Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

A horn sounded behind me. The light had turned green, and I was holding everybody up. I pulled away, into the intersection.

The last I saw of the young man was that, as if galvanized by the sound of the horn, he had started crawling again.

A rectangular pattern, across the interstate and back along a side road, brought me to the corresponding staircase on the other side of the pedestrian walkway. I didn’t go up to intercept the kid. He’d be safe crossing the highway; the overpass was bounded on each side by a high chain-link fence. Even if he rose to his feet and walked, there was no way he could topple over into traffic.

In time he appeared at the top of the stairs, staggering, but nonetheless on his legs. He looked down at the steps as though they were an obstacle course, then wisely decided to descend on hands and knees, just like he’d gone up. I got out of the car and climbed up the stairs to meet him.

His body, viewed from above, was even more slender up close, and his hair looked a little too blond to be true. When he looked up from my running shoes to my face, that suspicion was confirmed: his features were clearly Asian. Hmong possibly, or Vietnamese.

I saw something else, too. He wasn’t just under 21; he was clearly under 18.

“Are you all right?” I said. “Can you hear me?”

His eyes focused in on my face. “Oh no,” he said in a tone of resigned dread. “Oh no. Police.”

How do they always know? I thought. I was wearing nothing remotely official: mid-calf-length leggings, a T-shirt, and a hooded jacket.

“Can you stand up?” I asked.

“I don’ want to go to juvie,” he said in the same tone. There was no accent in his voice, marking him clearly as second-generation American.

“I’m not arresting you,” I said.

“I hate it at juvie,” he moaned.

“One, I doubt you’ve ever been,” I said, hooking a hand around his upper arm and pulling. “Two, you’re not under arrest. Stand up.”

“No, no, no,” he said, refusing to yield to my pressure. He wasn’t heavy, but I couldn’t get him up without his cooperation.

“Kid,” I told him, “you’ve got something in your sleeve that might someday be a bicep. There’s got to be enough muscle in your quadriceps to get you on your feet.”

“I don’ want to go to juvie,” he said, still droning lifelessly.

“Up,” I said.

When we got to my car, I put him in the backseat. He was only five-eight or so, and thin, but it’d still be safer there in case he got squirrelly on the ride to wherever we were going. Sometimes drunks who couldn’t even get coordinated enough to walk properly suddenly recovered enough to become violent. I fastened the seat belt around him.

As I got behind the wheel, he said once again, “I don’t want to go in, I don’t want to go to juvie,” and fell bonelessly sideways to lie down, head to hipbone, on the backseat.

“Kid,” I said, “how many police officers have you seen that patrol while wearing workout clothes and driving an old car that smells like superglue fumes?”

His lips dropped slightly apart. Too many concepts at once; I’d blown his mind.

“Let me ask you something easier,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Special K.”

Of course. “No, your government name,” I said.

“Kelvin,” he said.

“Okay, Kelvin, where do you live?”

The address he slurred was becoming very familiar. I started the car, pulled away from the curb.

“It smells funny in here,” he said, ending with a slushy word that could have been Officer.

“Yeah, that’s the superglue I mentioned.”

“Is making me sick,” he said, and he didn’t sound good.

“Do you think alcohol might have something to do with that?”

“ Real sick,” he said.

“Kelvin,” I said, glancing in the rearview mirror, “if you throw up in my car, I’m going to ask the prosecutor for special circumstances.”

Special K,cowed by the thought of a vomiting-in-an-official-vehicle enhancement to whatever charge he believed he was facing, kept it together until we arrived at the towers.

I helped him out of the car, but as soon as I let go, he stumbled and nearly fell, sinking to his knees. He looked up, squinting, at the south tower.

“Home?” he asked, blinking.

“I told you that I wasn’t arresting you,” I reminded him.

“Oh good,” Kelvin said. Then his gaze clouded, his attention focused inward like a newscaster receiving breaking news through his earpiece, and he doubled over to vomit on my running shoes.

“You broke my streak,” I said.

An older sister, almost heartbreakingly beautiful in a cheap sateen robe, took in the sight of Kelvin with a disapproving thinning of the lips that told me this wasn’t the first time he’d been delivered home in such a state. “Thank you,” she whispered, and then, looking at my shoes, “Sorry.”

When I was outside again, my eyes strayed involuntarily upward, at the north tower.

Oh, why not? You’re here already.

In the confines of the little elevator, the odor of the vomit I’d mostly scraped off my shoes was unmistakable. I couldn’t go visiting like this. On the 26th floor, I detoured back from the elevator to the stairs, and took my shoes off on the landing, behind the stairwell door. There was no worry that they would tempt thieves. I took off my socks as well. There’s a dignity to bare feet that stocking feet just don’t have.

When Cicero answered the door, I said, “I was just in the neighborhood. I’ll leave if I’m interrupting something.”

“Where are your shoes?”

“They’re in the stairwell,” I said.

“I see,” Cicero said, as though this were completely reasonable. “Every time I consider asking you more about your personal life, something like this happens, and I realize how much more fascinating it is not to know.” He rolled backward in the doorway, admitting me.

I declined anything to eat, but Cicero made us both tea, and we went into his bedroom.

“Who’s this?” I said.

“Who?” Cicero asked.

I was looking at the photos on the low bookcase in his bedroom. “Him,” I said, tapping what looked like the oldest of the photos, in weathered black-and-white.

It was a young man on a horse. The man, a teenage boy, really, wore a broad-brimmed hat and what might have been his nicest clothes, dark trousers and a cream-colored collarless shirt. The horse was beautiful: obviously nearly as young as the boy, with a dark-brown or black coat that gleamed even in an old photo, neck arched with impatience at being reined in long enough for the photo to be taken.

“That’s my grandfather,” Cicero said. “In Guatemala.”

“How old is he, in the photo?”

“Eighteen,” Cicero said. “I never knew him; he died not long after I was born. But I’m told that he loved that horse. Back then, a fast horse was your five-liter. I guess it wasn’t really his, it was the family’s. But he thought of the horse as his, until one day he came home to find his father had sold it to pay for his sister’s wedding dress.”

“No shit?” I said, amused.

“Oh, yes. He was just beside himself,” Cicero said. “At least, that’s how the story goes.”

“Were you born there?” I asked.

“In Guatemala? No,” Cicero said. “Here in America. My parents wouldn’t even let Ulises and me learn Spanish until we were well grounded in English.”

“You know,” I said, “we were going to get back to the story of your brother, and we never did.”

Cicero picked up an unrelated photo on his bookcase, one in which he seemed to be hiking with a female friend, and set it back down. “There’s not much to tell,” he said.