Back in Portland, they drop me off at the old abandoned Washington High School in the pitch dark. Manny tells me he’s sorry again, then grunts at Tappen like a guy muttering thanks for a final crappy paycheck.
*
I remember the fast-moving swirls of pregnant clouds directly above me, shifting counter to the dark river running below. It began raining harder, running down the concrete in streams. The rain had stung my face.
So there I had stood, atop the arch of the Oregon City Bridge, in my bare feet.
I turned to the inside of the bridge, with my back to the river. Looking down, between the crisscrossing arch-work, I saw the police—and firemen—standing by below, squinting up at me. The bridge was blocked off. Locals were gathering over on sidewalks and roofs with binoculars, cameras and food to eat.
I remember thinking, if I came down, I would never be able to return to the life I had.
A voice from a megaphone called out:
“We’re here to help you! Please, just stay where you are. We’re here to help.”
Rescue climbers were making their way up the arch, about halfway from reaching me.
I remember feeling a warmth swelling in my chest. I remember thinking, this was what normal people recognize as a feeling of liberation, of knowing they had found what they love in life. I remember smiling.
I had backed up, so that only the balls of my feet and my toes rested on the edge of this arch rising over the Willamette River.
Then I stepped backwards; I plunged into that abyss ...
*
Gerald Tappen wants me to find out what Eva is going to do about whatever she knows. The problem is, he doesn’t know all she knows. She won’t talk to him anymore. He thinks I can get to her somehow, appeal to her. He never asked me to get rough. He knows me better than that by now. It’s a pretty smart move on his part—keeps me on ice, in theory, and means he won’t have to get rough. Like that smack on the face that I’m realizing now he might have paid Manny to give me, having seen too many cop shows, and then he pretended like he was shocked, just shocked.
Old Washington High is not far from my Bressie building tent. I head over. Amy is gone. The next morning, I’m feeling pretty rough physically—like I’d been sleeping on concrete, most people would say, but I already had that going for me.
I don’t go look up Eva. I go find Matt and Jack before noon at Niki’s, one of the few old diners left on the East Bank. It’s where they usually do their cop break. I tell myself that coming to see them is not committing to a thing. Sometimes, committing gets defined by what you don’t do.
Inside, retirees and social-service cases sit in old vinyl booths. Matt and Jack wait for me in a corner spot. I stopped by the Salvation Army on the way—I have on an old used Columbia rain jacket, a nappy stocking cap pulled down low and big dark sunglasses.
“Star sighting,” Matt says. “Alert the paparazzi.”
“Only thing worse than being caught by us?” Jack says to him. “Being seen with us.”
So they will stop teasing I pull down my glasses like the battered wife in a soap opera, all we need is the ominous synthesizer.
“Whoa,” both say. “Took one for the team, I hope,” Jack adds. Whatever that means.
“I walked into a door.”
Matt and Jack exchange glances.
“Just tell me what you want me to do,” I say in my gravely voice.
Jack nods at Matt, who says, “Eva Tappen is at the Rescue House again this evening.”
“Just don’t tell me to play up the homeless bit or I’m walking.”
“However you want to play it. Just approach her in a good light. Don’t get maced or something stupid.”
“I just want to know what happened to Oscar.”
“Exactly. We’ll be here the next three afternoons, from 2:00 pm till 3:00 pm,” Jack says.
“Or, we could get you that phone,” Matt says.
“No!” I bark at them. “Sorry. But, no. They’re just trouble.”
“Fair enough,” Jack says. “Get freaked out? Come at a different time, leave us a note. The staff here knows us. Speaking of, they could get you some ice for that.”
“No.”
“Okay. Then, you good?” Matt says.
“No. Need a mocha to go. Quadruple.”
*
I wait for Eva Tappen in a doorway across from the Rescue House. She must have seen me from inside, looking out those panes of glass. I’ve been here for two hours at least. Huddling in the half-dark, hands hanging off my knees. Staring. Her silver little BMW coupe is waiting for her parked under a streetlight. When she finally comes out she looks around, gets in the car, shuts the door. I stand and step out onto the sidewalk not five yards away. I keep staring but can't see in, the tinted windows reflecting the light. A full minute goes by. Maybe she’s calling someone to beat the crap out of me, that or the cops.
The passenger door unlocks, and she pushes it open. I bow to the opening.
“How did you get that bruise?” she says.
“Looking for Oscar,” I say.
“Get in.”
I slide onto the leather seat, already warming. “I’d keep these windows down, I were you.”
She doesn’t. She drives us over the Burnside Bridge, past 21st and 23rd, heading for the West Hills, I’m guessing. She shifts a lot. She likes to shift.
“Why am I in your car?”
She shifts down for the next light. “Gerald is a silly man. Like all men.” She looks at me, but not with the glare I expect. “You are homeless, yes?”
“Right now I am. I wasn’t with Oscar.”
She shakes her head at the thought. Right before the West Hills, she turns off and guns it up a narrow street that winds along the base of the ridge. A sleek new condo building looms, a garage door opens, and we race inside like we’re in the Batmobile.
I don’t want her to let me stay here. Despite her hard tone, she probably will. People have tried this before. People don’t get it. Sometimes they have a certain kink, or they think it will make up for something missing in their lives. A vision flashes in my head of her cleaning me up, us making love. Won’t happen. I’ll ask to borrow a blanket or tarp for the road though. Meantime, maybe she’ll tell me what really happened if I play her along.
“You can stay here, if you want,” she says, like clockwork.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
She laughs. “What am I, a realtor? You have to see the place first?”
The condo has an open layout with modern styling, high-end appliances and fine wood surfaces—a simple and green-seeming design. Tappen probably built it; I don’t ask. Eva and I sit at a dining table in front of the vast windows. The city skyline sparkles beyond, as if floating. She drinks a pink wine, but not like a drunk, swirling it with both hands like it’s herbal tea. I drink a Jarritos, tutifruti flavor.
She says, “Gerald, he went to the coast. He said he did anyway. I don’t know.”
I stare out at the view. It’s a long way down. The city lights tell me where things are, my constellations. I can see the river and the grim, dark Steel Bridge, its skeletal ironwork a void—the opposite of light. It always finds me, and I it.
“Look at me,” she says, her face hardened up like bondo drying.
“Okay.”
“Gerald met with you, right? In that shitty strip club, I bet.”
“You don’t know? Why don’t you ask the man?”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said you helped out your brother. Didn’t tell me why. Look. All I know is, Oscar was good to me. We talked about what we’d do together someday.”
“Ah, yes. Someday. You will organize the laborers. Help the homeless. Lift yourselves up. Someday. Like you’re two prisoners in a prison movie.”
“It’s not a movie. I was going to—”
“So do it. Quit your talking about it. You don’t need him.” Before I can reply she says, “Do you even know how many people
Oscar was going to help over the years? He was always wanting to inspire someone, something.”
“No. I guess I don’t.” She’s right on cue, feeding me what I need, the true version I should know. My feet press at the floor, but these high-grade floorboards don’t creak.
“You were only his latest project,” she adds.
Project? My blood rushes to my head. I stand up. “Don’t call me that.”
“Shut up and listen.” She throws back wine as if she’d just popped a pill with it. “Oscar, he ... he needed help. If he had only wanted it.”
“What kind of help?”
Her long arm shoots out and she grabs me hard by the wrist, her fingertips digging in.
“What kind?” I say.
She just glares at me, keeps digging in.
I push her off me.
She bolts up, knocking over her chair. She rushes off down the hallway.
I let her cool down a while. I stand her chair back up, and slide it close to the table.
Eventually I make my way down the hallway. Light comes from the bedroom. I smell a cigarette. Eva sits on the edge of the bed. She’s smoking, rocking back and forth. Tears stream down her face.
I stand at the doorway. “I’m going to leave. Can I take a blanket?”
“I don’t care. And I don’t care how you smell. I smelled it all before and worse than this.”
“I just want to know,” I say.
Eva stands. Paces the room. She faces me. Her look says, get in here. I step inside the room. She steps within a foot of me and raises her chin, more like in defiance than pride.
“No,” I say.
“You do not even know what I am to say.”
“I’m not taking your money, or whatever you got to offer.”
“It’s what you do with it. This is what counts.”
“No. Not even after a nice shower.”
“How dare you.”
“Really, lady?”
Her fists are showing, and I don’t know where that cigarette went. In a flash I imagine it searing my eye.
We each step back a little, glaring around the room as if there are strangers here we really need to leave so we can have it out, right here and now.
“That job killed him,” she says.
“Right. Go on,” I say.
She paces in a circle. “Gerald, he killed him.”
“What?”
“You killed him.”
“Me? Stop.”
“He looked up to you. You didn’t even know it, you’re so stupid.”
“I said, stop. You’re drunk or something.”
She’s still pacing, another circle. “No doctors for Oscar. No clinics. No help.”
“What help?”
“Dreams, hopes, all this money. These systems we live in.” Eva shakes her head and it shudders her body and she’s swirling around and I lunge and grab at her upper arms to make her stop, focus. She sucks in air like she’s going to spit.
“It was my idea,” she says.
“What was?”
I shake her. She shows me teeth, slimy with the saliva of desperation.
“Gerald told you he found Oscar,” she says. “He said he didn’t know what to do.”
“You wanted Tappen to leave Oscar on train tracks? Your own brother?”
“Of course not. That was his stupid idea.”
“So he was just stupid about it.”
“Yes.”
I’m fucked, it hits me—maybe she lured me here to make it look like me, maybe Tappen was even in on it. What’s she got? A gun, scissors, dropped something in my tutifruti? She wants to be free, but I won’t let her. We struggle. She knees me in the crotch and the pain tears through me like I’m dunked in ice water, then it’s boiling. I slump forward, bent over. She stumbles backward, falls against the bed and slumps to the floor, her back against the frame.
I lower myself to the floor, fighting the pain. Anyone witnessing this scene would have already suspected me of horrible things.
We catch our breath. She glares at me with a wild look on her face, her lips shrunk back over her teeth.
“I killed him,” she says.
“I don’t believe you,” I say.
“He killed himself.”
“What did you say?”
“He killed himself.”
*
I leave. Just get the hell out. I don’t take a blanket. I march off down the hill. The road down is steep, tree-lined, dark. I walk along the shoulder. There’s a clearing. I stop there. Here I can look down at the city skyline. I get back in my sights the void that is the Steel Bridge—it’s like a watch I need to keep checking. I’m not far from a steep edge. I’m not sure what I’m waiting for, or what I’m going to do.
Eva comes walking down the road, her arms folded across her chest. She stands next to me. We say nothing.
“He got me my first job,” I say, after a while. “On the four corners. Oscar made them take me.”
“He looked up to you.”
“Hardly.”
“You truly did not know that?”
I shake my head. “This one time? We were on a job, big subdivision out in the suburbs. Framing. Muddier than hell. The super needed Oscar, wanted me to find him. I’m looking and I’m looking.” I have to shake my head again. “Well, I found him. Inside a honey bucket, of all things. He wasn’t going to the bathroom. He was just sitting there. But his face, it was all different.”
“Like he wants to cry, but no tears can come out.”
“Yeah. Like those street guys I know who were in Iraq, Afghanistan. The thing is though? It wasn’t the first time.”
“He needed help. He couldn’t accept that. To him he was either perfect, or ... nothing. I tried, for so long.”
Then it hits me, like a pigeon swooping down and crashing into my chest. I step back. I point at her. “You found him. You were the one. It wasn’t Gerald at all.”
She just stares at me. Lowers her arms.
“And then you called Gerald there.”
She closes her eyes a moment. “Afterward, yes.” It takes her a moment to go on. “Oscar, he was waiting for me there. He had called me. He wanted me there.”
“To make you see it. See him jump. He wanted someone—to know.”
“I tried to stop him.”
“And, afterward?”
“When Gerald came, I begged him so. He must help me.”
“You never told him.”
“No.”
“All he knows is, he has a mess to clean up.”
We stand there a long time, looking out together. The wind picks up, and we let it smack our cheeks.
“In my culture,” she says. “In my church, a man does not commit suicide.”
“So, what—he would have gone to hell for it? That what you’re saying? But the deed’s already done, so who you trying to fool?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Gerald was trying,” she says eventually. “He truly does love me and this is something I’ll probably never get.”
“What’s he going to do?”
“Where is he going to turn? Not to the cops. Oh, no. He owes his investors far too much. They would not like what they find out. These are not kind people.”
“They’re gonna find out,” I say. “They all are.”
“What makes you say that?” she says, straightening up.
“It’s the way things work. We’re all like these tiny, what do you call them? Marionettes. Ant marionettes. Even you. Gerald. There are forces pulling our strings, but we can’t see them, get to them. We think we can. We can pull ourselves up on the strings, hoist ourselves up and up and it really makes us think we’re getting somewhere. But it’s only just a longer fall down.”
A sad smile spreads across her face. “You might be smarter than you look.”
“Or smell?” I joke, but my smile won’t hold. “I don’t know. The jury’s still out. Gerald’s the accomplice. But I’m still liable.”
I don’t wait for her to answer that. I turn and descend the dark road, the steep grade propelling me downward, ever faster.
*
I don’t remember hitting the water. I remember the dim vast river hurtling at me. A moment of nothing. I remember the shock of cold water submerging me. I should have never come back up from underwater. No one had survived a jump off the Oregon City Bridge. But I fought the water. Paddled. Got free. I burst up from below. I remember screaming and gasping for air as the river carried me along. I treaded water, though it didn’t seem to work right. The pains in my back were so bad, I thought river rocks were pounding at me.
The shore came up fast, wanting to pass me. I paddled my way for it.
If I could have seen myself as I am now back then, I might have just opened my mouth wide and let myself sink down forever. Because I now have a beard, it’s going matted and crusty, and I’m draped in a creepy overcoat and a thin rain poncho.
I had to abandon my hideaway to avoid Matt and Jack. I stay on the move. Tappen can’t find me either. He’d given me a number to call when he let me loose with a long leash. But I still don’t have a phone.
I keep telling myself: there must be some reason why a guy like Oscar does himself in and why I don’t get to. Why should I survive? It’s like his message to me.
It’s two weeks later. I’ve been looking for Amy ever since I left Eva Tappen that night. No one has seen Amy. It’s raining, almost snow. It’s late afternoon but dim as dusk. I roam the Central Eastside, eyeing more dumpsters and places to take cover. I pass the day laborer corners and don’t want to look, but I have to. Many more men crowd the corners but no one’s stopping to pick them up. There’s a growing group of gringos. More woman are there. All are looking for work now.
Burly Man eyes me from a corner, the only one seeing me. I nod. He’s not working for Gerald Tappen now, apparently. I was his last day.
I wonder, again, what Tappen’s game was. I wasn’t just his informant. Maybe he wasn’t going to frame me some way—maybe he was only trying to force Eva’s hand. Well, I’m not going to let myself be his power tool, not anyone’s.
Rain Down Page 7