Part 16 (1/2)

”We've got a place to stay a bit up the road for tonight. It's about a half hour walk. It's indoors and there's toilets, but maybe not much to make beds out of. Take what you can carry for about a mile, you can come back tomorrow for the rest. You don't have to come, but this isn't going to be any fun tonight.”

A woman came forward. She was young, but not young enough to be a homegirl. She had long dark hair and she twisted her hands as she spoke in a soft voice to Francis. ”What about our stuff? We can't leave it here tonight. It's all we've got.”

Francis nodded. ”We need ten people to stand guard in two s.h.i.+fts of five tonight. Young people. You'll get flashlights and phones, coffee and whatever else we can give you. Just keep the rubberneckers out.”

The rubberneckers were out of earshot. The account they'd get of this would come from the news-anchor who'd tell them how dangerous and dirty this place was. They'd never see what Suzanne saw, ten men and women forming up to one side of the crowd. Young braves and homegirls, people her age, their faces solemn.

Francis oversaw the gathering up of belongings. Suzanne had never had a sense of how many people lived in the shantytown but now she could count them as they ma.s.sed up by the roadside and began to walk: a hundred, a little more than a hundred. More if you counted the surprising number of babies.

Lester conferred briefly with Francis and then Francis tapped three of the old timers and two of the mothers with babes in arms and they crammed into Lester's car and he took off. Suzanne walked by the roadside with the long line of refugees, listening to their murmuring conversation, and in a few minutes, Lester was back to pick up more people, at Francis's discretion.

Perry was beside her now, his eyes a million miles away.

”What now?” she said.

”We put them in the workshop tonight, tomorrow we help them build houses.”

”At your place? You're going to let them stay?”

”Why not? We don't use half of that land. The landlord gets his check every month. Hasn't been by in five years. He won't care.”

She took a couple more steps. ”Perry, I'm going to write about this,”

she said.

”Oh,” he said. They walked further. A small child was crying. ”Of course you are. Well, f.u.c.k the landlord. I'll sic Kettlewell on him if he squawks.”

”What do you think Kettlewell will think about all this?”

”This? Look, this is what I've been saying all along. We need to make products for these people. They're a huge untapped market.”

What she wanted to ask was *What would Tjan say about this?* but they didn't talk about Tjan these days. Kettlewell had promised them a new business manager for weeks, but none had appeared. Perry had taken over more and more of the managerial roles, and was getting less and less workshop time in. She could tell it frustrated him. In her discussions with Kettlewell, he'd confided that it had turned out to be harder to find suits than it was finding wildly inventive nerds. Lots of people *wanted* to run businesses, but the number who actually seemed likely to be capable of doing so was only a small fraction.

They could see the junkyard now. Perry pulled out his phone and called his server and touch-toned the codes to turn on all the lights and unlock all the doors.

They lost a couple of kids in the aisles of miraculous junk, and Francis had to send out bigger kids to find them and bring them back, holding the treasures they'd found to their chests. Lester kept going back for more old-timers, more mothers, more stragglers, operating his ferry service until they were all indoors in the workshop.

”This is the place,” Francis said. ”We'll stay indoors here tonight. Toilets are there and there -- orderly lines, no shoving.”

”What about food?” asked a man with a small boy sleeping over his shoulder.

”This isn't the Red Cross, Al,” Francis snapped. ”We'll organize food for ourselves in the morning.”

Perry whispered in his ear. Francis shook his head, and Perry whispered some more.

”There will be food in the morning. This is Perry. It's his place. He's going to go to Costco for us when they open.”

The crowd cheered and a few of the women hugged him. Some of the men shook his hand. Perry blushed. Suzanne smiled. These people were good people. They'd been through more than Suzanne could imagine. It felt right that she could help them -- like making up for every panhandler she'd ignored and every pa.s.sed-out drunk she'd stepped over.

There were no blankets, there were no beds. The squatters slept on the concrete floor. Young couples spooned under tables. Children snuggled between their parents, or held onto their mothers. As the squatters dossed down and as Suzanne walked past them to get to her car her heart broke a hundred times. She felt like one of those Depression-era photographers walking through an Okie camp, a rending visual at each corner.

Back at her rented condo, she found herself at the foot of her comfortable bed with its thick duvet -- she liked keeping the AC turned up enough to snuggle under a blanket -- and the four pillows. She was in her jammies, but she couldn't climb in between those sheets.