Right as Rain

In the doorless stalls were people smelling of perspiration and urine and wearing filthy, ill-fitting clothes. These people smiled at the Boones and greeted them, some caustically, some sarcastically, and some with genuine fondness and relief. Ray and Earl passed stalls where magazine photos of Jesus, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali, and Globe concert posters were taped up and smudged with blood and waste. They kept walking and at the last stall they stopped.

'Gimme some privacy, Critter,' said Earl. 'I'll meet you back at the stairs.'

Ray nodded and watched his father enter the stall. Ray turned and walked back the way he'd come.

'Hello, young lady,' said Earl, stepping into the stall and admiring the damaged, pretty thing before him.

'Hello, Earl.' She was a tall girl with splotched, light skin and straightened black hair that curled at its ends. Her eyes were tinted green, their lashes lined, the lids shadowed. She smiled at Earl; her teeth carried a grayish film. She wore a dirty white blouse, halfway opened to expose a lacy bra, frayed in several spots and loose across her bony chest.

Votive candles were lit in the stall, and a model's photograph, ripped from a Vanity Fair magazine, was taped above the commode. The bowl of the commode was filled with toilet paper, dissolved turds and matchsticks, and brown water reached its rim.

'Got somethin' for me, Earl?' Her voice was that of a talking doll, wound down.

Earl looked her over. Goddamn if she wasn't a beautiful piece, underneath all that grime. No thing like this one had ever showed him any kind of attention, not even when he was a strapping young man.

'You know I do, honey pie.' Earl produced a small wax packet of brown heroin that he had cut from the supply. She snatched the packet from his hand, making sure to smile playfully as she did.

'Thank you, lover,' she said, tearing at the top of the packet and dumping its contents onto a glass paperweight she kept balanced atop a rusted toilet-roll dispenser. She tracked it out with a razor blade and did a thick line at once. And almost at once her head dropped slightly and her lids fluttered and stayed halfway raised.

'Careful not to take too much, now,' said Earl. But she was already cutting another line.

When she was done, Earl gently pushed down on her shoulders, and she dropped to her knees on the wet tiles. He unzipped his fly because she was slow to do it and wrapped his fingers through the hair on the back of her head.

When he felt the wetness of her mouth and tongue, he put one hand on the steel of the stall and closed his eyes.

'Baby doll,' said Earl. And then he said, 'God.'

Ray checked his wristwatch. Fifteen minutes had passed and still his old man had not showed. Ray was ready to leave this place, the Junkyard and the city and the trash who lived in it. He flicked the ass end of a 'Boro against the cinderblock wall and watched embers flare and die.

It disgusted him, thinking of what his daddy was doing back there with that high-yellow girl. She did have white features, but she was mud like the rest of them, you could believe that. His father and him, they disagreed on a few things, but none more than this. What was Earl thinkin', anyway? Didn't he know how that girl got to keep that stall on the end of the row? Didn't he know what a prime piece of real estate that was, what you had to do to keep it? Ray knew. If you were a man you had to fight for it, and if you were a woman… girl was probably on her back or on her belly, or swallowing sword ten times a day just for the right to squat in that shit hole. Didn't his father think of that?

But Ray was tired of pressin' it. Once he had made the mistake of calling that girl common nigger trash, and his father had risen up, told him to call her by her name. Hell, he could barely remember her name. It was Sandy Williams, somethin' like that.

Ray Boone flipped open the top of his box and shook another smoke from the deck.

Sondra Wilson. That's what it was.

7

Terry Qui

The car looked exactly like a police vehicle, and the gray-haired, gray-bearded black guy looked like a plainclothes cop. He wore a black turtleneck under a black leather, with loose-fitting blue jeans and black oilskin work boots. It wasn't his clothes that yelled 'cop' but rather the way he walked: head up, shoulders squared, alert and aware of the activity on the street. The guy had called, said he was working in a private capacity for Chris Wilson's mother, asked if Qui

The chime sounded over the door as the guy entered the shop. Just under six foot, one ninety, guessed Qui

'Derek Strange.'

Qui

'Terry Qui

Strange was looking down slightly on the young white man with the longish brown hair. Five nine, five nine and a half, one hundred sixty-five pounds. Medium build, green eyes, a spray of pale freckles across the bridge of his thick nose.

'Thanks for agreeing to see me.' Strange drew his wallet, flipped it open, and showed Qui

'No problem.'

Qui

'How'd you find me here?'

'Your place of residence is listed in the phone book. From there I talked to your landlord. The credit check on your apartment application has your place of employment.'

'My landlord supposed to be giving that out?'

'Twenty-dollar bill involved, supposed to got nothin' to do with it.'

'You know,' said Qui

'I'm go

'You said you were working for Chris Wilson's mother.'

'Right. Leona Wilson is retaining my services.'

'You think you're go

'This isn't about finding you guilty of anything you've already been cleared on. I'm satisfied, reading over the material, that this was just one of those accidents, bound to happen. You got two men bearing firearms, mix it up with alcohol on one side, emotion and circumstance, preconceptions on the other-'

'Preconceptions?' You mean racism, thought Qui

'Yeah, you know, preconceptions. You mix all those things together, you got a recipe for disaster. Go

Qui

Strange cleared his throat. 'So it's more about exonerating Wilson than anything else. Wiping out the shadow that got thrown across his name, what with everything got written and broadcast about the case.'

'I didn't have anything to do with that. I never talked to the press.'

'I know it.'