Compromised

by Heidi Ayarbe

  “You got your box?”

  I nod.

  “I got my map and stuff.”

  “Okay.”

  “Fuck the other stuff.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Well, we can’t very well walk in there and say, ‘Oh. Excuse me. Could you pass me my backpack?’” Nicole helps Klondike up. “What’s so important, anyway? All you ever do is collect trash in that stupid pack. We’re already wearing all the clothes we have.”

  I swallow. It’s like giving up on the last piece of something that makes us different from other kids on the streets. Without our packs we’re just homeless teens—not teens on a trip somewhere.

  “Christ, Jeopardy. What’s so important that you left in there?”

  “What about the dolls? The worry dolls and money?” We have a reason to get the packs.

  Nicole pulls them out of her pocket. “I’m not a moron. I wouldn’t leave money in there.” Nicole stares at me stone-faced. She’s about to say something—I imagine related to some mobster who got killed wearing an REI pack—when the same police officer pokes her head out of the building.

  “You three, why don’t you stick around for a couple of minutes, okay?” She points to Klondike. “How old are you, kid?”

  Klondike grips my jacket. “No,” he says. “No. I can’t go back,” he says, then coughs. Then he clears his throat again, and a massive clump of green phlegm comes up.

  “Klon, it’s cool. You’re with us.” Nicole squeezes his shoulder. “Nice loogie.” She laughs. “Let’s go.” She leans into me. “We’ve gotta get away from the cops.”

  “Klon,” I say, “are you feeling okay? Maybe we could go by the shelter. Just for a day or so. Or a clinic. There’s got to be a free clinic around here. Just so you can get something to feel better.”

  He shakes his head and croaks. “I won’t go. Please no. Fuckit. Not with them. Tallywhacker, asswipe, tallywhacker. People don’t like deformed kids. People hate me when they see me. I want to be with you and Cappy. Please. Please. Tallywhacker.” He taps my shoulder and squeezes his eyes shut, his body shuddering with the wave of tics.

  I look at Nicole.

  She pulls me aside. “You know what happens if we take him to a hospital? They call social services. Social services shows up and assigns him a caseworker who has about two hundred other kids filed away in a ratty briefcase. This caseworker finds a home willing to take the social reject—a scarred kid—saying she’ll be checking up to make sure everything’s okay. Well, her weekly visits turn into every two weeks, then monthly, then every other month because she has a hundred and ninety-nine other kids in shitty homes she has to visit. And before long, his file that was once shiny and new and on the top of this caseworker’s to-do list is shuffled to the bottom of that ratty briefcase, and he’s forgotten. And his foster parents are happy because they get that fat monthly government check and treat him like shit because of a scar and some tics.” Nicole exhales and sighs.

  I don’t know where she gets the energy or the air for those kinds of speeches. I shake my head. “He’s so sick,” I say.

  “We’ll get him something. Okay? We’ll go to a drugstore and get something. We can do it.”

  But I can’t. I haven’t been able to. And if Klon’s health depends on me reading symptom labels and then shoplifting the right medication…I feel my stomach tighten and the familiar burn shooting acids everywhere. The ache is a constant now. And I think I’m used to it—being hungry, tired, cold, sick. But every part of me wants this all to end. I look at the brochure the police officer gave me and tuck it into my jeans pocket. I don’t know how much longer it’ll take to find Aunt Sarah. And I don’t know if we’ll live long enough to do it, the way things are going.

  Klon’s face is gaunt and pale. Dark circles ring his winter-green eyes. He tugs on my jacket constantly with one hand and covers his coughs with the other. “I’m fine,” he says. “Just a cough. Fuckit. Cough.”

  I squeeze his hand, and the three of us leave the alley before the police come back out. Plus I really don’t want to see Limp’s body. We walk behind three others who have spent the night in the alley. One of them drops a scarf. Nicole picks it up and says, “You dropped this.”

  The three of them turn around, and one snatches it out of Nicole’s hand.

  “Geez,” Nicole says. “Just trying to help.” She has that tough Kids Place attitude. Cappy’s gone. Nicole’s back.

  “Don’t,” one girl says, and tucks it into her coat.

  “Don’t be rude, ladies. Let’s introduce ourselves. This is Mario and she’s Baghdad.” Mario is the one who dropped the scarf. “And I”—he bows—“am Charity, Boise’s queen of the night.”

  Charity is as dark as charcoal. He has long curly hair and wears red stiletto-heeled boots. Mario looks like she’s Klondike’s age. She fidgets and twirls matted greasy hair around her thumb. The right side of Baghdad’s face looks like a patchwork quilt of skin sewn together. Her eye is fused shut.

  Nicole introduces us. “This is Klondike, Jeopardy, and I’m Capone.”

  Charity bats his fake lashes. “As in Al? Trying for the mobster thing?”

  Put it that way, it does sound kind of lame. But I’ve gotten used to Nicole being Cappy.

  “Give it out for free, Charity?” Nicole snaps.

  I elbow Nicole.

  “Don’t worry, honey.” Charity keeps up with us at a fast clip, his heels tapping on the asphalt. He primps his hair. “My merchandise ain’t free. Quality, baby. One-hundred-percent royal lovin’ has its price.”

  “Don’t those shoes, um, hurt?” I ask. I look down at my torn-up sneakers and don’t feel so bad anymore.

  “My trick left me high and dry last night, so I had no way to get home and change,” Charity says.

  “You have a home?”

  “Baby, the streets are my home.” Charity flashes a crooked smile. Three front teeth are chipped. “But I have a place where I keep my stuff,” he whispers. “I can show you.” He winks.

  “I’m okay,” I say. I stare at his shoes.

  Klondike croaks and says, “Asswipe.”

  Nicole pinches his arm. “He doesn’t mean it. He’s, um, twitchy.”

  Charity’s eyes narrow. When Klondike croaks again and taps Charity on the arm, Charity relaxes. “There was a kid like you around here for a while—he had some funky thing going on. Remember Cuss?” he says to Mario and Baghdad.

  Mario nods. “Yeah.”

  Baghdad shrugs.

  “Anyway, he went over about as well as a queer in Texas. You don’t look like a bad kid. Just watch out who you call names around these parts. Right, Baghdad?”

  Baghdad shoves her hands in her jeans pockets. Her clothes dangle on her like she’s a wire hanger.

  Charity smirks. “She hasn’t talked since I met her. One of these days I know she’s just gonna come down with a nasty case of verbal diarrhea and tell us all what’s up. Right, honey?”

  Baghdad looks down the road.

  Klondike shrugs. “I can’t—fuckit—help it. It just comes out, you know. I don’t mean it—asswipes, tallywhacker.” Klondike blows on his fingers and blinks. “Sorry.”

  I stare at Charity head to toe—especially at the bright red boots. They are raincoat plastic and come up midthigh. He wears stockings, really tight shorts, and a red fishnet shirt under a jean jacket. He has to have been freezing last night.

  “Darling, have you ever met a queen before?” Charity asks.

  I shake my head. “Actually, no.”

  “Well, baby, I don’t bite. Unless you pay me to.” He grins that chipped-tooth grin. “But it’s not polite to stare, okay?”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  We get to one of Boise’s main streets. Traffic streams from both ways. Tires spray black water, splashing through the melted snow. “We’re going to Rhodes if you want to come,” Charity says.

  “Rhodes?” I ask.

  “The place to be if you need to hook up wit
h something, someone. Or just be.”

  “We’re fine,” Nicole says.

  Mario mutters, “I can’t believe Limp didn’t go to the Garden. That’s where he should’ve gone.”

  Baghdad looks like she has a tear in her eye. She nods.

  “Oh, that’s total mumbo jumbo,” Charity says. “All that voodoo just creeps me out. Limp is just fine where he died.”

  Mario shoves her hands deep into her pockets and says, “He should’ve gone to the Garden.”

  “What’s the Garden?” I ask.

  Mario looks at me. “That’s where we go to die.”

  “Who’s we?” I ask.

  “We,” she says. “Us.”

  I shake my head.

  “The urban outdoorsmen and-women. Bums. Homeless. Hobos, whatever you want to call us, okay, Jeopardy?” Charity raises his eyebrow. “And they call you Jeopardy because…”

  “Anyway, that’s where we die. That’s the safe place to do it.” Mario is twirling her hair faster now.

  “Rubbish,” Charity says. He flips his hair. “It’s like when people tell you a body new to sex rejects sperm, because darlings, we all know that no body would reject this package of power. Complete rubbish.”

  Mario glares. “Could you cut that weird talk? And it’s not bullshit. It’s true. The Garden is safe. It’s a guarantee.”

  “For what?” Nicole asks.

  “Heaven,” Mario says. “No matter what you’ve done.”

  Baghdad nods.

  Charity sighs. “Or maybe no matter who.” Charity and the others walk on. Charity turns back. “You sure you three aren’t comin’? Rhodes is where everyone goes when the alley’s been raided.”

  “Maybe later. Thanks,” Nicole says.

  Charity looks at us. “Your friend here’s looking a little green.” He motions to Klondike. “Sometimes the Mennonite Fellowship on Twelfth Street gives out soup.”

  “What’s that?” Nicole asks.

  “You know. Banjos, tambourines, ‘Praise the Lord’ shit. It’s soup.” Charity smiles his sloppy red lipstick smile.

  “Which way?” I ask. Soup sounds too good to be true.

  “About twenty blocks past Rhodes. We can walk together.” We follow them for a couple of hours. Then Charity points. “Go that way. Twelfth Street. You can’t miss it.”

  Soup. All I want is soup. I feel like I could walk ten hours to get it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “We better try to get out of Boise today, okay?” Nicole says. We’re sitting on a park bench staring at a lake. I’m sure if it weren’t for the fact that I feel like Klon’s road kill semirevived, I’d actually think it was pretty. “So where to, Jeops?”

  I don’t know where to go to find Sarah Jones in the U.S.

  “C’mon, Jeops. Think about the letters. There’s gotta be something.”

  I pull out the box and go through the letters one by one, looking for any return address label. I empty the box and run my fingers along the sides and bottom. Under the lip, stuck to the side, I feel something, and pull up the lip. Stuck to it is a return address label. Everything’s faded, though. “Hand me your glasses.”

  She gives them to me, and I look through them, trying to make out the letters—anything. A tear drips down my nose onto the box. Nicole pulls it away. “C’mon, Jeops. We’ll feel better after we eat. Don’t smudge our only next clue.”

  My stomach growls. After another forty minutes of walking, we finally find the church. And they’re out of soup. The guy says there’s another soup kitchen—across town.

  “Where?” I ask.

  “You know. Near the Basque museum. It’s a nice museum, too,” he says.

  Nicole glares at him. “You’ve been inhaling too much incense. A museum?”

  “A little culture,” he says, and mumbles something else under his breath.

  I refrain from mentioning we’ve got all the culture we need on our bodies. Ugh.

  I take out the tourist map we got at some office while wandering around. I think that maybe pre–running away I should’ve probably come up with a learn-to-read-maps procedure. I find the Basque museum. It looks far.

  “Where are we?” Nicole asks, looking at the map.

  I shrug. “Around here. I’m pretty sure. But I think we should try to get to a library before leaving Boise. Maybe we’ll get more clues.” I look around. The neighborhoods have started to blend together.

  “And muffins,” says Klondike.

  “So which way do we go to find a library?” Nicole asks.

  “I think this way,” I say. And we walk. We have nothing else to do. We can’t just sit and freeze on the streets. Water from puddles sloshes up the holes in my shoes. At first I tried to dodge the puddles. But we’re in Boise—the puddle capital of the United States or something. I look at the tourist map. It says, “City of Trees.”

  I look around. There are definitely more puddles.

  We sit in a forgotten park surrounded by run-down brick houses. A big change from the manicured lawns and pretty homes we just walked by. Tufts of crabgrass poke through loose gravel. A rusty swing set teeters in the wind. I stare at the map. “I don’t know if I’ve been looking at it right.”

  I hand the map to Nicole. “Well don’t ask me,” she says. “I sure as hell can’t read it.” She squints, crumples it up, and throws it in the snow.

  I pick it up and wipe off the damp dirt. “What’d you do that for?” I ask.

  “What good’s a map if you can’t read it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I just thought—”

  Klondike has leaned back and fallen asleep in the gravel.

  “He doesn’t look too good,” I say. I pat my pocket with information about the shelter. Just one night, I think. Maybe we can go for one night.

  “Maybe,” Nicole says. “Maybe we should hole up a day or two. Let him rest.”

  “Yeah.” I nod. “We can go to that Path of Light Home.”

  “No way. We’ll find Rhodes, get some meds. We’ll be just fine without a bunch of Jesus freaks giving us a place to sleep.”

  “Well we spent the afternoon looking for soup from Jesus freaks. What’s the difference?” I ask.

  “Soup is soup. Shelter is obligation and getting reported to social services, and going back to where we started. You want that?”

  Yes. I think. Suddenly Don and Cherry don’t seem so awful. I can’t imagine foster care being worse than this. Ever. Maybe I can look for Aunt Sarah from Don and Cherry’s house. A phone. Internet…probably should’ve thought of that before all this.

  “Klon.” Nicole jerks him awake. “Wake up. Come lie down here.” She leads him to one of those cement tubes. I didn’t think they were allowed in parks anymore—safety regulations and all. I clean out the spiderwebs and leaves from the bottom of the cement tunnel and help Klon scoot in.

  Nicole pulls off her last sweatshirt and hands it to him. We both keep our coats. We need them. “Put that on,” I say, “under your coat.”

  “Let’s find Rhodes—where the others hang out. We’ll be safer with others,” Nicole says.

  I haven’t come up with a hypothesis. I feel like a hack scientist. We’re just reacting now. There’s no method to what we’re doing. It’s all basic. Instinct. And it’s not working.

  “We’re in Boise, Cappy. How bad can it get?” I ask. It wasn’t like Boise was on the U.S. top dangerous city lists.

  “We could be in—where is Dorothy from?”

  “Kansas.”

  “Exactly. Anywhere is bad at night. People are bad,” Nicole says. “Or did you miss out on that ‘don’t talk to strangers’ lecture in grade school? It’s safer in numbers. Trust me. Plus the kids at Rhodes will have information we need.”

  “Like what?” I ask. I hardly think any of them are pediatric pulmonary specialists. “And what about Klon? We can’t just leave him.” I look over, and he has already fallen back to sleep. I touch his head and his face is burning.
<
br />   “He’s too tired to come with us. He’ll be better off here, sleeping. We’ll get some medicine, okay? And we’ll find Rhodes and the others. When we do, we’ll come back for him. Then we’ll use the worry doll money to go back to Rhodes in a bus.” She holds the worry dolls in her hand.

  “What makes you think we can even find Rhodes? It took us almost an hour to find a church that already ran out of soup.”

  “We’ve already walked by Rhodes. We just have to go where Charity, Baghdad, and Mario went—when we split up.”

  “And you remember where that was?” I ask. It feels like it was years ago. I wonder if runaway time is warped—just endless minutes.

  “Pretty much. As long as we stay to these same streets, I think we’ll be okay.”

  “Okay,” I say. We shake Klon back awake. “We’re going to find somewhere to stay, Klon. And get you some medicine.” I hand him the box. “Don’t croak if anyone comes by here, okay?”

  Klondike nods, twitches, and lets out a massive croak. “Promise you’ll come back?”

  “We promise. We stick together,” Nicole says.

  He clutches my jacket between his fingers. “You promise you’ll come back?” he asks again.

  “We’ll be back.” I pry his fingers loose. “We’ll find food and medicine.” I hold my hand to his forehead. Every time he coughs, a little bit of blood comes up with phlegm. “Don’t move. We’ll come back for you.”

  “I won’t—asswipes. Don’t be long.” He blows on his fingers and curls up in the cement tube. I wish we had more to keep him warm, but there was nothing else.

  “Klon?”

  He looks up at me.

  “If people come around—” I look around.

  Nicole points. “There. There are some trees over there. If you have to move or go pee or something, you do it there. But don’t go far.”

  “Come back,” Klon says. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “We’ll be back before you wake up,” I say. “I promise.”

  Klon nods and closes his eyes. Asleep already.

  “Ready?” I turn to Nicole.