Jilly sighed. “His mother was a hooker, Sue. The reason he’s a little flaky is her pimp threw him down two flights of stairs when he was six years old—not because Zinc did anything, or because his mother didn’t trick enough johns that night, but just because the creep felt like doing it. That’s what normal was for Zinc. He’s happy now—a lot happier than when Social Services tried to put him in a foster home where they only wanted him for the support cheque they got once a month for taking him in. And a lot happier than he’d be in the Zeb, all doped up or sitting around in a padded cell whenever he tried to tell people about the things he sees.
“He’s got his own life now. It’s not much—not by your standards, maybe not even by mine, but it’s his and I don’t want anybody to take it away from him.”
“But—”
“I know you mean well,” Jilly said, “but things don’t always work out the way we’d like them to. Nobody’s got time for a kid like Zinc in Social Services. There he’s just a statistic that they shuffle around with all the rest of their files and red tape. Out here on the street, we’ve got a system that works. We take care of our own. It’s that simple. Doesn’t matter if it’s the Cat Lady, sleeping in an alleyway with a half-dozen mangy toms, or Rude Ruthie, haranguing the commuters on the subway, we take care of each other.”
“Utopia,” Sue said.
A corner of Jilly’s mouth twitched with the shadow of a humourless smile. “Yeah. I know. We’ve got a high asshole quotient, but what can you do? You try to get by—that’s all. You just try to get by.”
“I wish I could understand it better,” Sue said.
“Don’t worry about it. You’re good people, but this just isn’t your world. You can visit, but you wouldn’t want to live in it, Sue.”
“I guess.”
Jilly started to add something more, but then just smiled encouragingly and got out of the car.
“See you Friday?” she asked, leaning in the door.
Sue nodded.
Jilly stood on the pavement and watched the Mazda until it turned the corner and its rear lights were lost from view, then she went upstairs to her apartment. The big room seemed too quiet and she felt too wound up to sleep, so she put a cassette in the tape player—Lynn Harrell playing a Schumann concerto—and started to prepare a new canvas to work on in the morning when the light would be better.
* * *
2
* * *
It was raining again, a soft drizzle that put a glistening sheen on the streets and lampposts, on porch handrails and street signs. Zinc stood in the shadows that had gathered in the mouth of an alleyway, his new pair of wire cutters a comfortable weight in his hand. His eyes sparked with reflected lights. His hair was damp against his scalp. He licked his lips, tasting mountain heights and distant forests within the drizzle’s slightly metallic tang.
Jilly knew a lot about things that were, he thought, and things that might be, and she always meant well, but there was one thing she just couldn’t get right. You didn’t make art by capturing an image on paper, or canvas, or in stone. You didn’t make it by writing down stories and poems. Music and dance came closest to what real art was—but only so long as you didn’t try to record or film it. Musical notation was only so much dead ink on paper. Choreography was planning, not art.
You could only make art by setting it free. Anything else was just a memory, no matter how you stored it. On film or paper, sculpted or recorded.
Everything that existed, existed in a captured state. Animate or inanimate, everything wanted to be free.
That’s what the lights said; that was their secret. Wild lights in the night skies, and domesticated lights, right here on the street, they all told the same tale. It was so plain to see when you knew how to look. Didn’t neon and streetlights yearn to be starlight?
To be free.
He bent down and picked up a stone, smiling at the satisfying crack it made when it broke the glass protection of the streetlight, his grin widening as the light inside flickered, then died.
It was part of the secret now, part of the voices that spoke in the night sky.
Free.
Still smiling, he set out across the street to where a bicycle was chained to the railing of a porch.
“Let me tell you about art,” he said to it as he mounted the stairs.
* * *
Psycho Puppies were playing at the YoMan on Gracie Street near the corner of Landis Avenue that Friday night. They weren’t anywhere near as punkish as their name implied. If they had been, Jilly would never have been able to get Sue out to see them.
“I don’t care if they damage themselves,” she’d told Jilly the one and only time she’d gone out to one of the punk clubs farther west on Gracie, “but I refuse to pay good money just to have someone spit at me and do their best to rupture my eardrums.”
The Puppies were positively tame compared to how that punk band had been. Their music was loud, but melodic, and while there was an undercurrent of social conscience to their lyrics, you could dance to them as well. Jilly couldn’t help but smile to see Sue stepping it up to a chorus of, “You can take my job, but you can’t take me, ain’t nobody gonna steal my dignity.”
The crowd was an even mix of slumming uptowners, Crowsea artists and the neighbourhood kids from surrounding Foxville. Jilly and Sue danced with each other, not from lack of offers, but because they didn’t want to feel obligated to any guy that night. Too many men felt that one dance entitled them to ownership—for the night, at least, if not forever—and neither of them felt like going through the ritual repartee that the whole business required.
Sue was on the right side of a bad relationship at the moment, while Jilly was simply eschewing relationships on general principle these days. Relationships required changes, and she wasn’t ready for changes in her life just now. And besides, all the men she’d ever cared for were already taken and she didn’t think it likely that she’d run into her own particular Prince Charming in a Foxville nightclub.
“I like this band,” Sue confided to her when they took a break to finish the beers they’d ordered at the beginning of the set. Jilly nodded, but she didn’t have anything to say. A glance across the room caught a glimpse of a head with hair enough like Zinc’s badly-mown lawn scalp to remind her that he hadn’t been home when she’d dropped by his place on the way to the club tonight.
Don’t be out setting bicycles free, Zinc, she thought.
* * *
“Hey, Tomas. Check this out.”
There were two of them, one Anglo, one Hispanic, neither of them much more than a year or so older than Zinc. They both wore leather jackets and jeans, dark hair greased back in ducktails. The drizzle put a sheen on their jackets and hair. The Hispanic moved closer to see what his companion was pointing out.
Zinc had melted into the shadows at their approach. The streetlights that he had yet to free whispered, careful, careful, as they wrapped him in darkness, their electric light illuminating the pair on the street.
“Well, shit,” the Hispanic said. “Somebody’s doing our work for us.”
As he picked up the lock that Zinc had just snipped, the chain holding the bike to the railing fell to the pavement with a clatter. Both teenagers froze, one checking out one end of the street, his companion the other.
“’Scool,” the Anglo said. “Nobody here but you, me and your cooties.”
“Chew on a big one.”
“I don’t do myself, puto.”
“That’s ’cos it’s too small to find.”
The pair of them laughed—a quick nervous sound that belied their bravado—then the Anglo wheeled the bike away from the railing.
“Hey, Bobby-o,” the Hispanic said. “Got another one over here.”
“Well, what’re you waiting for, man? Wheel her down to the van.”
They were setting bicycles free, Zinc realized—just like he was. He’d gotten almost all the way down the block, painstakingly snipping the shac
kle of each lock, before the pair had arrived.
Careful, careful, the streetlights were still whispering, but Zinc was already moving out of the shadows.
“Hi, guys,” he said.
The teenagers froze, then the Anglo’s gaze took in the wire cutters in Zinc’s
hand.
“Well, well,” he said. “What’ve we got here? What’re you doing on the night side of the street, kid?”
Before Zinc could reply, the sound of a siren cut the air. A lone siren, approaching fast.
* * *
The Chinese waitress looked great in her leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings. She wore a blood-red camisole tucked into the waist of the skirt, which made her pale skin seem ever paler. Her hair was the black of polished jet, pulled up in a loose bun that spilled stray strands across her neck and shoulders. Blue-black eye shadow made her dark eyes darker. Her lips were the same red as her camisole.
“How come she looks so good,” Sue wanted to know, “when I’d just look like a tart if I dressed like that?”
“She’s inscrutable,” Jilly replied. “You’re just obvious.”
“How sweet of you to point that out,” Sue said with a grin. She stood up from their table. “C’mon. Let’s dance.”
Jilly shook her head. “You go ahead. I’ll sit this one out.”
“Uh-uh. I’m not going out there alone.”
“There’s LaDonna,” Jilly said, pointing out a girl they both knew. “Dance with her.”
“Are you feeling all right, Jilly?”
“I’m fine—just a little pooped. Give me a chance to catch my breath.”
But she wasn’t all right, she thought as Sue crossed over to where LaDonna da Costa and her brother Pipo were sitting. Not when she had Zinc to worry about. If he was out there, cutting off the locks of more bicycles…
You’re not his mother, she told herself. Except—
Out here on the streets we take care of our own.
That’s what she’d told Sue. And maybe it wasn’t true for a lot of people who hit the skids—the winos and the losers and the bag people who were just too screwed up to take care of themselves, not to be mentioned look after anyone else—but it was true for her.
Someone like Zinc—he was an in-betweener. Most days he could take care of himself just fine, but there was a fey streak in him so that sometimes he carried a touch of the magic that ran wild in the streets, the magic that was loose late at night when the straights were in bed and the city belonged to the night people. That magic took up lodgings in people like Zinc. For a week. A day. An hour. Didn’t matter if it was real or not, if it couldn’t be measured or catalogued, it was real to them. It existed all the same.
Did that make it true?
Jilly shook her head. It wasn’t her kind of question and it didn’t matter anyway. Real or not, it could still be driving Zinc into breaking corporeal laws—the kind that’d have Lou breathing down his neck, real fast. The kind that’d put him in jail with a whole different kind of loser.
The kid wouldn’t last out a week inside.
Jilly got up from the table and headed across the dance floor to where Sue and LaDonna were jitterbugging to a tune that sounded as though Buddy Holly could have penned the melody, if not the words.
* * *
“Fuck this, man!” the Anglo said.
He threw down the bike and took off at a run, his companion right on his heels, scattering puddles with the impact of their boots. Zinc watched them go. There was a buzzing in the back of his head. The streetlights were telling him to run too, but he saw the bike lying there on the pavement like a wounded animal, one wheel spinning forlornly, and he couldn’t just take off. Bikes were like turtles. Turn ’em on their backs—or a bike on its side—and they couldn’t get up on their own again.
He tossed down the wire cutters and ran to the bike. Just as he was leaning it up against the railing from which the Anglo had taken it, a police cruiser came around the corner, skidding on the wet pavement, cherry light gyrating—screaming, Run, run! in its urgent high-pitched voice—headlights pinning Zinc where he stood.
Almost before the cruiser came to a halt, the passenger door popped open and a uniformed officer had stepped out. He drew his gun. Using the cruiser as a shield, he aimed across its roof at where Zinc was standing.
“Hold it right there, kid!” he shouted. “Don’t even blink.”
Zinc was privy to secrets. He could hear voices in lights. He knew that there was more to be seen in the world if you watched it from the corner of your eye, than head on. It was a simple truth that every policeman he ever saw looked just like Elvis. But he hadn’t survived all his years on the streets without protection.
He had a lucky charm. A little tin monkey pendant that had originally lived in a box of Crackerjacks—back when Crackerjacks had real prizes in them. Lucia had given it to him. He’d forgotten to bring it out with him the other night when the Elvises had taken him in. But he wasn’t stupid. He’d remembered it tonight. He reached into his pocket to get it out and wake its magic.
* * *
“You’re just being silly,” Sue said as they collected their jackets from their chairs.
“So humour me,” Jilly asked.
“I’m coming, aren’t I?”
Jilly nodded. She could hear the voice of Zinc’s roommate Ursula in the back of her head—
There are no patterns.
—but she could feel one right now, growing tight as a drawn bowstring, humming with its urgency to be loosed.
“C’mon,” she said, almost running from the club.
* * *
Police officer Mario Hidalgo was still a rookie—tonight was only the beginning of his third month of active duty—and while he’d drawn his sidearm before, he had yet to fire it in the line of duty. He had the makings of a good cop. He was steady; he was conscientious. The street hadn’t had a chance to harden him yet, though it had already thrown him more than a couple of serious uglies in his first eight weeks of active duty.
But steady though he’d proved himself to be so far, when he saw the kid reaching into the pocket of his baggy jacket, Hidalgo had a single moment of unreasoning panic.
The kid’s got a gun, that panic told him. The kid’s going for a weapon. One moment was all it took.
His finger was already tightening on the trigger of his regulation .38 as the kid’s hand came out of his pocket. Hidalgo wanted to stop the pressure he was putting on the gun’s trigger, but it was like there was a broken circuit between his brain and his hand.
The gun went off with a deafening roar.
* * *
Got it, Zinc thought as his fingers closed on the little tin monkey charm. Got my luck.
He started to take it out of his pocket, but then something hit him straight
in the chest. It lifted him off his feet and threw him against the wall behind him with enough force to knock all the wind out of his lungs. There was a raw pain firing every one of his nerve ends. His hands opened and closed spastically, the charm falling out of his grip to hit the ground moments before his body slid down the wall to join it on the wet pavement.
Goodbye, goodbye, sweet friend, the streetlights cried.
He could sense the spin of the stars as they wheeled high above the city streets, their voices joining the electric voices of the streetlights.
My turn to go free, he thought as a white tunnel opened in his mind. He could feel it draw him in, and then he was falling, falling, falling…
“Goodbye….” he said, thought he said, but no words came forth from between his lips.
Just a trickle of blood that mingled with the rain that now began to fall in earnest, as though it too was saying its own farewell.
* * *
All Jilly had to see was the red spinning cherries of the police cruisers to know where the pattern she’d felt in the club was taking her. There were a lot of cars here—cruisers and unmarked vehicles, an ambulance—all on official busines
s, their presence coinciding with her business. She didn’t see Lou approach until he laid his hand on her shoulder.
“You don’t want to see,” he told her.
Jilly never even looked at him. One moment he was holding her shoulder, the next she’d shrugged herself free of his grip and just kept on walking.
“Is it…is it Zinc?” Sue asked the detective.
Jilly didn’t have to ask. She knew. Without being told. Without having to see the body.
An officer stepped in front of her to stop her, but Lou waved him aside. In her peripheral vision she saw another officer sitting inside a cruiser, weeping, but it didn’t really register.
“I thought he had a gun,” the policeman was saying as she went by. “Oh, Jesus. I thought the kid was going for a gun….”
And then she was standing over Zinc’s body, looking down at his slender frame, limbs flung awkwardly like those of a ragdoll that had been tossed into a corner and forgotten. She knelt down at Zinc’s side. Something glinted on the wet pavement. A small tin monkey charm. She picked it up, closed it tightly in her fist.
“C’mon, Jilly,” Lou said as he came up behind her. He helped her to her feet. It didn’t seem possible that anyone as vibrant—as alive—as Zinc had been could have any relation whatsoever with that empty shell of a body that lay there on the pavement.
As Lou led her away from the body, Jilly’s tears finally came, welling up from her eyes to salt the rain on her cheek.
“He…he wasn’t…stealing bikes, Lou….” she said.
“It doesn’t look good,” Lou said.
Often when she’d been with Zinc, Jilly had had a sense of that magic that touched him. A feeling that even if she couldn’t see the marvels he told her about, they still existed just beyond the reach of her sight.