SARAH
Such shame had worked its way through me the instant my hand had connected with his cheek, and if it hadn’t been for Roxy (that’s the girl on the floor; this wasn’t our first meeting) spitting in Kay’s face, I would have offered up more in the way of an apology. But as I dealt with the struggling Roxy, I turned to look and he was gone.
Within our grip, Roxy got back to her feet, her tall, wiry frame swaying and wobbling the whole time. She wanted to leave, but she was weak and Kay and I kept her easily enough within our grasp.
“Just let me go,” Roxy exclaimed, turning her face to me. “Ain’t no motherfucker cares about me. Ain’t no one. Not even you. You come out here every fucking night bothering folks who don’t wanna be bothered. You and your Jesus and your God can go fuck yourselves as far as I can see. None o’you motherfuckers really give a shit; you’re just trying to get yourselves into heaven.” Here she raised her hoarse voice as high as it would go, directing all her anger into my face. “And guess what?” she added.
“What, Roxy?” I asked casually.
“Heaven don’t even fucking exist,” she said with absolute conviction. “Don’t fucking exist. You’ve been fed a lie, bitch. Ain’t nothing but this shit heap down here. Ain’t nothing but me, you and all these laughing jackasses.”
I didn’t know what to say. There was so little hope in her. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve found Roxy in this state. Every single time she becomes abusive, and the spitting from tonight is not the worst thing that this woman has done to me and others on patrol over the years. She’s repeatedly pushed me to the brink. But would I ever offer this woman anything other than my complete assistance? Of course not.
“I have no easy answers for you, Roxy,” I explained to her in a calm manner.
“No easy answers!?” she let out, throwing her limp arms up in the air. “Well, let me give you one: crystal!”
The crowd of drunks cheered.
“You see with crystal,” Roxy continued, spurred on by the crowd’s reaction, “you get your heaven. You get it in a little glass pipe and it brings you peace and forgiveness all on its own. It takes all your little problems and bundles them into one big problem: hunger for crystal. It reduces and simplifies the most complicated and shitty existence into one pure, singular need.” With the pronouncement of this last word, she looked me right in the eyes and asked, “You got need, bitch?”
And she abruptly placed her hand between my legs, making me jump. She took the hand away, sneered at me and brought it under her nose.
“Oh, you got need, bitch!” she shouted out for all to hear as she revoltingly smelt her hand. “You got real need. You want old Roxy here to give you what you need? Maybe that’s why all you Christian Patrol motherfuckers come out here every night. Maybe it’s not us you’re trying to save, but yourselves.”
I simply looked at my sister and said, “Let’s go, Kay.”
“But her nose?” Kay replied. “She needs stitches.”
“She doesn’t want them. Come on.”
“But Sarah we can’t give up on her.”
“She’s given up on herself.”
I turned and walked away, not even caring if Kay followed. Roxy made me mad and the crowd had added salt. Plus, I was still feeling shameful for hitting the guy. All in all I felt horrible in that moment and needed all my faith to fight the urge to say to Hell with it. To Hell with the great torrent of horror that exists on the streets. Let them decay and despair on their own.
Roxy was a product of those despairing streets. A few years ago, after first coming into contact with her, I looked into her unhappy history and found a girl that had been abused since childhood. At the age of eight, she’d been taken into care after her stepfather was caught by a neighbor sexually abusing her. Her mother was an addict and had chosen to support her drug-dealing husband over her own daughter during the trial, in which he was eventually convicted. In the end, the courts had little choice but to place Roxy in care. Then when she was thirteen, Roxy ran away from her latest foster parents and disappeared out of the system for several years until she was picked up at the age of fifteen during a raid on an underage brothel. Ever since, Roxy has continued to lead a miserable and humiliating existence.
Kay caught me up and placed her arm tenderly around my shoulders as I continued to walk with my head down. The moment I felt her touch, I felt soothed, stopped dead and turned to her with tears in my eyes.
“Maybe they’re right,” I sobbed.
“Don’t ever think that,” Kay insisted. “They’ve given up; don’t you ever give up, Sarah Dillinger.”
“But can they really be brought back into the light? Sometimes I feel that too much darkness has surrounded them for too long and they’ve become swallowed up in it so that they resemble the darkness themselves.”
“No one is ever too far to come back into the light. Every person on God’s earth has the chance of redemption. God gives all of us that. He leaves it burning in our hearts. Roxy acts like she does because she’s stuck in a storm of anger and self-abasement.”
“But am I any better?” I asked her. “I hit that guy tonight. What right did I have?”
“That guy was typical of the contempt we have to deal with. He’s just like Roxy: lost.”
“You’re right,” I said, his blue eyes appearing suddenly in my mind. “In his eyes I saw how lost he was. Is that why I feel so terrible for striking him?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just because you’re a good person and good people inwardly abhor all violence no matter its reasons.”
I smiled at my sister and pulled her into my arms. We hugged warmly for a minute or so on the sidewalk, ignoring the comments of the drunks that filed past. When we parted, we walked back to the spot where Roxy had been sitting and found that she’d gone, along with the throng. Walking a little further down the street, I recognized one of the people from the crowd and asked him what had happened.
“She wandered off when someone said the cops were coming,” the guy pronounced in slurred speech as he swayed unevenly on his feet.
I asked him which direction she went, and he merely threw his arms up and blew a raspberry in my face, his beer-soured breath and spittle covering me. I took this to mean that he didn’t know or couldn’t recall. Ignoring his rudeness, I thanked him and went off.
We scoured the streets for another twenty minutes to no avail and were about to give up when we heard a scream emanate from an alleyway we were passing. Darting our eyes down it, we saw Roxy fighting off two men about halfway along. One of them had her by the throat and held the blade of a knife in front of her face, while the other man held her arms, her skinny legs kicking out at them both. I pulled my phone out and dialed 911. But as I did, Kay flew off in their direction before I had a chance to hold her back. I screamed her name and for her to stop, but she kept running toward them. The operator came on and I gave the woman the details of the crime. Then I walked toward the scene.
Having noticed Kay’s approach, one of the guys—a great burly skinhead—had let go of Roxy and confronted her. Once I reached them, he was towering over my sister, holding his arms out and blocking her access to Roxy, her head only coming up to his wide barrel of a chest.
“I’d get out of here if I were you,” I informed him.
“Oh, and why’s that?” he replied taking his little lizard eyes off of my sister and shining them at me.
“The police will be here in a minute.”
“Mmm…” he let out, musing out loud. Holding his arms wide and moving his body to bar us both, the guy shouted over his shoulder to his colleague. “Hey, Silver?”
“Yeah?” the other returned as he held Roxy by the throat, hovering the knife over her eye while she begged him to leave her alone, the glint of the moon shining off of its silver blade.
“These bitches have called the cops,” the burly one announced, “so I guess you better do whatever it is you’re gonna do.”
Almost the second he finished this statement the alley erupted in a fearsome scream that escaped Roxy’s lips like a flaming bird from fire. At first I didn’t know if it was her, because the scream was almost non-human and sounded more like a mortally wounded animal letting out its final death rattle than a person. While the terrible howl dissolved into a monstrous gurgling sound, Kay and I fiercely tried to get past the mammoth man, but he held us back as easily as a dam holds back a stream.
“Come on, let’s go,” Silver cried out and the big guy simply turned and began running after his friend, who was now already a considerable distance from us. Kay and I let them go and ran to Roxy, who was slumped on the floor holding her mouth with both hands. On getting to her, I immediately saw the blood pouring out through the gaps between her fingers, flowing down into a pool, the poor girl coughing and choking on it. I knelt down to her and when she saw my face her eyes took on a look of terror, as though she were afraid of me. I begged her to take her hands away from her face so I could take a look, and when she did I saw something that will follow me to the grave.
I saw a wound that stretched from both corners of her lips and ran about an inch along each of her cheeks. This ‘Silver’ had only gone and placed the blade across her open mouth and pushed down. What sort of animalism existed in this creature of a man that pushed him to do something so evil?
I instantly called for an ambulance to follow the police. When it arrived, the paramedics got Roxy inside and Kay went with her to the hospital while I made a statement.
“It’ll probably amount to nothing,” the short tubby female officer said once I’d finished my statement, the two of us sitting in the front of her squad car. “The girls very rarely press charges. The guy’s probably her pimp and dealer, so she has no choice. Plus, people in her condition of life never like talking to the police. We’ll probably go to the hospital tomorrow to interview her and she’ll turn us away.”
“But what about Silver?”
“It’s a nickname of someone that I’m aware of. But like I say, the girl won’t talk, so we won’t have a case and your Silver will carry on as if nothing ever happened.”
There was such fatalism in her tone that I almost burst into tears again. Sitting there listening to the indifference of the officer made me so sad. So very very sad. In a daze, I got out of the vehicle, said goodbye to the police lady and walked off down the street. When I was about a hundred meters along, I ducked into a small recess in the wall where I was partially hidden, put my hands over my face, and cried my eyes out.