by Peter Plate
TWELVE
THE AFTERNOON MOVED ON, galloping toward sundown. The trees, buildings, and automobiles along Market Street were pink, gray, and black. In the smoggy distance was the Maria Alicia Apartments, a three-storied stucco low-income housing project. An SRO hotel used to be at the site—the Gartland Apartments—but it was destroyed in an arson-related fire in December 1975. Twelve residents died in the conflagration. Seventeen others were never found. People said the landlord did it, but nobody could prove it.
Waiting for his wife to emerge from Martuni’s Lounge, a Market Street bar, a vexed Jeeter Roche analyzed his marriage. Chiclet had been getting loaded all day long. First the Valium and now Placidyl, a controlled substance classified as a hypnotic. She had downed two pills an hour ago, and when she didn’t feel them right away, she took two more. Then it hit her all at once.
How long had him and Chiclet been married, a couple of months? How she carried on, dabbling in dope and messing around with that idiot Stiv Wilkins—as if it was a secret—Jeeter could swear it had been a century. Maybe the age difference between them was the problem. Jeeter had a good twenty-five years on Chiclet, most of them spent in prison.
To complicate things, Chiclet didn’t share his love for literature. Books bored her and this pained Jeeter to no end. He couldn’t tell his woman about the Brazilian writer Amado. Couldn’t tell her about a world that was better than getting high, and better than the one they were living in.
Jeeter saw a police car jet east on Market Street. The cruiser ran the red light on Gough Street, and then the red light on Franklin Street. The sole thing him and her ever talked about was the price of weed. That was his fault. After all he provided the dope and the money and kept her in the drug room to look after their enterprise.
His reverie was cut short as Chiclet, fixing her makeup, paraded out of the bar. The green anorak she had on was skanky and marked with cigarette burns. A quartet of pimples tattooed her chin. Her hair was mussed, draggling over her nose, and getting in the way as she applied cobalt blue lipstick to her mouth.
Richard Rood studied the dope dealer and his wife from behind a parked Saturn sedan. They were a diorama of white people and their problems. He could see them in a museum of the future: urban primitives and their mating rites. They were fools is what they were. He gobbled at them, his gravelly voice carrying across the street: “Yo, baby, yo.”
Jeeter froze when he heard Rood. Nothing was worse than that man. Not pestilence. Not disease. Not starvation. Not even death. Too bad the black dealer wasn’t a figment of his imagination, the aftermath of taking too many drugs and seeing too many things that weren’t there. “Goddamn it,” he said to Chiclet, pinching her arm. “We’ve got company.”
Eating up the asphalt in his Timberland boots, Richard Rood made a beeline toward the Allen’s property manager. His eyes were somber. His fists were balled. Four inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than the white man, he transmitted enough hatred to scare the heebie-jeebies out of Jeeter Roche.
Richard gazed at Jeeter, targeting him with a reptilian stare that had taken thousands of hours to perfect in front of a mirror. “I’ve been looking for you, boy. Been wanting to talk to your ass.”
Jeeter was in a lightweight North Face goose down parka held together with duct tape. Corralling his emotions into a semblance of coolness, he twisted his chapped lips and answered, “I could care fucking less. You know why?”
“Why?”
“You were at my house earlier and you were messing with Chiclet, you turd, that’s why. What the fuck is wrong with you? You lost your mind or what?”
Richard was terse. “You got something to say about it?”
Jeeter could smell the shabbiness of Richard’s patent leather suit. “Yeah, I do. This is my wife we’re talking about. What did you have to freak her out for? It was unnecessary. You’re out of line.”
Richard was nonchalant and hawked a lunger on the ground. “I didn’t do nothing untowardly to her.”
“Bullshit.” Jeeter was excited. “You were trying to intimidate her.”
“Who says? That cow?” Richard Rood picked his nose and then motioned at Chiclet. “She’s all high.”
Jeeter’s goose down parka billowed in the wind. “You seriously suck, dude. You’ve got no respect for nobody or nothing. You’re an animal.”
“Too bad.” Richard spread his arms, indicating serenity. “You dig me?” Nourished by the mounting acrimony, he offered an invitation. It seemed like the manly thing to do. Move the debate to a higher level. A tremor of undiluted hate blanched his face when he said, “You want to fight?”
Jeeter flung the parka on the sidewalk like a bullfighter’s cape. “Hell, yeah. I can’t have you dogging my old lady.”
Taking the initiative was Jeeter’s first mistake. The combatants squared off under the streetlights and Richard made contact. He lashed out at Jeeter, feinting left hooks, and connecting with right jabs in the gut, all the while saying, “C’mon, you want a piece of me? What are you waiting for?”
Jeeter retreated a pace, windmilling his arms. Getting jabbed in the stomach hurt. Made him want to toss his cookies. He wasn’t ready for no boxing match—and that became his second mistake. Richard snapped off a punch that clipped Jeeter on the nose; a gout of blood streamed from the white dealer’s nostrils as he rocked back on his heels.
Richard Rood crowed, “You gonna cry, little pussy? You want your mommy?”
Afraid that Jeeter would get pulverized, Chiclet stepped in between Richard and her husband. Her neck was buried to the chin in a cashmere scarf. The anorak’s upturned collar scalloped her high-boned cheeks. The wind coming off the street had burned her skin crimson red. She placed a hand on her hip and said to Richard Rood, “What do you want from me and Jeeter?”
Richard dropped his fists and targeted her with a disingenuous smile. A smile that had several subtexts: repugnance, interest, and abhorrence. He schooled his eyes on Chiclet’s body with undisguised and scientific interest. He’d never been with a woman. Not in the Biblical sense. Technically, he was a virgin. Wouldn’t know a vagina if it hit him in the face. Personally speaking, he was a child of sodomy.
He examined her breasts, their roundness showing through a ratty cardigan ski sweater. He appraised the lines of her buttocks bunched inside a pair of melon pink capris. He measured the narrowness of her ankles and the Indian sandals on her feet, the emerald green nail polish on her toenails. She was as queer to him as an alien from another galaxy.
Chiclet brushed away a strand of dyed blonde hair from her triangular face. Richard’s belladonna black eyes made her head reel. He was more unnerving than a bad acid trip. It was like flirting with a rattlesnake. If you ventured too close, you’d get bitten and die. She blustered, “So what do you want?”
“What do I want?” Richard read her body language and said with impatience, “You need to do something about them pimples, you hear me? But fuck it. Let’s get down to brass tacks. I’m looking for someone.”
Chiclet had broken the thread of violence. Plasma trickled out of Jeeter’s busted nose, proof that his hardness was complete fabrication. He was too old for brawling. Jeeter pointed one foot at Richard. His left shoulder was hitched high. His slanted feline eyes were askew. There wasn’t anything about him that was in sync. He said, “Who’s that? Anybody we know?”
Richard was emphatic. “Damn it, yeah. It’s a buddy of yours. One of your honchos.”
“And who would that be, huh? Who do you know that we know? You and me ain’t got shit in common.”
“Yes, we do. This white dude.”
“Most of my friends are white. Which one are you talking about?”
“That punk rock faggot.”
Jeeter’s resistance was melting faster than ice cream left out on the hot pavement. Tiredness tickled his throat. It was nightmarish to have Richard Rood breathing down your neck. Wanting to put an end to it, Jeeter ventured, “You mean Stiv Wilkins?”
Richard’s
eyes softened. “Uh huh. I mean Stiv.”
“He ain’t my buddy.”
“He ain’t? What exactly is he to you?”
“The pissant is just a tenant in my building.”
“Your building? You own it?”
“No.”
“Then what does that make you?”
“I oversee the Allen and all the shit that goes down in it.”
“Is that so? You must be one very important motherfucker in the scene over there.”
“I am.”
“But you do know Stiv, don’t you?”
Jeeter confessed without shame. “I admit to that.”
“Well, then.” Richard Rood stroked his chin sagaciously. He toed a beer can into the gutter. “I’m looking for the dickhead. Have you seen him?”
“Damn, right, I have.” Jeeter said. His tongue burned with a snitch’s lust to be truth speaking. He practically strangled on the words when they petered out of his mouth. “The fucking runt sold me a lousy gun earlier. He said it was good. I believed him. Then I went to test it at the Lake Merced shooting range and the thing exploded in my hand.”
“No shit?”
“Stiv’s a goddamn lizard. He sucks. I hate him.”
“But where is he?”
Jeeter Roche unbuttoned his shirt and used the tails to soak up the blood on his face. “How the hell would I know?”
There was little else to say. Richard wanted to insult Jeeter, just to fuck with him, but decided to reserve his energy. Cooler that he should hold back and stay blasé. He said, “Okay.”
The flu had him going downstream in a river of incomprehension. His fists were sore from rearranging Jeeter’s face. He didn’t know what his next step was, but it wasn’t hanging around these dolts. He had no time for trashy-assed losers. Jeeter and his woman were good for doodly squat. Richard Rood bid them a curt farewell. “Hey, I didn’t mean to fuck with your evening or bring you down, but it had to be done, you know?”
THIRTEEN
ONCE YOU GOT OUT of the Tenderloin and into the Castro district, Market Street became a different palette of colors. Few homeless people were seen. No crack dealers hawked their wares. No fire engines raced to tenement hotels. No hookers were at the curb. In their stead were renovated Victorians, upscale flower shops, jewelry stores, pricey restaurants, hair salons, and wine bars.
The annual Castro Street festival was taking place during the upcoming weekend, and a hundred thousand people would congregate outside to party. The disco king Sylvester used to sing at the event and had regaled the masses with his opus “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”
The song was an anthem for gay men in San Francisco and was played a hundred times a day in neighborhood bars. Sylvester was the reigning diva of the international dance music scene in the 1980s. Recording for a regional label, his pioneering vocals made their presence felt in nightclubs from New York to Berlin. He died of AIDS, as did thousands in the city.
At four o’clock the doors to the post office were open, in the hopes of attracting a breeze. Sunlight had penetrated the station’s blue-tinted plate-glass walls; ponds of light coruscated on the brick tile floor. An airmail package with foreign stickers sat next to a computerized cash register on the service counter. A muzak version of the Lee Morgan composition “Sidewinder” percolated from a radio.
The lone clerk at the counter, a middle-aged Filipino man, heard a person come in the door. He levered his head to see who it was. The afternoon had been slow and he was a mite bored. It was a male customer, one he hadn’t seen before. Postal work was like that—people came and went, never to be seen again. There were too many faces to remember, too many voices to sort out. Some brought good cheer along with their mail. Most didn’t.
As the man’s footsteps came closer, the clerk’s short black hair stood up on end. His lips curled, showing uneven teeth. His skin whitened from brown to gray. His eyes widened in tortured recognition when he saw what was in the fellow’s hand.
A clean-shaven Stiv Wilkins pointed a Colt revolver with a three-inch barrel at the postal worker’s pudgy face. With his hair combed, Stiv looked positively juvenile, no more than eighteen. He pulled back the gun’s hammer, cleared his throat of phlegm and stated the purpose of his visit. “Can you help me, please?”
“To do-do-do-do what?” the clerk stuttered.
“Open the register drawer.”
“Why?”
Stiv was direct. “I want the money.”
“I can’t give it to you.”
Stiv was perplexed and signified with the Colt. “Why not?”
“Because you have to make a purchase. You have to put in money. It won’t open otherwise.”
“Fuck that.” Stiv goaded him in the chin with the revolver.
The clerk had coronary thrombosis written over his face. His orbs were egg yolks swimming in blood vessels. His skin was greasier than bacon. The sweat stains in his blue postal uniform were moons. He made a suggestion. “How about buying some stamps?”
Stiv let his arm drop, the gun at his side. His tongue was metallic, a warning that an attack was coming on. Not a full-blown hallucination, but near enough. The walls shifted a few inches. The post office’s bulletin board, spangled with the FBI’s Most Wanted posters, was moving up and down. It let him know he was on the brink.
Closing his eyes, Stiv forgot where he was. He daydreamed about taking the cable car at Powell and Market over Nob Hill and down into Chinatown. The ride took forever and you could see Angel Island and Mount Tamalpais. He reopened his eyes and found the postal worker was on all fours under the stamp machine. A handful of coins, dimes, pennies, and nickels were on the floor next to a stack of boxes. Stiv asked sleepily, not quite sure what was going on, “Where’s the money?”
“I’m trying,” the man gasped, “to get change for stamps.”
Having no more patience for the situation, Stiv scrambled on the countertop by the weight scale and sighted the clerk with the Colt. He counted backwards from ten and when he reached zero, he asked himself a question. Where had the summer gone? June had been cold and foggy. July had been a month without heat at the Allen Hotel. In August you had to hide out from the tourists on Market Street. Now it was a melancholy September day in his heart. Stiv fired the gun, once, twice, three, four times.
When a man is shot in the neck, his head explodes in a dance of bone fragments. Pieces of his skull take flight. How far the body parts fly depends on how close the shooter is to the victim. The brain splatters like jelly. The eyes pop out. The face is ruined in a surge of skin and blood. The lower cavities vacate urine and feces. By the time the gunshot’s amplitude dies away, the body is already turning cold.
The postal guy was kissing the ground, praying in Spanish. “Madre de Dios, por favor …”
All Stiv heard was a click—the pistol’s safety button was on. He undid the safety, and came up with a better idea. If he couldn’t send the postman to glory, at least he could kill himself. He flipped the pistol around and put the muzzle in his mouth. Wedding his lips to the barrel, Stiv rimmed the bore with his tongue, and hit the trigger.
Shooting yourself in the face is the pièce de résistance of suicide. It’s a hostile act that guarantees a drastic mess for someone to clean up. Believing he was dead, Stiv was puzzled. In the afterlife there was supposed to be no jazz on the radio, but nonetheless he was hearing it in the background. And the clerk was futzing with the stamp machine. Nothing had changed, meaning he was alive. Stiv had a gander at the Colt: it had been unloaded.
Hopping off the counter, he backpedaled out of the post office and cut up Eighteenth Street, just as the sun dipped over the sparsely grassed fields of the Eureka Valley Playground. He bustled past Cliff’s Variety hardware store and the Castro Theater and made a break for Market Street. Tongue lolling from his mouth, Stiv Wilkins spurted across the road and passed under an elm tree, trying to outrun the hallucination that was overtaking him.
Fog was coming down over the
forested hills onto the beach as the skiff neared the cove. Harbor seals swam alongside the boat, their sleek heads visible in the moonlight. Mallard ducks were quacking in the water. José Reyna watched the two Ohlone oarsmen as they paddled the craft. Their unbraided black hair was wet with sweat and they were barefoot in wool trousers. Their thick leather belts held butcher knives and muzzle-loading pistols. The buoyant skiff, woven from marsh reeds, nosed into a wave. Two-Fingered Tom cleaned his guns and said to José, “Chale, this is a bitch, ain’t it?”
The last time Two-Fingered Tom had been in San Francisco, he’d escaped from jail. Since there was a bounty for his capture, he didn’t look forward to returning to the village and stared at the piney hillsides with suspicion. The two outlaws sat in the boat’s prow, attempting to keep their weapons and gunpowder dry. The rest of José’s men, mestizos and runaway Mission Indian slaves, were in Oakland guarding their horses.
The first Ohlone oarsman was using his paddle as a tiller, urging the vessel toward the coastline. Three yards from the shore, the other Ohlone jumped into the surf and guided the boat onto the sand. José and Two-Fingered Tom grabbed their serapes, rifles, and quirts and put on their sombreros.
“What’s the name of this beach?” José asked.
“Warm Water Cove,” Two-Fingered said.
The skiff was hidden onshore behind a crop of scrub brush and camouflaged with tree branches. José watched the Indians as they searched the ground for the path that led through the pine forest and into San Francisco. The older Ohlone was muscular; his back was cicatrized with scars from the whippings he’d received at Mission Dolores. The younger Indian, slim and quick on his feet, said something to him in pidgin Spanish and then gave the high sign. He said, “Aquí, hombres.”
Two-Fingered muttered, “That pinche indio better know where he’s taking us.”
With the moon in the west to navigate by, the four men followed the trail into the trees. The Ohlone took the lead. Two-Fingered Tom, paranoid out of his mind, brought up the rear with a six-barreled squirrel rifle. It was a model favored by the gringos. Birds were tweeting in a lilac bush. Two deer, a doe and a fawn, ran away when they heard the men. A small bear crashed through chokeberry bush brambles and a coyote barked in the hills.
