“I don’t know how I’ll pay you back for this,” Clark said as he slipped on the shoes. He found it hard to look up at the older man. He was still angry and embarrassed about having his shoes stolen, but his sense of relief and gratitude toward the man made him just as uncomfortable.
“If you bought these...” Clark said, “I don’t have enough money…”
He wasn’t used to owing anyone anything. Even his foster parents had all been paid by the state.
“Saving my life not enough?” Charlie asked. “Then this is payment for taking care of Rufus while I was laid up in the hospital.”
The older man grinned. “Besides, I didn’t buy these. There’s places where you can get clothes if you need them.”
At Clark’s look, he said, “Don’t worry. They’re clean. I know the good places.”
“I don’t know much of anything,” Clark admitted. He’d felt lost for the previous two days and knew he was deeply out of his element.
“I thought you looked new,” Charlie said. “When I saw you go in there, I was sure of it.”
“How’d you know they’d steal my shoes?”
The older man chuckled. “When you live on the streets your feet are the most valuable thing you’ve got. You’ve got to take care of them. You hurt your feet and you can’t get to where you need to go. You can’t make money, you can’t eat…you can’t even run away when things get bad.”
“I can’t do any of that now,” Clark admitted. “Except for the running part.”
“I’ll show you,” Charlie said. “Let’s start with the clothes. You look like you could use a good jacket.”
************
“I don’t know why you made me get the whole outfit,” Clark said.
He’d gotten a good denim jacket and two pair of heavy denim blue jeans, a knitted cap that covered his head and would roll down over his ears and gloves. Clark had also gotten a pair of heavy long sleeved shirts and a third pair of torn jeans.
He was a little worried that his backpack wouldn’t hold all of the clothes.
“You wear layers, you don’t get frostbite,” Charlie said. “But you need a bad set of clothes sometimes too.”
“Why?” Clark asked.
“How are you going to get breakfast in your good clothes?” Charlie asked as they stepped into the alley.
Clark stared at him, and Charlie tapped the dumpster meaningfully.
Flinching, Clark scowled and said “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“You know what they call people with too much pride?” Charlie asked. When Clark shook his head, Charlie said,” They call them hungry.”
Despite being raised in Foster homes, Clark had never been forced to dig around in the trash for food like some kind of…he flushed as he realized he was being judgmental.
“Isn’t this like stealing?”
The older man shook his head. “They threw it away in a public area. There’s places with specific laws against diving, but it’s legal here.”
“Still,” Clark said reluctantly, “Don’t you get sick?”
“I threw my guts up for two days once,” Charlie admitted. “You learn to be careful about what kind of food you get. Supermarkets throw away a lot of perfectly good food- fruit that’s a little bruised, cans of food that are just barely past their expiration date.”
“So...” Clark said. “You want me to climb in there?”
“The collection truck comes in forty five minutes,’ Charlie said. “You don’t want to be inside when that happens…it’s a good way to get yourself killed.”
“How do you know the schedule?”
“This place has a service that comes an hour before they open in the morning. There’s other places that come an hour after they close. You live out here long enough and you find out the best places, then you learn the schedule. If you don’t, you end up in a red smear inside the trashman’s truck.”
Clark couldn’t help the look of distaste that crossed his face. Crawling around in dumpsters was something that rats did. He’d always considered himself a little better than that.
At his look Charlie said, “I can do it, but if I do, I’m not sharing any. Rufus eats enough for any three people on his own. You need to learn this.”
“Couldn’t I just earn some money and buy food?” Clark asked. Even stale convenience store food would be better than something out of the trash.
“Where are you going to cook it?” the older man asked. “I don’t suppose you’re carrying a stove or a refrigerator in that coat of yours?”
Clark shook his head. “I could buy bread and peanut butter.”
“Sure,” the older man said. “There’s a few things that’ll keep in your backpack, but how much room do you have? You’ve got to carry everything you own with you; if you leave it somebody will take it or throw it away.”
It wouldn’t take long to get sick of peanut butter either. Clark scowled as he realized what he was about to do.
Reluctantly he climbed into the dumpster.
**************
In addition to the food, Charlie had insisted that Clark gather every aluminum can he could find.
It had gotten easier when it had occurred to Clark to use his special vision, but he’d still come out covered in coffee grinds and old pasta. Charlie had insisted that they re-bag everything and keep the area around the dumpster clean.
“The stores turn a blind eye, but if we make a nuisance or a mess they’ll start calling the cops. They might start putting locks on the dumpster.“
Clark could see the wisdom in that, although he had trouble seeing how some of the men he’d seen at the shelter the night before would be able to see that far ahead.
“It would have been better if we’d gone to a place that picks up after the place closes,” Charlie admitted. “Everything wouldn’t be mostly frozen.”
After they’d left the scene, Charlie had gone into a small corner store and come out with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a roll of toilet paper. It had taken a while to find an out of the way place where nobody was likely to find them. They’d ended up in a small loading dock behind a warehouse in an industrial district.
It amazed Clark how far they’d walked carrying a trashbag filled with stolen food without anyone asking any questions. When he’d asked Charlie, the older man had simply responded, “People don’t look at us if they can help it. Sometimes that’s hard; other times it can be useful.”
The older man had insisted that Clark find a coffee can. He’d cleaned it out, stuffed the toilet paper inside and filled the can with the rubbing alcohol.
“Always use at least 70 percent,” he said. “Ninety will burn hotter, but it’s a little more expensive. The cheaper stuff will go out too fast.”
The can provided a surprising amount of heat, and it had already burned for more than forty five minutes.
“Don’t do this inside,” Charlie said. “At least not without good ventilation or you’ll suffocate. Probably not a good idea to fall asleep next to it in a tent either…you’ll burn to death.”
“Is this legal?”
“Setting a fire in town?” Charlie asked. “Strictly speaking, no. The cops take a dim view of people setting fires.”
Clark looked around. They were on a loading dock leading down into locked metal doors large enough to drive several vehicles.
“Aren’t you worried somebody will show up?”
Charlie shook his head. “This is a CostMart warehouse. They don’t do any loading until nighttime, nobody comes here during the day either, as long as you don’t try to break in.”
“I’d have thought they’d have had a gate,” Clark said. The area they were in was secluded, and he didn’t see any cameras, for which he was grateful.
Charlie looked serious suddenly. “They don’t need a gate. Nobody steals from CostMart.”
“I don’t understand,” Clark said. “How would they know?”
“They’d know.” The older man leaned forward. “Don’t even think about taking as much as a stick of gum from them.”
There was something almost frantic about the expression in the older man’s face, and Clark wondered if this was the first signs he’d seen that the man was crazy. He didn’t run around talking to unseen figures like some of the men
Clark had seen in the shelters, but there were other, more hidden kinds of crazy.
“It’s not like CostMart is the mafia,” Clark said. He laughed uneasily, eyeing the older man and wondered if this was the moment he’d show how crazy he really was.
“They’ve got ties to some really dangerous people,” Charlie said soberly. “People on the street know not to mess with them. It’s a good way to disappear permanently.”
The older man didn’t speak for a long time, and Clark decided to let him have his delusions. If believing that CostMart was a front for the mafia was the extent of his craziness, Clark would just avoid the subject altogether.
**************
“This isn’t bad,” Clark had to admit. On his own he could have used his heat vision to heat some of the cans, but he wouldn’t have had the cooking skill Charlie showed. His mother had planned on showing him how to cook, but she hadn’t gotten around to it before she’d died.
Life in foster care wasn’t about home cooked meals either. The one family he’d lived with where the mother had actually cooked hadn’t been interested in letting him in the kitchen, especially since he’d had a record of setting things of fire.
It was a simple meal- ranch style beans, corn, some three day old tortillas and some slightly outdated spam in a can, cooked in the can.
“You get more fresh stuff when everything isn’t frozen,” Charlie said. “Stale bread, fruit that’s misshapen or imperfect, stuff like that. Summertime is bad though…everything goes bad quick when the heat gets up and you have to go back to buying everything.”
The older man relaxed, warming his hands over the fire. Even though the toilet paper had begun to char in the middle, Clark could see that it still had quite a ways to go before it burned out. It had already been more than an hour.
“You don’t pit this hot in the trash,” Charlie said. “Unless you want to start a fire. Relax. That’s the thing about being on the streets. You’ve got nothing but time.”
Clark felt better after eating, even if he still felt a little queasy about where the food had come from as well as seeing Charlie use his fingers to pull food out of the can. At least there had been enough for them each to have their own cans, even if it had taken forever to cook.
Still, he was beginning to feel a little more confident that he was going to be able to make it. He’d learn everything he could, and unlike the thousands of other teenagers who were in his same situation, he had special gifts that would make life easier.
Life was looking brighter than it had at any time in the last forty eight hours, and that was something.
