AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My fears were realized when Jackson pulled on the locked shelter doors. This was going to be a long night.
I stayed out front and watched him walk up the alley looking for a back door. If he found one, it would be locked as well. Everyone planning to stay the night in the shelter would line up in front of the building starting around 7:30 in the evening. They would let the homeless guys in around 8:30. Lights out at 10:00. A privileged few would manage to get into the showers before lights out. The other would try in the morning before they were evicted. Only about a third of the guys would actually get a shower. During the colder months the shelters would be packed full.
They would still be crowded this time of year, but some people would prefer sleeping outside to being here, even if it did get down to about forty-five degrees at night.
Many of Jackson’s soon to be bunk-mates were eating at a church about six blocks from here, but Jackson didn’t know that. He had to be getting hungry by now. Sean said that he hadn’t eaten anything but pancakes all day.
When dinner was finished at the church, the homeless would congregate here in front of the shelter until they were allowed inside. We had about fifteen minutes to go until Jackson would encounter his first taste of what real homeless people were like.
He circled the building. When he didn’t find another open entrance he walked to the end of the block and back as if verifying that he was in the right place. A few minutes later the first man showed up with a plastic shopping bag under one arm. He ignored Jackson and shuffled back and forth in front of the shelter steps.
I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt and moved closer. I doubted that Jackson would recognize me. We’d only met one time, and it had been several years ago. We were also at Jason’s wedding together, but we didn’t speak to each other as there were about seven hundred people in attendance, including half the politicians in the state. The Hayes family knew how to throw a great party.
I wanted to be close enough to save Jackson’s ass should he get into a fight, but far enough away to keep my cover. Jason had made the rules pretty clear to me. “Don’t let him get killed, but don’t help him either.” I chuckled under my breath. Jason was a riot.
That meant, though, that I couldn’t give Jackson the information that he needed. He was going to have to learn how to communicate with the homeless if he wanted to keep eating. It took a few minutes before Jackson even noticed that people were beginning to congregate in the street. He appeared to be in his own little world. That seemed pretty on par from what I knew of the guy–nice enough, but clearly self-centered.
Finally, he wandered over to a group of three guys who had all come together. I was fairly certain that they had walked up from the soup kitchen as a group. Homeless people had needs that went beyond food and shelter. Humans are pack animals. We all feel the need for social interaction, although some more than others.
“Is this shelter open tonight?” Jackson asked the guys.
They appraised him for a few seconds before one of them spoke up. “Yeah. They open up
‘bout eight-thirty.”
“Great.” Jackson smiled at them, and I had to stuff my fist in my mouth to keep from laughing. He clearly was not accustomed to making small talk with bums. He looked like he was about to hit them with a sales pitch. “Do you guys know where I could get some dinner?”
“You ain’t been around long have you?” another one of the guys mumbled. I think he was missing at least half of his teeth, so it came out as a mostly jumbled mess.
“Uh, no,” said Jackson. “I just recently… sort of… had well, uh… this is new to me.”
“I’ll say,” laughed the guy who had spoken originally. “But you just missed dinner. On Wednesday it’s at the church on Maple.”
“Oh,” Jackson was clearly disappointed. I wondered if this was the longest he’d ever gone without food. “What about Thursdays? Is there food somewhere tomorrow?” The three guys looked at each other, and I thought for a minute that they might lie to him and send him on a wild soup kitchen chase, but after a pretty lengthy pause one of them offered up the truth. “Yeah, the Presbyterian Church by the docks. It’s at noon.”
“Noon. By the docks,” Jackson repeated. He was shifting nervously from foot to foot. I was sure he was tired. The guy was used to sitting in meetings all day. He’d done a lot of walking and not a lot of eating. His body was working overtime. He was still incredibly clean compared to most of the guys who were now in line, but his fancy ass jeans were starting to show a little wear, and his hair looked dirtier than usual. If he didn’t find a change of clothes soon, he would start to look homeless.
Jackson kept to himself until they opened the shelter doors. He was close to the head of the line so he had a pretty good choice of sleeping space. The building used to be a convent, so there was a long hall with dorm-like rooms on each side that could house six guys in three sets of bunk beds. There was also an open area with four rows of ten cots. I waited to see where he would go before choosing my own space. He chose a top bunk in one of the smaller rooms. It wasn’t a bad choice, but the more private rooms were often out of the view of the shelter employees, which meant that there was a higher likelihood of theft. I would be surprised if Jackson made it through the night with his jacket still in his possession.
Sean thought he still had some money on him, and I hoped he had the sense to hide it.
Down his pants would be the best place, but Jackson didn’t strike me as the type to favor putting cash in his Italian silk boxers.
I took the top bunk on the other side of the room. There was a bed separating us, which would hide me well enough but still allow me to watch over him.
Now came the tricky part. If he left to use the bathrooms, he would most likely lose his sleeping space. If he didn’t get in line now, he wouldn’t get a shower. He was observing the line forming at the bathrooms across the way, but he was also watching the other men in our room protect their sleeping spaces. I could tell he was conflicted.
He must have decided that sleep was more important than showering at this point, and I thought he made the right choice. If his luck held, he might be able to get a shower in the morning before heading out. At that point, protecting his sleeping space wouldn’t matter.
A shelter worker was making rounds and Jackson called him over. They had a short conversation and while I couldn’t hear it word for word, I got the basic idea. Jackson had asked him to borrow some money, twenty dollars, I think. The young volunteer had quickly and efficiently turned him down.
Rule number one of volunteering in a shelter: never give money to people who were likely to spend it on drugs and then harass you for more. There was no such thing as
“borrowing” in a place like this.
Jackson lay down on his bunk when the kid walked away. I couldn’t see what he was doing from here, but I thought he was probably rearranging his few possessions. Maybe he did realize the theft potential. I certainly hoped so.
I studied the four other men in the room. The two guys in the middle bunk appeared to be friends, maybe even brothers. One was guarding both beds while the other headed off to the bathrooms. They would likely switch before lights out. I didn’t see them as particularly threatening.
In the bunk below my own was an old-timer. He had to be at least seventy years old and looked more like ninety. Homeless people rarely lived past seventy-five or so. This life was hard on the body. He had already put his back to the wall, closed his eyes, and gone to sleep. I thought a man like that could probably sleep anywhere.
The guy who had taken up residence below Jackson had me worried. He had taken a good long look at Jackson before choosing his bunk. He was fairly young, maybe thirty, and I could smell the booze on him from the other side of the room. His eyes were red and bloodshot, and he had a crooked nose that had probably been broken more than a couple of times. He would need to be watched.
Luckily, I had slept for most of the day, because there was no way I would be able to let my guard down in here. The last of the stragglers were coming in now and nearly every bed was full. The last additions were the type that I had been worried about. The main room was getting rowdy as the first fight of the night broke out. A crazy drunk was screaming obscenities about someone who had supposedly cut in the shower line.
Jackson watched with wide-eyed fascination as the shelter workers made him go back to his cot and settle down. They turned off the water to the showers a few minutes later, much to the disappointment of the men still standing in line, and a few minutes after that, the lights went out.
Let the games begin.
Within an hour the place had quieted down. You could hear some loud snoring coming from various parts of the building. There were no doors on the smaller rooms so the sounds echoed down the hall easily. I hadn’t heard a peep out of Jackson, so he was either asleep or trying to be.
I flipped open my cell phone to check the time. Almost midnight.
At 12:15 another fight broke out in the main room. It was hard to know exactly what had happened, but it was probably a theft gone awry. It usually was. The shelter workers broke it up and threw both parties out into the night.
