At the Edge of the Haight

by Katherine Seligman

  I was going to untie Root and start walking again, maybe after a stop in the Mill Valley, whatever that was, when a lady who could barely see over the steering wheel of her dented white car stopped in front of us. The back bumper was crammed with stickers—be kind, save the bees, life is good—and close to dragging on the ground. She rolled down the window and waved at me. “Get in front,” she said, “but put your friend in the back seat.”

  The door clanged when I opened it and again when I managed to pull it shut. She reached over and attached an elastic cord to the handle. “Sometimes it flies open,” she said. “I keep saying I’m going to get it fixed.” There was a pile of newspapers and an empty cup from Starbucks on the seat and the woman tossed them in the back like confetti. Root settled where one of the sections of paper landed. “Belt,” said the woman, and I snapped on the stiff canvas across my chest. “Him too,” she said. “You know, dogs are like projectiles if you have an accident. I don’t want him slamming himself into the dashboard here if something happens.”

  I turned so she couldn’t see my expression and then slipped into the back seat to stretch the belt around Root. He looked like a freak, the belt squishing his chest fur and shoving him onto one haunch, but he didn’t complain. He had been around long enough to know when he needed to step up and act like a street dog that would rip off someone’s head or suck up and be quiet.

  “So where are you going?” asked the woman.

  I told her we needed to get to the other side of the bridge. From there we could walk. But she said she had time to kill before she went to meet her friends for lunch, like she did every Sunday. Haight would be fine, she said. She used to like it there when she lived in the city, before she had children. Sometimes she wished she hadn’t moved to Marin County because it was too out of touch with reality. People there didn’t know the first thing about community. They donated to a million causes and then closed their blinds so they didn’t have to talk to the person next door. She didn’t like the way the whole country was going. She kept talking all the way across the bridge. She wagged her head when she spoke, which made her small stained-glass butterfly earrings flutter from side to side. I stopped listening and watched the fog on the ocean. A foghorn bleated from out in the bay. I thought how it must feel to be at the exact center of the bridge when the mist moved onto it, be able to look down at the water with nothing above or below me.

  “You never did tell me about yourself,” the woman said when I got out of her car on Haight. I shrugged and thanked her. She didn’t want to know. She probably closed her own blinds at her own house, over the bridge, in that valley. Root and I walked a few blocks, looking for Ash, Fleet, and Hope. The wind pushed me down the street, which was quiet except for a bar with TVs hanging from the ceiling, all tuned to a football game. I leaned in a big open window next to the sidewalk and took a glass of water off of a table. Four guys in shorts and backward baseball caps were watching the screen and they didn’t notice. I held the glass down for Root, who lapped most of it, and put it back. I looked for chicken wings or chips, any kind of food, but they were just drinking. One of them, in a bright yellow sweatshirt, reached behind for his glass and finished off the water. He wiped a sleeve across his mouth and I thought he was going to turn around and see us, but he kept his eyes on the TV. A second later he shot out of his chair and jumped into the arms of the guy next to him, wrapped his legs around his waist and smacked him with his cap. “Yeah, buddy,” he screamed.

  No one was at our sleeping spot, but Ash’s extra coat was high up in a tree and a few of Hope’s tie-dyed T-shirts were strung around another limb like dying flowers. The rusty shopping cart sat in a stand of trees down the hill, piled with bags of sliced bread, Ash’s torn up red sneakers, Fleet’s rumpled paperbacks.

  I dug up the plastic tub of Root’s food, which smelled moldy even though it was sealed. He didn’t seem to mind and finished it as soon as I dumped it on the mushy leaves.

  The dinner line had already started at the shelter. From down the block it was hard to tell anyone apart, the overflowing packs, knotted hair, dirtied up jackets and sweatshirts. When I got closer I could make out Fleet, strawberry hair tied up on her head, Tiny in a box under her arm.

  “Hey,” she said, like I hadn’t been gone. “What’s up?”

  I stood there, no expression, and she put down the box and pulled me in for a hug. I gave it back to her.

  “Hey yourself, sister,” I said. “I didn’t think I’d ever get back.”

  “But here you are.”

  “Where is everyone?”

  Ash was with some kids from the high school who lived around the corner. Sometimes they gave him their lunches, names printed out on the brown paper bags, because they knew they could count on him if they wanted anything. And Hope had hooked up with a guy who worked on a weed farm up north.

  “So who is this guy?” I asked her.

  “Pizza John.” Fleet laughed and I could see she was high. She’d probably smoked with Hope’s friend, whoever he was.

  “So she went up there with him?”

  “The harvest ended last month,” said Fleet. “He’s trimming in some warehouse in the East Bay. He goes wherever there’s a crop. He says they used to pay him good money, until weed went all legal. Now there’s too much of it, which I don’t personally notice.”

  I put an arm around her and she smiled. I held on to her but I hoped she was not going to tell me any more about Pizza John. I was still thinking about being in the cabin with Dave and Marva.

  We inched our way toward the dining room and Fleet pointed him out, standing up near the front of the line with Hope. He was tall, with a ponytail peeking out under an oversized straw hat.

  “I’m not going off with him to trim weed,” I said.

  “I knew you’d be that way,” she said.

  “I’m not any way.” I took my arm off her shoulder and picked up a plate. A server spooned spaghetti onto it. Another added the mixed vegetables. I sat at one of the long tables with Fleet and three guys with skateboards. I started telling Fleet about Dave and Marva. The skateboarders leaned in to listen and I tried to ignore them.

  Fleet kept interrupting to ask questions. She liked the part about the birds, except when I said that they would have eaten Tiny. She said I should have stayed longer, taken the chance to sleep and eat all I wanted. They sounded nice. Besides, Dave and Marva had to have bucks, she said. She was surprised to hear that I hadn’t lifted anything. I didn’t tell her about the blue soap dish, which was still in my backpack. It had been a while since I’d taken something so pointless.

  “Watch him,” she said, pushing Tiny’s box across the table. “I’m going for seconds.”

  Tiny had bunched himself into a ball in a corner of the box. I dropped a piece of corn from my plate by his twitching nose and he reached for it and started chewing. I put what was left of my dinner on the floor for Root.

  “I wish someone would take care of me like that,” said one of the skateboarders, and laughed. He was wearing a black knit cap with eyes painted on it.

  “I bet,” I said. Ash’s least favorite crew was the skaters, even though he had a board too and could flip down any hill. He said you couldn’t trust them. They would share food one minute, then be all cranked up and in your face later. They could go either way and you couldn’t tell when it would happen.

  Fleet came back with her plate refilled. She had to be wasted to eat like that.

  “I knew a chick in Santa Cruz who had a rat,” said one of the skaters, his elbows reaching halfway across the table. “She let him sleep in bed with her, but one night he ate one of her fingers. Chewed it right off.”

  I gave Fleet a look that said, “Just pretend this idiot doesn’t exist,” and she pretty much did. She dove into her food. I took my plate and dropped it in the compost bin. One side of the room had colored cans, each with its own set of cartoon drawings of what to put in there. If you dumped your paper into the landfill bin someone s
erving dinner would call out, “Compost! Compost!” like someone was being killed.

  “Maddy Donaldo?” One of the volunteers stood near the door and looked around, one hand shading his eyes from the overhead light.

  I went to sit back down with Fleet, who was still shoveling in food. She poked me and looked over at him. I was hoping she wasn’t going to say anything. I’d signed in, so they knew I was here. Dave and Marva must have discovered I was gone and had stolen something from their house. I was about to get arrested for taking a soap dish.

  “Maddy? Donaldo?” he called again, as if I was in first grade and didn’t know how to raise my hand.

  What was I supposed to do? Ash wasn’t there, I was stuck in a shelter with skaters who watched rats chew people to death, and now the police were after me. I could picture Chip, how he sawed his fingers back and forth in the air whenever I complained. “Getting out the world’s smallest violin,” he said. It felt like everyone was looking at me.

  I raised my hand halfway, since it was obvious I was there.

  “I have someone who wants to talk to you,” the volunteer said.

  I followed him into the hallway between the dining room and dormitory where I could see two cops. One had his arms behind him. The other was the one who’d cited me for blocking the sidewalk. Of course, I hadn’t paid the fine. None of us had.

  “Ms. Donaldo?” he said. His buzz cut was standing straight up, rooster style, on the top of his head. I couldn’t tell if he recognized me. “We have a pending investigation on a homicide in the park, and we were hoping you could help us. We heard that you might have seen what happened.”

  What was it with everyone wanting my help? I’d been minding my own business, with no one noticing. Now I was the one everyone needed to find.

  “I didn’t see anything actually happen,” I said. “All I saw was the kid, the one who died.”

  “We need you to look at some pictures,” he said. “See if you recognize anyone. If you don’t want to do it for us, do it for Shane Golden’s parents.”

  I’d been thinking about the stupid soap dish while Dave and Marva were ratting my story to the cops. The cop said he would send a car for me in the morning, if that made things easier. I told him I’d rather walk. Having a squad car roll up outside with everyone watching was not what I wanted. He nodded and told me to have someone call if I changed my mind. He handed me his card with his number on it. officer william patz, it said. I tucked it in the back pocket of my jeans.

  “Okay,” he said in a voice louder than it needed to be. “So we’ll see you tomorrow?”

  I didn’t know if I could make myself go. What else had Dave and Marva told the cops? Seeing a killer was not something they could arrest you for. They couldn’t make me talk to them.

  I slept on the top bunk that night, above Fleet, who tucked Tiny’s cage under the bed. Root had to stay tied to the side of the bunk, but he didn’t make any noise about it. Usually I tried to take the bottom spot so he could jump up beside me, but I wanted to be harder to find. I tried to remember what the guy who killed Shane even looked like. I could see Shane lying on the ground, the way his eyes were open but not looking at anything. I held onto the scratchy blanket and listened to the snoring and coughing and sleep-talking. One girl moaned in her sleep, shaking off a bad dream.

  In the morning, I was first in the bathroom, which was a mess of used toilet tissue and small wet towels on the floor. I splashed my face with water. Someone had stuck a sign on the bottom of the mirror. keep me clean. thanks, your sink.

  It made me think about Ash, who would write something like that. I wondered why he didn’t show up at the shelter last night. Maybe he was in the park or posted up on a stoop. In the mirror, I looked like the same person as yesterday. I slapped my cheek. “Be here now,” I said, which I had picked up from an acting class that met last winter at the shelter. The teacher had trooped over from a nearby Catholic college to work with us. It was supposed to build confidence, he said. He stood in the middle giving directions. Find a character. Look into your neighbor’s eyes. Reach deep. “Be here now! Be here now!” Ash and I had gone for a few of the classes, partly because he passed around homemade cookies at the end and then let us stay there until dinner. But I liked pretending to be someone else, even if was just for an hour. The teacher said I was a natural, that I must have acted before.

  When I opened the metal side door of the shelter I saw the squad car parked out front. The cop reached across and opened the passenger side door, like he’d been expecting me. Root climbed in, then jumped into the back seat.

  “Good morning, Maddy,” he said.

  I hesitated, but got in. I probably had no choice and I didn’t want to have my arms snapped into cuffs and twisted behind me again.

  “You want a doughnut?” he said, after I closed the door. I purposely didn’t look at him. “Kidding,” he said. “I just thought, you know, everyone expects the cop to have doughnuts.”

  “I like doughnuts,” I said.

  “We could get some then,” he said. “Why not?”

  He pulled a U-turn and drove around the corner to Donut World, a rundown shop that blasted the smell of sugary frying dough onto the sidewalk. I was not in the mood, but I got out of the car anyway and walked into the shop in front of him.

  “Two creams, two jellies, two plain,” he said to the clerk.

  Back in the car he picked out a jelly donut and took an enormous bite. Purple jelly stuck to his fingers, which he licked one by one. The bird on his badge looked like it was sitting on flames and trying to escape. He picked up the box and held it out to me. I took a plain one and nibbled it around the edges.

  “Okay, then. Headquarters,” he said.

  I broke a chunk off my donut and gave it to Root, sitting patiently in the back seat.

  “I’m not sure that’s good for his digestion,” said the cop. “Just make sure he doesn’t crap on the seat. Can I ask you something?”

  I looked over at him. He had a speck of jelly on his lower lip. I knew he was going to ask about my parents, about how much they worried, how I should let them know where I was.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about the kid you’d seen when we cited you on the street?”

  I didn’t say anything. Could I get in trouble for staying quiet? Why didn’t he tell me last night that he knew who I was? He was playing games and I could too.

  “Well, you’re here now,” he said. “Do the right thing. I always tell people that, especially young people. It helps, in the end. It’s a shame they don’t teach that to kids anymore. Just do the right thing.”

  We walked into the station, to the same room where they had held us for hanging out on the sidewalk. The same angry, vacant faces stared down at me from the walls. Root stood still beside me like he felt the seriousness of the place. I sat on one of the long benches until a door opened and Patz called out my name.

  “Let’s get started,” he said, and led me and Root into a small room with a table and no windows.

  The black cloth of his shirt was tight across his bulb of a belly. He asked me if I had seen a line-up before. I said I had seen them on TV, where people sit in a room and look through a window, but the guys inside can’t see you. It was how I used to feel at Karen and Chip’s house. I watched everyone in the house, but no one really saw me.

  “That’s TV,” Patz said. “In here we’re going to show you some photos in a book. That’s how we do it. You tell us if you recognize anyone. But first we have to set up the equipment. You understand all this will be recorded?”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. If I was going to look at a book of pictures, they could have brought them to me at the shelter instead of giving me the cop car escort. Another cop came in with a camera and a microphone that he set up on a little stand in front of me. Patz put a black plastic binder on the table. He opened it to a page filled with photos of faces and then announced his name, the day and time, and that he was talkin
g to Madlynne Donaldo. He asked me to spell my name and to state my home address. I didn’t say anything. He knew where I lived.

  “Take your time and look at these men,” he said. “Really look at each one. And then tell me if you recognize any of them.”

  I forced myself to look down at the rows of faces, which were covered with a sheet of plastic. My eyes skidded over them. They all looked like they could kill someone, if they found you alone somewhere. They didn’t need a reason. A small space heater spewed warm air at my feet, but I was cold. My whole body shivered once, hard. I stared across the page left to right, like I was reading, and I came back to one at the end of a middle row. He had patchy gray-and-black hair brushed back from his face, a few days of gray beard on his chin, and eyes so dark they looked like they went on forever. I knew I should not have eaten the doughnut because I could feel it coming up in my throat.

  “Look carefully at all of them,” said Patz. “Even if one jumps out at you.”

  I took a deep breath and was quivering, but wasn’t sure if he could tell. I could have lied. It would have been easy to say I didn’t know any of them and then I could leave, walk back to the shelter and find Fleet and Hope. But I put my finger on top of the man’s plastic-shielded face. I skimmed the other pictures again. Some of the men looked in the camera, but most stared away to the side. The man from the park had an empty look. Nothing before and nothing after. Until that moment, I couldn’t have described his features, but it turned out I had memorized them.

  “That’s him.” I had a finger on the picture.

  “Ms. Donaldo is indicating a positive on number eight,” said Patz.

  He turned to me and put an arm around the back of my chair and switched off the microphone. “Good going,” he said. “That’s it. You did the right thing.”

  “That’s it, as in now I leave and the guy comes after me?” I said. “Won’t he know I’m the one who turned him in?”

  “We will be putting out a bulletin,” said Patz. “We think we know where he is. He’s not exactly a stranger to us, if you know what I mean, but neither was Shane. Neither of them was up to any good.”