Police and Thieves: A Novel (20 page)

It was Flaherty.

With the instinct of a cow seeking the shelter of the herd, I went back into the party. I collided with Eichmann inside the door, and he protested vociferously. “Hey, what’s with you?”

I turned around and pointed at Flaherty. The narc had the Smith and Wesson in his gloved hand, and he was holding the
chromed piece high in the air. The music stopped without warning, leaving Loretta’s scream as the only sound in the room.

Because Flaherty was blocking the entrance to the storefront, nobody could get out. He aimed the Smith and Wesson in my direction. Eichmann was shouting at his guests to get down on the floor. Everything was moving slowly, how it always did when I was scared. Eichmann wrestled Loretta to the ground, getting on top of her. Flaherty and I were the only ones left standing when he pulled the trigger.

The bullet came out of the pistol’s muzzle rotating in decelerated motion, exaggerating the distance between the narc and myself. It would take forever to get to me.

Being the sage of the family, Doojie Sr. said having it out with a police officer was no great sin. He saw it as a burden every man had to shoulder. In his cosmos, there were only two kinds of people, the hunters and the hunted. He was at the low end of the food chain because he was in perpetual trouble with the police in Daly City. “It’s like getting a deer,” he said. “You have to take a buck by surprise because it’s smart, but you’re smarter.”

To increase my intelligence, he purchased a .22 magnum deer rifle for me on my eighth birthday. It was a bolt-action piece with a parkerized barrel. The stock was made from light maple oiled to a beautiful golden color. “I’m not into unnecessary killing,” he told me with pride. “What I shoot I eat.”

The only time he was able to focus all of his energies and harmonize them was when he was sighting a deer over the barrel of his favorite hunting rifle. Laying his cheek on the stock of the gun, his finger picking at the duct tape on the trigger guard, he’d whisper, “You have to do it cleanly and take them out with one shot. If you just wound them, you poison the meat because they get frightened. They ain’t fit to eat. I hate it when that happens.”

When he took me hunting in Tunitas, we went out to the glades where the deer came to feed at dawn and at twilight. Before we did anything else, he escorted me to a field with a couple of redwood pines. There he gathered a small pile of pine needles and lit them with his Zippo cigarette lighter. When the needles were smoking, he’d say to me, “Come over here and get this smudge on you. Rub it all over your body like you’re cleaning yourself. Get rid of your human scent. That way, the deer won’t know you’re there.”

Deer trails were faint and ran up and down the sides of hills, belying the animal’s agility. Doojie Sr. ran ahead with his face set in a scowl as he examined the spoor in the ravines. I lagged behind him, weighed down by the Browning automatic rifle and two pocketfuls of .308 ammo. The cartridges looked like small brass missiles in my hands.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s get in the trees.”

He boosted me up into the limbs of a black oak tree, then he handed me the Browning and a Winchester lever-action rifle. Certain I had the guns safely in my arms, he heaved himself onto the branch next to me. “I don’t like that Winchester,” he complained. “Those lever actions aren’t accurate, but that’s what we got to work with.”

Below us on the ground were the scratchings of a deer lane. A few turds lay like black berries near a rash of clover. A squirrel was circling the tree’s trunk, chittering. For Doojie Sr. this was paradise. He rested the Browning against a branch by his left hand. The Winchester lay across his lap, cocked and ready. All we needed was a deer.

Jail was something he brought up discreetly, the way one talked about inclement weather. He did it with trepidation, tripping over his own thoughts, making it obvious he wasn’t sure how to summarize what he’d been through in prison. “It’s like this,” he explained to me, stroking the well-worn stock of the Winchester.
“I blew off my fingers at my dad’s place. That started the ball rolling. Then I got into breaking and entering. I acquired some guns that way and I went out and sold them. The rest is history. I’ve been marked, but it’s from the inside out. I’m not wearing any kind of sign that says I’m a criminal. I don’t look different from other folks. But when I check myself out in the mirror and look into my own eyes, that’s where I see it. Just for second. Who I am. Nobody else can see it except other guys like me and the cops. They see it, too. That’s not good, Doojie. The cops have got me wired.”

He nodded at me, wiping a strand of moss from his hair. A breeze was rushing through the oak tree, blowing leaves out into the field. “And Doojie?” he added. “You have to be careful. Because of me, something rubs off on you. I know it ain’t fair. But you get a reputation. And believe me, you don’t want a reputation.”

The bullet was now half way across the room, moving faster, boring down on me with a kamikaze drone. The narc crouched behind his smoking gun, watching its path. Eichmann and Loretta were facedown on the floor with the other party-goers. In the back of my mind, I heard my mother telling Doojie Sr., “See? I told you he would turn out like this.”

Her voice was reminiscent of the actresses in the World War II era movies I watched on television where every character was either a secret agent, a saboteur, or a beautiful refugee looking for the body of her dead lover. Her marriage to the Daly City outlaw had been exciting in the beginning, never knowing where your next meal would come from. With him, the food might be straight from the woods or from a Safeway supermarket.

Then there were the nights in the bars in South San Francisco, drinking with his poaching buddies. Big, tough men in flannel shirts and baseball hats wearing gore-crusted jeans who talked in one-syllable words. She was younger than most of his
crew, and sassy. She flirted with everybody and was able to have fun that way.

Doojie Sr. didn’t see it like that. The more he drank, the deeper he sank into self-conscious discomfort. She was too complicated, too Jewish for him. At home, she’d walk around the house in one of his white dress shirts and not much else, complaining about his alcoholism. The living room was covered with shell casings, gun-cleaning kits, bottles of solvent, extra magazines for the Browning automatic, and fancy beadwork scabbards for the other hunting rifles. On the walls hung several sets of deer antlers; fur pelts were scattered on the floor.

The drinking was getting to him, especially when he talked to her. A crescendo was reached the night she reminded him of his infidelity—the time he needed money to take them out to dinner at the Elk’s Club, so they went to his friend’s house, an old high school buddy named Paul. Doojie Sr. received a blow job and twenty dollars from Paul in his bedroom while she waited in the living room. “You stupid goy!” she cried. “I should have never married you!”

The slug zeroed in. It would enter me with an enormous hole and exit leaving an even larger one. Most of my life, I’d been waiting for this, a symmetry that’d never been there before. “You were such a lovely child,” my mother said. “What happened to you?”

The bullet was a foot away from my head, and with its arrival I saw my funeral. A special San Francisco funeral held in Golden Gate Park.

An organic wine bar had been set up on a table under a eucalyptus tree. Piles of whole wheat pita bread, goat-cheese wedges, bowls of arugula, carrot and celery sticks, and Tassajara sourdough bread were spread out on a checkered tablecloth. There was so much to eat, the mourners were asked to take the leftovers home with them.

Everyone I knew was in attendance. Roy drove down from Marin. Dee Dee was talking with candor, telling a crowd of strangers, “Doojie? He and I did business, but he was bad news. Hell, I can say without qualification, he was a thief. I’ve got me lots of people who can testify the man was a rip-off. If he’s moldering in his grave today, he got what was coming to him. Damn right, he did. No one fucks with me and gets away with it.”

Maurice had his own opinion, and he was glad to let everyone know it. Attired in a natty white linen suit and a thatched straw hat, he barged into a folding chair stacked with wheels of Gouda cheese, asking the people standing in line at the wine bar, “How many of you knew the deceased?”

Nobody answered my old foe, so with uncontested authority he said, “I watched Doojie get an unbalanced ego. He was the kind of guy you liked when you first met him, but as you got to know him, he was too moody, too intense, and you enjoyed him less.”

I didn’t see Eichmann anywhere. He wasn’t by the wine bar and he wasn’t circulating among the other guests. I felt betrayed. It was my funeral and the bastard wasn’t there.

Dee Dee was declaiming, “Doojie lost and we won.”

Louis was standing alone with his hands over his ears. In front of him was Flaherty. Both of them were staring at me. The bullet was so close to my nose, I saw every detail in its pitted soft-lead surface. How it was cut four ways at the tip, and how it bulged at the base, the sign of a hand-crafted reload—Flaherty made his own bullets. I wondered if he’d made this one for me, like a silver bullet for a werewolf.

My last conscious thought was a picture of the junkies blocking the stoop to the Crown Hotel on Valencia Street. They were swinging the steel-mesh security gate, crashing it into the window of the Laundromat next door. I said my thanks to Louis for his
friendship. I said thank you to Chad and Roy for improving our business with their donations. I sent out kudos to Bobo for braving the trenches with me. There was nothing in front of me and nothing in back of me. I had taken this as far as I could go. The bullet’s wind licked my face. I told myself, You better get out of here.

The fire’s creamy smoke made it hard for me to breathe. Flaherty worked the Smith and Wesson’s slide action, ejecting a shell casing. Louis flung himself toward the narc, making me think he was going to jump the man. Flaherty heard him and turned to see who it was, just as the bullet power-dived into the wall behind my head.

Dee Dee was right. I had lost something. A piece of myself, and I didn’t even know what it was.

All of a sudden I am running after Doojie Sr., who is stealing onto somebody’s property with a customized German Mauser slung across his back. He sees a No Trespassing sign and shakes his head. His scalp has been freshly shaved at a barbershop in Half Moon Bay. His OshKosh flannel shirt is tucked into his Ben Davis jeans. A forged hunting license is sticking out of his back pocket. He stops and puts a match in between his uneven teeth. Up ahead is a damp stand of coastal redwoods. The sun is petering out over the hills near La Honda. It’s late November and gets dark early. I call to him, “Don’t you want your cigarettes, Daddy?”

But he is beyond earshot and he cannot hear me.

PETER PLATE taught himself to write fiction during eight years spent squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of five previous novels,
Black Wheel of Anger
(1990),
Darkness Throws Down the Sun
(1991),
The Romance of the American Living Room
(1993),
One Foot Off the Gutter
(1995), and
Snitch Factory
(1997). Plate lives in San Francisco, where, at spoken word concerts or readings, he has been known to speak his novels from memory.