In the Slammer With Carol Smith Read Online Free Page A

very hot nights she might go to one of the docks on the lower river, a family one, not the gay one where she might be unwelcome. By day she might stay in the pad, cleaning herself, keeping up her Lopez connection. To Angel, who wanted to know where she went, she said—after a gap meant to show she was making things up: ‘Turkey country. I have a brother there.’ He asked if he could come along. After which she answered: ‘Not on the bike.’ Kids understand the future; it propped up the now. They didn’t really believe in it.
    The summer went, like a picture she was in.

G OLD TOOK VACATION all of August, like she always did. Time out for me, else I might have told her about the Cat Club, which I must not do; that would be joining up with her, over the long-term case that is me. Last time she comes, end of July, I am there of course, though I had spent the night before on the street. I do that the day before she comes; it keeps me limber against her influence. Summers though, the pad itself has a pull. Carmen gave me a window-blind that grades the sun down to lemony. ‘I only have one window,’ I grudged at her, but she has such courtesy you find yourself saying thanks. Lopez could fix the jammed window in the back, that opened on the air-shaft—she said. ‘Only put a security grill, so nobody can come down from the roof.’ So, since her husband don’t work Wednesday, that has been done and afterwards she is introducing me to the tea called mate; she is not Puerto Rican like him but South American.
    She has brought the black gourds you drink it from, and the metal straws. The gourds have metal bases. I look closer—‘Silver.’—and she nods; the Club has made me talk more. The gourds were a wedding present from her six aunts when she married Lopez after Angel came. She is wearing her hair very high these days, in a basket of curls which her face is too strong for, and has bought a couple of housedresses in too small a size; Lopez has a woman in the bar downstairs.
    ‘I had aunts,’ I tell her. ‘They had a house full of games.’ Telling her is only dropping it down a slot, like you do the lapel clip-on the museums give you on entry; when you leave it vanishes, but you’ve paid. I could almost say where the house was; the location would mean nothing to her. It was like an old nag of a horse, that house, its bones poking up like haunches from the lawn, and had a real horse to match, so old that we never got to ride, but there was a game of parcheesi always set up and ready for us in the window-bay.
    The mate is bitter, which I like. Sipping, I see the iron cage Lopez has put over the air-shaft window in the back half-room, which is now a tiny cell. ‘Looks like I keep a gorilla here.’ Angel, who is oiling the bike he now comes to see every day after school, and nagging his mother for money to buy an ice-cream stick with, says, ‘Would the gorilla be touched by God?’ Carmen, mouthing him to hush, says ‘Get out of here, Angel. Go ask your father for the ice-cream money. You know where.’
    We both stare at her. She doesn’t like him to go in the bar.
    He runs up again to say, ‘Carol’s lady is sitting on the stoop.’
    ‘Hah, she don’t know we have bells now,’ Carmen says. Lopez fixed the old wires. She is still building him up, for me to hear. ‘We go now. Come, Angel.’
    ‘No, stay. You never met the SW.’
    So she is still there, in her high-collared, no-sleeve starchy pink when Gold walks in. Out of breath, and the way the summer city can do to people—creased and lowdown from what they usually are. But also more faded on her own. I want to build her up. ‘Carmen, this is my social worker; she knows about the roach campaign. Gold—you met Angel; he’s her boy. This is Carmen; she—.’ Knows about the medicine in the fridge, though I have never said. I see I don’t have to say any of it. They both know their place in my life.
    ‘You give her some mate,’ Carmen says. ‘I bring