She walked out of the bathroom wearing the clothes she had arrived in. She handed Jean-Alexi the dress and shoes. “I’m going.”
His chin went up and down rapidly, biting down on something nasty. He nodded. “Then.”
She took her bag of possessions to the front door, but now he shot up and followed her.
“I didn’t even fuck you to get mwen lajan, my money, back. Just suck me off then. At least there’s no chance of a idiot coming out nine months from now.”
“Non.”
“Don’t want to hurt you.” He banged his fist on the wall behind her head.
She looked at him then, but no longer saw him. “You’ll have to kill me first.”
He howled but let her walk away, down the stairs. They both knew that she had reached the point where she had nothing left to lose, and he had no chance bargaining that.
“You think you’re something special, but you’ll find out. It’s bad out there, fi. You’ll come back soon, unless you mouri,” he yelled out the window.
“Coming back won’t happen.”
“I be here when you’re begging. Price go way up then,” he screamed down the block at her retreating back. Did he sense he might be losing someone true? Non.
When she could no longer hear his shouts, she sat on the ground and shook, as if she had just scraped by with her life. She wasn’t brave enough for her own actions.
After a time, Marie heard footsteps. If it had been Jean-Alexi, she might have gone back, but it was Amélie with another girl.
“Jean-Alexi kick you out?”
She nodded. The whole story in her eyes.
“I work at this place before here.” Amélie scratched around in her purse, then grabbed a piece of newspaper off the ground. “It’s bad, but they don’t ask questions. My sister, Coca, worked there. I don’t know anymore. Go early. Early bird gets the poison. You have someplace to sleep?”
Marie shook her head.
“Be careful. Careful out here. Not like back home.” Amélie took her aside. “If you see Coca, tell her I work as a model in a department store downtown, okay? This is just temporary, don’t want them to worry.” She emptied a few crumpled bills from her wallet into Marie’s hand. “What do you have?” Amélie barked at the other girl, who made a face, but added a few more. “It’s all I can.” With that, they walked away.
* * *
Marie found the building when the sky was still dark. Many hours from Jean-Alexi’s apartment, and she had spent the whole night in slow movement toward it, like a ship tacking in the ocean, asking for directions that were more often than not wrong. Nobody in this city of foreigners seemed to know where they were. That night they were all lost. Under the sickly orange glow of streetlights, the concrete building appeared squat and defeated and did not seem promising of any kind of future.
She sat against the chain-link fence, her bag in her lap, and fell asleep. She woke to a gentle kick on her thigh and looked up into the not-unkind face of a young Hispanic man. Marie showed him the address and said, “Amélie,” but when she got no look of recognition, she said, “Coca,” and he nodded.
Inside was a jail, small cages packed tight with dogs. The dogs barked and howled, their noises echoing and amplified against the concrete floor and walls until she felt a humming inside her head as if it would split open. The overwhelming smell of urine and kaka gagged her.
The man, Jorge, handed her earplugs and a stained plastic apron. The job was to shovel out the cages, then hose down the floor and the dogs. Afterward, she filled the metal bowls with dry food. The dogs cowered in their cages, the muscles in their hind legs twitching with fear, but when she unlocked the doors, they bared their teeth and growled.
By noon Marie finished and was handed a twenty-dollar bill and a stale sandwich. As she stood eating in the shade of a coral tree because it reminded her of home, a pretty girl walked in. She hung on the arm of a short white man with tattoos down both arms. His teeth, brown and crooked, were ringed in gold. Marie saw the girl’s resemblance to Amélie, except this girl did not have the fine bones and clear skin of her sister.
“Coca?”
Her eyes narrowed, and Marie saw the polite island ways were not followed here.
“I am zanmi of Amélie.”
Now she smiled. It was only this place that made her wary. “How is Amie?”
“She told me to come here.”
Her boyfriend ignored them. He picked his teeth, then swatted Coca on the behind. “Come on. You have a paycheck to earn.”
When he had gone inside, Coca bent her head to Marie. “You in trouble?”
“What is this place?”
Coca lit a cigarette, and Marie admired her red-painted nails. “They steal dogs, pick them off the street. Even pretend to adopt them, but the shelters are starting to catch on. They sell them to the clinics. Cram lipstick in their eyes.” She laughed.
Marie looked back into the cages.
“It’s travay, work.” Coca shrugged.
“You find me somewhere to sleep?”
“Our family is close by. Go introduce yourself to Papa. Use Amélie’s bed.”
* * *
For the next two weeks, Marie worked the morning shift from five till noon. Coca worked in the front office, but Marie was buried in the back. After a while, she got to know the dogs individually: this one would calm down once she entered his cage and another could be coaxed with a bit of food. She took out her earplugs now because she recognized the different barks, they were distinct voices, and she knew their cause and no longer found the noise frightening.
A reddish-gold pit bull mix wagged her tail each time Marie came into her cage, and she stole an extra half cup of food for the dog every morning so that her ribs wouldn’t poke out so sharply against her skin. After the first week, the dog let Marie rub her ears, one ear shorter and frayed, probably from a dogfight. Under her breath she took to calling her Rolex, the most precious thing she could think of in this new country.
The workers were forbidden to interact with the dogs and were supposed to treat them as things. Jorge said they were no different from cattle in the stockyards, but Marie did not see the point of it. It seemed to her that especially the condemned were entitled to any little kindness so maybe their last memory of this earth and their jailers was not so damning. Why else did the executioner allow a last meal, or a cigarette? The man in the pink house, if he had stayed kind and loyal, he could have used Marie for life; she didn’t know better. Sweet with salt; the smallest bit of love with hate. That’s the way one made a true slave.
Marie tried to ignore how Jorge and the other men rough-handled the animals, holding the leashes tight till they were swinging by the neck, bodies dangling like the stripped bodies of pigs or cows from butcher’s hooks in La Saline. If the dogs were mean, the men kicked them with their heavy boots, and sometimes they kicked them even when they were not mean; it did not much matter to the men either way.
She rooted for the mean dogs. She wished them luck in their bites because either way they were doomed, and after a time she thought they, the humans working, were equally doomed, and the dawning knowledge that life could be as hard and ugly in America as it had been back home packed her chest so tight she could not breathe.
* * *
At the end of each week a van would pull up to the back of the building, and the dogs who had been there longest were pushed into the back in plastic crates and driven away, never to return. Then the process of refilling the cages would begin again. Marie was given overtime to stay and clean up after the dogs were hauled away. If Maman had been there, no doubt she would have felt the spirits, despair so painful Marie had to hit herself in the leg or arm so that she could bear it.