Passenger(48)

I pulled off my coat and cuffed up my sleeves. The shoulder of his pullover was freckled in blood.

“Clarence, man, I don’t have anything to clean you up with. My place is empty.”

“Ain’t even got running water. You worse off than me, bro.” With some difficulty, he reaches into his pocket and produces a ball of damp bills. “Here.” He scatters the bills, along with some change, on the floor beside him. I make out a hundred dollar bill among the bounty. “Been a good week.” Clarence winks. His eyelid is sticky with blood.

“Jesus, hold tight.” I go to the kitchen while tearing apart a length of my scarf. I moistened the swatch in the stagnant puddle of water in the sink and carry it back to Clarence, instructing him to hold it against his wound until I can run out to the drugstore.

Clarence winces as he presses the bit of wet fabric to his injury. “Hurts.”

“A goddamn pipe?” I say.

“Get me a Snickers, too, yeah?”

It takes me five minutes to locate a drugstore, buy some antiseptic, some gauze, a box of adhesive bandages, a Snickers bar, and return home. Like quelling a child, I distract Clarence with the Snickers bar while I squirt antiseptic into his wound.

“Shit, boy!” he bellows. “That stings!”

“Quit bitching.”

“Ain’t they sell any that don’t sting?”

“Here.” I toss the ball of gauze and the box of bandages into his lap. “Do it yourself. I’m not a goddamn surgeon.”

“You might be.”

“Yeah, well, I doubt it.”

As he cleans himself up, still huddled on the floor with his back against the wall (the half-eaten Snickers bar balanced impressively on one knee), I lean against the wall opposite him to examine my driver’s license.

“I was doin’ all right for a while,” Clarence says. “It wasn’t real hard at first. No wheels—it’s almost easier that way—and no name, shit, ain’t nobody come lookin’ for you when you don’t exist.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My plan. Same as your plan. Starting over. Remember?”

“I didn’t plan it.”

He goes on, “Made some good money table-hopping. You know—sit in a diner sipping coffee, waiting for people to finish their meals and pay their checks and get up and leave, so’s you can bounce over to their table when no one’s looking and take the tip.”

“Stealing, you mean.”

Blinking rapidly, holding a bit of gauze to his wound while, one-handed, he tries to peel the backing from an adhesive bandage, Clarence scowls. You would think he was mortally wounded. “Table-hopping,” he reiterates. “Ain’t stealing. And, anyway, it was fine until some goddamn Chinaman catches me and chases me out of his restaurant. Asshole was actually waving a gun. All Chinamen in Baltimore have guns, you know it?”

“I thought you said he hit you with a pipe.”

“No one hit me. He chased me out into the back alley and I ran, like, rabbit-quick through the trash and shit. Hit a fence and climbed that mother like it was my job. And wouldn’t you know it, the little Chinaman, he’s climbing the fence, too! Right behind me! That big-ass revolver in his hand, his ass gone all bobo keys, wild-ass eyes, he’s trying to climb this fence. So the hell with that, I just kept running. And when I turn the next corner—wham! I run right into this metal pipe. Part of some construction equipment on this scaffold-thing, sticking right out into the sidewalk. I run right into it. Knocks me flat on my ass. Lucky for me the Chinaman wasn’t able to get over that fence, or he’d have capped my black ass while I be laying there half-dead.”

“Could’ve taken out your eye,” I tell him. “Could’ve been killed. You’re lucky.”

Clarence grins and, now bandaged, takes another bite of his Snickers bar. “Made some cool bank, too.”

“You give yourself a fresh start and that’s what you do? You steal?”

“That why the cops were out there just now? Looking for me?”

“No.” I slide my driver’s license across the floor to him. “Apparently my name is Paul Howard.”

Clarence scoops up the license with his big fingers. Examines it. Pulls a face. “Bullshit.”

“What?”

“It’s a fake.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s a betty, yo. She ain’t real.”

“Are you sure? How do you know?”

“I know fifty mothers pressing these things all over the city. Two hundred bones and you can be any fool you want from anywhere in the country. Call ’em mothers ’cause they be giving birth to brand new peoples everyday. New lives, new names, new stories. Like you, Moe—like that card I give you. Same peoples.” He taps the phony license against the palm of his hand. “This city full of people starting over. You no different.”

“You think you could find out who made that license?”

“Shit,” Clarence says. “I know who made it.”

“Who?”

“Government. Goddamn international cover-up is what it is. You some James Bond mother and this your fakeness.”





NINETEEN