Lostart Street

by Vinnie Hansen

  “You should thank The Fat Lady.” He tucked the can of mice under his arm and prepared to leave.

  Before settling down to his T.V. dinner, Vince set up the mice with some cheese and water and then went by his Datsun to drop off the can. His luck with getting Punky to take two of them had persuaded him to try to peddle some at the pet store the next day. At the very least, they might take them to feed to their snakes, a natural fate for a mouse.

  The Rescue

  The cloudy dampness of fall crept along the window as Punky woke that Tuesday and found Todd pushing Cheerios through the screen to Love. “My little munchkin,” she said, squeezing the boy. But only one mouse cowered in the cage. Peace was gone.

  The mouse could have climbed up the glass and nosed off the screened lid or maybe Todd had set it free. Another possibility made her intestines knot, but she dismissed it as preposterous, paranoiac. At night she locked the door and shut the windows; she would have heard someone entering. She’d ask Vince if a mouse could nudge off a screen.

  Punky put on her Mao jacket and drawstring pants and worked on combing Todd’s hair and dressing him as he squirmed and tried to continue his play. No one had advised her against having Todd, but her father thought she’d turned into a loose California hippie. Her mother said nothing, but regarded Punky with compressed lips and unhappy eyes.

  They both adored Todd, but she could no longer endure being around the family even for his sake. Her brothers and sisters seemed to consider her stupid for not having an abortion, secretly, of course, since none of them approved of such things. Bottom line, her family was embarrassed by her. How they could maintain these attitudes as they kissed and swung and fussed over Todd angered her so much that she didn’t want them to see him.

  Today she and Todd had to go to the bank. Punky dreaded The Shrinking Balance. First and last months’ rent and a security deposit had taken a chunk of her savings. Maybe she’d been crazy to move, but her heart had been set on the transfer. Anyway, it was done.

  Stepping out to the asphalt driveway with Todd on her hip, she had only a moment to hear blackbirds squawking in the persimmon tree across the street and to feel the sun breaking through the morning mist and to think, yes, she had done right. Then a door closed across the way.

  Lefty Hunt loped toward her. “I wanna talk to you,” he whimpered.

  Punky turned to walk away, but the man grabbed her arm. She shrugged free and repositioned Todd on her hip.

  Lefty grabbed her arm again. “You stay away from that guy.”

  His blue eyes seemed tuned to another reality, but otherwise he looked like an ordinary person, no worse, for sure, than the guys she’d seen in the Unemployment Office. He was no beauty contest winner, but he didn’t look like a psycho either.

  “Keep your hands off,” she said crisply.

  Lefty relaxed his grip and she lowered Todd to the driveway, but the baby clutched her leg.

  Then, Lefty clenched tighter. She touched the cold, purplish fingers and peeled them from her biceps.

  “We’re alike,” he said.

  A chill ran through her. “Let go of me!” She bent a finger backward, no longer concerned with whether it hurt. Todd cried and tried to crawl up her leg.

  Lefty bent as though to put his lips on her cheeks. She shook her head and snatched for her child’s hand, but the sudden move twirled Todd to the blacktop.

  “Mamamama,” he cried, hanging on to her leg and getting jerked around as she dodged Lefty Hunt.

  A vaguely familiar voice came up behind them, a female voice that demanded a salute.

  “You let that girl be. You have no right to grab her like that.”

  Lefty stopped. His eyes widened and blinked at the approaching figure.

  Todd wailed in full force now and Punky picked him up before she turned to the old lady hobbling down the driveway like Hopalong Cassidy. The woman vigorously shook a knobby finger at Lefty, her wrap-around sunglasses bobbing. “Shame on you!”

  Lefty slunk toward his apartment as Mrs. Bean wobbled up and patted Todd on the back. “It’s gonna be okay, little fellow,” she clucked.

  “Thank you,” Punky said.

  “I don’t know about that character,” Mrs. Bean said, returning to her normal, strident tone.

  “I feel bad for him,” Punky said. “All he tried to do was kiss me on the cheek. He’s obviously not all there. I overreacted.”

  “Overreacted, my foot,” Mrs. Bean said. “I wouldn’t let him kiss me for all the tea in China. I don’t know what he’s doing here anyway. Bobbi told me the apartment was taken by an older couple.”

  “He’s their son,” Punky said. That’s what she’d heard in the laundry room.

  “Well, he’s a strange one,” Mrs. Bean said. “Look, if you need any help, anyone to care for the little tyke there or anything else, come on back to number four. I was a counselor for twenty-five years and … .”

  In the middle of the driveway, Mrs. Bean played the tape of her life for Punky.

  The Continuing Saga of Vince and Punky

  Late in the afternoon with sweat trickling down his forehead from a beach run, Vince rapped at her door. He felt relaxed now. If he waited until after his shower, the giddiness might return. This woman was having a strange effect on him.

  The door swung open. “Boy am I glad to see you.” Punky’s deeply scalloped nose and full cheeks flushed. By contrast her eyes appeared green, not the gray he remembered.

  He wondered what else he had changed in his fantasies. Todd peek-a-booed at him around her wide pant leg. “You wouldn’t have a cat I could borrow?” he asked. The moppet kept widening its blue saucer eyes at him. In his daydreams about Punky’s breasts, he hadn’t thought much about the kid, either.

  “God, practically everyone in these apartments has a cat except me,” she said.

  “Maybe I could use Buddha Belly.” Vince chuckled. Then he told her about the mice that had gotten loose in his car. She stood laughing in the doorway until tears collected in the corners of her eyes. He smiled apprehensively.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in killing mice.”

  “This is different,” he said. “It’s natural for cats to prey on mice.”

  “What a rationalization,” she said. “Would you like some tea?”

  He confessed to being a coffee drinker and dashed over to his apartment for his instant coffee. His favorite barrel cactus lay uprooted and tipped on its side. The culprit could be the stupid little dog that the guy called Bucky walked around the complex. But Vince’s logic told him Dudu was too wimpy. The plant had been ripped from the ground.

  Inside his apartment, he scooped a few handfuls of water from the tap to quench his thirst from running. He’d looked forward to the cactus’s beautiful yellow blossoms in the spring. Florence had relayed to him the thoughts of the English teacher in five—her disdain for having a yard full of cacti—and Vince couldn’t wait for his yard to erupt into color. He knew that teacher type. Hostile towards men, her flesh consumed by anger, her body all angles and bones, her sexuality eaten away, and her heart poured into her work. She’d learn a thing or two about cacti come April.

  In the curtained dimness, Vince’s agitation mounted. Punky had seemed so happy to see him, but as devoid of sexuality as the teacher, the palpable force gone. He should have run harder at the beach. Anxiety tingled along his skin, threatening to pop out through his pores. He moved to his terrarium, unfastened Mendacity from a branch and rubbed her cold, scaly skin. He held her close to his face and her imperturbable stare calmed him. “How would you like to be free?” he whispered.

  When he returned to Punky’s apartment, the teapot was shrieking. She made their drinks and poured apple juice into a plastic cup for Todd. The child drank from a spout on one side of the screw-on lid. Punky tried to persuade Todd to sit with them on the futons, but he preferred to toddle, with his head tipped up to drink so that he couldn’t see where he was going.

  “He likes to li
ve dangerously,” Vince said.

  “Yeah, he’s the type who has to fall down to learn,” Punky agreed. “Runs in the family. Speaking of falling down, did you see your cactus?”

  “Looks like a dog got it,” he said.

  She sipped her tea. “I bet Lefty Hunt did it.” She told him about her morning, the missing mouse and Lefty’s harassment.

  “If he stole your mouse, I wonder if he could have taken my watch.”

  “Maybe, but Mrs. Bean said someone was stealing stuff before he arrived.”

  “But who’d want your mouse except Lefty who lusts for you?”

  Her eyes unplugged. They went gray and hard as stones.

  “I didn’t mean anything bad by that,” he stammered.

  “You don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  He thought hard, but couldn’t decipher her message. He thought he’d known what he meant, but he wasn’t sure now. Her scent made him act stoned. He mumbled an apology.

  She waved her smooth-as-caramel hand as though to clear the air. “That’s all right. I made too big a deal of Lefty Hunt.”

  He wished he could redo the conversation, but even if one could mend something, it was never like new again. Cracks and sorrows accumulated until eventually a thing wasn’t worth keeping.

  “You know what I was thinking?” she asked buoyantly, not suspecting that he loathed rhetorical questions.

  That I’m a psychic, he rejoined in his head.

  Punky waited, as though she sincerely believed he might know her thoughts. The silence made him uncomfortable and perspiration trickled down his side under his T-shirt. He shouldn’t have drunk coffee so late in the day. It contributed to his uneasiness.

  The little boy abandoned his cup and moved to a box of toys. Punky stood and swooped down on the baby’s cup, her large, loose breasts jostling. She took the cup to the sink, but returned, waiting for his response.

  “What were you thinking?” he obliged. She crossed her bare ankles and folded herself into sitting, without using her hands, her hips flexible and giving.

  “I was thinking about the Merrow fairies.”

  He blinked, surprised that a person from San Francisco would choose that word.

  “Not that kind of fairy,” she said, as though reading thoughts were indeed second nature.

  In spite of himself, his eyebrows shot up. He shifted on the cushion. “Are you into fairy tales?”

  “I’m Irish.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “The male Merrow is really ugly with green teeth, and green hair, and pig eyes,” she said, trying to scrunch her face into a simulation of ugliness. Todd, sensing the tone of a story, stopped tugging toys from the box and plopped into his mother’s lap. “So the female Merrow, who lives in a cottage of oyster shells at the bottom of the sea, is always searching for a young, handsome fisherman to be her lover.”

  Is she dropping a hint?

  “If she finds a man, then she’ll live with him on land.” Punky stroked Todd’s curly locks. “They say the storms on the Irish Coast are caused by the jealous Merrow fairy.”

  The lilt in her voice squelched his irritation and he wondered how she’d succeeded in telling him such a story, short as it was. His taste ran toward history, nonfiction, and detective novels.

  “That story makes me sad,” she said.

  He practiced unusual restraint and didn’t say what the story made him.

  “It reminds me of Lefty Hunt,” she added.

  “Well, Lefty is playing his jealousy to the hilt, all right.”

  Now the story was over, Todd padded back to the toy box.

  “I think about how everybody has called me Punky all my life, same as people called him Lefty. It has affected me.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  She shook her great mane over her shoulder and stirred up that incredible fragrance. “Margaret.”

  Margaret definitely seemed too stiff for her, like a queen’s name, but, on the other hand, he couldn’t imagine her as a Maggie, either. That seemed like a name for a maid. “What effect has your name had on you?”

  “Well, it makes me punky-like, short, childish, plump—like that.”

  “You mean,” he grinned, “if people hadn’t called you Punky, you might have grown taller?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean.” She unfolded a leg and playfully nudged his shoulder with her foot to show there was no anger at his mockery. “I do feel truncated.”

  “More likely it’s made you into a punk,” he said.

  “Yeah, a little of that, too.”

  They sat silently, sifting the conversation that had passed while Todd pulled a teddy bear, brightly colored plastic hoops and wooden blocks from the box, all the fun in emptying the box, not in the playing with the toys.

  “I saw a big, gray tom hanging around behind my house,” Punky said, coming back around to why Vince had knocked at her door.

  “I was thinking about catching that cat,” he said. “If you didn’t have one, that is.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “It has dessert every night from the garbage bin. I don’t think it’ll be that hard. It looks like a hell of a mouser. You wanna help?”

  “What’ll I do with Todd?”

  Again Vince exercised incredible restraint. “He can help.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “If we’re not going until it starts to get dark, he’ll be ready for bed. He’s tuckered out from all the running around.”

  Lefty Hunt had skulked to the bottom of the sea like that ugly Merrow fairy she’d mentioned, and Punky bubbled now at the surface like the escaping female.

  Vince possessed radar for such bubbles. It was unfair of women to call him insensitive simply because he declined to confuse the effervescence of lust with the gurgles of a man sinking into the mire of love.

  The Police at Punky’s

  Admiring the stars, Punky and Vince sat on the gravel in back of the dumpster, their feet protruding toward the empty field that ran along the last string of apartments. After the crowdedness of San Francisco, Punky could breathe in this place that afforded weed-grown lots. In the city the buildings had seemed pinched, the Victorians drawn up like corseted ladies, the bay breeze caught in their skirts and turned to chilly eddies. Here the air flowed freely, brisk with the oncoming fall. The scent of eucalyptus floated down the hill behind them. Of course, she also smelled the garbage, and the tuna Vince had thrown on top, but, at least here a person could distinguish one odor from another; they weren’t churned into a damp newspaper/diesel concoction.

  She felt as though they were waiting for something more momentous than a tomcat. She unfolded the doubled grocery bag, to be ready, and fished in the pocket of her Mao jacket for the joint and matches. She sparked up.

  Vince fumbled for the joint with his gloved hand, secured it, inhaled, held the smoke. He coughed and handed it back.

  Punky giggled.

  “I don’t smoke much dope,” he said. “Makes me sluggish.”

  “You mean relaxed?”

  “I guess I don’t like my thoughts melting into puddles. I have these great revelations that turn out to be trivial, but I never know, maybe I can’t recall them right. Maybe they were profound.”

  “I can see how not knowing would bug you.” She passed him the joint and he took another toke.

  The garbage poofed and rustled under a sudden weight. Vince leapt up, dropping the smoke. He knocked the lid brace and slammed down the top.

  “Hey!” Punky scooped up joint, pinched out the lit end, and stuck it in her pocket.

  “All right,” Vince said. “We’ve done the easy part.”

  As Punky eased open the lid for him, Vince bent over the edge and groped toward the hissing and snarling. The funky stench of disturbed garbage whirled up to her. Vince teetered forward, grasped the hissing silhouette by the nape of its neck, and worked the animal into the bag Punky had prepared for him. The cat would be a good mouser, all righ
t, Punky thought.

  Just as Vince was peeling off the smelly gloves and they both tasted the thrill of victory, Florence galloped around the corner toward them. Without her cigarette and jelly glass of wine, she looked naked in the moonlight.

  Punky braced herself to be yelled at for animal cruelty.

  “There you are, love,” Florence cried to Punky. “There are cops at your door. I told them I’d find you. I wouldn’t have said anything, love, but they looked like they might go in one way or the other.”

  “Oh, God,” Punky said. “Oh, God.”

  Florence laid a hand on her shoulder. “Relax, love. Have a piece of gum.” She shook a stick of Spearmint from its package with expertise.

  “Somebody must have reported my plant,” Punky choked. “God, that’s a felony. What’ll I do?”

  “Just chew, love,” Florence said.

  “I think it takes five plants for a felony charge,” Vince said.

  The cat had quieted and stopped struggling. Punky thrust the bag to Vince. They hurried toward her apartment.

  In the light of the half moon, the two men at Punky’s house turned to meet them. A tall, barrel-chested uniformed deputy stood at the door and a small man in plain clothes waited at the bottom of the steps.

  Florence put an arm around Punky. “Remember you’re a pretty girl, love,” she whispered, “and I’ll be right here if you need me.”

  “Good evening,” the sheriff deputy said heartily, tromping down the steps. “Are you Margaret Hayes?”

  “Yes, sir.” Her voice quavered.

  “I’m Deputy Smith and this is Julio Gutierrez from Child Protective Services.”

  They all stared at Julio Gutierrez, an anomaly. What did someone from Child Protective Services have to do with a dope bust?

  “We hate to bother you, Mrs. Hayes,” the big deputy continued, and Punky let the “Mrs.” slide, wondering how they’d gotten her full name. “But, we have a child abuse report on you.”

  “What?” Punky yelped. “That’s crazy.”

  “Now you have to understand,” the sheriff deputy said, “that a report is not evidence or proof, but we do have to investigate, especially when a caller states a beating is in progress.”