The Losers (30 page)

“Have you thought any more about going back home?” he asked her late one evening when the tree frogs and crickets sang monotonously from nearby lawns and the cars had thinned out in the streets.

“Not really. I’m settled in now. I don’t feel like going through the hassle of moving—facing family and friends and all that.”

“And it’s easier to sit?” He probed at her, trying to test her will.

“Bodies at rest tend to remain at rest.” She said it glibly. “As time goes on and I get progressively bigger, I suspect I’ll tend to remain at rest more and more.”

“You hardly even show yet, and that’s all the more reason to do something now—before you get cemented in.”

“I show,” she disagreed wryly. “My clothes are starting to get just a teensy bit snug. Besides, what’s all this to you? Are you secretly working for the Metalline Falls tourist bureau?”

“Have you looked around you lately—at the people on this street?”

“It’s just a street, and they’re just people.”

“Not exactly. This is Welfare City, kid. These people make a career out of what my father used to call ‘being on the dole.’ That’s a corrosive kind of thing. It eats away at the ambition, the will. After a while it becomes a kind of disease.”

“They’re just down on their luck. It’s only temporary.”

“Eighteen years? That’s your idea of temporary?”

“Eighteen years? Where did you get that number?”

“That’s how long you’re eligible for welfare—Aid to Families with Dependent Children. What the hell do you do when you’re thirty-eight years old and the check stops coming? You don’t have any skills, any trade or profession, and you’ve been a welfairy for eighteen years—just sitting. What happens then?”

She frowned.

“Most of the girls down there have come up with a fairly simple answer to the problem,” Raphael went on. “Another baby, and you’re back in business again. With luck you could stretch it out until you’re in your early sixties, but what then? What have you done with your life? You’ve sat for forty or forty-five year collecting a welfare check every month. You’ve lived in these run-down hovels scrounging around at the end of the month for enough pennies or pop bottles you can cash in so you can buy a loaf of bread or a package of cigarettes. And at the end of it all you have nothing, and you are nothing. You’ve existed, and that’s all.” “It doesn’t
have
to be that way.”

“But it is. Like you say, bodies at rest tend to remain at rest. That’s a physical law, isn’t it?”

“That’s about objects—things, not people.”

“Maybe that’s the point. At what point do people stop being people and start being things—objects.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Are you sure? Are you willing to bet your life on it? You said you didn’t feel like going through the hassle of moving. Are you going to feel any more like it after the baby comes?”

“I’ll think about it.” Her voice was troubled.

“Do that.”

“It’s late.” She stood up. “I guess I’ll go to bed. See you.” Her tone was abrupt, but that was all right. At least he had gotten through to her.

After she was gone and he was alone, Raphael sat for a long time in the silent darkness on the rooftop. Maybe it was time to give some consideration to
his
situation as well. Flood was probably right. Perhaps it was time to give some serious thought to moving on. It was too easy to sit, and the longer he remained, the more difficult it would be to uproot himself. His own arguments came back to gnaw at him.

“All right,” he promised himself. “Just as soon as I get the girl squared away.
Then
I’ll think about it.”

The sense of having made a decision was somehow satisfying, and so he went to bed and slept very soundly.

i

By late August the worst of the summer heat was past, and there was a faint haze in the air in Spokane. The evenings were cooler now, and sometimes Raphael even wore a light jacket when he sat up late.

Flood visited seldom now. His time seemed mostly taken up by his growing attachment to Heck’s Angels. Raphael could not exactly put his finger on what caused the attraction. The Angels were stupid, vicious, and not very clean. None of those qualities would normally attract Flood. Although they blustered a great deal, they were not really very brave. Their idea of a good fight appeared to be when three or preferably four of them could assault one lone opponent. They talked about fighting much of the time, and each of them attempted to exude menace, but with the possible exception of Big Heintz, they were hardly frightening.

Flood’s status among them was also puzzling. At no time did he assume the clothing or the manner of the Angels. He did not wear leather, and he did not swagger. His speech was sprinkled with “man” and “What’s happening?” and other identification words, but it was not larded with the casual obscenity that characterized the everyday conversation of the Angels and their women.

Big Heintz clearly respected Flood’s intelligence and laughed uproariously at his jokes and his parodies of popular songs. But although Flood was not a full-fledged member, neither was he a court jester or simple hanger-on.

One evening they sat on the porch of their big house up the street, drinking beer and talking. Raphael, sitting on his rooftop, could hear them quite clearly.

“They ain’t left town yet,” Big Heintz was saying. “You can fuckin’ take that to the bank.”

“Nobody’s seen any of ‘em,” Jimmy ventured.

“The Dragons are still around,” Heintz insisted. “You can fuckin’ take that to the bank. They know fuckin’ well that this ain’t over yet. Me ‘n that fuckin’ Mongol still got somethin’ to settle between us, and he ain’t gonna leave this fuckin’ town till we do.” He belched authoritatively and opened another can of beer.

“Unless you can come up with more attractive odds, I think I’ll pass next time,” Flood said wryly. “I didn’t get
too
much entertainment out of having two of them hold me down while another one kicked me in the ribs.”

“Shit, man.” Marvin laughed. “At least they was only kickin’ you in the
ribs.
They was kickin’ me ‘n Jimmy and Heintz in the fuckin’
head,
man. I still hear bells ringin’ sometimes.”

“Them was just games.” Heintz dismissed it. “Just playin’— sorta to let us know they was in town. Next time it won’t be no fuckin’ games—it’s gonna be fuckin’ war, man. I mean fuckin’
war]”

They continued to drink and talk about the impending battle, working themselves up gradually until their need for action of some kind sent them into the secret hiding places in the house where they kept their weapons. In half-drunken frenzy each of them in unself-conscious display moved to a separate quarter of the lawn and began to swing his favorite implement of war.

Chains whistled in the air and thudded solidly against the ground, churning up the grass. Spike-studded clubs sang savagely. Knives were brandished and flourished. The air resounded with hoarse grunts and snarls as Heck’s Angels bravely assaulted the phantom Dragons they had conjured up with beer and bravado to meekly accept the mayhem inflicted upon their airy and insubstantial bodies. “District Four,” the scanner said. “Four.”

“We have a report of a seventy-six at 1914 West Dalton. Several bikers threatening each other with knives and chains.”

Raphael smiled. A seventy-six was a riot, and the police usually attended such affairs in groups.

“District One,” the scanner said.

“One.”

“Back up Four at 1914 West Dalton. Report of a seventy-six.” “Right,” District One said. “Three-Eighteen,” the scanner said. “Three-Eighteen,” the car responded. Raphael waited.

On the lawn Heck’s Angels continued their war with their unseen enemies until five carloads of police converged upon them. The police spoke with the Angels at some length and then methodically and quite systematically confiscated all their toys.

ii

A couple days later, after supper, Raphael went out onto the roof to watch the sunset. He felt strangely contented. His life, though it was circumscribed, was interesting enough. The vague ambitions he’d had before seemed unrealistic now. Probably they always had been. He idly wondered what his life might have been like if it all hadn’t happened. It seemed somehow as if what had happened to him had been the result of sheer, blind chance—rotten bad luck. That was very easy to believe, and like most easy things, it was wrong. There had been a definite cause-and-effect sequence operating that night. He had been drunk, for one thing, and he had been drinking hard to incapacitate himself—to keep himself out of Isabel Drake’s clutches, and he had done that because it had been Isabel’s suggestions that had led to the events in the front seat of his car, and on, and on, and on. It had
not
been sheer blind chance. Of course the appearance of the train had not been all that predictable, but considering the way he had been driving when he had fled from Isabel’s house, if it hadn’t been the train, it would have been another car or even a tree. Trees are very unforgiving when automobiles run into them. The train had maimed him; a tree most probably would have killed him outright. He sat for quite a while, thinking about it. “Hey up there, can I come up?”

Raphael leaned over the railing and looked down. It was the girl from downstairs. She stood on the sidewalk below in the early-evening dusk, her face turned up toward him. “Come ahead,” he told her.

A minute or two later she came out on the roof. “Oh my,” she said, pointing.

Raphael turned. The last touches of color from the sunset lingered along the western horizon, and the contrail from a passing jet formed a bright pink line high overhead where the sun was still shining.

The girl came over and sat on the bench near his chair. “You’ve got the best view in town up here.”

“If you like sunsets. Otherwise it’s not too much. On a clear day you can almost see to the sewage-treatment plant.”

She laughed and then crossed her arms on the railing, leaned her chin on them, and looked down into the street below. “You were right, you know?”

“About what?”

“That street—those people. I’ve been watching them since we talked that time. All they do is exist. They don’t really live at all, do they?”

“Not noticeably.”

“You scared me, do you know that? I saw myself at forty—a welfairy—screaming like a fishwife and with a whole tribe of grubby little kids hanging on to me. You really scared me.”

“I was trying hard enough.”

“What for? Why did you bother? And why me?” She looked straight at him.

“Let’s just say it’s a bet I’ve got with myself.”

“You want to run that past me again? You can be infuriatingly obscure at times.”

He looked at her for a moment. In the faint light on the rooftop she seemed somehow very much like Marilyn. “It’s not really that complicated. I’ve lived here for six or seven months now, and I’ve been watching these poor, sorry misfits living out their garbage-can lives for all that time. I just wondered about the possibility of beating the system. I thought that maybe—just maybe—if I could catch somebody before the habits had set in, I might be able to turn things around. Let’s call it a private war between me and that street down there.”

“Then it isn’t anything personal?”

“Not really.”

“I just happened along?”

“It’s not exactly that. I like you well enough to care what happens to you. It’s not just a random experiment, if that’s what you mean.”

“Thanks for that anyway.” She laughed. “For a minute there I was starting to feel like a white rat.” “No danger.”

“You don’t even know my name.”

“Of course I do. You’re the girl on the roof.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to call somebody.”

“It keeps things anonymous—impersonal.” He smiled. “That way I can beat that thing down there with no strings attached. It can’t come back and say I was out to get something for myself.”

“Okay, I think it’s a little nuts, but I won’t tell you my name. You can keep on calling me the girl on the roof. I know your name, though. You’re Raphael Taylor—it’s on your mailbox. That doesn’t spoil it, does it?”

“No. No problem.”

“All right, Raphael Taylor, you can chalk one up for our side.

The girl on the roof is going back to Metalline Falls.” “Well, good
enough!”

“I don’t know if I’d go
that
far. When the girl on the roof shows up back home with a big tummy, tongues are going to wag all over town. My father might send me back out into the snow—and let me tell
you,
Raphael Taylor, we get a
lot
of snow in Metalline Falls—whole bunches of snow.”

“You’ll be all right. It might be a little rough, but at least the street didn’t get you.”

“It almost did, you know. I was ashamed. Girls from small towns are like that. You’re ashamed to go home because everybody knows you, and you know they’ll all be talking about you. It’s easier to hide on some street like this—to pull it around you and hide. I’ll just bet that if you went down there and asked them, you’d find out that most of those poor welfairy girls down there come from small towns, and that they first came here just to hide.”

“It’s possible,” he admitted.

“And now what about you, Raphael Taylor? Since you’ve saved me from a fate worse than death, the least I can do is return the favor. Nobody’s going to accuse the girl on the roof of being ungrateful.”

“I’m fine.”

“Sure
you are,” she said sarcastically. “Are you sure that street hasn’t got its hooks into
you?”

“I don’t think there’s much danger of that.”

“Can you be sure?” she persisted. “I mean
really
sure? Except for that first day I’ve never seen you anyplace but up here. Are you really sure you’re not just settling in? You made me think about it; now I’m going to make you think about it, too. I’d hate to remember you just sitting up here, growing old, watching that lousy street down there.”

“I won’t grow old up here,” he told her. “I had some things to sort out, and I needed a quiet place to do that in.” “You’ll be leaving then?” “Before long.” “Before the snow flies?”