He crutched on up past Sadie’s house and then past Spider Granny’s. Maybe Patch had gone down an alley. But there was no alley, and the yards in that part of the street where he had last seen Patch were all fenced.
Troubled, Raphael went slowly back down the street toward his apartment in the gathering darkness.
Flood had just pulled up behind Raphael’s car and was getting out. “Training for the Olympics?” he asked sardonically as Raphael came up.
“Damon,” Raphael said with a sudden sense of enormous relief, “where have you been all day? I tried to call you, but they said you’d checked out.”
“I’ve been moving,” Flood explained. “I found a place so grossly misnamed that I had to live there for a while.”
“What place is that?”
“Peaceful Valley,” Flood said, drawing the words out. “Isn’t that a marvelous name?”
“Sounds moderately bucolic. Where is it?”
“Down at the bottom of the river gorge. Actually, it’s almost in the middle of town, but it might as well be a thousand miles away. There’s only one street that goes down there. The banks of the gorge are too steep to build on, so they’ve just let them go to scrub brush and brambles. There’s a flat area along the sides of the river, and that’s Peaceful Valley. The whole place is a rabbit warren of broken-down housing, tarpaper shacks, and dirt streets that don’t go anyplace. The only sounds are the river and the traffic on the Maple Street Bridge about fifty feet overhead. It’s absolutely isolated—sort of like a leper colony. Out at the end of the street there’s an area called People’s Park. I guess all the hippies and junk freaks camped there during the World’s Fair. It’s still a sort of loitering place for undesirables.”
“Are you sure you want to live in a place like that?” Raphael asked doubtfully. “There are new apartment houses all over town.”
“It’s perfect. Peaceful Valley’s a waste disposal for human beings—a sort of unsanitary landfill.”
“All right.” Raphael was a little irritated. “It’s picturesque, but what are you doing down there? I know you can afford better.”
“I’ve never lived in a place like that,” Flood explained. “I’ve never seen the lower depths before. I suppose I’m curious.”
“That kind of superior attitude can get a jack handle wrapped around your head. These people are touchy, and they’ve got short fuses. Give me a hand with the groceries in the car, and I’ll fix us some supper.”
“Do you cook?” Flood asked, almost surprised.
“I’ve found that it improves the flavor. You can have yours raw if you’d like.”
“Smart-ass.”
They went upstairs, and Flood nosed around while Raphael stood in the kitchen preparing their supper.
“What’s this thing?” he demanded.
“Scanner,” Raphael replied. “If you want to know what Spokane is really like, turn it on.”
“I’ve heard about them. Never saw one before, though.” He snapped it on. “Is that all it does? Twinkle at you?”
“District Four,” the dispatcher said.
“Four.”
“We have a forty-two at the intersection of Boone and Maple.”
“Okay. Do you have an ambulance on the way?”
“What’s a forty-two?” Flood demanded.
“Auto accident,” Raphael told him, “with injuries.”
“Terrific.” Flood’s tone was sarcastic. “They talk in numbers—’I’ve got a seventeen and a ninety-three on my hundred and two. I think they’re going to twelve all over the eighty-seven.’ I don’t get much out of all that.”
“It’s not quite that complicated. There’s a sheet right there on top of the bookcase. It’s got the numbers on it.”
Flood grunted, picked up the sheet, and sat on the couch with it.
“Attention all units,” another dispatcher said. “We have an armed robbery at the Fas-Gas station at Wellesley and Division. Suspect described as a white male, approximately five-foot-seven. One hundred and forty pounds, wearing blue jeans and an olive-green jacket—possibly an army field jacket. Suspect wore a red ski mask and displayed a small-caliber handgun. Last seen running south on Division.”
“Well now.” Flood’s eyes brightened. “That’s a bit more interesting.”
“Sticking up gas stations is a cottage industry in Spokane,” Raphael explained.
While they ate they listened to the pursuit of the suspect in the ski mask. When he was finally cornered in an alley, the anticlimactic “suspect is in custody” call went out, and the city renamed to normal.
“That’s all you get?” Flood objected. “Don’t they report or something? How did they catch him?”
“Either they ran him down and tackled him or flushed him out of somebody’s garage.”
Flood shook his head. “You never get any of the details,” he protested.
“It’s not a radio program, Damon. Once he’s in custody, that’s the end of it. They take him back for identification and then haul him downtown.”
“Will it be in the paper tomorrow?”
“I doubt it. If it is, it’ll be four or five lines on page thirty-five or something. Nobody got hurt; it was probably only about fifty or sixty dollars; and they caught him within a half hour. He’s not important enough to make headlines.”
“Shit,” Flood swore, flinging himself down on the couch. “That’s frustrating as hell.”
“Truth and justice have prevailed,” Raphael said, piling their dishes into the sink. “The world is safe for gas stations again. Isn’t it enough for you to know that all the little gas stations can come home from school without being afraid anymore?”
“You know, you’re growing up to be a real smartmouth.”
Raphael went back to his armchair. “So you’ve decided to stay in Spokane for a while.”
“Obviously. The town intrigues me.”
“Good God, why? The place is a vacuum.”
“Why are you staying here then?”
“I told you. I need some time to get it all together again. This is a good place for it.”
“All right.” Flood’s eyes were suddenly intent. “I can accept that. But what about afterward—after you get it together? You’re not going to stay here, are you? Are you going back to school?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll feel better about it later. Sure, it’s going to take a while to get squared away, but you ought to make some plans—set some
goals. If you don’t, you’re just going to drift. The longer you stay here, the harder it’s going to be to pull yourself away.”
“Damon.” Raphael laughed. “You sound like you just dug out your freshman psychology text and did some brushing up.”
“Well, dammit, it’s true,” Flood said hotly, getting to his feet. “If you stay here, you’re going to get so comfortable that nobody’s going to be able to blast you loose.”
“We’ll see.”
“Promise you’ll think about it.” “Sure, Damon.”
“I’m serious.” For some reason it seemed terribly important to him.
“All right. I’ll think about it.”
They looked at each other for a moment, and then let it drop.
Flood leaned down and looked out the window. “What the hell?” he said, startled. “What in God’s name is he doing?” He pointed.
Raphael glanced out the window. “Oh, that’s just Crazy Charlie. He’s shaving his head again.” “What does he do that for?”
“Hard to say. I think God tells him to—or maybe one of his cats.”
“Is he really crazy?”
“What do you think? He hears voices, he shaves his head like that once a week or so, and he’s got a whole set of rituals he lives by. Doesn’t that sound sort of schizophrenic?”
“Is that his real name—Charlie?”
“I don’t know what his real name is. That’s just what I call him.” “What’s he doing now?”
&nb
sp; Raphael glanced out the window again. “That’s where he keeps his towel. He always wipes his head down with the same towel after he shaves. He has to lean way over like that because he’s not allowed to step on that spot in front of the cupboard—either there’s a big hole that goes straight down to hell or there’s a dragon sleeping there, I haven’t quite figured out which yet.”
“Why don’t they haul him off to the place with the rubber rooms?”
“He’s harmless. I don’t see any reason to discriminate against somebody just because he’s crazy. He’s just one of the losers, that’s all.”
“The losers?” Flood turned and looked at him. “You’re not very observant, Damon. This whole street is filled with losers.”
“The whole town’s a loser, baby.” Flood went back to the couch and sprawled on it. “Wall-to-wall zilch.”
“Not exactly. It’s a little provincial—sort of a cultural backwater—but there are people here who make it all right. The real hard-core loser is something altogether different. Sometimes I think it’s a disease.”
Flood continued to look at him thoughtfully. “Let’s define our terms,” he suggested.
“There’s the real Reed approach.”
“Maybe that’s a disease, too,” Flood agreed ruefully. “Okay, exactly what do you mean when you say ‘loser’?”
“I don’t think I can really define it yet.” Raphael frowned. “It’s a kind of syndrome. After you watch them for a while, it’s almost as if they had big signs on their foreheads—’loser.’ You can spot them a mile off.”
“Give me some examples.”
“Sure, Winnie the Wino, Sadie the Sitter, Chicken Coop Annie, Freddie the Fruit, Heck’s Angels—”
“Hold it,” Flood said, raising both his hands. “Crazy Charlie I understand. Who are all these others?”
“Winnie the Wino lives on the floor beneath Crazy Charlie. She puts away a couple gallons of cheap wine a day. She’s bombed out all the time. Sadie the Sitter lives on the other street there. She baby-sits. She plops her big, fat can in a swing on her porch and watches the neighborhood while she stuffs her face—with both hands. She’s consumed by greed and envy. Chicken Coop Annie is
a blonde—big as a house, dirty as a pig, and congenitally lazy. She makes a career of sponging. She knows the ins and outs of every charity in Spokane. She’s convinced that her hair’s the same color as Farrah’s, and every so often she tries to duplicate that hairdo—the results are usually grotesque. Freddie the Fruit is a flaming queen. He lives with a very tough girl who won’t let him go near any boys. He has to do what she tells him to because her name’s the one on the welfare checks. Heck’s Angels are a third-rate motorcycle gang. There are eight or ten of them, and they’ve got three motorcycles that are broken-down most of the rime. They swagger a lot and try to look tough, but basically they’re only vicious and stupid. They’ve lumped together the welfare checks of their wives and girlfriends and rented the house up the street. They peddle dope for walking-around money, and they sneak around at night siphoning gas to keep their cars and motorcycles running.”
“And you can see all this from your rooftop?”
Raphael nodded. “For some reason they don’t look up. All you have to do is sit still and watch and listen. You can see them in full flower every day. Their lives are hopelessly screwed up. For the most part they’re already in the hands of one or two social agencies. They’re the raw material of the whole social-service industry. Without a hard-core population of losers, you could lay off half the police force, ninety percent of the social workers, most of the custodians of the insane, and probably a third of the hospital staffs and coroners’ assistants.”
“They’re violent?” Flood asked, startled.
“Of course. They’re at the bottom. They’ve missed out on all the goodies of life. The goodies are all around, but they can’t have them. They live in filth and squalor and continual noise. Their normal conversational tone is a scream—they shriek for emphasis. Their cars are all junkers that break down if you even look at them. Their TV sets don’t work, and they steal from each other as a matter of habit. Their kids all have juvenile records and are failing in school. They live in continual frustration and on the borderline of rage all the time. A chance remark can trigger homicidal fury. Five blocks from here last month a woman beat her husband’s brains out with a crowbar after an argument about what program they were going to watch on TV.”
“No shit?” Flood sat looking at Raphael, his dark eyes suddenly burning. “What are you doing in this sewer, Raphael?”
Raphael shrugged. “Let’s call it research. I think there’s one single common symptom that they all have that makes them losers. I’m trying to isolate it.”
“How much consideration have you given to sheer stupidity?”
“That contributes, probably,” Raphael admitted, “but stupid people do occasionally succeed in life. I think it’s something else.”
“And when you do isolate it, what then? Are you going to cure the world?”
Raphael laughed. “God, no. I’m just curious, that’s all. In the meantime there’s enormous entertainment in watching them. They’re all alike, but each one is infinitely unique. Let’s just say that they’re a hobby.”
The expression on Flood’s face was strange as he listened to Raphael talk, and his eyes seemed to burn in the faint red glow of the winking scanner. It might have been Raphael’s imagination or a trick of the light, but it was as if a great weight had suddenly been lifted from the dark-faced young man’s shoulders—that a problem that had been plaguing him for months had just been solved.
iii
Raphael worked only a half day on Wednesday, since he was just about to the bottom of the pile of repairable shoes that lay to one side of his worktable.
About eleven-thirty Denise brought him a cup of coffee, and they talked. “You’ve changed in the last week or so, Rafe.”
“What do you mean, ‘changed’?”
“I don’t know, you just seem different, that’s all.”
“It’s probably Flood. He’s enough to alter anybody.” “Who?”
“Damon Flood. He was my roommate at college. His family has money, and he’s developed a strange personality over the years. He came to Spokane a couple weeks ago—I’m not really sure why.”
“I don’t think I like him.”
“Come on, Denise.” Raphael laughed. “You’ve never met him.”
“I just don’t like him,” she repeated stubbornly, pushing a stray lock of hair out of her face. “I don’t like what he’s doing to you.” “He hasn’t done anything to me.”
“Oh yes, he has. You’re not the same. You’re flippant. You say things that are meant to be funny, but aren’t. The humor around here needs to be very gentle. We’re all terribly vulnerable. We can’t be flip or smart aleck or sarcastic with each other. Don’t put us down, Rafe. Don’t be condescending. We can smell that on people the way you can smell wine on a drunk. If this Damon Flood of yours makes you feel that way about us, you’d better stay away from here, because nobody’ll have anything to do with you.”
Raphael looked at her for a moment, and she blushed furiously. “Has it seemed that way?” he asked her finally. “Have I really seemed that bad?”
“I don’t know,” she wailed. “I don’t know anything anymore. All I know is that I’m not going to let anyone hurt any of my friends here.”
“Neither am I, Denise,” Raphael said softly. “Neither am I. Flood makes me defensive, that’s all.”
“You don’t have to be defensive with mí.” She made a little move toward him, almost as if she were going to embrace him impulsively, but she caught herself and blushed again.
“Okay, Denise. I’ll hang it on the hook before I come to work, okay?”
“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”
“No. I wasn’t paying attention to how I was treating people. Somebody needed to tell me. That’s what friends are for, right?�
��
It troubled him, though. After he left work, he drove around for a while, thinking about what she had said. There was no question that Flood could influence people—manipulate them. Raphael had seen it too many times to have any doubts. He had, however, thought that he was immune to that kind of thing. He had somehow believed that Flood would not try his skills on him, but apparently Flood could not resist manipulation, and it was so very subtle that it was not even evident to someone who knew Flood as well as he did.
When he pulled up in front of his apartment, Sadie the Sitter and Spider Granny were in full voice. “Just wait,” Sadie boomed. “As soon as I collect his insurance, I’ll show her a thing or two. I’ll be able to spend money on fancy clothes, too—and a new car—and new furniture.”
It was evident by now that Sadie regarded the insurance money on her husband as already hers. The fact that he was still alive was merely an inconvenience. She counted the money over and over in her mind, her piggish little eyes aflame and her pudgy, hairy-knuckled hands twitching. When her husband came home at night, walking slowly on feet that obviously hurt him, she would glare at him as if his continued existence were somehow a deliberate affront.
Spider Granny, of course, cared only about the bellowing-idiot grandchild, and hurriedly agreed to anything Sadie said simply to prevent the horrid subject of commitment from arising again.
Raphael shook his head and checked his mailbox. There was some junk mail and an envelope from his uncle Harry. Harry Taylor forwarded Raphael’s mail, but he never followed the simple expedient of scribbling a forwarding address on the original envelope.
Raphael went on upstairs. He dumped the junk mail in the wastebasket without even looking at it and opened Uncle Harry’s envelope.
There was a letter from Isabel Drake inside. The envelope was slightly perfumed. Raphael stood at the table holding the envelope for a long time, looking out the window without really seeing anything. Once he almost turned to pitch the unopened letter into the wastebasket. Then he turned instead and took it to the bookcase and slipped it between the pages of his copy of the collected works of Shakespeare, where Marilyn’s letter was. Then he went out onto the roof. He made a special point of not thinking about the two letters.
The Losers Page 13