Sadie was a do-gooder, someone who was aware of the deeply rooted systematic injustices that perpetuated oppression throughout the world, and who wanted to do something meaningful about it. She was a liberal cliché and she knew it. Sadie found it interesting how drugs caused the woman who lived behind the grocery store to give an outward physical representation to the inner processes of her mind. Which is to say, while most of us carted around incorrectly remembered personal histories, useless grievances, and unhelpful fantasies, this woman had found a way to bring her mental garbage into the physical realm; she filled shopping carts full of non-redeemable waste, trash which was result of overproduction which was caused by capitalism. Sadie could admit that she did not want the transient woman in her own apartment, and she didn’t believe handing money to the woman would be helpful, but almost involuntarily, Sadie cultivated empathy for the woman. Sadie’s mental garden of empathy was bathed daily in love, and attention, but it was admittedly hard for Sadie to share the fruits of this garden with anyone. Sadie strived to pass out her excess empathy at her workplace, as though her empathetic thoughts were lemons that grew in unneeded quantities in her front yard and could be left up for grabs in a plastic bag by the cash register. Sadie worked for Saint-Loup, a high-end clothing boutique.

A stocky woman, wearing expensive boots and a fashionable top entered the store. The woman maintained a powerful-yet-clumsy gait, as though she were important but unsure of herself.

“Villeparisis dress, size forty,” the woman said.

It took Sadie a moment to realize the woman was requesting a garment. Sadie fetched the dress from the back and brought it to the sale’s floor.  The shade of the dress channeled a rosé targeted at hip young women. The dress had a sash in front which, if asked, Sadie would describe as sexy-Michelle-Obama chic. Had the designer not added a few almost imperceptible qualities, the piece would resemble something a punk girl could wear to prom to both sincerely celebrate and ironically comment on the occasion. The Villeparisis’ touch ensured the garment was worthy of a stylish and well-mannered rich woman. The outfit was cliché, original, traditional, and new, all at once. Though, in Sadie’s opinion, the garb was a few years out of style. The woman tried it on and nodded.  Some women, who were spending upwards of four thousand dollars on a dress, wanted Sadie to spend the better part of an hour engaging in flattery. Sadie sensed that this woman wanted as little human emotion as feasible to seep into the interaction. The woman paid with a card, and Sadie learned her name was Rachel. When Sadie handed Rachel the bag containing the dress, Rachel grabbed it without a word and walked out.

Sadie, who was thirty years old, lived with her mother and younger brother in Napa. For a time, she had paid sixteen hundred dollars a month to rent a detached in-law unit, which consisted of four hundred square feet of livable space.  That space had been cramped with her mattress and boxes containing psychology text books, much loved novels of her childhood and books she had not yet had the chance to read.  Most nights, her seventy-year-old female landlord invited her into the main house to watch TV. Sadie accepted. After a year and half of watching murder shows on the couch of her landlord, she figured that if she was going to spend her nights watching TV with an older lady, she might as well save sixteen hundred dollars a month and live with her mom.

At dinner that night, a pizza her brother brought home from his job at King’s Pizza, Sadie recounted her interaction with Rachel. Though their exchange with Rachel was wordles, Sadie believed she had allowed her acceptance of Rachel to shine through her eyes.

“It’s possible she just didn’t want to talk,” her brother, said. “Like, maybe she was holding in a fart.”

When Sadie was twenty-one, she had graduated from the University of Irvine with a Bachelors in Psychology. She knew that to utilize her degree and training, she would need either a masters or a doctorate. Instead of immediately applying to graduate school, Sadie increased her hours at Target. She had no illusions about the American health care system. She knew that an individual’s insurance might cover a year of therapy sessions, but by the time a provider had an opening, six months of that year had passed, and then the individual might be seen less than once a month. Sadie daydreamed about opening her own clinic where financially strapped people could walk in and receive free therapeutic attention, but she also knew that earning a doctorate would put her in six figures in debt. As a woman in her early twenties, she had believed she was using everything she had learned from the university when she helped Target customers, some of whom could clearly benefit from mental health services.  She gave them as much validation and encouragement as she could. For Sadie, the logical next step was to work for a high-end clothing boutique that paid its employees more, and had fewer customers. That way, Sadie could shower the relatively small number of shoppers with meaningful attention. Sadie had recently begun working for Saint-Loup. She had embarked on her dream job. She was beginning to understand that her brother and mother viewed her life choices differently.

 

Two weeks later, Rachel returned to Saint-Loup. She said was wanted a conservative cocktail dress, something that would be appropriate for her son’s birthday party. Rachel had offered a detail about her personal life and Sadie would not shirk from the opportunity to support her.

“I couldn’t imagine being a mother. The cooking, cleaning, waking the kids up, being a chauffeur, it’s like you work twelve jobs,” Sadie said.

“My son is twenty-four,” Rachel said.

Sadie nodded empathetically.

Sadie wanted to be absolutely present. With her facial expression, she yearned to say that even if Rachel was addicted to pain pills, even if she interacted with her child as little as possible, even if she spent every day burning through her husband’s money, and had never had a job of her own, Sadie would give the woman something that she lacked-something that she needed. She smiled as though she would give her soul to Rachel, as though, if she had her druthers, she would run away with Rachel to a concert, a night club, or a cabin in the woods, where the two friends would share with each other, from the infinite patience dwelling inside of them, except, it wouldn’t really be patience, because patience wasn’t needed with friends who cared so deeply about each other.

Rachel found a dress, tried it on, and decided not to buy it.

 

Sadie’s mom made turkey chili for dinner that night. Her brother Evan ate quickly, putting away more than his two female family members combined.

“At work today, this old boomer was screaming, you make people eat out of a box at this restaurant? Cause I accidentally entered his order in as to-go. I put his pizza on a pan and he was fine. Anyway, it’s too bad you weren’t there Sadie. You could’ve given him your phone number, and told him that when he woke up in the middle of the night, weeks later, upset that his pizza was in a box, he could’ve called you, and received comfort and support,” Evan said.

His smile indicated that he had thought up this joke hours ago and had waited all day to deliver it at the world.

“And it’s too bad you’re not a stand-up comedian, because humanity would benefit immensely from your witty observations on life,” Sadie said.

After dinner, Sadie went to her bedroom and browsed Tinder. The first profile she saw belonged to Tony, a man she knew in high school. Sadie acknowledged the significant drawbacks involved with online dating in her hometown. She swiped left on Tony and blocked his profile. Almost immediately, her phone rang. She cursed herself for maintaining the same phone number since she was fourteen years old.

“Yes?” Sadie said.

“It’s nice to hear your voice,” Tony said.

Sadie said nothing.

“I’m wondering if you told people… about our thing… because, I’m an important person in tech now. … I want to know you’re not disparaging my reputation,” Tony said.

“Oh,” Sadie said.

“If you told anyone, you should tell them you forgive me.”

“I don’t forgive you,” Sadie said.

She hung up her phone and blocked the number. Once, when Sadie was in high school, she had found Tony attractive. He invited her to his house when his parents were out of town. She drank the whiskey and cokes he handed her. She had been able to keep her clothes on, but he had forced himself on top of her, grabbed parts of her body, penetrated her with his fingers, and brought himself to completion. At the time, she told no adults of the incident.

 

At the store the next morning, Sadie noticed a short man in a starched, tucked in, checkered dress shirt, and grey slacks. Sadie asked a number of times if he needed help, but he always demurred. He was content to watch the store while writing things on his phone. The other employee on the sale’s floor ignored the man completely.

A couple in their sixties walked in. The woman wore heels, faux leather pants, and a flowy grey cashmere sweater over a white top.  The man, who was shorter than his wife, dressed in worn blue jeans and an old Kirkland flannel, as though proudly flaunting his wife’s fashionable inclinations. The woman admired a long, Verdurin scarf. Sadie stood by eagerly. The man locked eyes with her.

“This would make a great addition to my rape kit,” the man said.

“He’s so wild,” the woman said, and patted his arm.

“I’m looking at woman’s clothes, I just want my life back,” the man said.

“We admire your sacrifice,” Sadie said.

After the couple left, Rachel entered the store. There were customers who called out to Sadie because of their obvious need, a need that perhaps only Sadie could perceive. Sadie wanted a valid connection with Rachel’s core.  Rachel exited the fitting room wearing a twelve-hundred-dollar sweater.

“It looks fine,” Sadie said.

Rachel reentered the dressing room.  As Rachel changed, Sadie thought about a time when she was a child, when she viewed her friends as a natural resource that enabled her to live, no less necessary to her existence than clean drinking water.  Sadie saw her current life as relatively empty. She had excess energy to devote to Rachel, but had absconded from her duty.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said you looked fine. You looked absolutely incredible in the sweater. It was stunning,” Sadie said.

“It’s okay,” Rachel said.

“No, you’re an incredible woman, and the sweater brought out your incredible nature. I should’ve told you that you’re incredible. I’m just off today,” Sadie said.

Rachel said nothing.

Sadie took a deep breath.

“I’m off today because this boy sexually assaulted me in high school and last night he called me on the phone,” Sadie said.

“Oh, I hope the rest of your day goes better,” Rachel said.

Rachel looked like there was more she wanted to say, but whether her unspoken words contained support or an admonishment, Sadie could not tell. She left the store. Sadie had not noticed, but the man in the starched shirt was typing furiously on his phone during this interaction.

The next customer Sadie helped was a blond hipster woman who wore tight blue jeans, black chunk heels, and a grey V-neck shirt. The woman was beautiful and she had expertly applied her makeup, but compared to the other customers, her clothes were heavily used. The woman was younger than Sadie. She tried on a number of La Petite Bande tops. Finally, she approached Sadie, holding a La Petite Bande garment.

“Do you ever have sales, or offer discounts?” the hipster woman asked.

Sadie held the blouse in her hand. She looked at the woman and understood how badly she wanted it.

“Would a seventy-dollar discount work?” Sadie asked.

“Yeah,” the woman said.

“Some of our clothes get stained with lipstick, when people try them on. The lipstick comes out easy, with just a little bit of vinegar. If this top had a stain on it, I would have to give you the discount,” Sadie said.

The woman brought the top to her mouth and kissed it.

“That works,” Sadie said.

She rung up the blouse, subtracting seventy dollars from the total.

 

On Tuesday, Sadie had the day off. She went for a run and was back in her apartment, covered in sweat, getting ready to take a shower, when her phone rang.

“Sadie, this is Celine Diaz.”

Celine was the owner of Saint-Loup. Sadie had met her only once before, during her job interview. A woman named Ashely worked as the store manager, handling all of the day-to-day operations. Sadie had heard rumors that Celine was a multi-millionaire, if not a billionaire, who had purchased Saint-Loup during a period of brief-but-intense interest in clothing retail. According to the rumors, Celine had recently become interested in learning how to fly a helicopter, opening sustainable sushi restaurants, and making wine. Saint-Loupe was receiving less attention.

“I want to thank you for your hard work and attention to detail when arranging clothes,” Celine said.

“You’re welcome,” Sadie.

“Do you know who Marcus is?” Celine asked.

“No,” Sadie said.

“That does explain some things. Marcus oversees a lot of my business ventures. He acts as my eyes-on-the-ground when I’m otherwise occupied. He informed me that you had told a customer about a sexual assault you experienced.  He mentioned the customer was Rachel Feldman. She’s been a loyal patron for years. He took the liberty of calling her and she agrees that we should let you go. Marcus also said, that you advised a customer to damage a top in order to receive a discount,” Celine said.

“Yes, I did those things,” Sadie said.

“We’re going to discontinue your employment, but the problem is, we don’t have anyone to replace you at this moment. If you’re willing to stay on for a few weeks, I’ll give you a good reference. You can quit right now, but then you wouldn’t be able to apply for unemployment,” Celine said.

“I can stay,” Sadie said.

Sadie wasn’t in a position to turn down any income.

Sadie put on a holey pair of jeans and a Lou Reed t-shirt. For a moment, she fantasied about wearing the outfit to her remaining shifts. She imagined the conversations the outfit would spark. Sadie loved an ice cream sundae that was available at a popular fast-food restaurant, but she found it difficult to justify the treats’ plastic cup, which would outlive her. Being fired was a good justification. She bought the sundae and began walking around downtown.

She passed a number of restaurants that had only a few, if any guests, which made sense, as it was a dead time between late lunch and early dinner. The outside patio of Baddiel’s was completely packed. A sign indicated that the space was reserved for a private event. Sadie sat on stone bench in front of the patio and surveyed the scene. Many of the men gathered were guys in their twenties, who wore dress shirts, and gave arrogant looks to the other people present, as though every man thought they were the next Mark Zuckerberg. Within five years, the most interesting aspect of the other people present would be the stories they would tell about the future tech celebrity, the man they were now sitting across from. Sadie guessed correctly that she was looking at tech workers. A few of the men were in their fifties, but they had hip haircuts and were in good shape.  A youthful and industrious energy permeated the group.  A few women were present but Sadie was able to get a good look at only one lady, a redhead with colorful Ed Hardy style tattoos. She wore lipstick and kept a cocky smile, as though she was more than used to holding her own in a roomful of men.  Despite her loneliness, Sadie was not in the habit of openly gawking at groups of strangers. She assumed some men noticed her, in her terrible jeans and questionable t-shirt, but something about the scene had piqued her curiosity. She wouldn’t stop staring until she determined what it was. Most of the men sat at one of five giant tables, conversations were conducted across several tables at once.  At the far end of the patio, away from the loud men, a pair of women sat at a two-seater. One of the women appeared to be in her late fifties or early sixties, the other in her thirties. The ladies looked at one another with a laser focus, but it didn’t seem as though they were particularly enjoying each other’s company. Sadie assumed they were afraid to look at the guys. The older woman was Rachel.

Two men wearing dress shirts exited the patio and walked in front of Sadie.

“Excuse me. Sorry, I have an awkward question. Like a really awkward question. Why are those two women over their sitting by themselves?” Sadie asked.

“That’s our boss, Rachel, and her secretary,” one of the men said.

“And why are they sitting alone?” Sadie asked.

The men exchanged looks. Their facial expressions indicated had had a few drinks each.

“Rachel is a little girl who took on a man’s job. We make predictions about the specific demand for medical equipment over the next sixteen quarters. Our work impacts a billion-dollar industry, but Rachel doesn’t even know what an algorithm is. She can’t spell it,” the man said.

“I got my first job when was I seventeen working for Jack in the Box.  My boss there was better than Rachel,” the second man said.

One of the men on the patio caught the eye of the guys talking to Sadie. With a happy drunk grin, he pointed to Rachel. He had inferred who they were talking about.

“Our boss has Downs syndrome. That’s why she’s alone,” the man on the patio said.

He spoke loudly. It was likely Rachel heard him and possible Rachel saw Sadie, though she tried to hide behind the men she was talking to. Not a single person spoke in Rachel’s defense.

 

During Sadie’s last shift, Rachel walked in. She surveyed the clothing, and refused to look at Sadie. Ashely, the only other employee present, was helping a customer. After Ashely finished, she ran to the back to complete her managerial tasks. Rachel finally approached Sadie.

“Sachar skirt, red, size forty,” Rachel said.

She went to the back to fetch the skirt.

She found the Siamese cat tied up in a plastic bag in bushes behind Target. She can’t believe what some people do. Her boyfriend, Teddy, still asleep, rolls onto his side. He manages a gas station and gets off at six in the morning. Husband, Katrina calls him. Marriage a ceremony neither can afford and perhaps the fragility of their lives warns them against. Tweekers both of them but clean now. She looks out a window at the cracked street still wet from the calm night. A block away, the silence is being nibbled away by cars on Interstate 805, soon to be a madness of rush-hour traffic. Not long from now Katrina will awaken to other noises. She wonders what those will be. Some traffic, sure, this is San Diego. Every city has traffic but maybe she’ll hear birdsong, too. Waking up to birds as she did as a child. Imagine. She and Teddy recently found an apartment through the housing authority. Of the nearly 8,500 homeless people in San Diego County, more than 700 live in vehicles. Almost 500 emergency housing vouchers became available in 2021 to address housing insecurity worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Katrina and Teddy got one of the vouchers, but it took them nearly a year to find a place. One landlord told her, All people on Section 8 have bedbugs. She felt he was just lumping her into a stereotype. In her opinion, there’re the bums who are content being homeless, and then there are people like her and Teddy who are working but don’t have a place to live.

The landlord who finally accepted their application rents apartments on Loma Way. She offered Katrina and Teddy a two bedroom with brown linoleum floors. Much better than that cheap brown carpet so many apartments have, especially with cats. Katrina checked it out on Google Maps and thought it looked like crap. But the photo she saw was old. When she and Teddy met with the landlord they found that all of the apartments had been recently remodeled and freshly painted. Nine hundred and fifty square feet. Beats the thirty-two square feet of the Winnebago and the leaky roof. When it rains, water pours into the bedroom and kitchenette. Teddy will shove her to one side of the bed so he can stay dry, her body pressed against the frayed particleboard of a cabinet. The other day, her mother called from Utah and said a foot of snow had fallen. Tell her we got a foot of rain inside, Teddy said. When they were using drugs they draped tarps over their tent to keep out the rain. One night, Katrina had to be life-flighted out of a riverbed near the golf course behind Fashion Valley Mall because of flooding. She was detoxing from speed and shaking so bad she couldn’t climb out ahead of the rising waters.

The landlord did not hold the history of drug arrests and convictions against them. As long as you tell me the truth before I do a background check, you’ll be fine, she had told them. They can move in two weeks. Hard to imagine having a place after living in the Winnebago for a year. No, eighteen months. A year and a fucking half. She and Teddy didn’t sleep much when they lived on the street before the Winnebago. Afraid who might walk up on them. Katrina knows three people who died, one stabbed, two OD’d. Bad stuff. If you make someone mad they can hide anywhere and come for you about just stupid stuff. Could be a guy touched someone’s backpack. People are nuts about their packs. This one dude took a guy’s pack because he owed him money. The pack had his heart meds and he died that night of a stroke. At least that’s what the paramedics said. Scary out there.

 

 

Robin stirs, opens one eye and watches a man walk past her car wheeling a garbage can. He picks up pieces of paper with a trash picker, peers at her, glances away and moves on in a desultory fashion suggesting that the sight of her provided only a temporary diversion from the mindless tedium of his task. She sits up, opens both of her eyes wide, squints, opens them again allowing the morning to sift around in her head until it settles into the beginning of yet another day, then she pulls the door handle, gets out and stretches. She wears a faded, green sweatshirt and gray sweatpants. Short, stocky. A wrestler’s build. Her brown hair falls around her cheeks. She holds a hand over her eyes against the sun. No clouds. Down the street toward The 805, a sign promoting Hawthorne Crossings shopping center shines in the sun as do the names of stores listed beneath it: Staples, Cycle Gear, Ross, Book Off, Dollar Tree.

The staff at Cycle Gear throw away bike helmets like confetti. The slightest dent and scratch and they’re tossed into a dumpster. Robin has seen Teddy collect them to recycle. Teddy’s out there, a hustler. He says he even finds Rolex watches but he’s got to be bragging or lying or both, right? C’mon, Robin tells herself, selling just one Rolex would get him off Othello. But he and Mike keep the tweekers away. Othello Avenue is quiet for the most part but if someone parks here to get high, those two are on them and get them gone, they sure do. Robin doesn’t know Katrina and Teddy well, or Mike for that matter. Talks to them but not all the time. What’s the point? Get to know people and then they leave. Katrina and Teddy aren’t staying. If all goes well, she won’t be far behind them.

Robin has lived in her VW for about a year. Stick shift. Saving for a new clutch. She has a clutch kit but needs someone to install it. The car is her everything. It’s a mess of Burger King wrappers and coffee cups but it ain’t horrible. She’s not a packrat like Steve. When it becomes a mess, she cleans it and when it turns into a mess again, she cleans it again. Like her life. She works as a caregiver for a grandmother and her two-year-old granddaughter. The child’s mother lives on the street turning tricks for crack, a toothless, emaciated figure peering wide-eyed into the slow trolling cars. In four weeks, Robin will move in with a man who needs in-home care 24/7. She has known him for eight years. Not well but they talked a lot over the years. A Polish guy, Harold. In his sixties, maybe seventies. He lived next door to a mutual friend. He sorted mail at a post office before he retired. He wanted to be a cop but, he told Robin, in those days the San Diego Police Department wouldn’t hire a Pole. Injured his hip on the job and it’s given him problems ever since. He’s in Carmel Mountain Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center now. Comes out in about four weeks. She’s ready to move in with him, ready for a room of her own. She’ll sleep a lot the first couple of days, she’s sure.

The median home price in San Diego County has surpassed $500,000 and the median monthly rent is almost $2,800. Some studios downtown rent for $2,000 a month. With prices like those, Robin feels grateful for the arrangement with Harold. It won’t be her place but it’ll be better than living in the VW, and she’ll still have time to help the woman with the grandchild. With two jobs, she should do all right. She used to clerk at a day-old bread store for four years until she screwed up. Was going through a divorce.. Was going to casinos and losing money. She stole one hundred dollars from a cash register at work one afternoon. Got caught, got fired. Then one night at a casino she lost what little money she had left and in her fury she punched the window of a slot machine and broke it. Damn window must’ve been pretty wobbly because she did’t hit it that fucking hard. Prosecutors charged her with a Class A misdemeanor for destruction of property. Had to pay $1,800 for that little bitty window plus the one hundred dollars she owed the bread company. People in charge don’t play. Stuff follows you. Background checks screwed her when she put in job applications. She left her apartment with only her clothes and took to the streets. When she got tired of being in her car, she pitched a tent in one of the many canyons around the city. She tried to think of it as camping, but she missed her bed.

 

 

Mike sits in the driver’s seat of the Chrysler, left elbow out the window like a bored taxi driver waiting for a fare. His blonde hair falls to his shoulders. One side of his scruffy beard skewed from sleep. Heavy set, he looks much younger than his sixty-one years. Thick body, his belly spills over his belt buckle. His black shirt, speckled with dandruff, stinks of his unwashed body. The stale air within his vehicle carries his funk. He rolls down the passenger window and feels the breezy crosscurrents. Steve appears in his side mirror walking up from behind the Chrysler, a skinny little dude the same age as Mike, T-shirt and jeans sloppy with wrinkles hanging off his body. He pauses, pokes his head in, Hey. Mike. Says he’d gone to Target for coffee and dropped his phone but someone found it and gave it back to him. Pretty lucky, huh? Stressed him out. Feels exhausted. Gonna take a nap. See you, Mike. He walks to his RV, turns to face Mike again as if to fix him there. Mike makes a face, folds his arms and looks down and shakes his head. Steve’d lose his arms if it they weren’t attached to his shoulders. He’s OK. Harmless. Suffered a head injury in a motorcycle accident, or so he says. Might have TBI. Mike considers himself lucky that he doesn’t have it. Or maybe he does. He can be forgetful. When he was in the army, a tank hatch cover fell on his head. Dropped him like a stick. He receives VA disability, about a $1,000 a month.

The other day, he saw Katrina, and she told him that she and Teddy had found a place. They don’t talk much but if he splurges on a pizza, he’ll offer them a slice. Steve and Robin, too, if he has enough. Good for them. So many homeless people. Mike keeps his head down, minds his own business. If he sees someone shooting up in their car or loading a pipe, he writes the license plate number and calls the cops. They show up eventually. He tells the tweekers, I know what you’re doing. Get out. He doesn’t yell at them. That’d be a good way to get a gun in his face. Teddy always backed him up. Now, Mike just might have to settle for calling the police and leave it at that.

Every morning he drives four or five blocks, gets something to eat. He has received tickets for being parked in one place too long. Five of those and the city will tow him, and then where’d he be? Carl’s Jr., it’s close. Gas costs too much to go far. He has up-to-date tags so he’s good there, and insurance, he’s got that too. It’s hard to get insurance being homeless. He lies. Gives the DMV an old address. They don’t check. He loves to cook but can’t in his car, of course. He warms soup at a 7-Eleven. McDonald’s, Denny’s, Jack in the Box, they’re not too expensive. His doctor says he has high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes. Blood pressure off the charts. Well, doc, I eat nothing but fast food. At Costco, he gets grapes, cherries, and water. Bananas, too, but on hot days after hours in the car they begin to turn brown and spotty. In cold weather he’ll buy up to six bananas. If he eats one a day, they’ll be gone before they spot.

He worked as a home healthcare aide for his old man for thirty-eight years after a driver ran his dad off a highway in Arizona. It was 1979. The old man had dropped Mike off at a boy scout jamboree near the Grand Canyon and got hit on his way back home. Never did catch the guy. Mike was something like a junior in high school at the time. Yellow paint from the driver’s car etched into the old man’s passenger door. He flipped into a ravine. His headlights tunneled straight into the night sky. He broke about every bone that could be broken and remained in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix for a year. Came out a paraplegic but he didn’t quit living. He met a woman from San Diego, got married and moved with her to California. Mike stayed in Arizona, married his high school sweetheart and joined the Army. Bootcamp at Fort. Lewing, Washington. Served three years on the DMZ in South Korea. That was enough. Came home, got his wife pregnant. He worked at KFC, Jack in the Box, and Jiffy Lube. Bounced from one job to another. Eight months later, he and his wife divorced. Young love gets to be old love and then no love at all after a while. He had gotten into speed by then. The old man told him to come to San Diego. Mike had nothing keeping him in Arizona, so he moved, settled next door to his father in Oceanside. In 1986 he began taking care of him full time after the old man’s wife left him. Like father, like son. Shot speed with his sister, who lived in Santee, a suburb.

The old man died in October 2018. Eighty-nine years old, three months shy of ninety. Had dementia in his final years. He served in Korea during the war, won a Bronze Star, three clusters. Before he got dementia in 2011, he volunteered at the VA. Mike didn’t know about the medal until he sorted through his dad’s things. That sort of bothers him. After so much time together, they shouldn’t have had secrets. He thought they were as tight as Siamese twins. Guess not. Goes to show. He’s not sure what but it does. The old man never talked about the war to anyone so he didn’t deny Mike anything he hadn’t denied others. And he never confronted Mike on his drug use. Fair’s, fair. But Mike wasn’t anyone else. He cared for him for decades even when he was high. So much for family. Caring for the old man for so long, Mike didn’t have much job experience. No résumé that’d count for shit. By May 2019, nearly a year later, almost out of money, he moved into his Chrysler. He’s not using drugs now but his sister still is so he won’t stay with her even if she offered to take him in which she hasn’t. He stares out his windshield at Steve’s RV. Steve has two grown sons. They aren’t offering him a bed. So much for family.

 

 

Steve stirs from his nap as the draft from a passing car rocks his RV. He has so much crap he can’t open the side door. To get out, he wriggles through the sliding window that separates the cab from the back of the RV squinching his nose, and while still on his stomach, sprawled across the driver and passenger seats, his legs bent, toes balanced against the driver’s window, he opens the passenger door and crawls out to the sidewalk. Loose tennis balls and a fishing pole, follow him. He bends and tugs at his belt and a man walking pat glances at him and keeps going.  Steve picks up the pole and tennis balls and drops them on the passenger seat. He went fishing the night before, caught one small fish, and threw it back. Watched it swim crookedly to the bottom and felt bad he had hurt it.  He decided not to fish again giving up a diversion that began in his childhood. Loved the rhythm of tossing the line, reeling it in. Kind of hypnotic. Almost disappointed when a fish took the bait and broke the spell. He was born in San Diego but spent a big part of his childhood in a Fresno ranch house. He just saw it after God knows how many years, decades really. Super cool. He had driven his niece, Nicole, to Washington state where her husband was stationed in the Navy. She had been visiting friends in San Diego and needed a ride. When the bottom fell out of his life, Steve lived with Nicole for a time in Liberty Military Housing – Murphy Canyon until her husband was transferred to Washington. His keeps in touch with his sons, Jacob and Gabrielle. Gabriele is in the Air Force in New Mexico. Jacob lives in University Heights, San Diego. Computer guy. Steve uses his address for mail. Jacob lives with his daughter, Scout, 7, and his girlfriend. Not enough room for Steve, at least that’s what he assumes. Jacob gave him one hundred dollars one time. That was nice. He wants to believe his boys have faith in him. He doesn’t pull alarms. He doesn’t complain.

Steve was on his way back to San Diego after he’d dropped Nicole off when he decided to stop in Fresno and check out his old childhood place. More developed now, nothing like it was in ’69 when he was kid. He had pulled over and just looked at the low-slung brown house, closed his eyes and his memories played out like a movie. He took a bus to school,  walked down the long driveway when it pulled up. Cows nearby strolled in their heavy, head-bobbing way, pausing to pull at grass, and chickens wandered fields. That night as he slept in his RV, someone stole the generator he had strapped to the bumper. In the morning, when he realized what had happened, he shook his head with the innocence of someone who could not fathom how such a thing could happen anymore than how he could comprehend inadvertently injuring that fish. He continued his drive back to San Diego and Othello Avenue.

 

 

The morning progresses. Emaciated weeds grow through cracks in the sidewalk, vine-like and pale green. Palm trees sway. The noise of children and women drift from the Target parking lot. Gulls bob on currents staring down at the confusion below them and a few alight on the hot pavement of Othello Avenue snagging a speck of something before flapping their wings and rising again.

 

 

Katrina starts work at ten in the morning, stands behind the counter of the Häagen-Dazs store in Fashion Valley Mall and opens a box of paper cups. She wears a black T-shirt with the Häagen-Dazs logo and she ties her long hair in a ponytail. This is her time, the early hours. Gets more done working by herself, restocking for the afternoon and evening rush.

You have chocolate? Someone asks, poking their head in the door.

Of course.

I’ll be by after lunch.

I’ll be here, Katrina says.

She has worked part-time at the store for about a year and earns about $1,600 a month. A customer, a four-year-old girl named Sophie, recently asked her to be her best friend. Katrina smiled and agreed. Another asks for pumpkin ice cream, a combination that sounds disgusting to Katrina. She has gotten to know a hairdresser and her three daughters. Another customer said he’d miss her when she told him she had applied for a job at the Target store where she and Teddy park. It would be a wonderful opportunity to work there and so convenient. Even after they move, it would be closer than Fashion Valley and better pay with benefits.

She finds a stepladder and climbs onto the bottom rung so she can reach a box of styrofoam bowls from a shelf. Raising her arms, she arches her back. Her body curves, her shirt and pants tight to her body. A man pauses by the door and admires her. She grins. It’s good to be noticed. Good to feel attractive. Good to like herself, her figure. She pulls the box and sets it on the counter. Reminds herself to call her mother. She normally does every morning but she was running late today.

Katrina was born in Orem, Utah, and moved to Huntsville, Utah, when she was eight. She liked Huntsville, a small, quiet town. No weirdos. As a little girl she could hang out with friends in a park at night and play hide-and-seek near their elementary school. Rode their bikes. In the winter they met at the ice-skating rink. Father a diesel mechanic. She has two brothers in Washington near the Canadian border. Can’t recall the town. Another one still lives in Utah. Doesn’t hear from any of them.

Her senior year in high school she met a guy and got pregnant four months before graduation. She doesn’t know what she liked about him. He was cute: she was in love.  They were young and she thought he was perfect. Even when she realized he wasn’t, she stayed with him. Her parents had divorced and  she didn’t want her kids to grow up like that.

Stupid, she says to herself.

He didn’t work, sold drugs and introduced her to heroin and pills. In 2016, they divorced. She kept the kids until her mother informed the Department of Social Services about her drug use. Katrina had tried to hide it from her, but she knew. She saw her hanging out a lot with a crowd that looked like they hadn’t bathed in a month. Katrina didn’t allow her to see the kids because she didn’t want her mother to see her. So, yeah, she knew. Her ex-husband’s aunt ended up raising the children. A blessing, Katrina thinks now. They’ve done better without her. A twenty-year-old son joined the Marines; her eighteen-year-old son is about to graduate high school, and her thirteen-year-old daughter joined the girls’ eighth grade wrestling team. She hasn’t spoken to them in two, three years. The last time they talked, it didn’t go well. Pissed off at her for leaving them. They’ll come around. She’s different now. She writes letters and sends gifts, tries not to beat herself up. Does it hurt? Yeah. Does she feel bad? Yeah, but she can’t change the past. Guilt makes her want to get high. She’s no good to them high. That’s how she lost them. A lot of tweekers don’t quit. Or they do but just for a minute. They stop and look around and all they see are the bushes and dirt where they live. They start thinking about the mess they’ve made of their lives and they get high to stop thinking. So, yeah, she feels bad but she’s happy for her children. And for herself now.

Katrina did four months in a Utah prison for theft and other charges resulting from her drug use including prescription fraud. When she got out, she met a truck driver whose route included California, Colorado and Utah. He’d stop at the Flying J Truck stop in Ogden where Katrina panhandled for drug money. The trucker bought her a sandwich from Denny’s every time he came through. They became good acquaintances if not friends and after five years, he told her if she ever cleaned up he’d put her up in his San Diego home. In 2017, she got on a Greyhound bus and took him up on it. He died a year later at sixty-two of cancer. Katrina started using meth again and stayed in Presidio Park. She met Teddy about the same time outside of a 7-Eleven, tall, skinny and handsome and high on speed. He had just done a ten year stretch for drug crimes. He kept getting busted until his most recent release from prison in January 2019 when he decided to clean up. He told Katrina he was through with drugs and had even stopped smoking cigarettes. He wouldn’t see her unless she also quit. She did. When they received their housing voucher Teddy told her to leave him, that she’d have better luck finding a place alone. His extensive prison record, he said, would hold her back. Why would I leave you when you helped me get clean? she asked him.

 

 

With Katrina at work Teddy awakens alone. On his off days, he hustles with the instincts he honed scoring drugs. He found twenty-six helmets from the dumpster behind Cycle Gear one night. Abandoned shirts, pants and jackets he sells at swap meets fifty cents to a dollar. Jewelry, iPhones, he finds it all. He buys aluminum cans from homeless people, a penny a pop, and sells them to recycling centers. He has $250 worth of cans in the Winnebago. The cats squat on the sacked piles like royalty. His babies, Teddy calls them. Coils of tattoos snake down his arm and both sides of his neck. Braided hair down his back. Not like he was when Katrina met him but filled out. Buffed. A presence. He stops shoplifters busting out the back doors of Target with carts full of stolen stuff. One man yelled at him, At least let me keep the shoes! He didn’t. Teddy runs Othello Avenue.

 

 

Robin knows a lot of people, even a few with homes. There’s a woman she works with now while she waits for the postal worker to get out of rehab. She helps her raise a two-year-old granddaughter. The girl’s mother runs the streets. This woman, the grandmother, used to live on the streets. Just got a place. Everybody Robin knows needs a little bit of help, and she’s not afraid to help herself. Robin loves to work. Never once was she on welfare. Always found some kind of job even if it was only day labor. She passed those values onto her daughter, now thirty-years old living in Colorado working as a teacher’s aide. Married with two kids. Robin can go out and see her anytime but she ain’t no beggar. She’ll visit when she has money. She’s never been like the guy she sees now on the sidewalk by the shopping center, flat on his back, using his T-shirt to cover his face from the sun. No, never that bad. She always had a tent, a stove, and a good place near a highway or in a canyon when she got tired of the cramped conditions of her car. Police charged her with vagrancy more than a few times. She probably still has bench warrants from all her citations. Was it vagrancy or trespassing? She doesn’t know. Whichever, it’s not worth the time of any cop that’s not an asshole to bother her about it. She’s met all kinds of homeless people: the desperate, the meth heads, and the general trouble kind. One guy slammed her face with a rock in a Starbucks parking lot in Clairmont. Crazy. What did she do? Nothing. Still sees him jabbering to himself. Robin knows she’s a mess but she’s not crazy. A little touched maybe. Takes that to survive out here.

 

 

Steve has a 1973 sHonda CT90 in a carrier on the rear of the RV. Sweet little ride. Nice orange job. Sort of a keepsake, he guesses, from his good, younger days. He was into motorcycles as a kid. In high school, he rode a Honda Cl 175. He loved the way it turned, getting low to the road. Wind in his hair bugs, in his teeth. It was all that. Not a team sport, really, motorcycling. Just him and his bike and the road. All that. He moved up to a BSA DB350 and then a Yamaha RD 400. It was fast but heavy, it felt like he was riding a bus. He traded it for a Yamaha RD 350. Smooth better handling. Nimble. An extension of himself. His wife Sandi would sit behind him, arms wrapped around his waist. First date with her was on the last day of his senior year in high school, 1979. Pretty as all get out. Captain of the drill team. They had a history class together. Married in 1985. He scrolls through old photographs on his phone. There he is in a blue helmet showing all his teeth in a wide grin; there he is crouched low over the handlebars; there he is posing with a white Labrador retriever, his two young sons and Sandi, her mouth open with the same tooth dazzling smile he has.

Steve stopped riding after he crashed his 350 in November 1988. He was out with his buddies on California-78 and Banner Grade when they stopped for a break.. A beautiful day. One of those clear days where the sky stretches forever. The road ran into a flat stretch flanked by scrub and desert. Steve had a sip of a friend’s beer, put his helmet back on and said, I’m going to see the rest of this road. Sightseeing, staring at distant mountains going eighty miles an hour. Not paying attention. He skidded, lost control and hit the pavement striking his head, brains scrambled. He remained in a hospital for three weeks. Sandi had just given birth to Jacob three months earlier. Steve tried to return to work but he couldn’t focus on any one task for very long. He forgot what he was doing almost as soon as he began it. At home, he tried to help Sandi with Jacob. He understood he needed five scoops of formula to make his bottle but he couldn’t remember how to count to five.

He lost his job but found another as a maintenance man with a packing company. His boss wrote down what she wanted him to do so he wouldn’t forget. He was named an employee of the month one year but was laid off a short time afterward. In 2009, after years of taking odd jobs, he went on disability. Eight years later, he found a love letter to Sandi in the glove compartment of her car from another man. Steve called her all kinds of names and she slapped him and he shouted, Hit me like you gotta pair, bitch! She moved out the next day. He remained in the house until 2019 when they sold it, and then he moved in with a woman he had met on an online dating site. After two months and endless arguments, he left her and stayed with Nicole and her husband. When they left for Washington, he settled into his RV. He doesn’t know where his money from the sale of the house went. He believes the IRS took thousands of dollars for back taxes but he doesn’t know why and amid all his junk he can’t find any documentation to confirm that. He cashed out some of his savings with the idea of moving to Mexico but he thinks he left the money in a bag somewhere or did something else with it. Whatever. He doesn’t have it. He knows that much. Some days, he scrolls through his phone and looks at old family photos. He sends angry texts to friends condemning Sandi. She’s a narcissist, cheated. I discovered her dirty, little secret. He looks at pictures of his bikes like a lover. My beloved RD350.  My beautiful RD 400. My gorgeous Super Sport 750 Ducati.

This morning, he considers the mess inside the RV. He has an older brother, Joe, in Las Vegas, a retired maintenance man. Move in with me, Joe has suggested. His son, Joe Jr., runs a pest control business in San Antonio. Steve could work for him. They’ve talked about it but he can’t decide. Should he move to Las Vegas and be with his brother or San Antonio and work for Joe Jr? He doesn’t know. He feels so overwhelmed sometimes his head hurts. Today, I’ll throw away trash, he tells himself. He needs to do something.

 

 

A damp breeze tosses crumpled food wrappers across Othello Avenue. Pigeons strut, pecking at the ground. A slow moving semi-truck rattles a rusted sewer lid as it turns into the driveway of Wentworth Automotive. The driver swings out holding a clipboard and walks with a determined stride toward a door. Clouds collect in the distance above downtown .

 

 

A man pauses by Mike’s car.
Two guys tried to break into my ride.
What they look like? Mike asks.
No idea. Had gray hoodies. When they saw I was in it they ran.
Thanks for the intel.
Be careful, the guy says.
Same to you.

Mike sighs. A tweeker robbed him at gunpoint not too long ago. Ninety-five percent of the time Othello is quiet but not that day. Bastard got seven dollars, his eyes the size of dinner plates. Fucking tweeker.

Maybe it was payback for his own drug-addled days. When he was twenty-seven and doing speed with his sister, her neighbor, also a speed freak, accused him of abusing her fourteen-year -old daughter after he told her he had no dope to give. She hangs around your house a lot, she said. Maybe that’s because you’re fucked up all the time. She filed a complaint and the police arrested him. A public defender told him to plead guilty and she’d get him five years probation. You know what they do to child abusers in prison if you’re convicted? she asked him. Scared, he took the deal. He thinks now that his lawyer screwed him to make her job easier. He checks in with the police once every thirty days. Has done that for thirty-six years. Nothing else on his record but parking tickets. He can forget about finding housing and a job. A background check will take him out faster than he can say, I didn’t touch that girl. Othello Avenue allows him a kind of peace. Here he experiences no judgment.

 

 

Teddy scours neighborhoods on blue days, the days of the week when households put out their blue recycling bins. He knows the hotspots. One week he made $1,000, and he and Katrina bought the Winnebago. He was ten years old when he arrived with his mother in San Diego in 1993, refugees from poverty and civil war in Ethiopia and devout Muslims. His mother tried to steer him away from the street, but he saw drugs as a fast way to make money and followed a different path than the one she had chosen for him. He had money and women until he didn’t. Before he met Katrina, he lived for four years camped in a parking lot. He has two kids in grammar school, one son at Georgia State University. His wages are garnished for child support. He doesn’t complain. Past is past. He won’t say more. Doesn’t need just anyone to know his business. He lives for the future. He changed course, follows a different path.

 

 

 

The cats in the Winnebago settle on the dashboard and watch Katrina walk toward them after a coworker dropped her off from work. She opens a door and they rub against her ankles until she scoops food from a bag into their bowls. After being on her feet all day she would like to sit and relax but she knows if she does that she wouldn’t get up again. Instead she finds a broom, goes back outside and begins sweeping the sidewalk, her way of showing appreciation for being allowed to park there 24/7. Teddy found a perfectly good generator in a dumpster that she’ll use later to power a vacuum and clean the Winnebago. They purposely work opposite shifts so one of them is at the RV at all times to prevent a breaks-in. Once they move into their apartment, they’ll try to work the same hours so they can spend more time together.

When she lived on the street, Katrina spent her evenings at a soup kitchen downtown. After she quit using drugs, she stopped by to show the staff she had changed. She wore makeup, had on a perky pink blouse and designer jeans. Teeth fixed. Told everyone to call her by her full name instead of her street name, Trinny. She wasn’t that person anymore.

It’ll be so good to get off Othello. People drive down it at seventy miles an hour, tow trucks barrel ass. What if someone hit the Winnebago while she was in it? There was an accident one time in the Target parking lot. A guy’s car got smashed in a hit and run. Katrina heard the noise inside the Winnebago. The guy whose car got hit was dazed but unhurt. The airbag had knocked him almost cold. At first he didn’t know where he was. She comforted him until the police came. He was so grateful that he invited her to his beauty parlor and did her hair.

She rummages for a jar of peanut butter to make Steve a sandwich. He forgets to eat sometimes. And Mike and Robin. They might want one. She won’t be back here, she knows. She won’t forget about them, but there’s no need to return. She’ll no longer be bound by the experience that now connects them. Being homeless isn’t a group sport but they do look out for one another. So, while she’s here. While she’s homeless. Sheltered homeless, as social workers call it because she lives in a vehicle. She supposes that sounds better than plain old homeless but whatever they call it, it still sucks. A distinction devised by people who haven’t been on the street, she’s sure. She reaches for a loaf of white bread, removes six slices. After she makes the sandwiches, she puts them in a bag maneuvers around the cats and steps outside.

Thank you, Steve tells her in a breathless voice that reminds her of a child.

Thank you, Robin says.

She stops at Mike’s van.

Thank you, he says taking the last sandwich.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

I’ll be here.

 

 

Shadows spread over Othello Avenue as late afternoon progresses into evening. A clear night concealing in its depths the sounds of desolate, unsettled sleep in the cramped confines of vehicles. Except for Katrina. She looks at the clear, night sky and stares into the light of one star until its yellow glow is all she sees. Her mind clears. She dreams in that kind of emptiness. Dreams quiet dreams of a yard, birdsong, and a cute little garden. Something small. Something clean. Something safe.

(Editor’s Note: Some names have been changed for privacy.)

The three white, rectangular buildings of Light of the Village ministry stand bright as a smile in the clammy humidity of a late Sunday afternoon in southern Alabama. A deep red cross rises above a stone walk where disturbed horseflies make a sharp buzzsaw of noise. On one of several bare trees, a cracked two-by-four scrawled with the message, Holy Spirit I have You, hangs unevenly. Arthur James Williams Sr., better known as Mr. Arthur, nailed up that sign and dozens more like it all around Alabama Village, an impoverished neighborhood in the town of Prichard.

I have just parked outside Light of the Village to meet its founders, John and Dolores Eads. They have been in Prichard since 2002 sharing their Christian faith. A friend told me about them. Before I became a reporter, I had been a social worker. Since then, I’ve been covering families who fall well below the news radar, and if in the unlikely or unfortunate event become noteworthy, are generally viewed with disdain. The residents of the Village fall into that category. Decades ago, white flight and economic downturns turned Prichard, and Alabama Village in particular, into a brutal place. Today, the chance to be a victim of violent or property crime in any given year is 1-in-19, making this town of 22,000 just outside Mobile one of the most dangerous places to live in America.

Because of the violence, some people have compared the Village to Syria. When I lived in Illinois, people called Chicago “Chiraq” because of its astronomical homicide rate––as many as forty shootings some weekends. But that was Chicago. It was hard to believe that an obscure neighborhood in an equally obscure small town would in its own way be as bad, and yet that’s what news reports implied. I’d worked in Syria as a reporter. That experience and my social services background made Prichard an irresistible draw as did John and Dolores. To work in the Village they had to be more than do-good, Jesus people who provide free after-school programs, meals, and other services, as well as Bible study. I called John. Totally cool, he said when I told him I wanted to spend two weeks in the Village. In late February 2021, I left my San Diego home for Alabama.

*

As I drove into Prichard, I saw the collapsed roofs of abandoned homes punctured by trees that had muscled through them. Canted doors, buckled floors, charred outlets, fractured walls. The rotted remains of broken porches turned black by weather and rot. Chips of peeled paint dusted the ground and the scat of feral dogs.. Splintered steps sagged inward. Corroded stoves dust-covered and entwined in cobwebs. Pans and pots on stilled burners. The head of a doll rested against the leg of a broken chair beside a rusted, metal bed frame. Streets that once knitted the community together had been submerged beneath weeds and heaps of abandoned couches, mattresses, toilets, boxes and stuffed garbage bags. The air smelled rancid. Destination, the brand of one forsaken tire. There was no sound.

Now, as I get out of my car, a man calls to me and I see John and Dolores and a handful of staff and volunteers across the street on the porch of a house newly rehabilitated by the ministry. John adjusts his cap against the sun. Casually and unhurried, he introduces me to everyone. Dolores has a dome of short, dark hair and wears wide glasses. Her voice exudes joy. Hey Malcolm! she shouts, as if I’m the highlight of her afternoon. Then I follow John back to the ministry. He unlocks the front door and we walk inside and pause beside a wall plastered with photographs of smiling children and teenagers. Some of them wear blue Light of the Village T-shirts. Other pictures show spent bullets, a splintered window, a shell casing.

One of the volunteers you just met, Jamez Montgomery, that’s his uncle Mayo, John says, pointing to a photo of a grinning young man with dreadlocks. Mayo was shot. Jamez would be a great person for you to talk to you. That would be pretty cool. We got Jesse. You haven’t met him. That’s his mom, Cindy. She was killed. He’d love to talk to you. He’s going to a community college.

John points to the photo of the shell casing.

Keeping it real, he says. We never forget where we are.

We walk back outside, squint against the glare. John shouts to Dolores, I cruise and distribute fruit.

The staff and volunteers collect boxes of donated oranges and grapefruit and load a pickup. I hop in the back with John, Jamez and Dacino Dees. Dacino works for the ministry. He grew up in the Village and had no idea what to make of John and Dolores. He was about eight years old when he first saw them playing games with other children. Why’re these white people out here messing with kids? he wondered. White people bought drugs in the Village and left. They didn’t play with children. Then John walked over and talked to his stepdad and persuaded him to let Dacino join the other kids.

My birthday’s tomorrow, Mr. John. Can I drive? Jamez asks.

You ain’t driving.

I’ll be fifteen.

Now you sure ain’t driving.

Jamez laughs. He has been coming to the ministry since he was five.  He has known John and Dolores for so long he calls them his godparents.

Let’s roll! John shouts.

The pickup turns out of the ministry, jostling on the pitted road.

We got oranges and grapefruit, Bo. John shouts at a man peering at us from behind the screen door of a listing house.

I’ll take a few.

Alright, Bo.

John calls almost everyone, Bo––men and women, boys and girls, sparing himself embarrassment when he forgets a name.

Thanks, Mr. John.

See you later, Bo!

We continue past a green house that opens as a juke joint at night. It stands in a block John calls the Donut Shop, an area used by drug dealers. Like a donut shop, 24/7, it never closes. Shirtless young men in blue jeans linger, watching us.

Bingo, what’s up, man? Want some fruit? Just off the tree.

I see the leaves on it, Mr. John.

That means it’s fresh. You doing good?

Yeah.

John doesn’t judge the young men before him. Drug dealing does not define the entire person. However, he does not underestimate how quickly his interactions with them can go off the rails. Christians say, God will protect you. Yes, John agrees, and wisdom too. Wisdom has taught him to linger in the Donut Shop long enough to maintain neighborhood connections and no longer.

Keeping it real, he says.

*
After we distribute the fruit, Jamez leaves for the apartment of his grandmother, Deborah Lacey. He expects her and one of his aunts to take him out for his birthday. When he was little, they would go to Chuck E Cheese. Now he prefers McDonald’s. He especially likes Big Macs. However, he enjoys Chick-fil-A, too, and might go there.

Jamez and his grandmother used to live on Hale Drive in the Village, and he often heard gunshots. If the shots sounded close, he would run into the house. If not, he didn’t worry about it. He has seen people firing guns on New Year’s Eve but never at people.

Jamez has lost family. His grandmother’s son, Uncle Mayo, was shot. His great-great grandmother, an aunt and a baby cousin have also died.. The baby drank lighter fluid. Jamez doesn’t know how the aunt died. His great-great grandmother stopped breathing. She was old. Things are cool and then the next thing he knows someone’s gone.

When Mayo died, his mother called him. Your uncle’s been shot at your grandmother’s house, she said. Jamez started running. When he reached Hale Drive he saw everyone crying and he began weeping. Blood pooled in the yard. The family had an open casket funeral. When Jamez touched the body it felt hard and not like Mayo. Everything about him was gone.

*

Sixty-five-year-old Deborah Lacey left Alabama Village with her grandchildren after Mayo died.  She hopes Jamez lives a better life. She tells him right from wrong. His older brother, Jeremiah lives in Atlanta with his daddy. He’ll turn eighteen soon and graduate from high school. He calls her every day. His younger brother, Jerry, got caught with marijuana and a judge referred him to a drug program for six months. Deborah took the boys just after they were born. Their mother, her daughter, was off into other things. Not drugs just running wild. Still is.

Mayo, her baby son, was twenty-seven when he died. He had just come from his girlfriend’s place and had pulled up to his house when someone shot him from a pickup with a 9 mm pistol. Deborah spent days afterward walking and weeping. You killed him! she screamed. She lost her mind for a minute and has still not recovered. A niece took her in. Mayo sold a little bit of weed but everybody did. Deborah doesn’t understand anything anymore.

A small, eight-month-old dog the size of a Chihuahua with long, brown hair scrambles in circles on her lap. Deborah bought her for company and calls her Kizzy. The dog reminds her of Mayo. Hyped up just like him. When he was a boy, he participated in the ministry’s after-school programs and summer camp, and he attended church on Sundays. In those days, Deborah worked at a Wendy’s and cleaned offices. Then she got shot and had to quit. It was a big help to have Mayo at Light of the Village because she couldn’t handle him all day while she recovered. It wasn’t a bad wound. Bad enough, she supposes. Two people started shooting at each other just as she stepped off a bus. She hadn’t walked but a minute when a bullet entered the calves of both legs. It didn’t hurt, but it burned something awful. The bus driver called 911. Deborah was laid up for a good little while.

Alabama Village has been rough for so long it’s hard for her to say when it started going downhill. She has seen just two shootings––Mayo’s and her own––and that was enough. It scares her. She stays out of their way. She was caught in that crossfire once and that was once too many.

Deborah can’t hardly remember her younger days. She grew up in Prichard but not in the Village, and was into a little bit of everything. Whatever wasn’t tied down she stole, money mostly. Never broke into houses. She robbed people on the street. No guns. She was afraid of guns. Instead she used a bat or a stick, whatever was available to intimidate people. She spent five years in the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women and learned to leave stuff alone that didn’t belong to her and to live a better life if she didn’t want to spend it in jail. She kept her head down and got into a work release program making baskets in a Birmingham factory. Then the prison placed her with a telemarketing company that sold light bulbs. That didn’t work out. People would often cuss, become irrational, and worse, and company rules forbade her to respond in kind. But she broke those rules more than once and returned to making baskets.

Deborah tells her grandchildren how crazy she was at their age and where it led. She told Mayo the same thing. Sometimes he listened; sometimes he didn’t.

*

Dacino picks me up at my hotel the next morning. He spent the night at the house of one of his sisters in Gulf Village, a project adjacent to the ministry. They sat on the porch, heard gunshots, and hurried inside to a room away from the road.

Anybody can get shot, he tells me. When he was little, older people ran the streets. Now it’s all younger people. Back in the day, they didn’t shoot in broad daylight like they do now. He could play outside but was aware of his boundaries. No one told him. He just knew, like instinct passed down from one generation to the next. He’d sometimes walk around, feel uneasy, and think, Yeah, I’m not going over there.

He was eight years old when he saw his first shooting. He and his brothers, Marco and Jamichael, and their stepdad saw a man chase and shoot another man in front of a Prichard convenience store. Smoke flashed out of the shotgun and Dacino’s legs turned to noodles. He had gone to the store on his scooter and after what he had seen, he couldn’t move. The ambulance took a while to arrive, and the the wounded man bled out in front of the store. The storeowner wouldn’t let him inside. He didn’t want blood on the floor. Dacino’s stepdad said, Ya’ll get over here, and they went to another store across the street.

That night, Dacino refused to go outside. He didn’t want to walk into something that could get him killed. He knows homeboys who hang out and sell drugs but never joins them. He doesn’t go around toting a gun. Everybody knows he won’t pull a weapon and try to kill or rob someone. That’s not him. He’s Dacino from the ministry. They do their thing, and he does his.

When he leaves the Village, the absence of gunshots unnerves him. Man, he thinks, this is too quiet for me. When he enters a building, he makes a note of every exit in case someone starts shooting, but nothing happens. He lies awake at night thinking of things he’s seen. In the Village, his mind is going, going, going. He doesn’t have time to dwell on bad stuff.

His mother rarely let Dacino and his siblings outside when they were young. He played on the football team at his middle school just to get out of the house. Even when the season finished, he would tell his mother and stepdad, I’ll be at football practice. His parents never came to the games, so how would they know?

He never met his biological father. One year, Dacino got a text from him on April 15: Happy birthday. Dacino was born on March 15. He didn’t reply. Dacino does remember his stepfather, though. He doesn’t know how he and his mother met. Maybe he stole her heart because he sure knew how to steal everything else. One weekend, he walked into a store and left a few minutes later with a slab of ribs stuffed down his pants. No one noticed. He was that good.

When he didn’t steal, he beat Dacino and his siblings until they gave him money they had earned cutting grass. I can make it work with this, he’d say, and leave the house to buy drugs. Sober, he didn’t have a kind thing to say about anyone. High, he was nicer. After sixteen years, he left Dacino’s family for his own in Michigan.

Dacino’s mother never commented on his behavior. In fact, she rarely talked. She never whooped Dacino or got on him about not doing homework and skipping classes. He wishes she had because then he might have graduated from high school. Now, he’s studying for his GED certificate and wants to earn a degree in physical therapy. About two years ago, he developed a staph infection and now he can’t bend the fingers in his left hand. He would like to help others with similar problems. No one knows how he contracted the infection. His arm just started swelling one day. He went to three emergency rooms and each one dismissed the problem as tendonitis. This ain’t no tendonitis, not with my arm this big, Dacino said. The doctors at a fourth ER agreed and rushed him into surgery. John and Dolores stayed with him the whole time. His mother never visited.

Sometimes children need their parents to give them a shove, Dacino thinks. Hearing his stepdad telling him he’d be nothing and his momma sitting there letting him be nothing made him think he was nothing. Dacino assumes she just didn’t know how to raise kids because she lost her parents at a young age. She had her first child at fifteen. Eight followed. She moved in with her older sister and just winged it. Dacino always felt like a stranger in her house.

She’s my mother, Dacino tells me, but that’s it.

*

When we reach the ministry, Dacino takes me inside and shows me a wall with forty-three photographs of people who have died in the Village since 2005. He points at the pictures, speaks in a matter-of-fact tone of voice:

He got killed on D Block.

He got killed in Gulf Village.

He got killed walking to a store.

He drowned.

He got killed by his cousin.

I notice a photo of Mayo. Dacino had been on D block near Hale Drive the day he died and heard the gunfire that killed him. I hope no one got shot, he thought, and then he heard screaming from Hale Drive. He walked toward the noise and saw a man futilely giving Mayo CPR. Everybody liked Mayo. No one in the neighborhood would have shot him. It was somebody from outside the Village, Dacino feels sure, somebody he had dealings with. The guy saw him and found his opportunity. Nobody was around but Miss Deborah. Had Mayo been with a friend they could have shot back and the guy wouldn’t have made it out. That was a crazy day.

Another photo shows a baby boy who died of a gunshot wound in 2020. This morning I’m meeting his father, Corey Davis, better known as Big Man. He sits in the parking lot waiting for me in a red Dodge Charger R/T.  I get in on the passenger side. Big Man slouches behind the wheel, barely glancing at me. Small diamonds are set in his teeth. He wears a red sweatsuit that he says cost $1,500. He paid $38,000 for the car. It took him a minute to get accustomed to the push button start. He owns five other cars including a Oldsmobile Delta 88 and a 1989 Chevy Caprice.

As I begin to ask my first question, Big Man raises a hand to let me know he will speak first. He never would have agreed to see me if Mr. John had not asked him, he says. He loves Mr. John and Miss Dolores. They help anyone. He has never seen two people give of themselves as they do. They pay bills, provide food, clothes, and talk about Jesus like he’s this cool dude who lives down the block. They do more than they should, way more. Big Man will let no harm come to them.

Now he lets me talk. I ask him if he’ll introduce me around in the Village. He shakes his head. No. If he took me to someone’s house, they’d want to know why. They could make a bigger deal out of it than necessary and that could lead to a shooting. On the other hand, if I walk around by myself, people will want to sell me drugs. Why else would I be there? He suggests I stick close to the ministry.

Rain begins falling and he turns on the windshield wipers and the defrost, dialing down the heat when it gets too hot. He can’t say how he earned his name. He weighed a few pounds more than he should have as a boy and he supposes his family decided to call him Big Man. No one uses his real name except girls. At twenty-five he has been with a few and has four children, including a baby whose photo I saw on the wall, Corey Jr.

The baby had been with his mother and her boyfriend the night he died. His mother called Big Man and told him to come to the hospital. He assumed his son had fallen, broken a bone or something. When he reached the emergency room, baby Corey’s mother just looked at him. The look in her eyes told him it was worse than he thought, much worse. Something deep had happened, something bad deep. Then she told him: Baby Corey had shot himself in the head while she was in the shower and her boyfriend slept. Big Man went off, shouting and yelling and hitting walls. Two security officers held him. They told him Corey Jr. should be OK. Big Man thinks they just wanted to calm him, but they only added to his confusion. Even if Junior is OK, he thought, he won’t be the same person. He was shot in the head. Something’s going to be missing. Something won’t be right. Alive or dead, Big Man will have lost his son.

He called John and they met at the ministry, prayed, and talked. That was good as far as it went but Big Man needed something more. Counseling wasn’t going to work. He stayed in his house for three months crying and smoking weed to ease his mind. Every time he thinks about his son he breaks down. The boyfriend is in jail for drugs. When he gets out there’s no telling what Big Man will do. One thing’s for sure: He’ll want him to explain how a two-year-old lifted a pistol and shot himself.

Big Man has spent his entire life in the Village. His father was in and out of prison. He had two mothers, his real momma and an auntie who treated him as her own son. When he needed them, they took care of him. His father did his part when he was out. Big Man hears from him but doesn’t need him now that he’s grown.

He was about six or seven when John and Dolores established the ministry. His family was living just down the street. Big Man wondered what they wanted, these two white people. They helped him and other kids but once he was grown there wasn’t much more they could do. No one, even John and Dolores, can tell an adult how to behave. They help families meet their needs but people will always have wants too, and when Big Man wanted something and Light of the Village didn’t have it, he snatched it.

He counts on his fingers: at fourteen, he did a year in juvenile. Got out for three, four months and went back in for another year. Went back again when he was seventeen, got out at eighteen. Went in once more at twenty-three, got out at twenty-four. Most of it for selling drugs. But was never arrested for distribution, just possession.

John and Dolores would visit Big Man in prison and John would ask him what he planned to do to be a better person when he got out, and Big Man always answered, I’m going to change. But he never did. He meant what he said, but once he hit the streets his mind moved in an entirely different direction. What made sense in prison no longer applied.

He and another dude got into it about a girl one time. The girl told Big Man she was with him and then turned around and told the dude he was her man. The dude saw them together one day and thought Big Man was trying to backdoor him. He pulled out a gun and Big Man drew his. Look, I’m going to put my gun down, Big Man told him. I ain’t trying to go there with you about no girl. I didn’t know you were talking to her. The dude put up his gun. You right, he told Big Man.

Sometimes Big Man wonders what would have happened if he had started shooting. Where would he be now? Where would the dude be? Would they even be alive?

Big Man likes to wash cars and do construction projects with a friend he met in prison. He does other things to make money but that’s not for me to know. He wants to buy an eighteen-wheeler and travel state to state delivering whatever. See a little of the country and get out of the Village but he can’t conceive of living anywhere else. How do you leave everything you know? he wonders. If he could go back in time, he’d graduate from high school, enroll in college, and be a nerd. But it’s too late for that. He doesn’t think he’d fit in. He’s smart but he doesn’t believe he has the kind of intelligence necessary for school. If he flunked out, people would know and that would affect their opinion of him. He’d have to assert his pride and that would result in a shooting. He can avoid all that by not going. However if he could get an athletic scholarship, he’d sign up for college today. But he’d have to be good. He was once but not now, too fat. If a coach told him, You work out, you can play football, he would do that. Get your body back in shape and in six months we’ll let you play sports, he’d be on it. But that won’t happen. No one will say that to him. He is who he is: Big Man. That’s how people know him. They look up to him. He’s respected. Who would he be outside the Village?

Big Man has dreams of homeboys dying, and then they die for real. Like a guy everyone called Dirty. Big Man dreamed about him getting shot and two months later someone killed him. He has dreams of getting shot himself. The bad stuff in his dreams comes true. He wishes he could leave the Village. He wishes he could stop dreaming.

Dolores is pleased I met Big Man. Just the other month he dropped by the ministry. She hadn’t seen him for she doesn’t know how long. John was out. Big Man offered to take them to lunch and he would pay for it. In all their years in the Village, no one had ever offered to treat them to a meal. Anywhere you want, Big Man said.

He was blown away that they had bought a house across the street. The house, Dolores explained, would be for kids who need a place to stay. Two or three—not many—and Dacino would live there to provide supervision. Big Man told her she needed to establish rules: Don’t let them listen to rap music with bad words. No violent video games. No girls in the house. Bible study should be mandatory and held every day. Rules should be posted on the wall.

He asked Dolores if she could help him apply for a commercial driver’s license. Yes, she said. Whatever you need to do, let’s do it.

Big Man told her that at Christmas he bought bikes and passed them out to children. When he hears of someone in need, he helps with food and a hotel room. Big Man, Dolores thought, wanted her to know he was doing good things.

John pulled up and they joked about a time when they treated Big Man and some other kids to a buffet at a Golden Corral restaurant in Mobile. Big Man was about ten. He took an entire chocolate cake and brought it back to the table. What are you doing? Dolores and John asked. They were so embarrassed. Big Man could have cared less. He sat down and started eating the cake. We can’t take you anywhere! they said.

Big Man laughed at the memory, a soft kind of laugh, almost shy. Dolores still saw the boy in him.

You’re always welcome here, she said.

As he left, she had no idea when or if she’d see him again. She knew the rumors about what fueled his lifestyle. His money didn’t come from selling candy, and she worried where that could lead.

*

In many ways, Dolores feels she has been training to do ministry work since she was a child. She and her family lived across the street from their parish church in Las Cruces, New Mexico and she went to Mass with her family every Sunday and attended all the holy days of obligation. Before she met John, Dolores had considered becoming a nun.

She hates the idea that people think of the Village as a place to avoid. To her the families here mean more than the crime that makes the news. A person can know God and still grapple with temptation, she believes. She sees the person behind the gun. They are friendly and funny. They struggle, grieve, and yet survive. It amazes her how they persevere and look out for one another.

Her memories of each child that has passed through the ministry fulfill her. She has laughed with them, held them, taken them on field trips. The kids thought they were so tough in their little life jackets when she and John drove them to a waterpark one summer but when they saw the surging waves, the uncertainty of the water, they hesitated. Big tall boys wearing inner tubes laughing and screaming and dancing as the water lapped their feet. Kids being kids. Those memories remain among her most precious. She can see each child as they were. Like Big Man. Like Mayo.  Just before he died, Mayo saw Dolores arranging a tent for a ministry event. Miss Dolores, do you need help? he asked. Yes, I do, she answered. They put up decorations and laughed, and as they laughed a boy came up and said another boy had brought a play gun onto the property, something John and Dolores did not allow. Mayo said, I’ll talk to him. He took the boy with the gun aside and in a little while the boy approached Dolores and apologized. A few weeks later, Mayo died.

*

In a hall outside the room where Dolores and I talk, twenty-eight-year-old Jesenda Brown mops the floor. She said good morning to Dolores earlier. It’s the professional thing for her to do, she believes, greeting her employer. For three weeks the ministry has been a mainstay of Jesenda’s startup, Jesenda’s Cleaning Service. She established a business page on Facebook to attract customers. People have called, not many, some. She has a few regulars now and intends to get on Angie’s List to attract more. Then she thinks she will be super busy. She needs a car to get around and hopes to buy one in a couple of weeks. Her year-end goal: to earn $2,400 a month. A cleaning business makes sense. She was always neat. Her life did not have much order as a child but she kept the spaces she occupied tidy.  When she was on the run from foster care, she would clean the apartment of a boyfriend. Why not use that skill to earn a living? Her motto: maintain stability through responsibility. A bumper sticker slogan she repeats as if she had sat through a self-empowerment seminar but thought of it herself. She plans to buy a house in two years and get off Section 8 rental assistance. She doesn’t want her three children to struggle as she does. If she provides them with stability, they can go to college and beyond. She considers her life a success because she has survived this long when many other people she knows have not. She can offer her four-year-old son and two daughters, seven and five, a future. All of them live with her; each has a different father. That doesn’t bother her. People, she understands, may disapprove. They will say what they will and that’s fine. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks. It’s her life, not theirs. Her son stays in day care when she works. Sometimes her seven-year-old cleans houses with her.

Jesenda works at the ministry twice a week; she has known John and Dolores since she was a child. In those days, everyone called her Nay-Nay after Sheneheh Jenkins, a character that comedian Martin Lawrence created and voiced on his 1990s sitcom, Martin. Her happiest childhood memories revolve around the ministry. Light of the Village gave her access to another world, like she wasn’t in the Village anymore. Before the ministry’s summer program and the field trips, Jesenda and her friends threw rocks at abandoned houses and busted out streetlights late at night. Things, she knows now, they had no business doing.

She grew up in Prichard. Her mother died from a stroke when she was eight, and her father passed a few years later from a massive heart attack. They both had high blood pressure, drank, and used drugs. After her mother died, Jesenda lived with an aunt on Eight Mile, a stretch of road named for its distance from Mobile. Living with her aunt wasn’t bad but it wasn’t good either. Jesenda wanted her parents but they were gone and she didn’t understand why. Her mother had problems but she was the best mom she could be. Her father may have been a crack addict but he took care of her. When her mother passed out, he made sure Jesenda was fed, bathed, and ready for school. He told her not to use drugs. He didn’t follow his own advice, but he recognized his mistakes and she loved him for it.

One morning when she was in the seventh grade, Jesenda got into a fight with a boy on a school bus. He said something nasty about her hair and they had words and began hitting each other. Jesenda was a fighter. She even had a fight at Light of the Village years later when she struck her oldest child’s father with a stick. To this day, John will ask, Hey Nay-Nay, you still got your stick? And she replies, I don’t carry my stick no more, Mr. John, I carry my broom and mop. I’m doing my cleaning now. Oh yes, she reflects, she was a fighter. Even though she has changed, people remember how she was, and she was bad. She was horrible. She was a mean, little bitty something who didn’t take nothing from nobody. She didn’t care. Life was hard without her parents.

The bus fight landed Jesenda in the James T. Strickland Youth Center in Mobile. A court appointed social worker supervised her in foster care. Her foster parents were good people but they expected her to follow their rules. You have to be at home by seven, they’d tell her, but she’d come in at nine. You’re not my momma. You can’t tell me what to do, Jesenda would snap.

Sometimes she would get a home pass to visit her aunt. When it was time to return to her foster parents, the social worker would come to the house, knock on the front door and Jesenda would dash out the back. The social worker would eventually catch up with her and lock her down in Strickland. Eventually she would be placed with another foster family. Jesenda went back and forth between Strickland and foster care until she turned eighteen and aged out.

She believes in herself and in the people of the Village. They aren’t always killing each other. Still, Jesenda would not choose to live here. The Village is no place to hang out and chill. As rebellious as she was, Jesenda could not help but notice how her foster families lived a different life. They knew peace and calm. She doesn’t want her children to grow up amid chaos and violence and experience the kinds of losses she has. Her brother James was shot at twenty-three. Mayo was the uncle of her oldest daughter. A bullet took her friend Demetrius Brown, but he had also killed somebody. You live by it; you die by it. Her nephew Xavier, better known as Buckshot, killed her cousin George, whom everyone called Boo Face. Jesenda doesn’t know how or why that happened. Got into it with each other and let it go too far and forgot they were family. Jesenda received a phone call from her aunt. Hey, Buckshot killed Boo Face. She rushed to the hospital in disbelief. She still can’t believe it. She has dreams of Mayo, Xavier, Boo-Face, and of her family, James and her mother and father, all of them together again. All she can do is cry and pray to God, because no one else can fix it.

*

A lean young man with a self-deprecating smile stops at the ministry. As a child he fed his grandmother’s goats and forever after became known as Billy Boy. His pregnant girlfriend sits in the car of a friend who will drive her to a doctor for a checkup. If they have a girl, Billy Boy thinks he will name her Nola. He can imagine her bad little self getting on his nerves. So he thought, Nola, for no you don’t.

Billy Boy sees Jesenda walk out of the ministry and calls her name.

Girl, I just came from D block and I just seen your name on the wall of this empty house. It said, Nay-Nay and Shana.

Where? Jesenda asks.

At the end of a house.

I don’t know what house you talking about.

Dolores pulls up and parks.
You look happy, Billy Boy tells her.

Yes, I am.

OK, OK, he says. You’re in the game.

I decided I’m not dealing with my hair anymore so I got it cut.

Good look, good look.

Thank you. So you’re here because your girlfriend needs a ride?

Yes ma’am, but she found one.

Oh good. Who is your girlfriend? Do I know who she is?

You haven’t met her yet. Nobody has.

OK.

Brianna’s her name.

Pretty name. Is that her there?

Dolores turns and faces the car where Brianna sits and waves.
Hey, Brianna.

Brianna looks up. Billy Boy gives a nervous laugh. He has three children, ages ten, four and two, in state custody. He needs to find a nice little apartment and a job to persuade the court to give them back to him. Their mother is in trouble over drugs and Billy Boy has been in and out of prison. It doesn’t matter what kind of a job. Billy Boy’s good at whatever. More of a handyman type of guy, for real. He enjoys lifting and moving stuff. An active job that would be good, something to tie him up all day. In 2019, Billy Boy had work with a company that installed tents and booths for fairs and concerts but then the tailgate of a truck fell on his right hand and Billy Boy lost the job. He received temporary disability, and hasn’t worked since. He supposes he’ll have to apply for a job somewhere outside of the Village. Ain’t no jobs in Prichard.

He believes he could earn big money as a rapper. Cats around here know he has talent, but he doesn’t trust studios. A producer might get his lyrics, give him a little money, and make a fortune. Billy Boy doesn’t have time for those types of games. If produced right and orchestrated right, his raps would be a success. His words provide him with a chance to tell his story, and the streets can vouch for its authenticity.

Billy Boy will turn twenty-eight in a few days. A lot of years, man, a lot of years, for real. Maybe not for the pretty people but for him and his homeboys, yeah, a lot of years. By pretty people, Billy Boy means suburbanites who have no knowledge and in many cases no interest in dudes like him. He doubts any of them would be surprised to see their twenty-eighth birthday. They’re much too judgmental, he thinks. Billy Boy believes they can learn from him. John and Dolores, they know. They came to Alabama Village because they understood not everybody has a lot of money. In the outside world, the universe of pretty people, when someone falls, they panic. Unlike Billy Boy and everyone he knows, they ain’t used to not having. People in the Village know struggle. They were raised on struggle and not having. If they fall they know how to pick themselves up and live by scraping bottom, because the bottom has been home for a long time. This right here, the cuts, teach survival. The people who are up now should come down to where Billy Boy lives and learn something about it. He can show them how they can make it without nothing and how they can be hungry and see another day and get on with little. Little is good. That’s a good day to have little. If you got little then you got something, and something is better than nothing. One day, the pretty people may ask for his help. They might be so far down they’ll need to sleep in an abandoned house with no roof. He can teach them how to persevere without power, without water, without plumbing, for real, or anything to piss and bathe in. It’s no big deal. Make it through that and anything above it will feel better—feel like you’re kicking back with the big dogs. He wishes the pretty people would open their hearts and try to understand him. He is so curious about them and what they do. Just their normal life, man, for real. Do they go fishing with their kids? Do they wake up every day with their entire family and not find that strange? What is it like to assume you’ll wake up the next day, that you’ll even have a next day? Billy Boy doesn’t know anyone who has that kind of peace. A typical day for people Billy Boy knows would be: Get your guns, get your dope; not, OK honey, I’m home, what’s for dinner? Just a day or two around people like that would be different. To be a child growing up with all the trimmings, Billy Boy would have loved that. Like a fantasy, man, that kind of love. Year after year he would have celebrated his birthday and received gifts and taken it all for granted. Be tripping just thinking about it, for real.

In jail, he would make his own birthday cake. He took a honey bun, two Reese’s peanut butter cups, some M&M cookies, and put it all in a bowl, mix in water, milk, heat it, and watch it rise. A cup of noodles on the side, and that was his birthday. Maybe he could work at a bakery. He wants a new pair of shoes, a nice pair. People crowd him. His kids, this new baby, his girlfriend. A new pair of kicks would lift his spirits. They’d help in a job interview too. People would look at his shoes and think he was sharp. Billy Boy turns to Brianna. She watches him. He prays really hard to be successful. He doesn’t want to make any more mistakes.

*

Dacino: Early for you, Billy Boy.

Billy Boy: What you talking about? Rained last night.

Dacino: I know.

Billy Boy: Warming up.

Dacino: Around five o’clock it’ll get cold again.

Billy Boy: They say it’s going to stay warm.

Dacino: You know how it is down here. Be warm, at five it be cold.

Billy Boy: I want to get me a bike, man. Spandex, little gym shorts. Skinny tight kind.

Dacino: I thought you wanted shoes.

Billy Boy: Doing it all, man.

Dacino: Where would you ride?

Billy Boy: No where. I’d have a picture of it on my phone. Just to show everybody I got one.

Dacino: Ride with it on top of a car.

Billy Boy: Just for show. Me and my bike are going out.

Dacino: Tell some dude, Let me see your bike, man.

Billy Boy: And never bring it back. I got you, man. Just for an hour.

Dacino: And don’t bring it back.

Billy Boy: Come back all the wheels are gone.
Dacino (imitating Billy Boy): Man, it didn’t have tires when you gave it to me.
Billy Boy laughs.

TWO

On a Tuesday evening, John picks up children for the ministry’s after-school program. They’ll play games and have about a half hour of Bible study. He drives beneath I-65 into a neighborhood of small brick houses with peeling, white trim. Bare bulbs illuminate empty porches. He turns into a housing project, parks outside a home and beeps.

Here’s Morgana, Cortney, and Shalanda, he shouts at two girls hurrying toward the van, shoulder packs bouncing off their backs. What’s up, Bo?

What’s up, Bo? they shout back to him.

What’re you drinking, bo?

Orange juice.

A little OJ. What you up to, Shalanda?

Watching YouTube cartoons.

They clamber into the van. Shalanda finds a zip-close bag with half a sandwich.

There’s food back here.

We’ll throw it away, John says. I tried to clean it up for you all. What kind of food?

It’s a mushed something. It stinks.

We’ll throw it away. Where’s your grandmother?

She’s not coming today. Not feeling well.

She OK?

OK.

Let’s roll.

John starts driving

We have to pick up Jerome and a few others, what do you think? he asks.

Good.

OK. That’s a good attitude.

Mr. John?

Yeah, Bo?

Rosa Parks didn’t want to move on the bus, Shalanda says. We learned about her in class today. Was she and Martin Luther King friends?

No, Courtney answers.

Yes, Morgana says.

They were partners in the fight for civil rights, for sure, John says.

Rosa Parks was sitting down and a white person wanted her seat and Rosa Parks said, No, I’m not going to move out of my seat, Shalanda continues. You better go back there, white person, because I was here first and that is right because she was there first.

That’s true, John says.

And then white people got angry and she got arrested.

Hank Aaron, we read about him too, Courtney says.

He grew up in Mobile, John says. He’s from Thomasville.

He played baseball.

He was good. He had made a lot of inroads. Progress, let’s call it progress, John says.
Like Rosa Parks he had to take a stand to make things for the better. You guys learned a lot.

I learned about math and science, Morgana says.

Sounds like you guys did pretty good today.

I got all Bs, Shalanda says.

I got all As, Morgana says.

John stops at a squat house shadowed by trees.

Hey, Bo! John shouts to a boy running toward him.

*

The late afternoon turns into evening and Baldwin Drive descends into shadow. John drops the children off at the ministry. Collapsing houses sculpt the gathering dark. If these disintegrating homes could talk, they would tell stories. The old people say voices cry out from graves lost to the woods. Jamel, he was a Lacey. He got shot. Boo-Face got shot. Boo-Face was a Davis. Bam-Bam got killed. Big Terry too. Red, she died. Last name, Robbin. Everyone called her Red although her hair wasn’t red. She’s gone all the same. Just got sick and died. Detoria got shot in the head. Dorian’s boy, Sean, got killed. Someone shot him by a church down there on Telegraph Road. It’s sad. The list goes on.

*

John walks the perimeter of the ministry, hears the children laughing, keeps moving slowly, holding a walkie-talkie to communicate with staff inside. His gaze flits between buildings. His shoes scrape against stones. He never knows who might drop by or what their mood will be, agitated or friendly. Better to assess the situation outside away from the kids. He compares Light of the Village to a forward operating base. Over the years, he and Dolores have established codes: broken arrow means gunshots in the area, Mike Tyson means a fight. Hand signals too. Fingers shaped like a phone receiver means call 911. The codes resulted from an encounter one afternoon in June 2015 when a man convicted of murder and just released from prison drove to the ministry under the mistaken impression John and Dolores were holding his daughter.

The man’s name was Franklyn. The girl had been adopted after her mother died of a drug overdose while Franklyn was in prison. No one told him. He rolled up to the ministry with his sister and a friend and her baby. They told him his daughter was at the ministry because her mother had used its services. John was inside with about one hundred children enrolled in summer camp; Dolores was outside. Franklyn got out of the car, walked toward her and put his finger to her head in the shape of a gun

Where’s my motherfucking daughter? he shouted.

I don’t know where she is. Dolores said, trying to stay calm, but her heart raced. She worried he might hit her. He continued shouting, shaking like he would burst through his skin. John heard the commotion and hurried outside. Franklyn spun around and faced him.

I want my child! he demanded.

John raised his hands for calm.

We don’t know where she is, dude.
I want my child!

Man, you got to chill out.

John had a crazy kind of wish for Franklyn to clock him with a solid right hook and end this. Instead, Franklyn stormed back to his car and opened the back door. John followed. He saw Franklyn reach for a revolver. John had few options, none of them good: Fight, but with two women and a child in the car, that wouldn’t end well; run, and risk Franklyn shooting at him and at the ministry and the children inside; or keep talking.

Dude, we don’t have your daughter.

A woman named Tyra Quinie who had been studying for her GED certificate rushed outside and started shouting at Franklyn. He cussed her out and leaned into the car for the gun. John glanced at Dolores and their eyes locked and he gave her a well-this-is-it look. The thought comforted him. He stood in the presence of God, his wife, and the ministry—everything he had devoted his life to. Whatever happened, he belonged here.

We’re going to get through this, Dolores told herself. It will be OK, but she knew it might not. It will be OK, she told herself again. She dialed 911. When she got off the phone, she shouted, The police are on the way!

Franklyn jumped in the car and slammed the door. He cussed out John and sped off just as the children wandered outside. Unaware of what had happened, they began playing.  John watched them. He felt OK. He hadn’t panicked, had stayed focused. A group of volunteers, however, left and didn’t return.

Later that afternoon, a brother of Franklyn’s called John and put him on the phone. He apologized. The two women, he said, had told him John had his baby.

OK, John said, let me stop you right there. The police are looking for you. You’re out on parole for murder. Chill out, go to the police, and we’ll come by and see you.

Franklyn turned himself in. When John and Dolores arrived at the Prichard Police Department, a detective told them that if they pressed charges Franklyn would probably do fifteen years. He cried and apologized when they met with him. He had been played by people spreading rumors about his child, he said, and one of the women in the car egged him on. John and Dolores believed him. He had a manila folder with cards from his daughter. He had brought it with him because he assumed he was going back to prison.

No dude, it’s all good, John said. If we can help you get a job, whatever, come by and we’ll see what we can do.

John and Dolores have seen him twice since. They said hello and nothing more. John believes that if someone commits a crime they should be punished. Throw away the key, he gets that. At the same time, inmates need to be helped when they get released. Because they will get out. Franklyn had nothing. His daughter was gone and no one had told him. John and Dolores took the brunt of his anger, understood, and forgave him. Then the three of them moved on.

*

Tyra Quinie thinks God told her to rush outside when Franklyn pulled up. She hadn’t heard a thing, just looked up from her desk and decided to take a look. Because John and Dolores believed in her, she thought of them as her parents. Her father was mostly absent from her life and her mother was around but stayed to herself because she was deaf.  Tyra relied on and trusted John and Dolores in a way she never did her parents. When she saw Franklyn yelling at John, she lost it. Franklyn called her all kinds of names but Tyra didn’t care. If you’re going to hurt Mr. John, you’re going to hurt me first, she had yelled.

Tyra had met John and Dolores years earlier when she worked at a Prichard gym, now closed. Many of the children she supervised participated in the ministry’s programs. One day, Tyra dropped by looking for two sisters. Their mother had died of AIDS and Tyra had not seen them at the gym for a while, but she knew they ate breakfast at the ministry. One of them, Shadderias, later died from a drug overdose. Her picture hangs on the memorial wall.

The Lord spoke to Tyra as she parked outside the ministry that day. She knows how that sounds but she’s not asking anyone to believe her. She believes it and that’s what matters. Tyra, God told her, I want you to get your GED. She was about twenty-seven and could barely read. Dolores and John told her: You can get your GED. You can do this. Dolores was adamant: If you don’t try, then you don’t want it. All you got to do is try.

Dolores helped Tyra study. She took the GED test but failed by eighteen points. However, she aced the reading portion. Undeterred, she took it again and passed. Then the Lord told her, I want you to go to college. Tyra told John, I don’t know what it is but the Lord says I should go to college. I guess you’re going to college, John said, and she did. These days, she works at Amazon. She trains and supervises drivers.
Tyra does not live in Alabama Village anymore. When she was eighteen, her family moved here from the Orange Grove projects near downtown Mobile. Orange Grove was rough but not as rough as the Village.  Life is real in the Village, no joke. When Tyra first came to the ministry, the memorial wall held only one photo. Now look at it. Forty-three. It’s sad. More photos will go up, she has no doubt, but hers won’t be one of them. She has all that she needs, not much but enough, and she doesn’t mess around. Many families in the Village have much less and therefore they have nothing to lose. That’s one reason for the violence.

Tyra has seen plenty of people shot. She saw her best friend shoot another man in front of a convenience store. Nothing she could do but step back, run for cover, mourn the loss, and cry for the ones left behind. Don’t be naive, John taught her, and have faith in God. Sunday is the most important day of the week for Tyra. She attends Bible study and renews her faith. Then she goes home and lives the best life she can. Many people in the Village have repented. They grew up and quit playing. No one knows what path someone will take.  The boy with a gun might become the man kneeling in prayer. No one should give up on the Village. Look at her. She learned to read. Who would have thought?

*

The death of a young man named Yellow was the first killing to insinuate itself in the lives of John and Dolores after they came to the Village. But they only sort of knew him. Certainly not well. The loss of another young man, Mook, left a deeper impression. They had watched him grow up. When they first came to the Village, they ran into him and some other kids. As they talked, it started raining and they all dashed under a porch, gray storm clouds scudding above them. Mook took pleasure showing them around. He was mild mannered but he was into drug dealing. Over the years, his temper began to tilt toward hot. He died after a former girlfriend told him she was with another man in the Roger Williams housing project in Mobile. Mook drove there and confronted him. They fought to a draw and Mook left. The man got a gun and called Mook, daring him to return. He did. The man had locked the door so Mook pulled the air conditioning unit out of a window and crawled inside. The man shot him.

The violence also can take bizarre, darkly humorous twists. Like George and the muffin. Sounds like a children’s book doesn’t it? John says. George was always out there a little bit and he had made enemies. One afternoon a sedan drove through the ministry playground, and the two men inside started shooting at George. He ran behind a house holding onto a muffin. The shooters sped through in minutes, if that long. George peeked out from around the house and smiled, his gold teeth flashing. He had not dropped his muffin. It was a good muffin, he said. That stuck with people. George and the muffin assumed the status of folklore. A few years later, he moved to Florida. Not long after, his charred remains were found in a car.

Joseph Torres killed a man at fifteen. He had been involved with the ministry since he was a child. Like Mook, his moods ran hot and cold. If Joseph liked someone, he liked them 100 percent and would do anything for them. But if he disliked someone, he ignored them; they didn’t exist. He knew how to take charge. If he saw kids fighting he’d stop it through his presence, by the way he carried himself, without speaking a word.

One night in 2008, days before Christmas, Joseph, his friend Johiterio, and a third young man whose name John does not remember, stopped at the ministry and said they wanted to be rappers. Joseph asked for money to buy shoes. John and Dolores didn’t have as much cash as the boys needed and they got angry.

We’re going to go make music, they said, and stalked off. They didn’t hear from Joseph again until April 25, 2009, when he shot forty-two-year-old Benjamin Henry on D block. Benjamin didn’t live in the Village but he knew people there. Joseph, Johiterio, and according to court documents, a third teenager, Antonio Hall, assumed Benjamin had money to buy drugs and decided to rob him as he sat in his car. Joseph approached the driver’s side carrying a sawed-off shotgun. At some point he blew a hole in Benjamin’s chest. He and the two other teenagers fled. Joseph would later claim the gun had misfired.

John heard about the killing from a couple in the Village who had volunteered at the ministry. Two of your boys killed a guy, they said, Joseph and Johiterio. Two of your boys, John repeated to himself. OK, whatever. Dolores was stunned. She would not have been surprised if Joseph had been stopped for selling weed, but murder? What happened? she asked herself. What went wrong? What had they missed?
Later in the day, Joseph called John.

Hey dude, John said, we need to talk.

Yeah, Joseph said.

They agreed to meet at the ministry that evening.

First off, how are you doing? John asked him.

I screwed up, Joseph replied.

Let’s pray, John said.

He noticed Joseph wasn’t scared. He had never been one to show fear. What remorse he felt he kept to himself. He seemed more upset that he had ruined his future.

What do you think God wants you to do? John asked him.

I think I need to turn myself in, Joseph said.

You know what that means?

I do.

You want to turn yourself in now?

Yes, they’ll blame someone else and I did it.

John suggested they call his family. An aunt asked John to take Joseph to the police.
In 2009, a judge sentenced Joseph and Antonio to twenty-five years in prison. Joseph broke down and apologized to Benjamin’s family and his own; Johiterio, who had been on his cell phone when the shooting occurred, received three years. Police arrested him soon after his release for violating parole. His sentence that time: twenty-five years.

John keeps in touch with Joseph. They talk by phone on Sunday mornings.
What’s going on? I hear him say in one call. You’re still in Easterling Correctional Facility? You know it’s been crazy down here. There’s been shootings all over the place, you heard about that? Going back and forth right now. Hopefully things will tap down a little bit but yeah it’s been kind of nuts. Going on for a little bit. How’s COVID? Gone through the place or no? No, that’s cool. Hope it all goes away so we can get back to normal. I’m glad you called. We have to work out a visit. We’ll try to work that out. It’s pretty up there. I know to you it looks the same but we like it. We can travel up there. OK I’ll let you go. We love you, Bo. Holler at you.

John understands people may wonder how he can say, I love you, Bo, to a murderer? He saw the autopsy photos of Benjamin with a hole in his chest. He saw his mother leave the courtroom because she couldn’t look at the pictures. Benjamin had a life. John makes no excuses for Joseph. Punish him, yes, he has no problem with that, but he sees no downside to showing him love. He doesn’t know a perfect person, however that might be defined. It’s not about second chances. It’s about chance after chance after chance. Only death closes the door.

*

Betty Catlin talks to her incarcerated son, Johiterio, every other day. She puts money on his books. One day at a time, prayer and faith, Betty tells me.
She was born in Mobile but her family moved to the Village in the early 1980s after her grandmother passed and the family took over her house. Her mother used drugs and spent much of her time on the street. Her father drank and lived with his mother. In those days, Alabama Village had stores and houses on every block. She used to go to dances at the same gym where Tyra Quinie once worked. She remembers a 7-Eleven and a convenience store called Bert’s. A hamburger stand took up a corner behind Two Dragons, another convenience store, and a laundromat. Betty moved around Prichard. She lived on Blount Drive, Colby Street, Fayette Street, and Dallas Street. At fifteen she had the first of five children. If she could go back in time, she would tell herself to wait. Just wait, girl, but she didn’t. Only so much she can do now. Looking back don’t change what’s done. She talks to young people. Hey, come on here and let me holler at you. You ain’t got no business hanging out like this. She pulls them aside and gives them something to think about. Other mothers look the other way: She ain’t my child. I don’t care about her. But not Betty. Somebody’s got to care about them, otherwise they’ll be pregnant and become mothers way too soon and then they’ll see how hard life can be. It ain’t about not having enough money. It’s about wondering every day if your child will come home. Their fathers are out and up to no good. It’s the mothers who get the calls. One night, Betty’s phone rang and the girlfriend of her son Carlos told her he was dead. Betty’s heart dropped so far down she couldn’t feel it beating but the girlfriend had been mistaken. It was actually another young man who had died.

The sound of gunshots terrifies her. She was at her mother’s house around the corner from where Mayo lived when he died. She looked out the front door and he was dead at his mother’s house. He had a beautiful smile. He could be loud. Boy shut up with all that noise in there! Mayo would laugh. She couldn’t help but think: That could be one of my sons.

Betty knows how people judge families in the Village based on no evidence at all. Like Miss Mandy. She’s sick now but back in the day everyone called her the Candy Lady. Children would go around the corner to her house and come back with all kinds of sweets. People joked she must be receiving kickbacks from dentists. There was also Miss Tooty. Her real name was Claudia. She also gave out candy.

Betty used to hover about the neighborhood behaving like everyone’s mother. Even though she lives in Mobile now, kids still come around especially during the holidays. They know she can cook and love her greens, macaroni, ribs, dressing, beans, roasts. Whatever she makes, they’ll eat.

Most Sundays, Betty makes breakfast at the ministry. Eggs, sausage, and grits. She also prepares meals for events. She’s known John and Dolores a long time. She remembers when she first saw them. They parked their car, got out, and in minutes had all these kids, Big Man, and a bunch of others hanging around. If children liked them, they got to be all right, she remembers thinking. They stopped at her house and introduced themselves.

In August 2013, Betty studied at the ministry for her GED certificate. By that November she had passed the test. Now she hopes to save enough money to buy a house and leave it to her kids so they have something they can call their own. She works as a cashier at the Springhill Quick Stop in Mobile from noon to six. She earns minimum wage and puts aside what she can.

Betty likes her neighborhood in  Crighton in the north part of Mobile. It’s a little more restful than the Village. She still hears gunshots but less often. In the Village, it was every day. Or there would be fights. Everybody wanted to meet in a field and have at it. You all bring your problems over here and we get all the heat, she scolded them. Look at these older people on their porches trying to relax. They ain’t paying no bills to look out over a field and watch you fools fight. Girls with their children in their boyfriends’ cars watching them go at it like it was a basketball game. Scar their children for life. Betty shakes her head. It’s no wonder children turn out as they do.

THREE

Throughout his life, John has found guidance when he needed it most. He was born in Dallas and moved to El Paso at a young age. At fourteen, he enrolled in New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell and completed high school and two years of community college. He grew close to its chaplain, Vernon Edmondson. Kind and approachable, Edmondson always had a smile on his face. He encouraged his cadets to read the Bible as a book of stories and not as a weighty tome. Take it, go off by yourself, he told them. The book of John is a good place to start. He brought doughnuts to Bible study, a nice touch but for John and the other cadets, Edmondson’s willingness to spend time with them meant much more. He walked the students through the Bible story by story.

The institute gave John structure. He lived in a spartan, three story barracks and learned to be responsible. He joined the boxing team, the only white kid on it. The coach was Black, his teammates Hispanic. He connected with people whose lives were very different from his.

John earned a commission in the US Army. After he completed his undergraduate degree, he earned a Masters in Business Administration and took a job in a jewelry store in Las Cruces, New Mexico where he met Dolores. They married in May 1994, a week after Dolores had graduated from college.

About a year into their marriage, they moved to San Antonio and John returned to school and earned a second master’s degree, this one in healthcare administration. He and Dolores volunteered with Prison Fellowship, the world’s largest Christian nonprofit organization for prisoners, former prisoners, and their families, and they also joined Angel Tree, a fellowship program that provides holiday gifts to children from their incarcerated parents. In addition, they helped with after-school and outreach programs, and facilitated Bible studies in housing projects for Victory Gospel, a Pentecostal church that offered help to the very poor. The compassion of its pastor, Donny Banks, and his wife, Jackie, impressed them. They did not criticize homeless addicts for their drug use or require them to attend church. Instead they offered help without condition, and they were always cheerful.

In 1997, John accepted a job with the Mobile Infirmary Health System. He and Dolores remained involved with Prison Fellowship and Angel Tree. In December 2001, they began leading Bible studies in the Queens Court apartments, a housing project, after a six-year-old boy had been killed and a Prichard police officer wounded in an ambush authorities called retaliation for the shooting of three young men by undercover officers. When Queens Court closed in May 2002, John and Dolores began looking at other impoverished neighborhoods around Mobile where they could establish a ministry. By the time they drove through the Village, they had seen most of the city’s housing projects but nothing had clicked. The Village did. The vacant houses and overgrown lots and dark streets spoke of a desperate need.

In the following days, weeks and months John and Dolores walked through the Village speaking to families. If we started a ministry here what would you want? they asked. Children told them they wanted a place to play and people to take them on field trips. The adults were more subdued.

Yeah, they said, that would be good for the kids.

Inspired by John 8:12, Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life, John and Dolores named their ministry Light of the Village. With help from a South Carolina ministry, they turned a crack house into a church, plugging gaping holes and shoring up the collapsed roof on the only building they could find that had a clean title. It’s pretty messed up, one man told them. Another man agreed. Yeah, but the rafters are OK. You won’t be here more than a couple weeks anyway. But John and Dolores kept coming back from their home in Bay Minette, about forty miles away. Once a month became once a week. Once a week became every day. Every day became twenty years. John and Dolores stayed.

*

John and Dolores attended a Baptist Church when they first moved to Alabama, although they didn’t restrict themselves to a denomination.  When they started Light of the Village, John wondered if he should study theology but his pastor dissuaded him. For what God has called on you to do, do you think the kids care about a degree? No, John agreed. That settled it. These days, John considers himself a layperson who practices his faith. If someone had to put a finger on it, he would say that he and Dolores are evangelicals. They take the Bible and go verse by verse, story by story, allowing it to speak for itself. They don’t push it. They don’t cram it. Anyone can come to the ministry. Faith or lack of it has no bearing. John and Dolores are not selling a product. John recalls a young man named TJ. He wasn’t a product.

TJ rarely spoke. John heard him say six words if that. A little, shaggy black dog followed him around. TJ couldn’t read so he asked Dolores to get him a recorded version of the Bible. He’d sit outside the ministry with his dog and listen to it.

John and Dolores may have been one of the last friendly faces TJ saw before he died in 2008. They had just given him a Christmas present, a pair of sneakers. Here’s your gift, John said. Merry Christmas. We’ll see you Sunday. TJ was shot in the head minutes afterward. John thinks someone playing with a gun probably killed him by accident. Everyone he knew liked TJ.

His death disturbed John. He thought he should have given TJ more of his time. You’re one of the last people he saw and all you could say was, Merry Christmas, see you Sunday? he reprimanded himself. Then he reminded himself that TJ had been at the ministry for years studying the Bible. In his own way, he had been talking to God up until he died. The realization didn’t deaden the pain but it provided perspective and a dose of humility. This wasn’t about what John should or should not have done. It wasn’t about him at all. It was about TJ and his faith. He had not died alone. Still, John thought he should try to be a little less rushed with people. TJ’s death was a reminder of the fragility of life in the Village.

*

When John hears the pop, pop, pop of a gun, his mind flashes with questions: Where’s this going? Is it someone just testing his weapon or something worse? After twenty years in the Village he has not grown used to the violence and doesn’t want to, but he works with so many children who have. He recalls one April afternoon in 2014 when he picked up the Darrington brothers—Jesse, Jeremiah, and Jerel—in Gulf Village for an after-school program. Jeremiah got in the front seat. Every kid wants the front seat. Cindy, their mother, came outside, spoke to John, and left just as two men running between houses began shooting at each other. A driver behind John jumped out of his car and ran and John couldn’t back out. He reached over to push Jeremiah’s head down, but the boy was already on the floor as were Jesse and Jerel. John counted thirteen shots. Then the shooting stopped. Wind stirred, silence. Jeremiah sat up, broke out a juice box, and stuck a straw in it.
OK, he said. We can go now.

*

John arranges for me to meet with Jesse at the Whataburger in Saraland, not far from where he and his brothers live with their grandmother. I buy Cokes and we sit in a corner. Sunlight shines our table. Jessie watches me, fingering his plastic cup. He is soft-spoken and serious. A smile flashes across his face when he recalls a good memory but I sense a wariness. He is waiting for us to get through the small talk for the painful questions he knows I’ll ask about his mother. She was killed when he was seventeen.

Jesse grew up next door to the Village. He would walk through a hole in a fence to see his friends there. At five, he got involved with the ministry. His mother told him, There’s a program where people will help you with homework and feed you. Young as he was, Jesse was skeptical. It was not that common to see white people in the Village or anywhere nearby, but John and Dolores held a six-week summer camp and it was fun, and it didn’t take long for the color of their skin not to matter.

Every morning before school, Jesse’s mother made him and his brothers read a chapter from the Bible. It could be any chapter. The point was to start their day with God’s word and stay focused despite distractions. Jesse encountered many distractions. He never knew what he’d see when he left for school. Before he reached his teens, nine people had died in front of his house. Once, he hadn’t even left for school when he saw a man on the ground bleeding from a gunshot wound. His mother and a neighbor tried to stanch the blood but he died. Jesse stayed in the moment. There’s a dead man in the yard. I have to finish breakfast. I have to go to school. I have to catch the bus. He learned to smother his shock. The feelings would eat him up otherwise. So much dying. Even his brothers, they stopped feeling. They slept through shootings.

His mother understood the dangers and kept the boys in the house as much as she could. She told them to think about what they wanted to do when they were older. Avoid the lure of fast money, she warned them. Jesse promised her he’d enroll in college. He started thinking ahead to the next day, the next week, the next month. Even now as he talks to me he considers what he wants to do this afternoon. He doesn’t know why he thinks this way. To stay out of trouble, maybe. He has homeboys and cousins who try to lure him into the streets.

C’mon, get in the car, Jesse. Let’s do this, let’s do that.

Nah, man, I’m good.

Jesse’s father did not involve himself with the family, and Jesse has seen him only a few times. He thinks his father’s absence forced him to become a man and assume responsibilities sooner than he otherwise might have. Unlike many of his friends, Jesse has no children. His mother and grandmother warned him against having kids unless he was married and had a job to support a family. John and Dolores told him, Don’t slip up.

He pauses, drinks his Coke and watches me. I’ve run out of small talk. I take a sip from my glass. Setting it down, I flip to a blank page on my notepad. Then I ask the question he has been waiting for: Tell me about your mother, I say, and what happened.
A day doesn’t pass when Jesse doesn’t think of her, he begins. He speaks of her to anyone who asks to keep her name alive and in his heart. Cindy Denise Darrington. Everyone called her Miss Cindy. She loved everybody. Didn’t matter who you were. Anyone could walk into her house for a meal. She loved to cook. People would fight over her fried chicken. She helped people get off the street. Jesse can name a handful of people who lived with them until they got right.  When he was young, his mother helped a homeless lady with a few dollars and encouraging words. The words impressed Jesse. Or maybe it was how she said them. Firm but loving. Don’t give up. Hang in there. Something like that. His mother would ask John to help someone if she could not. Hey Mr. John, I got so and so in my house and they need this and that. What can you do for them? She knew she couldn’t assist everyone so she turned to him. Some people took advantage of her, but Jesse’s mother believed that no matter their sins everyone deserved love.

She died the night of December 1, 2017. That evening, he lay in his bed chilling. Jerel warmed food in a microwave. Jeremiah slept. No one outside, no backfiring car exhausts. A quiet night. Then Jesse heard a bang inside the house and his heart jumped. He leaped to his feet and ran toward the front door, and Jerel slammed into him running from the kitchen and knocked Jesse down. Jesse jumped up and Jerel fled into Jesse’s room and dropped in a corner below a window, shouting, Momma just got killed, Momma just got killed. Jesse raced down the hall and saw a man she’d been seeing point a gun in his direction, and he fell. He thought he had been shot but he had only slipped and he leaped back up and ran to his room, closed the door, and pushed a dresser in front of it.  Jerel sat crouching in a corner. Then Jesse remembered Jeremiah. He moved the dresser, opened the door, crept out, and peered into Jeremiah’s room. He was asleep. Jesse tried to catch his breath, to slow the banging of his heart. He walked down the dim hall and stopped. He saw his mother on the floor, eyes open, blood pooling. The man was gone. He had no call to do this, Jesse told me. His mother never hurt anyone. She had fed this man, run errands for him, been intimate with him. Jesse learned later that the man had left the house and turned himself in to the police. People say he was on drugs. That doesn’t mean anything to Jesse. High or sober, he should not have murdered his mother. Jesse’s voice trails off. He turns back to his drink.

And now? I ask him.

Now? Jesse repeats. Now?

He and his brothers will continue living with their grandmother. They love her and help her clean the house and tend the yard. At night, they talk to one another to stay strong and keep it together so their feelings don’t boil over and explode. That can happen. The murder of a mother can make her children lose their minds, mess with their brains in some type of way. When people get mad they don’t think, they just do. Everyone has the strength to hold on. It’s up to them to maintain or lose control. He and his brothers hold on.

When Jesse graduated from high school, he enrolled at Coastal Community College just as he had promised his mother. He wants to transfer to Auburn University and major in engineering. He needs to earn money first. Auburn won’t pay for itself.
Some of his classmates don’t know about the Village, but it’s never far from Jesse’s thoughts. He has flashbacks of the night his mother died and tries to subdue the trauma so he doesn’t go crazy. His brothers have bad dreams. Anyone who thinks about something real hard, of course they’re going to dream about it. Everyone has nightmares.

*

Morgan Carnley, a ministry staff member, takes a break outside. I join her. A few men stroll by and we listen to their low laughter, muted chatter. After they pass, I ask Morgan about Cindy. I was home in Mobile when I received a text from John that Cindy had been shot, she tells me. She remembers what she wore, a red flannel shirt and blue jeans, and her hair was up. I have to pray now, she thought, for Cindy and her children. They’ve been thrown into a whirlwind. All of them are doing as well as can be expected, she tells me. Jerel went through a rough patch where he rebelled a little.
It can be so challenging working with these kids, Morgan continues. At a recent Bible study with a group of teenagers, she said women should not have children outside of marriage. That hit a nerve. Not one child in the room had parents who had been wed. How does she express herself without sounding accusatory? How does she raise uncomfortable topics? She has worked with these kids for fourteen years. When she considers that they come from generations of single mothers and absent fathers, she feels overwhelmed.

Morgan grew up in Enterprise, Alabama, about 160 miles east of Prichard. She majored in music at the University of Mobile. In the fall of 2007, during her freshman year, a college friend invited her to lead a music class at Light of the Village. Morgan had no idea Prichard existed. It’s hard now to remember what subsequently drew her back. The kids, she thinks. How they thrived with just minimal attention.  John and Dolores too. Their quiet yet determined belief in their mission. But it was difficult. She didn’t understand street slang, had never experienced the kinds of losses the children had. She doesn’t recall feeling shocked but she assumes she was.

Morgan hopes that the children will find an alternative to violence. Not getting shot. Not committing a crime. Making a choice to leave the street. Those feel like achievable goals. Then perhaps college, a job and a two-story home. For the next generation, or the generation after that.

*

Dacino thinks Jesse has it pretty together. Sometimes he’s weird, but who isn’t? He stayed in school, that’s good. Funny how he controls his anger. No one knows why Miss Cindy’s killer did it. In the house, in front of the kids. That was shocking even for the Village. It just happened and he turned himself in. Miss Cindy was cool. Everybody knew and liked her and her boys. She was always at the ministry on Sundays. Dacino suggested to Jesse he see a counselor but he played it off like he was busy. Probably doesn’t want to talk about it. He might be waiting on the right trigger and not even know it. Just happens and he goes nuts and shoots someone. That scares Dacino.
Dacino recently moved into the house across from the ministry. It has new hardwood floors, sliding doors, a living room with a fireplace. Huge kitchen and three bedrooms. A washer and dryer too. And new furniture. Dacino has never, and he means never, lived in a house so nice. He still can’t get used it. He won’t sit in the living room because he doesn’t want to break anything. He has such a large bed, he jokes, rolling to the other side is like exercise.

Dacino had his own apartment and a job until the COVID-19 pandemic. He has worked since he was a kid. As a boy, he cut grass. When he reached his teens he cooked at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen in Mobile. At seventeen, he moved to Spanish Fort for a job at a movie theater. On his first day, the boss lady asked him, Do you know what you’re supposed to be doing?

This, Dacino said, indicating the broom in his hand. Cleaning. I read the job manual.
Nobody ever reads that, she said, and promoted him to cashier. Over time he became shift leader and then manager. He stayed on for six years until he accepted a job with the Wind Creek Casino in Atmore. Three years later, he became the manager of Premiere Cinema in Spanish Fort and worked with an older woman named Rosie. Then COVID struck and Dacino lost his job and apartment. He couch surfed between among three of his sisters, sometimes sharing a bed with one of his nephews, and volunteered at the church to fill his time. One day, Dolores asked him, Why don’t you work for us? Come back tomorrow. Dacino assumed she was joking and didn’t return.
I thought you were going to work for us, Dolores said when she saw him again.

You were for real? Dacino asked.

The next day, he showed up.

Dacino would never speak to John and Dolores when he first started coming to the ministry. He wasn’t shy; he didn’t trust them. They’d leave, he assumed. Every other church group had. Black, white, it didn’t matter. They left. No way were these white people going to stay. Why’re they doing this? he wondered. What do they want? How long is this going to last? Dolores approached him when it was just the two of them, and then he had to talk. Dang, this lady’s going to want to talk to me, he thought. He never disrespected her but he did laugh a lot in her classes, goofing with other boys. Dolores would pull him aside and look him dead in the eye, a smile on her face. She never got loud or mean. You know what you’re doing, Dacino? Do you want to be disruptive?  She wouldn’t speak another word until he answered. She’d wait. And wait. And wait until he finally spoke. He knew he’d, better have the right answer or she would look so disappointed he would want to cry.

These days, alone in the house after work, Dacino sometimes wonders what kind of parent he would be. He had a son when he was twenty-two, Dacino Jr., but he died. Dacino was young and dumb, in the moment, and then just like that his girlfriend was pregnant. He vowed that unlike his father he would be there for his son.

A week before the baby was due, his girlfriend traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, to visit family. She called Dacino one afternoon and told him she had passed out and had been rushed to a hospital. The doctor told her the baby had a faint heartbeat. What do we need to do? Dacino asked. I need to stay in bed and chill, she told him. The next day, Dacino Jr. was stillborn. Dacino didn’t know what that meant until he asked one of his sisters and she told him.

Dacino took the death hard. Angry at the world, he didn’t want to talk to anyone, including his girlfriend. The baby was so small. Had he lived, Dacino probably wouldn’t be working for the ministry because he’d require a bigger salary to support a family. His child would need attention, and he wouldn’t have time for ministry kids. The money needed to study physical therapy would be spent on his family. Tragedy happens for a reason, he decided. It took him a long time to reach that conclusion and even longer to accept it.

Many of his homeboys have kids. They speak to their children but they don’t take them out or live with their mothers. They’ll say, These are my kids, and that’s it. Dacino doesn’t think having a child has anything to do with status. If they can sleep with a girl they will, and if she gets pregnant, oh well. It’s not about the number of kids who are born but the number of girls they sleep with. They live for the moment because life can be that short.

Dacino doesn’t want children now. He sees his sisters with all their kids, how they can get stressed running them around, and he thinks, I don’t need to take that on. He has his hands full at the ministry. Those kids, man, they can be so bad. He’s OK giving them back to their mothers. But he would have loved his son. He carries a photo on his phone of Dacino Jr. swaddled in white cloth. The baby’s mother got married. Dacino talks to her from time to time. He’s happy for her.

*

Evening. Wilson Avenue, Prichard. Dacino cruises, no destination in mind, just driving, thinking. The walls close in sometimes being alone in the house. Darkened storefronts stand in the shadowy glow of streetlights. Building a new Popeyes, Dacino notices. And a new car wash over there. Wasn’t there the other day. Tony’s Car Wash. Back in the day, Tony was always drunk. Morning and night he was full. In 2008, he told John and Dolores, I got to kick this life. The next day, they put him on a bus to San Antonio and Victory Gospel Church. He stayed ninety days and renewed his faith in God. Now, he has his own business. Twenty dollars a car, no charge for vacuuming.

There’s Fry Daddy’s, a restaurant. Order today, get your food tomorrow. That’s how slow they are. Fry Daddy’s and Fat Boy’s restaurants nearby. They’re not bad. Dacino turns onto U.S. Highway 45, a road that runs from Prichard into Saraland. There’s another car wash. Next door, Dacino sees the store where he first saw a man shot to death. My Boy’s Food Market it’s called now. His stepdad made him ask people for money. No one will give a grown man money but they will help kids. Dacino hated it. He felt so embarrassed.

FOUR

I move in with Dacino the second week of my trip to better experience the Village. As night approaches, a pale light illuminates the porch. I see the dim outline of one of Mr. Arthur’s signs. Wandering around, I notice many more: Praise God; Holy Spirit I have you; Let It Shine, Lord; Wow, God Is Intense. Any number of his signs fill the road to Restoration Youth Academy, a closed juvenile bootcamp in the Village that shelters a homeless man, sixty-three-year-old Tommie Bonner. Since I once worked with the homeless, I decide to meet him.  I take a road to the cracked drive of the academy. Shoulder-high grass and weeds shroud the buildings. I walk past a charred school bus covered with vines. Corroded ammo casings litter the pavement. The air left a bitter taste.

I shout, Tommie Bonner! several times before I hear a hoarse reply, Yo! A concrete walk leads through chest-high shrubs to a one-story building where I find him standing on a landing.

You made it, he says, as if he had been expecting me.  Stroking his gray goatee, he runs his other hand through his thick hair. A worn black sweatshirt and two long sleeve knit shirts cover his narrow chest. He watches me wipe sweat from my forehead.

We’ll get another frost in two, three days. It’s coming, he says. Then you’ll be wishing you was hot. Not summer yet.

He adjusts a clutter of pots that hold the rainwater he uses to wash dishes and points to a bare patch of ground he’s cleared to plant onions and watermelon. He should have waited until June. It’s just March now. Frost will kill them, he says.

Tommie discovered the bootcamp by chance. One night in 2018 he had stopped in a field to sleep. About two in the morning it started raining. Crawling out of his sleeping bag, Tommie got on his bicycle—something he found, doesn’t know the year but he knows it’s old—and started riding in no particular direction seeking cover. Through the rain, he saw the square shaped buildings of the academy. He rode toward them and has been here ever since. Took him a minute to clean out the large room he now calls home. He moved mountains of debris, mostly broken ceiling tiles, and piled them in a hall where they remain today, a testimony to his labor. Then he swept and swept, dust pluming around him, until a blue carpet emerged. He hung plastic sheets where there had once been walls for insulation.

He has a sleeping bag and a mosquito net inside an oblong tent. Like crawling into a coffin, he jokes. He shows me a radio. As long as he has batteries it will provide him with company. He’d be talking to himself without it. A firepit lined with aluminum siding takes up one corner where he also keeps rodent traps. He gets rats, big ones, and hears them in the walls. One of them walked into a trap about three in the morning. Tommie didn’t get up. Hours later, he kicked out of his sleeping bag and checked the trap but it was gone. Must’ve been a huge rat to run off with a trap.

I’d be back out in the field, I tell him.

Tommie laughs. You’ve never been in the rain with no place to stay.

Fishing calendars cover one wall. The owner of a hardware store in Chickasaw gave them to him. The calendars help conjure up good memories. Tommie loves to fish. He once caught a barracuda in the Gulf, not a great eating fish and the big ones have a lot of mercury. Same with tuna. The bigger they are the more mercury they carry. He has caught redfish, a good eating fish. Croaker, too, a better eating fish. He likes sheepshead almost as much. He snagged one the size of a plate years ago, a big son of a gun.

A grocery basket holds wood for cooking. Tommie won’t burn treated wood; the fumes knock him out. One window provides light and overlooks his vegetable garden. He used to see rabbits but hasn’t seen one in five months. Coons, possums eat all the trash, he says, and scare away everything else including dogs. All the birds have left too. Won’t be long before someone comes and hauls the burned bus for scrap and then it, too, will be gone.

A meth head named David used to live in one of the buildings behind Tommie. He’s been gone now for a minute and Tommie doesn’t miss him. He believed in Satan. He had written, I love Satan on the walls. All night long he was in and out, in and out. Weird, man. Satan didn’t teach him to clean. He lived worse than a pig. It was a good day when David left and the devil with him.

Tommie shows me an office he uses as a prayer room. A crucifix and a picture of Jesus hang on the wall. Lying in his tent one night, Tommie heard the Holy Spirit tell him: Build you a room to pray, and he did.  Every morning, before he does anything else, he stops in his prayer room and reads the twenty-third Psalm. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want/He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters/He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake/Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me/Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over/Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

After his prayers, Tommie rides his bike to collect cans. He makes about thirty-seven cents a pound. In the evening, he smokes his room to discourage bugs. He sits in the warmth of the airy heat looking at gathering shadows before he douses the fire. He does not want the flames to attract the wrong people.

He has grown used to the sounds of gunshots at night and the noise no longer bothers him unless bullets strike close to his room. A bullet pierced six stucco pillars outside his door one time. Bam, bam, bam. Tommie dropped and rolled against a wall. Then the shooting stopped. A lot of people tote guns. He wonders how they afford them. Bullets ain’t cheap. Big guns too: .357s, .44s, and others like machine guns.

Tommie was born in Choctaw County way up Highway 45 a good three hours from Prichard. He and his mother stayed with her father. They moved to Crichton, Alabama, in the early ‘70s. In his mother’s final years, Tommie lived with her and worked as a maintenance man, painting and installing pipes. One evening, he returned home and his older sister asked, Where you been? I found momma on the floor. She’s been like that all day. Tommie quit his job to care for her. When she died, he drifted from one temporary job to the next.

A white guy he knew from Daphne, Alabama, told him he needed someone to watch his own mother, eighty years old. Why don’t you stay with her? he suggested, and Tommie agreed. She lived in a trailer and he moved into an RV nearby. She had rare plants, the names of which Tommie no longer remembers. At least she said they were rare, and she owned twenty-five little dogs, Chihuahua-like things. She wasn’t the cleanest lady. In the evenings, they would drink a little wine and she’d smoke a cigarette surrounded by dogs and plants and talk him to death. Her son-in-law, however, didn’t like the idea of a stranger staying with her and Tommie left. It only takes one person to ruin a good deal.

I ask him if he has noticed Mr. Arthur’s signs. Ray Charles could see those signs, he tells me, they’re everywhere. He thinks he may have met Mr. Arthur. A Black guy big on Jesus stopped him one day and gave him fifty dollars. Just up and gave him the money and kept going on about Jesus.

I’m blessed, thank the Lord, I’m blessed, he said.

Pray for me, Tommie asked him.

I will, brother, the man said. Pray for me too.

Tommie never saw him again. He stretched that fifty like a rubber band.

*

Dolores tells me she worries about Tommie. She wonders what he does for food, how he keeps warm in the winter. He doesn’t seem to want help. She enjoys talking to him. He’s very sweet and polite and appears at peace. One time he had trouble with his bike and she and John replaced a tire. When he stops and checks in, she gives him food. Mostly she tries to be kind and offer him company.

She hopes Big Man will drop by again. Was he going to call them about going out or were she and John supposed to call him? She can’t remember. Big Man was always a good kid but the streets exerted their pull. He wanted money for shoes, outfits. Every holiday he’d ask, Miss Dolores, can we get me an outfit, get me these shoes? He wanted to leave a store wearing new clothes. The Fourth of July was not about fireworks or cookouts but walking around in a fresh outfit. Big Man never outgrew that.

She remembers when he called John about his son, Corey Jr. She doesn’t think he understood what happened. She doubts he asked himself how he might have contributed to the situation. Every young man she knows in the Village believes they love their kids. She doesn’t blame them for not trying harder. They never had an example in their own lives. They don’t know about birth control, something Dolores chides herself for not emphasizing more. She doesn’t believe they have kids so they can be eligible for higher welfare benefits. They may do some things with the wrong motive but who hasn’t? They live lives different from what most people know.
Now, Jesenda dotes on her children. Dolores remembers how she used to be. Jesenda could fight and she would fight. Once that switch turned on, good luck turning it off. Nothing could stop her. She has come a long way. She exudes joy and Dolores is so proud of her. Jesenda is smart, always has been. People don’t mess with her.
Cindy, Jesse Darrington’s mother, could not have been more devoted to her children. She wanted her boys to receive an education, but she also allowed kids into her house who sold drugs and had dropped out of school. Her home became the center of all this junk. Jesse and his brothers had to navigate all that, the different guys she dated, and not good guys either. Jesse would say, I don’t like them. Dolores never understood why she let just anybody in. She was so nice, too nice. She couldn’t say no and do what was best for her. But she loved her children and they adored her. No one questions that.
Dacino has traveled far. He was always polite. Quiet, but polite. His stepfather, a wiry skinny man, didn’t really like John or Dolores. She remembers when she first saw him with Dacino and his brothers. Dolores asked if she could get them water. Their stepdad said yes and then let them play with the other children. He could be nice in a condescending way. Dolores put up with him so Dacino and his siblings would come back. Dolores has no doubt Dacino will be a great physical therapist. He is compassionate, committed, and disciplined.

I ask her about Mr. Arthur. He was a gentle soul who professed a deep faith, she replies. He died in 2020 and she misses him. He loved God but he drank until he was intoxicated and then he beat himself up for displeasing God. He had a huge heart but he was torn. He told Dolores he wanted to do better but his alcoholism held him back. He was a big, balding man, about six feet one, but not heavy. What hair he had he tied into a braid. His expressive eyes danced with joy or drooped with sorrow depending upon his mood and the amount of alcohol he had consumed. He could fix things and helped out at the ministry. He dropped by and swept and mopped according to his whims. He would arrive in a good mood or walk in weeping. Dolores would take him in a room, give him Kleenex, and they would talk and pray. He spread the Gospel with his signs. It’s almost impossible to drive through the Village and not see one. Dolores wrote what he wanted to say and he’d copy it onto a board with markers she provided. It amazed her how many he put up. He used discarded boards he found in the woods. In the fall and winter the bare branches holding his signs declared his faith. Oh, Lord, I’m Coming Home. When he died in 2020, Dolores believed he did.

*

Billy Boy stops at Mr. Arthur’s house on Hale Drive and walks around he porch to a back door. The swollen wood sticks and he tugs on the knob with both hands until it opens. He knew Mr. Arthur well and likes to hang out with older cats like him, guys in juke joints. Chill, drink-a-shot-or-two type of guys. Mature kind of dudes. Billy Boy doesn’t worry about them. They won’t go off into nonsense and shoot their friends. Billy Boy prefers them to younger cats. Mr. Arthur’s house became one of Billy Boy’s go-to places. If his family couldn’t find him, they knew where to call.

Mr. Arthur and those older dudes were drinkers. Outside of the juke joints they put down the wine, man. Started early and didn’t bother to eat. Billy Boy used to get on Mr. Arthur about that. Whatcha doing, Mr. Arthur? I know you ain’t got no wine in your hands. Not at no eight o’clock in the morning. Mr. Arthur made Billy Boy mad, killing himself like that.

Sometimes Mr. Arthur burned trash in a barrel outside of his house. Billy Boy would warm his hands and then walk inside without knocking, just give a shout, Hey, Mr. Arthur! He used to watch him put up his signs. That was all he did. Hammer and nails. Real old school. Signs everywhere, man, like weeds. He put one on a tree in his front yard where a young woman died. O, yes, Jesus loves Detoria. Billy Boy knew her. Some guys started shooting and she got caught in the crossfire and dropped as if a hand rose out of the earth and yanked her down. That was a very bad day, Billy Boy says. Three people were wounded and Detoria died.

Billy Boy feels Mr Arthur’s presence. One of his rooms has a desk and a lectern where he’d preach to whoever dropped by. A deer head stares out from its spot on a wall, cobwebs laced around the dusty glass eyes. In the dark kitchen, a rusted can of cranberry sauce stands alone on a warped shelf, the oven lost in a corner, the cabinet doors shut. Billy Boy walks down a hall, the sound of each step filling the house. Dark suits and a hanger full of colorful ties crowd a bedroom closet. A dresser stands beneath a mirror. Sheets and blankets cover a bed as if just made. The smell of mildew hangs heavy as fog. Only thing missing is Mr. Arthur. Billy Boy takes a couple of shirts and jackets. They’ll go to waste if he doesn’t. Mr. Arthur would want him to have them.

Sitting on Mr. Arthur’s bed, Billy Boy looks out the bedroom window at the backyard, sloppy with water from a recent rain. He remembers how thunderstorms flooded streets when he was a boy. He’d drag an old mattress from a trash pile and do somersaults into the water and play for hours. The sight of garbage brings Billy Boy home, makes him feel like an eight-year-old again. Much of the trash, he thinks, doesn’t come from the Village. Contractors who won’t pay to use a landfill instead treat the Village like a dumpster. To Billy Boy it’s beautiful. He can hear his scrawny boy’s body splashing in the water, smell the stink of it and the odor of the funky mattress on his skin. He felt a kind of freedom. If he had an opportunity to go back in time and put it on camera and record it, he would. This is where he came up, amidst all this garbage, and felt joy.

A homeboy, Sean, died in the yard next to Mr. Arthur’s house. He had wandered around to the back and saw some guys he did not like. They felt the same toward him and started shooting and Sean ran and fell beside a trash can. As he bled out, people say he called for his mother, and the guys who killed him are dead now, too, shot. What goes around comes around. Mr. John has a photo of Sean on the memorial wall. Another homeboy got killed on First Street not far from Hale Drive. He said something to a dude that the dude didn’t like, Bro what you say? and the dude had a big ass gun and shot him. Billy Boy didn’t see it but he heard the shot and was ready to throw down. If there’s going to be a war me and my homeboy are going to win the war, he thought, but that’s not how it went. Homey died; war over.

Billy Boy knew another homeboy who died in front of a convenience store, Two Dragons. He tried to shoot a dude but his gun jammed and the dude turned around and shot him. That was the first of many deaths Billy Boy witnessed. A bunch of dudes chased another friend and shot him when he tried to jump a gate. Not too long after that, Billy Boy got together with two homeboys. They got carried away teasing each other; the joking started getting personal. Went from laughter to serious malice. Emotions got involved and then bullets flew and one of them died. After so many years of killing, Billy Boy has no expectations. He was exposed to death early before he knew what death was. Before he knew the word for it. He wonders when it will be his turn. He has been involved in a couple of shootings but no one died. So many of his homies have been killed that Billy Boy’s like, I know I’m coming. Y’all make some room for me in heaven because I know y’all’re all up there and there ain’t no place else for me to go because I know I’m coming.  He has reached a point in his life that he can’t make friends because of the love, man, because he loves so hard. He’s afraid he’ll lose them. He tries to put restraints over his heart, hold back on the love and not feel. He keeps to himself. It’s too late in the game to play.

Billy Boy thinks that if people fought like the old guys did back in the day, the shootings would cease. But if a dude doesn’t know how to fight, what’re they going to do? They got a reputation to uphold. Imagine a guy with diamonds in his mouth like Big Man all beat up from losing a fight. He wouldn’t be able to ride around all falsey like that without people laughing at him. So now when he throws down he reaches for a gun. No one says, Hey, man, remember when we went to school together? Remember when we played basketball at Light of the Village? No one says any of that. They shoot.

Billy Boy leaves Mr. Arthur’s house. Knee-high grass brushes against his pants as he walks through an empty lot, flies scattering. He considers himself a backstreet mover and prefers paths and alleys in and around the Village instead of streets. Safer. If he sees somebody he doesn’t know, he worries, drops down to a crouch, watches. Don’t too many people move off the main roads. If it’s an older dude, cool, but a young cat will make him paranoid. Why’s he out here? What’s he up to? Billy Boy has learned to be alert. Anything he sees that doesn’t feel right or look right or feels out of place arouses his suspicions.

Billy Boy was born in Sacramento but moved with his mother and grandmother to the Village when he was five. His grandmother was from Mobile and he presumes she wanted to come home. His father stayed in California but called every so often. Hey, his father would say, I’m going to mail you fifty dollars tomorrow then Billy Boy wouldn’t hear from him again until the next time he offered to send money. His mother used drugs and would leave him alone in the house. I’m going out to eat, she’d say, and he wouldn’t see her for weeks. But he’d die for her. Even though she wasn’t there for him, she’s still his mother.

He relied on his grandmother, Miss Annie Marie. She was a sweet old lady and gave him what she had even if it wasn’t much. By-the-book kind of lady.  She made sure Billy Boy attended school and showed respect. Chores and keeping the house right. She was big on house cleaning. One time a lady made her so mad she tried to fight her from a wheelchair. Billy Boy laughs. Miss Annie could act crazy, man. Billy Boy called her momma. She died when he was ten and Billy Boy moved from one aunt to another. He dropped out of school at thirteen and began hanging out with older cats and learned to sell drugs. Use your instincts, they told him. Follow your gut. Hesitate, you die.

When Billy Boy turned fourteen, the police busted him with a gun a friend had given him, a .22, little thing. Watch your back, his friend had told him. Don’t let nobody do nothing to you, you feel me? The police took him to Strickland. His mother and father didn’t attend his hearing. A judge sentenced him to the Lee County Youth Development Center where he served thirty days. Since then Billy Boy has been in prison three times: in 2012 and 2014 for robbery and in 2016 for robbery and assault.

He did not steal because he needed money. Sometimes he would have a pocket full of cash and still rob someone. The thrill drove him—and his anger. Billy Boy has a temper. Today he keeps that side of himself chill. Someone would have to physically assault him for it to kick in, but his anger scares him because he gets hot pretty quick. He copes through prayer. All he does is pray. Its’ not on-top-of-a-roof praying, but it’s prayer. He prays for his safety, his family’s safety. He prays to God that he has the wisdom to identify danger.  When he was in jail, he prayed with other guys. They had faith to a certain extent but too many of them lost it when they got out. The world of faith ain’t the world of the ‘hood. Billy Boy tattooed a cross between his eyes. Every time he looks in a mirror he sees it as a reflection of his love for God.
Billy Boy feels the weight of the spirits and ghosts of the dead, like Sean and another homey, Cyrus. Billy Boy and Cyrus were like brothers. They protected each other. Watch-my-back, watch-your-back kind of love. One time as he sat in a car with Cyrus, a dude pulled up next to them and gave them a troubling look. Damn, Billy Boy thought, there might be some shit, and cocked his .45, but nothing happened and Cyrus pulled off and cruised to a Burger King.  At the drive-through, they asked for two Whoppers. Billy Boy reached into his pocket for change and nicked the trigger of his gun. Boom! The bullet went through the floorboard and into the right front tire.

We got to go, Billy Boy said.

Hell no, I want my food, Cyrus screamed at him.

Man, these people are going to call the police.

Not before I eat, Cyrus said.

They bought their food and limped off. The police never did catch them. Those kinds of stories, Billy Boy says, become legend in the Village.

He had a dream recently about playing basketball with Cyrus. Then he dreamed about Sean. He asked him how death felt. Chill, Sean said. Billy Boy has been dreaming about dead people since he was little. He spoke to prison counselors about his dreams but they told him they couldn’t provide the help he needed. After a while, Billy Boy embraced his dreams. They remain the one way he can still see dead friends, and they feel so authentic. In one dream he wanted to warn Cyrus he would get shot but he didn’t want to upset him. So Billy Boy stayed quiet and then, as in the real world, Cyrus died.

*

John and Dolores have known Billy Boy since he was a child. He always had a mind of his own and wanted to be seen as a hip, cool dude. However, people in the Village watch his actions more than they listen to his words. He doesn’t command their respect. They see he doesn’t work or take care of his kids. He has to change his life before he can be a role model.

That’s the sad part, John tells me. Billy Boy knows what he should be doing. He talks about it but he doesn’t follow through. John and Dolores have sent Billy Boy to several job programs but he always walks out. It’s tragic, really. Billy Boy is bright and has insight. His observations about people can be spot-on. John recalls one afternoon when a preacher approached the basketball court behind the ministry. Guys from all over Prichard were playing. The preacher said, Stop. I want to share the word of God with you. Bow your heads. Who here wants to go to heaven? The players looked at John and he nodded, indicating they should do what he asked in the hope he’d leave. The preacher led them in a prayer of repentance. Billy Boy shuffled next to John. What do you think? John asked him. Is he leading them to Christ?
He’s not leading them very far, Billy Boy said.

When Billy Boy was eighteen, John spoke by phone to his father in Sacramento.

I’m ready to be a dad, his father said. Send me a picture of him.
John did.

Oh he looks great, his father said in another call. He gets that from me.
John and Dolores bought Billy Boy clothes, had a big send-off for him at the ministry and drove him to the Mobile Bus Station the next morning at eight o’clock. Fifteen minutes before departure, his father called.

I don’t need him right now, he told John. Better stop him.

John told Billy Boy. Billy Boy shrugged. Disappointed, yes, but not surprised.

FIVE

On a Thursday night, Billy Boy hangs around the ministry. He talks to Dacino and follows him to the house across the street, where John sits on a porch swing. Dacino tells him Billy Boy wants to buy shoes for his birthday.

How you going to buy shoes without any money? John asks him.

I don’t know, man.

How much are the shoes?

Eighty dollars.

C’mon, Dacino you know you’re flush, John says.

Who?

You.

Man, I don’t have it. I’m going to stand by the dumpster and smoke a cigarette.

That’s where your money’s going.

John looks at Billy Boy.

What’s going on, Mr. John? he asks.

I’m getting ready to go pick up kids for the after-school program. What have you been up to?

Walking around the Village. It’s my birthday coming up. Kind of special to me.

Yeah, I know, but here you are.

I ain’t in no trouble.

That’s a plus.

I got nowhere to stay. I need a room.

You going to hang out while I figure out something for you, Billy Boy?

Yes sir.

I’m going to pick up the kids now.

Billy Boy walks behind John to a van and gets in with him. John backs onto Baldwin Drive. Billy Boy stares out a window. The night sky dances with stars.

Somebody got killed last weekend, he says.

Been a little shooting today, yeah, John says.

Got to be careful at nighttime. It’s crazy. Do a lot of shooting from the bushes. After my birthday, I’m going to go out of town.

Where?

I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere. Start over. Be something positive. I need work.
A birthday is a good time to get a new direction.

That’s what Miss Dolores says. She gave me a good talk today. She’ll tough-love you, man.

John picks up the children and drives back to the ministry. He gets out and the children follow. Billy Boy stays by the van. Minutes later John walks out and calls to Dacino.

I got a hundred bucks. That should handle the shoes. I’ll tell him and then you want to run him up real quick to the store?

If it wasn’t his birthday, I wouldn’t do it.

Dacino looks at him. John shrugs. Does he just write Billy Boy off? Say, I don’t want you around here anymore? John doesn’t see how that would help. Enabling, the textbooks call it. It’s easy to sit at home and recite academic rules of social work about what should and should not be done. In the field, that is much harder to do. John deals with people, not words on a page. They aren’t canned goods with a shelf life. Billy Boy certainly isn’t the only one. Many people see the ministry as an ATM. John tells them to text him. It’s a lot easier than listening to their spiel: How are you, Mr. John. So glad you guys are here. John doesn’t need the small talk, the false praise. Get to the point: What do you need? The manipulation is so obvious. He gives them what they want. It gets exhausting saying no all the time.  At some point he’ll cut off the spigot and Billy Boy will leave angry, hurt, and confused but not surprised, and that’s sad too. It’s just shoes. A fleeting moment of happiness. Why not? Enabling. That’s a good term. John supposes it applies to him.

Go get you a birthday gift, he tells Billy Boy and hands him the money. Dacino will take you. Then we’ll deal with finding you a place to stay.

Billy Boy looks at the ground and runs a foot over pebbles. He takes the money almost self-consciously, perhaps a little ashamed, without looking up.

Ya’ll going to make me cry, he says softly.

I don’t know about that.

Thank you, man.

Alright, Bo.

I love you, Mr. John.

We love you too, you know that.

*

John walks through the Village early the next morning. He strolls behind the ministry and crosses a highway to the Donut Shop. On his way home last night, John noticed it was packed, the green juke joint filled with cars, the empty homes around it frantic with activity. Trap houses, people call them, places to stash drugs. No one steals because someone would rat them out and lethal repercussions would follow. Quiet now. John thinks he should call the Donut Shop something else. A donut shop never closes. Sure feels closed now.

What’s up Bo? John shouts to a man peering out the door of a ruined home.

He doesn’t answer. A dog barks.

John walks through the Donut Shop to other neighborhoods. The wind stirs, the air damp but warm, sunlight poking through clouds. A stop sign on a street named Madison Avenue carries graffiti: PA for Life. John thinks it means Prichard, Alabama, for life. Like a prison sentence. There had been houses all the way through here at one time. Nothing now except the rusted frames of stolen cars.

He walks to Big Man’s house, a gray trailer home with a small front yard. He’s up and busy, everyone coming around. Cars out front for only one reason. Got to get it. Early bird gets the worm. Big Man holds a shoebox where he keeps his money, or so rumor has it. Rides around with it too. Doesn’t leave it at his house, a precaution against burglars. He leans into the passenger window of a car. After a short moment, he jogs into his house.

What’s up? John calls out to him. It’s early, Bo, too early to be up.

Big Man glances at him without expression.

Dude, I like those pants. I gotta say, you looking good, Bo.

A kid named Elijah lives with his grandmother around the corner; another boy, Daniel, nearby. He’d come to the ministry with Elijah. Elijah’s aunt brought them but Elijah hasn’t been around for a good while. Maybe because of COVID; John doesn’t know. A dude named Diamond Dog lives not far from here. He serves as the Village mechanic.
John keeps walking. He remembers the early years of the mission. He and Dolores were suspect then. Everyone was friendly but people did wonder about them. After twenty years, a few still do. Other people, too, wonder. Some of them think he and Dolores want to save souls and charge their egos. If anyone thinks they drive home at night feeling empowered, they don’t know, they really just don’t know. More often than not John feels deflated. It sucks, caring about people who self-destruct. Sucks big time. So many people have died.

It should be me up on the memorial wall next, he has said more than once in Bible study. At fifty-six he is much older than the young people staring back at him but he knows the chances of him dying before them remain slim. An argument over a girl, or someone feels insulted, a robbery gone bad, or something equally tragic and stupid will result in death. John feels immense joy and immense sorrow, most days not in equal measure. He and Dolores stay focused on the mission: Show love, hope, and faith. Let the Bible speak for itself, see who it touches. Listen, encourage. Be consistent and genuine. Tell the truth in a kind way. Don’t condemn or judge. Help in whatever way possible. Come back. Be consistent. Be present.

John relies on scripture, 2 Timothy 4:5: But you should keep a clear mind in every situation. Don’t be afraid of suffering for the Lord. Work at telling others the Good News, and fully carry out the ministry God has given you. He tells anyone who will listen, If you feel compassion for something, don’t ignore it. Explore it. You don’t have to go all Mother Teresa and run at full speed but you can investigate it. What do you feel compassion for? Search for it, embrace it. What moves you? The answer, he believes, is a gift from God.

*

Postscript

On March 12, 2021, two days after I left the Village, I received a text from John: Very sad news this morning. Apparently Big Man (Corey) was killed this morning.

The shooting occurred in the Donut Shop about ten o’clock. He was shot in his red Dodge Charger R/T. Dacino called John. Dolores heard the ring and thought, Oh, crap. She saw by the expression on John’s face that someone had been shot. He drove into the Village, Dolores stayed home. She usually doesn’t go to murder scenes. At that point all she could have done had been done. Big Man was in God’s hands now.
Everybody liked him, even the person who witnesses alleged shot him. This person some say hung out in the Donut Shop as much as Big Man. He stopped at the ministry every so often to wash his car and John would talk to him. He was wounded on Hale Drive one year and John visited him in the hospital. His vital signs were crashing more from panic than the seriousness of his wounds, and the doctors asked John to calm him. He was pleasant like Big Man. His kids participated in the after-school programs. No one knew the why of it. It may be that Big Man broke up a fight between him and another young man. It may be that Big Man said something that humiliated him. That’s all it takes, injured pride.

The Donut Shop turned into a ghost town. John wondered who would fill the void.
In some ways, John told me, Big Man’s death was a story that has been told many times, only every retelling is different because each person is different. He was more than a statistic, more than a number. When John thinks of Big Man, he sees the boy who snagged a cake from a restaurant buffet. He always had a young face, a kid’s smile. John can still see his hurt when he talked to him about his son. Are you at the church? Yes, John said. I need to talk to you. Sure. Big Man had just come from the morgue and looked bewildered. How does a two-year-old shoot himself in the back of the head? he asked. He was upset, his pain palpable. The ministry was the one place he could let down his front and be Corey instead of Big Man, a grieving father, exposed and vulnerable. Just the other day, John told me, when Dolores took some children home, DT, a young man who had been shot four weeks earlier, flagged her down. Leaning on his walker, he showed her his wounds like he was baring his soul.

I recalled my conversation with Big Man as we sat together in the same car he would die in. At one point, I asked him what people should know about him. He said he was a good person. Not a perfect person but a good one. Friendly, kind-hearted. But he would not let anyone disrespect him. He had a bad temper, he admitted, but believed he had it under control. I told him I thought it spoke well of him that he had sought out John after his son died instead of retaliating. It seemed at that moment, no matter how brief, he had sought an alternative to violence. Big Man stared out the windshield, his right hand resting on the wheel.

Maybe, he said.