Across the street, children continued to laugh. A ball hit the chain-link backstop behind home plate. A boy called for it to be thrown again. Moments later, a wooden bat struck solidly. Carl used to do this with his buddies, thrilling to the peril of trying to hit and catch a baseball in the dark. He cringed in his memory, unable to see the ball out there in the night, falling somewhere.
“Tell them,” Mrs. Wilcox called from the bedroom, “to go home. It’s too late for that nonsense. Someone could get injured.”
He rose from the recliner to do as she instructed. He walked out her door to the field. High above, a jet streaked home to the airport, lights at the extreme of each wing like falling stars. Sandston hummed to window units, cooling behind closed doors and windows. These kids on the ball field broke that pact which Sandston made with itself, to stay quiet, and, in that way, stay.
“Y’all need to go home,” he announced to five boys.
The one batting answered: “Who says?”
“The lady across the street.”
“Who’s she?”
“A teacher.”
This seemed enough, and they quit.
Carl mounted the bleachers to watch the boys shuffle off. He sat for another ten minutes to guard against their return. Years back, if he’d been one of those kids, he’d go directly home down Union Avenue after being told by an adult. He recalled his mother, who kept brownies in a tin on top of the refrigerator, or German chocolate cake slices in wax paper. His father, shutting the front door with a loud click after struggling all day with high blood pressure and passengers’ bags. His grandfather, Lucky Strike on his lips, gazing like a green-faced gypsy into the sweeping screen. They all fought hard over this land, though not in blue or gray, and without streets named after them. Mrs. Wilcox will depart too, from this town out by the airport. Carl considered staying.
He climbed down from the stands to cross the street before she locked him out and he had to go in again through the back door.
Gaia
by Mina Beverly
Providence Park
Long before she was a stripper, nicknamed Blaxican because of her mixed parentage, Gaia Esparza was a good student. As a schoolgirl, she’d learned that her street, Ladies Mile Road, had been a haven, a mile-long neutral zone in Providence Park. It was named for the white women who’d been tucked away there, safe to consider their fate and care for children while their men fought Union soldiers in Church Hill. That had been a long time ago. Now, it was probably difficult for most people to imagine that anyone had ever felt safe in Providence Park.
In a way, Gaia understood that feeling, but she didn’t share it. The neighborhood was mostly board houses, a few small clusters of project apartments, a boarded-up group home, and an ancient brick church, all just a few miles away from an industrial district. It wasn’t as dangerous as the evening news would have people believe, if you knew how to survive. And Gaia did. She’d had to learn the hard way, but she wasn’t a child anymore. Now, she knew the secret: money, knowing how to get your own, so no one could ever say you owed them anything. Money meant freedom, power, and protection. It meant that Gaia’s best friend, Charlene, could afford a real attorney. So, early on Saturday morning, when Felicia Doolittle came rattling her window screen, Gaia knew she would say yes before Doo even opened her mouth. Gaia squinted against the morning sun and leaned into the doorframe. As usual, Doo’s breasts were flattened, hidden underneath a crisp white shirt that looked oddly stark against her sepia-colored skin. The long shirt reached her knees and, in large black letters, it read, Stop snitching. A fitted camouflage cap, tilted to the side, covered her close haircut. Several layers of pants made her petite frame appear bulky. It was January and cold outside, and Doo wasn’t wearing a coat, but Gaia didn’t invite her in.
“You in?” Doo asked, her hand pressed against the screen, her dark, slanted eyes taking in Gaia’s long legs stretched out beneath a short, silky robe.
Gaia shifted uncomfortably.
Doo licked her lips, blackened from years of smoking. “What’s the problem? The guy is a sure thing. He has the perfect family. Two kids. Even a fucking dog that looks like Lassie.”
Gaia nodded. “I know. I’m in.”
Gaia had never met Mr. X, but Doo’s description of him was probably dead on. He probably even had a little blond PTA wife. Gaia had met many men like him before, had enjoyed taking their money. This time was different, though. Charlene wouldn’t be there and Gaia could feel her pulse pounding in her neck at the thought of being alone with just Mr. X and Doo.
Doo started to walk away, but turned around as Gaia was closing the door. “Hey, I could come by here earlier if you want to get fucked up before.”
“Let’s just keep this business, Doo.”
Doo grinned, shaking her head. “All right. Midnight then.”
Doo was unpredictable and working alone with her worried Gaia. The one person who could keep Doo in line, her lover and Gaia’s best friend, Charlene, had been locked up the week before for boosting GPS consoles and assaulting the arresting officer. Charlene needed a lawyer, a real one, and Gaia knew that working with Doo was the only way to get the kind of money necessary. A court-appointed lawyer was the surest way to lose her only friend to the prison system. Even if, lately, Gaia had been wondering about their friendship.
Charlene had been Gaia’s friend ever since Tenth House. Nine years ago, Gaia had been a shy ten-year-old who kept to herself when a fourteen-year-old girl with fuzzy braids, a bossy attitude, and a desperate need to mother something had hooked arms with her and declared that she would be Gaia’s play mom. To Gaia, that was unwelcome news. Gaia had a real mom, whose face she could draw by heart, a mom who would get sober soon and who would never again forget to take Gaia to school for forty-five days straight. Besides, Gaia didn’t want to be friends with Charlene Christmas of all people. The girl had these crazy, terrifying outbursts. One second she’d be calm, staring into space, and the next she’d be yelling at the top of her lungs. The counselors sometimes had to restrain her physically during these violent fits, when she would scream over and over again, “I want my baby!”
One day, when Charlene found Gaia balled up in a corner, weeping, she pried and prodded until, gingerly, Gaia handed her a small notebook. It was a diary and inside it was the truth about Mr. Gardener, the sixty-year-old man who oversaw the entire staff of Tenth House, and who had been molesting Gaia for a year. Three times a week, like clockwork, his bony fingers troubled her sleep. The jarring scent of his woodsy Outlaw cologne mixed with the smell of the old-people liniment he rubbed on his bad knees. He called those nighttime visits payment for putting a roof over her head when no one else would. Charlene shared the diary with another counselor and was punished for lying.
Still, it put a sudden stop to Mr. Gardener, at least up until Charlene left Tenth House for good two years later. To Gaia, Charlene was her savior, her protector, her god. She was only truly safe when Charlene was nearby. They kept in touch as Gaia went round and round the revolving doors of Tenth House, until she finally broke free from the confining walls of Mr. Gardener’s punishment room in the attic, where he sent her when she was uncooperative. She moved in with Charlene, into the housing projects not more than three blocks from their now-abandoned group home, near enough to it so that a mother coming back for her long-lost child would still easily find her. The two women fell into a comfortable routine and were inseparable. Charlene had even convinced Slick, the manager of Club Pink Kitten, to hire sixteen-year-old Gaia, so that they could work together.