If you let me teach you not to end a sentence with a preposition, Edgar thought, I will save your life.
Ismael said, “Maybe the mother returns. She feels the worm of remorse. You have to think positive.”
“I do,” Gracie said. “All the time.”
“But the truth of the matter there’s kids that are better off without their mothers or fathers. Because their mothers or fathers are dangering their safety.”
Gracie said, “If anyone sees Esmeralda, take her to Brother Mike or hold her, I mean really hold her until I can get here and talk to her. She’s too young to be on her own or even living with the crew. Brother said she’s twelve.”
“Twelve is not so young,” Ismael said. “One of my best writers, he does wildstyle, he’s exactly twelve more or less. Juano. I send him down in a rope for the complicated letters.”
“When do we get our money?” Gracie said.
“Next time for sure. I make practically, you know, nothing on this scrap. My margin it’s very minimum. I’m looking to expand outside Brooklyn. Sell my cars to one of these up-and-coming countries that’s making the bomb.”
“Making the what? I don’t think they’re looking for junked cars,” Gracie said. “I think they’re looking for weapons-grade uranium.”
“The Japanese built their navy with the Sixth Avenue el. You know this story? One day it’s scrap, next day it’s a plane taking off a deck. Hey, don’t be surprise my scrap ends up in North, you know, Korea.”
Edgar caught the smirk on Gracie’s face. Edgar did not smirk. This was not a subject she could ever take lightly. Edgar was a cold-war nun who’d once lined the walls of her room with aluminum foil as a shield against nuclear fallout from Communist bombs. Not that she didn’t think a war might be thrilling. She daydreamed many a domed flash in the film of her skin, tried to conjure the burst even now, with the USSR crumbled alphabetically, the massive letters toppled like Cyrillic statuary.
They went down to the van, the nuns and three kids, and with the two kids already on the street they set out to distribute the food, starting with the hardest cases in the projects.
They rode the elevators and walked down the long passageways. Behind each door a set of unimaginable lives, with histories and memories, pet fish swimming in dusty bowls. Edgar led the way, the five kids in single file behind her, each with two bags of food, and Gracie at the rear, carrying food, calling out apartment numbers of people on the list.
They spoke to an elderly woman who lived alone, a diabetic with an amputated leg.
They saw a man with epilepsy.
They spoke to two blind women who lived together and shared a seeing-eye dog.
They saw a woman in a wheelchair who wore a fuck new york T-shirt. Gracie said she would probably trade the food they gave her for heroin, the dirtiest street scag available. The crew looked on, frowning. Gracie set her jaw, she narrowed her pale eyes and handed over the food anyway. They argued about this, not just the nuns but the crew as well. It was Sister Grace against everybody. Even the wheelchair woman didn’t think she should get the food.
They saw a man with cancer who tried to kiss the latexed hands of Sister Edgar.
They saw five small children bunched on a bed being minded by a ten-year-old.
They went down the passageways. The kids returned to the van for more food and they went single-file down the passageways in the bleached light.
They talked to a pregnant woman watching a soap opera in Spanish. Edgar told her if a child dies after being baptized, she goes straight to heaven. The woman was impressed. If a child is in danger and there is no priest, Edgar said, the woman herself can administer baptism. How? Pour ordinary water on the forehead of the child, saying, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” The woman repeated the words in Spanish and English and everyone felt better.
They went down the passageways past a hundred closed doors and Edgar thought of all the infants in limbo, unbaptized, babies in the seminether, hell-bordered, and the nonbabies of abortion, a cosmic cloud of slushed fetuses floating in the rings of Saturn, or babies born without immune systems, bubble children raised by computer, or babies born addicted — she saw them all the time, bulb-headed newborns with crack habits, they resembled something out of peasant folklore.
They heard garbage crashing down the incinerator chutes and they walked one behind the other, three boys and two girls forming one body with the nuns, a single sway-backed figure with many moving parts. They rode the elevators down and finished their deliveries in a group of tenements where boards replaced broken glass in the lobby doors.
Gracie dropped the crew at the Bird just as a bus pulled up. What’s this, do you believe it? A tour bus in carnival colors with a sign in the slot above the windshield reading SOUTH BRONX SURREAL. Gracie’s breathing grew intense. About thirty Europeans with slung cameras stepped shyly onto the sidewalk in front of the boarded shops and closed factories and they gazed across the street at the derelict tenement in the middle distance.
Gracie went half berserk, sticking her head out of the van and calling, “It’s not surreal. It’s real, it’s real. You’re making it surreal by coming here. Your bus is surreal. You’re surreal.”
A monk rode by on a rickety bike. The tourists watched him pedal up the street. They listened to Gracie shout at them. They saw a man come along with battery-run pinwheels he was selling, brightly colored vanes pinned to a stick, and he held a dozen or so in his hands with others jutting from his pockets and clutched under his arms, plastic vanes spinning all around him — an elderly black fellow in a yellow skullcap. They saw this man. They saw the ailanthus jungle and the smash heap of mortified cars and they looked at the six-story slab of painted angels with streamers rippled above their cherub heads.
Gracie shouting, “This is real, it’s real.” Shouting, “Brussels is surreal. Milan is surreal. This is the only real. The Bronx is real.”
A tourist bought a pinwheel and got back in the bus. Gracie pulled away muttering. In Europe the nuns wear bonnets like cantilevered beach houses. That’s surreal, she said. A traffic jam developed not far from the Bird. The two women sat with drifting thoughts. Edgar watched children walk home from school, breathing air that rises from the oceans and comes windborne to this street at the edge of the continent. Woe betide the child with dirty fingernails. She used to drum the knuckles of her fifth-graders with a ruler if their hands were not bright as minted dimes.
A clamor rising all around them, weary beeping horns and police sirens and the great saurian roar of fire-engine klaxons.
“Sister, sometimes I wonder why you put up with all this,” Gracie said. “You’ve earned some peace and quiet. You could live upstate and do development work for the order. How I would love to sit in the rose garden with a mystery novel and old Pepper curled at my feet.” Old Pepper was the cat in the motherhouse upstate. “You could take a picnic lunch to the pond.”
Edgar had a mirthless inner grin that floated somewhere back near her palate. She did not yearn for life upstate. This was the truth of the world, right here, her soul’s own home, herself — she saw herself, the fraidy child who must face the real terror of the streets to cure the linger of destruction inside her. Where else would she do her work but under the brave and crazy wall of Ismael Muñoz?
Then Gracie was out of the van. She was out of the seat belt, out of the van and running down the street. The door hung open. Edgar understood at once. She turned and saw the girl, Esmeralda, half a block ahead of Gracie, running for the Bird. Gracie moved among the cars in her clunky shoes and frump skirt. She followed the girl around a corner where the tour bus sat dead in traffic. The tourists watched the running figures. Edgar could see their heads turn in unison, pinwheels spinning at the windows.