Chapter Text
The summer of 1969 lingered, refusing to draw its last feverish breath. The children looked at each other, whimpered, and fell quiet. Sons and daughters of addicts, gamblers, vagabonds and whores.
In the heat of the afternoon, she slept.
Here’s a story for you:
There was a man who owned a spinning mill. He had a son, who was eight years old. The man gambled, and lost his estate. When he lost his estate, he took a loan from the mob. When he couldn’t pay back the mob, the mob killed him, and sold his son to pay his debt.
She didn’t know this story, and perhaps she never will. Running a low fever, she tossed and turned on her makeshift plywood bed, her head still throbbing from being knocked down in the street for saving the boy.
Here’s a story that she did know:
There was a little girl, whose father cheated, scammed and robbed people. Below her refuge on the second floor of an old warehouse, hungry and unwashed children cowered and flinched, waiting for men such as her father to judge them fit to be nimble pickpockets or crippled beggars.
You see, memories also cheat, scam and rob.
She opened her eyes, went and crouched by the window. Down there, a machete gleamed, and sooner or later, a child would begin screaming.
That was the second time she saw the boy, dirty, gagged and beat up. Yet the first time was the one she remembered always – the boy in his white linen shirt, eyes bright and cheeks clean, chasing after her father who had cheated his nanny in a game of dice.
Perhaps the reason was, if men such as her father were to bring down the knife that day, no sacrifice of hers would have mattered.
As things go, there is always a selfish selflessness to love.
1985 came and went.
She was starting to suspect that someone was getting paid to fill her life with strange people.
Or rather, she was paying weird people to fill her life, she thought as she wrote another check.
She couldn’t trust Buckteeth to bring people in. Days into the whole ordeal, the entire first floor had turned into pseudo-gangland.
20 years of living as the scum of the earth, she was, finally, at least in name, the lady of the house and the heiress to an (almost) legal establishment. There shouldn’t be people hacking each other with machetes here in the first place.
And then there’s the “help” that Buckteeth found. Fresh off the boat.
When she asked him, rather hyperbolically, as he wolfed down the tenth helping, how long had he not eaten, he said four.
“Was there nothing to eat on the boat?”
“They ate a dead man. I didn’t.”
Well, that was morbid.
He spoke little and did nothing for fun. All he seemed to like was eating just about anything in a stupid quantity.
“Stop. You can’t eat ten bowls of noodles.”
“Kay.” He put down the bowl.
That was unexpectedly docile. She eyed the man curiously, perhaps gleefully. When he beat up ten men for her, she was feeling like a true mobster.
Then there was also the problem of the gambler. Who showed up all bling in his white suit. She had heard about chickens flying up the branches and becoming phoenixes, and she somewhat considered herself one, but such bullshit was too much.
She and never expected to see him again. Not after the first time, or the second. The only altruistic thing she ever did, she had done for him. And it was fine that he didn’t remember her. It was fine. Just fine......
“Do you think he’s a good match for his fiancée?” She asked her stoic assistant.
“Yea.”
“What?”
“…”
“Am I a good match?”
“…”
"Ok. Fine."
What did the gambler want in life? Certainly, not ten bowls of soup noodles.
Maybe he was truly blessed by some damned god, and she was not. To think he had rebound so thoroughly from a cruel twist of fate that made him an orphan and a slave…
But a question worthy of consideration was that: is a flying chicken really a phoenix? A well-versed robber is still a robber. Scum in a nice suit is still scum. There is no dignity for thieves and no gods to bless cons.
She could slap on evening gown and heels and say that she’s a lady, but the mob would be coming for her and her dad with nailed baseball bats all the same.
Was being a genius at the very thing that killed his family a blessing? It was probably irony.
She watched as the two men talked on the balcony.
The two strangest people she had ever met, but they were rather fun to have around. As for the other strange people who came and went with them…she’d rather not think about.
Perhaps 1986 was the year to set everything straight, to wash the past away once and for all, and live as if it had always been this way.
Then, the second altruistic thing she had ever done, was also for the gambler. And the third, and the fourth…
There was nothing truly selfless about her. She had wanted what she had always desired. The smiles they greeted each other with as children in the summer of 1969, would suffice her heart forever.
All that love was returned when he leapt off the balcony to save her. The assistant had grabbed him, and wouldn’t let go even when stabbed in the shoulder.
It was only that he didn’t quite catch her.