Biofire, page 34
Her birth certificate read Evangeline Maybelle Carter, but she had not answered to that name, or even heard it, in years; she had put it behind her just as she had put behind her the pain of losing her husband, Amelio, then, a little over two months later, her teenage son Russell. She had not lost them without a long hard fight against the ugly powers that pulled them away from her—drugs, the street, the darkness that seemed to be the city’s lifeblood—slowly at first, then with a frightening swiftness, until they were both gone. But although they had left her, the fight in her remained. The way Mama looked at it, she lost the battle and not the war. She continued to fight and South Street was her battlefield. As far as Mama Charity was concerned, she had always been at South Street and she had always been Mama Charity. She had nothing else, and needed nothing else.
Tonight, she was working the receiving room again, but she would have to take some time off soon; she had been at it for nearly fourteen hours with only a couple of short breaks. She needed to get something to eat and then lie down because her arthritis was starting to chew on her ankles and knees. Dagmar and her son Boy were in the clinic; Boy had fallen down the subway steps and had a gash on his forehead that needed stitches, and he was near tears with fright at the idea of someone working on him with a needle and thread. Mama Charity wanted to check on him, maybe take him a Tootsie Roll from the candy box.
Dagmar and Boy were regulars at South Street. They lived down under in the filthy black belly of the city, with the rats and the roar of the subway trains. Mama did not know exactly how old Dagmar was, but she was no more than a girl, she knew that much. And with a son. Dagmar did not talk about herself much, about her past or how she fell on such hard times. But that really did not matter. All Mama knew was that she needed help.
The problem was, Dagmar would not let anyone help them. Mama had tried to convince her to move into the mission for a while until she got back on her feet and could make a life for herself and Boy. But she always shook her head, silently refusing to stay. She never took any more than she needed, and always more for Boy than for herself. She accepted medical treatment only when it was necessary, and again, for Boy, never for herself. She protected that child like a lioness protecting a litter of cubs, but Mama wished she would take better care of herself as well, or one day Boy might end up on his own in the mean and heartless down under, the only home he had ever known.
Mama knew it was most likely pride that kept Dagmar from accepting charity, even if it was the kind South Street provided. Mama knew, because she had been through it herself. After her husband Amelio was fired as a truck driver for a furniture company because of his love for the needle, Mama took on two jobs. But after he was stabbed to death in a drug deal gone awry, she lost her night job cleaning a soft-drink bottling factory because the distractions of her life had made her sloppy. Then, after Russell, her sixteen-year-old son died of a drug overdose, she came to pieces, unraveled like a ball of string. She lost her second job, eventually lost her apartment, and found herself with nothing and nowhere to go. Except for South Street.
Mama could still remember the gnawing ache in her stomach when she had to admit defeat and move to the mission where she had been working as a volunteer. And she was sure that Dagmar felt the same ache whenever she was asked to stay at South Street. So many people, even at the end of their rope, wanted to hang on with their own two hands, their own strength, with no help.
But Dagmar and Boy came to the mission every two or three weeks for food or to see a doctor when they had infected rat bites or got too sick from eating garbage, and Mama helped them as much as she could, even though that was not as much as she would like.
She especially enjoyed spending time with Boy. It was an odd name, of course, but he did not seem to mind. Why should he? He had never been called anything else. Boy, as well was the other children who came to the mission, always reminded Mama of her own son, and she always hoped she would be able to help them in some special way, do something, say something that would make their lives better. She wanted desperately to be able to touch those children in a way she had never seemed able to touch Russell, no matter how hard she had tried.
Hunger pangs rumbled in her stomach, and Mama Charity decided to grab herself a candy bar to hold her over when she got Boy’s Tootsie Roll. That and a diet cola would keep her on her feet a while longer. Besides, she still had to check on those poor kids in the basement one last time for the night. What a mess that was. She knew it was worrying Willy into fits, which meant he would probably get even less sleep than usual, and with that temperamental heart of his, he needed a lot more of it than Mama Charity.
As Mama Charity headed for the clinic to coax a smile out of a scared, hurt little boy, P.W. climbed the stairs in the basement. His 9mm was tucked beneath his belt in the small of his back. He had given McNolte the .45 automatic Colt Commander, along with several clips and careful instructions in its use. He had considered arming Emma, but decided she was dangerous enough.
P.W. was especially concerned about Emma. The voice on the answering machine had spooked her, sent her into a panic. He was tempted to have Willy get one of the volunteer doctors to prescribe a sedative for her, but if the people on her tail were as serious as they seemed to be, P.W. wanted to make sure that thing in her head was loaded and ready to fire if they should storm the place.
He was going to tell Willy to call Juarez and get him down to the mission right away, maybe even suggest that he bring a few friends. Juarez still had the sharp, suspicious eye of the street kid he used to be, and P.W. wanted him on the door watching for anyone who looked the least bit shifty, somebody who looked like he did not belong there.
When he reached the top of the stairs, he pulled the door open, stepped out into the loud racket of the laundry room, and was jolted out of his thoughts, nearly reaching around to draw his gun.
Two men stood outside the basement door. One was tall and thin, with long, stringy dark hair that fell limply down his back; he wore a bulky, mud-colored sweater, a pea-green jacket, jeans, and a pair of old cowboy boots. The other was about the same height but heavier and unshaven, with short, curly, red hair and a long coat that looked like it was made of burlap, and his right eye socket was empty, covered by sunken, puckered flesh. They both looked to be somewhere in their thirties. Their clothes were filthy and barely held together.
“You gotta bathroom?” the heavier man asked
“Yeah,” P.W. replied, nodding. His eyes raced over them warily. They looked pretty thrashed, and they smelled of rum. “You guys, uh…” He nodded toward the row of mismatched, battered washing machines against the wall he quickly hid his suspicion behind a pleasant, lazy smile. “…you washin’ some clothes, or something?”
“No,” the one-eyed man said, returning the smile. “Just lookin’ for a bathroom, is all. Can we use it? Your bathroom?”
The man’s teeth were uncommonly clean; it did not necessary mean anything, but P.W. noticed. “Sure, sure you can. You fellas been checked in yet?”
“No,” the long-haired one said. “Just got here. Big place.”
“Yeah, a real monster to heat, too, I can tell ya.” P.W. stopped between the two men, turned, and placed a hand against each man’s back gently. “Let’s get you fellas checked in, okay?”
“Can we use the bathroom first? We just came in to use the bathroom, is all.”
“It’ll just take a minute. We like to know you’re here before you go wanderin’ around the place. It’s an old building, so it’s for your own safety, y’know.” P.W. was not sure what the hell that meant, but it sounded good, and the one-eyed man nodded.
“Okay, sure.”
“My name’s P.W. How ’bout you two?”
“I’m Dennis,” the long-haired man said. “This is Charlie. He don’t talk much. But he’s company, you know?”
“Sure, sure. Lotta people in the world could take a lesson from Charlie.”
P.W. led them down the corridor and into the receiving room, where he spotted Mama Charity heading into the clinic.
“Hey, Mama,” he shouted, startling Dennis and Charlie.
She jerked to a stop, not certain she had heard her name called, and looked around. When P.W. shouted to her again, she hurried toward him, grinning.
“What do you need, P.W.?” she said.
“Dennis and Charlie, here, need to be checked in, if you’ve got a second.”
“Hello, boys,” she said, sharing her grin with the two newcomers. “Why don’t you just come with me, okay?”
“Thanks, Mama,” P.W. said as she led the men away. He moved as if to turn away, but stopped and glanced at them.
Dennis and Charlie had their backs to him as he watched them. Just to make sure. He heard Dennis laugh, saw Charlie nod his head a few times.
They had caught him off-guard in the laundry room and that made him angry at himself. He had gotten rusty. It had been a while since he had found himself in a situation like this and he had become easily distracted over the years. That would have to stop.
They did not look back at him; they seemed to have forgotten about him already. P.W. decided they were okay. But they might not have been, and he could be dead, or at least out like a light with a nasty headache in his immediate future. He reached up and tugged on his beard firmly, thinking, Gonna have to pull the old head out of the old ass and get with the program. Then he went off to find Willy, tossing one more look over his shoulder.
“I am Mama Charity, and I want you to tell me a little about yourselves,” she said. “You boys feelin’ okay? You wanna visit the clinic?”
“No,” Dennis said. “We just came to use the bathroom. I gotta use it pretty bad, the bathroom. Do we gotta sign something first, or something?”
“Oh, no, no, not that kind of checkin’ in. We just wanna find out if you need medical treatment, or food, or a bed, that sorta thing. C’mon I’ll take you to the restrooms.”
They followed her back the way they had come, down the corridor and around a corner to the two labeled doors. An old porcelain drinking fountain grew from the wall between them.
“Here you go,” she said. “When you get done, you come find me or talk to one of the volunteers if you need anything.”
Dennis returned her smile as he and Charlie pushed through the door into the men’s room.
Ignoring the deep ache in her knees and ankles, Mama Charity leaned over the drinking fountain for a few swallows of cold water before heading back to the clinic.
In the men’s room, Dunne checked the stalls—they had no doors—to make sure they were alone, then said, “We hit the jackpot, Morrie. Did you see the way that guy looked at us when he came through the door?”
The black and white tiles were old and cracked and the glass mirror had been replaced by a rectangle of shiny, reflective chrome.
“For just a split-second, there, with that look in his eye, I thought he was gonna kill us both. Like Santa Claus on angel dust, or something.”
“I say we go back and see what’s behind that door he came out of.”
“Looked like a stairway to me. The basement, maybe, couldn’t tell for sure. But I bet our lady’s down there. You think?”
“Yeah,” Morrie said with a nod. “Looked like he was hiding something.”
Dunne smiled and gestured at Morrie’s face. “Hey, that’s a nice touch, taking the eye out and not wearing your patch. I like it.”
Dunne had known Morrie for ten years, but Morrie’s prosthetic eye and the empty socket that held it remained a source of endless amusement and fascination. So did the story behind it. When he was twelve, as Morrie told it, he had run out of a classroom at school after being held for thirty minutes after the bell as punishment for disrupting class, with a pencil in his hand. In a moment of schoolboy clumsiness, he had validated the age-old warning given by every mother to every child about running with sharp objects: he had fallen and poked out his eye.
“Yeah, that’s the great thing about disfigurements,” Morrie said. “People either feel sorry for you, or it scares the shit out of them, which is good for a laugh.”
“You think Mama Chubbycheeks is gone?”
“Should be by now, I’d think.”
Each man removed a surgical mask from a pocket and slid the band over his head, fitting it over his nose and mouth.
The instant they stepped out of the restroom, Mama Charity rounded a corner, touching a knuckle to her lips as she belched after gulping water. She decided that while she was at that end of the building, she would duck into the basement to see how Magnolia and his friend were and if they needed anything.
As she stepped into the laundry room, she gave a bright hello to Margaret, a tough old volunteer who was unloading sheets into a basket from a dryer, and fished her keys from the enormous pocket on her thin, billowy, floor-length jacket. She slipped the key into the lock, pushed the door open, stepped down and swung it closed behind her, but stopped on the third step down because the door did not close, and when she turned, she got only a glimpse of Dennis’s eyes above his mask before he punched her in the face.
Mama Charity slammed against the wooden rail and hooked an arm under it tightly when she felt her feet leave the step. She could already feel blood dribbling from her nose, but she fought the flashbulbs in her head and the slippery feeling of nearly losing consciousness before she bellowed, “Margaret, get help!” as she swung her left arm up between Dennis’s legs and clasped a fist onto his crotch, squeezing hard.
Without making a sound, he raised his hand, which now held a gun, and brought the black butt down on Mama Charity’s forehead, setting off more flashbulbs inside her skull. The pain finally arrived, lagging behind the actual assaults, and it exploded behind her face, pressing outward over her cheekbones and filling her sinuses with fire. She felt herself black out once, for just an instant, then again, but she bit her lip and desperately held onto consciousness, and the one-eyed man’s genitals. And she pulled.
Morrie let out a small grunting sound as Dunne, who had come through the door behind Morrie, grabbed the door before it could swing closed and stepped out to the laundry room as the beefy old woman who had been pulling sheets from the dryer ran toward the corridor. Dunne swung out a foot and caught her shin with the toe of his boot. She slammed to the floor face-down and he kicked her in the side of the head hard before she could make a sound. When she did not move, he went back to the basement door, stepped through and closed it as Mama Charity’s right arm slipped from the rail and she fell backward down the stairs, pulling Morrie with her.
“Shit,” Dunne muttered, starting down the steps after them. When they slammed against one of the rail’s supports with Mama Charity on top of Morrie, Dunne planted his foot on the fat woman’s side and heaved, rolling her off of his partner. She tumbled the rest of the way down the stairs and sprawled onto the concrete floor below. “You all right, man?”
Morrie cupped both hands over his crotch as he took deep breaths and blew them out hard. His eyes bulged and his face had turned the color of boiled beets. He tried to speak to Dunne, to say, No, I’m not, you fucking idiot, but rusted blades of pain cut upward from his testicles, ripping through his guts. He rolled his head to the side and dry-heaved over the edge of the stairs.
Dunne hurried down the stairs toward Mama Charity, who was struggling to get to her knees. He hoped no one had heard them as he prepared to kick her in the face.
Mama Charity rose up on her knees, saw him coming, and threw herself forward, swinging her pendulous arms around Dunne’s legs.
His back struck the stairs and he yelped with pain, but snapped his mouth shut instantly. He could not afford another fuck-up, not now, so soon after missing the woman in the café, and his mind clung to that, to the need to get the job done this time so he did not really piss off Mr. Shaw.
Mama Charity got to her feet, her face shiny with blood. Her teeth were bared, arms out at her sides like a Sumo wrestler’s as she bore down on him, swallowing his field of vision, and he swung a leg up to kick her in the stomach. Instead, she grabbed his leg and dragged him off the stairs, the back of his head cracking against the edge of each step until it smacked flatly against the concrete.
Dunn rolled to his left, got on all fours and was about to get to his feet when she kicked him in the ass, flattening him to the floor again. When Dunne felt Mama Charity’s hand close on a clump of his hair, he grunted, “Morrie!” as she pulled his head back and slammed his face to the concrete. Everything blurred inside and outside his head, and a sound like a tuning fork filled his ears.
Morrie staggered down the stairs clutching the rail and aimed his gun at her.
“Magnolia!” Mama Charity cried. “Magnolia, get in here!”
When the scuffle began, McNolte and Emma were sitting on the edges of their beds facing one another and talking softly, and it sounded to them like nothing more than someone clamoring back down the stairs, P.W. or Mama Charity. But when they heard a garbled sound followed by a loud crash, Emma said, “I think somebody fell,” and they stood. By the time the gunshot cracked through the basement, they were jogging out of the room.
After the gunshot, there was a long moment of stunned waiting between Mama Charity, standing on the basement floor, and Dunne, who stood two steps up from the floor, gun still pointed at her, waiting for her to drop dead or start bleeding, but nothing happened and Mama Charity took advantage of that instant, not thinking about what had just almost happened, and launched herself forward, slamming into him. His gun clattered on the steps and they both fell on top of Morrie, who immediately groaned and began to drag himself out from under them. Mama Charity began pounding Dunne’s face with her fist, growling, “You shot at me and missed, you must be blind as a bat, you damned son of a—”
McNolte shouted, “No!” as he and Emma rushed in from the other room just in time to see Dunne’s switchblade knife click open and cut through the air, sinking to the hilt in Mama Charity’s back.
