by Peter Plate
Chiclet had a yank at her tacky dress and said, “You look bad. You aren’t gonna barf, are you?”
He gestured at her, moving his arms, but couldn’t speak. Bells tolled in his ears. His intestines churned with a life of their own. The floor was moving under his feet. He slumped forward and collapsed, walloping his forehead on the chair. Dust balls moiled around his face. The last thing Stiv saw before he blacked out was the ghost of José Reyna climbing in the window.
José’s freshly washed hair was as glossy as a raven’s wing. His handsome profile exuded health. His expression was agreeable, his eyes were clear, and his skin was fair. Several pistols were tucked into the purple and red wool sash girding his waist. His silver and bronze spurs jingled as he walked.
Another man in the regalia of a mexicano cowboy, suede chaps and a buckskin jacket with silver buttons, accompanied the outlaw. It was his cousin, a teenager known to the police as Two-Fingered Tom.
Two-Fingered was in a foul mood and bickered with José. Soon they’d have to sneak into San Francisco to pull off a robbery, crossing the bay from Oakland in a canoe built by Ohlone Indian mixed-bloods. They needed the cash, but Two-Fingered wasn’t looking forward to the excursion. San Francisco had too many gringos and made him antsy. Like his primo, he never liked standing in one place for too long.
“Hijo de la gran puta, what are we doing?” he railed. “Los puercos are after us and when they find our asses, they’re gonna wipe us out. So you snuffed those dudes who killed your woman. You did what you had to do. But now what?” He flourished the mutilated hand that had earned him the infamous nickname. “We’re in deep shit, vato.”
José’s emotions boiled to the surface, but he refrained from talking. He tried to remember his wife. What she looked like before she was raped and slain by a pack of gringo gold miners. He had already tracked down fifteen members of the mob that had murdered her. There were moments when José could hardly believe he’d just turned twenty-one years old.
Hunting his wife’s killers with the instincts of a bloodhound, José had found the last two at a camp fifty miles outside of Marysville. The twosome was tending a small campfire under a weeping willow tree in a creek bottom. The air was hot and somnolent; flies and mosquitoes afflicted their corralled ponies. The first gringo was short and roly-poly with a ginger beard and a red face. His partner was reedy and thin with a sallow mug. They were sharing an earthenware jug of moonshine.
Dismounting from his horse and tying it to a copse of datura in a ravine, José took out a knife with a deer bone handle. He stuck it between his teeth and belly-crawled through the creek’s low-lying brush. He waited until his prey was asleep and then cut the roly-poly man’s throat, severing his vocal cords, letting him choke in his own blood. Stripping his partner naked and staking him out on the sandy ground, José chopped off his fingers and toes one by one before shooting him five times in the mouth.
Stiv came out of the fugue as the ghosts of José Reyna and Two-Fingered Tom dissolved into nothingness. Their faces and voices, and then their clothes, boots, and weapons atomized. He raised his head and moved his feet. No bones were broken. He twisted his neck: it still worked. His arms and legs were numb, disconnected from the rest of him. He was alone and the room was spinning in circles.
He lay there for a couple of minutes, listening to his heart. It was banging against his rib cage with the fury of a wild animal. Woozily, he clambered to his feet and jetted out the door into the hall. It was quiet; he could hear his own asthmatic breathing. He gadded downstairs into the lobby and then outside.
A bunch of yellow-eyed black starlings were sunning themselves on a Market Street fence. Stiv saw an audience and jived the birds as if they were his comrades. He put his hands in his motorcycle jacket, and said, “Listen, guys. I need money. I need lots of money to get the fuck away from this place.”
Hearing his trebly voice, the starlings flew off in a panic. Feeling rejected—even the birds couldn’t handle him—Stiv stared hard at the street. The traffic was backed up for three blocks to the red light on Van Ness Avenue because a truck had broken down in the road. Stiv wiped a runny nose with the back of his hand and reckoned on what he had. It didn’t amount to much. Fifty dollars in his wallet, and only a few hours left to pay the rent and Richard Rood.
TEN
CHICLET DUG HER FINGERNAILS into the hallway banister and held on for dear life. The Valium was rushing over her in tidal waves, each one bigger than its predecessor. Maybe she needed to do some crystal meth to get her biorhythms in balance. A cold Budweiser would be nice too—anything to kill the taste of the Allen Hotel in her mouth. She reached in her Ralph Lauren purse for the drug room keys and couldn’t find them. Her heart pounced into her throat: Jeeter would massacre her if she ever lost them.
Her ears pricked up when she heard footsteps on the carpeted staircase, and she waited to see who it was. But her curiosity flagged as the footfall grew nearer. God help her if it was Jeeter. She didn’t have the strength to contend with him right now. It was impossible to talk to the lummox when she was loaded. He was so pushy, do this and do that, she couldn’t hold her own with him around.
Cresting the fifth floor landing, Sharona let the laundry bag fall at her feet. Dressed in tight black denim Wrangler jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, and gold hoop earrings, she had on black lipstick and black loafers. A pair of zircon-encrusted sunglasses nested in her platinum blonde bouffant. She shifted the baby in her arms and saw Chiclet in the hallway’s shadows.
The landlord’s doper wife looked like something the cat had dragged in. Chiclet’s dress was unzipped down the back. Her eyes were huge and bloodshot. One of her sandals was missing a buckle. Her hair was a haystack, sticking out in all directions. Cardinal red lipstick was smudged on her left cheek. A sterling silver earring dangled from her left ear. Sharona played it cool and picked up the laundry bag and started toward her room.
Chiclet cozied up to her. “Hey, wait a minute.”
Sharona was preoccupied with a dozen things that had to be done. The baby was hungry and wanted nursing. The garbage had to be taken out. She had to sew a torn bra strap. The brat’s milk bottles needed boiling. Chiclet’s eyes were eating her alive. Sharona couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen that much loneliness in one person. The woman was an asteroid from outer space.
“What do you want?” Sharona asked.
Chiclet was too stoned to be diplomatic. “My husband’s gonna evict you and Stiv for not paying the rent.”
It wasn’t news to Sharona. Jeeter Roche was always threatening to put them in the street. She stuck her chin out and harpooned Chiclet with a fleer. “So the fuck what?”
Because she had made love with Stiv, Chiclet felt connected to Sharona. They had shared a man and this bound them together. She knew the feeling was unrequited but didn’t care. She touched the younger woman’s arm. “Honey, I didn’t mean to be brusque. I’m just trying to help you.”
Gratitude wasn’t in Sharona’s vocabulary. Not when she was paying $170 a week at the Allen. The toilets in the hall overflowed every time you turned on the sink in your room. There were power outages daily. She manufactured a smile from equal parts of anger and sarcasm. “Thanks for the tip. That’s real nice of you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to change the baby’s diapers. I think he just took a dump.”
Dropping the clothes on the bed in the room, Sharona chucked the brat in a swaddle of blankets and peeled off his soiled nappies. His poop was an ochre-hued puree, a vivid contrast to his ivory-colored skin. Using the premoistened wipes that Stiv had shoplifted the day before from a Rite-Aid drugstore, Sharona swabbed the boy’s tush. Plump legs churning, he goggled at her with round eyes. “What did you do?” she said.
Booboo scowled. “Ga-ga.”
“Did you go ga-ga in your nappies?”
He responded with a sustained belch and reached for her breasts. Every time Booboo went poo-poo, it reminded him that he was hungry. Sharona tuc
ked a new diaper around his butt, pulled up her sweater, and unfastened her nursing bra. Having a baby had increased her coordination and manual dexterity. She had learned to do two things at the same time.
“You want some titty?”
Her breast was delicate with blue and red capillaries. The nipple was marble-hard and the areola was dark brown. Booboo regarded it with awe. Wheeling her tit like she was piloting a ship into port, Sharona brought his mouth to it.
As he suckled, her eyes grew heavy lidded. The sun in the window warmed her face. September’s heat was welcome after August’s coldness, but the morning’s fog had declared a hint of winter was in the air.
A year ago she’d been single and didn’t even know who Stiv Wilkins was. Then she got in a car wreck with two boys and another girl in a ‘67 Mustang near the Devil’s Slide, north of Half Moon Bay in San Mateo County. The boy at the wheel had been drinking and broadsided a Greyhound charter bus coming into the city.
Ejected from the back seat during the impact, Sharona was propelled onto the asphalt. Because she was in the path of oncoming traffic, she was run over by a VW Passat. An ambulance came a few minutes later and she was scraped off the pavement. Blood was rushing from her mouth, nose, eyes, and ears. Wanting to vomit, she conked out cold.
She woke up in the critical ward at Seton Medical Center in Daly City. Leaking blood from one ear onto the gurney, she passed out again. She regained consciousness in the intensive care unit the next day. A doctor was leaning over her gurney. He was young, unshaven and bored. He held out three fingers. “How many?” he asked.
She croaked, “Two.”
He held up four fingers. “Now how many?”
“Three.”
“Can you tell me the name of the president of the United States?”
“I don’t know it.”
“What year did the Americans land on the moon?”
“Huh?”
“It was 1969. Well, my dear,” he said. “You’ve had a major concussion.”
“What about my friends?”
The doctor was honest. “They died.”
There was a swelling behind her right ear and she was hospitalized for seven days. The Mustang’s driver made a cameo appearance in a dream on the fourth night. His face was bloody and he was missing an arm. Unable to converse, he mimed with his remaining hand. He had three basic questions. One, where was he? Two, why was he alone? Three, would the darkness ever end? The nurse’s station backlighted his near-translucent body. He waved the stump of his missing arm; his charred eyes begged her to answer his questions. Sharona opened her mouth to comfort him, but nothing came out.
After leaving the hospital, Sharona met Stiv at a friend’s party and he invited her back to his room. Against her better judgment, they had sex. Looking back, she had to admit that it had been her idea.
Upon discovering she was pregnant, Sharona set up a schedule for prenatal classes and got indigent Medi-Cal insurance to cover the maternity costs. Stiv, not surprisingly, had been missing in action. During her second and third trimesters, he sent her postcards from jail, saying he was doing fine.
Sharona regarded the clock. It was two in the afternoon. Christ only knew where Stiv was. It was best not to think about it. There were times when she looked in his limpid eyes and didn’t know who he was. Or what country he was from. You got the feeling he didn’t know either. With the baby at her breast, she turned on the radio—the broadcast was about the Brinks job. A representative for the company vowed the thieves would suffer the full penalty of the law. Kissing the top of her child’s fuzzy dome, Sharona said to him, “Shit, we need some money, don’t we, sugar bear?”
Booboo pried his lips off her tit and beamed a toothless smile at his mother. “Ga-ga.”
When the hour struck three, Richard Rood materialized at the entrance of Jeeter Roche’s Stevenson Alley residence. The scar on his forehead ached as it always did when the weather was foggy. He gave the sky a withering look. The sun was pissing about behind a mackerel cloud. The walk up Market Street had been a royal pain. The high point had been meeting Mama Celeste. But the money she gave him didn’t change anything. The cop had chumped him. His clothes were trashed. The flu was killing him. Stiv Wilkins was going to pay for all that.
He gave the security door a shove and it opened. A blast of Pine-Sol all-purpose cleaning liquid flayed his skin as he crossed the threshold. Richard Rood cursed and went through the vestibule and repaired up the staircase.
All the while questioning his own sanity, he stomped up four long flights of stairs. Some of the slats were missing, causing him to stub his toe. The building was a furnace. It was the coal room in Hades. It was the devil’s own home. Must have been five hundred degrees in there. Richard was perspiring as if he had malaria. People were screaming and babies were hollering and radios were blasting music. Water gurgled in the plumbing under the floor. A mockingbird was singing on a fire escape. Tearing off his jacket, he wrapped the garment around his head in a turban. He gained the fifth floor landing and pussyfooted it through the stifling hallway.
The third door on the left opened and a young woman came out of a smoke-filled room. She paused in the doorway to light a clove cigarette. Her petite feet were clad in Moroccan sandals. Her black silk bathrobe was loose around her waist. Her hair was tied back with a turquoise-blue linen ribbon. Her face was slathered in Revlon cold cream.
Richard’s visage hardened into basalt. The girl was Jeeter Roche’s old lady. He gave her the once-over from head to foot. She was coltish and high as a kite. Must be having a bad day. He called out to her in a desultory whine overlaid with absolute menace. “Hey, beauty queen, I need a word with you.”
Instantly recognizing his basso voice, Chiclet jumped out of her skin. Jeeter had talked often enough about the guy. He’d warned her more than once: “If this ugly black motherfucker ever comes here looking for me, it means you’ve just gone to someplace that’s worse than hell. Much worse. He’s psycho. He’s short and talks like a frog. Dresses like a freak. You watch your ass around him.”
Swaggering over to her, Richard Rood stood at arm’s length and licked his lips to see if he could get a reaction. When Chiclet didn’t take the bait, he stated his quest. He was succinct. He was polite. He didn’t mince words. He was explicit. “Listen, baby cakes, I’m looking for your husband, that Jeeter Roche dude. He knows somebody I have to get next to.”
Chiclet was exquisitely loaded, the right combination of vertigo and weightlessness. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about Richard’s needs. She exhaled a perfectly executed smoke ring, saying, “Jeeter? He ain’t here.”
Richard was dubious. “Oh, yeah? Where is he? I’m on urgent business.”
“He’s out taking care of things. What do you want?”
“I have to talk with him about some information. Vital shit.”
Chiclet’s unfriendly eyes were two red holes in the white cold cream. “About what?” she said.
Richard corrected her. “It ain’t what, but who. I’m looking for Stiv Wilkins. You know that punk?”
“Nope.”
Richard nodded. “C’mon, kitty-cat, be honest with me. I understand you doing Stiv.”
Chiclet looked at him as if he were a eunuch. “That ain’t so.”
“I hear otherwise,” Richard said. “People say you fuck him on the sly.”
She dared him to refute her. “People lie, don’t they?”
He was philosophical. “For sure, but all you have to do is tell me where I can find this Stiv Wilkins.”
“I don’t know who he is.”
“Please don’t say that again, sugar cube. It upsets me.” Spicing his request with the only Italian word he knew, Richard said, “The sooner you help me find him, the happier you and me will be. Capiche?”
A vein throbbed on Chiclet’s temple and she had an inkling of danger. Maybe it was how the dude was talking. Maybe it was how he looked at her. Maybe it was the suit he wore. Jeeter wouldn’t hav
e approved of it. Where she came from in the East Bay, out in suburban Concord, there weren’t too many guys that dressed like Richard Rood. She snuffled, “I can’t help you, man, okay?”
Richard opened his mouth in a sick smile, displaying a battlefield of unfinished dental work. His breath was harsh and vinegary, potent enough to ream the hair off a dog. He raised a hand; ten-carat gold rings glimmered on every finger. He said, “You can’t? That’s a goddamn shame. Why don’t we just go on inside and discuss it then?”
His hollow voice broached no protest. Doing a three-sixty, Chiclet sidled into the apartment. Following her, Richard inspected the place with a professional eye. The dining area contained a vintage formica-top table with three matching chairs. A door opened to a bedroom; a king-sized futon bed and a rectangular olive-green macramé carpet occupied the floor space. The sheets on the bed were paisley flannel. A pile of unwashed clothes guarded one corner. The open closet door revealed a battalion of shoes. The kitchen was in the other direction by the bathroom. A Nautilus weight machine was in the hall. Richard saw nothing that he liked and expressed his contempt by saying, “Jeeter got any toot here? Anything good?”
Chiclet was offended by his intrusive tone. “We ain’t got any.”
“Don’t give me that baloney. He’s slanging the shit. He’s got to have some around. Something recreational. Just a little toot, you know?”
“We don’t do business at home.”
“You don’t? Pardon me. Where do you do it then?”
“The Allen Hotel.”
Richard smirked. “That a fact?” He turned his attention to Chiclet and objectified her with the same kind of heartbreaking coldness that he had used on the furniture. She had bad skin under all that cream. Dyed punk rock hair. Interesting bathrobe. Her eyes weren’t close set together. She wasn’t too ugly. He walked around the living room with his chin in his hand and dawdled by the window. “So you don’t know Stiv, huh? I thought everyone damn well did. The man is contagious.”