by Paula Guran
In San Francisco’s Mission District, West African magical powers reveal the consequences of Mr. Ash’s unfortunate actions as well as the innermost reality of the city.
Ash
John Shirley
A police car pulled up to the entrance of the Casa Valencia. The door to the apartment building, on the edge of San Francisco’s Mission District, was almost camouflaged by the businesses around it, wedged between the standout orange and blue colors of the Any Kind Check Cashing Center and the San Salvador restaurant. Ash made a note on his pad, and sipped his cappuccino as a bus hulked around the corner, blocking his view through the window of the espresso shop. The cops had shown up a good thirteen minutes after he’d called in the anonymous tip on a robbery at the Casa Valencia. Which worked out good. But when it was time to pop the armored car at the Any Kind Check Cashing Center next door, they might show up more briskly. Especially if a cashier hit a silent alarm.
The bus pulled away. Only a few cars passed, impatiently clogging the corner of 16th and Valencia, then dispersing; pedestrians, with clothes flapping, hurried along in tight groups, as if they were being tumbled by the moist February wind.
Just around the corner from the first car, double-parking with its lights flashing, the second police car arrived. By now, though, the bruise-eyed hotel manager from New Delhi or Calcutta or wherever was telling the first cop that he hadn’t called anyone; it was a false alarm, probably called in by some junkie he’d evicted, just to harass him. The cop nodded in watery sympathy. The second cop called through the window of his SFPD cruiser. Then they both split, off to Dunkin’ Donuts. Ash relaxed, checking his watch. Any minute now the armored car would be showing up for the evening money drop-off. There was a run of check cashing after five o’clock.
Ash sipped the dregs of his cappuccino. He thought about the .45 in the shoebox under his bed. He needed target practice. On the slim chance he had to use the gun. The thought made his heart thud, his mouth go dry, his groin tighten. He wasn’t sure if the reaction was fear or anticipation.
This, now, this was being alive. Planning a robbery, executing a robbery. Pushing back at the world. Making a dent in it, this time. For thirty-nine years his responses to the world’s bullying and indifference had been measured and careful and more or less passive. He’d played the game, pretending that he didn’t know the dealer was stacking the cards. He’d worked faithfully, first for Grenoble Insurance, then for Serenity Insurance, a total of seventeen years. And it had made no difference at all. When the recession came, Ash’s middle management job was jettisoned like so much trash.
It shouldn’t have surprised him. First at Grenoble, then at Serenity, Ash had watched helplessly as policyholders had been summarily cut off by the insurance companies at the time of their greatest need. Every year, thousands of people with cancer, with AIDS, with accident paraplegia, cut off from the benefits they’d spent years paying for; shoved through the numerous loopholes that insurance industry lobbyists worked into the laws. That should have told him: if they’d do it to some ten-year-old kid with leukemia—and, God, they did it every day—they’d do it to Ash. Come the recession, bang, Ash was out on his ear with the minimum in retirement benefits.
And the minimum wasn’t enough.
Fumbling through the “casing process,” Ash made a few more perfunctory notes as he waited for the armored car. His hobbyhorse reading was books about crime and the books had told him that professional criminals cased the place by taking copious notes about the surroundings. Next to Any Kind Check Cashing was Lee Zong, Hairstyling for Men and Women. Next to that, Starshine Video, owned by a Pakistani. On the Valencia side was the Casa Valencia entrance—the hotel rooms were layered above the Salvadoran restaurant, a dry cleaners, a leftist bookstore. Across the street, opposite the espresso place, was Casa Lucas Productos, a Hispanic supermarket, selling fruit and cactus pears and red bananas and plantains and beans by the fifty-pound bag. It was a hardy leftover from the days when this was an entirely Hispanic neighborhood. Now it was as much Korean and Vietnamese and Pakistani and Indian and Middle Eastern.
Two doors down from the check-cashing scam, in front of a liquor store, a black guy in a dirty, hooded sweatshirt stationed himself in front of passing pedestrians, blocking them like a linebacker to make it harder to avoid his outstretched hand.
That could be me, soon, Ash thought. I’m doing the right thing. One good hit to pay for a business franchise of some kind, something that’d do well in a recession. Maybe a movie theater. People needed to escape. Or maybe his own check cashing business—with better security.
Ash glanced to the left, down the street, toward the entrance to the BART station—San Francisco’s subway—this entrance only one short block from the check-cashing center. At five-eighteen, give or take a minute, a northbound subway would hit the platform, pause for a moment, then zip off down the tunnel. Ash would be on it with the money, escaping more efficiently than he could ever hope to, driving a car in city traffic. And more anonymously.
The only problem would be getting to the subway station handily. He was five-six, and pudgy, his legs a bit short, his wind even shorter. He was going to have to sprint that block and hope no one played hero. If he knew San Francisco, though, no one would.
He looked back at the check-cashing center just in time to see the Armored Transport of California truck pull up. He checked his watch: as with last week, just about five-twelve. There was a picture insignia of a knight’s helmet on the side of the truck. The rest of the truck painted half black and half white, which was supposed to suggest police colors, scare thieves. Ash wouldn’t be intimidated by a paint job.
He’d heard that on Monday afternoons they brought about fifteen grand into that check-cashing center. Enough for a down payment on a franchise, somewhere, once he’d laundered the money in Reno.
Now, he watched as the old, white-haired black guard, in his blue and white uniform, wheezed out the back of the armored car, carrying the canvas sacks of cash. Not looking to the right or left, no one covering him. His gun strapped into its holster.
The old nitwit was as ridiculously overconfident as he was overweight, Ash thought. He’d never had any trouble. First time for everything, Uncle Remus.
Ash watched intently as the guard waddled into the check-cashing center. He checked his watch, timing him, though he wasn’t sure why he should, since he was planning to rob him on the way in, not on the way out. But he had the impression from the books you were supposed to time everything. The reasons would come clear later.
A bony, stooped Chicano street eccentric—aging, toothless, with a squiggle of black mustache and sloppily dyed black hair—paraded up the sidewalk to stand directly in front of Ash’s window. Crazy old fruit, Ash thought. A familiar figure on the street here. He was wearing a Santa Claus hat tricked out with junk jewelry, a tattered gold lamé jacket, thick mascara and eyeliner, and a rose erupting a penis crudely painted on his weathered cheek. The inevitable trash-brimmed shopping bag in one hand, in the other a cane made into a mystical staff of office with the gold-painted plastic roses duct-taped to the top end.
As usual the crazy old fuck was babbling free-form imprecations, his spittle making whiteheads on the window glass. “Damnfuckya!” came muffled through the glass. “Damnfuckya for ya abandoned city, ya abandoned city and now their gods are taking away, taking like a bend-over boy yes, damnfuckya! Yoruba Orisha! The Orisha, cabrón! Holy shit on a wheel! Hijo de puta! Ya doot, ya pay, they watch, they pray, they take like a bend-over boy ya! Eshu-Elegba at your crossroads shithead pendejo! LSD not the godblood now praise the days! Damnfuckya be sorry! Orisha them Yoruba cabrones!”
Yoruba Orisha. Sounded familiar.
“Godfuckya Orisha sniff ’round, vamanos! Chinga tu madre!”
Maybe the old fruit was a Santeria loony. Santeria was the Hispanic equivalent of Yoruba, and now he was foaming at the mouth about the growth in Yoruba’s power. Or maybe he’d done too much acid in the si
xties.
The Lebanese guys who ran the espresso place, trying to fake it as a chic croissant espresso parlor, went out onto the sidewalk to chase the old shrieker away. But Ash was through here, anyway. It was time to go to the indoor range, to practice with the gun.
On the BART train over to the East Bay, on his way to the target range, Ash let his mind wander. He had only fired the automatic once before—and before that hadn’t fired a gun since his boyhood, when he’d gone hunting with his father. He’d never hit anything, in those days. He wasn’t sure he could hit anything now. But he had been researching gun handling, and even if he didn’t turn into Wild Bill Hickok, he would be able to stop a man. How hard could that be? He didn’t want to have to shoot the old waddler. Chances were, he wouldn’t have to shoot. The old guard would be terrified, paralyzed. Putty. Still . . .
He scanned the interior of the humming train car, as if somebody or something might be able to read his mind. But none of the passengers were paying attention. His eyes focused on a page of a morning paper abandoned on the seat beside him. It was a back-section page of the Examiner, and it was the word Yoruba in a headline that focused his eyes. Lurching with the motion of the train, Ash crossed the aisle and sat down next to the paper, read the article without picking it up.
Yoruba, it said, was the growing religion of inner city blacks—an amalgam of African and Western mysticism. Ancestor worship with African roots. Supposed to be millions of people into it now. Orisha were spirits. Eshu Elegba was some god or other.
So the Chicano street freak had been squeaking about Yoruba because it was getting stronger. His latest attack of paranoia. Next week he’d be warning people about some plot by the Vatican.
Ash shrugged, and the train pulled into his station.
Ash was glad the week was over; relieved the waiting was nearly done. He’d begun to have second thoughts. The attrition on his nerves had been almost unbearable.
But now it was Monday again. Seven minutes after five. He sat in the espresso shop, sipping, achingly and sensuously aware of the weight of the pistol in the pocket of his trench coat.
The street crazy with the gold roses on his cane was stumping along a little ways up, across the street, as if coming to meet Ash. And then the armored car pulled around the corner.
Legs rubbery, Ash made himself get up. He picked up the empty, frameless backpack, carried it in his left hand. Went out the door, into the bash of cold wind. The traffic light was with him. He took that as a sign, and crossed with growing alacrity, one hand closing around the grip of the gun in his coat pocket. The ski mask was folded up onto his forehead like a watch cap. As he reached the corner where the fat black security guard was just getting out of the back of the armored car, he pulled the ski mask down over his face. And he jerked the gun out.
“Give me the bag or you’re dead right now!” Ash barked, just as he’d rehearsed it, leveling the gun at the old man’s unmissable belly.
For a split second, as the old man hesitated, Ash’s eyes focused on something anomalous in the guard’s uniform; an African charm dangling down the front of his shirt, where a tie should be. A spirit-mask face that seemed to grimace at Ash. Then the rasping plop of the bag dropping to the sidewalk snagged his attention, and Ash waved the gun, yelling, “Back away and drop your gun! Take it out with thumb and forefinger only!” All according to rehearsal.
The gun clanked on the sidewalk. The old man backed stumblingly away. Ash scooped up the bag, shoved it into the backpack. Take the old guy’s gun too. But people were yelling, across the street, for someone to call the cops, and he just wanted away. He sprinted into the street, into a tunnel of panic, hearing shouts and car horns blaring at him, the squeal of tires, but never looking around. His eyes fixed on the downhill block that was his path to the BART station.
Somehow he was across the street without being run over, was five paces past the wooden, poster-swathed newspaper kiosk on the opposite corner, when the Chicano street crazy with the gold roses on his cane popped into his path from a doorway, shrieking, the whites showing all the way around his eyes, foam spiraling from his mouth, his whole body pirouetting, spinning like a cop car’s red light. Ash bellowed something at him and waved the gun, but momentum carried him directly into the crazy fuck and they went down, one skidding atop the other, the stinking, clownishly made-up face howling two inches from his, the loon’s cocked knee knocking the wind out of Ash.
He forced himself to take air and rolled aside, wrenched free, gun in one hand and backpack in the other, his heart screaming. People yelling around him. He got to his feet, the effort making him feel like Atlas lifting the world. Then he heard a deep voice. “Drop ’em both or down you go motherfucker!” And, wheezing, the fat old guard was there, gun retrieved and shining in his hand, breath steaming from his nostrils, dripping sweat, eyes wild. The crazy was up, flailing indiscriminately, this time in the fat guard’s face. The old guy’s gun once more went spinning away from him.
Now’s your chance, Ash. Go.
But his shaking hands had leveled his own gun.
Thinking: The guy’s going to pick up his piece and shoot me in the back unless I gun him down.
No he won’t, he won’t chance hitting passersby, just run—
But the crazy threw himself aside and the black guard was a clear-cut target and something in Ash erupted out through his hands. The gun banged four times and the old man went down. Screams in the background. The guard clutched his torn-up belly. One hand went to the grimacing African charm hanging around his neck. His lips moved.
Ash ran. He ran into another tunnel of perception, and down the hill.
Ash was on the BART platform, and the train was pulling in. He didn’t remember coming here. Where was the gun? Where was the money? The mask? Why was his mouth full of paper?
He took stock. The gun was back in his coat pocket, like a scorpion retreated into its hole. His ski mask was where it was supposed to be, too, with the canvas bag in the backpack. There was no paper in his mouth. It just felt that way, it was so dry.
The train pulled in and, for a moment, it seemed to Ash that it was feeding on the people in the platform. Trains and buses all over the city puffing up, feeding, moving on, stopping to feed again
Strange thought. Just get on the train. He had maybe one minute before the city police would coordinate with the BART Police and they’d all come clattering down here looking to shoot him.
He stepped onto the train just as the doors closed.
It took an unusually long time to get to the next station. That was his imagination; the adrenaline affecting him, he supposed. He didn’t look at anyone else on the train. No one looked at him. They were all damned quiet.
He got off at the next stop. That was his plan—get out before the transit cops staked out the station—but he half expected them to be there when he got out of the train.
He felt a weight spiral away from him: no cops on the platform, or at the top of the escalator.
Next thing, go to ground and stay. They’d expect him to go much farther, maybe the airport.
God it was dark out. The night had come so quickly, in just the few minutes he’d spent on the train. Well, it came fast in the winter.
He didn’t recognize the neighborhood. Maybe he was around Hunter’s Point somewhere. It looked mostly black and Hispanic here. He’d be conspicuous. No matter, he was committed.
You killed a man.
Don’t think about it now. Think about shelter.
He moved off down the street, scanning the signs for a cheap hotel. Had to get off the streets fast. With luck, no one would get around to telling the cops he’d ducked into the Mission Street BART station. Street people at 16th and Mission didn’t confide in the cops.
It was all open-air discount stores and flyblown barbecue stands and bars. The corners were clumped up, as they always were, with drinkers and loafers and hustlers and people on errands stopping to trade gossip with their cousins. Black guys
and Hispanic guys, turning to look at Ash as he passed, never pausing in their murmur. All wearing dark glasses—it must be some kind of fad in this neighborhood to wear shades at night. It didn’t make much sense. The blacks and Hispanics stood about in mixed groups, which was kind of strange. They communicated at times, especially in the drug trade, but they were usually more segregated. The streetlights seemed a cat-eye yellow here, but somehow gave out no illumination—everything above the street level was pitch black. Below, a leprous mist smudged the neon of the bars, the adult bookstores, the beer signs in the liquor stores. He stared at a beer sign as he passed. “Drink the Piss of Hope,” it said. He must have read that wrong. But farther down he read it again in another window: “Piss of Hope: The Beer That Sweetly Lies.”
Piss of Hope?
Another sign advertised Heartblood Wine Cooler. Heartblood, now. It was so easy to get out of touch with things. But . . .
There was something wrong with the sunglasses people were wearing. Looking close at a black guy and a Hispanic guy standing together, he saw that their glasses weren’t sunglasses, exactly. They were the miniatures of house windows, thickly painted over. Dull gray paint, dull red paint.
Stress. It’s stress, and the weird light here and what you’ve been through.
He could feel them watching him. All of them. He passed a group of children playing a game. The children had no eyes—they had plucked them, were casting the eyes, tumbling them along the sidewalk like jacks—
You’re really freaked out, Ash thought. It’s the shooting. It’s natural. It’ll pass.
The cars in the street were lit from underneath with oily yellow light. There were no headlights. Their windows were painted out. (That is not a pickup truck filled with dirty, stark-naked children vomiting blood.) The crowds to either side of the sidewalk thickened. It was like a parade day; like people waiting for a procession. (The old wino sleeping in the doorway is not made out of dog shit.) In the window of a bar, he saw a hissing, flickering neon sign shaped like a face. A grimacing face of lurid strokes of neon, amalgamated from goat and hyena and man, a mask he’d seen before. He felt the sign’s impossible warmth as he pushed through the muttering crowds.
