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The Commons: Book 1

The Journeyman

Dinuhos Arts, LLC

THE ALL-SEEING EYES

Paul Reid died in the snow at seventeen. The day of his death, he told a lie — and for the rest of his life, he wondered if that was what killed him.

"Don't worry," he said to Mike Hibbets, the only adult in New York City who'd ever cared about him. "I'm coming back."

Pop Mike ran the New Beginnings group home, where Paul lived. He didn't believe the lie. And Paul told himself that it didn't matter.

"Does your face hurt?" The old man leaned on his desk in the New Beginnings main office.

Paul twisted his pewter ring, a habit that announced when something was bothering him. His face did hurt — especially his swollen eye.

As did the ribs he hadn't been able to protect two days earlier, when he hit the ground, balled up, in a Hell's Kitchen alley while four guys stomped him until they tired of it. He'd tried to shield his face, where damage might show forever. But he fared just as poorly at that as the afternoon sun cast a beat-down shadow show on a brick wall and a girl stood nearby and cried.

Paul had little to say, and no one worked a silence like Pop Mike. His nickname had once been "Father Mike" due to a talent for sniffing out guilt that rivaled any priest's. He asked the New Beginnings kids to drop that name so potential donors wouldn't confuse his shelter with a religious operation. There's no God to lift us up — we rise or fall together, he taught them. So they compromised and shortened it.

"Five foster homes, three group homes, some street life in between," Pop Mike said.

"So?" Paul couldn't look him in the eye.

"So no one makes it through that without survival skills, which you have. And you've found a place here for four years, and now you're just up and leaving."

The desk was a relic of the building's days as a school, a general hospital, and before that, a mental hospital. Its round wood edge was uneven and worn, as if the many kids trapped in this chair over the years had stared it away, varnish and all.

Paul shifted in the chair, his side one big ache. He hated hearing his life recited as if it were recorded and filed somewhere, which it was.

The winter wind forced its way through the gaps between the cockeyed window sash and its frame. A storm was due.

Outside, the fading daylight illuminated the wall of the adjacent building. A cartoon-ad peacock, its paint battling to hang onto the decaying brick, peddled a variety of Pavo fruit juices.

"New Beginnings matters to you." Rumor was, Pop Mike could go weeks without blinking. "Look how you tried to save Gonzales."

"I told him to run for help. He just ran." Paul had practiced this conversation — how it would play out. Pop Mike wouldn't mind that he was leaving. If he did, Paul wouldn't sweat it.

Yet he was unable to face the man.

The painted peacock smiled despite its sentence of death-by-crumbling. Its tail, gathered in one fist, bent outward in offering. The feathers ended in a once-vibrant assortment of bottles spread above the Pavo slogan like leaves on a branch of a shade tree: "Wake up to the rainbow! Wake up to your life!"

Decades of sun and rain had rendered the flavors unidentifiable in the grime and washed-out hues. Paul could only guess at grape, apple, orange, and watermelon.

"You could apply for our Next Steps program — work your way to an equivalency credential."

Paul didn't bother to refuse that one again.

Pop Mike followed his gaze. "The all-seeing eyes."

"What?"

"The peacock. In some Asian faiths, it's a symbol of mercy and empathy. In others, it's the all-seeing eyes of the Almighty. What that one sees, of course, is a customer."

"It's time for me to go." Paul touched his fingers to his eye, which flared in protest. "This is how New York chose to tell me." He prodded the bruise to see if he could make it hurt more. He succeeded.

Pop Mike reached across the desk, took hold of Paul's wrist, and gently pulled his hand away from his face. He didn't let go until he was convinced Paul wouldn't do it again. That was the only way he could keep Paul safe from himself.

"Please," he said. "That's the one word I have left. It won't work, but I'm saying it. Please."

Paul twisted his ring.

Pop Mike took in the beaten-up backpack at Paul's feet, the military-surplus coat thrown over the back of the chair. "Where are you going?"

"Away. I'll let you know when I get there."

Wake up to your life, said the peacock.

* * *

The three-block walk to Port Authority seemed to triple in the stinging wind. Paul's military-surplus coat was suitable only for motivating the troops wearing it to prevail before winter. It came from a pallet of stuff donated to New Beginnings as a tax write-off. He'd thought the coat would keep him warm and make him look tougher. The bite of the air and the beating in the alley proved him twice wrong.

A radio, its volume cranked up to the point of distortion, hung from a nail on a newsstand, dangling over piles of papers and magazines draped with clear plastic tarps. A weather-on-the-ones update milked the conditions of the approaching storm for drama, as did several headlines. "Blizzardämmerung!" screamed the Daily News. "Snowmageddon!" warned the Post.

The stand's owner, his face framed by graphic novels and tabloids binder-clipped around the window of a dual-pane Plexiglass wall, sung about how he'd just dropped in to see what condition the conditions were in. Commuters trying to beat the weather home paid him no mind.

By now, the meteorologist was more reporter than forecaster. Rounding the corner at Forty-second and Eighth, Paul had to blink away hard-blown flakes.

A feral-looking girl pulled one of the terminal's heavy glass doors open against the wind and held it for Paul as he swept into the stream of businesspeople headed for the buses within. She shook a jingling paper cup at him, but neither he nor his fellow travelers dropped anything in.

Paul was relieved that he didn't know the girl, but as he angled through the rush of commuters, he chided himself for ignoring her. He'd worked those doors in more desperate times. He knew what it meant when people were kind enough to part with a few coins — and what it meant when they weren't.

Getting past the beggars meant going head-down at a steady pace. Paul was holding money, so he didn't want to see anyone who knew him. The big ones wouldn't try to take it from him in a public place, but the smaller ones could talk him out of some.

"One way to San Francisco, please," he told the woman behind the ticket-counter glass after waiting his turn. She laughed at something the man working the adjacent line said.

He couldn't hear either of them through the barrier. That was the way of Port Authority and the world beyond for the children of the streets — for the concrete kids. The people with something to smile about did it in a world built to keep you out.

She slid Paul's ticket and change through the gap under the glass. He counted the bills against his chest to see how much was left, keeping his cash out of view.

There wasn't much to hide. He was nearly broke.

TRINA AND THE TRAVELIN' SHOES

Annie Brucker sat on the floor of the Port Authority basement, waiting in line for gate two. Leaning against the wall, she read aloud to her five-year-old son, Zach. She held the book, Trina and the Travelin' Shoes, with one hand. With the other, she kept a cat's-eye marble rolling back and forth across the backs of her fingers.

She'd been doing this for forty-five minutes, flexing her knee to keep it from going stiff. Her throat burned from speaking. Her fingers ached. But she kept it up for him.

Success with the marble meant Zach watched it instead of withdrawing to his inner place. If he didn't withdraw, then he might listen. Keeping him engaged was worth the discomfort, and Annie chose to believe he was paying attention because she had no proof that he wasn't.

Their matching red hair marked them as mother and son to anyone who might have noticed them waiting in line. And whoever did notice would have been shocked to know how much sitting cost her — that a thirty-something mom suffered from advanced osteoarthritis.

That was because they wouldn't have imagined this pleasant-looking woman held down on a table by three men working hard to keep her there while she screamed, her leg filled with nails, ball bearings, and other shrapnel too tiny and blown out to identify.

"Trina took one step and was gone from her little bedroom — gone from her little house," Annie read. Zach watched the marble. "With the next step, she left the town of Jarrett, where she knew everyone and everyone knew her." The legs of the passing commuters flickered light and shadow across the pages. "The shoes didn't tell Trina where they were going, and they never asked permission to take her there."

The H.M.O. doctors in Newark said Zach suffered from autism. The V.A. doctors wouldn't go that far because they weren't equipped to deal with children, and certainly not kids like him. The experts in San Francisco would tell her more.

Annie didn't want to know about autism. She wanted to know about Zach. Did he suffer? Was he happy, or was he lost? Was he truly autistic, or was that the easy answer for doctors chasing a goal of how many patients to see in a day?

"Trina watched the trees flow beneath her, step by step," she read. "Up and over, over and up, she and the travelin' shoes went." The marble traveled along with Trina — west to Annie's little finger, east to her thumb.

The flickering of the moving legs was a distraction. So was the knee, which didn't approve of her choice of seating. When the two tag-teamed Annie, that was all it took.

The marble went rogue, clacking to the floor and rolling away. She reached for it and missed, and Trina and her travels piled on. The book slipped from her hand, her place in it lost. Cursing to herself, she fought her way to her feet.

A fast-moving commuter, lost in his texting, kicked the marble. It bonged off of a recycling bin and fled into the shadows of a vacant bus gate.

Annie limped across the terminal floor, dodging people, and ventured into the murk. Bending to grope the floor in the dim light near the empty gate, she looked back to check on Zach.

He gazed into the air to his left — already gone.

She needed that marble. No other would do. To hold her son's attention, it had to be a certain mix of blue, green, and white. It had to be a cat's-eye.

Zach knew when it was a replacement, and it took him days to adjust. Until he did, she lost him.

Annie walked her hands across the tile, through candy wrappers and empty corn-chip bags. A few feet in, she clipped the marble with her pinky. It escaped and clicked off a wall.

Further into the gloom she went, patting the varying textures of the floor. She was damned thankful for the hand sanitizer back in her purse, assuming that hadn't already been stolen.

This was New York City. She should have taken it with her.

The noises of the concourse were transformed in the blackness. Voices came not from behind her but from the dark ahead.

"I'm trying!" an old woman cried. "I'm trying!"

Annie conjured an image of a frail figure somewhere off in the terminal. Back bent, cocooned in donated blankets, the poor lost creature was having an argument from years and years before. It was a plea to no one — an attempt to convince some greater force — or maybe just a battle with herself.

Pistachio shells.

A penny, a dime — if what she felt was U.S. currency.

An empty box of some gum or candy called Gifu, its label hardly legible in the bad light.

And there, at last, was the marble, which allowed itself to be captured fair and square. She stood to return to Zach.

The victory fell away from her.

More commuters had entered the concourse. Many more. Flowing four-deep, they blocked her view entirely.

She pressed into the current of people, the tide of sharp-cornered briefcases and interfering backpacks, trying to catch a glimpse of her son. "Excuse me, please." It was just something she said — a talisman. It had no measurable effect.

"Zach?" A sidestep. "Pardon." A dodge. She caught sight of their bags.

He was gone.

"Zach?" The voice was nothing like hers. "Zach!"

One of a pair of teenage girls looked up from her smartphone and pointed down the line of ticket-holders. Zach stood alone at the bend, where the queue folded in upon itself like a millipede.

He watched a skinny kid in an army jacket who used a pack as a cushion. The boy, a teen from the looks of him, was up against the wall, eyes closed, unaware that he had an audience.

Annie calmed herself. If she allowed Zach to see her upset, he would be frightened, too. Despite all of the things he screened out, he was quick to adopt her moods and slow to lose them, even after she moved on. Freaking out would make the long ride ahead of them that much longer.

She took a breath and held it for a count of three.

* * *

"Zach?"

The voice ended Paul's attempt to doze through the wait for the bus. Napping was impossible in Port Authority. Faking it could stop people from bothering you, but not often enough.

A pretty red-haired woman stood behind a little kid who was staring at him.

"Whatcha doing?" she asked the boy, who Paul figured was hers. She smiled in greeting.

Paul replied with a stiff nod. Cute girls threw him off his game. Women were even worse. He knew it, and so did they.

"Who's that, Zach?" she said. "Did you make a new friend?"

"Hello, Zach," Paul said. The kid regarded him with the most serious of expressions. "What's going on, buddy?"

The woman's smile fell a little. Maybe she didn't like nicknames.

The kid turned to his mother and held his hand out, beckoning. She hesitated, unsure, but then placed something into his palm.

He offered it to Paul — a marble.

Paul liked to keep to himself on the road. Other people meant complications — delays. But this was kind of interesting. "That for me?"

No reply. The kid just kept holding out the marble.

Paul took it from his hand.

The boy looked back up at his mother, who seemed as flummoxed by her son's behavior as Paul was by her. Something important was going on, but Paul had no idea what.

The mother didn't, either. She glanced from Paul to the kid, as if there were some secret they kept from her.

He tried to hand the marble back. "He'll miss it," he told her.

The kid wouldn't accept it.

Paul gave it another try, but no. "You sure? I have to give you something, then."

The kid pointed at his ring.

"Not that." He went into his pack, pulled out his notebook and pen, and wrote "I.O.U. one gift" on a page. Tearing it out, he handed it over to the boy, who studied it.

"He doesn't do this," the mom said.

"I work with little kids at this place I live — lived. Worked. Sometimes they give me stuff."

"No. He doesn't do this. With anyone."

Paul was so terrible at reading girls — at figuring out what they meant when they said things to him. "I'm sorry," he said, because he couldn't think of anything else to say, and because maybe he'd done something wrong.

Zach held his arms out to his mother. He appeared to be satisfied with the trade.

She picked the boy up.

"I'm sorry," Paul said.

BUMP-DI-DI-BUMP

"How fast are you going?" June Medill asked the bus driver, leaning sideways to check the speedometer.

"Fast enough to get there, slow enough to get there alive," he said.

June Medill had asked the driver about his speed many times in the hours since the bus commenced braving the storm. Paul figured the driver would ignore her at some point — or tell her to shut up. But June Medill was tough to tune out, and she didn't seem the type to listen to others anyway.

Paul, Annie, Zach, and everyone else knew June Medill's name because when she'd boarded, she told the man sitting behind the driver that he was in the seat reserved for Medill, June. She'd told him loudly, and she'd upped the volume when the driver said that the bus line didn't issue assigned seats. She'd been just as audible when pulling out her cell phone and threatening to call Port Authority and New Jersey Transit to complain.

The driver had pointed out that they were not on a New Jersey Transit bus, but the man in the seat got up and moved in order to keep the peace. That freed June Medill to hector the driver as he guided the motor coach through curtains of snow at a safe crawl, though not a crawl safe enough for June Medill.

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Excerpted from The Commons: Book 1 by Michael Alan Peck. Copyright © 2014 Michael Alan Peck. Excerpted by permission of Dinuhos Arts, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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