1

Park Dwellers

The woman rubbed her sore hip, sore where she’d landed and,sat heavily on a bench. Someone was already there, guarding a shopping cart full of black plastic garbage bags. She grabbed a dirty Gucci purse from one of the bags and clutched it to her breasts.

“You can’t just sit on someone else’s bench without asking first!”

Two men were on a nearby bench, one white, one Black. The white man, wearing threadbare army fatigues, said, “Don’t be a hardass, SueAnn. Lady just fell out of that window over there. We were all watching. Let her rest a minute.”

“I’m not a soldier in your army, Elwyn. You’re not the boss of me, I’ve told you that a hundred million times.”

The woman who’d fallen rubbed her hip again.  “Sorry,” she muttered. “I need to catch my breath. I’ll move on in a second.”

She hadn’t fallen, exactly; she’d lowered herself on a rope she’d tied around the base of the toilet. Trouble was, the rope wasn’t long enough. Eight feet from the ground, she’d had to let go. Tried to bring her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them so she could roll like a ball when she landed, but her joints were stiff. They no longer responded instantly on command, and she’d fallen hard on her right side.

That didn’t bother her as much as her mistake with the rope. She’d calculated how much she needed if worst came to worst and she had to run – and her estimate had been way off.

“Why’d you go out the window?” the Black man said. “Your room on fire?”

“Someone was breaking my door down,” the woman said. “I was scared.”

“What were they doing that for?” the Black man asked. “You owe a bookie? Is that who’s driving that Lexus?” He pointed at a late-model SUV, flashers winking, in front of the run-down building where the woman had jumped.

“She’s a fugitive, Joey,” Elwyn said. “That’s an unmarked car. U.S marshals are after her.”

The three park-dwellers had watched the car pull up, watched two men climb out and march toward the door, passing under the one working streetlight on the block.

The trio couldn’t make out the men’s ages or features, but agreed that they were wearing sport coats. Way too pricey a car, way too dressy clothes for the run-down building. Elwyn thought they were cops or FBI, pulling up in an unmarked car.

“That isn’t a cop car,” SueAnn had said. “Too fancy for a cop. Maybe it’s a Mob hit.”

“Mob hit?” Joey was scornful. “No mobster would be caught dead in a fleabag like that.”

None of them said, if they could have afforded a fleabag like the tired building on the corner, they’d have been sleeping there instead of squirming on benches in the park across the street, trying to find a place where the slats didn’t cut deep into the shoulder blades, where rats didn’t crawl around their food and trees didn’t drop branches on their heads.

“Is someone really after you?” SueAnn asked as the fallen woman got to her feet. “Is it like Joey said?  You owe money to a bookie?”

“Do I look like someone with a bookie?” She gave a laugh that sounded like a seal’s bark. She was wearing clothes as shabby as SueAnn’s, although not as many layers of them. She carried a worn backpack instead of a garbage bag, but she was obviously only a step away from the streets herself.

“So why are they after you? Is it the law?” Elwyn persisted.

“My ex,” the woman said after a pause, her eyes on the building across the street. “He’s an ex because of his gambling, and since they can’t get blood from one turnip, they’re trying to see what happens when they squeeze both of us.”

“That’s harsh,” Joey said.

He held out his bottle, offering a pull. The woman tilted her head back, bottle to her lips, but didn’t swallow. Even if Joey’s rotgut hadn’t tasted like turpentine, she couldn’t afford to numb her mind.

“Hey, they found where you jumped,” Elwyn cried.

The others followed his pointing finger. The two men who’d driven up in the Lexus were peering at the rope hanging from the window.

SueAnn and Joey went to the edge of the trees to see what the pair would do. SueAnn giggled – it was like a scene from a 1920’s silent movie, the two men looking at the rope, at the ground, at each other, and then vanishing from the scene.

The duo reappeared a few minutes later, charging through the fleabag’s front door. They still looked like Keystone cops to SueAnn: they darted around to the side of the building and inspected the ground near the dangling rope. No old woman. All they needed to complete the picture was to lift the powerful flashlights they carried and hit each other over the head.

Instead, they shone their lights up and down the street, trying to decide which way to go. One pointed at the park, the other nodded. SueAnn and Joey retreated into the cover of the trees as the bookies or mobsters or whatever they were ran into the road, so intent on their search that they didn’t see a boy on a skateboard in their path. They knocked him to the ground.

His skateboard flipped out from under him into the path of an oncoming car.

“Watch where you’re going, assholes,” the boy bleated. “You just wrecked my board.”

The two men ignored him. They were pointing their powerful flashlights at SueAnn and Joel, who were scrambling to settle onto their regular benches. Like other rough sleepers, the pair pulled blankets from the plastic bags that held their possessions, used other bags filled with boots or food as pillows.

Everyone in the park was waiting tensely for what the men with the flashlights would do. They marched first to SueAnn, shone the light straight at her eyes. When she whimpered in a faint protest, one of them stuck a hand inside her layers sweaters and tugged at skin on the back of her neck.

SueAnn cried out and tried to bat his hand away.

“It isn’t her,” he said to his companion. “At least, this creature’s ugly face is her own.”

The second man shook Elwyn’s shoulder. “Wake up, buddy. Have you seen this woman?” He held a photo in front of Elwyn’s face, pointing the flash at it.

Elwyn blinked, squinted. “Is that an actress?”

Joey stumbled over to look. The photo showed a young woman, laughing, head tilted back. Inserted into the frame was an old woman, face created by aging software.

“Is that the woman who jumped out of the window?” Joey said. “Is she an actress?”

“An actress?” SueAnn sat up. “Is she famous? What did she star in?”

“Actress?” the man said. “Yeah, you could say her whole life is one big act. She starred in betraying her country. Was she here in the park just now?”

“Betraying her country?” SueAnn repeated. “I don’t know that show. What’s her name? Was she in Survivor?”

“She’s not a fucking actress!” the man shouted. “She’s a traitor. We’re looking for her.”

“You said she had a big act,” Elwyn said stubbornly. “Now you say she didn’t. Sounds like you don’t even know who you’re looking for.”

“Listen, dirtbag. The woman who jumped out of that window is a traitor. We are with the FBI. We are trying to find her. Did she come into the park?”

“You can’t come around calling people ‘dirtbags,’ or ‘creatures.’ We’re human beings same as you. And what do you care about the woman in the window. Why don’t you leave her alone? You drive a fancy car and she’s living in a cheap SRO. You don’t need her money!”

“I don’t want her money.” The man seemed to grind his teeth in the dark. “I’m a federal agent; she’s wanted for endangering our national security, which, by the way, keeps people like you secure when you want to sleep on the streets.”

“Federal agent?” Joey snickered. “Good one. Federal agents shake down homeless people all the time looking for traitors because they figure traitors make so much money selling secrets they want to live on park benches. Hey, Elwyn, you commit any treason lately? I did, I pretended I was dead broke and got a lady on Hutchinson Place to give me a ten when I already had five in my pocket. Was that treason or just lying?”

“Did you see Lily tonight or didn’t you?” the second man smacked his flashlight against his palm hard enough to produce a loud thwack. Elwyn and Joey seemed to shrink. No violence, please, no violence.

“Don’t you have to show a badge, if you’re really a federal agent?” SueAnn demanded.

“Not to punks like you. Which way she go?” the second man demanded.

Joey shook his head. “We didn’t know she was a traitor, we didn’t even know her name is Lily. Besides, there aren’t any signs on the lampposts, the kind they put up, you know, watch out for this old lady, she could be armed and dangerous once her hip gets better. So we didn’t watch which way she went.”

The two men went through the encampment, shining their lights on all the people they could find, pinching some at the base of their necks the way they had SueAnn, and ignoring protests as they’d ignored hers. They even shone their lights up at low-hanging branches.

“She’s not here,” The men agreed. They’d been told Lily was a master of disguise who could change her appearance to any age or race or sex, but that was obviously the kind of exaggeration the spooks liked to use so that mere mortals in the FBI would think the CIA had some kind of special magic.