The Last Call

“Of course she does,” Hank said.

“They’re gone,” the girl said.

“Who's gone?” Julie asked her.

“The bad men.”

“Oh,” Hank said.

There was a long story here, in the side yard of a dilapidated duplex in a dilapidated neighborhood, in the little girl's eyes and her wan frame. I could already see the additional trouble brewing, coming on with the inevitability of bad storm.

I looked at Julie and she was looking at the kid, seeing what I'd already figured out, maybe even more. And Julie being Julie, invited the additional trouble right on in to pull up a chair and sit a spell.

“Where's your mama, honey?”

“She gone.”

Of course she is, I thought.

We put our guns away in silent agreement.

“Where’d she go?”

The kid turned her head and gestured back toward the thicket to the back of the property, or maybe just generally back towards Greater Austin.

“Mama wasn't doing nothin' except smokin’ cheese for a whole year.”

Cheese. It was street-slang for crack cocaine in these parts, and I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't traversed certain neighborhoods in Austin where the junkies were brazen enough to shout it out to cars going by.

Hank was talking low, not moving his lips, and he was talking to Julie-as if it would have done any good. “There's agencies that handle this kind of thing,” he said.

Julie darted Hank a quick, angry look. Hank raised both hands a trifle, took a step back, and she turned her attention back to the kid again.

“Then she takes up with Melvin Hobbes one day and they go to the store, only they don’t come back.”

“How long ago, honey? And what's your name?” Julie asked.

“Keesha. Don’t know how long.” This said, Keesha hopped up and sat on the rusting AC unit and regarded us with just a little less interest. I was willing to bet that she'd heard promises and offers to help in the past.

“Those two bad men left this mornin'. I had to act like my mama was here so they wouldn't chase after me no more.”

“Very smart,” Julie said, and turned to look at me. There was a plea in her eyes. I found myself nodding, slowly.

Julie sat beside Keesha, and they chatted away. Hank and I moved around behind the duplex to have a look.

There are some places that simply don't have a good vibe to them. I expect you could probably cut the grass back, replace the bad wood, paint things and generally clean them up, but like as not that vibe would still be there, if only subdued. The ramshackle duplex where Keesha lived and where Jake and Freddie-the friendly neighborhood sniper-patrol-had set up their base camp was like that. The back yard had weeds up to three feet tall in places and had been trampled back and down where little brown feet had often stepped. There was scattered trash here and there which consisted mainly of candy wrappers and chip bags of the convenience story variety. I suspected that there was a sympathetic convenience store clerk somewhere close by that just couldn’t say “no” to sad little brown-eyed girls.

There were two brown-painted doors like twin peepers in the rear face of the building, and evidence that a hog-wire divider had existed between once separate yards. The further door stood slightly ajar on rickety hinges, somewhat crooked. No doubt it was the back door to Keesha's home. I stepped back around for a moment and gently interrupted Julie and Keesha to confirm it, then ducked back around to join Hank again.

Hank tried the back door to Jake and Freddie’s side, but it was locked. Of course. It couldn't be that easy. On a lark, Hank rambled back around to the front for a try. I waited. He came back. He didn’t say anything, but I knew the answer. I could also tell by the look on Hank’s face that he wanted to have a look inside Keesha's side of the duplex. There was the biggest part of me that wanted nothing to do with the place. I had one of those “I don't want to know” feelings that start in the pit of the gut. Somehow, though, the mystery of not knowing was even worse.

Hank ducked into the gloom through the open door.

I waited two beats, then followed.

It was dark inside. I tried a grimy light switch, knowing full well it was no use. I was right.

The place was a cave.

An unpleasant odor emanated from a clothes washer and dryer just beside the back door. Wet clothes going to mildew and rot. Hank clicked on a little mag-lite flashlight and the stark reality of conditions sprang up in the wake of his roving beam. I followed him through the squalor, seeing things I'd seen before, and some things I'd not and rather hadn't.

I'm not much of a Bible-thumper, but being the product of the deep East Texas Bible belt, tent revivals as a kid and Wednesday night Bible study, some things come to mind unbidden. I was thinking about something I was taught in Sunday School at about nine or ten years of age. Christ had purportedly stood up on a hill and lectured the crowds and said something about “the poor you will always have with you”. It had always seemed to me to be a very simple yet profound statement, and the utter truth of it hadn't altered a bit from the hour that he was reported to have spoken it. Knowing that, though, didn’t make it any easier to confront the condition that Hank and I witnessed inside the duplex.

The living room was a complete wreck. There was no television or stereo or radio or anything. Probably whatever had once served to make the place a real home had long before disappeared, a casualty of habitual drug usage. There was plenty of soiled furniture, though, rescued, no doubt, from the clutches of the quarter-annual bulk trash collector some months or perhaps years past.

Worse yet was the odor; the ever-present, distinct and oppressive scent of burned chemicals mixed with rat and cockroach droppings.

“I've seen enough, Hank,” I said and headed out the way we came in, holding my nose.

I got back outside and could breathe again. Hank joined me a few minutes later. He had some clothes under one arm and carried a small stack of photographs in his other hand.

“Change of clothes,” he said. “For the kid.”

I nodded.

“Pictures, huh?” I asked.

“Kid’s family, probably. She’d know who they are, I hope.”

We went back around to the side of the duplex. Julie had Keesha in a big bear hug. Julie looked up at me and by God there were tears in her eyes. Hank gave me a grim look.

“All right,” I said.

Julie mouthed a silent “thank you” to me and patted Keesha’s back.

*****

When we all came back around front, there was Dock fiddling with the front window.

“As a quick-getaway-driver, you’re fired,” Hank said.

Dock started.

“You scared me,” he said.

Upon seeing the dog, Keesha drew in a quick gasp of surprise and almost bolted, but Julie caught her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “That’s Dingo. She doesn’t bite.”

“You promise?”

“She maybe don’t bite,” Hank said, “but I do. Dingo’s my dog.”

Hank called Dingo over to him and by way of petting and tousling the dog around maneuvered her slowly closer to the kid. After about a minute, the child was petting the dog. The way she did it, though, left little doubt that this was her first friendly dog encounter.

While this was going on Dock quizzed us about the kid.