The train pulled away, picking up speed. No, he was not going to make it.
Please, she prayed-
no, no, no, no.
Thank god, she was saved.
He pried open the doors and, jumping from the train, he looked to Brandy with eyes like murderous slits against the glaring sun.
Screaming, she ran.
Angel chased on her heels, shouting, “You’re fucking dead bitch when I catch you!”
Her shopping bag flopped wildly at her side.
She ran-so fast-the people, and storefronts, and the buildings she ran past, blurred into ghostly echoes.
To her, all that mattered was running, staying alive.
She ran-faster, harder.
Then rounded a corner and-
– ran straight into an alley.
The world caught up to her, upside down.
Everything slammed into focus at the mouth of the alley.
Angel lifted her by her waist, as if she were filled with air; threw her face-first to the pavement. Her cheek broke like porcelain against the alley.
Inside her face, she felt the shattered bone slide around. She tasted blood, opened her mouth. The blood squirted out.
“Fucking bitch!”
Turning Brandy over, her gold chain fell from her cleavage. She started crying.
“Oh my god! I’m so sorry! I thought you stole it!”
She gargled on the blood, spilled it from her mouth, “Please! I didn’t know! Oh my god! I’m so sorry!”
He hammer-fisted her face.
Why would no one help her, she wondered? Where were all the good Samaritans, the cops to her rescue? Her eyes swelled shut.
The last thing she saw before her eyes closed was the young hipster artist drinking from his cup of Starbucks.
Finally, her knight in shining armor had arrived.
“Not my problem,” the kid hurried past.
Across the street, the Marks, the Ericas, were taping her murder on their cell phones.
Her forehead, swollen and gigantic, looked ready to burst.
Her eyes: puffy, blood-filled black sacks.
“Fucking bitch!”
Angel stomped on her stomach. He jumped up, down on her stomach.
He jumped up and down on her chest, missed, and almost fell over.
Kicking her in the head, her neck snapped.
Then he jumped up, stomped on her face, and her nose crunched into her face. The kids across the street gasped, but kept taping.
Angel held the gold chains up to the sun.
The gold glinted in the sunlight, and Brandy’s chain caught his eye.
From his doorway, Momma Rodriguez waved to him: the run-down, Spanish colonial revival.
It was midway along the broken street, the cracked sidewalks. Worn concrete the city of Phoenix had neglected fixing, or had forgotten alltogether to fix.
The little hovel, where they eked out their living.
Same as the rest of the dirt-poor residents of Garfield district, the ones lucky still to have homes.
He thought on the little ratty crack girl; her homeless family…
…fuck them!
bitch he'd stomped in…
…fuck them!
On beating that uppity bitch to death, he felt some remorse. The cell phone tapings would likely catch up with him, he realized.
He regretted that most.
Not that any of those kids cared, really. So why should he?
Because apathy was the new America.
The day still brutally hot, the sky still laden with hazy green smog. He saw pigeons, and doves, and sparrows; the ugly and obnoxious black great-tailed grackles. They soared gracefully in the sky.
A few blocks over, he heard the sirens of all the police cars, and all the ambulances, and the fire trucks still cleaning the bodies-the mess-of Lauro, the murdered kids.
“Is this the motherfucker right here?”
He felt the gun at his head.
Miss Padilla and her boyfriend stepped from the shadows of another abandoned house.
So fast, Angel didn’t have time to notice them before it was too late and her boyfriend was behind Angel, pointing the gun.
“That’s him,” Miss Padilla said, “Fuckin’ no good rotten kid.”
From their doorway, Momma Rodriguez waved.
Looking to the sky, Angel saw the sun, the birds in the sky.
The boyfriend flashed a mouth full of gold, “Take back what’s yours,” he said.
Miss Padilla smiled, satisfied.
Then she snatched back the gold chains from Angel’s hand.
He looked in his palm before the gun took his life, and he was holding Brandy’s thin gold chain, the one she had hoped to pass to her daughter someday.
The Gleaner's Union by Court Merrigan
I come home from the Gleaner’s Union hangdog with a corn whiskey stumble in my step, trying not to believe what the boys was saying. How a man didn’t hardly have a choice no more. How he had to hire out. The boys who still came in to the Union, they was stalwart, they knew good as me the difference between laboring for wages and working your own land. But young ones can’t eat your knowing all winter, can they?
Cora sat by the stove, skinning spuds.
“How you been, little girl?” I said to her. “You go out walking today?”
“Yeah,” she said.
She looked up from that half-skinned spud all ladylike, knees pressed tight together, hands on her lap. Cora never sat like that unless she was bad upset.
I pulled up a chair. Took the tater and knife out of Cora’s slick little hands. Wanted to wrap her up in my big arms but that wouldn’t do, big as she was getting.
“Ma,” I said, “I plain forgot to change out the goat’s hay. Maybe you want to give it a look.”
“I already been out there,” said Ma. I just…” Then she saw how I was looking at Cora. “Yeah,” she said, reaching for her coat. “I better check.”
She’s always been a good woman.
“Now what is it, baby girl?” I said to Cora when Ma was gone.
“I was over round Griselda Harlan’s place today,” she said.
“Cora…”
“I know you told me and told me. But I didn’t mean nothing by it. I was coming back out of Seven Mile Draw and you know that tree line they got’s the best way to get back. It’s out of the wind.”
“Out of sight from the house, you mean.”
Cora nodded. We’d all helped Harlan plant in that windbreak and of course them trees come up like weeds the first years before the drought and alkali. Now they was just thick tangles of branches for pheasants to hide out in.
“I seen Mr. Ryne and Griselda,” said Cora.
“That’s Mrs. Harlan to you, little girl.”
“Him and Mrs. Harlan. I known it was Mr. Ryne because of that Mustang of his tied up outside.”
“Go on.”
“I saw em, Pa. Together.”
“Together.”
“I just wanted to see, Pa. I couldn’t help myself.”
Feature of life out there in that hardscrabble valley: no one had curtains. Couldn’t afford em, for one thing, didn’t need em, for another, what with your nearest neighbors living miles away.
“Well, what’d you see?” I asked.
“They was rutting, Pa.”
She didn’t have to say it, of course. Maybe I shouldn’t of made her come out with it.
“Mrs. Harlan, she was bent over the table, and Mr. Ryne, his face was all twisted up and…”
“That’ll do, girl,” I said. “They see you?”
“No. They was too busy.”
We sat there a while, pondering the possibilities.
“Pa,” Cora said, “you can’t go rutting someone you ain’t married to, can you?”
“No, baby girl,” I said, “you cannot.”
You want to go back, you’d blame it on Harlan’s taking the job with the railroad. Course, he only took that job on account of the alkali eating up his land. For that you’d have to blame God. Or the government putting out the land around Spirit Lake, Wyoming, up for homesteading, what used to be Indian ground-but of course they never done nothing with it. Hundred-sixty acres free and clear if you pledged to work it seven years.