One Foot Off the Gutter

by Peter Plate

  “Do you see him, Coddy?” Bellamy asked.

  It was a peculiar trait of Bellamy’s. The greater the danger, the softer his voice became.

  I wrenched the steering wheel, making a hard right onto the sidewalk. The police car jumped the curb and barreled straight into a crowd of fruit vendors, who leaped out of harm’s way. I squeezed the patrol car past a pustule of winos, then plowed into several shopping carts, sending them flying. I worked the gas pedal up and down, touching the brakes whenever I got too close to anyone.

  Bellamy picked up the dashboard microphone, clicked on the open frequency, and yelled, “Stop, asshole! This is the police!”

  The warning infuriated our quarry. He dropped the paper bag and without pausing, he whipped six rapid shots over his left shoulder. The squad car’s windshield splintered into a thousand fragments, showering the front seat with a snowfall of glass dust. I jammed on the brakes; the vehicle screeched to a halt, topped off by a twenty-foot skidmark of burned rubber that ended a fraction of an inch away from a telephone pole.

  Bellamy threw open his door, blinked against the hard white pollution in the sky, then sprang out of the squad car. He drew his revolver and started running south on Mission after the perpetrator.

  I was right behind him, my face covered with broken glass. The sun was rough on my eyes; I followed the sidewalk by instinct. Pedestrians were screaming and waggling their arms, cursing at me as I went sailing by. I caught up with Bellamy, then Bellamy passed me, huffing and puffing, busting his balls to catch up with the asshole.

  Running was not my favorite pastime. A lot of cops shared an antipathy toward the act. Running was something you did only when the odds were against you.

  The man with the gun turned the corner at Eighteenth Street, sprinting across the asphalt, bolting in front of a Muni bus. Bellamy saw him and cried out in a hoarse voice, petulant with frustration, “Halt, mother! Or I’ll shoot!”

  Hot weather always brought out the intransigent side in people. For no good reason the robber careened to a stop and smiled at us. I caught a glimpse of him when I rounded the corner after Bellamy. The perpetrator fit one of several criminal profiles. He could’ve been a Polk Street hustler. He was a thin, girlish man wearing expensive shoes. He gestured with his chrome pistol, a toreador of the new school.

  “Watch out, Bells,” I warned.

  I don’t know who fired the first shot, but a second later, I was flat on the sidewalk. I saw a couple of bullets coming at me and before I could say my prayers, especially the one to St. Jude, the sickening whine of hollow-point shells ricocheted on the pavement next to my head. My heart leaped into a scream that jumped out of my mouth. Bellamy fell into a crouch and fired back.

  The asshole was already gone. He’d crossed over to San Carlos Street, and had disappeared behind a row of parked cars. He was moving as only a panicked man can run with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. Bellamy scrambled to his feet and took off after him. I looked at Bellamy and wondered if my partner was working on a death wish. I got up, wiped the dirt off my pants, and followed Bellamy down San Carlos.

  The three of us, as if we belonged together, ran south, zigzagging past the cars driving north in the sloping one way alley. Bellamy pulled off another round. The shot went wild, clipping a palm tree. I happened to glance down at my own uniform. I wasn’t unduly surprised to find several thin streams of dried blood on my badge. Blood was melting through my combat blouse into the bulletproof vest, guaranteeing more laundry bills.

  I stumbled over a pothole in the street, an ill-fated step that made my ankle twinge. It was too hot to run on a day like this. A humming noise filled my ears. The sound came from a distance, then drew nearer, inciting my stomach to tweak against my ribs. The ground underneath me was shaking through the sidewalk into the soles of my boots. Heat waves were rising waist high from the curb. Up ahead, Bellamy was a mere speck.

  Three more shots rang in my ears. I saw one of them streaking towards me. Sure enough, a hollow-point shell buzzed by my ear. The infernal rumbling under my feet grew louder, causing my fingers to tingle.

  Two police helicopters zoomed overhead, flying no higher than the telephone lines. The choppers circled San Carlos Street, banking in a double helix over the check cashing store at the corner. More police sirens could be heard coming from the other direction. One helicopter swung around and swooped over the rooftops on Mission Street. Six shots went off with a feeble, percussive note, almost inaudible over the sound of the traffic. The helicopter hung over Mission Street, then started to falter. Its motor sputtered and to my horror, it died.

  The propellers turned one more revolution and stopped. The chopper was inert for seemingly forever, then it plummeted into the telephone lines. It plunged downward, crashing into the check cashing store’s roof. The fuselage crumpled up like tissue. There was no sound and for a substantial moment, all held back and breathless, nothing moved.

  The quietude amplified the red and yellow explosion that mushroomed from the rooftop, breaking the windows in the stores up and down Mission Street. The burning fuselage went up in the air; metal shards flying. The men inside the chopper’s cab were on fire. The helicopter dropped over the side of the building, falling in scattered melanized pieces on the cars parked in the street below.

  I could see everything from where I was standing. It was a case of my own déjà vu superimposed against the city’s eastern skyline. Somebody had finally shot down a police helicopter with a hand gun. I’d been waiting for that to happen; years of idiotic waiting were over. I was placated and strangely redeemed. There wouldn’t be any sense of anticipation to contend with anymore. If something like that had to happen, the sooner, the better.

  At the corner I found Bellamy yelling at the station captain, an intelligent man too sensitive for this kind of employment. He and I had never grown close. My throat was lacerated from smoke and thirst. Fire engines were blaring at the entrance to San Carlos Street. People were pouring out of the cottages that lined the block, gawking at the helicopter cooking in the flames of its own gasoline.

  Bellamy squinted at me, a scowl more than anything else, and said, “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Where have I been? Where were you? Did you see what happened?”

  “Sure I did. What should I do? Mourn for it?”

  “What’s he doing out here?” I nodded at the captain.

  “Who knows? Hey, let’s hit it. Follow me.”

  We left the captain at the corner, leaving him to contend with the unpleasant task of supervising the chopper’s clean up, and went jogging down the next block of San Carlos. The surviving helicopter flew overhead, aiming its blunt, angry nose for Twentieth Street. Behind us, the street was clogged with police vehicles. A nine-year-old girl had wandered off the sidewalk and in a stroke of genius, a squad car had backed up and crushed her foot. A crowd of Salvadoreños were surrounding the car, shouting insults at the two cops locked inside. Someone hurled a brick at its hood. A second later, rocks and bottles were raining down on the cop car’s roof.

  “Which way did he turn?” I shouted.

  “Over there!” Bellamy pointed.

  Bellamy led me into a vacant lot. There, he restrained me, clutching my sleeve, urging, “Wait a minute.”

  He held a finger to his lips and motioned for me to fan out to the left toward a green tin tool shack at the rear of the lot.

  “This is it,” Bellamy said.

  “I don’t want this to be happening.”

  “Keep dreaming. It’ll get you nowhere.”

  I held my revolver in both hands, a Faustian rosary for the poor and the damned. Sweat was pouring down my neck, stinging me in the nicks where the glass had cut my back. The vacant lot was spotted with cast-off mattresses, wood boxes, tablecloths, broken glass and a fire pit. It looked like a warm weather homeless encampment.

  Bellamy squatted low and started to duckwalk across the lot, taking cover behind a mattress and a trashed couch. He pa
used after each step, cocking his head. A light breeze was rattling the shed’s roof.

  “I can’t stand this. Why do we always have to do this. It always comes down to you and me and the armed guy.”

  “Shut your mouth, Coddy. I can’t bear it now.”

  The air was cooling off, much to my relief. I knew my time of reckoning was near. I thought about Alice and what I’d promised her. Her name came to my blistered lips. I could get killed out here and what for? My death would be meaningless, an obscure incident that no one would notice. A passage that no one would contemplate.

  I was standing close enough to Bellamy to smell him: a vinegarish, unwashed odor like the bank of a stream when the water was stagnant. Bellamy’s credit card transplant was limp, flattened against the hump on his head; he’d left his riot helmet in the squad car. He gestured for me to cover him while he sneaked up on the shed door.

  Alice: I found myself wanting her. The way she woke up in the morning, and how she always turned over to climb into my arms.

  “I’m ready, Bells,” I called softly.

  Bellamy flung open the shed door and fired off his pistol as fast as he could. I pounced over the threshold after him, shouting a cry that came from my guts.

  We pumped a week’s worth of bullets into the shack’s far wall. The gunpowder sucked the oxygen out of the air, leaving a gray tang that was acrid to the taste, and that scorched the lungs. I kept firing until my pistol was emptied. Bellamy was screaming, “We got him! We got him!”

  It took a few seconds for the smoke to clear away before I could see the shed was empty. I hawked up a brown lunger and spat it on the ground. The perpetrator had escaped. Maybe he’d never been there in the first place. Some assholes possessed magical powers; they resembled phantoms. They were shadows that made you doubt your own sanity. You could never apprehend them.

  Bellamy scratched his neck with the smoking barrel of his pistol and commented, “I’m glad we’re getting paid to do this.”

  “Are you kidding me, man? We’re getting chicken feed.”

  I unsnapped my chin strap and pulled the riot helmet off my head. My scalp was soaked with sweat; my mouth was filled with dirt. I ran my tongue over my teeth, inspecting the flecks of glass that were lodged in my gums. I squinted at Bellamy, rubbing my tongue against the inside of my cheek. He could see I was about to lose my temper.

  “We’d better get out of here,” he suggested.

  After taking the bus home to Novato, I eased myself into a kitchen chair and sat down at the table to stare at the television. Alice was kind enough to stand behind me and dab at the dried blood on my neck with a witch hazel-soaked, sterile cotton ball. The blue gray jazz tones of the news on Channel Seven were painted on my face, highlighting my chin and brow so that I resembled a cubist portrait. I knew this because I saw my reflection on the screen.

  “That must have been some ruckus out there today, Coddy.”

  “It’s the fucking weather,” I flared. “Summer comes around, and these people can find nothing better to do than to drink and rob stores. On top of that, more people hate us than ever.”

  “You’re exaggerating. I’m proud of you. That helicopter could have landed on you.”

  “That would have been just what I needed. But seriously, in that goddamn neighborhood, they act like we’re trying to hold them down. It ain’t a containment zone, the Mission. We ain’t wardens in a dog pound.”

  The television camera panned to the squad car on San Carlos Street that had been torched by the Salvadoreños. I felt cynical, inspiring the need to elaborate.

  “I can only hope the situation will get worse, you know that, Alice? The day is coming when I’ll be asked to put the dogs to sleep. I can see it now. There are too many dogs, and not enough room to put them all behind fences. A selection will have to be made. I hope to retire before then.”

  Alice looked at me with demure, but undeniable pleasure. She hadn’t heard that much from my mouth in a long while.

  That night, I tossed and turned in my unhappy slumber. I’d been reading a naval history book, a number about the War of 1812. I’d fallen asleep with the tome on my stomach. I couldn’t get comfortable in the bed. First, I had too many blankets on top of me. I removed one of them, then woke up minutes later, cold and wanting more covers.

  My bladder was bugging me, too. I lay there for a second, gathering the energy I’d need to put on my bathrobe and plod down the hallway to the can. I rolled over on my side, pushed the book away and promised myself that I’d close my eyes only for a moment.

  I didn’t know where to look for the gunman on San Carlos Street. So I went back to the scene of the crime on Mission Street. That’s called playing it by the book. It was by chance that I avoided a collision with a gorgeous, peroxided blonde. She’d been standing on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store where the robbery had taken place. I flushed mightily with a school boy’s cowardly guilt.

  “Sorry,” I apologized. “I almost knocked you over. Sometimes I don’t think about it, you know, where I’m stepping.”

  It was all I could do to restrain myself from reaching out and pinching her. She wasn’t the type of female I was used to being around. She was a Capp Street hooker on a cigarette break. I saw women like her in the district every day. A vast glass wall divided me from them, and I wanted to keep it that way. Some guys would have dismissed her as a cheap whore. She had on high heels and a white vinyl dress that barely covered her bottom.

  The hooker picked up on the signals I was sending her and rewarded my interest with an incandescent smile that stood alien against the rest of the dreary street.

  “What’s a handsome cop like you doing out here all alone? I thought you boys worked in couples.”

  “Yeah, we do. But I don’t know where Bellamy is.”

  “Bellamy. Is he your partner?”

  “And my main man. That’s Bellamy.”

  “Well, don’t you worry yourself about him. A stud like you can take care of himself, can’t he?”

  She draped a large, unfeminine looking hand on the buckle of my gun belt. She rested her other hand on my shoulder. In some mechanical attempt toward feigned intimacy, she let her spray-hardened hair scrape my cheek. I caught a whiff of an unidentifiable cologne and swore I detected stubble under the makeup caked on her face. She leaned into me, purring, “You smell like a real man. Good and stinky. C’mon, let’s go for a walk.”

  There was something uncanny about her mannerisms. I tried to back away from her, but she would not let go of my belt. Before I knew what she was doing, she unzipped my pants and slid her hand inside my jockey shorts. My underwear was moist; her fingers were cold and dry. My scrotum shriveled from her touch.

  “What do we have here? Oohh, isn’t that just wonderful,” she cooed.

  She unbuckled my gun belt. My trousers dropped to my ankles, exposing my scrawny, gray shanks. My pot belly hung free from my shirt tails. Something about her face that me to tune into immeasurable wavelengths of paranoia. It was a tangy paranoia that refused to be ignored.

  “I’ve got to find the asshole who robbed this store,” I said.

  “What makes you think you haven’t, sweetheart?” she answered.

  It was an odd thing to say, but every move she made was a caricature, a symbol of something that refused to reveal itself. She might’ve been attractive, but I didn’t quite trust her.

  “When was the last time you had the best blow job of your life? Can you remember, officer? I bet you can’t.”

  Too late, I reached for my gun. To my chagrin, my hand came up orphaned. She had the gun in her hand and a gloating, literate look on her face. The revolver’s muzzle was trained on my neck.

  “Surprise!” she squeaked.

  “Who are you?”

  Without my gun, I was as good as dead. I started to get sick, not so much in fear of the moment itself, but for all the other times when I’d been scared; doing it now and all together. She lowered the revolver until th
e muzzle was pointing at my pubic hair, nudging the scant fur that I had there.

  “Who’s the asshole?” she smiled.

  “I am,” I said, cooperating.

  “That’s a good boy.”

  She pulled the trigger. I went out like a light.

  The next morning Alice prepared breakfast for me. She scrambled steak and eggs with a dash of paprika in a frying pan. The aroma of cooking meat filled the kitchen. Alice caught a whiff of the food and hummed to herself.

  I was on another planet. I drank my coffee and didn’t say a word. Something was eating away at me, taking invisible bites out of my ability to converse with another human being. It was an emotional disease that didn’t leave any marks on my body. Alice didn’t know where it began or where it ended. My face was broken out in a shaving rash; dark purple bags hung under my eyes.

  “I love you, Coddy.”

  The words came out of her throat with the force things have when there doesn’t seem to be anything else left to say. Nothing else went far enough, didn’t reach into the emptiness and pull it apart by giving the silence a name. I fixed my destructive gaze on her eyes. Alice hugged herself, afraid to be in the same room with me.

  I whispered rich and thick, as if I were catching a cold, “I love you, too, bunny.”

  twenty-eight

  it was the biggest crowbar Bellamy had ever seen. It was as tall as a six-foot man, forged from wrought iron and painted a luminous burnt orange. As I had intended, the crowbar left Bellamy speechless.

  “Coddy, that bar. Do I know what it’s for?”

  I never smiled much and when I did, it made Bellamy shy. You could always determine the slow disintegration of a man by watching the quality of his smile. That’s what Bellamy saw in me.