Winners (11 page)

“Definitely.”

“Let’s beat the shit out of them later. I’m serious. I’m serious. Tanya’s great. You having a good time?”

“I must be.”

“I wish you’d stop worrying. Your wife doesn’t give a fuck, you know?”

“What do you know about my wife.”

“I don’t. ’Cept she wants you to be here, I know that, and I know why and I don’t care, because you want to be here too. Fuck, don’t listen to me, I just talk too much, listen, I’m glad you came, I really am. You,” he begins, about to say something else when the music leaps another ten notches and drowns him out. He leans forward very close, and Shane can see the octagons of pores above his lip, smell something recent and minty in his breath. “You’re the real thing, you know that, don’t you? You and me, we should hang out.”

“We’re hanging out.”

“Yeah. Too bad you won’t join my gym. Makes me almost wish I played basketball.”

Shane doesn’t know what he’s about to say but suddenly the scouts return with girls but no coke. They all head outside, a group now, turning Fulton’s vehicle into a clown car packed double-decker, boys beneath girls. Fulton sits up front, hanging a mysterious silver chain on the rearview mirror.

“You and your damn trophies.”

“No red panties tonight?”

“Not tonight. Now what’s this about drugs?”

“Yeah what happened Ed?”

“I don’t know.” They’re cruising down Third Street in the wrong direction, continuing by the old abandoned warehouses and docks.

“Where are we?” a girl says.

“I think my car was towed down here once.”

“Dogpatch,” Shane says.

“Fucking nowhere,” Ed says. “Should have done the Tenderloin.”

“I’ve got some pot,” Tanya’s friend says.

“Pot.” Ed sounds disgusted, searching the streets for a sign.

Shane looks out the window and sees the elevated concrete of 280. On the other side, the Potrero Hill projects wink out from the hill with their hundred points of bright white light. He whispers something to himself but he’s too drunk to know exactly what. He feels Fulton watching him.

“Someone knows where,” Fulton says. He sounds giddy, meeting Shane’s eye and trying not to laugh at the funniest private joke in the world. “Shane knows.”

They all look at Shane.

“Where,” Ed says.

“Over there,” Shane says, not thinking, just talking. He points like a child. They all look out the window, seeing nothing.

“Where?”

“Those lights on the side of the hill?” Fulton says.

“What are those?”

“The projects,” Shane says. “That’s the projects.”

“Yeah right,” Tanya says.

“Fuck you, Fulton, don’t do this. I’ll do the Tenderloin, okay.”

“Too late. Call out the turns, Shane.” The girls are making noises but he shakes off their protests. “Shane,” Fulton says again.

“Take a right,” Shane says.

“Right turn!”

“Dude, I don’t know.”

“Scared?”

“No, just looks like a pretty shitty idea.”

“The shittiest,” Fulton says. “Shane?”

“Straight.”

“Shane.” He can’t see Tanya through the bodies but he hears the plaintive voice from his past somewhere in the car. They’re getting closer now, and the projects look like a prison camp quarry chiseled into the steep hill. The bright white lights blaze from the corners of every building, like warning signals laid out for aviators and drivers and pedestrians alike. Watch out for the mountain. Watch out for black people. Watch out for everything, bub.

“Left.” Shane wants them to see it, now.

“Oh fuck,” a girl says, almost cheerfully.

They climb the ruined slope and pass the first barracks, doors and windows boarded up with plywood. Below them they can see the highway, cars skimming by on the elevated pavement. Then all views disappear as the projects leap up around them on all sides, a tunnel of rock and concrete. From the shadows up ahead, shapes move from the buildings to the streetlights, three guys sprinting to intercept the big black car, elbow jockeying one another. Shane feels the girl on his lap contract and stiffen, bracing for the impact.

“Stop the car,” Fulton says. The car halts gently, clinging to the steep grade. No one says a word.

The guys outside arrive, stooping to peer inside, shouting something. Shane can feel the girl pushing back into him, trying to get out of the way. Behind the first wave, a few more shapes have stood up off the hoods of parked cars, leaning forward to see what happens. A hand floats inches in front of Shane’s face on the other side of the glass, one finger rolling through the air as if to will the window down. A face appears, clear eyes leaping through the back seat and then the window hums magic and retracts. Shane can smell dust and metal and burnt rubber. Something else. What does blood smell like, he thinks.

“What you need?” The guy moves back from the car a half-step, getting the angle to try to see them all at once. If he likes what he sees it’s impossible to tell. His voice is loud, filling the car with sound. With one hand he is holding off the other two guys behind him and they stay put, trying to peer over his shoulder. He gives Shane another half a second, the look scouring out the inside of Shane’s head, seeing everything there in one instant, everything, and not finding one single thing of interest. “What we doing tonight?” the guy says, frowning.

“Ed?” Fulton says. “Would you like to place an order?” Ed seems frozen, looking straight ahead and saying nothing. “Come on Ed. Tell the man what we need. And get a lot.”

“Quarter,” Ed says.

“Quarter,” Shane repeats softly.

The guy stiffens slightly, despite himself. “Quarter,” he repeats. He nods, turns his head to the guys behind him and murmurs something. They take off jogging, back towards the buildings. The guy holds out six fingers. “Red Jetta,” he says, shifting his weight from side to side as if dancing to a private beat. Fulton’s hand appears, stretching through the car like plastic man, and Shane takes the wad of bills and holds it out and the dancer disappears.

The car is silent as they roll forward, slowing beside the parked red shiny car in question. They stop there, waiting.

“I don’t see shit,” Ed says.

“Hold on, now,” Fulton says. “Just wait a minute.”

“They’re gonna fuck us, they have to,” Ed says, miserable. “Let’s just get out of here.”

“Shut up Ed. It’s business. We’re businessmen, remember.”

“That guy?”

“Everyone. Fucking us isn’t a good business plan.”

“Why not? Best case it’s light and cut to shit. Worst case we end up dead.”

“One day for sure.”

“Jesus,” a girl says.

From the shadows, a figure appears, tossing a crumpled brown paper bag onto the hood of the red car, right outside Shane’s window. Shane watches the kid disappear and then leans out the window into a halo of streetlight, stretching one arm out, trying to reach the bag. He can’t get it, they’ve put it deliberately too far from the edge so you have to get out of the car. No way. Shane’s gaze slips up beyond the car where he sees the blue and white jersey catching the light, the eyes above it wide with knowledge. Tennessee nods at him, bobbing his head slowly, smiling with his Cheshire teeth. His mouth moves, a whispered nothing. There’s someone standing beside him, and Tennessee turns to face him, pointing at the car. Shane bangs his head in his jerky rush to vanish. The knock jolts faces into motion, as he closes his eyes: Tennessee, Debra, Jimmy, Shane, Lou. Samson. He blinks wide and peers out into the dark, trying to see Tennessee’s friend.

The pressure in the car changes as a door opens, front passenger, and now Fulton is striding around the car, through the headlight beams, the sheen in his pants sparkling in the light. He plucks the paper bag off the hood, glances inside, and tosses the bag through the back window, into the car. The bag lands on Tanya’s lap and she convulses as if it’s a poisonous snake. Ed has the bag now, but Shane is watching Fulton, standing there in the dark facing Tennessee. Tennessee calls out to Fulton, Shane can’t quite hear what.

“Okay,” Ed says, his voice small and shaky. “Okay, come on, lets go.”

Fulton lingers and then puts his hand to his mouth and kisses his fingertips. His lips smack loudly and then he flicks his fingers at the two shapes watching from the shadows. Fulton holds his hand steady, a perfect follow through as he watches the kiss through the air to its final destination. The shapes don’t move but Shane can almost see them growing in size, inflating toward a large, loud pop.

“Jesus.”

“Get in the fucking car!” someone yells, or everyone, the car thick with sudden sound.

Fulton’s hand snaps shut and then he turns and shimmies back across the car headlights, breathing quickly, teeth clamped together, moving fast. He dances the final steps to the car door, quick quick slow. He opens and jumps in.

The car leaps forward even before the door slams shut, Shane hears a voice call out to them, he waits to feel a thump against the car, a body, a brick, a bullet, something is going to stop them, but instead he feels the thank-you-ma’am of hopping over the hill. Music erupts from the speakers in the car, and everyone is talking at once as they plunge down into the city, waiting there below.

“Goddamn, you’re a fucking nut, you know that?” Dan is laughing, Tanya is upset, Matt is making out with one of the girls, Ed is snorting their purchase through some sort of nose pipe. Someone passes Shane a flask.

“How about that?” Fulton says to Shane across the din. “How ’bout that, huh?” The girl on Shane’s lap is snorting now, reloading. Shane shakes his head but she dips a finger into the powder and puts it in his mouth, rubbing along the gums. The car is filling with pungent smoke as Tanya’s friend puffs on a joint and passes it up to Fulton. Shane can still taste the girl’s finger. His gums are numb. The car has gotten smaller, everyone expanding in the smoke and coke and drink.

Ed’s eyes are bulging out of his head, he’s coked up good and shouting at Fulton. “You and your fucking field trips, you’re going get us killed, you know that?”

“Shut up and do drugs,” Fulton says. “We’re alive, aren’t we? We’re alive as you get.”

“Blow them a fucking kiss?”

“Shit, they loved it. All those guys are equal opportunity doinkers.” Fulton’s reaching back and pulling one of the girls into the front seat and she goes easily, laughing. When her thighs have cleared the gap between the seats, Fulton is still looking back, locking his eyes on Shane as the girl settles into Fulton’s lap.

“Gotta take me back there sometime,” Fulton says. “The real thing. I knew it.” Shane shakes his head in disagreement. His brain wobbles in his skull, a straightjacket banging angry against walls. Ed passes the nose pipe up front and Fulton takes a fast hit. “We’ll leave these jerks at home, just you and me.” He leans back to pass Shane the pipe and whispers, “We know we can all just get along.”

They’re passing General Hospital, and as they stop at the light Shane opens his door without warning, slipping from beneath the bodies and tumbling out on the street. He lies there on the pavement, tiny pebbles digging into his hands, expecting to vomit, but instead he pops up on his feet and pulls in an enormous breath. Someone calls after him, they all do maybe, but he’s running. He hears his name. He runs.

He cuts through a parking lot, hugs the side of a building, and crosses the wide avenue at full tilt, ignoring the light and barely looking for traffic. He can really move when he wants to. The air sluices by his cheeks, pulling his face back into a smile. He just keeps running, with the short quick steps of a little kid. He passes dark store windows advertising beef, bodegas with their fruit locked up, an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, Discolandia, Mexicatessen, a block of travel shops and money grams. Shane lets his stride out as he races past stores he’s never seen before, never stepped inside, maybe never will. His feet hammer against the concrete, smash smash smash, those hundreds of bones holding steady and strong. If he follows this street across the valley and up the hill it will take him straight into his neighborhood, to a corner four blocks from home. These long veins of San Francisco are what keep them all alive, connecting neighborhoods that each believe they’re the city’s heart. He wants to bring Lou here in daylight, he thinks, it’s been a while since he showed her something. They will walk this block, the sidewalks crammed with Mexicans and strollers, walk it as they once walked the hills of North Beach, the Seacliff trail to Land’s End, Baker Beach where you can see the Golden Gate over gritty sand. Have you ever seen a Mexicatessen? he’ll say, a tamale parlor? a Discolandia? a psychic’s shop? a bridal store for little girls? And she hasn’t, just as she’d never seen the other secrets of this city with which he wooed her, long ago. Fuck the Fultons and the projects, the live/work lofts and the strippers in the Tenderloin. San Francisco is the pet cemeteries in Colma, the houseboat canals, the reservoirs, the rooftops of this city, cresting in black tar peaks and faded waves. It’s like he’s forgotten until just now: this is my city. Not the moguls and the gangsters, mine. He’ll show her. Show them all. He runs.

L
OU IS AMUSED
by his hangover, which lasts until Monday. He hears her moving around the house, talking on the phone, vanishing and then returning as he lies in the curtained bedroom drifting in and out of sleep. His urine is an outrageous shade of irradiated orange, he can’t seem to get enough fluids into his body to make things right. He still feels slightly foggy when he drops Lou off at the airport Monday morning for a work trip to New York. She kisses him like she means it and says she’ll be back soon. Be good. She wants to hear all about it when she gets back. He goes home, cancels his jobs, and drinks coffee for the rest of the day. There’s a message on his cell phone from Fulton, a cheerful hey what’s up, but Shane doesn’t return the call.

He skips basketball on Tuesday and schedules a chimney liner in Pac Heights as a kind of penance. The house is on the same block as one of the first roofs he ever climbed on, almost twenty years ago with Dad. Watching his ten-year-old son crab-walk down that steep roof must have made even his tough guy father nervous. Shane wrestles the 200-pound metal snake up there alone and then crams it in, swearing and sweating. The liner gets stuck and he has to pull it up and try again. The steel scrapes against the brick inside as his arms shake with the effort. There’s a problem with the chimney cap, he’s brought the wrong kind and has to crimp the oval mouth into a perfect circle to make the fit, jerry-rigging to secure it with drill and wire and ill-fitting screws. Improvise or die. Below him in the guts of the house he can hear a toilet flushing.

When he’s done he sits straddling the roof crest, resting in the sun. Pacific Heights is a paradise of rooftop treasures hidden away up high. Antennae and cupolas, skylights and triangular windows in the eaves, small-tiled patios and miniature chairs, benches, tables, plants, gardens, putting greens, sculptures of cats and naked ladies, stiff poles flying unknown flags, bird nests, vanes and wires and metal laundry trees. Steel vents shaped like wild mushrooms or periscopes or tall nuns with flapping caps. Chimneys. Chimneys everywhere. He gets that childhood twinge of looking out and feeling entitlement to every aerie inch he sees. As a boy, he couldn’t imagine that he’d want to do anything but leap around on rooftops the rest of his life.

His hand is bleeding slightly, a little cut from the hard edge of something. He wipes it against his pants. He presses the cut and then blows on it until it stops. It seems like he bleeds about every other day. Black vinyl gloves would help but they annoy him. He wears them sometimes to keep his hands from turning black. Dirty hands are damning. People think he’s a mechanic. He looks down into the window of the enormous house next door, where a man is pacing a room, gesticulating, talking on the phone. Sometimes the men are naked, the women too, sometimes they’re having sex or cooking or staring at themselves for minutes at a time. The man next door is angry. Someone, somewhere, is trying to fuck him and he won’t have it. How does he make his money? No one Shane meets anymore understands why he cleans chimneys, although Shane’s not sure there’s anything to understand. But when he sees the look in people’s eyes—if that man glances up and out his window—he wants to tell them: remember seven years ago? Remember that? He was out of college and his dad was dead, his mother’s house was slipping from brick to twigs to straw, these were the beautiful cloudless drought years and the economy was a mirthless running joke. He could have gone to work for someone, probably—but his dad had left a $60,000-a-year business already in motion, and there wasn’t anything out there close to that. No one had doubted his decision then, and it never occurred to him that his dad’s business was also at its limit, that he wasn’t ever going to make more than that without changing everything.

By now everyone thinks he should have sold the business, or forced hapless Jimmy to take it over, or expanded it into an army of trucks and soldiers to do the dirty work. Something. He is supposed to have done something. He’s done his best to explain to Lou the feeling of the self-determined life, making his own hours, his own decisions, his own regions of responsibility. This is something she can understand—who wants to work for someone else? Not her. Not him. But what’s so great about bleeding hands, about rooftops, about wrestling giant metal snakes? Why not trade in the body for the mind, if you’ve got a good one? Why doesn’t he want more? These are the things Lou can’t figure out. These he can’t convincingly explain. He does want more. He just doesn’t want it or expect it from his work. He doesn’t want a chimney-sweeping empire, to worry about employees trashing Persian rugs with sooty boots or killing infants in negligent fires or falling off the roof. He doesn’t want to trade in his brushes for an office, dust off his Cal diploma and jump into the fray no matter what Yahoo secretaries make. Fuck Yahoo. He knows that Lou’s days inside would drive him completely cuckoo. His brothers can do it: Brendan a desk-tied engineer in Marin, Tommy a high-tech salesman in Livermore, even Jimmy who reads all day because he won’t get a job and can’t be trusted on a roof, they seem to have no problem domesticating themselves to a static indoor life of pneumatic chairs, computers, phones, the unmoving printed word. Why not him? What’s so great about climbing on top of steep-pitched roofs to peer down into the rough black throats of houses? Well it’s not perfect but it works for him. Okay but for how long? And what about when he gets hurt again?

Alcatraz and Angel Island sit shimmering in the September heat in the rare and glassy calm of the bay. He stands and unzips and pees serenely to the tiles of the roof, staring north into the purple Marin hills as his self-made creek runs to the gutter and disappears into the unknowing world below. Then he checks the fittings one more time and descends to tell his client everything’s good to go. You got yourself a brand new chimney system, people. Go ahead and burn.

He’s on the roof at Carol’s house when his phone begins to ring.

Carol is an older lesbian and pyromaniac who builds enormous fires all year round and has her chimney cleaned twice a year. Once annually for most people is more than enough but in her case twice seems like a good idea. Carol has a basement full of good dry wood and likes to send great hot yelping flames licking up the sides of her chimney night after night, thumbing her nose at the utilities and deforestation and the frequent chill outside. She is the McCarthys’ oldest continuous customer, dating from the very first days of his dad. Her house has two chimneys, but one of them was bricked up until five years ago. Shane found a fossilized bird in there, its mouth agape in mid-scream. A newspaper from 1910. His father once discovered a box full of old coins and silverware in a chimney in the Haight. You hear these stories. Beer bottles, tennis balls, tiny skeletons, but he knows a guy who found a loaded gun. Santa better watch his ass.

Carol’s chimney has been cleaned regularly of secrets, but it’s used so often that even after six short months he can never see the telltale cleaning lines of wire brush there up top. “It’s scary Shane,” Carol’s partner always tells him the minute he arrives. “She’s going to burn the house down one day I know it.”

“She’s made it this far. All these years.”

“I know, but that’s what I’m worried about. That she wants to go out in her own big funeral pyre.”

“God forbid. I’ve got a new video, give it a shot.” The new video in question is one in a series Shane receives from the National Chimney Sweep Association, featuring chimney fire: chimneys blasting a huge, hot, angry spume of fire thirty feet into the air. He’s never seen a fire like that with his own eyes, this greedy gleeful kind that would think nothing of gobbling up a city block. The videos are meant to scare clients into regular cleanings and general submission, but Shane mostly gets them for the amusement of Carol and himself.

“You know that video won’t help,” Carol’s partner scolds him. “She loves the pyro porn.”

“Well, got to get the girl her fix.”

They’re watching the video right now, he can hear the sound of the television filtering up the chimney and out the top. He answers his phone.

“This Shane?”

“Yes.” A woman.

“Yeah, you said to call?” They have the volume cranked up down there, he can almost hear the whoosh of the recorded fire. Is someone singing? “This Debra.”

“Debra.” He feels a jolt of panic. He’s in Fulton’s big black car, a young buttock rubbing against his matrimonial thigh.

“Debra Marks. You, uh, what you doing, you with your brother?”

He sees the apartment, Sam’s picture on the fridge tilting in the breeze. “No, yeah, how are you?”

“I wanted to talk to y’all, about that thing?”

“Okay, sure, yeah.” He waits for her to talk about it but she waits right back. “Hello?” he says.

“I’ll be home in twenty minutes,” she says. “You could pick me up.”

Never. “Okay,” he says. “Give me an hour.”

“An hour.” She sounds pleased. “I’ll see you.” The line goes dead. Downstairs Carol is laughing, thrilled by the cataclysm of fire, and he steps away from the chimney, suddenly not wanting to hear the private world below. He should be used to it by now, stepping into other people’s lives.

He collects Jimmy first for backup and drives them to the projects while his brother narrates the highlights of Tuesday’s game and then speculates on Sam. Jimmy’s been thinking about the kid and can’t wait to talk to Debra. He’s got theories, ideas, plans. Shane sits there nodding but not exactly listening. They halt at a stop sign on top of Potrero Hill.

“It’s left,” Jimmy says, pointing one sure finger into the orange roofs and ruined pavement waiting for them again.

Shane knows exactly where it is, but his foot won’t move and his hands are pulling right. He heard a story once about anarchists in England who would buy lion shit when the circus was in town. They’d put it outside their little anarchist houses, and when the police came with their dogs, the dogs would smell that shit and refuse to cross the line. Those dogs had never seen a lion before but they knew whatever made that shit was big and wanted to eat them.

“Left,” Jimmy says again, more forcefully, and Shane clears his mind and feels his feet and hands obey, sending the van on its way. That’s what Jimmy’s for.

The streets are empty. Shane knows the way but for some reason doesn’t recognize a thing. Is that where the red Jetta parked? Is this Tennessee’s nighttime stoop? If they’d been shot that night, if he’d crawled out of a car of corpses, fairy-dusted with bad coke, what would he be able to reconstruct for the cops and jury and wife? He can’t quite look closely at the streets around him, now that he has an inkling of how dangerous they must be.

He pulls into the lot and Jimmy hops out of the van without a second thought. I need to tell him something, Shane thinks. I’m going to get my brother killed. Jimmy takes two steps toward Debra’s door when it opens and she slips out, like someone trying to keep cats inside.

“Where we going?” she asks when they’re all safe in the van, barreling out of the projects as fast as Shane can manage. Jimmy and Debra both look at him as if this expedition were Shane’s idea.

“I missed lunch,” Shane says, and despite the fact that it’s four o’clock, Jimmy and Debra nod and quickly begin discussing their impending meal.

“I don’t care for Mexican food,” Debra says.

“How can you not like Mexican food? That’s like you just don’t like food.” Jimmy is appalled.

“Get on.” She glares back at him, enjoying their disagreement. “Taste like sweat.”

“Without Mexicans, this town wouldn’t even eat. It doesn’t matter what kind of restaurant, nine out of ten there’s Mexicans cooking in the kitchen.”

“Aw, now you playing.”

“Without Mexicans, this city’d starve to death. Shane, back me up here. Wait, I know a place,” Jimmy says.

Shane follows Jimmy’s directions toward the bay, under the highway and over the railroad track that runs from downtown south near Third Street, past Potrero Hill. From the van Shane can make out the tunnels below where the city swallows up the double-decker trains coming in from San Jose. A couple of kids are leaning against the railing above the tracks, eating chips and flicking crumbs onto the rails below. Shane drives them past trucks and camper vans where people are obviously living. Homeless encampments marked by tents and shopping carts. This is a part of the city where you can still disappear.

“Any news from Samson?” Shane hears himself say.

Debra doesn’t look at him but shakes her head. “Now you got me hungry,” Debra tells Jimmy. “Where we going?”

The place is Cajun and good. They sit at one of the small tables crammed near the front, even though Jimmy lobbies for the counter. Debra nixes that. She doesn’t want to watch them cook. She asks if she can still get breakfast and orders poached eggs, bacon, biscuit, grits. Jimmy gets a catfish po’boy. Big bowl of gumbo for Shane.

“Well?” Jimmy says.

“It’s adequate,” she fires back, smiling. “’Cept for the biscuit. Can’t do too wrong with breakfast.”

“Where do you go to eat?”

She shakes her head. “If I’m out I’m eating pizza, chicken or something, you know, something quick. Mostly I cook. And if I want soul food I make it myself.”

“This is soul food?”

“No, like real soul food. Chitlins, hot-water cornbread, black-eyed peas. You got to clean the chitlins right and lot of people don’t clean ’em right.”

“Come on,” Jimmy says. “People don’t really eat chitlins.” They stare at one another, and then Debra smiles.

“You messing with me, now.”

“Nah.” He leans back and looks around. “Well I like this place,” Jimmy says. “Even if they don’t have chitlins. Least it hasn’t been colonized by yuppies yet.”

“Oh, you not a yuppie.”

“Me?” Jimmy can’t believe it. “I don’t even have a job. And I’m living at home.” He sounds almost proud about it. “That’s not too yuppie, is it?”

“Oh boy,” she says, shaking her head, “you one a those. Let you momma take care of you ’til she drops, I know that one.” She looks at Shane with solidarity, smiles knowingly and he smiles with her. He likes the way she handles Jimmy. Jimmy seems poised to explain something, then thinks better of it and shrugs.