Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [30]
“Lies! They told you lies! She was mine, and so are you.” He opened his arms toward the girls. “Now come give me a hug. Come on, you with the dimple in your chin, you first.”
He lurched forward, and all three girls turned at the same instant and started to run, galloping, determined runs. They quickly put space between themselves and Larry. But right then Victoria tripped over a slither of a hole in the grainy concrete and fell. She fell hard. She cried and spit bloody fragments of teeth and curled on her side and clutched at her knee, which felt as if it had just splattered like grade A extra large eggs hitting a concrete floor.
“Victoria, oh, my God, Victoria,” Shern screamed in a panic as she let her library books drop so she could help her sister run away.
“Oh, no, you’re bleeding, Tori,” yelped Bliss as she spun around in fast circles.
Shern hoisted Victoria up and half dragged, half pulled her to the doorway of the abandoned bread factory. She propped her up at the bottom of three short steps. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” she whispered over and over to try to calm Victoria and herself.
Larry was where they were now, still calling for a hug, still chanting, “Lies, lies, they told you lies.” The air around him had turned filmy and rippled with his voice as the wind rose and the sun fell and his words dipped and peaked with the wind and mixed with the deserted block and the sound of flapping as every wren in the park, it seemed, was roused at that instant and took flight. Even the sun had gone from butter drips to a red bruise in the sky and was chilling and especially affected Victoria and looked like the ribbon of blood that circled her mother’s wrist that morning last month.
Victoria could no longer tolerate Larry’s words, or the pine and wood smell coming off his clothes and hitting her nose like pinpricks, or the red-tinged sky. She started to scream hysterically. “Make him stop! Please make him go away!”
Bliss ran right in front of him and stomped her foot like she was trying to make an alley cat run. “Stop saying that, you old crazy, just stop it.” She rolled her neck around like the bad girls at school when they talked back to the teacher. “You’re not our grandfather. You’re not!”
He did stop then and flashed his eyes. His eyes looked amber from the reflection of the waning sun and froze Bliss where she stood.
The commotion in the air outside his bedroom window woke Mister from his nap, and he sat straight up all at once in his bed, actually his cot, his bedroom window actually the window on the lower level of the abandoned bread factory. His home was actually the bread factory where he’d lived since 1961, a reformed man of the streets struggling with a habit and an attitude and three different varieties of VD. The habit he kicked cold turkey over four days of chills and sweats and vomiting and cramps after his young wife moved everything out of their apartment when he’d gone to cash his veteran’s check, which used to take two, three days sometimes to cash. The VD was cured from VA-dispensed penicillin. The attitude took care of itself, dissipated over months of living alone down here in the cozy corner of the bread factory in relative grand luxury considering some of the foxholes he’d known since he’d also served in the Korean War. He’d feed the squirrels through the window down here and reflect on aspects of the human condition ranging from the existence of God to capitalism to race relations to whether Smitty or Schaffer made the best hoagies. Now he was wide-awake and on alert; he always woke alert, another habit he’d picked up in Korea. He moved to the window and cupped his hands against his face and peered out. Then he grabbed his heavy black coat and ran outside and around the corner to where the girls were.
Shern saw him first. She said a silent thank-you when she saw him. His face was dark brown and wide, and his eyes hung low and looked sad as if someone were pulling on the skin beneath his eyes. He had a flat-footed walk that reminded her of how her father used