A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [10]
“Just passing on through.” It was the same young man with thick gold chains he had seen the other morning. He swaggered along the edge of her patchy lawn, grinning. Mrs. Jukas kept demanding that he hurry up. Gordon recognized the walk, the strut with its coiled, lethal bravado that could strike with pythonine force. The man crossed the street in slow, imperious fashion, looking neither right nor left, not even quickening his pace as cars bore down from both directions. He spoke to the girl who was sitting on the top step. The ball extended farther and thinner with each blunt whack. Suddenly he seized the ball, snapping it from its rubber tether. It rolled into the gutter. She shouted something. He grabbed her shirt and yanked her to her feet. She stumbled down a step, then caught herself on the railing.
He darted past her and rang one of the buzzers. The front door opened onto a scrawny young woman in skimpy shorts and a leather bomber jacket. She held her head at a dazed angle, squinting into the light. She gestured as if she didn’t have whatever he wanted. She called to the girl. The girl answered back angrily. The man grabbed the girl then and forced her down the steps onto the sidewalk. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a large purple SUV pulled up to the curb. The girl tried to get back up the stairs, but the woman shrieked at her to go. With that, the girl headed toward the SUV in her own version of the walk. She got in and it sped off. The man followed the woman into the house.
“Who is that? Who’s down there?” Mrs. Jukas suddenly called. “I can see you. I see you down there hiding!”
“Mrs. Jukas.” He stepped out from the bushes. “Gordon Loomis, Mrs. Jukas,” he said quietly. He hadn’t meant to startle her. Dennis had told him to go right over and say hello, and he should have, he said as he hurried up her steps. “But I didn’t want to bother you.” He’d been dreading this moment.
She hadn’t moved. Her faded eyes darted between him and the relative safety of the street. One of her legs was bigger than the other, enormous in its casing of elastic bandaging. Instead of shoes she wore wide, soiled slippers.
“My mother used to tell me how after my dad’s stroke Mr. Jukas would always come over and help her get him into bed at night,” he said from the walk below.
“She was always asking for help,” the old woman said.
“Well, it was nice of Mr. Jukas to do it.”
“Your father had a hard life.” She looked straight down at him. Thanks to you, she didn’t have to add.
“I know. I know he did.”
Her dark eyes went to his arms.
He nodded. “Well. I guess I better go. The thorns,” he said, and tried to smile. “They certainly did a job on me. Next time I’ll know enough to wear gloves. And long sleeves.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She’d seen him last, being led, pushed from his house with bloody gashes down both arms. She watched him squeeze between the bushes into his own yard.
There had always been a constant glare in the cells from the corridor lights. He sat on the sofa, enjoying the darkness, though he still wasn’t used to sleeping in it. Or in silence. In the beginning he’d had a succession of cellmates, most older than he was. He had managed to bunk alone these last few years by taking the smallest cell. His cot had been the length of the wall, with no room to stretch his feet over the end. For that modicum of privacy he had slept for years in a cramped coil.
A truck rumbled down the street, and he looked out the window. The sound of passing cars continued to be a strange sensation. Most of the tenement windows across the street were lit. Julia Kirbowitz had lived in the first-floor apartment. They used to walk to school together until sixth grade, when her family moved to a new house in Dearborn. The front door opened now, and a short, bearded man came onto the porch. He hurried down the steps and got into the old car parked below. As he drove off, someone rose up from the porch shadows. It was the same frizzy-haired girl. She ran to the window, looked inside, then ducked back. The door opened and another