Chapter 12

        

 

                Yet here she was -- that same face staring at him through a veil of filth, with a set of green eyes so hurt and stained and dim they might as well have had no color at all, nor a mind behind them to which to send their visual information. And that body, once so perfect for ballet and prostitution, sagged beneath the doubtful weight of grey of tattered rags.

                "Suzanne," he muttered again, and again stepped towards her, his clutching fingers unable to bring himself to touch her another time, already aware of the grit such a touch left on his own flesh.

                And she -- now with full recognition of him in her eyes -- took one more staggering step backwards and came to an abrupt halt at the window, the glass and metal gates rattling with her frail impact.

                Finally, plucking up some measure of courage, Maxwell grabbed her wrist again. He could have broken her bones with no more than a snap of his fingers -- she was so thin. Like a bony bird who trailed unfriendly streets, driven by some inner torment Maxwell did not understand. He could barely recognize her as the woman he had romanced years earlier.

                "What happened to you?" he asked, the words escaping him with a long, expelled breath, a sigh and a sign of shock.

                She glared, then glanced over at someone moving among the other bums. Then Maxwell heard their rustling, like disturbed snakes coming to the defense of one of their kind.

                "BACK!" he yelled at them, raising his free hand as if he would strike the first to come near.

                Their advance stopped. Their faced registered doubt -- but in that vague way Maxwell always imagined ant faces to look, as each was part of some collective thought process which needed time to gather itself into a command for action. Then, apparently sensing danger, they staggered back again.

                Suzanne looked panicked as they abandoned her and moan: "NO!" She clawed at Maxwell's finger. He tightened his grip.

                "I don't want to hurt you," he whispered. "I just want to talk."

                "Go away!" she cried and clawed at his arm with her tattered nails.

                Close up, Maxwell could see that she had the same grey-brown tint as the other bums, from layers and layers of filth never washed. He could have escalated there and found a history of the long days and nights on the streeted, canned beans, spoiled milk, bad coffee, combined with her own excrement. He felt himself ready to retch, and yet stopped himself. It was as if was changing her shape before his eyes, twisting into a variety of disguises, any one of which might have fooled him if he was not staring straight at her, anyone of which would steal her away if he let her go. And the whole time, he waited for the original Suzanne to reappear, the green-eyed farm girl he had made love to so many times.

                Then, when it became clear to her that Maxwell would not release her, Suzanne sagged.

                "I want to go home," she murmured.

                "Where do you live?" Maxwell said. "I'll take you there."

                This morning's jog down Broadway had taken him passed the line of 1930 style buildings that served a number of the city's public shelters, some funded by the feds, others by the state, while a few were even sponsored by local churches. People jokingly called it "Dead Man's Row." In Winter, the police routinely found bums frozen to death on the side walk, men and women associated with the shelters, but for some reason had been unable to get back inside before curfew.

                "I can take you home," he repeated when she had not responded for a moment. She seemed to have fallen into a haze again, looking up only when she heard the word "home." She jerked her head up and down once. "Home," she muttered.

                Some of the tension eased in Maxwell as he led her away from the store front, although the other bums stared, parting from his path like shifting leaves -- many of whom even made the vain attempt to call to her, grunting out her name as she passed. But none came close or dared to touch her or Maxwell. None sought to follow as Maxwell led her around the corner onto Broadway, headed in the general direction of Dead Man's Row. Suzanne stumbled, stopped, started again, only to stumble again, making Maxwell think she was drunk or off balance due to some other alcohol or drug related ailment. Then, he realized there was something wrong with her right leg and that his pace was much to quick for her to keep up.

                "Of course, you dummy!" he thought. "She broke bones in that fall from the stage!"

                He slowed to a less stiff pace. She stumbled less, though always seemed to fall forward with each step, as graceless in her movements now as she had been graceful as a dancer, a mockery of the art to which her own life had been dedicated. She might have been a plow horse past her prime, her face and features falling into that same disrepair as her broken bones. Only she wasn't old and didn't need a pasture as much as a bath and a nice warm place to lay her bones.

                Around them, people stared and struggled to muffle their mirth, and only when Maxwell caught sight of himself in the windows of the store fronts did he fully understand their laughter -- he with his designer jogging suit leading a ragged greying woman who could easily have passed for his grandmother, step by step passed the aging business community, Italian faces, Polish faces, Chzeck faces and more, peeping out from behind yellow cellophane to watch this parade.

                Maxwell's face warmed, despite the cool air whipping at him and his sweat-soaked jogging gear. This stretch of street would bring out hundreds more staring people if he didn't find a way to hurry Suzanne. Although the original seven blocks had since been sliced by the city in constructing its new police station, county college and welfare clinic, the street still drew a lot of foot traffic, and now, word went out, people ringing doorbells to the apartments above the stores, urging the residents to take a look at this odd thing passing by. Maxwell found himself meanly wishing the city had leveled the whole neighborhood, not just the few blocks it did, erasing all signs of these people and their old-Paterson culture, and their old-Paterson curio city, and their old-Paterson sense of right and wrong. Years ago, these people had fought whole religious wars on this spot, Jews fighting Christians, Catholics fighting protestants, protestants fighting the old gypsy culture which had used Paterson graveyards to bury their dead, and whom all faiths seemed to hate with equal vengeance.

                Now, everybody looked the same, the same aging faces covered by the same hats and kerchiefs, wearing the same heavy coats or ankle-length wool dresses, walking with the same painful, shuffled step of the near dead. And yet they laughed, they who suffered most when the gangs rode up from River Street, they whose store windows shattered or car tires sagged, they would scurried from door to door with perpetual glances towards real or imagined muggers. They laughed.

                "Suzanne?" Maxwell said, aware of just how long this march might take and how many more people would witness them as he and she moved along the dozen blocks to where the first of the homeless shelters stood. "Why don't we take a cab?"

                She looked at him the way a pigeon would, turning her head to stare with one eye, then again to stare at him with the other. Her expression might not have been one of disbelief, yet it was difficult not to think that. What cab or bus would take her aboard as small as she was? Nor had Maxwell brought enough money for the normal fare, let along the double or triple amount needed to bribe the driver into taking her for so few blocks.

                "Home," Suzanne said with sudden vehemence, her stare growing suspicious.

                "I am taking you home," Maxwell said. "But it's so far away and walking like this could take us the rest of the day to get there."

                She shook her head. "Not far," she said and jabbed her bony forefinger forward.

                Maxwell glanced in that direction. A few blocks of store fronts remained before the newer brick and stucco buildings marked the city's take over. If another, nearer shelter existed, he didn't know about it. Perhaps the college had started one, isolating some small part of its tiny campus as a community service? Or maybe even the brick-faced public clinic that had always seemed to cold and bureaucratic in the past? Least likely among these, of course, was the newest building complex, that stucco and glass structure the newspapers had dubbed "King Graves' Palace," housing the mayor's office, the police station and several bays for ambulances. No one would install any social facility in such a grand place as that.

                "All right," Maxwell conceded. "You lead on. I'll follow. But if it gets too late, we'll have to call a cab."

                And hope the driver would trust Maxwell long enough to drive Suzanne to the shelter and Maxwell back to the store, where he could "borrow" the fare from the petty cash box in back.

                Once more the woman staggered ahead, and for the first time, Maxwell saw a rhythm to her movement, as formal and precise as the steps in any dance. Suzanne's right leg seemed to be the injured member and she lifted it, thrust it forwards, allowing her body to fall with it as the foot fell flat on the pavement in front of her. Her left leg, apparently quicker and more able to bend, caught up in time to keep the whole operation going.  Suzanne moved ahead with all the precision of a robot.

                So natural and easy did this new sense of walking seem that Maxwell was surprised when she stopped. He presumed she had tired herself out, because she hadn't stopped near anything that looked remotely like a shelter. The college stood to her right, harried students and teachers bumping into her. The police and municipal complex stood like a mausoleum to the left and across the street, police cruisers easing in and out of the driveway.

                "Well? Maxwell asked, easing as close to Suzanne as he could stand. She seemed to have fallen asleep standing there, her eyes closed, her body swaying. "Suzanne?"

                Her eyes popped open, clear, but blank, though which a tinge of panic leaping into them from their edge. She turned towards him, stared as if she once more failed to recognize him, this phase passing and the horror of her earlier recognition replacing it instantly. Her mouth opened forming a soundless "NO!"

                "You were going to show me where you lived," Maxwell said, deliberately pronouncing each word carefully, as if talking to a child.

                She blinked, and then, the horror vanished, too, fading back into the vague expression of acknowledgement, her head rising and falling with a slow nod. "Home," she said, then turned, then stepped off the curb into the street.

                "LOOK OUT!"  Maxwell screamed and grabbed her back by the shoulder, just as a green and white Veteran's Cab raced over the space where she had stood. "Are you crazy? Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

                Maxwell's voice sounded shrill as it echoed off the buildings of this man-made canyon. People stared and shook their heads, no longer amused by the disparity between their appearances. He looked now like some dirty old man seeking to seduce one of the female bums, too cheap to spend ten bucks on a River Street whore.

                He grit his teeth, glaring the onlookers away, then bent close to Suzanne, his breath partially held against her stink, her face as blank and innocent as a child's, as if time had come and erased all the reasons for care and concern, rather than adding to it. Only deep in the eyes did the spark of pain show, one sole sign of the still intelligent human trapped in the frame of despair.

                "You were going to show me where you live," Maxwell said again.

                The spark in the eyes changed; something of a smile rose onto her lips. "Home," she said, making the word sound so warm and comfortable that Maxwell pictured an armed chair, fire place and old hound laying on a rug near her feet.

                Then, she started across the street again and again Maxwell stopped her.

                "Suzanne!" Maxwell complained. "There's nothing over there but the police station."

                "Home!" she insisted with a jab of her hand, which did indicate the glass and stucco building, but did nothing to clear up the mystery for Maxwell as to where in that building anyone might install a shelter. Mayor Graves was not the kind of man to open his office up for the homeless.

                "Where?" Maxwell asked,. Searching through the frost covered benches and dead potted trees for some small sign of life, but all there was was the glass, stone and steel, symbolic of the modern Paterson, Graves hoped would emerge in the future, all angles and edges. Even the pigeons avoided this place, preferring the loftier areas of old city hall where they could view the activity of the still-living part of Paterson from ledges of stone, making their comments on last trends with a variety of voices and numerous plops of shit.

                "Home!" Suzanne insisted, clearly frustrated by his inability to understand.

                "All right," he said softly. "Show me."

                This time, however, he helped her across Broadway, holding up traffic with a raised hand as she made her way from one curb to the other, in her odd robotic style of walk. On the far sidewalk, she paused to rest and Maxwell cringed under the hard stare of the police station, two frowning garage doors showed on the right side of a Picasso style face, while a small porch and set of stairs to the left made up the rest of the face. Old memories flooded into his head with flashing lights and wailing sirens, though it was to the old police station that the cops had brought him years earlier, when they had arrested him, not to this new pristine place.

                Still, the frowning doorways stilled to stare into Maxwell's soul, eking out confessions for crimes he had not committed, eking out secret desires he only rarely even admitted to himself. He could only recall the rages he'd felt towards the police and authority, when over those last few hours in county jail they had done nothing, guards clearly aware by that time as to what was going on, guards laying side bets as to whether or not he would succumb to exhaustion or hold out, his fight to keep his eyes open nearly as vicious as the fight to keep the other inmates from murdering him, wave after wave of them coming at him the way a storm-stirred ocean came after a sea wall, their fingers searching for cracks in his defense, sensing his weakening condition, pressing to take advantage.

                "Home," Suzanne said.

                "You live in the police station?" Maxwell said, incredulously, as he stared up at the windows of the offices above the front porch, each window nearly as blank as Suzanne's eyes.

                Suzanne, clearly as frustrated with his lack of understanding as he was for her to explain, shook her head vigorously, then took another stumbling step towards the building -- not towards the squat garage doors, but up towards the ornamental facade of the municipal building's porch, her shuffling step echoed in its vast arches, she dwarfed by the huge pillars.

                Then, the same cold feeling Maxwell had gotten among the marble mausoleums of the grave yard with Puck came over him now, as if he was disturbing something from the dead, his sneakers squeaking on the marble steps as he climbed to keep up with the now stumbling, headlong charge of Suzanne.

                Tinted windows reflected the two of them, he looking as out of place among this modern tribute to Greek architecture as she did. The tinted glass enclosed the space on two sides, east and south, with the open-spaced pillars marking the boundaries on the west and north. Few inside the building seemed to use the front door, or look out these windows from the lobby. But the porch -- which was about as big as a tractor trailer -- was clearly used by someone, and not just by the mayor for one of his now famous public diatribes against the city council.

                Like the police, the mayor and the other city employees came and went via the rear, where they could park their cars and walk to and from the building behind the safety of fence and barbed wire. The mayor hadn't even installed a camera here, as he had in the place behind the building -- wisely aware of how little time it would take the local gangs to remove it and hock it and use the money to buy booze or dope. Few of the occupants of the building likely noted any of the changes that went on here.

                And changes had occurred.

                As with any unused store front door way, this space had collected the drifting leaves of Paterson's homeless, serving the dilapidated and the dying as a shelter. If not heated, then a thousand times more luxurious than the bed to bed facilities offered by the more formal public shelters further east on Broadway, yet oddly enough, modelled after those institutions as if the bums -- when left to their own resources -- had no better example from which to choose, newspapers and tattered blankets spread out on the floor of this place in the same side by side fashion as the beds in the shelters with people's paltry possessions arranged at the foot and head of each, valueless trash that resembled grave stone markers.

                And the people -- of whom there were dozens-- leaned, sagged, stooped, squatted, sat, sprawled, lay flat, curled up, rolled this way or that, groaned, moaned, though most stayed silent. They looked and smelled as significant as rotting leaves with a blast of the usual scent of unbathed bums. Maxwell could taste its vulgarity, so thick was it in the air, and his could feel its creeping touch working up his arms from his unprotected hands, an itch he feared to scratch with the prospect of somehow making it worse.

                "Home," he heard Suzanne sigh with a satisfaction so deep it might have been her father's Midwest house with a hot meal cooking on the stove. Maxwell tried to say something but emitted only an acknowledging grunt. Then, he heard the echoes of another rasping voice, more laugh than grunt.

                "Hey, hey," a bent figure said, emerging out of the deeper shadows to appear as Nathanial, his back as twisted at the pillars were straight, and the shadows painting his half-melted face into a even more grotesque shape. "Does Susie have a new boyfriend, hey, hey?"

                Nathanial advance, one arm crimped close to his chest, the other -- longer -- swinging at his side, his good eye glinting at Maxwell in a careful study of his face.

                Maxwell shifted around in place, keeping the strange man in front of him as he circled, Maxwell's hands tightening into fists at his sides, then loosening again the way Uncle Charlie and years at the dojo had taught, he waiting for the gnarled man to make the first move. The figure, however, did not advance, did not even look as if he wanted nothing more than to laugh.

                "Suzie's brought a fine boy home this time, yes, yes," the little man said, obviously not recalling Maxwell from their previous meetings. "A generous man, yes, yes, one so helpful and friendly, yes, a friend who will pay us, yes, the way the police men's do, yes?"

                Maxwell frowned, trying to sort out the man's verbal riddles in his head, and then, when finally making sense of them, stared horrified.

                "You have me wrong," Maxwell said, taking a step towards the man, and stumbling over someone's clattering possessions and paper bed. "I didn't come here for that!"

                "No pay?" Nathanial said, turning his head, bird-like to keep his one good eye aimed at Maxwell's face, an eye which grew suspicious. "No pay, no play. No, no. We don't give no credit to you like we do the police men, who come for rent, no. We can't gives no samples. Not with Suzie. Not when so many other boyfriends wants her, boyfriends with money, yes, who pay and pay."

                Maxwell stared at the man, then at Suzanne who stood to one side half in the shadow of a pillar, her hands folded in front of her. She appeared neither embarrassed or ashamed by the man's filthy talk, but looked the part of some shy, Midwest girl at a dance, waiting for Maxwell or some cop to make her an offer.

                "Well?" the little man said, edging closer, his tilted head cocked like a question mark. "You want to pay, yes? You want to be little Suzie's boyfriend for an hour, yes? She does it good, yes. She loves to do it, yes. Ask all her other pretty boyfriends, as them if Suzie isn't work for them to pay and pay, yes?"

                "SHUT UP!" Maxwell yelled, the echoes of his own voice resounding in the chamber, drawing up nervous gazes even from the previously nearly unconscious, as if they thought him a cop. Even Nathanial's half melted mouth snapped shut over his endless string of words, his one good eye blinking at Maxwell, staring hard as if he expected to get hit. The whole space seemed to shift, grey and brown figures suddenly stirred to life, leaves urged by the wind to flee, though all apparently waiting word from the little man before Maxwell.

                Nathanial, startled at first, then shook his head and laughed.

                "You don't like us to say that?" he asked. "You don't like hearing other men pay? Maybe you is green with being jealous, eh? Maybe you wants her for yourself, yes? We arranges that if you want. But it costs, oh yes, costs lots of money, yes, yes, more than you has, maybe. Policemen wants her, too. And we stays here because of her..."

                "Look, friend," Maxwell said sharply, jabbing his forefinger at the little man's face. "I told you to quit that talk and I mean it."

                Nathanial's mouth soured, the unmelted side drawing up into what could have been a sneer.

                "Does you wants us hurt, yes?" he asked, "wants to beat us up, yes, yes, like a big bully, he is, yes."

                The small man swiped at a strand of hair that fell across his face, one of two long strands that did serve in covering his balding head.

                "We's so afraid, we's shaking," Nathanial went on in the same mocking voice, laughing so that others in the chamber began to laugh, too, but it sounded like a laughing dead, scaring Maxwell a little. "So afraids we's mights yell for the police. And they come and take the big bully boyfriend away, yes."

                Maxwell glanced around, first at the double doors that opened out from the building. He could well imagine a troop of black-booted blue-hatted Paterson cops charging out with swinging clubs the way Chicago cops had at the National Convention in 1968, beating at his head and these pathetic already dead's head, sweeping the steps with their beating, washing away the filth with blood -- the bums' blood. Maxwell's. Suzanne's, too.

                Then, when the door did not swing open as promised, Maxwell glanced the other way, to the two still-frowning double garage doors, waiting for them to release their thunder and lightning, and they, too, remained unmoved, though Maxwell felt more danger there than from behind the glass door, an uncomfortable feeling he'd had since Puck's robbery that gave the town authority to do what it wished with him once he stepped across a certain line.

                Was he now standing on the wrong side by challenging this crew of living dead?

                "I don't believe this!" Maxwell muttered, staring at Suzanne. "Even you couldn't have sunk this low, living on a door step, doing things this little dwarf tells you to do."

                 Suzanne's gaze remained fixed on a imaginary space, looking neither ashamed nor embarrassed, having gone beyond both in her long fall from the heights of New York.

                "But Suzie does, yes, yes," Nathanal ranted on. "She lives with us, dirty stinking bums, she stays here and stays safe, yes, yes, safe as long as she goes off with the nice policemen when we tells her to go. She stays safe, we's stays safe, not like those nasty smelly shelters full of rules and religion, telling us when to gets up, when to go to sleep, sneaking up on poor little Suzie in the middle of the night, taking what they wants without paying saying thanks. She stays here and helps us and keeps everything safe, yes, yes."

                "Safe?" Maxwell said, staring round at the place as horrified by the scattered junk and dilapidated people as if the acropolis had been converted to a public toilet. The smell -- which had been unbearable in the relatively open space of the street -- festered here, and grew, its foul fingers working into the microscopic cracks of the stone itself, immortalizing this place. No cleansing would ever fully remove it, short of chipping awry the stone layer by layer.

                "You mean nobody bothers you here?"

                "Bothers us, oh yes, they bothers us. Bad men come to beat us up. But they afraid now. They don't come here no more since policemen chase them away. Oh, they wait for us on the streets. They take us and hit us and steals our money, yes. But here, the policemen says they can't, so they don't come here, and we are safe, yes, yes."

                "You're telling me the police let you stay here? On the Goddamn steps of the municipal building?"

                "Yes, they knows," Nathanial said. "But the Mayor doesn't, no, no."

                The little man held up a knobby finger to his partially deformed lips.

                "It's our big secret, yes, the policemen says. They lets us stay by we can't say nothing to the mayor, no, no. We can't say anything to nobody, no..."

                "But that's insane," Maxwell said. "Why on earth would they bother?"

                "We tells you," Nathaniel snapped, growing agitated and impatient at Maxwell's questions. "We pays, yes, yes, we pays, and they leaves us alone, yes."

                The little man's knowing glance at Suzanne raised a pang of pain in Maxwell so acute that he grabbed his stomach, and glanced around, searching for a way of escape, the stink and the circumstance leaving him with little dignity.

                These were bums! They had made the choice to live here like this. Maxwell's attention would change nothing.

                And yet, when Maxwell glanced at Suzanne, a different, more acute pain started in him, a pain whose cure was far less practical than simple flight. This pain he would bring away with him, and if he did nothing now, he would live with, reviewing this scene again and again in his head for the rest of his life, seeing Suzanne as a bum, the pride and possession of a half-melted dwarf, paying the price of existence by bedding down with a station full of cops. Even in rags, even with her face and hands and arms caked in dirt, she looked innocent to Maxwell, the way she had that first day at the poetry festival, and in those eyes, he saw the same desperate search in her, someone trapped, but still looking for a path to importance.

                Nathaniel rattled on, but Maxwell heard little of what was said. But the pain was now so great in Maxwell that he wanted to lash out and cause a more violent pain in this pathetic pimp, closing his twisted mouth forever, if just to keep it from offering Suzanne again.

                "SHUT UP!" Maxwell screamed, again sending his shrill voice up into the arch of stone for it to return in brittle echoes. This time, the men and women hidden in the shadow, rocked back on their heals, staring at Maxwell, as if he had called them to life out of the very stone. Nathaniel only glared, as his sputtering diatribe came to an end.

                Maxwell motioned to Suzanne.

                "Gather up your things," he said. "I'm taking you out of here."

                In the quiet, Nathaniel's shoes squeaked as he leaned back on his worn heals, the last of his words lost in a single gush of expelled breath, the good side of his face now as distorted as the bad.

                Suzzane stirred, her arms -- which had risen to her chest during the little man's recitation -- fell away like abandoned clothing.

                "Home," she said, planting her feet on the stained concrete.

                "Not any more," Maxwell said. "We'll find a better place where you don't have to..."

                "NO!" Nathaniel roared. "You can't take her away from us, no, no, you can't. We needs her. She needs us."

                "I told you to shut up," Maxwell said savagely. "You're not going to use Suzzane any more to pay your rent -- such as it is. She's coming with me, and if you or any one tries to stop me, you'll get hurt."

                "But the nasty policeman will want her, the nasty policeman will tells us to go away if she's not here."

                "Well, I'm so sorry," Maxwell said in the same cold voice. "Maybe you should try getting yourself a job instead of pimping innocent girls like her."

                "INNOCENT?" Nathaniel howled, his laugh no longer even remotely humorous, but manic, as he began the slow shuffle of his feet, like an unmilked cow trapped in a pen, needing to kick at something to relieve himself of the pain, but afraid of Maxwell. "She's not innocent, no, no, not innocent at all, no. You tell the man, little Suzzie, you tell the man about all the nasty little things you've done, all for money, yes, yes, all for money and nothing else."

                "I'm not going to tell you to shut up again," Maxwell warned, taking a step towards Nathaniel, who like a brown leaf blown by a sudden gust of wind, staggered back the same distance as Maxwell's advance.

                Suzanne remained as fixed as a statue with only her head turning towards Maxwell and Nathaniel, apparently unable to make up her mind as to which one she should obey, caught between the little man's glare and Maxwell's pleading.

                "Forget your stuff," Maxwell finally said and grabbed her hand, yanking her across the tattered newspapers and ragged bundles which had seemingly become her world.

                She resisted, yanking back and shaking her head.

                "Mine!" she said, breaking free of his grasp long enough to bend down to retrieve a cracked brown leather bag, something normally carried by the new breed of male business executive with both a handle and a strap, the way their female counter parts carried a purse. Only now one strap was missing and the brass clasp broken so that Suzanne had to clutch the bag to her chest to keep the contents from tumbling out. "Mine!" she said again.

                "No! You can't take her!" Nathaniel screamed as he lunged across two sets of newsprint blanket, stumbling over one that was still occupied by a grumbling and groping and probably still drunk body. The little man fell, one unmauled hand unable to keep his face from striking the pavement.

                "No, no," he groaned from the ground, then graveled, squirming in his effort to regain his feet, but unable to manipulate his one good arm into a position to lift himself. Rage or panic also made him quiver, and helped defeat his efforts. He glared up at Maxwell like a fish which had managed to escape a fisherman's bucket only to flop mercilessly in the dust.

                After a moment, the little man ceased flopping, and glared at Maxwell instead, a dribble of blood oozing out the corner of the good side of his mouth.

                "She can't go," he moaned. "She's all we got."

                "Too bad," Maxwell said coldly, staring down at Nathaniel, as angry at him as he had ever been with anyone -- even his family, wishing he could crush the little man's head under his heal, doing away with it the way he might a bug for all the little man had done to Suzzane.

                How dare he pimp her to the police in order to get free rent, and who knew what else!

                "Come on, Susy," Maxwell said, and slowly led the puzzled woman back down the stairs to the street.

                The scuffling had attracted attention, people on the street looking up towards the stairs to see what the excitement was about, much the way idiotic drivers on the highway did when passing an accident, needing to see someone else's misery in order to feel less bad about themselves.

                Nathaniel soon satisfied their lust with a wail of pain that rose from the enclosure with all the pathetic Malay of a parent whose child had been ripped from his arms -- with the echoes making the wail worse, drawing even more attention from the shopkeepers a half block away and the students exiting the college across the street. Even the line of patients outside the free clinic glanced over, forgetting their pain long enough to wonder at his.

                "This way," Maxwell said, leading the robotic Suzanne to the right towards downtown, passed the line of shocked shop keepers and blue collar workers waiting for their bus, passed the old ladies hobbling towards morning mass.

                In their faces, Maxwell saw the sheer audacity of his deed, raising questions as to what he should do next.

                "Maybe I can go see if our Oak Street apartment is still available," he thought bitterly, "or see if my family will take us both in. Considering what Jack will do when he finds out what I've done, I might have to move out of my own apartment."

                Jack would take one look, shake his head, then slam out the door himself, looking drink or a gun, or perhaps even shove Maxwell and Suzanne out, and for the first time, consciously and deliberately lock every lock to make sure the two did not reenter.

                "But you don't understand," Maxwell imagined himself shouting through the thick door. "She needs me."

                "Fuck you," would be Jack's reply.

                "Are you hungry?" Maxwell asked Suzanne, the thought popping into his head out of nowhere, not so much a realization as desperation. He needed time to think, and he had seen no sign of food in the open quarters in front of the municipal building, and only vaguely did he recall the grubby fingers of the bums struggling to tear open the black plastic bags Jack had put outside the store, fingers that -- when finally finding something edible -- immediately rushed the crumbs of bread and meat to an open mouth, sanitary or not.

                "Hungry?" Suzzane asked, as if she had just recalled the proper word for such a primary condition of her life.

                Hunger plagued people like her day and night, was never absent, a gnawing mouth working inside their bellies. Sometimes they managed to reduce its complain with handfuls of trash, but it was always there, always tugging at them for more, making them rise in the morning, resisting their attempts to sleep at night.

                Yet more than this, the word seemed to have more meaning than many of the those Maxwell had used in addressing her, meaning more than home, sleep, cold or warmth, as if translating directly into a condition she could acknowledge.

                She nodded and grinned, her formerly beautiful smile marked with years of tartar, some of which had turned slightly green.

                "Hungry," she said with such enthusiasm that for one moment, Maxwell thought he could a gleam of the old Suzzane in her eyes.

                "Well," he said with a heavy sigh. "At least, that's something we can fix."

 

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