Rain Down

by Steve Anderson

  Rain Down

  A Crime Novella

  Steve Anderson

  Copyright © 2019 by Steve Anderson

  Cover design: Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  First published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Second edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Other novels by Steve Anderson:

  The Losing Role (Kaspar Brothers #1)

  Liberated: A Novel of Germany, 1945 (Kaspar Brothers #2)

  Lost Kin: A Novel (Kaspar Brothers #3)

  The Other Oregon: A Thriller

  Under False Flags: A Novel (Wendell Lett)

  The Preserve: A Novel (Wendell Lett)

  Steve Anderson on Amazon

  www.stephenfanderson.com

  Table of Contents

  Rain Down

  Thank you for reading.

  My latest novel is The Preserve

  About the Author

  Rain Down

  The Fall of 2009

  Oscar Alvarez is missing. Vanished. Without my friend Oscar, I got nothing. Oscar is the only one who believes in me. He believes in me more than I do myself. The fact that he’s gone missing makes me worry. It eats away at me and it makes me start imagining, like I used to so much, what it would be like to climb up onto the Steel Bridge and never have to climb back down.

  It’s Friday. For the second day in a row, I look for Oscar on one of the four dingy concrete corners of SE Sixth and Ankeny, which is near Portland’s actual center on a map, but far from its heart. This is where we always meet, where we go off to work together. By 7 most mornings, all four corners fill up with Latino day laborers—jornaleros, they call themselves. They hail anything that looks like a work vehicle; vans, pickups, old station wagons, even cargo bikes, this being Portland-town. It’s already past 7:15 am now. I pass through the crowd, the rare gringo here. I ask the jornaleros in my crappy Spanish, “Donde Oscar? Tu ve’ Oscar?” No, they say, no one seen Oscar. And then they’re asking me the same, looking me up and down.

  “Of course I haven’t seen him,” I say—that’s why I’m asking all of you. Even the old caballero who always knows something can only shrug at me.

  “He’ll be here,” I say. “He always shows. If he don’t, I’ll find him.”

  I keep waiting and watching, though it’s way past the pickup. Three days ago, Oscar and I were working a good job he had going for us. The job supervisor always sent someone over here in a pickup to get us. But no pickup came the day that Oscar vanished.

  It’s October and getting colder and I hop up and down to keep warm. I feel like that kid whose friend didn’t show up at the school bus stop. I got no idea where to start looking. For all the time we worked together, Oscar never told me where he lived. He lived alone. I knew it was an apartment way out on East Powell. I guessed he wasn’t too proud of it. I could relate. Where I’m living is a homeless hostel, one of many in the center of the city. Homeless Lifelines, the place is called. It’s the first time I’ve had a constant roof over my head for a couple years, thanks to Oscar. To most people it might as well be a prison. Many of the men sleeping on cots in the open room around me have been in jail for this or that, most of it drugs, and some others in another kind of jail, for those guys “not right in the head.” When I left this morning, the day receptionist smiled at me wearing my new work gloves as I passed through the lobby. She has a wide face and an even wider smile. I waved, smiled. Neither of us looking at that white board with the names and dates of boarders checking out soon, the one’s whose time is up.

  If I don’t get more work soon, my name is going right to the top.

  Now it’s late morning, the weekend’s coming, and the four corners have thinned out. The few jobs came and went. I got elbowed out a few times, and I can’t blame the elbowers. Without Oscar, these new heavy-duty work gloves I got on make me a big red flag. I’m just some sorry-ass gringo street dude in a shabby Oregon State Beavers starter jacket and stained work pants. The only thing missing is the cardboard bed and cart of cans and bottles.

  *

  Oscar knew how it was—as if he had also grown up in a Canby trailer park and not Guatemala, like he did. Oscar looked about 20, but was 32 and seemed old-man-wise to me. I first met him last spring in Dad’s Place on Grand Avenue, not a surprise there. There aren’t too many bars left for guys like us; all the new East Bank bars and cafes might as well be West Side day-spas and downtown jewelry stores. We played Golden Tee, the golf video game. We had a couple beers in a booth. At first it seemed to me that Oscar had this power for excavating the truth. Day laborers weren’t all Mexicans, he told me—they’re Guatemalan, El Salvadoran, Honduran, even a few gringos. Oscar said we could help each other—I had the English while he had skills better than most subcontractors. He even gave me his old work gloves.

  We got jobs. Some jornaleros trash-talked us in Spanish but I got the gist: just who did Oscar think he was bringing in a gringo when it was hard enough? Oscar told them: it doesn’t matter where we’re from, we’re stronger all working together, instead of divided like the powers that be want us. Summer came and jobs kept coming for us. I wanted to quit a few, the way some supers and subs treated us, but Oscar told me to focus on the upshot. I had just enough pay to hit Goodwill for work clothes and the Laundromat. We hung out after work. Oscar had almost played pro soccer back in Guatemala, he told me. He was a forward, always wearing the number 9. A bad knee wrecked it all, though, and the knee hurt on some jobs, but he didn’t complain about pain, not like I did. Not openly. When my back wanted to spasm and made me have to limp, he told me how to stretch it, take care of it, manage the pain.

  People wonder what’s wrong with me, what’s my deal, why me. It’s never like people guess it is. No, I don’t have Tourette’s or hear aliens (who make me scream at you); I don’t pass out and piss myself in doorways and my face isn’t fried brick red from all the sun, cold and wind, though my voice has gotten a little gravely. In movies and TV there’s always something clear-cut that puts a guy on the street—war or disease, a priest or a cult, disability, abuse. Those’ll do the trick. But homelessness can also just befall you. I first came into the city about fifteen years ago. It owned me ever since. Every job I had seemed to end up in Central Eastside—pulling auto parts, powder coating, dishwasher, heaving around furniture and pallets. Nothing lasted—if business was down, I was always first to go. I had the back spasms and limp, which did not help. Sleeping on the hard stuff made it worse, cardboard or not. As best I could, in the spring and summer at least, I’d try to leave the shelters and handouts to the worse off. I got by. I collected cans. I’ve had places to live and applied for plenty others, but the pavement always ended up kinder than the paperwork, than the questioning. I tried to look for work again and again, but things only got worse when the economy went to hell and now we’re a year into it.

  I know what people think. Suck it up, bro, and get a real job—you’re only 37. But poverty’s not that simple. The despair is worse. It’s not just the dough you’re lacking. In the same way the rich guy gets richer because he’s pulling in the money and yanking hard on the strings, the chances for a guy like me sink faster than dead weight in the Willamette River.

  *

  I’m still on the corners, hoping for an after-lunch rush. I try to hail a U-Haul van but the few laborers left crowd me out. I take a look around. Any jornaleros worth a rip have gotten work already or given up. Only the users are left, passed out against walls as if lined up and shot where they shot up, mouths open, heads rolling around.

  Oscar had started confronting these drug-taking types who were enc
roaching on the four corners and using us for cover. Most jornaleros stayed clear, let the druggies’ have one corner of the four, but Oscar got in their faces, urging them to get help, stop making it worse on jornaleros by spooking businesses and bringing the cops around.

  I stayed clear of that noise. Amy, my sort of ex, was a joneser herself. Oscar got out his power tool for that. He said I was not helping Amy by trying to clean her up the way I was. I was only prolonging her suffering, like you’d feed and massage a bull for the next bullfight. Amy is just a little thing with a delicate face and big eyes. She used to come find me when the tricks, drugs and rotgut got up on top of her. I’d get her cleaned up. Sometimes we’d move it to big bushes along the river, farther south past the OMSI museum was best, we could just stay in there the whole day. I could see Amy cleaned up for good. I told her it would happen. She is still young, her body strong despite the scabs and bruises and red veins in her eyes. But she started to go her own way more after I met Oscar. I still keep an eye on her, when I can find her.

  It’s afternoon now. I only have about fifty bucks left. I’d counted it out this morning on the edge of my cot, facing the wall so no one could see me counting it.

  I rip my new gloves off my hands, and I exit the four corners and head out.

  I have to change this up. I have to do what Oscar would do.

  I unlock my beater BMX bike from its signpost, cross Grand and pedal through the old industrial riverside, under the Morrison Bridge on-ramp between the train tracks and river. The stretches of old cobblestone thump at my too-low tires and the bridge overpass hovers above me, its thick pillars monotonous square trunks not even good enough for chickenshit graffiti. The freight trains thunder past a block away, the barricade lights going ding-ding-ding. I pass the homeless village of tents, tarp and cardboard, carts and old bikes lining the way. Amy wouldn’t be here because this group kicked her out.

  I’m not looking for her right now anyway. I’m pedaling over to the job site where me and Oscar last worked. There’s a chance Oscar is there. Maybe he was cutting me off? I have to be ready for that. Maybe I wasn’t doing good enough work.

  The job site is close-in between Morrison and Hawthorne. It will be a condo building one day. They had Oscar and me doing the demolition. The work’s been rough. They gave me a ripping bar to tear apart rusty, grimy metal cabinets and built-ins and then they had us clear out the cellar, all kinds of ancient heavy equipment down there, pitted and jagged like boilers from some old ship. Oscar was so good the supers asked him for advice and let him use their tools, even a welding torch. Sometimes Oscar stayed later than me. He would make me go home, get some rest for my back and my dang nerves.

  Now that I remember it: the last time I saw Oscar, he was going to stay after everyone else left.

  At the moment the job is a skeleton of an old industrial building, some floors half exposed, the windows gaping squares, tangles of old metal and fittings. It’s a job stuck in demo phase. A chain-link fence surrounds the site. A sign reads Tappen Urban Projex in big letters along with the words Green is Good. On a mockup photo of the condo building, boxes with windows protrude from a crazy-ass quilt of surfaces and textures, making the whole deal look like mismatched egg cartons stacked on their sides too high.

  I stand across the street, watching. Inside the fence, various subs cover material stacks with tarp while others haul away tools, machines. It looks like a job on hold, if you ask me.

  And no sign of Oscar.

  I walk on over. Standing behind the closed gate is this big-shouldered construction guy, Manny, who I call Burly Man. Oscar didn’t know the word but he didn’t have to. Big Manny stands there looking like he has to visit the John but someone’s using it. They got him standing here like a bouncer, which is weird. They never had a guard in the middle of the day like this, especially one that’s not a tin badge. I talk to Manny through the chain link.

  “I’m supposed to say the same thing to anybody that comes by,” he tells me.

  “What’s that?”

  “Sorry, dude. We’re going to be down a while.”

  “Oh. Something happen?”

  “Yeah, it’s called the economy. That’s my guess. Shit’s so bad they can’t even pay for real security.”

  “Thanks for not being a dick to me,” I say.

  That gets Manny smiling, but I meant it. “Listen,” he says. “I used to be on the street. Take care of yourself.”

  “Thanks. Maybe something did happen though. Inside there, I mean.”

  “Now, I wondered about that too. But I ain’t heard a thing.”

  “Okay. You know Oscar Alvarez, right? He got me on here.”

  “‘Course.”

  “You seen him?”

  Manny shakes his head. “We was all wondering where he went. I know I was. I figured you would know.”

  I don’t answer that. Of course he’d think I would know. I shake my head, shrug.

  “You got his number?” Manny says.

  “No. I mean, I do, but ...” Some guys on the street have phones, smartphones even. I could have had a cheapo one if I wanted.

  Manny frowns and looks around and hands me his phone through the fence. I can’t figure it out without getting aggravated so I hand it back, reading the number to him off my ragged little note pad. He dials, listens. I reach for the phone, give it here, but he only holds it up for me.

  “It’s in Spanish,” he says.

  We listen together. It’s an automated message. It hangs up.

  “You know any Spanish?” Manny says.

  “Not that kind.”

  “Me neither, but sounds like one of those ‘voice mail full’ deals to me.”

  “Okay. Thanks again.”

  “Hey, we tried,” he says, pocketing his phone, his eyes glazing over like he’s done with me now.

  “I don’t want to keep you,” I say to him. “But let me ask you something. You know of any cops coming around here?”

  I have to ask about cops because recently I had seen two of them around the four corners talking to the jornaleros. Their names are Matt and Jack. They’re not exactly undercover, but they’re not showing off their cop balls either. In their Levi’s and fleece jackets, Matt and Jack could have been any contractors wanting extra hands on the cheap. The truth was the duo wanted the word on the junkies and wannabe pimp dealers who slither into our little cut-rate labor sale using us for cover.

  “Cops? Hell no,” Manny says. “Not that I seen.”

  “That’s all right. Thanks.” I turn to leave.

  Down at the corner, the developer himself is heading out a gate, name of Gerald Tappen. The guy has thick black hair, walks taller than he is, and wears an expensive parka and work pants that look ironed.

  “Oscar knew that guy,” I say to Manny.

  Manny just nods.

  At the corner, a nice-looking woman with dark hair and her chin raised stands next to a big shiny black Cadillac SUV crossover pickup, like a Hummer with more chrome. She goes around to the passenger side without a word to Gerald Tappen and both get in.

  “Piece of ass there,” Manny says. “That’s Eva Tappen.”

  “When Tappen needed a thing done right? He always asked his supers for Oscar,” I say.

  “Subs didn't always like it either. But I seen he and Tappen arguing about stuff, too, how to do this or that. Oscar was always pointing out the hazards. The guy stood the hell up.”

  “Oscar always told him when a certain job wasn’t right. Unjust.”

  “Unjust? That Oscar’s word? Not bad for a visitor.”

  Actually, it was my word. More often than not, I was the one pushing Oscar to point out the pitfalls. Sometimes Oscar needed pushing in that department, despite what people saw.

  We watch Tappen’s SUV drive away. Then I leave Manny be. I don’t want him to get in trouble. There were enough of us without work.

  *

  Amy has mud or who knows what on her cheeks like she smeared it on he
rself and snot running out a nostril nonstop like a bad tap. She came bounding around a corner and there we are, locking down the sidewalk on Grand. Blocking each other. Her tiny fingers can’t stay put, her head stays down and her stare wants to drill right into the concrete at our feet. She has to be high. People go around us, talking into their smartphones. I step toward her, she lets me. I wipe at her nose with my sleeve. It doesn’t make her smile like it sometimes does. She tries to go around me. I pull her over to the nearest wall and press a fiver into her little hands.

  “Do not smoke this. Do not drink this. Don’t even eat it. Head over to Central Women’s Assistance—”

  “They won’t take me anymore,” she says.

  “Street Mama House?”

  “Them too. Not even the Annex. And don’t tell me Salvation Army or some other religious joint, they treat me like a fuckin’ child.”

  “There’s the Laundromat. Our one. Clean up in the restroom while your clothes are drying.”

  “Some’un’ll just steal ‘em.”

  “Do it anyway. Promise.”

  Amy nods. Her little face scrunches up. I hold her a moment.

  “You still have the tent,” I say. “Right?”

  Amy nods again. She pushes off of me. “Hey, that new cafe off a Stark? They let me use the restroom. Be nice, they’ll let ya.”

  We share a smile, and I let her go off down the sidewalk, and it’s all I can do not to ask her when she’s coming back. But I have my own trouble now.

  I pass a couple cross streets and sit in a doorway, focusing on the other side of Grand through the jammed traffic. The police have a small storefront precinct across there on account of all the trouble. Sometimes I see Matt and Jack standing out front chatting with this or that cop.

  Two quarters land at my feet with a clink. I start to say, “Hey, I’m not a ...” but the wannabe do-gooder is already gone, texting with earphones on. I scoop up the change.