The bus pulled under the broad roof that sheltered the loading gates at the terminal and stopped. “Spokane,” the driver announced, and opened the door of the bus.
The trip had been exhausting, and toward the end had become a kind of tedious nightmare under a darkening, lead-gray sky that had spat snow at them for the last hundred miles. Raphael waited until the bus emptied before attempting to rise. By the time he had struggled down the steps and reached the safety of the ground, most of the other passengers had already joined family or friends, reclaimed their luggage, and left.
The air was crisp, but not bitterly cold, and the Muzak inside the depot came faintly through the doors.
There was another sound as well. At first Raphael thought it might be a radio or a television set left playing too loudly. A man was giving an address of some kind. His words seemed to come in little spurts and snatches as the swirling wind and intermittent traffic first blurred and then disclosed what he said.
“If chance is defined as an outcome of random influence produced by no sequence of causes,” he was saying in an oratorical manner, “I am sure that there is no such thing as chance, and I consider that it is but an empty word.”
Then Raphael saw the speaker, a tall, skinny man wearing a shabby overcoat of some kind of military origin. He was bald and unshaven, and he stood on the sidewalk at the front of the bus station talking quite loudly to the empty street, ignoring the snow that piled up on his shoulders and melted on his head and face. “For what place can be left for anything to happen at random so long as God controls everything in order? It is a true saying that nothing can come out of nothing.” The speaker paused to allow his unseen audience to grasp that point.
“These your bags?” a young man in blue jeans and a heavy jacket who had been unloading suitcases from the bus asked, pointing at Raphael’s luggage sitting alone on a baggage cart.
“Right,” Raphael said. “What’s with the prophet of God there?” He pointed at the skinny man on the sidewalk.
“He’s crazy,” the young man replied quite calmly. “You see him all over town makin’ speeches like that.”
“Why don’t they pick him up?”
“He’s harmless. You want me to put your bags in the station for
you?”
“If you would, please. Is there a good hotel fairly close?” “You might try the Ridpath,” the young man suggested, picking up Raphael’s suitcases. “It’s not too far.” “Can I get a cab?”
“Right out front.” The young man shouldered his way into the station and held the door open as Raphael crutched along behind him.
“If anything arises from no causes, it will appear to have arisen out of nothing,” the man on the sidewalk continued. “But if this is impossible, then chance also cannot—”
The door swung shut behind Raphael, cutting off the sound of that loud voice. Somehow he wished that it had not. He wished that he might have followed the insane prophet’s reasoning to its conclusion. Chance, luck—good or bad—if you will, had been on Raphael’s mind a great deal of late, and he really wanted to hear a discussion of the subject from the other side of sanity. His thoughts, centering, as they had, on a long series of “what-if s,” were growing tedious.
A few people sat in the bus station, isolated from each other for the most part. Some of them slept, but most stared at the walls with vacant-eyed disinterest.
“I’ll set these over by the front door for you,” the young man with the suitcases said.
“Thanks.”
The Ridpath is one of the best hotels in Spokane, and Raphael stayed there for four days. On the first morning he was there he took a cab to a local bank with branches in all parts of the city and opened a checking account with the cashier’s check he had purchased in Portland. He kept a couple hundred dollars for incidentals and then returned to his hotel. He did not venture out after that, since the snowy streets would have been too hazardous. He spent a great deal of time at the window of his room, looking out at the city. While he was there he had all of his pants taken to a tailor to have the left legs removed. The flapping cloth bothered him, and the business of pinning the leg up each time he dressed was a nuisance. It was much better with the leg removed and a neat seam where it had been.
On his third day in Spokane it rained, cutting away the snow and filling the streets with dirty brown slush. It was when he checked his wallet before going to the dining room for supper that a rather cold realization came to him. It was expensive to be disabled. Since the disabled man could do very little for himself, he had to hire other people to do them for him. He skipped supper that night and sat instead with pad and pencil adding a few things up. The very first conclusion he reached was that although the Ridpath was very comfortable, staying there was eating up his funds at an alarming rate. A man of wealth might comfortably take up permanent residence at the Ridpath, but Raphael was far from being a millionaire. The several thousand dollars Uncle Harry had given him in Portland had seemed to be an enormous sum, but now he saw just how small it really was. “Time to pull in the old horns,” he said wryly. “I think we’d better make some other arrangements.”
He took the phone book and made a list of a half dozen or so nearby hotels and apartment houses. The next morning he put on his coat and went downstairs to the cabstand at the front of the hotel.
The first hotel on his list was the St. Clair. It was totally unsuitable. Then the cab took him up Riverside to the Pedicord, which was even worse. The Pedicord Hotel was very large, and it looked as if it might at one time have had some pretensions about it. It had long since decayed, however. The lobby was filled with stained and broken couches, and each couch was filled. The men were old for the most part, and they smoked and spat and stared vacant-eyed at a flickering television set. There were crutches and metal-frame walkers everywhere. Each time one of the old men rose to go to the bathroom, a querulous squabble broke out among those who stood along the walls over who would get the vacant seat. The smell was unbelievable.
Raphael fled.
“Just what are you lookin’ for, man?” the cabdriver asked when Raphael climbed, shaken, back into the cab again. “A place to live.”
“You sure as hell don’t wanna move in to that dump.”
“How can they live that way?” Raphael looked at the front of the Pedicord and shuddered.
“Winos,” the driver replied. “All they want is a place that’s cheap and gets ‘em in outta the cold.” He stopped and then turned and looked at Raphael. “Look. I could drive you all over this downtown area—run up a helluva fare—and you’re not gonna find anyplace you’d wanna keep a pig in—not if you thought anything
about the pig. You’re gonna have to get out a ways—outta this sewer. I’m not supposed to do this, but I think I know a place that might be more what you’re lookin’ for. How much do you wanna pay?”
Raphael had decided what he could afford the previous night. He rather hesitantly named the figure.
“That sounds pretty close to the place I got in mind. You wanna try it?”
“Anything. Just get me away from here.”
“Right.” The driver started his motor again. They drove on back down Riverside. It was raining again, a misty, winter kind of rain that blurred the outlines of things. The windshield wiper clicked, and the two-way radio in the front seat crackled and hissed.
“You lose the leg in ‘Nam?” the driver asked.
“No,” Raphael replied. “I had a misunderstanding with a train.” He was surprised to find that he could talk about it calmly.
“Ooog!” The driver shuddered. “That’s messy. You’re lucky you’re still around at all. I saw a wreck like that out in the valley once. Took ‘em two hours to pick the guy up. He was scattered half a mile down the tracks.”
“How far is this place?”
“Not much farther. Lemme handle it when we get there, okay? I know the guy. You want a place where you can cook?” “No. Not right away.”
/> “That’ll make it easier. There’s a pretty good little restaurant just down the street. You’ll wanna be on the main floor. The place don’t have an elevator.”
The cab pulled up in front of a brick building on a side street. The sign out front said, the barton, weekly-monthly rates. An elderly man in a well-pressed suit was coming out the front door.
“Sit tight,” the driver said, climbed out of the cab, and went inside.
About ten minutes later he came back. “Okay,” he said. “He’s got a room. It’s in the back, so there’s no view at all, unless you like lookin’ at alleys and garbage cans. He’s askin’ ‘bout thirty-five a
month more than what you wanted to pay, but the place is quiet, pretty clean, and like I said, there’s that restaurant just down the street where they ain’t gonna charge you no ten bucks for a hamburger. You wanna look at it?”
“All right,” Raphael said, and got out of the cab.
The room was not large, but it had a good bed and an armchair and a sturdy oak table with a few magazines on it. There was a sink and a mirror, and the bathroom was right next door. The walls were green—every rented room in the world is painted green—and the carpet was old but not too badly worn.
“Looks good,” Raphael decided. “I’ll take it.” He paid the landlord a month’s rent and then went back to the Ridpath to get his luggage and check out. When they returned to the Barton, the driver carried his bags into the room and set them down.
“I owe you,” Raphael said.
“Just what’s on the meter, man. I might need a hand myself someday, right?”
“All right. Thanks.”
“Anytime,” the driver said, and left. Raphael realized that he hadn’t even gotten his name.
The weather stayed wet for several weeks, and Raphael walked a little farther each day. Quillian had told him that it would be months before his arms and shoulders would develop sufficient strength to make any extensive walking possible, but Raphael made a special point of extending himself a little more every day, and he was soon able to cover a mile or so without exhausting himself too much.
By the end of the month he could, if he rested periodically, cover most of the downtown area. He considered sending for the rest of his things, but decided against it. The room was too small.
Spokane is not a particularly pretty city, expecially in the winter. Its setting is attractive—a kind of basin on the banks of the Spokane River, which plunges down a twisted basalt chute in the center of town. The violence of the falls is spectacular, and an effort Was made following the World’s Fair in 1974 to convert the fairgrounds into
a vast municipal park. The buildings of the downtown area, however, are for the most part very old and very shabby. Because the city is small, the worst elements lie side by side with the best.
Raphael became accustomed to the sight of drunken old men stumbling through the downtown streets and of sodden Indians, their eyes a poached yellow, swaying in bleary confusion on street corners. The taverns were crowded and noisy, and a sour reek exhaled from them each time their doors opened. In the evenings hard-faced girls in tight sweaters loitered on street corners, and loud cars filled with raucous adolescents toured an endless circuit of the downtown area, their windows open and the mindless noise of rock music blasting from them at full volume. There were fights in front of the taverns sometimes and unconscious winos curled up in doorways. There were adult bookstores on shabby streets and an X-rated movie house on Riverside.
And then it snowed again, and Raphael was confined, going out only to get his meals. He had three or four books with him, and he read them several times. Then he played endless games of solitaire with a greasy deck of cards he’d found in the drawer of the table. By the end of the week he was nearly ready to scream with boredom.
Finally the weather broke again, and he was able to go out. His very first stop was at a bookstore. He was determined that another sudden change in the weather was not going to catch him without something to read. Solitaire, he decided, was the pastime of the mentally deficient. He came out of the bookstore with his coat pockets and the front of his shirt stuffed with paperback books and crutched his way on down the street. The exercise was exhilarating, and he walked farther than he ever had before. Toward the end of the day he was nearly exhausted, and he went into a small, gloomy pawnshop, more to rest and to get in out of the chill rain than for any other reason. The place was filled with the usual pawnshop junk, and Raphael browsed without much interest.
It was the tiny, winking red lights that caught his eye first. “What’s that thing?” he asked the pawnbroker, pointing.
“Police scanner,” the unshaven man replied, looking up from
his newspaper. “It picks up all the police channels—fire department, ambulances, stuff like that.” “How does it work?”
“It scans—moves up and down the dial. Keeps hittin’ each one of the channels until somebody starts talkin’. Then it locks in on ‘em. When they stop, it starts to scan again. Here, I’ll turn it up.” The unshaven man reached over and turned up the volume.
“District One,” the scanner said, “juvenile fifty-four at the Crescent security office.”
“What’s a fifty-four?” Raphael asked.
“It’s a code,” the man behind the counter explained. “I got a sheet around here someplace.” He rummaged through a drawer and came up with a smudged and tattered mimeographed sheet. “Yeah, this is it. A fifty-four’s a shoplifter.” He handed Raphael the sheet.
“Three-Eighteen,” the scanner said. The row of little red lights stopped winking when someone spoke, and only the single light over the channel in use stayed on.
“This is Three-Eighteen,” another voice responded.
“We have a man down in the alley behind the Pedicord Hotel. Possible DOA. Complainant reports that he’s been there all day.”
“I’ll drift over that way.”
“DOA?” Raphael asked.
“Dead on arrival.”
“Oh.”
The lights went on winking.
“This is Three-Eighteen,” the scanner said after a few minutes. “It’s Wilmerding. He’s in pretty bad shape. Better send the wagon—get him out to detox.”
Raphael listened for a half an hour to the pulse that had existed beneath the surface without his knowing it, and then he bought the scanner. Even though it was secondhand, it was expensive, but the fascination of the winking flow of lights and the laconic voices was too great. He had to have it.
He took a cab back to his hotel, hurried to his room, dumped his books on the bed, and plugged the scanner in. Then, not even
bothering to turn on the lights, he sat and listened to the city. “District Four.” “Four.”
“Report of a fifty at the Maxwell House Tavern. Refuses to leave.”
“Spokane Ambulance running code to Monroe and Francis. Possible heart.”
“Stand by for a fire. We have a house on fire at the corner of Boone and Chestnut. Time out eighteen-forty-seven.”
Raphael did not sleep that night. The scanner twinkled at him and spoke, bringing into his room all the misery and folly of the city. People had automobile accidents; they went to hospitals; they fought with each other; they held up gas stations and all-night grocery stores. Women were raped in secluded places, and purses were snatched. Men collapsed and died in the street, and other men were beaten and robbed.
The scanner became almost an addiction in the days that followed. Raphael found that he had to tear himself from the room in order to eat. He wolfed down his food in the small restaurant nearby and hurried back to the winking red lights and the secret world that seethed below the gloomy surface of the city.
Had it lasted much longer, that fascination might have so drugged him that he would no longer have had the will to break the pattern. Late one evening, however, a crippled old man was robbed in a downtown alley. When he attempted to resist, his assailants knifed him repeatedly and then fled. He die
d on the way to the hospital, and Raphael suddenly felt the cold constriction of fear in his stomach as he listened.
He had believed that his infirmity somehow exempted him from the senseless violence of the streets, that having endured and survived, he was beyond the reach of even the most vicious. He had assumed that his one-leggedness would be a kind of badge, a safe-conduct, as it were, that would permit him to pass safely where others might be open to attack. The sportsmanship that had so dominated his own youth had made it inconceivable to him that
there might be any significant danger to anyone as maimed as he. Now, however, he perceived that far from being a guarantee of relative safety, his condition was virtually an open invitation to the jackals who hid in alleys and avoided the light. He didn’t really carry that much cash on him, but he was not sure how much money would be considered “a lot.” The crippled old man in the alley had probably not been carrying more than a few dollars.
Raphael was unused to fear, and it made him sick and angry. In the days that followed he became wary. He had to go out; hunger alone drove him from the safety of his room. He took care, however, always to go in the daylight and at times when the streets were most crowded.
In time it became intolerable. He realized that even his room was not an absolute sanctuary. It was, after all, on the ground floor and in the back. The front door of the building was not that secure, and his window faced on an unlighted alley. The night was filled with noises—small sounds he had not heard before and that now seemed unspeakably menacing. He slept fitfully and dreamed of the feel of the knives going in. It was not pain that he feared, since for Raphael pain was no longer relevant. It was the indignity of being defenseless, of being forced to submit to violation simply because he would not be able to protect himself that he feared.
It could not go on. He could not continue to let this fear so dominate him that it became the overriding consideration of his life. And so he decided to move, to take himself out of the battle zone, to flee even as Christian had fled from the City of Dreadful Night. And ultimately it was for much the same reason—to save his soul.
The Losers Page 7