by John Shannon
‘What is going on in The Nickel?’ Paula asked. ‘The real estate is, like, utterly worthless and people are fighting over it? What Yuppie wants to live with a hundred per cent vandalism, a hundred per cent homelessness, a hundred per cent graffiti? The old hotels are like sewers.’
‘Cities are doing it all over the country, at least before the collapse. People seem to want to be urban now – as long as they don’t have to be bothered by urban people.’
‘Ah, crap,’ Paula said. ‘You know – whites are always so sure they can get the upper hand.’
Something about Paula’s attitude annoyed her. ‘Yeah, maybe all caucasians need to be held down and raped by a couple of mokes of color. That’ll let them know how the world really works.’
Paula seemed a bit startled. ‘Jeez, that’s pretty intense. Where you going with shit like that?’
Gloria locked the car doors and stared at her friend over the roof. ‘No farther than you talking about the “good death,” girl. Sorry. We probably both need a mood adjuster to mellow down. I don’t know why I’m so angry.’ She had faint memories of a nasty pit bull at one of her foster homes. She’d made a sign for him: Don’t even THINK of trying to pet this dog, and then she’d tied him outside McCowan’s market, doing her assigned chores, and she came back to find the beast methodically chewing and destroying the sign. ‘Am I getting worse, Paula?’
‘Yeah, recent-like. Maybe it’s having to take care of your man when he’s such a basket case.’
‘It’s before that,’ she said with distaste. ‘It’s in my head. But you know what happens if I go to a shrink. It gets back to the brass in five seconds flat. That unstable bitch. Put her in traffic.’
A terrifying image came back for a moment – a dream from her childhood that had recurred again – so intense for that moment that it took her breath away: her nine-year-old self standing and screaming defiance into a dark open doorway and knowing utterly that her insolence would set something lethal to flying out of the darkness at her – but screaming anyway. Girl, you need something. All this crazy rage down in there.
They walked through The Nickel, past a number of men reclining amongst dubious possessions. Gloria and Paula were both silent for a while, awed by the actual presence of so much human misery – and their own.
‘Shit,’ Gloria said. ‘I keep thinking there should be labels posted over those guys back there, you know – common name, habitat, Latin name. That really sucks, doesn’t it?’
‘Yeah, c’mon, honey. Ain’t no zoo. And we’re not on duty. Let’s get you a minor mood adjustment.’ She took Gloria’s arm and tugged her into a bar with the unlikely name of Ed’s Bang-Up.
‘This is a bad road to start down,’ Gloria objected ineffectually. A grizzled old drunk lifted his head from a round table as they came in, meeting her eyes with hollow red-rimmed false hopefulness, and she looked away. Too much pain everywhere. OK, we’re all out here together in this shit, she thought.
Fortunately Samuel Greengelb had the right tool: a pipe-wrench he’d borrowed from the super once, when they’d had a super, and never given back. He scavenged five feet of half-inch pipe from where it ran through the fourth floor basins, and then he capped off the stub that he’d left using the pipe-cap the thugs had used on the heater down below. It was hardly worth capping off. The water was shut off. Two of the five original Musketeers had fled the building for good, and the third old-timer, Joel Wineglass, had moved two doors down from Greengelb, but he’d been losing his resolve for days, and Greengelb wasn’t even sure he was still in the building.
It was lucky Greengelb had a few other tools in the kitbox his nephew had left him, despairing whether his uncle could or would ever use them. But Greengelb had always seen himself as handy. An arbeiter of sorts. Hammer a bit, saw, paint, screw and unscrew.
He stuck the pipe-wrench in his pocket like a six gun and carried the long pipe he’d swiped down the staircase by himself, an ungainly spear, grazing and scarring the walls from time to time, accidentally ramming hard at the landings.
‘Sam, that you zhlubbing down like a flock of elephants?’
‘Who else? The Messiah come to fix our plumbing? I got pipe. Heat you’re going to get, my friend.’
‘Lang lebn zolstu! The boy and girl are off collecting junk from the empty rooms to make a barricade. I’m on guard. I’m Jeff Chandler, the Jewish cowboy.’
Greengelb came out onto their floor and saw his friend clasping the pistol with determination.
‘Enough with the gun, Morty. The shmucks can get plenty of guns, I’m sure. So help me with this pipe.’
‘OK.’
The pipe was about a foot too long to fit between the heater outlet in the lobby and the pipe coupler that had been left dangling empty behind an access door on the next floor up. They had no tools for rethreading the pipe, but by trading off the hacksaw and working arduously for twenty minutes, they managed to cut a foot off the iron pipe. They screwed it in below and jammed about a quarter inch of the sawn end of the pipe into the coupler. They wrapped and tied it in place with duct tape and all the rags they could find, finished off with old stiff wire.
‘A plumber I’m not, but a pure genius. A genius, I admit it.’
‘You keep thinking that when we light up the boiler and all fly to the moon. But even poor old men can have mazel. It could work.’
‘Of course it’ll work. Let’s light it up.’
As soon as the women had left him to his own devices, Jack Liffey had stood up shakily from the comfy chair and forced himself to start walking around the house, lurching at first, then stabilizing himself by holding on to doorframes and the old darkened oak chair rails, enjoying this new tentative state of being. He could tell it would be a while before he was steady on his feet without support, but there was a strange elation in moving around on his own legs now. Damn, he thought, I should get myself something outrageous to celebrate, something that would shock Maeve and Gloria both – a big pirate earring, maybe, or a Yakuza tattoo on my neck.
Loco followed him around the house curiously, mewling now and again in complaint or anxiety at his stumbles. Some areas of the house newly terrified him, the wide open spaces without handholds. But this euphoria at his new freedom of movement was almost as if he were drunk.
‘It’s OK, boy. Walking was once my normal state of being, remember? I can talk, too. La la la. Good boy. Love you, Loco.’ His voicebox deep in his throat hurt when he spoke aloud, but he tried to ignore the rasp, and he was amazed that his vocal cords seemed to work fine. Goodbye, Mr Ack-ack. Life was so delicate and so robust at once, he thought.
Thank God I’m not abandoned over there in The Nickel, stuck on the flypaper of an abused childhood or a traumatized military deployment or the slow collapse of my hopes or just plain bad luck – and a jobless and homeless future. So many of those men had been robbed of their kindness, too – he’d seen their eyes turn toward him with calculation, revealing neither compassion nor pity. It was remarkable that a few with so little of their own could still reach out and help. He decided to track down Chopper Tyrus and do something generous for him. Not just money. He would try to find something the man needed to right himself in life.
He thought of Gloria and Paula over there right now – looking for Maeve! The notion hit him like a giant slap across the face. Guilt sent him sprawling awkwardly into Gloria’s easy chair. Christ, Maeve was still in danger!
Somehow he’d resigned himself to letting Gloria take over the watchdog role. But he was no longer helpless. Somebody had brought his pickup back to the house, Gloria or Paula, but had kept the keys, probably to keep him out of trouble. But it didn’t matter. There was a spare key in a tiny magnetic box.
But first he went to the stash of books where he kept his .45 in a hollowed-out Oxford Companion to American Literature, and he remembered instantly – the book sitting open on the desk – that he’d taken that away with him and had it ripped out of his hands some time ago by the little
psycho. OK, he knew where Gloria kept her old backup .38 Smith & Wesson Police Special, more or less abandoned when the Department had gone over to .40 Glocks.
The big fat revolver tugged uncomfortably in his waistband, making him a bit more unsteady, but he couldn’t do anything about that until his leg muscles healed.
He got into the pickup and fought the spare key into the ignition.
Maeve and Conor had scavenged what they could from the abandoned flophouse rooms that were full of ratty clothing, old magazines, crusty eating bowls and unmatched single shoes. None of which was very useful for the proposed barricade – between the second floor, wholly empty now, and the third floor, where everyone was living. What she and Conor had finally settled on using were the unpadded box springs on almost all the bed frames, and a few light dressers and cabinets, which they’d shoved into the hall.
Maeve was still worried about barricading rather than escaping the building for help, but it seemed to have become a matter of principle to the old men, and she was willing to do what she could for them. She decided there was something really noble in their resistance.
Once the furnace had been lighted and was up to pressure, and the new pipe joint was declared imperfect but serviceable – leaking a steady jet of superheated steam on to the second floor landing – they could build the barricade. They all helped in carrying the bedframes down the staircase one by one, then they shoved the rubbish they had collected down the stairs and stacked it all together into a massive tangle tied rigid with some old stiff wire and duct tape from Samuel Greengelb’s tool kit. It made an almost impassible barrier, but Maeve noted that it was equally difficult to breach the barrier either way, and she secretly left a weakly linked tunnel on the handrail side that could be yanked apart in an emergency so they could crawl out fast if they had to. She didn’t even tell Conor about her secret passage, but she made the last downside layer of her secret tunnel as strong as she could so it would look impenetrable from below.
She hoped somebody had some food up here, and, as usual, she felt she had to think of everything for them all. They wouldn’t be able to live up here forever. It was hard enough to imagine what would happen the next day – but she wasn’t that worried somehow. The whole city would hardly sit back and ignore an assault on three old men and a couple of teenagers.
They gathered in Greengelb’s room to appraise what they’d done and pat each other on the back. Maeve’s purse was long gone so she had nothing to contribute, and Conor had only a Honer 532/20 blues harmonica – an instrument he called a ‘harp.’ No one had a cell phone. They would have to signal by yoo-hooing out the windows or flashing lights dot-dot-dot after dark, if anyone would be looking and if anyone knew Morse code any more. But who would be watching for Morse code from Skid Row? Lipman still had his little pistol, and luckily Joel Wineglass’s room revealed a formidable stash of food, though a lot of it ran to bottles of gefilte fish, canned herring, chicken broth, and several jugs of deep purple concord grape wine – none of which struck the teenagers as particularly palatable or even edible.
* * *
‘Man, didn’t you hear Mr V? We’re supposed to disengage and leave the world painless for tonight.’ Rice Thibeaudeaux had given up fussing with his flick knife, but he was too restless to give up all perseveration – a very high-functioning autistic, McCall finally decided – as the midget drummed erratically on the dashboard with two fingers.
‘It’s my worry, sweetie.’ McCall knew that things got dangerous when you disobeyed orders, but there was no way he was going to walk away now. No way. Only assholes walked away. It was an ocean-to-ocean freak show in America these days, and you couldn’t let down on your hard edge or they’d put you in the cage with the geeks and glass-eaters.
‘Let’s do it to the old goofs,’ McCall said.
‘Fuck them up?’ Thibodeaux’s face lit up.
‘That’s what you said you’re good at, sweetie.’
NOTES FOR A NEW MUSIC
Day 7
Miss M, I’m waiting here
For you to reach out to me.
We’re both homeless without love
And loveless without home.
Miss M, I’m terrified
That you’ll tell me
My feelings are a big mistake
And I have no shelter in the storm.
O, Miss M, is this the end
Or just one more day of waiting?
I need somebody to help me hang on
But I swear I won’t burden you longer.
The average income of the top one per cent of taxpayers in California more than doubled between 1995 and 2005. The typical hourly wage worker’s wage declined by 4.4 per cent, while that of the lowest-wage workers declined by even more. Even before the crash. Almost five million full-time workers in California have wages beneath the Federal poverty line. This is all well known. Why is it allowed to happen?
FOURTEEN
My Yiddish Mama
‘Remember those airstrips out in the boonies that were nothing but sheets of perf steel over the sand?’ McCall said.
Thibodeaux snorted derision. ‘They brought us in on big 747s. Right to Baghdad SDA, man. All the best for Blackwood. We had stewardesses, f’chrissake. No Spam-in-the-can shit for us. Then straight down the twelve klicks of the Irish Run in armored rhinos to the Green Zone and the Intercontinental Hotel, drinking cold beer all the way. We only had one bump the whole trip.’
McCall wondered why the little psycho was being so voluble tonight. ‘I only asked because the way the damn wind is kicking up.’ Loose newspaper sheets, wisps of dirt and old Styrofoam cups were gusting past the windshield. ‘Choppers on those boonie fields always blew a storm of crap in your eyes.’
‘Goodie for you, Mr. G.I., with the blue cord on his shoulder. I hope you waxed some towelhead for every annoying minute you spent over there.’
‘We did try to rack them up,’ McCall said. ‘Staying even is good for the soul.’
‘Whatever. It was a pretty strange war,’ Rice Thibodeaux said.
‘The whole sandbox was strange, babe, not just the four-star hotels with the hookers where you mercs lived. Glad to be home, I tell you, out of the evilness.’ McCall cracked the truck window; he could tell immediately it was a cold wind out of the west, the big pineapple wind that would bring more rain.
He cranked the window closed and looked over to find Thibodeaux glaring unnervingly straight at him. The little man didn’t often meet your eyes, a strange-o most days, but he was doing it now.
‘I didn’t know you were that way,’ Thibodeaux announced.
‘What way is that, friend?’
‘Poison toad – scared of biting yourself.’
‘Bullshit, little man.’ He was riled, it was true, edgy, worried a little and maybe angry, but he wasn’t scared. ‘OK, when it’s dark tonight, we go in and mess with them.’
‘Can I do some hurt?’
In his imagining, McCall saw the L.T. on his last patrol in country, bringing his knee hard up into the balls of an Iraqi father whose whole family was spaced along the wall of his home, watching. An RPG had flamed into their firebase from this guy’s house or maybe nearby. Mortaritaville. ‘OK, let’s change levels. We go off the grid tonight. Our enemies are gonna cry. Happy?’
Thibodeaux put up a fist and McCall sighed and popped it. Let smiles cease, McCall thought. He’d made his choice. This is where we all go to hell.
Gloria showed her badge to the beat cops that the LAPD had out walking The Nickel these days, a Dick-and-Jane pair not long out of the Academy. The woman was brown skinned and fine featured. A Brahmin East Indian, Gloria guessed. Pretty odd cop. Paula hung back talking to a group of young black men sitting on the curb as the sun sank into a dark cloud bank behind the skyscrapers off to the west.
‘Strange assignment down here,’ Gloria said. ‘How long you two been up?’
Gloria could see the woman intentionally defer to her partner. ‘Since the chi
ef decided the best thing to do about the homeless was bust the shit out of them every time they jaywalk.’ He was a cocky young man with a mustache so blond you could hardly see it. ‘I’m no Monday-morning quarterback. Maybe it was the thing to do then. We’ve run off a lot of dirtbags that were living off the poor winos. Selling dime bags to them, for shit’s sake. Stealing a man’s only pants. That’s the honor of Afro gentlemen for you.’
The comment set off a lot of alarms for Gloria. She’d thought the Academy worked a little harder on racial tact these days.
The woman cop gestured to the man’s chestpak radio. ‘That’s an open carrier, Denny.’ She made a mute gesture of caution.
Apparently they had a way of leaving their radios on during the foot patrol. That was new to Gloria. Maybe it was only local, or maybe their training officer was babysitting.
‘Look, I need to find these kids. You seen ’em?’
She showed the pictures of Maeve and Conor.
‘Sergeant, these kids look like they just stepped out of the Wide World of Disney,’ the male cop said. ‘We don’t get a lot of that around here.’
He probably just meant they were white, Gloria thought.
The woman cop took Maeve’s photo from her and looked closer.
‘Yeah, we did see this one. She drive a little white Toyota?’
Gloria perked up and nodded.
‘Two nights ago we saw her doing just what you’re doing – canvassing the neighborhood.’
The male cop made a scornful sound. ‘Neighborhood. That’s a nice one, Bina. Maybe they got a Thirty-one Flavors around the corner.’
‘What they got is plenty of kids in school,’ Gloria snapped. ‘And life is all uphill for these poor kids. Try to imagine it, Biff. And, meantime, just shut up.’ She turned to the woman. ‘Anything more recent you remember?’
She handed the photograph back. ‘Sorry. We’ll keep our eye out. How do we reach you?’
Gloria gave her a card with her cell number. ‘Were you born here, sis’?’
