Work Text:
Tell me where are you driving
Midnight cruiser?
Where is your bounty of fortune and fame?
I am another gentleman loser
Drive me to Harlem or somewhere the same
—Steely Dan, “Midnite Cruiser”
A wail split the afternoon open.
Pat woke, fractals cutting his vision. He had fallen asleep with the curtains drawn aside; the sun had crept on top of him, a rude passenger, and simmered his head until his sleeping pills evaporated and his brain was cooked a perfect headache. Sunny side up.
Pat eyeballed the alarm clock on his nightstand; it was 16:13. His next shift was still hours away. He knew he needed to drop this watchman gig as soon as possible or he was bound to shoot his brains out sooner rather than later. And yet, it seemed unlikely he was getting work anywhere else.
The motherfuckers on Wall Street and the resulting market crash of 2008 fucked the housing market first and the construction and land development businesses, its little siblings, immediately after; and Pat, a recent chemical engineer major specializing in demolition, was out in the streets as fast as he had gotten the job.
America was a building set for implosion.
If he had known that after so many backbreaking years of effort at college, he would be wasting the rest of his youth one shit-hole apartment at a time, then he would have at least majored in Philosophy or History as he originally wished. But no, he had to think about his future.
There was no future, Pat thought, clutching his head with one hand.
The crying, easily audible through the paper-thin walls, did not stop.
He needed to have a word or two with one of his neighbors.
Pat stood and dragged himself across the whole, entire room—sans kitchenette and bathroom—that was his apartment, towards the door, which was missing two locks, but the burglars didn’t need to know that.
Not that there was much to burglarize in the first place.
The drumming inside his head ceased just enough for Pat to register that the crying voice was one of a young girl.
Pat opened the door, and the hallway came into view. His closest neighbor was an apartment diagonal to his; there lived an immigrant single mother and her daughter. Latinas, Pat knew from the Spanish they used to communicate between themselves, but he wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint their exact nationality. He had never asked in any of their brief exchanges. Small talk they used to have early in the morning before Pat lost his job. Nowadays, they only greeted each other briefly in the laundry room’s evenings, between rounds of dirty-then-clean clothes.
To his astonishment, the door towards the women’s home was bashed open. Probably kicked down. From the gaping maw that was the splintered entrance, Pat could hear the weeping voice.
The man crossed the narrow length between his apartment and the other one; it took two strides to clear the entirety of the “linoleum” floor, checkered black-and-white like chess or an old school classroom. Pat’s brief stint in decommissioning made him suspect that these might be cracked VATs or vinyl asbestos tiles, which the administration could not be bothered to replace, given that the majority of their tenants were: a) minorities, b) unemployed, c) poor, d) immigrants, or e) a mix of the above.
Pat pushed the remains of the door and entered the apartment. The room was, design-wise, a mirror of his own, but fallen in disarray; signs of struggle were clear in the way the nylon carpet became a cemetery for glasses, dishes, and broken plastic.
On top of the only bed in the apartment was the girl. Solana or Soledad, Pat didn’t remember. Sprawled in bed and crying her little heart out, she still wore her pink school bag on.
“Hola,” Pat tried to summon his Spanish lessons from high school. “Are you okay? ¿Estás bien?”
The girl jolted her head from the mattress, big bubbles of tears gathered around her face, and fear was painted in her eyes.
The girl, in shock, said nothing. Pat approached her with his hands up, as placatingly as possible. “What happened?”
“La Migra,” she spoke in soft, quiet horror.
Pat understood that. Migración, that was ICE or a similar institution. Their agents must have taken the girl’s mother while she was in school. He felt a pit of dread as he imagined the scene, the girl, no more than ten years old, making her way alone from school after her mom failed to pick her up, taking the old, creaky elevator on her own and finding that her entire life was fractured…
…and she was completely and utterly by herself.
Pat felt his eyes sting. Must have been the lack of sleep.
The man pointed towards himself. “Pat,” he said, then, more doubtful, “Mi nombre es Pat. Come to my house. Ven a…” Shit, how did you say apartment? Maybe a synonym.
“¿Mi casa?” he asked, when he meant to state, looking for recognition or approval on the girl’s olive and vigilant face.
Pat thought about the first thing your mother told you when you were a kid: stranger danger. Don’t follow anybody you don't know. Especially a strange man. What did this child see from her thunderstruck eyes? Pat must have looked messy, tired. Wearing unwashed clothes because energy of any kind had been eluding him for weeks, for months. Maybe ever since he grasped his diploma inside his hand and realized that this was the so-called rest of his life: selling yourself to an industry where more often than not you were forced to call the cops for squatters, homeless people closer to your economic bracket than the owners you were doing their dirty work for, all so companies could build shiny, new buildings Pat would never be able to afford to live in or in vertical ghettos compressing life to its maximum profit.
He remembered, in passing, a history lesson from his teenage years: the 60s and its counterculture movements, May 68, Allende. Pat wondered what it would be like, back then. When people dedicated themselves to causes bigger than greed, bigger than themselves at the very least. When people knew the reasons, they lived for and died for. He wondered about that and the brown eyes that looked at him, about the kind of life that awaited her in the ICE detention centers and the things she had lived and seen in her home country or in the thousand miles that separated Central America and the US, that it was still preferable for her to trust this unknown, depressing man than waiting for deportation, when she hopped from the bed and took his hand.
Her name was Soledad, but her mom and friends called her Sole—with a short “e”, like rent or tent—, and she spoke better English, even if she was still learning, than Pat did Spanish.
Pat didn’t have much to offer her, but he asked if she liked Count Chocula and served her a bowl with the leftover milk.
They sat around the counter of Pat’s miniature kitchen, Sole with her cereal and Pat with his laptop, trying to use Google Translate to ask more elaborate questions. Something that could give him more information.
Unsurprisingly, Soledad knew very little about the specific situation with her mom. She didn’t have family that she knew of in the US, and Sole had never met her dad.
Soledad and her mom had migrated not long ago. Her mother used to have a vegetable stand in Mexico City. Eventually, she made a deal with the farmers outside the city: she’d bring the seeds, fertilizer, tools, and the car, and they would do the labor and split the earnings. Business boomed for a while. But one night, as her mamá and two workers made their way from the fields, they were stopped at gunpoint and kidnapped by members of a cartel.
Her mom spent three days with them. Soledad’s mom never spoke about what happened in captivity.
The farmers managed to gather enough money for their release. But Sole’s mom fell into debt paying that money back, and she was terrified that if she managed to get back on her feet again, something like that or worse would happen.
But that hadn’t been the reason they chose to leave Mexico, no. The last push came when she went to report the crime, and the police chief asked her not to. “Do you love your country?” she had asked Soledad’s mom, because her statement made the crime statistics worse. Her mamá knew then nobody would protect them. So, she spent every one of her last pesos hiring a coyote, a smuggler, to help them cross the frontier.
“Did you ever,” read Pat in Spanish, “plan something with your mom, in case something like this happened?”
Sole gave a slow shake with her head.
“Do you have anywhere to go?”
Sole stared wordlessly at the soggy debris of cereal in her bowl.
“La iglesia,” she answered. The church, Pat translated. “Es santuario.”
Sanctuary. Whatever church Soledad was talking about belonged to the sanctuary movement. Pat could recall a blurry memory like TV static from the news when he was a teen: originating in the 80s to protect and host asylum seekers from the Salvadoran and Guatemalan far-right military regimes. While democracies returned in the 90s, the web built in those decades endured, helping people the world over find refuge.
“Do you know how to get to the church?” asked Pat.
Sole pondered the question gravely. Then, she gave two cute bobs with her head affirmatively—long, black hair swaying. “I think so.”
“Ok,” Pat said. “We’ll go there tomorrow. Mañana. Alright?”
“Yes, Mr. Pat,” she replied, visibly more relieved.
“I work at night, so you can sleep in the bed and I’ll take the couch. Is that ok, Sole?”
“Thank you, Mr. Pat,” Soledad said, with a demure little smile. It was the first time in the entire day she showed even an ounce of joy. It made Pat’s own face bloom, if bittersweetly. Who could have the heart to hurt a child like her?
Two firm knocks on the door interrupted their reprieve. Pat and Sole both turned and remained fixed in the direction of the door. They said nothing and didn’t move.
Two new knocks, louder this time, made the door shake on its rusty hinges. Pat knew, but didn’t say, that he hadn’t received any type of visit—not even for takeout—in months. The timing was too suspicious.
He stood and walked towards the door. Pretending everything was normal for the person outside, for Soledad, and for himself.
A woman waited for him on the other side. Pat had never seen her in the building before. She had dirty blonde hair and a clean, pink face. She wore blue jeans, a white blouse, and a black office blazer. The woman looked nondescript, business casual, besides the simple gold cross around her neck. Pat suspected her immediately.
“Hello miss, can I help you?”
Pat gave a polite smile, then suppressed it, then smiled again. Did he look trustworthy or too eager? A regular man in his PJs at 18:00 on a Wednesday, or like a hider of somethings?
His fingers pressed the cold surface of the loose locks, hanging on one bolt like a guilty man. It would take one good kick to break in.
“Good afternoon, sir,” she replied, her smile bubbly. “My name is Alba Frostic. Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior Jesus Christ?”
Pat chuckled nervously. “No, ma’am, I apologize. Have a long day ahead of me yet.”
He attempted to close the door, but the Frostic lady lodged the tip of her foot firmly in the gap.
“Are you sure, sir?” She giggled. “The world around us is changing fast. Do you ever think about where we go from here?”
Pat kept pushing, now with increasingly more energy. Did she have a fucking steel tip in her office shoe? How was she still resisting?
“But there is good news. A way to find peace,” sister Frostic was now using her fingers to pry the door a bit more open, “even now.”
The woman tried to peek inside Pat’s apartment, but he answered this by putting his forearm in the gap.
“I’d love to come inside,” Alba’s white smile plastered on her face, “read a short passage, talk some more—would that be alright?”
Absolutely-fucking-not. “No, thank you, lady. Leave me alone.”
Pat was now pushing the door back with both arms. They did not make missionaries this strong—power of God or not—this woman was something else entirely.
“But sir,” she insisted, her smile looking more like gritted teeth than any expression of mirth, “think on the fate of your undocumented— I mean unsaved soul.”
“My what—”
But Pat didn’t manage to say the full sentence. The struggle from Alba’s side was such that she managed to break the old doorknob’s mechanism on his flank, the abrupt release sending Pat backwards, then slammed on the cheekbone and pushed to the side by the door’s sudden opening—one half of the brass knob in hand.
Alba tumbled forward and fell on her face, making a dull thump sound.
The woman lifted her eyes from the floor and searched the apartment. Sitting on a chair, looking too bewildered for fear, was Soledad and her bowl of chocolate cereal in the kitchen.
“Ah,” she smirked, any trace of beatitude left in the hallway, “there you are, you little Mexican rat.”
She straightened up slowly, wiping the smudge of blood on her forehead with her backhand.
“I’m taking you into custody.”
Pat hit her on the nape of the neck with the heavy doorknob, sending Officer Frostic back to the floor with a groan. Then, unthinkingly, he smacked her again.
Officer Frostic lay unconscious in the middle of the carpet.
“Oh fuck, I killed her,” Pat breathed out loud, adrenaline buzzing between his ears, still half-dazed. “I killed a fed.”
Pat looked at Sole, who was staring at him mutely, both of their jaws only slightly above the proverbial floor than Frostic’s unmoving self.
Gathering himself, Pat slipped a shaking hand under her face and over her mouth. Warm, faint respiration moistened his hand.
“Thank fuck, oh my God. She’s alive!”
He grabbed her by the jaw and turned her head slightly so she could breathe easier. Then, he turned towards Soledad.
“Change of plans, Sole. Vamos a la iglesia ahora. Grab your stuff now.”
Pat clutched his keys with one hand and held Soledad in the other, racing down the stairs at such speed that the poor girl was practically flying behind him. The door was FUBAR, and the moment that woman regained awareness, it was one phone call away before his entire life was FUBAR too. Assaulting an officer, aiding and abetting a dangerous ten-year-old criminal with a Bratz backpack. It was a lot of A’s; his stomach signaled with a twist. He couldn’t go back.
Four floors later, and they were on the street, Pat fumbling, dropping his keys, picking them up, and unlocking his car. Finally, he opened the passenger door without thinking and rushed to the other side to sit in the pilot’s seat. Sole went inside wordlessly.
Pat looked at her. Can kids her age ride in front? “Seatbelt,” he said, and Sole clasped it in one go.
His foot crushed the accelerator the moment they had an opening. Pat had a faint idea of how to get to St. Ampulla Church from Tenderloin. Though really, he was betting on Soledad’s skills and bilingualism to steer them true. Was izquierda right or was that derecha? Shit.
Pat took a left, then another one immediately after. Once the apartment was well behind, the man breathed a little easier. He could feel a vein on his left temple throb with a distant, numbed sort of pain.
Oh, that’s right. Alba slapped him across the room with a door. How could he forget?
Pat sneaked a glance at his young co-pilot. Soledad was meerkat-taut against the backrest, eyes on the road as if the pavement was one long, storm cloud-gray snake ready to coil at them and strike.
“Hey, Sole,” Pat called the child. “Why don’t you put some tunes on the radio? Find something you like.”
Sole nodded and started playing with the stereo’s buttons and dials. She stopped at a station playing Single Ladies by Beyoncé. She rested her back against the seat, a bit more at ease than before—one of her gym sneakers, a faded, foggy white, tapped the rhythm of the song in the air. Her dangling feet didn’t quite reach the floor.
Red light. They were getting close to the Panhandle. Suddenly, a soft tapping on the door: a cop in fascist black was pulling them over.
Pat’s heart skipped a beat. He was close to entering cardiac arrest. Fuck, fuck. They were so close.
The officer made a motion for Pat to roll down the window. He complied and turned down the stereo.
Figures Frostic, fucking Terminatorette woman of steel, received two blows from a base metal on the back of the head, and her adamantium skeleton was none the wiser, and now he and Sole were on their way to Guantanamo or wherever the fuck these motherfucking pigs—
“Sir,” the portly woman said, “do you know why I pulled you over?”
“No, officer,” Treadwell read the shiny tag above her uniform’s right pocket. “I’m afraid not.”
“Well, one of your taillights is broken!” She chirped, writing something down in her notebook.
Oh my God, it was a traffic cop. “Is that right? Ah, I’m sorry, Officer Treadwell,” Pat pleaded with his hands in a prayer position. “I haven’t used my car in a while. Somebody must have bumped me while it was parked.”
“That’s ok,” she finished scribbling. “This is a fix-it ticket. Once you repair the light, you can go to your local police station or DMV to have it dismissed.”
“Thank you, officer, thank you,” he said most gratefully, and it was genuine.
Treadwell eyed him bemusedly, probably the most effusive reaction she had gotten from any citizen all day. “It’s alright, mister.”
She peeked inside the car, and her eyes lay on Soledad, who didn’t know which face exactly to put. “Hello, young lady. How do you do?”
Sole gulped. “Fine,” her voice came out soft, more sweet than anxious.
“She’s on the shyer side,” Pat improvised.
“Hmm,” Treadwell hummed, “is she your daughter, mister…?”
“Calhoun,” Pat provided. “Patrick Calhoun. She’s my girlfriend’s daughter, actually. Her mom is feeling a bit under the weather, so we are going to McDonald's for dinner today so she can sleep off the cold.”
“I see,” Treadwell answered, then she directed her attention to the girl. “What’s your name, sweetie?”
Sole doubted just a moment. “Soledad.”
“Do you like your mom’s boyfriend, Soledad? Is he nice to you?”
Holy fucking shit, she thought that Sole was getting trafficked. It was entirely up to Soledad’s English to save them both right now.
Sole nodded enthusiastically. “Mr. Pat is very nice. Uhm, he buys my favorite cereal and, uh, he lets me pick the songs on the radio.”
Her voice was steady and louder this time around. Shit, even Pat thought he sounded nice, friendly, and non-pedophilic. He really hoped the cop did too.
“Oh, he sounds like a catch, alright,” replied Treadwell dryly. “Well, your little girl is cute as a button, if I say so myself.”
Then, she said to Pat, more deeply, “I hope you continue being nice to her.”
“I always wanted a daughter,” Pat blurted out. He didn’t know what pressed his subconscious to say that; he hadn’t thought about having children. The world was so shit that he never imagined bringing more people into it. But once it left his mouth, it sounded right to him: a daughter.
“Huh,” Officer Treadwell replied, slightly aback, but not in a bad way. “Well, I’m happy for you, Mr. Calhoun. You can leave now.”
“Thank you, officer.”
“Bye, officer!” Sole said, waving her hand.
“Bye, sweetheart,” Officer Treadwell fanned her fingers up and down her. Her hand looked like a curled Lego figurine.
It took five more minutes for them to arrive in front of St. Ampulla. They exited the car expeditiously and entered the church the same way. Soledad recognized one of the priests sitting on a bench, praying.
She wasted no time in sprinting towards him and letting out a stream of Español that Father Funkhouser—a short, bespectacled middle-aged man with a bed of silver hair—listened to, patient and serene, even during the times that the girl needed to stop and catch her breath and clean the tears of the last hours’ amalgamated emotions.
Pat sat right in front of them, body half-turned towards them.
Once the entire story was out of her, Father Funkhouser went to look for one of the residents, a young black woman with a half-ponytail, who took her to a bedroom in the back of the building.
“What’s going to happen to her?” Pat felt his hand strangely naked, cold, now that he wasn’t holding hers.
Father Funkhouser removed his glasses and cleaned an invisible spot with a cream-colored cloth. Pat thought he was an unassuming, thin fellow. His face fragile and creased like a partially used napkin.
“She’ll stay here for the time being. We’ll try to track her mother’s whereabouts with our contacts from the sanctuary network. As well as finding them, or at least Soledad, legal aid.”
Pat nodded, disheartened. All that sounded well and good, he supposed, but it seemed so distant. He felt impotent, powerless.
“Soledad mentioned you had an altercation with a federal agent trying to keep her safe in your apartment,” he pushed the glasses back in place. “And your door was compromised as well, is that right?”
“Yeah,” he said, trying not to appear as deflated and tired as he was, shoulders cramped from the tension. “A traffic cop got my plate too and saw me with Sole. I told the woman we were going to McDonald's, so Sole shouldn’t be on their radar. I, on the other hand, am absolutely screwed.”
Was “screwed” vulgar? “Sorry, Father.”
“It’s okay, son. Sounds like you are, honestly.”
Pat didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Father Funkhouser put his hand on Pat’s shoulder. “We have another room you can use for today. Worst case scenario, I can make a call and we could pass you as a seminarian in St. Patrick until everything quiets down.”
Pat now understood how Soledad probably felt trying to speak and not cry from exhaustion. “Thank you, Father.”
“I’ll go fetch Deandra, the volunteer who is with Soledad right now,” Father Funkhouser gave him a lopsided look. “I think you two could have some things in common.”
Pat’s (closer) first impression of Deandra was that she was an attractive woman—long, dark hair styled in soft curls and bronze skin—with a serious demeanor and a ghostly gait—her steps seemed to make no sounds.
They walked in the church’s inner hallways, stretching long and dark like veins, in silence.
“Do you work with Father Funkhouser, Deandra?” Pat broke their mutual discretion. “You don’t look like a sister.”
A corner of Deandra’s full lips sharpened. Pat couldn’t tell if it was a smile.
“Not a sister, but a sister.”
Pat chuckled. “True.”
Deandra said nothing for a minute or so, but Pat didn’t take it personally. The hallways kept going by the side of a courtyard, surrounded by thick shrubs, a green so deep it seemed pelagic blue in the chiaroscuro of the dying sun. Pat had to suppress a shiver; he was basically wearing his nightclothes, and the cool of the sanctuary was leaking on him, minute by minute.
“I don’t work for him,” Deandra cut. “Our groups have common interests. That’s all.”
“Groups? Are you both part of the sanctuary network?”
Deandra took a long sip of a look at him, unreadable. She was regarding him, considering him, weighing him up and down in the scales of her mind.
“Yes… and no. Call it a rhizome.”
Pat stilled his lips into a line.
“What did you think about Funkhouser?” asked Deandra. It took Pat strangely by surprise.
“Uhm,” he mouthed dumbly. “I don’t know if inoffensive is the right word. Meek, I guess?”
Deandra snorted. “He used to be a missionary during the Somoza dictatorship and the Nicaraguan revolution. The Church denies it, but rumor has it he personally fought with the Sandinistas.”
“Oh, wow, wrong on all fronts, I guess.”
“Not exactly, but being able to be unnoticed at will is necessary in that line of work, don’t you think?”
Eventually, Deandra stopped walking in front of a door.
“This here is your room,” Deandra grasped the knob with her hand, but did not turn it to either side.
“Funkhouser believes you could be of help, if the information is correct—and given that Soledad had several chances by now of throwing you under the bus if you were a bad kind of hombre—I must tentatively agree given the story: you fought off an undercover ICE goon and lied to the authorities several times on the spot, so besides the muscle you must have a good head on your shoulders.”
Pat watched her arms’ blood vessels on display, rooted like trees.
“But I still have one thing nobody but you can answer: why did you risk so much for a stranger like her?”
Deandra’s eyes were big and held something warm in them, but they were direct and unrelenting.
In truth, Pat wasn’t sure. Instinct, he supposed. But one could override even the most deeply ingrained impulses with enough practice. He thought that there was an argument, one piece of logic that had pierced any possible terror he felt.
“At the— at the risk of circular reasoning,” Pat stammered, “I think that the reason to help a crying, lonely child is that… It’s a crying, lonely child.”
Deandra’s round eyes did not leave him. “I see.”
She opened the door. “Well, Pat, here’s your room.”
Pat crossed the threshold. It was a humble, priestly room: a simple bed with a nightstand and a lamp, a small chest, a crucifix on the otherwise blank walls, and a window looking eastwards.
“Ain’t much to look at, right? But if you go to the seminary with Funkhouser, I guess you’ll probably end up getting used to this kind of view.”
Pat sat on the thin mattress, ran his hand over the old, itchy bedspread.
Deandra leaned on the wall. “Or you could crash at my place. I have some friends whom you could meet. Like-minded friends.”
It was Pat’s time to scrutinize her, though he didn’t know what expression he was making. Maybe incredulous at the state of his life.
“Ok.”
Deandra’s lips twitched. Now he was getting sure it was a smile.
“You ain’t going to consult it with the pillow, at least?”
Pat shrugged. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“I’ll be here by 8:00.” Deandra grabbed the door and, before she closed it completely, said through the crack. “Don’t be late.”
He wasn’t.