The Angels of Catastrophe (9 page)

Durrutti hesitated. Jackie was behind the door with a .38 Ruger semi-automatic in her hand. Her hair was quarantined under a row of plastic curlers. Her face was slathered with vaseline. A silk bathrobe hung undone, exposing her mammoth belly, and beneath it her cock, which she had tied back with a baby blue thong. She said, miffed by the intrusion, “Shit, it's Ricky Durrutti. What do you need, man?”

He wasn't sure. He walked into the room and over to the bed, tested the mattress with his hand, scattering the silverfish, then sat down on a hill of soiled red satin sheets and looked around him. Arlo had covered the walls and ceiling with Indian fabric. Durrutti answered Jackie, saying, “Ah, I don't know. I just want something to take the edge off things. I need to fucking mellow out. I'm losing it.”

Arlo was quick to fathom Durrutti. She minced toward him with one silk stocking dangling from her hand; the rest of her was stark naked. Her thin hairless concave chest was postmortem white and her penis was jet black. Her hair, wet from a shower, was parted down the middle and hung in two wings to her shoulders. She asked, “What's wrong? You tripping? Shit bugging you? You can tell mama, can't you?”

Arlo's high lilting voice was designed to do two things in life. To make Jackie jealous and to flirt with other men. While Durrutti basked in the warmth of Arlo's mock solicitude, he didn't want to tangle with her spouse. Nor did he want to talk about his recent visit to Kulak. Disclosure would be premature. He replied, “You guys seen Jimmy Ramirez yet?”

Jackie fumed as she pointed the Ruger at Durrutti's head, unconscious of what she was doing. Her torso was marked with faded tattoos from her stint in the Marines. Her cock drooped like fruit under her open robe. “Jimmy is gonna get his ass kicked. I fronted him some sherms to sell for me. And do you know what he did? He smoked them. Then he told me he lost the money. That liar is gonna come to no good.”

The revelation didn't shock Durrutti. The Mexican's reputation was on the skids in every quarter. He was becoming the prince of unpopularity. “Yeah, well, if you hear anything about him, tell me.”

“You still looking for him?” Jackie asked.

Durrutti was noncommittal. “Yeah.”

“How come?”

He didn't know how much he could trust Arlo and Jackie. They didn't like pressure. If they knew Kulak was asking about them, they might turn on him. Like most dope dealers, they'd snitch on anyone who compromised their safety and their enterprise. Durrutti was not exempt. Recognition of this sobered him and he said, “It ain't nothing. Speaking of Jimmy, you got any more sherms?”

Arlo changed voices, trading in her street whore dialect for the prim and efficient clucking of a retail clerk at Woolworth's. “Sure do, darling. You want a two dollar joint or the five dollar kind?”

“Give me a five dollar one, please.”

Jackie plucked a two paper joint from a pocket in her bathrobe and handed it to Durrutti. The misshapen sherm stank of parsley and was warm from having nestled against Jackie's groin. Durrutti threw a handful of one-dollar bills on the bed sheets and pocketed the thing, asking Arlo, “This shit decent?”

Arlo stepped into a Vivienne Westwood shift, a prize from the Goodwill box in Pacific Heights, and trilled for Durrutti's benefit, fabricating an assertion that was part sales pitch and part religious zeal. “Honey, it ain't just good. We're talking about a whole other dimension here.
This here angel dust is pharmaceutical. It's gonna tear your brain apart.”

Arlo's enthusiasm echoed in his ears when Durrutti sat down on the floor in his room. The angel dust was going to take him to a higher ground, money-back guaranteed. He put an ashtray beside him on the rug, then lit the sherm and took a drag. Five seconds passed. Ten more seconds went by and the room began to spin.

Before he could exhale a parade of hallucinations began their attack on his brain. His face ran down his chest in a sheet of melting skin, bubbling like molten taffy. He thought to himself, Thank the Lord I don't have a mirror around.

The doorframe bulged as if someone was going to pop through it. The unlocked door gaped wide—and Lonely Boy stepped inside. “I came to see you, homes.”

The
vato loco
was unarmed and alone. He gave the room a haunted glance, looked in the armoire and under the piss-stained porcelain sink. He got down on his knees and checked under the bed, sneezing on the dust balls. Convinced he was safe from ambush, Lonely Boy then padded over to the window and peeked out from behind the chintz curtains at Mission Street.

He stood there for a long while, staring at the sidewalk. The sun had passed over the building and the street was bathed in shade, cooling the air. He watched the hookers, the school kids and the fishmongers with the
scrutiny of a mad scientist—Mission Street was his laboratory. His grand experiment. His final stand. Satisfied his cosmos was in order, Lonely Boy closed the curtains and sat down on the floor next to Durrutti.

His freshly sunburned open face had a large suppurating zit on his right cheek. He was wearing a black Hanes T-shirt, a pair of blue Dickies cut off two inches below the knees and white Nike trainers. He stretched out his legs and clasped his hands behind his neck and inspected the room again. “So this is your crib, huh? Stark, ain't it? I guess you don't believe in furniture.”

It took everything Durrutti had to get his tongue to work. The struggle to do it made him sweat. The yield was marginal. “Yeah.”

“You ain't got much, do you?”

“Nope.”

Lonely Boy was full of opinions. “You look goofy, dude.” His voice resembled a bullfrog on helium. “You loaded?”

Durrutti let the words roll out of his mouth like fresh cement. “Well ... uh, I'm wasted. You want to smoke some sherms?”

“No, homie, I don't do that stuff no more. It's bad for my lungs. I've got to think of my future.”

Lonely Boy helped himself to one of Durrutti's Marlboros and puffed on it, lost in contemplation. He had burdens all up and down the hemisphere. His family depended on him to become a success for them in America. They wanted him to go to school and get an education. His homeboys needed him to fight the
Sureños and the Norteños and the cops. Lonely Boy wanted to do it all.

He looked older than his years with his clean shaven scalp, the two tattooed teardrops under his left eye that signified time served in the California Youth Authority system, and the tattoo with his mother's name on his forearm. He poked at the zit on his cheek, letting his eyes go faraway, as he said, “You know
mi ruca?”

That was Spooky from Shotwell Street, a tiny girl who wore her hair in a foot-high bouffant girded by a blue bandanna. A
huera
with vivid black eyes. She worked at Whiz Burger, an easy walk from her house. Tattooed in old-school gothic script on her neck was the phrase:
mi amor
por
vida
—Lonely Boy.

“Your girlfriend?” Durrutti asked. “How is she?”

“She's cool, man. Me and her, we've been together for two years. We been to jail together and all over the place, you know? We've seen a lot and yeah, she's knocked up.”

“She's pregnant? Jesus Christ.”

“You know it. Three months now. First of the new year, she's gonna bring me a big strong
hijo.”

The angel dust had left Durrutti color blind and effusive. “That's great. Congratulations.”

“Ain't no thing. It was easy. I could do it every day if I had to. You know what else?”

“What's that?”

Lonely Boy hotboxed the cigarette and exhaled three perfectly symmetrical smoke rings, working his jaw like a locomotive to execute the trick. “I told you I knew who killed the cop on Mission Street, didn't I?”

“No, you didn't.”

“No? Don't bullshit me,” Lonely Boy said. “I didn't? Well, fuck me. I thought I did. But you know Chamorro had to go, don't you? The backstabbing motherfucker. It's like he forgot his arithmetic, that if he tried to rip us off, we wouldn't do anything to retaliate. He was stupid, that's for sure. He fucked up and when you do that, you don't get no second chances.”

Lonely Boy jiggled his head up and down, his eyes brooding and hooded, his jug-handled ears flushed scarlet. He seemed distant and slightly vacant. What he'd confessed made Durrutti cringe as if a furry long-legged tarantula was walking on his face. He didn't want to be the recipient of information like that. On the other hand, his survival depended on it. The paradox was making him crazy. The angel dust made him even crazier. He asked him, “Who did the shooting?”

Lonely Boy whispered with sadness, a tad offended, “You think I'm going to tell you? No way,
cabron.
This ain't about you. This is about me and that shit is confidential.”

“But the cops are fucking with me.”

“So? What can I do about that? Clap my hands and make them go away? If it were only that easy, I would have done it yesterday.”

“I need your help.”

“What do you want, charity? Ain't nothing for free.”

“No, I don't want your goddamn charity. I need advice.”

“Don't be asking me. This ain't no welfare office. Figure it out for yourself. Be a man.”

He made a quarterturn and stared at Durrutti. The
angel dust was taking apart his face. There was a swirling maw where Lonely Boy's mouth should have been. His eyes evaporated into viscous steam. His head went up in a column of smoke. The rest of him disintegrated geometrically; first his arms, then his legs. His dimmed voice crackled. “It's all uphill from here, so you better watch your shit.”

He got to his feet and walked out of the room.

The next thing Durrutti knew the sky was black and it was raining, unusual for the summer months. Sheets of ocean-driven water washed over Mission Street, drowning the sidewalks. He went to the window, cranked it open and stuck his neck outside; a pre-autumnal wind whipped across his face, plastering his hair to his scalp. The traffic lights, a red line of them, blinked on and off like fireflies. An unerring flow of people scurried down the street with newspapers held over their heads, looking lost in the rain. But that was only the beginning; the weather was going to get a lot worse before it got any better.

A
thunderclap of an earthquake rumbled through the neigh borhood before dawn. The temblor left a rash of broken storefront windows on Mission Street, foot-deep fissures in the roadbed and jagged cracks in the unreinforced masonry of the older brick buildings. Mongrel dogs barked from the rooftops and irate sleepy-faced citizens opened their doors to see what the hell was going on. A series of aftershocks shattered more windows and set off a thousand car alarms. No one went back to bed after that.

The quake set the mood for the rest of the day. Maimonides invited Durrutti to meet a snitch he knew, a forty-year-old junkie named Robert. Snitches were similar to fine wine. You could only find them in certain places. They flourished in select climates. Their availability was limited. Each one had a distinct bouquet and flavor and their price tags varied. Unfortunately, as far as wines went, Robert was expensive and he was not a very good year. The relationship between Robert and Maimonides was complicated.

Robert was a Persian Gulf War veteran subsisting on a VA pension. He'd gotten ill handling uranium-depleted
artillery shells for a National Guard howitzer squad in Iraq. While recuperating at an army base hospital in Germany, he'd acquired a vociferous heroin jones.

Robert's pension made him independently wealthy, relatively speaking, and gave him a peculiar status; he didn't have to rob and steal to get money to feed his addiction. He was a rare junkie. It set him apart from everybody else on Mission Street. Robert was ranking ghetto royalty, particularly on the first of the month when he received his government disability check—you would never know one man could have so many friends.

Hours after the earthquake, the day turned blazing hot and was daubed in brown smog; the sun was a red ball leering over the apartment rooftops on Capp Street. Durrutti and Maimonides shuffled over to South Van Ness Avenue through Clarion Alley past mounds of garbage and cast-off clothing to rendezvous with the junkie. Maimonides was limping like the hunchback of Notre Dame. He complained loudly, getting wistful. “I'm a fucking wreck. Every part of me hurts. My head. My back. Everything.”

Durrutti didn't get it. “What's wrong with you?”

Maimonides stopped walking and looked down at his Florsheims and said with spiteful tenderness, “I've got arthritis in my foot. And in my knees. And in my hips. You don't like it? Is it a problem for you? If it is, let me know and I'll tell my feet to cut it out.”