by Peter Plate
Two-Fingered kept his crippled hand on the squirrel gun’s trigger. Blue jays, robins, starlings, and sparrows dithered in the trees. It was getting on his nerves. His soft-soled riding boots were making footprints in the mud. If the pinche gringos wanted to find them, it wouldn’t be too hard. A blind man could see their tracks.
On the south side of the lagoon were a general store, a blacksmith’s shop, a saloon with a hotel, and a barbershop. The sad-faced wood shingled buildings abutted a two-way dirt road. The Ohlone guides motioned José and Two-Fingered toward a rise behind the saloon, a low hill that was dotted with weeping willows. The outlaws secured cover behind the willows and looked at the bay. The masts of British frigates and U.S. warships blackwashed the piers at the Embarcadero. To the north were the chimneys on Telegraph Hill.
“I need to get hold of some goddamn opium,” Two-Fingered said.
Below them was a courthouse with a rude log cabin jail. Three Miwok Indian women were sitting on the courthouse steps begging for food. A mangy dog was gnawing on a steer bone at their feet. Two-Fingered Tom slapped José on the leg and said in an undertone, “Mira, over yonder.”
A dozen gringos in low-heeled cowboy boots, flannel shirts, and denim jeans were assembled under a gigantic oak tree with a priest. In front of them was a Mexican with his hands tied behind his back. His white linen shirt was torn; his pants were undone. His left eye was swollen. Blood dripped from his shoulder-length black hair onto his bronzed shoulders. The cleric was holding a crucifix.
One of the cowboys, a man with a blonde mustache and piercing blue eyes, threw a rope over the oak’s upper branches. He gave the rope a tug and constructed a hangman’s noose from it. Another cowboy took a Sharps rifle and smacked the Mexican in the head with the weapon’s butt; two other cowboys placed the noose around his neck.
The local magistrate, a tall, potbellied white man in a gray pinstriped suit, mud-splattered spats, and a beaver skin top hat, addressed the Mexican. “You are Antonio Valencia?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“You want to live?”
“What do you think, pendejo?”
“Then you’d better tell us where José Reyna is.”
The Mexican said nothing and the cowboys heaved the rope. The prisoner was lifted three feet off the ground; his face turned a violent shade of green. The magistrate made a signal with his thumb; the cowboys holding the rope let it go slack and the Mexican fell in the dirt. He coughed up blood and rolled over on his back, foaming at the mouth. The priest waved the crucifix over him and said a few words in Latin.
Two-Fingered Tom tapped the squirrel gun’s walnut stock. “Pinche maricones. Where the fuck do they get off with this foolishness?” He said to José, “Do you know the vato they’re lynching? They’re making like the motherfucker rides with us.”
José Reyna saw the seeds of death in Two-Fingered’s coal black eyes, and knew he had the same look in his own eyes. When you were close to muerte, ghosts came out of no place. José’s dead wife haunted him and brought sorrow. He replied, “I’ve never seen the ese before.”
A cowboy got the Mexican to his feet, and the noose was placed around the prisoner’s neck again. His mestizo face, more Indian than Spanish, was becalmed, as if he’d made peace with his demise. He turned to the sun and saw a heron fly over the lagoon. Crickets chirped in the tule reeds. The man in the top hat snapped his fingers, prompting the cowboys—and the Mexican went up in the air. He gyrated, fighting the noose, using his chin to keep it from strangling him. His feet went up and down, as if he were pedaling a bicycle.
“That’s enough,” the magistrate said.
The Mexican slammed into the ground. The judge stood over him and bellowed, “This is your last chance. Where’s that goddamn horse thief?”
The dearth of oxygen in the condemned man’s brain had muted his tongue. Too groggy to talk, he struggled with his bonds. The white men were staring at him while the brown-robe gave him last rites. The rope was positioned around the prisoner’s abraded neck for the third time. The birds in the tree’s branches made a frightful racket. The judge cried, “Heave ho!” and the Mexican was strung up. He did a mazurka in mid-air, his feet seeking the earth.
Two-Fingered Tom let loose with all six barrels of the squirrel gun. Designed to hunt small game, the carbine was accurate. The fusillade cleaved through the judge’s hat and wounded three cowboys. The gringos returned the fire, pulverizing the weeping willows. With bullets flying everywhere, the Ohlone led Two-Fingered and José Reyna into a thicket. California’s most wanted criminals retraced their steps back to Warm Water Cove. They got in the skiff and crossed the bay to the friendlier shores of Oakland.
A hysterical car horn on Dolores Street jolted Stiv out of his swoon. He opened his eyes and saw the horizon had deepened from aqua blue into indigo. The bald hills of Berkeley and Oakland were lampblack. The skies over the oil refineries in Richmond were marigold yellow. The Bay Bridge was gridlocked with rush hour commuters. An unmarked twin-prop military intelligence plane and a full moon were poised over Market Street. Sitting up, he put on his motorcycle jacket.
He wanted nothing more than to sit on the bench and savor the evening’s breeze, to let it be a barrier between him and what was coming, but the clock was ticking away. The rent had to be paid. Securing the gun in his belt, Stiv levitated to his feet and made his way down a slope to the park’s water fountain for a drink.
SIXTEEN
RICHARD ROOD DUCKED INTO Martuni’s Lounge to use the restroom. As he came in the door, dodging the neon sign that spelled out the watering hole’s name, he scanned the joint. You never knew when you might run into someone you didn’t want to see. Cops. Probation officers. Ex-lovers. The dudes you burned on drug deals. Several patrons, two women and a man, were at the bar. A jazz pianist was playing standards at one end of the room. A television was tuned to the news.
The guards at a Wells Fargo Bank branch on Mission Street had detained a sixty-year old Salvadoreño man about the Brinks money. He was in possession of seventy thousand dollars. The cash was in his coat. He said he didn’t know where it came from. Then he recanted his testimony and said he found it on a sidewalk in the Tenderloin. The police had issued a statement: No comment. There would be an update at ten o’clock.
While urinating in the latrine, Richard probed his face in the mirror. The flu was getting to him. Doing him cosmetic damage. He had ashy skin. Fried eyes and hair all dry. The lines on his forehead were getting deeper. Double chin was bigger. Mouth like a glory hole. Nothing nice. He shook a few drops of piss from his dick, buttoned up his pants, and walked out of the bar.
Back on Market Street he ran into a good-looking white man under a streetlamp. The gent was in a costly two-tone gray-green suit, glossy brogans and a red beret; his hair was cut in bangs across his forehead. His complexion was marble white. He seemed to be trying to hook up with some rough trade. He was putting out the signs: hanging in the shadows, keeping quiet, acting wistful.
Knowing he could earn a few bucks turning a trick if he played his cards right, Richard glissaded over to the white dude. He was all smiles and sugary pressure. He laid it on thick, waxing seductive. “Hey, girlfriend, you want some company? I’ll make it worth your while.”
The man gave Richard a taste of his scrumptious profile and didn’t say anything. Richard knew he was being tested. It didn’t faze him. On the contrary, it turned him on. “What’s your name?” he asked.
Richard Rood had made it with all kinds of men. He’d been with Puerto Ricans from New York City and with Creole boys from New Orleans, cowboys from Wyoming and hobos from Florida. He’d been with white studs and black dudes. He’d done it in restrooms, park bushes, under train trestles, in hotel rooms. But he’d never gotten down with a rich white man.
He gambled and gave the stranger a kiss. The fellow’s lips were cold and unresponsive. Encircling the man’s waspish waist with his hands, he pressed himself against his cock. It was limp. Ri
chard kissed him again, this time more violently, putting his teeth and tongue into it. He asked, “You okay? You feeling it?” He added, “Let’s get real here. You got a hankering to go to bed with me? It’ll cost you. I’m good and I’m expensive.”
A light bulb went on in Richard’s brain. Maybe the guy wanted to have sex right there in the street. Maybe he needed titillation. Needed to do it up against a parking meter. Wanted it rough. Disengaging his arms, Richard took the man’s hand and said, “Look, it’s fifty for head, a hundred to go all the way. You can suck me off, but I don’t take it up the ass. Anything else, that’s extra. Cool?”
Fumbling with the dude’s clothes, Richard worked discreetly to get at his wallet. The man had to have a billfold, a nice one, dressed the way he was. But he couldn’t find the damn thing. It wasn’t in his jacket, nor was it in his pants. That was uncool. The trick was being prissy. Frustrated, Richard gave up and said, “Fuck this shit.”
He tugged at the man’s sleeves and the two of them ended up sitting side by side on the pavement. Richard’s nose nuzzled the trick’s neck, so that when he breathed, he inhaled his hair. Cars raced in the street. Laughter from the Zuni Café disintegrated in the misty air. A Coast Guard seaplane, an ancient prop job with pontoons, sputtered over the rooftops. The flu had left Richard drowsy and weak. He nodded off with his head on the white man’s shoulder and had a dream about his mother.
A mocha-skinned woman of medium height with wide-set brown eyes, she was at the corner of Ellis and Mason in the Tenderloin. She wore a straw bonnet with a blue ribbon, a yellow print sundress and leather sandals, and held an overnight bag in her hands. Her legs were unshaven and her arms were bare. An onyx bracelet glistened on her right wrist.
The sidewalks teemed with undocumented workers, fruit vendors, winos, and roving merchants selling cassette tapes in Spanish and Korean. A teal-colored Mercury sedan oozed to a stop by the curb. The driver, a middle-aged white man in a decrepit suit with no tie, poked his head out the window and asked, “You Arlene?”
She answered with a jerk of her chin. “Did the doctor send you?”
The driver’s hair was slicked back with Vaseline. His face was blackened with two-day-old stubble. His skin was sallow. Worry lines were written in his mouth and there was no animation in his eyes. “Yeah, he did. Get in. We’ve got a long ways to go.”
He opened the passenger door for her. She plunked into the front seat. “All right,” he said. “You’re not supposed to know where we’re going. I’ve got to put a blindfold on you. Doctor’s orders.”
No one had told her about that part. No one had told her much of anything. She didn’t protest—who would listen? Without a word, he tied a black silk scarf over her face. Then he disengaged the brakes and restarted the car. They drove out of the city on Highway One over the Golden Gate Bridge.
Leaving the road, they took to the surface streets of a rural town somewhere in Marin County. The Mercury’s engine purred with efficiency. The sun heated up the right side of Arlene’s face, which made her think they were traveling north and east. The wind was redolent of wild flowers and dried grass. Eucalyptus trees gave off their astringent scent. She smelled cows and hay in the pastures. The car bumped over holes in the road and then halted within walking distance of a white-framed farmhouse. The driver said, “We’re here.”
Removing the blindfold from her eyes, he helped her out of the car and directed her to a room on the ground floor in the house. She was told to wait there. Framed medical certificates hung from the peach pink walls in the room. Trays of surgical instruments sat on a chair in a corner. A sheet-covered examining table took up most of the floor.
Minutes later a tall physician in his sixties walked in the door. A stethoscope hung from his neck. A tie was loosely flung over a white medical smock. His bilious gray face was inexpressive and his movements were labored. He handed her a pink paper dressing gown and motioned for her to remove her clothes. His voice was softer than cottage cheese when he said, “Lie down on the table, please.”
Undressing and then donning the gown, she did as he instructed, allowing him to insert her feet in steel stirrups. Rough and clumsy, he was unconcerned with her discomfort. He clapped on a pair of latex gloves, lubricating the fingertips with KY jelly. He asked, “How many months along are you?”
The question eliminated all the pride she had. It reminded her that she was naked in the presence of a strange man and that she was eighteen years old and on her own. Things couldn’t get any more basic. There was nothing for her to give up, except what he wanted to know. “I’m three months pregnant.”
His flinty eyes evinced dislike for her. When he spoke, his eyebrows went up and down, but his lips didn’t move. He said, “The procedure is curettage without anesthesia. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“I can’t put you under because that might cause complications.”
She accepted this without knowing why. “Okay.”
“You have the money?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Cash?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“One thousand.”
“What size are the bills? Are they fresh and clean?”
“They’re in twenties.”
“Where are they?”
“In my overnight bag.”
He picked up the satchel. “This?”
“Yes.”
The doctor found the cash and stashed it in a cabinet. “Good, very good. Now let’s begin.”
Lying on the table, she hyperventilated as he went to work and scraped the walls of her uterus. She dissociated, using her mind to get out of her body. She hardly felt a thing though blood ran over the table’s edge, splatting on the floor. The only sound in the room, other than the surgeon’s breathing, was the neutral ticking of a clock on the wall.
She didn’t remember how she got back to her parents’ house in the city. By then, she was bleeding profusely. She walked in the door and said to her mother, “I’ve got a problem,” and foundered on the living room carpet.
Streaming down her legs, blood made a puddle between her feet. Her two-year-old son bumbled into the living room, sucking his thumb. She groaned miserably, cranked her head sideways to avoid his gaze and quavered, “Richard, get the hell out, okay? Mommy’s not feeling too good right now. She needs to rest. It’s been a long day.”
The mockingbirds in the palm trees awakened Richard Rood. The sky was buttery and low over the city. Fog blurred the streetlights. Gunshots went off a block away. He heard a man cough and sensed something close by in the dark. He reached out with his hand to find out what it was. His fingers made contact with a regulation police department riot boot, size twelve.
A cop in a gas mask was kneeling at his side. The policeman’s eyes were magnified behind the mask’s lenses. He was holding a male mannequin dressed in a chic continental suit. The facsimile had a pink plastic face and a corn-yellow wig woven from synthetic fibers. Richard reflexively reached for the man he’d been sleeping with. When he found nobody at his side, he looked at the mannequin again, and drawled, “Aw, hell.”
The policeman straightened up and hurled the dressmaker’s model into a garbage dumpster. The dummy’s legs jutted out of the bin. Getting out a pad and pen, the cop said to Richard, “Name, please.”
“Richard Rood.”
“Residence?”
“The Tenderloin.”
“Street address?”
“Fifty-six Mason.”
“House or apartment?”
“Hotel.”
“Tourist or residential?”
“Residential. The Bristol.”
“Telephone number?”
“I don’t got one. It’s been disconnected. I couldn’t afford the bill.”
“No cell phone?”
“Nope.”
“No beeper?”
“No.”
“Occupation?”
“Self-employed.”<
br />
“As what?”
“Salesman.”
“In what line of goods?”
“General merchandise, whatever people in the community need.”
“Age?”
“Forty-eight.”
“Birthplace?”
“San Francisco. I was born in General Hospital.”
“Next of kin?”
“Don’t have any.”
“Social Security number?”
“I don’t know it.”
“Person to contact in case of an emergency?”
“No one.”
“Now what the hell are you doing out here?”
“I was going somewhere, but I got tired and went to sleep.”
“That’s illegal. You can’t do that in public. It’s a misdemeanor. I can ticket you for it. Where were you going?”
“The Allen Hotel.”
“That snake pit? You have a residence there?”
“No, I live on Mason Street.”
“You got business at the Allen or what?”
“Nah.”
“Who do you know that lives there?”
“A friend.”
“His name?”
“Jeeter Roche.”
“That dope fiend scumbag?”
“Uh huh.”
“You in cahoots with him?”
“Nope.”
“You selling drugs for him?”
Richard was impudent. “For that fucker? Hell, no.”
“You better not be.” The cop wiggled a finger at the mannequin in the dumpster. “Looks like you’ve got all kinds of friends.” He jabbed Richard in the leg with his nightstick. “Now book on out of here before I arrest your sorry ass.”
SEVENTEEN
THE HOUSES IN EUREKA VALLEY off Market Street cost a fortune, running between a half-million bucks for a one-bedroom condominium, and up to five million dollars for a two-storied house with a yard. The 130-year-old mansion on Caselli Street was an Italianate Victorian, easily worth twenty million smackers. All the windows in the place were shuttered; no cars were in the garage. A hedgerow the height of a grown man’s head cordoned a sumptuous flower garden; the vast lawn was centered on a three-hundred-year-old Ponderosa pine.
