Ring Transport

Ring Transport: Hard Escape

(Started 12/7/2018)

== Sequence ==

This book is a standalone spin-off and doesn't require reading previous parts of this series. However, some parts will make more sense in context.

# Ring Transport: Origins, Part 1

# Ring Transport: Origins, Part 2

# Ring Transport: Kansas Anna (Spin Off)

# Ring Transport: Hard Escape (Spin Off)

== Disclaimers ==

Nothing sexual happens to anyone under age 18.

In an infinite multiverse, everyone has the same name as you, get over yourself (names are randomized).

== Chapter: My Backstory ==

My name is Mary. I'm an orphan from a favela (slum) in a small town in Chile.

I was 10 when I saw my first dead body.

It was just in front of the porch I slept under. I waited a few minutes after the shots, then crept out to see what had happened. I'd only been on the streets about 3 months then, aged out of the orphanage at 10 like every other girl.

The nuns tried to keep us longer, but the gang that controlled their block had a hard rule about ages. The nuns said they needed drug carriers, and girls aged about 10 were perfect for them since no one would stop them, and people thought we were all really innocent. So, they'd made an arrangement with the orphanage that no one over 10 could stay there anymore.

The Reverend Mother said we could leave the neighborhood if we wanted (HUGE head nod YES), but if we stayed, we might end up 'desafortunado acantilado' [near an unfortunate cliff]. This was their code for BAD things, which they freely told us about from the bible like prostitution and gambling, or leprosy.

I never saw a leper but the urgency they used to describe it as bad made an impression on all of us.

She told us, it was up to us if we wanted to stay in the neighborhood. The gang (she used their name) had told her, don't tell us to leave (she nodded her head really strongly), that we might want to stay (shaking her head 'NO!' with huge motions despite her words saying sorta-yes), and it was up to us, for our safety (again, head shaking emphatically told us all, get out of the neighborhood quickly).

If we were asked on the street where we were going, she said we could say, "There's supposed to be another orphanage to the south and I'm trying to figure out which way is south."

I had to respect the Reverend Mother, she did what she could and cried with the rest of us when bad things happened. And, they _did_ happen.

So, when she nodded and shook and her head, no one misunderstood her.

On my leave day, my actual 10thbirthday, there was a mini-celebration, and I hugged all the young ones I'd raised from when I was old enough to rock them and soothe their cries. They cried, and I did, even though we weren't supposed to, ever, since it was a sign of weakness.

I left with just a small bag with two more pairs of underwear, two socks, and two hats. One was a baseball cap, and the other was a stained old foldable wide hat for when it rained in the springtime and sometimes at night. Southwestern Chile's rains were haphazard after springtime, frequent but not every day.

Walking like a normal kid, sort-of, I wore the baseball cap to cover my face and long hair to shield me, too. If I didn't, my big birth-defect scars would make people look at me twice, and it's never good to be looked at too much when you're homeless.

Halfway across the city and about two desperately-hungry and nearly-sleepless weeks later, I found a hacienda with a raised front porch.

The porch faced a wide alley. The house it was attached to held two old gay men; they worked mostly in the bar across that alley as janitors and bouncers, plus at the attached brothel next door. I knew what a janitor was already, but a 'gorila' (bouncer in Chilean Spanish) really meant security guard, and we had one of those for the orphanage, too, so I understood that as well.

My delight in the under-porch space was that once I pushed the accumulated garbage away, it was a very nice nesting place where I could be safe overnight.

The men both knew I was there. One scowled, and one smiled, when they saw me that first morning. After that, they knew I was there but left me alone. I figured they regarded me as their own security guard and could tell them what happened when they weren't around.

We struck up a friendship, at a distance, since they didn't want to get involved in my situation or feel responsible for me. That worked for me, I had a safe dry place, even if it was pretty cramped.

I kept myself clean, mostly; the shopkeeper down the block had a hose on his second floor balcony for watering his plants, and I could sneak up there at night, hide behind his plants, and wash myself off all over. It wasn't anywhere like the bathrooms I'd grown up with since the water was always very cold, but at least I could get clean and keep the lice out of my hair.

Sometimes I'd get a louse (or more than one, there was never just one). They itched a lot, but I'd been told that covering your head with lard or fat, thickly, for 2 or 3 days would cure that. I had mixed luck with that method, sometimes it took twice PLUS doing a massive cleaning where I slept and pulling out the trash bags under the thin layer of rags.

I could boil those rags in a bucket with a driftwood fire on the beach.

The second way to get rid of lice was supposedly to shave your entire body, but I didn't dare do that or people could see my face, and I spent considerable effort to prevent that from ever happening.

Lastly, I knew that lice could be killed with lye, but that also was supposed to hurt a lot, and burn you, and you had to be super-careful or you'd be blind forever, the nuns had said. I didn't ever do that. No amount of discomfort would balance being blind.

My life was hard enough.

Eating wasn't easy, any more than life on the street in general, but the bar's kitchen had scraps and I quickly made a deal with the cook that I could have enough food to live on, as scraps, if I did odd jobs like washing dishes, cleaning everything, sweeping the alley, garbages, whatever.

She even had me work over in the brothel, in the early morning when most everyone had gone home.

Some girls waited tables at the bar, some were prostitutes, and some were both. I knew enough to recognize who was doing what, but it was somewhat distant from me and I aimed to keep it that way. There was some drug use, but the lady that ran the brothel mostly kicked those girls out quickly.

I got LOTS of info by overhearing conversations.

I also got to be well-informed by some of the nicer girls, who answered my questions and told me the minimal things about keeping clean (as a girl) that the nuns hadn't mentioned.

My job sweeping up let me hang out around corner-walls sitting down (thus out of sight), and listen in pretty clearly. Even though sometimes what they said was contradictory, it mostly made sense.

The 'average' conversation had good perspectives I wouldn't have gotten in on if I was sleeping down by the waterfront. Plus it was a lot more comfortable during the day versus if I had rented the corner of a hut in a favela. Rent in that case would have been either cash money or 'favors' that I didn't want to pay.

Some of the ladies spoke Spanish, which is what I grew up speaking. Others spoke mainly Brazilian Portuguese, since a lot of sailors in that dock area were Brazilian like them. After a while, I picked up Portuguese enough to have small conversations, and then more, as long as I waited until someone was drunk enough to not want to look across the table.

There were two ladies who mostly did laundry but sometimes helped in the kitchens (both brothel and bar), and they spoke Arabic. They were regular chatterboxes all day long even when no one was around, and since I was in the kitchen and laundry room to help them, I got to listen to their words.

The third older lady was their boss in the kitchens. She spoke mostly Spanish with some Arabic. She'd tell them what to do, sometimes using both Spanish and Arabic as she figured out what to say, and that added to my vocabulary faster.

I played games with all of them, pointing at things, and they'd say what it was in Arabic, and I'd repeat it back, sometimes getting the accent right and sometimes not. I found out the word they used for soup ladle sounded a lot like the word for donkey penis, and that set them laughing a lot until they explained it to me, mostly in pantomime.

Under my porch, I could hear voices from the alley, from people hanging out at the little set of tables they had there for when it was super-hot, or overcrowded in the bar.

They'd talk and laugh, and with it being mostly quiet in that part of town, I got to where I could understand most of what they were saying.

Some of them spoke English. Mainly it was Spanish, but I liked the English conversations better, since I knew that was more universal. I knew I could go more places with it, if and when I ever got to travel somewhere.

The trouble was, I didn't have a teacher and limited time with drunks that spoke English made that harder.

Later, the bar kitchen had a TV that I could set the channel on late at night or early in the morning when I was cleaning and no one else was there, so I set it to American cartoons. Not always were there words, but when there were, it was simple stuff, which made learning faster.

For instance, I learned the word 'Ouch!' before I learned word 'cow'.

About a year later, I started getting my period. One of the nicer ladies, she took me aside and explained carefully that I needed to have a plan, that I couldn't live under a porch much longer. She said, I had to go somewhere better, but more than that, I needed to learn to defend myself.

She told me there was a man she took self-defense lessons from, who ran a martial arts place by the dockyards. She said if I covered her clean-up shift two days a week, she would make him give me lessons, too.

I was pretty sure I knew that she exchanged the right for me to be in the guy's class, for blowjobs after the class, but I wasn't certain.

Her conditions were, though, that I had to make sure he didn't have to do a lot of work to teach me, I'd have to do most of the work ahead of time and be ready when he gave pointers in the classes.

Being ready meant that I should just sit and watch his classes for a few weeks, whenever I could, and copy all their moves. I had to be _Exact_, she said. Very exact, in how the move went, in how the snap worked, in where all your body parts were, like a precise dance.

I went the first time, and watched, and practiced a little, and the lady taught me some of the starting moves. She also said I had to get really, really strong, because it would only be about another year before someone might attack me (with the implication being clear). Since I was getting taller, I'd better be ready to fight really well before then.

This was excellent motivation.

Really, what she taught me to do was pretty fun. After I did the observing and got corrected by her for a while, she started me on working her shifts, an easy thing for me since it meant I was in the kitchen and could eat more leftovers.

My diet improved even more than leftovers from the bar food. The brothel served better food, but I had NOTHING to do with what went on upstairs. The gay men that worked there helped protect me that much. What they said, happened.

The martial arts guy let me into his class; I didn't have to say who I was because, really, how many long-haired ragged girls with a disfigured face are there.

The classes were straightforward. I followed the woman's advice and stayed out of the way and was quiet. I did everything I could to be even more perfect than their best student, though I always made sure to lose sparring with the ones who had a deep need to win-or-else.

At the orphanage, I'd met plenty of kids (girls, of course, like it mattered) who had the win-or-else bullying attitude, I knew how to either avoid those people, or project enough power to deter abuse.

It wasn't too long before I knew more than the cook did; I had more time to work on it, for sure.

One of the gay guys saw me practicing in the alley using a broom like a bostaff (they had classes at the martial arts school with a staff weapon). The guy was impressed, and taught me some of the forms - a form is a series of moves- and we started talking more. As the brothel's bouncer, he knew lots of martial arts, something called Aikido, so he taught me that and I practiced those moves too.

Time passed; I learned and learned, and soon I knew no one seriously could attempt to assault me. Sure, some bar patrons tried walking my direction, but looking at my face made them turn around, and mostly I stayed out of the public areas anyway.

Pretty soon I was 13, then 14, and had moved into the broom closet off the bar's kitchen, behind the stove. This was nice when it was cold out but not so nice when it was hot. Still, it was better than under the porch, and I didn't have lice problems. I could shower in the janitor's area, there was a showerhead we used to wash down whole chairs when someone puked.

I could even wash my clothes in the brothel's laundry room, though I made sure to do that when no one was up yet, early in the morning.

Madame Listrovna, who ran the brothel and whose word was law, told me that because I had a 'hare lip' (there was a name for what I looked like?) she didn't want to hire me, but if I got desperate there might be some chances.

I said NO, thank you, and that I wanted to become a nun, but I had to wait until I was old enough.

She gave me more jobs, I think, so she could pretend she was giving something to the church by raising me to be a nun. I laughed at that inside; I had no intention of being a nun.

When I turned 16, I had heard enough about working at the shipyards that it seemed possible, and I looked marginally old enough. I knew my age, the nuns had shown me a copy of my birth certificate, unlike a lot of orphans they accepted. Every orphan had a 'birth date', it's just some were more accurate than others.

The shipyard's employment office had big signs that said you had to be 18 to work there, among other things. I ignored those and went up to the desk, filled out the application as best I knew how, except that I put I was 18 years old and male. I had a hat on, and it was cold, so I had a thick sweatshirt on, too, and I'd strapped down my boobs pretty well.

The guy there swore when he saw my face; my lip did that to people sometimes. He said, basically, shit, you're ugly, no wonder you want to work here. Are you strong?

I said in my best gruff lower-register voice, "Fuck yeah." I dropped to the floor in front of him and did 3 one-handed pushups, then switched to the other arm and repeated it. I'd been practicing one-handers for a long time since I saw someone do it during martial arts practice, so it was no problem. I stood up and said, "When can I start?"

The guy laughed and said, "Good enough for me. You can start right now if you want." He got out a timecard, wrote my name on it, wrote in another book, typed in a computer, wrote a set of numbers on my timecard, and handed it to me. "Go in the blue building. Hand them this. Tell the guy in the green hat you're a roustabout."

I did, and thus started my first day as a dock worker. I would be making actual cash money, better than just bartering for shelter. The dockyard offered some minimal bunkroom space for nearly free, so I moved there.

That bunkroom featured a lot more snoring than I'd heard before. I'd never slept near anyone. I learned what it was like to live near men, and take care to not show off to anyone that I was a girl.

At least it was an actual mattress (in a high dark corner) where I could stretch out.

Maybe six months went by, and I heard that it was possible to get work onboard a ship. People said it was dark and dirty work, mostly either deep in the ship where it was hot and stuffy, or frigid cold out on the deck at all times of the day or night. I knew I could handle more than the people I was working around. They would complain about the cold when it was barely chilly out, or about the heat when my closet had been right next to a stove in the summer.

I knew what real heat was.

I also had a plan, to get to the Best Country: Canada.

Everyone said it was best, or at least most people said good things. Some roustabouts I knew said they'd heard Norway was best, but Norway was smaller, I knew that from my schooling. Plus, I didn't speak Norwegian. I could speak English, some, so I could get by. So, I had to wait for a ship that would go near to Canada, or to a place where ships that went to Canada went.

Keeping my eyes open, I found a container ship bound for lots of places, including eventually Nova Scotia. I signed on as crew, and went around to say my goodbyes. That Included the bar and the two gay men, but they didn't live there anymore. That made me sad.

I thought about visiting the orphanage, but when I walked by I just couldn't go in. I had too many bad memories of being beaten up in that schoolyard, I didn't want to go back quite that much to confront my demons.

I'd never been able to read well in school, so when I walked by a used bookstore I thought about getting a book or two but I wasn't sure I could do it.

I decided, I'd have time, and I could practice my language skills. They had all kinds of books including math textbooks, and I'd always loved math. I had money, and I knew my Chile money wouldn't be any good anywhere else but Chile, so I spent a little on an algebra textbook (and a Bible). I thought, maybe the numbers won't dance around and get jumbled in my vision when I'm reading this one.

Onboard, I watched as we left port, and I knew I would never see that city again. I was kind of happy for it, and sad, and ambivalent at the same time. I was happy to be going somewhere new, I was sad for saying goodbye. I didn't know what I felt, exactly, otherwise, kind of numb, I think.

There was some bravery, maybe, I realized I had needed it after the fact. Being brave is sometimes like that - the full implications of what you're doing hit and you have to decide, yes, I'm sure. Then, later, the emotional impact, the loss, hits.

Anyway, I left, and I was happy I'd have better chances somewhere else.

Work life on the ship was easy compared to the Brothel, but just about like roustabout work. That is, physical lifting and carrying stuff, but far less of going fast because you're being yelled at.

On the ship, people yelled to me, but not at me.

No one wanted to look at me, so I got the jobs that required me to check things in remote parts of the ship, up and down ladders, checking lashings on containers, lots of physical labor. On the plus side, I could eat when I wanted, the cooks got used to me and there was always enough food available, hot and filling when it was cold out.

Sailing South, we made frequent stops. We weren't a supermax ship, just a medium-sized one, so we stopped at almost every port along the way in Chile, but they said once we got to Rio we'd go straight from there to Nova Scotia, and then Antwerp. It was dangerous work I was doing, climbing those containers in the cold weather, the ship pitching below me and the sea spray getting everything wet. I knew enough to follow their safety instructions, I saw the wisdom in that, especially since my left leg hurt a lot when the weather changed, and sometimes when I tried to do too much climbing or walking in a day, it would ache.

Everywhere we stopped, I looked for ways I could get off the ship without being seen, so the dockmaster wouldn't know that I was trying to jump ship and sneak into Canada. There were big rules against that.

Ring Transport: Hard Escape

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