Heavy on the Dead

by G. M. Ford

  “Okay.”

  “Well, one of the guys they sent apparently lost a brother up in Conway and is batshit crazy over it. Decides he’s gonna find you and kill you himself. One of ’em calls in from Mexico, tells them what the other guy wants to do. They tell him to keep the other guy in sight and not let him do anything stupid, anything that could further endanger the movement.”

  “That won’t get ’em to me,” I said.

  “We recorded another call. Hour and a half or so ago. Same guy tells them that the other guy, guy named Greenway, is still determined to kill your big ass. They tell the first guy he’s gonna have to do his duty and kill this Greenway guy before he brings down the house. First guy don’t like the sound of that at all. Claims he’s a lover not a shooter. They tell him to call back in an hour.”

  “Okay,” I said again.

  “The second call came from San Diego County . . . from somewhere in Ocean Beach.”

  Forty-four seventeen Muir was like the rest of the houses in this part of town. Little tiny joint, couldn’t have been more than five hundred square feet. Mottled Spanish tile roof. Had a little masonry wall around the street side and about a thousand bright plastic toys strewn all over the front yard like confetti.

  Lamar had managed to ditch Chub about six blocks south. He figured he had maybe ten minutes at best before Chub noticed he was gone and went into his Godzilla Unchained routine.

  He moved the broken metal gate aside, stepped over a red-and-yellow Big Wheel bike, and mounted the slab of concrete masquerading as a front porch. He knocked on the door. A dog started barking. He could hear the squeal of kids. The door cracked. The barking and squealing got louder.

  A heavily made-up eye appeared in the opening. Blinked.

  “Somebody give you a call?” Lamar asked.

  She didn’t answer. Just used her foot to swing the door open and took a couple of steps backward. Lamar stepped inside. She was tall and had green hair. Pierced eyebrow and a big silver stud in her tongue. She had a tear-streaked baby balanced on her narrow hip and another little girl, maybe three or four, hiding behind her legs. The rest of the joint looked like a swap meet gone wrong. There was shit everywhere. Lamar could feel the carpet under his feet but couldn’t actually see it. He shuffled to avoid stepping on anything. Behind her, in the archway, the dog—looked like some sort of border collie—stalked back and forth, barking every time it reversed course, like an old-time arcade bear.

  “Jimmy’s friends called,” she said suddenly. “They said I should give you one of his guns.”

  “Where’s Jimmy?” Lamar asked.

  “Salinas Valley.”

  “What’s in Salinas Valley?” he asked conversationally.

  “The state prison,” she answered.

  “Oh . . . aah . . . ,” Lamar stammered. “Sorry . . . didn’t mean to . . .”

  She waved him off. “Ain’t none of it your fault. That dumb shit done it to himself,” she said. “Him and them other white-power asshole friends of his.” She swung her free arm in a slashing arc. “Out there playacting like they’re soldiers or some such shit. Pretending they’re not just another bunch of low-life losers who can’t hold a job.”

  “Sorry . . . I didn’t . . . ,” was as far as he got.

  “So now what?” She stood still for a moment, as if waiting for an answer from the skies. “I’m alone here. Two kids. No damn money. Working three jobs. My mom’s in a nursing home that smells like piss. What the hell am I supposed to do now?” The baby on her hip began to squall and squirm. She bent at the waist and set it gently on the floor, where it immediately grabbed a discarded yellow hamburger wrapper and stuffed it into its wet mouth.

  Her narrow eyes looked as if they were trying to burn a hole all the way through Lamar’s head. Lamar blinked uneasily.

  “I know what it’s like to be the one left behind,” Lamar blurted. “All my life I know what that shit feels like. Like there’s really no place you’re supposed to be. No place you belong. Like you’re just wherever the hell you are, waiting to see what happens to you next. It ain’t right.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” she said after a while.

  “The gun?” Lamar said.

  She pulled the hamburger wrapper away from the baby, who immediately began to voice its indignation. She ignored the siren sounds, walked over to the hall closet, opened the door, and pulled a ratty crocheted afghan down from the overhead shelf.

  Lamar walked over, reached up, and came out with a green gym bag. He set it on the floor. Inside was a Browning Black Label Pro. Custom grips. Eight rounds of fury. Nice gun. Brand spanking new. Two full boxes of shells, one of which he opened and then carefully loaded into the semi, finally sliding one shell into the chamber before stashing the weapon in the back of his belt. He put the rest of the ammo back in the gym bag and then returned it to the closet shelf.

  “Thanks,” he told her.

  “Just take it and go,” was the best she could manage as she stepped over and separated the baby from a pink Styrofoam cup.

  Gabe snapped a round into the chamber, thumbed the safety to “On,” and stuffed the gun into a small leather holster hidden beneath the waistband of the Nike running shorts.

  “Can you see it?” Gabe asked.

  “Looks like you’ve got a dick.”

  “That makes one of us,” Gabe said, smoothing the tank top down over the rest of it. I opened my mouth to speak, but Gabe beat me to it. “I’m thinkin’ you maybe ought to break out that little Smith & Wesson you’ve got stashed around here someplace. If Supercop says there’s a couple white-power assholes here in town looking for us—and much as I hate cops, I’m guessing he’s probably right—then I think we probably oughta be carrying until further notice.”

  Wasn’t until that moment that I realized how much I’d been enjoying my newfound freedom. How much being unarmed and unknown had saved my soul and my sanity. Probably explains why I said something so stupid:

  “Neither of us has a California gun license.”

  It was hard to argue with a derisive snort, so I didn’t bother. Instead, for once in my life, I followed directions. I found a plastic shoulder harness in the bottom dresser drawer, put on a Hawaiian shirt big enough to hide a lawn tractor, and slid the Smith & Wesson into place and snapped it in.

  “So what now?” Gabe wanted to know when I came back out. “We just gonna sit around the apartment here and wait for these guys to figure out where we live and show up to put our lights out?”

  I thought it over. “I guess I’m gonna go out and start looking for the guy who bit me,” I said after a minute. “Nothing else seems to matter to me right now. It’s like my life is on hold until I find out whether I’m gonna live or die.”

  “Yeah . . . I’m guessing that’d be a real attention getter.”

  I was feeling kinda pensive today, so I mulled that one over too. “In a way, it’s liberating,” I said after a while. “It’s like all the other stuff in your life just sort of fades to black and then burns from the edges in, until there’s nothing left in the room except you and the prospect of dying.”

  Gabe nodded. “I don’t remember who said it—somebody famous, I’m thinkin’—but somebody I read once said that death is the only enemy.”

  “Sounds to me like whoever it was knew what they was talking about,” I said.

  “Where we gonna start?”

  “Up by the river.”

  “Let’s go.”

  You sail into the mouth of the San Diego River, you damn well better be on the north side of the breakwater so’s you can hook a hard left into Mission Bay. Either that or you will immediately run aground in the river. That’s because the present mouth of the river is not in its original location. Back in the late 1870s, the river got in the way of progress, so they moved it over here into the mudflats and sloughs of north O.B., where it wouldn’t bother anybody ’cause there was nobody over here to bother.

  We started up under the bridge at Sea World
Drive by the skate park, about as far to the northeast of downtown O.B. as a body could get, and then zigzagged our way between camps on the banks of the river and those of the extended-stay folks who were living down in the park.

  I’ve never been homeless, but personally speaking, it seemed to me that the banks of the river were a better place than the beach to pitch camp if you were living outdoors. You could find a little privacy amid the dense undergrowth. The river had your back, and you were far enough from the commercial zone so that the cops were inclined to leave your ass alone, unless the river was about to flood and they came down here and rousted everybody out so they wouldn’t drown in their sleeping bags, or the once a year they sent the cleanup crews out to round up a couple thousand stolen bicycles and something like five hundred tons of loose garbage scattered and left about by our erstwhile urban campers.

  If you didn’t count the guy with the machete, things went well. We followed each well-worn path we came upon. Some of the campsites were empty. Most were not. You could tell right away how territorial people were regarding their chosen ground.

  The first river camper we encountered met us about halfway down the bank. This guy was ready. He was holding a piece of lumber, with several rusty nails hammered through one end, above one shoulder like a sledgehammer.

  Gabe raised a moderating hand. “Not here to give you a hard time, man,” Gabe said. “We’re not the cops. Just lookin’ for somebody. That’s all.”

  The guy was real nervous. He kept shifting his weight from foot to foot, almost like he was dancing. “Gwan get outta here,” he chanted. “Go.”

  I stepped up next to Gabe. “Guy with a great big Afro and a bar code tattooed on his forehead.”

  He stopped dancing. Frowned at me. “Yeah . . . I seen him. Everybody seen him.”

  “You know his name?” I asked.

  “Creamed spinach.”

  “What?” I croaked out.

  “I asked him what the bar code was for one time. You know, what it would read if you ran it through the machine. He told me it was for creamed spinach.”

  Our stunned silence spurred him on. “Swear to God,” he said as he pulled one hand loose from the cudgel and shot us a peace sign. “Creamed spinach.”

  Gabe looked my way. “You know, my man . . . you know how I am . . . we catch this motherfucker . . . I’m gonna have to run him through the machine and see what it says.”

  “What say we just use the wand,” I said. “Like the checkers do when you’ve got heavy shit in the cart. That way we don’t have to hoist him up onto the conveyor belt.”

  “That’ll work,” Gabe conceded.

  We climbed back onto the bike path and then slalomed down the other side of the berm onto Robb Field, a massive athletic complex that comprised the northwestern boundary of Ocean Beach. In addition to fields for all known sports and hobbies, the vast area was ringed with concrete picnic tables and benches originally intended as an amenity for a nice family respite in the park but which, if you were living in the streets, were a definite step up from the au naturel end of the local housing market.

  Most of the picnic table ensembles had morphed into something roughly akin to those blanket forts I used to build in my bedroom when I was a kid. Tents, parts of tents, big sheets of blue plastic, lean-tos, scrap roofing, you name it and somebody had found a way to make it work for a shelter.

  It didn’t take long for us to figure out that the working plan for the tables was gonna have to be different than it was for the riverbank, where a certain amount of stealth was called for so’s to keep from getting your head bashed in by some paranoid lunatic.

  Out here in the flatlands, things were a little different. We tried to make a lot of conversational noise as we walked around, making sure they heard us coming from a long way off so we didn’t freak anybody out.

  Also didn’t take long to discover the underlying hierarchy of homelessness. The screaming crazies—those poor souls who simply weren’t watching the same TV channel as the rest of us—they were the riverbank people. The better adjusted, but likewise domestically challenged, were most likely to be found in the park. Couples, small families, and single mothers with children preferred the more suburban, lawn-like ambience of Robb Field.

  We’d been at it for an hour and a half or so. Lots of people knew who we were looking for but couldn’t be of any help in finding him. The best any of them could come up with was that he must live around there someplace because they saw him all the time. The only real trouble we’d come across was a guy who came charging through the brush at us waving a machete, spittle bursting from his mouth as he screamed and shrieked around the shrubbery like a deranged weed whacker. Gabe and I didn’t need to talk about it. We’d just turned around and walked away.

  It was the Native American woman with the two long-haired little boys who finally got us pointed in the right direction. Despite the warm weather, she had a little fire going in the firepit. Sleeping bags were airing on a rope tied between trees. A couple of Coleman lanterns, a pair of kids’ bikes chained to a tree. The place looked picked clean, like it had been used for quite a while.

  At the sight of Gabe and me heading her way, she got to her feet, looking around on the ground as if she were trying to find something she’d dropped. Gabe put a sideways hand on my chest, silently telling me to hang back so we didn’t scare the woman any more than necessary. I stopped walking. Waited.

  I stood thirty yards away and watched as the woman traded strained pleasantries with Gabe. Two minutes later, the woman turned her back on me and pointed in the direction of the river. Gabe was nodding and listening to what she had to say.

  I watched Gabe pull a handful of folding money out of the shorts and extend it in the woman’s direction. She shook her head and turned away. Gabe tried again. The woman ducked inside the makeshift tent. As if connected to her by rubber bands, the two boys scuttled across the ground and followed her inside.

  I could feel Gabe sigh from thirty yards away. Gabe crooked a finger in my direction. I walked over. Gabe shouldered me a few feet to my left.

  “See the thicket over there with the yellow flowers?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “She says she sees him goin’ in and outta there all the time. That his camp’s down on the river there behind the thicket.”

  “Let’s go see if he’s home,” I suggested.

  We took our time scouting the area. Real careful like. This section of underbrush was about thirty yards long, thick and thorny with no hint of an entrance. As we spread out, working our separate paths to the edges, we found there were two ways down to the campsite. One at either end of the thicket, kind of like a prairie dog hole. You start diggin’ at one end, he goes out the other.

  On a signal from Gabe, I started tiptoeing down the narrow track. Out in the river, bright-white egrets picked among the shallows and sandbars. A squadron of brown pelicans floated overhead. And then I could hear him—ahead of me in the undergrowth, low and musical, as if he were humming a childlike tune to himself.

  As I neared the river, I saw that the bushes ran all the way into the water. If I was going to step around the corner into the campsite, I was going to have to take at least one wet step.

  I was standing there, trying to decide which foot I was willing to get wet, when I noticed the thick branch with the missing bark. I reached out and touched it. Smooth but bony and dry. Bark peeled off a long time ago. And then I knew how he got around the corner. I took three steps up the bank, reached out and grabbed the barkless branch, lifted my feet, and swung myself around the corner like an orangutan.

  I landed right in front of him. About three feet away from where he was sitting in one of those low beach chairs, eating Dinty Moore stew out of the can. Before I could react, he powered off the canvas chair like a bottle rocket, the can of stew pinwheeling in the air as he headed for the opposite end of the campsite on a dead run.

  My mouth opened to shout a warning, but the words cau
ght in my throat when I heard the collision of flesh. Sounded like somebody’d dropped a heifer from the roof of an apartment building.

  “Goddamn,” I heard Gabe grunt, right before it all got swallowed by the sounds of somebody thrashing the underbrush. I crossed the short section of riverbank and started up the opposite path. Gabe was sitting on the ground, using two fingers to wipe at a bloody nose. I could hear Boy Bar Code forcing his way through the thick cover to my right. He was still humming.

  I reached out with both hands and pulled Gabe into a standing position and then started chugging up the bank, trying to beat our quarry to the top of the berm. My right knee hated the strain, but I kept pushing until I popped out onto the bike path, hands on knees, bent over, breathing like a steam locomotive.

  The kid was twenty yards away by the time I looked up, pumping across the park like a long-distance runner. Gabe stumbled to my side, red in the face, still trickling blood from one nostril.

  The precise reasons why we started to chase after him I suspect had more to do with psychiatry than common sense. Took both of us about fifty yards of sprinting to devolve from running like the wind to running like the winded. Only reason we made it that far was because neither of us wanted to be the first one to give up.

  We stood there on the grass, hunched over, barking at invisible ants as the kid hotfooted it off into the ozone on the far side of Robb Field.

  “Few years back we’da caught him,” Gabe eventually huffed.

  I stifled a snicker. “Whatever you say.”

  Gabe threw an arm around my hunched and heaving shoulders.

  “We know where he lives. Let’s give him a couple of days to settle back in. We’ll get him next time.”