Gods Go Begging (27 page)

“That’s where they found Little Reggie,” said Eddy. “There was only two or three inches of soil on top of him. Somebody just kicked some dirt over him. The homicide detective said that he had been strangled, but he didn’t find any signs of a struggle. The ligature was still around his neck. There was a lot of excitement over the ligature—it wasn’t the usual extension cord or curtain pull. It was a woven rope. The coroner thinks it might be ceremonial. Whatever it is, it’s very old.

“The heels of his shoes were badly scraped. It’s pretty clear that he was dragged here from somewhere else. The other two bodies were found up there on that slope. They were both shot in the head at close range with a nine-millimeter weapon.”

“How do they know that?” asked Jesse, suddenly recalling the expended round that had been found on Persephone Flyer’s breast.

“The other two bodies are pretty decomposed. The slugs just dropped to the ground beneath the skeletons.”

“And Little Reggie Harp was the only one who was strangled,” mumbled Jesse to himself. “Shooters don’t strangle, it’s too personal. Have they found Little Reggie’s gun yet?”

Eddy shook his head in the negative. Suddenly all the officers and lab technicians that had been working the crime scenes dropped what they were doing and converged noisily at a fourth location. This one was much closer to the project buildings themselves. Eddy and Jesse scrambled up the slope in hopes of getting a better look.

As two burly officers pulled at a large slab of cement, the others turned away violently and grabbed at their jackets and shirts to shield their mouths and noses from the stench. One green-faced officer raised his hand to signal the photographer. They had found another one. Jesse and Eddy ducked under the perimeter tape and walked toward the newest dig.

In this impoverished crypt, only the athletic footwear was still intact and untouched by decay. The geometrically sculpted gray soles of the shoes, pliable medals of stealth and virility, looked as though they had never been burdened by living weight. The padded uppers still looked unused, their garish stripes and glib hieroglyphic logos still charged with portent and prowess.

The shirt and pants, on the other hand, had collapsed as the human within had deflated. The arms were bent upward at the elbows. The fingers had grasped the soil with infinite patience until the soil had finally returned the embrace. The facial features of the boy had already resolved into a colorless expression made of soft shadows of sediment. Flesh had settled into layers of loam and sand. A dying grimace on the lips had merged with the remnants of a tap-root. The teeth, cracked and separated, had been sown into the earth, into a hollow beneath the left shoe.

Jesse closed his eyes to compose himself. Like so many young men in his memory, this one had been spoiled, smoke-damaged, broken. There must be a million such shoddy graves in Vietnam and Cambodia. This boy had suffered two of the grunts’ greatest terrors: the first was a bullet in the testicles. Then this boy had also been shot in the mouth, causing the teeth to be sprayed back through the brain and sideways through the cheeks.

At the top of the hill, on the litter-blighted street that ran just below the ugly rows of buildings on the crest, a long line of youthful spectators had gathered to watch the diggers down below. Like brooding, dark-skinned Egyptians, they resented the presence of pale outlanders on their soil, foreigners who were digging at their private past and carrying away the mummies and artifacts of their lives.

A common, silent sigh rose up from these onlookers as a fourth deflated and desiccated body was revealed to the open air. Another pair of sacred shoes would be manhandled and studied, defiled by infidels. Their secret rites of passage would now be exposed to a cynical, unschooled outside world.

Every child born on this hill had entered this world without the slightest chance to succeed. That chance had been ritually excised at birth, as routinely as excess umbilical cord, as routinely as the removal of the foreskin.

Having suffered that mutilation ceremony, every child had been given rights to an automatic weapon, a pair of oversized shoes made by Indonesian slave labor, and a personal saint—a celebrity athlete who had “gotten out,” a patron point man who had scouted out the invisible path to the other world and would soon return to lead the way there.

According to ghetto mythology, this mystic pathway of escape would he marked not with mere bread crumbs on the sidewalk or with cryptic ciphers cut into the stumps of trees, but by a never-ending assortment of white, balding, television sports announcers and by a complete line of coordinated designer sports clothing. All of the boys on this hill were wearing their uniforms and waiting for a mission.

Jesse shook his head at the throng of aimless boys at the top of the hill. As they stood side by side, their colorful clothing seemed to join together to form one huge advertising billboard. Over the years one or two of their predecessors had managed to use their athletic abilities to escape this place, only to become transformed into strutting, megalomaniacal Judas goats for various clothing and fortified beer companies. They were the new John Waynes, peddling the myth.

Jesse turned away from the human billboard. His old friend Cornelius, a machine-gunner who had died at the age of eighteen, had come from a place like this one. He reminded himself that hope, like despondency, could find you no matter where you lived. The youngsters up above had fallen silent for a moment as the last body was raised from the ground. A boy who once weighed one hundred and fifty pounds was lifted with ease by a single man. In another age, in another place, a communal song of loss would have risen from these onlookers’ throats.

Behind these bystanders, inside three separate apartments, three mothers were deep in mourning. All three women were without husbands. All three had hearts that had been completely untouched by the love of a man but whose striated wombs had been stretched and shrunken time and again by the burgeoning squirm of new life.

There had been men, of course—brown amphibians who slid easily from the firm soil of one woman into the salt waters of another; wriggling, slippery eels between the sheets, these men grew legs whenever the weather changed. They rose up and walked away when the tremor in the loins transmuted into family; when hot, writhing women became mothers.

These mothers would not have to be told the identities of the shriveled corpses. These three had known all along, yet they had steadfastly hoped beyond hope that their wayward sons had run away or were somewhere in the city’s seedy Tenderloin district, passed out from quarts of old English 800, anesthetized by crack cocaine or, the good Lord willing, comatose with tar heroin. Or just maybe their three missing boys had gone searching in Oakland or in the Marin City projects, and had chanced to run across their shiftless, good-for-nothing biological fathers.

Three fearful mothers had prayed fervently that perhaps their dear missing sons were languishing in a jail in some distant county, that maybe some racist cop was refusing to let them call home. On this hill the American Dream was out there beyond the yellow tape. On this hill the most that their children could do was not very much at all, but like mothers everywhere, they had all been hoping for the best.

The fourth mother did not mourn. Worry brought worry lines and crows’ feet. Worry changed the body’s chemistry and led to body odor and malodorous sweating. Mourning only weighed the body down, distorting the posture and bearing.

The fourth mother did not mourn. Nor did she worry. When the official word came down about her son’s death, the fourth mother took an express bus to Union Square, where she purchased some skin conditioner imported from Paris, got a pedicure at a Vietnamese shop, and bought a new pair of shoes. Believing that no one was watching, the fourth mother had dashed out on a moonlit night dressed only in a towel … and danced naked in her dead boy’s grave. This time it was empty.

“Let’s go up,” said Jesse, who had just caught the syrup, salt, and acid scent of death. The breeze had shifted and carried the horrid odor southward. He recognized it immediately and reflexively held his breath. Almost thirty years had passed and still it smelled precisely the same. It smelled like boys that he had once known; people like Roosky and Cornelius. It had the odor of his dreams. He stopped holding his breath, inhaled deeply to honor his old friends, then started the long climb toward the buildings.

“Are you kidding?” asked Eddy, who suddenly seemed very nervous. “You can’t just go waltzing up there. That’s Tourette’s Hill. Haven’t you heard the stories about that place? Why they call it Tourette’s Hill? If that place gets a grip on you, you’ll wind up doing an armed robbery in Pacific Heights or a drive-by shooting in the Fillmore. Then it’ll be sayonara and goodbye to your law practice.”

Jesse searched Eddy’s face for some trace of sarcasm or humor. There was none. Eddy was deadly serious.

“The word is that the paramedics and ambulance drivers from San Francisco General Hospital came up with that name: Tourette’s Hill. The closer you get to the top of this terrain, the less control you’ll have over your faculties, your senses, even your conscience. More often than not, whenever there’s an emergency out here they’ve had to send a second ambulance crew to rescue the first. Even pizza delivery won’t come up here.”

“I’ll bet you Giles de la Tourette never had a place like this in mind,” said Jesse, laughing at Eddy’s words. There was a grin of smug skepticism on his face when he stepped under the yellow tape onto the road that led to the first row of projects. Eddy shook his head, then followed closely behind, his beard quivering with worry and expectation.

As they reached the first intersection, Jesse began to feel that a sharp, involuntary twitch had developed in his right hand. It began as a small tug on his wrist muscles but soon grew into a violent, twitching spasm that contorted the muscles of his upper arm. Jesse gritted his teeth and grabbed his right hand with his left. No matter how much force he exerted he was unable to control it.

Suddenly the word “shit” burst from his tensed lips, then “motherfucker!” Jesse had no idea what impulse might have prompted those words. He had not been angry, or even excited. The words seemed to have no connection whatsoever to his aching wrist. Behind him he saw Eddy doubled over and laughing knowingly, his own left arm convulsing uncontrollably.

“Shit, I told you,” said Eddy, stuttering as he tried to resist the impulse to curse. “First you get these involuntary tics, then hundreds and hundreds of goddamn words drop from your motherfucking vocabulary like so many flakes of dandruff. Then you get the overwhelming urge to wear huge tennis shoes and sell drugs. Fuck, if we’re going to talk about this, we have to go back down the hill a little fucking distance.”

The two men backtracked thirty or forty feet down the hill in staggering steps until they reached the precise point where their extremities had begun quaking.

“Jesus, what on earth was that?” said Jesse, still using his left hand to control his right. He spat toward the ground, trying to rid his tongue of unwanted expletives.

“That was urban Tourette’s syndrome,” answered a breathless Eddy. “I tried to warn you.”

“What an experience!” exclaimed Jesse. “I was cursing like a soldier. For a few moments up there I actually cared about the NBA championships, and I even believed that big-time wrestling wasn’t rigged. I kept trying to tell you something but didn’t have the words with which to say it. Then, all of a sudden, I had the overpowering desire to carry a loaded gun. What the hell is urban Tourette’s?”

“Look up there at that intersection. Tell me what you see.”

Jesse squinted toward the intersection above. The kids had dispersed and now were on every corner, forming spastic, mercantile gestures with their faces and hands, holding up plastic bags of rock cocaine for sale and crying out spasmodically at passing cars. Among the drug dealers were a dusty pair of white men wearing the soiled uniforms of a local ambulance company. Two medics from the lowlands had succumbed and gone over to the enemy.

On the northwest street corner one young man was screaming a convulsive stream of obscenities into his cellular phone. When Jesse turned his gaze to the opposite corner, he realized that those obscenities were being directed to another cellular phone just across the street, not forty feet away.

“Fuck you!”

“No, fuck you very much! Wait a minute, muthufucka, somebody’s paging me. Shit, it’s just my mother. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Fuck you very much! Don’t mean nothin‘. Okay, talk to you later, man.”

On every corner there were kids with cellular phones stuck to their ears and pagers beeping on their belts. They were peddling drugs and cursing one another vociferously at the very same time.

Dozens of kids with huge pants and even larger coats were standing next to uninsured BMW convertibles with empty gas tanks. Beneath the driver’s seat of every car there was an unlicensed or stolen semi-automatic handgun. Jesse could feel the presence of weaponry. A metal detector on this hill would burn out in ten minutes. Within thirty yards of the lawyer and his investigator were two Beretta 92s, one Ruger Mark II, an UZI SMG, five Mac 10s, one stainless steel Walther and two Glock 26s. Chained to the driver’s seats, guarding each car, was an angry, unfed, pit bull.

All subtlety had been wrung from these boys. No stranger who stood at this crossroads could imagine any of them ever whispering to any other. The women here had abrasive, cutting voices like brass horns or wailing banshees, while the young men shrieked and grunted to themselves, to one another, and to no one.

Every gesture, every motive, every word and every response to a word was an expression or an application of personal force—a gesture of violence, possession, control, or aggression. On this hill, the powerless were obsessed with power. Jesse turned his gaze to the east, toward the bay and the distant hills of Piedmont and Montclair. Beyond those towns were Concord, Vallejo, and Walnut Creek, all the bedroom communities of the East Bay. The blight of identical tract homes was still spreading, as whites fled toward the flatlands of Brentwood and the Delta.