by Peter Plate
Time was running out on him. That was for sure. There was no stopping it. The hours were ticking down. The fear in his guts, always there but usually at a slow burn, had reached a crescendo. He thrummed his fingers on the greasy bar top, unable to control his agitation. “I have a plan,” he declared.
Slatts was afraid to ask, but couldn’t stop himself. “Is that so?”
Another tune came over the jukebox—Howard Tate’s “Get It While You Can.”
Robert had his thinking cap on. “You know that liquor store? The one near the post office?”
“What about it?”
“There’s a safe in there with money in it, lots of money. I’ve seen it.”
A man in a coma could tell where the conversation was going. Slatts had to laugh. “Go on. I’m listening.”
“I was thinking that we could wait until just before closing time and then walk in there and take it.”
“Take what?”
“Take the damn safe.”
“You mean, carry it out?”
“No, no, no, just the money.”
“Then what do we do?”
Robert’s eager face was a pizza of bad skin and sleepless nights. “Run like motherfuckers.”
“Shit.” Slatts wasn’t thrilled. “That’s no goddamn plan.”
“It’s the beginning of one.This is the foundation.” Robert was animated, moving his hands. “Nobody is on Market Street at midnight, just a bunch of winos. We’d blend in easy. It’ll be a cinch, especially because it’s Christmas.”
“What about the cops?”
“Who cares?” He didn’t want to think about the law.
The robbery was basic. Making it complicated would fuck it up royally. In Robert’s estimation, the liquor store was a cash cow. He wasn’t worried about the surveillance cameras. All that was needed was a little reconnaissance on the place. “You in or out?”
Slatts negotiated. “What’s the split?”
He was ticked that he had to do all the thinking. It had always been that way between them. Slatts was two steps behind him, mentally speaking. “It’s fifty-fifty.”
“When do you want to do this thing?”
“Tonight.”
“I’m in. And you wanna know why?”
“Yeah, why?”
“This ain’t for you. I’m doing it for me.”
The hustle was on. There was no turning back. A familiar warmth seared Robert’s stomach. Talk about being scared. He was going to pull a job. If he failed, it was back to the joint for the rest of his life.
A hubbub broke out at the other end of the room. Robert turned half-heartedly to see what it was about. It sounded like a drunkard was hassling the bartender. That was standard fare in a wino bar on Ninth Street.
Dirt Man was chest-to-chest with the barkeep. The booty bandit was swaddled in a pair of blue Ben Davis jeans and a bleached denim jacket with the sleeves torn off. His arms showcased a full array of Aryan Brotherhood tattoos. The bartender had a baseball bat in his mitts and was squared off to duke it out with the gangster.
Slatts vaulted from the stool and steamed over to the bar with his fists clenched. A foe had reappeared—bad news was poetry on a muggy night. He hawked a marbled pearl of sputum on the linoleum floor and thought about what to do.
Keeping the peace was his best bet. He didn’t want to brawl. Not with Dirt Man. That would be lame. Didn’t want to get all bloody. That would be stupid. Didn’t want fisticuffs. That might bring the police.
It was smarter to keep his cool. It wasn’t his business if the booty bandit was fighting with the bartender. Slatts had to do what the psychologist in San Quentin told him. Subdue his impulses. Practice anger management. Rein in his temper. Stick to his boundaries. Take care of his needs first. Without any further ado, he launched an elbow at Dirt Man’s nose.
In retaliation, the booty bandit drove a knee in Slatts’s groin. Groping for a beer bottle, Dirt Man slapped his hands on one and crunched Slatts in the noggin with it. The sound was dreadful, similar to an overripe watermelon encountering a speeding automobile. Slatts stepped back, his scalp cut. Emerald stars kaleidoscoped behind his eyes. Whoa, he thought.
There are angels in heaven and demons in hell. Men dance in madness on earth. With his last ounce of energy, Slatts unloaded a fusillade of right hooks and left upper-cuts, and artfully reorganized Dirt Man’s mouth. Cut all his knuckles doing it. The booty bandit capsized, holding onto a stool. He jettisoned an incisor, getting blood on his spiffy denim jacket. In Robert’s opinion, it was time to split. While the bartender telephoned the cops, he hurried Slatts out the door.
In the pitch-dark street a blood-warm shower was coming down, the first rainfall in weeks. Thunder and lightning crackled in the bilious skies north of the city. The rain cascaded with reckless fury, beating down tempo on the heated sidewalks. The number 19 Polk bus skimmed by, splashing water on Robert’s jeans. Car headlights were mirrored in pools of rain in the road. Too drunk to feel the lacerations on his head, Slatts yelped triumphantly at Robert, “You see what I did to that dude?”
TWENTY-SIX
Market Street was a no-man’s-land of hookers and lonesome sidewalks at midnight. Half-built condominiums were skeletal in the rainy, red moonshine. Leafless trees did a drunken bolero in the wind. Winos clung to the doorway of the Donnelly Hotel. For rent signs cluttered the windows of long-abandoned storefronts. Since the cut-backs in bus services, hardly anyone went downtown after dark.
Under the Orpheum Theater’s marquee a troop of homeless women and men had converted shopping carts, suitcases, clothes, tarps, and strips of cardboard into a shanty fort. Robert tarried at the intersection of Ninth and Market with the Mossberg shotgun under his jacket, studying the liquor store. Slatts was by his side, fiddling with the crude bandages on his head.
Robert was all business. “You down for this?”
Slatts hiccupped a bloody spitball. “Yeah, sure.”
“Okay. You go in the store first.”
“Then what?”
“You distract the clerk.”
“From doing what?”
“Whatever the fuck he’s doing.”
“And then?”
“I’ll take it from there. Any more questions?”
“Nope.”
The shotgun strained against Robert’s jacket. “Let’s go.” The shop’s windows advertised ATM services, Lotto ticket sales, and groceries. Despite these attractions, there were no customers in the place. It was a retail graveyard. Petrified fruits and fossilized vegetables languished in a bin. A miniature vinyl Christmas tree adorned the cash register.
The proprietor was behind the counter dressed in a wide-lapelled brown tweed suit, white shirt with no tie. He was engrossed in a crossword puzzle. A radio in the back room coughed out James Brown’s “Please, Please, Please.”
The surveillance sensors let off a shrill beep when Slatts streaked in the door. The shopkeeper looked up, surprised to see another human being in his establishment. It had been hours since the last one. He had no time to say anything. Not even to say hello, because another fellow had entered the premises.
Brandishing the Mossberg like it was a dowsing rod, Robert slipped in the doorway. His boots had no traction, and he started to fall. A billion things went through his head. How clumsy he was. How the strife between him and Harriet had caused his hairline to recede. At the last possible moment he recovered his balance with a ballerina’s effortless grace and pointed the weapon at the merchant. “Open that fucking safe, will you?”
The demand befuddled the man. He’d have said it was a prank, but the gun made it serious. Pushing off from the counter, he clambered to the vault, brushed aside the newspapers on it, and piddled with the combination. The lead-lined door opened merrily with a well-oiled click.
Slatts wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help. “Robert?”
“What is it?”
“You need me for something? I mean I’m just standing
here doing nothing.”
“Just be quiet, will you?”
Robert flung the shopkeeper aside and stuck his nose in the vault. He’d been waiting for this. Been fantasizing about it at night. Armed robbery was a poor man’s nirvana. What he saw gave him a hemorrhage. Except for a stack of expired food stamps, there was nothing in it. “What is this shit?” he asked.
The owner was matter-of-fact. “We never have any dough.”
In every criminal’s career there is a flirtation with failure. The vocation demands it. Robert had been down that lane countless times. Was he a loser? Only god could judge him. He fixed the shotgun on a cardboard beer advertisement. It was a life-sized color shot of a young white woman at a Caribbean resort.
“We have to get the fuck out of here,” he said to Slatts.
The coast was clear. The two robbers booked from the liquor store. Slatts split away and evanesced to Larkin Street and the park in the Civic Center. Robert fit the shotgun under his jacket and slunk in the other direction toward Market and Seventh.
It was still drizzling. Fog crested the public library’s roof. Sea gulls scattered over the UN Plaza. A tape loop of events replayed itself in Robert’s head as he walked. Two days ago he was on the bus to the soup kitchen at Hamilton Church in the Haight-Ashbury. A passenger had left behind a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. He glommed the paper and turned to the obituaries section. At the top of the page was a photograph of one of the narcs that had collared him in Pacific Heights. In the picture the dead cop was smoking a cigarette.
That same night he and Harriet had finally had sex. It was at five in the morning, before sunrise. The dog barked in the bathroom. Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Serenade to a Cuckoo” was on the stereo. As he made love with his wife, holding her tight, drinking in her hair and skin, caressing her soft tits, all he’d been able to think about was Slatts.
Lost in his recollections, he didn’t see the two black-and-whites converging at Eighth and Market until it was too late. Another squad car skidded in front of the liquor store. A policeman in a white riot helmet jackknifed out of the cruiser and unholstered his service weapon. The shop’s owner rambled outside to join him.
If Robert had known a prayer, he would’ve said it. Instead he backed up, hotfooted it onto the hood of a parked Ford station wagon, then sprang to the next auto at the curb, a late model Saab. Skinning his knees on the windshield, he leapfrogged to the street, dodging a taxi and a newspaper delivery truck, and bolted toward the Odd Fellows Temple and the Bargain Bee variety store.
Running to the corner, he glanced backward. Patrolmen were pursuing him; the closest one was fifty yards away. Without thinking, he pivoted and hurdled a wood fence into the Embassy Theater’s lot. It wasn’t a slick move—he collapsed in a lagoon of sidewalk garbage and sprained his ankle. He tried to get up and couldn’t.
The moon was in between pillowy rain clouds. The street’s lights were afire. The Strand Theater was a blackened silhouette. Doves cooed on the telephone wires. A kitty meowed from the lot. Robert propped himself up with the shotgun in a bed of orange rinds, apple cores, dog food cans, and computer parts, and waited for the cops.
Six policemen bustled up the street, ghostlike in the rain’s pitter-patter. Robert gave them a dirty look. The wheel of anger in his gut turned. There were two ways to play it. Let the motherfuckers arrest him. Or get killed. He laughed into his collar because neither choice made sense.
A blitzkrieg of faces surged from the darkness to bedevil him. People he hadn’t seen in ages. There was Stephen who took two bullets in the back at a telephone booth on Twenty-fourth Street, Victor who’d had a coronary watching a Giants ball game on television, and Vance who’d gotten his throat cut attempting to rob a burger stand in Hunters Point. Last were Jimmy and Donald, taken by AIDS.
He imagined himself back in San Quentin napping in the upper bunk of his cage, the air rich with marijuana smoke. Slatts was spooning him from behind, the thread-bare blankets in a noose around his neck, the teddy bear by his head. The guys in the cell next door had John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” on the radio.
The picture melted into a fresco of the Trinity Plaza Apartments. He and his daughter were in the parking lot. She was in a poplin shift, a straw bonnet with ribbons on her head. He had on a leather biker vest. A blue jay landed on a fence post and sunned itself. Diana picked up a round stone and snuffled, “I want to kill it.” She pitched the rock at the jay, breaking its neck. The girl ran to Robert. He swung her upward onto his shoulders. Her satiny cheeks were baked apples, warm against his unshaven face. “Bull’s-eye,” he said.
Harriet came into his thoughts. She was at the Golden Gate Bridge in a spandex one-piece bathing suit. Her skin was unblemished, oiled with coconut cream and toast-brown from the sun. Her legs were shaved, sprigs of blonde pubic hair protruded from the swimwear. There was lipstick on her teeth when she smiled. “I love you, daddy.”
The rain performed its muted ballet, pissing silently on Market Street. The police hit the corner, and he gave them a blast from the Mossberg—coins of buckshot arced into the lightless intersection. The pavement was showered with gold, silver, and white sparks. The shotgun’s heavy-duty recoil knocked Robert flat on his back.
Then the cops were on him. The smallest cop grappled with Robert’s legs. Another patrolman seized his arms. The sergeant in charge whomped him with a baton in the ribcage. Somebody else drop-kicked Robert in the temple with a steel-toed riot boot, deploying the ex-con’s head like it was a well-seasoned soccer ball. The largest officer kneeled on his stomach, hollering, “You’re fucked, asshole! It’s all over!” and handcuffed him.
Robert recited his catechism. He whispered it so that nobody could hear him. Everything was cool. Things would get better. Just not right now. He turned his face to the lights on Market Street.
The hunter’s flight into the wilderness had begun.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The thermometer broke one hundred degrees in the nighttime’s hush. While it rained, a power outage in Chinatown and Russian Hill browned thousands of households. An accident on Market Street—a head-on collision between the coroner’s wagon and a limousine for hire—eliminated bus services from the Tenderloin to the Castro district.
The next morning, Diana waited patiently for Robert on her grandmother’s stoop. She was in her church clothes. A starched white dress with beaded shoulders. Knit socks and little black booties. The old lady was in a long-sleeved wool smock. She sat in a lawn chair on the porch and fanned herself with a newspaper. “Your daddy is a liar,” she said. “That damn weasel ain’t returning here for you.”
When the phone rang neither of them made a move to answer it. The horn dinged on and on. Finally the kid scooted indoors and grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”
Harriet’s voice was labored. “Hi, precious.”
“Where are you, Mommy?”
“I’m in Oregon. This is about your dad.”
“Where is he?”
“I made a few calls to find out.”
“And what happened?”
“I got hold of his parole officer.”
“What did she say?”
“The police want him. He’s not coming back, snoopy. He’s going to jail.”
The slow jog of memory did its haunted dance for the girl. When Robert was in San Quentin one of his oldest friends in the Tenderloin had contracted spinal meningitis from shooting dope with a dirty spike. Harriet had tried to nurse the guy back to health. He had abscesses all over his body and died. Junkies broke into his pad on Pine Street and stole his belongings. Took his old photographs. Took the refrigerator. Her mother had tried to explain it in the same tone of voice she was using now.
Harriet was running wild at the mouth. “I’m staying in Portland and applying to schools up here. It’s a friendly place with lots of trees. You’d love it. When I get some money, I’ll send for you. We can have a picnic in the woods somewhere. Won’t that be exciting?”
/> It was Christmas. Robert had broken his promise. Harriet was missing in action. Diana put the phone down, cutting off her mom in midsentence. Her grandma bellowed from outside. “Who the hell you talking to in there?”
She wasn’t the priestess of family secrets anymore. “Nobody.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Plate, whom the Review of Contemporary Fiction calls “one of the most intriguing novelists writing now,” is a self-taught fiction writer. His eight novels include One Foot off the Gutter (1995), Snitch Factory (1997), Police and Thieves (1999), Angels of Catastrophe (2001), and Fogtown (2004), all published by Seven Stories Press. In 2004 Plate was named a Literary Laureate of San Francisco, where he lives.
ABOUT SEVEN STORIES PRESS
Seven Stories Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City, with distribution throughout the United States, Canada, England, and Australia. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Octavia E. Butler, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Gary Null, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Our books appear in hardcover, paperback, pamphlet, and e-book formats, in English and in Spanish. We believe publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights wherever we can.
For more information about us, visit our Web site at www.seven-stories.com or write for a free catalogue to Seven Stories Press, 140 Watts Street, New York, NY 10013.
Copyright © 2006 by Peter Plate
