One Foot Off the Gutter

by Peter Plate

  I crossed over the brink of the passageway and ran the flashlight across the hardwood floor. The ceiling was high and the floor was polished. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in sight. It didn’t seem abandoned, and there was nothing in sight to arouse my suspicions.

  My bowels relaxed, letting the pressure in my lower intestinal tract drop down to a more tolerable level. There had been moments in the last few weeks when I doubted whether I’d ever be able to regain mastery over my own affairs.

  When Bellamy was in the hospital, the job had been difficult. Sympathy for Bellamy’s plight had dissipated. The station captain had sent me a memo that said a disciplinary hearing was scheduled for the near future.

  “I’ll let you know the exact date as soon as possible,” the captain had stated. “The loss of the squad car is unforgivable. I can’t write it off into next year’s budget proposal. The Chamber of Commerce has already written a letter of protest about the refunding of your vehicle.”

  It made me think twice about whether I wanted to stick out the next couple of years in the Mission, trying to get a twenty-year niche on the force so that I could retire with a full pension. I needed the money. But I didn’t know if my pride could stand it.

  Maybe I would leave the force. I held the flashlight down, aiming it at my feet. Maybe I could get out of the Mission. Better yet, I would become a cop in another, smaller town. Some burg where the citizens and the other cops would appreciate me for my talent and skills, not like here in San Francisco.

  It had taken me years to realize my own salt, my own worth. I deserved a better toss of the dice than the one I’d been handed. I stepped across the floor into the depths of the room. I let my mind flow along the trail of recriminations that soared out of my heart.

  I felt bad about not visiting Bellamy in the hospital, but that couldn’t be helped. My sense of compassion had been worn away until it had become a wall against the mediocre things in life.

  Whatever I planned, the converse invariably happened. Irony added to the pleasure I felt when I was inside the rooms of an abandoned building. Since the beginning of summer, those rooms were the only places where I felt like a complete man. Why couldn’t I be left alone with them?

  I didn’t want to arrest assholes in the Mission anymore than I wanted to assume further grief for the squad car or for Alice’s happiness. Much less continued responsibility for Bellamy’s health. If I had any smarts left in my head, I’d run away from all of my responsibilities.

  A sliver of light meandered through the four panes of a tall window. I liked the window, and I admired the room. The house hadn’t been trashed during its abandonment, something that was rare in the Mission.

  I heard a rustling sound, maybe the scurrying of mice across the bare floor. Someone came out of the next room. A man’s thin brown face emerged from the open doorway. “Who the hell are you?” I grated.

  The man drew closer to the flashlight’s ray, almost swaggering into the light. He didn’t quail when I hit him in the face with the yellow beam. He stopped where he was, standing fifteen feet away from me.

  “You shouldn’t play around,” I said, holding my temper. “Just stand where you are and produce some identification for me.”

  It took a moment with my memory jumping a groove, then I remembered the guy. First, in a blur of general understandings, then in a jumble of details. It was him. The phantom asshole in the green tin shack on San Carlos Street. The guy who’d gotten away with robbing a liquor store. I could have sworn the asshole was happy to see me. The guy was actually smiling. In spite of myself, I said, “What are you doing here?”

  I didn’t get an answer.

  The revolver was limp in my hand. This was the magical motherfucker who’d disappeared into nowhere. The asshole was much smaller than I recalled, but he was wearing the same expensive shoes, and had a chrome plated pistol.

  “You’re the pendejo that shot out the windshield of the squad car.”

  It occurred to me that for the first time in my illustrious career, I was standing face to face with someone I’d exchanged gunfire with. The longer I stared at the robber, the more the man’s face changed. His mobile features dissembled, then reassembled.

  “Don’t you got anything to say?” I said with a menace I did not feel.

  “What is there to talk about?”

  As quickly as the asshole came, he vanished. For a moment, I didn’t know what had happened. I felt a slight breeze under my nose, then it was gone.

  “Hey, where did you go?”

  “I’m right behind you.”

  I whirled around and trained the flashlight to where his voice had come from. I lowered myself into a combat-ready stance, aiming the revolver, turning to the right, then to my left.

  It was such a fine building. Why couldn’t it have stayed that way? Now there was more trouble, another obstacle for me to contend with. It had been that way since the beginning of time.

  I held the revolver in front of me. Rain drops splattered on the window. A bird landed on the sill, squawked once and flew off. I was starting to think the perpetrator had an advantage over me. What it was, I didn’t exactly know, but the recognition was growing.

  “I’m a San Francisco police officer. I can detain you right now. We had a report of someone attempting a robbery. You are a suspect in another unsolved robbery. The neighbors say an individual went into this building. Please identify yourself. It may make a difference in how we treat you.”

  I turned the flashlight around, hitting the walls with the beam. First, this wall. Then, the next wall. The asshole hopped outside the light, moving in a neat circle around me.

  The fear on my face must have betrayed me. It would have been fun, this clash of opposing wills, if it weren’t for the fact that I’d been shot at by this very same man not so long ago.

  “I’m asking you,” I repeated myself. “Please identify yourself.”

  I pointed the flashlight and the gun and found nothing. I was positive the ghoul was nearby. I could feel the asshole was all over me, devitalizing me.

  Bellamy stepped through the opened door, pulling his gimp leg behind him into the house. He peeked around the front room, and not finding Coddy, he shook his head. The rain was giving his leg a real fucking. His body had never failed him before; it couldn’t start now. The pain was screwing him up, making him think back to Doreen.

  Since Bellamy had shared a room in the hospital with a pack of other charity cases, the few times Doreen came by, he’d never gotten much of a chance to be alone with her. The guy in the bed next to him had been a Hell’s Angel mending a broken hip. The biker always had some friends coming by to give him cigarettes, and to bring him freshly laundered bandannas, so that he could have a clean one to tie around his ratty, salt and pepper hair every day.

  Bellamy walked into the front room, pecking at the polished floor with the rubber tip of his cane.

  “Coddy? Where are you? Are you in there?”

  I heard Bellamy. Rain was hitting the window, distracting me with its insistent demand for attention. I speared the floor with the flashlight; the beam played off the wall, casting an aureole of gold against the shadows near the ceiling. The short hairs on the back of my neck stood up when the perpetrator stepped back into the circle of light. His quick and understated presence left me scrambling to find a position where I could defend myself.

  The asshole took another step forward. I brushed up against the wall at my back.

  “Halt where you are!”

  My opponent was standing no further than an arm’s length away from me. The robber was younger than my previous recollection of him. He was handsome and more womanish than I remembered, too. The flashlight’s beam fastened onto his smooth skin and short hair. The asshole judged me with a shrewd glint in his eyes.

  “You want to play games, don’t you?”

  I didn’t know what else to say to him. I was going to have to arrest the man, and I didn’t know where to begin. Steady, I advi
sed myself.

  “No, no games,” the asshole replied. “I don’t think it would be fun with someone like you.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. It was as good of a time as any to bust the shithead. I reached for the handcuffs on my belt.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m going to have to take you in.”

  He giggled, an eerie, thin laugh.

  His laughter was followed by a loud bang that hurt my eardrums. The robber’s face was a mere glimmer of light. Bellamy’s voice was in back of the light in the other room.

  And what was this?

  A bullet was traveling in a beeline toward me. It was moving slowly for a bullet, rotating in mid-air. I looked past its flight and saw the liquor store robber was holding the gun in his fist. The bullet began to pick up momentum. I examined its trajectory, then stared at the asshole. I heard Bellamy call my name again, and I cried, “No, don’t!”

  A huge fist socked me in the solar plexus, backing me up into the wall. Okay, now what? I asked myself. It was a question I couldn’t negotiate. In what took a million years, I fell to the floor, giving me the opportunity to go over everything I’d ever done wrong.

  I had been falling for a long time. Yesterday, Bellamy and myself had been called to the scene of a domestic conflict on Shotwell. Ordinarily, I didn’t enjoy those encounters, and this situation did not deviate from the norm.

  A young, outraged pregnant lady in a maternity dress, some eight months gone and wielding a large kitchen knife was out in the street backed up by various members of her family. She was squared off against this guy attempting to protect himself with a screwdriver. He didn’t have a chance. She’d already stabbed him three times. A pregnant woman. Nobody in the crowd spoke English, and we didn’t know any Spanish. Of course, this made everything worse.

  Bellamy got mad because he wasn’t able to express himself. He started to shout, as if volume would solve the problem of comprehension. I knew we had to get out of there. We didn’t belong there, really didn’t.

  In all worlds, there were mistakes that needed correcting. And if Bellamy didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to make a plan, I’d travel alone. I knew what I was doing. All I wanted were a few more minutes to set things straight. I called out once, Alice? My partner was screaming, but I couldn’t answer him. I was dropping away. I was slipping out of reach. It was time to go. My journey toward home was just beginning.

  PETER PLATE taught himself to write during eight years spent living in abandoned buildings in San Francisco’s Mission district. A spoken-word performer, Plate possesses an eidetic memory that allows him to recite whole chapters of his books from memory. One Foot off the Gutter joins Snitch Factory, Police and Thieves, and Angels of Catastrophe to complete Plate’s Mission Quartet. His previous novels are The Romance of the American Living Room (1993), Darkness Throws Down the Sun (1991), and Black Wheel of Anger (1990). Peter Plate lives and writes in San Francisco.

  Copyright ©1995, 2001 by Peter Plate

  First published by Incommunicado Press in 1995

  First Seven Stories Press Edition November 2001

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Plate, Peter.

  One foot off the gutter : a novel / Peter Plate.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-609-80054-3

  1. Mission District (San Francisco, Calif.)—Fiction. 2. Police—California—San Francisco—Fiction. 3. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 4. Squatters—Fiction. 5. Criminals—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3566.L

  813’.54—dc21 2001041090

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