Spiral (6 page)

Fifteen, Haydon thought. Mooney always exaggerated. Nothing had ever been good enough for him just the way it was.

"But I bet I never told you about Patty Sherrill."

"I don't think so," Haydon said. He was now going to hear about Patty Sherrill.

"Used to be a matron in vice. Retired now. Worked there forever. We used to go out for a drink once in a while after the shift. She was ten, twelve years older than me. Had lots of stories." An attribute worthy of great esteem in Mooney's books. He slipped his feet out of his shoes. "Jesus, that feels good. Patty had the dubious pleasure of frisking the gals we brought in. She told me one time she must've frisked two thousand of them over the years. Not a pleasant job, considering the kind who come in there. You know, you just do it, ignoring the damn thing. Just do it, and get it over with.

"Well, one long summer it just happened that all these gals were handling tons of drugs. Naturally, it was necessary for Patty to go over these baby dolls to see what they'd stuffed in their gashes. Seems that was a favorite place. She frisked so many that she began to have this funny feeling about it. She sort of got the heebie-jeebies when she had to do it. Couldn't really figure out what was happening to her, like she was going to freak out every time. She couldn't close her mind to it anymore. Started doing just the opposite, paying attention to these things, close attention, like she was
studying
them. Shape, size, texture. She got gynecological about it.

"Then one week she had this dream."

Mooney looked out the window. "Goddam, look at that." He pointed down the street at several men pushing a car along the shoulder to a gasoline station a block away. "Mexicans." He shook his head. "Stuart, you been driving around this city, what, all your life. How many times you see Mexicans pushing some old junker to a gas station? You can't count 'em. I don't know. I mean, if they've got the money to put gas in it when it runs out, why the shit don't they just put gas in it
before
it runs out? These guys probably passed that station fifteen minutes ago. I don't know. Like to push cars, only thing I can figure. It's a cultural ritual."

As they drove by, Mooney got close to the window so they could see him, and shook his head at them in an elaborate display of disgust. One of the men threw his head back and cursed him, then shot him the finger. Mooney laughed, satisfied, and sat back.

"Patty had this dream," he said, picking up the thread of his story. "A twat nightmare. She had it every night for a week. Same dream. She chased twats. That's what was strange about it. Seems like they should have been chasing her, but they didn't, was the other way around. All colors of hair on these things, all kinds. She told me about 'em, had a whole detailed catalogue of different types. Hell, she'd been scrutinizing the things all summer. They had these little legs, a whole flock of them running from her, jigging jerky fast, like in the old silent films, their hair streaming in the breeze, and every so often one would turn around, still running, and snap at her. Some of them were snapping without even turning around. Said she could hear this clatter of snapping. She said in her dream she wore a surgical glove on her head like a shower cap, all the fingers sticking up and waggling like a rooster's comb. She was terrified one of those twats was going to turn around and go for her, but they never did, and she kept chasing 'em. Seven nights straight."

Mooney shook his head, "Mondo bizarro. Then one night she didn't have the dream, and she never had it again. That was it. Never did feel funny about the job anymore. Just put the whole thing out of her mind. Cured. I asked her, Patty, what the hell you chasing 'em for? She said she didn't know, but she thought maybe it was something Freudian. After that she went on frisking twats for another six years until she retired."

Over the years, Haydon had heard hundreds of Mooney's baroque tales, but never this one. Everything reminded Mooney of a story. But Haydon couldn't ignore the fact that it seemed to be didactic, a modern morality tale for Haydon, who in Mooney's psychoanalytic assessment, it seemed, suffered from the same type of job-related disorder as Patty the Matron. The healing moral seemed to be that if Haydon just hung in there, nature would run its course, and he would eventually be "cured." People went through phases, or something.

Mooney remained curiously quiet after this offering, but the story gave Haydon something to think about until they reached Chicon. The sun was a few degrees off the meridian and the asphalt of the street was getting soft as Haydon parked the tan department car next to the curb and turned off the motor. He and Mooney immediately rolled down their windows. You had to understand Chicon to appreciate it. It ran through the center of one of the barrios near the shipping channel, and like most of the city, it had an abundance of trees, which gave it the quiet attractiveness associated with shady places everywhere. And there were times, if you were not too much of a realist, when it was even beautiful: when it rained and the fog rolled in from the coast and you saw the street through a gauze that obscured the details, and at night when the darkness rounded off the rough edges, and the streetlights made magic of common things, and glittery signs in beer-joint windows lied.

But in midday Chicon was more rough edges than anything else. It had two lanes with room for cars to parallel-park along the crumbling curbs. The asphalt was crazed and the dotted yellow line that marked the center of the street had almost paled to invisibility. Both sides of the street were lined with chunky telephone poles from which draped a ropy confusion of heavy black cables that were strung back and forth across the street as if every other one were an afterthought. The signs on Chicon were consumer-targeted: "
Salem que frescura!" "Que pareja
, Canadian Club!"

Across the street to his left was the graffiti-covered wall that protected like a shell the dead kernel of the old house. A grocery stood on the corner in the next block, and beyond that a store with a sign above its door that said "
Ropas Usada
." Beside that was Tres Marias lounge. The two blocks in front of him contained a small dry-cleaning shop, a shoe shop, Los Cuates lounge, an auto-parts store, a bakery, La Perla lounge, and the barbershop.

The lounges, more accurately cantinas, were the unrepressible bane of the neighborhoods. There were as many as three to the block in this barrio around Chicon, and they were consistently the sites of many of the city's homicides. They were usually small, dank little places, often a converted house that sold only beer and wine. A large number of their customers were young undocumented workers from Mexico and El Salvador who had already fulfilled their number-one dream in the land of opportunity: to own a gun. It was a necessary thing, to defend their machismo and to protect the money they had earned to send home—but were afraid to deposit in banks—until they could get to the Western Union office on Friday night. In the glare of the noon heat these lounges seemed deserted, but Haydon knew that if he paused in their opened doorways and looked into their damp shadows he would see the lonely daytimers sitting in kitchenette chairs at wooden tables, sweating like their brown bottles that left dark rings on the wood.

Haydon wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. The temperature inside the car had swelled rapidly in the few minutes without the air conditioner.

Mooney looked through the windshield at the picture window of the barbershop and saw the barber cutting hair and glancing out at him.

"That guy looks like a barber, all right, but he's not our barber," he said.

"Let's see what he says."

As Haydon walked around the front of the car to the sidewalk, he heard a parrot squawking from one of the shady backyards a few houses away. From Mexico. There was a burgeoning and lucrative black market in parrots, but hundreds of them died every year from heatstroke and suffocation as Mexican
fayuqueros
stuffed them into a variety of cruel hiding places in every kind of vehicle crossing the border. The huge colorful birds that had lifespans equal to that of a man were always in great demand in the drab streets of the barrios.

The barber shop was in a small frame building with asbestos siding. The front door was approached from the sidewalk by ascending three cement steps, but to get to the steps you had to slide around a telephone pole that was inexplicably installed in the center of the sidewalk and aligned with the center of the steps. Herrera had coopted the pole, in defiance perhaps, and painted it barber-pole red, white, and blue up to a height level with the roofline of his shop. It was the most obvious sign on the street. Sparrows had nearly covered the transformer at the top of the pole with their frumpish nests, and their chalky droppings whitened the sidewalk in a two-foot diameter around the pole.

The barber nodded at them as they came into the shop and sat down in the chrome armchairs covered in pea-green vinyl that were lined up against the wall opposite the two barber chairs. Haydon picked up a copy of
Impacto.
The cover of the magazine was dominated by a Mexican vocalist smiling brilliantly and singing into a chrome microphone. He wore a shiny, lead-blue suit and was standing against a flamingo-pink background. Mooney looked through a scrungy copy of
People.
The barbershop smelled of sweet tonics and scented powders.

The barber put the finishing touches on the middle-aged man in the chair and whirled him around to check out the new job in the long mirror behind the chair. The man looked at himself out of the corners of his eyes as he twisted his head, then nodded and said,
"Bien
." The barber stripped the apron from around the man's neck and dusted inside his collar with a little round brush into which he had shaken scented powder. The man got up from the chair, paid, and went out the door, using the candy-striped telephone pole to steady himself as he descended the steps.

Haydon put down the magazine and stood, as the barber looked at him and shook out the stripped apron, popping it twice.

"We were looking for Ernesto Herrera," Haydon said, reaching in his pocket and presenting his shield.

"You talkin' about my brawther, Ernesto," the barber said. "I'm Ricardo." He smiled and flashed a single gold incisor. His long upper lip was adorned with a thin mustache that rose in two upright lines at the center.

"Your brother's not here?" Haydon asked.

"Naw, he's gone home for lawnch. He won't be back here till two." His face sobered quickly. "Hey, that wass bad business over there, huh? Ernesto, he tol' me." He paused. "Man, I seen ever'thing aroun' here, you know. Shootings ... cuttings ... beatings ... but this one, it's the first
nailing/"

He could hardly keep his face straight until he got it out, a kind of staccato throat laugh followed by, "Shit!" Haydon guessed he had pulled that on every customer he had wrapped his apron around that morning.

Behind him, Haydon heard Mooney say sarcastically, "Oh, that's apisser."

"When do you close?" Haydon asked.

"Close? Six. Nine on Thursdays, but this ain't Thursday."

"I can find your brother here until six?"

"Oh, sure, sure. You can catch him later. Ernesto will be happy to talk to you about it."

"I hope he's got a better feel for comedy than his 'brawther,' " Mooney said, standing, and preceding Haydon out the door.

Another customer was coming in as they were going out. "Hey, Javier," Herrera said brightly,
"Que dice?"
The striped apron popped twice.

They stood on the edge of the sidewalk and looked across to the gates. There was nothing along the wall to indicate what had happened there earlier that morning. They crossed the street and approached the iron gates. Haydon looked through at the dead undergrowth that surrounded the house.

"Lock's on the inside," Mooney said. He reached in and lifted it, looked at its bottom, and dropped it quickly, shaking his hand. "Shit!" He licked his burned fingers. "Brass facing's scratched around the keyhole." His suit sleeve was smeared with rust from the old bars. He didn't notice.

He stepped over to the gate hinges next to the wall and examined them. "Rust's been worn smooth in the joints of these pillar brackets. Not regular use, maybe, but recent."

"Can't really see anything in there," Haydon said, and they turned and walked back across the dusty street to the car.

Haydon started the motor, and Mooney turned the air conditioner on high, and they waited a moment for the compressor to begin producing tempered air before they rolled up the windows.

They followed the wall of the estate to the end of the block and turned left. Equidistant from both corners of the back wall there was a tall wrought-iron gate with perpendicular bars. Haydon stopped the car and got out, leaving Mooney in the idling car as he crossed the street. Here the hinges were definitely worn and the padlock was well oiled. Haydon looked down at the dusty ground just inside the gate, where a solid stand of brittle bamboo sprang out of the powdery earth. Above him, rangy cypresses and oaks hung their heavy branches over the top of the wall. There was little else to see.

He went back to the car, and they continued slowly around the block, straining to get glimpses of the house before turning toward Harrisburg on Chicon.