Under the Bridge, page 7
“People all over the world are hungry and sick,” I shout. “Why? Because we, with money bulging our pockets, buy up their land, their metals, their trees, their crops, their oil to make all this …” I wave my hand at the glittering displays around me, “… junk.”
Someone tugs on my sleeve. Robin. “Lucy, it’s great, what you’re saying, but — ”
“People all over the world are killed by militaries and paramilitaries to keep them silent in their suffering, keep them sitting quietly at sewing machines.”
Robin pulls my sleeve again. I shake him off.
“To keep them on electronics assembly lines, on bulldozers and loaders, making these shiny piles of stuff.”
“Come on,” Robin says, urgent, his hand hooked in my elbow. I try to push his hand away, but he pulls me firmly off of my box, catches me when I stumble. Gord hooks my other elbow and they pull me along. I sputter, but they’re young and strong.
I twist, catch a glimpse of Bara running back the way we came, toward a cop about to step through the door. She points at something behind him, out on the street. He stops, swivels to look up and down the sidewalk.
“Lucy, come. Now,” Robin hisses and I start to co-operate. People stare, but step aside. A few counters from the perfume, crowds are intent on their shopping as if nothing happened. The boys take me to the side wall, Robin glancing over his shoulder before pushing me through a big steel door behind a display. He guides me through a dark space and then all three of us tumble out into the alley beside the store. “Come on,” Robin says and drops my arm, leading the way toward the back of the building.
Behind the store, there’s a row of huge dumpsters with lids. Robin opens one, pulls out a few garbage bags and drops them beside the bin. He and Gord more or less lift me in. I land on something squishy. Robin vaults in beside me, a stick in his hand. Does he think he’ll fight off a cop with a stick? No, he arranges it on the metal edge of the dumpster so that it props the lid open a crack. Feeling around, he finds an intact garbage bag and slides it over for me to sit on. He finds one for himself too. He’s done this before, I think. Gord has disappeared.
We crouch in stinking darkness. I get alternate whiffs of garbage and the perfume from my hand. Don’t know which is worse.
Voices. “They can’t have gone far. It’s just been a few minutes.” Robin’s hand on my knee in the dark. Does he think I’m so out of control I’ll say something?
Another voice, just outside our bin. “No one here.”
First voice again, “This is a waste of time,” moving away.
After a while, Robin whispers, “You okay?” Touches my knee again. I’d slap his hand, but I’m too busy holding on to the garbage bag I’m sitting on. It keeps threatening to slump to the side and dump me into unidentified smelly muck.
“Get me out of here,” I say.
“It’ll be dark in an hour.” He looks up toward the crack where he propped the lid. The light falls on his earnest narrow face, dark stubble on his cheeks. “Can you wait that long?”
“No choice.”
“That was cool, what you said in there. It’ll get you in trouble pretty quick in a classy store like that, but you were speaking truth. You’re one brave lady.”
“Don’t have to tell me I’m in trouble. Or I’m right.”
“So what, like, got you started?”
“Don’t you start up with that ‘like’ thing.”
He chuckles, then waits for an answer.
After a pause, I try. “It’s like looking through something and seeing the whole story behind it. Like floating in a boat. Everyone else is saying how beautiful and calm it is, clouds and blue sky reflected on the water, and all you can see are the rusty cans and broken bottles on the bottom, covered with slime from the pollution. I want to wake them up, show them. The lake is dying. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Uh, no. Can’t say I do.”
“All those clothes in there. They’re made in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Central America, where they can pay the workers a few dollars a day and not worry about sick pay, or pensions, or health and safety regulations.
“In Guatemala once, a friend plucked at the fabric of my sleeve, asked me, ‘Where did this come from?’ I had no idea, never thought about it. Later, when we were travelling, he asked a friend of his to give me a tour of a sewing factory. Row after row of young women bent over their machines, fingers cracked and aching, eyes squinting in the poor light. They were paid by the piece. To make enough for their families to live, they had to work twelve, fourteen hours a day, as fast as possible, until they sewed their hand into a seam or lost a finger to the cutter. The air was full of cotton dust. Ever heard of ‘brown lung disease’? And the noise …
“Those shoppers in there, they’re not bad people. They don’t want to force people all over the world to live in poverty, suffer ill health, die young, but why aren’t they asking, ‘Where did this come from?’”
I can feel him nodding in the smelly dark.
***
Light’s fading. I try to get my feet under me. Can’t feel them. I think I’ve pissed myself, but who’d know? “Get me out of here.”
“Wait,” Robin peeks out through the crack under the lid. “Okay, then.” He lifts it open carefully as he can. It squeaks, and he pauses, waiting, but there’s no one in the alley. Embarrassing to have him help me out of there, stiff, cold and filthy, but I can’t hold myself up without him.
We make our way slowly through the growing dark back to the lane behind Susan’s Place. Bara looks up from sorting through what the staff have left in the plastic bucket. “About time,” she says. “Anyone see you?”
“Nope,” Robin assures her. “Stuck to parking lots and alleys.” He helps me sit on the restaurant’s back step. “Got to go,” he says to Bara. “You okay to take care of her from here?”
She nods, and he takes off with long strides. She begins arranging food on scrounged napkins, brings one to me. “You stink,” she says as she bends to put it in my lap. I’m too tired to care what I smell like or what I’m eating.
***
Bara helps me into the alley, finds several layers of cardboard to sit on and urges me to lie down, but that doesn’t feel right. I lean on the cold bricks of the wall and she wraps my sleeping bag around me. Next thing I know, she’s climbing under one side of it, leaning against the wall and my shoulder.
“No, no, Bara. You have to go back to Horizons, where you’ll be safe.”
“And you’ll be safe? Here, alone?”
“Safe enough. No one will see me.”
“Then they won’t see me either, will they?”
“You’ll lose your bed at Horizons.”
“I don’t like it at Horizons.”
“I can’t take care of you.”
“Then we’ll just have to take care of each other, won’t we?”
I feel something against my leg. Almost push it away before I hear that raucous purr. Raggedy has curled up on the sleeping bag between us. Bara strokes him a few times, her hand gradually slowing, finally coming to rest. The cat’s purr fades off into sleep.
Nicolás liked to call on his vast network of friends to give me tours of the places the campesinos went to work in the off season or after they lost their land. The lucky ones, that is. I saw bananas harvested, coffee beans loaded onto ships, vegetables graded on endless conveyor belts, workers in pharmaceutical plants completely covered in paper suits. Before long, I couldn’t look at anything without asking where it came from, who made it, who made money from it.
Nicolás could never have gotten me into the Inco mine, though. The offer of that tour came from a Canadian engineer when I was still a harmless missionary, long before I learned to ask who profits and who pays. Although, even then I felt uncomfortable when he called nickel “the metal of war.”
“It makes steel harder and rust-proof,” he said. “The price is depressed right now, but all we have to do is wait for another war and the price will soar again.” And he laughed.
My eyes are closed, and in the darkness behind my eyelids, I’m suddenly there again, sitting in a jeep, breathing red dust, looking down into a vast, barren amphitheatre, a disappearing hillside, sloping downward to the sparking blue waters of Lago Izabal. Every few minutes, a battered bulldozer appears at the lip of the hill. They look old to me, and small, left over from the 1950s. I hold my breath as they tip over the edge and plunge down at an impossible angle toward the lake below, pushing red earth in a cascade in front of the blade. They look to me to be on the verge of tumbling blade over treads. “Is that safe?” I ask him.
He laughs. “Looks scary, doesn’t it? But it’s perfectly safe. We work to Canadian health standards here. Men line up for these jobs, you know. Three hundred men are employed here. There was desperate unemployment in the region before we came.”
I open my eyes. No, Nicolás did not arrange that tour, but years later, he introduced me to the people who made me understand it. The part about creating desperately needed jobs? That was after the government expropriated hundreds of square kilometres for the mine, land that used to grow food for several thousand people. And after the tailings from the mine poisoned the fish in the lake. The fishery had supported almost a thousand people. When people resisted, the government assigned the job of “pacification” to General Osorio, who later became president and introduced the whole country to the brutal genocide he perfected while he was “making the highlands safe” for Inco. By then he was called the “Butcher of Zapata.” Turns out even that plunge down the hill wasn’t so safe, after all. The workers’ lives meant nothing to the company.
I reach into my pocket, fondle the key to Judith’s basement. Warmth. Safety. Wish I was there. Wish I were there.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As soon as grey light begins to seep into our alley, Bara stirs. She crawls out from under the bag and fumbles for something beside her. She holds up the bucket.
Her face blurry in the faint light, or maybe with dirt and exhaustion, she grins. “I brought it in here last night, so it didn’t, like, get dumped into the bin.” She looks inside. “Not much left, though. What time does the drop-in open?”
My body’s turned to wood. I grunt as I try to shift my weight.
She frowns at me. “You okay?”
“No. Didn’t sleep a wink. And I can’t go to St. Marks.”
“Why not?”
All my attention is focused on ploughing through the pain to sit up a bit straighter.
“What happened at Magdalen House?”
“Is there anything at all to eat in there?”
She pokes at the contents of the bucket. “Not really.”
“We’ll just have to wait then. Dump that thing into the bin and put it back by the step.”
“You’re hiding again, aren’t you? You’re in trouble. Not the thing yesterday at the store, because you didn’t get caught. Something else. Something John will find out about.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson.”
“Lucy, whatever you’ve done, you know you have to talk to him sooner or later.”
“They’ll charge me again, send me back to jail.”
“Yeah.” She says it with that up and down slide the young people use when one of us oldies is being particularly obtuse. “As long as you keep doing nutty things.”
“It’s not that easy, catching the words in my head before they fly out of my mouth.”
“I’m going to stick with you, keep you out of trouble.”
“You’re going back to Horizons.”
“No, I’m not.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s what I am.”
“A lesbian?”
“Don’t say that.” She actually looks behind her, toward the opening of the alley into the lane.
“God, Bara. There’s nothing wrong with being a lesbian, and the staff at Horizons have lots of gay kids there all the time.”
“Well, tell that to the other kids. There’s a couple of bullies there. They get their nasty jabs in when the staff aren’t around.” She looks miserable, tired and frightened.
“All right. Tell you what. Let’s go see John together. He’ll report me, but you’re right. Got to talk to him sooner or later.”
“At least he doesn’t know about what happened yesterday. Thanks to us.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Thanks.”
“So, we’ll both go to John and … ?”
“We’ll ask him to get us in somewhere together.”
***
“They’re just too strict there,” I tell John, after the lecture about breaking my conditions again.
“Way I heard it, you assaulted Sister Marie.”
“I didn’t hurt her.”
“Lucy, m’dear, you pushed her into the wall. Don’t you think that might be a bit threatening, given what you did to Dell?” He stops, glances at Bara. She is busy staring at me with big, round eyes.
“I didn’t hurt Dell either.”
“Well, I can’t send you back there anyway. Let’s make a couple of calls, see where else we can get you a bed.”
At least he doesn’t seem to know about the missed psychiatrist appointment.
Bara pipes up. “Can I go with her?”
“But you’ve got a place at Horizons.”
“It isn’t working out. The other kids are mean to me.”
“The staff should deal with that. We can’t be hunting for another shelter bed just because you don’t like it where you are.”
“I want to go with Lucy. I’ll keep her out of trouble.”
John arches one thick eyebrow at her.
“I can,” she nods earnestly.
He’s on the edge of laughing at her but doesn’t. Then, his expression shifts. He shrugs his ample shoulders. “Well, who knows? Maybe you can take care of each other.”
Bara looks at me with a half-smile.
A couple of phone calls finds us two places at Fresh Start. “Those your things?” John is looking at the sleeping bag and suitcase sitting on the floor beside me.
I nod.
“Bara, your things are at Horizons?”
“I don’t have things.”
John looks at his watch. “Well, it’s almost time for my lunch break. I’m going to take you both over there.” He picks up my suitcase, leaving Bara to bring the sleeping bag. Just before we step out into the hallway, he turns to face us. “This is just to see if you really can keep each other out of trouble, okay?”
We both nod.
“And you,” he directs this at me, but stops again.
“It’s all right. She knows.”
“All right, then. Take your meds.”
***
Fresh Start is in one of those flat-roofed Edwardian duplexes that are everywhere in Halifax. The reception room still feels like the living room it once was, except for the big reception desk at one side. I study the once-classy hardwood as the young woman at the desk writes our names in a ledger.
“The only beds we have are cots in the overflow dorm, in the basement,” she says. “You’ll have to sleep there until rooms come free.” She opens the bottom desk drawer, pulls a plastic bag out of a neat row of them, holds it up. Soap, shampoo, toothbrush. “Either of you need one of these?”
Bara takes one.
She takes my pills and puts them in a locked drawer. I’m supposed to ask a staff person for them morning and evening. She gets towels for us from a closet and lets Bara look through a box of used PJs. She picks a pair of blue flannel ones with snowmen on them.
We follow her to the basement. It’s bare, linoleum tiles and painted walls, a row of cots down one side. There’s a lump of blankets on one cot, lightly snoring. The rest are made up with worn but clean bedding, an extra blanket folded at the foot of each one.
“Bathroom’s down there.” She points at an open door at the far end.
Feels good to have a toilet, brush my teeth at a sink. I look over the big, old-fashioned bathtub. Actually big enough for me to get in and out of. While Bara uses the bathroom, I sit on the edge of my newly assigned cot. Exhaustion takes over every fibre of my body, making my limbs heavy and loose as rags. I tuck my jacket, sleeping bag and suitcase under the bed, spread the extra blanket on top and crawl in under it with my clothes on. The last thing I remember is looking up at the small high windows and thinking of Judith’s basement. I don’t even hear Bara come back from the bathroom.
CHAPTER TWELVE
When I wake up, Bara is curled up under the blanket on her cot, fully dressed and sound asleep, towels, plastic bag of toiletries and snowman pyjamas tossed on top of the blanket. It takes me a while to sit, then stand up, my body creakier than the metal cot. Holding my weight on the side of the mattress, I manage to bend and pull my suitcase out, flip it open. Inside, a small tangle of clothing and two of my books, read many times. I need to go back to Judith’s basement. I close the suitcase, push it back, fish out my jacket.
I heave myself up, but my weight raises the far side of the cot and it bangs back down on the floor. Bara starts awake and sits up. She looks around, sheds her grogginess as she figures out where she is. Without a word, she gets up and heads to the bathroom.
By the time she comes back, I have my jacket on. She pulls hers out from under her bed. “So where are we going?”
“What do you mean, where are we going?”
“I’m keeping you out of trouble, remember?”
“Wait, wait. You’re not thinking you’re going to follow me everywhere, are you?”
“How else am I going to keep you out of trouble?”
“But I need my own space. So do you.”
Bara shrugs her shoulders. “So, what do you want to do today?”
“I want to read.” Damn, can’t go to Judith’s with Bara tailing me. I’ll have to wait for a chance. “Hey. Do you want to go to the library?”
