Reapers Are the Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

spot right about now.
    So Ruby brings her a glass of Coke with ice in it and the two go down to watch the children playing in one of the lobbies. A swing set and plastic slide have been dragged over from one of the department stores and hopscotch squares are drawn on the floor with chalk.
    We have a school too, Ruby explains. My sister Elaine runs it.Six days a week in the mornings. Education is the most important thing, of course. So we can rebuild when all this is over. Did you go to school?
    I learned some things.
    I was just a young woman when it started. I guess you weren’t even born yet.
    No, ma’am.
    This must seem like a strange world to you.
    No, ma’am.
    No?
    The world, it treats you kind enough so long as you’re not fightin against it.
    Ruby looks at Temple and shakes her head, sighing. She’s a chubby woman, Ruby is, with a round face and eyes that wrinkle on the sides when she laughs. Her hair is done up in a style that Temple has never seen before. It’s piled on top, mostly, but some of it hangs down too. She wears a long shapeless dress and sandals, and her fingernails and toenails are painted a pretty shade of burgundy red—exactly the same color, Temple thinks, as spilled blood when it’s about twenty minutes old.
    The sounds of the playing children echo off the marble walls of the lobby. There are twenty of them, of different ages. The windows are painted over so that, Temple assumes, the slugs don’t see them in here and start congregating outside. Large yellow floodlights are set up around the perimeter of the lobby to help out the diffuse sunlight absorbing through the thin layer of streaky brown paint.
    She thinks of Malcolm, picturing him here among these other children. No doubt he would have wanted to go outside—he would have scraped the paint off the windows so he could see. But that was two years ago. He would be older than a lot of them now.
    How many people you got here? Temple asks.
    We have seven hundred and thirteen spread out between all four neighborhoods. You make seven hundred and fourteen.
    Neighborhoods?
    The four buildings. We like to call them neighborhoods.
    Is this all the kids?
    Most of them. It’s hard for people to have children here. We have a doctor, but our medical facilities are limited. But also, it’s just hard for people to be . . . optimistic.
    Oh.
    Ruby smiles broadly at her, as though she herself is the prime emissary of optimism.
    I like your hat, she says, nodding at Temple’s panama. We don’t have any hats like that here.
    Thanks. I like your nail polish.
    Do you? Do you want some? Most of the women here don’t bother to paint their nails, so we have a lot left.
    Ruby takes her back to the department store, to the cosmetics area, and shows her a rack of dusty glass bottles with a hundred different colors and names on the bottom that describe the colors. Temple settles on a kind of pink Ruby says is called Cotton Candy, even though she has no idea what cotton candy is—but it puts her in mind of lollipops made out of T-shirts.
    Then Ruby rides the elevator with Temple up to the sixteenth floor, where Temple’s room is, a little office with a mattress on the floor and a table with a lamp and an artificial plant.
    The bathroom is down the hall by the elevators, Ruby says apologetically. We have to share.
    Thanks, Temple says. For the soda and the nail polish and the food and everything.
    You’re very welcome. I’m glad you’re here with us. We’ll take care of you, Sarah Mary.
    Temple says nothing. She tries to imagine staying here, in this place, with these people, and she is surprised to find the idea is not entirely objectionable to her. She wonders if this means she is growing up.
    Oh and one more thing, Ruby says. You can go pretty much anywhere here, but it might be a good idea to avoid neighborhood four. That’s where most of our men stay, our unmarried men—the ones who go out patrolling—the ones who broughtyou in today. They’re