the Warren, and he told me how it was going to be. He told me how it happened one day when he was off-loading the copper wire he’d stripped out of a sad cul-de-sac the night before. He looked over the scrap yard fence and saw this place, the Warren, a ghost mall full of ghost stores. He figured it had been stripped years ago. I mean, it’s right next to the scrap yard, right? Talk about convenient. But Raoul, he thought, What the heck? Who knows? And so he drove over here and had a look around. It was weird. The windows weren’t broken. The doors weren’t forced open. Far as he could tell, there was all kinds of stuff just waiting to be collected and sold. It seemed impossible that somebody wouldn’t have already marked it and stripped it, but it was just as impossible that it hadn’t been bulldozed down years before, to make room for more AllMART parking or an expansion of the scrap yard or a vacant lot full of weeds. Raoul made his marks on the parking lot, on the walls and the sidewalks, and on the windows and doors that were still there, still shut. But when he got home that night, Raoul did some due diligence. He did some research. He got online, did a little poking around, and found out that the place was all hung up in legal proceedings. It was a pretty low-priority case, though, and nothing had budged for a long, long time. The next morning, Raoul bought the whole place for back taxes, which was less than the cost for gas to drive out to the neighborhoods.
“He went there the next day with his crowbar in hand and popped the lock open on one of the delivery doors. Then he walked into the place like he owned it, which he did. He just walked around. He saw the empty places and the naked mannequins. He looked into the ice cream store that somebody was remodeling so it could be church. The sign on the ticket window said ‘Join us for our first service!!!’ but the date on that sign was five years ago. He saw the bright painted pillars and the tile benches. And it seemed like a good place. He didn’t rip anything out. Instead he put his mark on the doors and left everything just like it was.
“A week or so later he found me and didn’t kill me. Raoul built a fire in the chiminea and we sat beside it on the patio of the abandoned ice cream parlor. We talked all night while smoke floated up to the sky. We decided I should live here, in the Warren. It’s close to AllMART, so that saves time and money. And it is safe, since it belongs to Raoul. Nobody is going to mess with Raoul. Raoul would stop by and we’d hang out, and that was cool. When I said it was kind of weird and lonely sometimes, Raoul said, ‘Well, you can change that. You find some others who need to live here, and you bring them in. Be generous and on the lookout for the weak and the powerless.’ That’s why I saw you that day at the bus shelter; I was looking. I was looking just like Raoul told me to look.”
It has been a long time since I’ve felt so nervous. Maybe the first day of high school? My first day in 2-B? That could be it, the mix of I-know-I’m-supposed-to-be-here and I-don’t-know-how-I-belong-or-what-it-means-to-be. I’m at the employee entrance conscientiously early, comfortably early. So I just stand and wait and watch the sky change color, from cement to pink and then back to cement. I’m part of a thin little layer between the cement sky and the cement under my feet. A squished paper cup, a candy wrapper, and me.
While I wait, other new trainees arrive: some quiet, some nervous, others probably like me — nervously quiet. Some faces I recognize from passing by in the halls at school. I don’t know the people behind the faces. The only other person from 2-B is Bella Masterson, and if she remembers me, she doesn’t show it. I wonder where all the rest of them have gone. Each to where their talents are needed. I remember Abernathy in the zipcuffs waiting for the bus to the penitentiary. That was right for Abernathy,
“He went there the next day with his crowbar in hand and popped the lock open on one of the delivery doors. Then he walked into the place like he owned it, which he did. He just walked around. He saw the empty places and the naked mannequins. He looked into the ice cream store that somebody was remodeling so it could be church. The sign on the ticket window said ‘Join us for our first service!!!’ but the date on that sign was five years ago. He saw the bright painted pillars and the tile benches. And it seemed like a good place. He didn’t rip anything out. Instead he put his mark on the doors and left everything just like it was.
“A week or so later he found me and didn’t kill me. Raoul built a fire in the chiminea and we sat beside it on the patio of the abandoned ice cream parlor. We talked all night while smoke floated up to the sky. We decided I should live here, in the Warren. It’s close to AllMART, so that saves time and money. And it is safe, since it belongs to Raoul. Nobody is going to mess with Raoul. Raoul would stop by and we’d hang out, and that was cool. When I said it was kind of weird and lonely sometimes, Raoul said, ‘Well, you can change that. You find some others who need to live here, and you bring them in. Be generous and on the lookout for the weak and the powerless.’ That’s why I saw you that day at the bus shelter; I was looking. I was looking just like Raoul told me to look.”
It has been a long time since I’ve felt so nervous. Maybe the first day of high school? My first day in 2-B? That could be it, the mix of I-know-I’m-supposed-to-be-here and I-don’t-know-how-I-belong-or-what-it-means-to-be. I’m at the employee entrance conscientiously early, comfortably early. So I just stand and wait and watch the sky change color, from cement to pink and then back to cement. I’m part of a thin little layer between the cement sky and the cement under my feet. A squished paper cup, a candy wrapper, and me.
While I wait, other new trainees arrive: some quiet, some nervous, others probably like me — nervously quiet. Some faces I recognize from passing by in the halls at school. I don’t know the people behind the faces. The only other person from 2-B is Bella Masterson, and if she remembers me, she doesn’t show it. I wonder where all the rest of them have gone. Each to where their talents are needed. I remember Abernathy in the zipcuffs waiting for the bus to the penitentiary. That was right for Abernathy,
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