“I’ve never seen her like that, not on beer.”
“It wasn’t beer this time. She was stoned, she was blowing pot. Couldn’t you smell it? It’s like musty.”
He sniffed. “It’s like a wild animal smell. She scared me.”
“She scared me too.” And suddenly Jenny was angry. Angry at Crystal. He’s only nine, she thought with fury. He’s too young to see this. She lay down beside Bingo and put her arms around him.
But she couldn’t take away the ugliness. He had to learn to live with it. If she expected Bingo to be strong, he would be. It never did to hide your head from the facts, it only made things worse.
She pulled a corner of his blanket over her bare feet.
Bingo relaxed a little and yawned. “Has Turnock followed us, do you think?”
“When you were asleep in the car I saw him flying in the night. He was following the car. His wings were all shiny with the rain and when he looked down at me his eyes were like fire. I knew he would never stay behind.”
Bingo went to sleep then, holding his sister’s hand.
She crept to her own bed finally, but the pot smell sickened her, and when she touched Crystal, Crystal’s skin felt clammy and unnatural. Was it only pot, then? Jenny drew away, disgusted, and buried herself beneath the strange blankets.
Chapter 4
For breakfast Jenny made fried bread with syrup and opened a can of peaches. Lud had a good appetite in the morning. He scuttled it down, his share and more. Mama ate daintily, a bit of dry toast, some black coffee. Crystal, pale and wan, wanted nothing. She turned so white once that Jenny thought she was going to be sick. Jenny walked her to the door and they stood on the wet stoop in the cold fresh air. The rain was only a sprinkle now and the sun was coming. “Jenny, did you put me to bed last night? Did you put me in the shower?”
“Yes. You were screaming, you were afraid. You said something was crawling.” Jenny shuddered. Then she put her arm around Crystal.
“I can’t remember it,” Crystal said. She turned to face Jenny; her eyes were frightened. “I can’t remember it.” Then her eyes went flat and she looked away.
When they were on the road, Crystal sat hunched against the side of the car, her forehead pressed against the glass and her eyes closed. As Jenny watched her, the sun caught at her cheek and lashes. Outside, the sunlight made the wet bushes sparkle. The earth and trees, darkened by the soaking, were incredibly rich in color. Jenny pulled the newspaper packing out of her broken window and stared out. She could smell the wet earth and the grass. In a field of stubble one apple tree stood alone, naked and twisted.
The children had never seen a large city. The idea frightened Bingo, thinking of schools—big schools. But Jenny was eager. She watched the green hills on their left, and studied the houses on them with interest. They were large houses with gardens and they commanded a view of the city. A river ran through its center. But the main street was lined with topless bars and nude movies.
Lud said, “You can get anything in this town.”
Jenny wondered what, exactly.
Crystal brightened and ogled the college boys as they passed through the downtown campus.
They drove beside a narrow city park where the bare trees held twisted branches against the silver sky. Tall buildings lined the park and suddenly Bingo was alert. Some of the buildings were handsome slabs of brick and wood and smoke-colored glass; others were of ancient styles, carved and deeply shadowed under porticos, with stained glass windows that bled color as the sun touched them. Bingo pressed forward, studying them. The air was diamond-clear and the buildings seemed larger and sharper than life. Black shadows angled across rough stone walls. The thrusting carved towers might have been shaped by giant hands, as Bingo made his models. But these were infinitely more finished, infinitely more beautiful. He leaned over Jenny, pushing against the broken glass to see, then he rolled Crystal’s window down and leaned out.
“It’s cold!” Crystal snapped.
But Bingo, locked in his own world, hardly heard her.
Maybe Lud knew this city, or maybe it was instinct, but he headed unerringly for the cheap apartment houses. He chose a neighborhood where lumberyards, delicatessens, and warehouses were jumbled among the dilapidated residences. The first apartment for rent sign they saw was on a boxlike brick building blackened with soot. “One place’s good as another,” Lud said. Fire escapes covered the front, and the windows were blind with dirt. They could hear tugs hooting from the river.
The apartment they were shown had bile-green walls and a lumpy pink couch across one corner of the living room. The colorless rug was worn to threads in pathways between the inner doors. The limp lace curtains had holes in them, and the rooms smelled of cabbage.
But it was a corner apartment with a view of the river in one direction and the green hills in the other, and off the smaller of the two bedrooms was a balcony. Bingo went out onto it. From four floors up he could see the tops of warehouses and freight cars, and beyond them the river with ocean-going ships on it. Behind an ancient little church with a white steeple rose the elevated freeway; half-finished, it stopped in mid-air. A car going along it at high speed could drop suddenly to the street below, where it would roll and bounce, smashing other cars.
Jenny scraped caked food out of the kitchen drawers and from between the maroon tiles of the walls, then scrubbed the kitchen with Lysol. The filth made her retch. Mama helped for a while, but soon she was standing at the open front door talking to the landlady, a pale wisp of a woman with ragged hair and skin the color of thin milk. She wore no stockings, and above her carpet slippers her legs were knobby and blue-veined. She had a whining voice. Jenny listened to her with care. She talked about the tenants, then began asking Mama questions. But Mama was adept at hedging questions.
The landlady whined, “Does your man work around close?”
“I did want to ask about that: how is the bus service downtown from here?”
“It’s right on the corner, every fifteen minutes. Are you new in town?”
“I’m not too familiar with this part of town. Is it safe for the children on the streets after dark, or should I have them in?”
“There are some strange characters. Though I keep them out of my apartments.”
“I know what you mean,” Mama said. “It’s hard, running an apartment house, ain’t it?”
“Oh, you have no idea, honey. Take that man in 3D, all that grease up the walls, and why in the world would anyone keep his sofa turned up on end like that? It ain’t normal. At least he don’t have no women around. But if he don’t have women, what does he do?”
Jenny grinned and thought, I might hate moving, and I might hate the dirt, but I sure do get an education. Mama is good at fencing questions. She just asks one right back. If that old bat out there gossiped less and scrubbed more, she might have nicer tenants. Doesn’t say much for us, though, does it? For two cents I’d tell her what I think of her pigsty.
But she knew she wouldn’t. Mama couldn’t afford to be on bad terms with the landlady. Jenny set herself to dreaming of a little house, a clean cottage painted white inside and out, with a private bedroom of her own. With a garden all around it, and sunshine. By the time she had it furnished, with pictures on the walls and flowers on a red lacquer table before a bay window, she had scrubbed the real kitchen clean and put the boxes of cereal and crackers and the few cans and jars into the cupboards. Then she washed all the dishes, those that belonged to the landlady and those they had brought with them.
She found Bingo kneeling beside the red trunk at the foot of his cot. His drawings were scattered across the floor and he was studying them critically.
Crystal’s voice wafted up from the yard and Jenny peered over the balcony rail. Two boys with a guitar, Jenny thought. She sure doesn’t waste any time. I wonder if I could operate like that if I wanted to. I guess I’m too skinny. She looked in the mirror, wound her hair on top of her head like Crystal’s and puffed out her chest. But it wasn’t the same. She grinned at herself and stuck out her tongue. Maybe in a few years. Maybe I’m a slow starter.