Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

Lucy came to a rusted chain-link fence with one end peeled back from its support. She slid through and descended a rough, weedy embankment to a concrete apron overlooking the sunken Metro Transit Authority-Long Island Railroad yards. Graffiti covered every vertical service, some of it elaborately wrought, and with a certain barbaric beauty, a museum of the doomed. There in the shadow of a high, buttressed, gang-tagged retaining wall, she found what she was looking for.

It was a kind of village. The dwellings were constructed with varying degrees of art and skill out of large corrugated cartons, fiberglass, scrap lumber, sheet metal, and the ubiquitous black plastic. There were a dozen or so of these structures, each occupying one of the bays marked off by the tapering buttresses of the wall. At either end of this fancy district (walls, roofs), there were humbler dwellings, sometimes only a plastic tarp covering a shopping cart, or a crude tent. The social center of the village was a fire flaring in an oil drum, silhouetting half a dozen lumpy figures clustered around it. Her foot struck a pebble, making a small sound, and the group stopped its buzz of conversation. Two dogs yelped and growled. Every face turned to look at her, wariness showing in each one. When they saw who it was, they visibly relaxed.

A tall, bearded black man wearing a greasy olive-drab mechanic's jumpsuit hailed, "Hey, Lucy. My girl! What you got for us today? Chicken?"

"Vegetable soup, bread, salad, and pie."

"Pie? Pie is good," said the tall man, who was called Real Ali. "Hey, Benz, you going to get some of that pie?"

"I might," said the woman thus addressed, a large, heavily swaddled woman with a pitted Hispanic complexion. "Lila Sue likes pie. Is there any meat in that soup?"

Lucy said, "No, no meat, but we got a bunch of bones cooking in with it. How's Lila Sue today?"

Mercedes Ortiz, who was never called anything but Benz, stroked the head of the creature leaning comfortably against her padded bosom. Lila Sue was looking at the fire with pleasure, her large, dark eyes reflecting the sparks. She was a pretty girl, as far as features went, elfin, yellowy tan, with a sharply pointed chin and a straight little nose. Lucy thought she was probably in her late teens, although it was hard to tell. No one knew where Benz had picked her up, but they were inseparable.

Another man, dark, thin, spoke up. "Lucy, what we want is a little room service around here. How come you don't deliver, is what I want to know. I'm too beat, to use my feet, to go and eat."

Real Ali said, "Man, you think you still in Vegas."

The other man became animated and started jumping around the fire, shadowboxing. "Yeah, Vegas, that's where I beat Ron Lyle, eleven rounds. Pow! Ka-pow! Okay, first round, he goes, left, left, right to the body. It don't hurt me none, I'm feeling him out. Pow! Left jab… pow!"

"Oh, shut the fuck up, Ali!" This from a man standing opposite, wearing a Raiders cap over dreadlocks and a greasy blue parka with stuffing oozing out of it. He had the twitchy moves and fuzzy features of a crankhead. The shadowboxer bounced away from the fire barrel and started dancing around, twirling his fists artistically. "Hey, let's go. You want to go with the greatest? Come on!"

Real Ali walked over and put a big arm over Fake Ali's shoulders. "Take it easy, champ. It's not worth it. Doug ain't in your class."

"Fuckin' nutcase," said Doug Drug under his breath. "Jesus, I got a fuckin' headache about to take my skull off. You got any aspirin there, Lucy?"

Lucy handed him a flat tin of Bayer. He popped it open and tossed half a dozen into his mouth and swallowed them dry. He said, "Think I'll go by Redeemer and get some of that pie."

"Pie," said Lila Sue. "A pie was walking down the street and saw an elephant a flying elephant with silver wings and he said hello Mr. Elephant I want to go to pie heaven will you take me and the elephant says yes I will and then they flew up high high high high high up on top of the clouds and then the elephant said here we are in heaven but first I must have a bite of you, no no said the pie I must have a bite of you because I am a vampire pie-"

"Christ, can't you shut that bitch up!" yelled Doug. "Benz!"

"Shut up yourself, asshole. She ain't doing you no harm. She just telling a story."

"-And all the other vampire pies came out of vampire heaven," Lila Sue continued, "and bit on the elephant and the elephant said oh oh I am all eaten I will change into an angel so he did and the angels came and changed all the vampire pies into flowers but flowers that had wheels and televisions and they rode down the hill until they weren't in heaven anymore and they said let's look for the mother pie…"

Doug Drug pulled a filthy rag out of the pocket of his jacket. "Hey, stick this in her mouth, Benz."

"Get fucked," said Benz.

Real Ali said, "Go eat, Doug, or go score one. Your fuckin' personality is deteriorating."

Doug looked across the fire at Desmondo and Ralphie, the two other men in the group, but saw no rush of support. He said, "You going over?"

"Yeah, we'll go over," said Desmondo, and Ralphie nodded in agreement. "I think I heard this story before, anyway." A chuckle of acknowledgment floated around the fire barrel. Every story was different, and every one had the same pointless eloquence. Lucy reflected that of all the people in the little group, Lila Sue and she probably had the most in common, both of them having strange brains. Lila Sue could tell stories by the hour, that being the only part of her intellect that had any real function. She could not dress herself or go a block without getting lost or stepping into traffic and would walk away cheerfully with anyone.

The three men departed, and Lucy moved around the fire to get closer to Real Ali. Lila Sue's story had sunk to a low warble, like a TV on in a distant room. He grinned at her and said, "You looking for your boyfriend?"

She felt her face heat. "He's not my boyfriend."

"You wish he was, though."

"I do not!"

"Uh-huh. Well, he ain't been by today. You probably meet up with him up at the church, cut up some vegetables together."

Lucy ignored this. "How's Canman?"

"Hell, honey, I don't know. He's acting like a spooked cat. He keeps talking about Joe Romero."

"Was he friends with him?"

"Oh, he just knew him from around, you know, from the streets. Joe helped him haul stuff once in a while. He thinks the slasher's after him, gonna do him like he did Joe. He's talking about moving out of the paper house."

"You mean to a shelter?"

Real Ali laughed. "Hell, no. The Canman, he rather get his throat cut than go in a damn shelter. Canman don't like rules and regulations. I'm not particularly fond of them myself, if you want to know. Nah, he was talking about the tunnels."

"I should go talk to him. Is everyone else afraid, too?"

"Not particularly. I figure we're pretty safe here, all of us being together. Someone's up most of the time, and we got the dogs. No, the slasher, he's going to take out people sleeping alone, like Joe, and the guy he did before Christmas, that Chaney character, over by the convention center. Anyway, life on the mean streets." Real Ali laughed. "You ain't afraid of no slasher, are you, Ali?"

Fake Ali did a little shuffle and said, "The greatest ain't afraid of no man or beast."

"I'm going to see him now," said Lucy, and walked down the cracked concrete to a low black structure snuggled into one of the bays. It was made almost entirely of baled newspapers covered with tar and plastic. Its roof was a cone of scrap lumber and lath, tied together tepee fashion, and covered with a wrapping of tar paper, plastic, and foil sheeting from insulation. Smoke emerged from a tin pipe above. It had two windows covered with translucent plastic sheeting and a low door, made of packing-crate slats, plastic, and duct tape. A canvas laundry cart was parked next to it, like a Toyota at a suburban ranch house. Lucy knocked on the door.