The Orange Houses (12 page)

“He kidnapped my daughter. He's snapping. He's gonna—”

“No, he's not. He's not. Hush now. Sister Sykes, Jimmi would kill himself before he brought harm to Tamika. He brings a world of hurt unto himself, but his heart is pure with the Spirit. I come to you as truth's witness.”

Mik shivered in the tunnel draft. So much silence as the second hand on her watch clicked slower than the time it takes to cross one dead universe after another. Finally she felt the vibration. She clicked on her aids to confirm the tremors' source: skate wheels on cracked concrete.

An invisible fist broke into her abdomen, opened up with long hard fingers and squeezed her stomach.

Jimmi stepped off his board into the stove light.

“Thank you, Jimmi.”

“For what?”

“You came back.”

“Of course. Couple of Shanelle's crew still up there, hunting around by the highway. No sight of Fatima.”

“You're a good man.”

“Yeah? There's things y'all don't know about me. Mik, I watched people die over there. I didn't stop the killing.”

“Jimmi, you didn't start it.”

“I wonder, kid. I ask myself. Is it worth it, the living? Why bother, you know?”

“Sit with me. Give me that gun.”

He did.

It was a lot heavier than she'd have thought. She set it behind her, pushed it out of reach. “Hold my hand. Without you, I wouldn't have met Fatima. Without you, Fatima wouldn't have met the kids at the hospital. Without you, people wouldn't have smiled that day you stood on the mailbox and set the angels flying.”

“I just wanna be someplace bright and clean,” he said.

“I'm-a take you there. Close your eyes. Squeeze my hand tight now, we gonna fly. If an ocean.”

“If an ocean.”

“Not the shore, Jimmi. The water. Not in it. Above it. We're dancing on it. We soaring now, thirty feet over the seas—”

“No land in sight, middle of the night, but lit bright, every star a kite, planets burning might.”

Mik bopped her head to Jimmi's mix. “Nobody's uptight. There you go, man.”

“People be playing, everybody saying, ‘reeling this day in, to my heart, my heart, my heart.' Where we at now, Mik?”

“Oh we far, far out now, Jimmi. Just the warm wind and us. See them waves?”

“Big as countries. Rolling the moon. I'm reaching up—”

“Reach up, Jimmi.”

“I'm grabbing two moonbeams.”

“Outta sight.”

“They're our surfboards, Mik.”

“We
flying
off the top of that moon wave, man. We're
way
high now. The world's small. We in the sea of space.”

“The sea of space.”

“And the stars are our people. Everyone sparkles. Everybody you ever loved and who was kind to you is with us.”

“Julyssa?”

“She's with us, Jimmi.”

“My baby?”

“She's with us.” Mik shut her eyes to see it all. “Out here the party goes on all night to the tune of a sweet-strummed guitar. There are no accidents out here. No injuries, no fighting, no hunger. When folks smile, you feel like they're hugging you. Out here promises are kept. The snow never turns to slush, nobody's sick, and everybody has a nice safe house and Moms doesn't have to work so hard and nobody's lonely and nobody fears and I can hear it all pain free.” She opened her eyes.

Jimmi nodded. “What all you hear, angel?”

Mik smiled. “What's real.”

Jimmi and Mik rushed through the streets toward the VA hospital where they would find medical attention and—please—Fatima teaching her class.

“If she's not there, we'll call my apartment,” Mik said. “You got quarters? Lost my phone in the cave.”

“Security guard'll let us use a phone,” he said.

“After that, we check her house.”

“After that, we call the cops.”

“She'll freak, we get the police out looking for her.”

“No choice. And anyway the police ain't mandatory reporters.” Not yet, he almost said.

“You said Fatima and I were gonna create the most beautiful thing in the world,” Mik said.

“You did.”

“The Liberty we painted on the PD garage? It wasn't
that
good.”

He shook no. “You still haven't figured it out. The bombs can fall and waste us, but what you two made will last forever.”

“That's him, the dude on the TV,” some cat said to his boy as Mik and Jimmi passed. The men were scoring malt forties on the tailgate of a parked car.

Jimmi followed the men's eyes to Mik's lips and cheek, swollen from when Shanelle clocked her. They stared at the blood-soaked bandage on her forearm. Then their eyes went to him.

Mik pulled him across the street. “We gotta hurry now, Jimmi.”

He looked over his shoulder. Car doors were opening, tenement doors. Men followed, drawing their phones. Five dudes trailed them, eight, now a ninth with a Lou isville Slugger.

“Jimmi, you run,” she said. “You
fly
.”

“I ain't leaving you,” he said. The morphine had started to wear off. He would get her to the avenue, the traffic, people—“People, please,” he said to the vigilantes.

They came down on him fast, tens of them, seeming like hundreds as they ripped Mik from him. Pinned against a truck, he could do no more than watch as they passed her kicking and screaming to an enormous woman who held her back with manlike arms. He broke free with a pair of punches that jacked the men into a fury. Their hatred stunned him. He knew these men, their brothers, mothers, sisters, daughters, helloed them daily in these streets surrounding the hospital. They were his neighbors, his friends. Why now did they kick him? He called out to them by name, and they struck him harder. He staggered to bent knees. “Let her go,” he said. “Do what you got to do with me, but let her go.”

Somebody kicked the back of his skull. Numbness spread over and through him.

“String 'im up,” said the lead vigilante, some gangbanger.

They roped him by his ankles, threw the line over the streetlamp's arm and heaved him high. The physical pain was nothing compared to seeing them upside down with fever in their eyes. He'd seen men work each other up like this in battle. Any sense of why they were killing was lost to them. They knew nothing but a want for maximum destruction. One man saddled another's shoulders. Another handed that man the ball bat. He jabbed Jimmi's gut. More men saddled more shoulders and pummeled Jimmi Sixes. They beat his arms and legs, his face with fists that tore skin. One man lashed him with a studded belt.

Jimmi felt as if he'd been thrown under a speeding car. He convulsed. The rope snapped and dropped him to the sidewalk. Falling into darkness he saw Mik and thought,
I want to live. I was eighteen.

Jimmi dropped onto the crowd. Landing on them made them angrier. They tossed him at each other as if he were somebody else's trash.

“What a sound,” the leader said to Mik. “Somebody make that girl stop bawling.”

The giant woman held her hand over Mik's mouth, jerking back just shy of hard enough to snap Mik's neck. She twisted Mik to make her see the woman's slitted eyes and pulled-back lips. “It's all right, baby. It's all right now,” the woman said. When Mik bit the woman's palm, the bruiser jerked harder on Mik's head. “Hush. We got you. He can't hurt you now, blessed child.”

“Roll 'im out,” the lead gangbanger said. “Roll 'im
out
, I said. Yeah, like that. Put his chin on the curb and stomp down.”

Two lifted their boots to kick down the deathblow to the back of Jimmi's neck when someone must have yelled something that got the men to hold up. They whipped their heads to look up the street. Mik followed their eyes.

“You will
stop
.” Fatima shoved through the crowd. She put herself between Jimmi and the mob.

“Get that bitch out the way,” the lead gangbanger said.

Others shouted the same and worse. The screaming shorted out Mik's hearing aids. She read one woman's lips: “Terrorist.”

Fatima stood tall and spread out her hands stained with newspaper ink. She yelled to quiet the mob. As the crowd noise dropped off, Mik's hearing aids came back partway. Fatima said, “You will not harm this man. You will not.”

“Move or die,” the lead gangbanger said.

“Are you so anxious to hit a woman, great man? Are you so brave? I am sure the police will think so. What is the punishment for striking a child here? Where I come from they cut off your arms.”

“Do 'im,” the leader said to the posse. “Before the heat rolls up.”

But Fatima stood firm, keeping herself between the men and Jimmi. “Will you put your hands on a
girl
?” she said.

A man reached for Jimmi. Fatima scratched his face. He backhanded her. Fatima made no effort to duck the shot. She wiped her mouth and held up bloody hands. “Do you see? This man has bloodied a child. Will you stand here and do nothing? Will you be accomplices to this crime? Will you?”

All snap-turned their heads downhill.

Sirens on the move bleated in Mik's ears.

“Grab 'im,” the head dude said. “We'll bring 'im to my basement and finish it there.”

But the crowd had started to bolt.

Red and blue flicker brightened on the buildings.

Mik looked out onto the sea of men, some anxious as they shoved to get out of the crowd, some near regret, some drunk and laughing. The gumball-colored lights from a dozen cop cars thickened on their faces.

Fatima stood over Jimmi. Her eyes hard, she signed to Mik,
GOOD-BYE
.

A cop brought them something to drink. “You sure you don't want to go the hospital?”

Fatima took the icepack away from her mouth, shook no, smiled. Mik too had refused medical attention, demanding to stay with Fatima.

“Just hang out here a few more minutes. Captain has a couple of questions. After that we'll drive you home.” He pointed to Mik. “
Then
will you let us take you to the ER?”

Mik nodded.

The cop left them with a tin of peanuts.

“I am afraid of the captain's questions,” Fatima said.

“I'm telling you, it's illegal for them to ask your immigration status,” Mik said.

Mom came back. She had been talking with the police out in the hall. She closed the door and brought Fatima into a hug.

“Mom, what's wrong?” Mik said.

The door swung in. Two men in suits pushed past a cop trying to hold them back. The police captain followed them. He was angry.

One of the men flashed a badge: U.S. Department of Immigration. He said to Fatima, “I'll tell you flat out, I do not want to be doing this, especially after what I heard you did.”

“Then why not take a walk and forget about it?” the police captain said.

“You know I can't do that,” the federal agent said.

“How could you turn her in like that?” Mom said.

“We didn't,” the captain said.

“Our reward money line got an anonymous tip about an illegal from a country on our terror watch list. The call triggered a priority check. The report has been filed. She's in the system now. Fatima, I'm sorry, but do you have any ID?”

Adjusting her hearing aids, Mik seemed to have a hard time taking in the many voices. “Who?” she said. “Who ratted her out?”

“No,” Fatima said. “Do not tell me. I do not want to know.” The room was cold but she was sweating.

Bloods and MS-13 were locked to chairs and bleeding after a brawl.

The nurse pointed to a curtained bay. NaNa was stroking Jimmi's hand, but he was out of it. The vigilantes had broken his nose, his teeth. The welts around his eyes were turning purple. Bandages covered his arms and shoulders where the men whipped him.

“Tamika, he was asking for you,” NaNa said. “Even with the tranquilizers he was very agitated until I swore to him that you were safe.”

Mom hesitated, went to Jimmi's bedside. “Jimmi? Thank you for taking care of Tamika. Jimmi?”

His eyes drifted to Mik. “I messed up, kid.”

“No you didn't, Jimmi. You did great.”

“They bring me in here, I'm asking for Fatima. I seen that dude backhanded her before I blacked out, she's bleeding from her mouth—”

“Easy now, Jimmi,” Mom said.

“I'm on the cot, the pain, man, they got me hooked up to the morphine, I couldn't think right, I'm calling out to anybody who'll listen, ‘Is Fatima okay? Somebody check on Fatima.' This old man come up to me, say he a priest, he gonna help me find Fatima, what's she look like, like that. I'm like, she's tall, pretty, scar over here, beautiful accent. I'm telling him about you too, so he can look for y'all, but all the old man wants to know is about Fatima's accent, what country. The painkillers, man, messing me up—I tell him where she's from. His eyes bug. Is she legal, he ask me.”