The Outside Lands

by Hannah Kohler

  “I didn’t know there was sun in the summertime till I was old enough to drive out of the Sunset,” said Uncle Paulie as he stood at the bay window, rubbing his back.

  “You could live a whole life here,” said Aunt Ruth, taking in all the corners of the room, as though she were picturing all the babies and heartaches and sicknesses that would breathe their hours there. “That’s it—you’re going to die here,” agreed Nancy when she visited a week after the wedding, trailing her fingers over the furniture like a customer who, in the end, wasn’t minded to buy.

  “Can I feel it?” she asked, pushing her palms against Jeannie’s belly, her eyes saucering like a little girl’s, and Jeannie loosened herself from her friend’s hands and asked about Mickey and Sandy and the tramp at the soda fountain who still refused to serve Nancy because of some scandal way back in high school.

  “It’s all the same,” said Nancy, clicking her heel against her ankle. There’s no place like home. She paused, then sighed. “I got to go,” she said, and Jeannie watched through the window as Nancy walked down the hill, her shadow stretching along the sidewalk.

  Those months Billy worked days and nights at SF General, and Jeannie got fat with her baby, accepting visits from her next-door neighbor Cynthia, who had an overbite, an explosive toddler, and nine yards of advice. Every couple of days Jeannie would get on the streetcar and ride it all the way to the Sunset, where the wind blew and life happened, and after a soda with Nancy or Kip she’d ride home, fold herself in her mom’s old quilt at the bay window, and wait.

  Kip / 1966

  Here’s a true story. Me and Bobby were fishing on Torpedo Wharf. It was hot as hell—this mean sun had fried off all the fog. Bobby was cranked about catching a bunch of sand dabs. Ugly fucking fish, all grease and teeth, don’t even taste good. So Bobby’s setting the lines and I’m hand-scrabbling for a cigarette. Like Uncle Paulie says, “God created fishing so a man can smoke in peace.” The guy has wisdom crammed into him like shit in a sewer.

  So there I was, smoking a cigarette, and I saw it—this man falling away from the Golden Gate Bridge. There he was, crawling down the sky like a spider; the bay took him and his body fucking exploded in the water. Then it was done and the ocean closed over and the bridge just stood there and the sun was still furious. I turned to Bobby, but he was digging in his bag, asscrack creeping out of his pants, whistling the Supremes. It was like I imagined the whole damn thing. True story.

  That was the summer the rats came. They ate up the carpet, dropped shit in the kitchen, and smeared fur on the walls. One bought it in Mrs. Fleish’s pond. It was brown and soft, like a rotten pear. We fished it out and Bobby tried to get Blackie to chow it, but she just sniffed and turned away, flicking her tail to show her asshole. “I hate that fucking cat,” said Bobby. He flipped the rat over the fence into Mr. Kowalski’s yard: “I hope he steps on it.” Bobby didn’t like Mr. Kowalski ever since he called the cops on him way back for exploding a cherry bomb under his Oldsmobile. “Fucking Polack,” said Bobby, which was funny because Bobby was a fucking Polack too.

  A couple dollars a week to do Mr. Fleish’s work—cut the lawn, weed the grass, paint over the rot. At the end of the afternoon, Mrs. Fleish would slip us the money like she was doing us a favor. The bills were damp and wrinkled and smelled like old-lady skin, like she kept them stuffed down her shirt. One afternoon I saw her tits, saw her washing in the bathroom when I was window-cleaning—they were long and white, with nipples big as baseballs. I reckon she wanted me to see her, wanted me to climb in through that window and nail her right there on that purple bath rug. Didn’t do it, though—not my bag. Bobby didn’t believe me, said it was bullshit and truth be told he had a nasty streak, but he had a Rambler sedan and a dead mom too, so we found ways to get along.

  That summer was so damn boring it made your balls ache. The days came in clean and wide and we fogged them with being broke and lazy. But we had too much sun in our blood to bother with anything steady, and the dollars bought us movie tickets and the odd make-out with one of the Byrne girls, so we made do. But all those days rolling over us and I couldn’t shake this sense that there was something waiting for us, something naked and ugly, like that rotten rat waiting to be stepped on in Mr. Kowalski’s yard. We didn’t talk about it, but the way Bobby drove his car like the Devil was chasing him made me sure he felt it too.

  The summer turned sour by the time the moving truck pulled up across the street. The skirts had gotten long and the beach had gotten sad, and I couldn’t walk in the house without my dad talking about getting serious for senior year. Two delivery guys with heavy asses chewing up their shorts piled beds and bikes in Dead Daisy’s front yard. That house was cursed— three owners in three years, all dead, one by one: pop, pop, pop. Some Indian chief was skinned and knifed there, I reckoned, bones bleeding pissed-to-hell evil into the soil. They found old Daisy with a broken neck at the bottom of the stairs. Tripped and fell, they said, but we knew the truth, knew the ghost had taken her by her bald head and hurled her down, just like he’d stuck that wiener in Mr. Ritchie’s throat and kicked that music teacher off the roof. And now these guys moving in, thinking they’d got themselves a deal at eleven thousand dollars.

  “Assholes,” said Bobby.

  “I give it nine months,” I said, and wondered which one would go.

  It was a family this time, a full set: mom, dad, three sons. The oldest kid was our age, then maybe a sophomore and a who-gave-a-crap little one. The mom was muddy with freckles and the dad looked like Ed Sullivan, all teeth and lips and eyes that wouldn’t blink. The oldest kid seemed like he’d taken a few face knocks on the football field.

  “My guess is it’ll be the jock gets it,” I told Bobby.

  “Shut up with your bullshit,” he said.

  All the girls got pretty fired up about Pete Marshall. He even caught Nancy’s eye, which was hard to take. She didn’t come by too often since Jeannie got hitched, but there she was, sitting in our kitchen, brown thighs squashing against the wicker chair, and you could see it pressing its patterns into her. Jeannie had given her Charlie to hold and as she bounced him her breasts rolled like water balloons. Two trails of lime snot ran down to Charlie’s lip, but nobody cared to fix it.

  “Who’s that?” said Nancy, watching Pete Marshall wipe his face with his shirt on the slowdown from his run.

  “They the new neighbors, Kip?” asked Jeannie.

  “The Marshalls,” I said.

  “He’s cute,” said Nancy, tickling Charlie under his armpit and making him screech. “Nice and strong-looking. Think he needs breaking in?”

  “Nancy! Not in front of the boys!” said Jeannie, and Nancy laughed, but she was looking at me and she had a question in her face.

  “Screw you, Jeannie. I’m not a kid,” I said, and gave her the finger as I turned away I went to my room and locked the door and lay down and just as it was happening I heard Nancy burst out laughing in the next room like she knew.

  It turns out Mr. Marshall was a Bible-thumper, while Pete Marshall was a natural-born troublemaker, smashing up those commandments one at a time, drinking and stealing and coveting and no honoring at all. He had to hide it, though, or get the shit beaten out of him by his dad. “The guy can beat the music out of your soul,” Pete said, and if anybody else had said that kind of thing, Bobby would have smashed their nose, but Pete Marshall was different—he could say things the rest of us couldn’t.

  By the time school started up again in the fall, the three of us were pretty tight. We left school at recess and hid out in Bobby’s garage, drinking my dad’s Buds and smoking grass Pete had bought from some guy on roller skates at the Beach House. Pete always brought something special with him, shook it out of his bag with real ceremony like one of those showgirls with a prize on Let’s Make a Deal—Playboys, Marlboros, Premium saltines, and melted Borden’s Golden Vanilla ice cream that we drank straight from the carton. Whole days bled away that way. They say when you bleed
to death you feel cold and light and sick, and that’s just how it felt when night folded around us and Pete’s mom called him for dinner.

  Sometimes Pete would disappear for a couple days and next time we saw him he’d be beat purple and he’d say he was going to murder his dad. What we didn’t get was that Pete was bigger than his dad, could have taken him any day, but just let it go ahead.

  “You know what’s going to happen,” I said one day when Pete’s bedroom drapes had been closed for three days straight.

  “What?” said Bobby.

  “One day Pete’s going to get mad and he’s going to take his dad’s rifle and he’s going to shoot him in the back.”

  “You and your bullshit,” said Bobby.

  “I was wrong,” I said. “It’s not going to be Pete that goes, not right away. It’ll be his old dad bleeding his Jesus blood all over Dead Daisy’s lawn, and then they’ll take Pete away and gas him at San Quentin.”

  “Pete wouldn’t shoot anyone in the back,” said Bobby.

  Bobby never got to see what happened because one of those nights, after Pete had been called to his beef Stroganoff and the CBS Friday Night Movie had already started—it was The Alamo—Bobby got into his Rambler stuffed with smoke and graham crackers and drove straight into the eucalyptus tree on Noriega. The car smashed so hard it made the tree bleed, and they only knew it was Bobby from the plates.

  Those days after what happened with Bobby, Pete stopped getting hit so much by his dad and Jeannie came by more. If I held Charlie she would make her special casserole and we all sat together, Charlie sucking the sauce off the chicken and trying to slap the wet meat into my mouth.

  “I’m happy he’s doing that to you, and not me,” said my dad.

  “It’s a compliment,” said Jeannie. “He’s telling you he loves you.”

  “Your mom is lame,” I said to Charlie. “But not as lame as your dad.”

  “Kip—” said my dad.

  “Where is Billy, anyway?” I asked. “Saving lives?”

  “One at a time,” said Jeannie.

  “He never comes here,” I said.

  “He works late, Kip. You know that.” Jeannie leaned to spoon a heap of potato into Charlie’s mouth.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” I said.

  Bobby had been knocking his heels in his custom wood casket nearly two weeks by the time second semester came around. The fact of his death felt far-off and magic, as if it didn’t belong to us, like when we were juniors and Chad Burton disappeared hitchhiking on Highway One. They found him tied to a sycamore tree, bare-ass naked, and dead. We didn’t know him, but we felt the electricity of his death, felt it crackling up and down the hallways of Liberty High. Now it was Bobby’s turn. Except he was “Robert Nowak” now, and his name smudged the local paper and rose like smoke from the lips of cheerleaders. None of it seemed to have much to do with the pimple-pasted Bobby we knew.

  “Who the fuck is Robert Nowak?” said Pete one morning recess, and this cracked me up.

  “You’re disgusting,” said Linda Green.

  “You’re fucking disgusting,” said Pete. If anybody else had cussed out Donnie Rawl’s girl, he would have gotten slugged; but nobody took up with Pete—all the fear had already been beaten out of him, and it showed in his small gray eyes.

  Death was no stranger to us. He’d visited our neighborhood a few times, making his big entrance and then hanging around, stinking up the place and wearing everybody down.

  “Whole business is like make-believe, isn’t it?” Uncle Paulie had said as he watched the Nowaks step into the black sedan bound for St. Anne of the Sunset. “But trust me. Soon the truth of this is going to kick you in the balls and it’s going to hurt like a bitch.”

  For all Uncle Paulie’s world-spun wisdom, on this he was wrong. Bobby didn’t get dead to us all of a sudden, he got dead by degrees. Little facts flapped in the air and stuck to us like bugs till it was hard to think for the itching of them. The leaf-scuzzed square where he parked his Rambler, the spare glove at ball practice, the look on Mr. Nowak’s face Monday mornings.

  “I miss the goon,” I said one afternoon as we sat smoking Pete’s Marlboros, watching Mr. Nowak rake the leaves all slow and solemn.

  “Yeah. Gotta say, though, he was kind of an asshole,” said Pete.

  “He was a mean motherfucker.”

  “He really fucked up that tree.” Like I said, Pete was funny.

  When I was a kid, my mom was into silver linings, and one cold clean dawn I saw the silver lining of this particular sky-bruiser. That shit-breath Devil that had been chasing us all summer, giving us the evil eye through Mrs. Fleish’s hairy big roots—it was Bobby he wanted, and boy did he get him, ran him silly down those wet streets all the way till he smashed into that tree.

  “You know what this means,” I told Pete.

  “You’re going to tell me.”

  “That asshole ghost that’s been hiding under your house . . .”

  “Big Chief Howling Wolf?”

  “I’m serious. We thought you’d be next.”

  “You did? Fuck you, man.”

  “He got Bobby instead.” I clicked my tongue. “Maybe he thought it was you.”

  Pete whistled.

  “But we’re safe,” I said. “Bobby’s our lucky charm.”

  By March, everybody had gotten to forgetting about Bobby; my dad took off drinking with his buddies, and Pete’s dad started cracking his belt again. Spring came scratching, pulling green snubs from the dirt and sending the songbirds into a fury, and Pete got restless. He was stealing again, pulling scrawny miracles from his bag—the Fran Gerard Playboy, a box of Dutch Masters, cheese packed in red wax. But bigger things were coming—I could see it in his face.

  And one day he said it. “Let’s boost Ted’s.”

  Ted’s was the liquor store on the corner of Thirty-Fifth and Rivera. It was a soul-rattling dump, with bottles of scotch pressing at the window like they wanted to escape. Old Ted was a cowboy without a horse, full of shout and powder but nowhere to take his fight. He stood on the sidewalk yelling at the kids, and they yelled right back, and this just made him madder. Ted packed a twenty-two behind the counter, told everybody all about it, swore he was going to blast the next asshole that looked at him the wrong way. All this wasn’t too good for business, and most days the store was shut-up dark, with the old rascal dumb drunk upstairs. Pete had cased the place and said it had potential.

  “Problem is,” I said, “he’ll blow our asses off as soon as we set foot inside.”

  “Old bastard’s so bombed he couldn’t find the trigger,” said Pete.

  “You want to find out?”

  “You a pussy now?”

  “Fuck you, man.”

  Pete lit his cigarette. “Come on—Old Ted’s long gone. Everybody knows he owes money. He got the hell out. Skipped town.”

  It was true that we hadn’t seen Old Ted in months.

  “He didn’t shut the store?”

  “No time. Those loan sharks are nasty sons of bitches.”

  “Right.”

  “Old Ted’s as good as dead.” Pete grinned.

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “Remember Bobby,” added Pete. “We’re safe. Bobby’s got us protected.”

  I thought about Bobby and knew that the last thing he wanted to do was protect anybody from anything.

  “’Course,” continued Pete, “you don’t want to help, I’ll find somebody else.” He twisted his cigarette into the wall. “You know who’s got balls? Rosales.”

  Carlos Rosales was the sort of kid who had to do everything first—whether it was grow a mustache or touch Tammy Smith’s tits—and I’d be damned if he’d be first to this too.

  “If Old Ted’s gone, we can do it,” I said.

  Pete grinned at me; his eyes were cold as dimes. “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” he said. “We’ll do it then. It’s simple.”

  But nothing was simple with Pete.

  T
he next day, while Pete’s dad was shouting up to God in church, Pete was in his kitchen preaching all he knew about the Five Finger Discount.

  “Faith is everything,” he said. “You’ve got to believe you can do it. Faith can move mountains. You let in doubt, it’ll eat the ground from under you and swallow you whole. Three years I’ve been stealing,” he said, and he looked at me with those gray eyes, “and I’ve never been caught.”

  If Bobby were here, he would have called Pete on his bullshit. Six months back, Pete got caught stealing Donnie Rawl’s new football cleats from his locker; Mr. Marshall beat Pete so hard his face bruised all the colors of the rainbow.

  “There are three rules to steal by,” continued Pete. “Know what you want. Don’t get greedy. And get the hell out.”

  “You’re talking like I don’t know all this already.”

  That afternoon we weeded the dirt in Mrs. Fleish’s backyard and listened to the Giants game on the radio. It was a strange day: the sky was blank and the birds were quiet. There we were, working the earth, and it was honest and sound and silent. We were hauling redroot into Mrs. Fleish’s garbage can when Donnie Rawl wheeled past on his bike, his jacket flapping.

  “Afternoon, faggots,” he cried.

  “Climb it, Tarzan,” said Pete, giving him the finger.

  “Get a fucking car,” I said.

  Rawl turned and ran his bike straight at me, squeezing the brakes to bring his wheel to the edge of my boots.

  “You better watch it, shrimp,” he said.

  I watched him speed up the street, his jacket lifting like a parachute behind him. One day, I decided, he was going to know about me, know what kind of man I was.

  We waited till night was set, after Pete had eaten his chicken à la king and me and my dad had cleared out the refrigerator. The houses were folded away in their drapes and nobody saw us walk across the street, heads bowed like a couple new-in-town cowboys, heels ringing on the deserted street. Nobody saw us crawl off in Mr. Marshall’s Chevy, headlights dark, radio down low.

  “Look under your seat,” said Pete, and I felt beneath me to find a brick wrapped in a towel.