Shelter

When the bell above the door chimed, Jozef knew it would be them. He opened the bookstore every morning at nine, but no one came inside until after ten-thirty or eleven, if at all. As he fumbled the keys from his pocket at eight fifty-nine, he saw them huddled on the bench of the bus stop across the street, felt the boy’s eyes narrowing on him as he nudged the key into the lock. He had barely put down his coat when the door opened again and they were standing in its frame, wrapped in a gust of November wind.

The older boy entered first, dragging the younger boy by the hand. The old woman trailed them so slowly Jozef worried she would be caught in the door as it swung closed. The older boy looked around, stuck out his chest, and strode up to Jozef at the counter.

“Do you work here?” he asked. He was shorter than Jozef even, but broad shouldered and solid. He was probably older than he looked, but twelve or thirteen at most.

“I do,” Jozef said, smiling at each of them—the boy trying to take up space, the smaller one bouncing in the tight spaces between boxes of books, and the old woman who stood like a scarecrow a few paces behind them. “How can I help you?”

“We’re here for the food and clothes and stuff.” His measured confidence was wavering. His eyes wandered from around Jozef’s collar down to the scuffed edge of the counter. Jozef puzzled over the request for a moment, long enough for the younger boy, no more than five or six, to knock over a precarious tower of books Jozef had been meaning to shelve.

“Sit down!” the older boy snapped. “Here.” He dragged him away with one hand, guided the woman with the other. He deposited them on the bench by the door, side by side, like two slender volumes on the last narrow space of a shelf.

Jozef said nothing but watched the older boy: distracting the younger one with a toy dinosaur, softly whispering some unfamiliar words in Spanish to the old woman. She was so small and bundled that he could barely make out her face, just a small patch of brown skin under a knot of white hair stuffed deep into a coat.

Studying the boy’s movements, harried and weary, Jozef saw in him another boy, a boy who adjusted a headscarf on an old woman as he spoke to her in Polish, who had a sister in a wool dress carrying a doll by its braided pigtails. He was their interpreter and ambassador to a new world that confused them, that he pretended to navigate with confidence. He walked them through strange streets and unfamiliar weather and absorbed all the glares and slurs and sometimes physical blows from their new neighbors who did not want them there, who would have preferred they stayed where they were from and died.

When the boy approached the counter again Jozef returned to the present, to this boy who had his own unfamiliar streets to navigate, despite the ways he imagined their journeys to be the same. The boy was looking at him, waiting.

“I’m sorry,” Jozef said, remembering his request. “I don’t have any food and clothing here.” Jozef opened his empty hands, shrugged, and smiled meekly. “Only old books.”

“But they sent me here,” the boy insisted. “They said you do.”

Jozef heard the hunger in his voice, recognized it in the way he talked and saw it in the way he moved. He noticed that the boy wasn’t wearing a coat like his brother and grandmother, or possibly great-grandmother—who knew how many missing generations in between?—only a t-shirt, too big and stretched at the collar.

“Don’t you have a coat? It’s nearly freezing today.”

“I need one,” the boy said, shrinking to his normal height. “They said you have coats. And food in boxes and cans that don’t go bad. They said we can get one bag a month.”

Jozef stared at him blankly, unsure what he meant or what to do. He had a shop full of things he would love to give away, but nothing that would be useful to them. He stopped saving the clothes two decades ago and said it was because fabric carried bugs, but really it was that the clothing was too personal. It still smelled like the men who used to wear it.

“Are you sure you’re in the right place? Maybe you have the wrong address. This is a bookstore.” Jozef gestured around him, the rows of shelves stacked to the ceiling as evidence.

But it was only a bookstore in that most of its shelves contained books—used books with cracked bindings and torn covers—one of the two greatest loves of Jozef’s life. But on looking closer, as the boy now was, each shelf was a collage of used items: glass and ceramic figurines collected on someone’s forgotten travels, antiques that survived longer than the lineages that passed them down, picture frames from which some of the original owners still smiled out. Everything belonged to once-young men who never got old, some he knew and some he didn’t, some he knew only in the way you can know a stranger who shares the same grief and loss you’ve lived. It wasn’t just a bookstore, more a shelter for stories that had stopped being told.

Jozef followed the boy’s eyes around the room until they landed on the framed charcoal drawings above the shelves, various studies of a male nude. His eyes traced the charcoal angles of shoulder blades and collarbones, down the curvature of a spine or a ribcage, lingering on what he found beneath them, filling in the gaps between the artist’s strokes with his own imagination.

Jozef remembered his lover presenting them to him, a draft raising goosebumps on Jozef’s bare skin and his lover’s hands still smudged in black. They were practice to him, like a child’s multiplication tables, but Jozef loved them. He loved everything those hands made when they were alive and able to create. They created Jozef into the man he was, on paper and in life, rendered more beautiful than he thought he could be.

The boy must have felt Jozef’s eyes on him, and they snapped his attention back down to the counter as he tripped over his explanation.

“This is where they told me to come,” the boy said, digging into his pocket and withdrawing a piece of paper. He presented it, unfolding the dirty creases and flattening it on the counter. The address of Jozef’s store was printed on it, neatly and legibly, unmistakable.

“Hmm,” Jozef considered the paper, traced the folds, stained brown with worried use. “I think perhaps they meant to send you to this same address on the north side of the city. There’s no North or South, you see?” he said, pointing to the space where the letter N or S should be. The boy did not see. “I think there’s some kind of shelter that gives out food and clothing in that part of the city. That must be where they meant to send you, to the north side. We’re on the south side now.” The boy glared down at the counter but said nothing, so Jozef continued, “It’s like a mirror, the north side and the south side. Each street has the same numbers on the north and the south, and they go in opposite directions.”

The boy pursed his lips and kept his eyes focused on the paper, the correct address that was somehow still wrong.

“Let me get you a map and show you,” he rummaged in the drawer under the counter, pulled out his map of bus routes. Most people, some only a decade or so younger, would use their phones to do what Jozef still used paper and ink to accomplish. “There’s a bus that picks up right across the street there that can take you all the way up. You just take it in a straight line.” He traced it on the map to illustrate. “It comes every twenty minutes or so.”

“Okay,” the boy said finally, brushing a strand of overgrown hair from his eyes. Then, to his brother, “Come on, we’re leaving.”

“Do you want me to write out some directions for you?” Jozef offered.

“No. I can use my phone.” He crouched down and zipped the younger boy’s coat, then helped the old woman up from the bench as she stood.

A sudden panic grasped Jozef by the throat. He swallowed the impulse to yell out for them not to go yet, to let him help them somehow, but he struggled to think of anything he could offer them. His eyes fell on his register, stocked with the same denominations of bills he started with each day, to be prepared to make change. As the boy secured garments around his family, Jozef eased the register open and slid out the largest bills, folding them neatly in half and then in half again. The sound of the bell above the door drew his eyes up to see their backs bracing against the wind.

“Wait a minute, young man!” Jozef called out to them, “You forgot something!”

Jozef picked up his coat from the counter and tucked the folded bills inside one of the front pockets. The boy took a step back inside, watching Jozef as he came around the counter. Jozef held out the coat, and the boy hesitated only for a moment before reaching out to accept it.

The boy looked into Jozef’s face for the first time since entering the store, and Jozef imagined the boy’s thoughts as he took him in: his discolored skin like crumpled paper, his tiny frame dwarfed by the towering shelves packed too tightly with the belongings of dead men. Jozef wondered if he appeared swallowed by the remnants of other people’s lives, or if the boy could see the loss in each item, the pages torn from the ending of each story, all the wars he fled and the wars that still somehow found him. Jozef wondered if the boy saw anything of himself, if he thought he might be peering into the future the way Jozef knew he was seeing his own past. He blinked twice to clear the tears that suddenly threatened the pink edges of his eyes.

“Thanks,” the boy mumbled, eyes cast down. When the boy drew the coat close to his body, he noticed the loop of rainbow ribbon pinned to one of the lapels. They were selling them for a dollar at a fundraiser Jozef attended, to raise money to open a shelter for homeless gay youth. Only they didn’t say gay, Jozef remembered; they said queer. The word queer still hit Jozef’s ears like a punch in the jaw, and he had to remind himself of what had been explained to him several times, that the younger generation had reclaimed the word. Jozef watched as the boy lifted one end of the ribbon and examined it.

“Are you a faggot?” the boy asked, not with surprise or disgust, but the cool, level tone of someone who already knew the answer they were seeking.

“That’s what I’ve been told,” Jozef said.

The boy grabbed his brother’s hand and opened the door. The old woman shuffled out and he quickly followed, pulling the younger boy who trailed behind him, waving.

Jozef watched through the window as the boy tightened the coat around his shoulders, gathering its extra width closer to him. The boy glared down at the loop of rainbow ribbon pinned to his chest and carefully picked it from the lapel. He didn’t toss it away but shoved it deep inside the front pocket. He froze when, Jozef assumed, his fingers reached the folded bills inside. But he didn’t stop or look up, just quickened his pace until they all disappeared around the corner.