At least Podborczintski had checked out my apartment. I didn’t have to worry about his coming when I was gone. I had one dole appointment before we left and that cash would come in handy. Tanya told us we could use one of her beer coolers in our van for food, so we wouldn’t have to eat in restaurants. Much. Even if we didn’t find the busker, we’d be getting a bit of a break from Half-a-Life. With all the rain, and the prospect of school ending for the summer, the mothers in the block, as well as the on-again-off-again fathers, were getting tense. Serenity Place too, apparently, was getting rowdy. I had noticed the cops over there three times in the past week. They always had one woman cop, so you knew it was a domestic dispute. That was kind of satisfying, really, and the more stressful things got over there, the more organized Sarah became.
She had landed the job with the carnival, which only lasted a couple of weeks, but still, she was getting out of Half-a-Life every day. And, in the evening, she was still helping Sing Dylan scrub the graffiti (someone had recently written KILL THE RICH THEN FUCK THEM and this was too much for Sing Dylan, so he had thrown an orange tarp over it when they weren’t hosing it down). And he and Sarah were also busy digging the trench away from Sing Dylan’s basement apartment, toward the front doors of Serenity Place. They were serious about revenge. Sarah wanted her son back, and she wanted to show the women, especially Sindy, that she could fight back. Already, when it rained, you could see the trickle heading over there. But it hadn’t arrived yet and we’d need a really big storm for it to make it all the way. And a deeper trench. So Sing Dylan and Sarah had a purpose, a goal. Okay, it was a mischievous one but hey, they deserved it. The women in Serenity Place would stand around watching Sarah and Sing Dylan dig and laugh at them, and sometimes call out to them, insults and things. Once one of them even said, “You’re not gonna get your kid back if you’re sleeping around with a Paki.” They hadn’t seemed to figure out what the trench was all about. Sing Dylan and Sarah just kept digging, and digging, in the rain, in the mosquitoes, in the sun, sometimes at night. The women in Serenity Place would soon be flooded out and revenge would be Sarah’s and Sing Dylan’s. At the end of the day I imagined Sing Dylan saying to Sarah, “Thank you. Thank you kindly.”
When Emmanuel came to visit, Sarah stopped digging and put on her peach t-shirt dress and they sat together on their balcony playing checkers and sucking on Freezies. Sometimes Sing Dylan would look up from his digging and give the thumbs up sign to Emmanuel, which always cracked up me and Lish. Another thing, Emmanuel was coming for longer and longer visits: when it wasn’t raining, he was out in the parking lot roller-blading and riding his bike, and when he and his mom said goodbye, they smiled instead of cried. Sing Dylan shook his hand.
Lish was acting funny, too, in a good way. She was giddy and full of beans, pushing for the high yellow note, as Vincent Van Gogh would have said, as Lish herself told me: the high yellow note being that kind of intense but temporary manic creative force. If Vincent Van Gogh had given birth, he’d probably have called birthing the high yellow note.
I knew Lish was excited about leaving, which didn’t exactly make my mood any better. But it was fun to see her so happy. Everything she did, she did with a little flourish. Like, when she picked up toys and clothes and things, she’d pick them up, throw them in the air so they spun and then snatch them before they fell to the floor. When she put milk in her coffee, she’d stir it and then ding the spoon a couple of times against the side of her cup and then slice the air with the spoon, like a symphony conductor. And then there was the little patch of sunlight on her kitchen wall. It didn’t last very long in the morning, about twenty minutes or so. And with the rain and everything, there was only ever enough sunshine for it to materialize about once every two or three weeks, so it wasn’t a regular thing. It was a square of white light on the wall beside the fridge. It came through the kitchen window. Lish would stop to spread her fingers in it briefly, making goofy shadow monsters, birds and rabbits. Then she’d dart off to whatever errands she was performing that day; I had seen her doing it a couple of times when she thought I wasn’t looking. She didn’t talk about it with me, and when Terrapin told Lish that she and her kids played shadow puppets instead of seeing movies, Lish told her to get a life.
So Lish was happy. She was buying food for the trip and learning about Colorado in the encyclopedia at the library. She was gathering little games and craft things the kids could do in the back of the van and checking out maps and routes and interesting places along the way, like the Badlands.
“You know, nothing, well just about nothing, lives in the Badlands,” she said. “They’re called the Badlands because cowboys knew they could die there on their treks across America. Isn’t that cool? I mean, nothing lives. Everything’s dry and hot and flaky.”
I could see the appeal. The rain hadn’t stopped in ages. Mercy was going nuts down at the flood disaster board, and more and more people were losing all their possessions. Farmers were committing suicide and some disease from rotting cattle was spreading to the farm animals that were still alive. The Infectious Disease people said there was a slim chance the disease could be spread to humans, and only if they had a lot of contact with animal fecal material. (Just walking down the street it’s hard to say who those folks would be.) One good thing, the mosquitoes had died out a bit. But about the flood: some guy had invented a sandbag-filling machine. It could fill them in one tenth of the time it took to fill them by shovel. Apparently he was going to just hand the machine over to the government to fight the flood and then try to market it to the States and other places. But the government, I think it was Bunnie Hutchison, refused his offer. She said it was better to put the single men on welfare to work shovelling than to try to use something with no track record of success. What made her think single men on the dole had a track record of success?
But speaking of Bunnie Hutchison, apparently Mercy did have some dirt on her. It was true, she had filed for flood relief money, claiming she had no insurance when she actually did. Now a group of welfare mothers was going to try to frame her. Mercy was their key, their secret weapon. This was the plan — blackmail. The mothers would tell Bunnie Hutchison that Mercy would suppress the file, but she would have to do something for the mothers in return: she would have to save the child tax credit. At Half-a-Life, there was a petition being passed around to sign. Even at Serenity Place, they were signing up. When all the petitions had been filled out they’d be presented to Bunnie Hutchison. Mercy would have to remain anonymous in case the plan backfired and she got into trouble and lost her job. The petitions were to be put in Bunnie Hutchison’s mailbox along with a note saying, “We, all of us, knew what Bunnie Hutchison was up to at the Disaster Board. Comply with our wishes, give us back our extra one thousand dollars a year, and nobody’ll be the wiser.” This was the plan. Naturally, Mercy was nervous. She was always nervous, but now she was really nervous. She didn’t want to lose her job. She had already been under observation because of Joe.
Joe and Pillar were going through a bad time. Joe had been unfaithful. He’d got drunk after one of their big fights and picked up a girl of no more than sixteen, in a bar. They’d had sex in Joe’s car and Joe ended up with a case of genital warts which, naturally, he’d passed on to Pillar. Pillar freaked out and told Joe they were history. She had her warts burned off, had an AIDS test and told the kids that their father was mentally ill. He had to leave. But, as so often before, he talked his way back into her heart and her home. He appealed to the kids, he showered her with affection and bought her flowers and said it would never ever happen again. He blamed his actions on booze and depression, on feeling unloved and unappreciated. He turned it around. If Pillar had been more attentive, Joe wouldn’t have been forced to sleep with the girl. Poor Joe. Pillar said there were certain things he’d have to do if he wanted to come back. One was get a job and support them. Lish and I thought he should have to get the name Pillar tattooed on his penis. As his penis grew, so would the letters of her name Pillar get stretched out, maybe in red or black, on his swollen member, forever reminding him where it belonged. Pillar told Joe that she was tired of living with a fuck-up. She told him the only way he could be a fuck-up in his personal life was if he was brilliant in a career. Then you can get away with it because you’re special. Look at Chaplin, or Picasso. But Joe wasn’t an artist and Pillar was nobody’s muse.