Forever People (pt 6)

True is sitting on the steps of the police station, wearing a sweatshirt Jude gave him with the hood pulled over his head. Jackie arrived and took the money and went inside to take care of things. He doesn’t know how she heard, or what she did with that baby. When they exit the station they look like people True has never seen: Dixie’s face is purple and knocked out of place, and Jackie is carrying her wig, her face washed back to a man’s. Motherfuckers, she says, using her fingers to comb out the tangles.

Dixie pulls the hood back from True’s face and looks at the bite marks on his cheeks and neck. Jackie gives up and shoves her wig into her purse. Let’s go.

They limp, and don’t talk; it takes a million years to make their way back to The State, and at every block they rest in the shadows of old storefronts. When they get to Wicker Park, a brown grass lot that used to be houses until they burned down years ago, Dixie tells them that he went back to where they hit the little girl. I just wanted to see it again, he says. Somebody called the cops. I guess I was yelling at people, I don’t remember.

The wind is picking up, whistling through the trees; it’s going to be a bad winter. Dixie leans back against a stump, his wounds looking even worse in the cold, like something dead is coming out of him. He gestures at the boarded windows and doors. It’s like the world ended, he says. Like everybody took off like a hundred years ago.

We should too, True says. We could. We really could, to someplace warm.

We’re gonna be here forever, Dixie says. Forever and a day, Doc.

True’s guts are full of cramps; Dixie would do bad for True if he just said the word, and it’s hard not to say the word, the kid thinks. The bad thing for us is like breathing and to not do the bad thing is like we are choking to death.

Jackie gets up, trying not to tear her skirt. Dixie takes her hand and doesn’t let go, waiting. I didn’t hurt it, she says, and kisses him. I’m not evil.

Dixie kneels down so that True can climb on his back; though the bruises under his shirt are as big as dinner plates it’s the best feeling in the world to make the kid happy. Like he used to with his brother and sister, dead now for so many years, he bounces True up and down and throws the kid in the air like he was made of paper, the empty park filling with the addict’s laughter while Jackie chases after demanding that Dixie be careful for fuck’s sake because they’re going to fall down.

*