“You had a distant look in your eyes.”
“Ah, you know. Thinking about my profession.”
“It’s demanding, isn’t it?”
Not wanting to give her an opening, I didn’t reply until she asked me:
“What’s the money like here? Is it rotten, or fair to middling?”
“Inquisitive, aren’t you?”
“You don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to.”
“Sure.”
“
Qué?
”
“It sucks.”
“And how about me?”she asked.
“You’re getting the same amount. One hundred and fourteen dollars worth. I tried to ask for more because of your income, but my request was denied.”
It had taken a considerable amount of diligence to get Frances her food stamps. It wasn’t going to be any easier in the months ahead. She knew it and was prepared; I could see that. Resolve was written in her face. She was stubborn; that much was evident.
“Did you receive your Muni vouchers?”
Mrs. Dominguez gave me a glimmer of a smile. “Yes, I did. Thank you.”
“You get things straight with your landlord?”
“Yes,” she perked up. “He said he could wait for the rent another few days, until after the weekend.”
“And your friend, the woman who got out of prison?”
“Oh, Mary Klein?
Qué lastima.
Too bad for her.”
“What is it?”
“She was arrested for boosting underpants at Woolworth’s. Playtex, no?”
“Who was her lawyer in court?”
“She got assigned to a public defender. A Cambodian woman from Fresno.”
“Oh, yeah? What did she do. It had to be a misdemeanor. Was the charge dropped?”
“No, it wasn’t. Mary violated her parole and she got sent back to Frontera.”
“Wonderful. Just wonderful. Look, I’ve got to go.”
I stood up, stuck out my hand for her to shake. She gathered the food stamps, vouchers, her notepad and stuffed them into her purse. My palm was wet, galvanized by electricity. When she took it, my fingers gave her a spark and she jumped.
“See you next month, Frances.”
“Yes, I’ll phone you if I need anything.”
“You know where to find me.”
I watched Frances recede through the door to the corridor, evanescing into the Pinkertons and the clients. Simmons was carrying a coffee pot to the men’s restroom. I sat down, feeling in my pockets for a cigarette. Before I had a chance to settle back, the telephone rang.
The person at the other end of the line didn’t say anything when I said hello, like a kid playing a practical joke. But I heard the furtive intake of their breath, the lisp that came from an overbite, and I knew who it was.
“Gerald?”
“Charlene? How did you know it was me?”
“How could I not know it’s you? That would be impossible.”
“I think you’re trying to appeal to my vanity.”
“No way.”
“Well, the important thing is that you’re better, but should you be back here? Is that smart?”
“I didn’t want to stay at home. The doctor said it was up to me.”
Petard laughed graciously at my expense. “Don’t be a dunce. I’m not talking about your physical health.”
He paused and before I could respond, as if he was talking to himself and answering his own question, Petard speculated, “I wonder what you’d have been like as a man.”
“A man?”
“You’re more like one than you’re willing to admit. Denial only looks good on some people, and you’re not one of them.”
“What about Lavoris?”
“Lav? Funny you should ask. I convinced her not to take that job with Corrections, that’s what I did.”
“Why the fuck did you do that?”
“You’re interested?”
“More than ever.”
“Hold on for a second, will you?”
A commotion on his end interrupted our dialogue. By the sound of it, there were several men in the office with him. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but whoever they were, their voices were aggressive. Petard owed money to a lot of people. Maybe they were from the governor’s office in Sacramento.
“Hassler?”
Lavoris had stepped into my office without knocking, and without being asked. There wasn’t much I could do, except to internalize my displeasure, which I did. She was so rude and discourteous, it was obvious she’d never curb herself. Knowing that, I hung up the phone and coated my temper with a layer of cynicism, spouting, “I haven’t seen you for a while.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Oh, yeah? Doing what?”
“Who was that woman I saw coming out of here? Haven’t I seen her before?”
“Yeah, with me. But we aren’t here to talk about that, are we, sweetie?”
“Give me one good reason why I should tell you anything.”
“The answer to that riddle is this: because you can always avoid recrimination by telling your secrets to a stranger.”
“Okay. You know why I turned down that job with the Department of Corrections, don’t you?”
“Petard talked you out of it.”
“Is that what he said?”
“Not exactly. We didn’t get that far.”
“He didn’t tell you why he wanted me to stay, did he?”
“No, he was going to.”
“He’s such a dick. Anyway, it’s sayonara to food stamps. Doesn’t it make you sick?”
“Lav, what does he want you around for?”
“Do you really think I should tell you?”
“Hell, yeah, you should. This is something that involves me.”
I already knew why she was staying, why any of us were hanging here. I knew it before she did. We’d come up with Gerald; none of us thought we could be stopped.
Deflowered, it was inconceivable to think about leaving. We had invested too much in him. Lavoris was afraid Petard would abandon her at the DSS. When she thought of flying from the coop, he brought her back into the flock.
“Gerald asked me to stay and help him through to the end of the fiscal year.”
“You’re serious? Is that how he put it?”
“Yes. We were drinking at Ton-jo’s, and that’s what he said.”
thirty-three
T
he weatherman on the television reported the state of California was in the clutches of an unprecedented drought. To add salt to the wound, he said it was coinciding with record breaking temperatures. The German psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich claimed the desertification of any terrain was caused by people’s calcified emotions. But I was elated to trundle south on balmy Mission Street bare-legged and in shirtsleeves during the month of February.
In some other part of the city, I never would’ve seen the fog barreling over the top of Ashbury Heights and above it, the sun shining like a red rubber ball. I wouldn’t have noticed the school kids at the Muni stop waiting for a bus. The
evangelicas
walking arm in arm selling their magazines. The beat cops huddling by the Wells Fargo Bank and the junkies from the Thor Hotel and Eula Hotel scoring dope in front of the Yangtze Fish and Meat Market.
I would not have seen the pig’s feet in the market itself, along with the tripe, the carp laying on beds of shaved ice, the giblets, the cows’ tongues, a pig’s head in a basket and the white-smocked workers going about their tasks dressed in knee-high rubber boots.
One of the butchers was wielding a green garden hose,
washing away the blood, sleeves of pig skin and fish heads down a drainage hole in the brick-tiled floor. Korean women from Sycamore Alley and the Honduran men from the Leandro Soto apartments across the street were jostling at the glass display cases, haggling for meat, fish, poultry, intestines, brains, stomachs, and tails.
Behind them, holding a Neiman-Marcus shopping bag in the crook of his arm and wearing his Adidas trainers while straining to get a glimpse of the products, was Frank.
I stepped through the door and I walked up to him, putting my arms around him. I plunged my nose into his neck-stubble, kissing his jaw. Aroused by my passion, Frank murmured, “Hey, Charlene, what do you think? I’m gonna get something. You got a hankering for fried chicken?”
The palm trees and their fronds waved over the street. The heat waves rose off the roofs of the police cars parked outside, I knew this was as near to heaven as I’d ever get. So I said, why not.
thirty-four
A
noncorporeal Hendrix appeared in my sleep and told me to meet him in a seedy cafe on Mission Street named John’s Coffee Shop. It was a dive where you could get juice, two hot cakes, one egg, two pieces of bacon or sausage for three dollars and fifty cents.
Harry was sitting at the counter and a waitress in a burgundy-colored uniform was wiping down the Formica top. He was the only other customer in the dump until I came in.
I slid onto the seat to his left, and without casting a single glance at him, I said out of the side of my mouth, “Look who’s here. How are you, bucko?”
“Hi, Charlene.”
He was wound up, gnashing his teeth, tense and edgy, how he’d always been. I signaled to the waitress that I’d like a cup of coffee with another one for my friend. I said with my eyes, give us a doughnut.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question, Harry?”
“Sure, feel free to. Say, how’s Frank doing? Staying out of trouble?”
“Ah, he gets into things. He says we need a vacation,
but he’s cool. So like what happened? What did you do to get yourself shot?”
He didn’t even have to think about it.
“I’ve been waiting to tell you. I was too brusque. I can tell you that right now. There was this whole problem about him, the client not giving me enough information to make a claim. If it had been Simmons, the guy would have been told to get lost. But me, I got involved.”
“Did he have a legal address?”
“No, he didn’t even have a place to live. A sister’s address, but she’d kicked him out. That’s what was fucking me up. I was over my head on this one.”
The waitress came back with my cup of coffee, a plateful of doughnuts, and a glass of steaming milk for Hendrix. “This will do him nicely,” she said. “He’s already had several coffees.”
I smiled at her. A statuesque woman, good teeth, black-haired, brown-eyed with sinewy arms and no tattoos. Hendrix warmed his hands with the glass, his neck periscoped into a coat, pensive. He said to me, “This guy had nowhere to live. I wanted to help him, but he had to provide me with several things. He said he understood that. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. I’d seen him a couple of times during the preliminary interviews. You know, those five-minute scenes where the client introduces himself to you, and because you’ve already seen twenty people that morning, you don’t remember anything. If you did, your head would implode.”
“Drink your milk, Harry.”
“Let me finish this. Okay, so that’s when I made my first mistake. I was being asinine. I’d been seeing too many clients. I couldn’t recall on the spot a specific fact about the kid’s case, and I didn’t have it in his file. We’d made an oral agreement about something, and I thought I’d written
it down. Without it, that alone was going to tie up the process for the next two weeks.”
“What did he do?”
Hendrix sniggered. “Take an educated guess, Charlene. He pulled out this gun, no bigger than my hand, and without saying hello, he pumped two slugs into me. I wanted to go, wait, you’re doing me because of food stamps? I just couldn’t believe it.”
I drank my coffee and munched on a doughnut. The coffee was lukewarm and the doughnut was stale, sugary. What could I say? Hendrix should have known better.
thirty-five
T
he tourists visiting San Francisco saw the gardens in Golden Gate Park, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands, the island of Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Ghirardelli Square.
It was like a foreign country to me.
A house had burned down to the ground on Treat Street; the tenants claimed the landlord did it. A thirty-eight-year-old black Cubano male prostitute, one of the original Marielistas, turned up dead by the railroad tracks in the east end of the district. Ten pine saplings had been planted on Harrison Street by the Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce. Eldon Paskins had gotten out of jail, as his bail had been reduced to the paltry sum of five hundred bucks.
I spied him after lunch, washing a section of the floor in the corridor. Eldon was on his knees. With my usual stealth, I came up from behind him, admiring his luscious buttocks.
He must’ve heard me when I stepped on an air pocket in the linoleum. Eldon screwed his head in my direction, and there was so much distaste in his bleak eyes for me,
you’d have thought I’d been making love to his ex-wife on the sly.
We stayed like that for a second, neither of us moving. The bruises on his face were still healing from the throttling the Pinkertons had given him. His lunarscape complexion, the handmade prison craftshop belt he sported, and his hips, so womanly on an otherwise masculine physique, completed my take on the man.
“What are you doing, Eldon?”
It took him a second to realize that I’d opened my gob and that he’d have to respond or risk looking like a moron.
“The usual,” he grunted. “What’s with you?”
“Ordinary incidentals. Things are back to status quo. And you?”
“About the same. Getting my life, you know, in motion. Junk like that.”
To the janitor, progress was meaningless. With violence and stolen moments of romance, he managed to bear up in a universe that wasn’t predisposed to him. That we were living in a state of emergency; the banality of this was not lost on Eldon.
“How’s the leg?” he asked.
The sneaky fuck, thinking I was going to reveal anything to him. “What did you say? My leg?”
“Is it getting any better? I see you’re favoring it, and dragging your foot.”
I asked myself: why should I tell him anything? This fellow had been a friend, and if you tell your sort-of-friends your dreams, you get hurt. To divulge the things I felt when I saw him, it was like giving him dum-dum bullets for his gun. I said, “I’m not bad. So what’s up with your legal bullshit?”