Police and Thieves: A Novel (18 page)

He kissed Loretta again, nuzzling her neck with the four-day stubble on his face. “The kid’s going to be a stud, isn’t he?” he asked her, almost pleading.

If Loretta kept eating
schmaltz
on toast every day, her child would be as big as the Empire State Building. When she moved, she did it gingerly, taking her time, going as slow as a river that’d been moving for a thousand years. “Doojie,” she said, acknowledging me for the first time since I’d walked in the door. “Would you give me that bottle of water by your feet?”

The men in Loretta’s life had been reduced to one of two things. Either they helped her to get through another day as painlessly as possible, because it was a guy who got her into this position in the first place. Or they didn’t.

Mrs. Popolovsky groaned and got up from the sofa, saying, “Oy, my bones. You little ones just don’t know,” and tottered back into the kitchen. The second she was out of earshot, Loretta turned to Eichmann and said, “I can’t stay here much longer.”

“What’s the matter, you ingrate, it ain’t good enough for you? What do you expect me to do about it?” Eichmann razzed. He pounded his hand on the armrest, trying to control his ire. The cat rubbed up against his leg and meowed. Eichmann put his hands over his eyes and said, “Can’t you make it shut up?”

“Forget it. Just answer me,” Loretta persisted.

“You know, honey, I’m trying to come up with a plan, okay? Give me some time, will you. These things don’t happen overnight. There’s logistics and things like that. But I’m working on it.”

“Give you some time? How long? Long enough for us to be
homeless with a kid?”

Eichmann caressed the multihued bristle on his chin, sighing through his nose. “I’m focusing on a plan, but it’s not ready to unveil yet. It’s complex and needs to develop.”

“Well, you better hurry up because the baby isn’t going to wait for you to make some money. Why can’t you go out and get a job?”

Mrs. Popolovsky added a plate of hot cabbage to the tongue and potatoes steaming on the table. The three dishes made me think she was putting out a lot of food for us. When I was a kid, meals had to be rationed. Not literally, but almost. For instance, if I wanted two glasses of milk, I had to settle for one. I learned to create an arithmetic about eating; I never ate too much, and often not enough. The key was to stop eating before you got full. That way you had something to eat the next day.

Your body began to understand the physics of calculated deprivation and adjusted itself. You learned to think with a caloric clock, how much and when. Over time you needed less, wanted less. You became more emotional, always ready to get violent at the drop of a hat.

Loretta said to me, “So how are you doing these days, Doojie?”

Funny she asked. If we were evicted from the garage, where would I go? I couldn’t think about the future until I finished some unsettled business with the past. Since Doojie Sr. wasn’t my father, I had to find out who was. Until then I would go round and round in circles haunted by a ghost.

I’m sure my real dad wasn’t an outlaw like Doojie Sr. He didn’t buy and sell guns. He’d never been to jail a day in his life, and he didn’t hunt wildlife in America’s national forests. He’d never had a policeman strike him in the face with a nightstick. It would never occur to him to live in a garage even during the worst of times. He
was an ordinary citizen with his head in the sand. I said to Loretta, “I’m fine. Just hanging out.”

“And how’s the garage?”

All I had to do was look at Loretta: This alone kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t imagine being pregnant and living with Eichmann’s aunt. I said to her, “The garage? It’s not bad.”

Eichmann wanted to go outside to smoke a cigarette. “Mema,” he said to his aunt. “Me and Doojie are going for a smoke. We’ll be right back.” We ducked through the kitchen into the backyard. Eichmann pointed at a hole in a rusted chain-link fence covered with oleander bushes. “Follow me,” he said.

On the other side of the fence was the crosstown freeway. We found ourselves in a small clearing strewn with bottles and cans overlooking the traffic. The southbound lanes were twinkling with the headlights of cars coming into the city; the northbound lanes were blazing with taillights leaving town. “That fucking cat my aunt’s got,” Eichmann lamented, stamping the heels of his oxfords in the dirt. “Every time I come over, my sinuses get stuffed up.” He found a rock and threw it onto the road’s shoulder, digging up a puff of dust. He said to me, “You seen Bobo?”

“No, he took his stuff and said he was leaving town for a while. He said he was sick of you, but that doesn’t come as any news, does it?”

Eichmann kicked the fence with his shoe. “How unremarkable can you get? I knew he’d cop out on me. I saw it coming a mile away. Well, he ain’t my friend no more. You’ll be next, I guess.”

Our conversation wasn’t getting off to a good start. Eichmann wanted to have a soul-to-soul dialogue with me, but he didn’t know how to initiate it. He watched the cars and waited for me to ask him what was going on with him. If I didn’t say something, we’d stand there for the entire night.

I’d lost sympathy for him. Over time, as if through osmosis, I’d learned to imitate him. Maybe I was as cold as he was. Sending me out to set up Dee Dee had been the last straw. What if Flaherty had caught me? Eichmann and I would remain friends, but in my book, we were no longer equals.

“What do you think of what Loretta said?” he asked me.

On subjects like that, if invited, I didn’t weigh my words. Loretta’s entire body radiated the architecture of a biological prison. Every cell was begging, Let me out of here. Eichmann was unable to conceptualize that. I answered, “You better do something quick for her, because she’s getting worn down. If you don’t help her soon, it’ll get funky. She needs you to get your act together.”

His scar twitched as he replied out of one side of his mouth like he always did when he was angry and trying to control it with aloofness. “What’s that moral crap supposed to mean?”

“Your girlfriend is asking you to step in and support her. She needs money and she needs a house of her own. That fucking baby is going to take effort.”

“It sounds bogus. Let me ask you something, Doojie. Who was in the garage first, me or you?”

“You were, right?”

“That’s right. And who got our business going, you, me, or Bobo?”

“You did.”

“Damn straight, I did. I took care of everyone. When you didn’t have a place to stay, I let you live there. Where do you get off telling me about responsibility? All my life, I’ve been dealing with the needs of the people around me. It ain’t nothing new.”

“But the baby is going to change everything.”

“Is that so? Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“You have to marry Loretta so the kid has a name, so it knows
where it comes from.”

“You suck, Doojie.”

The look between us was a bolt of unfiltered tension. He knew exactly what I was saying. The rictus on his mouth told me I’d harpooned him. Commitment, that’s what Loretta wanted. A commitment from him to find them a decent place to live, and to get a paying job for himself. Loretta’s vision wasn’t sophisticated, but she had a grasp of the basics, something which defied Eichmann.

He picked up another stone and hurled it as hard as he could across the freeway, landing it in a patch of roadside ivy. Eichmann balled his fingers into a fist. Behind us, the skyline glittered with the lights of the Moscone Center, the MOCA, the office buildings in the financial district.

I was hoping he’d be honest and reveal himself to me, but the hatred in him was strong. He turned and raised his fists, feinting and jabbing, bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter. He had a crumpled, self-pitying smile on his mouth. “C’mon, Doojie,” he mocked me. “Enough of the bullshit. Put up your hands.”

He shuffled around me, taking swipes at my head with a series of left hooks, flicking at my chin with jabs from both hands. He was closing in on me, taking light punches at my arms and ribs. I backed off a step, and Eichmann hit me in the ear with another hook, then another jab. The same combination. Every time he swung at me, he dropped his arm and left his chest unguarded. When he moved in again, I’d slice to the right and nail him with an uppercut to his Adam’s apple.

I waited while he shuffled in close, his face a drooling mask. When he dropped his arm to deliver a hook, I slugged him with all my energy—he stepped through my windup and clouted me on the chin. In a small feat of aerodynamics, I stayed dizzily upright, seeing emerald-green rectangles behind my eyes.

Eichmann went ashy with regret and put his hand on my shoulder. “Sorry about that, Doojie. I must be having my period or something. I don’t know what got into me.”

I wanted him to know I felt the same way—if I wanted to change anything, I’d have to forgive him. We went back inside, and during the supper we had around Mrs. Popolovsky’s cheery kitchen table, I kept saying fuck you to Eichmann under my breath like it was an incantation. Every time the old woman saw my bruised lips move, she raised her water glass and blessed us, cackling with gusto at the thought of Loretta’s unborn child, saying,
“Mazel tov
, my children! God is with you.”

Waiting out the landlord required several steps. You had to stay at home and hold the fort and you had to be quiet all day long—you never knew when he was going to ambush you. He might be in the parking lot’s driveway, or at the end of San Carlos Street sitting in his car. You didn’t want to be caught off guard. No squatter ever did. So I was pulling guard duty on the couch.

Bobo’s departure and Eichmann’s presence at his aunt’s left me in control of the garage. This was something to consider. Even if it was just a carport, the garage was worth a hundred thousand dollars; the real estate in the Mission was that valuable. To know this made me want to laugh and cry simultaneously. No wonder the landlord wanted me out, and no wonder I was fighting so hard to stay. California civil law said if I held on to the carport for seven years, I could apply for ownership by filing an imminent-domain claim.

I had six years to go.

The din of a parade on Mission Street was coming through the garage’s walls—the
evangelicos
were marching through the neighborhood in a show of strength. Brigades of clean-cut teenagers in white T-shirts and off-the-rack designer jeans were carrying banners and the national flags of El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua past the winos and the junkies on the sidewalk. A preacher in a blue serge suit was pumping his fist and shouting into a bullhorn, “
Jesus Cristo! Jesus Cristo
!” The marchers answered him with a chorus that rattled the windows of the liquor stores and the
bodegas on the block. “
El Rey! El Rey! El Rey por vida!
”

I stuck my head out the door to see if anyone was approaching; a dragonfly revved past my face. In the street a guy was working on his car, the front end up on a jack. The radio beside him was tuned in to a sportscast. For a moment there was no tempest, no conflagration, no sense of vertigo. Everything was balanced nice and delicate on a fault line, waiting to get pushed off. If I didn’t make a move or breathe, I was safe. The air was sparkling with sea salt, drawing into itself all the heat it could. Closing my eyes, I saw the pallid, smog-kissed sun through my lids. If I held my breath, I could also see Flaherty standing at a distance, biding his time, waiting for me to take a false step.

A week later Eichmann moved in with Loretta and Mrs. Popolovsky, the three of them in the old woman’s studio. Now that Loretta was pregnant, she was going to apply for Section Eight housing vouchers. Eichmann was already boasting about the fine apartment they’d get in the projects. Then, much to my surprise, he married Loretta. They sent me an invitation to their wedding party, and having nothing better to do, I went.

The celebration was in a storefront meeting hall on Valencia Street across from the police station, and near the Busy Bee Market and the King Hotel. When I got there, Louis was out front on the sidewalk drinking a quart of beer. He welcomed me as he would a brother, getting beer on himself and mangling my fingers in a frantic handshake. “Doojie! Where’ve you been keeping yourself?”

“I’ve been around. What’s up with you?”

“Not much, not much. I’m glad to see you, you know? You boys walked into some shit, huh?”

“Ah, well, a cat’s got nine lives. You keeping out of trouble?”

“Sure am. Ain’t nobody to aggravate me anymore, that’s why.”

Louis’s eyes were wet and filled with merriment. His face had healed from the throttling Flaherty had given him—like a history book, Louis’s skin was inscribed with everything that had ever been done to him. My own face wasn’t doing so great: I had plenty of scars. He stood by me and asked, “I hate to bug you, but you got any weed?”

“No, I don’t. I wish I did, but I’m dry.”

“You don’t have none? Serious?”

“Yep. Swear on it.”

“You’re putting me on, ain’t you?”

“No, man. I’m tapped out.”

“You out of the business?”

“Let’s say I’m on a hiatus.”

“Hiatus? That a flower?”

“No, I’m taking a break.”

“Is that so? If you didn’t know it, Eichmann has plans for you.”

After Bobo left the city for a semipermanent vacation in Seattle, saying he was done with Eichmann, I quit selling dope. I didn’t want to do anything. There was a place inside of me as large as a warehouse with all of its windows broken. I was living on stolen time in the garage, a major inconvenience. I felt unsettled, and only one thing was for sure: I had to track down Dee Dee.

The junkies in the Mission didn’t have too many places to assemble in public: I found Dee Dee on a sultry, cloudy afternoon by the Laundromat at Twentieth and Lexington. He was talking to a couple of vatos when he noticed me cross the street. At first Dee Dee faked like he didn’t see me, but when I made it clear I wanted to speak with him, he got all phony-friendly, calling out, “Hey, Doojie, long time no see … what’s new?”

“Not a whole lot. The usual. What’s with you?”