“I could wait,” Raphael offered, starting to feel ashamed of his helplessness.
“Naw, you don’t wanna stand around for three quarters of an hour. Let’s go see if we can find a kid.”
They put Raphael’s two bags of groceries in the cab and then both got in.
“You know,” the driver said, wheeling out of the lot, “if I’d been smart, I’d have called in sick this morning, but I can’t afford to lose the rime. I wish to hell the bastard who invented skateboards had one shoved up his ass.”
Raphael laughed. He still felt good.
They pulled up in front of the apartment house, and the driver looked around. “There’s one,” he said, looking in the rearview mirror.
The boy was about fourteen, and he wore a ragged denim vest gaudy with embroidery and metal studs. He had long, greasy hair and a smart-sullen sneer on his face. They waited until he had swaggered along the sidewalk to where the cab sat.
“Hey, kid,” the driver called to him.
“What?” the boy asked insolently.
“You wanna make a buck?”
“Doin’ what?”
“Haul a couple sacks of groceries upstairs.” “Maybe I’m busy.”
“Sure you are. Skip it then. There’s another kid just up the street.”
The boy looked quickly over his shoulder and saw another boy on a bicycle. “Okay. Gimme the dollar.” “After the groceries are upstairs.” The boy glowered at him.
Raphael paid the driver and got out of the cab. The boy got the groceries. “These are heavy, man,” he complained.
“It’s just up those stairs.” Raphael pointed.
The cab drove off, and the boy looked at Raphael, his eyes narrowing.
“I’ll go up first,” Raphael told him. “I’ll have to unlock the door at the top.”
“Let’s go, man. I ain’t got all day.”
Raphael went to the stairs and started up. Halfway to the top, he realized that the boy was not behind him. He turned and went back down as quickly as he could.
The boy was already across the street, walking fast, with the two bags of groceries hugged in his arms. “Hey!” Raphael shouted at him.
The boy looked back and cackled a high-pitched laugh.
“Come back here!” Raphael shouted, suddenly consumed with an overwhelming fury as he realized how completely helpless he was.
The boy laughed again and kept on going.
“You dirty little son of a bitch!” a harsh voice rasped from the porch of the house directly across the street from Raphael’s apartment. A small, wizened man stumbled down the steps from the porch and staggered out to the sidewalk. “You come back here or I’ll kick the shit outta ya!”
The boy began to run.
“Goddamn little bastard!” the small man roared in a huge voice. He started to run after the boy, but after a couple dozen steps he staggered again and fell down. Raphael stood grinding his teeth in frustrated anger as he watched the boy disappear around the corner.
The small man lay helplessly on the sidewalk, bellowing drunken obscenities in his huge rasping voice.
V
After several minutes the wizened little man regained his feet and staggered over to where Raphael stood. “I’m sorry, old buddy,” he said in his foghorn voice. “I’da caught the little bastard for ya, but I’m just too goddamn drunk.”
“It’s all right,” Raphael said, still trying to control the helpless fury he felt.
“I seen the little sumbitch around here before,” the small man said, weaving back and forth. “He’s always creepin’ up an’ down the alleys, lookin’ to steal stuff. I’ll lay fer ‘im—catch ‘im one day an’ stomp the piss outta the little shit.” The small man’s face was brown and wrinkled, and there was dirt ingrained in the wrinkles. He had a large, purplish wen on one cheek and a sparse, straggly mustache, pale red—although his short-cropped hair was brown. His eyes had long since gone beyond bloodshot, and his entire body exuded an almost overpoweringly acrid reek of stale wine. His clothes were filthy, and his fly was unzipped. In many ways he resembled a very dirty, very drunk banty rooster.
“Them was your groceries, wasn’t they?” the small man demanded.
Raphael drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He realized that he was trembling, and that angered him even more. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, even though it did.
“Was that the last of your money?”
“No.”
“I got a idea. I’ll go get my truck, an’ we’ll go look fer that little bastard.”
Raphael shook his head. “I think it’s too late. We’d never catch him now.”
The little man swore.
“I’ll have to go back to the store, I guess.” “I’ll take you in my truck, an’ men Sam’ll take your groceries upstairs for ya.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t hafta.” The little man’s voice was almost pugnacious. “I wanna do it. You come along with me.” He grabbed at Raphael’s arm, almost jerking him off balance. “We’re neighbors, goddammit, an’ neighbors oughta help each other out.”
At that moment Raphael would have preferred to have been alone. He felt soiled—even ashamed—as a result of the theft, but there was no withstanding the drunken little man’s belligerent hospitality. Almost helplessly he allowed himself to be drawn into the ramshackle house across the street.
“My name’s Tobe Benson,” the small man said as they went up on the creaking porch.
“Rafe Taylor.”
They went inside and were met by a furnace blast of heat. The inside of the house was unbelievably filthy. Battered furniture sat in the small, linoleum-floored living room, and the stale wine reek was overwhelming. They went on through to the dining room, which seemed to be the central living area of the house. An old iron heating stove shimmered off heat that seemed nearly solid. The floor was sticky with spilled wine and food, and a yellow dog lay under the table, gnawing on a raw bone. Other bones lay in the corners of the room, the meat clinging to them black with age.
A large gray-haired man sat at the table with a bottle of wine in front of him. He wore dirty bib overalls and a stupefied expression. He looked up, smiling vaguely through his smudged glasses.
“That there’s Sam,” Tobe said in his foghorn voice. “Sam, this here’s Rafe. Lives across the street. Some little punk bastard just stole all his groceries. It’s a goddamn shame when a poor crippled fella like Rafe here ain’t safe from all the goddamn little thieves in this town.”
The man in the overalls smiled stupidly at Raphael, his eyes unfocused. “Hi, buddy,” he said, his voice tiny and squeaking.
“Sit down, Rafe,” Tobe said, and lurched across to a rumpled bed that sat against the wall opposite the table. He collapsed on the bed, picked up the wine bottle sitting on the floor near it, and took a long pull at it. “You want a drink?” he asked, offering the bottle.
“No. Thanks all the same.” Raphael was trying to think of a way to leave without aggravating the little man.
“Hi, buddy,” Sam said again, still smiling.
“Hi, Sam,” Raphael replied.
Tobe fished around in a water glass he used as an ashtray and found a partially burned cigarette. He straightened it out between his knobby fingers and lit it. Then he looked around the room. “Ain’t much of a place,” he half apologized, “but we’re just a couple ol’ bachelors, an’ we live the way we want.” He slapped the bed he half lay on. “We put this here for when we get too drunk to make it up the stairs to go to bed.”
Raphael nodded.
“Hi, buddy,” Sam said.
“Don’t pay no mind t’ ?f Sam there,” Tobe said. “He’s been on a toot fer three weeks. I’m gonna have t’ sober ‘im up pretty quick. He’s been sittin’ right there fer four days now.”
Sam smiled owlishly at Raphael. “I’m drunk, buddy,” he said.
“He can see that, Sam,” Tobe snorted. “Anybody can see tha
t you’re drunk.” He turned back to Raphael. “We do okay. We both got our pensions, an’ we ain’t got no bills.” He took another drink from his bottle. “Soon’s it gets dark, I’ll get my truck, an’ we’ll go on back over to the Safeway so’s you can buy more groceries. They took my license away from me eight years ago, so I gotta be kinda careful when I drive.”
They sat in the stinking room for an hour or more while Tobe talked on endlessly in his raucous voice. Raphael was able to piece together a few facts about them. They were both retired from the military and had worked for the railroad when they’d gotten out. At one time, perhaps, they had been men like other men, with dreams and ambitions—meaningful men—but now they were old and drunk and very dirty. Their days slid by in an endless stream, blurred by cheap wine. The ambition had long since burned out, and they slid at night not into sleep but into that unconsciousness in which there are no dreams. When they spoke, it was of the past rather than of the future, but they had each other. They were not alone, so it was all right.
After it grew dark, Tobe went out to the garage in back and got out his battered truck. Then he erratically drove Raphael to the supermarket. Raphael did his shopping again, and Tobe bought more wine. Then the little man drove slowly back to their street and, with wobbly steps, carried Raphael’s groceries up the stairs.
Raphael thanked him.
“Aw, don’t think nothin’ about it,” Tobe said. “A man ain’t no damn good at all if he don’t help his neighbors. Anytime you wanna use my truck, ?f buddy, you just lemme know. Anytime at all.” Then, stumbling, half falling, he clumped back down the stairs.
Raphael stood on the rooftop, looking over the railing as Tobe weavingly drove his clattering truck around to the alley behind the house across the street to hide it in the garage again.
Alone, with the cool air of the night washing the stench of the two old men from his nostrils, Raphael was suddenly struck with an almost crushing loneliness. The light was on in the upstairs of the house next door, but he did not want to watch Crazy Charlie anymore.
On the street below, alone under the streetlight, Patch, the one-eyed Indian, walked by, his feet making no sound on the sidewalk. Raphael stood on his rooftop and watched him pass, wishing that he might be able to call out to the solitary figure below, but that, of course, was impossible, and so he only watched until the silent Indian was gone.
vi
Sadie the Sitter was an enormously fat woman who lived diagonally across the intersection from Raphael’s apartment house. He had seen her a few times during the winter months, but as the weather turned warmer she emerged from her house to survey her domain.
Sadie was a professional sitter; she also sat by inclination. Her throne was a large porch swing suspended from two heavy chains bolted to the ceiling. Each morning, quite early, she waddled onto the porch and plunked her vast bulk into the creaking swing. And there she sat, her piggish little eyes taking in everything that happened on the street, her beet-red face sullen and discontented.
The young parents who were her customers were polite, even deferential, as they delivered their children into her custody each morning. Sadie’s power was awesome; and like all power it was economic. If offended, she could simply refuse to accept the child, thus quite effectively eliminating the offending mother’s wages for the day. It was a power Sadie used often, sometimes capriciously—just for the sake of using it.
Her hair was a bright, artificial red and quite frizzy, since it was of a texture that accepted neither the dye nor the permanent very well. Her voice was loud and assertive, and could be heard clearly all over the neighborhood. She had, it seemed, no neck, and her head swiveled with difficulty atop her massive shoulders. She ate continually with both hands, stuffing the food into her mouth.
Sadie’s husband was a barber, a thin man with a gray face and a shuffling, painful gait. The feelings that existed between them had long since passed silent loathing and verged now on open hostility. Their arguments were long and savage and were usually conducted at full volume. Their single child, a scrawny girl of about twelve, was severely retarded, physically as well as mentally, and she was kept in a child’s playpen on the porch, where she drooled and twitched and made wounded-animal noises in a bull-like voice.
Sadie’s mother lived several houses up the street from her, and in good weather she waddled each morning about ten down the sidewalk in slapping bedroom slippers and a tentlike housecoat to visit. Sadie’s mother was also a gross woman, and she lived entirely for her grandchildren, a raucous mob of bad-mannered youngsters who gathered in her front yard each afternoon when school let out to engage in interminable games of football or tag or hide-and-seek with no regard for flower beds or hedges while Granny sat on her rocker in bloated contentment like a mother spider, ready to pounce ferociously upon any neighbor with the temerity to protest the rampant destruction of his property.
At first Raphael found the entire group wholly repugnant, then gradually, almost against his will, he began to develop a certain fascination. The greed, the gluttony, and the naked, spiteful envy of Sadie and her mother were so undisguised that they seemed not so much to be human, but were rather vast, primal forces—embodiments of those qualities—allegorical distillations of all that is meanest in others.
“She thinks she’s so much,” Sadie sneered to her mother. “She has all them delivery trucks come to her house like that on purpose—-just to spite her neighbors. I could buy new furniture, too, if I wanted, but I got better things to do with my money.”
“Are you Granny’s little love?” Sadie’s mother cooed at the idiot.
The child drooled and bellowed at her hoarsely.
“Don’t get her started, for God’s sake,” Sadie said irritably. “It takes all day to quiet her down again.” She glanced quickly at her mother with a sly look of malice. “She’s gettin’ too hard to handle. I think it’s time we put her in a home.”
“Oh no,” her mother protested, her face suddenly assuming a helplessly hurt look, “not Granny’s little darling. You couldn’t really do that.”
“She’d be better off,” Sadie said smugly, satisfied that she had injured her mother’s most vulnerable spot once again. The threat appeared to be a standard ploy, since it came up nearly every time they visited together.
“How’s he doing?” Sadie’s mother asked quickly, changing the subject in the hope of diverting her daughter’s mind from the horrid notion of committing the idiot to custodial care. As always, the “he” referred to Sadie’s husband. They never used his name.
“His veins are breakin’ down,” Sadie replied, gloating. “His feet and hands are cold all the time, and sometimes he has trouble gettin’ his breath.”
“It’s a pity.” Her mother sighed.
Sadie snorted a savage laugh, reaching for another fistful of potato chips. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I keep his insurance premiums all paid up. I’ll be a rich woman one of these days real soon.”
“I imagine it’s a terrible strain on him—standing all the time like that.”
Sadie nodded, contentedly munching. “All his arteries are clogged almost shut,” she said smugly. “His doctor says that it’s just a question of time until one of them blows out or a clot of that gunk breaks loose and stops his heart. He could go at any time.”
“Poor man,” her mother said sadly.
“Soon as it happens, I’m gonna buy me a whole buncha new furniture.” Sadie’s tone was dreamy. “An’ I’m gonna have all them delivery trucks pullin’ up in fronta my house. Then watch them people down the street just wither up an’ blow away. Sometimes I just can’t hardly wait.”
Raphael turned and went back into his little apartment. Walking was not so bad, but simply standing grew tiring after a while, and the phantom ache in the knee and foot that were no longer there began to gnaw at him.
He sat on the couch and turned on the scanner, more to cover the penetrating sound of Sadie’s voice than out of any real interest
in morning police calls. A little bit of Sadie went a long way.
It was a problem. As the summer progressed the interior of the apartment was likely to become intolerably hot. He knew that. He would be driven out onto the roof for relief. The standing would simply bring on the pain, and the pain would drive him back into the apartment again. He needed something to sit on, a bench, or a chair or something like Sadie’s swing.
He checked his phone book, made some calls, and then went down to catch a bus.
The Goodwill store was a large building with the usual musty-smelling clothes hanging on pipe racks and the usual battered furniture, stained mattresses, and scarred appliances. It had about it that unmistakable odor of poverty that all such places have.
“You’ve come about the job,” a pale girl with one dwarfed arm said as he crutched across toward the furniture.
“No,” he replied. “Actually, I came to buy a chair.”
“I’m sorry. I just assumed—” She glanced at his crutches and blushed furiously.
“What kind of a job is it?” he asked, more to help her out of her embarrassment than out of any real curiosity.
“Shoe repair. Our regular man is moving away.”
“I wouldn’t be much good at that.”
“You never know until you try.” She smiled shyly at him. Her face seemed somehow radiant when she smiled. “If you’re really looking for something to do, it might not hurt to talk with Mrs. Kiernan.”
“I don’t really need a job. I’ve got insurance and Social Security.” It was easy to talk with her. He hadn’t really talked with one of his own kind since the last time he’d spoken with Quillian.
“Most of us do have some kind of coverage,” she said with a certain amount of spirit. “Working here makes us at least semiuseful. It’s a matter of dignity—not money.”
The Losers Page 10