It was a gorgeous day, clear and blue. Monster stretched his enormous head over the top of General’s Dutch door, taking in the sun. Bobby Del Monte was five stories up, banging on the roof. With Rogue leading the way, I hurried across the street, and as I went, I pulled the pins from my hair and combed it with my fingers, letting it fall every which way, down my back.
I hoped Bobby or the neighbors hadn’t seen me. I decided I didn’t care.
Rogue tore up the hill past the rows of tents. There were some five hundred people now living in Lafayette Square. I ran after Rogue and didn’t stop till we reached the uppermost hill of the park, where the trees clustered in a ring. I sat with my back against a large boulder and had a good, cleansing weep. Then I fell asleep.
When I opened my eyes, Bobby was standing a few paces from me, holding an orange in his hand.
“I figured I might need this,” he said, grinning. He’d peeled the orange and fanned it in slices in his palm, the way I did when I lured Ricky from the trees.
“Where did you get that?” I asked. Fruit was impossible to find in the city.
“The madam’s car,” he replied, stepping closer. “There was a bag of them, hidden under the seat. I snitched a few.”
“Those must have been for Rose to take downtown.” I smiled, thinking of Hank and our evening ride to Caruso, a world ago.
“There’s also a shotgun under the seat,” Bobby said as he sat near me in the dirt and smiled sweetly. “Should I have brought that? You look like you might need to shoot someone.”
I shrugged and popped a piece of orange in my mouth, not knowing what else to do. The boy unnerved me.
“Go on,” he said, “have the whole thing.”
“Guess this makes me a bird,” I mumbled between bites.
“I think maybe you are. What kind, I can’t figure yet. What kind are those?” He pointed to the high branches.
“There? That’s a kinglet. On the branch next door, those are white-crowned sparrows. A couple of chickadees in that tree over there. See that crow? He stays at the top. No one wants to get too close to him.” I kept pointing out more birds, but Bobby had his eyes fixed on me.
“I still don’t see any of your kind,” he said. Then, before I could stop him, he brushed back the hair that was blowing in my face and put it behind me. “See. Their feathers aren’t as long as yours.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was so flustered. I didn’t know if he was mocking or flirting with me.
“Why… why are you here, Bobby Del Monte?”
“To see you home, Anyway.”
He let me be. That’s all. We didn’t say much; didn’t need to. He let me be. Eventually, we made our way across the hill to the north side and took in the view of the bay. There were plenty of boats going by, and seagulls cawing, and the Marin Hills in the distance just beginning to turn golden with the onset of summer. As we gazed at the water, our backs to the encampment, the world looked almost the way it used to.
We stayed all afternoon on the top of Lafayette Square, till the wind picked up and shivered through the rows of canvas tents like a thousand flapping wings.
The Women
I sometimes wondered what it would have been like to be raised a normal girl, with no mention of brothels or folks who preferred it Frenchie, no talk of payola and crooked politicians. But that was not my story.
The women began arriving that next week, just as Rose knew they would. It was as if a call had gone out, announcing that the madam was now receiving at her gold house. They arrived hungry, broke, with just their first names—their professional names. They came with their hair curled and waxed, and their nails clean. Once inside, they filled the house with their sweet cloying perfume and the distinct insouciance of the high-end whore.
Capability was the first. She carried all her possessions in a small suitcase: an umbrella, four pairs of shoes, and a metal rod she heated on the stove to curl her hair.
“Oh, baby girl,” she cried, clapping with the tips of her fingers like a happy child. Cap—that’s what her familiars called her—smelled of the cinnamon and vanilla she dabbed each morning behind her ears.
“How are ya doin’?” she cooed. “I remember you so, when you were just a sweet, wee little thing. And when I saw you again, stopping by the other day, well—” When Cap smiled, the space on the left side of her mouth showed, where a drunk once hit her and knocked out two teeth. “Honey, whereabout is Ma’am Rose?”
Valentine arrived next. She offered her hand, her meaty palm twice the size of mine. “I’m Valentine,” she said, in her slightly formal, silk-smooth bass. “Madam Rose,” she added, “never talked much about you. Oh, she talked about a lotta girls, sure-sure, but not you. I think prob-o-bly she was saving you for herself, eh, sugar? Tell me, is she receiving?”
Mercy tried to sneak by me with a kitten in her basket. Out front, Tan paused over his boiling pots to see what I would do.
“No cats,” I said. “House rules. No men, no cats.”
Mercy wrinkled her nose and wobbled a bit in her high shoes on the narrow front steps. “Exactly how firm is this no-cat law? I mean, how much wiggle we got, honey—for a little bitty kitten?”
“No wiggle,” I said.
She peered into the basket with besotted devotion, same way I looked at Rogue.
An hour later, Mercy returned from the square with two bottles of wine in her basket. “Found him a good home,” she said.
That first day, Cap, Valentine, and Mercy took over the two rooms next door
