TEAMWYNN

Local Medicine. Global Media. South Africa.

Cement Pad

Posted on | December 25, 2006 | Comments Off

As I neared the addled soul, she put a filtered Marlboro into the corner of her mouth and lit it. Dawn was a few hours ago and she had been smoking since before then, I figured. Her eyes were on me.
A cool wind came from the north. The naked maple trees and the brown grass all waited for spring to quit teasing and show up. The apartment complex had acquired the smell of cheap burnt wood, which still lingered heavily in the mornings. I liked it. I liked the cold. She probably didn’t. She hardly wore anything.
A blue jean jacket, which would have done her scrawny white shoulders some good, laid over her backpack, her mobile dresser. She acted like she was sunning herself, like she wanted to be there.
She sucked her cigarette, spit out the smoke, and spoke while I still walked over. “You look like a man with something on his mind.” Her voice wavered.
“I am,” I said.
She adjusted her seat on a cement pad built for the air conditioning units. We were in a grassy area hidden behind the last building in the complex. Except for this patch of winter-brown grass, the complex was all parking lots and painted lines. I often went there seeking solitude. Over the fence grew a stand of maple trees and tangling shrubs with an enchanting set of tire tracks, overgrown with grass and disappearing into the underbrush. This morning, the spot clearly suited her too, since it was a place to sit and out of the way and behind everything.
The bright sun made the grass and the building and the cement pad blanched like exposed film, and she looked like an angel; her pale skin glowed like holiness. We both squinted to see.
“You come back here the other day,” she said. “I saw you over there.”
Of course she had. That was when I had started to say something, made a butterball expression, buckled, and slunk away.
What worried me most was I lived here. If something went wrong, I mean, I couldn’t just disappear. It was the kind of complex most people simply came and went from, and kept their heads down while doing it. But even so, it wasn’t big enough to disappear: one entrance, one exit. It wasn’t like the brochures either, if it even had brochures, I’m not sure it did, but I imagine, if it had brochures, it wouldn’t be anything like those. The place was good for students who had no money, for single mothers working two jobs, for the government assisted. But there were others. They were why you kept your head down, people who hadn’t found peace with the world or didn’t want peace with it or something.
How many nights ago had I called the police? I can’t even remember, now. I heard gunshots in the parking lot, half a dozen of them, which woke me up; or maybe it was the woman screaming. I don’t remember. But when I came back from the phone to the window to listen to her scream some more, I felt stupid. I should have called the cops to save the fool who shot the gun, because as loud as she could, in the dead of night, with the whole place listening, that woman gave that gunman the most ferocious, seamless, verbal battering, I ever heard.
In any case, things like that made people guarded around here. It did me.
I knelt down in the grass four feet away from her shoeless feet and chipped pink toenails. Her narrow shoulders and bare arms pinched together, as I imagined they had in the cold hours before dawn.
“Did you spend the night out here?” I asked.
“No. Not all the night,” she said. “I stay awake. I nod, but I wake up. So, it’s not bad. My boyfriend . . .”
She made a backhanded, swatting-fly motion to fill-in the rest of the story, which she assumed I could guess.
“Well, I know some people, if you need a place,” I said.
“No, my boyfriend. He’s just testing to see if I leave, and I won’t. Just a broken heart, that’s all. Testing me, he’ll let me back in, maybe a little while.” She took a hasty drag. “Only threw me out this morning, so, it’s all right. Stayed awake. Things you do for love. You know?”
She dug into her backpack for something but didn’t find it right away and gave up. One of the broad blonde curls over her forehead bothered her, and she brushed it to the side with a flick of her hand. To me it didn’t move at all, but she turned her attention back to her cigarette, satisfied. She took another pull and expelled the smoke through whistle-tight lips.
A flood of stupid things to say splashed around my mind, but I ignored them, for which I’m glad, now that I think about it.
“That’s hard.”
“You have no idea, no idea,” she said putting her hand up, palm towards me, shaking her head as if words couldn’t communicate what she knew. And maybe they couldn’t. They probably couldn’t.
“Well, I saw you out here the day before, and just wanted you to know there are other places . . . if you’re in trouble.”
She finished with her cigarette and stubbed it out on the cement pad. I saw the other butts sitting there in a row beside the black ash mark. She took the extinguished butt and lined it up with the others, so they were all even and ordered. Then she slapped her red and white Marlboro box. A brown filament poked out. Pulling with her lips, she drew it from the box and went again into her backpack, rooting around for something.
Inside her backpack were crumpled shirts, faded blue jeans, curling iron, can of hairspray. As she dug, these contents slowly spilled over onto the cement pad. A padded bra— red, with ribbons—rolled over the other clothes and onto the grass. My first thought was to hand it back to her. My second led me to pick up a stick and poke at an anthill near my feet.
After blaming Jesus Christ for not finding what she looked for, she asked me, “Do you have a light?”
“Nope, sorry,” I said, but at the same time pointed to the folder of matches beside her right thigh.
“There they are,” she said. “Sometimes I put these in the funniest places, always looking for them. I must have a hundred stashed around our apartment, makes him crazy, having so many. Yells his head off about it.” She grinned at what she had said.
As she talked, I thought of the white slip of paper management had left on our door six months ago. Public Safety Notice: “At 3:00 am, Sunday, October 17, two black men, late twenties, forced entry to Apartment #303 and fought with a tenant and shot his wife before fleeing the complex. The woman was taken to the emergency room. Police are still searching for the suspects.”
The real story came out a few days later from management that there were no black men involved. The woman and her husband were fighting, and she had locked him out. He got a gun from somewhere, his truck or something, and when she finally let him in, he shot her. Of course she lied to the police.
Now, when I hear shouting in the complex, escaping from behind closed doors, at night, when sound travels, I wonder. Not about the yelling. People yell. My wife and I yell. What couple doesn’t yell? But when raised, angry voices echo down the apartment canyons, and then halt, abruptly, I wonder.
“If you needed a place . . .”
“My boyfriend is just testing me, you know, I know. To see if I go away, but I won’t. This is what I do for him. I do so much for him. You have no idea. To treat me like this . . . I love him. Damn these things.”
The wind kept blowing around the cup of her hands and putting out the match before she could light her cigarette.
“I’m in love too, but . . .” I said and shrugged my shoulders. “There’re other places . . . other guys.”
I felt I crossed a line. She got her cigarette lit.
I poked at the anthill, and a troop of red ants came to the surface to do battle with my stick. I had turned their smooth dirt dome into a volcanic bowl.
“I know what it must look like. I know. Like I’m a hoe, sitting out here with my backpack, barefoot. But that’s what you do, for love. He’s all I . . . it’ll be all right, I know . . . my parents don’t even know . . . my mom thinks . . .”
Whatever traversed her mind left me out. She sniffed like she might cry. I saw her eyes wet over. With her middle finger she dabbed the side of her nose.
“But I don’t care,” she said. “I love him. He’ll see. He’ll take me back when he sees.”
Other ants surfaced frantically to rebuild their mound.
“There’s options, you know,” I said. “Other options. I can make a phone call for you. I live just over there in number five.”
I pointed. She couldn’t see from where she sat, but she acted like she could, craning a careless glance the direction of my finger.
“I have a place,” she said. “Some people might say I’m . . . but I’m not, I love him, what can you do? It’s love. I don’t care what it looks like, what people say.”
“Hey. I’m not judging. I’ve gone down my own roads. I’m just…”
“I’m fine.”
“Alright.”
I had more to say, but didn’t. I wanted to say something about Jesus and hope and God and life can be different, but didn’t.
In the cold wind she crossed her arms and rubbed her bony shoulders: they would have done better under the jean jacket still lying beside her. I think she said thanks and I said no problem. I just remember the ants, more than anything, freaking out and trying to put their dirt mound back together.

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