“I been on my own,” she said. “Looking out for myself since forever. When I got the invitation from the Library, I couldn’t get up there fast enough. And when they welcomed me, I just couldn’t believe it. A person like me.”
She tore at her napkin, dropping the bits right on top of her half-eaten breakfast.
“I’m just supposed to give that up?” she asked, more herself than me.
“But you’re not alone now,” I said.
Adele looked at me again. “You know the last time my mother was really proud of me? Seventh grade. I won a spelling bee. Beat everyone in my school.”
“What was the winning word?”
“Exalted,” she said.
“Exalted? That’s it?”
“It was a bad school.” Adele laughed. “But Maxine kept my certificate on the fridge for a year.”
“I bet she still has it,” I said. “Folded up in a drawer somewhere.”
Adele sucked her teeth. “You think so?”
“She’s your mother, Adele. She hasn’t given up on you.”
Adele rose from the table.
Once she’d showered, she dressed in an olive middy blouse and walking skirt, a Crusher hat, and black gaiters. I whistled when I saw her. She looked well-qualified for the job. Adele turned, to show off the outfit, then caught herself and stopped.
Her old green handbag carried a compact umbrella, two road flares, and that pistol of hers, a little gray automatic. She gave that to me.
“You went back down to the Devils’ Well to get this?”
“That was a revolver. This is an automatic.”
Ms. Henry walked me out and along the side of the cabin. Adele’s blue garage door swung upward with one good tug. It wasn’t the cleanest place. Insects had done a lot of decorating. An immense spiderweb filled one small window. But forget that, how about the car: a green 1977 Mercedes-Benz 450 SLC Coupe. Snooky’s chariot.
“His wife didn’t mind you keeping this?”
“She didn’t want it around. She was going to sell it, but I asked for it.”
“And she just handed it over?”
“As far as she knew, Snooky died believing in the Library. Cherise loved him too much to cut us off entirely.”
I walked to the passenger door of that old Mercedes-Benz. “Let’s hit it, then,” I said.
She stood by the taillight. “Wrong side, Ricky.”
“What do you mean? I can’t drive.”
Ms. Henry pressed one finger against the rear window. “But it’s an automatic.”
I looked inside. “That’s a stick shift, Ms. Henry. And I can’t work either one.”
She looked again while I leaned back, my butt against the side of the hood. Me and her, she and I, a pair of city kids. We’d never learned how to drive.
“How’d you even get it here?” I asked, pointing at the garage roof.
“It was towed.”
“Well, I’m not walking,” I said. “That’s out. It’s just not possible.”
“You want to ride on the handlebars of my bike?” she snapped.
She pointed to that silver beast of hers, propped against the wall. It looked even more monstrous than I’d imagined. Half-mechanical, halfanimal. The curved front fender looked like a lip drawn back into a snarl.
“This is great,” I said. “Maybe I can steal some kid’s skateboard.”
Adele looked ready to yell, but she contained herself.
“We can find another bike,” she said. “The Washburns couldn’t have taken all of theirs.”
They were going to be helping us out after all.
64
AS SOON AS WE’D WALKED into Murder’s living room, I knew Wilfred had set me up.
It’s frightening to step into a place and understand you’re a victim. I’m not talking about a bad feeling or a vague sense. I mean knowing. A quick fire runs through your heart and limbs. You go stiff because you’re aware something’s about to happen, but you can’t think clearly enough to escape. I shivered, involuntarily, and then hands swarmed over me. That’s it. The front door shut and I was trapped. Murder didn’t even get out of his love seat. He had plenty of friends in the room.
Those hands pushed me to the ground so quick that I didn’t even scream. No thoughts of any kind. One minute I’m nodding at our fat Belgian host, and next there’s carpet fibers scratching my neck.
The living room was small. This was one of those houses that look bigger on the outside. Lots of little rooms, instead of a few large ones. This house was probably built back when people were only waist-high. One hundred years old? Two hundred? The air stank of timelessness.
From my place on the ground Murder looked bizarre. I don’t know how tall he was. Like I said, he never stood up, but the man had to be five feet wide. Not hard to guess how he got that way, because he had a supermarket bag full of butterscotch candies in his lap. Murder didn’t suck on those sweets either. He’d pop one yellow disc in his mouth and chew it like a potato chip. If I hadn’t seen that it was candy, I would’ve sworn he was eating glass.
“Your cousin does this to you,” Murder said, between bites. “You understand?”
The man barely opened his mouth, so his accented English was forced through his pinched little lips. The Belgian didn’t speak. He spat.
“Wilfred?” I shouted. “Wil?”
The Belgian nodded, but I hadn’t been speaking to him. I was just calling out for the boy who’d held my hand in that stairwell twenty-seven years before.
But he wasn’t there. Wilfred Tanner, the man he’d become, said, “We’re not related.”
Murder sucked another butterscotch into his mouth and chewed it to shards.
“But this is what you tell me. ‘Cousin Ricky is bringing money’ Isn’t it what you say?”
“Me and Ricky don’t share blood, that’s what I mean. We spent our lives together. That’s why I said cousin.”
Murder laughed. “But you don’t say cousin now.”
Lying facedown on the ground, I saw all these butterscotch shavings clotting the carpet. Whatever didn’t make it down his throat fell to the ground. His bare feet were covered in the stuff. Had Murder ever moved?
“You must be careful who to trust,” the Belgian said to me.
I spoke to him for the first time. I said, “I promise never to trust Wilfred again.”
The men holding me down laughed at this. One of them was stepping on the small of my back, and I felt his laugh when he pressed harder into my spine. How many of them were there? Five or six probably. I couldn’t say. I hadn’t had time to count. They’d all been gathered right inside the doorway. That seemed like a lot of muscle just for skinny little me.
“Do you want to say something more with your cousin?” Murder asked.
Wilfred bent low. His fat shoulders and head filled my view. He smelled like ketchup and beer. “Doubt is the big machine. Don’t you remember, Ricky? Ain’t you learned that yet?”
I said, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Wilfred snorted. “Shut up, crackhead.”
Then he went into my pants and took back his eighteen hundred dollars.
“What is that money there?” Murder asked.
Wilfred stood again.
“That’s what you paid me this morning. He wouldn’t have come in here without it.”
“That is a good idea,” Murder said.
“Yeah,” Wilfred said, almost casually.
I listened to him count the fifty-dollar bills, and in that time Murder watched him. The men on top of me shifted and sighed. I think they wanted to get to their work. Chopping me up and feeding the parts to dogs, no doubt.
Fucking Wilfred Tanner.
Murder said, “You are staying with us.”
He made it sound like a bed and breakfast. Murder’s B & B, butterscotch served at nine A.M. How I wish I could’ve said something like that, witty and cool. Instead I groaned.
“All right, th
en,” Wilfred muttered. “I’m gonna go.”
That bastard even sounded bored.
Murder said, “I was speaking of you too, Wilfred.”
Talk about screaming! My cousin worked his lungs.
But of course the Belgian was in the right. Instead of taking twenty-four thousand dollars to the thug who was owed, Wilfred had brought it to Murder. Got paid eighteen hundred dollars for the service. With me dead Wilfred could just blame the loss on some unreliable junky. It all smacked of a loser’s logic. The kind of plan hatched by an idiot at last call. But now Murder wanted to make sure there was no one alive to speak his name, because the Belgian wasn’t a fool. Wilfred should’ve just sent me in there alone and sped away. But he knew I’d never have stepped inside by myself.
When Wilfred went to the floor, it trembled. The wood planks beneath the carpet rolled like a wave. Even Murder lifted an inch out of his seat. But he didn’t drop that bag of candies.
After the screaming stopped, Wilfred promised that he wouldn’t speak a word of this. He’d erase it from his own memory. He’d move out of state. Today.
The Belgian reached into his plastic bag and swept his fingers through the butterscotch candies. They clacked like gnashing teeth.
Murder said, “I doubt this.”
65
THAT MORNING HAD TO BE the worst traffic day in Garland’s history. Intersections lose their definition when you can’t turn left, right, or around. And the problem wasn’t just down there on MacArthur Boulevard or along Lakeshore, but above our heads too, on the elevated lanes of I-580 west, headed into San Francisco. Full-on frozen. Packed streets and highways. Ms. Henry and I rode our bikes on the uneven sidewalks, and we were the fastest things moving.
People in their cars craned their necks trying to see something, anything, as if a solution was just up the road. I felt surprised so many people had come out of their homes at all, considering the threats and the bombs. But if employers hadn’t closed their businesses, then most employees couldn’t afford to skip work. Paychecks pulled them out of hiding.
Garland’s manners were breaking down around us: car horns played by the dozen, drivers yelled at other drivers through rolled-up windows. Some wore a look of rageful contemplation, thinking about pressing the gas and plowing through. Others only cradled their heads.
As we crossed Lakeshore Avenue, we had to get off our bikes and walk them between car bumpers. We stopped in front of a burger joint. They were open, but weren’t busy. It wasn’t a sit-down place. You walked up to the glass and made your order, watched them prepare it. Then they slid it through a door in the bulletproof shielding. Inside, a man and woman in clean white T-shirts leaned against the counter, watching the congestion. They stared at the gridlock the way one might stare into the Gobi Desert, with a mix of awe and depression.
Ms. Henry pointed to a walking bridge above the highway.
“Let’s go up and see what we can see.”
We had to walk our bikes uphill along the southern side of the highway. At the top of the hill I-580 was almost hidden, tucked down between trees and bushes. The westbound lanes were so congested that people had stepped out of their cars. Some climbed onto their trunks, trying to see how far this mess went, but even from my place on the walkway—twenty-five feet above them—I couldn’t see the end of it. It ran right up to Stitch Bridge, and across it. Many people mingled in the breakdown lane.
The parking lot of the burger joint lay just below us, had a couple of cars parked there. I saw a figure crouched down behind a hatchback, couldn’t tell if it was a woman or a man. Trying to take a quick piss, I thought, and this made me nostalgic for New York. So I actually stared on, waiting for that special gesture of relief, the shoulders relaxing as the bladder empties. And because of this I was the first to see the figure rise to full height. Not pissing but vomiting, not a woman but a man. A bum. He stepped out from behind the car.
He slumped forward as he walked. The guy looked downright malarial. His motto was malnutrition. He teetered toward the crowded street carrying a small green sack.
“Ms. Henry,” I said, and pointed down to where we’d just been.
The guy threw out his arms and screamed, “Solomon Clay is a lion in the wilderness!”
Every face turned to him.
Ms. Henry was on her bike seat in less than two heartbeats, and I managed almost as good a time. But we were slowpokes by comparison. Down below, a red Volkswagen lurched from the street onto the sidewalk. It clipped that homeless dude right in the leg, sent the wasted man backward, five feet into the parking lot. He lay still for a moment, but then stood again.
The driver popped her door and shouted to a passenger. Meanwhile the man and woman inside the burger joint ran out from the safety of their bulletproof glass. The guy carried a spatula and the lady held a long knife.
The homeless guy didn’t run. He lifted his arms again and smiled.
They kicked and punched. The guy with the spatula brought its handle down on the homeless guy’s head like he was driving in a spike. The woman waved the knife, but used her foot instead. Three other people got out of their cars and ran toward the fracas. They surrounded the homeless guy. They beat him.
They beat him pretty bad.
When they were done, the woman from the red Volkswagen pulled up on the guy’s ratty coat, and his head fell back, limp.
“Why didn’t he just blow them up?” Adele asked.
“Maybe he didn’t have time to light the fuse.”
“He stood there and taunted them. Why?”
Ms. Henry looked back to the highway, the eastbound route, at the crowds gathered in the breakdown lane. And then off to her left, to Grand Avenue below.
“Look there,” she said.
I leaned against the warm metal and felt heat through my sleeves. I watched the street, but only saw more gridlock. Some pedestrians crowded bus stops while others walked to work. And a little ways behind that scene lay Laguna Lake, cordoned off by police tape.
“Forget everything else,” Ms. Henry said. “Look at those men.”
She wiggled one finger to lead my eye.
Fourteen men marching in single file.
But nobody on the street paid attention to them because their clothes weren’t tattered. They’d dressed better than they’d probably done in a decade. Either sweatpants or khaki slacks. Button down shirts and cheap sports coats. Camouflage.
But Ms. Henry recognized them. And I did too. Those men slinking down Grand Avenue had a familiar posture, stooped from a lifetime of defeats and dirty dealing. A bum by any other name is still as shabby. Each carried a gym bag or a briefcase or a book bag.
Ms. Henry said, “That other guy was just a decoy.”
66
WE WERE CARRIED DOWN CONCRETE STEPS and left in Murder’s basement. Wilfred made faint panting sounds as soon as we were alone. He seemed to be hyperventilating, but I wished he was choking to death. And told him so. I whispered threats first, then questions. How could you do me dirty like this? Did that for a long while, but stopped asking eventually. He wasn’t going to answer. He cried and he muttered, that’s all he could do. The tears ran down his round cheeks and into his gaping mouth. It actually calmed me to see Wilfred’s panic. It was like watching distant lightning in the dark. The storm over there means it hasn’t reached me yet.
At least the basement floor was padded. That’s what I noticed when I looked away from Wilfred. There were old mattresses on the ground and piles of torn clothes, discolored sheets stacked on top of them. It looked like someone had robbed a Salvation Army bin and then left the spoils there to rot. We were having a sleepover party at the dump.
It was an unfinished basement. Dirt floors peeking up from areas the mattresses didn’t cover. And there wasn’t any heat. Exposed pipes and wiring ran just above our heads. There were holes in the foundation, but it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t be crawling off, because my hands were tied behind my back and my ankles wrapped in rope. In the
face of Wilfred’s silence, I lay there for an hour, lost in my own quiet fog.
“How’s your parents?”
I was so used to Wilfred’s heaving breathing that I didn’t even realize he’d spoken. I looked around in confusion, as if a lump of clothes had asked the question.
“Your mom and dad,” he said.
Then I realized it was him. I guess he’d finally swallowed his fear. But I didn’t respond.
“My mom got saved a couple years ago,” he whispered. “She’s living in Wichita.”
We left it at that until nighttime. I could see the light change through the holes in the walls. And when it got dark, a horde of feral cats crawled in through them. About a dozen.
They casually rambled through the holes and broken basement windows until they noticed us and stopped, midmovement. Two dashed back out immediately, but the others stayed and sniffed the air. They padded around our bodies, keeping far enough away, and watched.
They looked at one another.
Which of them would be brave?
Eventually this one bobtail crept closer. A long-haired cat, its fur a mix of silver, black, and just a little gold. Tufts of white hair stuck out of both ears. Its short tail lay flat against its ass. The bobtail inched closer to see if we’d lash out, but we couldn’t use our hands or feet. That wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because Wilfred was half-passed-out and the lack of dope in my system was already making me a little weak. Soon enough the cats knew we were harmless. When you considered diseases and fleas, their claws and teeth, we had more to fear from them.
They settled into the pillows and curtains all around us. That bobtail, the brave one, plopped down closer than the rest.
They formed a semicircle around our bodies and stared. A jury of feral cats.
Then I heard Wilfred repeating his name.
“Wilfred Tanner,” he whispered. “Wilfred Tanner.” As if introducing himself.
And upstairs?
Murder’s house mumbled throughout the night. Pots being dropped onto the oven range, loud as shouts. The murmur of boiling water. They might’ve been making pasta or cooking crack, I couldn’t say, because my nose was already blocking up and I couldn’t smell anything. That’s when I understood I was going into withdrawal.
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