There are too many trains. Royal takes the Ninth Avenue elevated all the way down to Park Row and then transfers to the Myrtle Avenue line that crosses the bridge to Brooklyn. They have moved three times since the last address Junior wrote them at, no trace in those sorry buildings but Jubal able to come up with another possibility through Alma Moultrie. It has been too long. Dragging his feet after mustering out at Fort Reno, sick again, feeling like it was hopeless, something gone forever. The bridge makes him sweat, so high over the water, the train wobbling as it speeds across, passing wagons and carriages and even some people walking beside the tracks. San Francisco was enough of a mare’s nest, but this city, spread across rivers, looming over your head, even tunneling under your feet—the idea of finding anybody in it seems impossible, the kind of lucky accident that never happens to him. People here move all the time, says Jubal, move up, move down, move out, Jubal himself just resettled to the far north of the main island.
That any city can have two hundred streets all in a row, and more without numbers below those, is more than he wants to think about.
One day at a time, the doctor at the military hospital told him. You’re still carrying the worst of the tropics in that body.
Royal gets out at Navy Street, climbs down the stairs, and walks to a large park a block away. He needs more time to think. If they haven’t moved, if she is still there—
He crosses the long, grassy rectangle of a park to a bench that faces a large stone crypt and sits.
TO THE VICTIMS OF THE PRISON SHIPS
—is inscribed on the side of the crypt. Royal wonders who the victims were, whose ships they were on.
There are women pushing babies in perambulators, and there are children running free, some making a hoop roll with a stick, and people sitting on the other benches alongside the path that snakes down the terraced hill to a large circular walk. It is a relief, this green after the brick maze of the island, but he doesn’t feel any more sure of what he is here for.
“Somethin for the kiddies?”
It is a small man, maybe forty, white, with a crate strapped around his neck. WORLD OF FUN say the red letters painted on the front and sides. The man steps up and drops one knee onto the grass so Royal can see into the box.
“Got a little bit of everything here, dirt cheap.”
There are tops and jacks and small wooden horses and rubber balls and throwing rings and a paddle-whacker and five metal soldiers, regular infantry. One of them, only one, is a tan color, something like Junior’s shading. Royal points to it.
“Aint that the nuts?” says the man. “A one-of-a-kind item.”
Royal lifts it out of the crate to study the face. It is surprisingly heavy for a toy. The eyes are not bugged, the lips not bloated like the golliwogs sold on almost every street corner here. Just a colored soldier.
“How much?”
“Fitty cents,” says the older man. Royal gives him a look.
“Hey, like I said, it’s one-of-a-kind.”
Royal pays the man and sets the soldier on the bench. He sits. The other people in the park, who know why they are here, go about their business.
Royal sits and watches the carefree people on the green. The sun feels good against his skin as it dips lower and lower in the sky. They are all different colors up here, sometimes all jammed together in the same trolley car, and there must be rules about it but not so clear as back home. What was home. The shadow of the prisoners’ crypt is very long when he stands to go back to the elevated train. It was never in the cards and time passing doesn’t change anything. Spend the night with Jubal, tell him they’ve moved on, gone who knows where, say goodbye the next morning and then—what?
Royal realizes he’s left the iron soldier on the bench. He goes back and when he picks it up he is suddenly ashamed. He can’t leave it here, and riding back over the river with it sitting beside him—
A bullet in the head will only kill you, Sergeant Jacks used to say, but cowardice in the field will hound you into the grave and beyond.
It is a street of three-story brownstone buildings with front stoops leading down to the sidewalk. There are children everywhere, mostly colored, running and playing and talking in groups, ignoring Royal as he searches for the number Jubal told him.
There is a middling-sized girl at the top of the steps, minding a very tiny girl with her hair twisted into braids and red ribbons tied at the ends.
“The Luncefords live here?”
The girl looks at him sideways, suspicious.
“They aint in.”
“But they do live here?” The tiny girl is staring at the iron figure in his hand.
“Doctor out with his bag. An Miz Jessie workin.”
It would be easier, better probably, if they had moved on.
“You mind if I sit?”
“S’a free country.”
Royal sits a couple steps below them. The tiny one is pointing at the soldier now, making sounds, so he sets it in front of her. She smiles and grabs around its body, maybe not strong enough to lift it, and begins to talk to it. Not words, really, but with the music of a conversation.
“Miss Jessie has a job?”
“Right now she learnin to be a typewriter girl.”
Royal looks into the tiny one’s face and counts the time. She seems too little to be three, but her eyes are old.
“If you sick,” says the big girl, “Doctor don’t usually get back till dinner.”
She is halfway down the street before he knows it’s her. She is wearing spectacles and no gloves and doesn’t look like a girl anymore. Jessie slows as she sees him, then comes forward. She looks up to the top of the stoop.
“Thank you, Berenice.”
“Night, Miz Jessie.”
The girl goes inside. Jessie steps up past him and lifts the tiny one into her arms.
“Hope you don’t mind,” says Royal. “I was visiting my brother—”
“This is Minnie,” Jessie tells him, holding his eye and placing the tiny girl in his lap. “We have been waiting so long for you.”