“You get it, okay? Okay?” The arms were flailing again.
Dani made a noise that might have been a giggle and might have been something closer to fear. Kids always know when someone isn’t right.
“I’ll try.” I gave Dani’s car seat straps one more tug, even though I knew they were tight enough. She let out a howl of protest. “Sorry, honey. Mommy’s finished.” Juanita watched us pull away from the curb, her mouth forming the same words over and over.
That weekend I dug out the doll Dani had found. It was in even worse shape than Juanita. It had been loved hard, if you could call that kind of treatment love. Some people did. The doll’s head hung at an angle that would have killed a human baby, and if there were a Doll Social Services they’d want to know who’d tried to open up Baby’s belly with a screwdriver and where her missing leg had gotten to. I flipped the switch on her back—she was supposed to cry, probably, or say—but nothing happened. A piece of crap like that wasn’t worth wasting a couple of good batteries on. I had enough baby noise in my life already.
If Juanita wanted a baby, I thought, she could at least have one in decent shape. When Dave took the kids to the park for the usual Sunday afternoon run—“I’m going to run ’em like dogs,” he told me, “tire ’em out good”—I rummaged through the plastic bins of discarded toys in the basement. Sure enough, there was a baby doll in one of them, a chubby thing in a onesie with stains all down the front from Dani’s attempts to feed it pureed peas. Dani had moved on to other things—horses, Barbies, getting her little brother into trouble. The doll’s blue eyes looked a little crazy now, and it was a couple shades lighter than Juanita’s, but at least it had all its appendages.
I took it over to the group house—I’d never had cause to venture up those steps—and knocked hard enough to be heard over the TV that was always on. The day caregiver, one of a rotating 24/7 crew whose names I never learned, answered the door. He was a beat-up-looking guy in his fifties who wore the same shapeless clothes as his charges. If you spent enough time around people like that you couldn’t help picking up a few of their habits.
He looked ticked off when I told him what I wanted, but he shouted Juanita’s name into the dim interior of the house anyway. From one of the upstairs rooms I heard a radio playing salsa and wondered if it was WHFS, the indie radio station I’d listened to growing up. It had gone Latin a few months ago. I didn’t listen to the radio much anymore, but I missed that station. It was the soundtrack of my youth.
Juanita came down the stairs like a ghost. She grabbed the doll from my arms, held it out a little distance from her, and gazed into its crazy eyes as if she saw the very truth of heaven there.
“Nut job,” the caretaker said under his breath.
I thanked him anyway and left Juanita alone with Baby.
I had a bad dream that night, the kind that makes you wake yourself up just to stop it. But when I was fully awake I couldn’t remember what had scared me. I sat up in bed and listened—no noise at all from the children’s rooms. I listened for the teenagers but they had all gone home. It was almost 5 o’clock. A mockingbird sang his morning warm-ups in the park across the street. Dave breathed next to me, the intake and outtake of his breath regular as waves along a quiet beach. The only noise from the street was a bus that groaned its way to a halt at the four-way stop on our corner, then heaved itself into motion again and was gone.
The noise reminded me—trash day. The trucks would be coming through before it got much lighter, and as usual Dave had forgotten to put the can out the night before. I shrugged on my bathrobe and felt my way down the stairs to the back door.
I’d just pulled the can out from its spot next to the garage when I saw her. She lay face down in the little walkway that cut between the rental storage units across the alley. Someone had dragged her behind the chain-link fence to die.
She had on that ratty parka, the green of it dark where it had absorbed some of the blood. I couldn’t see where it all came from, just that there was a lot of it spread out around the body, dark and congealed into wrinkles like the skin on a cup of chocolate pudding.
“Mommy?” All of a sudden Dani was standing next to me, eyes full of sleep. I didn’t have time to stop her from seeing what lay there—I hadn’t heard her follow me out the door. She was pointing at an object half-covered by Juanita’s body. “Mommy, is that my doll’s leg?”
“Don’t tell them you gave it to her.” Dave sat at the kitchen table with a cup of black coffee between his large hands. He never drank his coffee black. That’s how I knew it was serious—as if a body in the alley hadn’t told me that already. “You’re asking for trouble.”
“Trouble is finding a woman shot dead in the alley behind my house.”
“They don’t have to know it came from you.” Family life had brought out the conservative, don’t-make-waves side of Dave. It wasn’t my favorite thing about him. “What possessed you, anyway? You hate those people.”
“I don’t hate them. I just worry about the kids.”
The cops were still out back doing whatever cops do when they have a murder scene on their hands. It only looked like they were standing around shooting the shit with cups of coffee in their hands. They’d sat me down at my own kitchen table and taken a statement, then gone over it again to make sure I had my story straight. There wasn’t much to tell, after all.
“Haven’t had a bag lady in a while,” one of them, a fat little guy whose belly kept trying to bust out of his uniform, said to his partner. I liked the partner—he’d kept himself trim and he had nice manners for a cop. “Little long in the tooth to be playing with dolls.”
“She wasn’t a bag lady,” I said. “She lived down the block.”
The fat one laughed in a way that really soured me on him. “Different kind of bag lady, lady.” He pushed his hat back on his head. His hair could have stood a couple of good latherings with industrial shampoo. “Know what a mule is?”
The Thin Man saved me the trouble. “She ran drugs for a cripple who works the territory east of here.”
“East of the sun,” I said. I didn’t mean anything by it. Just some old story I used to read as a kid, a story about a girl who has to find her one true love east of the sun and west of the moon. “Over at the New Dragon. The Wheelchair Bandit—that’s what the neighborhood listserv calls him.”
“Nice neighbors you have.” Fatty picked a dark speck out of his teeth.
“Sometimes they try to cut a deal on the side and make a little extra cash,” Thin Man said. “They’re not real smart, these people.”
When they finished with me, they went out in the alley and walked up and down, making notes in those pads they carry around. I watched them for a while and that’s when I realized I hadn’t said anything about the doll. They’d found most of its parts spread through the alley. If I hadn’t mentioned it to Dave first, I probably would have gone straight out and told Thin Man, who had parked himself against the patrol car that blocked the alley. He was making more notes. Notes about splatter patterns and exit wounds and time of death. Notes about the grisly end of a woman whose worst crime, as far as I’d ever known, had been to try and bum cigarettes off people who didn’t have them. What was she doing with scum like the Bandit? She was probably too crazy to know what she’d gotten mixed up in. All she’d wanted was a baby of her own.
“Think of the kids,” Dave said. We’d been sitting there while. His coffee must have gotten cold by then, but he didn’t even complain like he usually would. “You want them to get dragged into this? You want Dani on the stand telling a courtroom full of people how her mother gave her toys away to the drug dealer down the block? The cops have all the information they need.”
I couldn’t see how any lawyer in his right mind would put a four-year-old on the stand to tell a story about a doll, but I let Dave talk me out of what I knew I ought to do. He had a way of making certain things seem unnecessary, like you’d be a damn fool to hassle yourself.
It wasn’t a dream that woke me up that night. As I passed the doors to Dani and Jack’s rooms I heard the baby give out a creaking little sigh and settle himself back to sleep. I went down to the basement and got out Juanita’s first doll, the one she’d never see again. I held it in my hands and tried to get the head to stay straight, but it couldn’t. When something gets that broken, you can’t fix it.
I got a flathead screwdriver out of Dave’s toolbox. I turned the doll over and looked at the screws that held the doll’s battery compartment shut. They were almost stripped, but if I pressed hard enough into the metal groove I could catch just enough traction to get them turning. You had to want it bad, though, to get that job done. After I dug the last one out of its hole, I used the tip of the flathead to jimmy the cover off. It popped out more easily than I was expecting and the tip of the screwdriver slammed into what should have been a battery—but whatever it was gave under the point.
In the space where Baby’s batteries should have been—and crammed inside her torso and up into her poor dangling head—were plastic bags about the size of the half-sand-wich-sized Ziplocs I used to pack up snacks in to take to the playground. I didn’t need to know the name of what was in these.
I sat on the floor in the laundry room in my nightgown and stared at that doll and it stared back at me and its eyes weren’t crazy at all, not one bit. It knew the score. It knew that one of these nights I’d hear the noise of the Wheelchair Bandit’s keys and hear the panting breath of that pit bull and my family would never get clear, ever.
Unless.
I put every screw back in as tight as I could get it. I worked the flathead until my knuckles ached. A little bit of residue had settled into the gap where the doll’s head had separated from its neck; I blew every last speck of it out. Then I collected the doll and myself and found the back door key and let myself out onto the deck. I didn’t bother to get my slippers. I had to get that thing out of the house.
The lonely streetlight by the storage units shed an orange glow that just reached the spot where I’d found her. I could see the dark circle on the ground where Juanita had bled her life out with only an empty doll for company. I could see the gap in the bricks where Dani had found the thing I held in my hands.
I set that hateful thing back in the darkness where my daughter had found it and told myself I didn’t hear the jangle of keys, the dog panting right behind me. I told trouble I didn’t want any part of it. Nobody does, when you think hard about it. Isn’t that the truth?
SOLOMON’S ALLEY
BY ROBERT ANDREWS
Georgetown, N.W.
solomon’s alley parallels M Street, Georgetown’s main drag. Running behind Johnny Rockets, Ben & Jerry’s, Old Glory Barbecue, and the Riggs Bank, the alley connects Wisconsin Avenue on the west to 31st Street one block east.
Battered blue dumpsters line the alley. Solomon had puzzled over the dumpsters for several years. Finally, he’d decided that their BFI logo stood for big fucking incinerators. That job done, he’d taken on thinking out the likely origins of the five ancient magnolia trees that shaded the stretch of alley where he parked his two Safeway carts.
On this Tuesday morning in September, he sat in his folding canvas deck chair, part of him pondering the magnolias while another part got ready for his day job, watching the Nigerian. At 10:00, like clockwork, the white Dodge van pulled up across Wisconsin at the corner of Prospect, by Restoration Hardware.
“Hello, Nigerian,” Solomon whispered. He settled back to watch the sidewalk come alive. Each morning’s setup was a ballet, a precisely choreographed routine, and Solomon was a discriminating critic.
Most mornings the performance went well: every move efficient, rhythmic, smooth. Some mornings it didn’t: some mornings everything fell apart in a cranky series of busted plays.
The driver eased the van forward so its front bumper toed the white marks on the pavement. He switched off the ignition and got out to go round to the back.
Waverly Ngame was a big man. Two-fifty, six feet and a couple of inches, Solomon figured. His skin blue-black…shin…like the barrel of a .38.
First out, a long rectangular folding table, the kind you see in church basements. Ngame locked the legs open. With his toe and wood shims, he worked around the table until it rested solid on the uneven brick sidewalk.
He disappeared into the van and came out with racks of white plastic-coated wire-grid shelving under both arms and a grease-stained canvas bag in his left hand.
In swift, practiced motions, he picked the largest of the shelves and braced it upright on the side of the table facing the street. With one hand he held the shelf, with the other he reached into the canvas bag and came out with a large C-clamp. Twirling it with sharp snaps of his wrist, he opened the jaws just enough to slip over the shelf and the table edge. He tightened the clamp, and moved to repeat the process on the other side of the table.
More shelving and more C-clamps produced a display stand.
Now the van disgorged Ngame’s merchandise in large nylon bags and sturdy blue plastic storage boxes. Soon, Gucci and Kate Spade handbags hung alluringly from the vertical shelving while Rolex watches and Serengeti sunglasses marched in neat ranks across the top of the church-basement folding table.
He slow today, said Voice.
“He did good,” Solomon contradicted. He didn’t want to give Voice shit. He did that, give Voice any slack, Voice start up. Voice need his pills? Solomon tried to remember the last time he trucked to the clinic, then gave it up. Long as it was only one Voice, he could handle it. It only got bad when he had to put up with the whole goddamn family yelling and screaming, scrambling things inside his head.
Ngame climbed into his van. That was Solomon’s cue. He got out of his chair and walked to where the alley ran into Wisconsin. There, he could keep a closer eye on Ngame’s stand.
Ngame eased the van across Wisconsin and into the alley, waving to Solomon as he passed by. He pulled the van into a slot by the florist shop on 31st Street where he had a deal with the manager. Locking the van, he walked back up the alley toward Solomon.
“Nobody bother the stand, Waverly.”
Ngame palmed Solomon a folded five.
“A good day, Solomon.”
As a boy in Lagos, Ngame had learned his English listening to BBC. He sounded like a Brit announcer except that he had a Nigerian’s way of softly rounding his vowels and stressing the final syllables of his sentences.
Solomon shook his head. “Watch yourself today.”
Ngame gripped Solomon’s shoulder.
“Voice tell you that?” he asked. He searched Solomon’s face with clinical curiosity.
Ngame’s concern irritated Solomon. “Hunh! Voice don’t know shit,” he said crossly. “Solomon telling you.”
Something passed behind Ngame’s eyes. He looked serious. “You hear anything?”
“Just feel,” Solomon whispered to keep Voice from hearing, “just feel.”
Ngame smiled. “You are a belt-and-suspenders man, Solomon.”
Solomon pouted and tucked the five away. “You don’t have belt and suspenders, Waverly, you lose your ass.”
Ngame took that in with a laugh. He squeezed Solomon’s shoulder, then turned and made his way across Wisconsin.
In the street by Ngame’s stand, a crow worried at the flattened remains of a road-killed rat.
And down the block from the stand, Solomon saw two men get out of a maroon Crown Vic. One black, one white. Both big. Both cops.
With a little finger, Ngame made a microscopic adjustment, poking a pair of sunglasses to line them up just so with its neighbors. He didn’t look up from putting fine touches to his display.
“Detectives Phelps and Kearney. Good morning, sirs.”
“How’s business, Waverly?” José Phelps asked.
Ngame gave the sunglasses a last critical look, then turned to face José and Frank. He smiled a mouthful of perfectly straight glistening teeth.
> “This is America!” Ngame exploded with exuberance. A-mare-uh-CUH! “Business is always splendid!” A wave of his large hand took in the sidewalk. “One is free to sell and free to buy…buy and sell.” He caressed a handbag. “This purse, for example—”
José pulled Ngame’s string. “Mr. Gucci gets his cut?”
Ngame got the tired look of a long-suffering teacher with a slow student. “Detective Phelps! Do you suppose this is a real Gucci purse?” He swept a hand over the watches. “Or that these are real Rolexes?”
José’s eyes widened. “They aren’t?”
“And do you suppose that any of these good people who come to my stand believe they are buying real Guccis or real
Rolexes?”
José opened his eyes wider.
Ngame spun up more. “And do you suppose that my customers could buy a real Rolex?”
“Oh?” José said, egging him on.
“So who is hurt?” Ngame was deep into it now, eyes wide in enthusiasm, hands held out shoulder-high, palms up. “Not Mister Gucci! Nor Mister Rolex! As a matter of fact, Mister Gucci and Mister Rolex ought to be pleased with me! Yes, pleased! My customers have learnt good taste here at my stand.” Ngame’s chin tilted up. “When they get wealthy, they’ll buy the real Gucci and the real Rolex.”
“Like Skeeter Hodges,” Frank Kearney said.
Ngame gave Frank a heavy-lidded somber look. “He didn’t buy here. He kept the real Mister Rolex in business.”
“What’s the talk?” José asked.
Ngame scanned the sidewalk. He did it casually, but he did it.
“Conjecture?” Con-jec-TURE?
Another glance, this time across the street. “The Puerto Ricans say it was the Jamaicans. The Jamaicans tell me it was the Puerto Ricans. And the American blacks”—Ngame shrugged—“they all point their fingers at one another.”
“No names?” Frank asked.
Ngame shook his head. “No pretender to the throne. But then again, Detective Kearney, it was only last night.”