“Contemplating it.”
“You still think there’s something out there.”
“Yup. Besides, I lost my hat.”
“What a shame. You know, you might have been hallucinating.”
“I’ve never once hallucinated while in the throes of mania.”
“That was then; this is now,” she says. “All bets are off, right?”
She has a point, however trite.
“You know, Colleen, I’d love to stand here all day discussing my mood disorder, but with this overcast, it’s going to get dark early.”
“Then I guess you’d better get going.”
I start off; Colleen falls into stride with me. I realize she’s also dressed and outfitted for the bush-belt packs, machete, the works.
“So,” I say, “you got elected to keep an eye on the goof-ball, huh?”
“No. Actually, I figured you’d do something like this and I just thought I might tag along. Call it curiosity.”
I think very hard about minding, then realize I don’t. “You must be bored stiff if you’d rather baby-sit me than tinker with broken machinery.”
“I don’t do baby-sitting,” she tells me. “But it’s been a long time since I’ve been out for a lark in the woods.”
I can’t help but smile. “Not since last night, huh?” “Goldie, if that’s your idea of a lark, you really are crazy.”
Sticks and stones… “You called me ‘Goldie.’ ”
She shrugs. “You called me ‘Colleen.’ ”
An unexpected turn of events: Colleen the Self-Possessed is venturing out on an adventure with Goldie the Strange and Unpredictable, notwithstanding she thinks I’m a raving loon.
We cross the meadow and enter the woods, with her silent as a post and me trying to sniff Purpose on the wind. We have wandered for some time without me sniffing a damn thing, when she says, “So, Goldman, what was all that about your probation officer? Were you just putting me on?”
“I’d never do that. You’re not my size,” I say, and add, “Ms. Brooks.”
She mumbles something under her breath that rhymes with duck doo and then louder, “Don’t be a dipshit. Do you really have a probation officer?”
“Not anymore. He converted. To something unpleasant and slimy, I suspect.”
“Do you ever give anybody a straight answer?”
Why am I being so ornery about this? “I got into a little trouble a while back.”
“Trouble,” she repeats.
“Assaulting a peace officer.”
Her head swivels around and big green eyes skewer me. “Whoa. You? Assaulted a cop?” Beat. “What happened? Were you drunk or something?”
“I don’t drink. I don’t do something, either. Not without a prescription, anyway. I was living in a tunnel community-”
She cuts me off. “Tunnel community?”
“Subway tunnels. Train tunnels. Under New York.”
“Yeah, yeah, ‘mole people’-I get it. But community? Isn’t that a bit highfalutin’ a word for a collection of losers and misfits?”
“Present company excepted, of course?”
“Sorry.” She sends me a half-apologetic glance out of the corner of her eye, then turns her attention back to the ground, looking for signs of passage.
“No, you’re right. Guilty on both counts. I put myself underground. But everybody’s story is different. Some folks got put there. They… fell through the cracks, I guess.”
“Into the sewer.”
“Subway tunnels. Not a bad place really. There were about fourteen of us in this one compound-under Grand Central. Mostly guys, some couples… a family.”
She’s surprised. “A family? Mommy, Daddy, and kids?”
“Kid. Rachel. She was about four. Her dad worked in a body shop aboveground, saving money to afford first and last on an apartment. One night this cop showed up and started busting up the place.”
The memory, I find, is still painfully sharp. It was late. Agnes and Gino had just put their little girl to bed; Gino was reading to her by Coleman lamp, and in came Officer Jordan on little cat feet. None of us heard him. He was just there, flashlight and nightstick and attitude.
Usually Officer Jordan was a pretty cool guy, a mensch, by any standard. We called him “Petey” and joked with him and talked baseball. Sometimes he’d bring sandwiches and cans of soup, and sometimes we’d invite him to join us for a meal. He even helped a few of our more chemically dependent fellows ease back into some sort of life.
But that night he got his first glimpse of Gino with his family and that big, friendly man turned into something Other.
He was going to take them in, but they couldn’t let him, because they both knew that if he did, they’d lose their little girl to social services and their chances of getting her back would be slim and none. He knew that, too, of course, which made his actions even more inexplicable.
Some of us tried to get in his way, to give the family a chance to disappear. Things got ugly, and he pulled out his service revolver to subdue us, but by then Gino, Agnes, and Rachel were gone. Jordan came unglued. Fired his gun into the roof of the tunnel, over and over. Then he started breaking up the place, one piece at a time. He kicked their little orange-crate bookshelf to pieces, tore up their books, and used his nightstick on their scavenged dishes. Then he did something that just about broke me in two. And that’s when I hit him. Square on the head with Agnes’s toaster oven.
He ended up with ten stitches; I ended up in jail. I look back and think we both committed crimes that night. Weirdly enough, I think we committed them for the same reasons.
Colleen is watching all this storm debris flood back through my head. I wonder what she can read in my face. I look away through the trees, admiring the way the watery sunlight sparkles through their crystalline leaves, and she crouches to examine something in the dry grass and leaf-fall that I can’t even see.
“So you busted up the cop?”
I can still see the shattered remnants of a family’s pseudolife. The Winnie-the-Pooh they’d lifted from some library, torn and lying in a puddle of dirty water, the remains of a bowl of cereal soiling the cover; the clothing Agnes had so carefully washed that day in the warm leakage of steam pipes, shredded and filthy; Rachel’s bed looking like it had exploded.
“He broke Rachel’s doll,” I say, as if that explains everything.
“You assaulted an officer for breaking a child’s toy?” “He ripped it apart with his bare hands.”
She looks up at me-a long, measuring look. “I don’t understand. Why would a cop do a thing like that, anyway?”
“Oh, I understand. He wanted them not to have anything to come back to. He wanted to get that family out of the tunnels, and I guess that was the only way he could think to do it. They didn’t belong there. Crackheads and fuck-ups and psychos belonged there, not real people.”
“Did he? Get them out?”
“They got themselves out after a while. But that time, they just moved somewhere else to rebuild. Somewhere deeper, safer.”
“Kind of like most of the folks out here, I guess,” she observes. “Moving, looking for a life, a home, a safe place.”
I’m wondering if anyone can find those things anymore when Colleen straightens and points with her machete. “This way,” she says, and pushes off into the bush.
Just as I’m about to ask what she’s tracking, we come upon a clear, well-used trail.
“Deer?” I suggest, but Colleen is already down on her haunches, checking out the spoor.
She shakes her head. “People.”
“Anything else?” I ask warily.
“Not along here.” She gives me a dark grin over one shoulder. “But then, I’ve got no idea what kind of tracks Shadows make.”
We follow the trail until it forks. I argue for splitting up, but Commando Colleen is having none of it.
“There’s no way I’m going back into Grave Creek and tell Cal I lost you out here,” she says. “We stick together, you got that?”