Flying for Food

By Kobbie Alamo

David jumped—adding a mid-air body roll for the hell of it—from the top of the red brick pillar marking the entrance to the parking lot. He made the ten-foot drop, nailing the four-inch beam, balancing on the balls of his feet.

He stared into the enclosure of St. Timothy’s Academy, squinting to make out the shapes in the dark. David figured they enclosed their garbage, using fancy carved wood, in order to keep out people like him. He snickered and dropped to the concrete ground. The smell wasn’t bad tonight; they must’ve had Italian for dinner. Usually fish smelled the worst—and smelled fast. Then the chicken dishes. Italian sauces, even with beef in them, could go for days.

He pulled on the workman’s gloves he found last Halloween at an abandoned construction site and brushed the palms on his pants. Climbing into a damn dumpster, especially in the dark, was always nasty. Not the actual climbing; hell, David could climb up, leap over or balance on anything. Not the trash he mined for something edible; hell, David would eat anything. Nope. It was the possibility of rats.

There’d been rats the first time his mom stuck him inside a dumpster to scavenge for a discarded Whopper. Each of them seemed bigger than he; but then he’d been scrawny for six. When he’d seen them, he’d frozen, hoping they’d scurry away. They hadn’t. Instead, the largest rat scampered onto an empty box of Amway laundry detergent, tweaking its nose at a waft of lavender soap as it looked at him. David had watched that nose, edged with long whiskers, vibrate in his direction.

But that fat rat had been merely a decoy. While David focused on him, he’d forgotten about the other two. He remembered feeling the sharp nails and furry body of one inside his t-shirt; the other had scuttled up the shorts his mom made from a pair of jeans she’d found at a Goodwill deposit site. He’d jumped. Then screamed, but only for about ten seconds.

Mom’s head poked over the top of the dumpster. “Quiet!” She hissed. “There are terrorists. If they hear you, they’ll blast you away.”

David shut up.

By the time the scrawny rat’s teeth actually tore into his fleshy upper thigh, he was silent. Stock still. His mom had to climb in after him.

“You know better than this,” she’d said. “Get moving.”

David had to go a whole day and night by himself, secreted away in the ice skaters’ hot house. Empty, since it’d been summer.

“Next time, look for rats before you go in,” Mom scolded as she pushed him onto the bench where children laced their skates. Then she’d left, looking over her shoulder. “Those turban men better not find us!”

When Mom finally returned, she’d brought a hot dog. A whole one, not the remains somebody tossed away. Still warm, the bread so soft and steamy, nothing had ever tasted as good—before or since.

He’d been damn lucky the rat was rabies free. That’s how he’d picked up the phrase, “no-rab.” It stuck.

He knew it’d taken almost two years after the rats before the state took mom away and stuck his ass in foster care. Care. What a joke. The Palmers didn’t know the definition of the word. But for some reason, he always equated the rats with Mom’s going away. Dumb. Maybe it was simply the first time he realized she believed those voices in her head.

Shaking off the irritation of his hesitation, David grabbed hold of one side of the dumpster, revved his body with a few back-and-forth rolls, then catapulted himself inside. He landed with a whoosh—moving fast—and yanked out the folded paper bag from inside his nylon jacket. By rote, he began jamming foodstuffs inside.

“Hello?”

David froze.

“I know you’re in there,” a voice whispered.

He gently, silently, placed the paper bag on top of the trash and inched toward the back edge of the dumpster. If he could be within arm’s reach, he’d propel himself back out, up and onto the fence.

The gate opened with a whispered groan.

Through the slats at the corners, he followed a small beam of light as it flicked side to side around the dumpster.

“I haven’t called the cops or anything,” the voice continued. “I just want to talk to you.”

Another three inches and he was out of there.

“If you look inside the white bag with Crate and Barrel written on it,” the whisper said, “there’s a whole Tupperware full of macaroni and cheese.” The light stopped moving and the voice lowered even more. “I’ve left you something every night since I started watching you.”

She’d watched him? Not good, even if free food was no-rab.

Then the light blinded him. He might as well have been wearing a neon sign that read, “Here I am!”

“I can see you.”

No shit.

“My name’s Bethany.”

David snorted.

“What’s funny?”

“Off,” David said.

The light snapped dark.

He’d made it to the side of the dumpster. Without using his hands for support or leverage he bent his legs, coiled the muscles and sprung. Tough to jump that high without a running start, it’d taken David months of practice to pull it off. But this time felt harder than normal, like using a pummel horse without handles, since the garbage beneath his feet shifted. He still landed with cat stealth on the lid closing half the dumpster.

Back when he’d stayed with the Palmers, he’d discovered St. Timothy’s one night when he’d snuck out. Yeah, he’d hated where the Palmers lived—Battery Park too far from his familiar streets and alleys of South Street Seaport – but at least it’d been easy to get around in the dark. That’s when he started, after practicing on railings and staircases, to use rooftops and fire escapes as his main means of getting around. Not many people hassled him when he was thirty stories above them. Not to mention, it was a blast. Sometimes, when he balanced just right and felt the flow, dove from one building to the next and slammed the landing, it was almost like flying.

Now, from his position on the dumpster lid, he looked down on the girl.

 She was a couple of years younger than he, no more than fourteen, maybe fifteen.

“Well?” he asked from his newfound height.

“Oh,” she said, obviously startled. She glanced up and flicked the light back on. “Hi.”

He waited.

She cleared her throat and moved the hand holding the flashlight.

“Off,” he said.

“Okay.”

He waited.

Bethany took a deep breath and kept her face—her eyes seemed too big for her features—angled toward him. The light flicked off once more. She said, “I need you to teach me.”

What the hell—teach her? He stayed quiet, assuming there was more.

“I don’t want to go home,” she whispered. Then, with a trembling voice she added, “See, free running’s a lot like gymnastics. Well, kinda. At least it uses the same basic moves. I figured you could teach me what you do and I can add the moves to my routines.”

The girl talked crap. People taught themselves what they needed to know. David always had. He turned and leapt to the top of the privacy fence; then he flexed his calves and thighs to spring back to the brick pillars from where he’d entered.

“Wait! I’ll leave you food,” Bethany pleaded. “Every night. If you’ll just show me. . .”

David sprung and took off into the night.

˜

A week later David decided to try St. Timothy’s again; the ritzy private school offered a guaranteed meal. He even wondered if that girl had held up her promise to leave food.

Lately, Mom was worse—flat out refusing to take her meds. Sister Helen, who ran the Manhattan shelter at the corner of 23^rd and Lex, ordered Mom’s meds. Sister told him that if Mom didn’t start taking them, she’d be put away again. He would go back into foster care, as if the four years he’d spent in the system needed repeating. Sister Helen was okay, even when she harped on him to go to school. But she was wrong. No way would David ever go back into foster care. He and Mom no-rabbed. As long as she took her damn medications. When she refused, there was little he could do, other than throw his fist into a wall. He’d tried grinding up her meds and putting the granules in her food, but she was too smart.

Sometimes he wondered if she’d be better off back at the state home for psychos. Now that he was sixteen, even if the state did try to stick him into the system, he’d be vapor. But the thought of Mom in one of those rat-hole institutions made his stomach clench and his eyes burn.

One thing for sure, she no longer held up her end of finding food or clothing. She spent most of her day talking to those he’d long given up on trying to see or hear.

He’d missed St. Timothy’s dumpster, but the encounter with the girl made him nervous. Every time he thought about her, he took an extra lap to the roof. He had to go back, though. For years he’d counted on the school at least twice a week for delicacies he couldn’t find anywhere else. Turns out rich kids, especially girls, didn’t eat much of the cafeteria food. Most of it ended as trash.

An added bonus for him, thanks to overpaid custodians, not a single rat in sight.

St. Timothy’s was far from both the shelter and the bridge where he and Mom stayed with about fifteen—depending on the day—other people; homeless only by state standards. As far as he was concerned, as long as he had Mom and a full stomach, he was home.

As he slammed his landing at the edge of St. Timothy’s parking lot, every light was out. He’d waited until after midnight to ensure they were. He figured he was safe. But as soon as he made the drop onto the concrete floor, he knew he’d been wrong.

“Hi,” Bethany whispered.

“Shit,” David muttered.

He readied to leave, but a hand on his arm stopped him.

“Please wait,” Bethany said. “Look. I brought you something.”

She clicked on her flashlight and pointed it toward a dark, bulky shape tucked in the corner beside a weathered push broom.

David didn’t move. His arm felt both heavy and tingly beneath her fingers.

“See?” She grabbed the shape and held it out for him. “It’s a backpack. Brand new. I got two this year—one from both sets of grandparents—and never used this one. It’s navy blue, not a chick color. A guy could use it,” she paused, as if realizing she was babbling. “I thought maybe you could wear it while you’re free running to carry your stuff.” Her voice trailed off.

Very slowly, very deliberately, David pulled his arm away.

“Off,” he said, nodding toward the flashlight.

A moment later the darkness returned. Muted traffic sounds and the insistent beep of a cement truck in reverse were the only sounds David heard, other than his heartbeat and Bethany’s breathing.

“I guess you really aren’t going to help me, are you?” she asked and let the backpack fall to the ground.

David didn’t know what to say. What to do. Since leaving the Palmers, almost four years ago, he hadn’t dealt much with people. Just Mom, Sister Helen, and Mr. Levine, who owned a newsstand on Waters. David sometimes cleaned his kiosk. Mr. Levine chattered, but David let him talk—he rarely needed to respond—and simply included listening as part of the duties he did for the under-the-table seven bucks an hour. Right now he felt funny. Hot, like he stood too close to a trash-can fire. His stomach flipped around like the time he’d eaten bad tuna salad.

And he wanted her to touch him again.

Bethany turned away. “Go ahead and take the backpack, I’m not gonna use it, anyway,” she said. “And there’s beef jerky and Oreos in the outer pocket, if you want ‘em.”

When she reached the gate she didn’t look back.

“You’re really good, you know,” she said without facing him. “You could make a lot of money.”

Then she was gone.

She took the air with her. Sticking his hands on his knees, David bent over and tried to suck lungfuls without sounding like a subway tunnel—he still couldn’t risk waking anyone who might call the cops. He had gut knowledge that Bethany was no-rab; the only student who wouldn’t rat him out.

Finally he grabbed the backpack and rigged it around his waist. There was no way he could have anything strapped across his back, inhibiting his arms. Not with the moves he had to make to get home.

When he reached the roof of the First Union bank, he threw in an extra wall flip and B-twist ‘cause he felt especially light. Lighter than he’d ever felt. Simply fly? Forget it. Tonight he soared.

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