I looked up and down the fence, searching for an entrance to the lot, had to walk a ways until I found it: a square hatch cut into the link, held in place with rusty baling wire.
Prying the wires loose took a while and hurt my fingers. Finally, I bent the flap back, squatted, and passed through, retying one wire from the other side. Making my way across the soft dirt, my nostrils full of shit smell, I dodged chunks of concrete, Styrofoam food containers, lumps of things that didn’t bear further inspection No bottles or cans-probably because they were recyclable and redeemable. Let’s hear it for green power.
But nothing green here. Just blacks, grays, browns. Perfect camouflage for a covert world.
A vile smell overcame even the excremental stench. Hearing the buzz of flies, I looked down at a cat’s carcass that was so fresh the maggots hadn’t yet homesteaded, and gave it a wide berth. Onward, past an old blanket, clumps of newspaper so sodden they looked like printed bread dough. .. no people that I could see, no movement. Where had the movement come from?
I arrived at the spot where I thought the thing had rolled, toward the back of the covered lot, just a few feet from the inner angle of a canted concrete wall.
Standing again, I focused. Waited. Felt my back itch.
Saw it again.
Movement. Hair. Hands. Someone lying rolled up in a sheet -several sheets, a mummy wrap of frayed bed linens. Twitchy movements below.
Lovemaking? No. No room for two people in the swaddle.
I walked toward it slowly, making sure I approached headon, not wanting to startle.
My shoes kicked something hard. The impact was inaudible over the roar, but the figure in the sheeting sat up.
A young, dark Latina, bare shouldered. Soft shoulders, a large vaccine crater on one arm.
She stared at me, pressing the sheets up to her chest, long hair wild and sticky looking.
Her mouth was open, her face round and plain, scared and baffled.
And humiliated.
The sheet dropped a bit and I saw that she was naked. Something dark and urgent snuffled at her breast-a small head.
A baby. The rest of it concealed by the filthy cotton.
I backed away, smiled, held up my hand in greeting.
The young mother’s face was electric with fear.
The baby kept suckling and she placed one hand over its tiny skull.
Near her feet was a small cardboard box. I got down and looked inside.
Disposable diapers, new and used. More flies. A can of condensed milk and a rusty opener. A nearly empty bag of potato chips, a pair of rubber sandals, and a pacifier.
The woman tried to nourish her baby while rolling away from me, unraveling more of the sheets and exposing a mottled thigh. As I started to turn away, the look in her eyes changed from fear to recognition and then to another type of fear.
I whipped around and found myself face-to-face with a man. A boy, actually, seventeen or eighteen. Also Latin, small and flimsily built, with a fuzz mustache and a sloping chin so weak it seemed part of his skinny neck. His eyes were downslanted and frantic. His mouth hung open, a lot of his teeth were gone. He had on a torn, checked flannel shirt, stretched-out doubleknit pants, and unlaced sneakers. His ankles were black with dirt.
His hands trembled around an iron bar.
I stepped away. He hesitated, then came toward me. A high sound pierced the freeway din.
The woman screaming.
Startled, the boy looked at her and I moved in, grabbed the bar, and twisted it out of his grip. The inertia threw him backwards onto the ground so easily that I felt like a bully.
He stayed there, looking up at me, shielding his face with one hand, ready to be beaten.
The woman was up, tripping out of the sheets, naked, the baby left squalling on the dirt. Her belly was pendulous and stretchmarked, her breasts limp as a crone’s, though she couldn’t have been much older than twenty.
I threw the bar as far as I could and held out both hands in what I hoped was a gesture of peace.