CHERRY LEANS AGAINST THE brown-papered windows. Smoke from her cigarette curls around her hips. She taps off some ash and raises it to her mouth.
“They put in fresh glass?” I say. The plywood sheets are stacked and leaning against the brick.
Cherry raises a shoulder. “I don’t know what’s the point. We’re just going to sandbag it.”
I touch it through the paper. It’s like a wall to the touch, but now we know better. So thin, so fragile.
Sandbags or not, it seems obvious to me why the windows had to be replaced. We could have left up the plywood, I guess, but we have to show them we heal. We move on. Business continues as usual in spite of their best efforts to bring us down.
“Here comes Hamlin,” Cherry says, stubbing out her cigarette on the bricks. She squeezes my upper arm. “Better get your muscles on, girl.”
Hamlin’s truck rolls up, weighed down in the back with a load of sandbags. He waves through the window at us.
Rocco, Slim, and Lester pop out of the office. Lester brings down the tailgate and says, “Line it up, ladies.”
I end up between Rocco and Cherry in the bucket brigade. Slim takes a place on the other side of Cherry. Can’t help but notice how he’s watching her the whole time. When he cracks a joke, he laughs along louder if she laughs too.
Slim pinches Cherry at the waist, wearing a teasing smile.
She smacks his hand away. “Don’t touch the merchandise. ’Less you want to lose a hand.”
Slim grins. “Long as I got a handful of that sweetness when it goes.”
Cherry bites back a smile. “Dumb as a rock, but willing to go down swinging,” she says to me out the side of her mouth.
“Hey,” Slim cries, acting all hurt. “I may be dumb but I ain’t deaf.”
Rocco laughs. “Give it up, man. She’s never going to go for you.”
Cherry looks at me with this secret woman-smile. I’m flattered to receive it, and surprised I know exactly what it means. She likes Slim, doesn’t want him to know it yet. And I think about how, for all the times I’ve seen guys looking at her, I’ve never seen her really with anyone.
My arms ache from passing the sandbags. By the time we get inside, my limbs feel like mashed potatoes, and it’s only making me hungry. Between Slim’s jokes, Cherry’s flirting, and Rocco’s deep belly laugh, the time flew by, but now I can feel how hard we’ve been working.
I lean against the desk, staring at the sandbag wall we’ve built. From outside it was easy to make light of everything, to joke about the grunt work and to be grateful when it was done. Inside, it’s a different story.
Lester’s outside tearing down the brown paper; we don’t need it anymore. Light comes in through the top third of the windows; the lower portion is completely obscured by sandbags. They’re stacked like cozy little molded bricks. Lining our space with protection it never needed before. Turning it from an office into a bunker.
Looking at it, I feel all over again what has happened. I feel it as hard as I did the moment when the bullets were flying. I love it, hate it, want to run my fingers over it, want to tear it down. It’s right, though. It matches. The space has been transformed.
“We’re in the paper,” Hamlin says. “Did you see?”
“No.”
He cuts the twine off a bundle of the fresh issue, and I take one off the stack.
Flip it open. CHICAGO OFFICE ASSAULT. The picture is stark in black-and-white. The flatness is what strikes me most, and the stillness, because the memory in my mind is alive with depth and motion. The image they’ve chosen is of Rocco, his arm bandaged and bloody, stepping out of the wreckage of glass and spent bullets. He advances toward the camera, pistol held low in his hand, while at the other side Hamlin has his back turned, surveying the damage.
I’m not in the shot. Not sure where I was at the moment it was taken. In the back, or already on my way home. I lay the paper open, smoothing it onto the pockmarked desk.
“You see they got my good side,” Hamlin jokes. He heads into the back room.
I tuck my finger into the groove of a bullet streak on the desktop. I’m strangely relieved to see that things can’t just go back to business as usual. The office is scarred. It tells the story, as much as or more than the photograph.
Raheem comes through the door. I look up just in time to catch him walking in, as if I knew he was going to appear right then. His gaze flicks toward the sandbags, then to me.
It’s one of those times when he pretends not to even know me. He rolls by me and hits up the rifle rack, slinging one over his shoulder. Starts talking to Rocco. They must be going out to police.
Cherry and Slim have been sitting on the sofa real close, talking. They get up and join Raheem and Rocco, gathering gear to go out on rounds. No one speaks. The only sounds are little clicks of things being loaded and organized. They file out the door one by one. “See you, Maxie,” Rocco says.
“Bye.” I want to go with them. Want to do my part to protect the community, like I couldn’t do the day of the shooting.
Raheem meets my eye again, and I still don’t like what I see there.
The door closes behind them and then it’s just me and Hamlin, who says, “We’re walled in now, but good.”