A bony, stooped Chicano street eccentric—aging, toothless, with a squiggle of black mustache and sloppily dyed black hair—paraded up the sidewalk to stand directly in front of Ash’s window. Crazy old fruit, Ash thought. A familiar figure on the street here. He was wearing a Santa Claus hat tricked out with junk jewelry, a tattered gold lamé jacket, thick mascara and eyeliner, and a rose erupting a penis crudely painted on his weathered cheek. The inevitable trash-brimmed shopping bag in one hand, in the other a cane made into a mystical staff of office with the gold-painted plastic roses duct-taped to the top end.
As usual the crazy old fuck was babbling free-form imprecations, his spittle making whiteheads on the window glass. “Damnfuckya!” came muffled through the glass. “Damnfuckya for ya abandoned city, ya abandoned city and now their gods are taking away, taking like a bend-over boy yes, damnfuckya! Yoruba Orisha! The Orisha, cabrón! Holy shit on a wheel! Hijo de puta! Ya doot, ya pay, they watch, they pray, they take like a bend-over boy ya! El-Elegba Ishu at your crossroads shithead pendejo! LSD not the godblood now praise the days! Damnfuckya be sorry! Orisha them Yoruba cabrones!”
Yoruba Orisha. Sounded familiar.
“Godfuckya Orisha sniff ’round, vamanos! Chinga tu madre!”
Maybe the old fruit was a Santeria loony. Santeria was the Hispanic equivalent of Yoruba, and now he was foaming at the mouth about the growth of his weird little cult’s power. Or maybe he’d done too much acid in the sixties. Or both.
The Lebanese guys who ran the espresso place, trying to fake it as a chic croissant espresso parlor, went out onto the sidewalk to chase the old shrieker away. But Ash was through here, anyway. It was time to go to the indoor range, to practice with the gun.
* * *
On the BART train heading to the East Bay, on his way to the target range, Ash let his mind wander, and his eyes followed his mind. They wandered foggily over the otherwise empty interior of the humming, shivering train car, till they focused on a page of a morning paper someone had left on a plastic seat. It was a back-section page of the Examiner, and it was the word Yoruba in a headline that focused his eyes. Lurching with the motion of the train, Ash crossed the aisle and sat down next to the paper, read the article without picking it up.
Yoruba, it said, was the growing religion of inner-city blacks—an amalgam of African and Western mysticism. Ancestor worship with African roots. Supposed to be millions of urban blacks into it now. Orisha the name of the spirits. Ishu El-Elegba was some god or other.
So the Chicano street freak had been squeaking about Yoruba out of schizzy paranoia, because the cult was spreading through the barrio. Next week he’d be warning people about some plot by the Vatican.
Ash shrugged, and the train pulled into his station.
* * *
Ash had only fired the automatic once before—and before that hadn’t fired a gun since his boyhood, when he’d gone hunting with his father. He’d never hit anything in those days. He wasn’t sure he could hit anything now.
But he’d been researching gun handling. So after an hour or so—his hand beginning to ache with the recoil of the gun, his head aching from the grip of the ear protectors—he found he could fire a reasonably tight pattern into the black, manshaped paper target at the end of the gallery. It was a thrill being here, really. The other men along the firing gallery so hawk-eyed and serious as they loaded and fired intently at their targets. The ventilators sucking up the gunsmoke. The flash of the muzzles.
He pressed the button that ran his paper target back to him on the wire that stretched the length of the range, excitement mounting as he saw he’d clustered three of the five shots into the middle two circles.
It wasn’t Wild Bill Hickok, but it was good enough. It would stop a man, surely, wouldn’t it, if he laid a pattern like that into his chest?
But would it be necessary? It shouldn’t be. He didn’t want to have to shoot the old waddler. They wouldn’t look for him so hard, after the robbery, if he didn’t use the gun. Chances were, he wouldn’t have to shoot. The old guard would be terrified, paralyzed. Putty. Still …
He smiled as with the tips of his fingers he traced the fresh bullet holes in the target.
* * *
Ash was glad the week was over; relieved the waiting was nearly done. He’d begun to have second thoughts. The attrition on his nerves had been almost unbearable.
But now it was Monday again. Seven minutes after five p.m. He sat in the espresso shop, sipping, achingly and sensuously aware of the weight of the pistol in the pocket of his trench coat.
The street crazy with the gold roses on his cane was stumping along a little ways up, across the street, as if coming to meet Ash. And then the armored car pulled around the corner.
Legs rubbery, Ash made himself get up. He picked up the empty, frameless backpack, carried it in his left hand. Went out the door, into the bash of cold wind. The traffic light was with him. He took that as a sign, and crossed with growing alacrity, one hand closing around the grip of the gun in his coat pocket. The ski mask was folded up onto his forehead like a watch cap. As he reached the corner where the fat black security guard was just getting out of the back of the armored car, he pulled the ski mask down over his face. And then he jerked the gun out.
“Give me the bag or you’re dead right now!” Ash barked, just as he’d rehearsed it, leveling the gun at the old man’s unmissable belly.
For a split second, as the old black guy hesitated, Ash’s eyes focused on something anomalous in the guard’s uniform; an African charm dangling down the front of his shirt, where a tie should be. A spirit-mask face that seemed to grimace at Ash. Then the rasping plop of the bag dropping to the sidewalk snagged his attention away, and Ash waved the gun; yelling, “Back away and drop your gun! Take it out with thumb and forefinger only!” All according to rehearsal.
The gun clanked on the sidewalk. The old man backed stumblingly away. Ash scooped up the bag, shoved it into the backpack. Take the old guy’s gun, too. But people were yelling, across the street, for someone to call the cops, and he just wanted away. He sprinted into the street, into a tunnel of panic, hearing shouts and car horns blaring at him, the squeal of tires, but never looking around. His eyes fixed on the downhill block that was his path to the BART station.
Somehow he was across the street without being run over, was five paces past the wooden, poster-swathed newspaper kiosk on the opposite corner, when the Chicano street crazy with the gold roses on his cane popped into his path from a doorway, shrieking, the whites showing all the way around his eyes, foam spiraling from his mouth, his whole body pirouetting, spinning like a cop car’s red light. Ash bellowed something at him and waved the gun, but momentum carried him directly into the crazy fuck and they went down, one skidding atop the other, the stinking, clownishly made-up face howling two inches from his, the loon’s cocked knee knocking the wind out of Ash.
He forced himself to take air and rolled aside, wrenched free, gun in one hand and backpack in the other, his heart screaming in time with the throb of approaching sirens. People yelling around him. He got to his feet, the effort making him feel like Atlas lifting the world. Then he heard a deep, black voice. “Drop ’em both or down you go, motherfucker!” And, wheezing, the fat old black guard was there, gun retrieved and shining in his hand, breath steaming from his wide nostrils, dripping sweat, eyes wild. The crazy was up, then, flailing indiscriminately, this time in the fat guard’s face. The old guy’s gun once more went spinning away from him.
Now’s your chance, Ash. Go.
But his shaking hands had leveled his own gun.
Thinking: The guy’s going to pick up his piece and shoot me in the back unless I gun him down.
No he won’t, he won’t chance hitting passersby, just run—
But the crazy threw himself aside and the black guard was a clear-cut target and something in Ash erupted out through his hands. The gun banged four times and the old man went down. Screams in the background. Th
e black guard clutching his torn-up belly. One hand went to the carved African grimace hanging around his neck. His lips moved.
Ash ran. He ran into another tunnel of perception; and down the hill.
* * *
Ash was on the BART platform, and the train was pulling in. He didn’t remember coming here. Where was the gun? Where was the money? The mask? Why was his mouth full of paper?
He took stock. The gun was back in his coat pocket, like a scorpion retreated into its hole. His ski mask was where it was supposed to be, too, with the canvas bag in the backpack. There was no paper in his mouth. It just felt that way, it was so dry.
The train pulled in and, for a moment, it seemed to Ash that it was feeding on the people in the platform by taking them into itself. Trains and buses all over the city puffing up, feeding, moving on, stopping to feed again Strange thought. Just get on the train. He had maybe one minute before the city police would coordinate with the BART police and they’d all come clattering down here looking to shoot him.
He stepped onto the train just as the doors closed.
* * *
It took an unusually long time to get to the next station. That was his imagination; the adrenaline affecting him, he supposed. He didn’t look at anyone else on the train. No one looked at him. They were all damned quiet.
He got off at the next stop. That was his plan—get out before the transit cops staked out the station. But he half expected them to be there when he got out of the train.
He felt a weight spiral away from him: no cops on the platform, or at the top of the escalator.
Next thing, go to ground and stay. They’d expect him to go much farther, maybe the airport.
God it was dark out. The night had come so quickly, in just the few minutes he’d spent on the train. Well, it came fast in the winter.
He didn’t recognize the neighborhood. Maybe he was around Hunter’s Point somewhere. It looked mostly black and Hispanic here. He’d be conspicuous. No matter, he was committed.
You killed a man.
Don’t think about it now. Think about shelter.
He moved off down the street, scanning the signs for a cheap hotel. Had to get off the streets fast. With luck, no one would get around to telling the cops he’d ducked into the Mission Street BART station. Street people at 16th and Mission didn’t confide in the cops.
It was all open-air discount stores and flyblown bar-b-cue stands and bars. The corners were clumped up, as they always were, with corner drinkers and loafers and hustlers and people on errands stopped to trade gossip with their cousins. Black guys and Hispanic guys, turning to look at Ash as he passed, never pausing in their murmur. All wearing dark glasses; it must be some kind of fad in this neighborhood to wear shades at night. It didn’t make much sense. The blacks and Hispanics stood about in mixed groups, which was kind of strange. They communicated at times, especially in the drug trade, but they were usually more segregated. The streetlights seemed a cateye yellow here, but gave out no illumination—everything above the street level was pitch black. Below on the street it was dim and increasingly misty. A leprous mist that smudged the neon of the bars, the adult bookstores, the beer signs in the liquor stores. He stared at a beer sign as he passed. Drink the Piss of Hope, it said. He must have read that wrong. But farther down he read it again in another window: Piss of Hope: The Beer that Sweetly Lies.
Piss of Hope?
Another sign advertised Heartblood Wine Cooler. Heartblood, now. It was so easy to get out of touch with things. But …
There was something wrong with the sunglasses people were wearing. Looking close at a black guy and a Hispanic guy standing together, he saw that their glasses weren’t sunglasses, exactly. They were the miniatures of house windows, thickly painted over. Dull gray paint, dull red paint.
Stress. It’s stress, and the weird light here and what you’ve been through.
He could feel them watching him. All of them. He passed a group of children playing a game. The children had no eyes; they had plucked them out, were casting the eyes, tumbling them along the sidewalk like jacks—You’re really freaked out, Ash thought. It’s the shooting. It’s natural. It’ll pass.
The cars in the street were lit from underneath, with oily yellow light. There were no headlights. None. They didn’t have headlights. Their windows were painted out. (That is not a pickup truck filled with dirty, stark-naked children vomiting blood.) The crowds on the edges of the sidewalk thickened. It was like a parade day; like people waiting for a procession. (The old wino sleeping in the doorway is not made out of dog shit.) In the window of a bar, he saw a hissing, flickering neon sign shaped like a face. A grimacing face of lurid strokes of neon, amalgamated from goat and hyena and man, a mask he’d seen before. He felt the sign’s impossible warmth as he walked by.
The open door of the bar smelled like rotten meat and sour beer. Now and then, on the walls above the shop doors, rusty public address speakers, between bursts of static and feedback, gave out filtered announcements that seemed threaded together into one long harangue as he proceeded from block to block.
“Today we have large pieces available … The fever calls from below to offer new bargains, discount prices … Prices slashed … slashed … We’re slashing … prices are … from below, we offer …”
A police car careened by. Ash froze till he saw it was apparently driving at random, weaving drunkenly through the street and then plowing into the crowd on the opposite side of the street, sending bodies flying. No one on Ash’s side of the street more than glanced over with their painted-out eyes. The cop car only stopped crushing pedestrians when it plowed into a telephone pole and its front windows shattered, revealing cracked mannequins inside twitching and sparking.
Shooting the old guard has fucked up your head, Ash thought. Just stare at the street, look down, look away, Ash.
He pushed on. A hotel, find a hotel, a hotel. Go in somewhere, ask, get directions, get away from this street. (That is not a whore straddling a smashed man, squatting over the broken bone-end of a man’s arm.) Go into this bar advertising Lifeblood Beer and Finehurt Vodka. (Christ, where did they get these brands? He’d never …
Inside the bar. It was a smoky room; the smoke smelled like burnt meat and tasted of iron filings on his tongue. One of those sports bars, photos on the walls of football players … smashing open the other players’ helmets with sledgehammers. On the TV screen at the end of the bar a blurry hockey game played out. (The hockey players are not beating a naked woman bloody with their sticks, blood spattering their inhuman masks, no they’re not.) Men and women of all colors at the bar were dead things (no they’re not, it’s just …), and they were smoking something, not drinking. They had crack pipes in their hands and they were using tiny ornate silver spoons to scoop something from the furred buckets on the bar to put in their pipes, and burn with their Bic lighters; when they inhaled, their emaciated faces puffed out: aged, sunken, wrinkled, blue-veined, disease-pocked faces that filled out, briefly healed, became healthy for a few moments, wrinkles blurring away with each hit, eyes clearing, hair darkening as each man and woman applied lighter to the pipe and sucked gray smoke. (Don’t look under the bar.) Then the smokers instantly atrophied again, becoming dead, or near-dead; becoming mummies who smoked pipes, shriveled—until the next hit. The bartender was a black man with gold teeth and white-painted eyelids, wearing a sort of gold and black gown. He stood polishing a whimpering skull behind the bar, and said, “Brotherman, you looking for de hotel, it’s on de corner, de Crossroads Hotel—You take a hit, too? One money, give me one money and I give you de fine—”
“No, no thanks,” Ash said with rubbery lips.
His eyes adjusting so he could see under the bar, in front of the stools—there were people under the bar locked into metal braces, writhing in restraints: their heads were clamped up through holes in the bars and the furry buckets in front of each smoker were the tops of their heads, the crowns of their skulls cut away, brain
s exposed, gray and pink; the clamped heads were facing the bartender who fed them something that wriggled, from time to time. The smokers used their petite, glimmering spoons to scoop bits of quivering brain tissue from the living skulls and dollop the gelatinous stuff into the bowls of their pipes—basing the brains of the women and men clamped under the bars, taking a hit and filling out with strength and health for a moment. Was the man under the bar a copy of the one smoking him? Ash ran before he knew for sure.
Just get to the hotel and it’ll pass, it’ll pass.
Out the door and past the shops, a butcher’s (those are not skinned children hanging on the hooks), and over the sidewalk which he saw now was imprinted with fossils, fossils of visages, like people pushing their faces against glass till they pressed out of shape and distorted like putty; impressions in concrete of crushed faces underfoot. The PA speakers rattling, echoing.
“… prices slashed and bent over sawhorses, every price and every avenue, discounts and bargains, latest in fragrant designer footwear …”
Past a doorway of a boarding house—was this the place? But the door bulged outward, wood going to rubber, then the lock buckling and the door flying open to erupt people, vomiting them onto the sidewalk in a keystone cops heap, but moving only as their limbs flopped with inertia: they were dead, their eyes stamped with hunger and madness, each one clutching a shopping bag of trash, one of them the Chicano street crazy who’d tried to warn him: gold roses clamped in his teeth, he was dead now; some of them crushed into shopping carts; two of them, yes, all curled up and crushed, trash-compacted into a shopping cart so their flesh burst out through the metal gaps. Flies that spoke with the voices of radio DJs cycled over them, yammering in little buzzing parodic voices: “This Wild Bob at KMEL and hey did we tell ya about our super countdown contest, we’re buzzing with it, buzzzzzzing wizzzz-zzzz—”
A bus at the corner. Maybe get in it and ride the hell out of the neighborhood. But the vehicle’s sides were striated like a centipede and when it pulled over at the bus stop its doorway was wet, it fed on the willing people waiting there, and from its underside crushed and sticky-ochre bodies were expelled to spatter the street.
San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics Page 22