by Mike Sager
Freeman half turned, attempting to triangulate the two conversations.
“It’s cold out here,” she said. “I’m gonna go in now.”
“You don’t want to come back to my place? I’ll make you a nice snack.”
“I’ll probably just read or something.”
“Okay, then,” Freeman said. “I’ll come get you for dinner. You have my number, right?”
“Nice meeting you, Sojii,” Greene called out affably.
As Jim turned back to his grown-up conversation, the girl skipped down the several steps to the entrance of Seede’s basement apartment. With some effort—one gate, one door, three keys, four locks—she let herself inside.
The place was as she’d left it, still life with Matchbox and Lego. She walked toward the miniature table, shedding her coat and hat and muffler as she went. She sat down in one of the little chairs, cleared a space, took out the skull.
Sojii placed her hand on top. The crystal was smooth and cool. A tingle of energy ran through her fingertips and up her arm. The fine hair on the back of her neck stood at attention.
She stared deeply into the cranium, trying to focus all of her thought, trying to achieve a “watchful, vigilant silence,” as Greene had suggested. In a few moments, the skull began to darken, the holographic clouds appeared. The dark spot became visible at the center. The spot grew slowly, gathering size and intensity, leaving a black void.
Impulsively she dipped her index finger into the void. The sensation was welcoming—and creepy. Like jumping into a muddy lake on a hot summer day, and then your feet touch the gooey bottom. With haste she withdrew.
Presently an image appeared.
A mountain ridge, a sheer cliff. Eagles soared, riding the updrafts. Clouds floated past. Hundreds of feet below, a sparkling lake was nestled like a giant sapphire into a basin of undulating green hills.
And then she was on the cliff.
Not just viewing it anymore but actually standing on the edge, hair blowing, raindrops on her cheeks.
And then she was standing beside the lake, the shoreline rendered in animated Disney hues. A path led into a dense alpine forest. It reminded her of Hansel and Gretel. She wondered if that was the idea.
In time, she came to a clearing, presided over by a modern building. Small but chic, it was built of glass and stone and dark wood.
Inside was a reception desk, a lobby bar, a pricey little boutique.
She entered the store, moved among the racks of clothing the way females do, not so much browsing the offerings as sojourning among them.
At the rear of the store, she came upon another shopper, an Asian woman in her midforties, perusing a circular rack of cute little tops. She had a prominent Semitic nose which lent to her face an odd, beautiful, asymmetrical quality. She slid the shiny metal hangers one by one along the rack, a distinctive scrape and tinkle, her head tilted appraisingly to one side.
Sojii recognized her instantly.
38
Head down, boots pounding the sidewalk, Perdue Hatfield marched full tilt in a southerly direction down Thirteenth Street.
At R Street he turned west. He’d seen a lot of gruesome stuff over time, plenty of blood and heartache, plenty of bodies, he’d even killed a man. The guy was high on PCP. It took four shots in the chest to knock him down. But this was different. No kid deserved to grow up with that kind of film inside his head. Hatfield wanted to scream, to jump up and down, to punch a wall, to hurt someone. He wanted to hold the boy and tell him everything would be alright. He wanted to bitch-stomp the corpse of the mother until it turned to bloody pulp. He wanted to be a million miles away, anywhere but here, with no one counting on him for anything.
“Whoa, big man, what’s the hurry?”
John Steinschmidt was standing by the curb smoking a cigarette, wearing a cleric’s collar and a cook’s apron. His graying hair was low-parted into a sweeping comb-over. He had a tough, North Philly accent, flat Os and glottal stops, that put you in mind of a football coach.
Hatfield pulled to an abrupt stop. “Sorry, pastor,” he drawled, a bit breathless. “I guess I was a little preoccupied.”
“I guess so.”
“What’s with the getup?” Hatfield asked.
Steinschmidt wedged his index finger between his neck and his collar and pulled—slightly at first, feigning discomfort, and then harder, strangulation. “I was up on the Hill today—had to look suitably pious. We’re trying to get a grant to build some low-income housing.”
Hatfield knitted his brow. “Around here? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
Steinschmidt winked.
“What about the neighbors?”
A young woman walked past, headed east on the cobbled sidewalk, hurrying to beat the darkness home. She was wearing a camel-hair overcoat and Nike running shoes, white with neon yellow accents and a purple swoosh. Slung from various parts of her anatomy were her purse, her briefcase, her gym bag, a plastic sack of groceries—out of which jutted a baguette and two hothouse sunflowers—and a leather dog leash, attached at the other end to a brown rottweiler, a muscle-bound creature marching possessively at her side.
Steinschmidt waited until she was safely out of range. “There’ll be some screeching and hollering, but we’ll see it through. People like to do good, despite their selfish instincts. You just have to show them the way.”
“We all know you’re the master of that,” Hatfield said.
Steinschmidt cracked a wry half smile.
The two men stood together in silence, each facing a different direction. A few steps away, lined along the brick wall in an orderly fashion, were two dozen women—despairing, demoralized, some of them clearly deranged—clutching suitcases, plastic bags, the sticky hands of small children with dark circles beneath their eyes. The sun was going down; another sub-freezing night was at hand. Each shuffling step brought them closer to a tepid spaghetti dinner and a cleanish cot at Karen’s Place, a shelter for homeless women housed in Steinschmidt’s former church rectory. The hard-bitten but compassionate Lutheran sucked a last drag from his cigarette and flicked the butt into the street—a high, arching trajectory, like a shot from a flare gun. “The Green Party will be after me next,” he said.
“Don’t you just love how recycling these days passes for social commitment?”
Hatfield smiled halfheartedly. He stopped by Karen’s Place on a regular basis to chat with Steinschmidt; he was usually a much better audience. Though the gulf between their personal philosophies was wide—the pastor was a man who believed that the laws of man could be superseded—Hatfield felt a kinship with the plainspoken son of a German immigrant baker. In some ways, judging from the stories they’d exchanged, growing up in a tenement neighborhood in North Philadelphia had not been so much different than growing up in Hatfield’s West Virginia hollow—just as insular and clannish.
Steinschmidt searched the cop’s face, trying to take stock.
“Are you okay?”
Avoiding his eyes: “Fine.”
“Hmmm,” grunted the pastor, unconvinced.
“What?”
“I guess it was pretty rough over there today.”
Hatfield met his eyes. “You heard from Child Protective Services?”
“There’s always room for one more.”
“I told them to call you. When are they gonna transport him over?”
“Sometime tonight.”
“Do they have a name yet?”
“He’s still not talking. At this point he’s a Johnnie Doe.”
Just then the wind picked up, a rogue gust from the northeast that skittered the leaves and the trash. Steinschmidt’s carefully lacquered comb-over was lifted from his head. It fluttered there for a few beats, one end rooted, luffing like a flag, exposing the shiny pate beneath.
“He’ll be safe here with us,” Steinschmidt assured the officer, meanwhile fingering his hair back into place. “Maybe they’ll be able to locate some family.”
<
br /> Hatfield looked off down the block. The sky was darkening. The pink neon cross atop the Central Union Mission had been switched on; the words pulsed beneath: come unto me. Though he’d searched the apartment several times, he’d been unable to find any ID, official papers, or anything else that would help identify the boy—no mail, no bills, no papers or certificates. It was as if the occupants didn’t really exist, not officially anyway. Neither were the other tenants or the manager much help. The room was let on a week-to-week cash basis, no paperwork was kept, no relationships were forged. There was no way of telling who the dead woman was or where she came from. And no one from either the police department or CPS was going to bust their butt to find out.
The pastor reached up and placed his hand upon the cop’s ample shoulder. “Come on, big guy, lemme buy you and your black cloud a cup of coffee.”
They walked through the alley, past the line of women, toward the back of the building, a wide, three-story townhouse, as were most of the others on this stretch of R Street, distinguished in real estate circles by its two homeless shelters: Karen’s Place, for women and children, was on the east end; the Central Union Mission, for men, was on the west. Rounding out the assortment of properties on the block were a trio of abandoned buildings, the windows boarded, and several illegal rooming houses that catered to hookers, alkie pensioners, and welfare moms, some of whom supplemented their checks with part-time streetwalking. On the northeast corner of Fourteenth and R, opposite the mission, was the jewel of the neighborhood: the newly opened Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center, a gay-run free clinic and AIDS hospice. Freeman had been part of a committee responsible for persuading La Liz to attend the gala opening in person. As her companion for the event, she’d brought along her good friend Michael Jackson, who himself had brought his own companion, a chimpanzee named Bubbles. Jackson and the chimp looked resplendent in matching sequined military-style uniforms. Liz was timeless in Halston.
A staircase led to the basement door, then down two steps into the kitchen. The cooking staff—none of them, it appeared, far removed from the streets themselves—circulated purposefully around the room, wearing hairnets, tending huge cook pots with paddlelike utensils.
Steinschmidt drew two cups of coffee from a shiny urn. “It’s funny,” he said, with a hint of regret, “one of the main reasons I took this job in the first place was because Karen loved this house.”
Hatfield leaned against a counter, conscious of being in the way. Even as he increased his mass, rep by rep, in the precinct weight room, he could never quite shake the feeling—developed during his childhood when the neighbor kids called him “Fatty” or “Oven Stuffer” (as in Perdue brand Oven Stuffer roasting hen) or just “Stuffy” (for short)—that people resented him for taking up too much space. No matter how much muscle he managed to build, no matter how cut his abs or expansive his pecs, deep down he would always be the little fatso who’d once shit his pants at school. That he’d had a stomach flu, that the teacher wouldn’t excuse him to go to the bathroom, none of that seemed to countervail. Whenever he went back home, he had the sense that everyone he knew was remembering the burden he had carried through the balance of that day in sixth grade, a Wednesday, his sweater tied around his waist for camouflage. He certainly remembered. Maybe that’s what they meant when they said you can’t go home again. Especially not when you come from a town of ninety-four.
Hatfield removed his hat and squared it away, military-style, between his elbow and his side. “When did you first come to Washington?”
“Nineteen and seventy,” Steinschmidt said fondly. Hatfield always found his football coach voice oddly soothing, like Spencer Tracy in Boys Town. “What a time that was. Historic. Exciting. Kind of the grand finale of the sixties, you know? Like the ending of a good fireworks display—all hell was breaking loose. And here we were, one mile from the Nixon White House, one mile from the devil himself! We held this little coffeehouse every week in the basement of the church. We called it the Café Iguana. We’d meet there and talk big talk. Roberta Flack got her start there. Marion Barry would show up with his radical homeboys. The government had our phones tapped, the whole nine. Once a night we’d turn on the house lights and ask all the FBI undercovers to stand up so we could give them a round of applause.”
“Did you ever actually live here?”
“For fifteen years—until eighty-five. Probably right around the time you were getting to town, the early days of the Sanctuary Movement. The city was lousy with Central Americans fleeing the U.S.-sponsored bloodbaths in their countries. Remember Ollie North? Drugs for arms? They called it Iran-Contra—Contragate. These people’s stories were un-frickin-believable. They had nowhere to go. And we had this huge, five-bedroom rectory and no little chicks in our nest, so to speak. Woodies donated a couple dozen sleeping bags. The Foam Store, over on Sixth and G, gave us a tower of foam pads. Next thing we knew, we had wall-to-wall people. We had a family of five that set up housekeeping in Karen’s walk-in closet.”
“So you never lived here again?”
It dawned on Steinschmidt that he’d been standing there running his mouth, still holding the two cups of coffee. “I kept promising Karen we would move back in,” he said, handing Hatfield his cup. “But just about the time we were placing the last of the Central Americans—a lot of them ended up in the poultry industry on the Eastern Shore—Reagan flung open the doors of all the so-called mental wards. Virtually overnight the sidewalks and steam grates were filled with human beings who were basically unequipped to cope with everyday life. We had people sleeping on the steps, on the lawn, even in our car one time when Karen forgot to lock it. The first night we reopened the shelter, we were filled to capacity. And we’ve never had an empty bed since. I used to joke with this friend of mine—Jerry Weiss? He’s the general manager of the Madison Hotel. Great guy. He’s donated a ton of stuff over the years—I used to tell him, ‘Karen’s Place has the highest occupancy rate in town.’”
Hatfield stared into the dark pool of his coffee. One by one, the little air bubbles popped. “How do you do it, pastor?”
“Do what in particular?”
Hatfield ran his palm across his bristly, sand-colored flattop.
“After what you saw today, Perdue, it’s pretty normal to question your faith—even tough guys like you. All those muscles don’t make you immune to pain.”
“We were always brought up to believe that God would take care of things,” Hatfield said bitterly. “Let go and let God, they told us. Leave it in God’s hands. Have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. How can you have faith in someone who allows such travesties to occur on his watch?”
A pained expression stretched Steinschmidt’s doughy features. “God doesn’t allow anything, Perdue, no matter what they tried to teach you back home—good Lord, all that fire and brimstone shit is like child abuse! It ruins people for life. God allows free will. He allows choice. Your choices have consequences. When you choose to inject heroin into your body, you’re adding to the equation the possibility that your child might end up spending some quality time with your corpse. It’s all in the Torah, the Old Testament. It says that you have a choice between the light side and the dark, between good and evil. Deuteronomy 30:19: ‘I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. U’vacharta b’chaim, l’ma’an tichiyeh,’” he said, quoting the Hebrew. “‘Therefore choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants.’”
“I was brought up to believe that God expects so much,” Hatfield said. “I’m supposed to treat others as I would myself. I’m supposed to act in a just fashion. I risk my life every day to serve and protect my fellow man, to uphold the law. And I do it to the very best of my ability. Every single day I make the extra effort. I go the extra mile. Couldn’t He work just a little bit harder? What the hell else has He got to do anyway?”
“You know damn well that’s not what He does, Perdue. God doesn’t wave his hand and fix stuff, despite what it says
in all those pretty Bible stories. And neither can we. At Karen’s, we feed and house a maximum of thirty-seven women and children. Every single night, 365 nights a year, thirty-seven women and children get something to eat, a place to shower, somewhere safe and warm to sleep. It doesn’t change the world. It doesn’t cure homelessness. But it does help a few real individuals in a concrete way, however briefly. And that’s all you can do. That’s all you can do. You have to let the big stuff take care of itself.”
Hatfield looked at him. He didn’t know what to say.
“Can I ask you something?”
Hatfield shrugged.
“Strictly as one service professional to another: when’s the last time you went somewhere with a woman who wasn’t wearing handcuffs?”
“Hmmm,” Hatfield grunted, recalling the pastor’s earlier sentiment.
“Seriously, Perdue. If I didn’t have Karen, if I didn’t have other people to talk to, other people in my life—not to mention vacations or getting-away time, processing time, healing time, time to be a human instead of a tin soldier in God’s army—I think I would be a total waste-case. Because the script doesn’t change. It always remains the same. We’re humans: flawed creatures with good intentions, stuck together on the same planet, fighting our baser instincts, trying our best to get along.”
“Flawed being the operative word.”
“I’d bet, if you went back to biblical times—or to any time: the Middle Ages, the Wild West, pick your favorite epoch—if you could get into a time machine and travel back through the years, I bet you’d discover that people have always lived with this same acute sense of dread. The feeling that any minute the other shoe is going to drop. That something really bad is about to happen. The sky is falling, you know what I mean? It wasn’t that long ago that vast populations were being wiped out by flu. Twenty-five years ago, kids in schools were being taught to duck and cover. Now the Evil Empire has been dismantled, and we’re on to the next thing, AIDS. They say that by 2010, 89 percent of all people living on the continent of Africa will be infected. The very act that is supposed to sustain us—reproduction—is now threatening our existence.”
