“I’m never doing that again,” Clark said, staring at the thirteen dollars he held in his hand.
“It’s not for everybody,” Charlie admitted. “Personally I hate panhandling. It offends my pride in ways that digging through a dumpster doesn’t.”
“Then why did you make me…?” Clark asked. It had been humiliating asking people for money and in five hours he’d only gathered thirteen dollars. That was less than minimum wage.
He’d seen others making more money, but they were much more aggressive, and he’d seen them telling what seemed to be different lies to different people.
Charlie carefully folded the cardboard sign and put it in the trash. “You never know what’s going to happen in life. Any skills you develop can make the difference between being hungry and being safe.”
“Safe?” Clark asked as the older man picked up his pack and absently petted Rufus.
“You get too hungry, you get weak. You get weak, you get slow. Slow is never safe.” Charlie stared off into the distance, and then shook his head. “Even if you never use it for yourself, you might be able to help someone else.
Clark shoved the money in his pocket. “I’m never doing this for myself again,” he said, knowing that he’d be willing to beg if it was for someone else.
“You don’t have to,” Charlie said. “Let’s go.”
“Where now?” Clark asked.
“Dinner.”
**************
It was good that the snow was finally melting, although Clark could tell from the reactions of the people around him that it was still cold.
Dinner apparently consisted of slightly stale bread and donuts.
“They just throw this out?” Clark asked.
“Bakeries are great places to get food,” Charlie said. “They have to have everything fresh or people won’t buy it.”
Clark found himself particularly enjoying the jelly filled donuts. The fact that they were slightly stale barely registered.
“There are a few places where the employees cover everything in bleach so nobody can do this,”
Charlie continued. “Usually places where people
keep making messes, or they’re afraid somebody will get sick and sue. That’s one of the reasons it’s important to make as little mess and fuss as possible.”
“Some of the guys panhandling got pretty aggressive,” Clark said.
When he’d been younger, he’d have been intimidated by some of the tactics he’d seen. He’d almost been tempted to intervene a couple of times.
“Guys on drugs start getting twitchy and desperate, they can get pretty aggressive,” Charlie said. “They’re worse than the crazy ones.”
Charlie had room to talk, what with his paranoia about CostMart. But maybe that was what he meant. Maybe you could talk to some people and they’d seem totally normal until you hit the one area of their delusion.
“A lot of the crazy guys see things and hear voices,” Charlie said. “Schizophrenia. They can get pretty paranoid. There’s medications now, but sometimes they aren’t pretty.”
He sped up a little, and Clark could hear that the older man was sounding a little winded. Clark had no problem keeping up with him, and doubted that he’d have had a problem even if he hadn’t been different from other fifteen year olds.
“Ten years ago you didn’t see any of those guys,” Charlie continued. “It used to be that if somebody thought you were crazy they’d lock you up and throw away the key and nobody would ever see you again. I hear some of those places were the closest thing you could find to hell on earth.”
Clark shuddered. He’d heard stories from some of the other foster kids that had given him nightmares.
“Things are better now, and they keep getting better, but when they let everybody out they didn’t exactly set them up with a house and a job. Still, at least they get a chance to have some kind of life now that they’ve changed the laws.”
Clark found that he suddenly didn’t want to talk about being locked away for life. It was too much like the warnings his father had given him all throughout his childhood.
If anyone discovered his true nature, they wouldn’t hesitate to lock him away, assuming they didn’t just cut him open.
“So why do people get hooked in the first place?” Clark asked.
“Wasn’t so long ago lots of people thought drugs were fine. Tune in, turn out, whatever,” Charlie said. He scowled. “You live out here long enough, you’ll see people waste away to practically nothing.”
“So why start?” Clark asked again.
“You’ve been pretty busy since you left…wherever you came from, right?” Charlie asked.
Clark nodded. Survival hadn’t left him much time to sit around and think, and learning from Charlie had been like going back to school, a school he needed if he was going to survive.
“Thing is, it’s not going to take you long to learn your way around,” Charlie said. “Surviving will get to be old hat, and it really won’t take a lot of your day. Then what will you do?”
“I’ll pick up jobs at the Home Depot or CostMart parking lot,” Clark said.
“There’ll be twenty guys from Mexico waiting for the job, and even if you get it, it won’t happen every day. What will you do with the rest of your time?”
“I…don’t know.” Clark said. He’d never really had any choice in what he’d do with his time, not since his parents had died at least. His life had revolved around schoolwork, chores and sleep.
“And that’s the problem for a lot of guys,”
Charlie said. “What are you going to do? You don’t have a TV. You don’t have board games. You don’t have one of those newfangled Atari thingamajigs. You can’t invite friends over.”
The streets were getting deserted, and the sun was setting. Charlie stopped to catch his breath. He pulled a cap from his pack and slipped it over his head.
“If you live in a shelter it’s hard to keep a job because they want you in line by four thirty. If you don’t live in a shelter, it’s hard to keep a job because it’s hard to shower and keep clean. If you don’t work or go to school, that’s a lot of hours to fill.”
Clark nodded. School had at least been a shelter for him; he’d enjoyed learning and even when things weren’t good at home, teachers appreciated and encouraged bright students. At times those strokes to his ego had been the only affection he’d had.
At least he hadn’t acted out like a lot of his foster brothers and sisters.
“A lot of guys go stir crazy,” Charlie said, panting. “They get so stressed out by having nothing to do that they try a little something. About half the guys on the streets end up on drugs.”
“I thought the drugs were why they were on the street in the first place,” Clark said.
“Some of them, I guess,” Charlie said. He looked distracted, peering up and down the street.
“What’s going on?” Clark asked.
He didn’t hear anything nearby, other than some cats in the alley up ahead, but he wondered what had the older man so spooked.
The fact that the sun was setting might have had something to do with it. It was twilight, and the street lights hadn’t yet been lit.
Charlie stepped into an empty lot overgrown with weeds. Old tires could be seen piled in a corner of the lot. Glancing behind him one final time,
Charlie disappeared behind the clump of tires, pulling out two shopping carts.
“Don’t those belong to the store?” Clark asked.
Charlie shook his head. “Got these off a guy who died. I usually can’t handle more than one at a time. I tried tying Rufus to the other one, but he kept knocking it over. He may be the size of a horse, but he doesn’t like doing a lick of work.”
He gestured, and Clark reluctantly took one of the carts.
He hoped the next lesson wasn’t as humiliating as the last one.
****************
It seemed as though they had been walking forever, pushing the carts through the deserted streets. To Clark’s ears, the sounds of the carts wheels seemed thunderous, echoing in the distance. The streetlights in this area were infrequent and those that existed often didn’t work.
Occasionally they saw figures moving in the darkness, hunched over the doors of parked cars with flashlights. Clark felt outraged, sure that they were up to no good, but he felt helpless. He couldn’t be sure that they weren’t locked out of their own cars. If he burned out the tires on someone’s car and stranded them in this kind of neighborhood, he’d feel terrible, especially if something happened to them.
Still, it felt like the kind of rationalization people used so they didn’t have to do anything when they saw something wrong. His parents hadn’t raised him that way.
He was indecisive, but each time he’d had to hurry to catch up with Charlie and the moment had been lost.
Clark could see fairly well despite the darkness, although there were places that were too dark even for him to see. Charlie seemed to move as much by memory as by sight, and Rufus had a sense of smell to guide him.
“Where are we going?” he asked finally.
“To the promised land,” Charlie said, a gleam in his eye.
In the distance as they turned the corner Clark could see lights. He could hear the sounds of loud music.
“I’m too young to go to a bar,” Clark said.
“We’re not going to the bar,” Charlie said. “We’re going behind it.”
****************
Collecting five dollars worth of cans earlier in the day had taken almost thirty minutes even using Clark’s x-ray vision. He’d had to wade through spoiled food, coffee grinds and even had seen one bottle that seemed like it was filled with urine.
This was something else entirely.
In less than five minutes they’d filled both the shopping carts with what had to be forty dollars’ worth of cans each, piled high. He could smell beer.
“I’d say to collect the bottles too if we had the time,” Charlie said. “You can get a nickel apiece for them.”
“Are we in a hurry?” Clark asked.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Charlie said. “You think we’re the only ones who know about this?”
They both rolled their carts down the darkened alley as quickly as they could. Before they could turn the corner, though, Clark could see lights behind them as a truck turned into the alley.
“Go,” Charlie said urgently. He began to jog with the cart. Clark turned the corner, but he could hear angry shouts from behind him.
“Do these belong to those guys?”
Charlie wheezed and said, “There’s a Mexican street gang that rides around in trucks grabbing the easy pickings and pushing the rest of us around.”
They reached the next intersection and Charlie said, “Turn!”
It was too late. As Clark turned the corner, the lights of the vehicle were already all around them.
The truck behind them accelerated, its engine roaring to life as the men in the vehicle tried to run them down.
