SHORT STORY

The Leak

Andrew Ferenc hadn’t always been homeless; as a teenager in the 70’s, he’d been a bona fide groupie for Sly and the Family Stone. Wherever the band went, Ferenc went, setting up his red canvas tent as close to the tour bus as possible. He’d brokered deals when other members of his Tribe needed drugs; he’d gone on liquor runs in borrowed trucks; he’d head-banged his way to numerous concussions in concerts all over the country. His roots may not have lived in the soil, but he did have a home with Sly, The Family Stone, and his Tribe.

Overdoses (Ferenc liked to think of them as ‘overindulgences’) had picked off his friends one by one; Sammy “Jesus” Salander had gone first, slipping away outside of a public restroom during a tour stop in Oklahoma City, a needle still hanging from his arm. Toots Benbow went next, her heart stammering to a halt after too much cocaine. Sissy Tindall, Mac Keegan, Rudy Mitchell, Henny Pennow, Chuck Glass, Heather Richard, Patty Ames…

The names of his dead friends played over and over in his head like a chorus, the tune getting stuck on endless repeat. He’d heard once that to get a song out of your head, you needed to sing the ending of it. His song had no ending.

When the Tribe gradually dissolved, with those who had escaped death drifting off to other places, getting married, doing the right thing, Ferenc had traveled. He hitchhiked his way around America, panhandling for food and sheltering in parks or in covered doorways. When he scrounged enough change, he’d hit the liquor store for a pint and, if anything was left over, McDonald’s for a Big Mac. He drank the liquor first, and never remembered eating the burgers. The greasy residue on his fingers was his only confirmation that he’d eaten at all.

The intervening decades hadn’t been kind to him; hard living had taken its toll. In 2019, Ferenc was sixty-two years old, but he could have passed for eighty. Over the years, poor nutrition and a good handful of street fights had whittled away at his teeth, until many gave up and dropped out. As a result, his needle-thin lips pursed inward above a jutting chin, making his lined face look as though it were caving in on itself. What little hair he had left was patchy and nearly white, a ghost of the thick black mane he’d sported in his Sly days. His painfully slim torso perched atop two bony legs, and his arms were a pair of string beans, ropy with wasting muscle. His baggy clothes, scavenged from trash bins and the occasional homeless shelter, hung on his body loosely, snapping in a stiff wind like a flag.

He’d been sleeping in the underground subway station for a few weeks, slipping in and out unnoticed to beg for his liquor and Big Mac money from whoever looked guilty enough to toss a coin or a bill his way. The trash buildup in the station due to the garbage strike was a lucky break for Ferenc; he could burrow into the piles of banana peels, empty takeout containers, used tissues, used condoms, used diapers — the trash functioning as insulation for his scarecrow body. The rats didn’t bother him, and neither did the smell; the stench acted as an olfactory fortress, keeping out casual passersby, suspicious police officers, and ruthless ruffians looking to beat up anybody who couldn’t defend himself.

On this particular morning, Ferenc woke up, snug in his garbage nest, a bloody tampon adhered to the grizzle on his cheek. He peeled it off and tossed it aside, nearly hitting a sleeping rat.

Blinking the grit of sleep out of his eyes and stretching, he looked around the station.

It was empty.

He couldn’t be sure, having never owned a watch, exactly what time it was, but the pounding of excessive foot traffic overhead suggested that it was rush hour.

Which meant the station should have been flooded with people, yelling into cell phones and staring down at screens, headphones perched in the delicate cups of ears, stiff professional shoes digging into the tender backs of heels.

But, as another brief glance confirmed, there was nobody.

Normally, Ferenc’s only words were spoken to the clerk at the liquor store and the fast food worker at McDonald’s; he didn’t have the need or the desire to speak more than was absolutely necessary. When he panhandled, he let his frayed cardboard sign speak for him: HUNGRY, GETTING OLD. PLEASE GIVE WHAT YOU CAN. HAVE A BLESSED DAY.

So, when he opened his mouth to croak out a tentative “Hello?”, his voice cracked on the first syllable and then lost steam. He cleared his throat, sweeping out all the cobwebs with a harsh cough, and tried again. “Hello?” he said, his voice echoing around the cement-and-tile tunnel, lit, he realized now, only by the sparse string of red emergency lights.

Still nothing.

He tunneled his way out of his putrid cocoon, shoving aside grease-spotted paper bags, empty beer bottles, a child’s headless stuffed animal, the white cotton spilling out at the neck. A few rats scuttled away, annoyed by the movement. His limbs were stiff and sore, and it took a moment to find the strength to heave himself to a standing position. When he had risen, his head swung in a one-eighty-degree arc, hoping to spot something that had previously been hidden from him, tucked away as he’d been in his nest. He had to squint; the red glow from the emergency lights gave the entire subway station a malevolent, veiled appearance.

Nothing looked out of the ordinary; no object or scene stuck out to explain the absence that now pressed down on Ferenc, making his joints creak. He’d been alone a long time, but he’d never felt this forsaken.

As he stepped across the tile, hands in front of him like a zombie to feel for anything he couldn’t see, the air began to feel close and hot. Beads of humidity prickled on his forehead, and he resisted the urge to scratch the thin skin. He’d learned the hard way that infections were slow to heal when one lived as he did; the pinky stub on his left hand was an inescapable testament.

Clop-swish. Clop-swish. His cracked boot heels clicked on the tile, and his loose trousers billowed around him as he crept forward. The silence was oppressive, almost menacingly alive, and even the smallest bit of sound from his own movements threatened to send him screaming back to his trash heap, diving in before whatever boogeyman that had chased all the people away came for him.

Weaving through structural columns, he finally reached the base of the stairs that led up to Inverness Street. He could only be sure of his location due to the thunk of his boot on the concrete base of the stair, which nearly sent him reeling forward; the stairwell itself was a sea of blackness, a fortress that the red lights could not penetrate.

He looked up, straining to find whatever it was that had blocked the stairwell. Lifting one foot, he propelled himself upwards, arms still cocked like shotguns in front of him, ready to go off at the slightest provocation. He ascended higher, his hands still grasping at the heavy air. The humidity was thicker in the stairwell, and Ferenc even thought he could make out the infuriating, metronomic sound of dripping water.

When he thought he’d gone just about as far as he could, the top of his head brushed something thick and rough. In his surprise, he nearly fell backward; instead, he caught himself and gingerly lifted his fingertips to the material now pressing down on his skull.

As his fingers grazed across the surface, a memory erupted in his brain. It was 1970, and Ferenc and his Tribe had followed Sly to Chicago, where a free peace concert was going to bring everybody together. They’d snagged their spot in Grant Park at 8am, jostling in among teeming crowds of every stripe — women, men, white, black, young, old. Cheap wine and beer flowed freely, and the atmosphere was thick with marijuana smoke. That hot July day was one of Ferenc’s happiest — sitting with his family, enjoying the day, intermingling with groovy people while riding high on a Ripple wine buzz and a fat joint that kept getting passed around. It wasn’t until later, when some kids started yelling out that Sly was cancelling, that everybody started getting angry. That afternoon, Fat Water came out and played a few songs, but everybody was chanting for Sly, give us Sly — Ferenc had joined in — and they slipped off the stage. The Flying Burrito Brothers started to set up, and someone threw a wine bottle, and then it was like Vesuvius blew — a lava flow of boiling anger and frustration surged through the crowd, screams reverberated around the park instead of songs, broken glass glittered in the grass, somewhere, smoke billowed from a growing fire, and then everybody broke out of the confines of the park and headed around the Loop, breaking into stores and taking whatever they could. The police came, yelling and trying to restore some sense of order, but it was no use. Ferenc got separated from his Tribe, ping-ponging through the waves of bodies, his buzz turning sour. At one point, he was pushed up against an overwhelmed police officer, his Kevlar vest digging into Ferenc’s cheek. With both hands — there had been ten full fingers at that time — Ferenc had shoved him away, desperate to escape the melee. His fingertips came away slightly bloody, the imprint of the Kevlar etched into his skin.

He remembered the feeling, and now, as he caressed the barrier above him, he imagined the screams and smoke from that horrible night in Chicago, enveloping him, choking him.

Something up above was cutting him off from the outside world, but he couldn’t be sure if it was meant to keep something out of the subway…or something in.

Within his ballooning rags, Ferenc was sweating. Small spaces had never bothered him much; a lifetime of squeezing himself into truck beds, backseats, tents, and, more recently, piles of trash, had inured him to claustrophobia. But this was something different.

He was trapped, walled inside a deserted subway station with little light and no way to communicate his own existence to anybody in a position to help.

He brought his hand down from the Kevlar and gave in to the urge to scratch his forehead. Curiously, his own touch was cool and moist on his feverish skin. Reaching out once again, he waved his palm back and forth over the Kevlar like a windshield wiper. With every arc, more droplets of unmistakable, cool water adhered to his flesh.

As he stood there, openmouthed with shock and confusion, he felt the first raindrops spatter across his face and shoulders, the spray tentative but gaining speed.

“Shit,” he whispered, his voice croaking into the emptiness. “Shit shit SHIT shit SHIT.”

It was true that he’d never been afraid of small spaces, but, as a man who’d lived an entirely landlocked and road-dependent life, he was unspeakably terrified of water.

In a few quick movements, Ferenc scuttled down the stairs and away from the leaking barrier, trying desperately to gather enough brainpower to think through his situation.

Of three things he was certain:

One: He was trapped.

Two: He was alone.

Three: The only barrier between him and some crazy tsunami of murderous water was leaking.

He tried to push down the acidic crush of panic creeping up his throat at his last thought. He knew from experience that panic wouldn’t serve him, and it could very well get him killed.

His feet sent echoing clomps around the tiled warren, sounds that now sounded watery and abstract. One of the red emergency lights blinked on, off, on.

A drink sounded divine at that moment; the thought of the warming alcohol slipping down his gullet set off an explosion of shivers. His mouth went dry with longing, and he licked his lips compulsively.

The silence he’d awoken to just a few minutes before had shattered; the humid air now hummed with his harried footfalls, the drip-drop-drip of the water on the stairwell, the fleeing of the rats deeper into the tunnel, the sandpapery scraping of his tongue along his lips, and the ragged heave of his breaths. In his alcohol-craving haze, rational thinking came slowly, if at all. He’d reached an impasse — he couldn’t think of a goddamn thing to do except curl up in his garbage and wait for the drips to turn to trickles to turn to horrific sweeping rivers that would carry him off to a watery, dark grave.

Drip. Drop. DRIP. DROP. SPLASH. BANG.

Ferenc’s ears pricked up and he turned, trying to home in on the source of the incongruous BANG. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought it had come from the subway tunnel. It sounded a bit like the earsplitting cacophony that usually heralded the arrival of the train, except it was isolated and blurrier, reaching his ears from a long distance away.

“Hello?” Ferenc called out, his voice shaky. “Anybody there?”

Without waiting for an answer, he scurried to his trash pile and dove in cartoonishly, sending broken Legos, rat-gnawed baguette crusts, and empty boxes of suppositories flying across the tile. He burrowed inside and shut his eyes tight, like he did as a boy when sounds from his closet had sent him reeling and calling for his mother, who never came.

BANG. It was louder this time.

Ferenc swept his arms out and pulled them back in, covering himself in an avalanche of snotty tissues, moldy French fries, and lipstick-tattooed coffee cups.

BANG BANG. Even louder, even closer, and growing more insistent.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BA —

The booming sounds stopped abruptly directly in front of Ferenc’s rotting nest. A few beats of unexpected silence weighed heavy in the humid air, and Ferenc held his breath, stuck in limbo. The silence stretched like taffy until he was just about sure that the sound and its creator had gone. In a tiny whoosh, he exhaled.

“Andrew?”

He froze, a slimy banana peel sliding down his scruffy cheek. He hadn’t heard that voice in years, decades.

His hands shook violently as he swept aside the garbage from in front of his face, now more curious than frightened. Standing in front of the small window he’d cleared, dressed in faded flare jeans and a deerskin and feather vest, was Toots Benbow. If Ferenc squinted, he could just make out a sprinkling of white below her nostrils, like freshly fallen snow.

“Toots?” he said, his voice cracking. She looked exactly how he remembered her — slim, smiling, constantly swaying to the music, even if she had to use her imagination to hear it.

“It’s been a long time,” she said, taking a few steps toward Ferenc. As she came closer, he saw that there were hundreds of fine lines of red threaded through the whites of her eyes.

Ferenc glanced down at his body self-consciously, able to see only his skeletal torso and knobby knees under the piles of moth-eaten blankets and empty soda cans. “It sure has,” he said. “How you been, Toots?”

She stepped closer, one of her feet dragging a bit behind her. Her skin had a pale green tinge and her limbs were slightly bloated, making her look waterlogged. “I’ve been better, Andrew,” she said. Rivulets of water ran from the corners of her mouth, pooling at her bare clavicle.

His fingers closed on a shredded piece of sweatshirt and he pulled it over his lap, his hands shaking so badly that the fabric vibrated. A shiver clawed at his spine and he let it flow through him, leaving him cold and spent.

She was still coming closer. “I’m so glad you’re here now, Andrew,” she said.

“You are?” he said, trying to rebury himself without her noticing.

One more step and her bare toes, the nails painted a faded traffic-cone orange, would be touching the sticky pool seeping sluggishly out of a crushed bottle of pancake syrup.

“Of course,” she said. Her hair was lank, so weighed down with dirt and oil that it didn’t move when she walked. “We’ve all been waiting for you, Andrew.”

A fresh wave of savage shakes overtook him, setting off landslides of candy wrappers, napkins, and bright red Solo cups.

“Who?” he managed to ask in a small voice he didn’t recognize.

Toots didn’t answer; instead, unmistakable music penetrated his nest, distorted by the acoustics of the tunnel.

“Stand. You’ve been sitting much too long. There’s a permanent crease in your right and wrong.”

Ferenc knew the song, of course he did — it had been his favorite Sly song for nearly forty years. When he’d heard Sly play it, the song had been empowering and inspiring, making him want to go up against the Man and all the other nonsense people of his age supported. Now, as the words bounced around the underground warren, they took on the inarguable feel of commands issued from the mouth of a large entity with little patience.

“Andrew, is that you?” came a new voice, languid and searching.

Ferenc blinked, trying without success to clench his body against the shakes. He brushed aside a stained diaper and found Sammy “Jesus” Salander slumped in front of him, one locked arm preventing him from collapsing back onto the tile.

“Jesus?” he said, his tongue swollen.

“It’s me, man,” he said, the laziness dropping away from his tone, revealing something hard and cold underneath. Ferenc could see the needle still dangling from his vein, the area where it penetrated his skin black and festering.

“We’re all here,” chimed in Sissy Tindall, her voice gravelly like Janis Joplin’s.

“Stand. They will try to make you crawl,” Sly ordered from deep in the tunnel.

“Who?” Ferenc asked, sweeping his arms around, trying to pull more material on top of himself. The shaking taking hold of his arms made the task difficult, sending trash flying away instead. An icy drop of sweat slicked its way from the hair tangled at the back of his neck down to the base of his spine.

“I’m here,” came Mac’s deep baritone.

“Me, too,” echoed Rudy, right on Mac’s heels.

“And me,” chirped Henny. Ferenc could hear the slap of her ever-present flip-flops, the sound like suction cups on a shower door.

“Hey, man,” said Chuck.

Ferenc’s face was buried in the folds of his stinking coat, but he ratcheted his head up far enough to see Chuck flick open a lighter, illuminating his skeletal features and Heather’s pockmarked jawline as he lit her cigarette.

“It’s been a long time, Andrew,” drawled Patty, her Southern twang tense as a bowstring.

The shakes were now so vigorous that Ferenc suspected he might be having a seizure. The seat of his pants grew wet, but he couldn’t be sure if it was his doing or the creeping flow of water leaking through the Kevlar.

“Don’t you miss us, Andrew?” Toots asked. He looked up, squinting. Toots was now crouched in front of him in a puddle, grinning with a mouthful of broken teeth. Behind her, Sissy, Mac, Rudy, and Henny stood stock-still; Jesus still sat propped up on one arm on the floor; Chuck and Heather smoked, the wispy tails of their cigarettes quickly evaporating in the humidity. Patty swayed next to them, a smirk on her blue face.

“Well?” Sissy asked.

“Y-yes,” Ferenc stammered. The wet had seeped into the holes on the bottoms of his shoes; there was now no doubt that whatever the barrier was trying to keep out was flowing right on in.

“You don’t seem like it,” Mac said, his eyes glassy and pink in the glow of the emergency lights.

“Yeah, we’re starting to think you don’t miss us at all,” Jesus said, leaning forward, bringing his free hand over to toggle the needle in his arm.

“You never come to visit,” Rudy said, running a pale hand through his scraggly beard. Clumps of wiry hair sloughed off at his touch, landing in fuzzy heaps on the wet floor.

“We’re lonely without you,” said Henny, the sultriness she usually carried in her voice turning sour, like curdled milk.

“We want you back,” Heather said, the words raspy through the smoke.

Sweat disgorged down Ferenc’s face as he tried to dig his heels into the ground, looking for purchase on the slick tile so he could push himself backwards. The floor was too wet now, and his boots far too worn for him to gain any meaningful ground. His heels sloshed around in the water, sending cold sprays into the red-tinged darkness.

“It’s time to come with us now, Andrew,” said Toots, still crouched in front of him. Her once-blue irises were filmed over and blank. She reached out a pale, shriveled hand toward Andrew.

Behind her, Jesus scooted closer, and the rest of his Tribe moved forward, seeming to glide on the thin film of water. They were forming a half-circle around him, broken grins spreading below their sunken noses and spots of decay plastered on their hollow cheeks like spackle.

Ferenc’s heart raced, pulsing to a beat even Sly couldn’t match. His ribs ached with the effort of holding his heart in his chest. His shakes sent ripples through the trash pile, everything shifting around and sloshing back like the water bed he’d always wanted.

“Stand. Don’t you know that you are free.”

The others heard the music too, and Sissy laughed her Joplin-laugh, like rocks were caught in her throat.

Hands reached toward him, dirty nails aiming for his sagging flesh. Thin screams erupted from his lips, the panicked bursts drowning out Sly.

“Well at least in your mind if you want to be.”

They closed in, blocking out all traces of the red emergency lights.