Thrown-away Child

nothing much to do beyond mining the alleys for redeemable bottles and cans; either that or stay home, drinking beer and fighting with their wives. The only people making serious money were hard-faced young men who carried beepers and dressed in cashmere sweatshirts with attached hoods and hundred-dollar sneakers, and rode around in Mitsubishi Monteros with heavy-tint, bullet-proof windows.
    The neighborhood children had to make do with angered parents, temptations of historical proportion, schools that would not teach them, and politicians yapping about traditional family values. Children who could not cope were on their own. Children like Perry Duclat.
    From inside the blackened shed, hidden in shadows with his diminishing bottle of Duggan’s Dew, Perry shook his head. Anybody who had ever been locked up would have recognized the hollow sound of his laugh. Those who had never been imprisoned would have thought he was crying.
    Perry saw beyond the shed wall through a rusty hole the size of a peach still green on the branch. He had an unobstructed view of the landmark next to his birthplace—a black-and-white billboard on the other side of the muddy river: ALGIERS IRON WORKS & DRY DOCK COMPANY. Behind the sign was a coal yard, and in it the shack where Perry was born, where his father still lived. He laughed because he believed not in God, but in Irony.
    “Old dried-up nigger’s probably sitting over there his hole drinking, just like I’m here in my hole drinking,” Perry whispered. He might as well have spoken in full voice. Only the weeds pushing up through the dirt floor could hear. He took a swallow from his bottle. There was precious little whisky remaining, and at least an hour before sundown, when it would be safe to venture out for more.
    Perry set the bottle down carefully in a corner where it was least likely to tip over. He lit a Pall Mall and pulled his knees up to his chest and hugged them, his habit when the helpless vision came.
    Which now it did. The vision of Harlem—and a ghost floating before his drunken eyes in blue-gray curls of cigarette smoke.
     
    “Cutie, you don’t got to be peeking at me from over by the door.” She waved the frightened boy into her drafty room with a handful of lacquered fingers, red with silver sparkles. In her lap was a brass clock with a bell on top. She picked it up and wound the stem, setting the time. She placed the ticking clock on a chair next to the bed and said to the nervous boy, “Come on here. You be next.”
    “Mama?”
    “Whoa, little darlin’ ...” Her slitted eyes fluttered wide, slowly focusing. A cigarette fell from her rouge-caked lips, landing in the cleft of her black lace pushup brassiere. She picked the glowing butt from between her breasts — casually, as if she was used to being burned—and crushed it into an ashtray by the clock There was an open Te-Amo box on the chair, too, containing no cigars. The boy looked at the contents of the box, knowing just enough to fear the things he saw inside. He jumped when she spoke again. “Who you calling your ... ?”
    She quit speaking, for the fog of time and neglect and guilt and grief had now lifted. She simply knew and understood there was no place to hide anymore. Mother and son stared at each other, recognizing themselves in their opposite faces.
    Rose Duclat had skin the color of a yellow August moon, and eyes as soft and green as pine forest shade. Perry’s African tones were a few shades closer to the surface than his mother’s. He was built lanky like Rose, with her own straight features and wavy brown hair with a cast of red to it. Mother and son were both young, less than twenty years of age between them.
    Rose’s beauty had not completely faded, but it had been harshly used. Her attraction to men was now increasingly dependent on paint and hasty eyes, or darkness, or the right price. Her pride was altogether gone, to a bed in a room that rented by the quarter hour. Her boy was very handsome. He might have been surrounded by adolescent friends and exuberant times if not for the cares that crowded him. Perry usually wore the expression of a dog vaguely suspecting he was about to be cuffed. This caused people naturally to shy away from his company.
    Rose Duclat pulled up a sheet to cover her nakedness.
    The alarm sounded. Time! Perry turned his back to Rose, as much to hide tears as to heed the hallway commotion.
    A heavy woman of fifty years or so with a honey-blonde wig and