In the morning I got on the Metrorail and took it downtown, where I found a no-questions pawnshop and got rid of Jerrell for four hundred and change.
Why these details? I am drifting, am I not? The tone is drifting too, isn’t it, the person I am now oozing back into the past, coloring the story with later experience. The voice problem again. Oh, Jesus, if you could just help me get out of my own way for two minutes at a time…!
Okay, back to the park, hook up again with Tommy and Carmen. Smoked some mediocre dope. Was offered crack but declined. Got hit on by two guys in their twenties, offered money too, I guess it showed, I mean what I really was, but declined that too. It was the world of no-plans, we were like pigeons pecking at bits and pieces. Restful in a way, much easier than whoring. A week or two or three passed like this. Then one morning Carmen said it was her birthday, sixteen, and cried. It turned out she came from a family that did not believe in parties, some religious nut thing, and she had never had one. So I did the first fairly selfless thing I ever did in my life?hey I got some money, I’ll throw you a party tonight at the Market, and I did, cake and candles from the Winn-Dixie, KFC, beer on my fake ID. I don’t know where it came from, maybe the first feathery light touch of my saint.
It was nice for her and for the kids I guess. I was pretty out of it because I started having bad cramps around four in the afternoon and they just got worse, and Motrin didn’t do anything for them. I was bleeding like crazy too, not like usual at all. I started to think seriously about my plumbing, writhing there on my pallet, and realized that my cycle had been screwy for months, although I laid that to my career choice at the time. I should also say that, weirdly enough, while I was having sex with hundreds of men a week the idea that it would have some effect on my body never once crossed my mind, I was that young.
Anyway Carmen asked me what was wrong and I told her and she said I ought to go to the hospital and I said no way, for obvious reasons, and then Audrey, an older woman with two kids, said I ought to try the sister van, which was this nun who drove a white bread truck around where the homeless hung out and handed out medicine and did exams and never asked about anything. You’re on the run, right? she asked, and I admitted I was.
Tommy and Carmen half carried me to a parking lot on Dixie Highway off Douglas where an old white-painted bread van stood under the orangey anticrime lights surrounded by a small group of homeless patients. I was dripping blood down my pants leg, so they let me through first. The van’s interior was brightly lit off the idling engine and held a gurney, a metal stool, shelves, and cabinets. The proprietress was about forty, smooth brown skin looking darker against a white head cloth with red piping across the brow and under the broad forehead black serious eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. Something wrong with her face, the right side drawn up in a funny way, so that it looked like a smirk but there was no smirking in the rest of it, the opposite really, deep serious. Gray dress, white apron like a restaurant cook, a chain with a heavy silver crucifix on it, a pin at her breast, another lighter chain around her neck with something small and brassy on it. She looked like she weighed ninety pounds wet, but her grip as she helped me on the gurney was like a jockey’s. She slammed the door on the interested crowd. Trinidad Salcedo, my very first Blood Sister.
Off with the jeans and underpants, soaked red. Temperature taken, blood pressure. I was weeping with pain. She looked, probed gently and at length. A smell of antiseptic and a sting. More pain. I howled. She was between my thighs, busy. What’s wrong with me? Her head rose above my belly. How long have you been pregnant? Are you nuts? I’m not pregnant! You were, she said, you just had a miscarriage. More antiseptic, stick in the arm, a tiny cylinder filling with red. Wave of nausea. Take these. Pills. I swallowed, asked for another glass of water. I pulled up my bloody jeans.
What’s your name? I gave her Emily, and she introduced herself. You in the life? No small talk from Sister Trinidad. A lie leaped nimbly to my lips but a sudden and unfamiliar impulse batted it away. Yeah, I said, but I quit. Good girl, she said, and it wasn’t until that very moment that I realized that it was true. She handed me a bottle. You have crab lice. This is insecticidal shampoo. She gave me a photocopied list of places where I could get a shower.
There was a knocking on the van door. She opened it, and there was an old deteriorated piss bum with a gash on his forehead. She ushered him in and motioned me into a corner of the van. I sat on a padded chest and watched her work. She talked to him more than she had to me, she knew his name, apparently not the first visit. He stank, and I wondered how she could stand to touch him, and felt obscurely jealous and then felt angry with myself for giving a rat’s ass.
Stitched and bandaged, he left. A couple of more customers then, mostly first aid, but one baby too, the mother a little older than me, speaking Spanish, frightened. The nurse seemed to have forgotten me. I may have dozed.
Her hand on my shoulder, face close to mine. I have to move to my next stop, she said, and asked me if I had a place to stay? I said I did. I asked her if she was a nun. She said she was a sister, she explained that nuns are sisters who live in communities, which she and the others of her order did not, and told me the name of it, which meant nothing to me. I don’t think we had any sisters or nuns in Caluga County. She waited for me to go, but for some reason I was reluctant to leave her presence, no not for some reason, no this was the Holy Spirit making his first little chip at the ashes impacted around my heart. I said what do those letters mean, pointing at her badge. It was a gold cross on white enamel with a red bleeding heart in the center and on the arms of the cross U V I M and around the gold rim SNSBC FAM
She said pointing this means Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ and Fidelis ad Mortem, and these letters stand forubi vadimus ibi manemur. I asked what it meant and she said it means faithful unto death and where we go there we stay. I must have looked blank because she explained that it meant that when they decided to go someplace and take care of people, they stuck with their patients even if it meant the sisters had to die. I asked whether any of them had ever died, and she said only about a hundred or so. In Miami? She let out a surprising guffaw then hid her face in her hands, a strange sort of oriental gesture, and begged my pardon. No, in other countries. We specialize in helping people hurt by wars, she said, and asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no and asked her why she was here there wasn’t any wars in Miami except dope wars and she said she was taking a break, this was like a vacation for her.
I had a lot more questions, like what was that little brass angel she wore around her neck, but although she wasn’t looking impatient or anything I could feel her vibing me out of there. She handed me a package of thick sanitary pads. Take care of yourself, Emily, she said, and God bless you. She looked at me and I could feel that she could see through me just like I thought Ray Bob could that time, but instead of seeing all the bad she was just seeing the good. It surprised the hell out of me at the time since I didn’t think I had any in there. Then I was outside thinking that aside from Percival Orne Foy she was the most interesting person I ever met.
Twelve
They put Paz on administrative leave while they investigated the shooting. He didn’t think it would be much of an investigation, because they had the guy’s gun, there was a civilian witness (Lorna Wise) backing up Paz’s story to the letter, and the victim was a well-known local scumbag named Amando Cortez, Dodo Cortez to his friends and the police, who knew him as a head breaker and enforcer for the dope people. He had a pair of murder arrests on his sheet, both of which he had beat at trial, and a thirty-six-month jolt for aggravated assault/attempted murder. He was also a whiteish Cuban and so could be shot by a cop of any color whatever without hysteria breaking out.