The fat one laughed in a way that really soured me on him. “Different kind of bag lady, lady.” He pushed his hat back on his head. His hair could have stood a couple of good latherings with industrial shampoo. “Know what a mule is?”
The Thin Man saved me the trouble. “She ran drugs for a cripple who works the territory east of here.”
“East of the sun,” I said. I didn’t mean anything by it. Just some old story I used to read as a kid, a story about a girl who has to find her one true love east of the sun and west of the moon. “Over at the New Dragon. The Wheelchair Bandit — that’s what the neighborhood listserv calls him.”
“Nice neighbors you have.” Fatty picked a dark speck out of his teeth.
“Sometimes they try to cut a deal on the side and make a little extra cash,” Thin Man said. “They’re not real smart, these people.”
When they finished with me, they went out in the alley and walked up and down, making notes in those pads they carry around. I watched them for a while and that’s when I realized I hadn’t said anything about the doll. They’d found most of its parts spread through the alley. If I hadn’t mentioned it to Dave first, I probably would have gone straight out and told Thin Man, who had parked himself against the patrol car that blocked the alley. He was making more notes. Notes about splatter patterns and exit wounds and time of death. Notes about the grisly end of a woman whose worst crime, as far as I’d ever known, had been to try and bum cigarettes off people who didn’t have them. What was she doing with scum like the Bandit? She was probably too crazy to know what she’d gotten mixed up in. All she’d wanted was a baby of her own.
“Think of the kids,” Dave said. We’d been sitting there while. His coffee must have gotten cold by then, but he didn’t even complain like he usually would. “You want them to get dragged into this? You want Dani on the stand telling a courtroom full of people how her mother gave her toys away to the drug dealer down the block? The cops have all the information they need.”
I couldn’t see how any lawyer in his right mind would put a four-year-old on the stand to tell a story about a doll, but I let Dave talk me out of what I knew I ought to do. He had a way of making certain things seem unnecessary, like you’d be a damn fool to hassle yourself.
It wasn’t a dream that woke me up that night. As I passed the doors to Dani and Jack’s rooms I heard the baby give out a creaking little sigh and settle himself back to sleep. I went down to the basement and got out Juanita’s first doll, the one she’d never see again. I held it in my hands and tried to get the head to stay straight, but it couldn’t. When something gets that broken, you can’t fix it.
I got a flathead screwdriver out of Dave’s toolbox. I turned the doll over and looked at the screws that held the doll’s battery compartment shut. They were almost stripped, but if I pressed hard enough into the metal groove I could catch just enough traction to get them turning. You had to want it bad, though, to get that job done. After I dug the last one out of its hole, I used the tip of the flathead to jimmy the cover off. It popped out more easily than I was expecting and the tip of the screwdriver slammed into what should have been a battery — but whatever it was gave under the point.
In the space where Baby’s batteries should have been — and crammed inside her torso and up into her poor dangling head — were plastic bags about the size of the half-sand-wich-sized Ziplocs I used to pack up snacks in to take to the playground. I didn’t need to know the name of what was in these.
I sat on the floor in the laundry room in my nightgown and stared at that doll and it stared back at me and its eyes weren’t crazy at all, not one bit. It knew the score. It knew that one of these nights I’d hear the noise of the Wheelchair Bandit’s keys and hear the panting breath of that pit bull and my family would never get clear, ever.
Unless.
I put every screw back in as tight as I could get it. I worked the flathead until my knuckles ached. A little bit of residue had settled into the gap where the doll’s head had separated from its neck; I blew every last speck of it out. Then I collected the doll and myself and found the back door key and let myself out onto the deck. I didn’t bother to get my slippers. I had to get that thing out of the house.
The lonely streetlight by the storage units shed an orange glow that just reached the spot where I’d found her. I could see the dark circle on the ground where Juanita had bled her life out with only an empty doll for company. I could see the gap in the bricks where Dani had found the thing I held in my hands.
I set that hateful thing back in the darkness where my daughter had found it and told myself I didn’t hear the jangle of keys, the dog panting right behind me. I told trouble I didn’t want any part of it. Nobody does, when you think hard about it. Isn’t that the truth?
Solomon’s alley
by Robert Andrews
Georgetown, N.W.
Solomon’s alley parallels M Street, Georgetown’s main drag. Running behind Johnny Rockets, Ben & Jerry’s, Old Glory Barbecue, and the Riggs Bank, the alley connects Wisconsin Avenue on the west to 31st Street one block east.
Battered blue dumpsters line the alley. Solomon had puzzled over the dumpsters for several years. Finally, he’d decided that their BFI logo stood for big fucking incinerators. That job done, he’d taken on thinking out the likely origins of the five ancient magnolia trees that shaded the stretch of alley where he parked his two Safeway carts.
On this Tuesday morning in September, he sat in his folding canvas deck chair, part of him pondering the magnolias while another part got ready for his day job, watching the Nigerian. At 10:00, like clockwork, the white Dodge van pulled up across Wisconsin at the corner of Prospect, by Restoration Hardware.
“Hello, Nigerian,” Solomon whispered. He settled back to watch the sidewalk come alive. Each morning’s setup was a ballet, a precisely choreographed routine, and Solomon was a discriminating critic.
Most mornings the performance went welclass="underline" every move efficient, rhythmic, smooth. Some mornings it didn’t: some mornings everything fell apart in a cranky series of busted plays.
The driver eased the van forward so its front bumper toed the white marks on the pavement. He switched off the ignition and got out to go round to the back.
Waverly Ngame was a big man. Two-fifty, six feet and a couple of inches, Solomon figured. His skin blue-black… shin… like the barrel of a .38.
First out, a long rectangular folding table, the kind you see in church basements. Ngame locked the legs open. With his toe and wood shims, he worked around the table until it rested solid on the uneven brick sidewalk.
He disappeared into the van and came out with racks of white plastic-coated wire-grid shelving under both arms and a grease-stained canvas bag in his left hand.
In swift, practiced motions, he picked the largest of the shelves and braced it upright on the side of the table facing the street. With one hand he held the shelf, with the other he reached into the canvas bag and came out with a large C-clamp. Twirling it with sharp snaps of his wrist, he opened the jaws just enough to slip over the shelf and the table edge. He tightened the clamp, and moved to repeat the process on the other side of the table.
More shelving and more C-clamps produced a display stand.
Now the van disgorged Ngame’s merchandise in large nylon bags and sturdy blue plastic storage boxes. Soon, Gucci and Kate Spade handbags hung alluringly from the vertical shelving while Rolex watches and Serengeti sunglasses marched in neat ranks across the top of the church-basement folding table.