Ishmael Toffee by Roger Smith Page B

she knows some white man is offering a fortune of money, which is why these people have got themselves all worked up.
    Money.
    She doesn’t worry with it no more, not like them all around her. Asks herself: Katryn what would you do with big money like that? And she can’t for the life of her find an answer.
    So, while the others are looking for the kid, she knows it’s a good time for her and Long Jan to search the rubbish for empty bottles and old boxes and bits of wire and metal. All of this they drag down off the dump to their supermarket cart and take it to a house in Paradise Park where a man gives them coins, enough to buy them wine and maybe a half loaf. All the money they need.
    Katryn stumbles forward across the landfill. Hard sometimes to get the legs to do what she tells them. She knows every inch of this place like it’s her own yard, and she sees something white and shiny sticking up out the trash. Something new, brought in overnight. She scuttles across and bends down and shoves away some rubbish and sees it’s a fridge, still with its door on. Ja, now that door, when Long Jan breaks it off, will keep them drunk and happy for a day or two.
    Katryn waves him over and she tries to open the fridge door, then sees it’s held closed by a screwdriver. She grabs at the broken handle, but it slips from her shaking fingers and she falls to the ground, coughing. Lang Jan pulls out the screwdriver and opens the door and jumps back, making those funny little budgie noises.
    Katryn gets herself to her feet and stares into the fridge. She shuts her eye and opens it and wipes at it with her hand. Still sees the white child, folded up like a little dolly inside. She jabs a filthy finger into the child, but it don’t move. Just lies there, dead still.
    Katryn backs away now, instinct telling her this is trouble, this. Trouble they want no part of. But Long Jan kneels down and lifts the child out, very gentle, and it hangs limp from his big bucket hands, all dangly pink arms and legs like raw sausage.
    And then there’s a terrible noise and a wind that tugs Katryn’s rags away from her body and Long Jan lifts the white child high to the helicopter that swoops down like a bird, as if he wants to feed the child to it.
     

29
     
     
    Ishmael knows he’s dying. Feels the blood pumping out his belly, where the gangster’s bullet took him low. Watched enough gut-shot men to know that it’s a slow and painful business. Maybe the dead lying under these tombstones are having their say, after all.
    He stumbles his way out the graveyard, hiding inside the jacket with the hoodie he took from the gangster he smacked with the rock. Stumbles up toward the dump, hears the low roar of the crowd and flat smacking gunshots as the cops fire tear gas. People on the edges of the landfill run blindly, some of them sliding and falling down the side, a white haze hanging low over the trash.
    Ishmael, the edges of the world soft and blurred, somehow gets himself up the slope. The wind blows from behind him but his eyes still tear up from the gas. When he reaches the top of the rise he sees maybe two hundred people running in panic. Rows of cops in gas masks and riot gear advance across the trash trying to drive the mob back, away from the helicopter that has landed its skids on the garbage.
    Ishmael’s close enough to see a medic carrying the blonde child, running hunched down to avoid the whipping blades. The man hands Cindy’s lifeless body into the chopper and pulls himself inside, and the helicopter lifts off and banks over the landfill, clattering off.
    Ishmael stands and watches the chopper disappear, dust and shredded paper and fragments of plastic settling down on him in a soft, stinking rain. He wonders if the girly is dead and decides that it may be a blessing if she is.
    Then the cops advance and he is caught in a swirl of bodies, and Ishmael lets them take him like the tide and before he knows it he’s off the dump, down at the