A smooth ridge of rock jutted parallel to the road. Bride took Rain’s hand and led her gently to the stone. They both sat down. Neither saw the doe and her fawn standing among the trees on the other side of the road. The doe watching the pair of humans was as still as the tree she stood next to. The fawn nestled her flank.
“Tell me,” said Bride. “Tell me.”
At the sound of Bride’s voice, mother and child fled.
“Come on, Rain.” Bride put her hand on Rain’s knee. “Tell me.”
And she did, her emerald eyes sometimes sparkling wide other times narrowed to dark olive slits as she described the savvy, the perfect memory, the courage needed for street life. You had to find out where the public toilets were, she said; how to avoid children’s services, police, how to escape drunks, dope heads. But knowing where sleep was safe was the most important thing. It took time and she had to learn what kinds of people would give you money and what for, and remember the back doors of which food pantries or restaurants had kind and generous servers. The biggest problem was finding food and storing it for later. She deliberately made no friends of any kind — young or old, stable or wandering nuts. Anybody could turn you in or hurt you. Corner hookers were the nicest and the ones who warned her about dangers in their trade — guys who didn’t pay, cops who did before arresting them, men who hurt them for fun. Rain said she didn’t need reminding because once when some really old guy hurt her so bad she bled, her mother slapped him and screamed, “Get out!” then she douched her with a yellow powder. Men scared her, Rain confessed, and made her feel sick. She had been waiting on some steps at the Salvation Army truck stop when it began to rain. A lady on the truck might give her a coat or shoes this time like other times when she had slipped her food. That’s when Evelyn and Steve came along, and when he touched her she thought of the men who came to her mother’s house, so she had to run off, miss the food lady and hide.
Rain giggled on occasion as she described her homeless life, relishing her smarts, her escapes, while Bride fought against the danger of tears for anyone other than herself. Listening to this tough little girl who wasted no time on self-pity, she felt a companionship that was surprisingly free of envy. Like the closeness of schoolgirls.
Rain
She’s gone, my black lady. That time I saw her stuck in the car her eyes scared me at first. Silky, my cat, has eyes like that. But it wasn’t long before I began to like her a lot. She’s so pretty. Sometimes I used to just look at her when she was sleeping. Today her car came back with a busted-up door of another color. Before she left she gave me a shaving brush. Steve has a beard and doesn’t want it so I use it to brush my cat’s fur. I feel sad now she’s gone. I don’t know who I can talk to. Evelyn is real good to me and so is Steve but they frown or look away if I say stuff about how it was in my mother’s house or if I start to tell them how smart I was when I was thrown out. Anyway I don’t want to kill them like I used to when I first got here. But then I wanted to kill everybody — until they brought me a kitten. She’s a cat now and I tell her everything. My black lady listens to me tell how it was. Steve won’t let me talk about it. Neither will Evelyn. They think I can read but I can’t, well maybe a little — signs and stuff. Evelyn is trying to teach me. She calls it home-schooling. I call it home-drooling and home-fooling. We’re a fake family — okay but fake. Evelyn is a good substitute mother but I’d rather have a sister like my black lady. I don’t have a daddy, I mean I don’t know who he is because he didn’t live in my mother’s house but Steve is always here unless he’s doing some day work somewhere. My black lady is nice but tough too. When we started walking back home after I told her everything about my life before Evelyn and Steve, a truck with big boys in it passed us. One of them hollered “Hey, Rain. Who’s your mammy?” My black lady didn’t turn around but I stuck out my tongue and thumbed my nose at him. One of them was Regis, a boy I know because he comes to our house sometimes with his father to give us firewood or baskets of corn. The driver, an older boy, turned the truck around so they could come after us. Regis pointed a shotgun just like Steve’s at us. My black lady saw him and threw her arm in front of my face. The birdshot messed up her hand and arm. We fell, both of us, her on top of me. I saw Regis duck down as the truck gunned its engine and shot off. What could I do but help her up and hold on to her bloody arm as we hurried back to our house as fast as her ankle would let her. Steve picked the tiny pellets out of her hand and arm, saying he was going to warn Regis’s father. Evelyn washed the blood off my black lady’s skin and poured iodine all over her hand. My black lady made a hurt face but she didn’t cry. My heart was beating fast because nobody had done that before. I mean Steve and Evelyn took me in and all but nobody put their own self in danger to save me. Save my life. But that’s what my black lady did without even thinking about it.
She’s gone now but who knows maybe I’ll see her again sometime.
I miss my black lady.
PART III
Blood stained his knuckles and his fingers began to swell. The stranger he’d been beating wasn’t moving anymore or groaning, but he knew he’d better walk away quickly before a student or campus guard thought he was the lawless one instead of the man lying on the grass. He’d left the beaten man’s jeans open and his penis exposed just the way it was when he first saw him at the edge of the campus playground. Only a few faculty children were near the slide and one was on the swing. None apparently had noticed the man licking his lips and waving his little white gristle toward them. It was the lip licking that got to him — the tongue grazing the upper lip, the swallowing before its return to grazing. Obviously the sight of the children was as pleasurable to the man as touching them because just as obviously, in his warped mind, they were calling to him and he was answering their plump thighs and their tight little behinds, beckoning in panties or shorts as they climbed up to the slide or pumped air on the swing.
Booker’s fist was in the man’s mouth before thinking about it. A light spray of blood dappled his sweatshirt, and when the man lost consciousness, Booker grabbed his book bag off the ground and walked away — not too fast, but fast enough to cross the road, turn his shirt inside out and make it to class on time. He didn’t make it, but there were a few others sneaking into the lecture hall when he arrived. The latecomers took seats in the last rows and plopped backpacks, briefcases or laptops on their desks. Only one of them took a notebook out. Booker preferred pencil on paper too, but his swollen fingers made writing difficult. So he listened a little, daydreamed a little and covered his mouth to hide his yawns.
The professor was going on and on about Adam Smith’s wrongheadedness, as he did in almost every lecture, as though the history of economics had only one scholar worth trashing. What about Milton Friedman or that chameleon Karl Marx? Booker’s obsession with Mammon was recent. Four years ago, as an undergraduate, he’d nibbled courses in several curricula, psychology, political science, humanities, and he’d taken multiple courses in African-American Studies, where the best professors were brilliant at description but could not answer to his satisfaction any question beginning with “Why.” He suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running. So as a graduate student he turned to economics — its history, its theories — to learn how money shaped every single oppression in the world and created all the empires, nations, colonies with God and His enemies employed to reap, then veil, the riches. He habitually contrasted the beaten, penniless, half-naked King of the Jews screaming betrayal on a cross with the bejeweled, glamorously dressed pope whispering homilies above the Vatican’s vault. The Cross and the Vault by Booker Starbern. That would be the title of his book.