Salvation City Page 12

  The boy in the bed next to Cole’s had spoken both Spanish and English before he got sick but now could speak only Spanish. Another nurse translated: “Where are my parents?” “I see cockroaches!” “No more needles, they hurt!”

  And Cole would hear many other stories like this, including stories of people who’d come through the flu blind or paralyzed or mentally retarded, or who’d go on to develop symptoms of parkinsonism. And the more he heard, the more he understood that he had been lucky.

  It was Tracy who said putting Cole on a live radio show might not be such a good idea.

  “Why not?” demanded Boots, bean eyes jumping with irritation, and when Tracy replied that she wasn’t quite sure: “In other words, no reason at all? Just women’s intuition or some like nonsense?”

  Tracy knew better than to argue with Boots. And since she believed firmly in a wife’s biblical duty to submit to her husband’s authority in all things, she did not challenge PW’s view that she was just being an anxious mother hen.

  But as late as the day of the broadcast—that morning—she reminded Cole that no one was forcing him; he could still change his mind.

  “Maybe it’s just me, Cole-cakes, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so pale. And I know you haven’t been sleeping so good.”

  But Cole couldn’t imagine surviving the shame if he backed out now.

  It was true he’d been sleeping poorly all week, but it was not just at night that his mind was unrestful. The thought of the upcoming show—“We’ll keep it real easy and relaxed. Just you and me for about fifteen minutes, then we open up the phones to questions”—had naturally got Cole wondering what he might be asked and how he was going to answer. And it was as if a fissure had opened in him out of which more and more of his past life seeped through.

  Now that his memory was so much better, he was able to see how the false had got mixed in with the true. No dog named Zeppo, but his father had hit a dog with his car one time. And Cole remembered lying to his new classmates about wanting a sheepdog, and then wondering why he’d lied. He remembered the first day of school and the last day of school and all the chaos in between. Dogs: the chocolate Lab that belonged to the man who lived on their street, the old man who’d helped his mother carry Cole’s father to the car but refused to go with her to the hospital—he remembered all that. He remembered wanting to hurt that man.

  Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough. That sound lived so deep in him he didn’t see how he could ever have forgotten it, even for a while. But then, forgetting your own name—how unlikely was that?—and he had done that, too.

  His mother at the kitchen table, buttoned up in her winter coat—had she ever finished writing that message to Addy?

  I’m sorry for your loss. A man—not a doctor or a nurse—a man dressed in street clothes. Visitor’s badge, hair-choked nostrils, crooked brown teeth. A man with a laptop. We need to talk about next of kin.

  Cole was still feverish, his head was like a noisy machine churning mud. He tried to churn up answers. Somewhere in Florida were his grandparents: his father’s father who had Alzheimer’s, and his father’s mother, paralyzed from a stroke. In a home for old people but—and this had always puzzled Cole—not the same home. He could not remember the name of the town or the last time he’d seen them.

  No brothers or sisters on his father’s side; on his mother’s side only Addy. When the man asked him where Addy lived, Cole slipped and said Chicago. Sometime after his second, more severe, bout of illness, he was told his aunt had not yet been found. He was confused; he had no memory of telling anyone about Addy.

  He would be living at Here Be Hope for weeks before the mistake about Addy’s whereabouts was discovered. But Cole thought if Addy had been trying to reach him she’d have done so by now, and he was not surprised when one day, not long after he’d moved to Salvation City, PW gave him the news that she had passed. PW didn’t say anything about Addy’s being Jewish, or about her being unsaved and therefore condemned to hell. He only repeated what he’d told Cole before: the best way to remember people after they’ve passed is to remember the good about them. And then they had prayed together.

  That loss did not touch his core. He’d never been close to Addy, or even had a chance to get to know her. He’d never been quite sure what to make of her, especially after hearing his mother say Addy was the kind of woman for whom having kids would’ve ruined her life. It wasn’t that he took it personally (Addy had always been perfectly nice to him), but it had made him a little wary.

  His father used to say that part of his mother’s dissatisfaction in life had to do with the fact that growing up a twin, she’d never felt she was unique or special enough. Which perplexed Cole, not just because he would have given anything to have had a twin brother but because he thought being a twin meant that you were special.

  Once he’d absorbed the fact that Addy, too, had vanished from the earth, his strongest feeling was not loss but gratitude that his mother had been spared this. Because even though they had lived far apart, and even if his mother had not been happy about being a twin, he knew that she had loved Addy. He remembered that Addy was the first person she had turned to after his father died.

  Remember not the former things (Isaiah). Forget and press on.

  But in the days leading up to the broadcast, Cole found himself living more and more in the past. As if his memory were like an empty stomach now, needing to fill itself up.

  Lying in his parents’ bed, in his father’s flu germs—this he remembered so well it could have happened that morning. Cole had never spoken out loud his wish to die. (The secrets piling up, one after the other; he carried them with him, stones in a sack.) That feeling had passed; he’d stopped wanting to die.

  He did not have the strength for such a powerful wish.

  The pills he was given in the hospital, the ones he was promised would make him feel better, he’d cheeked them and later flushed them away. Feel better for what?

  And when he was well enough to be moved to the orphanage (actually a converted warehouse for an electronics supply company that had gone out of business), it had helped not to care. It made the transition easier, as things are easier when you don’t care what happens to you.

  He did not feel better, he did not feel worse. He was a stranger inside his own skin. He did not eat much, some days not at all. Either he had trouble falling asleep or he slept around the clock.

  He did not make friends. He avoided people—and not just the ones you had to avoid if you didn’t want trouble. He avoided everyone, other kids and grown-ups alike. But in fact, unless you were a gangbanger or a rapture child or injured or very sick, you were not likely to attract much grown-up attention.

  “Sounds to me like it wasn’t much better than a kennel. Is that right, my dear? You got food, water, and shelter, but not much else?”

  “Yes,” Cole said—truthfully, yet his face reddened as if he’d lied. He knew he was expected to say more, and he could have said more. About the way kids fought over food. About how some kids would take food away from other kids, partly out of hunger, but mostly to be mean. They’d throw the food around (Here Be Hope food fights were epic), or do something to it so that even the hungriest kid wouldn’t eat it. (Though there was the time a boy had a coughing fit, and when a chunk of meat flew out of his mouth another boy caught it midair and stuffed it into his own mouth.) It had happened a few times to Cole, having his food snatched (usually by Da Phist), but since he was never very hungry it hadn’t affected him too badly.

  They had names like Pharocious II and Grime-Boy and Niggahrootz and Da Phist. The black kids.

  The white kids called themselves Methastofeles and Skull Mother and Kid Hammer and Dude Snake.

  The grown-ups did whatever they could to keep them apart, and when they failed there was mayhem.

  He knew this was what he was supposed to be talking about, what he had already talked about with PW, who in turn had told all to Boots. But in the
sound booth, Cole had gone all but mute. He knew what he was supposed to say, but the words wouldn’t come, and Boots was being forced to do most of the talking.

  “We’ve all heard people call these places Dickensian. Would you say that’s a fair and accurate description?”

  “Yes.”

  At first, before he’d heard it so many times, he hadn’t been completely sure what “Dickensian” meant. He’d always assumed it had something to do with Christmas. He thought of the dreadlocked giantess who told everyone to call her Mama Jo, but whom everyone called by another name instead, forever fuming about the “Dickensian” or “barbaric” state of things, and how funny it was the way she shook her fist at God at the same time she was begging him to help her.

  Mama Ho. In a quiet moment alone with her (haircut, delousing), Cole once heard her say the pandemic had set life back a hundred years. She was crying then, and he’d worried she would nick him, the way her shoulders were jerking. But those were the days when, rather than stop whatever they were doing, people would just go about their business in tears. Everyone was used to the sight. His mother—

  “Why don’t you share more about it with us? You know, just—in your own words.” Boots was smiling and his voice was calm, but Cole knew Boots couldn’t be very happy with him at this moment.

  Come on, Cole. Words. Remember? But now was not a good time to be thinking about his mother.

  “It was like life was set back a hundred years?”

  “Ah. Well said. Can you elaborate?”

  “Like, we didn’t have any computers or cells, and that was weird. There were a couple TVs, but they all got smashed or stolen. We didn’t have lots of books. We had some paper and some pens and pencils. But we didn’t have real school.” These few lines had exhausted him, but he labored on. “We had classes. Sometimes. Only not real classes. I mean, they’d put us in groups and make us talk about something, and maybe they’d give us homework. But it wasn’t like, you know—it wasn’t like school school.”

  None of the kids could get over it. Days and weeks passing without any school, and no one able to say for sure when they’d be going back again. The rumors that, in fact, there were schools reopening out there. Just none ready to take orphans.

  “What about religion?”

  “I didn’t go to church.”

  “You don’t have to ‘go’ to church, son. Church happens wherever and whenever folks come together to pray and ask forgiveness for sins and worship the one true God. No special edifice required. Did that ever happen? Did people ever read the Bible together? Did anyone lead you boys and girls in prayer?”

  Cole shook his head. Boots frowned, but without losing his smile, and pointed to Cole’s microphone.

  The great thing about radio, PW had told him, is that people can’t see you and you can’t see them, so you don’t have to be all that nervous.

  But from the moment he entered the sound booth Cole had seen them: sitting in their kitchens or in their cars or offices or shops, listening to him the way he and Tracy listened when PW was on the air, listening to every word.

  He had also seen himself, through their eyes, larger than life, the world’s biggest retard.

  And besides, what about the people—Mason, for one—who Cole happened to know were tuned in right now, and who knew exactly who this retard talking (or not talking) was? How was he ever going to show his face to those people again?

  Through the window he could see Tracy and PW, sitting outside the booth but able to hear everything through the speakers. Whenever he glanced their way, PW would bob his head enthusiastically while Tracy flashed her widest smile, probably without realizing she was wringing her hands at the same time. Cole was aware of Beanie Gill, a young man he knew from church, sitting in a smaller booth built into the opposite wall. Like Cole and Boots, he had headphones on, and he was constantly monitoring some controls. From what seemed like another room Cole heard Boots repeating his last question, and there was a quaver in Cole’s voice as he replied that he didn’t know, he couldn’t remember.

  Yet as soon as he said it he did remember. There’d been plenty of religion at Here Be Hope, he just hadn’t taken part in any of it, hadn’t been forced to. It was there that he’d first learned what a rapture child was, and he remembered how everyone—grown-ups even more than kids—trailed after those children, pestering them about the Second Coming. It was then that he’d first started to understand what the Second Coming meant. He remembered how, at night, in the crowded room, boys could be heard saying their prayers before going to sleep, just as he himself did now. Mama Ho carried a Bible with her and read from it, sometimes to herself, sometimes out loud to others. In fact, he didn’t think he’d ever forget the sound of her voice as she read, a little-girl voice that sounded cartoonish coming from such a large woman, and the way she punctuated each passage with a brief snort, like a horse or a bull. He remembered all this in the instant after he’d spoken, but he was too shy to open his mouth again. It was too late to change his answer; it would only make him look dumber. He kept quiet, avoiding Boots’s eyes. He would not look at PW, either. Shame was like a sticky substance he could feel on his scalp and under his T-shirt. Later, listeners would tell him how they’d been able to hear him breathing.

  The agony went on and on (in reality, just another few minutes) as Boots tried to draw him out. He asked questions about the gangs and about the fights that had ended with somebody knifed or knocked senseless. He asked about the boy who’d hanged himself with the same belt one of the guardians, in a drunken fury, had used to beat him. He asked about the runaways and about girls who got pregnant. Using the word violated (a word he’d prepared Cole for beforehand), he asked about rape.

  Cole was good at keeping secrets, but not at faking. One thing he knew he could never be was an actor. And so it was hard for him, knowing that Boots already knew the answer to every question he asked. Cole understood that by pretending not to know, Boots was just trying to make the program more interesting. But to Cole it felt not only dishonest but silly. Mostly he just answered yes or no.

  “Sounds to me like a living, breathing hell,” Boots said solemnly. Cole said nothing. His throat was constricting. He felt a surge of emotion as it struck him that, in fact, it had not been hell. Though he’d longed to escape it, the orphanage had not been so bad at all. The thought brought a sizable shock—never would he have believed while he was there that he could think such a thing. But looking back now, he realized that, again, he had been lucky. And he hoped people listening to the radio wouldn’t think he wanted them to feel sorry for him. He worried that maybe he’d exaggerated when he told PW stories about the orphanage. If he could find his tongue now, he’d explain how it was mostly about hiding from the bullies, who had a way of picking on the same kids all the time anyway. You were lucky not to be one of those kids, but to stay lucky you also had to avoid them. You had to be ruthless, you had to refuse to have anything to do with them. You had to refuse to help them. Today, the memory of this shamed Cole. But it had all been so complicated. The most dangerous and despicable thing you could do was to snitch, and nine times out of ten helping someone was going to mean snitching. Still, he liked to think that if he ever had to go back, or if he was ever in that kind of situation again, he would do the right thing. It was a hard truth for him to acknowledge, how far away he was from being a hero. He liked to think if he had another chance he would act differently. He would not abandon the weak. He would battle against injustice. He would protect and defend the unlucky ones.

  And there was another reason the orphanage meant more to Cole than just brutal memories, and this had everything to do with his secret life in that cavity under the stairs. And then it had turned into a blessing, not having any friends, because it meant he could disappear and no one would notice; he could hide out for hours without being missed and no one would come looking for him.

  It was at Here Be Hope that Cole discovered he could sit and sketch for longer and longer
stretches without getting bored or distracted, as he used to do. And for the first time he understood that he carried this in him: the ability to shut everything out—not just the unhappiness of the moment but the past with all its pain and loss and the future with all its question marks—by concentrating on this one thing, which happened also to be the thing that made him happier than anything else he knew how to do.

  He imagined this was the way someone like PW or Tracy must have felt when they prayed. He himself had not yet experienced such a feeling while praying. And not that he was saying prayer and drawing were the same, he knew that wasn’t right; but in his mind they lay so close they touched.

  “I have here a newspaper article.”

  Cole had known Boots was going to bring up the dog.

  He never knew exactly where they’d found it. There were the runaways, many of whom you never saw again, and there were the kids who sneaked in and out whenever they felt like it and who sometimes stayed out overnight or even longer—and what were you going to do about it, kick them out for good? They came back with loot like cigarettes and vodka and weed, and bursting with stories about what they’d been up to—usually, if true, even worse than what they did at “home.”

  They could have found the dog anywhere. The pandemic had orphaned pets, too, and you couldn’t go far in any direction without seeing strays. Stray dogs formed packs, some harmless but others a danger to anyone they happened to scent. Dogs didn’t get the flu, but neglect or violence had been killing them and other animals off by the score, their unburied remains yet another danger.

  Kid Hammer and Dude Snake, brothers two years apart—with Dude Snake, though the younger, being the bigger and meaner—claimed to have hunted and killed the dog, but Cole didn’t believe them. Not that he didn’t think they were capable of this, but the way the muzzle was pinched said the dog had been dead a while.

  The dog was dead, but they tortured it anyway.