The Losers (17 page)

a blonde—big as a house, dirty as a pig, and congenitally lazy. She makes a career of sponging. She knows the ins and outs of every charity in Spokane. She’s convinced that her hair’s the same color as Farrah’s, and every so often she tries to duplicate that hairdo—the results are usually grotesque. Freddie the Fruit is a flaming queen. He lives with a very tough girl who won’t let him go near any boys. He has to do what she tells him to because her name’s the one on the welfare checks. Heck’s Angels are a third-rate motorcycle gang. There are eight or ten of them, and they’ve got three motorcycles that are broken-down most of the rime. They swagger a lot and try to look tough, but basically they’re only vicious and stupid. They’ve lumped together the welfare checks of their wives and girlfriends and rented the house up the street. They peddle dope for walking-around money, and they sneak around at night siphoning gas to keep their cars and motorcycles running.”

“And you can see all this from your rooftop?”

Raphael nodded. “For some reason they don’t look up. All you have to do is sit still and watch and listen. You can see them in full flower every day. Their lives are hopelessly screwed up. For the most part they’re already in the hands of one or two social agencies. They’re the raw material of the whole social-service industry. Without a hard-core population of losers, you could lay off half the police force, ninety percent of the social workers, most of the custodians of the insane, and probably a third of the hospital staffs and coroners’ assistants.”

“They’re violent?” Flood asked, startled.

“Of course. They’re at the bottom. They’ve missed out on all the goodies of life. The goodies are all around, but they can’t have them. They live in filth and squalor and continual noise. Their normal conversational tone is a scream—they shriek for emphasis. Their cars are all junkers that break down if you even look at them. Their TV sets don’t work, and they steal from each other as a matter of habit. Their kids all have juvenile records and are failing in school. They live in continual frustration and on the borderline of rage all the time. A chance remark can trigger homicidal fury. Five blocks from here last month a woman beat her husband’s brains out with a crowbar after an argument about what program they were going to watch on TV.”

“No
shit?”
Flood sat looking at Raphael, his dark eyes suddenly burning. “What are you doing in this sewer, Raphael?”

Raphael shrugged. “Let’s call it research. I think there’s one single common symptom that they all have that makes them losers. I’m trying to isolate it.”

“How much consideration have you given to sheer stupidity?”

“That contributes, probably,” Raphael admitted, “but stupid people
do
occasionally succeed in life. I think it’s something else.”

“And when you do isolate it, what then? Are you going to cure the world?”

Raphael laughed. “God, no. I’m just curious, that’s all. In the meantime there’s enormous entertainment in watching them. They’re all alike, but each one is infinitely unique. Let’s just say that they’re a hobby.”

The expression on Flood’s face was strange as he listened to Raphael talk, and his eyes seemed to burn in the faint red glow of the winking scanner. It might have been Raphael’s imagination or a trick of the light, but it was as if a great weight had suddenly been lifted from the dark-faced young man’s shoulders—that a problem that had been plaguing him for months had just been solved.

iii

Raphael worked only a half day on Wednesday, since he was just about to the bottom of the pile of repairable shoes that lay to one side of his worktable.

About eleven-thirty Denise brought him a cup of coffee, and they talked. “You’ve changed in the last week or so, Rafe.”

“What do you mean, ‘changed’?”

“I don’t know, you just seem different, that’s all.”

“It’s probably Flood. He’s enough to alter anybody.” “Who?”

“Damon Flood. He was my roommate at college. His family has money, and he’s developed a strange personality over the years. He came to Spokane a couple weeks ago—I’m not really sure why.”

“I don’t think I like him.”

“Come on, Denise.” Raphael laughed. “You’ve never met him.”

“I just don’t like him,” she repeated stubbornly, pushing a stray lock of hair out of her face. “I don’t like what he’s doing to you.” “He hasn’t done anything to me.”

“Oh yes, he has. You’re not the same. You’re flippant. You say things that are meant to be funny, but aren’t. The humor around here needs to be very gentle. We’re all terribly vulnerable. We can’t be flip or smart aleck or sarcastic with each other. Don’t put us down, Rafe. Don’t be condescending. We can smell that on people the way you can smell wine on a drunk. If this Damon Flood of yours makes you feel that way about us, you’d better stay away from here, because nobody’ll have anything to do with you.”

Raphael looked at her for a moment, and she blushed furiously. “Has it seemed that way?” he asked her finally. “Have I really seemed that bad?”

“I don’t know,” she wailed. “I don’t know anything anymore. All I know is that I’m not going to let anyone hurt any of my friends here.”

“Neither am I, Denise,” Raphael said softly. “Neither am I. Flood makes me defensive, that’s all.”

“You don’t have to be defensive with
mí
.” She made a little move toward him, almost as if she were going to embrace him impulsively, but she caught herself and blushed again.

“Okay, Denise. I’ll hang it on the hook before I come to work, okay?”

“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

“No. I wasn’t paying attention to how I was treating people. Somebody needed to tell me. That’s what friends are for, right?”

It troubled him, though. After he left work, he drove around for a while, thinking about what she had said. There was no question that Flood could influence people—manipulate them. Raphael had seen it too many times to have any doubts. He had, however, thought that
he
was immune to that kind of thing. He had somehow believed that Flood would not try his skills on him, but apparently Flood could not resist manipulation, and it was so very subtle that it was not even evident to someone who knew Flood as well as he did.

When he pulled up in front of his apartment, Sadie the Sitter and Spider Granny were in full voice. “Just wait,” Sadie boomed. “As soon as I collect his insurance, I’ll show her a thing or two. I’ll be able to spend money on fancy clothes, too—
and
a new car—
and
new furniture.”

It was evident by now that Sadie regarded the insurance money on her husband as already hers. The fact that he was still alive was merely an inconvenience. She counted the money over and over in her mind, her piggish little eyes aflame and her pudgy, hairy-knuckled hands twitching. When her husband came home at night, walking slowly on feet that obviously hurt him, she would glare at him as if his continued existence were somehow a deliberate affront.

Spider Granny, of course, cared only about the bellowing-idiot grandchild, and hurriedly agreed to anything Sadie said simply to prevent the horrid subject of commitment from arising again.

Raphael shook his head and checked his mailbox. There was some junk mail and an envelope from his uncle Harry. Harry Taylor forwarded Raphael’s mail, but he never followed the simple expedient of scribbling a forwarding address on the original envelope.

Raphael went on upstairs. He dumped the junk mail in the wastebasket without even looking at it and opened Uncle Harry’s envelope.

There was a letter from Isabel Drake inside. The envelope was slightly perfumed. Raphael stood at the table holding the envelope for a long time, looking out the window without really seeing anything. Once he almost turned to pitch the unopened letter into the wastebasket. Then he turned instead and took it to the bookcase and slipped it between the pages of his copy of the collected works of Shakespeare, where Marilyn’s letter was. Then he went out onto the roof. He made a special point of not thinking about the two letters.

Flood arrived five minutes later. He was in high good humor and at his sardonic best. “What a wonderful little town this is,” he said ebulliently after he had bounded up the stairs and come over to where Raphael sat in the sun beside the railing. “Do you realize that you managed to find perhaps the one place in the whole country that’s an absolute intellectual vacuum?”

“What’s got you so wound up?” Raphael asked, amused in spite of himself. When Flood was in good spirits, he was virtually overpowering, and Raphael needed that at the moment.

“I’ve been out examining this pigsty,” Flood told him. “Were you aware that the engineering marvel of the entire city—the thing they’re proudest of-—is the sewage-treatment plant?”

Raphael laughed. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“Absolutely. They all invite you to go out and have a look at it. They all talk about it. It’s terribly important to them. I suppose it’s only natural, though.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Old people, Raphael, old, old, old,
old
people. Spokane has more hospitals and doctors per square inch than cities five times its size because it’s full of old people, and old people get sick a lot. Spokane is positively overwhelmed by its sewage-treatment plant because old people are obsessed with the functioning of their bowels. They gloat over their latest defecation the way young people gloat over their most recent sexual conquest. This place is the prune-juice and toilet-paper capital of America. It’s got more old people than any place this side of Miami Beach. And the whole town has a sort of geriatric artsy-craftsy air about it. They do macramé and ceramics and little plaster figurines they pop out of ready-made rubber molds so they can call themselves sculptors. They crank out menopausal religious verse by the ream and print it up in self-congratulatory little mimeographed booklets and then sit around smugly convinced that they’re poets.” “Come on.” Raphael laughed.

“And the biggest thing on their educational TV station is the annual fund-raising drive. There’s an enormous perverted logic there. They hustle money to keep the station on the air so that it can broadcast pictures of them hustling money to keep the station on the air. It’s sort of self-perpetuating.”

“There are some colleges here,” Raphael objected. “The place isn’t a total void.”

Flood snorted with laughter. “Sure, baby. I’ve looked into them—a couple of junior colleges where the big majors are sheet metal, auto mechanics, and bedpan repair, and a big Catholic university where they pee their pants over basketball and theology. I love Catholic towns, don’t you? Wall-to-wall mongoloids. That’s what comes of having a celibate priesthood making sure that their parishioners are punished for enjoying sex. A good Catholic woman can have six mongoloids in a row before it begins to dawn on her that something might be wrong with her reproductive system.”

“You’re positively dazzling today, Damon. You must be in a good humor.”

“I am, babes, I am. I’m always delighted to discover elementáis—things that seem to be a distillation of an ideal. I think I’m a Platonist—I like to contemplate concepts in their pure state, and Spokane is the perfect place to contemplate such concepts as mongolism, senility, perversion, and bad breath in all their naked, blinding glory.”

“Bad breath?”

“It must be something in the water. Everybody in town has breath that could peel paint at forty yards. I could stand that, though, if they weren’t all about three quarters ‘round the bend.”

“It’s not quite
that
bad.”

“Really? The biggest growth industry in the area is the loony bin out at Medical Lake. The whole town is crawling with maniacs.

I saw a man on the sidewalk giving a speech to a fifty-seven Chevy this morning.”

“Tall?” Raphael asked, “Skinny? Bald and with a big, booming voice?”

“You’ve seen him?”

“He was in front of the bus station when I first got into town. Is he still talking about the nonexistence of chance?”

“No. The old bastard was lecturing on Hegel as close as I could tell—thesis, antithesis, synthesis, all that shit.”

“Did it make any sense?”

“Not to
me
it didn’t, but that doesn’t mean anything. Even the original didn’t make sense to me.”

“It’s nice to know that he’s still around.” Raphael smiled. “It gives the place a sort of continuity.”

Flood looked at him, one eyebrow raised.
“That’s
the sort of continuity you like? You sure you don’t want me to reserve you one of those rubber rooms out at Medical Lake?”

“Not just yet. What else have you been up to? I haven’t seen much of you in the last few days.”

Flood leaned out over the railing, looking down into the streets.

“Careful,” Raphael warned.

“It’s solid enough,” Flood said negligently. “I’ve been playing your game, Angel.”

“What game is that?”

“Watching people—examining loserhood in all its elemental purity. You picked the wrong place, Raphael. Come on down to Peaceful Valley.
That’s
the natural and native habitat of the archetypal loser. Did you know that people throw things off the Maple Street Bridge down onto the roofs of the houses down there? It’s the only place in the world where it rains beer cans. A couple years back a drunken old woman got her head caved in when somebody chucked a potted plant over the side up there. Can you imagine being
geraniumed
into eternity? Now that’s a real, honest-to-God loser for you.”

“You’re not serious.”

“May the great and eternal flyswatter of God squash me flat right here if I’m not. Who’s that?” He pointed down at the street. Raphael glanced over the rail. “That’s Patch.” “Another one of your losers?”

“No, I don’t think so. He doesn’t look like a loser, and he doesn’t act like one. I haven’t figured him out yet.”

“Gloomy-looking bastard, isn’t he? He’s got a face that could curdle milk.” Flood walked away from the railing as if the sight of Patch were some kind of personal affront. “Anyway,” he went on quickly as if trying to recapture his mood, “I’ve started collecting losers, too. We got a whole ‘nother class down in Peaceful Valley. Take Bob the Buggerer, for example. He’s been busted four or five times for molesting little boys. One more time and he goes off to the slammer for the rest of his natural life plus about seventy-five years. Every time a kid goes by on a bicycle, he gets that same desperately longing look on his face you see on the old geeks downtown when a wine truck passes. It’s just a matter of time until it’ll get to be too much for him. And then there’s Paul the Pusher. He’s got stashes of dope all over the valley down there. The cops shake him down every time they go through—just to keep in practice—so he’s afraid to keep the stuff in his house. He buries it in tin cans under logs and behind trees up on the hillside. He’s worried that somebody’s going to find it, so he’s always digging it up to make sure it’s still there. Every night you can see him scurrying out of his house with a shovel and a panic-stricken look on his face. Freddie the Flasher creeps around exposing himself to little girls. Polly the Punchboard is a raging nymphomaniac. She frequents some of the raunchier taverns and brings home horny drunks by the busload.”