The Losers (12 page)

When he finished the letter, he sat waiting for the pain to begin, for the memories with their little knives to begin on him; but they did not. It was past now. Not even this had any power to hurt him.

His apartment, however, was intolerable suddenly, and although it was raining hard outside, he pulled on his coat and prepared to go down to the bus stop.

For only a moment, just before he went out, there was a racking sense of unspeakable loss, but it passed quickly as he stepped out onto the rain-swept rooftop.

Willie the Walker, grimly determined, strode past the bus stop, the beaded rain glistening on his coat and dripping from the brim of his hat. Raphael smiled as he went by.

Across the street there was another walker, a tall, thin-faced young Indian moving slowly but with no less purpose. The Indian’s gait was measured, almost fluidly graceful, and in perhaps a vague gesture toward ethnic pride, he wore moccasins, silent on the pavement. His dark face was somber, even savagely melancholy. His long black hair gleamed wetly in the rain, and he wore a black patch over his left eye.

Raphael watched him pass. The Indian moved on down to the end of the block, turned the corner, and was gone. It kept on raining.

iv

By mid-April, the weather had broken. It was still chilly at night and occasionally there was frost; but the afternoons were warm, and the winter-browned grass began to show patches of green. There was a tree in the yard of the house where Crazy Charlie lived, and Raphael watched the leaf buds swell and then, like tight little green fists, slowly uncurl.

He began walking again—largely at the insistence of his therapist. His shirts were growing tight across the chest and shoulders as the muscles developed from the exercises at his therapy sessions and the continuing effort of walking. His stamina improved along with his strength and agility, and he soon found that he was able to walk what before would have seemed incredible distances. While he was out he would often see Willie the Walker and less frequently the patch-eyed Indian. He might have welcomed conversation with either of them, but Willie walked too fast, and Patch, the Indian, was too elusive.

On a sunny afternoon when the air was cool and the trees had almost all leafed out, he was returning home and passed the cluttered yard of a house just up the block from his apartment building. A stout, florid-faced man wheeled up on a bicycle and into the yard.

“Hey,” he called to someone in the house, “come and get this stuff.”

A worn-looking woman came out of the house and stood looking at him without much interest.

“I got some pretty good stuff,” the stout man said with a bubbling enthusiasm. “Buncha cheese at half price—it’s only a little moldy—and all these dented cans of soup at ten cents each. Here.” He handed the woman the bag from the carrier on the bicycle. “I gotta hurry,” he said. “They put out the markdown stuff at the Safeway today, an’ I wanna get there first before it’s all picked over.” He turned the bicycle around and rode off. The woman looked after him, her expression unchanged.

Raphael moved on. His own supply of food was low, he knew that, and there was a Safeway store only a few blocks away. He crutched along in the direction the man on the bicycle had gone.

The store was not very large, but it was handy, and the people seemed friendly. The stout man’s bicycle was parked out front when Raphael got there.

It was not particularly busy inside as Raphael had feared that it might be, and so he got a shopping cart and, nudging it along the aisles ahead of him with his crutches, he began picking up the items he knew he needed.

Back near the bread department the stout man was pawing through a large basket filled with dented cans and taped-up boxes of cereal. His florid face was intent, and his eyes brightened each time he picked up something that seemed particularly good to him. A couple of old ladies were shamefacedly loitering nearby, waiting for him to finish so that they might have their turns.

Raphael finished his shopping and got into line behind the stout man with his cartful of damaged merchandise. The man paid for his purchases with food stamps and triumphantly carried them out to his bicycle.

“Does he come in often?” Raphael asked the clerk at the cash register.

“Bennie the Bicycler?” the clerk said with an amused look. “All the rime. He makes the rounds of every store in this part of town every day. If he’d spend half as much time looking for work as he does looking for bargains, his
family
could have gotten off welfare years ago.” The clerk was a tall man in his midthirties with a constantly amused expression on his face.

“Why do you call him that?” Raphael asked, almost startled by the similarity to the little name tags he himself used to describe the people on his block.

The clerk shrugged. “It’s a personal quirk,” he said, starting to ring up Raphael’s groceries. “There’s a bunch of regulars who come in here. I don’t know their names, so I just call them whatever pops into my mind.” He looked around, noting that no one else was in line or standing nearby. “This place is a zoo,” he said to Raphael in a confidential tone. “All the weirdos come creeping out of Welfare City over there.” He gestured vaguely off in the direction of the large area of run-down housing that lay to the west of the store. “We get ‘em all—all the screwballs in town. I’ve been trying to get a transfer out of this rat trap for two years.”

“I imagine it gets depressing after a while.”

“That just begins to describe it,” the clerk replied, rolling his eyes comically. “Need anything else?”

“No,” Raphael replied, paying for his groceries. “Is there someplace where I can call a cab?”

“I’ll have the girl do it for you.” The clerk turned and called down to the express lane. “Joanie, you want to call a cab?”

“Thanks,” Raphael said.

“No biggie. It’ll be here in a couple of minutes. Have a good one, okay?”

Raphael nudged his cart over near the door and waited. It felt good to be able to talk with people again. When he had first come out of the hospital, his entire attention had been riveted upon the missing leg, and he had naturally assumed that everyone who saw him was concentrating on the same thing. He began to realize now that after the initial reaction, people were not really that obsessed by it. The clerk had taken no particular notice of it, and the two of them had talked like normal people.

A cab pulled up, and the driver got out, wincing in obvious pain. He limped around the cab as Raphael pushed his cart out of the store. The driver’s left foot was in a slipper, and there was an elastic bandage around his grotesquely swollen ankle.

“Oh, man,” the driver said, looking at Raphael in obvious dismay. “I
told
that half-wit at dispatch that I couldn’t handle any grocery-store calls today.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I sprained my damn ankle. I can drive okay, but there’s no way I could carry your stuff in for you when we get you home. Lemme get on the radio and have ‘em send another cab.” He hobbled back around the cab again and picked up his microphone. After a couple minutes he came back. “What a sere wed-up outfit. Everybody else is tied up. Be at least three quarters of an hour before anybody else could get here. You got stairs to climb?”

“Third floor.”

“Figures. Would you believe I did this on a goddamn
skateboard?
Would you
believe
that shit? My kid was showin’ me how to ride the damn thing.” He shook his head and then looked across the parking lot at a group of children passing on the sidewalk. “Tell you what. School just let out. I’ll knock a buck off the fare, and we’ll give the buck to a kid to haul your stuff up for you.”

“I could wait,” Raphael offered, starting to feel ashamed of his helplessness.

“Naw, you don’t wanna stand around for three quarters of an hour. Let’s go see if we can find a kid.”

They put Raphael’s two bags of groceries in the cab and then both got in.

“You know,” the driver said, wheeling out of the lot, “if I’d been smart, I’d have called in sick this morning, but I can’t afford to lose the rime. I wish to hell the bastard who invented skateboards had one shoved up his ass.”

Raphael laughed. He still felt good.

They pulled up in front of the apartment house, and the driver looked around. “There’s one,” he said, looking in the rearview mirror.

The boy was about fourteen, and he wore a ragged denim vest gaudy with embroidery and metal studs. He had long, greasy hair and a smart-sullen sneer on his face. They waited until he had swaggered along the sidewalk to where the cab sat.

“Hey, kid,” the driver called to him.

“What?” the boy asked insolently.

“You wanna make a buck?”

“Doin’ what?”

“Haul a couple sacks of groceries upstairs.” “Maybe I’m busy.”

“Sure you are. Skip it then. There’s another kid just up the street.”

The boy looked quickly over his shoulder and saw another boy on a bicycle. “Okay. Gimme the dollar.”
“After
the groceries are upstairs.” The boy glowered at him.

Raphael paid the driver and got out of the cab. The boy got the groceries. “These are
heavy,
man,” he complained.

“It’s just up those stairs.” Raphael pointed.

The cab drove off, and the boy looked at Raphael, his eyes narrowing.

“I’ll go up first,” Raphael told him. “I’ll have to unlock the door at the top.”

“Let’s go, man. I ain’t got all day.”

Raphael went to the stairs and started up. Halfway to the top, he realized that the boy was not behind him. He turned and went back down as quickly as he could.

The boy was already across the street, walking fast, with the two bags of groceries hugged in his arms. “Hey!” Raphael shouted at him.

The boy looked back and cackled a high-pitched laugh.

“Come back here!” Raphael shouted, suddenly consumed with an overwhelming fury as he realized how completely helpless he was.

The boy laughed again and kept on going.

“You dirty little son of a bitch!” a harsh voice rasped from the porch of the house directly across the street from Raphael’s apartment. A small, wizened man stumbled down the steps from the porch and staggered out to the sidewalk. “You come back here or I’ll kick the shit outta ya!”

The boy began to run.

“Goddamn little bastard!” the small man roared in a huge voice. He started to run after the boy, but after a couple dozen steps he staggered again and fell down. Raphael stood grinding his teeth in frustrated anger as he watched the boy disappear around the corner.

The small man lay helplessly on the sidewalk, bellowing drunken obscenities in his huge rasping voice.

V

After several minutes the wizened little man regained his feet and staggered over to where Raphael stood. “I’m sorry, old buddy,” he said in his foghorn voice. “I’da caught the little bastard for ya, but I’m just too goddamn drunk.”

“It’s all right,” Raphael said, still trying to control the helpless fury he felt.

“I seen the little sumbitch around here before,” the small man said, weaving back and forth. “He’s always creepin’ up an’ down the alleys, lookin’ to steal stuff. I’ll lay fer ‘im—catch ‘im one day an’ stomp the piss outta the little shit.” The small man’s face was brown and wrinkled, and there was dirt ingrained in the wrinkles. He had a large, purplish wen on one cheek and a sparse, straggly mustache, pale red—although his short-cropped hair was brown. His eyes had long since gone beyond bloodshot, and his entire body exuded an almost overpoweringly acrid reek of stale wine. His clothes were filthy, and his fly was unzipped. In many ways he resembled a very dirty, very drunk banty rooster.

“Them was your groceries, wasn’t they?” the small man demanded.

Raphael drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He realized that he was trembling, and that angered him even more. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, even though it did.

“Was that the last of your money?”

“No.”

“I got a idea. I’ll go get my truck, an’ we’ll go look fer that little bastard.”

Raphael shook his head. “I think it’s too late. We’d never catch him now.”

The little man swore.

“I’ll have to go back to the store, I guess.” “I’ll take you in my truck, an’ men Sam’ll take your groceries upstairs for ya.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t hafta.” The little man’s voice was almost pugnacious. “I
wanna
do it. You come along with me.” He grabbed at Raphael’s arm, almost jerking him off balance. “We’re neighbors, goddammit, an’ neighbors oughta help each other out.”

At that moment Raphael would have preferred to have been alone. He felt soiled—even ashamed—as a result of the theft, but there was no withstanding the drunken little man’s belligerent hospitality. Almost helplessly he allowed himself to be drawn into the ramshackle house across the street.

“My name’s Tobe Benson,” the small man said as they went up on the creaking porch.

“Rafe Taylor.”

They went inside and were met by a furnace blast of heat. The inside of the house was unbelievably filthy. Battered furniture sat in the small, linoleum-floored living room, and the stale wine reek was overwhelming. They went on through to the dining room, which seemed to be the central living area of the house. An old iron heating stove shimmered off heat that seemed nearly solid. The floor was sticky with spilled wine and food, and a yellow dog lay under the table, gnawing on a raw bone. Other bones lay in the corners of the room, the meat clinging to them black with age.

A large gray-haired man sat at the table with a bottle of wine in front of him. He wore dirty bib overalls and a stupefied expression. He looked up, smiling vaguely through his smudged glasses.

“That there’s Sam,” Tobe said in his foghorn voice. “Sam, this here’s Rafe. Lives across the street. Some little punk bastard just stole all his groceries. It’s a goddamn shame when a poor crippled fella like Rafe here ain’t safe from all the goddamn little thieves in this town.”