One Foot Off the Gutter

by Peter Plate

  I watched her back as she opened the cabinet above the stove. There were a lot of voices in my head. I saw my own survival as a sunset; fuchsia flamed, mushroom clouded, and getting dark very fast. A day off from the job, from the soul breaking margins of the Mission’s streets was a reprieve. Better yet, it was an extension on life itself.

  eight

  a man in a sleeveless undershirt was dumping garbage from a third story window in the building across the way. The stuff landed on the sidewalk and it didn’t take long before she could smell it. The guy looked like he’d never seen the sun a day in his life. He was white in a deep-sea fish sort of way. He poked his head out the window, looked down at the garbage strewn on the sidewalk, yawned and scratched his neck. He stared at the trash on the pavement for a second, withdrew his head, and slammed the window shut.

  She turned around and stared at the bed. Free Box had told her to go out and look for a job. She didn’t know where he was at the moment, which was good. Because there weren’t any jobs.

  This realization didn’t change the fact that they needed money. She didn’t have any choice in the matter. Barbie glared at the pantyhose on the bed. They didn’t match the dress she wanted to wear. The pantyhose were sheer white, something she’d stolen from a clothing store run by Honduran evangelicos on Mission Street. The dress was a plaid cotton shift with a tacky vinyl belt. The dress looked good on her, but she didn’t have the proper colored shoes to go with the shift.

  She had to get her hands on some cash. Maybe she’d pull a job; the stakes were high and the risk was great, but so were the rewards. She liked money: who didn’t? But it was work that she hated to the bone. She’d go out tomorrow, or maybe the day after. Barbie picked up the cotton shift, held it to her nose. She removed her bra and stepped out of her underpants. Then she glanced across the room to a mirror leaning against the far wall.

  There was something about staring into a mirror when she didn’t have any clothes on that excited her. She wasn’t sure if she was pretty, or if that even mattered. What she owned was a winning smile. Her breasts were good enough to attract attention which, from time to time, she didn’t mind, depending on who was doing the watching.

  Barbie turned sideways, threw her head back and flexed a leg. Without thinking about what she was doing, she let her hands drift down past her stomach. Once her fingertips got entangled with her pubic hair, her nerve endings started to issue commands that she had to obey. The needs of her body were so demanding, her mind didn’t dare to interfere.

  She reached into her slit, nudged the lips apart with a thumb and forefinger. She touched her clitoris with a three stroke motion that went from her lips to her walls, then back to her clit. She inserted one finger, then two more before she groaned. She bent forward from the waist, letting her hair fall across her face. A flush of blood was rising from her slit, rippling across her stomach and speeding toward her heart.

  “Barbie? I thought you were going out to look for work.”

  She turned around. Free Box was standing in the doorway. To her relief, he didn’t seem concerned by what she was doing. She withdrew her fingers from their nest. She didn’t know where to put them. She held them out to Free Box, asking him, “Do you want to smell them?”

  He took three steps toward her, glanced at the clothes on the bed and floor and smiled. “Why not?”

  She smoothed the wrinkles in the sheets and straightened out the blankets for her and Free Box to lay down on. He kicked off his massacred tennis shoes, throwing his skeletal butt down onto the mattress with an audible grunt. It made her laugh, something that was hard to do on an empty stomach.

  He wrapped his legs around her, and she told him, “I could stay in bed all day. There is something about this house that makes me feel like that. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  She ignored him, and continued talking.

  “This building knows we’re here. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t know. I wonder how it feels about us. Architecture is such a strange thing,” she sighed. “I think it’s the last great religion of our times. This place is getting under my skin, and the funny thing is, I don’t know why. I don’t know who lived here before us. I don’t know anything about them. But they’re here. They’re still here with us.”

  She fell quiet and stretched out beside him on the mattress, idly touching the hair on his chest. The abandoned building creaked; Barbie and Free Box listened to the sound. She turned to him.

  “Can you put your arm around me? Yeah, there.”

  Free Box laid back on the bed and gazed at the cracks in the ceiling. If he stared at them long enough, he’d hallucinate; he was that hungry. He couldn’t remember when he’d eaten last.

  “We’re safe here,” Barbie murmured. “Nothing bad will happen to us. This building will take good care of us, I just know it.”

  nine

  a one legged homeless man stopped the squad car at the intersection of Eighteenth and Mission in front of Wang Fat’s Fish Market. I leaned out the window and gave the guy a dime and a nickel. I floored the gas pedal and we drove off in a cloud of smoke down Mission Street.

  Everything in the road possessed a low grade, low rent, super-8 film texture. I was on the same wave length. I sensed the devil moving around inside of myself. The devil was in my lungs every time I smoked a low-tar cigarette; the devil was in my mouth whenever I fielded an interview with a citizen in the street. The devil was just a part of myself, another voice I’d discovered in my head.

  Wielding the steering wheel like I was a Roman charioteer, I hung a left off Mission Street, rolling nice and easy without any problem up Nineteenth Street toward the next block on Lexington.

  Bellamy propped his elbows on the dashboard, coughed once, then said, “See that driveway, Coddy? In there.”

  We got out of the squad car simultaneously, twins born from the same mold. Everything he did, I did. Bellamy pointed his face toward the house, a two story, paint faded Victorian. A dog was barking somewhere on the first floor of the building. All the curtains in the place were drawn tightly shut, as were all the windows. He said, “Let’s go around back. There’s a path.”

  First, Bellamy at a quick pace, then myself, followed the cement walk that paralleled the driveway to the rear of the Victorian. A large palm tree loomed over the house and part of the backyard, casting a spider web’s shadow over us. Infinitesimal sized palm frond shavings dropped on our riot helmets; I could hear rats in the palm tree.

  At the end of the quiet path was a gate surrounded by seven-foot-tall bamboo rushes. The bamboo was bright green, tinged with silver, spilling onto the path. A woman speaking in Chinese, and a young girl’s suppressed giggle came from the other side. Bellamy swatted a bamboo rush away from his face and opened the gate. A quartet of galvanized steel garbage cans were brimming with corncobs, carrot pulp, cabbage leaves and spinach stalks. A short, stocky woman in a red jumper looked up from a stack of dishes in a wash basin and screamed.

  “I’m a police officer, ma’am,” Bellamy explained, startled.

  The woman started to yell louder.

  A wiry man with long hair tumbling to his shoulders came running out of a garage door; two kids peeked their noses from the doorway behind him. There was a pile of dirty dishes on a picnic table near an outdoor brass spigot. A clothes hanger was draped on a barred window to the left of the door. A plastic gallon jug on the ground appeared to be filled with a liquid resembling urine.

  “They don’t have no toilet,” Bellamy said, getting mottled, embarrassed, blood heightened cheeks. “See that jug? They piss into that. And look at this.”

  He pointed at the dirty dishes; the faucet was leaking water steadily into the basin. I assessed the man and the woman, the two kids standing behind them. They, too, existed with the devil around them. I could see it in their eyes. The woman’s eyes were yellow, not from jaundice, but from lack of sleep.

  “What do you expect me to d
o about it, Bells?”

  “We just can’t leave them here. They’re living in a backyard, man.”

  “They’re lucky not to be in the streets. I say we give them a break and leave them alone. Maybe they’ll manage on their own.”

  “And what if they don’t make it?” Bellamy challenged.

  I gazed at him with pity. “We’re cops, Bells. Do I have to remind you of that? We can’t help anyone until we learn to help ourselves.”

  ten

  doctor Dick woke up prickly under the Scandia down comforter. Patsy had gotten it on sale at the Whole Earth Access store on Bayshore. He didn’t know if he liked the comforter or not, and for a second, he wasn’t sure of his bearings. He was having a lot of trouble getting proper sleep since they’d had the kids.

  He didn’t feel cold toward Malcolm or Celeste, nothing like that. But the responsibility of child rearing was doing him in; he just couldn’t handle it. Instinctively, he reached for Patsy. She could have been in another galaxy for all that it mattered. She was snoring on the other side of the futon with her back turned to him; a picture of classic alienation sealed inside a vast, hermetic unconsciousness.

  The wind was scratching against the window. It was a dry, hot wind, not unlike the Santa Ana winds in Southern California. A wind so dry, you couldn’t sweat, no matter how hot you were. On the street, a dog was barking in mournful, repetitive bursts. The cur sounded insane with loneliness.

  The whole world with everyone in it was suffering from anxiety. That’s what had woken him up; the totality of humanity’s discontent. It was a pain in his guts, and the doctor could never get away from it.

  He laid there for what felt like an hour, getting nowhere with his nocturnal ruminations. He’d been awake for so long, staring into the darkened bedroom, he didn’t think he could fall back asleep. He closed his eyes under the pretext that he could at least try to rest. But his mind kept racing back and forth between two poles: Patsy in the bed next to him, and Patsy when they first got married. Thirty seconds later, he was fast asleep.

  He was standing in an empty, barren hallway. He’d been on duty for the last twenty hours. He needed a shave and a cup of tea. The patients in the intensive care ward were crying for meds and water. He could hear them through the walls. Where was the nurse? The doctor looked down at the floor. A dollop of fresh blood was shining on the linoleum at his feet. He inspected the blood for a moment. The red arterial liquid was a hypnotic sight, but he didn’t like it. His face darkened with anger; whenever you needed a nurse, you could never find one.

  The doctor heard two male voices arguing heatedly out of sight in a nearby room. He took off walking, not thinking about where he was going.

  The first person he saw in the corridor was an orderly wheeling a geriatric towards the incinerator room.

  “Where are you taking her?” the doctor asked when he came within earshot.

  He approached the wheelchair, cleared his throat and examined the geriatric with a cursory gaze that was cruel, and which bordered upon disinterest. The patient was wrapped up in adhesive bandages like a mummy.

  “Is that you, Doctor Dick?” the orderly said. “I didn’t recognize you there for a second. You asked about this here biddy? Where am I taking her? I was told to take her outside.”

  “Outside?” the doctor asked.

  “Yeah, you know. Got to put her somewhere.”

  “Let me see her chart.”

  “She ain’t got one.”

  “Oh, that’s peculiar. What’s going on here?”

  There was a lengthy and uncomfortable pause in which no one said a word. Nary a sound was heard in the lysol reeking corridor. The geriatric looked up at the doctor with her milk colored eyes; her pupils were dilated and gray. She opened her toothless mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” he whispered.

  “Ahhh,” she croaked.

  “I see. Well, she doesn’t have any complaints,” the doctor said.

  “That’s right,” the orderly chipped in. “Elizabeth here, she’s been happy with us. She’s got no problems to speak of.”

  A gurney came speeding down the hallway, guided by three red-faced medics.

  “Watch out, doc!” one of the medics shouted. “We’ve got a live one here!”

  “It’s not so good,” another medic gasped.

  “Let me have a look,” the doctor ordered.

  The gurney was laden with a heavy, inert body covered by a sheet. The doctor peeled back the sheet a few inches and received a jolt that shocked him speechless. It wasn’t possible; there had to be an error. He became scared, and strangely enough, as if he’d been waiting for this moment, he felt thrilled.

  “Patsy! My God, what is going on here?”

  The ice cold features of his wife’s unmarred face greeted him. Her eyelids were ashen, her skin bloodless; her breathing was shallow. He doubted if she was conscious, and there was a chance her heart wasn’t beating.

  “Where did you find her?” he asked the medics.

  “Ambulance got her,” the third medic chirped. “They picked her up by Folsom Park.”

  The first medic pulled the sheet back from Patsy’s neck, revealing her breasts and shoulders. Three dark, bruised holes formed a triangular pattern across her left thigh and stomach. The doctor pressed his fingers on the wounds. The flesh was pulpy and wet; the bullets were buried under layers of muscle and fat.

  “Where are you taking her?” the doctor asked.

  “We haven’t decided,” the second medic answered.

  He kneeled down beside the gurney; the medics did the same. The doctor whispered, “Patsy? Can you hear me?”

  From a point on the map further away than the doctor could have imagined, she answered, “Yes, I can hear you.”

  “Do you feel any pain?”

  “I don’t know. I feel something. But it’s not what you think.”

  The doctor’s pulse double-timed a beat. Patsy was trying to tell him something important. But this wasn’t the proper occasion. Boy, did she ever freak him out; he never could tell with her. A voice inside his mouth told him to proceed with caution.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” she whimpered.

  The words rattled like a corn husk in her throat. The doctor felt a blast of icy, arctic air blow across his shoulders.

  “Get what?”

  “I think we need to talk.”

  The medics stared at her with undisguised horror.

  “I thought she was dead,” one of them confessed.

  “Not yet,” the second medic smirked.

  “What do we need to talk about now?” the doctor asked.

  “Our marriage.”

  A drop of blood appeared on her lips; it resembled a solitary ruby. The doctor wiped away the drop with the sleeve of his surgical smock.

  “Our marriage?” he repeated.

  God, he hated her when she got into a snit about their relationship. Patsy could be so manipulative. She felt the need to dominate him; she liked to trap him in front of witnesses. That’s when she showed her true colors.

  “Aren’t you worried about Malcolm and Celeste?” she asked.

  The doctor was aghast. He was taken aback by Patsy’s tone of voice. How dare she try to belittle him. If she thought she could humiliate him before several of the hospital’s employees, she had another thing coming.

  “Don’t talk to me about Malcolm and Celeste,” he snapped. “They were your idea, not mine. Remember, dear?”

  “Oh, now we have the real story...it was my idea,” Patsy mocked him.

  She’d picked up the ability, God knows where, to mimic his voice. During the course of their marriage, she’d learned to twist the way he talked into an unflattering caricature that made him feel like a dunce. She could throw his own words back at him with a venom that made him think he was three inches tall and shrinking.

  “Yes, it was your idea. That and giving them those ridiculous names.”

  �
��You don’t like their names? I didn’t know we’d come this far. This is wonderful. It’s so good to hear you be honest for a change.”

  “Don’t provoke me. It won’t work. I’m too smart to fall for it.”

  He put his hands over his ears. He tried to reassure himself, this was not happening. To speak his mind, that was a big mistake.

  “I told you it would turn out this way,” Patsy said with self-evident satisfaction. “I always knew you’d shirk your duties as a father and as a man.”

  “Who’s wearing the chastity belt? Can I ask you that?” the doctor blazed up.

  “That’s it. It’s over. You’ve gone too far, Richard.”

  “Take her away,” the doctor ordered. He snapped his fingers. The tableau surrounding the gurney liquefied instantaneously.

  “Where to?” the first medic said.

  “To the incinerator room,” the doctor replied.

  He turned around and took off down the hallway. He was determined to keep her from having the last word. It was too late; he wasn’t quick enough. Before he passed out of hearing range, Patsy used the last of her strength to lean over the restraining bars of the gurney, and to scream, “You’ll pay for this, you bastard!”

  “I’m sure I will,” the doctor muttered.

  eleven

  i turned off the engine as the squad car rolled up to the curb near the abandoned building on Twenty-first

  Street. The warm Mission night was quieter than usual. That gladdened me: I was having a hard time concentrating on what I needed to do.

  “What are we doing here again?” Bellamy complained. “C’mon, Coddy. We don’t need to do this. What the fuck are you trying to prove, ha?”