The Bum's Rush

by G. M. Ford

  I applied my vast knowledge of public agencies. "So, let me guess. Because this Barb Watson is still on leave, they never rehired the position. That would seriously screw up the budget. What they did was palm her work off on m

  Karen. Am I getting warm here?"

  "Sizzling," Alleman confirmed.

  "So, what should have been a system of checks and balances was suddenly useless."

  They nodded in unison and then both checked the hall.

  "They always fudge," said Williams. "They're always trying to get around the state hiring guidelines. They delay all rehires for as long as possible." "Karen was working sixty, seventy hours a week," Alleman said.

  "And you guys had no idea she was " I let it hang.

  "Well, we all knew how unhappy she was."

  "Karen and '' Williams jerked a thumb over her shoulder "were always at one another's throats. And, you know, since the thing with Earl "

  "I expected her to quit every day."

  "Or burn the building down."

  "What thing with Earl?"

  They glanced at each other. Williams took the lead.

  "You remember back right after the first of the year, when we had that real cold weather, when those three homeless people froze to death, right outside here?"

  I said I did. Anchormen had agonized. Pols had pontificated. Hearts had bled. And life had gone remorselessly on.

  "You know how down on the first floor, the building has a big overhang and the homeless like to get in there right up against the building, you know, to keep warm?''

  Williams took up the thread. "There was a group of regi ulars who had been sleeping there for years. One of them was an old guy named Earl. He carried this sawed-off broom with him all the time. Used to sweep the curbs." She made a two-handed sweeping gesture.

  I knew just who she meant. The old guy had been a fixture in the city's homeless population for as long as I could remember. Sweeping imaginary refuse from the sidewalk down into the gutter with a broom so old and worn it looked more like a mustache on a stick.

  "Looked like Popeye's father," I said.

  "Yeah, that's him." Williams smiled. "Anyway, Karen and Earl were good friends. She sort of adopted him. Every morning she'd bring him coffee and a muffin, and sometimes if he was around she'd even buy him lunch."

  "Until--" Gina said ominously.

  "Until?"

  "Until the higher-ups decided that these people were bad for the shrubbery. That was their excuse. That they were hard on the landscaping. They put up that fence that's there now. They got the cops to keep them out."

  "They stopped letting them use the bathrooms, too."

  "Then we got that cold weather."

  "They found three of them huddled up to the fence, dead."

  "One of them was Earl."

  "Karen was devastated," Alleman said.

  The sound of a bus five stories below in the street intruded upon the silence. Williams folded her arms and said, "Karen bought him a little funeral out of her own money."

  "Really?"

  Alleman shook her head sadly. "Karen copied up a bunch of posters about the funeral and hung them all over the square."

  "All the street people came. All of them."

  "Must have been a hundred of them," Alleman finished.

  "You guys went," I said, more a statement than a question.

  They nodded in unison. "She hardly talked after that," said Williams.

  "I still think she was clinically depressed."

  I kept at it. Heard the whole story of Karen's estrangement from Franchini, up until that one day when she just didn't show up at work. About how they'd been so worried they'd gone to Karen's apartment.

  "What about her social life?" I asked. They both shrugged.

  "Boyfriends?" A shrug. Not that they knew of.

  "Girlfriends?" Again, a no.

  "I think she'd just given up," said Williams. "I mean, dating "

  "You'd have to be single to understand," Alleman said.

  "I am," I confessed. "I know what you're talking about. After a certain age, dates are like four-hour job interviews." We all agreed on that one. I tried again. "No social life at all?"

  "She worked almost all the time," Williams said.

  "Sometimes she did volunteer work at an AIDS hospice."

  "And she read," DeeAnn added. "Incessantly."

  "Mysteries."

  "She'd read all the mysteries before they ever got to the shelves."

  I pecked away at them for another fifteen minutes. The picture wasn't good. The girl seemed to be one of those urban animals who fill city apartment buildings, surrounded by their fellow travelers and yet isolated amid the clamor, reduced to routinized replays of previous days and consuming personal interests. These disconnected refugees from hope are always the toughest to find.

  When it became apparent that I'd gotten everything I was going to, I thanked them for the time and took the elevator to the street.

  A breeze had freshened the air, pushing the pedestrians along with their collars up. I headed downhill toward the Fiat. Three blocks down, the King County Office Building's honeycombed face caught my attention. Selena Dun lap. Five-four-one, eight-two, six-threesix-seven.

  8

  The Overnight wind had driven the remnants of the inversion deep into Idaho, leaving the city rubbing its eyes, blinking like a mole at the dry clarity of a Northwest winter morning. Relieved of the blanket of sludge, Puget Sound, the sky, and the Olympics now competed for the eye in complementary shades of acrylic blue, animated here and there by fast-moving patches of shade, as railroad car clouds, still deep gray at the edges, rolled east across the sun.

  I parked the Fiat at the top of South Washington, next to the Nippon Kan Theater, and limped across the street. My body felt like a knuckle that needed to be cracked. I could feel every stair I'd rolled down Sunday night. My aching shoulder blades were grateful for the heat of the sun on the back of my jacket. The last of the season's leaves, curled tight about themselves on the ground, were now unfurling, coming loose and beginning to tumble about haphazardly in the swirling breeze.

  I think the official name of the place is the Danny Woo International District Community Garden. Danny Woo had been a major mover and shaker in the Chinese community. He was sort of the Asian equivalent of my old man. Whatever you wanted in Chinatown went through Danny Woo. President of Gee How Oak Tin Family Society, board member of the Chinese Alliance Society and the Hop Sing Tong. The list went on and on. The guy had clout.

  Back in the mid-seventies, faced with a sticky bribery rap, Danny had practiced a little image enhancement. With a great deal of fanfare and media hoopla, he'd donated this little shard of earth to the Asian community, which in turn had taken the incredibly steep piece of dirt and terraced and planted it into a model intensive community garden, whose carefully tended plots seemed almost to grow directly from the nearby skyscrapers. On a fine summer day, with the city lost behind you and the slope of the land blotting out all but the sky, it was easy to imagine yourself momentarily transported to some rural Chinese province.

  I always come by once in the spring and again in late summer, when the ancient gardeners, speaking in their exotic singsong tongues, smile beneath their straw hats as they turn and smooth their allotted spaces. The smell of the loam and the incongruity of a place so pastoral existing within the very gullet of the city somehow always sends me home with a smile.

  The city had been less amused. Not to be outdone by any Chinese restaurant owner, it took the remaining sliver of land between the garden and the freeway and developed the Kobe Terrace Park. They placed an enormous stone lantern at the uphill entrance. No matter that it was Japanese. Asian was Asian, wasn't it? So what if these were the same people who had packed the entire Japanese community off to desert concentration camps just thirty years before? They could damn well build a park too.

  The garden was deserted now. The homeless stay out of it. They seem to know intui
tively that to lie down in such a place would be to return from whence they came, voluntarily to become mulch. They prefer the park, with its paved walks and comfortable benches snuggled beneath imported cherry trees.

  I stopped at the first fork in the path, where Danny's gravel met the city's hardtop, and ran my eyes down over the terraced hillside. Out in the middle, by the toolshed, old bok choy leaves, strung between poles on heavy twine, flapped like stiff brown flags. At the extreme left, all the way down by the front wall of the garden, a remnant rhubarb grew resplendent candy-apple red. Here and there among the empty plots and the white five-gallon buckets, tall yellow chrysanthemums stood nodding, stalks shattered and bent, leaves and petals brown at the edges, but still finding sustenance somewhere deep in the ground. In the distance, out over the top of the Panama Hotel, the Kingdome squatted like a segmented cement shiitake.

  I found her right where George said she'd be, camped out on a green bench at the top of Kobe Terrace Park, grinning into the morning sun, picking her teeth with a matchbook. She must have started early. At ten-forty-five in the morning, already she was seriously shitfaced.

  "I knew I hadn't seen the last of you," she said when she blinked herself into focus and figured out who was on the bench next to her.

  "Oh, really? How'd you know that?"

  " 'Cause you remind me of a dog I had years ago."

  "A dog. I can't believe it. I'm crushed. After all we've meant to each other, you say I remind you of a damn dog?"

  "Nice little black Lab. Lucky was his name. Good dog, friendly like Labs are, you know. 'Cept this fool just couldn't keep his nose outta things. Nothin' he liked better than a fresh cat box or a live porky pine. The cat box wasn't so bad. You know, if a dog wants to eat cat shit, long as he don't spread it around the floor or breathe in my face, I guess that's his business. You know what I mean." She leaned against the back of the bench, smoothing the sun on her round cheeks.

  "A rule to live by," I offered.

  She sat back up. "But now porkypines, that's a whole 'nother matter. Every time that dumbass dog would get outside, he'd find him a porkypine and then come back whinin' on the porch with a nose full of quills. We'd hold him down and yank 'em out and he'd walk around with his muzzle all swole up for the next week, and then the dumb shit would just go off and do it again."

  "Must have been in his blood," I said.

  "Once in a while, he'd get 'em so bad we had to take him to the vet. Get 'em through his tongue and all, you know. Vet would charge us forty bucks to get 'em out and 'fore they was even healed the dumb shit would go and do it again. Well, Bobby that was my husband about the third time he had to come up with the forty bucks, he took that old Lucky dog out behind the woodshed and put one in his ear." She shrugged. "To Bobby's way of thinkin', havin a good dog was one thing, but making monthly payments on one was another."

  "You're not going to take me out behind the woodshed, are you?"

  She laughed. "Not me, Leo. I myself am startin' to get fond of you, but my guess is that you keep stickin' your nose in where it ain't wanted, sooner or later somebody gonna put you down."

  "It's been tried before."

  She grinned again. "I just bet it has, Leo. I just bet it has." She reached under the bench and retrieved a bagshrouded bottle. I watched her throat work as she made a serious dent in it. Finished, she motioned toward me with the bottle. I declined.

  "I ain't got cooties," she said.

  "I'm getting old, Selena. I drink in the morning, I need a nap."

  She slapped her knee. "Me too, Leo." This sent her into spasms of laughter.

  I waited until she calmed down. "So listen--" I started.

  She shook her head. The movement seemed to make her dizzy. She grabbed the bench with her free hand, closed her eyes, and composed herself. "No, you listen, Leo. Don't think I don't 'predate what you're trying to do. But--"

  "I only--"

  She waved me off. "Button it, will ya," she said. "I'm makin' a speech here." She took a deep breath and a big dry swallow. "Nothing's gonna change anything. Maybe if--" She closed her eyes again. "Who knows," she said when she reopened them. "Who knows. If--ah, shit--" She broke into hearty laughter. "If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bus. It's done. Over. That's it." This time she waved herself off. "Let it go, Leo. Just let the damn thing go."

  "It's in my blood," I confessed.

  She groped around for her bottle, found it, and stood. "Time for that little nap," she said.

  "I just wanted to know how you felt about being dead, that's all."

  Her eyes narrowed as she weaved over me. "Ain't no reason to get nasty. Don't be gettin' nasty, Leo; it don't suit you. I'll have to smack you with this here bottle, you get nasty," she said with a smile.

  "I'm not being nasty. I'm trying to tell you that according to King County and the State of Washington, you've been dead for years." I reached in my pocket and pulled out a copy of her death certificate.

  She looked at my hand like I was trying to pass her some of the aforementioned cat shit.

  "What's that?" she asked, making no move to take it.

  "That's your death certificate. Cost me eleven dollars, too."

  "Eleven bucks just to say I'm dead?"

  "Yep."

  "I coulda told 'em that for nothing." Again, she collapsed in great whoops of laughter. Selena's mirth was beginning to attract attention. A black man of about forty had spotted her bottle. He wore a dirty blue athletic jacket and an elongated yellow stocking cap tipped at an angle. At the sound of the laughter, he began to stumble over in our direction. When he got within ten feet or so, I turned to face him. "Need something, buddy?" I asked.

  His eyes were nearly solid red, littered about the rims with some sort of seepage that looked like coarse yellow sand; his knees quivered in the breeze. He licked his cracked lips and opened his mouth.

  I moved closer and said, "Take a hike. This is a private party."

  "Heh, heh, my man--" he started.

  "Beat it," I said.

  Selena stood at my elbow. "I'll talk to ya later, Rodney. Here. Take the rest of this." She extended the bag containing the bottle. He groped for it until Selena grabbed his wrist, put it in his palm, and closed his shiny black fingers around it. Satisfied, he lisped his thanks and tottered back up the hill. Two steps forward, one gravity step back, but at least he was making progress.

  Selena pulled the paper from her pocket and appeared to study it. I watched her eyes. They didn't move from left to right and back, but instead seemed to attack the words at random.

  "Can you read?" I asked.

  She punched me hard in the chest with the paper.

  "I'm not ignorant," she said, her eyes suddenly hard and focused.

  "I didn't say you were," I said. "I just asked if you could read."

  She turned her back on me, smoothed the paper out on her leg, and mumbled something into the breeze.

  "What?" I asked.

  "I read a little," she said without turning. "Where'd you get that thing, anyway?" she added.

  "I was doing a little work downtown yesterday. Paying off our bill to Jed. I figured that, you know, as long as I was there, so I walked down to the County Office Building, punched five-four-one, eight-two, six-three-six-seven and your name into the computer, and lo and behold you came up dead as a plug herring."

  "It ain't right."

  "No, it's not," I agreed.

  "I never made no trouble. I dinna want nothin'. I just--"

  She turned to leave. She took three steps and stopped. Rodney, having now mojo'd his way up to the steep part of the path, managed two mincing steps forward before falling backward for three. The old boy was losing ground. I calculated that, at his present rate, in three months he'd run out of terra firma and shuffle backward into the Sound.

  Her wide shoulders again shook with laughter.

  "What you call that dance, Rodney?'' she hollered, starting after him. "That the cha-cha you doin'?"


  Rodney turned his feet in a series of small ski turns. When he was satisfied with his purchase, he took a hefty pull from the bottle.

  "Na. Ain't no cha-cha, Lena. Heh. Heh. What it is, girl. That there's the pigeon shit shuffle, is what it is."

  9

  The Steering Wheel pressed into my chest; I hung suspended from my seat belt harness as I eased the squealing Fiat down the face of South Washington. Reaching flat ground, I huffed a sigh of relief, turned right on Fourth Avenue, and headed uptown. As I wiggled myself back into the seat, I pulled my notebook from my jacket pocket and flipped it open. Karen Mendolson lived at 905 Union. First Hill. No problem.

  I climbed Pike all the way to Minor, hooked a right, drove one block, and turned right again on Union. Nice apartment buildings, mostly tilt-ups from the late sixties, on both sides of the street. Numbers in the eleven hundreds. I moved slowly down the block checking the numbers. One thousand and six was the last number before Union dead ended on Terry. Dude.

  Figuring 905 must be on the other side of the interstate, I backtracked, crossing the freeway at Pine, then cut over to park by the Eagles Auditorium at the head of Union. I got out and walked to the comer. Across the street, the first building on the other side was the Union Square Grill, number 621. Double dude.

  The way I saw it, there were only two possibilities. Either three blocks of downtown Seattle had been vaporized by aliens, or 905 Union must be buried somewhere down under the Washington State Convention Center. I headed back toward Pike Street, keeping a sharp eye peeled for anyone sporting an antenna.

  About ten years ago, faced with a desperate need for a showplace convention center, but lacking any downtown property whatsoever upon which to build one, the city and the state had hit upon a novel solution. They closed two of the overpasses that crossed the freeway, bridged the space between with steel and concrete, and built a massive, greenglassed temple of commerce directly on top of the busy interstate. Creative government at its finest.

  This time, as soon as I recrossed the highway, I took a hard right on Hubbell, driving down, seemingly into the basement of the city. Hubbell Street was virtually buried now, the rerouted freeway roaring in its front yard, the thirty-foot, ivy-covered retaining walls keeping it in perpetual shade, giving it a nearly medieval quality. Two blocks down, I found it, a splintered little thirty-yard section of Union running nearly straight uphill, wedged hard between the interstate and the Convention Center parking garage.