Thrown-away Child

building to see what I imagined I would see. I wanted more than anything to go someplace and sit down in the grass under the warm sun.
    I did not want to think about killing…
    …unless it was me killing a pint of Johnnie Walker Red.
    The wet dog shook himself again.
    Then I pulled on the rubber wading boots Vonny handed me. After that, matching rubber gloves, up to the elbows. Vonny laughed hard at the Martian from New York City, and handed him a flashlight.
    Then I walked through the door.
    Black bodies, thin and small and dead, were sprawled crazily over a bullet-scarred cement floor slicked with blood and brains, and the excrement and urine that comes of lightning quick death. The yellow beam of my flashlight fell upon a face I knew.
     

THIRTY-THREE

     
    “My God, my God—!”
    Sister moved quickly from the hand that crept through her clouds, the hand now nudging her bare and lightly perspiring shoulder.
    “No—I ain’t feeling like it, Minister Zeb! Oh, heavenly Jesus—please, no!”
    Sister was now bolt upright in the daybed. She had been sleeping, with her fingers laced across her young brown breasts. She had been dreaming of angels, her favorite dream.
    The daybed was set in the shady end of a small back terrace on the attic floor of the church, overlooking the garage. Her private aerie, all draped in cotton mosquito netting the color of eggshells. She thought the nets were beautiful, she thought of them as clouds.
    Zeb Tilton did not disturb Sister here, not in her clouds. Well, hardly ever. The only access to the terrace was a long flight of stairs so narrow that Minister Tilton had to scrunch in his fleshy shoulders clear to the top, and Zeb Tilton did not like messing his fine clothes by scraping the dirty walls of an old stairwell. There were plenty of other places he could disturb Sister Constance besides that old terrace.
    All the beds in heaven looked the same as her cloudy daybed, Sister imagined. She retreated to it and her terrace in the high heat of the day, after a cool shower bath and talc dusting. There she could lie naked and free, in her beautiful clouds.
    Sometimes she would stand at the terrace rail and look down at the concrete drive, and feel the urge to jump to sweet death. She imagined that during her leap she would sprout angel wings, in the final instant before smashing into the ground. She imagined she would soar up into the sky, seen by no eyes but those of God. And with her new strong wings she would dance in the air between earth and heaven, and then finally alight to her rightful place—among her stained glass sisters in the Jesus window.
    “No... No, I ain’t feeling good!” Sister, still in her half-sleep and wishing she could go back to her angel dreams, wrapped her lanky arms across her chest, clasped her shoulders with her long-fingered hands, covering her naked bosoms. “G’wan, go way, leave me be! Maybe I go bleed all over you. You know you don’t want that!”
    “Hush, girl. Just, please—hush yourself.”
    “Perry!” Sister recognized his voice. She came fully awake. “What you doing here in the daylight?“
    “Don’t mean no harm.”
    “I thought—”
    “My Aunt Vi house is no good,” Perry said, looking away from the girl’s nakedness. “The po-lice no doubt Watching the place for me.”
    Sister thrust herself forward and reached down to the end of the daybed. She picked up her blouse and slipped it over her head while her body was bent low and modest. Perry looked up and saw the back of her neck and the delicate curve of her shoulder blades. “You got no other place to lie low?”
    “Got a little shed I know about off of Chartres Street. Only problem is, couple of friends of mine at Shug’s bar up to Jackson Avenue know I know about that shed.”
    “Talkative kind of friends?”
    “I don’t want to be taking the chance some barfly going to sing when a cop come round and be giving out free drinks.”
    “But you say you need something from the house.“
    “My notebooks. They got to stay put, I guess. But they in good hands.”
    “What’s in them books?”
    “Ruminations, observations, cogitations.”
    “La!”
    “Anyhow, the conclusion’s something I’m working out in my head, with a little help from an unlikely friend.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “You don’t got to right away, all you got to do is trust me.”
    “Why I should do that?”
    “ ’Cause I got the idea to stay by you, girl. That’s why I sneak on