Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(81)

“We ain’t out here to fuck with old ladies, man,” the nervous one says. “Let’s go.”

It occurs to me that thanks to my height and my bearing, someone who spots me from a distance in bad light might easily take me as younger and maler than I am, and this seems to be what my three challengers have done. Two seem set on proceeding regardless, but I think I see a hint of anguish in the bespectacled face of the third. A fear of consequences, probably—but it could also be recognition of some kind: an echo of a grandmother or a great aunt. With the vodka encouraging presumptuousness and leaps of logic, I cannot help but feel a sudden rush of affection for this boy, my reluctant champion, my bridge to safety.

I raise a wobbly finger to point at him. “You,” I say, “look just like that young man in the Oreo cookie commercial.”

The three of them stare at me.

“Those glasses,” I explain.

“Bitch is drunk or crazy,” the short one mutters.

“We were just talking,” the tall one says, “about the five dollars you gonna give us. Remember that?”

“Oh yes,” I say. “I wish that I could.”

“I think you can,” says the tall one.

“I think you definitely can,” says his short friend.

He has something metal in his hand—a knife, maybe, though it doesn’t look like a knife. The men the Subway Vigilante shot were supposedly armed with sharpened screwdrivers, tools they planned to use to break into vending machines.

“Maybe you oughta just give us your wallet,” says the taller one.

The third is silent, drifting away again.

For the first time it occurs to me that these young men might kill me. Or they could knock me down, which at my age might amount to the same thing, depending on how I fall.

If they kill me, they kill me. Gian loses both his mothers in one night.

If they don’t, they don’t. And I don’t think they will. They seem like troublemakers, but not hard criminals. They’re not violent or strung out. If they wanted to hurt me they’d have done so by now.

“Are you sure you want my wallet?” I say. “If a police officer stops you, how will you explain where it came from?”

“Lady, what the fuck do you think this is, Let’s Make a Deal?” says the tall one, but his eyes hesitate in a way that his words do not.

“Look,” says the short one, “we ain’t discussing this. You can give us the cash, or maybe we just walk off with your bag. Right?”

“Yo, what the fuck, Keith?” the nervous one says, addressing his tall friend, who blanches to hear his name spoken aloud. “This ain’t what we come out here for, man. This ain’t the guy.”

Keith flares, forgetting me for an instant. “They’re all the guy,” Keith says. “You been listening to all the same shit as me, man. Every cracker in five boroughs is calling up the mayor, telling him to give the keys to the city to this Charles Bronson subway-shooting motherfucker. We got to take our streets back.”

“Yeah, but these ain’t our streets, man,” the nervous one says. “We in Midtown now.”

Keith has already launched into the next component of his diatribe before I begin to grasp what he’s saying. “Wait a minute,” I interrupt. “Wait just a minute. Are you boys out here looking for the Subway Vigilante?”

He’s back in my face now, leaning in. “What we’re looking for,” he says, “is five dollars. That’s all you need to concern yourself with.”

I catch my breath, let it out slowly. “For your information,” I say, “not every white person in the city approves of what that man did.” Keith objects, but I raise my voice, cutting him off. “That man wasn’t defending himself,” I say. “He was a racist thug looking for trouble. What he did was disgusting, and I hope he goes to jail for it.”

This just makes Keith angrier; I need to start backing down. Before he can say anything else, I slide my purse from my shoulder and put it in his hands. “Here,” I say. “Take a look. Go ahead. It won’t help you. After you see there’s nothing of value, I’d appreciate it if you’d give it back.”

He passes it to his short friend, who begins to rifle through it, dropping items to the pavement as he goes: my little can of Mace, my penlight, my Swiss Army Knife. “Nothing here,” he says, letting the purse fall, showing the wallet to Keith.

“You’re too late,” I say. “I gave all my cash to a guy at a Filipino bodega in the Village. I spent all I had on some snacks and a pot of dirt.”

Keith is giving me a withering glare, outraged and unsatisfied. The short one’s movements evince an injured heartlessness, a desire to do harm. Even the prudence of the third is being shoved aside by plain fear. If they kill me, I just hope that someone comes to my apartment and finds Phoebe quickly. Cats can live for a while without food, but I don’t want her to suffer because of my recklessness.

“Okay,” Keith says, pointing at my mink. “You got no cash, you can give us that coat.”

“Man, what are we doing all this talking for?” says the shorter one. “Let’s grab the coat and get the fuck out.”

“I don’t want no part of this, Darrell,” the third one says. He’s even farther away now. More a spectator than a participant. The chorus in a Greek tragedy. I think back to the Christian Women’s Hotel, our bedsheet-costumed performance of Antigone. How little we understood then of the lines we spoke. No man is so foolish that he is enamored of death.