Dreams Underfoot

I took off my hat—it’s this fedora that I actually bought new because it was just too cool to pass up.

I wear it all the time, my light brown hair hanging down from it, long and straight, though not as long as Angel’s. I like the way it looks with my jeans and sneakers and this cotton shirt I found at a rummage sale that only needed a tear fixed on one of its shirttails.

I know what you’re thinking, but hey, I never said I wasn’t vain. I may be a squatter, but I like to look my best. It gets me into places where they don’t let in bums.

Anyway I took off my hat and slouched in the chair on this side of Angel’s desk.

“Which one’s that?” she asked, pointing to Rexy who was sitting outside by the door like the good little dog he is.

“He can come in if you’d like.”

I shook my head. “No. I’m not staying long. I just had this thing I wanted to ask you about. It’s ...”

I didn’t know where to begin, but finally I just started in with finding the envelope. It got easier as I went along. That’s one thing you got to hand to Angel—there’s nobody can listen like she does. You take up all of her attention when you’re talking to her. You never get the feeling she’s thinking of something else, or of what she’s going to say back to you, or anything like that.

Angel didn’t speak for a long time after I was done. When I stopped talking, she looked past me, out at the traffic going by on Grasso Street.

“Maisie,” she said finally. “Have you ever heard the story of the boy who cried wolf?”

“Sure, but what’s that got to do with—oh, I get it.” I took out the envelope and slid it across the desk to her. “I didn’t have to come in here,” I added.

And I was wishing I hadn’t, but Angel seemed to give herself a kind of mental shake. She opened the envelope and read the message, then her gaze came back to me.

“No,” she said. “I’m glad you did. Do you want me to have a talk with Franklin?”

“Who’s that?”

“The fellow behind the counter at the post office. I don’t mind doing it, although I have to admit that it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing he’d do.”

So that was his name. Franklin. Franklin the creep.

I shrugged. “What good would that do? Even if he did do it—” and the odds looked good so far as I was concerned “—he’s not going to admit to it.”

“Maybe we can talk to his supervisor.” She looked at her watch. “I think it’s too late to do it today, but I can try first thing tomorrow morning.”

Great. In the meantime, I could be dead.

Angel must have guessed what I was thinking, because she added, “Do you need a place to stay for tonight? Some place where you’ll feel safe?”

I thought of Tommy and the dogs and shook my head.

“No, I’ll be okay,” I said as I collected my envelope and stuck it back in with Tommy’s mail.

“Thanks for, you know, listening and everything.”

I waited for her to roll into some spiel about how she could do more, could get me off the street, that kind of thing, but it was like she was tuned right into my wavelength because she didn’t say a word about any of that. She just knew, I guess, that I’d never come back if every time I talked to her that was all I could look forward to.

“Come see me tomorrow,” was all she said as I got to my feet. “And Maisie?”

I paused in the doorway where Rexy was ready to start bouncing off my legs as if he hadn’t seen me in weeks.

“Be careful,” Angel added.

“I will.”

I took a long route back to the squat, watching my back the whole time, but I never saw anybody that looked like he was following me, and not a single person in a dark robe. I almost laughed at myself by the time I got back. There were Tommy and the dogs, all sprawled out on the steps of our building until Rexy yelped and then the whole pack of them were racing down the street towards me.

Okay, big as he was, Tommy still couldn’t hurt a flea even if his life depended on it and the dogs were all small and old and pretty well used up, but Franklin would still have to be crazy to think he could mess with us. He didn’t know my family. You get a guy as big as Tommy and all those dogs ... well, they just looked dangerous. What did I have to worry about?

The dogs were all over me then with Tommy right behind them. He grinned from ear to ear as I handed him his mail.

“Surprises!” he cried happily, in that weird high voice of his. “Maisie bring surprises!”

We went inside to our place up on the second floor. It’s got this big open space that we use in the summer when we want the air to have a chance to move around. There’s books everywhere. Tommy’s got his own corner with his magazines and all the little cutout people and stuff that he plays with. There’s a couple of mismatched kitchen chairs and a card table. A kind of old cabinet that some hoboes helped me move up the one flight from the street holds our food and the Coleman stove I use for cooking.

We sleep on the mattresses over in another corner, the whole pack together, except for Chuckie.

He’s this old lab that likes to guard the doorway. I usually think he’s crazy for doing so, but I wouldn’t mind tonight. Chuckie can look real fierce when he wants to. There’s a couple of chests by the bed area.

I keep our clothes in one and dry kibbles for the dogs in another. They’re pretty good scavengers, but I like to see that they’re eating the right kind of food. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to them. One thing I can’t afford is vet bills.

First off I fed the dogs, then I made supper for Tommy and me—lentil soup with dayold buns I’d picked up behind a bakery in Crowsea. We’d been eating the soup for a few days, but we had to use it up because, with the spring finally here, it was getting too warm for food to keep. In the winter we’ve got smaller quarters down the hall, complete with a castiron stove that I salvaged from this place they were wrecking over in Foxville. Tommy and I pretty near killed ourselves hauling it back. One of the bikers helped us bring it upstairs.

We fell into our usual Thursday night ritual once we’d finished supper. After hauling down tomorrow’s water from the tank I’d set up on the roof to catch rainwater, I lit the oil lamp, then Tommy and I sat down at the table and went through his new magazines and ads. Every time he’d point out something that he liked in a picture, I’d cut it out for him. I do a pretty tidy job, if I say so myself. Getting to be an old hand at it. By the time we finished, he had a big stack of new cutout people and stuff for his games that he just had to go try out right away. I went and got the book I’d started this morning and brought it back to the table, but I couldn’t read.

I could hear Tommy talking to his new little friends. The dogs shifting and moving about the way they do. Down the street a Harley kicked over and I listened to it go through the Tombs until it faded in the distance. Then there was only the sound of the wind outside the window.

I’d been able to keep that stupid envelope with its message out of my head just by staying busy, but now it was all I could think about. I looked out the window. It was barely eight, but it was dark already.

The real long days of summer were still to come.

So is Franklin out there? I asked myself. Is he watching the building, scoping things out, getting ready to make his move? Maybe dressed up in some black robe, him and a bunch of his pals?

I didn’t really believe it. I didn’t know him, but like Angel had said, it didn’t seem like him and I could believe it. He might bug me, being all friendly and wanting to play Pygmalion to my Eliza Doolittle, but I didn’t think he had a mean streak in him.

So where did the damn message come from? What was it supposed to mean? And, here was the scary part: if it wasn’t a joke, and if Franklin wasn’t responsible for it, then who was?

I kept turning that around and around in my mind until my head felt like it was spinning. Everybody started picking up on my mood. The dogs became all anxious and when I walked near them got to whining and shrinking away like I was going to hit them. Tommy got the shakes and his little people started tearing and then he was crying and the dogs started in howling and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

But I didn’t. It took me a couple of hours to calm Tommy down and finally get him to fall asleep. I told him the story he likes the best, the one where this count from some place far away shows up and tells us that we’re really his kids and he takes us away, dogs and all, to our real home where we all live happily ever after. Sometimes I use his little cutouts to tell the story, but I didn’t do that tonight. I didn’t want to remind him of how a bunch’d