Cathy Adams
Glabella is my least favorite person at the shelter. She’ll start up yelling like a house afire even when she isn’t upset about anything, and every other word out of her mouth is a lie. Then, for no reason you can guess, she’ll be quiet as a sleepy horse for hours at a time. With Glabella, you never know what you’re going to get.
I didn’t see Glabella on the street for about six weeks, but it was the dead of winter, so no surprise there. If you have some place to hole up in, that’s what you do. I’d been staying nights in a basement off Troost. The old keg room of a boarded-up bar. The concrete floor held only about six of us. Some fella I’d never seen before with a glass eye and packing a gun horned into the place late one night. He kept stealing glances at me. I couldn’t decide if it was the real eye or the glass eye that made me feel like he was going to come creeping over during the night and try some mischief. I gripped my crescent wrench under my blanket and tried to sleep. A twelve-inch metal wrench is no match for a gun, but I’m quick with it when I have to be. Quicker than most men think a sixty-year-old woman could be. After a long night of Mister Glass Eye squinting from across the floor at me, it was time to look for a new place.
February is cold as shit in Kansas City. Even if you bundle up in everything you’ve got, it’s a freezing walk over to St. Paul’s to get a food bag at the pantry. Some weeks it’s not worth the trip, but on this Wednesday they put chocolates in the bag. Whitman’s damn good chocolates, and they weren’t even expired. I’d eaten nearly all of mine by the time I got two blocks up the street. And there was Glabella at the corner of 39th and Main in nothing but a windbreaker like it was a spring day. Too late to hide the box. My jowls full of chocolate were pumping like pistons.
Glabella waved off my defensive look. “I done had a box,” she announced. She was watching the traffic like she couldn’t care less that I was chomping on at least three pieces of truffle, orange cream, and caramel nut milk chocolate all at once.
My mouth was too full to reply, and I nearly choked when I tried to swallow. With all of my belongings on my back and my bag of groceries on one arm, I almost lost my balance. Coughing and chewing, I finally got a wad down my gullet, but Glabella didn’t even bother looking back at me. I wanted to move on, but something about Glabella just standing there in her thin little jacket made me hesitate. I opened my bag and rooted around inside. “They got good soups today. Bean and ham. Lentil.” I didn’t see a bag from the church pantry among her belongings. She probably lied about the chocolates. A long time ago I gave her a spare pair of my socks at the shelter one rainy night when she came in with dripping wet sneakers. That was before I got to know how she was. Now I mostly steered clear of her. “You going to Union tonight?” I asked. “Gonna drop below zero soon as it gets dark.” Glabella remained focused on whatever was down the street. She was in one of her distant moods, one of those days when her head wasn’t on right. I folded up my bag and proceeded to leave.
“I got a place over on Campbell Street,” said Glabella.
She had to be lying again, but that got my attention. “You got your own place?”
“Sure do.” She reached inside her jacket and pulled out a key on a grimy string. “Devil himself give me this.”
“The devil gave you a key?” I knew it. She was dreaming. She had this little smile on her face that said she knew something she wasn’t saying.
“I got a bed, and there’s a water spigot around the back of the place. Best place I’ve stayed at since ten years I been here. You could stay there, too.”
“What kind of deal did you make with the devil to stay at his place?” I asked.
“You make a deal with every devil you meet.” She looked like she had a head full of secrets. “Look for the red door,” she said, and then hobbled off with her armload of bags.
The below zero weather arrived long before darkness fell, and I was so weary from the cold my fingers ached in my acrylic gloves. It was either Union shelter or that old keg room. Or a night at Glabella’s. That is, if I could find the place. If she wasn’t lying about that key. If it was even real.
I was on the corner of Armour Boulevard and Main Street, waiting to cross. The crossing light gave me the green man, but I stayed put. Blowing onto my gloves, my breath was white against the growing night. I turned to my right and started walking.
Maybe it was the devil’s paint, or maybe it was just the only house with a cheap orangey looking front door. I didn’t see any sign there was a person inside. That was how I knew she was probably there because anybody living on the street as long as she had knew all about not bringing any attention to herself. She would have entered somewhere in the back. I crept across the overgrown yard to the rear of the house. The windows were dark and a metal backdoor was shut up tight with a fist-sized padlock. No sense bothering with that. I kept searching for what I knew had to be near and finally spotted it. A low basement window on the left of the back wall was illuminated with the faintest glow. No broken window or kicked in door like the keg room but an open padlock hanging from a metal ring at the base of the window. I bent down and called Glabella’s name, low and soft. If she was in a bad way she’d likely not respond. This was a quiet neighborhood, and I wondered how she’d managed to keep herself from attracting attention with one of her fits. She might have forgotten what she said on the sidewalk earlier and this was a waste of time. I called out again and was about to back away, wondering if the keg room would be worth the trip and the risk. Then I saw fingers on the glass, pushing it outward. “You’ll have to squeeze through,” Glabella called up to me. “Toss your stuff in first.”
I maneuvered my way through that window and slid down until my feet touched the floor. I thought I was at the Hilton. A single candle on a table burned at the innermost side of the basement. In the right corner was a twin bed piled high with blankets. Glabella’s bags and their contents were laid out on the floor as if she was setting up for a yard sale. Covering a counter built into the wall were stacks of empty soup cans, plastic bags, dirty pots, and spoons. It looked as if she’d had a meal out of every available dish in the place and left each one out without another thought. The air was heavy and cold, but the blistering wind that had driven me here was safely outside. Nobody here with a glass eye to ogle me, or I hoped there wasn’t. The backdoor I’d passed outside faced a set of plywood stairs leading upward into the main living quarters.
“Can’t we go up in the house?” I asked. “It’d be warmer up higher.”
“Metal door at the top of the stairs is locked up tight. No way in. But that don’t matter with all this space.” Glabella held her arms out, a rich woman showing off her estate.
So this would be it for the night. Except for having to share it with Glabella, I’d lucked out. “I’ve got grapes,” I said, reaching into my backpack for the fruit I’d saved from the pantry. I put my offering to the host on the table.
“Got anything to drink?” she asked with a hopeful note to her voice.
“Sorry. The church pantry was fresh out of champagne.” I said it to make her laugh, but she didn’t. I should have known better. Once more, I was beginning to question my choice to come. It never took much to set Glabella off, and I was in an enclosed space with her. If it had been even ten degrees warmer outside, I might have taken my chances elsewhere. I always had my crescent wrench. “So,” I said, gathering up my bag and looking for a place to settle, “you got this all to yourself?”
“Most nights.” Glabella seated herself at the table and pushed aside some of the flotsam.
“How’d you find this place?” I asked.
Glabella shook her head. “Can’t tell you that.” She felt around the grapes and tore off a sprig. Shoving them one by one into her mouth, she worked her jaw like a person with a few missing teeth. I took a seat in the second dining chair across the table and pulled off most of the other half of the bunch. “Nope, there’s a lot of stuff. Lotta stuff.” She shook her head like she was remembering something she’d just as soon forget. “Can’t tell nobody.”
I knew better than to question her or try to goad her into talking, so we just sat there chewing grapes until there was nothing but a brown stem left on the plastic tray. Every person I know has a head full of stuff they’d just as soon forget. The candle had been burning for at least ten minutes, but I couldn’t tell that it had come down any smaller.
“Back when I lived in St. Louis with my mama and daddy we had a big house like this. Bigger than this even. But I never liked living there ‘cause there was ghosts in the back behind the house.” She made a stirring motion with one hand. “They’d wrap themselves around weeds and when you walked out the back door they were always slithering around. Sometimes they’d get me by the ankles. I’d scream for my mama, but she didn’t like going out there. Sometimes I’d have to crawl back inside, shaking those haints off my feet and legs like they was ticks.” Glabella shook her arms up and down like she was praising the lord, and I wondered how long this night was going to be. “This is a crazy town! A crazy town. Do you know that?” She dropped her arms and looked straight at me like she was finally noticing another person was right across from her.
“Won’t we play some cards?” It was the first thing I could think to say that might keep her straight. I figured in a junked-up place like this there had to be a deck of cards somewhere. I didn’t much care one way or the other. All I wanted was to get her thinking about something else. That usually was what folks did at the shelter, but what I said made her eyes light up.
“Cards. Let’s play us some cards. Everybody likes cards.” She took the candle with her to a stack of boxes under the staircase. The darkness felt even colder without the light. She started throwing papers and what looked like books around before she came back with a deck of cards. She was grinning. “These are dirty cards. Only cards here. Everything here is dirty like this.” She tossed a worn wax-paper box filled with playing cards on the table and returned the candle to its place. Spreading them out in the light, she grinned. “What’d I tell you?”
All were white ladies either topless or showing their behinds, with legs that looked like biscuit dough. Ugly as hell to me. The photographs looked like they’d been made in the 50’s. Each one smudged and dirty, they’d seen many a game. I wasn’t sure if she was saying they were dirty from smudges or dirty because all those ladies were near naked. Glabella started dealing cards to each of us without shuffling or counting them. I had no idea what we were playing.
“I wasn’t going to do this, but I think, yeah, yeah.” She dropped the remainder of the deck on the table and then rummaged around the counter. In a few seconds she found two coffee cups that were as clean as anything else in the room. “Let me get something I was going to keep for myself, but you’re here, and I think it’s right that we share it.” She returned to the backside of the staircase and began pushing aside heavy boxes. Holding up a wine bottle toward the candle so I could see the label: Casillero del Diablo. “I only got one of these. Cassa. Cassa Lee-ro Dell Diablow,” she pronounced with gusto. Proud of her offering, her blue eyes twinkled in the candlelight. “This is his.”
Somebody owned the place, and it clearly wasn’t Glabella. “I reckon everything here is,” I said.
“Everything in his place is like that there,” she tapped a finger on the cards. “Dark. Dark. I found nudie pictures, a sword, rusty knives, ropes.” She poured herself a cup before filling mine. “I even found a dog’s skeleton the first time I come in. Right there behind where you’re sitting.” Her shoulders shuddered in disgust and she curled her lips over her teeth, savoring her drink. “I threw that out. I can’t sleep with nothing dead in the room.”
I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to make me feel better or not. The candle had grown brighter, or maybe my eyes were just growing accustomed to it. I looked in my cup. Nothing visible was floating in the wine, so I took a sip. Sour and cold. Wine was a rare treat, so I gratefully drank my fill.
“He still live here?” I pointed at the ceiling.
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head as if she didn’t want to discuss it further. “He’s not here tonight.”
“As long as I got this, he won’t bother us.” I pulled the wrench from my bag and held it up proudly.
Her laugh began as a cackle but it soon grew to a full-throated laugh, the crazy laugh. “You think that’s going to do anything to him?” She picked up the bottle and refilled her own cup, ignoring my empty one. “He’d snap your neck like you was a daisy and use that wrench to pick his teeth!”
“What are you staying here for if he’s so dangerous? Do you think he’s liable to drop by?”
Forgetting all about our dirty card game, Glabella stood up and waved her arms like a cat who’s spotted a bug in the air. “When he comes, you’ll feel it. There’s a cold that creeps up on you like it’s going to jump right down your throat. But you can’t run. You get froze up right in your place when he’s coming at you. You ever feel that?”
I was feeling that right now. It was as if all the cold from outside had been boxed up inside these four walls, and despite that one candle trying its damndest to push it out, that cold closed its fist around me. I pushed my hands up under my arms to warm them.
Glabella was rolling. “Sometimes you’re in your bed and he’ll come in. He puts his hands on you and you can’t run away. They’re so cold like his fingers are made of ice and you just close your eyes ‘cause you can’t do nothing.” She was moving across the room where it was darker.
“Death! Death! I had ten chances. You don’t get all your chances. You got to run away. Run away no matter how little you are. They won’t let you in even if you stand there all day long. Just standing there.” She waved her hands, weaving some unseen thing in the air in front of her. “I see one. Two. Three. They keep coming! You see that?”
It must have been around nine, maybe ten o’clock by now. My head was hurting. I eyed my backpack, glad I had closed it up tight after I took out the grapes. To leave I’d have to pull myself back up through that high window. Despite the wine, I decided this had been a bad idea. I grasped the handle of my pack and began to walk toward the window, carrying it low by my side, hoping she would be so far gone she wouldn’t notice me moving. I made it halfway.
“Where you going? You can’t leave!” shouted Glabella.
“I got to go. I’m sorry.”
“No, no! Don’t go now. We can drink some more wine. I was lying when I said I only had one. There’s another bottle. Lemme get it.” She ran toward the same space and rummaged in the darkness. I hurried to the window and pushed it open. “No, you can’t go!” Glabella darted across the room, wine bottle in hand. Another del Diablo. “You have to help me. This was supposed to be the devil’s going away party.”
“I can’t help you Glabella.” I tried to push my back pack up through the window. It was a lot harder pushing it up and out the window than it had been dropping it in.
She put the bottle on the floor and pulled me back by my shoulders. “Please. Please don’t leave.” Her eyes filled with tears and her lips shook. Her face was as filled with loneliness as it was terror. “He’ll leave for good if you stay. I’ve been trying to make him leave, and you can help me.”
I pushed her hands off me. “Ain’t nobody here but us. Look around.” She was acting crazy and I didn’t want to stay in this place. I was so tired. I wanted to sleep without keeping one eye open wondering when I’d have to use that wrench.
“The devil won’t stay in a place he hates. He runs from places like that. That’s why I need you. That’s why I asked you here. You give me them socks. I remember that nice thing you did, and that’s why I chose you. I knew you could help me.” She picked up the bottle. “You can have all the wine if you stay. You can have the cards. Anything you want.” She wiped a dirty hand over her cheeks and brushed away tears. Glabella was small. I’d never noticed how small she was. Her craziness had always made her look bigger, but now she just looked like a scared little girl with gray hair.
“I don’t want anything from you,” I argued. “You got a good place here, so don’t tell nobody else. I won’t tell nobody either, but I can’t stay when you acting all–.” I let the idea hang in the frigid air.
“Please, just help me make him leave,” she said.
“The devil, huh?”
“That’s right. He loves this place, but if you stay here, he’ll hate it and he’ll go away. Do you know what the devil hates?” She nodded her head, confident that somehow I understood. “Just a little kind thing. That’s all. He hates love. He can’t abide it. He’ll go away for good if he sees that.” She was wringing her hands, chapped and white like a ghost’s hands.
Somehow I began to understand. It would be easy, I suppose. The smallest act of kindness. Maybe that would send him away from this place for good. As long as Glabella believed it would, I guess that was all that mattered. I returned my backpack to its place on the floor, and we took our seats at the table once more where the candle brightened the both of us in its circle of light. Glabella poured wine from the new bottle, this time filling my cup first and then her own.
#
Cathy Adams’ latest novel, A Body’s Just as Dead, was published by SFK Press. Her writing has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a short story writer with publications in The Saturday Evening Post, Utne, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Barely South, Five on the Fifth, Southern Pacific Review, and 72 other journals from around the world. She earned her M.F.A. at Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University, Washington. She is a faculty member at the American University in Bulgaria.