Don DeLillo - The Angel Esmeralda

Ismael had his headquarters on three and the nuns hustled up the stairs. Grace had a tendency to look back unnecessarily at the senior nun, who ached in her movable parts but kept pace well enough, her habit whispering through the stairwell.

“Needles on the landing,” Gracie warned.

Watch the needles, sidestep the needles, such deft instruments of self-disregard. Gracie couldn’t understand why an addict would not be sure to use clean needles. This failure made her pop her cheeks in anger. But Edgar thought about the lure of damnation, the little love bite of that dragonfly dagger. If you know you’re worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Ismael stood barefoot on dusty floorboards in a pair of old chinos rolled to his calves and a bright shirt worn outside his pants and he resembled some carefree Cuban ankle-wading in happy surf.

“Sisters, what do you have for me?”

Edgar thought he was quite young despite the seasoned air, maybe early thirties — scattered beard, a sweet smile complicated by rotting teeth. Members of his crew stood around smoking, uncertain of the image they wanted to convey. He sent two of them down to watch the van and the food. Edgar knew that Gracie did not trust these kids. Graffiti writers, car scavengers, probably petty thieves, maybe worse. All street, no home or school. Edgar’s basic complaint was their English. They spoke an unfinished English, soft and muffled, insufficiently suffixed, and she wanted to drum some hard g ’s into the ends of their gerunds.

Gracie handed over a list of cars they’d spotted in the last few days. Details of time and place, type of vehicle, condition of same.

He said, “You do nice work. My other people do like this, we run the world by now.”

What was Edgar supposed to do, correct their grammar and pronunciation, kids suffering from malnutrition, unparented some of them, some visibly pregnant — there were at least four girls in the crew. In fact she was inclined to do just that. She wanted to get them in a room with a blackboard and to buzz their minds with Spelling and Punctuation, transitive verbs, i before e except after c. She wanted to drill them in the lessons of the old Baltimore Catechism. True or false, yes or no, fill in the blanks. She’d talked to Ismael about this and he’d made an effort to look interested, nodding heavily and muttering insincere assurances that he would think about the matter.

“I can pay you next time,” Ismael said. “I got some things I’m doing that I need the capital.”

“What things?” Gracie said.

“I’m making plans I get some heat and electric in here, plus pirate cable for the Knicks.”

Edgar stood at the far end of the room, by a window facing front, and she saw someone moving among the poplars and ailanthus trees in the most overgrown part of the rubbled lots. A girl in a too-big jersey and striped pants grubbing in the underbrush, maybe for something to eat or wear. Edgar watched her, a lanky kid who had a sort of feral intelligence, a sureness of gesture and step — she looked helpless but alert, she looked unwashed but completely clean somehow, earthclean and hungry and quick. There was something about her that mesmerized the nun, a charmed quality, a grace that guided and sustained.

Edgar said something and just then the girl slipped through a maze of wrecked cars and by the time Gracie reached the window she was barely a flick of the eye, lost in the low ruins of an old firehouse.

“Who is this girl,” Gracie said, “who’s out there in the lots, hiding from people?”

Ismael looked at his crew and one of them piped up, an undersized boy in spray-painted jeans, dark-skinned and shirtless.

“Esmeralda. Nobody know where her mother’s at.”

Gracie said, “Can you find the girl and then tell Brother Mike?”

“This girl she being swift.”

A little murmur of assent.

“She be a running fool this girl.”

Titters, brief.

“Why did her mother go away?”

“She be a addict. They un, you know, predictable.”

If you let me teach you not to end a sentence with a preposition, Edgar thought, I will save your life.

Ismael said, “Maybe the mother returns. She feels the worm of remorse. You have to think positive.”

“I do,” Gracie said. “All the time.”

“But the truth of the matter there’s kids that are better off without their mothers or fathers. Because their mothers or fathers are dangering their safety.”

Gracie said, “If anyone sees Esmeralda, take her to Brother Mike or hold her, I mean really hold her until I can get here and talk to her. She’s too young to be on her own or even living with the crew. Brother said she’s twelve.”

“Twelve is not so young,” Ismael said. “One of my best writers, he does wildstyle, he’s exactly twelve more or less. Juano. I send him down in a rope for the complicated letters.”

“When do we get our money?” Gracie said.

“Next time for sure. I make practically, you know, nothing on this scrap. My margin it’s very minimum. I’m looking to expand outside Brooklyn. Sell my cars to one of these up-and-coming countries that’s making the bomb.”

“Making the what? I don’t think they’re looking for junked cars,” Gracie said. “I think they’re looking for weapons-grade uranium.”

“The Japanese built their navy with the Sixth Avenue el. You know this story? One day it’s scrap, next day it’s a plane taking off a deck. Hey, don’t be surprise my scrap ends up in North, you know, Korea.”

Edgar caught the smirk on Gracie’s face. Edgar did not smirk. This was not a subject she could ever take lightly. Edgar was a cold-war nun who’d once lined the walls of her room with aluminum foil as a shield against nuclear fallout from Communist bombs. Not that she didn’t think a war might be thrilling. She daydreamed many a domed flash in the film of her skin, tried to conjure the burst even now, with the USSR crumbled alphabetically, the massive letters toppled like Cyrillic statuary.

They went down to the van, the nuns and three kids, and with the two kids already on the street they set out to distribute the food, starting with the hardest cases in the projects.

They rode the elevators and walked down the long passageways. Behind each door a set of unimaginable lives, with histories and memories, pet fish swimming in dusty bowls. Edgar led the way, the five kids in single file behind her, each with two bags of food, and Gracie at the rear, carrying food, calling out apartment numbers of people on the list.

They spoke to an elderly woman who lived alone, a diabetic with an amputated leg.

They saw a man with epilepsy.

They spoke to two blind women who lived together and shared a seeing-eye dog.

They saw a woman in a wheelchair who wore a fuck new york T-shirt. Gracie said she would probably trade the food they gave her for heroin, the dirtiest street scag available. The crew looked on, frowning. Gracie set her jaw, she narrowed her pale eyes and handed over the food anyway. They argued about this, not just the nuns but the crew as well. It was Sister Grace against everybody. Even the wheelchair woman didn’t think she should get the food.

They saw a man with cancer who tried to kiss the latexed hands of Sister Edgar.

They saw five small children bunched on a bed being minded by a ten-year-old.

They went down the passageways. The kids returned to the van for more food and they went single-file down the passageways in the bleached light.

They talked to a pregnant woman watching a soap opera in Spanish. Edgar told her if a child dies after being baptized, she goes straight to heaven. The woman was impressed. If a child is in danger and there is no priest, Edgar said, the woman herself can administer baptism. How? Pour ordinary water on the forehead of the child, saying, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” The woman repeated the words in Spanish and English and everyone felt better.