by Peter Plate
Taking a final swig of beer, Robert reached over the seat and scooped up his Winchester bolt-action rifle. A tingle ran through his fingers as he caressed its polished maple stock. He pushed open the driver’s door; the reek of alluvial soil and rotting ferns gusted in. Winchester in hand, he gamboled out of the sedan. A coyote was caterwauling on the hill. “I’ll be back shortly,” he said. “You and the girl chill out.”
“I don’t like this, Robert. It ain’t smart.”
“Sweetie, don’t worry about a thing. Trust daddy, okay? Is he ever wrong?”
Harriet watched him move into the fog and then lit a Parliament cigarette. Well, she rued. Things were back to normal. Before Robert went to prison, he always dragged her to places like this. Forests. Gullies. Hilltops. Ravines. Swamps. Thickets. It was his notion of romance. Having a chick in the car and a gun in his arms. Robert was a hunter who saw everything that moved as potential food and cash. Hunting boar in upstate New York or alligators in the swamps of Florida—for every season, there was a different geographic destination and new game to slaughter. Fuck him, she thought.
Robert knew his deer. How their minds worked. What they wanted. What they hated. Getting adjusted to the gloom, he glanced around. It was too hazy to do any shooting. Couldn’t see for shit in the fog. And something was off. The vibe wasn’t right. The hair on his neck bristled. Before he could fathom what it meant, flashlights cut across the field and touched on his sallow face.
He lifted the Winchester to his shoulder. Figures were running across the hillside toward him. It was an ambush. He was in hot water. It was just his luck. Lowering the weapon, he sputtered, “Goddamn, they got me again.”
A brassy voice rang out: “This is the police! Put that gun down, asshole! We’ve been waiting for you, fucking poacher!”
A dozen cops burst from the shadows and surrounded Robert. His reputation had preceded him. His movements were well known to the local lawmen. A flashlight was aimed in his face, illuminating his acne scars and underscoring every sleepless night he’d had in the pen. Knowing it was all over, he surrendered with a listless shrug and raised his hands. A foolish grin crept across his supple mouth.
“Hey, guys,” he joked. “What’s the problem? I ain’t doing shit.”
“Shut up, you fuck.”
The rifle was wrenched from his grip, and he was handcuffed. Dancing inside a circle of flashlight beams, Robert told the cops the gun wasn’t his. It belonged to his wife. A police officer limped over to the Hillman, stuck his head in the car. He said to Harriet, “Is that true?”
She puffed on her fag. Nothing would ever change. Robert was still Robert. The cops were the cops. It would be like this until the end of time. She saw a jet flying overhead, its lights blinking white and red, zigzagging toward the airport. She observed the stars in the inky molten sky and prayed for a space ship to rescue her. She looked at the policeman and wished he were dead. “Yeah, it’s mine. Is this going to be a problem, sir?”
“Not necessarily. What about the car? Is it yours, too?”
“It sure is. The pink slip is in the glove compartment if you want to see it.”
The cops bought her alibi. They decided Robert wasn’t worth busting. It was too late at night for more bullshit. The manacles were removed from his wrists. An officer saw the kid in the Hillman’s backseat and reached in the window to chuck her under the chin. “Hey, you okay?”
Diana was dehydrated and too weak to scream, so she vomited into his gloved hand. The policeman stepped back from the sedan as if he’d been electrocuted. The wind was rising, whistling, blowing in from the ocean. The fog thickened, uncoiling in a white-gray bank over San Bruno Mountain. It was Robert Grogan’s first night out of prison.
SIX
In the morning, a stray cat was wedged in a drainpipe outside Harriet and Robert’s apartment. It didn’t stop yowling until the fire department rescued it. Then the telephone started ringing. Robert shuffled into the kitchen to answer it. He was in no state to talk to anyone. Getting harassed by the police on San Bruno Mountain had been a bitch. The cops knew he was back in town. Nothing could be worse than that.
Snatching the receiver, he burred, “Yeah, who is this?”
An automated voice droned: “This call is from a Department of Corrections facility and is being monitored.” The female operator was toneless. “You have a collect call from San Quentin State Prison. Will you accept the charges?”
Robert knew who was at the other end of the line and almost had a heart attack. His blood ran cold. Talk about crummy timing. His daughter was in the hall; he motioned for her to go into the bedroom. No how did he want the brat to eavesdrop. She might snitch on him to Harriet. Breathing in the horn, he grated, “Yeah, sure, what the hell, I’ll take it.”
There was a torrent of electronic ticking and then Slatts came on, earsplitting loud and jaunty. “Is that you, daddy? Are you there?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” Robert was annoyed and didn’t know why. Maybe he was having trouble maintaining his boundaries. Between the cops, Harriet and the kid, and worrying about money and the parole officer, he felt invaded. “Who else would it be? The pope?”
“Can you talk louder? The fucking guards are yelling at someone.”
“I said, who else would—”
“You don’t have to repeat yourself. I heard you the first time. How are you, baby? Are you taking good care of yourself out there?”
Robert didn’t know. Confinement to a maximum-security penitentiary had educated him in how to smuggle drugs up his ass, how to double-talk the warden, how to bullshit his fellow convicts. It didn’t teach him how to cope with a marriage. He didn’t know what to do with Harriet. He was numb and had a fear of intimacy that ran deeper than a mineshaft.
Harriet had a bugaboo about his rifles. She claimed they were bad for the kid. He didn’t understand that and was heartsick. Guns were good for children. Weapons encouraged discipline and self-control. “I’m fine,” he said to Slatts. “Everything is great. It’s sweet to be back in the city.” He thought about the reception the cops had given him on San Bruno Mountain. “Everyone is happy to see me. What’s going on with you? Any news?”
“No. Have you seen your parole officer yet?”
He didn’t want to think about it and prevaricated. “Yeah, it was super. The first visit was a success. Our rapport was excellent. It was like making a new friend.”
“That’s swell.” Slatts approved. “Get tight with her and everything will be a groove. What else is happening?”
“It’s fucking weird, dude.” Robert opened up with a salvo. “Like I’m here with the old lady and the kid and shit. The girl looks like she just did thirty days in the hole. She’s hard as nails. I don’t know what to make of her or Harriet.”
“Aren’t they glad to see you?”
“That’s a good question. I can’t tell. It’s too early to say.”
“Heavy, real heavy.” Slatts keened with empathy. “But what about you and me? What about us?”
“Huh?” Robert acted dumb. He didn’t take the bait. He refused to be manipulated. He knew Slatts. Give him any hope, and he’d crucify you with it. “What are you saying?”
His lover was brutal and to the point. “The facts. I’m getting out in twelve days, and I’m watching the clock. It’s Christmas and I’m counting on you to be there for me. Just like you promised. You’re my husband. Right?”
“Right.”
“So, like, are we cool?”
Slatts needed reassurance. He always did. Robert didn’t want to say yes. He didn’t want to say no. It was too exhausting. Slatts bringing up the parole officer was not kosher. It was bossy. It put Robert’s head in a vise grip. “Of course we are. We’re righteous.”
“Does Harriet know about us yet?”
The question caught him off guard. Made his pulse jump a notch. He hadn’t said a damn thing to Harriet. Hadn’t seen an appropriate opportunity to do it. Didn’t see one in the foreseeable
future. He was untruthful with Slatts, putting verve into the lie. “Yeah, she’s happy with it. She thinks it’s splendid. Like I told you, she’s a mellow chick.”
“Really? You mean it?”
“Absolutely. It was a joy to tell her.”
“Thank god. Did you get an apartment in Pacific Heights?”
Robert had a peek out the open kitchen window at the junkies and the homeless on Market Street. A bonfire was going in a trash can on the sidewalk. A dog slept in a shopping cart. Two police officers were arresting a rambunctious wino by the Orpheum Theater. The perpetrator’s trousers were bunched around his knees. “Yeah, it’s nice.”
A door scraped behind Robert. He turned to see what the noise was. Harriet trooped out of the bathroom with a fluffy white towel around her breasts. Something was different about her. He didn’t know what it was. Then it struck him like a thunderbolt. She didn’t have on any makeup. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her without it. Might’ve been five years, maybe even longer.
Slatts detected a seismic shift in Robert’s attention span. “You’re being distant.”
“No, I’m not. I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Harriet and you.”
“You ain’t gonna leave me for her, are you?”
“No, man, no way.”
“For sure?”
“Uh huh. Everything is fine.”
“Baloney. I can smell your shit over the phone.”
“Okay, okay, maybe I’m stressing a little bit.”
“About what? Harriet?”
“About everything, dude.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because talking doesn’t help. It never does. You talk a lot. What’s it gotten you? Absolutely nothing.”
“Fuck you, Robert. You don’t have to get hostile.”
“I ain’t. I’m just angry.”
“That’s weak.”
The remark got his goat. “Yeah, well, tough.”
Slatts gave him a pep talk. “You better get a grip on yourself.”
“Says who?”
“I do.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. You need to keep your shit together. Because what happens if we don’t have our shit together?”
He knew the answer to that one. Every criminal worth his salt did. It was the golden rule. It was the bottom line. “The cops will get us.”
“That’s right, daddy. The cops will get us. And then we’re fucked. Totally doomed. Is that what you want?”
“No.”
“Say it again. Like you mean it.”
“No.”
“That’s better. Now listen. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay.”
Robert got off the telephone, more than a little rattled. Slatts’s demands were driving him batty. He had less than two weeks to prepare for the guy’s arrival. Robert was over his head, and there was no way out. The anxiety it manufactured was enough to give him a stroke. From the living room the radio burbled Duke Ellington’s “A Night in Tunisia.”
Harriet flowed into the kitchen in a red cotton sports bra and black satin panties. Her yellow hair was wet and neatly combed. She saw Robert was distracted and zeroed in on him. “Who was on the phone? The parole officer?”
Frightened, he jumped out of his shoes. He avoided her eyes and rhapsodized in a singsong cadence. “No one. It was just a wrong number.”
A month before Robert obtained his release papers, he got into a fight in the shower room. It happened after a work-out in the exercise yard. Weight lifting had been a horrendous waste of time. He couldn’t even do a dozen push-ups, much less one chin-up. A bunch of guys were horsing around in the stalls, throwing bars of soap at each other. Mobbed up white dudes in the Aryan Brotherhood. One of them deliberately bumped into Robert and goosed him hard in the ass.
Getting goosed in the showers was bad juju. It was a signal. Robert spun around to see who the culprit was and nearly fainted. Towering over him was Dirt Man, the cellblock’s booty bandit. An enforcer for the Brotherhood, the forty-nine-year-old peckerwood was six and a half feet tall and wider than a barn door. Long stringy black hair streamed over his blue eyes and acne-ruined face, highlighting his pushed-in cheekbones. His oft-broken nose was a mesa of scar tissue. He had the gang’s trademark cobweb tattoos inked on both of his wart-ridden elbows.
The other cons got drift of what was happening and skedaddled. Nobody wanted to be in the vicinity when Dirt Man was on the prowl. The results were predictable. Somebody ended up maimed. The gang member was legendary for raping fish. It was his hobby.
The water from the showers hissed in the steamy room. The two men circled each other. Faster than a bullet, the booty bandit clocked Robert in the nose with a slashing right hook and pummeled his ribs with a barrage of left jabs. The blows left Robert woozy. His nostrils wept blood. This is fun, he thought.
Slatts entered the stalls, checked out what was up, and pounced on Dirt Man. He bashed the booty bandit in the mouth with a deft uppercut; a matching pair of Dirt Man’s ivory yellow teeth fell to the tiled floor and swirled down the shower drain. The fight in him fizzled and died. He turned around and stumbled off to his cell.
It had been a prison epiphany. Yet there was one bothersome detail. Dirt Man was going to parole to San Francisco. In the city, ex-convicts gravitated to Market Street no different than moths to a candle’s flame. As if it were a sacred pilgrimage, a hegira to a promised land. Sooner or later, Robert and the booty bandit would cross paths again.
SEVEN
There was nary a breeze that day, not even a stirring. The aging Civic Center Hotel cast a dissipated shadow over the Honda showroom. Two Salvation Army volunteers in raggedy Santa Claus costumes, a middle-aged black dude and an elderly white guy, had a donations kettle in front of parole unit number four. The telephone lines were flush with pigeons drunk on the heat.
A man had died near the flower stand at Market and Van Ness. In a rush to get the body, the coroner accidentally backed his van over the corpse, crushing it under the vehicle’s rear tires. More than a dozen pedestrians witnessed the incident.
Several bands of homeless lived on Market Street. There was the library tribe at the Civic Center. There were the speed freaks on mountain bikes headquartered by the recycling center in the Safeway parking lot at Duboce and Market. The crusty punks with dogs on strings were down in Hallidie Plaza.
Each group had a clothing style. The crusty punks wore re-stitched denim and suede coats, old pants and vests, and had homemade tattoos on their faces. The speed freaks had black leather motorcycle jackets, baseball hats, and beards. The library tribe, an intergenerational band of winos dating back to the 1960s—the oldest group on the scene—sometimes didn’t wear any clothes.
Two cops on dirt bikes patrolled the scraggly lawns below Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park. Homeless vets had pitched a tent behind the tennis courts. Crows vamped over a grove of eucalyptus trees. Raccoons snooped in nearby flower beds. Picnickers ate lunch on the grass. Robert Grogan crouched in a stand of oleander bushes with the Winchester rifle and said to his daughter, “You know what, doll?”
They were alone for the first time since he got out of prison. Both of them were nervous about it. Diana hunched at his side and examined her sneakers. The left one had no shoelaces and a jagged hole in the sole. “What is it, Daddy?”
“Your mother and myself are gonna have trouble. You need to get ready for that.”
“Why?” The girl’s hooded eyes glistened with suspicion. He started out slow. “Our marriage is, sort of, like, you know,” he grasped for the correct thought. “It’s evolving. That’s going to affect you.”
“How come?”
“Because I met this guy in prison.” Robert decided to test the waters with her. It was now or never. It was sink or swim in a minefield with a blindfold
on. One wrong word, and everything would explode. “He and I, uh, we fell in love.”
“Like you and mom?”
“No, this is . . . sort of different. He’s a man. But we sleep together. At least we did in the pen.”
“You mean in the same bed?”
“Yeah, except that in San Quentin, it wasn’t nice.”
“Is this guy your husband?”
Robert was appalled. “My husband? Oh, god, no.” He didn’t want her to get the wrong impression. “Slatts is my other wife. I just happen to have two of them.”
“But he’s a boy?”
“Right. I’ve got two wives. One is a guy and the other is a female, your mother.”
Diana absorbed the information and blanched. It made no sense to her. Why would anyone want to be married to two people at the same time? And then there was the other issue. She had a new competitor for her old man’s attention, someone named Slatts.
Mistaking the shock on her face for comprehension, Robert continued his soliloquy. “The problem with all of this is Harriet. She’s the only hitch. If it weren’t for her, everything would be copacetic. But sad to say, she’s not hip to it.”
“Hip to what?”
“You know, the other guy. There’s no way I can tell her about this dude. It’ll send her over the edge.”
“What’s going to happen?”
Robert laid his cheek against the rifle’s parkerized barrel. “I don’t know. But one thing is for sure. You’ll have to grow up real fast and start pulling your own weight.”
“I’ll be an adult?”
“Yeah, like me and Harriet. And you know what else, cupcake?”
“What?”
“I want you to keep what I told you to yourself.”
“How come?”
“Your mommy is going to wig on Slatts when she sees him.”
“Is he a movie star?”