Winged Shoes and a Shield

by Don Bajema

  The next morning Eddie knows the man is dead as soon as he steps out of his door. Lying there motionless with the beach damp in little dots in his hair. Who needs to see his face? Bottle Chicano fought Red-freak last night and won. Bottle Chicano banged Red-freak’s head too many times. Red-freak managed to get his headache and temper tantrum just this far, to the front door of Eddie’s house in Old Mission. Eddie steps over him. It is now beyond his code to care about things like violent death. Fuck him, Eddie’s roommate can call the cops. Eddie walks down the beach noticing the perfect sets rolling in, but he’s a little hungover, and the speed makes him cold as hell in the water.

  That night Eddie’s with a new girl and yes, he is fronting a little. His Levi’s drag down too large. He wears a red waiter’s jacket and no shirt. Eddie looks like a baboon with a huge head of tangled hair. A month ago he was at the Olympic trials, faking an injury when he couldn’t get any higher on the speed he had left, and had nothing in reserve. Besides, he had himself convinced that the whole deal was a joke, supported by the kind of people that believed in the war, and his life contained the true life of the outlaw which meant he was really the winner. The predominant voice in his head kept telling him he was an asshole and would soon be dead, and fuck you, anyway. The new girl is rich, from Marin. She is tall, skinny, with the narrow rib cage and medium breasts that Eddie likes. Her mouth is huge and she smiles rarely, the lips are enough. Her infrequent smile is like punctuation, timed perfectly with an ironic observation. It was hard to say who hated themself more, the girl with the money, or the boy suspended over the ground awaiting the next fall. They were young, they took what they had in common and tried to call it love, or attraction, or some fucking thing. It didn’t matter, they drank themselves to sleep and hated each other after they fucked, because it used to mean something with someone else and meant nothing now. But she’d let Eddie do anything, and she wanted him to. Eddie imitated her upperclass attitudes and style. She convinced him he was a coward, or he’d be dead already. But they walked like the proudest people on earth. The public must never know. And the public was aware of them. Wherever they went they carried a certain on-time charisma. The midnight rambler and a beautiful stray cat.

  A Hell’s Angel grabs his cock and groans at her as they walk past. Eddie is nuts to do this, so it is perfect. He walks back to him and says, “C’mere.” The Angel stands stock-still. Eddie slaps his face, calls him “. . . a fuckin’ punk.” Eddie has been eating steroids and speed for several weeks, strong and crazy. The Angel is no match. The Angel’s face is pouring blood in seconds. Eddie scares himself as he goes absolutely wild, transformed into an angry body, but sitting back with ice-cold emotions. It’s as though Eddie is just above their heads watching two animals fighting in the street, but at the same time he feels his fists cracking the face of the Angel, turning it to mush. Eddie picks him up and runs with him. Wondering, what am I going to do next? He spins and throws the helpless Angel in front of a carload of tourists, as the near unconcious body bounces off the fender and lies there, Eddie screams he’s not hurt and starts kicking him. He wonders, in the semi-quiet part of his brain, if he is going to kill him, surprised that he wants to kill him. The girl is holding and doesn’t want the cops, she grabs Eddie’s arm and pulls him off. Eddie wants to leave before any other Angels see this. They drive up to Del Mar and pick at their food on a deck overlooking the setting sun, drinking tequila and feeling aroused.

  For the next six weeks, Eddie is pursued by Angels. He sleeps in a new place every night, his cars are broken into, his bed is set on fire, his new girl gets raped and leaves town.

  Eddie moves to Logan Heights in the riot-burned section of the ghetto. He is not wanted there, he looks like trouble. Nevertheless there are a series of parties, the house is a clearing room for speed and marijuana. Eddie beats his roommate’s dog. He stays in the house for two days with the cowering dog lying in the kitchen. Eddie scalds his hands in the sink. He cries and wonders what he has become. He stops crying. He sits. He cries some more. He knows he is just too pissed. He goes down the list, naming everything but himself.

  He’s got another run to make tomorrow. Back at the hovel at the beach he stays up drinking, smoking dope, lifting weights and listening to “Gimme Shelter” over and over again. He’s half hoping this will be the time and he can take a few with him. Scared into a stinking cold sweat, the volume of everything much too loud.

  To his surprise, when he’s sitting on the cliff five miles north of the campground where he first saw Jenny ten years earlier, he misses his mother. He misses her the whole time he waits; he misses her like a little boy. He sits on the cliff waiting for the speedboat, mindlessly packaging the bricks, setting the net, watching for the flashlight signals, hoping the Federales haven’t learned the spot and signal . . . to lure him out there, to shoot him in the water and let him bloat, and be found by some surf fisherman like the guy before him. The white light blinks about a hundred yards off shore. Eddie will never let go of the load, he knows the only respect anyone has left for him comes from those that can respect craziness. If he drowns they’ll find the net with him. He takes the gaffer tape and weaves his fingers into the net, a handhold he can’t let go. He jumps. Eddie, and a net of two hundred bricks wrapped in plastic, drops down the black cliff and splashes next to the rocks below. Coming to the surface and slamming into the rocks under the force of angry white water, Eddie looks at the boat, recognizes it and swims toward it, dragging his load, laughing.

  He hasn’t been in his old house since his father told him he’d turn him in to the FBI if he could tell them where to find him. His mother looks at him like he’s a ghost. She stands there by the door, nodding her head: Yes. Yes. This is what you’ve become. She knew it all the time. Yes. Yes. This is you. THIS is NOT me. I am temporarily living this. I am partial; this is NOT the whole story. It is what I have to DO, not what I have BECOME. Can’t you see that? No, she can’t. She nods her head — cold as ice, unfeeling. Yes. Yes. Look at yourself. Eddie tells her, “I missed you.” She says, “That’s good, now leave.” As he leaves, he hears her crying, heading for her bedroom.

  He winds up delivering some dope to a fraternity house that is holding some afternoon party. The frat boys think Eddie is some kind of romantic figure, they get some vicarious rush out of being close to him. They promote him to some of the girls in an effort to keep him around. Besides, Eddie gets good drugs. There are some great-looking girls there, some of them curious about Eddie, most of them pushovers for anything he’d tell them. They’re too young to see through the outlaw front, never guessing he’d just been put down by his mother. Eddie talks to a few of them looking for some sign of decadence in their faces, some giveaway that his being with them would not be the low mark of their lives. No luck. His soul is in a drought and the mark is even lower than he thought.

  Just before he leaves, a guy walks up. Eddie knows the guy is a narc and tells him so. Eddie feels something gaining strength, feels an expansion of some wrongheaded need, blames it on the narc, tells him if he sees him again, he’ll kill him. Eddie swallows a lump, knowing that he really means it and that he really will. Eddie knows that he has finally given up. It is a weird perverse freedom finally getting to that place. To have that power, not over the narc, over himself. Eddie knows he’ll throw it all away now, at the drop of a hat. He’ll stand in the moat and yell “Fuck the King.” Eddie spends a little more time convincing the narc, who needs no convincing. The narc can see it in Eddie’s eyes, smells it coming through his skin. The narc is never seen around again.

  Eddie likes the fear he brings where ever he goes. Because Eddie has realized he is entirely powerless. Empty. Dead already. Just breathing. The war rages on, the killing reverberates just over the heads of the whole world, no one escapes it. The war makes a lie of anyone still breathing, no one deserves to breathe, no one can stop the killing, and until the killing stops everyone
and everything is rotting like a corpse in the sun. Eddie feels it as a total humiliation; if this is what it’s about, then someone oughta kill him now and get it over with. Let ’em try. It’s all cheap, blood spent for nothing.

  The last run was closer than any — won’t be long now. He’s rolling joints for a few friends. Smiling in secret amazement at the physics of simply not caring, and how that seems to break the odds wide open. Despite everything, Eddie is still breathing. The room is full of young long-haired friends, some of them radical-left professors, a pimp and two prostitutes, kids from the neighborhood, a buddy and three new girls and another narc. Eddie has been sloppy. He doesn’t realize the long-haired rat-faced guy is a narc until six cops carrying shotguns walk through the screen door, and the sound of a helicopter begins whopping over the house. The cops ask whose Galaxy is parked down the street. Eddie says, “Mine.” Well, it is being used to hold up gas stations. “It is?” Yes. “When?” At night, around two or three in the morning. “Yeah?” Yeah. “That’s when I come home from the job I have, parking cars in Mission Valley.” Silence. “That’s a bad time to be driving.” That’s right. “It’s a bad car to be driving.” Silence. “I won’t be driving that car anymore. In fact, I’ll be leaving town. Tonight, this afternoon.” “That’s a good idea.” They leave, the narc leaves with them. One cop lingers behind. He’s a skinny guy looking and sounding like Hank Williams. He looks so pissed, like he’s going to start crying. He tells Eddie, “If I ever catch you again with drugs. . . .” He stops and his Adam’s apple jumps up and down his throat as he regains his composure. His voice gains control and Eddie recognizes his face from someplace. He finishes emphatically, “If I ever see you again, I’m going to send you straight to the place where scum like you belong.” Eddie smiles at him. The cop catches his breath and tries to get outside. He can’t, and slams the door shut. Eddie’s heart flies through the roof. He fights off the desire to placate the enraged Okie. The cop’s face is shaking under the skin. His eyes are looking at Eddie with a kind of panic. Eddie wonders if the cop knows that the barrel of the shotgun is traveling toward Eddie’s chest. Eddie knows that another instant of insolence will drive the cop over the edge, he thinks “Fuck it — him or me.” Eddie sucks his teeth and smiles again. The cop seems to lift off the floor, but he begins to back out the door. Eddie sees him killing him in a raid, or for any excuse. Eddie locks his eyes on the cop, who is staring back promising Eddie silently that he will do what he says he will do. Eddie says, “I don’t care, I don’t give a fuck.”

  Eddie drives up to Marin, north of San Francisco that night, listening to “Stairway To Heaven” between static on the radio. Oddly, he turns off the exit and makes it to 29th and California to visit a woman he’d met who he has been thinking about a lot. He wants to see her again and get her off his mind. Just see her, sleep with her, talk to her and see that she’s another girl, someone else he can leave, and won’t need. He makes it to her house, she lets him in, he never leaves.

  WHAT’D YA SAY?

  The next time Eddie said “I don’t give a fuck,” and thought he meant it was to his wife. Despite, and because of, his love for his wife and his daughter — he resented them and regarded himself as a coward for his attachments to them. His external world was no longer a battlefield. His simple freedom to risk life or death was changed to stupid domestic quarrels and self-hatred. Unable to express himself as a husband or father he plunged into a darker and darker depression.

  The shades of the bedroom were drawn against the warm sun beating on the window. His wife walked into the room holding a picture of Eddie when he was a fifth grader. “Look at him. Look at that eager face. What has become of you? What do you want to do with your life?” It wasn’t a cop cradling a shotgun this time, it was his beautiful wife of twelve years. Eddie felt the same emotion as he had when the shotgun slowly turned toward his chest, foolishly he told the same lie, the one he still thought he believed, “I don’t give a fuck.” In three weeks she was gone, and he blamed her.

  What’d ya say? Sorry. Why do I live in the desert? You want to know that, huh. Why I live in the desert? I started living out here, a little while after, a long time ago, when. . . .

  I’d been driving all night, in a very dark, very solitary car. You can feel alone that way. I was driving, I was real tired, strained. I started seeing things. It was the last few minutes of night, right before dawn.

  I saw a floor-to-ceiling off-white curtain blowing rhythmically in the sunlight. The windows were open and the breeze felt as though I were actually in the room. But I wasn’t, I was still in the car. Then I heard a bird calling from a distance, a long distance. I could see the bird stop, stare around, then flip its head up and call out a combination of a song and a cry. The bird was perched on a tall century plant. Each time it sang, it bounced gently on the branch.

  I heard murmuring. Then a single loud laugh from the cool shady side of the room. A woman’s laugh. I heard kisses softly exchanged. First one, then another. I heard more murmuring, a kiss and a sound in my wife’s throat, a deeply satisfied rumble. Mary was walking to the window. The curtains licked her legs, swung around her and clung to her briefly. The curtain seemed transparent, Mary an apparition.

  She is beautiful. Radiant. She is happy. Delirious. She is the same and entirely different. Transformed. She stands in an unfamiliar posture of security and strength, drawn from her lover, given to her lover, given to herself. She is free. Feeling at last a time where she belongs, a place she loves, a self to love. The exhilaration of being where she is, where it had seemed for so long impossible to be.

  Mary stares out the window. Her brown eyes languish, deeply relaxed, alert, encompassing everything. The still of the morning, the permanence of the desert. She believes what is in front of her, what she can see. She teases herself, thinking that the woman on the bed behind her is not really there. Her heart pounds for a second. She turns and her eyes meet the eyes of another woman. The woman smiles, and smiles again. The impulse of a warm electric twitch throbs between their legs. The look in each other’s eyes. Mary remembers taking her lover in her arms, her legs in her legs, her mouth in her mouth. In a post-orgasm choreography, they inhale, they exhale, they smile. Beautiful mirror images.

  A knock on the door. The maid. “Come in.” Comfortable together in their nakedness, they laugh at the absurdity of covering themselves in this room, their room.

  I walk in. The room becomes a swirling centrifuge of emotion. I start to shake, I lose my voice. I suddenly become tired, defeated, desperate.

  I look at Mary. I tell her, “I’m sorry. I had to see you. I had to see the reality. The images were so strong that I thought the reality would be better.” The reality is not better. I feel foolish. The women come to my aid. They prop me up with their compassionate faces. They register my pain. They want me to be strong. My desperation is a foreign echo to them and it is amplified by a series of dull explosions in my chest.

  “I’m sorry, I gotta go,” I say. Mary stands silent by the curtain, almost invisible in the light. She is illuminated in the curtain. She is veiled by the bright sunlight. I cannot move to her. I will break down in a useless series of pleads and sobs.

  From the bed, from my wife’s lover’s lips to my ears, a sound from deep in her chest. “Do you want to talk?” she asks like she means it. I can see she regrets the question. Without saying a word she is telling me, “No. Go. Leave now. You don’t belong here.”

  “No, I can’t talk. I had to come here. It’s like an amputation. Nobody really believes it even after it happens. It makes you sick and fevered not to believe something like that, not until they pull the sheets down, and you see what you have to see to believe it.”

  Five miles up the road, I see into the room again. I see Mary crying. The woman gets up from the bed and embraces her saying nothing. The curtains sway, Mary sobs. The woman holds her close. The woman kisses
her eyes, her ears, her mouth. They fall into each other.

  I can’t leave the room. I try to put my thoughts in Mary’s head. I want her to think of the twelve years with me. They are gasping. I want their love to have some connection to me. Even if it means she is tearing my fetters to pieces, pulsating through my remembered irritability, my condescending understanding, my denials. I want her to exorcise my demands, my bullying. I want her to smother my injustices, to shudder past my protests. I see her body pressing, pushing, spreading, and convulsing like an elevator screaming past the familiar floors, beyond the roof, into the air.

  In a medium faint, she falls asleep, sweat running rivulets down her swollen neck, across her open armpits, spotting the sheets. She moans. She has a dream of when she was a little girl with a very high temperature. Then I go into her dream. I dream of her dreaming of me. From another time. My familiar profile with the scenery changing behind me. She sees me force a smile. In a tone as though she were offering me coffee on a long drive, sitting beside me in the car, invisible a few inches away, I hear Mary’s voice say, “Time heals all wounds.”

  I hear the woman’s voice breathe in my love’s ear, “That’s right.”

  ROBERT, I KNOW WHEN I’M NOT WANTED . . .

  I was pretty scared even before the lights went out. The party had turned from “soul shakes,” and “Cómo estás, amigo?” to “Why don’t we send these white boys to the hospital?” We were where we didn’t belong, and it was too late to do anything about it. It was our own fault; we’d pulled out some drugs, assuming they would be welcome. They weren’t welcome and neither were we.