She thought of the time when the bad thing happened.
She was living with her grandmother, an old woman who had seen more than her share of heartbreak. They lived together in a two-bedroom unit at the Robert Taylor Houses, the largest public housing complex in the world. Lola hated it there. She hated the grim towers that dominated the landscape, and she hated the fenced in outdoor walkway that made their apartment seem like some kind of motel room. She hated the drug dealers who plied their trade, bottle by bottle, in broad daylight. She hated the police who circled like vultures. She hated the pimps and the crack whores and the crack heads. She hated the couples who fucked – there was no other word for it – in the stairwells, and the muggers and the molesters who lurked in the shadows, and the thieves and the murderers and the corpses that sometimes turned up on the sidewalks in the very early mornings.
She hated them all.
She kept her hate inside herself, clutched it tightly to her like she clutched her schoolbooks. She didn’t show her hate to them. Instead, she went about her business and dreamed of the day when she would be away from here. She knew from the television that there was another life outside of this one, a life where people weren’t afraid all the time, where you could go outside after dark, where it was okay to show weakness, where people smiled and said “thank you” and “please.”
But for now, this was where they lived, and since Lola’s mother had died, there was nowhere else for her to go. And Lola’s relationship with her grandmother was great. They talked and laughed together easily, as though there weren’t fifty years between them. Her grandmother had even scraped the money together to send Lola for modern dance instruction. By sixteen, it was clear that Lola wasn’t going to Broadway, but she still enjoyed it and it kept her fit.
But dancing for fun ended that early spring afternoon.
Months before, she had discovered a shortcut, a path that cut across a vacant lot about a quarter of a mile down from where the project started. She would walk home from the bus station, and spy that path cut through the weeds, and think that it would probably save her five minutes walking time. At first, she wouldn’t walk that path. But then one day, she got up the guts to do it. It was a weedy jungle back there, ripped clothes hanging from the bushes, broken glass littering the packed down earth. Her heart was beating something terrible, but she made it through.
Afterward, she realized that if she stuck to the path, there was only a moment, perhaps thirty seconds of walking, perhaps a full minute, where she lost sight of both the street behind her and the one ahead of her. Surely nothing could happen during those short seconds. She started taking the path regularly, and nothing happened except she reached home five minutes earlier.
But there was a boy named Kendrick who said he liked her and kept nagging her when she walked the streets. She didn’t like him. He had been tall, a big dumb boy, always playing basketball in junior high school and early on in high school. He was gonna go pro one day, right? He was still tall, but now he was selling drugs and he didn’t go to school anymore. With his vacant stare, and his bloodshot eyes, he looked like he was high most of the time.
Kendrick was a loser.
He was never going to get out of the neighborhood, and by that age, Lola realized that the only hope a person had was to get out of the neighborhood. In any event, she could tell the look in his eyes. He only wanted her for sex. She wanted no part of that – no part of a boy who thought of himself as a desperado, and would soon go the same way as the rest of the desperadoes. Jail. Addiction. Death. One of those, and maybe all three.
But Kendrick the loser was insistent.
“Oh, you’re gonna be with me,” he told her with a smile. “You think you’re too good for everybody. I tell you little sister, you ain’t gonna be uppity like that for long.”
On the fateful day, she debated with herself as she always did. Should I take the shortcut? Should I go the long way around? Once again, she took the shortcut. As soon as she reached that point where neither street was visible, a voice spoke behind her.
“Little Miss Uppity Nigger. Girl, why you always cutting through this back way? You looking for somebody back in here?”
There was laughter. She turned.
Maybe twenty feet behind her was Kendrick, and he wasn’t alone. He was accompanied by two other boys, Tyrone and Abel. Lola knew all three of them. Tyrone and Abel were a year behind her at school. They were following Kendrick down the sewer. They grinned at her.
The facts came to her in one second flat – pierced her awareness like a bullet to the brain. The boys were here for a reason, and it was all business. They had been watching her, and they knew she took this shortcut.
She dropped her books, turned and ran.
Just ahead on the path were two more boys. They were brothers. Michael and Ishmael. Coming this way. For a moment she thought she was saved. Two people on the path. Witnesses. Then she saw the grins – the boys hadn’t come to rescue her. They had looped around the block on Kendrick’s orders.
They went for her. She tried to bolt past them with her big legs and her speed. But then their strong young hands were on her. One hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head backwards.
“Bitch, where you think you going?”
Bitch. The word stung like a slap. It was a strong word, a hateful word, and she felt paralyzed against its force.
They took her deeper into the lot, behind some bushes. There was an old mattress back there, and some old and tattered pornographic magazines. She could hear the traffic out on Dan Ryan Freeway, but she didn’t cry out. Then they stuffed a dirty sweat sock in her mouth and she couldn’t cry out.
They did their dirty business, one at a time, while the others looked on and critiqued the action. She didn’t remember much except the sharp and terrible pain in the beginning, and then the sun in her eyes as it sank behind the buildings, bringing an end to another gray day in Chicago. That and the sound of their whispering voices as they talked about her as if she weren’t human, as if except for her body, she wasn’t even there.
“Damn. I didn’t know she was a virgin.”
“Nigger, how you gonna know something like that?”
“Learn something new every day.”
“She ain’t one no more.”
They giggled like the children they had been only recently.
Then she was alone. No, there was one person left. It was Kendrick, more than six feet tall, towering over her as she lay on the mattress. He spit on her, and the saliva landed on her breasts and stomach.
“You ain’t so uppity now. Am I right?”
Then he too was gone.
It was almost dark. There were sounds of rustling in the weeds, the rats that lived at the edge of human society. Thousands of them were all around the Robert Taylor Houses, maybe millions of them, feeding off the garbage of more than twenty thousand people. She didn’t want to stay there a moment longer. She didn’t want to see the rats, of course. But at night, back in that horrible lot, there were worse things than rats. Anybody might come along. Somebody worse than those boys, even.
Her clothes were all around her, on the mattress and on the ground. They at least had the decency to leave her something to wear home. She got dressed, went back to the trail, gathered up her books, and went on home.
Smoke lay in bed, enjoying the bright play of light, and the cool breeze coming through the open window. Both Lola and Pamela were out somewhere.
Sunday was the day Smoke most loved to sleep in. It had little or nothing to do with it being a day of rest after a week of labor. Smoke’s schedule was his own. No, it was a sense of nostalgia, of romance.