The Sacrifice Zone: Chapter One (Free)

by Sandra Gail Lambert

The Sacrifice Zone by Sandra Gail Lambert

The Sacrifice Zone: Chapter One

Vic leaned against the dumpster and smeared soot over her crutches to dull the aluminum. The first layer had worn thin, and the forearm cuffs and rivets showed too bright from the single bulb hanging over bar's backdoor. Her targets had spent longer than usual having another of their secret meetings that flouted all those pesky open record statutes. But this was good. Maybe they’d stumble out into the alley drunk and chatty and loud enough for her to get them on tape. Vic fingered the plastic bag of fish guts in her pocket, but decided her clothes didn't need another application to keep the disguise successful. She probably hadn't needed the initial one. This was her first time in a New York City alley, and she hadn't known about the stew of vomit and old pee—human and rat. Vic had left Florida to get away from the claustrophobia of a Gulf Coast fishing village with its constant smell of sulphured mud flats, brine, and rotting shrimp bait, but she wasn't used to these smells yet. The shallow breathing made her head swim. Vic forced a deep inhale.

Vic spread more soot over the back of her hands. She'd been gone from home much too long to have any tan left, and her skin had gone white. Not as white as after they'd sawed off the body cast she'd had as a kid, but close. A red light blinked up from the breast pocket of her shirt. Vic slapped a hand over it, and the camera shifted out of position. Keeping an eye on the door, she pulled it out and blocked the light with the bill of her trucker's cap. It was the low battery alert. And she'd left behind the camera case with the extra batteries.

And now, after arguing that she worked better alone, she was going to have to ask for fucking help from Shay, her editor-in-fucking-chief who'd insisted on waiting out on the street as backup in a way too obvious, brand new hybrid that her parents had given her just because. Back home great blues announced themselves with a screech each time they flapped into the air. Shay's every move screeched money, well, not money so much—lots of Vic's drug smuggling relatives sometimes had shit tons of money. This was something else. Shay Cromwell was fancy. That's what Vic's uncles called some of the northerners who hired them for sport fishing charters and showed up in expensive outfits that made her uncles and the customers themselves happy to ruin with blood and innards.

Vic was now college-educated and a soon-to-be journalism school graduate, so she knew more than her uncles. She knew that sort of fancy came from generations of money and education, and the words were privileged and intellectual elite and inherited wealth. But on top of all that, Shay was fancy. Her clothes were perfect in a way Vic hadn't known existed, and Shay wore them as casually as Vic wore her Wal-Mart jeans. Everything was coifed except for her hair, which she let grow into a wavy, loose, wild, almost afro.

It annoyed Vic that she thought Shay was the most beautiful woman she'd ever met and that at this very moment her breath was going short at the thought of seeing her. But there was no way that woman could get down the alley without drawing attention. It might blow the entire investigation of university regents collaborating in shady real estate deals. Still, Vic texted Shay. Their only hope was that the men didn't come out of the bar just yet.  

The corner where the dumpster met the wall was the darkest part of the alley. Vic leaned into it. The bricks felt both rough and slick with something unnamable. Used to be, at home her crutch would slip on decaying jellyfish or bloated, belly-up mullet in the wrack line. That was nasty but cleaner than this muck. A jerky metallic sound echoed down the alley. Vic looked around the corner of the dumpster and watched a decrepit grocery cart wobble her way. Piles of plastic bags teetered over the top, but Vic could see it was Shay. Her hair was wrapped in a rag—not a fancy headwrap in a reclaiming of the historically oppressive rules about black women and head coverings, as Shay had written in a recent article, but an actual rag. How would Shay have ever even found a rag? Much less a grocery cart? Shay came up alongside her and smiled. Vic tried not to smile back.

"Great outfit."

"What, this shmata?"

Shay angled sideways, tossed a moth-eaten sweater off one shoulder, and ran her hands down the faded housedress and along the contours of her body like a model. Shay had curves and a belly and a big rear end that made Vic want to cup it in both hands. She leaned in close and slipped batteries into Vic's breast pocket. Vic heard Shay's breath catch from smell of fish guts, but she didn't pull back and instead smiled even bigger.

It had been junior year in high school when Vic had honed in on how to ease the itch in her hoo haw she'd been waking up with each morning. There was something—her enthusiasm, her need, her appreciation, maybe—that pulled other women in, and by senior year there was hardly a willing one left un-hit in the tri-county area. College had been like jumping in an unexplored ocean of women, but this, right now, in the alley was different. Vic was uncertain and nervous and desperate, as if she were at Shay's mercy. Vic hated that. She'd tried berating herself that she was having a racist attraction to the exotic. Shay's mix of European Jew and African-American wasn't known or even really imaginable back home. She'd tried having sex with even more women than usual. Nothing helped.   

"This is perhaps the most exciting thing I've ever experienced." Shay whispered into Vic's ear, and Vic clamped her throat shut to keep from groaning out loud. "We're accomplishing real journalism in the real world."

Vic decided to get mad about the way Shay was thrilled at the chance to dip her toe into "the real world," by which Vic decided Shay meant poor people. Getting mad was always helpful to Vic in situations that seemed beyond her control. A neon green satin bra strap had fallen down Shay's shoulder. It gleamed into the dark.

"Homeless women don't have bras like that. Maybe you should leave before you ruin this." Vic remembered that Shay was her boss in this situation, so she tagged on a "and thanks for the batteries." 

Shay pulled her strap up and tugged the sweater back into place. But before she left, she put her hand on Vic's arm, leaned close again, and murmured.

"You wouldn't have wanted me to flop, would you?"

Shay then hunched over the cart and shuffled out of the alley. Vic stepped back into her dark corner and fumbled replacing the batteries. She winced when the old ones dropped on the ground and clanged against the side of the dumpster. Once the battery latch was locked in place, she repositioned the lens through a hole she'd ripped open in the pocket of her shirt.

Vic had always been able to think through things. She'd mentally hang all the parts of an issue in the air around her. It was a wavery, three-dimensional bulletin board that she could rearrange until the solution appeared. It's how she aced her exams. She needed to think through Shay. But Vic only got as far as creating a floating post-it note that asked "was she flirting?" when an angled line of light and burst of music spread across the alley.

It was like the opening of a joke. Three white men—a Provost, a state senator, and a real estate entrepreneur—walked out the backdoor of the bar. Vic switched on the camera's video. She pulled her hat low, leaned on her crutches, and exaggerated her limp as she moved into the light. She needed to be close enough for the microphone to pick up the conversation. The men were loud. And they were glad-handing each other with slaps. The real estate agent was the loudest and teased the state senator and the Provost about having a boner for one of the bartenders.

"Didn't know you two liked them dark and skinny like that." 

The conversation deteriorated into a crude racist, sexist, and every other "ist" three-way rant, but they had yet to say anything financially incriminating. And they were about to leave. Vic stumbled forward and fell down in a way that spread her body and crutches across the alley. They'd have to step over her. Which they did. Although the real estate guy did pause, look down, and drop a bill into Vic's upstretched palm. She watched them leave the alley knowing that she'd failed. Vic's hand closed over the bill. It was a tenner. At least she could call this her first paid reporting gig. Vic got up on her knees and bent her elbows so she could wedge the crutch tips alongside cracks in the concrete. She pulled herself into the air with the strength of her arms.

She'd been warned by doctors about post-polio syndrome, how when she got older her arm strength might fade, she would have fatigue and pain, that she should conserve now. But doctors said all sorts of things that didn't turn out to be true. And she came from a long line of people who didn't get sick—another way Vic was an oddball. And even if it was true, saving something for later didn't make sense. No one knew the future. Like a gymnast on the rings, Vic balanced on her crutches with her legs dangling. She used her hips to kick her feet out enough that the spring locks on her braces snapped over the knee joints and locked them upright just as her feet dropped to the ground. Her arms followed through with a wide forward sweep of her crutches, and she moved down the alley.

Vic reached the street and was once again shocked by how many people were out, even this late, regular people, just focused on their own business. No one acknowledged her. Vic reveled in not being noticed. She loved that not a single one of these people was related to her in any way or had been her math teacher or had worked on one of her great uncles' bird dog boats. Beyond the people walking past, Vic saw Shay giving money to a woman who looked like the rightful owner of the grocery cart. She'd changed her clothes into jeans and a plain shirt that had probably cost more than Vic's textbook bill, which Vic would never have been able afford without her collection of scholarships and grants for everything from cripples to rural students to first time in a family college-goers.  

"Give me the tape, and I'll watch it while you get out of those clothes. I brought you these." Shay handed her a full plastic bag. "Ilene's alley is at the end of the block. She'll let you change in there. Right, Ilene? And Ilene, thank you so much for the rental of your cart." Shay and Ilene hugged as if they'd been friends for years. "And Ilene, I can't promise anything, but I'll look into that matter we spoke of."

The owner of the cart pushed her reclaimed worldly goods down the street. Vic noticed she was jealous of Ilene. Vic handed over the camera and followed Ilene to her pile of blankets spread over layers of cardboard. Vic changed and took her clothes back out with her. It seemed wrong to leave them like trash in Ilene's space plus it would be interesting to toss the bag in the back of Shay's car. Reminding herself that Shay had never actually been anything but nice to her, Vic instead dumped the clothes on a pile of trash waiting at the curb for pick up. She got in the car. 

"I'm sorry. I even threw my damn body down in front of them, but it didn't work."

"This is exactly the final piece we needed."

Vic and Shay had spoken in unison. They both stopped talking and stared at each other. Shay put a hand up and motioned for Vic to speak.

"There's nothing worth shit on that tape."

Shay twisted the car into the street traffic. She accelerated before settling into a fast, steady pace that ignored yellow, even newly red lights while she explained things to Vic. She'd assigned part of the investigation to another reporter whom she described as a rebellious scion of a Wall Street banker, which meant he knew where the metaphorical financial bodies were buried. Between his findings and the tape showing how buddy buddy the major players were, they had a solid story about financial malfeasance.

"Of course, their racist and sexist rant is enough to at least cause the dismissal of the Provost. But I want more than a 'gotcha piece.' And we have that."

Vic had never gotten used to a world where white men saying all that shit they always said got called out on it. Not that it happened very often. Still, her family patriarchs wouldn't last five minutes at a university. Although she hadn't noticed that the educated variety thought much different than her relatives. They just kept it quiet. Her people didn't keep anything quiet.

Vic watched Shay drive through the night streets with an exciting grace, all the while making calls and giving orders. By the time they arrived at the campus office everyone was there. The online version, including the video, went up at three in the morning. The print edition was on the streets a few hours later. By the end of the week they were famous. Shay and Vic and the financial reporter became Pulitzer runner-ups. They were interviewed on C-SPAN, all the morning shows, a smattering of late night, and every online news source. Magazines did features about them. And Vic and Shay became lovers.

Their next story was about how felons, even if the conviction was twenty years ago like Ilene's, couldn't access services for the homeless under the present administration's regulations. The next story was about the effect of dark, corporate money on one particular comptroller election that had led to the diversion of billions of development funds. Editors had always wanted to confine Vic to the "disability beat." Shay knew better, but even so asked her for one article, just one. Vic figured as long as she didn't have to write some fair-to-both sides story about eco-creeps deciding that straws were the great Satan and effectively snatching them out of disabled people's mouths, she'd give Shay something. So Vic did her first ever disability-focused story. She polled every visibly disabled student on campus about how often they were publicly "prayed over." As Vic knew they would be, the interviewees’ responses were scathing and profanity-laden, and Vic, the paper, and the institution were accused of anti-Christian prejudice and defaming religious freedom. The school's lawyers had to get involved. It was a proud moment for Vic.     

How much Vic and Shay loved the hunt and chase of their work and how attracted they were to each other wound together into a heady mix. Shay took them out to nice restaurants where Vic paid her share with raucous stories of her sketchy family and their sketchy ways with smuggling, drugs, and poaching. Vic liked eating something besides cheap Chinese take-out. Once, she told Shay about her cousin Mellie, about how after Vic's mother had died, she'd gone to live with Mellie and her mother. How they'd never treated her like a freak the way the most of her people did. Vic liked that Shay didn't push. For instance, she never asked about Vic's father.

Shay, however, talked about everything. She loved people, all types. She laughed a lot, her first instinct was to be kind, and she was maybe smarter than Vic. Vic knew their affair wouldn't last because she wasn't any of those things and had always preferred to be the smart one. But for now Shay kept saying she liked the way Vic was and would name all the qualities relatives had tried to shame her with or other women had thrown in Vic's face—her ambition, her mule-headedness, how she cussed, the way she burped at will, her lack of sentiment. Shay wanted Vic to be more of who she was. No one else ever had. And at night, after sex, there was sometimes a sweetness between them that Vic had never known to want. Even though she never promised it to Shay, Vic stayed away from other women.

END OF CHAPTER ONE

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