Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

“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 airheads, 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 connecting 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 lowrent apartment 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 rubblestrewn 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 noman’sland. 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 choppeddown 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 Crowsea’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 khakicolored 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, lowheeled 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 Tshirt and a scuffed leather jacket that I hoped would make me look tough. I had some of my hair up in a topknot, 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 respectively.

“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 rundown 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 ....

My new plan was to head out towards the Tombs, then work my way over to Yoors where I’d follow Lori and take my picture of her and her pal in his monkeysuit. Mama didn’t raise any stupid kids, no matter what her neighbors thought.

So I gave them both a jaunty wave and set off down Gracie to where Lanois would take me north into the Tombs. Lori went up Yoors. Ruth was still standing by the stairs going down to the subway station by the time I lost sight of her, looking back through the crowds. My pink Mohawked admirer followed me until I turned up towards the Tombs, then he went whizzing back to his friends, expertly guiding his skateboard down the congested sidewalk like the pro he was. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen.

7

When you’re a nina—and maybe twentyone is still being a kid to some people—it’s not so weird to be worrying about who you are and how you’re ever going to fit in. But then you’re supposed to get a handle on things and by the time you’re my age, you’ve got it all pretty well figured out. At least that’s the impression I got when I

was a nina and twentyone looked like it was about as old as you ever wanted to get.