Something catches my eye. There’s a police car up ahead. It creeps along a cross street. I hug a wall and watch it pass.
I need to keep my thoughts straight. Still, my heart thumps hard and fast and I feel like I am falling, like I’d jumped off a bridge but can’t hit water. Rants and raves collide in my brain. This is what a guy gets for trying, I think. What a guy gets for helping. What you get in this goddamn world here where it’s every man for himself.
I near the Goodwill store wearing a stocking cap to help disguise me, holding my jacket crumpled in a ball. I toss it in the donations bin outside. And I’m already cold. I’ll need another layer soon, but I don’t go inside for one because too many know me in there.
On paper, I’m probably the only one who could have harmed Oscar. I will be their suspect. Of course I will. The thought of it makes my veins boil. I stomp onward and see a newspaper box and now I do take a running jump and kick at it. It knocks me back, on my ass. I bounce back up again. I’m pissed and steeled like I haven’t been in a long time. A regular passer-by seeing me like this would have pegged me for a tweaker looking for a fight.
In a way, I am. I’m going to get to the bottom of this, somehow. If I can sleep under a highway, I can sure as hell do this.
At least the rain has stopped. I prowl the warehouse side streets and find the loading dock where I sometimes check on Amy. The tent is there and the flap’s open but there’s only a pile of trash inside, all to-go boxes and rags, tall cans and candy wrappings.
I make my way over to the four corners at Sixth and Ankeny. Most jornaleros are gone for the day. On the corner where the druggies hang, three guys pass around a forty. A radio blares out crappy FM rock. A shopping cart lies on its side, dumping out soiled clothes.
Amy runs with jonesers like these and I still can’t take it, never could. These are her crew? Her lame-ass pimps? They’re spilling half the forty, beer foam all over them. One crawls into the cart and they twirl him around, howling, hopping up and down. When Amy isn’t tricking, she gives these rejects blowjobs behind dumpsters, in the same place they pissed. These bozos plunge their grubby hands down her pants.
Fists form in my pockets. But I put on a grin and march over.
“Hey. Hey. Turn that down a sec,” I tell them.
The three just smile at me. I go and turn off their radio. “That cool?”
Two laugh. One glares. He goes by the stupid name of Deuce. He’s always around. Of course he has a neck tattoo. One of his eyes likes to screw up when he looks at you.
“Guys, I need a coat,” I say.
“They’ll take the clothes right off your fuckin’ back,” Deuce says.
“That’s right,” I say. “Looks like you got some stuff in that cart there.”
They laugh, a little too long. They’re high for sure.
“Fuck it, brah. We’ll give ya a coat,” Deuce says.
“All right. How’s about I take a look?”
No one answers, so I go through the pile and pull out a jacket with a padded liner and a fur-lined hood. It also has a ridiculous blingy dragon pattern. I can’t help that. I put it on.
Two laugh at me with the jacket on. Deuce’s eyes screws up tight.
“How much?” I say.
“How much you got?” Deuce says.
“It’s your coat.”
“Fifty bucks.”
“Give you five.”
“You got a joint?”
“Don’t smoke.”
“Sit down, dog. Sit down.”
“That’s okay. Listen, all you guys. I have a question: where’s Oscar? Don’t look at me like that. You know who Oscar is. He knew you.”
They laugh.
“What did you do with him?” I say.
“What did you do with him?” Deuce shouts.
One of them comes around my side. He yanks at my hood, pulling me backward—
“You guys, leave him alone!”
It’s Amy. She marches up wearing a jacket like mine, but the kiddie version. The three jonesers laugh at that.
“Are they fucking with you?” Amy says to me.
Deuce mimics her: “They fucking with you, they fucking with you, baby?”
I ignore them. Amy is swaying—she’s high too. “Where you been anyway?” she starts to say to me, but two of them grab me. I swing at them and kick. We all tumble down the sidewalk. My shoulder blade slams at the pavement, my back cramps up and burns with spasms. I go black a moment, probably hit my head. All three hold me down, giggling, panting. Amy pulls at them, trying to pry them off me. Deuce pushes her away and she stumbles off. I move to get free and somehow I do because they’re still too high to put up a good fight. I wince at the pain in my back, my shoulder.
“Emergency! Get him to a hospital,” one shouts.
“Fuck him—got no insurance, dog,” says the other one.
“I’m a doctor,” Deuce says. He holds a paper bag to my face. A whiff of huffing chemicals bites at my nostrils. I turn my head away.
“We fix you up, senórita. That’s what you are, right? Oscar’s your papacito.”
“No!” I shout.
“Calm it down, dog.”
“Wait, no, I gotta puke,” I groan, faking it. The three back off and I get free for good and scramble away, the three peering around for me but not seeing like they’re in a windowless room with the lights off. I look for Amy, but she’s gone.
I hobble away, favoring one shoulder. My goofy fur-hood jacket has a ripped sleeve.
I’ll live.
I get back to the homeless hostel after sundown. No one mans the front counter, so I rush inside for the rest of my stuff and pass back out the lobby with my duffel.
“Don’t forget lockup later,” says a voice. The night receptionist at the counter, Mr. Doom-Gloom we call him, is gaunt with deep eye sockets like the innkeeper in a horror movie. I don’t say anything. “You haven’t paid,” he adds. “Tomorrow’s your last night.”
I pause at the door hearing that, what he is really saying to me.
“And I will lock you out,” he says.
“So lock me out,” I say and push on out the front door.
*
The reality comes back to me, again and again. It makes me think about those detectives, Matt and Jack. They might be the only cops I could trust. They might even be looking out for me. I wasn’t a betting man, never played Video Poker or Keno, having seen too many suckers fall down a whole so deep you can’t hear them screaming. Still, betting on Matt and Jack was a wager I might have to make eventually. But they also could be playing me.
Then I realize that they’re no different than anyone. They’ll think I did it. Everyone will. They’ll have to. They’ll need to. I am expendable. No one really knows me, and the other half don’t even know my name. Me doing it gives them some sense to their lives. A guy like me being made to pay is all they got to keep them warm at night, all those people who got no clue they are only a shot of bad luck away from being me. How far would a person like that go to keep that from happening? Would a person like that let a guy die?
It’s only 8:00 pm, on a Saturday night. I’m wide awake. Things are becoming clearer. It’s like Oscar himself has risen from the mire, reassembled, and passed to me his power tool of truth. It tells me, exactly, how it all could have gone down. But I need confirmation.
What do they always say in cop shows? Follow the money. Or in this case, the lack of it.
I head down Grand to Dad’s Place. This building is one of the East Bank’s oldest, and inside Dad’s they got dusty sailing memorabilia on the timbered rafters and brick walls. It smells like fryer grease that needs changing and cigarette smoke blown out lungs soaked in cheap-ass well whisky. It can be old-school slacker like Portland used to be when you hit it just right. I’m not hitting it right. At this later hour, your so-called creative class youth fill out the place, mixing with the aging so-called trailer trash types, the blue-collar, lost souls, happy campers and the beaucoup
sketchy, keno, video poker, vinyl booths the color of sewage. The waitress young enough to be a guy’s daughter but looking like their New Wave girlfriend about 1982. Kids whose parents thought Portland was in Maine play lowbrow loser with their simulated raggedy-ass facial hair and factory-faded caps, but if they really knew what losing meant they’d run right out into the cold fall rain and keep on going, right for that sweet Iowa girl and the ad agency job they been denying too long. Dodge too long, kiddies, and you’ll be living like me.
I’m down to twenty bucks, total. All I got left is this bone-dry truth Oscar gave me. I find Burly Manny at the far end of the bar, facing out, his pint emptied. I plop down next to him.
Burly Man gestures for a beer, to buy me one.
“I got money,” I say.
“Save it,” Manny says, “save it.”
The beers come, two Ninkasis. Manny toasts me in the way a guy does when he’s out of a job a while.
“Sucks about Oscar,” he says. “Sorry, dude. Nobody gives a shit.”
“I give a shit.”
“You had nothing to do with it.”
“You can speak at my hanging.”
“Don’t think like that,” Manny says. “They round guys up? Talk to you?”
“No. They talk to you?”
“No. No reason to.”
We sip our beers. IPA is too hoppy for me and I don’t drink much anyway. It’s just us back here up against a corner within the dim glow of video games no one’s playing.
“Me and Oscar,” I say. Fake another sip. “We talked about helping guys get work. Safe work. Don’t matter who they are, we get ‘em organized. Someday. Anyway, Oscar fired me up about it.”
“He was good at that.”
“Oscar liked to talk about it. But, here’s the deal: I meant it.” I was more into it than Oscar. Something always kept Oscar from committing, from helping me come up with a plan. He’d rather play Golden Tee or watch soccer games when we weren’t working. But me, I’d had enough idling. “Quit dreaming, you know?”
“Sure. American Dream? Why you think they call it a dream—you’re dreaming.” Manny shakes his head. “Dude, you know how many guys that Tappen had to let go?”
“No, but this keeps up they’ll have more gringos standing out there than jornaleros. Then who will all those immigration haters wanna kick out?”
“Martian labor? Fuck ‘em.”
“What about you? Still getting a check?” I ask Manny.
“For now. Tiny as hell. I do this and that, on-call. That condo job? Dead. They don’t even bother with site security except for me on the cheap.”
“That so?”
“Everyone’s sweating. Blame the economy, they say. Well, know what? Economy’s not a person. So whose fault is it? Top dogs? Hell no, it’s everyone but them. Same all over. Every douche out there thinks they were entitled to it all, they deserved it, and just because we’re living in the US of A. Well, fuck it. Time to grow up, kiddies.”
Two trendy young guys of the type everyone currently calls hipsters are making eyes at my stupid jacket. Burly Man goes quiet and stares them down until they look away.
“It doesn’t bug me,” I tell him. Those two are just as sheltered as I’ve been, in their own way.
“You’re a better man than I.”
I shrug. I take another sip, make everything seem natural. Me, I’m just sitting here. Stuff enters my head and I say it, no rhyme or reason. I shake my head at a thought. “I just can’t believe that was the last time I saw him. Crazy.”
“Yeah. Wednesday, right? I was right here at the bar already. You can tell the cops that.”
“All the subs and supers had gone. Everyone. Me and Oscar were the last ones. I left Oscar there. He said he didn’t need me. Said he wanted to finish alone. I wanted to help. He got pissed about it. He was like that sometimes.” I shrug again. “He just wanted to be left alone.”
“Okay so the guy did have his moods. Still. Someone had to come around eventually, make sure it was closed up.”
“Like Gerald Tappen. Somebody like that.”
Manny nods. “He goes by there every day, night, rain or shine.”
“Even though the job is stopped?”
“Last I seen, he does. It’s his baby. Maybe it’s his last for all we know.”
I sip my beer again. Somehow, it tastes better. And yet I want to smash this pint glass to shards, the way I’m feeling. Knowing that what I know has to be true. I’m almost shaking from anger, but I keep it inside. “I guess so,” I say.
*
I have a plan. Before the night is through though, Amy will be needing me. So I head over to SE Oak near Eleventh and the old abandoned Bressie Electric building. All the veteran street people circle wagons here, safety in numbers. Their tarps and carts and worn tents surround me in the dark. I huddle in a doorway.
Amy comes to find me here. I figured she would. It’s our little routine when she’s had enough. She has the tent stuffed into a cart. She reeks of forties and cigarettes and whatever carcinogen was in that paper bag. We set up the tent, saying nothing, just like we used to as a team. We crawl inside, spread out our old sleeping bag.
“Take that coat off,” I say.
“Who cares if we look alike? People are wearing garbage bags.”
“It reeks. Put it outside to air out.”
Amy lets the jacket fall off her shoulders and chucks it out the tent flap. “Now I’m chilly,” she says, chattering her little teeth. I feel her nose—stone cold. I put my jacket around her. A tear rolls down her face. She probably can’t even feel it.
“They didn’t do anything to your friend Oscar,” she says.
“Okay,” I say.
“I asked ‘em for real. I was with them most of the time anyways.”
I want to spit, just thinking about them with her.
“They’re not mad at you,” she adds.
“Mad?” I laugh. I can only laugh. “They couldn’t do Oscar if they tried, those jokers.”
“I asked around, too. For you. I did it in Spanish. I speak good Spanish.”
“I know.”
She was an honors student in high school before she dropped out. She usually tells me that too. This time she doesn’t bother. We huddle together a long time, just holding each other. The tent is only a two-man, but with her in here it seems bigger. She cries again, not out loud, just muffled shivers and sobs.
“I don’t even want that stupid coat anymore,” she says.
“I know. It’s okay.”
On my way back I’d bought her a little cinnamon roll and a banana from the mini mart so she’ll have something special if she comes. I know she can smell it my pocket, but she doesn't bring it up. I hand her the food. She takes it, eyes lowered.
After she eats some, we sit there hugging our knees like two cold city kids in the woods who took too long to build a campfire. She whispers, “What if I looked outside and we were, like, at the Grand Canyon or somewhere?”
“Could be cold there too.”
She looks to me, her eyes sparkling in the dim light. “Okay, Hawaii.”
“Okay.”
“I was there when I was a little girl. My dad took me there. Kona.”
“I know. It must have been great,” I say.
She turns away, facing the tent wall. I can tell by the way her shoulders shrunk that her little face has scrunched up.
“Look. I’m not mad at you,” I say.
I hold her, rocking her. She snuggles up against me. I tell her:
“I want you to keep the tent. My stuff. I have a little money left. I want you to take some.”
“Why? Where you going?”
“The ones around here will help you out. Just ask. I’ve helped a lot of these guys. Don’t look at me like that. Please? There’s something I need to do. And the cops might come around meanwhile.”
“What kind of cops?”
I think about mentioning Matt and Jack, that maybe they’re different
, but I swallow the words back down. “Any kind.”
Amy pushes off me, sits up. “Why they always gotta screw with us? Only when it's a murder they can’t solve, some rich girl ODs, just looking to vent or whatever, why not, here they come harassing us.”
“This is not like that.”
She stares at me as if I suddenly got three heads. “That’s what they do though. You used to tell me that.”
“I know, I know. But, this time? Don’t fight them like you do. Tell them whatever they ask. Promise me.”
It’s only the tent, my duffel and about ten bucks, but it will help. I can tell she knows I mean it by the way she pokes at the tent fabric with her finger.
After a while, she snuggles up next to me again. We lie there. She coughs a little, but I tell myself it won’t keep her awake after all that peaking out earlier.
“Thank you,” she mutters, eyes closing, “for the food and stuff.”
I wait till she’s finally asleep, snoring now, a cute little rumble in her throat that won’t be so cute one day if she keeps this up.
I wake in a sweat, a cold dribble under my clothes. That hot reality is back.
I pull the sleeping bag over Amy. I kiss her on the forehead. I bundle up, as quietly as can be. I leave the flashlight at Amy’s hand in case she wakes up. And I crawl out the tent, zipping the flap tight behind me.
*
Sharp sawed-off rebar, barbed ironwork and gnarled bolts jut out everywhere. Demo scraps lay in piles, all jagged. This skeletal demolition of a building looks like a bridge on its side.
It’s Sunday. No one’s around the job site. The gate’s locked up but I see no tin badges, which confirms what Manny told me. There’s always a way in though—a guy just needs the right mindset. My mind is set. I eye the whole of the site, taking my time as I move around it. I find a way through the temporary chain-link. I tiptoe deeper inside, crouching low, on into the building. The recessed third story used to be a mezzanine level. I approach the ironwork supporting it. I study it. Test my footing on it. I begin to climb up, and up.
I hunker down up on the mezzanine. A heavy rain comes. Most windows are gutted so the wind and water blow right through, pinging at the exposed studs and girders, the drops flowing and trickling down along. I pull a tarp over me. I can see out, with full view of the street. The rain won’t stop. It roars like gravel on this metal. Pools form on the scarred, uneven floors.
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