The Losers (15 page)

Raphael was quite pleased with his theory. It provided him with a convenient handle with which to grasp what would have otherwise been a seething and incomprehensible chaos on the streets below.

And then Patch went by again, followed by that strange hush that seemed always to fall over the neighborhood with his passage, and Raphael was not so sure of the theory. Into which category did Patch fit? He was totally unlike the others—an enigma whose dark, melancholy presence seemed somehow to disturb the losen as much as it did Raphael. Sometimes, after he had passed, Raphael felt that if he could only talk with the man—however briefly—it might all fit together, the whole thing might somehow fall into place. But Patch never stopped, never looked up, and was always gone before Raphael could call to him or do anything more than note his silent passage.

i

In the end Raphael took the job at Goodwill Industries more because he could find no reason not to than out of any real desire to work. The sour hunchback who was moving to Seattle to live with his sister taught him the rudiments of shoe repair and then, without a word, got up and left.

“Don’t worry about Freddie,” the pale girl with the dwarfed right arm said to him. “He’s been like that ever since his family ganged up on him and made him agree to move to Seattle.”

The girl seemed always to be hovering near the bench where Raphael worked, and her concern for him seemed at times almost motherly. She was a very fair young woman with long, ash-blond hair and a face that was almost, but not quite, pretty. Her name was Denise, and Raphael forced himself to think of her as Denise to avoid attaching a tag name to her as he had to all the sad losers on his block. A nickname for Denise would be too obvious and too cruel. Denise was a real person with real dignity, and she was not a loser. She deserved to be recognized as a person, not oversimplified into a grotesque by being called “Flipper,” even in the hidden silences of his mind.

The dwarfed arm bothered him at first, but he soon came to accept it. Although it was somewhat misshapen and awkward, and the tiny knuckles and fingers seemed always chapped and raw as if it had been brutally windburned, it was not a totally useless appendage. Denise wrote with it and was able to hold things with it, although she could not carry much weight on that side.

There were others who worked at Goodwill also, assorted defectives, the maimed, the halt, the marginally sighted, dwarves, and some who seemed quite normal until you spoke with them and realized that anything more than the simplest tasks was beyond their capabilities. They were not, however, losers. Common among them was that stubborn resolve to be independent and useful. Raphael admired them for that, and wished at times that he could be more like them. His own work record, he realized, was spotty. There were days when he had to go to therapy, of course, but there were other days as well, bad days when the phantom ache in thigh and knee and foot made work impossible, and other days when he deliberately malingered simply to avoid the tedium of the long bus ride to work.

On one such day, a fine, bright day in late April when the trees were dusting the streets with pale green pollen and the air was inconceivably bright and clear, he called in with his lame apologies and then crutched out to his chair and his roof to watch the teeming losers on the streets below.

“Try the son of a bitch again,” Jimmy, one of the scruffier of Heck’s Angels, called from under the hood of a battered Chevy convertible parked on the lawn of the house up the street.

The car’s starter ground spitefully, but the engine refused to turn over.

“Ain’t no use, man,” Marvin, the frizzy-haired blond one sitting in the car, said. “The bastard ain’t gonna start.”

“Just a minute.” Jimmy crawled a little farther into the engine compartment. “Okay, now try it.”

The starter ground again, sounding weaker.

Big Heintz came out on the porch holding a can of beer. “You’re just runnin’ down the battery,” he told them. “Give it up. The fucker’s gutted.”

Jimmy came out from under the hood, his face desperate. “It’s
gotta
run, man. I
gotta
have wheels. A guy ain’t shit if he ain’t got no fuckin’ wheels.”

“The fucker’s gutted,” Heintz said again with a note of finality.

“What am I gonna
do,
man?” Jimmy’s voice was anguished. “I
gotta
have wheels.”

“Start savin’ your nickels,” Heintz suggested, and laughed.

“Dirty useless son of a bitch!” Jimmy yelled at his car in helpless fury. He kicked savagely at one of the tires, winced, and then began to pound on one of the front fenders with a wrench. “Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” he raged.

Marvin went up and joined Heintz on the porch, and the two of them stood watching Jimmy pound on his car with the wrench. Finally he gave up and threw the wrench down. There were tears on his face when he turned toward the two men on the porch. “What am I gonna
do,
man?” he demanded. “I
gotta
have wheels. Maybe Leon can fix it.”

Big Heintz shook his head and belched. “Forget it, man. Nobody can fix that pig. The fucker’s gutted.”

Jimmy’s shoulders slumped in defeat.
“I gotta
have wheels. I just
gotta.”

The idea had not really occurred to Raphael before. His injury had seemed too final, too total, and he had resigned himself to using public transportation, but now he began to consider the possibility. Driving, after all, was
not
really impossible. You only needed one leg to drive. The memory of the crash was still there, of course, but it was not something insurmountable. The more he thought about it, the more possible it all seemed.

He went back into his apartment and methodically began to draw up a list. The amount he would spend on buses and taxi fare in the course of a year surprised him, and when he added to that the wages he would lose on those days when the decision to go to work or not was weighted by his distaste for the bus ride, the number began to approach a figure he might reasonably expect to pay for reliable transportation.

He decided to think about it some more, but that evening he bought a newspaper and checked the used-car section of the want ads.

More than anything, what he wanted was a sense of independence. He had not particularly missed it before because he had not even considered the possibility of driving again, but now it became a matter of urgent necessity. “I
gotta
have wheels,” he said to himself in a wry imitation of Jimmy’s anguished voice. “I just
gotta.”

The car was adequate—not fancy, certainly—but it had been well maintained, and the price was right. He was startled to discover how nervous he was when he test-drove it. By the time he had gone three blocks, he was sweating, and his hands were shaking. He had not thought that he would be so afraid. He set his teeth together and forced himself to continue driving.

After he had paid for it and brought it home, he went out onto his roof quite often to look down at it. He did not drive it to work or to his therapy sessions yet, but concentrated on growing accustomed to it and to driving in traffic again. The fear was still there, but he drove a little farther every day and inserted himself carefully into heavier and heavier traffic. His accident had made a cautious driver of him, but he managed to get around, and he finally worked up enough nerve to drive it to work.

Because Denise lived on the same bus route as he, they had usually ridden together when they got off work. On that first night, however, realizing that he was showing off his new toy, he gave her a lift home.

“Why don’t you come up?” she suggested hesitantly when he pulled up in front of her apartment house. “I’ll make a pot of coffee.” She blushed and turned her face away.

“Could I take a raincheck on it? I have to go grocery shopping tonight, and it takes me hours.”

“Oh,” she said quickly, “sure. Maybe next time.”

“You can count on it.”

She got out of the car. “See you in the morning, then. Thanks for the ride.” She closed the door and hurried across the sidewalk to her apartment building.

The shopping had been a lie, of course, but Raphael had not wanted to become involved in anything just yet. The implication of the invitation might have been wholly imaginary, but it was the kind of thing that he had to avoid at all costs. Still, he was just a bit ashamed of himself as he drove home.

Flood was waiting for him when he got there. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, leaning against the rear fender of his little red sports car with his arms crossed, “and what the hell are you doing in Spokane, for God’s sake?” His tone was matter-of-fact, as if they had seen each other only the week before.

Raphael crutched toward him, feeling a sudden surge of elation. He had not realized until that moment how desperately lonely he had been. “Damon! What are you doing here?”

Flood shrugged, his eyes strangely hard and his smile ambiguous. “The world is wide, my Angel,” he said, “but there are only a few places in it where my face is welcome.” The rich baritone voice, so well remembered, with all its power to sway him, to persuade, to manipulate him, had lost none of its force. Raphael immediately felt its pull upon him.

One of Heck’s Angels roared by, his motorcycle sputtering and coughing. “Come on upstairs.” Raphael was suddenly aware of the curious eyes of the people on the street, and he did not want to share Flood with any of them. He led the way to the stairs at the side of the house, and they went up.

“A penthouse, no less,” Flood noted when they reached the roof.

“Hardly that.” Raphael laughed. “More like a pigeon loft.” They went on inside. “Sit down,” Raphael told him. “I’ll make some coffee.” He needed something to do to cover his confusion, to get him past that first stiff awkwardness that was always there when he met someone again after a long time. He was quite suddenly painfully aware of his one-leggedness and particularly anxious that Flood should not think of him as a cripple, so he made a special show of his competence, even though he was aware at the time that it was childish to do so.

Flood had not changed much. His skin was a bit sallower, and there were circles under his eyes that had not been there before. His grin was still sardonic, and his eyes still had that same hard
glitter,
but he seemed less sure of himself, almost ill at ease, as if he had somehow lost control of his life or something important had gotten away from him.

“Why aren’t you in school?” Raphael asked, filling his coffeepot at the sink.

“I dropped out at midterm,” Flood replied, sitting on the couch. “The Reed experience got to be a bit overpowering. Scholarship was never one of my strong points.”

“How did your father take that?”

“He was moderately unenthusiastic—until I assured him that I wasn’t coming home to dear old Grosse Pointe. We struck a bargain. The old pirate will keep those checks coming as long as I stay west of the Mississippi. It’s a pretty good working arrangement.”

Raphael put the pot on and then crutched over to the armchair. “How did you find me?”

Flood shrugged. “It wasn’t that hard. I stopped by the hospital after Christmas vacation, but you’d already left. I talked with some of the nurses and that bald guy in the wheelchair.”

“Quillian?”

Flood nodded. “There’s a man with all the charm of a nesting rattlesnake.”

“He’s rough,” Raphael agreed, suddenly remembering all the sweating hours in therapy under the lash of Quillian’s contemptuous voice, “but he’s damn good at his job. You might not want to walk when he starts on you, but you’re damn well walking when he gets done.”

“If only to get away from him. Anyway, I finally wound up in the administration office. I seduced the name of your uncle in Port Angeles out of one of the file clerks—blew in her ear, that sort of thing. You really don’t want all the sordid details, do you?” “Spare me.”

“Sure. Anyhow, I filed Port Angeles away for future reference, and then after I hung it up at Reed, I drifted on up to Seattle. There was a girl who got fed up with the Reed experience about the same rime I did. We got along—for a while, anyway. I was thinking about San Francisco, but she convinced me that we’d have a ball in Boeing City. We went on up and set up housekeeping for a month or so. It didn’t work out, so I pulled the plug on her.”

“You’re still all heart, Damon.”

“I improved her life. I taught her that there are more important things in the world than rock concerts and political theory. Now she’s got a deep and tragic affair in her past. It’ll make her more interesting for the next guy. God knows she bored the hell out of me.” Flood had been speaking in a dry, almost monotonous tone with few of the flashes of that flowery extravagance Raphael remembered from the days when they had roomed together. The feeling was still there that something had gone out of him somehow, or that he had suffered some obscure and hidden injury that still gnawed at him. “I knocked around Seattle for a while,” he went on, “and then I decided to take a quick run up to Port Angeles to see how you were doing.”

“What made you think I’d be there?”

Flood shrugged. “It just seemed reasonable. That’s your home. I just had it in my mind that you were there. It seemed quite logical at the time.”

“You should have called first.”

“You know, your uncle Harry told me exactly the same thing. Anyway, after I found out that I was wrong and got your address here from him, I took a quick turn around Port Angeles and then bombed on over. Once I set out to do something, I by God do it. I’d have followed you all the way to hell, my friend.”

“What did you think of Port Angeles?”

“Would you accept picturesque?”

“You were unimpressed.”

“Moderately. I don’t want to offend you, but that is one of the gloomiest places I’ve ever had the misfortune to visit.” “It was raining, I take it.”