if he understood this plan was fruitless. But then Loochie saw a new quality in his eyes. They flashed brightly. “Mom says you and Sunny are going to be here alone for the afternoon.”

  Loochie crossed her arms. Where was Sunny anyway? It seemed like it had been more than a couple of minutes already.

  “We’re old enough,” Loochie said quickly, just in case Louis wanted to cause trouble by convincing their mother the two girls shouldn’t be left by themselves. What better way to get out of his suspicious lunch date than to convince their mom that Loochie and Sunny needed a chaperone?

  Louis put up one open hand. “Relax,” he said. “I’m not trying to spoil your party.”

  She almost believed him. She waited to see what he’d say next.

  He looked past her now, out the window. “I’m just impressed that you guys aren’t worried.”

  “About what?” Loochie asked a bit defensively. She’d been allowed to stay in the apartment alone since she was seven. Since Louis moved out and Mom didn’t get home from work until six o’clock, Loochie was in the apartment by herself all the time and she’d yet to get herself killed.

  “The Kroons,” Louis said quietly. “I’m impressed you’re not worried about them.”

  “What is a Kroons?” she asked.

  Louis grinned and immediately Loochie regretted asking. The glee on her brother’s face suggested that Louis was about to enjoy himself at her expense.

  “You’re too young to remember what the eighties were like,” Louis began.

  This was true, considering that Loochie hadn’t been born until 1992.

  “They called it the Crack Era. You know what crack is?”

  “A drug?” she said, and wished she hadn’t posed it as a question.

  Louis shook his big round head. “Weed is a drug,” he said. “Tobacco is a drug.”

  Loochie’s eyes went wide and she looked down at her pocket. “It is?”

  But Louis wasn’t listening. “Crack was a plague,” he said. “The whole country got hit by it in the eighties. Queens was no exception.” Louis looked at the ceiling as if he were watching images of the era scroll by up there.

  “The people who smoked crack, the addicts, they were called crackheads. Man were they rough. Crackheads didn’t care about eating or sleeping, they didn’t wash, and they didn’t change their clothes. Hell, they barely had any clothes because they were too busy selling everything they had just to buy more crack.”

  “So they were naked?” Loochie asked. She imagined the sidewalk below, the streets of Flushing, overrun by naked, unwashed men and women. In her imagination they tackled any normal person who walked by and tore away everything, purses, jewelry, cell phones. Did they have cell phones back then? Loochie didn’t know enough ancient history to be sure.

  “They were monsters,” Louis said with some satisfaction. He spoke like a veteran recalling war. “We had a family of crackheads in this building,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant because he seemed to know that would only scare her more.

  “In our building?” Loochie asked.

  “Not just in our building,” he said. “Right above us.”

  Loochie reeled back with open horror. “In Sunny’s place?”

  Louis chuckled, satisfied with the reaction. “On the sixth floor: 6D. Why do you think everyone is so afraid of that place? The Kroons. That was the family name. Mother, father, five sons, and a daughter. Every single one was a crackhead. I never took the elevator when I was young because one or two of those Kroons would ride the elevator, day and night, just looking for a kid to get on the elevator alone. They’d rob him for whatever he had. Sometimes they did worse.”

  Now Louis looked at Loochie directly. Loochie looked over his shoulder, for her mother. She wished her mother would appear and make Louis shut up, but she wouldn’t let herself call out for the help. She’d feel too much like a baby if she did. So she sat quietly.

  Louis looked across the living room, at the television, which was off. He was reflected in the dark screen but the image was warped. His head was even bigger and lopsided and grotesque. Loochie could almost imagine that he was a Kroon now, a creature that had snuck into their living room.

  “A whole family. Can you believe that? Every single one of them was smoked out. It was crazy. I’d see them in the hallways or the lobby and they had sores on their bodies, on their faces, because the crack made them so sick. They didn’t eat or drink. They smoked so much crack it was like their bodies started rotting. I remember one brother, the oldest brother, he had a dent in his head. Like a basketball without enough air in it. And that dent kept getting deeper, year after year. One time I saw him, I was going up the stairs and he was coming down, and half his skull was just gone. It was like a pit with some skin over it. I didn’t know how he could even be alive. He tried to grab me.”

  Loochie leaned forward. “What did you do?”

  “I was on the second-floor landing of the stairs. I opened the stairwell door and ran out and went over to my friend Todd’s place, 2B. I still remember. I stayed there until mom got home from work. I wouldn’t even leave Todd’s place. Mom had to come get me. I was just a little younger than you. The early eighties was a weird time. I remember kids started disappearing, all over the country. The news and parents said kids were getting snatched by guys in vans, but that wasn’t it. Not in this neighborhood. It was the Kroons. Stealing children up to their apartment. And once they get you in there, that’s it. Nobody leaves 6D.”

  “Why?” Loochie whispered.

  “They just … Well, I don’t know what they did to kids up there, but the smells were so bad. They must’ve been burning the bodies.”

  “Why?” Loochie asked. “For what?”

  “I don’t know why things like that have to happen to children,” Louis said quietly. “But being young doesn’t protect you. Horrors come for kids, too.”

  At that moment Louis stared into the distance and seemed truly sad for having to reveal a truth like that to his little sister.

  “But they’re gone now,” Loochie said softly. “I’ve never seen them.”

  Louis lost the sad look and returned to something more gleeful. He shook his head. “The parents died, I remember that. But the others didn’t. The super locked that apartment up tight one day. But the brothers, and the sister, are still in there. Why do you think nobody’s ever moved into 6D? They can’t. That place still belongs to those things. The super was hoping to just starve them out but it hasn’t worked. The Kroons won’t die.”

  “But if they’re just stuck in there it doesn’t matter, right? They’re stuck.”

  “The super closed off the door. But they can still get out.”

  “How?”

  “Same as I used to do. Same as you probably still do.” Louis watched her to see if she’d figure it out.

  “The window?” Loochie asked.

  “The window,” Louis confirmed.

  Just then their mom walked into the living room and Louis got up from the couch. Loochie’s mother said, “We have to go or we’ll miss our appointment.”

  “Appointment?” Louis asked.

  “Reservation,” their mother quickly corrected.

  This whole time Loochie was stiff on the couch, her body locked with fear.

  “Tell Sunny I said hello,” her mother said. “I hoped I’d get to see her before we left.”

  “Sunny’s missing?” Louis said, but the way he grinned showed that he was being theatrical.

  Their mother looked closely at Louis, then at Loochie, who hadn’t moved from her spot on the couch. “What have you been saying to her?”

&
nbsp; Louis shrugged. “We’ve just been talking about the good old days.”

  Their mother looked at her watch. “Loochie,” she said, but got no response. “Lucretia.”

  Finally Loochie turned her head.

  “We’re leaving,” she said. “You’re on your own.”

  4

  The story of the Kroons seemed to float in the living room like a great gray cloud. So Loochie left the living room. She walked into her mother’s bedroom and stopped before the two wig-wearing mannequins. She had another idea, along with the bike ride, of what to do with Sunny when she arrived. Two wigs for two girls who might enjoy a little dress-up. Loochie would save the nicer one, the date wig, for Sunny. She slipped the work wig off its foam head and placed it gently on her scalp. She knew she should’ve waited for Sunny to do all this, and normally she would have, but Louis’s story had her feeling jumpy. She needed to do something just so she wouldn’t be sitting around having nightmares about apartment 6D.

  She tucked one braid under the wig, as best she could, then the other. Did she look older now? Loochie turned to her right profile and her left. She dipped one shoulder and looked into the mirror with her most mature expression. The wig looked nice. And wouldn’t it be even better with a little lipstick?

  Loochie found the small bag in the top dresser drawer where her mother kept her cosmetics. Unopened lipsticks, eyeliner, foundation, a jar of cold cream. Loochie decided to be bold and she uncapped one lipstick, a red that wasn’t too red, and she applied it lightly like she’d often seen her mother do. Now she looked at herself in the mirror again, delighted at the sight. Forget the fact that she was twelve years old: She practically looked fifteen. Maybe even sixteen. She stepped backward from the dresser mirror and the farther she moved the older she seemed to get. She found a pair of her mother’s socks on the floor, rolled each into a ball, and tucked them into her sweater. Now she even had boobs!

  Her hand moved toward her pants pocket without her even willing it to do so. She had one of Sunny’s cigarettes pinched between two fingers and almost didn’t realize how it had gotten there. She was becoming someone else. Not Loochie but Lucretia. Lucretia put the cigarette between her lips and made a loud sucking sound, treating the cigarette more like a straw. The sound was embarrassing but in the mirror across the room the moves looked so elegant to her.

  Lucretia swiveled, her hips turning before her feet did. Lucretia sashayed out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. Lucretia spun the dial on the front burner of the oven and the flames whooshed when they rose. Lucretia batted her head from side to side as if a breeze were playing through her hair. Lucretia bent forward delicately and brought the tip of the cigarette to the flame. When it lit Lucretia pulled on the other end more gently this time and the rolling paper flared. Suddenly Lucretia thought she heard the front door unlock. Her mother was back! She turned off the burner and listened.

  “Mom?”

  Loochie waited. She held the lit cigarette behind her back.

  “Louis?”

  If it had been Sunny and her grandmother they would’ve rung the bell.

  Still nothing. She shut her eyes and held her breath. No sounds. They weren’t back. Maybe just the door of another apartment nearby being opened. She walked back into the bedroom. Where was Sunny though?

  Lucretia stood in the same place, a few feet from the dresser mirror, and watched herself take a pull so deep, so expert. The smoke filled her mouth and her cheeks expanded. Then some of the smoke snuck down her throat and boy did it burn. Her eyes watered quickly, suddenly, and her mouth fell open and she hacked inelegantly once, twice, three times.

  The cigarette fell out of Loochie’s fingers and landed in the bedroom carpet but she hardly noticed. She stooped forward and coughed violently. She was crying now and her mouth filled with spit that tasted vile. She opened her mouth and choked out all the spit right into the carpet. Then she kept heaving and something came up from deeper in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten much for breakfast, too excited, so she vomited bile. Right there in her mother’s bedroom. A puddle in the carpet.

  Nice.

  At least the vomit doused the lit cigarette, though.

  Loochie stepped back from the puddle and stood straight. When she looked at herself in the dresser mirror she no longer looked sixteen, just twelve again. Her face was flushed and the lipstick had smeared down onto her chin. Her mother’s wig had slipped so far forward that it almost covered her eyes.

  Loochie squatted and fished the rest of the cigarette out of the carpet. It would have to be flushed. She went to the bathroom and when she was in there she heard the wail of a siren coming down her block. It was loud. Not the police. Not a fire truck. It was an ambulance. This wasn’t so strange. Ambulances came down her block from time to time. There were a bunch of old people who lived in her building and the one across the street. Sometimes the ambulance was just passing through, headed toward an emergency on another block.

  But the siren only got louder. The ambulance wasn’t passing by. It had stopped outside. The sound was so loud now that Loochie shut the bathroom door as if that would keep it out. But it didn’t. She flushed the cigarette to drown out the siren. She tried to think of which old person in her building might’ve called 911. Mrs. Kirikou? Mr. Dodgson? Who else might’ve called for it? The siren continued to wail so loudly it was as if it had parked right in front of her window. Loochie flushed the toilet a second time, but nothing would shut that ambulance out. She stood in the bathroom wishing for something, anything, that might distract her.

  It was right about then that she heard a new sound. Something rattling. Earlier she’d hoping for Sunny’s knock at the front door, but this sound came from the kitchen window by the fire escape.

  Loochie walked into the kitchen to the sound of more rattling. Sunlight filtered in through the grille of the security gate. The gate had a waffled pattern, steel bars crisscrossing so tightly that an adult would have a hard time slipping more than two fingers through any of the spaces. This was a good design, meant to keep a burglar from getting his hand inside, but the close-set grille also made it hard to see through, to see out. So it wasn’t until Loochie was standing right up to the security gate that she realized there was someone out on the fire escape. The person was much bigger than Sunny.

  It was a woman. At least that was Loochie’s best guess. But no one she recognized and she knew most of her neighbors in the building on sight. Loochie pressed one eye to the grille and looked through. The woman was crouched there by Loochie’s window, pressing so close that Loochie could only make out the upper half her face. The woman wasn’t even looking into Loochie’s apartment. She crouched out there, right in front of Loochie’s window, but her face was in profile. Looking away, maybe down at the ambulance still on the street. It was just then that Loochie realized the siren had stopped ringing but she could still hear the heavy chugging engine of the thing, double-parked on the street below.

  Loochie closed her mouth and quieted her breathing. She kept her eye to the grille but didn’t know what else to do. Who was this woman? Loochie could see one ear, one eye, the curve of her bulbous nose. The woman’s hair was short and dry looking. It was pulled back into a small ponytail. Her hair was almost the same color as her skin. Both a deep gray, like the color of the cigarette ashes that had fallen to the carpet in Loochie’s mother’s room. The woman’s ear looked tiny, misshapen. It took a moment before Loochie realized it was just that the woman’s earlobe had been torn off (or fallen off?) long ago. The white of the woman’s eye looked pink.

  But for all this, somehow, the worst part of this was that the woman wouldn’t even turn her head and look into Loochie’s window. She just kept staring down at the street, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to stoop in front of a stranger’s fourth-floor kitchen window. It was this, the calm of the woman, that unnerved Loochie. The fear was like an itch, running up her scalp. What to do? What to do?

  “My mother’s in the othe
r room!” Loochie finally shouted through the grille.

  The woman didn’t move. She stood in profile, only inches from the window, and the longer she stayed there, immobile, impassive, the more Loochie wanted to reach out and push her off the fire escape. Better she fall to the ground and break her back than just keep squatting there scaring the life out of Loochie.

  “And my brother is here,” Loochie added, less forcefully.

  Loochie had been watching the woman long enough to see the faint rise and fall of the woman’s head as she breathed. Loochie went quiet again and now she could hear the woman breathing, too, even through the gate and the closed window. It was a strained sound. Like Sunny’s breathing had been earlier. But there was something more to it. It was wet, like gurgling, each time the woman exhaled. When Loochie had a cold and her nose was clogged up and she had to breath through her mouth she sounded like that. So maybe the woman was just sick. Maybe she needed help. Not that Loochie was about to open the gate and start offering assistance. She was twelve but she wasn’t a dummy. Still, the thought that she might just be a sick woman made Loochie feel a little less scared of her. Loochie hadn’t realized she had one hand balled into a tight fist until she looked down at it. She relaxed it.

  Then she heard the rattling sound again. It kept on for ten seconds. Wood moving and glass shaking. Then a little squeak. And that’s when Loochie finally understood what was happening. The kitchen window was rising.

  The woman was opening Loochie’s window.

  These old buildings weren’t always in the best shape. After decades many of their windows were loose in their frames. Loochie had seen Louis slip back into the apartment this way more than once when she was young. His hands putting pressure on the edges of the glass, then just jiggling the window until it began to lift. It was one of the main reasons buildings like this needed security gates. But even the security gate didn’t make Loochie feel very safe right now. If this woman could so blatantly climb to her window, then pull the window up, who knew what else she could do? Maybe even the security gate wouldn’t be much of a hurdle. Loochie would be defenseless.