Crooked Roads

by Alec Cizak

  “That’s simple,” said Connie. “Forty-nine.”

  The preacher kept his cool. “Sweetheart,” he said, “it’s the password. It’s how he knows you’re not the police.”

  Connie got out of the car. Her shoulders jerked up and down as she walked. Harold assumed she was crying again. He felt bad for her. I can’t have any bastard babies, he remembered. To distract himself from his conscience, he tuned the radio, looking for another gospel station.

  * * *

  A commotion coming from across the street woke Harold up. An orange AMC Rebel pulled into the alley. A woman in a skirt and a thick sweater got out and ran up the stairs at the front of the building. When she reached the top, a man waiting there loaded her arms with two huge cardboard boxes. He shooed at her and she bounced back down and put the boxes on the ground while she opened the gate on the station wagon.

  The man from the top of the steps produced two more boxes from inside the office and hustled to the car without even shutting the door. Harold wondered if that was the doctor. Then he wondered about Connie. The man got into the station wagon. The woman nearly tore the pavement up as she peeled out.

  All went quiet save Bill Monroe on the radio. Harold waited for Connie to show up. The office remained dark. He finally said, “That’s odd.” He killed the engine and got out.

  The preacher climbed the staircase. Rotting wood creaked under his weight. He held tight to the railing. He got to the top and reached for the door. Then he stopped himself, thinking that touching anything would be a bad idea. He slipped inside the office and saw that it was just a small apartment with a kitchen and bathroom near the back. Aside from a table and three metal carts, the place was empty.

  Connie lay on the table, her upper-half covered with a blanket, her legs and midsection bare. A streetlamp just beyond the window provided enough light for Harold to make out a pile of bloody fragments taken, he assumed, from inside of her, dripping down the edge of the table to the floor. Her thighs were soaked in blood.

  “Connie?” he whispered.

  He walked to the other end of the table, wrapped his sleeve over his hand and removed the white sheet hiding the girl’s face. Her eyes were frozen open.

  “Good grief,” he said.

  Once on I-65, back in Indiana, he allowed himself to feel bad for her. She had been nothing more than a pretty girl who sat near the front in church and had introduced herself at an Easter mixer the year before.

  * * *

  Harold Hornung conducted the funeral service for Connie Moore. The doctor who killed her had been caught in St. Louis, trying to get to Mexico. He told police the girl had shown up all by herself.

  The preacher read a sermon prepared by his wife:

  “I can’t explain what this world is coming to; while our young men sacrifice themselves in Vietnam for the freedoms that make this country the greatest on the Earth, their peers at home sit down in streets and universities, frying their brains with the devil’s weed, claiming they know better than the president of the United States what is and is not moral.”

  He wiped sweat from his forehead.

  “I can tell you what’s moral, brothers and sisters. Preserving the sanctity of life, both the lives of those who walk the Earth on their own and those carried in the wombs of God’s most delicate creation, woman. And when a woman denies that sanctity to herself and to the seed growing inside her, I do believe we have reached the saddest stage in the human adventure.”

  Wally Moore and his wife Elizabeth stared at him with twisted faces.

  He ignored them.

  “Connie Moore was possessed, at some point, to engage in activities reserved for a grown man and woman united in the bonds of matrimony.” He looked at a group of fourteen-year-old boys, classmates of Connie’s. “I don’t know who it was that planted the seed in her,” he said, “but what I do know is that she felt the father was not worthy of seeing his own child open its precious eyes. While I’m sure Connie will be forgiven by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, I’m also sure she will be spending eternity with her child in heaven where, I pray, she can explain to the poor soul why she chose to engage in such a brutal act of matricide.”

  * * *

  The Wednesday after Connie’s funeral, Harold paid his weekly visit to Nicole O’Brien. When she opened the door for him, she scowled. He asked her what her problem was. “Nothing,” she said. She walked to the bed, pulling her skirt down along the way.

  “We’re not going to talk a little?”

  She slapped her left butt cheek and said, “Let’s go, preacher.”

  He stepped in and closed the door. “Don’t you want to finish your cigarette?”

  She laughed. “You got two seconds to get your tiny pecker over here.”

  Harold unzipped his pants and moved into position behind her. Nothing happened. “Good grief, Nikki,” he said. “You’ve got me distracted.” He closed his pants and sat on the bed.

  Nicole pulled her skirt up and plopped down in a wooden chair by the only window in the room. She smoked her cigarette and glanced out at the concrete mixing plant across the street. “Klan torched another cross on the lawn tonight.”

  “I noticed.”

  “This country ain’t ever going to accept us, is it?”

  The pastor asked her what she meant.

  “Catholics. Me. Hell, anybody who ain’t Protestant and willing to lie straight through his teeth.”

  Harold laughed. “Well, Nikki, truth be told, this really isn’t your country. We tolerate you, and when we don’t need the entertainment you provide, we send you back home or lay you down with the worms.”

  “But the kids today, they’re going to change all that.”

  Harold Hornung smiled. “Won’t take us ten years to turn things back the way they’re supposed to be. I promise you.”

  THE RALPHS AT THIRD AND VERMONT

  The Riots

  You remember when the Ralphs on Third and Vermont stretched across the entire block? Before the riots. Before those motherfuckers brought shit north, past Wilshire Boulevard. Set the best parts of the city on fire. No cops, baby. Too busy protecting Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Malibu. Like those motherfuckers from South Central had time to go that far west. Shit.

  By the third day, everybody got in on it. Only people who gave a damn about their stores were the Koreans. Unlike the dumbfucks in Simi Valley, they’d been paying attention. The Koreans had guns. Patrolled their roofs, their parking lots, shot at anybody who looked like they needed it. Lucky for us, they were the only shop owners with the guts to stick around. Here’s what I got when that shit went down:

  1. A used toaster from the kitchen of the Jack in the Box on Vermont (pawned it at a joint on Hollywood Boulevard a few months later).

  2. A brand new shopping cart from the Vons on Third.

  3. A sturdy thermos from the drug store on Oxford (lost it on the twenty line going to Santa Monica).

  4. A case, motherfucker, a case of Bud and three bottles of Cisco (remember that shit?) from the 7-Eleven on Kingsley.

  5. A small reclining chair I took from someone’s apartment while they were off snatching some free shit for themselves.

  I pushed that chair around on the cart until it became a nuisance. Then I dumped it on a bonfire burning right smack in the middle of Western and Third. Sat in the cart drinking the rest of the beer, which had gotten pretty damn warm by that point, watching those flames snap, crackle, and pop. The old fucks who stand outside the 7-Eleven, holding the door for Koreans and Mexicans, gave a ton of shit to Charlie—You better hide yourself somewhere, white boy! And Charlie, he stared at that blaze like he was hypnotized. Said it reminded him of some poor motherfucker in Bangkok.

  “Just lit himself on fire,” he said.

  I said, “Buddhist, or something?”

  He said, “No. Just a father, pissed off his daughters were giving it to American soldiers for cigarettes instead of cash.”

  “Damn,” I said.
/>   “Yeah,” said Charlie.

  I asked if he ever fucked any of those Thai girls while he was there.

  “Nope,” he said. “Plenty of pussy in Saigon.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  The fire on Western spread, same as the riots. Spread across Third to Vermont. Long way. Crept into the parking lot of the Ralphs and, after motherfuckers tore out the side of the building, that fire walked right in and turned those empty shelves into modern art.

  Charlie

  Everybody called him Charlie because of his long stringy white hair, full beard and mustache. Wore jeans and a jeans jacket so ratty they looked like they had been dipped in oil and dried in the sun. Only thing he didn’t have was that goddamn swastika on his forehead. So yeah, we called him Charlie. He said he came back from Vietnam with the spike. Couldn’t shake it until he married the bottle. Said that never really did the trick. “Ain’t got money for junk,” he’d said. “I guess Boone’s got to do until the Good Lord takes mercy and cuts me down for good.”

  Myself, I got better with age, even living on the damn streets. Sun did me right. Rich girls from west of La Brea, they still jock me for a thrill fuck. You ever lived on the streets, you know what I’m talking about. Poor Charlie, he dried like a prune, looked like a corpse before he turned fifty. Frail, nasty. Those white girls in nice cars stopped giving him charity just before the century flipped. But everybody in Koreatown—Koreans, Mexicans, and the few white people left—they all knew and loved Charlie. Ralphs should have hired him. He stood by the door and offered to carry groceries. People would pay him ten, sometimes twenty-five cents per bag. That man never went to sleep without a bottle, let me tell you.

  It was in the fall of 2004 when some boys from USC took care of Charlie. Those days, folks from other neighborhoods shopped at the Ralphs on Third and Vermont for one of two reasons—the first was the fact that the Mexican girls working the registers didn’t give a shit about the drinking age. USC brats were always buying beer there. More refined people, they stopped in because word spread across Los Angeles that the deli cook, Leticia, broiled the best damn chicken in the known universe. Four wings and thighs for five bucks. No lie, baby. I don’t care how good you think your mom or dad grilled a bird, this woman knew what she was doing. For most of us living on the street, we’d save for a bag on Thanksgiving or Christmas. Put away dimes and nickels for months, walk in, smell that chicken from the other side of the store, hopefully have enough for some beer to go with it (or the energy to steal some from the 7-Eleven). We’d sit in our spots, mine being a bench behind Our Lady of the Angels on Kingsley, and eat that shit like it was the finest pussy on the planet. Charlie loved that chicken, too. And he got it more often. Regulars at Ralphs would ask him if he was hungry, knowing damn well the answer.

  “Chicken sure would sit nice on my belly,” he’d say.

  Even Koreans will buy a man a bite to eat if they know that’s exactly what their money’s going to. Charlie would help someone carry groceries and, just before they took off, after giving him some nickels and dimes, they’d smile and pull out a white, smoking bag of Leticia’s legs and wings. He bowed, regardless of who gave him the food.

  “Thank you very much,” he’d say. He sounded like Elvis and he knew it. Worked it. Especially on the ladies, back when he didn’t look like a Muppet. He once told me he’d come from a religious family. Alabama. Maybe Mississippi. Around here, nobody knows the difference and nobody cares.

  When there was no action, Charlie took a broom the manager had set by the door and swept the walk. That motherfucker swept without being asked, without being paid. Said to me, “You don’t expect me to work in a pigsty, now do you?”

  Well, a trio of white boys from USC pulled in to the Ralphs. Cream-colored SUV. Looked like a Caddie. They let the rest of us know they had money and we didn’t, walking around in their goddamn checkered boxers, their goddamn golf shirts, the kind my friends and I made fun of in the 80s. Their Trojan ball caps were turned sideways and backwards, like those goofy motherfuckers were gangbangers from Crenshaw or something. Stupid-ass plastic sunglasses over their eyes. And they brought their little white girlfriends with them. Short shorts, so damn short their ass cheeks spilled out the bottom, the kind of shit you could only see in porno movies when I was coming up. Tight, tank-top t-shirts, Greek letters inflated like balloons across their plastic titties.

  Charlie stood by the south door. I worked the north with a crazy fuck named Wendell. Wendell used to blow a broken trumpet, same three notes, all over Koreatown. Folks gave him money, I suspect, just to shut him the hell up. Watched him get thrown off his spot by the Hollywood Video three times in the same night once.

  Charlie nodded to the USC kids, said “How do you do,” which he said to everybody.

  One of the boys, let’s call him Moe, pushed him back, said, “The fuck you looking at, loser?”

  “Come on,” said the girl closest to him. “He can’t help it.”

  Another boy, Larry, if you like, said, “He needs to get a fucking job.”

  And the last one—might as well be Curley—said, “Fucking parasite.”

  Their women disengaged, gave them looks like, You all don’t pretend to have a goddamn soul, you can forget about getting any pussy tonight.

  I balled my hands into fists, imagined throwing those filthy motherfuckers through one of the plate glass windows. Wendell said, “You know them boys’ daddies got a different lawyer in every pocket.”

  I said, “How much of nothing they going to take from me?” I moved sideways, like I wasn’t paying attention. Snagged my pants on a table of rotting oranges. “Shit,” I said. Took a second too long to free myself.

  The college boys insisted the girls go into the store. Then Larry and Curly shoved Charlie hard enough to send him over the rail by the door. The little fuckers laughed. One of them actually called him a “douche,” with that stupid-ass emphasis on the d.

  Charlie’s legs were caught on the rail. Maybe he’d gotten buzzed already, couldn’t figure out the difference between the sky and the concrete. I heard him cussing. Hustled over and helped him to his feet. “What you putting up with that shit for?” I said.

  He brushed the back of his jacket. “They’re just funnin’,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Their daddies forgot to smack them for shitting their diapers. Somebody needs to fix that slack, know what I’m saying?”

  “You slap those kids around,” he said, “they’ll just call the cops. You know how this story goes.”

  “Fuck that shit.” I charged into the store. Ranchero played on the stereo. The scent of Leticia’s chicken called like a damn siren. Most folks minded their own, pushing carts, grabbing cereal and whatever else. I spotted the SC kids in the booze section. “Yo,” I said, walking toward them. Their women scattered, like they’d seen a herd of bison.

  Moe said, “What you need, homeslice?”

  Homeslice…motherfucker.

  They huffed their chests, let me know they were real proud of the hours they spent shooting steroids and lifting weights.

  “You best scoot your ass outside and apologize to Charlie,” I said.

  “Who the fuck is Charlie?” said Curley.

  “You know who I’m talking about.”

  Larry tried to push me away. I spun him and shoved him into a stack of cases. He stopped himself, stopped the beer from collapsing on his head. His friends made a move, one from each direction. Moe swung first. Slow as fuck. I ducked, let him graze Curley’s nose. They got mad at each other, spewed the only other insults frat boys have ever known:

  “Faggot.”

  “Pussy.”

  The manager rushed over. Gustav. Skinny Salvadoran with glasses. Fought in the revolution. Let me use the toilet in the mornings. He machine-gunned some Spanish at us, then realized we didn’t understand. “What is this,” he said, “all of you.” He gave me a fatherly kind of look, like, “You kno
w better.”

  Larry sulked, like he was working on an Oscar. “This guy just came in here,” he said. “He just started picking on us for no reason.”

  Rich folks always considered the rest of us idiots.

  “This man,” Gustav said, pointing his chin at me, “this man does nothing for no reason.” He glanced at the college girls.

  They shrugged, tilted their heads at Larry, Curley, and Moe.

  Moe said, “Why would we lie? We’re just here to get beer for the game.”

  “Go Trojans,” said one of the girls, like anybody in Koreatown gave a shit.

  “All of you,” said Gustav, “take your problem somewhere else.” He leaned toward me and said, “No bathroom for you, not for a week.”

  Curley slammed his fist into his other hand. “We don’t get any beer, holmes…” He punched his palm a few more times.

  “Let’s go,” said Moe. He sounded convinced he had the high road.

  I kept right behind them. Made sure they passed Charlie without giving him any extra shit. We watched them climb into their SUV and drive away. Figured that would be it.

  * * *

  To this day, the old motherfuckers outside the 7-Eleven insist it’s not my fault what happened. But I could have done something. I could have figured out what kind of car those boys were driving. Could have gotten some idea what the license plate number was. Instead, I told Wendell, “So long,” and headed to my afternoon spot near the depot on Wilshire and Vermont. The ESL teachers would be going home right around then. They were always good for a handful of nickels and dimes.

  Later, I cruised to Oxford, floated between Denny’s and the Hollywood Video. Put together enough coins to buy a bottle of Wild Irish, a pack of Kools, and some Twinkies for the night. A breeze shot down Western as I made my way to Third. I wanted to rap with the old folks at the 7-Eleven before settling behind the church.