The Bum's Rush

by G. M. Ford

  "It sells ads."

  "Lukkas Terry was like a son to me," he said sadly.

  Before I could open my mouth, he started in on the canned spiel. The same mythic tale I'd gotten from the papers and from Marty Stocker. I let him ramble. I was used to it. It was the same thing they did when they talked about my old man, that mixing of tinted recall and tainted desire that makes the person simultaneously both more and less than he actually was and blurs forever the boundaries between fact and fiction for all who hear the tale.

  "So he lived here with you," I said when he'd finished.

  "Right up until the end."

  "How come he moved out?"

  He looked wistfully out the window. "My fault," he said quietly. "I told myself I was weaning him. That I was getting him ready for the real world. I mean " He threw his hands up and then let them drop to his sides. "I thought I was doing the right thing."

  "Did you know about you know that hard drugs," I blurted.i

  "I should have suspected," he said. "God knows, I've been around the business long enough. It's always there." He turned back my way. "He'd lived with me for two years. I hadn't heard from him in several days. That should have put up a red flag for me. Lukkas was very dependent on me. It wasn't like him to be out of touch for three days." Gregory Conover pinched the bridge of his nose and took a long, deep breath.

  "How did you " I began.

  The banging of doors and a series of coarse shouts filtered in from the center of the house. Several voices could be heard through the door. Conover stepped around me toward the office door when it suddenly burst open, banging back twice against the wall.

  Cherokee looked as if he had either survived the Death of a Thousand Cuts or recently been threshed and baled. Every square inch of exposed skin was crosshatched with deep scratches. Several leathery leaves were stuck in his hair. His bright yellow shirt was streaked with sweat and dirt. He was missing one sneaker. He seemed to be annoyed.

  He pointed at me with a bleeding finger. "You," he bellowed. "I'm gonna take you and tear your "

  Conover put a hand on Cherokee's overdeveloped chest. "Whoa, now, whoa," he said, as if gentling a horse. "We have to get you something for those scratches." Cherokee was trembling all over like an over-amped retriever on the first day of pheasant season. I backed to the far wall, rolling my shoulders, feeling the comfort of the 9mm beneath my jacket. I had no intention of fighting him. I'd take my chances with a jury of my peers. I figured they'd give me a commendation for not shooting him in the head. If he got anywhere near me, I was drilling him in the foot.

  The doorway was filled with wide-eyed partygoers, pawing past each other for a better view. Holding Cherokee by the shoulders, Conover spoke out into the hall. "Brittany, you and Melody go upstairs into the main guest bath. Start a bath. See what you can find for these scratches." I heard heels clapping across the tiles and a buzz of conversation from the hall.

  Cherokee shrugged the hands from his shoulders and started for me. I moved to the left, keeping the couch between us. Like most farm animals, he was a lot bigger indoors. Conover hustled back between us, steering him toward the far corner over by the windows, where he administered a hushed lecture to the big fellow. Conover looked back over his shoulder toward the doorway.

  "Reenee," he called.

  The shortest of the five young women stepped hesitantly into the room. Her jet-black hair was cut in a severe pageboy, bangs low over the forehead but cut up high in back, leaving only stubble on a long, thin neck. Conover pulled the key and chain from his pocket and waved it at her. "You'd better show Mr. Waterman out."

  She crossed the room, her eyes locked on Cherokee, took the key from Conover's hand, and backed her way out. She met my gaze but didn't speak. I sidled slowly around the end of the couch and followed her out the door. "I'll find you," Cherokee growled from behind me. "I'll find you, and when I do "

  Whatever atrocities he had in mind were lost as I brushed by the gaggle of guests and followed the young woman down the breezeway.

  She slipped the key in the lock but didn't pull the gate open. Instead she looked past me, back up the path toward the house.

  "Somebody needs to look into it," she said.

  "You mean Lukkas Terry?"

  "Yeah."

  "You knew him?"

  She shook her head. "Nobody knew him. He was too weird to know." Before I could speak, she went on. "I mean, like, you know, everybody, all the girls anyway, tried to put the moves on him, but he was just too weird. But " She pulled open the gate. "You want to know about Lukkas, you find his little girlfriend."

  "He had a girlfriend?"

  "Ditziest honey in America," she said with a laugh. "After years of every light hook in the music scene trying to get in his pants, he finds this little piece from Utah on his own." She shook her head. "Beth Goza is her name."

  "You got any idea how I might find her?" "She used to come over here once in a while. I took her home one night when Lukkas had locked himself in the studio and wouldn't come out. She lives on one of those streets that run between Pike and Pine up on the hill. I always get them mixed up. Got these big white rocks out front so you won't park there. That's all I remember." I figured that was all I'd need.

  15

  I started down at the freeway and worked my way up the hill, slaloming back and forth between Pike and Pine streets, among the pubs, tattoo parlors, vintage clothing stores and omnipresent espresso bars that defined the neighborhood as generic Generation X.

  Reenee's memory had been good. About six blocks up, I turned onto Boylston, and there they were. A dozen good size stones, once painted white, haphazardly filling the muddy area between the apartment building and the street, denying this hallowed space to all but monster trucks.

  The building was a throwback to a less pretentious age of traveling salesmen, of single nights in shirtsleeve rooming houses with bathrooms just down the hall. The windows on the ground floor were covered with square black wrought-iron bars. Brown composition shingles covered the outside in what, before slippage, had been some sort of weave pattern, its geometric unity now eroded into a series of senseless waves that frittered aimlessly about the building.

  I slipped around the corner and parked in front of the Mercedes dealership. For some reason, the sight of me and the Fiat didn't give either of the car salesmen the urge to so much as twitch.

  I stood on the blue AstroTurf in the covered vestibule and tried to make sense of the door security system. Somewhere in the distant past the rain had blown in, smearing the ink on the resident list, rusting and running the cheap metal of the frame, creating a mushy mosaic where the names should have been. I began pushing buttons. I didn't answer the garbled voices screeching from the ruined speaker; I just kept pushing buttons until the woman appeared.

  She looked like an anorexic member of the Munster family. Five foot four, maybe eighty pounds, in a tight print dress and knee-high black boots. The skin between the boots and the dress had surely never seen the sun. Her black hair suggested a recent dose of high voltage. She banged open the door. The blast of hot air smelled like a giant cat box.

  "What the hell is the matter with you?" she demanded.

  "I'm looking for Beth Goza."

  "Then why don't you just push her button, man?"

  I tapped the filthy glass next to the buttons. "What, you can read this crap? Am I missing something here? What are these, ancient runes or something?''

  "That's shit, is what it is, buddy. It's broken shit like everything else around here. Once it breaks, it stays broke. You can call 'em till your ass falls off, and they won't come out and fix it."

  I spent a few minutes and scored a few points by sympathizing about the plight of helpless tenants caught in the grip of pitiless slumlords. Finally she said, "This time of day, Beth's always down at that books-and-coffee joint on the corner." When I looked blank, she went on. "You know, the one over on Pine. I see her every day when I drive to work. Hell, most tim
es she's still there when I come home."

  She didn't stick around for thanks. As she motored back up the narrow stairs, I concluded that she had, as she'd so colorfully suggested, dialed for repairs till her ass had fallen off. I smiled as I turned, the image of her sliding out of chairs onto the floor significantly brightening my little morning. What can I say? I'm a man of simple pleasures.

  I stuffed my hands in my pants pockets as I rounded the corner onto Pine Street and headed downhill. She meant the Bauhaus, four blocks in front of me, one of those books and-coffee bars that have puffed up like hives all over the city in the last five years. Watering holes for the thousands of melancholic intellectuals who need some place to get their backpacks in out of the rain, get wired to the ears on designer coffee, and discuss how the retro values of postindustrial America no longer hold meaning. Staring at a lifetime of diminished expectations and menial employment, they've opted to Free Tibet.

  The place was just like I remembered. It had a vaguely East European quality. Sedition City. This week only. Forty percent off purges. On my left a guy with a long, unkempt beard muttered as he scribbled on a yellow legal pad. He looked as if he might at any second jump to his feet and begin an impassioned denunciation of capitalism and the running-dog lackeys of the imperialist state.

  Maybe a dozen people were scattered about the tables. My finely honed skills of deduction and detection told me that if I discounted the anarchist, the four gay couples, and the two African-Americans, Beth Goza was probably the willowy one with the cranberry-colored hair over by the books.

  She was reading a trade paperback copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. She didn't look up as I stood next to the table.

  "Are you Beth Goza?" I asked.

  She looked up from the book. She had a pair of nearly yellow eyes that seemed to glow without pretense.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Could I have a few words with you?''

  I pulled out a chair and sat down. Except for the ten or fifteen eyebrow rings, the pierced nose, and the four pounds of metal she carried in each ear, she looked a lot like an occidental version of a Japanese dancer, bright red lipstick offsetting perfectly white skin, eyebrows drawn perfectly in place. She wore black tights, a short black leather jacket decorated with enough chain to pull a propane truck, and a short plaid skirt. Industrie-leather Catholic school.

  "I don't know you," she said. Quick, this one.

  I fished a business card out of my pocket. She held the card with two hands, running her eyes slowly over the surface rather than just reading the words. "What are you investigating?" she asked.

  "Lukkas Terry," I said without hesitation.

  I wouldn't have thought it possible that one who had so perfectly achieved the Seattle never-seen-the-sun, dead-foracoupleof-weeks skin pallor could actually blanch, but she did.

  Without a word, she pocketed my card and hustled for the door. I followed along, watching the yellow soles of her new Doc Martens.

  "Go away," she said over her shoulder. Her legs were a bit shorter than mine, so I had no trouble keeping up.

  "This is dumb," I said as we cleared the door frame. "I'm not here to make any trouble for you, but I'm not going away either. I'm yours morning, noon, and night until we have a little talk." She lengthened her stride. "I know it was you who called the cops. You're the one who found him, I know you did," I said.

  She turned and poked me in the chest. "You know nothing. Now, get away from me."

  Again I found myself staring at her back as we hurried up Pine Street. Beth had not done nearly as much dialing as the other one and was symmetrically the better for not having done so. I tagged along for another half a block, where she again turned to face me. She put her hands on her hips and faced me like an impatient parent. "What is it with you, Mr.--"

  "Waterman," I said with a Bondian air. "Leo Waterman."

  She favored me with a sneer. ' Take a hint, detecto boy. Buzz off. It's almost over. Just leave it alone. Okay?"

  I made eye contact and held it. "Listen to me, Beth. You seem like a nice kid." Her eyes flickered. Been there. Heard that. "Let me finish," I said. "If, when you tell me to leave it alone, if by it you mean this whole deal of Lukkas's estate being divvied up between Sub-Rosa Records and Gregory Conover, well then, honey, you better make other plans."

  She started to speak, but I waved her off. " 'Cause that little scenario is over." She held my gaze now. "A lawyer friend of mine is going to throw a jumbo monkey wrench into that little arrangement first thing tomorrow morning. It's a done deal. I'm telling you the truth here."

  She bared her teeth and leaned forward. I made sure I was on the balls of my feet. I thought she was going to go for my face, but instead she regained her composure.

  "You're contemptible. You know that? You're just trying to scare me. I won't let you frighten me," she said.

  "Your lawyer friend has no connection to Lukkas Terry. None. N-O-N-E," she spelled it. Correctly, too. "You're sooo full of it."

  "Yeah, but my lawyer friend represents someone who is connected to Lukkas."

  "Like who?"

  I shouldn't have. I should have told her it was confidential and let it go at that. Instead, I showed off.

  "Like Lukkas's mother," I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. "You're a bad man, Mr. Waterman."

  She could have said nearly anything else. She could have questioned the viability of my genetic material, the bona fides of my parentage, the nobility of my appointage, or the quality of my tumescence. Anything would have pissed me off less.

  "I am not," I shot back.

  "Are too."

  "Am not."

  "I can see it in your aura."

  "I don't have an aura."

  "Do too."

  "Do not."

  If necessary, I was prepared to carry on at this for another couple of weeks. I didn't care. Whatever it took.

  "You leave me alone," she said.

  "No."

  She shifted her weight to her right foot. "I can't believe it. You're sooo lower vibrational."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "The fact that you don't know proves it."

  She leaned back against a shop front and brushed at her skirt. Something about the way she patted herself clean slipped an odd gear somewhere in the mess of my mind. "So help me out," I said. "You need way more help than I can give you." "Mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"as

  "The fact that you don't know proves it."

  "Grow up," she said.

  "My immaturity keeps me young."

  Traffic on Pine had picked up. The hissing sound of bus brakes approached from the east. Without warning, she pulled the jacket tight about her middle and took off up Pine Street like a greyhound. She caught me flatfooted. Cursing silently, I trotted along half a block back. She was in good shape. Even encumbered by the little skirt, her long legs ate up the uphill ground. I concentrated on finding my rhythm and moving my arms. Two blocks up she cut off slantwise across the street. Afraid I was going to lose her, I picked up my pace and tried to close some of the distance. J No need.

  The girl was still running smoothly when she unexpectedly went to the ground in the doorway of the Mars Cleaners. She threw her back into the right rear corner and slid to the pavement. The studs on the jacket screeched down the tiles like fingernails across a blackboard. I stopped running. The street was deserted. I approached her slowly as I traversed Pine Street.

  Her mouth was open, but she was only slightly winded. She held her sides with both hands and looked me in the eye.

  "I didn't think you could keep up."

  "You were right," I wheezed.

  "Lukkas said he'd seen her," she said.

  "His mother?"

  "Right at the end. Right before he--'' She mustered her reserves. "One night coming out of the Moore. The first night there was ever really a band. He swore he saw his mother in the crowd there in t
he alley when they were getting him into the limo. He swore. And I didn't believe him," she said with a shake of her head. "I didn't believe him."

  "Why not?"

  "Because he was already so freaked out. You know, about having to play in public. Lukkas never wanted to play in public. He wanted to make studio music. But Greg kept at him, you know, this was the nineties. That there had to be a band, like, that people could see. That they had to do videos and stuff. Lukkas was blown away. That night, the night he said he saw his mom, the night the band played its only gig, he musta puked about twenty times before they went on. It was--"

  She sat there slowly shaking her head. I stood in the doorway and watched as she worked her way through it. Watched until a hand on my shoulder spun me around.

  A kid. Maybe twenty. Long blond hair in dreadlocks. Scuffed leather bag over one shoulder. Nice knit cap, red, yellow, and green, pulled rakishly over one eye. "I don't know what's goin' on here, man. But this don't look good to me. Maybe you ought to--"

  I cut him off. "Everything's cool here, kid. Thanks for being concerned. We need more concerned citizens."

  He dug his fingers into my shoulder. "I think you better --"

  I grabbed the thumb with one hand, the forearm with the other, and commenced introductions. He went to one knee. I relaxed a little.

  "You need to go away now, kid."

  When I let go, he backed down the length of the block, mumbling, "Hey, fuck you, man," bobbing his head, assuming combat stances. A Mighty Morphine Power Ranger. Way too much time spent playing Mortal Kombat, I suspected. We silently watched his exit.

  "You hurt that boy," she accused.

  "Not much."

  Rasta Boy was one block down now, other side of the street, pointing a particularly vicious tai chi exercise my way.^

  "It's all my fault," she said, looking down at herself.

  I took a chance. "You're pregnant, aren't you?"

  She threw her eyes toward the sky. "I can't believe it," she said.