Ben Brooks RUNNING FAST, RUNNING FREE
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ben brooks RUNNING FAST, RUNNING FREE A crowd formed around the street performer, a magician. Idlers, loungers, loiterers, shoppers already happy with the purchases they’d made and in no hurry to make more, people with nothing better to do on a beautiful spring afternoon, the air clear and fresh and warm. The crowd simply appeared, drifted over – it materialized in clumps, iron shavings drawn to a magnet. Twenty people, thirty, fifty, a hundred. The magician strode into The Well on stilts, towering above everyone, nine or ten feet tall. He took the stairs down carefully. He wore oversized lime-green pants that stretched from his hips to the ground, hiding the stilts, a purple polka-dot shirt beneath a loose tan jacket, and an old-fashioned top hat on his head. The clothes alone, and his stretched-up height, made him an instant show. He began with two silver discs the size of pancakes that he shufed together into one. He turned the remaining disc so the edge faced out, the sun glinting of it, and then suddenly it was gone. He shook out his sleeves to show there was nothing there. A boy around twelve, an assistant, handed up more props from a wooden box. The box was also used for collecting money from spectators. The performer kept up a rhythmic, singsong patter as he made things disappear. They went into his hat and up his sleeves and down the back of his coat, and they reappeared somewhere else. “Beautiful day for tricks, ladies and gentlemen. Beautiful day for illusions. Keep your eye on the ball here. All you sharp minds, who can say what I’ll pull out of my ear next?” Cassandra watched from the corner of the adjacent subway station, eyed the crowd, finally joined it. She moved without hurry, purposeless, a lovely afternoon in Harvard Square, the warmth of the March sun a surprise to everyone – an idling type of day. It was a young crowd, so she fit in. This man on stilts was new to Cassandra – she had never seen him before. The Well, on the plaza by the subway entrance, was down a few steps from street level. At any kind of gathering there, whether for musicians or jugglers or political ranters or religious haranguers, people were pressed together. Now the necks in the crowd were tipped back so eyes could get a view of the man at his full height. BROOKS 43 The performer showed a large egg, handed up to him by the boy below. He held it between his thumb and middle finger and swung it in an arc. Then he threw his arm back and dropped the egg into the collar of his jacket. A second, two seconds, three, and he pulled out a bird, a full-grown dove-looking creature – though possibly an albino pigeon – alive, plump and white. The bird flapped its wings as if chafing at having been confined in the magician’s jacket. Feathers flew of. Then, as the magician wobbled perilously on his stilts, the bird escaped his hands. It rose into the blue sky and away. Cassandra moved casually through the crowd, sidling, took her time as if she had all day, but her eyes remained keen. She stopped beside a young woman with black hair in a long thick braid that hung down the entire length of her spine. A college student, Cassandra judged, for sure. She stayed a half-step back, but the student sensed her presence and turned to smile. Cassandra was short, not even five feet tall, and the college student peered down. Cassandra smiled back. Her smile was dazzling, radiant, it lit her up like a bulb, and she had bright blue eyes to go with it. But now that the young woman had gotten a look at her, Cassandra inched along. She threaded through the crowd, legs shifting sideways, and stopped again in a knot of people. The woman directly in front of her was wide, heavy, with burly- looking shoulders and flakes of dandruf speckling her cropped hair and her jacket. Cassandra only stood as tall as this woman’s shoulder blades. Bodies angled toward one another and squeezed Cassandra in. The magician was a juggler now, spinning batons into the air. He kept up his talk and wobbled dramatically on his stilts, pretending he would spill over at any moment. The woman in front of Cassandra had a tan purse hanging by a strap of her shoulder, and somehow, barely moving, Cassandra’s fingers were on the seam of it. The fingers unclasped the purse and dipped inside. Cassandra’s body, not quite touching the woman’s, shielded her hand from view in case anyone looked away from the juggler. Those fingers were trained to operate on their own – Cassandra’s eyes remained fixed on the performance. The fingers were miniature burglars let loose in a room they’d never seen before. They scoped out the inside of the purse – boundaries, walls, furniture that was fixed, and movable items. They located a wallet, a cell phone, a watch, and in no time, with a sleight of hand that equaled that of the performer, the fingers made their exit from the purse, and the wallet and phone and watch were 44 december inside one of Cassandra’s capacious pockets. The fingers finished the job by re- fastening the clasp on the purse, and Cassandra moved along. What she loved most were the surprises she found later in her pockets. Opening a wallet and discovering a small fortune, or else that there was no money at all inside, the surprise on her. She took relish in unfolding bills from a money clip and finding out if they were large denominations or small. Sometimes a cell phone was a brand new model, a $250 item that she could move for $100. She might come away with a gold anklet, a small folding knife, or a ring with a real ruby in it. And there were times she ended up with handwritten notes – love letters – or chewing gum, or a fancy pen, or even condoms. She fancied herself a gypsy, but there was no Roma blood in Cassandra. She was of English stock on both sides, her surname Richards. She lived with her parents and four brothers in a two-bedroom apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, halfway up the hill above Union Square. Their apartment was on the first floor because her father couldn’t do stairs. Cassandra was fourteen, the middle child, with two brothers older and two younger. She was the one who shared a bedroom with her parents and listened to them snore. She slept on a cushion made of rugs and blankets piled on the floor by the foot of their bed. The four brothers, ranging from nineteen to nine, shared the other bedroom, wall to wall when they were all in it. The third room in the apartment contained the television, the toys, a worn green sofa, the table where they ate. The fourth room was the kitchen, and of the kitchen, sharing a wall through which the pipes ran, was the bathroom. Cassandra’s father was a cripple – he was in a wheelchair. She could remember when he’d been a house painter and would come home stained with paint, and smelling of it, but when she was seven he had fallen of a ladder. Later, when he had regained his ability to speak, he said he reached over too far with his brush. He’d felt the ladder lean, tip, as if in slow motion, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Cassandra’s mother was convinced that her husband had been drinking, though she never said this to him directly. He’d been a heavy drinker before the accident, and after it as well. Jimmy Richards was a mean drunk, before and after he was hurt, and Fanny approached her husband with fear even in his confinement. He might not BROOKS 45 be able to chase anyone, but he could still hold things in his hands and swing them around. The accident happened one August afternoon. There were twenty feet between Jimmy and the ground, and he ended up with a Grade III concussion, four crushed vertebrae, and a rupture in the spinal column that resulted in his loss of lower body function. Now he collected disability pay, and his wife augmented his checks with a job in a Brazilian bakery, but even so, there was never enough money. Not for seven people, five of them young, two of whom lobbied incessantly for their own cars to drive, and two younger boys who yearned for electronic toys that seemed nearly as costly as cars. Only Cassandra wasn’t constantly whining about what she didn’t have and yammering about what she couldn’t possibly go on living without. It was a bountiful outing. Cassandra emptied three purses and two pockets, and not one victim so much as glanced her way or furrowed a brow. She worked three people in that magician’s crowd, one in a cafe in the Square, and one by the river where she’d gone to stroll. At six she caught the bus back to Union Square. Her legs tired, she squeezed into a seat between two large men and ignored the press of their thighs against hers. Her coat pockets were heavy, but she hadn’t yet examined the full scope of what she had. There was no privacy at home, so when Cassandra got of the bus she went straight to a playground.