by D. W. Buffa
“This is yours?” I asked, as I scrambled sideways to get beyond his reach. “Yours?” I asked, nodding. I kept moving, and kept repeating the same question, letting him know that my trespass was entirely inadvertent. “Sorry,” I said when I was far enough away from him to risk struggling to my feet. I backed down the alley, apologizing, and then, when I was safe, turned around and walked away as quickly as I could.
Late that night I made my way to the Morrison Street Bridge.
I dragged a few rotting pieces of cardboard I found under the bushes, and crawled underneath this makeshift blanket. The ground was hard, cold, jagged with rocks, and each time I turned over there were only a few moments of relief before I started to hurt in a new place. I hardly slept at all that night, and never for very long. Though I could not clearly see more than a few of them when I first arrived, I could sense that there were breathing bodies scattered all around. Years had passed, but the memory I had of the nights spent in the county jail was still vivid in my mind. This was not like that. No one cried out; no one moaned or whimpered or cursed; no one made a noise, nothing, except the heavy rolling sound of people who were sleeping in their own beds, the only ones they knew.
I did not think I had slept at all, but when I opened my eyes the sun was out and the traffic on the bridge overhead was deafening. My mouth felt like glue and my teeth hurt. I climbed out from under the cardboard blanket and looked around. Down at the edge of the river, two men stood side by side, urinating. Off to the side, sitting on his haunches, another man soaked his shirt and then wrung it out with his hands. On the shadows next to the concrete pilings, four men were gathered around a small fire, warming their hands while water boiled in a blue aluminum pot.
No one moved aside to let me in, and I stood a few feet away.
The one who had been doing his laundry in the river came back, carrying his shirt in his hand.
“Let him in,” he said as he sat down in the circle. “Come on,”
he insisted when at first I did not move. They made room, and I joined them. No one said anything, and looking at them, dull-eyed and lethargic, I wondered how many knew how.
“It’s the best coffee in town,” the man said, urging me to drink it. My eye darted to the river behind him. He shook his head.
“The water came from a fountain. I fill my canteen.”
I wondered if, with that careless glance, I had given myself away. With a blank look, as if I had no idea why he thought he had to explain something so obvious, I tried to cover my mistake. My eye still on him, I took a drink, and almost gagged on the rancid taste. He watched me for a moment longer, and then, smiling to himself, lowered his gaze.
No one said anything, not to me, not to anyone. They sat in a circle, drinking that awful brew, made, I discovered later, from the used coffee grinds found in the garbage behind one of my favorite restaurants. Then, a few minutes later, as if by some silent signal that passed my notice, they got to their feet and, without a word, drifted off in different directions.
The one who had given me the cup lingered behind. “You coming back tonight?” he asked.
I let him know with a look that it was none of his business what I did. If he thought my belligerence a threat, he did not show it. He reached inside his overcoat pocket and brought out a half-pint bottle of whiskey and offered it to me.
“Suit yourself,” he said when I refused. Removing the cap, he took a short swig and wiped his mouth with the back of his tattered, greasy sleeve. “Helps keep the coffee down,” he explained as he shoved the bottle back in his pocket.
I started to walk away. “You can come with me, if you want,”
he said. I stopped and looked back. He had already turned and was heading along a path that led under the bridge and came up on the other side. I followed behind and when we reached the top, he moved a bush aside and pulled out a rusty shopping cart heaped with black garbage bags stuffed full. Craning his neck, he squinted up at the glaring white sky. His lips pressed tight together, he moved his mouth back and forth while he made up his mind. Opening the bag on top, he dug out an olive green army camouflage jacket. He took off the overcoat, rolled it into a ball, and shoved it as far down in the basket as it would go and then put on the jacket.
We worked our way through town, stopping at every trash basket. A division of labor soon developed between master and ap-prentice: I pushed the cart, and each time we halted, he did a thorough search, deciding what was useless and what had value.
He always found something, a bottle, a can, something that could be turned into cash. When we reached the park behind the courthouse, I remembered the two men I had seen there late at night, doing what we were doing now, my own life somehow prefigured in that dreamlike apparition from the past.
On the sidewalk outside the courthouse entrance, afraid I might be recognized, I left my newfound friend and partner to rummage through the wire mesh trash baskets alone. I stood off to the side, next to a lamppost at the curb, watching people I knew at least vaguely going in and out the doors. Hunching my shoulders, I pulled the flaps of the cap I was wearing farther down over my ears. I ran my fingers over my beard and felt a little more confident that at least at a distance no one would know it was me.
He finished with the one basket and looked around to see where I was. I was about to catch up with him when someone bumped into me from behind. Instinctively, I turned around, and found myself face-to-face with Cassandra Loescher, the deputy district attorney who was prosecuting the case. She had been talking to someone, not paying attention to where she was going, and when she knocked into me had spilled the paper coffee cup she was carrying in her hand.
“Damn it!” she cried, holding the cup out in front of her. She started to apologize, but as soon as she saw me all she could think about was getting away. I reached out to help, but she dropped the cup on the sidewalk and walked rapidly up the courthouse steps.
Emboldened, I took a position next to the steps, held out my filthy hand, and studied the various ways in which the people I asked for money averted their gaze and tried to avoid making an answer. Two otherwise fair-minded judges treated me with open contempt, one of them complaining loudly to the other that it was bad enough this sort of thing went on in the public park and disgraceful that it was allowed in front of a public building. Defense lawyers sneered and turned away when I asked them if they could help one of the indigent. Harper Bryce, his reporter’s notebook sticking out of his suit coat pocket, ambled past me, on his way to cover yet another trial. He stopped, turned back, reached into his pants pocket, gave me all the change he had, and without once looking at me, disappeared inside. I opened my hand, counted seventy-eight cents, and felt like a wealthy man.
I caught up with my nameless friend and his shopping cart a block away and, while he searched through a basket, stood ready to push when it was time to move on to the next one. All day long we did this, drifting from one street to the next, taking what no one wanted, until the cart groaned under a mountain of debris and I had to lean my shoulder into it to keep it going. I never did know what he did with it. At a corner near the mission, he took over control of the cart, and made me wait while he pushed it down an alleyway. When he came back a few minutes later, he had emptied the cart of everything we had picked up during the day. He took out of his pocket an old coin purse and gave me three one-dollar bills, the wages of a scavenger’s helper. He snapped the purse shut and put it in his pocket, and from the same place pulled out the half-pint bottle. Thrusting it toward me, he held it still until I shook my head and then, with his head thrown back, guzzled a mouthful. He smacked his lips while he screwed the cap on and slipped the flat bottle back into his coat pocket.
We made our way through back streets and alleyways to the bridge, pushing the cart ahead of us, staring into the distance in a dull-witted daze. I had lived homeless only a night and a day and already the edge seemed to be off all existence. My senses were numbed and the only things that had meaning were the s
imple necessities of survival. Homeless, I was learning, meant more than not having a place of your own: It meant having nothing of your own—no friends, no family, no one you could talk to, no one you could trust. I could go home whenever I wanted, and I could only wonder at how it must feel to know that you could not.
“How long have you been doing this?” I asked when he finished hiding the cart in the bushes on the side of the bridge.
He studied me, suspicion in his eyes. “Long enough.” He turned and walked down the path that led under the bridge, the dull echo of the traffic throbbing overhead.
The pieces of cardboard I had used as a bed and a blanket were still where I had left them, and so strong is the instinct for possession, I felt a sense of relief that no one had taken what I now considered my own. There was no one else around, and after he had gone down to the edge of the river, where he took off his shoes and washed out his socks, he climbed barefoot back to where I was sitting. He lowered himself down beside me, wrapped his arms around his knees, and watched the slow-moving brown water flow past.
“Are you an undercover cop?” he asked in a flat voice that seemed not to care one way or the other.
He had guessed wrong, but the fact that he had guessed at all told me that I had failed. “No,” I replied.
“When you came here last night, the others wanted to roll you.”
“Roll me?”
“Yeah. Whack you over the head, take whatever you had. I told them they better not, that you might be a cop.”
I looked down at my shoes. A beetle was crawling across the toe and down the other side. The gravel gave way and it tumbled over on its back, legs flailing helplessly in the air. With a flick of my fingernail I flipped it right side up and watched it scramble to safety.
“When you live on the streets you know better than to show up some place for the first time after dark.” He reached in his pocket for the whiskey bottle. “And besides that, you don’t move right: You’re too quick, too nimble. You’re not one of us.” He took a drink and offered it to me.
I took it from him, wiped the opening with the heel of my hand, and put it up to my mouth. It ran down my throat like fire and acid, and for a moment I thought it had burned away my larynx and left me without the power of speech. A second surge scalded my nostrils and flamed out of my ears.
“Thanks,” I said, gritting my teeth as I handed the bottle back to him. “And thanks for last night. But I’m not an undercover cop. Why would a cop come here?” I asked, poking at the dirt.
“You’re not a cop? Why are your clothes so new?”
“Why don’t you mind your own damn business,” I said, pretending to be angry. “You didn’t want to tell me how long you’d lived like this, but I’m supposed to tell you? Who the hell are you, anyway?”
He made no reply. Instead, he passed the bottle back to me. I had no choice, not if I wanted to keep him there, talking. I took another drink, and this time it did not burn quite so much.
“They come once in a while, looking for drugs. They came a week ago, a whole bunch of them, just swooped in on us. We weren’t doing nothing. They took away a guy because he had a knife. They said he killed somebody with it. They’re all nuts.”
He scratched the side of his face and took the bottle out of my hands. There was not much left in it, and he finished that with one last gulp. “Have to get more tonight,” he said matter-of-factly.
A couple of other homeless men appeared at the far side of the bridge and wandered down to the riverbank. “You better not stay here tonight,” he warned me. “Better move on. Find another place.”
“I’ll stay here if I want,” I insisted, tossing a contemptuous look at the pair down at the river. “The guy with the knife didn’t kill anyone?” I asked, trying to sound indifferent.
He tapped the side of his head. “Feebleminded. We looked after him, best we could. It wasn’t even his knife.”
Looking out across the river, I picked up a rock and sent it sailing into the water. I picked up another one. “So whose knife was it?” I asked as I sent it on its way.
There was no answer, and I looked back over my shoulder. He was watching me, a grotesque grin on his face. “You sure you’re not a cop?”
I found another rock. “Go screw yourself,” I grunted as I let it fly. I looked back at him and waited.
“A little guy with crazy eyes. He stayed here a couple of days—
started getting real friendly with the feebleminded kid. We caught him one night. He had the kid’s pants down and he was—you know—trying to do things to him. We sent him on his way.”
“Sent him on his way?”
“Yeah, we threw him in the river,” he explained.
“What happened to him—after you threw him in the river?”
He looked at me and then shrugged. “Don’t know. Didn’t see him get out.”
I fought back the panic that swelled up inside me. Whoever had given Danny the knife had disappeared and was probably dead. We did not even know his name, and the only witness I had that he had ever existed was a homeless drunk who had probably killed him.
“We were pretty tired of that jerk anyway,” I heard him saying. “Always going around mumbling to himself, and then every time he had to take a leak coming up to me to ask if it was all right. I’m telling you: The guy was nuts. He was nuts; the cops are nuts; everybody’s nuts. I gotta go get another bottle,” he said without a pause. He struggled to his feet. “You want to come?”
I walked with him to a liquor store and told him before he went in that I wanted him to get me something, too. I put a few folded-up bills in his hand and said I would wait outside. As I walked away, I wondered what he would end up buying when he discovered that I had given him a couple of twenties instead of a couple of ones.
Though it called itself a city, Portland, or at least that part of it that had stayed on the same side of the river, was no larger than a New York neighborhood. You could walk from one end of it to the other in less than twenty minutes. I was at Howard Flynn’s place in less than ten.
The curtains were open, but it was dark inside. Flynn lived alone and never went out, except to an AA meeting or when one of his friends called for help. I climbed the steep stairs to the unlighted front door and for the first time all day suddenly felt tired. I leaned my forehead against the heavy wooden front door and pressed the bell. I let go, waited, and when I heard no sound inside, punched it again. There was still no response. With one last short burst on the bell, I pushed myself away from the door and sank down on the top step, heavy with fatigue.
At first I thought it was the passing headlights of a car, and shut my eyes to avoid the glare. Then I heard the dead bolt turn, and reaching for the railing above me I struggled to my feet.
Standing in the doorway, thick, hairy legs protruding below a threadbare flannel robe tied together with a cotton belt that did not match, Howard Flynn blinked into the harsh overhead light.
He took one look at me and shook his head.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked as he shut the door behind us.
He turned on the light in the small entryway and looked at me from head to toe. “Why?” he asked with a shrug. “Because you’re not wearing a tie?”
“What took you so long to answer the door?” I asked irritably as I followed him into the kitchen.
“I kept hoping whoever it was would go away.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Actually, I was watching television and I didn’t hear it at first,” he confessed.
“How could you not hear that goddamn thing? It makes as much noise as an electrocution, for Christ sake,” I grumbled.
“For a homeless guy, you’re pretty damn pushy, aren’t you? Sit down,” he ordered. “I’ll make you some coffee. You look like you could use it.”
While Flynn carefully measured three level teaspoons of ground coffee into a paper filter, I waited at a small Formica table that looked onto a square atrium. A glass bowl of artificial frui
t—yellow wax bananas, and red wax apples, and green and purple glass grapes—was right in the center where it always was. A bite mark on the side of the apple, left by the teeth of a disappointed child of a long forgotten friend, made all of it seem more real. Flynn poured water in the top of the coffeemaker and turned it on.
“That friend of mine—the psychologist—saw Danny.” He stared into the glass pot, watching as first one drop, then another slowly formed and then fell, coating the glass bottom with a dark turgid liquid. “Turns out he isn’t retarded after all—not in the usual sense, anyway. Fox thinks he’s about twenty-three or -four. Can’t be sure, exactly. Danny doesn’t know. He lived somewhere—out in the country, near a river. Fox thinks it might have been somewhere down around Roseburg or Grants Pass.”
The coffee kept dripping down, gradually increasing speed until it turned into a fine-flowing stream.
“His mother might have been retarded. She wasn’t married—
he didn’t have a father that he knew—but there were always men around. He was abused, probably starting when he was just an infant: sexual things, physical things, mean, perverted, awful things. Fox thinks the burn marks weren’t the half of it.”
Turning around, Flynn put his hands on the counter behind him, looked at me, a grim expression on his face, and then stared down at the floor. “He never went to school; he never went anywhere. When he wasn’t locked in a room he was chained like a dog in the backyard.”
Flynn raised his eyes. “You can’t really blame the mother. You ever know a girl like that when you were a kid, a girl who was a little slow, a little backward: a girl guys knew how to take advantage of? That’s probably what you had here: A girl, young and retarded, who didn’t have any parents of her own, finds herself pregnant, has the kid at home, lives from hand to mouth, becomes the punchboard for every lowlife in the county, and then one of these creeps starts getting his kicks with the kid.”