One Foot Off the Gutter

by Peter Plate

  Silence was almost forgettable. It didn’t take up any room. Silence had insinuated itself into our marriage like a snake sidewinding unnoticed through the grass in the backyard. Look out there, you told yourself. A snake is coming my way. But you were paralyzed. You did little or nothing until the beast entered your home.

  Then it was too late.

  From the beginning, the process had been elementary and sequential. You got yourself a marriage. You and your spouse lived together. You planned to build a house with babies in it. You didn’t know what the house was going to look like, or how many rooms it would have. There were miscalculations that caused damage. The house was too big; there were too many rooms that had to be furnished with your dreams and hers. Worse: the house was too small. You could never get away from each other. You were smothering under the weight of silence. The snake was in the door.

  “How in the dickens did the Harlows know who you were? Shit, someone must’ve told them. One of our idiot neighbors. I’ll bet they even know where we live,” I said.

  “Are you going to upset yourself over this? They just said hello to me for Christ’s sake.”

  “That’s just the start. You wait and see. They want revenge for John the junkie.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I would if I were in their shoes, that’s how I know.”

  The silence got under Alice’s skin as though it had always been there. Out of a strange desire to rearrange the past so that it resembled the present, she revised her own history until it corresponded with the silence she now carried inside of herself. Alice began to believe she’d always been a quiet woman.

  Not that I seemed to mind. But she was made from a different cut of fabric. Some things would have to change. The silence in our bedroom was one of them.

  I was a clumsy lover. I couldn’t dance, either. You’d never see me cutting up the floor at a nightclub, and I wasn’t very generous in bed. I always had to be on top, felt quite threatened by any other position. I invariably climaxed much too quickly for her purposes. I was too pent up, and there was never enough time to fully relax. I was earnest, though, and that’s what counted in Alice’s book. If anyone ever asked her, she would say that she wanted to talk as part of our foreplay. But I was having none of that.

  “Why do we have to say anything, ha? I mean, we hear noise all the time.”

  “It makes me feel close to you.”

  “How can anyone say that about talking?”

  Alice thought I was impatient in bed and it was accurate of her to say that. I was always racing to be passionate, to arouse her, and to interest myself. I could only keep myself aroused for a certain period of time. Talking seemed to wilt my erections. But without talking, Alice could not get wet. And without natural lubrication, penetration became impossible because I refused to employ any oils or gels in our sex. I was very strict about that.

  Maybe if we got a new place to live somewhere back in the city, our marriage would improve. We could have a baby and I wouldn’t have to commute so far to work. Alice would get over being quiet. If we had a baby together the silence would be annealed, healed over by a home filled with a baby’s laughter.

  “You want to take a walk?” I asked.

  I drummed my fingers on the kitchen table top, expecting to be refused. I knew what was on Alice’s mind; it was the same thing in my head. She didn’t have to say anything. Alice got a damp gleam in her eyes whenever she thought about having a baby. I didn’t know if the idea made me feel happy or sad. Probably both things. For sure, I wanted a child. To see my own blood in the world, that would be a miracle. But I couldn’t fathom what a family did together. That’s why the idea made me sad. I had raised myself from day one, had never been a kid in my life.

  “Where do you want to walk to?” she asked.

  “I wanted to go to the reservoir. If we get there before the sun goes down, we’ll beat the mosquitoes.”

  “Let’s do that. Let me put on my shoes. I’ll be ready in a jiffy.”

  “I’ll be in the living room.”

  If Alice wanted a baby, we needed money. My job was to get a home for the three of us. A trio, I mocked myself. That was cute. I needed a house if I wanted to create offspring, but I didn’t know how I was going to acquire one. Being a cop didn’t help. Protecting the property of the citizens was slowly whittling me away. I could see the shavings of my flesh laying there on the killing floor. Why should I risk my life for those people when I didn’t have anything except the overalls on my back?

  I understood the arithmetic of getting ahead, but my equations were not adding up. I thought my life would improve if I could get my hands on that abandoned building. I looked to my side; Alice was waiting for me. I took her chin in my hand and told her, “Listen, Alice. I’m going downtown to City Hall tomorrow. I’m gonna check out some records about a place I know about. It’s a long shot, and I don’t feel like talking about the details until I have more information under my belt, you hear me?”

  “Is it a house?” Alice asked. If it was, she was going to cry.

  “Yeah, it’s a house,” I admitted. I took both of her hands in my own, patting them. “It’s a house, all right.”

  nineteen

  one afternoon as a teenager, I was with some friends in an old milk truck. We were driving along a dirt road, raising whirlwinds of dust, and shouting at each other over the roar of the engine. Happy enough, for kids with the weight of the world on their shoulders. I forget who the other guys were. High school buddies whose faces have been eroded, become invisible, burned out by time. I was standing by the opened side door.

  We were slowing down to a junction consisting of three more unpaved muddy roads near an unfenced pasture. These local kids were sitting in two cars, talking and drinking under the minnowed shade of a cottonwood tree. The white capped peaks of the Sierras lay to the east. The horizontal stripe of the summer’s smog was hovering over the San Joaquin Valley’s desiccated foothills.

  For impulses I cannot explain, but that I know are still with me, dictating their policy to me, I got terribly excited. I couldn’t wait for the truck to stop. I had to get away to separate myself from the elements that bound me to the others; from family, from school, and most of all, from the future. I gave myself over to a jolt tension far more high strung than usual. I held on to the door, letting one leg swing out into thin air over the dirt road. The wind was riding the cuffs of my jeans, sending sprites whistling up my leg.

  And then I jumped.

  The second I was airborne, which didn’t last for more than a breath, I knew I’d done the wrong thing. I saw the guys and the girls looking at me from where they were parked under the cottonwood tree. I could see everyone was prejudiced in the same way I was. I could see in their blank, hardened faces, I had made the wrong move.

  I hit the ground with a concussive thrust that immediately rebounded me back into mid-air. I somersaulted to the dirt roadbed, landing on the gravel, then on my head below the ear, fracturing my skull. I did not wake up until three days later. I was at a loss for words for nearly a week, swaddled in horse blankets on a cot in the back room of my mother’s house.

  Sometimes I have a habit of fabricating evidence. For all I know, this story might not have ever happened. But it has stayed with me and it’s become another memory that I’ve been trying to cope with.

  Bellamy and myself cruised north on Mission Street toward City Hall. We drove by the Seven Coins Nightclub, Ana’s Cafe, The Mai Hing Restaurant, Zapatillas De Deporte, the Guadalupania Bakery, Ready Freddy’s Auto Repair, the Full Gospel Church, Speedy Gonzalez Reproduction Services, and more listless dope dealers then we’d ever seen before.

  I never patronized the local businesses and Bellamy did so on rare occasions. It was enough that we protected the merchants; we weren’t about to spend our meager salaries on them.

  Another squad car passed by, drifting in the other direction. I saluted the brothers with a curt bob of my chin, not moving
the rest of my head. Other cops were part of the job, no different than the citizens or the assholes. It paid off to keep an eye on your brothers.

  “You know those guys, Bellamy?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen them at the Central Station. Haven’t had a chance to say hello to them. Don’t know if I want to, either.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Ah, you know,” Bellamy said in between puffs on a cigarette. “These fucking rookies. They’re into weightlifting, steroids and going to rock and roll nightclubs. I mean, really. This a job, not a lifestyle.”

  The traffic on Mission was manic, divided between the drunk and the mad. Cars were sharks in two lanes going north and south. A Vietnamese man was spearing bottles from a Muni garbage can with a coat hanger. Children were playing around piles of cast-off Mack truck tires. It wasn’t quite noon yet, but my perennial headache was getting ready to lay down a migraine groove that would nail my sinuses to the back of my tongue for the rest of the day. I couldn’t do a damn thing about it; aspirin didn’t even touch it.

  Around the corner from the Purple Heart Thrift Store, the needle exchange program was going full blast. Intravenous drug users stood in long lines under the shadow of the decomposing brick fortress known as the Armory, waiting to trade in their tainted spikes for clean needles. It was a one-for-one deal. The junkies were getting a free ride. I was copacetic about that. I was getting tired of picking up after their shit.

  “Do my eyes deceive me, Coddy?” Bellamy said. “I swear it’s the end of the world.”

  “You’re being premature with your forecast, Bells. Give it a few more weeks.”

  We sped past Las Palmas, Payless Shoe Store, El Tico Nico, Coronitas Sports Bar and Cocktail Lounge, the ghostly upper stories of the Graywood Hotel, Lelenita’s Cakes, and the Norma Hotel. I was flatulent, passing noxious bubbles of gas. Bellamy noticed it, but he didn’t say anything, much to my relief. I wasn’t in the mood to put up with Bellamy’s sense of humor, which was boorish.

  “You feelin’ okay, Coddy?”

  “Bells, I’m fried.”

  I had been working for the last seventeen straight days, and I was feeling taxed. I endured what I had to. I’d pushed at my own limits on such a consistent basis, that I surprised myself. How long I’d go on like this, relying on raw nerve, I didn’t know. Maybe forever. I rubbed a finger across my unshaven chin, picking my nose on the uptake. All of this happened before I saw the flag.

  It was rippling on a pole high above a brake and clutch repair garage. The banner caught my attention and held it. The sight of the American flag was like a balm on my eyes. It reminded me of my personal motives. The flag symbolized the oath I’d recited when I joined the police force. I remembered what I’d said eighteen years ago, and recalled the other men and women who’d stood by my side.

  “Regardless of the cost and even if a river of blood should flow, nothing will stop us from fulfilling our duty to protect the soil and the law of the city and county of San Francisco”

  I didn’t consider myself a patriot. When I looked into the mirror, I didn’t see a redneck. I had never been in the military and I’d never voted before. But whenever I saw the flag, I felt complete, as if every little thing I did had been suffused with a divine purpose. I was a peace officer. Nothing else said it better.

  The squad car pulled up in front of the mayor’s parking space at City Hall. I was blocking the traffic on Polk Street, but I didn’t care. The traffic cop on the sidewalk laughed and waved at me.

  I turned to Bellamy and said, “Watch the car, will ya? I’ve got to run inside and look at some records in the Tax Assessor’s office.”

  “I never figured you for a citizen,” Bellamy remarked. “That’s what citizens do, isn’t it? Don’t they spend their time at City Hall looking for numbers on paper?”

  I grinned. I showed Bellamy my teeth; big, discolored teeth that hadn’t seen the interior of a dentist’s office for ten years. Bellamy was a true wit. If my headache got any worse, I’d end up killing my partner by sunset. A homicide on my otherwise unblemished record.

  I clambered up the stone steps of City Hall toward its ornate doors, nursing a chip on my shoulder for all the people I saw. Neanderthal-faced lawyers, politicians in blue serge suits, minor bureaucrats with alcoholic noses and citizens carrying manila envelopes—I bore a pathological grudge against the very sight of them. I elbowed a man in a suit to one side, deftly stepping on the guy’s brogues.

  My face was green with wrath. A corner of my upper lip was peeled back, and I knew how it looked: blue receded gums and a toothy snarl. There were too many parasites at City Hall. The whole place could fall apart in the next earthquake for all I cared. I did my job; why couldn’t they do theirs? I strode across the polished marble floor of the rotunda, projecting a magnetic force field of belligerence in front of me.

  Swinging open the glass doors to the assessor’s office, I was not surprised to find the sanctum was nearly empty. Most of the clerks had already gone downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch.

  I stepped up to the front counter. In a cubbyhole further back, a middle aged woman wearing gold-rimmed bifocals was banging away on an ancient electronic typewriter. I waited for her to stop tapping on the machine. I removed my riot helmet and when she kept going, acting as if I wasn’t there, I rapped my knuckles on the counter’s marble surface to get her attention. The office was sweltering. My headache was stapling blood into a spot behind my nose. What if I had a brain tumor? It would be great, I convinced myself. I’d get my pension early.

  “Yes, officer? What can I do for you today?”

  The clerk called to me. I broke out of my torpor.

  “I’m looking for an address, ma’am. I need to find out who owns the property. An abandoned building. I want to find out when the taxes were last paid. You know...official business.”

  “Officer.” She read my badge. “Coddy?”

  “That’s right, ma’am.”

  I hoped she wouldn’t think too badly of me. I could tell she was an old school style San Franciscan lady, the type that was big on propriety. I hadn’t shaved or showered in a couple of days. I hadn’t changed my uniform in a week. I also knew a haircut wouldn’t have hurt me.

  “Tell me what the number is.”

  The clerk rose from her swivel chair, taking her time, giving me the impression she did this sort of thing maybe once a year. She pulled a pencil out from her lacquered hair, licked her thumb, and tore off a slip of paper from a pad that she kept on her desk. She looked at me.

  “Well, what is it?”

  I gave her the address. She turned around and disappeared between two metal filing cabinets.

  The Tax Assessor’s office stank of cigarettes and paper. There were stacks of reports jammed into metal trays on every desk. It was a large office with black granite veins curling through the white marble columns that held up the ceiling and walls. It wouldn’t have been a bad place to work, if you had to make a career out of pushing paper.

  Expensive, costly minutes went by. I told myself to remain calm. Fortunately, the clerk came back soon, walking in short, knock-kneed steps to the counter with a frown engraved on her forehead. She held the slip of notepad paper like she hated what was written on it. With every step she took toward me, my headache got worse.

  “This is odd,” she bit her lip.

  “What’s that?”

  “For a start, nobody’s paid the taxes at this address in five years. I double checked the records on microfilm in the back, and I discovered that nobody had a title or deed to the property. Are you sure this is the correct address?”

  I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out she lost sleep over things like that. But I wasn’t concerned. What she told me was a stroke of luck. I might have a chance to do something good for myself. I was going to have a home. Not every cop in San Francisco could say the same.

  “It’s the right address,” I confirmed.

  “Well, that settles it. T
he city will confiscate the place and condemn the building if nobody claims it. When the city gets hold of it, they’ll tear it down. If that’s the case, good riddance. I don’t like this sort of thing. You know why?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Because an empty building is a breeding ground for crime.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Alice could have her house now. I could forget about riding the bus to and from Novato. I was going to get what I deserved. I plunked the riot helmet back on my head and thought with glee, wait until Bellamy hears about this.

  twenty

  the Yellow Co-op taxi cab skidded to a halt in front of the abandoned building. Patsy stood by her living room window with her children fingering the curtains and watching the vehicle buckle up to the curb. Wisps of fog were clinging to the houses along Twenty-first Street. Samoan women were talking by the Whirl-o-mat, which had opened up for the morning’s business.

  “Malcolm. Celeste. Your grandparents are here. I want you to be on your best behavior,” Patsy instructed the kids.

  “He’s not my granddaddy,” Malcolm offered.

  “What did you say?” Patsy snapped. “I told you not to talk that way anymore. What did I tell you? Your attitude is bad. Now go on and play.”

  The kids ran into the bathroom and shut the door. Patsy heard the toilet flushing, then a loud laugh.

  “Hey, you guys! Come out of the bathroom. Your grandparents will need to use the john after their trip.”

  The kids didn’t answer her. Patsy didn’t know whether to go downstairs and greet her mom and dad, or stay upstairs and wait for them. She felt dim and not quite sure of what she looked like to herself. She felt dislocated. The parts of her body had been separated and frozen and were floating apart. The only way she knew the pieces belonged together was through the invisible lines that told her where the numb parts were. And her mother hadn’t even stepped into the house yet.