Shouldn’t have come here, Fat Bob thought even as he did his best to relish Oso’s demise – I fucked up big time.
“Miya,” Bob tried to say with his last breath, but it hurt too bad.
And then he died.
Chapter 38
Fat Bob was supposed to have swung back by Carmel’s with some take-out food, but Speedy figured he’d been gone way too long. So after waiting a while longer, Speedy headed over to T.J. and Sergio’s to see what was keeping him.
“Where’d he go after here?” Speedy asked Willy.
“All he said was something about taking out the trash,” Little Willy replied, looking as guilty as if he’d been in on whatever Bob had been up to.
Speedy hurried back to Carmel’s, anxiety amping his brain to the point of paranoia.
“I think Bob might have done something stupid,” he replied, when she asked what the problem was. “But I got no way of getting there, other than AC Transit or a cab. I’ll see you.”
“Come with me,” Carmel said.
Behind her house was a carport. In the carport was a tarp-covered vehicle. Carmel pulled the drop-cloth off, revealing a pale blue ‘73 Vega station wagon. Speedy had to admit it was cherry, and the interior was nice and clean, but it was nothing to write home about – just one more ‘70s economy car.
“Get in,” Carmel said.
The Vega’s engine made a loud, muscular sound starting up, but Speedy didn’t think much about it – he wasn’t really an authority on Chevies as it was.
Carmel opened it up and blew through the Tube into Oakland Chinatown, the tiled tunnel walls seeming to amplify the engine’s guttural howls. A glass-pack crackling came out the exhaust as she downshifted just before rounding the first corner to the right. Even though she was only doing 20 or 25 as she curved east onto 7th past Harrison Railroad Park, the rear-end whipped out like they were cornering at a much higher speed.
“Its front heavy,” Carmel said. “Swapped a 327 V-8 engine into it, and the frame’s not really designed for this big a mill. I need to modify the suspension, put in some sway bars – in the meantime I should really put sandbags in the back to compensate for the crappy weight distribution.” She gunned it into the two-block straightaway leading up to their next turn, the Vega’s primal American big block roar startling several Chinese senior citizens wandering the sidewalks.
“Offenhauser 360 manifold, four barrel carb, Ram-Flo air filter,” Carmel intoned, running down the specs. “My Daddy put it together for me back in Redway, and taught me to handle it at speed – he made all his runs in it, police interceptors could never keep up. Hell, Porsches had a hard time when Daddy wanted to show off.” Carmel downshifted once more, again to the snap crackle pop of the exhaust, then fishtailed her way into the right turn onto Jackson.
“I don’t take it out much,” Carmel confessed, as she straightened the Vega out again. “Runs me about $10 to $20 a day in gas even at a buck twenty a gallon.”
She pressed the gas harder and had already accelerated to about 75 MPH by the time they hit the last turn. Speedy expected her to brake, but instead she merely twitched the steering wheel over; all four tires lost traction in a perfectly controlled four-wheel drift. Carmel kept the skid under expert control: the Vega slalomed at a diagonal angle to the auto’s forward passage as they arced around the corner onto 6th and headed up the onramp toward the Nimitz.
Her hand lightly caressed the five-speed’s shift knob as she merged the Vega effortlessly into the freeway traffic flow. “You don’t really drive this thing,” she admitted. “You more aim it.”
Carmel slid a playful glance over at Speedy, hoping he’d be sitting there gray-faced, clutching both sides of his bucket seat.
But “Just get me to West Oakland,” was all Speedy said in that ever imperturbable voice of his.
Carmel wondered for a moment if he’d change expression even if she reached over and smacked his face as hard as she could.
When they got to the Mexicans’ neighborhood, they were just in time to see the cops leaving and the meat wagon crew packing up. Speedy got out the Vega, this time not caring if the scumbags in the drug house saw him – he was only concerned with the fact that Fat Bob didn’t seem to be anywhere around even though Bob’s Valiant was parked down the block.
Speedy saw an Asian guy back in the alley by the liquor store dumpster; it was one of the Koreans that ran the store. Speedy walked up to see what the clerk was doing.
There was a chalk outline on the ground. The Korean was swabbing at it with a mop and bucket, leaving a lighter, human-shaped silhouette superimposed on the accumulated filth of the alley floor.
“What happened?” Speedy asked the storekeeper without preamble.
“I guess two fellows don’t like each other,” the Korean replied without looking up from his mopping.
“Was one of them a Caucasian dude, big hands, short?”
“One was,” the Korean said, nodding down at the outline he was scrubbing away. “He one foolish white boy. That Mexican much bigger, much bigger.”
Speedy saw an over-sized cowboy hat on the ground, peeping out from behind the dumpster; it resembled the one he’d seen Oso wearing.
Looking out in the street by the ambulance, Speedy saw another fresh chalk outline. There was another, older chalk outline on the sidewalk beyond it, on the sidewalk across the street.
Turning in place and studying the surrounding blocks, Speedy could see many more chalk outlines of varying ages and levels of sharpness in all directions, some scrubbed away and some not. Interspersed among them were just as many flower & photo memorials to other murder victims, all fluttering in the wind.
The flower & photo memorials could be dated relative to each other by their increasing levels of neglect and bedraggled-ness. You could tell the relative ages of the chalk outlines by the amount of smog and urban airborne grit that settled on them as time went by, blurring them more and more the older they got.
The newer memorials and outlines were still crisp and clean, as fresh as the memories of homicide and tragedy they represented. The older outlines could barely be identified as human-shaped, and the older memorials (even while remaining unmolested by passersby) coming to resemble nothing more than scattered accumulations of garbage.
All these chalk silhouettes and flower & photo memorials – mementoes from crime scenes past – were scattered around the liquor store and the neighborhood like a layered archeological exhibit of Oakland’s violent history.
But it wasn’t strictly an Oakland thing: Speedy knew that exhibit extended from the top to the bottom of the East Bay. He could drive from the Iron Triangle up in Richmond to the north, down past the Rolling 100s through San Leandro and Hayward all the way to Fremont in the south – there’d always be a chalk outline or a flower & photo memorial in his field of view, the entire trip.
The meat wagon was ready to head out but Speedy stepped into the street in front of it, holding his hand up in a ‘halt’ gesture. Not wanting to hit him, the driver stopped; but he also made a display of locking his door and rolling up his window as he stared at Speedy balefully, waiting for Speedy to stop blocking progress here.
Both paramedics were in the front seat and the siren was off – their passenger didn’t need any tending then. Speedy stepped around the side of the ambulance and the driver immediately gunned it away, relieved. As the meat wagon passed within inches of him, Speedy looked in the side window and saw Fat Bob, close enough to touch if not for the glass in the way. Bob was strapped onto the gurney, unmistakably dead. The ambulance continued on by, but Speedy was no longer focusing his attention on it.
Someone was honking at Speedy, they yelled at him to get the fuck out the street. But Speedy didn’t even hear – he was looking back at the alley, watching as the Korean scrubbed the evidence of Fat Bob’s last stand into a blur and then made it disappear almost completely – gone forever, other than a Bob-shaped patch of relative cleanliness in the neighborhood’s
grime.
‘Gone forever:’ Speedy was free of Fat Bob at last. He’d never have to look at Bob’s moon face while he followed Speedy around like a dog, expecting Speedy to make all the decisions.
Speedy would never have Fat Bob in his corner again; never feel the rock solid certainty of knowing a true brother’s loyalty was backing his every play.
Speedy’s steps were slow and his feet felt like lead as he went to the Valiant and dug the spare ignition key from under the driver’s seat. Carmel followed him back to Alameda in the Vega, this time with no further exhibitions of speed.
Chapter 39
“Bob’s gone,” Speedy said.
The gig was still on, Little Willy heard him say from a thousand miles away. On for tonight, rain or shine.
Speedy’s face was stony with enraged determination as he spoke the words, ignoring what was happening on Willy’s own visage. Then he abandoned Willy one more time to take off with Carmel and pick up the Thompson.
That was Speedy all the way, Willy reflected. As ever, he only saw the mission. As always, Little Willy’s big brother thought he could overcome anything, could fix any problem.
But there was no fixing Fat Bob’s death.
Little Willy sat there ignoring Pearl’s mewing attempts to start up a game of fetch, thinking about Bob in growing distress. Willy had always thought he only tolerated the no-neck brute for Speedy’s sake, and pretended it hadn’t bothered him a bit when Bob turned his back on him.
But now Fat Bob’s death was one more hole ripped in the soggy paper bag enclosing Willy’s life, and the size of that hole astounded him. There were too many wounds in Willy’s world; he didn’t know what to do, and Speedy wasn’t there to pretend he had the answers.
‘Foolish,’ Little Willy thought, feeling one of his spells coming on. ‘Foolish to ever leave me by myself.'
Then shadows swooped in on his mind, as they did so often ever since the night Willy and Speedy left home as kids.
Willy lifted his pillow and stared down at the .45 he hadn’t touched since moving back in. After a bit he picked up the automatic, stowed it in the back of his waistband under his Pendleton, and walked out the house over to Webster.
He took the 51 AC Transit Bus from Alameda to Oakland Downtown, then transferred to the 72 and rode it up San Pablo Avenue towards Emeryville. Little Willy was thinking hard the whole way, no longer able to hide behind pretense:
He could chronicle every geological event that had shaped the hills and rivers comprising the Bay Area’s bones; he understood the ecological interplay between every organism, plant and animal that lived here. He could explain the origin of every street name around him, was able describe the entire history of the Bay Area in minutest patriotic detail. He comprehended all the inter-linkings of economy, and technology, and culture that kept his home community ticking.
But it didn’t matter to anyone but him, and never had. There was no one to understand Little Willy’s words, and no one he could tell his thoughts to anyway.
Caring about the gestalt? Being fascinated at how all the little things came together to form each pulsing instant of existence? It had bought Willy nothing.
Were all his moment-to-moment ‘epiphanies’ just the result of a crippled brain misfiring and stuttering away? It didn’t matter: whatever knowledge he’d accrued tasted like ashes in his mouth, and his world was flat and gray.
He stood once more in front of the burnt-out squat that had been his house until Speedy came to offer him the false promise of a real home, with friends and family – there was no saving Willy from his rightful place at the bottom of things after all. Speedy’s return had changed nothing; they were just running through the same old games like a skipping phonograph record.
Willy’s head was whirling as he walked down into the basement and lit the candle. Everything appeared untouched.
He walked over to his shit bucket and looked in. The dead possum was still there though bloated and maggoty, but the three rocks were gone.
Had he really been going to smoke them? No, of course not, Little Willy assured himself.
“Welcome home Willy,” Ghost said from behind him.
Little Willy reached for his .45 as he spun but Ghost had his arm wrapped around Willy’s neck before Willy got even part-way turned around, everything blurring into a slow motion haze as Ghost lifted him off the floor and choked him unconscious.
When Little Willy came to he was duct-taped to the barstool, seated in the center of the basement where the baby possum had met its end, the stool standing tall in the middle of the Witch’s Sabbath circle of bloody rat footprints. Ghost was standing in front of Willy holding a crack pipe, his hood down and his snaky dreadlocks framing his face.
“Shit gives the rock more flavor,” Ghost said, graciously informative. “You always shared with me.”
Ghost hit the pipe and held it a while, then blew a stream of smoke into Willy’s face. Little Willy scrunched every facial orifice as tightly closed as he could and turned his head away (although every cell in his body shouted to accept the second-hand hit).
Ghost laid the pipe on the workbench and stood over Willy. “Now you tell me how I can hang with Speedy again.”
Willy studied Ghost with involuntary empathy despite his bonds, acknowledging the loneliness he saw in Ghost’s eyes, a burden equal to the one Little Willy had lived with his whole life.
He and Ghost weren’t so different, were they? They were much the same, and Little Willy had to make him see that.
“You don’t have to do this,” Willy said. “I always liked you Ghost. We were friends, weren’t we?”
“You’re not good enough Willy,” Ghost said, almost sounding regretful. “It’s Speedy that deserves me.”
“You’ll never get him,” Little Willy said as he looked straight ahead past Ghost, putting off having to acknowledge this as real until the last possible second, realizing with surprise just how badly he wanted to live. “He’s leaving, he’s gone. And he’ll kill you when he finds you, if you hurt me.”
Ghost stood immobile for a few seconds as if actually troubled by Willy’s claim. Then he pulled a big kitchen knife from his belt and held it in front of Willy’s face until Willy was forced to focus exclusively on his own reflection staring back at himself off that shiny blade.
Chapter 40
In the interests of saving gas, Speedy and Carmel dropped off the Vega at her house and took the Valiant to T.J. and Sergio’s. Neither of the potheads had seen Willy. Speedy drove by the Estuary where he and Little Willy had watched the cormorant hunting before: still no dice.
“We need to check one more place,” Speedy said, and they headed over into Oakland toward Willy’s ex-squat. Speedy was getting mightily steamed – Bob had been right, Speedy couldn’t keep babysitting his weak-ass baby brother anymore.
As Speedy was getting ready to turn off San Pablo onto Willy’s old block, Chatter drove by in the opposite direction in an Econoline van. Speedy could see Chatter’s mouth opening in surprise as he looked over and saw Speedy making the corner; Chatter mouthed a silent obscenity behind his closed window.
Three of Chatter’s crew were in the van with him. In his rear view mirror Speedy could see two of them craning to look behind them through the van’s rear windows with their own mouths and eyes wide open. An Oi-Boy leaned out from the shotgun seat window to stare back laughing, the same one that hadn’t wanted to let Speedy and Fat Bob out of Chatter’s apartment before.
Speedy tromped the gas all the way to the floor even as Chatter smoked his tires and donut-ed into a sloppy U-turn, ignoring near collisions with traffic as he came after them. Carmel turned to watch this van full of strangers howling after them like shaven-headed wolves.
The Valiant accelerated sluggishly, the Econoline keeping up without effort. Carmel knelt in her seat staring backward at their pursuers for a little bit longer. Then she turned around in her seat and faced forward.
“Who are they?” she a
sked.
“Their prez’s name is Chatter,” Speedy replied. “He’s not very fond of me.”
Speedy continued the few blocks up San Pablo to Ashby with the van right on their ass. The faster Econoline kept trying to pass but Speedy just swerved across the lanes as necessary to cut them off, preventing them from pulling up next to the Valiant and getting a clean flank shot or being able to run them off the road into the curb.
Speedy blew through the stop sign at Ashby and turned left toward the Bay, almost clipping the center meridian as he merged neatly into the heavy traffic without slowing. The van was forced to stomp its brakes, balked by all the clotted cars honking outrage over Speedy’s traffic violation; Chatter grudgingly took an opening several cars back.
Speedy continued on Ashby under one of the railroad overpasses feeding the Oakland Naval Shipyard. Ashby transformed into an onramp curving north through sodden wetlands to join the Eastshore Freeway. The van followed them onto the Eastshore and past the long inland mirror-placid lagoon that was the Berkeley Aquatic Park.
“Don’t worry,” Speedy said, risking a glance over at Carmel. “I have something in mind.”
“I’m reassured.” Her jaw was set and she refused to look at him.
Rush hour was nearing its end but there was still plenty of traffic to dodge around in as they continued north on the Eastshore Freeway past the towering high rise apartments of the Emeryville peninsula; past the horse players’ Golden Gate Fields Racetrack; past Albany and its shaggily overgrown almost perpendicular little tree-covered wart of a Hill; past El Cerrito.
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