Read No Lease on Life for Free Online Page B

forward and crash, land on her head. She could decide to jump, lunge, leap, or fly over the stairs. She thought she could fly over a flight of stairs. It looked easy. She didn’t want to train for years to be able to do it. That was crazy.
    She wouldn’t murder the morons in cold blood or in a moment of passion. When she murdered, it would be in self-defense. She’d be attacked. A large man or a small man would come at her. From behind. She’d move quickly, swing around. She’d gouge out his eyes or jab her fingers into his gut. She wanted to be able to sever someone’s jugular vein or hit someone over the head with the baseball bat Roy kept near the door. She’d bash the aggressor to death without blinking an eye. Then she’d toss the bloody bat onto the floor and phone the precinct.
    I just murdered a man with a bat. Right, a bat. He’s bleeding, but he’s dead. Don’t send an ambulance. Dead. A bat. A baseball bat.
    Even her revenge fantasies were silly. They ended without conviction. She clenched her hands into fists. She watched Roy sleeping. He was sleeping the sleep of the just and unjust and the innocent and the guilty.
    She followed the band of morons with tired eyes. They sauntered toward the park. They turned over another garbage can in a blasé way. Threw one at a car. They’d had a lot of experience throwing and overturning garbage cans. They turned over the last one casually, even gracefully, with a little wrist action. They could be tennis players or garbage collectors. There was garbage everywhere. It wouldn’t be picked up.
    On her block, the garbage collectors left as much garbage on the streets as they picked up. They threw the garbage cans all over the sidewalks. It was a display of real disgust, gutter hatred of the poor. Elizabeth caught them doing it.
    On another night she couldn’t sleep, she went downstairs at six  A.M. , carrying newspapers to be recycled. The garbagemen were throwing garbage and garbage cans. The street was an ordinary disaster, strewn with evidence of rampaging dogs or mad people. She wished she had her camera. But the garbagemen could argue about the photographs. They’d get lawyers, they’d interpret it their way. Her block wasn’t covered in garbage, it was her point of view, how she saw things, she had a distorted view of the world, of the block, they’d say. She did.
    They’d say the garbage collectors couldn’t have done it, because they were on their coffee break. Some hooligans must’ve done it, they fled before anyone saw them. Elizabeth could spend her life in court defending herself, her story. She’d present her story, and one of the garbagemen would say, That’s not the way it was. He’d shake his head adamantly or sadly, as if the thought of his doing something like that was beyond him. I would never do something like that, he’d insist dramatically. Maybe he’d cry. The jury would side with the men in uniform. Elizabeth would be branded a fanatic, an urban malcontent. She remembered the garbagemen down the street in their uniforms. She remembered their faces. She remembered thinking, I pay taxes to the City for them to take away garbage.
    It was pathetic. she watched as they flung the last cans onto the sidewalk. She surveyed the devastation and then glared at the men. She memorized their truck’s number. She was overwhelmed by despair. She noticed the acerbic super down the other end of the block. His face was inflamed, scarlet. Sometimes his face looked tanned and healthy, sometimes like an old shoe. She walked over to him, he always knew everything, who was in jail, who was about to go to jail and why, when there was going to be a bust. Elizabeth announced that she was going to report the garbage collectors.
    —What’d they look like? A tall black guy and a short Italian guy? The regular guys are OK. These aren’t the regular guys. The regular guys are good guys. They wouldn’t do this.
    He gestured to the street. They both looked at