Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (15 page)

“Lori, what are you talking about?” I asked.

“The way Cohen’s dragging in this business of police patrols.” She went back to the article.

“Could such a creature exist? According to archaeology professor Hel-met Goddin of Butler
University, ‘Not in the city. Sightings of Bigfoot or the Sasquatch are usually relegated to
wilderness areas, a description that doesn’t apply to Upper Foxville, regardless of its resemblance
to an archaeological dig.’

“Which is just his way of saying the place is a disaster area,” Lori added. “No surprises there.”

She held up a hand before either Ruth or I could speak and plunged on.

“Goddin says that the Sasquatch possibly resulted from some division in the homonid line,
which evolved separately from humans. He speculates that they are ‘more intelligent than apes ...

and apes can be very intelligent. If it does exist, then it is a very, very important biological and
anthropological discovery.’”

Lori laid the paper down and sipped some of her beer. “So,” she said as she set the glass back down precisely in its ring of condensation on the table. “What do you think?”

“Think about what?” Ruth asked.

Lori tapped the newspaper. “Of this.” At our blank looks, she added, “It’s something we can do this weekend. We can go hunting for Bigfoot in Upper Foxville.”

I could tell from Ruth’s expression that the idea had about as much appeal for her as it did for me.

Spend the weekend crawling about the rubble of Upper Foxville and risk getting jumped by some junkie or hobo? No thanks.

Lori’s studied Shotokan karate and could probably have held her own against Bruce Lee, but Ruth and I were just a couple of Crowsea punkettes, about as useful in a confrontation as a handful of wet noodles. And going into Upper Foxville to chase down some big
muchacho
who’d been mistaken for a Sasquatch was not my idea of fun. I’m way too young for suicide.

“Hunting?” I said. “With what?”

Lori pulled a small Instamatic from her purse. “With this, LaDonna. What else?”

I lifted my brows and looked to Ruth for help, but she was too busy laughing at the look on my face.

Right, I thought. Goodbye, Rob Lowe—it could’ve been
mucho
primo. Instead I’m going on a
gaza
de grillos
with Crowsea’s resident madwomen. Who said a weekend had to be boring?

3

I do a lot of thinking about decisions—not so much trying to make up my mind about something as just wondering,
eque si?
Like if I hadn’t decided to skip school that day with my brother Pipo and taken El Sub to the Pier, then I’d never have met Ruth. Ruth introduced me to Lori and Lori introduced me to more trouble than I could ever have gotten into on my own.

Not that I was a Little Miss Innocent before I met Lori. I looked like the kind of
muchacha
that your mother warned you not to hang around with. I liked my black jeans tight and my leather skirt short, but I wasn’t a
puts
or anything. It was just for fun. The kind of trouble I got into was for staying out too late, or skipping school, or getting caught having a cigarette with the other girls behind the gym, or coming home with the smell of beer on my breath.

Little troubles. Ordinary ones.

The kind of trouble I got into with Lori was always
mucho
weird. Like the time we went looking for pirate treasure in the storm sewers under the Beaches—the ritzy area where Lori’s parents lived before they got divorced. We were down there for hours, all dressed up in her father’s spelunking gear, and just about drowned when it started to rain and the sewers filled up. Needless to say, her
papa
was
not
pleased at the mess we made of his gear.

And then there was the time that we hid in the washrooms at the Watley’s Department Store downtown and spent the whole night trying on dresses, rearranging the mannequins, eating chocolates from the candy department .... Ifit had been just me on my own—coming from the barrios and all—I’d’ve ended up in jail. But being with Lori, her
papa
bailed us out and paid for the chocolates and one broken mannequin. We didn’t do much for the rest ofthat summer except for gardening and odd jobs until we’d worked off what we owed him.

No muy loco? Verdad,
we were only thirteen, and it was just the start. But that’s all in the past. I’m grown up now—just turned twenty-one last week. Been on my own for four years, working steady. But I still wonder sometimes.

About decisions.

How different everything might have been if I hadn’t done this, or if I
had
done that.

I’ve never been to Poland. I wonder what it’s like.

4

We’ll e’ll set it up like a scavenger hunt,” Lori said. She paused as the waitress brought another round—Heinekin for Lori, Miller Lites for Ruth and I—then leaned forward, elbows on the table, the palms of her hands cupping her chin. “With a prize and everything.”

“What kind of a prize?” Ruth wanted to know.

“Losers take the winner out for dinner to the restaurant of her choice.”

“Hold everything,” I said. “Are you saying we each go out by ourselves to try to snap a shot of this thing?”

I had visions of the three of us in Upper Foxville, each of us wandering along our own street, the deserted tenements on all sides, the only company being the bums, junkies and
cabrones
that hung out there.

“I don’t want to end up as just another statistic,” I said.

“Oh, come on. We’re around there all the time, hitting the clubs. When’s the last time you heard of any trouble?”

“Give me the paper and I’ll tell you,” I said, reaching for the
Journal.

“You want to go at
night?”
Ruth asked.

“We go whenever we choose,” Lori replied. “The first one with a genuine picture wins.”

“I can just see the three of us disappearing in there,” I said. “‘The lost women of Foxville “

“Beats being remembered as loose women,” Lori said. “We’d be just another urban legend.”

Ruth nodded. “Like in one of Christy Riddell’s stories.”

I shook my head. “No thanks. He makes the unreal too real. Anyway, I was thinking more of that Brunvand guy with his chok-ing Doberman and Mexican pets.”

“Those are all just stories,” Lori said, trying to sound like Christo-pher Lee. She came off like a bad Elvira. “This could be real.”

“Do you
really
believe that?” I asked.

“No. But I think it’ll be a bit of fun. Are you scared?”

“I’m sane, aren’t I? Of course I’m scared.”

“Oh, poop.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not up for it.”

I wondered if it wasn’t too late to have my head examined. Did the hospital handle that kind of thing in their emergency ward?

“Good for you, LaDonna,” Lori was saying. “What about you, Ruth?”

“Not at night.”

“We’ll get the jump on you.”

“Not at night,” she repeated.

“Not at night,” I agreed.

Lori’s eyes had that mad little gleam in them that let me know that we’d been had again. She’d never planned on going at night either.

“A toast,” she said, raising her beer. “May the best woman win.”

We clinked our mugs against each other’s and made plans for the night while we finished our beer. I don’t think anyone in the restaurant was sorry to see us go when we finally left. First up was the early show at the Oxford (you didn’t really think I’d stand you up, did you, Rob?), then the last couple of sets at the Zorb, where the Fat Man Blues Band was playing, because Ruth was crazy about their bass player and Lori and I liked to egg her on.

5

By now you’re probably thinking that we’re just a bunch of air-heads, out for laughs and not concerned with anything important. Well, it isn’t true. I think about things all the time. Like how hanging around with Anglos so much has got me to the point where half the time I sound like one myself. I can hardly speak to my grandmother these days. I don’t even think in Spanish anymore and it bothers me.

It’s only in the barrio that I still speak it, but I don’t go there much—just to visit the family on birthdays and holidays. I worked hard to get out, but sometimes when I’m in my apartment on Lee Street in Crowsea, sitting in the windowseat and looking out at the park, I wonder why. I’ve got a nice place there, a decent job, some good friends. But I don’t have any roots. There’s nothing connect-ing me to this part of the city.

I could vanish overnight (disappear in Upper Foxville on a
caza de grillos),
and it wouldn’t cause much more than a ripple. Back home, the
abuelas
are
still
talking about how Donita’s youngest girl moved to Crowsea and when was she going to settle down?

I don’t really know anybody I can talk to about this kind of thing. Neither my Anglo friends nor my own people would understand. But I think about it. Not a lot, but I think about it. And about decisions.

About all kinds of things.

Ruth says I think too much.

Lori just wonders why I’m always trying to explain Poland. You’d think I was her mother or something.

6

Saturday morning, bright and early, and only a little hungover, we got off the Yoors Street subway and followed the stairs up from the underground station to where they spat us out on the corner of Gracie Street and Yoors. Gracie Street’s the
frontera
between Upper Foxville and Foxville proper. South of Gracie it’s all low-rent apart-ment buildings and tenements, shabby old
viviendas
that manage to hang on to an old world feel, mostly because it’s still families living here, just like it’s been for a hundred years.

The people take care of their neighborhood, no differently than their parents did before them.

North of Gracie a bunch of developers got together and planned to give the area a new facelift. I’ve seen the plans—condominiums, shopping malls, parks. Basically what they wanted to do was shove a high class suburb into the middle of the city. Only what happened was their backers pulled out while they were in the middle of leveling about a square mile of city blocks, so now the whole area’s just a mess of empty buildings and rubble-strewn lots.

It’s creepy, looking out on it from Gracie Street. It’s like standing on the line of a map that divides civilization from no-man’s-land. You almost expect some graffiti to say, “Here there be dragons.”

And maybe they wouldn’t be so far off. Because you can find dragons in Upper Foxville—the
muy
malo
kind that ride chopped-down Harleys. The Devil’s Dragon. Bikers making deals with their junkies.

I think I’d prefer the kind that breathe fire.

I don’t like the open spaces of rubble in Upper Foxville. My true self—the way I see me—is like an alley cat, crouching for shelter under a car, watching the world go by. I’m comfortable in Crow-sea’s narrow streets and alleyways. They’re like the barrio where I got my street smarts. It’s easy to duck away from trouble, to get lost in the shadows. To hang out and watch, but not be seen. Out there, in those desolate blocks north of Gracie, there’s no place to hide, and too many places—all at the same time.

If that kind of thing bothered Lori, she sure wasn’t showing it. She was all decked out in fatigues, hiking boots and a khaki-colored shoulderbag like she was in the Army Reserves and going out on maneuvers or something. Ruth was almost as bad, only she went to the other extreme. She was wearing baggy white cotton pants with a puffed sleeve blouse and a trendy vest, low-heeled sandals and a matching purse.

Me? That morning I dressed with survival in mind, not fashion. I had my yellow jeans and my red hightops, an old black Motorhead T-shirt and a scuffed leather jacket that I hoped would make me look tough. I had some of my hair up in a top-knot, the rest all
low,
and went heavy on the makeup. My camera—a
barato
little Vitoret that I’d borrowed from Pipo last fall and still hadn’t returned yet—was stuffed in a shapeless canvas shoulderbag. All I wanted to do was fit in.

Checking out the skateboarders and other kids already clogging up Gracie’s sidewalks, I didn’t think I was doing too bad a job. Especially when this little
muchacho
with a pink Mohawk came whipping over on his board and tried to put the moves on me. I felt like I was sixteen again.

“Well, I’m going straight up Yoors,” Lori said. “Everybody got their cameras and some film?”

Ruth and I dutifully patted our purse and shoulderbag respec-tively.

“I guess I’ll try the Tombs,” I said.

It only took a week after the machines stopped pushing over the buildings for people to start dumping everything from old car parts to bags of trash in the blocks between Lanois and Flood north of MacNeil. People took to calling it the Tombs because of all the wrecked vehicles.

I’d had some time to think things through over a breakfast of black coffee this morning—a strangely lucid moment, considering the night before. I’d almost decided on getting my friend Izzy from the apartment downstairs to hide out in an ape suit somewhere in the rubble, and then it hit me. Lori probably had something similar planned. She’d have Ruth and I tramping around through the rubble, getting all hot and sweaty, and more than a little tense, and then she’d produce a photo of some friend of
hers
in an ape suit, snapped slightly out of focus as he was ducking into some run-down old building. It’d be good for a laugh and a free dinner and it was ust the kind of stunt Lori’d pull. I mean, we could have been doing some serious shopping today ....