I prayed hard that night for a sign. The deal I had with Sergeant Kosinski was broken, and it was on me to tell him what had happened. But I couldn’t see what good that would do. Jamal and Chantay would be listed as missing. When the cops found them, the city would take custody. This worried me as much as anything else. I knew too much about how social services worked. Those people had their hearts in the right place, but the system was broken. Some youth homes are no better than the ghetto. The kids in there are rough as they come. The children might even have been better off on the street.
And if they didn’t want to be found, the cops would never locate them. Which would mean that Sergeant Kosinki’s faith in me would be broken for nothing. He would have two more runaways on the books. He would have to explain to his bosses why he hadn’t followed the rules in the first place. He might even lose his job. It was all a big mess.
So I didn’t say anything to anyone. I had to trust that the children would come back if they needed me bad enough.
But I kept looking for them anyway.
During my spare time, I walked up and down the streets, talking to people, asking if they had seen Jamal or Chantay. I didn’t have a picture to show anybody. There were so many kids running wild that you couldn’t tell one from another. Nobody had seen a little boy with rat bites on his face. And nobody remembered a young girl whose pregnancy was not even beginning to show.
One day I stopped some young boys who were on their way to make some kind of mischief somewhere. They were not much older than Jamal, so I asked if they knew him. Their leader was a young fellow with dreadlocks. His voice hadn’t even changed yet, but already he had a teardrop tattooed on his face. That meant he was in a gang.
“Who he run with?” this little Napoleon demanded. “Crips? Bloods? La Mara? Eighteenth Street?”
“He’s not in a gang,” I said. “He’s too smart for that.”
“Then he already dead,” the boy told me confidently. “You don’t got a gang, you got nothin’.”
“You boys should join my gang,” I told them. “We’re the strongest gang in the world.”
He looked suspicious.
“What gang you talkin’ about?”
“Our leader is the Almighty,” I said. “And there is nothing he can’t do.”
“Yeah, I don’t wanna hear no church stuff, lady,” he said, his dreadlocks whipping back and forth as he looked at his friends. “How you gonna make money goin’ to church all the time?” He reached into his pocket and flashed me a wad of cash. “You lucky you ain’t got no purse, or I be takin’ it right now.”
“Young man,” I said, “the wages of sin is death.”
I gave him my best stare. He looked uncomfortable. They moved on then. But one of them, a boy so small he looked like he ought to be in kindergarten, hung back.
“I seen that boy,” he whispered. “Jamal. I knows him.”
“Where did you see him, love?” I asked.
“I dunno,” said the little one. His voice was high and hoarse as he whispered. “I just seen him, that’s all. He was with that dude everyone talkin’ bout. The dude in the big hat.”
“What dude did you say?”
“You know. The dude carry them suitcases around all the time. One black, one white.”
“You seen that man?” I felt a chill, even though it was high noon on a hot day. He was describing Jacky Wacky.
The little boy nodded, his face all solemn.
“I sees him at night sometimes,” he said, in that hoarse little voice. “Once he gave me some food. He nice to kids. But he don’t like grownups. Even though he is one.”
“Listen, son,” I said, “you ever get hungry, you come by my shelter. You’re better off there than running with this crowd. You’re just gonna end up in trouble.”
“Yo, Squeaks!” called the dreadlocked one from down the block. “Let’s roll!”
“I gots to go,” said Squeaks.
“No, you don’t, Squeaks,” I said. “There is a better way than this. Let the higher power lead you, little one. That fellow there is just gonna hurt you.”
Squeaks looked at me, then at his gang, then at me again. Then he moved off down the block to join them.
My heart broke, watching him go. He should have been in school, learning his ABCs. Instead he was learning how to stick up old ladies and run drugs for corner dealers.
That’s life in the city.
At the shelter one day about six months after all this, a lady named Linda Mae Johnson showed up to relieve me at the desk.
She said, “Too bad about poor old Mrs. Mingus.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, though from the way she said it I already knew.
“Didn’t you hear? She died at home yesterday. Nephew found her.”
I hadn’t seen Mrs. Mingus since that day at her house. She didn’t come by the shelter anymore. I saw her a few times at church, but she didn’t wait around to talk to the minister. She just skedaddled on home right away. She must have felt some shame at what had happened. But she never came clean with me about it. As angry as I was, I never bore her any ill will. It was not my place to pass judgment on people. That was for the higher power to do.
“Goodness,” I said. “How sad. How did she die?”
“Strangest thing,” said Linda Mae. “They can’t tell. Didn’t look like a heart attack or a stroke. She was just sittin’ there in her kitchen. And wasn’t she pointing at the window, even though she was dead! Her hand was stuck right up in the air like it was frozen there.”
Another chill went through me then. I am a sensible woman, but Jamal’s words came back to me, and part of me wondered if his warning had come true.
“I never heard of anyone dying like that before,” I said.
“Me neither,” said Linda Mae. “His work is done in mysterious ways sometimes.”
“Amen to that,” I said.
As a God-fearing woman, I ought not to say this. But after I heard that story, I began to wonder if maybe there wasn’t something to this Jacky Wacky story after all.
I mentioned before that I used to hope to meet a good man someday. Not to marry and settle down with—that was not my path in this life—but just so I could know there was some goodness left in the world.
But it seemed to me that a man would have to be strong and powerful beyond all human law to rise above the misery of this world. So I forgot about ever meeting such a man, because men like that didn’t exist.
Or did they? A tiny seed of wonder had been planted in me. I tried to ignore it, because I felt God would not be pleased with me for thinking such things. Then again, I was just some poor middle-aged woman. What did I know of what God wanted? What did I know about anything at all?