So Special in Dayville Page 18

  Ruiz contemplates him closely. “I can deliver a message to Ajeno if you would like.”

  The old man rubs his face. “It is nothing. Only that his mama does not like that I give him food. So I come to tell him,” he exhales shamefacedly, “that I no longer dare to leave his meal outside. She . . . uh . . . might . . .”

  “You fear,” Ruiz raises an eyebrow, “her adding something dangerous to la comida?”

  “. . . Sí.”

  ***

  The next afternoon, after her favorite Bible study class, Crystal shuffles inside the apartment, stunned by a bizarre turn of events.

  The fat man pops his head over the refrigerator door. “Is supper ready yet?”

  “How,” she screams, “can supper be ready yet? I just got home, for God’s sake!”

  Ajeno’s mouth drops open. Eyes filling up, he looks like a huge baby about to wail.

  “Oh, hon,” she falls exhausted and ashamed into a kitchen chair, “I’m so sorry. It was terrible of me to snap at you like that.”

  Ajeno sniffs. His hand, which had been submerged in a Meeper Cheeper sack, pulls out a cookie, which he quickly consumes. “What’s wrong?”

  “Well, it was my Bible study at church . . .,” she begins.

  He chews another cookie. “You danced again?”

  Crystal shoots him a quick, grateful look. “Aren’t you sweet? I didn’t know you heard me.” Ajeno ducks his head shyly, and she takes a deep breath. “No, we didn’t dance. That happened during the worship service, proper. No, today, during class, the pastor was lecturing on the fruits of the Spirit. And, you know,” her eyes narrow, “I thought it strange when they brought in that live chicken. But I just assumed the pastor would be using it as a metaphor for Easter renewal or something. But then he . . . he killed the poor thing right in front of us!”

  Swallowing, Ajeno nods. “For supper?”

  “No! He said it was to symbolize being cleaned in Christ’s blood. I mean,” she shakes her head, “it just happened so fast. All of a sudden, it’s bleeding. I’m crying. But everyone else is acting like it’s no big deal. Like it’s completely natural. And, really, I didn’t know what to do! Should I leave or should I stay? I was just so upset. Blood was all over the lectern. Maybe it was okay, but,” she stares up into his eyes, “it just didn’t seem proper, you know, for . . . Presbyterians.”

  Ajeno stops chewing another cookie. “Especially if you’re not gonna eat it, right?”

  She stares at him for a long minute. “Yeah, right.”

  “We got anymore Meeper Cheepers?” Upending the bag, the fat man stares up in its recesses.

  ***

  One block over, on the street where the Dawdlemans live, Ruiz waits, predator-like, near their house. Just after Frank Dawdleman leaves for his evening shift at the factory, Irene, his wife, returns home. She’s just gotten off from her shift at an altogether different factory.

  Other neighbors are milling about—searching one another’s garbage cans for discarded treasures, gossiping in groups of three or four, or just walking down the street kicking angrily at fire hydrants that no longer function.

  The tall man, moving stealthily, follows the Dawdleman woman up the front steps. She does not notice until his shadow falls across her as she wrestles the key in the lock. With a gasp, she whirls about. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I am here about our transaction.” He’s infused his voice with sinister intent.

  “Transaction?” She squints her eyes suspiciously. “Are you trying to sell me something?”

  Ruiz cannot help but sigh. The stupidity of these people is astonishing! “No,” he answers testily, “I am here to save your—”

  Relaxing, she holds up a hand to stop him. “Okay, now look! I don’t have anything against other religions. Some of my best friends are lost souls, sure to be eternally damned. But proselytizing like this won’t get you anything in this neighborhood, ’cept tomatoes thrown at you from windows.”

  “You must,” he says slowly, crowding her against the door panel, “listen . . . to . . . me. It is about the child—”

  “Oh, I get it! You’re some kind of pervert, aren’t you?” Still holding her door key, the small woman starts jabbing it at him, forcing him to step back.

  He can do nothing but retreat down the front steps. Drawing his gun is out of the question with so many witnesses.

  She’s still screaming at him, her tiny spit showering his face. “We don’t want your kind in our neighborhood. It’s a respectable neighborhood, understand? We got a neighborhood watch, understand?!”

  ***

  “I just don’t understand how I could’ve turned on Ajeno like that!” Crystal, mumbling to herself, is hobbling back home from the market with fresh ingredients for his dinner. Chicken marsala is his favorite. Has she remembered everything needed for the sauce? Mentally, she runs over the recipe, sticking her nose into the sack as she walks quickly down the sidewalk.

  A moment later, relief eases the tension in her neck. Everything seems to be accounted for. This includes, next to a bottle of cooking sherry, two tidily-wrapped chicken breasts and a box of freshly baked Meeper Cheeper Chocolate Peepers nestled in the shopping bag, just below her nose. The cookies’ tantalizing smell puts a lift in her step, her brain eased of its disturbing images of a chicken’s grisly death just hours before.

  Limping quickly down Hoskins, she easily spots Ajeno’s bulk up ahead, standing at the stoop of the Eden Palace. He’s talking to a couple of teenagers, gender nonspecific, who appear distraught. Too far away to hear what’s going on, she can only watch as she forces her cast to step livelier.

  Ajeno has draped a large arm around one of them as if to hold him or her up. “Ah, don’t worry ’bout it,” he’s saying as Crystal reaches the group. “There’s an empty place here. Up on the tenth floor. I can make a bed there for ya, but you can’t make no noise.”

  “Man, you’re a lifesaver!” cries one of the kids, who can’t be more than sixteen. “We ain’t slept anywhere safe in days.”

  Ajeno holds a fat sausage of a finger to his lips. “No problemo, but remember, we gotta be quiet.” Giving Crystal a quick shoulder pat, he leads the kids up the front steps.

  She watches, bursting with pride, as the threesome disappear into the building.

  A car across the street catches her attention. It’s a powder-blue SUV with a man sitting in the driver’s seat. He appears to be reading a newspaper, but the paper has a very large hole near its top half, through which she sees the glint of the man’s glasses.

  A sniff jerks her attention away. Dropping her gaze, she sees a dark figure sitting on the stoop’s bottom step.

  “God, my sinuses hurt!” Noah Jackman leans back, lifting his face to the waning sun. She’s opened her mouth to ask about the powder-blue SUV, but Jackman interrupts her train of thought. “I owe you an apology, Miss Crystal,” he says reluctantly. “You asked me a question the other day that I deliberately did not answer.”

  Forgetting about the SUV, she sinks down to rest beside him, the shopping bag at her side. There’s no need to hurry now. Ajeno will be busy settling the kids for at least an hour. “Oh, that’s okay.”

  “No, no, it’s not,” he argues. “Friends of long standing should be more courteous. Even when an answer’s hard to explain.” He drags a clean handkerchief across his nose. “Fact is, I paid Ajeno’s rent those first years. Later, Smu Chen took over the electricity and Miss Newman the water.”

  Astonishment renders the girl temporarily mute until she forces out, “But why?”

  Jackman shrugs. “For the same reason those kids are grateful to Ajeno tonight.” The handkerchief muffles his answer. “It was a payback to him for helping me.” Tidily, he refolds the square of cotton, his laugh bitter. “You know how I parade round here? Acting like I got all the answers?” He shakes his head. “Well, the truth is I’m just a retired insurance adjuster living by myself. It’s lonely, real lonely. Most of the time, folks
act like they know who I am. They act like they like me. You might not understand this, but from the first time I met Ajeno, I knew he’d seen,” he taps his chest hard, “the real me.”

  Crystal’s dizzied by a rush of understanding. “Oh, but I do understand.” She leans forward to tell him about how Ajeno had plucked her off the bridge when the lobby doors fly open at the top of the stairs.

  “Do you think I could forget,” demands Sam, “how my own wife died? I might be old, but not so old as that! Nowhere near as old as you, for example.”

  Visibly, the little lady puffs out the faux of her fur coat. “My memory, Sam Bratcher, is crystal clear. Why, it’s a mountain lake of . . . of clarity! I remember that morning like it was yesterday,”

  “Figures,” harrumphs the old man. “I remember it like it was this morning.”

  Still sitting on the bottom step next to Jackman, Crystal smiles politely as the old people teeter past her, cloaked in their own contest of wills. Beside her, the black man barely lifts his eyes from the pavement as Muriel and Sam disappear into the distance, still squabbling.

  “Oh, please,” comes the old lady’s faint retort, “you can’t even remember what you had for breakfast this morning!”

  Crystal reaches over to touch Jackman lightly on the shoulder. “Noah, you all right?”

  “No worries.” His glance is intentionally brave. “Didn’t sleep well last night. It’ll pass.”

  She nods. “It’s your back again, isn’t it?” A brief recitation conveys to him everything she learned from the school library on spinal issues.

  While he nods as if in rapt attention, Jackman’s eyes stay dark and troubled.

  His dream the night before still haunts him, though not in a frightening fashion. There had been no terrifying monsters or small, fat women trying to inoculate him with enormous needles. Instead, all he remembers is being completely alone and unanchored, as if adrift in a vast darkness.

  The girl continues her free association: “The Mayo Clinic’s supposed to be very good with such problems. It’s in Minnesota, I think. Huh . . . that’s probably a pretty area this time of year.” She starts bubbling in a more cheerful tone, “Maybe we’ll go there for our honeymoon. I’ve never been out of Dayville. It’ll be exciting going on a vacation.”

  Jackman looks down at his watch. Silently, he counts the seconds while listening to her talk. “Sometimes,” he interrupts the young woman’s stream of words, “sometimes I’d just like to step out of the now.”

  Crystal switches tracks with ease. “Why, what do you mean?”

  He points to his watch. Then he points to the digital clock across the street, both displaying the same time. “I get so tired of always being stuck in the moment. Unable to imagine the future or grieve the past, cause I’m always . . . right . . . here.”

  “Really?” The young woman remembers how trapped she’d been by the memory of her parents. What would it have felt like, back then, to walk free, uninhibited by the past? “Sounds sort of liberating to me.”

  He nods his close-cropped hair. “Oh, it’s liberating, all right!” Visible in his eyes are depths of sorrow. “But lonely. You see,” he tries to explain, “most people,” he nods down the street to the retreating backs of the elderly couple, “well, like Sam and Muriel, carry their pasts around like blankets. They’re so tightly wrapped up in ’em they can’t even see me!

  “But I’m here stuck in the present, alone with my bad back, while their minds are years away in yesterday. Then there are the others.” He nods across the street to where Sally Howie is cautiously counting steps away from her crevice. “Folks like that poor lady, who can only see and fear tomorrow.”

  Crystal does her best to see his point. “Never thought of it like that.” She reaches out to clasp his hand, squeezing it. “But you feel this, don’t you?” Her brightest smile gets a wan attempt in return. “You’re not alone here. There’s me and Ajeno and Eddie - the garbageman - and Beth, Lizzie, and Eliza, and—”

  Quickly, he kisses her hand. “As usual, Miss Crystal, you’ve shown me the path. But shouldn’t you be upstairs now, fixin’ dinner?”

  “Oh, right!” She jumps with a mental scolding for being scatterbrained. “But I’m not forgetting ’bout this. Maybe Ajeno will have an idea how to make you feel better!”

  Noah laughs. A miserable laugh, but still a laugh. “I don’t have faith in much, but if I placed a bet on anything, it’d be Ajeno!”

  “Well, I’ll be telling him everything about this over dinner.” She stands awkwardly as Harvey Epstein, 301A, hails Jackman from across the street. “But first I’m going to check on Sally.”

  “You do that.” Jackman waves her off just as Harvey reaches their side of the street. The two men immediately fall into a conversation about male-pattern baldness.

  Crystal, still carrying her shopping bag like a baby to her chest, shuffles to the crevice. There, as she expected, the doughy white form of Sally Howie stands silently behind her shopping cart.

  “Sally,” calls Crystal softly, unfocusing her eyes, “are you in there?”

  “Yep,” comes the reluctant answer. The girl wonders if Sally thought of not answering the door. The shopping cart moves slightly, but only enough for the homeless woman to slide past. “One. Two,” she counts, now standing next to Crystal.

  The girl smiles warmly. “I just wanted to invite you to dinner, Sally. Unless you have other plans.”

  “Mmmmm.” The woman appears to consider. “No, not tonight. Housework,” she jerks her head back at the crevice, “I gotta do. Lotsa cleaning.”

  “I understand,” says Crystal solemnly. “There’s a lot to keep up with. But Ajeno will be disappointed you’re not coming.”

  “He knows. No need to explain. He knows. I know he knows.”

  A thought strikes the young woman. “You two haven’t had a fight, have you?’ When the doughy white face shows confusion, she asks gently, “You still like Ajeno, don’t you, Sally?”

  “Yes, yes I do,” Sally answers quickly. “Like . . . I like knowing where to go.”

  “He makes you feel safe, doesn’t he?”

  A frown knits the older woman’s forehead. “Safe?”

  “Yes, like everything’s going to be all right.”

  Sally, still frowning, looks at her doubtfully. “You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”

  “Well, of course!” The young woman can’t keep from laughing. “We’re engaged to be married, remember?”

  “Married!” The homeless woman tucks her chin and stares. “To what? Can’t drain oceans into thimbles. Too big. No, too small. Nope, never work.”

  Crystal pats her hand, its skin rough and paper-dry. “Don’t worry, Sally, first thing I’ll do after our honeymoon is put him on a proper diet. No more Meeper Cheeper Chocolate Peepers, that’s for sure!”

  Sally steps very close to the young woman, staring into her eyes. “You have seen him?”

  “Yes,” emphasizes Crystal, “I’ve seen him. And he’ll make a wonderful husband, just you wait.”

  Sally’s lips twitch, trying to break into a smile. “A joke.”

  “Oh, is that why you keep asking me that?” Crystal giggles. “A joke, yes, I get it!”

  The older woman’s expression clears. “Yep, a joke. I thought so. Very funny.” She whirls about-face and begins counting her steps. “One, two . . . bye-bye!”

  Crystal watches the hunched shoulders of the white figure disappear into the crevice, and then the shopping cart is pulled back into place. Funny, but she’s never known Sally to make a joke before.

  It’s at dinner when Crystal explains Jackman’s problem to Ajeno. “I just think he feels lonely. Everyone’s busy with something else in their lives—the past or the future—and he feels left out.”

  Ajeno talks past a mouthful of meat. “Time easy.” He nods as if in complete understanding.

  Crystal takes her plate to the sink to rinse it clean. “Well, I don’t know about that, baby. Most fol
ks think times are hard.” Over her shoulder, she adds, “But I told Jackman you’d help somehow.” When he looks doubtful, she puts her arms around his neck. “You’re smarter than you give yourself credit for, baby.”

  Ajeno pauses in licking his plate to repeat, “Time easy.”

  “So,” she changes the subject, “did you get those kids settled?”

  The big head lifts from his plate. “Yep.”

  “You’re good at that, you know.” She lifts an eyebrow at his blank look of surprise. “You are. You help others feel at home—”

  “What does home feel like?”

  She shrugs. “A sense of belonging, I guess. Feeling part of a community.”

  “Part.” Ajeno nods. “I wanna feel part of something. I felt part of my family, the Garcias.” He hides his eyes. “Then they made me leave.”

  Crystal folds herself around his upper bicep to comfort him. “Oh, baby! I know how that hurt you.”

  “Made me hungry.”

  “Of course it did. You didn’t have any money to buy food, did you? It’s a wonder you didn’t starve to death!”

  “Yep.” Nodding, he echoes himself, “Made me hungry.”

  Later, after he’s left for the diner, Crystal pauses in cleaning the apartment. Something pulls her to the window. And there, through dirty glass, she looks down upon the stoop five stories below. Noah Jackman is down there, sitting on the third step from the bottom. Using a rag from her pocket, Crystal rubs the glass a little cleaner.

  Relief slows her breathing when she spots Ajeno standing nearby. She’d wondered why he left so early for his shift! Yesterday he said something about new uniforms being given to the cooking crew. She just assumed he left early to get his pick of the larger sizes. Her pride blossoms now as she watches. His large arms are shepherding Sally to sit on one side of Noah and the two elderly people—Sam and Muriel—to sit on the other.

  A smile steals over her expression. The fat man looks just like a schoolteacher standing before a classroom!

  Elderly Sam Bratcher is supporting Muriel’s arm as she lowers herself, with extreme delicacy, to the slab of concrete. Once ensconced, she reaches out a steadying arm to Sam, now seating himself, while giving the fat man her full attention.