Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

She decides to call 911, but then stops herself. A rescue vehicle from the fire department will have a police escort attached. Things always get complicated when you involve the police. They’ll want to know what she’s doing inside a locked car lot anyhow. Maybe she hid there after closing time, intending to pop car doors and trunks and steal parts, hubcaps, radios and CD players, planning to throw them over the fence to an accomplice on the street. Didn’t expect a guard dog to mess up her plans, did she? Maybe she hid in the lot after closing, intending to break through the back door into the showroom and steal the computers and office machines and any cash they stashed there. Before the police call off the dog and release her from her cage, she’ll have to prove her innocence. Which for a black person is never easy in this city. Never easy anywhere. She decides not to call 911.

That leaves her daughter, Gloria, and a small number of other people she knows and trusts — her pastor, a few of her neighbors, even her ex-husband, Gordon, whom she sort of trusts. Her son, Gordon Junior, who is more competent than anyone else she is close to, is stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. Not much he can do to help her. Gordon Senior will probably laugh at her for having put herself in this situation, and Gloria will simply panic and, looking for an excuse, start drinking again. She is too embarrassed to call on Reverend Knight or any of her women friends from the church or from the neighborhood, and she will never call on anyone from work. Although, if she can’t get free till nine tomorrow when Sunshine Cars USA opens again, she’ll be hours late for work and will have to call American Eagle Outfitters anyhow and explain why she’s late.

She thinks of hiding overnight inside one of the cars, sleeping on the backseat, but surely all the cars are locked, and in any case she is not going to climb down there and start checking doors to find out if one has been accidentally left unlocked. The dog will have her by the throat in thirty seconds. Her best option is to stay where she is until morning. It won’t be painful or cause her serious suffering to curl up and lie here overnight on the roof of the Ford Escape and try to doze a little, as long as she doesn’t fall asleep and accidentally roll over and tumble off the car onto the ground.

It’s almost dark now and the heat of the day has mostly dissipated. She hopes it won’t rain. Usually at this time of day clouds come in off the ocean bringing a shower that sometimes turns into a heavy rain that lasts for hours until the clouds get thoroughly wrung out. If that happens she will hate it, but she can endure it.

It’s quieter than usual out there in the world beyond the fence. Traffic is light, and no one is on the street — she can see Seventh Avenue all the way north to the bus stop at 103rd and in the opposite direction down to Ninety-fifth Street, where her pink shotgun bungalow is located three doors off Seventh, the windows dark, no one home. The narrow wooden garage she emptied out a week ago and where she planned to shelter her car tonight is shut and still emptied out, unused, waiting. Along Seventh the streetlights suddenly flare to life. The number 33 bus, nearly empty, rumbles past. A police cruiser speeds by in the opposite direction, lights flashing like the Fourth of July.

Using her purse as a pillow, she lies down on her side, facing Ninety-seventh Street. She can’t hear the dog’s growls anymore or his heavy, wet, open-mouthed breathing and figures either he is lying in the dark nearby trying to trick her into coming down from the roof or he is just making his rounds and will soon come back to make sure that in his brief absence she hasn’t tried to climb over the fence. She suddenly realizes that she is exhausted and despite her fear can barely keep her eyes open.

Then her eyes close.

SHE MAY HAVE SLEPT for a few minutes or it might have been a few hours, but when she opens her eyes again it’s dark. On the sidewalk just beyond the fence someone in a gray hoodie is jouncing in place, hands deep in his pockets, looking straight at her. He’s half hidden in the shadow of the building, beyond the range of the streetlight on Seventh, a slender young black man or maybe a man-size teenage boy, she can’t tell.

“Yo, lady, what you doin’ up there?”

She says nothing at first. What is she doing up there? Then says, “There’s a bad dog won’t let me get down. And the gate is locked tight.”

She sits up and sees now that he is a teenage boy, but not a boy she knows from the neighborhood. Mostly older folks live in the area, retired people who own their small homes and single parents of grown-up children and grandchildren like this one living in Overtown and Liberty City or out in Miami Gardens and the suburbs. He is younger than his size indicates, no more than thirteen or fourteen, probably visiting his mother or grandmother. He approaches the fence, when suddenly the dog emerges from darkness and rushes it, snarling and snapping through the bars, sending the boy back into the street.

“Whoa! That a bad dog all right!”

Ventana says, “Do me a favor. Go see if there’s a watchman or guard in the showroom. They not answering the phone when I try calling, but maybe somebody’s on duty there.”

The boy walks around to the front of the building and peers through the window into the showroom. Seconds later he returns. “Anybody there, he be sittin’ in the dark.”

The dog, panting with excitement, has staked out a position between the fence and the Ford Escape — his small yellow eyes, his forehead flat and hard as a shovel and his wide, lipless, tooth-filled mouth controlling both the boy on one side of the fence and Ventana on the other.

“If you got a phone, lady, whyn’t you call 911?”

“Be hard to explain to the police how I got in here,” she says.

“Yeah, prob’ly would,” he says. “How did you get in there?”

“Don’t matter. Looking for a car to buy. What matters is how am I gonna get out of here?”

They are both silent for a moment. Finally he says, “Maybe somebody with a crane could do it. You know, lower a hook so you could grab onto it and get lifted out?”

She pictures that and says, “No way. I’d end up on the evening news for sure.”

“I’m gonna call 911 for you, lady. Don’t worry, they’ll get you outa there.”

“No, don’t!” she cries, but it’s too late, he already has his cell phone out and is making the call.

A dispatcher answers, and the boy says he’s calling to report that there is a lady trapped by a vicious dog inside a car lot on Northwest Seventh and Ninety-seventh Street. “She needs to be rescued,” he says.

The dispatcher asks for the name of the car lot, and the boy tells her. She asks his name, and he says Reynaldo Rodriquez. Ventana connects his last name to the tag worn by a hugely fat woman she knows slightly who lives on Ninety-sixth and works the early shift at Esther’s Diner on 103rd. You can’t tell her age because of the fatness, but she’s likely the boy’s aunt or older sister, and he’s been visiting her. Obviously a nice boy. Like her Gordon Junior at the same age.

She hears Reynaldo tell the dispatcher that he personally doesn’t know the lady in the Sunshine Cars USA lot or how she got in there. He says he doesn’t think there is a burglar alarm, he doesn’t hear one anyhow, all he can see or hear is a lady trapped inside a locked fence by a guard dog. He says she is sitting on the roof of one of the cars to escape the dog. He listens and after a pause asks why should he call the police? The lady isn’t doing anything illegal. He listens for a few seconds more, says okay and clicks off.

“Told me the situation not 911’s job to decide on. Told me they just a call center, not the police. She said I was calling about a break-in. Told me to call the cops directly,” he says to Ventana. “Even gave me the precinct phone number.”