Conversations With the Crow

by Gregory Douglas

  When the county pathologist had the opportunity of examining the charred remains of the cremated Arabs, he discovered a number of Catholic medals on most of the bodies and on portions of their uncharred anatomy, tattoos of the Virgin of Guadeloupe and various Spanish incantations such as 'Maxine, mi vida' neither of which one would expect to find on Moslem Arabs.

  In fact, the absolutely reliable witnesses had seen six illegal Mexican workers going in and out of a rented house and identified the mustachioed Latinos as the wanted Arabs. Since there were no firearms in the charcoaled house, the police had to take a number out of their evidence room, char them with a blowtorch and have them ready to show to the media for the six o'clock evening news. No mention was made of the actual ethnic origins of the deceased to the media who had other fish to fry and, like law enforcement, believed in institutional maintenance which precluded the admission of errors of any kind.

  Lars found the television accounts fascinating.

  "They did find them after all. Do you think the jewelry got melted?'

  Lars believed everything he saw on television, regardless of personal knowledge to the contrary.

  "Jesus, what a boob you are! We are the ones, Lars, we are the ones, not the Arabs. Are you crazy?"

  Lars waved at the flickering television.

  "But there were witnesses, Chuck. I'll bet that the Arabs came in just after we left, don't you think?"

  "No, Lars, there were no Arabs. I told the cops in Brentwood that there were Arabs and they are too stupid to know the difference. I wonder if they'll ever admit they made a mistake. Probably not. They burned down at least two houses and killed everyone inside so I really don't think there will be any truth-telling here. Terrible about poor Art, isn't it? Shall we go to the funeral?"

  Lars was still staring at the television, watching the fire department trying to put out the fires caused by the Gomez incident.

  "I don't want to go to Art's funeral, Chuck. I never really liked him, you know and I don't think you did either. I had no idea how much damage that water could do. The house looked like it had been at the bottom of a lake for five years. I remember my Grandfather's basement flooded once when the pipes broke in winter and everything down there looked just like Art's place. It was terrible. All the labels came off my Grandma's preserves and no one knew what was in the jars and the cat drowned and we didn't find it until about two weeks later stuck up in the ceiling beams. I almost feel sorry for Art and Estelle but they were such bad people."

  Chuck turned off the set when the next story about perennial corruption in Washington began. Unlike the national legislators, Chuck was an amateur and to him the acquisition of a million dollars in bribes in less than a month had no place in his ambitions.

  They spent the rest of the day watching old video tapes and eating the aging food from the battered refrigerator. Later in the afternoon, when the apartment's working occupants began to fill up the courtyards below with the cacophony of their CD players punctuated with shrieks of false joy and the thunder of overweight bodies cannon-balling into the murky pools, Chuck fished around in one of the chipped plastic drawers of his rickety desk until he found a California road map.

  "I think," he said as he spread it out on the floor, "that we ought to give some very serious consideration to getting out of this part of the state and turning our loot into cold cash."

  He looked at the map for several minutes.

  "I don't think we ought to stay around here much longer. I have a fence up in San Francisco that wouldn't care if I dragged in a corpse with gold teeth as long as there was enough gold to justify the mess on the carpet. We can head up there just as soon as I've finished here. You don't have anything over at your place that you really need to bring, do you?"

  "I don't think so. I have all my family pictures in my wallet and I just have the tapes we got at Art's place. I don't want to lose those, Chuck."

  "We can get more, Lars, many more. And even better ones. Why in San Francisco, they have adult video shops that would really amaze you. Lots of fun viewing for you. But that's after we dump the nice things."

  "How much do you think we can get, Chuck?"

  "Normally, my fence would pay me about ten percent of the retail price but since I took the time to get these," he hefted a thick file of computer printouts, "I can get more. Probably thirty percent or maybe a little more."

  "What are those?"

  "This is the inventory file on all the items and I also found the computer disk with the information on it. In other words, I have the only records that could prove that our collection of nice things are hot. You see, it is worth the trouble to be through, Lars. Try to remember that."

  "I really don't plan to do that again. Besides, the police might know all about us and if I tried to get another job in a jewelry store, wouldn't they find out?"

  Chuck tossed the heavy file onto the floor and examined a semi-empty can of soft drink.

  "They might, but I doubt it. Let's see where we probably stand. We now know for sure that Arabs robbed the place and all got killed. Art and his wife are not functioning right now, I have the inventories and just to be sure, I got into the files and took out all the personnel records. Remember the pile of papers I put into the bag and how you complained about it? Well, learn to watch the master at work. By the way, it's going to be dark in a little while and I am going to go out and make very sure someone else gets the blame for the looting. While I'm out, I'll get some more food for us so why don't you just sit where you are and watch television for a couple of hours until I get back."

  "Can't I go with you? I don't much like this place."

  "Do you think I do? A couple of hours should do it if I'm lucky."

  And wearing an athletic warm-up suit, a pair of sport shoes and a knit cap, Chuck walked out of the apartment into the steaming dusk, carrying in one hand a zippered blue bag stuffed full of boxes and cases bearing the logo of their former employers, intermixed with some gaudy samples of faux costume jewelry.

  5.

  On the street directly behind the administration building of the Brentwood public safety agency was a very upscale gym. Behind it and above it, overlooking the rear of the badly lit government building, was a parking lot filled with expensive sports cars. The functioning police station, several blocks away, was surrounded with an eight-foot cyclone fence, crowned with rolls of razor wire and illuminated from dusk to dawn by bright mercury vapor floodlights. Entrance to that parking lot was via an electrically controlled gate operated by an armed guard. Like almost all police stations in Los Angeles, the Brentwood police were taking no chances on nocturnal visits of bomb-laden cars or vans filled with unpleasant ethnics armed with automatic weapons.

  Chuck slid under the fence, dragging his heavy bag with him and it took only a few minutes to dump the sanitized contents into the garbage dumpster that stood against the back wall. Inside, along with old files, soft drink cans, newspapers and empty donut boxes was now a highly incriminating collection of material from the scene of the fictional Islamic raid. Not wishing to leave this material to be found by chance, Chuck, ever eager to do his part in the detection of crime, used his parentless-phone and called the nearest office of the FBI. He pretended to be a horrified yet frightened police official who confessed that he had helped dump a box of stolen jewelry from the recent terrorist raid into the dumpster. As a born-again Christian, Chuck whispered into the phone, he could not allow such wickedness to go unpunished. Giving a name he saw painted on the wall in front of an official parking space, he hung up on the highly inquisitive agent and called several local television stations and a newspaper with almost the same information. By the time he finished, he actually began to believe his own pathetic bleatings.

  The gym was offering a special for new members. For a fifty dollars, Chuck could have a two month membership with the first two sessions absolutely free. He gave them the money, signed Art's name to the form and for the next forty-five minutes, worked out on the
various machines until he felt enough time had passed to permit him to safely leave the building and see if his seeds had fallen on fertile ground.

  In the parking lot, Chuck put the empty bag into his car and then spent several entertaining minutes watching the high drama being enacted on the other side of the fence.

  Men in black jackets with the large, yellow lettering, 'FBI' were taking small items out of the dumpster with plastic-gloved hands and dumping them into evidence bags while other agents were engaged in fending off members of the local media.

  Chuck paid special attention to a well-known anchorwomen whose public image was one of pert sweetness, alternately screeching incredible obscenities at the stoical FBI agents and trying to kick her way closer to permit her cameraman a better view of the loot.

  Members of the Brentwood police and officials in civilian clothes were also involved and the general tenor of the gathering was that of an Irish wake when the second keg of beer was broached, which is usually just prior to dumping the deceased on the floor and the coffin is used as a battering ram against the lavatory door to free the intoxicated inhabitants.

  Given the level and pitch of the garbled uproar, Chuck decided to leave the gym as quickly as possible. He recalled that Brentwood was where the football great O.J. Simpson's former wife and her current boyfriend had met with an untimely end and he did not want someone from the obviously hysterical local law enforcement to shove a bloody glove behind his car bumper. He had registered at the club as the late Art Winrod but it was not impossible that the police could exhume him and have him charged with masterminding not only the looting of his own business but fabricating his own death.

  Visualizing grotesque courtroom scenes with a decaying Art strapped in a witness chair, he got back on the freeway and headed home. Apparently, the gang members were either all in bed with each other or were engaged in shooting into the lobbies of movie theaters because the drive home was uneventful.

  6.

  The drive up the California coastal highway was relatively uninteresting. A pall of heat hung over almost the entire state and Chuck had decided, after loading the trunk of his car with suitcases and banana boxes filled with stolen jewelry, that driving up to San Francisco by any inland route was counter indicated.

  They drove through Malibu with the ocean on one side and towering hills on the other, hills that regularly disgorged tidal waves of mud onto the homes of the rich following the winter rains. Eventually, Chuck thought, a real tidal wave would sweep in from the sea and Hollywood would lose the services of half their upper level executives, some of their stars and a large number of high-priced whores of both sexes with some in between.

  The opening phase of their hegira was marred by an argument between Chuck and Lars about which radio station they would listen to on the car radio. Chuck was interested in following the saga of the barbecued Arabs while Lars wanted to listen to the latest obscenities by a black group called "Puzzy for Uz" which consisted of the words "bitch" and "ho" intermingled with noises redolent of a fat woman dipped repeatedly into a tub of boiling water.

  The argument was settled when Chuck turned the radio off and removed the control knobs from the panel.

  The public beaches along their route were jammed with people seeking relief from the heat wave, heedless of the concerns of scientists who claimed that even a ten minute daily exposure to the sun would result in terrible cancer or in the warnings of other scientists that the ocean was filled with feces from the open sewers of Mexico that would cause diseases only guessed at by the Founding Fathers.

  The packed beaches drew some comment from Chuck.

  "Look at all those lemmings, Eric. Most of them ought to be at work today so as to pay their taxes and help support their government instead of lying around on the sand having sexual fantasies and getting cancer. Of course if their fantasies are realized, they would get herpes or AIDS and next year, the beaches will be empty."

  Eric-cum-Lars was enraptured by the sight of chubby young bodies glistening in the harsh sun. Chuck was distracted by his leerings.

  "God, can't you keep it in your pants? What do you want me to do, buddy? Stop the car and let you pick up eighteen life sentences?"

  "Eighteen is far too old, Chuck. I am willing to consider thirteen."

  "That's an unlucky number. Why not go after a nice dwarf? I mean, they are about the right size for you."

  "A dwarf? God, how gross! Have you ever seen a dwarf?"

  "Sure. Clinton had one in his cabinet. They used to carry around a box for him to stand on during press conferences."

  "They have little bowed legs and big, ugly heads, Chuck. Would you like to drive a nice new car or buy a beat up old second hand one?"

  "That's enough of that talk. And for Christ's sake, stop drooling all over the seats."

  Lars lapsed into sullen silence but still strained his eyes towards the emerald surf and its androgynous waders.

  After they passed the beaches of Los Angeles and headed north towards Santa Barbara, Lars began to fish in the packed glove compartment.

  "What are you looking for?" said Chuck as he tried again to activate the sporadic air conditioning.

  "Now I just want to find a map. There's a gun in here, Chuck. Is that legal?"

  "No, and neither are a quarter million dollars of stolen jewels in the trunk. The gun is to shoot anyone who tries to steal the jewels, Eric."

  His companion looked shocked.

  "You never said anything about shooting anyone."

  "You never say anything about shooting people, Lars, you just point and shoot. Never waste your time talking. Now put the nice gun back in the map box and concentrate on finding the map. You have two maps in your hand now. Isn't one of them the map of California I had you stick in there earlier? Did all those tiny darlings back there disturb your coordination?"

  "I am very coordinated and I really wish you wouldn't make fun of my interests."

  "That's the California map you're pointing with. What are you looking for?"

  "Where we are going."

  "For the tenth time, Lars, we are going to Santa Cruz. And from there we are going to San Francisco to sell the jewels, get a lot of money and let you buy boxes of nice TV tapes. Trust me, lad, Uncle Chuckie knows just what you want. After all, it's a lot better to have you pollute yourself in front of a TV set than get us both arrested for your fumbling and feeling the peach clefts of adorable little sweeties in training bras."

  Lars unfolded the map very carefully.

  "Where are we now?"

  "Just outside of Santa Barbara. Do you want a pit stop? Have to drain your lizard? Hungry?"

  "I can do both."

  "For God's sake, not at the same time, I hope."

  "Lizard?"

  "Your penis. How about Rupert, the One-Eyed Trouser Snake? Sound better? My God, did you swallow your gum?"

  Lars was choking.

  "Oh, I never heard that one before! Where did you hear that?"

  "From Estelle when I was screwing her standing up in the mop closet."

  Lars was shocked. The thought of having any kind of relationship, especially a sexual one in the confines of the office mop closet, struck him as grossly immoral.

  "You never told me about that, Chuck. Did you kiss her too?"

  "I kissed her yet, Lars."

  "Her what?"

  "Her yet. I kissed her yet."

  "You keep saying all kinds of bad things I don't know about. What's a yet?"

  "I remember a story my grandfather's driver told me once. It seems some soldier in Japan after the war wrote to a newspaperman in New York about that subject. The writer said his captain told him that a nurse had been shot in Okinawa and she had the bullet in her yet. The GI asked the reporter what a yet was, just like you. The answer came back that a woman's yet was the same as a woman's now. The reporter made reference to a popular song, 'I wonder whose kissing her now.'"

  Lars wasn't sure whether or not to laugh.

&
nbsp; "How did your grandfather hear that? Was he a reporter?"

  "No, grandfather owned a lot of newspapers. And to answer your question, I wouldn't screw Estelle with your dick."

  "I'll bet you would with your own."

  "Oh, that's nasty my Norwegian sex fiend crime partner. You can take on Debbie or even old Art. You know what they say. 'If you can't get a woman, get a clean old man.'’”

  "Do you want me to throw up right here?"

  "Let's eat first and if you puke in here after that, you get to eat the same thing twice."

  7.

  Santa Cruz, California, was a shabby beachside resort town south of San Francisco. It had once suffered a heavy earthquake and a good part of the rundown city had either fallen inward onto the occupants or out into the street and onto various parked cars and pedestrians.

  For months after this, Santa Cruz smelt equally of seaweed and corruption.

  It had eventually been partially rebuilt but would never rival Newport, Rhode Island, as an elegant seaside resort.

  They registered, under Chuck's dead cousin's name, in a small but expensive motel on the beach. Just to the south of them was a very long city pier, studded with tourist shops, fast food restaurants and bait stands. Further south was a shallow, curving bay with its beach clotted with a late afternoon assemblage of the sacred bodies of the young and the profane ones of the old. This was backed by a large midway that sported a rickety roller coaster that rumbled periodically, its riders screeching like newly- castrated pigs.

  The clothing went into the tiny closet and the heavy containers of stolen jewelry were jammed under one of the twin beds.

  Chuck looked at his watch.

  "We can walk around for a while, Lars, and see what's happening here but I am going to have to ask you, very firmly, not to indulge your hobbies while we are here. I do not, repeat, do not, want you to try to lure some little darling up here and into the shower. I really mean that. As long as we're trying to sell the loot, I want no trouble.