The Big Both Ways

by John Straley

  There was no one there waiting for them. The streetlight was on and it poured out a pool of serenity in the night. Slip took three steps backward when a man in a gray suit stepped out of a gate and took his arm. He was joined by others. None of them was the tall man from the dairy, but they were cut from the same cloth: bone breakers in worn-out suits and clean shirts. Nightmares in crepe-soled shoes.

  “Easy now, bud,” one of them said.

  A slow-moving sedan turned the corner and came to a stop.

  “Put ’em in the car. I’m going to take the both of them for a drive,” he said with a growl the other mutts appeared to defer to.

  “Want us to come along, Ben?” the man getting out of the car asked.

  “Naw, I’m fine. These two don’t have balls enough between ’em. We’ve got some talking to do. I’ll see you back at the office tomorrow.”

  “If you say so,” the gray suit said, and pushed Slip into the front seat of the sedan.

  “You, logger. You drive,” Avery said, and he pushed Ellie into the backseat, slamming the door behind her.

  As they turned the corner on the darkened street where the meetinghouse stood, Slip looked up and saw Annabelle in the top window. She had the yellow bird resting on her index finger. The light from the window slid down the side of the building and spattered out onto the street like paint. As they turned the final corner, the yellow bird ruffled its feathers and looked as if it were going to fly.

  THREE

  Annabelle loved staring at the yellow bird. She could spend hours looking into his black doll’s eyes, thinking about what it must be like to fly through the eucalyptus forests of Australia. Buddy was from Australia, or at least his parents were from there. The lady from the pet store said that Buddy had been born in the store and had never known any other life. He was a cockatiel and he would live a very long time.

  Annabelle had won Buddy in a contest. All she had had to do was write her name very carefully on the back of a lid from a box of birdseed and put it in a jar. Ellie had given her the money to buy the birdseed in the first place. Ellie was good for those kinds of things. Surprises. Unexpected parties. Like buying a box of birdseed just out of the blue without much explanation.

  Ellie was Annabelle’s aunt, and though she was a good speech maker she wasn’t much like a mother. Ellie was fun, but ever since her mother had died Annabelle had learned to do things for herself.

  Annabelle loved Buddy even though when she first got him he would bite her hard enough to break the skin. Annabelle even suspected that the pet store lady had given him away in a contest because he was such a bad-mannered bird. Then the girl decided that it must have been a result of somebody being horribly mean to him. So Annabelle chose to be exceedingly nice to the cranky yellow bird. She fed him exactly what the books said to give him: nuts and sometimes some pieces of fruit. She gave him his food by lying for hours on the bed with the seeds cupped in her hand and her hand extended into the cage. For the first day Buddy would only shriek and hop from perch to perch, but the little girl would lie still, murmuring his name and saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” By the third day he was eating out of her hand, and by the end of the week she could put him on her shoulder while she read a book.

  Annabelle rarely spoke to anyone. It wasn’t out of unfriendliness or fear. It was just that she felt that her words were like money and she wanted to spend them wisely. She loved reading books. In books there was a surfeit of words and to her a library was a kind of Fort Knox. She particularly loved books about animals. More than books and words she loved the animals themselves. There was a drawing of a leopard above the window where she stood and watched the man put Ellie and that other man with the sad face in the car.

  They had been living in Seattle for a couple of years. Ellie had been in Aberdeen when Annabelle first came to live with her. They lived in her grandpa’s bar, which worked out fine for a while but Ellie wanted to give speeches in Seattle. Leaving Aberdeen seemed to have been a mistake. There were fewer and fewer men turning out for her aunt’s speeches, and more and more men coming around late in the evenings with whiskey on their breath. It had often occurred to her that one day Ellie might not be there in the morning, and this thought didn’t particularly frighten her. It didn’t frighten her like thinking about Buddy flying away, or thinking about Buddy flying into a windowpane, swooping down from some perch looking at that other yellow bird coming at him in the exact same motion. Annabelle knew about being alone. She just didn’t want Buddy to die or become lost.

  So when she heard the men breaking down the door, she took Buddy and hid underneath the bed, and when she stood at the window and watched them drive away she only thought about whether there was enough birdseed in the house.

  The night passed as it usually did for Annabelle. Ellie was out. The sounds of the street secreted their way into her dreams, so that she sometimes saw birds driving milk trucks and when newsboys threw their papers they would become fluttering moths before hitting the porch. So it didn’t seem odd to Annabelle that Ellie was home around daylight and was in a hurry to leave that next morning, just as the bruise across her aunt’s face hadn’t frightened her. Annabelle packed up her gear: a small bag of books, underwear, socks, two shirts, two pairs of pants, her heavy coat, and her umbrella. Ellie packed more of her clothes, furiously stuffing them into suitcases, and Annabelle walked slowly down to the kitchen and took down the big package of birdseed from the pantry shelf.

  The car they were riding in was the same one in which they had driven away the day before. When Ellie opened the car’s trunk, Annabelle saw a hand that looked kind of waxy white with blood on it. The rest of the person was covered with a blanket. All Ellie said was, “Don’t look at that now,” and she slammed the trunk shut. When Annabelle got in, she saw the sad man holding a cloth to his nose with blood dripping down on the seat. He said “hello” to her in a polite voice. It was then that Annabelle knew they were going on a very long trip and she was sorry she hadn’t brought more books.

  They drove on various small roads, trying to stay away from other cars or houses. Just before the sun came up, they came to a small yard near a muddy, fetid section of river. There were smokestacks behind them and rusty pieces of iron scattered in the mud. Ellie made a big point of talking to Annabelle while the man got out of the car and opened the trunk. Annabelle looked at her bird, the black dots of his eyes jittering around his cage, while just faintly along the edge of her perception she listened to the sound of someone dragging something across the mud.

  Ellie started to cry and she couldn’t stop. Her nose got all snotty and her chest heaved up and down with those big boohooing sounds that little kids make when they fall off the swings and get the wind knocked out of them or when they step on a bad rusty nail and know that they might die of lockjaw. Ellie cried like that, hard and sad, but when she was done crying, she acted as if nothing at all had happened. Annabelle kept one hand on top of Buddy’s cage and she put the other hand on Ellie’s shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said, looking only at the bird.

  The rest of the morning they drove around not going on any big street or in any one direction for very long. They stopped at a little house. Annabelle didn’t even get out of the car because people were yelling and Buddy sat with his feathers ruffled as if the sound of the angry voices were a spray of cold water. The girl looked up over the bottom of the car window toward the house where the man with the broken nose was yelling at someone, while Ellie sat off by herself on the porch smoking a cigarette. An ugly man who looked like a strongman from the circus, only about four feet tall, came out and threw a case down on the ground. The case was empty and it sat on the wet lawn like a broken clamshell. The little strong man was saying that they would be lucky if they got caught by the cops. Buddy pecked at his bell and looked at his curved reflection in his little mirror and Annabelle cooed to him to reassure the bird that everything was going to be all right.

  Then the ugly man told t
hem all to get off his property, which they did.

  They drove until they came to a spot where a bunch of cars were stopped and there was a police car. The sad-looking man said a bunch of bad words and turned the car around. Then he wanted to get out of the car once they got around the corner but Ellie wouldn’t let him. So they drove back down toward the city where there were lots of cars, and the man with the broken nose said that he had had enough and he got out of the car even when it wasn’t all the way stopped.

  Ellie said that they couldn’t go back to the house and they had to get rid of the car. She stopped at a gas station and made some telephone calls and then drove out to a market where a gray cat was sitting on top of the candy counter and a brown terrier was tied up to the water pump. Ellie stood outside the store and drank something from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. The dog didn’t even lift its head. Annabelle thought the dog didn’t look very happy and she was thinking about going over and seeing if she could get it something to eat or maybe just scratch his ears for a minute when Ellie came back to the car and told her that they were going to have to walk for a little ways down to a barbershop. Which they did.

  They walked down the street, away from the market, away from the gray cat on the counter and away from the sad-looking dog that lifted its head just an inch off of its paws to watch them go. They would come back for the car a little bit later but the dog would be gone, its chain lying tangled in the mud and its big footprints filling up with rain.

  FOUR

  Slip woke up sleeping on the ropes. He rolled over and felt a jab of pain from the cut on his hip. He looked down the row where some dozen other tramps were slung up on the thick lines strung above the warehouse floor. He wasn’t the only one who had blood dripping from his clothes.

  This was a warehouse where a shipping line stored the great mooring hawsers used for securing the big ships. The boys would stretch them across the width of the warehouse and make a kind of gigantic hammock out of two or three courses of the ropes. It wasn’t comfortable, but it beat sleeping in the mud under the blackberries and was certainly better than sleeping on the wooden floor of the warehouse where the rats would chew on your shoe leather.

  Slip woke up slowly. For a moment he lay relaxed, warm with the feeling that everything that had happened the night before had been a dream. He could hear the sound of the water slapping against the pilings under the floor. The images from the car swept back and forth in his mind: the sharp voices, the blows, and the knife blade, then the smell of gunpowder in the close quarters of the sedan. Some tramp fell off the ropes and hit the floor with a thud, and a coldness grabbed Slip. He knew it wasn’t a dream. Ben Avery was dead. He put one foot on the plank floor and wadded his shirt up against the weeping cut on his side.

  He had no idea what time it was. It was morning when he had gotten there but that didn’t mean much. Guys came in and out of the warehouse at all hours looking for a place to hide from the cops. The bulls had swept through Hooverville just a day later than the old man with the coffin had said, so now it was easy to get picked up downtown on a vagrancy charge.

  Downtown cops didn’t care much for loafers or tramps hanging around where people were making money. In other parts of town it was a little easier to hide out in the brush or in a vacant lot. But the boys just in off the freights or looking for work on the docks had to lie low if they wanted to stay out of jail.

  A couple of tramps came in from the train yards and said the place was crawling with bulls. “Christ almighty!” one of them yelped. “They got city cops, railroad bulls, and Floodwater ops going through every car. They got so much juice down on the flats there can’t be any cops up here!”

  One little hobo with a broken hand said he heard someone had killed a Floodwater op. Slip kept his collar up and his head down while he feigned sleep.

  “Hell, I wouldn’t kill me no private dick. Shit, they never had it in for nobody but the Reds. I’d kill me a railroad bull.”

  “I’d kill me a dock boss,” someone else said.

  Then came a clattering on the warehouse door, and cops with sticks lumbered in and started knocking shins. Large men in blue slickers walked down the line hitting the boys with sticks as if they were hoeing a bean field. Boys yelled and swore but none of the would-be murderers put up a fight.

  Slip turned and swung under the ropes, crawling on his belly toward the corner. He got a better look and saw that these weren’t cops but private security men, probably American Legion or local volunteers. They were yelling and standing guys up to get a look at their faces. One scuffle broke out when the little hobo with the broken hand smashed a bottle over someone’s head. Slip stood up and dove for a hole in the floor, while blows rained down on the little hobo like wet snow sliding off a roof.

  Slip caught his shoulder on a ragged nail on the way down, but he made it cleanly into the water beneath the warehouse wharf. He felt the weightlessness of falling and then the slap of the water. For a brief numbing moment he thought he was unconscious: no sound, no sensation of being either held up or held down. Then the coldness of the water began splitting his skin and he struggled to the surface. He gasped, choking and spitting as he came to the surface, then he started swimming back toward the shadows under the wharf.

  Rats crawled over the rocks and over his clothes as he lay there bleeding and shivering. He listened to the footfall of the dicks dragging the tramps across the floor above him. There were some more shouts and scuffles but eventually the clamor subsided and the voices took on their usual tone of muttering complaints directed at no one within hearing.

  Slip clambered up the rocks, then up onto the boardwalk that served as the sidewalk next to the warehouse. He slicked back his hair and tried to shake himself off as best he could. He reached in his inside pocket and took out the tobacco tin, opened it and checked his cash, which was still pretty dry. Slip straightened out his sore shoulder, put the tin back in his pocket, then tucked in his shirt to hide the bloodstain.

  The avenue was clattering awake as he lumbered over to the steam baths. He paid a kid a nickel to run up to the barbershop and get a message to Andy to meet him at the Alaska Steamship Company dock as quick as he could.

  Long hours passed as Slip waited for Andy. He went back to the ropes and took some dry clothes off a drunk, using the undershirt to bind up his hip and shoulder. He walked back out on the street. He kept his old mackinaw but was wearing a felt hat that was too big with a hole worn in the front brim. He wanted to go back up to the meetinghouse to get his tools but he didn’t dare. Avery had found him there, so other Floodwater operatives were bound to be watching the place.

  The rain kept falling between the buildings and the clogged gutters sprayed out like broken showerheads. He had no idea what time it was, but it felt like early evening by the time Andy came up the sidewalk to the spot where Slip was sitting back under the eaves of the steamship building.

  “This looks like some kind of mess,” Andy said as he ducked under the eaves.

  “Yeah?”

  “They are all over you. Couple of flatfoots came by my shop. Wanted to know where you are.”

  “What did you tell ’em?” Slip turned his head but didn’t look Andy in the eyes.

  “I told them I had seen you yesterday. Don’t want to get caught in a lie right off. They probably been following you all along.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Well … did you kill him? Avery, I mean.”

  “It’s a long story, Andy. All that matters is I’m in a hell of a fix.”

  “Yeah. You and that girl you were talking about. Just after the cops were by my shop she came in. Guess she’s in the same fix, huh?”

  “Ellie?”

  “Hell, yes, though I got to say it looks like you got the worst of it.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She wanted to know where you were.”

  “Was there a kid with her?”

  “I didn’t see anybody else. She just wanted to s
ee you real bad. But I don’t know. Everybody has their tit in a ringer about Avery. They found his car parked back up the hill and there was blood all over the trunk. They’re pretty riled up, son. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. They’re rousting out people who aren’t used to being rousted. They’re stopping cars on the streets and they say they got the docks and the trains shut down tight. This one flatfoot said that if you stick your broken nose out from under any rock in the city they will be on you like stink on shit. Hasn’t hit the papers yet but it will tonight, tomorrow morning for sure.”

  “Got any ideas?” Slip looked Andy in the eyes now. He was bone tired and every part of his body seemed to hurt. Slip didn’t know what he would do next if Andy didn’t have something to offer.

  “I got an idea. But I can’t say you’re going to like it much.”

  “I’m not picky.”

  “All right. You know where that little steam laundry is up at the far end of the beach? It’s run by that Chinaman? Meet me there tomorrow morning early. First light. I’ll get some stuff together.”

  “Andy?” Slip asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “If she asks about me again, tell her where I am, okay? Don’t tell nobody else. Just her. You understand me?”

  Andy shook his head from side to side. “Lord, Lord, Lord,” was all he said.

  Slip stole a loaf of bread and an apple from a vendor in the market and slept under the wharf near the Chinese laundry. He lay shivering as the rain dribbled down between the planking. He heard men talking in strange languages and their footsteps pounding along the walk. Each time he heard someone he held his breath, waiting for them to stop and start yelling for the police, but no one did.