by Ford, G. M.
The cops never managed to work up a court-worthy case against Ralph, but it didn’t matter. Ralph was his own judge and jury. As far as he was concerned, those six lives would always be on him. To my knowledge, he’d never been sober for a single day since. While George had retained his incisive eye and caustic wit through all of it, the years had not been nearly so kind to Ralph. A quarter century of debauchery had reduced him to a state of perpetual bewilderment. If George hadn’t been looking out for him, he’d surely have been dead by now.
Harold Green’s only sin was being a childhood friend of my father and trusting him implicitly. Unfortunately for Harold, he’d signed his name on various dotted lines, unwittingly making himself de facto CEO of several dummy corporations my father had set up to hide his ill-gotten gains, a misstep that cost Harold the better part of three years in the lockup and any remnant of self-respect he may have still possessed at the time.
I’d often wondered how different the trajectories of their lives might have been if they hadn’t fallen in with Big Bill Waterman. They sure as hell wouldn’t involve being shit-faced before ten every morning, I was pretty sure of that. Which probably explained why, all these years later, I still made it a point to keep track of them. To make sure they had at least a little of what they needed. Sins of the fathers and all that.
The Zoo’s day bartender generally let the boys in about an hour before the actual opening time at eleven A.M. Like most steady drinkers, none of them slept worth a damn, so, by the time seven A.M. rolled around at whatever dump they were crashing in, most of them had already started their drinking day.
They required a couple of beers in bed before attempting anything serious, like walking. Once up and stumbling about, a man could surely be excused an eye-opener or two, followed, of course, by the obligatory phlegm cutter as a medicinal prelude to serious intellectual discourse. After that, they’d venture into the great outdoors for their daily pilgrimage to the Eastlake Zoo, where a little snooker and an ocean of beer would wash them gently into the prelunch cocktail hour, from whence a bracer of two would of course be required in order to approach the dinner hour in a civilized manner. Then, depending upon the state of their finances and world affairs, the revelry generally continued till about nine P.M. or so, at which point they’d stagger back to their flop and settle in for another night in dreamland.
The whole crowd was there. George, Ralph, and Harold, Nearly Normal Norman, Heavy Duty Judy, Red Lopez, Large Marge, Frenchie, Billy Bob Fung, and a few others I’d seen before but couldn’t put a name to. Usually at least one of them was in the slammer. When you’re down and out, running afoul of the law is pretty much a given. They’d get cited for pissing in an alley or something and then fail to appear in court, which, of course, was a far worse breach of legal etiquette than relieving oneself, and then the next time they surfaced there’d be a warrant out for them, which would inevitably lead to yet another joyous month behind bars.
I threw some money on the bar and nodded at the kid for a round of whatever they were drinking. How to know you’re getting a tad long in the tooth: when you start making decisions about where you eat and drink based on whether you can abide the music they play. So whenever I came in, the kid and I had a longstanding deal. He could keep the change as long as he got rid of that fucking “I hate everybody” music he blasted all the time. He walked over and kept his end of the bargain. My ears thanked him. I heaved a sigh of relief and headed for the rear of the bar.
Norman saw me first. “Leo,” he bellowed, and the place erupted. They came at me like mad lemmings. I was backslapped and hugged nearly into submission.
I grabbed an empty chair from one of the tables and pulled it up next to George.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Passable, I suppose,” he allowed.
These days, George had a face like an old satchel. His wardrobe looked like it belonged to somebody else, which it once had.
“Wanna make some money?” I asked.
He red-eyed me. “Doin’ what?”
“Like old times,” I said.
When I was still making a living as a private eye, I made work for these guys whenever I could. They were great for stakeouts, as long as it was somewhere downtown. They could hang around all day and nobody paid them any mind because society has trained itself not to see the poor and the destitute. That way, we don’t have to think about how the richest society on earth allows so many of its citizens to live in the streets like stray dogs.
He took a sip of his beer, leaned back in the chair, and stifled a belch.
On the other side of the room, raised voices captured my attention.
“You’re fulla shit,” Red Lopez shouted. “You never done no such thing.”
“Swear to God.” It was a big, red-faced, Nordic-looking guy I’d never seen before.
“Ten dollars,” Red yelled. “I’ll betcha ten dollars you won’t, you lyin’ motherfucker.”
“Let’s see the money,” the guy yelled back.
Red jumped to his feet, dug around in his pants pockets for way longer than was considered polite, and finally came out with a wadded-up bill, which he unwadded and slapped onto the snooker table with a clap. “There,” he shouted. “There’s my goddamn money. Where’s yours?”
The guy pulled out a modest wad of cash, sorted through it, and clapped a ten on top of Red’s money. He pocketed his roll and looked around the room.
“Anybody else?” he wanted to know.
Frenchie and Judy jumped at the chance. Once they’d anted up, the red-faced man strode across the room, pulled open the men’s room door, and disappeared inside.
When I turned my attention back to the room, Ralph was tacking across the floor in our direction. “What’s goin’ on?” I asked him as he plopped down in the chair next to George.
He poured himself a beer and then downed it. “They got a bet,” he slurred.
“About what?”
“The Swede says he’ll eat one of those smelly things for ten bucks.”
“What smelly things?”
“You know, man. From the pisser.”
I didn’t have to press for a clarification before the men’s room door burst open and the guy he’d called the Swede came sauntering back into the room. I strained to see what it was he was bouncing in his hand. Looked like half a vanilla cupcake.
Across the room, the assembled multitude began to rumble and rise to its feet. “Do it, man,” somebody yelled.
“Yeah, do it!” Judy screeched.
The place came unglued.
And then they began to chant like a soccer crowd. “Do it. Do it. Do it . . .”
Wasn’t until he began to lift the cupcake to his mouth that I figured out what it actually was. When, with a great flourish, the Swede held it in two fingers and the rest of his hand got out of the way, I could finally see a little white cake . . . Awww . . . Jesus, nooo. It was one of those old-fashioned deodorant cakes that they used in the urinals.
“Do it . . . do it . . . do it . . .” rang through the room.
Instinctively, I started to rise. George put a restraining hand on my arm.
“Stay out of it,” he growled around a mouthful of beer.
It was like a wreck on the highway. You know you should turn away, show some respect for the dead, but you just can’t bring yourself to do it, as if some primal instinct insists that, for the sake of your own survival, you are required to pay attention.
I watched in horror as he chomped down and took a bite. Pieces dropped onto the wooden floor. Apparently, it was a bit flakier than my palate had imagined.
He chewed away. Swallowed. Took another bite. Swallowed.
“Do it . . . do it . . . do it . . .”
Took him about thirty seconds to get it all the way down. It was a toss-up. I couldn’t decide whether to puke or applaud.
When he raised his fingertips to his lips and then pulled them away in a classic “bon appétit” move
, wild cheering rattled the rafters.
The Swede smiled knowingly, snatched the money from the top of the snooker table, and strode regally toward the front door.
When things had settled to the usual mumble, I turned to George.
“I need a few guys to keep an eye on a couple places down in the square,” I said. “You guys interested?”
“How much?”
“Fifty a day for each guy,” I said. “It’ll take at least four of you.”
What I wanted could have been easily handled by one guy at each address, assuming, of course, that they weren’t hammered—an assumption I’d long since parted with when it came to these guys. So I automatically double the manpower required, in case somebody needed an in situ nap.
“Where in the square?” he asked.
I pulled out my notebook and wrote down both addresses.
“When?” he asked.
I told him tonight.
“And we’re just supposed to watch ’em?” he gargled around a mouthful of beer.
“See if you can get inside the Walter Street place,” I said, sliding the page across the table to him. “I think he lives there.”
“He who?”
I pulled the picture of Willard Frost from my inside jacket pocket and used my palms to straighten the creases. George leaned over and put his nose about an inch from the photo.
“His name’s Willard Frost,” I said.
“Sure as hell don’t look like a Willard Frost,” George said.
Great minds think alike. Scary thought, that.
“See if you can get inside the building and ask around about him. See what anybody knows about him.”
“What about the other joint?”
“Find out what in hell they’re doing in there. Seems like he’s the muscle for some kind of operation they’re running out of the building.”
He gave me a mock two-fingered salute. “Gotcha, boss,” he said. I slid him a fistful of money and got to my feet. Just as I was wondering if what I’d witnessed from the Swede could possibly have been real, I noticed that somebody’d stepped in the remnants of the deodorant cake and smeared it all over the floor. I was still swallowing hard and shaking my head in wonder as I headed for the street.
As I walked past the bar, I could hear George behind me calling out, “Harold, Billy Bob . . . get your moldy butts over here.”
The kid came out from behind the bar and locked the door behind me. I’d parked my car up on Franklin, so I waited for the light, crossed Eastlake, and started hoofing it up the hill. Gravity seemed to be stronger than I remembered, but, what the hell, it wasn’t raining. Gotta look on the bright side, I told myself.
One block up, a movement in my peripheral vision pulled my head to the right, and there he was. The Swede, sitting on a low stone wall that formed one side of an overgrown flower garden. He looked over at me and smiled.
He waved me over. I took a couple of steps in his direction and then stopped. I sure as hell didn’t want to get close enough for that mofo to breathe on me, so I kept my distance. He pulled a handful of something from his jacket pocket and set it on the wall beside him. I watched as he peeled back the ends of a brown paper towel to reveal what appeared to be two more of those disgusting deodorant cakes. I swallowed hard. Wasn’t till he peeled the cakes apart and set them beside each other on the wall that I noticed the slight difference in color between the two. I gravitated closer. He touched the whiter one with his grimy finger. It jiggled. I leaned in closer.
“Tofu,” he said.
Took me a couple of seconds to blurt out, “What?”
“I carve the ones I eat outta tofu,” he said with a gap-toothed grin. He nodded at the other cake. “But you gotta take the real one outta the john in case they check.”
A colorful Odwalla truck ground slowly up the street and turned uphill on Louisa. The tops of the trees swung gently in the breeze.
I collected my lower jaw, fished around in my pocket, came out with a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to him. He looked like he was going to ask a question.
“Just take it,” I said, and walked away.
I’d known Rebecca’s assistant Ibrahim for the better part of fifteen years. It was the kind of relationship that reminded me how little most human beings really knew about one another. How it’s come to the point where we call people we met online “friends” and yet, at the same time, have almost no idea what the lives of those most familiar to us look like.
He was Sudanese and had seen terrible things. He and his wife had somehow escaped the carnage and made it to London. Once they got to the United States, they had kids. Gender and age unknown. That was about it. Oh yeah. . . and he didn’t think I was a bit funny. Over the years I’d made several hundred jokes with him and had never so much as seen his lip quiver. All those years of seeing him on a fairly regular basis, and that was all I could bring to mind. Dude. An existentialist dream.
His wife answered the door. Two little girls in pigtails swirled around in her brightly flowered skirt, peeking out from the material to see the strange giant at their door and then slipping from sight.
His wife knew who I was. We met every year at the office Christmas party. She gave me a smile. As I recalled, her English wasn’t so good.
The larger of the two girls poked her head from the folds of the dress. The little sister scurried back into the house, giggling all the way.
“What’s your name?” I asked the older girl. Six or seven, I thought. I’m not good with kids’ ages.
She looked up at her mom and got a nearly imperceptible nod.
“Nikka,” she said, before disappearing back into the dress.
“Hi, Nikka,” I said. “I’m Leo.”
“Is Ibrahim here?” I asked the wife.
“My husband . . .” I didn’t understand the next part. “A walk,” the wife said, pointing at the little pocket park across the street. “A walk.”
I thanked her and began to back down off the porch. Nikka poked her head out again as her mom withdrew from sight. “Bye, Leo the Lion,” she said with a huge grin.
I gave her a wave and turned away, but she followed along. “Leo the Lion, Leo the Lion,” she sang as I stepped down onto the sidewalk. She pointed in the direction of the park. “Papa’s over there,” she said. She grinned and spread her arms wide. “Way up on top.”
I started to walk off, but she grabbed my hand and began to skip along beside me.
I stopped, squatted low, so our eyes were on the same level. She let go of my hand and threw an arm around my shoulder. I picked her up and carried her back to the porch.
“You watch out for your mama,” I said as I set her in front of the door.
“Leo the Lion, Leo the Lion,” she sang as she stepped inside the townhouse.
I waved bye-bye again and started up the sidewalk. I checked over my shoulder to make sure Nikka was gonna stay put and then picked up my pace.
The air was still and thick like soup. The newly planted trees in the median dripped with moisture. I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets, hunched my shoulders, and picked up the pace.
I crossed the street and followed the pristine white sidewalk up into the park. They’d built the park as a little hill, I suppose so the rainwater would easily drain back into the sewer system. No signage of any kind. Must have been so new it didn’t have a name yet. Eventually, they’d name it after some neighborhood luminary. They always did. Couldn’t have a park with no name. Google wouldn’t stand for it.
The sound of voices pulled my head up. A phalanx of strollers was rolling my way. The plastic wheels of death. I stepped off into the grass and gave a nonthreatening nod. One of the mothers said something to me in a language I didn’t understand. They all laughed. They kept looking back over their shoulders at me and laughing as I stood there on the newly rolled-out sod and watched them disappear into the gloom.
Up at the apex of the knoll, I could make out the shape of Ibrahim sitting on a bright-blue be
nch all by himself. Looked a bit like a pocket Rodin. He sensed me coming. I saw his body tense. He turned his head away and pushed himself to his feet. I sidled up to the bench. The fog had an acrid taste to it.
He was a skinny little man without an ounce of body fat. It was as if he had already used up every bit of his reserves. Bald in the front but not in back, he had enough coffee-colored forehead to post handbills.
“I don’t think I should be talking to you,” he said in a low voice.
His English was precise and perfect. All the s’s and t’s just right. Listening to him reminded me how sloppy most of us are when it comes to pronunciation.
“I read the suspension order, coupla times,” I said with a shrug. “As far as I could see, my name wasn’t mentioned anywhere. They said Dr. Duvall couldn’t have any contact with you, but they didn’t say anything about me.”
I was splitting hairs, and he knew it. Ibrahim was a careful man. He looked at me hard, weighing his options. “She’s a good woman,” he said finally. “A good doctor. This shouldn’t be happening to her. It’s not right.”
“You got any idea how this could have happened?” I asked.
He shook his head and sat down. “They didn’t tell me anything.” He shrugged. “Sometimes things happen,” he said. “Must be . . . She would never . . .”
I shook my head. “They think they’ve got a sure thing.”
I sat down next to him on the bench. I could hear the shrill sound of the strolling mothers in the distance. I spent the next ten minutes asking him everything I could think of and came up with a fat nothing. As nearly as I could tell, Ibrahim was as confused as the rest of us. When I ran out of questions, we sat there and watched the fog fold around us like a blanket of wet felt.
