One Foot Off the Gutter (5 page)

If it was so easy to understand, why was it so hard to do? There wasn't any conflict between us; we weren't arguing or fighting, but I felt like a mountain separated me from Alice.

“I want that French toast drowning in maple syrup. You got that?” I said.

“You can put clove powder on it.”

“I like cloves.”

“Then give me your plate, and be careful, honey. It's hot.”

She loaded up my plate and put it back down in front of me. The steam rose up in my face in a sweet smelling, seashell pink-colored cloud. I stared down at the golden brown slices of bread, soaked in eggs, drenched in maple syrup. I picked up a tin fork, tore off a hunk of toast and stuffed it into my mouth. I chewed with quick, angry bites, gulping the morsel down my throat, greedily burping.

“I got us a good bottle of wine.”

Alice smothered a laugh and replied, “A good bottle of wine? Where did you get it?”

“From Bellamy. Where else?”

I ducked my head and proceeded to wolf down the French toast, hunkering over the chipped enamel plate like Bellamy must've done when he was a kid in the orphanage. Bellamy had said that in order to eat the food on your plate, you had to protect it with your fists.

Life was precious; the wine I'd procured from Bellamy
for a box of illegal Black Talon bullets would taste sweet on my day off. My first day off in three weeks. The breakfast dishes could wait. We were going to unplug the telephone and drink a bottle of wine.

“Do you want your vitamins? I got some new ones for you,” she said.

Alice was keen on pills; she made me take a multitude of assorted minerals and supplements, saying they would bolster my performance on the job and in our bed. If Alice wanted me to take vitamins, enabling me to outrun speeding bullets and nab fleet-footed robbers, I wasn't averse to the proposition. I put the fork down on the plate, and gazed at Alice with a mask of total exhaustion written over the forty-seven years on my face. I said, “Get me the corkscrew, will you? And a couple of glasses for us.”

I watched her back as she opened the cabinet above the stove. There were a lot of voices in my head. I saw my own survival as a sunset; fuchsia flamed, mushroom clouded, and getting dark very fast. A day off from the job, from the soul breaking margins of the Mission's streets was a reprieve. Better yet, it was an extension on life itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

a
man in a sleeveless undershirt was dumping garbage from a third story window in the building across the way. The stuff landed on the sidewalk and it didn't take long before she could smell it. The guy looked like he'd never seen the sun a day in his life. He was white in a deep-sea fish sort of way. He poked his head out the window, looked down at the garbage strewn on the sidewalk, yawned and scratched his neck. He stared at the trash on the pavement for a second, withdrew his head, and slammed the window shut.

She turned around and stared at the bed. Free Box had told her to go out and look for a job. She didn't know where he was at the moment, which was good. Because there weren't any jobs.

This realization didn't change the fact that they needed money. She didn't have any choice in the matter. Barbie glared at the pantyhose on the bed. They didn't
match the dress she wanted to wear. The pantyhose were sheer white, something she'd stolen from a clothing store run by Honduran
evangelicos
on Mission Street. The dress was a plaid cotton shift with a tacky vinyl belt. The dress looked good on her, but she didn't have the proper colored shoes to go with the shift.

 

She had to get her hands on some cash. Maybe she'd pull a job; the stakes were high and the risk was great, but so were the rewards. She liked money: who didn't? But it was work that she hated to the bone. She'd go out tomorrow, or maybe the day after. Barbie picked up the cotton shift, held it to her nose. She removed her bra and stepped out of her underpants. Then she glanced across the room to a mirror leaning against the far wall.

There was something about staring into a mirror when she didn't have any clothes on that excited her. She wasn't sure if she was pretty, or if that even mattered. What she owned was a winning smile. Her breasts were good enough to attract attention which, from time to time, she didn't mind, depending on who was doing the watching.

Barbie turned sideways, threw her head back and flexed a leg. Without thinking about what she was doing, she let her hands drift down past her stomach. Once her fingertips got entangled with her pubic hair, her nerve endings started to issue commands that she had to obey. The needs of her body were so demanding, her mind didn't dare to interfere.

She reached into her slit, nudged the lips apart with a thumb and forefinger. She touched her clitoris with a
three stroke motion that went from her lips to her walls, then back to her clit. She inserted one finger, then two more before she groaned. She bent forward from the waist, letting her hair fall across her face. A flush of blood was rising from her slit, rippling across her stomach and speeding toward her heart.

“Barbie? I thought you were going out to look for work.”

She turned around. Free Box was standing in the doorway. To her relief, he didn't seem concerned by what she was doing. She withdrew her fingers from their nest. She didn't know where to put them. She held them out to Free Box, asking him, “Do you want to smell them?”

He took three steps toward her, glanced at the clothes on the bed and floor and smiled. “Why not?”

 

She smoothed the wrinkles in the sheets and straightened out the blankets for her and Free Box to lay down on. He kicked off his massacred tennis shoes, throwing his skeletal butt down onto the mattress with an audible grunt. It made her laugh, something that was hard to do on an empty stomach.

He wrapped his legs around her, and she told him, “I could stay in bed all day. There is something about this house that makes me feel like that. Do you know what I mean?”

“No,” he said. “I don't.”

She ignored him, and continued talking.

“This building knows we're here. Don't ask me how, because I don't know. I wonder how it feels about us.
Architecture is such a strange thing,” she sighed. “I think it's the last great religion of our times. This place is getting under my skin, and the funny thing is, I don't know why. I don't know who lived here before us. I don't know anything about them. But they're here. They're still here with us.”

She fell quiet and stretched out beside him on the mattress, idly touching the hair on his chest. The abandoned building creaked; Barbie and Free Box listened to the sound. She turned to him.

“Can you put your arm around me? Yeah, there.”

Free Box laid back on the bed and gazed at the cracks in the ceiling. If he stared at them long enough, he'd hallucinate; he was that hungry. He couldn't remember when he'd eaten last.

“We're safe here,” Barbie murmured. “Nothing bad will happen to us. This building will take good care of us, I just know it.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

a
one legged homeless man stopped the squad car at the intersection of Eighteenth and Mission in front of Wang Fat's Fish Market. I leaned out the window and gave the guy a dime and a nickel. I floored the gas pedal and we drove off in a cloud of smoke down Mission Street.

Everything in the road possessed a low grade, low rent, super-8 film texture. I was on the same wave length. I sensed the devil moving around inside of myself. The devil was in my lungs every time I smoked a low-tar cigarette; the devil was in my mouth whenever I fielded an interview with a citizen in the street. The devil was just a part of myself, another voice I'd discovered in my head.

Wielding the steering wheel like I was a Roman charioteer, I hung a left off Mission Street, rolling nice and easy without any problem up Nineteenth Street toward the next block on Lexington.

Bellamy propped his elbows on the dashboard,
coughed once, then said, “See that driveway, Coddy? In there.”

 

We got out of the squad car simultaneously, twins born from the same mold. Everything he did, I did. Bellamy pointed his face toward the house, a two story, paint faded Victorian. A dog was barking somewhere on the first floor of the building. All the curtains in the place were drawn tightly shut, as were all the windows. He said, “Let's go around back. There's a path.”

First, Bellamy at a quick pace, then myself, followed the cement walk that paralleled the driveway to the rear of the Victorian. A large palm tree loomed over the house and part of the backyard, casting a spider web's shadow over us. Infinitesimal sized palm frond shavings dropped on our riot helmets; I could hear rats in the palm tree.

At the end of the quiet path was a gate surrounded by seven-foot-tall bamboo rushes. The bamboo was bright green, tinged with silver, spilling onto the path. A woman speaking in Chinese, and a young girl's suppressed giggle came from the other side. Bellamy swatted a bamboo rush away from his face and opened the gate. A quartet of galvanized steel garbage cans were brimming with corncobs, carrot pulp, cabbage leaves and spinach stalks. A short, stocky woman in a red jumper looked up from a stack of dishes in a wash basin and screamed.

“I'm a police officer, ma'am,” Bellamy explained, startled.

The woman started to yell louder.

A wiry man with long hair tumbling to his shoulders
came running out of a garage door; two kids peeked their noses from the doorway behind him. There was a pile of dirty dishes on a picnic table near an outdoor brass spigot. A clothes hanger was draped on a barred window to the left of the door. A plastic gallon jug on the ground appeared to be filled with a liquid resembling urine.

“They don't have no toilet,” Bellamy said, getting mottled, embarrassed, blood heightened cheeks. “See that jug? They piss into that. And look at this.”

He pointed at the dirty dishes; the faucet was leaking water steadily into the basin. I assessed the man and the woman, the two kids standing behind them. They, too, existed with the devil around them. I could see it in their eyes. The woman's eyes were yellow, not from jaundice, but from lack of sleep.

“What do you expect me to do about it, Bells?”

“We just can't leave them here. They're living in a backyard, man.”

“They're lucky not to be in the streets. I say we give them a break and leave them alone. Maybe they'll manage on their own.”

“And what if they don't make it?” Bellamy challenged.

I gazed at him with pity. “We're cops, Bells. Do I have to remind you of that? We can't help anyone until we learn to help ourselves.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

d
octor Dick woke up prickly under the Scandia down comforter. Patsy had gotten it on sale at the Whole Earth Access store on Bayshore. He didn't know if he liked the comforter or not, and for a second, he wasn't sure of his bearings. He was having a lot of trouble getting proper sleep since they'd had the kids.

He didn't feel cold toward Malcolm or Celeste, nothing like that. But the responsibility of child rearing was doing him in; he just couldn't handle it. Instinctively, he reached for Patsy. She could have been in another galaxy for all that it mattered. She was snoring on the other side of the futon with her back turned to him; a picture of classic alienation sealed inside a vast, hermetic unconsciousness.

The wind was scratching against the window. It was a dry, hot wind, not unlike the Santa Ana winds in Southern California. A wind so dry, you couldn't sweat, no matter how hot you were. On the street, a dog was barking in
mournful, repetitive bursts. The cur sounded insane with loneliness.

The whole world with everyone in it was suffering from anxiety. That's what had woken him up; the totality of humanity's discontent. It was a pain in his guts, and the doctor could never get away from it.

He laid there for what felt like an hour, getting nowhere with his nocturnal ruminations. He'd been awake for so long, staring into the darkened bedroom, he didn't think he could fall back asleep. He closed his eyes under the pretext that he could at least try to rest. But his mind kept racing back and forth between two poles: Patsy in the bed next to him, and Patsy when they first got married. Thirty seconds later, he was fast asleep.

 

He was standing in an empty, barren hallway. He'd been on duty for the last twenty hours. He needed a shave and a cup of tea. The patients in the intensive care ward were crying for meds and water. He could hear them through the walls. Where was the nurse? The doctor looked down at the floor. A dollop of fresh blood was shining on the linoleum at his feet. He inspected the blood for a moment. The red arterial liquid was a hypnotic sight, but he didn't like it. His face darkened with anger; whenever you needed a nurse, you could never find one.

The doctor heard two male voices arguing heatedly out of sight in a nearby room. He took off walking, not thinking about where he was going.

The first person he saw in the corridor was an orderly wheeling a geriatric towards the incinerator room.

“Where are you taking her?” the doctor asked when he came within earshot.

He approached the wheelchair, cleared his throat and examined the geriatric with a cursory gaze that was cruel, and which bordered upon disinterest. The patient was wrapped up in adhesive bandages like a mummy.