Florida(44)

* * *



—

One Saturday in March, at their last club, she looked up to see Eugene-Euclean swaying on his feet. He was staring at the air ducts above with a taut look of ecstasy on his face. She couldn’t get to him before he fell over. His body was rigid, his jaw grinding. She considered an ambulance, then dismissed it, because he had no money for medical care: he was saving for a bridge for his missing teeth. He always came out of it, he had told her. The Devil couldn’t match the light in him. All she had to do was wait.

She went back to cleaning. When she was finished, she polished all the glasses and wiped the fur of dust from the bottles on the top shelves. She squeegeed the windows. When people in work clothes began passing by outside, it was time. When she came near Eugene-Euclean, however, she smelled a terrible odor and found that he had voided his bowels. She heaved him into a chair and dragged him to the bathroom and cleaned him as well as she could. She threw his pants and underwear and socks and shoes into the dumpster and fashioned a kind of loincloth from her sweatshirt. His van was parked in the lot, and she wrestled him up into the back and laid him out on a bundle of clean rags.

She didn’t know where he lived or if he had loved ones. She hadn’t asked anything about him, had only listened to what he’d chosen to tell. She left a note on his chest and locked the van, and when she returned in the afternoon to check on him, the van was gone, and he was gone, and though she waited for him at the clubs every night for the next week, none of the hungry, idle people in the plaza or the nightclub managers or the people at the shelter knew or would tell her where he was.



* * *



—

    A cold wind blew in one April night and killed the most fragile plants. Across town, there were skeletons of ferns and banana plants and camellias. In the morning, the small, frowning Thai woman who owned Affordable—Best Price—Comfortable knocked on the door and waited in the doorway, silent and cross-armed, until the girl had packed up, put on her shoes and jacket, and left the room.

At noon, she followed the slow-moving parade of the indigent to the plaza and received a sandwich in plastic and a can of juice. At six, she followed them to the Methodist church and was served milk with a sour taste she remembered from kindergarten and a baked potato with chili.

Afterward, she followed a group past the homeless shelter, which was always full by one minute past five, when it opened for the night. They passed the old town depot, went through a park scarred with chain-link fences and heaps of dirt. They came out onto the bike path where she and her ex, once upon a time, had taken long, leisurely rides to see the alligators glistening on the banks of the sinkhole pools. It was dark in the woods, thick with Spanish moss and vines that looked from the corners of her eyes like snakes. She felt a new uprising in her, a sharp fear, and tried to swallow it. The people ahead of her disappeared off the bike path and into the trees.

She could smell it before she saw it: the tang of urine and shit and woodsmoke and spilled beer and something starchy boiling. She heard the voices and came out into a clearing. In the dark, tents hulked beyond where she could see them, and there were fires here and there.

A man shouted, You looking for me, sweetheart? and there were laughs and she could see a dark shape detaching from the closest fire and gliding toward her.

She heard a woman’s voice behind her saying warmly, There you are! and she felt herself being pushed past the man who approached, then past seven or eight campfires.

They stopped. Hang on, the woman said, and she bent down and held a lighter to a newspaper, then the newspaper to a bit of kindling. The fire revealed a heavy woman with a bready face and hair in a pink shade of red. I got the water, kids, she said. You can come out. There was the sound of a zipper, and four little bodies crept from a tent. They were indistinguishable from one another at first, four skinny things with long blondish hair.

The woman looked up and said, Not smart, coming here alone.

I had nowhere to go, she said, and her voice sounded ugly in her ears.

No family? the woman said. Clean-looking girl like you?

No, she said.

Got food? the woman asked, and she nodded as she pulled from her pack the last of her supplies: a loaf of white bread, a jar of peanut butter, a pack of cheese, a few tins of sardines, three cheap dry packs of ramen.

Peanut butter! one of the kids said, snatching it up, and the woman smiled at her for the first time. Share your food, you can share our tent, she said.

Thank you, she said. When they sat to eat, one of the little girls came close to her and put a hand on the sole of her foot. When she was little, she’d had the same hunger for touch. She could smell woodsmoke in the girl’s blond hair, something clovelike in her skin.



* * *



—

The big woman was named Jane, and they nursed cups of weak cocoa after the children went to sleep. Jane told her about the husband who had run off, the house she and the kids lost, the jobs she’d been fired from because of her temper. She sighed. Same old story, she said.

She could hear the campsite settling, could smell marijuana over the thick stink of the place; a man was shouting, then his voice suddenly cut off. The house was real nice, Jane said ruefully. Pool and all. My husband always said there’s no such thing as a Florida childhood without a pool. She snorted, and made a gesture toward the children. Now we’re camping.