One Foot Off the Gutter (18 page)

Alice looked at me with demure, but undeniable pleasure. She hadn't heard that much from my mouth in a long while.

That night, I tossed and turned in my unhappy slumber. I'd been reading a naval history book, a number about the War of 1812. I'd fallen asleep with the tome on my
stomach. I couldn't get comfortable in the bed. First, I had too many blankets on top of me. I removed one of them, then woke up minutes later, cold and wanting more covers.

My bladder was bugging me, too. I lay there for a second, gathering the energy I'd need to put on my bathrobe and plod down the hallway to the can. I rolled over on my side, pushed the book away and promised myself that I'd close my eyes only for a moment.

 

I didn't know where to look for the gunman on San Carlos Street. So I went back to the scene of the crime on Mission Street. That's called playing it by the book. It was by chance that I avoided a collision with a gorgeous, peroxided blonde. She'd been standing on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store where the robbery had taken place. I flushed mightily with a school boy's cowardly guilt.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “I almost knocked you over. Sometimes I don't think about it, you know, where I'm stepping.”

It was all I could do to restrain myself from reaching out and pinching her. She wasn't the type of female I was used to being around. She was a Capp Street hooker on a cigarette break. I saw women like her in the district every day. A vast glass wall divided me from them, and I wanted to keep it that way. Some guys would have dismissed her as a cheap whore. She had on high heels and a white vinyl dress that barely covered her bottom.

The hooker picked up on the signals I was sending her and rewarded my interest with an incandescent smile that stood alien against the rest of the dreary street.

“What's a handsome cop like you doing out here all alone? I thought you boys worked in couples.”

“Yeah, we do. But I don't know where Bellamy is.”

“Bellamy. Is he your partner?”

“And my main man. That's Bellamy.”

“Well, don't you worry yourself about him. A stud like you can take care of himself, can't he?”

She draped a large, unfeminine looking hand on the buckle of my gun belt. She rested her other hand on my shoulder. In some mechanical attempt toward feigned intimacy, she let her spray-hardened hair scrape my cheek. I caught a whiff of an unidentifiable cologne and swore I detected stubble under the makeup caked on her face. She leaned into me, purring, “You smell like a real man. Good and stinky. C'mon, let's go for a walk.”

There was something uncanny about her mannerisms. I tried to back away from her, but she would not let go of my belt. Before I knew what she was doing, she unzipped my pants and slid her hand inside my jockey shorts. My underwear was moist; her fingers were cold and dry. My scrotum shriveled from her touch.

“What do we have here? Oohh, isn't that just wonderful,” she cooed.

She unbuckled my gun belt. My trousers dropped to my ankles, exposing my scrawny, gray shanks. My pot belly hung free from my shirt tails. Something about her face that me to tune into immeasurable wavelengths of paranoia. It was a tangy paranoia that refused to be ignored.

“I've got to find the asshole who robbed this store,” I said.

“What makes you think you haven't, sweetheart?” she answered.

It was an odd thing to say, but every move she made was a caricature, a symbol of something that refused to reveal itself. She might've been attractive, but I didn't quite trust her.

“When was the last time you had the best blow job of your life? Can you remember, officer? I bet you can't.”

Too late, I reached for my gun. To my chagrin, my hand came up orphaned. She had the gun in her hand and a gloating, literate look on her face. The revolver's muzzle was trained on my neck.

“Surprise!” she squeaked.

“Who are you?”

Without my gun, I was as good as dead. I started to get sick, not so much in fear of the moment itself, but for all the other times when I'd been scared; doing it now and all together. She lowered the revolver until the muzzle was pointing at my pubic hair, nudging the scant fur that I had there.

“Who's the asshole?” she smiled.

“I am,” I said, cooperating.

“That's a good boy.”

She pulled the trigger. I went out like a light.

 

The next morning Alice prepared breakfast for me. She scrambled steak and eggs with a dash of paprika in a frying pan. The aroma of cooking meat filled the kitchen. Alice caught a whiff of the food and hummed to herself.

I was on another planet. I drank my coffee and didn't
say a word. Something was eating away at me, taking invisible bites out of my ability to converse with another human being. It was an emotional disease that didn't leave any marks on my body. Alice didn't know where it began or where it ended. My face was broken out in a shaving rash; dark purple bags hung under my eyes.

“I love you, Coddy.”

The words came out of her throat with the force things have when there doesn't seem to be anything else left to say. Nothing else went far enough, didn't reach into the emptiness and pull it apart by giving the silence a name. I fixed my destructive gaze on her eyes. Alice hugged herself, afraid to be in the same room with me.

I whispered rich and thick, as if I were catching a cold, “I love you, too, bunny.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

i
t was the biggest crowbar Bellamy had ever seen. It was as tall as a six-foot man, forged from wrought iron and painted a luminous burnt orange. As I had intended, the crowbar left Bellamy speechless.

“Coddy, that bar. Do I know what it's for?”

I never smiled much and when I did, it made Bellamy shy. You could always determine the slow disintegration of a man by watching the quality of his smile. That's what Bellamy saw in me.

And yet I was inspired. This, too, worried Bellamy. I hefted the crowbar in both hands.

“You ready to roll?” I asked him.

“I guess so.”

Bellamy snapped his gun into its worn holster. He checked his equipment to make sure he had what he needed. A plastic water bottle tied by a string to a brass loop. Three speed clips of thirty-eight bullets were
attached to a creaky garrison belt along with four wooden matches wrapped in toilet paper, a skeleton key and a pair of handcuffs.

“Let's go, Coddy,” he said.

It was a silky October evening. The sky was a moody indigo blue; a storm was coming up, a low pressure front moving in from Canada. Across the street from the police station, a monstrous raven was perched on top of a church steeple. I laughed when I saw the bird. The black bastard was a good sign.

I dropped behind the steering wheel of the squad car and leaned over to unlock the passenger door so that Bellamy could get in.

Bellamy's dirty laundry was cluttering up the back seat. I hardly ever had any laundry to wash. I had one uniform that I wore every day, but Bellamy had managed to acquire two pairs. He'd inherited the second set after Rod Jensen died from a brain hemorrhage.

“Here we go, here we go now,” Bellamy chanted.

He began our nocturnal ritual by opening the door, plopping himself into the car, scooting down low in the front seat. I stashed the crowbar in the back on top of Bellamy's clothes. I rolled down my window, stuck a key into the ignition and started the engine. I navigated the car out of the station's parking lot, laying a generous stripe of rubber when we made contact with the street.

Bellamy torched two cigarettes and handed one to me.

We drove north on Mission. The sidewalks were crushed with people pushing and shoving on the pavement. The bars near Twenty-fourth Street were packed
with Guatemaltecos and Salvadoreños getting an early start on the evening's drinking. There would be fights to break up when the bars closed down for the night.

“We might be busy tonight,” I said.

“Don't let it bother you,” Bellamy replied. “You'll burn yourself out.”

“That's probably true. But you know what, Bells? Even when I'm not on duty, I'm always fretting about the bullshit. I see the people in the street. I see them as lesson plans in my dreams.”

“Sounds painful, bro'.”

I saw them when I was making love to Alice. I saw them when I was sitting on the toilet with the Sunday paper spread across my lap. I could lose my pretty blue eyes, and I'd still see the streets. The Mission had gotten into me like a knife in the head.

I maneuvered a left onto Twenty-first Street.

Bellamy said, “Don't tell me where we're going, Coddy. Just let me guess.... Goddamn it, I thought you were over that already.”

There wasn't anything I could say that would make Bellamy feel easier, absolutely nothing. The calm that put a smile on my face was the same calm that killed the words on my tongue.

“What are you doing, Coddy? Haven't you been through enough with this?”

I knew Bellamy had told Doreen I was going nuts. I drove past Folsom Street. The wind was blowing through the car, pouring into the hole where the windshield had been shot. Bellamy raked a handful of fingers through his
transplant and then he saw the lopsided Victorian coming up on the right.

“Aw, Coddy. Let's not get bogged down into this, you hear me? Jesus. I'll tell you what. We've got a few minutes. Let's you and me go to Hunt's and get a cup of coffee. We can sit down and shoot the shit. You can tell me what's on your mind.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

 

The patrol car sidled up to the abandoned building. I cut the engine, and it died with a pathetic whine. My mind was flattened out. I reached over and grabbed the crowbar from the back seat.

“Keep that thing away from me.” Bellamy recoiled in sham horror. He made a funny face, in the lame hope that he could charm me and get me to relax.

“I have this impression of you, homes. Maybe you want to hear it?”

“You can tell me later, Bells.”

I opened my door and got out of the squad car. I heaved the crowbar to my shoulder and loped across the sidewalk, up the front steps of the abandoned building. I had been getting ready to walk away from what I knew, to leave and to go somewhere else for a long time. Even Bellamy could see that.

Everything I had been thinking about since the beginning of September was crystallized into a precise formation of knowledge. I ran my eyes over the front door's frame. I was looking for a crack, for an aperture I could get my fingers into. This time, I had come prepared.

I wedged the tip of the crowbar against the door jamb, took a deep breath, then threw all of my weight forward. I leaned back, caught another breath, and did it again. With each successive blow, the fury I'd buried alive inside my head came roaring through my hands. I wrenched the crowbar back and forth. I felt like a serial killer: now that I'd begun, to stop was unthinkable.

 

The girl bolted upright in bed. A strange noise had woken her up. Maybe it had been a bad dream; her head cold made her feverish. She'd slept through most of the day and still, she didn't feel rested. She laid back down and closed her eyes before she heard the crowbar slam into the front door for a second time. She hit Free Box in the arm with her fist. His eyelids rolled up like window shades.

“Do you hear that?” she whispered.

The crowbar sank with a thud into the hard wood for a third time. Free Box knew exactly what it was.

“I thought you were kidding at first,” he said.

The cops had returned. They were trying to break in again. He got out of bed and padded barefoot to the window.

Barbie retrieved the revolver from under the pillow, sat up on the mattress, naked except for a t-shirt. Her sleep-tousled hair was hanging over her eyes.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“One cop is in the car. The other one is on the porch.”

“Is this for real?”

Free Box looked at her; a glance that left no room for an answer. She understood what he meant and pulled the
hammer back, letting her thumb rest lightly on its flat microgrooved head.

 

The crowbar was singing in my hands. It sawed through the door, splintering the dryrotted timber. The headache I'd been nursing for the last month was easing off. I took another swing, but it wasn't necessary. The door jumped off its hinges; it fell back and collapsed to the floor with a crash that echoed through out the rest of the building.

It took an instant before the sound evaporated. By then I was standing inside the doorway. I marveled at the house, how cold and musty it was, opening up like a treasure chest. I threw the crowbar down on top of the door and nearing delirium, I marched inside.

 

Bellamy stuck his head out the car window and put his ear to the wind. That noise, it could only be Coddy. Fuckin' Coddy. Bellamy rubbed his neck and tried to think.

He strapped on his riot helmet, got out of the squad car, rested his bulk against the vehicle's trunk and looked at the building. That was interesting. Where the front door used to be, there was an uninviting hole. Leave it to Coddy to start things off with a bang. What the hell, Bellamy told himself. He'd better go in there after Coddy. Otherwise, they'd be spending the entire night on Twenty-first Street.

Bellamy crossed the pavement, clambering up the front steps and over the fallen door. He yanked out a flashlight from his jacket and flicked on the beam. The light
played itself across the water-stained walls of the entrance hallway.