On the Nickel (18 page)

‘When I turned, I saw an Impala low-rider with faces and headbands in all the windows, and I just went into some deep instinct. I walked across the yard and pointed straight at the car like an old witch. The car took off fast without even anybody waving a
pistolo
or throwing sign. When I looked back at the porch, that whole crowd of macho men had emptied itself inside the house. Forget backing me up.'

She drank off the beer. ‘I admit I was scared to death, and it was a fairly dumb move, but, you know, it wasn't the kids in that car that got me – I hate to say, but even to save my damn life I wasn't gonna be seen backing off by a bunch of guys on the job. Maybe I'll leave Foothill Station a legend.'

‘You're a legend right now, girl.'

‘Fuck me, Eddie – you give to that bitch and her Home For All?' Moses Vartabedian exclaimed. ‘That's just one loud-mouth nun.'

Vartabedian fussed with a black stogie, then reamed the end with his gold cigar tool.

‘Shit, yeah,' Wolverton said. ‘Give the do-goods a little public help. It sends a signal when the feature writers come around.' Indeed, he thought. He still remembered the woman from
L.A. Loft Living
who'd talked amazingly dirty for three solid minutes while she was stripping for him and then had done a few tricks on the carpet he'd only really heard about.

‘You don't mean that.'

‘Actually, I do, V. I'm not that cynical. I really do believe in helping the homeless. We're gonna coexist down here, like it or not.'

‘What do you guys think?' Vartabedian exhaled smoke from the stogie and glared at his two hirelings, McCall and Thibodeaux, who seemed content to stand either side of his door like mismatched stone lions.

‘Nobody remembers givers for shit,' McCall said. ‘Just look at the world's greatest taker.' He flicked his head at Thibodeaux, who was running a finger along his unopened switchblade as if petting the head of a snake. ‘Nobody ever forgets Rice.'

Thibodeaux snicked the blade out, as if on signal, then walked the open knife end-to-end along his fingers in a showy way, like George Raft with a quarter on his knuckles. Having their full attention, he concluded his act by pretending to saw his own dick off.

No, Wolverton thought, flapping away Vartabedian's smoke. Even if he had fifty more years of the architectural redesign of these insipid beaux-arts buildings in Downtown and all the other half-assed gentrifying, and having to chum up with other slippery shmucks like Vartabedian who had the money to finance it all, he'd probably never forget this one job and this one little loon who'd turned up somehow on it. It was a pretty big job, worth a million and change for his studio, or he'd've checked out already, maybe start on the hill house that Madonna had wrecked above the reservoir that was waiting now for a fresh look, or hunt up that magazine chick for a second interview, though he couldn't even remember her name or what it was exactly that she'd been howling there at the end when she was down on all fours.

‘I'm about to miss the ballet,' Wolverton said. ‘Can we get on with this?'

‘Ballet?' the big Armenian said.

‘It's a joke, V.'

‘You got a funny sense of humor, Eddie. The problem is real easy. We got a couple days to clear out the Fortnum and get started or our permits expire. There won't be no extensions. That HFA nun and her ilk have been to the
Times
and the permits people and complained that we're bidding up the prices so much that the goody-two-shoes can't set up no more flophouses. Just what Downtown fucking needs – a bunch more flops for winos. These jerkoffs want to see some kind of
Blade Runner
out there.'

‘I liked
Blade Runner,'
Wolverton mused.

Vartabedian winced. ‘I liked
Godzilla,
too, but I don't want to live with him.'

‘Godzilla!' Rice Thibodeaux cried out, as if activated by a magic word. He swung his arm blindly and slammed the knife into the lovely rosewood door, an inch from McCall's ear, who stirred his golden ringlet curls by pulling slowly away. Steve McCall rotated his neck glacially toward his partner.

‘Don't even nick me, mouse. I got a .50-caliber Desert Eagle I could stick in your ear any damn time.'

Thibodeaux gave a lopsided smile. ‘Face-to-face, ten feet apart. Quick draw on your pathetic gun and my knife. Any time you say.'

‘Gentlemen,
please,'
Vartabedian said. ‘You already have a job on your plate. And a plan.'

This idea of a settled plan was what worried Eddie Wolverton. His reputation would be ruined if one of his remodels was caught up in some kind of wildcat thuggery. ‘What's the plan, Stan?'

‘We'll get the bitter-enders out of the hotel real soon.' McCall raised his palms to calm the others. ‘No one will be hurt. The Fortnum got no elevators now, no heat, no water. And they know we're threatening two of their buddies. The message is clear. Living there is asshole deep in the shit, and they got them a generous offer from Mr V. to move on.'

Wolverton glanced once at Thibodeaux who was waggling his switchblade to pry it out of the once-perfect door, then he glanced at Vartabedian. ‘This is terrific, Vart,' Wolverton said. ‘My firm is lead architect of record. We're mostly done with the plans. But I don't need any … what you say, bad press.'

‘You take your commission,
hombre,'
Vartabedian snorted. ‘Reality is always a hardship for you prissy guys. We're both whores for the bucks, and you know it.'

‘Maeve?'

‘I'm so exhausted.' It wasn't quite her own voice. She opened one eye and everything around her was dark. No movement. The animal, whatever it was, had apparently gone some time ago, and she'd almost fallen asleep. Maybe she had.

‘Me, too. I need you to help me remember a lyric.'

Her anger flared for an instant. How narcissistic could this guy be? They were handcuffed to pipes, prisoners of dangerous loonies, and he wanted help with his career.

‘I know it's stupid,' he went on. ‘But I've got to remember it. I've been working in my head so long it's going to get lost.'

‘Go on,' Maeve said dejectedly. ‘We'll both memorize it line by line.'

‘Oh, Maeve. You're a princess.'

They went through it one line at time, repeating each back and forth until they were sure they had it:

There were two more verses with the same chorus, plus a catchy drumbeat that he rapped out on the floor, and Maeve found she actually liked the song.

He opened with his king pawn once again. Chopper countered with a wacky knight opening that Jack Liffey hadn't seen since high school. His eyes were beginning to sag with fatigue in the lantern light, and he decided to play this one out and then insist on sleep. The speed games didn't take all that long. Big raindrops pattered like fingertips, almost countable, on the plastic over the boxes, and small gusts flickered the lantern and rustled up the newspapers under him. Now and again people hurried past.

‘This your rent, Jack. Obliging me so kind.' He pronounced it o-bul-idg-ing, which probably meant that at some time he'd sounded the word out slowly and had never heard it in daily conversation. ‘I can see you pretty tired. You got to enjoy the moment you in, friend. Who know how many fine games you gonna get wit' a friend like Chopper?' He chuckled.

Jack Liffey brought out a bishop recklessly and drew an appreciative nod from his opponent, who snapped a tiny pawn down hard into its peghole like a Jamaican playing dominoes.

‘Whoa,' Jack Liffey said.

The other man didn't react for a moment, nor did Jack Liffey. Though the universe seemed to have shifted on its axis. He felt there was another presence there, watching him. Was he still alone in his life?

Chopper's eyes came up. ‘Man, you just done
spoke.
Do it again.'

‘Whoa. Whoa.' Jack Liffey grinned in amazement, even laughed silently. He moved his lips into position for something more complex. ‘Ack. Ack.'

Damn. Quickly, he tried to get back to
Whoa,
but he couldn't find his place, like a book he'd dropped and it had fallen shut. He seemed to have lost the knack of connecting words and sounds. He shrugged and sighed. ‘Ack,' he said sadly. Another sound had come out only a moment ago. Maybe it would come again, then a third.

‘Don't get down on yo'self. Maybe some mornin' you wake up, be recitin' the Gets-a-bird
ad-
dress.'

Fourscore and seven years ago,
he thought with eloquent precision.
Our forefathers brought forth on this continent …
His mouth muscles would not make any of the adjustments necessary for those words. ‘Ack.'
It's all in your head, Jack. It's all trauma, irrational clutching fear.
The tingle was in his legs again and he imagined a toe moving. These tics were like promises from a mischievous god.

‘Ack
!' he bit off one more angry attempt.

‘Don't go there right now, man.'

OK, this is just the peewee league of bad, Jack Liffey thought. There's cancer and third-degree burns and being gnawed to death by wolverines. He laughed aloud at his own thoughts, but all that came out were puffs of air.

‘Let it be, Richard. You take one night at a time.'

They climbed back into Gloria's RAV-4, both pretty well done in by exhaustion. It was 4:30 a.m. and even the night-owls of The Nickel had run out of hoots and perched somewhere. Here and there in the corner of her eye a shadow disappeared down an alley, but no one stirred openly in all that gloom. Gloria knew it had not been possible to stick their heads into every flop and tent and cardboard condo to hunt down Jack or Maeve or the boy.

‘We done our best, I think,' Gloria said. ‘For one night. Let's say nobody gonna die in one night.'

‘I'm game for another block, if you are.'

Paula and Gloria looked at one another, sliding in and out of focus, then both laughed at the presumption that they were alert.

‘Jack's a big boy, even if he is lame and mute,' Gloria said. ‘We ain' gonna do him no good like this, we draggin' ass. I'm a walkin' zombie, girl.'

‘I don't know how to have these conversations,' Paula said. ‘Normally I got no give-up. But, I will say I'm sinking into the plant kingdom.'

Gloria smiled. ‘I've been up twenty-four hours a hundred times on the job, but tonight I'm starting to get those waking dreams. Ever have that?'

‘Maybe so. You know what I see when it come? I see the night back in the day that I answered a radio call to that ol' Chippendale's club on Overland. I badge in the door to a thousand screaming women. They all be jumping up and down watching men strippers dressed like cops and cowboys an' shit. It's like the sight of those women burned theyselves on my retina to stay forever. Jeez, girl. They was such heat in that room, but it wasn't no normal pussy heat. I think it was some kind of sex-kill they wanted – kill all men forever.'

‘Crap,' Gloria said. ‘Men ain' the real problem.' They both sat in silence for a while. ‘I really get the vision thing sometimes. Last week in the early morning, I saw a plains Indian in all that feather headdress and buckskin shit stand right there in front of the car and point at me like he wanted me. I think he wanted to warn me about something. I even got out of the car, but, course, he wasn't there.'

‘You know, girl,' Paula said. ‘Neither of us done give birth to no babies. Maybe something trying to get out of us late at night.'

Gloria reached out and squeezed Paula's hand. ‘Sweetie, it's too dark and rainy for talk like that. We'll end up saying we in love just ‘cause we know how the other one feel inside. Let's direct ourselves out of this bad place to a warm house with beds.'

‘I could sleep on your sofa fine,' Paula said.

‘Girl, I could sleep on a atom bomb tonight,' Gloria said.

J
ack Liffey was awake well before the sun, the oblong of sky he could see, over the brickwork opposite, grown just perceptibly brighter than the ambient black. He was conscious of the pungent smells of urine and human shit, then rotting food, and something else that was a bit fishy – maybe the body odor of his chess-partner snoring away across the cardboard shelter.

Slowly he began to realize what had woken him so early in the still-dark. A raspy sound was drawing near, unpleasantly, like an army of devils grinding away the surface of the world. Just as the sound reached crescendo, headlights lit the gutter and a street sweeper burst into view in his small frame of reference and lumbered wetly past. He wondered if they'd chosen to sweep Skid Row so early on purpose, to annoy and awaken all these non-taxpayers. He knew that many building owners on The Nickel hosed down the sidewalks for just that purpose. He could sense that he still had his wristwatch – it was only a Timex and had either been overlooked or hadn't been worth stealing. It was still too dark inside the box to read the time.

He dozed off again, awoke to see unlaced tennis shoes hurrying past, then dozed again. Finally, day was unmistakably arriving, then gloriously. The rain was over. Sun flooded down with its promise of renewal. Hallelujah. The worst had not happened. He felt a strange excitement, almost elation. He was truly out among the masses of the most wretched of his country's poor, and he was all right. Someone had come out of nowhere to help him. Chopper Tyrus. Wonderful name. Bless him; bless all humanity.

His arms were doing fine this morning and he managed to sit up and shunt himself gradually into the entrance of the boxes, keeping the blanket over his shoulders. Chopper Tyrus apparently had the knack of sleeping soundly well past dawn. A sign of depression? The activity outside slowly picked up, individuals and then groups walking past, presumably migrating toward breakfast, or propelled by other needs. A few greeted him graciously and he nodded. Cars and trucks shished past on the slick wet. He had a desperate need to pee. He'd have worried about Maeve, but for some reason, after listening to golden-curls, he had never taken the threat against her seriously.

The damp road was just beginning to lose its sheen when his companion had a coughing fit to mark his awakening.

‘Ack-ack,' Jack Liffey said.
Good Morning.

The man blinked a few times and glanced over.

‘Why, Richard! You still right here.'

Chopper Tyrus crawled past him and then stumbled out to pee for an inordinately long time through the hurricane fence beside their house. Then he came back and got Jack Liffey and propped him on his knees against the fence a few feet along, and let him handle the rest. Such a relief! His knees wobbled, but the legs seemed to be adding a little strength to his posture – until he finished and let go of the chain-link with his hands and crumpled like a sack of doorknobs. Damn.

‘You,
Jack –
I disremember.' Chopper helped him back to the tent. ‘Every man due his real name in truth. I's supposed to call home for you this morning. I know a place wid a heart, lets us make a ‘mergency call. Right after morning coffee. That be OK with you?'

Jack Liffey nodded happily, and the man began scaring up what he would need from the corners of his gracious home.

Maeve, too, woke in an agony of needing to pee. Her bowels were telegraphing spasms, and her mouth was sticky, her lips glued together. Light diffused through the awful room, showing what it was – a series of half collapsed grey cubicles. Dozens of wire conduits dangled from the ceiling, an upside-down forest.

She saw no evidence of the animal life that had worried her so, not even droppings.

‘Conor!'

‘Yes, Maeve. Good morning to you.'

‘How are we going to pee?'

‘I'm afraid I've already gone in my pants. It's a humiliation.'

‘Oh, crud. At least I read that pee is sterile.'

‘Hey, that's reassuring.'

‘No snark, pal, don't start,' she said. ‘Did you get some sleep?'

‘A little. Thanks. I'm pretty sore and stiff. How about you?'

‘I've been worse, but not in this life.' She felt a strange kinship to her father's impairments, but she also realized how lost and alone his disabilities had been making her feel. No self-pity today, please. ‘Any songs this morning?'

‘Don't be mean, Maeve.'

‘Any ideas about escape?'

‘Most of my thoughts in that direction deal with superpowers that I don't seem to possess,' he said. ‘I'm the wrong generation. Mostly I missed comic books for music. My dad talks about his dad reading him Tom Swift books. You know those?'

‘No. I did read a Nancy Drew once. It was pretty sappy and her boyfriend showed up to save her. Not going to happen, is it?' Her last boyfriend had been a girlfriend in any case – a lovely, brilliant girl who'd taught her how to drink absinthe, and had been hustled off to a private school called Le Rosey in Switzerland as soon as her parents found out what was going on.

‘Conor, can you try to saw your handcuffs on the pipe or something? We've got to get out of here.'

‘It's not that easy,' he said glumly. ‘My feet are attached to a chain that only lets me move a couple of inches. There's nothing at all in my little orbit. Nothing.'

‘Do what you can.' She started sawing away with her own handcuffs against the pipe.

Chopper Tyrus had thoughtfully propped him up against a building before writing the number down and going off to telephone. The boiled coffee was pretty dreadful but – not to seem ungrateful – Jack Liffey went on sipping it from a small tin can from time to time. He nodded to passersby, once bumped fists with a young black man who had paused and spoken to him, and he managed to make it understood with gesture and gulps that he couldn't talk. He felt like a goldfish who'd splashed to the floor, taking big hopeless breaths. Mostly he just watched the passing parade of the homeless, having no real game plan, alone in his life. Gloria would come before too long, and he knew this was the last hour or so of his edgy detachment as a non-speaking non-person, in a universe that did not generally value that option very highly.

He was still Other for now, he thought. He was pure object, pure outsider, the done-to. Metaphysics didn't really interest him, but as an immobile mute he seemed to have become nothing but metaphysics. There weren't even many distractions to escape the whirling of his thoughts.

And isn't everyone driven to try to kill the Other in some way? That primeval fear of the unknown. But maybe what everyone really wanted was to undo the terrible distance between them and the Other – to undo the Human Condition. Fat chance, he thought. He tried to laugh at himself for the rank sentimentality of that idea, but no sound would come out. That was the kind of idea that would always get sand kicked in its face by a bully on the beach – or get its wallet and shoes and wheelchair stolen. Soon Gloria would come, and he'd need to be quite hard-headed and sensible again. He tested one leg after another, then his voice. Nothing worked, but it all had a different feel this morning, a hopefulness.

He watched a one-legged pigeon fight other pigeons for a paper plate of soggy food that had been abandoned along the fence. The lame pigeon kept being muscled out, and every fiber of his being wanted to help.
That's how hard-headed you are,
he thought. But wasn't it a deep human responsibility to help the weak? How did we keep children alive through the age of the saber-toothed tiger? How long would Einstein or Joyce have lasted, thrown into a pit of gladiators? Why should the strong and ruthless always win?

When he glanced up, his mind went into a kind of overdrive of shock. It was amazing how immediately he recognized her after ten years – Eleanor Ong, ex-nun, his first great love after leaving his wife, a relationship that had been supremely intense for a fleeting time that might as well have been forever. She smiled enigmatically at him from only a few feet away, holding the handles of some sort of transport chair – four little wobble-wheels and a canvas seat on a light frame.

Too much remembrance flooded back at once, and too many emotions. His brain was a mood-light spinning madly through its colors. He remembered he'd been her first lover. Along the banks of the Sespe River. The power of that dewy innocence taking off her sweater for the first time for a man while well into her forties. How impossibly tight her portal had been after years in the convent. Then, later, he'd almost got her killed – that was the overriding memory – dumped into a storm drain by thugs during a rainstorm, and the jeopardy of his own life frightening her back into her convent of renunciation and silence.

‘Oh, Jack, it's so good to see you,' she said. His mind whirled into another reality.

So much for her silence, he thought. If only
he
had permission to speak, too. There was so much to say. He felt tears running down his cheeks.

Beside her, Chopper Tyrus stared curiously at Jack Liffey. ‘She seem to know your name.'

‘I met Gloria looking for you yesterday, Jack,' Eleanor said. ‘And I knew you were around here. A white man with bright blue eyes, this friend of yours tells me this morning. Name of Jack.'

‘Ack-ack!'

‘Don't, please. I know you're in trouble. I offer both of you a healthy breakfast at our shelter, and then we'll make your call and get Gloria over here.'

‘Whoa!' Was that his voice? His elusive second sound was back.

‘Moms was a gentle woman,' Paula said in the car that was awash in a hopeful morning light. ‘Of course, she was also a schizophrenic who couldn't find it in her strength to take her meds regularly, so eventually I was taken away from her and put in a home. The less said. But I got to
say.'

‘I was fostered out, too,' Gloria said. ‘You know that. That's probably how we recognized each other.'

Paula nodded as Gloria drove west toward The Nickel. She was not to be denied the rest of the story that she'd held back for years. They hadn't had much sleep, but it was going to have to do. ‘My new home was a kind of school of violence, with the fosters turning their thumbs down like Caesars as they pitted the rough girls against theyselves. They didn't know nothing but to put their anger out there. Sometimes it was yelling, sometimes a weird passive burn and yell thing, but mostly it was hitting and biting and scratching. Every Thursday was rope-a-dope night. Two of us was picked to fight it out.'

‘That's awful!' Gloria stopped at a light and watched an old man on a bicycle cross their path. His bicycle was adorned with a big plywood airplane tail and he hauled a wire trailer containing recyclables. The old man stood on the pedals to get his contraption going, eying the gutters and sidewalks for ready money. The light changed and Gloria waited for the whole rigamarole to inch past before starting up.

‘After I been beaten to a pulp enough, I learned what I had to.' Paula wiggled her broad nose for a moment like a rabbit remembering a nose punch, then rubbed it with the back of her hand. ‘I learned to use my own anger. I learned to live with a bit of pain, and mostly I learned to take me some satisfaction from the pain that I could inflict. Moms and her schizo gentleness was long gone. She came to seem nothing but a dream of a lost world.'

Gloria was about to say something about her own mom – who'd tumbled into a fog of alcoholism – but decided it would be insensitive just then. ‘What lousy fosters you was dealt. Is your mom alive?'

‘No. She kept her meds in a secret place for weeks and then took them all at once. She's in a happier place, if there is one.'

‘You believe in heaven?'

‘No. Six-foot pine box a happier place than Geneva was ever at.'

‘Aww.' Gloria reached over and gripped her friend's hand a moment. ‘Girl, don't go thinking that way. Not never. You got good friends here on earth.'

‘I know it. Neither of us gonna copy our mommas, don't you know. But I miss that gentle kingdom Moms lived in. I did once live in it, too. I don't know why I picked to be a cop. I shoulda hid in the basement of a liberry, stamping numbers on books.'

‘You got a lot to give, girl,' Gloria said. ‘Jack used to always say pain was a hell of a university, and struggle was a law of the world that taught you the best stuff – whether you like it or not.'

Paula nodded. ‘Struggle was highly regarded at Sixty-fourth Place.' Abruptly Paula seemed to notice something outside the car. ‘There's the spot we left off at.'

‘Yeah,' Gloria said. ‘No more moms right now, girl.'

‘Fo' shizzle. So we got to put off the good death till it permitted and come down the chute on its own.'

‘Don't be that way, honey. No, no. Them thoughts take you down the wrong track.'

‘Sure, hon. I happy with the House of Pain we be in now. We best find your Jack and Maeve real quick.'

Chopper wheeled the chair with difficulty along the obstacle course of The Nickel sidewalk toward the shelter, avoiding the mushy piles that were best not studied too closely. The little wheels made it a chore, but Chopper was strong and lifted him and the chair bodily over the worst obstacles. Jack Liffey could hear Eleanor's voice, now and again, familiar, reassuring, but could not see her at all where she walked behind him, and it gave him time to prepare himself. The simple idea of her had stirred too much, and his awareness had developed a pristine intensity that worried him. He saw the day's weather building in the sky above, and some of him wanted her to walk right back into his life.

On the fence that guarded the lawn there was a small plaque saying Catholic Liberation House beside an intercom, and she unlocked the gate with a key she kept on a chain around her neck.

‘Chopper, I'm sorry but men aren't allowed inside the shelter. I'm going to make an exception for Jack in his condition, but I ask you to wait on one of those chairs on the lawn and I'll have a nice breakfast sent out.'