Ishmael Toffee by Roger Smith Page A

wind a grown man. She lies still and for a moment he thinks he’s killed the fucken thing, then sees her lights are out but she’s still alive, her chest pumping, fighting for air.
    He hears shouting and a posse of homeless men are upon him, the leader nearly getting him with a plank thick with rusted nails. Angel rolls and the nails smack into the dirt next to his head. He comes out of the roll shooting, drops two of the men, and the others back off. Angel’s finger clicks on the empty chamber and he knows now how close he is to losing this race.
    A last burst of adrenaline drives him up and he lifts the kid and plunges on,  sees cops and ragged people streaming up over the lip of the dump like the plague. Hears the chopper before he sees it and drops to the ground as it clatters overhead. Then he’s up and running again, battling through the soft, wet, sucking garbage, the child a dead weight on his shoulders.
    The mob spots him again and he dodges between two mountains of trash and loses sight of them but he knows he has to ditch the kid. Hide it. Get his ass away and return for it later.
    He sees an old fridge lying on its back, white metal shining out from the garbage and he opens the door and releases a smell so foul that it overwhelms the stench all around him. The inside of the fridge is hairy with green mold and cockroaches swarm away from the open door.
    He drops the kid inside, folding her up like a puppet, and she fits perfect. He slams the door closed, hears the kiss of its rubber seal, and sees it’s got an old padlock hasp on it, lock long gone, though.
    A gleam of metal winks at him from inside the trash pile and he pulls free a screwdriver with a broken handle. Angel jams the hasp closed with the screwdriver and throws a few piles of junk over the fridge to camouflage it.
    Then he’s running again.
     
    ●
     
     
    Cindy wakes up and thinks, but how can you be awake, if everything is black, black, black?
    So she squeezes her eyes shut tight and then opens them again and sees nothing but that same darkness the color of ink. She tries to move her body and can’t, not even one little wormy inch, just feels something hard all around her, holding her tight, her knees squashed up to her face and her arms held fast against her sides. Feels scratchy, squirmy things running across her skin.
    She screams and she cries and she prays to gentle-Jesus-meek-and-mild, but her voice is small and squashed, like she’s hiding in a closet full of clothes—the way she did after she found her mommy lying in the red water.
    The shouting and the panic gets her fighting for air that isn’t there, just something hot and stinky that gets sucked into her when she gasps for breath, closing her throat like a hand.
    And then the darkness presses in on her and fills her up and she’s slipping away and knows she will never come back, and as it takes her she thinks: this is what happens to bad girls, Cindy Goddard.
     

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    Her name is Katryn. Her left eye was taken by a whore with a sharp stick and her reason by years of rotgut wine. She goes up the side of the dump on all fours, like an animal, grunting and wheezing through her toothless mouth. He follows her, like he always does, Long Jan.  Least that’s what she calls him.
     He had a name, she’s sure. Everybody got a name. But his went away when they cut out his tongue long ago in Pollsmoor Prison. So because he’s nice and tall she calls him Long Jan.
    Katryn’s right eye isn’t so good, and the world, anyways, is always blurred by the cheap booze she sucks from the silver bags, but she can see all the people up there on the dump, looking for that girly. She’s sure she spotted it, the child, this morning—or was it yesterday? Her memory isn’t so nice and bits of life fall together in a pile like the trash at her feet.
    But she seen that girly, clear as day, while she was getting her jollies with Long Jan, him lying under her, pointing at the child. And