The Losers (24 page)

Flood’s face was sober. “I didn’t realize. I’m sorry, Raphael. I guess I wasn’t thinking. You
have,
I suppose?”

“Have what?”

“Fallen.”

“What the hell do you think I’ve been talking about? Christ, yes, I’ve fallen—a dozen times. I’ve fallen in the street, I’ve fallen in hallways, I’ve fallen down stairs. Once I fell down in a men’s room and had to lie there for a half hour before some guy came in and helped me up. Don’t beat me over the head about moving until I get to the point where I can get back on my feet without help.
Then
we’ll talk about it. Until then I’m going to stay right where I am, and no amount of badgering is going to move me. Now, can we talk about something else?”

“Sure. Sorry I brought it up.”

They talked for a while longer, but Raphael’s mood had turned as sour as Flood’s, and both of them were unnecessarily curt with each other.

“I’ll catch you later,” Flood said finally, standing up. “All we’re going to do is snipe at each other today.”

“All right.” Raphael also got up and crutched out onto the roof behind Flood.

At the railing he looked down into the street and watched Flood come out at the bottom of the stairs.

Next door Crazy Charlie was furtively putting out his garbage. His face brightened when he saw Flood. “Hi, Jake,” he offered timidly.

Flood turned, changing direction in midstride without changing his pace. He bore down on Crazy Charlie and stopped only a few inches from the nervously quailing man. “Henry,” he said, his voice harsh, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you—for your own good.”

Charlie’s head swiveled this way and that, his eyes darting, looking for a way to escape.

“How come you shave your head like that, Henry?” Flood demanded. “It looks silly as hell, you know. And you missed a place—-just over your left ear.”

Horror-stricken, Charlie reached up and felt his head.

“And why don’t you take a bath? You stink like cat piss all the time. If you can’t keep the cats from pissing on your clothes, get rid of the goddamn things. And just who the hell are you talking to all the time? I’ve seen you talk for hours when there’s nobody there. Do you know what they call you around here? Crazy Charlie, that’s what they call you. They watch you through the windows and laugh at you because you’re so crazy. You’d better straighten up, Henry, or they’re going to come after you with the butterfly net and lock you up in the crazy house.” Flood’s voice was ruthless, and he kept advancing on the helpless man in front of him.

Quite suddenly Charlie broke and ran, stumbling up the stairs, almost falling.

“Nice talking to you, Henry,” Flood called after him, and then he laughed mockingly.

Charlie’s door slammed, and Flood, still laughing, went to hiscar.

Upstairs, Raphael caught one quick glimpse of Crazy Charlie’s haunted face before the shades came down. They did not go up again.

iv

Several afternoons later they were in the tavern again. Some need drove Flood to such places occasionally. They hadn’t spoken of the incident with Crazy Charlie, nor had Flood raised again the issue of leaving Spokane.

The tavern was quieter this time and less crowded. The orgy of drunken conviviality that always accompanied Mother’s Day had passed when the money ran out, and the losers had settled down to the grim business of grinding out the days until the next check came. The ones in the tavern spaced their drinks, making them last.

The only exception was the large table where Heck’s Angels sat in full regalia—creaking leather and greasy denim. They drank boisterously with much raucous laughter and bellowed obscene jests. They all tried, with varying degrees of success, to look burly and dangerous.

Big Heintz, his purple helmet pulled low over his eyes, bulked large and surly at the head of the table like some medieval warlord surrounded by his soldiers, and drank and glowered around the tavern, looking for some real or imagined slight—some excuse to start a brawl. The others—Marvin, Jimmy, Little Hider, and two or three more Raphael had seen but never bothered to put names to—glanced quickly at him after each joke or remark, looking for some hint of a laugh or expression of approval, but Big Heintz remained morose and pugnacious.

“Hey Jake,” Marvin said to Flood, “why don’t you two join us?”

Flood raised his glass in mock salute, but made no move to shift around from the table at which he and Raphael sat.

“Maybe he don’t want to,” Big Heintz rumbled, staring hard at Flood. Suddenly he turned irritably on Little Hider, who had just punched the same song on the jukebox that he had already played three times in succession. “For Chrissake, Lonnie, ain’t there no other fuckin’ songs on that sumbitch?”

“I like it,” Little Hider said defensively.

The song was a maudlin lament by some half-witted cracker over his recently deceased girlfriend. Little Hider sat misty-eyed, his thin, pimply face mournful as the lugubrious caterwauling continued.

“Shit!” Heintz snorted contemptuously when the song ended. “I think he left out the last verse,” Flood said, grinning. “I never heard no other verses.” Little Hider sounded a bit truculent.

“I thought everybody knew the last verse. It’s the point of the whole song.”

“Well, I never heard it. How does it go?”

Flood looked up at the ceiling. “Let’s see if I can remember it.” And then he started to sing in his rich voice. The impromptu verse he added was cynical and grossly obscene. There was an almost shocked silence when he finished.

“Hey,
man!”
Little Hider said in the almost strangled tone of someone mortally offended.

Suddenly Heintz burst out with a roar of laughter, pounding on the table with glee.

The other Angels, always quick to follow, also began to laugh.

Big Heintz’s laughter was gargantuan. He kept pounding on the table and stomping his feet, his beefy face red and contorted. “You slay me, Jake,” he finally gasped, wiping at his eyes. “You absolutely fuckin’ slay me.” And he roared off into another peal of laughter.

Flood’s impromptu parody changed the tone of the afternoon. Big Heintz was suddenly in better spirits, and the Angels quickly became gleeful and sunny-tempered. Raphael had almost forgotten Flood’s gift for parody, which had so amused him when they were in school. The Angels still swaggered back and forth to the bar for more beer or to the men’s room to relieve themselves with their cycle chains and chukka sticks dangling from their belts and their eyes flat and menacing, but their mood was no longer one of incipient riot.

Flood pulled their table closer to that of the Angels and introduced Raphael as Rafe, casting one quick apologetic glance at him as he did.

Big Heintz watched Raphael hitch his chair around to the newly positioned table.

“Hey, Rafe,” he said good-humoredly, “how’d you lose the pin?”

“Hit a train.” Raphael shrugged.

“Hurt it much?” Big Heintz asked, grinning.

“Scared it pretty bad.”

This sent Heintz off into another gale of table-pounding, foot-stomping laughter. “You guys absolutely fuckin’
slay
me. Fuckin’ absolutely
waste
my ass.”

The party went on for another half hour or so. Raphael watched and listened, but didn’t say anything more. Finally he turned to Flood. “I think I’ll cut out.”

“Stick around,” Flood urged. “We’ll go in a little bit.”

“That’s okay. It’s not too far, and I need some exercise anyway.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m serious. I really want to walk for a bit. I’ve been riding so much lately that I’m starting to get out of practice.”

Flood looked at him for a moment. “Suit yourself. I’ll stop by later.”

“Sure.” Raphael pushed himself up. Carefully, avoiding the tables and chairs, he crutched out of the tavern into the pale, late-afternoon sunlight.

It had rained that morning, and the streets all had that just-washed look. The air was clean, and it was just cool enough to make the exertion of walking pleasant.

The houses here were all turn-of-the-century style, and many of them had a kind of balcony or sitting porch on the second floor. Raphael thought that those porches might have been used quite frequently when the houses were new, but he had not seen anyone on one of them since he had come to Spokane.

Bennie the Bicycler rode past on his way to the grocery store.

Raphael kept walking, consciously trying to make his pace as smooth as possible. It was important to measure the stride. Too short and he stumped; too long and he had to heave with his shoulders. The idea was to kind of flow along.

It was farther back to his apartment than he had thought, and about halfway there he stopped to rest. He had not walked much since he’d bought the car, and he was surprised to discover that his arms and shoulders were tired.

The snarling roar of the motorcycles was several blocks away when he first heard it. He leaned against a tree and waited.

The three bikes, with Big Heintz in the lead, came charging down the street, popping and smoking as always. Oddly, or perhaps not. Flood was mounted on one of the bikes, and he didn’t seem to be having much difficulty with it. Big Heintz had a vicious grin on his face as they roared by. Trailing behind the bikes were two of the Angels’ clattering cars, and behind them Marvin was driving Flood’s little red sports car. They toured the neighborhood slowly, letting themselves be seen.

Bennie the Bicycler came peddling back with two sacks of groceries balanced in the basket on his handlebars. The Angels came sputtering back and spotted him.

The original intention, if it had even fully formulated itself in Heintz’s thick skull, was probably simply to buzz Bennie once and then go on, but Flood was aboard one of the bikes, and that was not enough for him. As he passed Bennie he suddenly cramped his front wheel over hard and drove in a tight circle around the man on the bicycle. Bennie wobbled, trying to avoid the snarling motorcycle. Big Heintz and Little Hider, already halfway up the block, turned, came back, and followed Flood in the circling of the wobbling bicycle. Bennie’s eyes grew wide, and his course grew more erratic as he tried to maintain control of his bicycle. The noise was deafening, and Bennie began to panic. With a despairing lunge he drove his bicycle toward the comparative safety of the sidewalk, but in his haste he misjudged it and smashed headlong into the rear of a parked car. With a clatter he pitched over the handlebars of his bicycle onto the car’s trunk and then rolled off.

The front wheel of his bicycle was twisted into a rubber-tired pretzel, and the bags fell to the street and broke. Dented cans rolled out, and a gallon container of milk gushed white into the gutter.

With jackal-like laughter the Angels roared away, leaving Bennie sprawled in the street in the midst of his bargains. As he passed, Flood flickered one quick glance at Raphael, but his expression did not change.

Slowly, painfully, Bennie got up. Grunting, he began to gather the dented cans and moldy cheese and wilted produce. Then he saw the bicycle. With a low cry he dropped his groceries again and picked up the bike. He took hold of the wheel and tried to straighten it with his hands, but it was obviously hopeless.

Raphael wished that he might do something, but there was nothing he could do. Slowly he crutched on past the spot where Bennie stood in the midst of the garbage that had been his whole reason for existence, staring at the ruin of his bicycle. His lip was cut and oozed blood down onto his chin, and his eyes were filled with tears.

Raphael went by and said nothing.

When he got home, he went up the stairs and locked the door at the top.

Up the street the Angels were partying again, their voices loud and raucous. Flood was with them, and his red car was parked at the curb among theirs. Raphael went inside and pulled his curtains.

The party up the street ground on, growing louder and louder until about midnight, when somebody on the block called the police.

V

Toward the end of June the rainy weather finally broke, and it turned warm. The stunning heat of July had not yet arrived, and it was perhaps the most pleasant part of the year in Spokane.

Raphael found that the mornings were particularly fine. He began to arise earlier, often getting up with the first steely light long before the sun rose. The streets below were quiet then, and he could sit on his rooftop undisturbed and watch the delicate shadings of colors in the morning sky as the sun came up. By seven the slanting light was golden as it came down through the trees and lay gently on the streets almost like a benediction.

Flood came by infrequently now, although he often visited with Heck’s Angels just up the street until the early hours of the morning.

A kind of unspoken constraint had come between Raphael and Flood. It was as if some unacknowledged affront had taken place that neither of them could exactly remember but that both responded to. They were studiously correct with each other, but no more than that.

Raphael considered this on one splendid morning as he sat with his third cup of coffee, looking down over the railing into the sunlit street. He had placed his scanner in an open window, but it merely winked and twinkled at him as the city lay silent in sleep, with yesterday’s passion and violence and stupidity finished and today’s not yet begun. He felt strange about Flood now. Weeks before he had even experienced a sharp pang of jealousy when Flood had first begun to hang around with the Angels, but now he was indifferent. He noticed Flood’s comings and goings at the crowded house up the street without much interest.

A movement caught his eye, and he turned slightly to watch.

Spider Granny, housecoat-wrapped and slapping-slipper shod, trundled down the other street on her morning pilgrimage to the porch where Sadie was already enthroned in ponderous splendor.

Ruthie, the retarded child, recognized her and bellowed a bull-like greeting from the playpen where she spent her days.

“There’s Granny’s little darling,” Sadie’s mother cooed. She bustled up onto the porch and fussed over the drooling idiot in the pen.