Bodies and Souls

by John Rechy

  Carla looked at her hand. Drying blood. The long-haired old man with the slashed throat stood before her; huge drops of his blood spattered her hand red. She didn't withdraw it until he collapsed. She blew anxiously on the blood.

  From her bag, she pulled out her perfume bottle—ornate designs like glass veins. She drank the cheap wine or liquor she tried to make sure she'd have for morning, filling the vial early, counting on forgetting she had it. Her tongue searched out the last drop of the liquid—not enough.

  Day flooded the world. Behind her, the aged library rested in squares on the lawn. Over it and her—beyond—were tall, lean muscular buildings of unyielding concrete, shiny glass and plastic. LLOYDS OF LONDON, BANK OF TOKYO, LINCOLN SAVINGS, PACIFIC FINANCIAL, CROCKER CITY, NATIONAL, WESTERN FEDERAL, CANADIAN BANK, WELLS FARGO, BANK OF AMERICA. The three enormous cylinders of glass—the Bonaventure Hotel—shone like black mirrors at dusk, changing to silver in daylight—now.

  Across the street from the library and flanked by careful regiments of flowers, a fountain cascaded in silver ribbons of water. RICHFIELD PLAZA. Its twenty storeys soared before an orange free-form sculpture of steel bands ascending like curved ladders to nowhere. Beyond, on rising hills, new condominiums captured the first rays of the sun.

  Carla prowled the grounds of the old library until it opened. Stairs hollowed out by millions of footsteps lead to cavernous musty rooms. Her own footsteps—she was wearing shoes now—always fascinated her; here, the hallways captured echoes, then released them in huge rooms.

  In the lavatory, she slid under the opening of one of the cubicles, not bothering to notice whether it required coins or not. Setting her bag carefully behind the toilet and away from the adjoining partition—once, hands had reached from under to snatch it away, but she kicked at them—she flushed the toilet until the water looked fresh. Then she bathed her feet in it, cooling the open sores. Carefully, she washed her lower body. She forced the grudging roll of tissue off its container to dry herself.

  When she came out, several youngwomen, students with books, stopped chattering. Two women stared at her—then pretended not to see her as she lowered her dress and washed her breasts, then her face. Her clothes adjusted again, she untied the string holding the two pieces of cardboard that protected the small mirror. She peered at herself, applying lipstick to her lips, spreading one dot of it on each of her cheeks; another dot, flushing them. With the brush, she smoothed out her soiled white-and-brown hair. She felt refreshed, shedding last night's crushed sleep.

  Traces of a good-looking woman—a pretty woman—remained under the roughened purplish-tanned skin seared by sun, cauterized by wind. She had strange gray, brown-rimmed eyes. Deer eyes.

  She reached for her perfume bottle containing the wine from last night. Empty.

  In the library, she walked from room to room, stirring hollow echoes.

  She sat on a bench on the lawn of the grounds. The police and the ambulance were gone. Her fingers roamed the seams of her bag, touching the familiar ashes of roses. Reassured, she walked away from the Los Angeles Public Library.

  She entered a long tunnel. Its rounded walls were glossy, like melting ice. Cars rushing through it in both directions made liquid reflections. From the other end of the tunnel, a man advanced toward her, his shadow borrowed from the night. She turned away, running from the sound of her own pursuing footsteps.

  Out of the tunnel, she heard the soft roar of the ocean. She was near it! She followed the recurring sound—along the hot concrete block. She heard it, closer! She was there! She squinted her eyes; she would open them onto the blue expanse of silver water Emmett had promised her would be at the shore's end. Under her patched shoes, she felt a softness. Sand!—but not the cool breeze Emmett had offered. She opened her eyes to speeding traffic just feet ahead. She was standing on a wide incline of grass bordering a freeway. It was the whooshing! of cars she had heard. To resurrect the triumphant sense of discovery, she closed her eyes more tightly and leaned forward, determined to conjure up the sound of water lapping at a peaceful shore. She jerked back, feeling herself slipping toward the crushing traffic. She turned back, walking up, toward towering buildings.

  She reached Pershing Square. Emmett had told her about the fiery preachers, the hustlers, the transvestites. The park was denuded now. Trees and benches rationed, to keep the drifters away from the scurrying clerks and bankers moving in and out of the parking lot below. In the center of the park, a building of giant globes like the eyes of a fly enclosed a travel agency, with photographs of brightly colored cities.

  “Where is this one?”

  “Get out of here, get out!” the woman cringed from Carla.

  “I want to go here!” Carla pointed on a blue poster.

  “I'll call the police,” the woman warned.

  “They'll poke me with their sticks!” Carla shouted at her.

  Then she was on Broadway. Then she hadn't left after all. Along its yellow-grassed median, they sat in the sunless days and held small brown envelopes full of pretty pills and instructions about when to come back to get more. Oh, another Broadway. Electric dots chased each other on the marquees of three-feature movie houses and Spanish-language theaters. On the hot sidewalks, Negroes and Mexicans waited for buses while others got off them.

  She was so thin she slid through iron gates and into a small triangle of grass and shade. Into— …

  “… —can't sleep here!”

  Candles glistened like tiny red jewels in truncated bottles. There were roses at the feet of the statue of a woman whose hands were clasped, her body draped in colorful folds.

  “I said, you can't sleep in here!”

  Carla sat up on the wooden bench. The flickering flames needled her eyes. Deer eyes. A priest stood over her, nudging her to get out.

  She was again in the churchyard surrounded by iron gates.

  Spring Street. She expected many trees—but there were only old buildings, solid gray walls like fortresses. Tombstones.

  Main Street. Hock shops, gaudy clothing stores, cheap fried food, stores with magazines displaying colored pictures of organs devouring each other. Tough bars vomiting music and smoke and disinfectant. Black pushers; cheap hookers: women in pants so short their buttocks looked naked; extravagantly coiffed Mexican, Negro, and some really blond transvestites with faces drawn on flesh. The yellow lights of police cars blinked near fallen bodies.

  Los Angeles Street. Beyond.

  Along pockets of heat, she entered the world she searched through in city after city. Squashed hotel corridors and squat bars were bathed in light the color of weak urine. She moved deeper into the ulcerated zone. Men and women leaned like breathing corpses against fuming walls. Old, younger—and some very young; youngmen with headbands like Indians, their faces already purple-tan. And youngwomen with matted hair. Bodies roamed the streets and alleys in small groups or alone. They sat, stood, staggered, surrendered to barren ground, vacant lots littered with bottles, wire, rags—and other bodies.

  In the skeletons of apartment buildings blackened by smog—she knew their gray corridors, coated with soft grime she used to touch, pretending it was velvet—skinny men without shirts, women in slips or brassieres or bare-chested stared out of the windows at nothing. Where there were curtains in the windows, they were knotted into X's—like warnings of plague; windows begging for a breeze—but only heat shot in.

  Carla gasped. She was in all those rooms. They were cold and hot, often at the same time. On the box papered to look like a dresser, she spread out the contents of her bag, careful not to disturb the reddish dust of flowers, which she touched delicately. Then she replaced the contents and looked down onto the fetid street where live corpses scavenged into the alleys, “Tramps!” she yelled.

  Tramps. She locked the word in her mind. Finding his bottle of liquor empty, a man flung it in angry betrayal. It smashed on the street at Carla's feet.

  She backed away and saw a man and a woman entering a hotel; they
were laughing. The man shoved the knife into the woman and she moaned, but why did she laugh? In the ashen light of the lobby, which smelled of Lysol and piss, a television set was on; gray outlines talked to each other. Behind a wired counter, the clerk looked like a caged shrunken hawk; his hair grew in a peak, his eyes were black dots, his nose was beaked. He stared fascinated at the television screen before which other bodies sat on linoleum-covered couches.

  The voice on the television said: “… —exploration into ’The Lower Depths.’ On tonight's news she'll introduce you to a tragic life of waste, danger, murder in an area the size of a small city, where from six thousand to fourteen thousand of the chronically homeless wander. You will learn shocking facts: The denizens used to be middle-aged or older men; now there are an increasing number of wandering women, and young people. You will meet them tonight, lost souls, alcoholics, men and women with nothing to hope for except a bottle of wine and welfare— …”

  Welfare!

  “You don't have a social security number?”

  “Yes, and I've memorized it. It's three-three-three-three-three-three-three-three-three-three-three-three-three-three-three— …”

  “Place of birth?”

  “I wasn't finished. There are three more ‘threes.’ “

  “I said, Place of birth!”

  “The Dust Bowl.”

  “Look, unless you cooperate— …” Incomeinthepastsix-monthsrelativesapartmentaddresslastplaceofemploym— …

  “Fuck your welfare!”

  “What did you say to me?” the clerk demanded from behind his shelter of wire in the rancid lobby.

  Carla laughed uncontrollably. “Did that man on that television say all that? I think I read it somewhere. In the library—in the newspaper section. Yes, I read it there, this morning.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Want a room,” Carla said.

  “Show me your money.”

  “I'm with those two who just registered,” Carla said. “They're expecting me, I'm always there.”

  “Like hell they're expecting you,” the man said.

  “Ask them,” Carla said. Her voice became urgent. “He's going to stab her, and then they'll bribe me with roses—I want to give them back!” He shoved the knife deeper, grunting, pushing it, his tongue licking her neck. She could smell the sweet and rancid odor. “I have to thank them!”

  “Get out of here, we don't rent to loonies.”

  “They just work here.” Carla moved out of the sick hotel.

  She walked past the Greyhound Bus Depot—an island of tourists and frantically gay shops surround a square building; cabs wait to whisk tourists away from the contaminated area. A bus brought her here. The man panhandling told her to go to the park outside the library.

  “Where can I sleep?” she asked the panhandler.

  “L.A.’s got no shelters; mission's got a few beds for women, though.”

  “I'll sleep in the lobby,” she told the man who came to the glass door but didn't open it.

  “The lobby's filled, too,” said the man. “You've got to get here early—very early. Sorry. God bless you.” He seemed sad, really sad.

  Carla stood under black fire escapes, which climbed up the walls. Beyond the window, bodies slept on the floor. She nodded, pretending she was inside, dozing on a couch.

  “If not, try the park outside the library—cops come around every few hours, though,” the panhandler said. “It's past Main, Broadway, Hope Street—you'll see it.”

  Her sweat saturated the newspapers and rags on which she lay. A cop's stick explored intimately between her legs. Deeper— … A garish red line across the old man's neck snapped into huge drops spattering her hand red. She walked away from the Greyhound station.

  A windowless fortress loomed gray. On one of its walls was a mosaic mural of faces and black cars. A sign said: TO PROTECT AND SERVE. Out of the barricaded police station emerged young, shaved, laughing cops.

  Deeper— … She felt a terrible pain where the cop had poked her with his stick last night. She clawed, tearing at the tall black boots, burying long sharp fingernails.

  As the cops drove away, she spat at them. “Tramps!”

  At the mouth of an alley, Carla smelled food. She remembered she was hungry. Some restaurants arrange leftovers neatly in boxes on top of the garbage, others mix them with filth, even roach poison. In the alley, heaps of rags stirred, bodies strewn on the ground like the wounded left to die on a devastated battlefield. Ahead, were red and white fried-chicken boxes. She hadn't eaten for days. As she moved toward the food, a bold body shoved its way into the other end of the alley. Now two others flanked it. She froze. The three rushed at her. They were young, in their teens, two dark, one blond.

  She knew what to do. Emmett told her when they lived under the subways in the maze of metal tubings, warm pipes, crisscrossed, creating small units like rooms under the city. It was the day he found the beautiful roses, yes, that day, that day, the same day they saw the punks waiting with sticks at the station where they crawled under the bitter city. “Act crazy, like an epileptic; stagger past them, scare them!”

  She did now, in the alley, she allowed her body to lose control, she quaked, howling, letting spit run out. Bodies lying in the creases of the steaming alley did not stir, merely curled inward, to shelter themselves from whatever was happening but not yet to them.

  The menacing young bodies danced about Carla.

  “You a crazy?” accused the Mexican.

  She backed away—and ran into the Negro. “She got lots of bread in that bag, see how she holdin’ it?”

  The blond boy had pimples like pox on a white bloodless face; he was so skinny his arms were knobby. “You got something real good in that bag?” He poked at her with a finger.

  “A bomb,” Carla said. “I got a bomb. Boom!”

  “Maybe it'll bust your dirty face, filthy scumbag,” said the Negro. No, the blond one. No, the Puerto Rican. No, the— …

  “How'd you like this, hag?” The Mexican groped himself.

  The blond boy advanced, his hands reaching out tauntingly toward the bag. “What you got in the bag, ugly bitch, huh? Whatcha got there?” Whatcha got there? Whatcha got there?

  My life. My father gave me the roses. No, he gave them to my mother and she gave them to me. Then he took them. I found them abandoned in a trash can. Someone left them for me in a train. Emmett brought them to me when we lived under the subway. They were wrapped in delicate green tissue. They grew in my mother's garden; I took scissors and cut them, but those weren't roses. After I cut them, the wind and the dust smothered everything—yellow, gray wind, yellow, gray dust—and I could see the men and sometimes women jump off the freight cars, once I heard shots. They would run hopping over the tracks and came asking for food before they jumped on another train when it was night, into a dark boxcar, bodies pressed tightly, smelling rancid and sweet because a woman wouldn't throw away the roses, which had begun to smell. Someone brought them to me in one hospital, and left them there. No, I went to a funeral, and I gathered them from a grave. My father's. My mother's. They were not my real father or mother, they were people in the freight train calling me in. Maybe my father was there. Or a woman, terrified. I held on to the shadows. So many feet, so many legs—the stick, and the policeman's boots! But they had to let us all out because the law said so. We sat on benches from summer to winter. I held my bag on my lap; the flowers were in it then. “That's what's in the bag!” she screeched at the blond boy.

  Where were they? Had she scared them away? They hadn't taken her bag—it wasn't even torn or soiled.

  The sleeping forms of ragged men hadn't stirred. Beside one was a bottle. She picked it up. A dirt-caked hand tried feebly to protest. The rags sighed. She took the bottle and drank the remaining liquor, real liquor, not wine—and a lot. It was warm, almost hot, but her body welcomed it with a jolt that reminded her she was alive—and made her realize that she had been shaking, trembling. She f
orgot she was hungry. She threw down the bottle and walked out of the alley. She felt scorched inside and outside by the liquor and the fired wind.

  “… —another slashing.” Under the iron webs of fire escapes men clustered by the mission, talking, already lined up for breakfast, lunch, dinner, beds? The line grew. “Just one more hour,” the man said, and went on: “Happened this morning, near the library—the fifth throat slashed.”

  “I was there,” Carla said.

  “Not safe at night,” another man said.

  “One punk's doing it all,” an old man asserted.

  “A gang,” said a youngman; he had a brown-dyed face, matted hair, a beard; a girl with blank eyes was with him.

  “Tramps,” Carla said sadly as she walked away. To another street, which stretched like a block of colored broken glass. “Tramps,” Carla echoed her sad sigh. Then a knot of anger choked. Tramps! Hobos! Tramps! Tramps! Tramps! she screamed when she saw them running across the desolate tracks. Tramp! the word and hand slapped her face, branding it with heat.

  “How much for this one?” She pointed to the picture of two intertwined roses. Framed drawings of tattoos decorated the walls, every inch of them, in the small shop. Butterflies, flowers, vines, birds, ships, flags, torsos, warriors, faces, stars.

  “Thirty dollars.” The man with the braided hair did not look up from the lighted magnifying glass under which his needle drilled into the arm of a youngman with dark short hair blackened deeply with dye. His eyes were so pained Carla couldn't look into them. She watched the tattoo forming. There was a skull, and under it, “DEATH BE.” Now the needle made an F.

  Carla said to the man with the braided hair. “I want a pink rosebud and a red blossom.”

  He glanced at her skinny arm. “Not enough flesh for one rosebud. Wait your turn, though, and I'll try—money first.”

  “I got roses.” Carla's anger rose. “I don't need your fake ones—I got real ones, here!” She pushed her bag toward him and drew it back quickly against her thighs.