Soon the Rest Will Fall (3 page)

A weatherman from the local evangelical AM radio station attributed the heat wave to the city's sins. The high temperatures were machinations of the devil. Only Jesus Christ could stop the heat. Listeners were asked to pray for rain.

At the bus station on First and Mission the lazy wind did a mazurka with the sidewalk's trash. A dozen sea gulls loitered at the curb. A band of homeless guys corralled their shopping carts in the parking lot. The custodian was sweeping the doorway with a broom. The clerk in the ticket booth played Christmas jazz on a tape machine.

Harriet Grogan leaned against the soft drink machine in the lobby, styling a madras cotton shift and low-heeled yellow patent-leather mules. A pea green ribbon held her ash blonde hair in a lank ponytail. A dab of mascara and a touch of scarlet lipstick accented her deep-set brown eyes and generous mouth. She had waxed her slender legs to celebrate Robert's homecoming.

She'd been a prison widow for three years, one eighth of her life so far, which was no victory, especially at her age. The only good thing about it was Robert had been in San
Quentin. A visit was just a short ride over the Golden Gate Bridge. It didn't cost much. Which had been a break. Most pens in California were hundreds of miles from any city.

Pelican Bay State Prison was the bottom of the barrel. The maximum-security penitentiary was in the boondocks near the Oregon border. Greyhound had discontinued its bus routes into the area. It took a week to get there.

Her counselor at the Haight-Ashbury Psychological Services Center on Hayes Street said she and Robert were codependent. That was the word the shrink used. Codependent. Made it sound like an infection. Which wasn't far from the truth. Harriet had tested positive for tuberculosis because of Robert. Her mother was on the warpath about him. “Your husband is a goddamn loser,” she claimed. “Drop him and move on before it's too late.”

Maybe she'd do that and maybe she wouldn't. It wasn't like she hadn't thought of divorcing Robert's ass. It had crossed her mind more than a million times. For now, Harriet didn't know what to do. That depended on him.

A tiny girl in an oversized Brown University sweatshirt, cut-off jeans, and sneakers looked up at Harriet and blinked twice. Her round knees were knobby and scraped raw. Her almond-shaped eyes were the color of muddy water. Her blank white face was painted with freckles. Her straight flaxen hair was shaved to the scalp. She chirped, “Mommy?”

Harriet studied the child, taking in her sharp features. Diana looked just like her father. Had the same bad posture, shifty eyes, and penal paleness, and the same ornery vibe. She'd been doing poorly at school. Lagging behind her classmates in reading and writing. Fighting with the
teachers. If Harriet ever dumped Robert, the kid was going with him. “What is it, babykins?”

“Is Daddy coming soon?”

“Any minute.”

“Is he going to be nice?”

All nerves, Harriet searched her purse for a breath mint. “I can't say.”

“Why not?”

“Because he's a strange motherfucker.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we'll just have to wait and see what he does.”

The bus from San Rafael thundered into the parking lot. The coach docked at a bay, and a string of passengers disembarked. First to emerge was a group of teenage mothers and their kids. Following them was a gaggle of Boy Scouts. Then came two longhaired bums with backpacks. Clutching his pillowcase, Robert brought up the rear.

He was in a white Hanes T-shirt and battered engineer boots, Ben Davis jeans and a motorcycle chain belt. A rumpled orange and blue polyester ski jacket was over his bony shoulders. Imitation Ray-Ban sunglasses were perched on his skinned head. Tooling through the lobby to Harriet and the kid, he planted a kiss on his wife's cheek. “Merry Christmas, baby.”

She threw her arms around his waist and squeezed tight. “You glad to see me, daddy?”

He saw no reason to lie. Not yet. That would come later. As if it were raining buckets. He dropped the pillowcase at her feet. “Yeah, honey, I am.”

“Swear on it?”

For the second time in twenty-four hours somebody was asking Robert to take an oath. First Slatts and now
Harriet. He wasn't hip to it. It was an omen. It signified that certain people he was intimate with didn't trust him. Kissing her again, now on the mouth, he said, “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Robert reflected on the promise he'd made to Slatts. His boyfriend was getting out of the clink in fourteen days. Which was way too soon. It wasn't enough time for him to get organized. How was he going to tell his wife about their affair? He didn't know. Robert was diving into uncharted waters, and it scared the tarnation out of him.

Harriet plucked at his sleeve. “I want to reintroduce you to somebody.” The wind toyed with her ponytail and made it swish back and forth on her shoulders. She nudged the girl forward, presenting her to Robert. “This is your daughter. The fruit of your loins. Do you remember her?”

He was horrified. His old lady was a real comedian. She was funny enough to have her own show on television. Just because he hadn't been around the kid for three years, didn't mean he'd forgotten about her. “Yeah, I remember everything.”

“She just had her seventh birthday. I guess you remember that, too.”

 

The public address system in the Greyhound station announced the departure of a bus, an express to Reno. Beads of sweat glittered on Robert's pate. He stared at the kid—she was no taller than his belt buckle—and saw a mirror of his own mug. She was his spitting image. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. A shiver ran the length of his spine. He had a hunch about Christmas.
Much as he dreaded the holiday, it was a chance to bond with his wife and child, to be a husband and father to them. Then he had a fearful thought—Slatts wouldn't cotton to it.

The Trinity Plaza Apartments was a 377-unit building at the corner of Eighth and Market, a memento to Cold War architecture with a flat roof and functional Bauhaus lines. The tenants were retirees, restaurant and laundry workers, single moms on the dole, and low-end office employees. Typical of many older dwellings on Market Street, the complex was slated for demolition in January.

Harriet and Robert's one-bedroom apartment was on the second floor. The living room was furnished with mustard-colored shag carpeting, a Sears and Roebuck couch upholstered in gray vinyl, a glass coffee table with brass legs, and a portable television. The kitchen had a four-burner gas stove, a self-defrosting refrigerator, a yellow formica-topped dining table, and four chairs. The balcony overlooked the UN Plaza, the Orpheum Theater, and the public library.

The parking lot at the Trinity Plaza Apartments was a graveyard of vehicles and dunes of trash bags. The buckled asphalt was littered with broken glass. In the center of it was Robert's ride, a secondhand two-tone Hillman sedan. The car's gray and red paint job glowered in the smog-encrusted sunlight.

In the afternoon Robert curled up on the living room couch with Harriet. The window shades were drawn. The air conditioner struggled against the heat. Robert had the parole lady's number in his pocket, but a force field of lethargy stopped him from calling her. He just couldn't get himself to do it. He had no energy. It was too damn hot. Talking to that broad could wait.

He explained his strategy to Harriet. “Now that I'm out of the joint, I plan to stay away from the police and the criminal element. I've turned over a new leaf.” Done with his speech, he asked for her approval. “What do you say to that?”

Parole was akin to reentering the stratosphere after being in deep space. There were several dimensions to it. There were the traps the cops placed in a felon's path, hoping that he'd self-destruct. Then there was the process of getting reacquainted with one's spouse. Either way, a dude couldn't afford to make any mistakes.

Harriet held his hand and wondered when she and Robert were going to have sex again. It had been thirty-six months. She was concerned. “I hope so, daddy.”

 

A couple of hours later, Robert Grogan was steering the sedan east on Market toward the piers at the Embarcadero. A platinum moon hovered over Market Street. It welled above the fog and the heat and backlighted the Golden Gate Theater against a blue velvet sky. Half the storefronts between the Burger King on Eighth Street and Hallidie Plaza were abandoned. The shoe store at Sixth and Market was gutted. Merrill's drugstore was closed down. Play Fascination had shuttered its doors. The St. Francis Theater was boarded up. Spear points of fog drifted offshore from Rincon Hill into the bay.

Robert had an open can of beer between his legs, driving with his right hand on the wheel and smoking a cigarette with his bad hand. Harriet was riding shotgun; her hair was pulled back in pigtails. Their daughter was in the backseat wearing tennis shorts and a Ramones T-shirt. Robert looked at her in the rearview mirror and did a double take. The brat had the grill of a hardened convict, colder than the bore of a sawed-off shotgun. Her eyes were ancient. She intercepted his gaze and flipped him the bird. He asked Harriet, nodding at the kid, “How come she has a shaved head?”

Harriet shrugged. “It's what she wants. To be just like you.”

“Is she a tomboy?”

“Why don't you ask her?”

“Because she ain't talking to me.”

The floor in the backseat was piled high with weapons—a pump-action Mossberg shotgun, a bolt-action Winchester 30-06, and a Browning semiautomatic rifle. Robert had gotten his rifles from storage and put them in the car. Guns were his first love, hunting his vocation.

He hung a right and followed Third Street over the Lefty O'Doul Bridge, past the Mariposa Yacht Club, the dry docks in India Basin, and the nightclubs at Mission Rock. He drove south beyond the abandoned Potrero Hill police station, the pump house at Islais Creek, the post office in Bayview, the Hunters Point housing projects, and the Cow Palace.

A mile outside the city's limits, he pulled the sedan off the road near the Southern Pacific rail yard. Lights stretched from Visitacion Valley over to Mount Davidson. The control towers at the international airport scintillated
on the shoreline. The San Mateo Bridge was luminous with car headlights. Over the water the burgs of Fremont and Hayward were penciled yellow in the fog.

The faint grooves of a dirt track on the eastern slope of San Bruno Mountain were visible in the moonlight. Robert chased the trail to the mount's bald crest. Off to the west Fort Funston's ramparts and the streets of suburban Daly City were coated in mist. The ocean surf boomed under the bluffs for miles. At the top of the hill he shut off the ignition and let the sedan coast to a stop in a fallow cow pasture.

It occurred to Harriet that he was up to no good. “What are you doing? I thought you were taking us somewhere pleasant.”

Robert sat motionless behind the driver's wheel. The salty air made him giddy, mad with glee. Prison hadn't smelled this good. For a long time nothing had. Not even Slatts. He intoned, “There's deer out here, babe. Millions of them.”

His wife wasn't getting it. “What are you talking about?”

“You heard me. Deer.”

“Deer?”

“That's right. They're going to come out and nibble on the straw in this field. When they do, I'm going to get me one and shoot its ass.”

Harriet was skeptical. “The deer in these parts are dead. This is San Francisco.”

He rebuked her. “You forget you're talking to a professional.” Her husband's coarse skin was oily and prison pale; his brown eyes were electric in their sockets. “I can conjure up a deer. Just watch me.”

Taking a final swig of beer, Robert reached over the seat and scooped up his Winchester bolt-action rifle. A tingle ran through his fingers as he caressed its polished maple stock. He pushed open the driver's door; the reek of alluvial soil and rotting ferns gusted in. Winchester in hand, he gamboled out of the sedan. A coyote was caterwauling on the hill. “I'll be back shortly,” he said. “You and the girl chill out.”

“I don't like this, Robert. It ain't smart.”

“Sweetie, don't worry about a thing. Trust daddy, okay? Is he ever wrong?”

Harriet watched him move into the fog and then lit a Parliament cigarette. Well, she rued. Things were back to normal. Before Robert went to prison, he always dragged her to places like this. Forests. Gullies. Hilltops. Ravines. Swamps. Thickets. It was his notion of romance. Having a chick in the car and a gun in his arms. Robert was a hunter who saw everything that moved as potential food and cash. Hunting boar in upstate New York or alligators in the swamps of Florida—for every season, there was a different geographic destination and new game to slaughter. Fuck him, she thought.

 

Robert knew his deer. How their minds worked. What they wanted. What they hated. Getting adjusted to the gloom, he glanced around. It was too hazy to do any shooting. Couldn't see for shit in the fog. And something was off. The vibe wasn't right. The hair on his neck bristled. Before he could fathom what it meant, flashlights cut across the field and touched on his sallow face.

He lifted the Winchester to his shoulder. Figures were running across the hillside toward him. It was an ambush.
He was in hot water. It was just his luck. Lowering the weapon, he sputtered, “Goddamn, they got me again.”

A brassy voice rang out: “This is the police! Put that gun down, asshole! We've been waiting for you, fucking poacher!”

A dozen cops burst from the shadows and surrounded Robert. His reputation had preceded him. His movements were well known to the local lawmen. A flashlight was aimed in his face, illuminating his acne scars and underscoring every sleepless night he'd had in the pen. Knowing it was all over, he surrendered with a listless shrug and raised his hands. A foolish grin crept across his supple mouth.