We Leave Together, стр. 5
Jona spat. “You a pup and you ain’t pulling for your own? I’ll put three on the little ones,” he said. “Lots of them.”
“I’ll take your money, Lord Joni.”
Jona shouted into the crowd. “You’re taking forever! Hurry up!”
One of the Pluckies chuckled through a bloody nose. “You want in on this?” he said, to Jona.
“If I come in there, I’m fighting with the kids on account of it ending faster that way, plus I got money on them. Too many of them kids with crowns. Lots of swings of the bat. You and your fellows’d go down like broken eggs and I don’t break a sweat.”
A stevedore collapsed under the weight of the boys on his back. He crawled a bit and tried to roll. Kids jumped on his head with bare feet.
“Don’t just jump on him!” shouted Jona. “Get the next one down!”
The kids listened. The new weight on the back of the nearest stevedore wore the weary fighter to his knees. Kids kicked at his face with their bare feet. They pounded on him hard.
Pup handed Jona the flask. “Put this in your mouth and maybe you don’t help any more. You know those kids are going to be in for the real trouble if they take anything pink. They got crowns to mark ’em, too. Don’t help them. You’re rolling them into the canal, and what they ever do to you?”
Jona took the flask, but didn’t drink. “You care about the mudskippers, now? Where’d those crowns come from, anyhow? I don’t know anything about crowns.”
Another giant tumbled down under the weight of children.
Pup watched with wide eyes. The children jumped on top of the fallen fighter’s body, grinding their heels like making meat.
Jona shouted at them. “That’s enough on that one!”
Some of the kids listened. Some didn’t.
“Pup,” he said. Jona whipped his bat from his belt fast, and swung it backhand in the same motion. Two kids tumbled off like broken crates.
The one they saved was the stevedore with the bloody nose who had spoken earlier. “Bunch of dirty rats!” he snarled.
Jona handed the man the flask. “Drink up,” said Jona, laughing, “You’ll need your strength to live with the shame. I know I’m telling this one to everyone I know about you going down to a couple kids in crowns. I’ve seen ’em around, but I never saw them all together like this. Looks like something we should know about, don’t it?”
“These kids, they think they’re something now.” He took the flask slowly with a battered hand. He drank. He gave the flask back to Jona. “You tell Calipari anything goes missing, it’ll be on his head what gets done about it. Lucky we weren’t carrying anything pink. They thought we were. Mudskippers need to learn their place. There’s more of us than them, once we get all together. And you know we will.”
Blood was smeared all over the brass of the flask. He took another drink, then handed it back.
The kids didn’t linger to drink with the King’s Men. They gathered the wounded, adjusted their crowns. Jona tried to stop one or two and ask them about the crowns, but none stuck around to chat. Jona didn’t really care to fight kids about a question like that. Where they got the crowns was not as important as them having the crowns, and fighting smugglers with them on their heads. Calipari would want to know about that. New gangs meant fighting over turf, bodies dropping into the canal. Both the king of the day and the king of the night preferred an orderly street for the business at hand.
“We should have grabbed one of them,” said Pup. “Right by the ear and take him in. Little mice got no business fighting dogs.”
***
Later, much later, Jona slipped away, telling the King’s men stories about a birdie singing a song about the kids with crowns, maybe, and no one believed him. King’s men laughed too loud about this bird’s particular tailfeather and about this bird’s song that sounded like moaning. Jona muttered at them and wandered off to Rachel’s building.
(He walked past the old woman in the rat-infested room. He averted his eyes.)
He broke into Rachel’s room quietly. He had his boots off and in his hands so he wouldn’t wake her stomping across the floor. He stripped his uniform quietly. He spread it on the empty bed near hers, against the adjacent wall.
He slid beside Rachel slowly to try not to wake her. She woke up, anyway. She adjusted herself in the bed to let him lie down with her.
Rachel was warm in Jona’s arms. Damp sweat seeped out from the places where skin touched skin. Before her eyelids dropped again, he coaxed her voice from the dreaming.
“What do you dream about when you dream about me?” he whispered.
She answered quietly. “When it is a good dream, I dream of your breath moving in and out of your chest and my ear pressed against your chest, and the breath flowing in and out of both of us, and it is the same breath. Blood flows out of our skin, and into the other’s skin.”
“Sounds like us doing this,” he said. “It’s good. I mean… I like this. I could do this more if you want.”
“I think you are cursed, Jona, to live without dreams. I think it’s a horrible thing,” she yawned and her next word stretched like crying, “hooow… the demon stain has touched your life. It’s always horrible, but for you, you are truly cursed to live without dreams. Better to just have wings on your back instead of scars.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that before.”
“I have watched your life’s flower grow a while. Don’t speak again, Jona. Let me have my dreams. I have to work tonight. You should be at work.”
“Work can wait. I get paid wherever I