Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

Then he asked, "Anything wrong?"

"No!" instinctively; then, "Yes. I find that the world is not perfect."

"Then the world must be changed." He laughed. She laughed, too. The line was from Pasolini's The Hawks and the Sparrows, St. Francis's comeback to the friars sent to preach the Gospel to the birds. The hawks still killed the sparrows; what can we do? cried the friars, it is the way of the world. Then the world must be changed. David had a tape of it, and they had watched it together in a church basement.

"I'm going over to the yards. I heard someone say they saw Canman today. I thought I'd check it out."

"I'll come with you."

They walked over. She made amusing conversation, with mimicry. She was, of course, a perfect mimic. Sometimes when he laughed, he clutched her around the shoulder, and she felt blood flush into her face, and not just her face either.

They went through the fence and down the rutted, trash-strewn path to the walkway. There they heard the sounds: shouts and a shrill keening. Lila Sue.

David broke into a run and Lucy followed him, her bag slamming against her hip, her cloak flying behind. When they got to the settlement, they found Real Ali attempting to get between Doug Drug and Benz, who were apparently trying to kill each other. They were in the center of a circle made up of inhabitants, watching the fight with fear on their faces, or avidity or insanity, depending on the twists of their particular psyches. Benz clutched a forty-ounce beer bottle with the bottom smashed off; Doug held a long chunk of dark pallet wood like a ball bat. Someone had kicked the fire barrel over. Smoke and sparks and cinders filled the air, the red glow from the fire lighting the faces of the combatants from below: Doug's dark skin like a furnace coal, his eyes red-lit, Benz's big teeth glittering demonically, the large black warts on her sweaty face throwing little moving shadows. The two fighters, the man and the woman, shouted curses at one another, not very imaginatively but with feeling and much spit. Ali was dancing between them, arms out, palms flattened, making soothing noises, "Come on, man, you don't wanna hurt nobody"; but they did. Lila Sue stood off to one side, in front of the hut she shared with Benz, howling, seemingly without taking a breath, her knuckles screwed into her eye sockets like spark plugs.

Grale moved instantly to stand before Doug and started to talk in his sweet voice, the meaningless, calming nonsense spoken to mad dogs or crazies. The poised stick wavered. Benz screamed and tried a dash around Ali. She was a great heavy sack of a woman, swaddled like l'homme Michelin in many layers, and she drove him backward several steps. Doug swung his stake at David. The blow whistled by his ear and landed on his shoulder. He staggered almost to his knees. Still, he did not try to protect himself. He spread his arms outward, martyrlike, offering himself.

"Hit me again, Doug!" he cried. "Does that make you feel better? Go ahead, hit me!"

Without knowing exactly how she had come by it, Lucy found she had a piece of fractured concrete in her hand, about the size of a softball, with a protruding sharp edge, and she found herself running toward Doug, around the struggling Ali and Benz, toward his blind side.

"Lucy! No!" David shouted. What she heard, though, was only the breath rushing through her mouth and the drum of her mother's blood in her ears. She wound up like an outfielder and slugged the man as hard as she could behind his ear, and when he went down, she was kneeling on his chest with the rock raised high above her head for the death blow when David swept her into his arms and smothered with his body the demon she had somehow become.

"What, um, what happened?" Candlelight on faces, David's and Ali's. She looked around. They were in Ali's hovel of cardboard, pallet wood, and plastic, familiar ground, but something was wrong. She was lying on his mattress, and there should have been a table with the Qur'an on it, and a straight chair and the neatly stacked orange crates that held Ali's paperback library. But everything had been smashed and broken and pushed into piles. "Did he hit me?"

"No, girl," said Ali, "you hit him. Like to busted his head."

A shock of fear. She looked at David, who had an awful red scrape down one side of his neck. "I didn't hurt him, did I?"

Ali said, "Nah, he got a hard head, Doug."

She rubbed her face. "God! This is weird-I can't remember hitting him. I remember the fight, Doug and Benz and you trying to break it up, you and David, and then Doug hit David. I thought he was going to kill you. And then I…" She shook her head energetically. "No, it's… wait a second… now it's coming back. I had a rock. I hit him in the head with a rock."

"Yes, you did," said David gently. "That was a different Lucy than the one we usually see around church." She felt herself blushing and was glad of the dark.

Ali chuckled and said, "Good thing, too. The boy needed a rock upside his head. Fool been smoking sherms all morning. I hate that angel dust."

"Was that what the fight was about?" Lucy asked.

"Nah, I don't know what in hell that was about. I think Benz thought he was messing with Lila Sue. You know how she gets."

"I calmed her down," said David. "She's really a very loving person." He sighed. "I guess if we were going to get all social worky, we would try to find someplace for that girl, but somehow I can't bring myself to do it. They make each other so happy." He looked around and seemed to see the wreckage for the first time.

"What happened in here? Not Doug?"

"Nah, the damn cops," said Ali. He started picking up items, examining them for damage, and tossing those few that failed to meet his generous standards of usefulness out the door.

"Cops?" asked Lucy. "Cops can't do that. They can't even come in here without a warrant."

Ali laughed and said, "Uh-uh, sugar, warrant's for when they bust into a home. Me being a homeless man, I don't have no home, so I guess they don't need no warrant."

"I don't think that's true, but anyway, they had no right to break up your stuff. Why did they do it?"

Ali set an orange crate on end and placed a couple of books carefully on its shelf. "Well, you know they don't need no reason, but these particular cops that did it was looking for Canman. I told them I didn't know where he was staying. They said, I mean the white one, they said I do know, I was his running buddy, and he starts pushing me around, like they do, and I go, 'Officer, only thing I know is there is no God but God, and Mohammed is the messenger of God.' And my own name. Everything else is speculation, and did they want me to speculate. And I told them that if they wanted to know every damn thing I knew about Canman, they should go talk to the other cop who came around last night. That's when the white guy went nuts and started busting up my stuff. The black fella, he wasn't too enthusiastic about it, I could tell, but I guess he had to back up his partner's play."

David started to help Ali pick up, but the older man waved him away, saying he had his own way of doing things, and he didn't want anything good to be mistakenly tossed out. He set up his rickety table, and after wiping off and kissing his Qur'an, he placed it in the center. "The funny thing was I did see Canman this morning, early, just after I done my morning prayers. I'm always the first one up around here anyway. He was skulking around the paper house with his dog, just like a dog his own self, to look at him. I asked him was he coming back to live here, and he snarled at me, just like a damn dog. Pulled a knife on me, too. Boy was scared, I tell you that."

"Of what?" asked Lucy. "Of the cops?"

"Maybe. The first cop kind of hinted that they had him in their sights for the slasher since Fake Ali got it. That would scare me. But, look, that Canman, he been scared for a long time, scared of stuff that go way past the cops. Stuff nobody but him can see. A sad cat, that Canman."