Conversations With the Crow

by Gregory Douglas

  "Once we get the money and you so desire, buy a whole day care center and pig out but not around me. Do you understand me?"

  Lars sniffed.

  "I understand you. You must think I'm crazy or something. I don't just go on the beach and grab people, Chuck. I like to take my time on things like that and they have to be willing. You would be surprised what a nice girl will do for a Barbie doll or even a cheap watch. Do you think I bang them on the head and drag them into a doorway somewhere? Anyway, I can't help myself and so I'm not to blame."

  Chuck opened the room door and the glare from the afternoon sun blinded him.

  "All right, prevert, out we go and remember my warnings."

  As they walked down the beach, the roller coaster roared again.

  "Oh, Chuck! I want to go on the roller coaster! I love roller coasters!"

  Chuck could see no harm in this because it would not only be very improbable that Lars could accost anything at speed and it was far too public for mischief.

  "Great. Got change? Here, take five bucks and really live."

  While Chuck walked up and down the boardwalk, looking more at the concessions and less at the display of semi-naked flesh on the beach, Lars rode the plunging cars twice and was greatly exhilarated.

  He caught up with Chuck who was leaning against the boardwalk rail, looking intently at a fast food store that was jammed with people.

  "Did you have fun, Lars?"

  "Oh yes. I remember once in Minneapolis there was a carnival and they had a nice roller coaster but not as nice as this one. Only this one seems a little, well, sort of rickety."

  "It's been here since Moses was a Corporal, Lars and one day, when it's full of nuns out for a frolic, it will cave in, right on top of this grease pit. Look at the people in there, grabbing hamburgers made from museum-quality kangaroo meat and French fries cooked in fat that's so old it probably came over on the Mayflower. Places like this are sponsored by heart surgeons to keep them in new cars."

  The summer sun was setting in red splendor and the denizens of the beach were reluctantly returning to their cars, dragging blankets, boogie boards and squalling children behind them. Chuck watched the sprawling exodus, leaning his arms on the railing of the boardwalk and behind him, the lights came on in the concessions and the roller coaster was outlined in a string of bulbs, only a few of which had burned out leaving dotted lines in the sky.

  "This is a dismal place, Lars. I remember it from my youth. You couldn't pay me to swim in the water and the food is the sort of thing that killed off the dinosaurs."

  The day's heat was slowly dissipating as they walked back to the motel.

  "Tomorrow, Lars, we will go to San Francisco and convert our loot into cash. Doesn't that excite you?"

  Lars grinned in anticipation.

  "I do like money, Chuck, but I can't wait to see the tape stores you told me about. Do they really sell things like that in public?" he said, kicking a dead rat into the remains of a sand castle.

  "Not quite in public. I mean in the front of the shop you can find the run-of-the-mill things like Mexican women with donkeys, fat men whipping each other while wearing leather body harnesses and an entire confirmation class being raped by lurid bikers. You know, the normal sex. But in the back, that's where all of your goodies are kept. You get to go in and spend all kinds of money on uplifting erotica. Of course it's all illegal. Congress, which is composed of swindlers, liars, drug abusers and men whose sex life would make yours look like a paragon of virtue, Congress passed laws against this so that's why it's sold in the back, not on proud display in the shop windows for all to gaze upon and admire. I look at it this way, Lars, it keeps you off the street."

  8.

  The next day, they arose early and shuffled down to the motel's parking garage with their very heavy boxes. As they pulled out of the parking lot, they passed long lines of cars filled with people heading for the beach. It was another hot day and the beginning of the Fourth of July holiday weekend.

  They took Highway One up the coast because it was the most direct route to San Francisco but it was certainly not the quickest. It was only eight in the morning and already there were clots of cars, vans and motorcycles at all of the small, inhospitable beaches along their route.

  The traffic in San Francisco was no worse than usual. Idiots with low foreheads ran stoplights, only occasionally smashing into cross traffic or knocking chronic jaywalkers into illegally parked cars. To Chuck, the City always reminded him of a view of Hell as painted by Bosch but since Lars had never heard of the artist, a simile would have been wasted.

  They parked in a small lot just behind a jewelry store off of Grant Avenue, San Francisco's Chinatown, and with no attempt at concealment whatsoever, hauled their boxes towards a dingy shop with a faded sign and flyblown window.

  The "Canton Jade and Ivory Emporium" was run by Mr. Thomas Lew, a thin, elderly gentleman who had been called the previous evening by one of his better sources of supply.

  The door, controlled from inside with an electronic lock, clicked open and the pair staggered inside.

  "Mr. Lew!" Chuck exclaimed with genuine pleasure.

  "Mr. Chuck!" the proprietor responded with equal pleasure.

  The owner looked at Lars.

  "Is he OK?"

  "Yes, he's with me. He's OK. Do you think I'd bring someone here who wasn't?"

  Lars looked around the small shop with its dusty cases and a picture of a very well constructed and thoroughly nude Chinese woman on a calendar hung up over the old man's chair behind the table.

  He was admiring her pert nipples while Chuck was opening the contents of the top box.

  "Now when I got these things, Mr. Lew, I thought of you at once. I said to myself, 'Mr. Lew would really like to have these things. Mr. Lew is such a generous businessman and he has such good taste in really superior merchandise.'"

  The owner looked at him and smiled.

  "Such bullshit! Shall we do business? We have missed you here....oh, such lovely pieces!" he exclaimed, his usual reserve melted by the glittering display.

  And they discussed each watch, bracelet, ring and necklace in great detail while Lars finally sat down on a rickety old chair and went to sleep.

  When he woke up, it was to the sound of an argument.

  "But Mr. Chuck, you want too much money! I never pay that kind of money and you know it! Why aren't you more reasonable with your old friend?"

  Chuck shrugged and picked up the thick sheaf of computer printouts.

  "This, my old friend and mentor, is why I want a reasonable amount of money from you. These papers," he thumped on their mass, " are the only records and so the pieces you have piled up all over the place are perfectly safe to sell, hence a bigger profit for you and for me as well."

  Mr. Lew looked at the printouts again.

  "I have done business with you for years and you have always been honest with me. These are exceptional pieces but the price you want is too high. Knock off twenty percent and you can have it."

  "Knock off ten percent and it's a deal."

  "You marked it up anyway. All right, it's a deal."

  And for the next ten minutes, the golden hoard was stuffed into two large safes in the back of the shop.

  "Where are you going to put all that cash?" Mr. Lew asked as Chuck was stuffing his pockets.

  "In my pockets, oh ancient one, in my pockets." Chuck said in passable Cantonese.

  When he was younger, he had lived in Chinatown for three years and also knew some Mandarin.

  "Here," the old man said, offering him a folded canvas bag, "try putting it in this body bag. It might make you look a little fat but it is far safer. I wouldn't want you robbed here on the street but I regret that there is a lawless element here in our little community. And you can go out the back door if you want. People see you coming in here with many boxes and leaving without them will assume you have sold me things and have money. Please, you don't need to return it to me."r />
  There was much formal courtesy and the pair went out the back door and into the heat of the day, Chuck much fatter and both much richer.

  In the car, Chuck looked at his cheap watch. A good Rolex was locked up in the glove compartment into which he placed his pistol.

  "Well, where do you want to go now, my friend?"

  "The video shops, Chuck! The video shops! You promised me..."

  "Of course I did and so we will. Jesus, I feel weird with this money wrapped around me. If the cops ever searched me, it would be all over. They would steal every penny of it and probably shoot me while escaping. This is a pretty town, Lars, but it has a long record of police brutality and corruption so we had best be very careful, get your lust objects and get back to Santa Cruz before it gets dark."

  Lars had never seen such wonderful objects before and the owner of the video emporium realized that he had a live one on the line.

  With the front door locked and the CLOSED sign in place, he hauled out boxes of tapes that would have gotten him a long-term cell in San Quentin State Prison across the Bay or even the Federal Prison down in Lompoc.

  He let a quivering Lars preview each tape and when he had finished viewing, Lars had to sit on the floor to recover.

  He bought almost the entire selection of forbidden material for cash and the owner immediately decided to close for the day and take Mr. Quackers, his pet duck, down to Ocean Beach for an outing.

  Chuck had to help him carry the big box back to the car, which was parked in a lot two blocks away. Strange people, mumbling to themselves, transvestites, prostitutes, tourists and speeding bicycle messengers passed them, paying no attention to Lars with his sweating face and glazed expression or Chuck with his bulging midsection that was so out of proportion to the rest of his lean body.

  "That," Chuck said as they headed for the freeway, "was quite an experience, Lars. What do you think of Frisco?"

  Lars had been staring out the window at all the strange people. Los Angeles had its share of street freaks but San Francisco put it to shame.

  "It's an interesting place, Chuck, but I don't think I'd like to live here. Look! There's some black guy in women's clothes beating up an old lady."

  "How do you know it's a man?" he said, avoiding a staggering drunk who had just bounced off the graffiti-emblazoned city bus in front of him.

  "Women don't have legs like that and besides, she knocked his wig off with her baseball bat."

  "Oh, I see. Who's winning?"

  Lars craned to see behind him.

  "I think she is. He's lying in the street and she's whaling on his head with the bat."

  "Scratch one up for the old lady. If she keeps hitting him on the head, she might get him angry."

  They returned to Santa Cruz by driving down Highway 101 to Santa Clara and cutting across to Highway 17 that went up over the mountains and down to the sea.

  A brief lunch in Santa Clara was followed by a leisurely drive through part of the small city. As they were driving through an expensive residential section, a reflex action of Chuck's who always liked to observe rich neighborhoods, they passed a walled compound with a guardhouse and a wrought-iron gate. A sign announced that ‘Crestmont Gardens’ was now leasing select units.

  The guard at the gate looked at them but when Chuck proffered his late cousin's driver's license in a hand whose wrist was encircled with a very expensive Rolex watch, the guard became much friendlier and opened the gate. He was trained to notice such things.

  "Why are we going in here, Chuck?" Lars asked, staring at the lush gardens and the swimming pools.

  "I don't know. It looks like a good place to hole up for a time. We have so much money now, Lars that I thought it might be better to stay out of sight for a while and just rest a little. Do you have any problems with that concept?"

  "No, just as long as I can look at my tapes."

  "Oh, I'm sure we can get a VCR just for you." he said as they pulled up in front of the rental office.

  Mrs. Constance ("Call me Connie, sweetie") McGiver had just returned to her elegant office after a lengthy sexual romp with a teenage Mexican immigrant whom she had hired to trim her shrubs. For a woman in her early forties, Connie usually reduced her somewhat unwilling partner to stupefied exhaustion. Her biological alarm clock was ticking with increasing loudness and she had endured three tummy tucks, one neck job, one removal of bags under her eyes, one liposuction, breast implants and a nose job.

  If she sought to reclaim her lost youth, her train had left it far, far behind her, standing in fading glory at a rapidly receding, distant station.

  Miguel, on the other hand, had a chronically sore penis and was developing a series of engaging facial tics as a result of his love-slave status.

  "Just keep on going, sweet, or its the INS for you and back to taco land,” Call me Connie would snap at him when he stopped for breath.

  No sooner had she sat down at her slate-topped desk when two potential renters emerged from the sunlight. One was tall, slim (the body bag was now in the trunk beneath the spare tire) and blonde with an expensive watch and the other short and dark with a furtive look.

  "Yes, dears, what can we do for you?"

  She was staring at the short man's crotch with some interest.

  Cyril, known to many as Chuck, appraised her lightly larded charms and rejected them out of hand.

  "Well, Ma'm my father is not going to run for Congress again and he wants to find a nice, but not permanent, place to live. It can't be too far from San Francisco. My grandmother lives there and she isn't well."

  "I'm so sorry to hear that. I buried my own grandmother last year."

  "Why did you do that?"

  "Why she was dead, of course, silly. We do have some very elegant units still available..."

  The unit finally chosen was one in a block called the Garden Apartments and consisted of three bedrooms, two baths, a large living room, dining room and kitchen.

  It was fully furnished with the sort of furniture found in very expensive clubs and one of the bathrooms sported a bidet. Eric, who had never seen one before, was under the impression that it was some kind of new appliance for washing socks.

  A lengthy lease was filled out by Chuck, almost entirely fictional in content, and a quick visit to the car trunk produced more than enough cash to keep Connie happy. She was a sentimental woman and this was the model unit she had most often used when engaged in what amounted to child abuse with her panting gardener.

  The sheets on the large beds were changed on a daily basis and the new tenants were none the wiser.

  On the way back to Santa Cruz, they discussed their new home.

  "That's an awful lot of money, Chuck. Couldn't we find a cheaper place to stay?"

  "Sure we could, but note that it has a VCR in the living room which will enable you to view your educational tapes in peace and quiet. Also, there is a nice pool nearby which means while you are panting over tinies, I can spend some time trying to get a nice tan without being groped by fatties. Ever notice that the more expensive a place is, the better looking the women are?"

  Lars looked out the window and admired the tall pine trees that flanked the ascending highway.

  "Oh, all those women are much too old. Did you see how that old woman kept looking at my pants, Chuck?"

  "I couldn't help noticing it, Lars. Why don't you take advantage of the situation and take a flyer with her? I'll bet you could have a very interesting time and it might cure you of your bad habits."

  "No thank you, Chuck. I'll bet her breasts hang down to her belly button."

  "So what, Osvald? Just toss them up over her shoulders and hang on for the ride."

  "Disgusting. You are really disgusting some times, Chuck. No, I can look at my tapes all I want."

  "Please, be sure and keep a towel handy, OK? There is a huge cleaning deposit involved and I would like to get at least some of it back."

  "And I asked you please do not call me Osvald. I thought y
ou agreed not to call me that."

  "I'm sorry, Eric and Lars. I forgot how sensitive you are. Anyway, I take it you approve of the new place?"

  "Oh sure, it's the best place I've ever been in. It's a lot better than the place I was living in down in LA. You know there were cockroaches there as big as mice and I used to step on them at night when I went into the kitchen. And then when I got back into bed, there was squished cockroach all over my sheets."

  "Jesus, how appetizing, Eric. Did you ever try to have sex with a nice, underage cockroach? A nice tender one with a training bra?"

  "Of course not. They're much too small anyway."

  "At least you could throw them away afterwards and not have to worry about the cops, eh, Eric?"

  "Nasty."

  Just before they got to Santa Cruz, they passed the little town of Scott's Valley. It was occupied in the main by an infestation of born-again Christians whose only sin was they had been born the first time.

  There was a huge billboard on the edge of the otherwise-scenic highway that stated that Jesus Saved. Chuck began to laugh when he saw the sign.

  "Do you see that sign, Eric? The one about Jesus?"

  "Yes. Is it funny?"

  "By itself, it's only in bad taste. When I was a kid, I stole one, but of course not that big. Do you know what I did with it?"

  "How many guesses do I get?"

  "Oh shit, just one."

  "Well, I don't know."

  "I put it up right in front of the local Bank of America."

  Lars looked at him.

  "I don't get it, Chuck. What did Jesus have to do with a bank?"

  "Just never mind, Eric. I'll bet when you go into a market and see a sign that says 'Wet Floor,' you do."

  Although it was early in the afternoon, the approaches to the beach area were jammed solid with traffic and it took them almost as much time to drive the five miles to their beach motel as it had taken them to drive over from Santa Clara.