Beyond Blame

by Stephen Greenleaf

  Surrounding the park, both in front of my car and behind it, was a string of vehicles, tires flat, windows smashed, paint eroded, fenders ripped or dimpled. I assumed them to be abandoned until I saw a face appear above the dashboard of the Pinto directly across the street from me. It was a young but battered boy, surely not yet twenty. He scrubbed at his eyes, looked sleepily at his surroundings, saw nothing promising or dangerous, then returned to his burrow. When a car door slammed shut behind me, I turned in time to see a girl hop out of a dented Datsun, carry a plastic bag full of garbage over to an abandoned pickup truck, toss the bag into the bed of the truck, then trot back to the Datsun and drive away with her hairy mate, both of them smiling at their creative solid waste disposal.

  What I was looking for was Lisa Usser, but from where I sat I couldn’t see her. The only possibility was that Lisa and her mates might be among those gathered in what looked like celebration around the glowing ember in the center of the pocket forest at the top of the park. I got out of my car and went up to take a look, alert for an encounter with a crazed inhabitant of the little unwalled city the people still claimed for themselves.

  Keeping to the sidewalk, I walked around three sides of the grove, slowly, carefully, but I couldn’t see anything from that distance. I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers and edged my way into the dark, dank stand of trees.

  The group around the fire seemed to number five or six. At least two of them were women. Their voices cackled in manic gaiety, indicating a high artificially induced for the occasion. The dance they did was tribal, the purpose unclear. I was still not close enough to focus on a face, so I penetrated farther, hiding behind one bush and then another, moving closer to the fire, feeling like a kid playing war and winning.

  As I was about to move to the next vantage point, I stepped on something round and soft. I heard a mumbled curse and felt something slap my leg. I looked down, muttered an apology at the heap of rags that slept there and moved on, inhaling only belatedly the stink of cheap booze and rotten wool. A minute later I had gone as far as I could if I wanted to keep my presence secret. I knelt behind a young Scotch pine that had somehow survived as lush, and looked closely at the twirling celebrants.

  There might have been some bodies snuggled in the cape of darkness beyond the fire’s gold reach, but the only ones I could see were five in number, three men and two women. All but one of them looked young and overly thrilled by whatever enlightenment they thought they were experiencing. They were dressed in the baggy ugliness of the street, their dominant features the hairstyles that seemed crafted with pinking shears and the glittering accessories that suggested either death or a variety of enslavement.

  The exception was the man who stood apart from the dancers in the manner of a commandant. He was tall but stooped, dressed in an army field jacket and the jungle fatigues that had been originally issued to the kids who went to Vietnam but now are worn by kids who have never heard of the place or who think it lies somewhere south of Florida.

  His head was a scruffy thicket, his eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses; he chewed gum in lazy movements of his jaw. He circled the fire in slow, mincing steps, his arms hanging stiffly at his sides, his hands twitching nervously. He wore jungle boots and a bandanna around his neck, and his legs were wrapped with knotted strips of rags that ringed them at ten-inch intervals, from ankle to crotch. The only other people I knew of who did that were Viet Cong sappers. The rags acted as tourniquets when they were hit, enabling them to fight much longer before they bled to death.

  As I watched the dance, one girl separated herself from the group and drifted toward the older man. She was young, thin, sad-eyed, a waif wearing the same knee-length boots and skintight jeans I had seen her in just before she had ducked through the hedge behind the Usser house a couple of hours before.

  She seemed more in control than the others, less given over to the drugs, more aware of both herself and her leader, the guy in the wardrobe out of Taxi Driver. As the others began to circle the fire again and to sing a song about what sounded like money, the girl, Lisa, drifted to the leader’s side.

  He draped an arm across her shoulders and kissed her. She kissed him back. They embraced, then danced a few steps. When he twirled unsteadily his back was to me for an instant and I saw two things, a word emblazoned on the back of his jacket in white paint and a stubby, pearl-handled pistol stuffed into the back pocket of his fatigues. The word on the jacket was MANIAC. As I shuddered with a psychic chill, one of the dancers stumbled into the fire, almost fell, put a hand into the flames to right herself, then drew it out slowly, looking quizzically at its sooty sear, laughing.

  I tried to decide what to do. As my mind gave off a series of bad ideas, Lisa pulled something from the pocket of her bulky canvas jacket and held it up to the firelight, then asked the Maniac a question. He nodded and pointed to the ground beneath the tallest tree in the grove. Lisa walked to the spot and began to dig. When she had a hole the size of a basketball she put the object into it, then took something else out of her pocket and tossed it in the hole as well, then covered them up, tamped the earth flat with her foot and pulled a half-burned log to the place to mark it and keep it hidden. Her task completed, she brushed off her hands and returned to the Maniac’s side and looked up at him in sedated awe, praying for approval.

  He bent to kiss her again, and this time they were body to body. His hands went to her buttocks and pressed her pelvis into his. Her hands edged between them so she could fondle his sex. He raised her off the ground and swung her in a circle. She laughed and whispered something in his ear, and he laughed, too, and ground his hips on hers. She slid down his body till she was on her knees, then pressed her face into his crotch. He grasped her head with both hands, moved it back and forth, masturbating against her lips. Smiling, Lisa reached for his fly. The dancers at her back seemed to sing her praises and to urge her on.

  I was about to step forward when a shout sounded from somewhere behind me, fearful, cautionary. Everyone froze, including me. Lisa got to her feet. A cry went out again: “Cops!”

  I looked behind me and saw a line of four uniformed men moving into the grove from the sidewalk. I looked back at Lisa. She and the group were already running, following the Maniac out of the grove, sprinting for the street opposite the one the cops were coming from, heading for the scramble of commercial buildings on the next block.

  I had started after them when someone yelled at my back, “Halt! Police! Don’t move, buster. Hold it right there.”

  I stopped and turned and waited while they approached. One of them had his gun out, the others moved warily past me at his signal and followed after the Maniac and his clique. In the undergrowth around me I could hear the scurrying sounds of the park’s other occupants making their escapes. The cops didn’t seem to mind. I thought about making a break myself, but the one with his gun out looked able and willing to shoot me. I stayed put and watched while a confident smile and a matching swagger brought him to me.

  He was young, blond, image-perfect. “What’s your name?” he demanded, holstering his weapon.

  “Tanner.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking.”

  “At what?”

  I smiled my friendly smile. “Am I under arrest?”

  “Damn right.”

  “For what?”

  “Trespassing, for a start.”

  “I thought this was a park.”

  “This is university property.”

  “I thought the university gave up on that idea back in 1969.”

  “Like hell,” the cop said, but he shifted uneasily at the prospect that I might know something about the situation that he didn’t. In 1969 he would have been still wetting the bed and playing with toy trucks.

  “I think this is private property only when it’s convenient for you to call it that,” I went on. “I think my case will be tossed out of court on the ground of discriminatory prosecution. What do
you think?”

  “I don’t think, pal. I just bring them in. You and the rest of the punks.”

  “You’re after Lisa Usser, aren’t you?”

  His eyes narrowed with a suddenly specific suspicion. “What do you know about her?”

  “I know she was here a few minutes ago. I know she took off. I know from the look on those guys’ faces that she got away.”

  I gestured toward the policemen that were trudging back to where we stood, unaccompanied by suspects. The cop who’d been grilling me asked me where Lisa went.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Is Howard Gable here? Or Bart Kinn?”

  The cop frowned. “You know Kinn?”

  I nodded. “Tell him who I am. Tell him I’m looking for Lisa, too. Tell him if he lets me go I might have a shot at finding her.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know yet. If you take me in I never will.”

  The cop thought it over. “Wait here,” he said finally, then told one of the other officers to keep an eye on me and trotted out of the grove to an unmarked car that was double-parked on Bowditch, the street that bordered the east end of the park.

  He leaned in the window and said something to whoever was inside, nodded, then trotted back. “You can go,” he grumbled. “Kinn says he wants to know the minute you find anything. I don’t know how well you know Kinn, buster, but when he tells people to do something their lives are a lot easier if they do it.”

  I nodded and moved away from the police and toward my car. My plan was to wait till the cops had finished poking around in the now-vacant pine grove, then go back and dig up whatever it was that Lisa Usser had buried by the fire. But my plan was amended by the hand that grabbed my shoulder as I passed the derelict pickup that served as the local landfill.

  “It was Lisa, wasn’t it?” he asked, his voice high and frightened.

  “Hello, Cal.”

  “They want her, don’t they? I heard them talking. Will she be put in the Youth Authority?”

  “I don’t think so, Cal. I think they just want her as a witness.”

  “A witness to what?”

  “Her mother’s murder.”

  “That’s lame. She doesn’t know anything about it,” Cal blurted, then looked sorry that he had.

  “How do you know?”

  “She … ah, hell. She was with the Maniac, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Piss on her, then. Just piss on her.” Cal’s hands congealed into fists and he punched the pickup hard enough to hurt himself. As he rubbed his hand he kicked at a bourbon bottle that lay in the gutter. The bottle skittered across the street like a fleeing rat. When it reached the opposite curb it shattered.

  Cal started to walk away. I put out a hand to stop him. “What did Lisa tell you about her mother’s murder, Cal?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Zero. Now let me go.”

  “You’d be helping her if you tell me.”

  “So who wants to help her? She just lies to me, man. All lies.”

  “Lies how?”

  “She told me she’d leave the Maniac alone. Stop taking drugs. Quit hanging around the avenue. But they were just there, weren’t they? She and that fucking psychotic. What were they doing, anyway?”

  Cal was so hyped on jealousy his eyes glittered in the moonlight as though they’d just been glazed. I fought with the image of Lisa’s face pressed against the Maniac’s bulging crotch, with the sodden, sultry smile she’d worn as she reached eagerly for his fly. I fought with it until I could keep it secret from Cal and anyone. “They were just smoking some dope and dancing around the fire,” I said instead. “Do you have any idea where they went?”

  “Naw. Who gives a shit, anyway?”

  “I do. You do, too.”

  I looked at him. He looked back. He stopped tugging against my grip so I released him. He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. His eyes shone enough for me to think he was close to crying. “The Maniac has this place he crashes, with his sister somewhere. I never been there. Neither has Lisa, I don’t think. But there’s this other place they go sometimes. Hell House, they call it. Down on Blake, couple blocks above Shattuck. It’s this old apartment house where the trippers crash till the cops come roust them every week or so. They might go there.”

  “What’s the address?”

  “I don’t know the number. I’ll have to show you.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Cal came with me to the car. I followed his directions, which led me around the traffic barriers that so frazzled strangers to the city, and got me where we were going with a minimum of detours.

  The house had once been white, a square, two-story box of Mediterranean design, once-removed from Italy or Spain. Now it was suitable only for destruction. The walls were stained from rust and weather, the windows cracked or missing altogether, the door teetering on a single hinge, the shutters flapping periodically in the wind like sets of fractured wings. The front steps were rotted and collapsed, the stucco facade was pitted and pockmarked, the grass dead and tangled beneath a glaze of litter that included mounds of broken roof tiles. I circled the block without finding a vacant slot, so I pulled into the Hell House driveway and stopped the car.

  Subdued, Cal looked past me at the building. “I hate to think of her in there,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe what goes down in there sometimes.”

  We got out of the car and went up the steps, careful not to fall through the spongy wood. The door didn’t need opening. The lower hallway smelled of feces and dog food. As I walked its length I peeked in doorways, hoping I wouldn’t be able to see anything familiar.

  The first room was empty; the second sheltered a group of sleeping bundles similar to those I’d seen in People’s Park, except one of these bundles was crying. In the room at the back a women was suckling a child beside the stub of a candle. The soft gold glow wasn’t nearly enough to make the scene maternal, given the sores on the mother’s face and the bruise on the baby’s back and the terrible silence that bound them to each other.

  In the only other room on the first floor, six young kids were gathered around a kerosene lantern smoking cigarettes so reverently they could only have been joints. Cal stopped in the doorway and asked if they had seen the Maniac.

  One of the six told him to fuck off. I couldn’t tell which one had spoken. From the nodding listlessness they all possessed, I doubted they could be of help. I had started to move on down the hall when I felt something fly past my face and strike the wall behind me. “Fucking narc,” one of them muttered. I thought I saw the glimmer of a knife blade as I looked to see which of them had assaulted me. I debated going in after him, but Cal was tugging me away. I let him succeed with less reluctance than I would have had five years before.

  We went upstairs. For several minutes the only sounds came from the scrape of our shoes on the gritty dirt that salted the floor and the creaking floorboards that suffered our search. All the rooms looked empty, all the shelves looked bare. I had reached the back of the building and was starting to retrace my steps when I heard a moan from the far wall of the apartment numbered 5. I went inside the room, squinted, tried to see who it was, saw what I thought was human. I turned on my pencil flash to make sure.

  It was a girl, lying on the floor, dressed in the lumpy linens of the street people, her feet and arms bare, her body curled against itself. I knelt beside her. As I was reaching for her wrist to take a pulse, she opened a single eye. “I need a hit bad,” she breathed. “You carrying?”

  I shook my head.

  “Who are you? A cop?” Her voice was high, a child’s.

  “No, I’m not a cop.”

  “Are you from Daddy? Did Daddy send you after me?”

  “No. I don’t know your daddy.”

  “Daddy wants me to come home. He sends people to find me but they never can.”

  She groaned again and I asked her if she was all right.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, strangely obj
ective. “I think I got some bad shit.”

  “What did you take?”

  “I take whatever they’ll give me,” she said. “Ow. It hurts in there.”

  “Where?”

  “My gut. Do you know where Sherry is, mister? Sherry takes care of me. Sherry can tell me what to do.”

  “Sherry Misteen?”

  “Sherry. Yeah. Do you know where she is?”

  “No.”

  “But have you seen her? She’s been gone so long, no one’s even seen her lately.”

  “I haven’t seen her. No.”

  “The Maniac says she’s dead. She isn’t dead, is she, mister? If Sherry’s dead, then everyone I know is dead.”

  Her singsong voice, drugged and pained, compelled me to stay with her. “Do you need something? Food? Water? Anything?”

  “I need some dope, man.” She giggled. “Shit, skag, speed, snow; crystal, coke, crank. Anything. What have you got?”

  “I don’t have any dope, but I can call an ambulance to take you to a hospital.”

  “No.” Her body arched and stiffened. “No hospital. They’ll lock me up if I go there. Ah, Christ. I hurt, man. Maybe I’m dying. Like Sherry. You think I’m dying, mister?”

  I was trying to decide what I could do for her when Cal came into the room and tugged at my shoulder. “Come on,” he said, the words rough and peremptory. “The Maniac’s out back. I just heard someone call out to him.”

  “This girl’s in trouble,” I said. “We should do something.”

  Cal looked down at her and sneered, his expression hardened beyond anything I’d ever seen on his face. “You can’t help her,” he muttered. “Everyone in Berkeley’s tried to help Needles, and it don’t do no good. She don’t want help, she just wants people to want to try.”

  “She might be dying.”

  “She’ll be better off if she does,” Cal declared. “So will the world.”