PROMISE THE HUMAN BEING
The night before she meets Rabie, Promise wakes from burning city dreams to a smoke smell out her window. She trails the smell down the fire escape to a smoldering paper bag half-buried in the alley trash, six hundred dollars in twenties and a burned-up note inside:
...three times I screamed at you...and in that last season...lied about hooking up...with your cousin...and I swear to fucking god...
—luv Kelly
The note crumbles to ash as she reads but the twenties seem fine, still warm as she counts them by the bathroom night light, seizing still each time her grandma coughs awake on the couch. She is fifteen years old and she moved in with her grandma a month ago.
“It concerns me, from a health perspective,” says Promise’s social worker to her grandma the next morning, pushing for them to address the vermin droppings piling in the hall corners, under the sink. “We could start with your landlord, or at least the building manager,” the social worker says. “Or there’s the tenants’ alliance, if you're concerned about retaliation...”
Promise’s grandma sighs as she washes dishes in her work clothes. She says It’s been like this since the garbage strike, the whole building, whole neighborhood, trash bags piled higher than your head and that puked-up candy smell every time you walk outside. She mentions the glue traps that caught two of them right away. “Which just means they're everywhere” she says, “like spitting in the sea, or crying in a river.”
Promise scrolls her grandma’s phone on the couch, bed-headed and empty-faced at eleven-thirty in the morning. She can smell the heat wafting off the social worker’s desire – just barely held in check -- to remind them it’s a school day.
“Ones I caught were this big,” her grandma says. “They watched me through the glass of the mason jar I drowned them in, big eyes full of regret.”
The social worker sets her pen down, rubs her own eyes like she has a headache. Promise smiles at her grandma who lifts a soapy jar from the sink, pretending to check for spots.
“Least I washed the jar.” she says.
*
That night, Promise watches the alley from the fire escape, apple munching, bare legs dangling in the warm dark. The city is a chorus of engines, sirens, phlegmatic AC window units straining with trapped voices in the humid shadows. Around midnight, she hears rustling in the bags, empty-rolling cans, hissing and voices. Finally.
“It’s not here...”
A crash.
“She fucking lied then because it’s not fucking here!”
She under-hands her applecore into where the noises clump. Eyes startle in the dark, bound off for deeper night, all but one pair, the biggest, wettest, smartest eyes of all. A mouth opens below them, takes a bite of her discarded apple, smiles chewing. “Hello there.”
“Hello there,” echoes Promise.
Uncurling a body from the shadows, she watches as the speaker takes the form of a dirty, teenage boy, motley clothes and boots held together with tape, mane of stormy hair matting around scarred cheeks. And the lusting animal hunger of those eyes. Encouraged, Promise smiles back.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“We’re, uh, looking for my homework,” says the boy. “A friend of mine was supposed to leave it here, but I can’t seem to find it.”
Still smiling: “That’s not what you’re looking for,” she says.
At which the boy laughs. His eyes narrow up at her. “Hey, my name’s Rabie,” he says. “What’s yours?”
Promise giggles at his stupid name, tells him her own. The boy offers a formal wave of greeting which she pointedly does not return.
“Well, you’re right, Promise. I’m not actually looking for my homework. Fact is,” he says, “I don’t go to school at all.”
“I know,” she says. “I’m not stupid.”
“Course you’re not, course you’re not. In fact, I bet I got a real smarty on my hands here, don’t I? Guess I’m gonna have to give it to you straight...”
He tells her he and his friends are traveling, leaving town tonight, but there are traveling papers they need first. Their friend said she’d stashed them here...maybe in an envelope?
Eyes track their exchange from the alley’s far end. Rabie’s teeth show, his true canines long and yellow.
“You haven’t seen an envelope around here, have you, Promise?”
Promise says nothing, savoring his need, kicks her long legs above him. A spark glows in Rabie’s eyes.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“It’s not papers you’re looking for, either,” she says.
The spark lights to a flame. Rabie leaps snarling for her – “where is it you little bitch” -- but Promise has already pulled herself up to standing, legs out of reach.
“No,” she says, sternly, not yelling, but as to a dog. “Stop that.”
And Rabie stops, quiets, jaw-clenched watching her. She checks the window to her grandma’s apartment, quick-scans the alley. Then, quietly: “Take me with you,” she says.
She says she has the money but that it’s hidden somewhere he’ll never find it, not in a million years. “Not unless you take me with you,” she says.
Rabie sniffs the air, low-growls looking around. His companions crouch along the streetlight’s edge. Promise waits until the snarl to melts from his lips and, with some effort, he is able to look politely up at her once more. A nod. “Alright,” he says.
And again she is smiling, auburn mane a-wild in the streetlight, already evoking Rabie’s own as she descends the fire escape. Her feet touch the ground and the city’s power grid strains, then shudders; streetlights dim and the air conditioners all chug nearly off before some desperate system failsafe kicks in, redirects sufficient power, and the city -- lights, sockets, AC, security systems – groans once more barely back to life.
When the lights’ return, the alley is empty. The children have all gone.
*
And so begins that part of Promise’s life, her years of traveling with Rabie, up and down the west coast, as far south as the boondock colonies of Baja, as far north as the Alaska canneries, Kodiak and Pelican, where the fish are nearly gone and the boats all sit on blocks. Not that either of them has much taste for work. Rabie claims his only salable skills are murdering humans and trimming weed and even the latter he never manages for longer than a month on some sketchy friend-of-a-friend’s farm before fights and changes in the wind return them to the road.
Promise knows he’s been living like this a while already from the number and frequency of “old friends” they encounter, individuals either ominously wary of Rabie or over-friendly to the point of suspicion. He is called many names and she sees how he lies to everyone, about everything, often to no end and surprising even him, the truth wild-shaping as he speaks it. Raised by liars, Promise understands and often finds it strangely comforting. Lies are sometimes the only language one knows well enough to speak. And Rabie talks a lot.
He says he knows how to hop trains and takes her to the yards that night, gets them as far as up into an empty grainer before getting so high that he barely seems to notice when the bulls find them an hour later, toss them down into the gravel culvert, stand on Rabie’s hand, and take turns kicking him in the ribs. He’s a fast healer, though, and good at hitching. Promise’s being a girl, a human girl, doesn’t hurt, either.
They winter whenever they can in the abandoned malls where his cousins the wolves are coming back, young packs ranging in the skylit-dusk between the stalls and clothing racks, cracked tile and overgrown planter ferns, spring water dripping new creeks from the long-dry fountains. They sniff and are satisfied with Promise, tolerate Rabie for as long as he can hold off stealing from them. Then they have to leave.
But Promise enjoys their life, these first few years, or that heavy, dark part of her is anyway appeased and lightened, as long as they are either arriving or leaving. Rabie’s loyalty to her is a wild dog’s, desperate, unpredictable, and seemingly limitless. The magic burning envelope smolders always between them, faint smell of old smoke pleasurably leashing Rabie to Promise, trapping him for years in that increasingly farcical lost-boy shape, assumed so casually on their first night, his pleading for the envelope is a balm to her, even in their meanest seasons. How she savors the aphrodisiac desperation of his howls and threats, the forced vulnerability of his tears and rage, snapping jaws impotent in the glow of dying cities.
Once she wakes tickled by a wetness that turned out to be her own blood, sees Rabie strung-out kneeling atop her, her own knife stolen and trembling in his hands, Rabie’s face twisted with sobs.
“--just tell me what the note said at least!”
And Promise feels the heat race in her, bites her lip and raises her hand to stroke his face, Rabie nuzzling against it.
“Hello there,” she says.
Though these rituals sustain her day-to-day, the trajectory of their lives remains pretty much unchanged. Episodes accumulate. Experiences that would break good people like you and I, Promise mostly endures, uncomplaining, an already-wet person walking home through the rain. But where is home? She is beaten and robbed, worse stuff, usually because of Rabie. She holds a drunk, old vet down in a snowy parking lot as Rabie beats the man to death with a bike lock. Years later, the blood-wet sound of the man’s weeping between Rabie’s growled accusations remains clear in her mind, even if any further context is lost -- and what would she do with context? Time crumbles to ash in her fingers, and not without some relief.
November. Two men emerge from the ravine behind the empty apartment complex. She’d seen Rabie accept money from them earlier that day and now he is nowhere to be found. The men circle her in the weed-choked foundation of one of the burned-out units, approach from either side, smile at one and other. Wind blows the trash and branches. Promise does her best to disassociate through the encounter, focusing on the bottle pressing against her back, until the scent of something wafting off one of them -- from in his beard or breath, from before she can remember -- penetrates her, and she looks him finally in the eye. Her fingers circle the bottle neck. She sees him smile once more, grossly pleased to have earned her attention, then explode as she smashes the bottle against the side of his face. Her body bursts into a teaming murder of six hundred crows and ascends coursing through the bare tree branches to depart into the purple sky. It is the only time she does it, but it is how she leaves him.
She trades the money for a gun.
Years later, grown and solitary, squatting with a few others like her in the cathedral of the old brewery here on Tumwater falls, she wakes from burning city dreams to the anguished, human-like cry of one of her cats. Cracking the door to look, a pair of them dashed ragged-eared inside, trembling behind her legs.
In the gray dawn light she sees him, a coyote, yellow-toothed, still and watching from the edge of the parking lot. He is himself a much scarred and chewed-up thing, barely bigger than the cats, and just a little older than her. But those eyes, how big, and regret-filled.
She levels the gun, her first shot’s ricochet echoing across the valley.
She walks toward him, gun still level, jogging to a run: “You leave my fucking cats alone, you motherfucking--”
He flees struck by the second shot, trails blood into the trees. And Promise pursues him, unsatisfied, screaming threats and accusations of her own, until his sign is lost in the cold mess and skree. Yet still she stalks him searching, calling furious to him, to someone, anyone, as human animals are wont to do.
“--and I did hook up with your cousin,” she screams, “--I swear to fucking god!”
These are the last words discernable as language to those of us listening. But the roar of her pursuit continues, is still known to us an hour or so after, unmistakable, at a range of about two miles.
Derrick Martin-Cambell a writer from Portland, OR. His stories have recently appeared in Joyland, Cold Signal Magazine, The Evergreen Review, Apocalypse Confidential, and Necessary Fiction.