On the Nickel (21 page)

‘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.'

‘R
emember 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 chief 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'?'

‘Gujarat. That's just north of what you know as Bombay. Lots of high-tech. But my parents came over when I was two. All I really know is Palo Alto.'

‘You got a strange job for a dot-on-the-forehead Indian,' Gloria said. ‘I'm a feather-on-the-head Indian, if you don't take offense.'

‘Ethnicity can be a funny moral area.'

‘If you got a sense of humor,' Gloria said, and turned away before the obnoxious male partner could put in his two cents.

Somewhere Morty had found a big can of baked beans, and they warmed it on a can of Sterno so the kids didn't have to eat gefilte fish and chicken soup, but not much ambient heat was making it uphill past the steam leak that they could see billowing out into the staircase when they took turns as scouts with the one flashlight, and it was going to be a chilly night. A jet of steam, probably very hot at first, shot out of the wall enclosure and eventually billowed part way up the stairs but was pretty much defeated by their barricade. The radiator in the room was slightly warm.

They all sat in sweaters and overshirts, scattered around Sam Greengelb's room after Conor had given up the hunt for his missing guitar and reverted to the harp. Greengelb and Morty Lipman were teaching him, syllable-by-syllable, an old Yiddish folk song, one they told him that Billie Holiday had once recorded. He was game, but he insisted on knowing the chorus in English.

Maeve watched out the window, which had a pretty good view of Main Street and a bit of Fifth, and no one out there looked like the thugs, not unless they were hiding in old refrigerator boxes. But there
was
a big navy blue SUV that didn't look like it belonged there. She began to wonder how they were going to get through this weird night unscathed. But she liked all these people and would never have run out on them.

Conor wrinkled his forehead and memorized phonetically.

Maeve saw a police car with a big 179 painted on its white roof and a 1 on its trunk. It cruised along Fifth and she wished she could flag it down. She was chagrined to think they were just as imprisoned on the third floor now as the bad guys were locked out.

She had no idea what they were singing, and even less interest, given their situation. She decided to be the responsible party and, while there was still a little daylight, she went upstairs with the flashlight, to make sure nobody else was hiding out there and to check exits. Mostly the room doors stood open to cheerless barren cells, the way she and Conor had left them, with stained mattresses askew and nothing personal on the walls or dressers. A few rooms had a rickety chair and a table the size of a hanky. Nobody answered her hollers. This had to be one of the most anonymous and forlorn habitations on the planet, she thought.

But something inside her objected to the thought, as if she had just affronted the homeless and impoverished.
Every place people live is as valid as every other place,
she decided.
So much of life is just luck.
The days in Skid Row had affected her deeply.
When this is all over, I will do special exercises, or special penance, or just special charity, to feel normal again.

The sounds of the folksinging drifted up the steps as she started back down. For just an instant she felt terribly lonely – maybe more than she'd ever felt – but she knew that she had loyal allies down there, if not close friends.

Later, when she was back and pretending to take part, the old men taught Conor the chorus of their song in English, swaying back and forth beside one another where they sat on the edge of the bed.

Maeve couldn't help thinking of her own mother, and various things she had done to make
her
cry, and her eyes burned a little as she let herself settle into the burden of the song.

Jack Liffey parked his pickup half a block from the Catholic Liberation shelter and took a really deep breath. He'd already returned to the horrible warehouse and found it utterly empty, and now he had only two possible starting points for searching The Nickel – here and Chopper Tyrus's cardboard condo. This one was harder, at least emotionally, but he had a feeling it would probably be more helpful. He was still pretty shaky on his feet and had to grasp the brickwork and chain-link from time to time as he approached.

‘Hi, ma'am, remember me?'

The big black woman sat on her folding chair in front of the center. She set down a paper plate of beans and franks and frowned hard into the dusk to try to make him out.

‘You the man come here wid Chopper. You the miracle man.'

‘Absolutely correct. Could you tell the sister I'm here?'

‘Which sister you mean?' Cagy – for some reason – as if there were lots of nuns in residence.

‘The skinny nun.'

‘Ah, Miz Mary Rose.'

It was hard for him to think of her as anything but Eleanor Ong – or a couple of pet names he'd once used – but he nodded. Sister Mary Rose it was. Even if the memory of her straddling his lap and muffling her cries of pleasure was fresh enough to start arousing him again.

‘Where I'm at right now, I like you-all to do me a favor, sir.'

‘But of course.'

She directed him to the paper bag behind the dumpster just outside the fence, and he could tell from the feel of the sloshing bottle that it was probably a half-drained pint of some twist-cap fortified wine. He'd once known their names but had forgotten them all except Thunderbird and Night Train. Gallo made most of them but didn't put its name on the labels.

‘How do I get … this package in to you?' He was afraid to toss the bottle over.

‘They's a cut in the fence.' She showed him a short slit in the wire and she held it open hard, just enough to pass the bag through. She took a good head-back slug of whatever it was and then gave a grateful smile to Jack Liffey.

‘You ever need a good time, mister, you come find me.' He decided it was positive news: she didn't seem to know what had gone on between him and Eleanor. The woman hid the bag behind a bush and went inside.

It was still early evening but starting to become chilly and windy out, like the rainy night before, and he felt a new sympathy for all those caught out on the streets in the winter, homeless and destitute, even in L.A. He'd had his share and didn't want another.

Then
she
stepped out the door, dazzling and confident, and came to a dead stop on the porch when she saw Jack Liffey. ‘We can't do this.'

‘It's not what you think. I'm looking for my daughter. You told me you saw her.
Please –
let it be the thing that you do for me.'

‘Yes, I did see Maeve. She's sure grown up. But it was two days ago.' She set her arms akimbo. ‘I have no idea where she is now.' She waited a while, then sighed. ‘All right, there's a woman staying here that Maeve helped. She'd do just about anything for her. Let me ask.' The sun was declining beneath a black cloud bank far to the west, and a last gleam of light lashed out, between the skyscrapers of downtown, and caught her like a Kleig light, in a thoughtful pose, watching him. ‘You're a sore temptation, Jack.'

‘You, too.'

She turned and went inside without another word. He'd have understood if she'd just sent him away immediately.

She'd once told him – her very last words to him way back when – that she didn't think he was going to make it. She and Gloria were a pair. He wondered why he was drawn to such strong women – if it was a vanity of some kind.

Then a skinny woman with the caved-in face of the dustbowl and limp blond hair came out the door. She wore a thin dress, a pink sweater, and weird rubber shoes. A smaller edition of the woman peeked around the door, her expression as ferocious as a guardian angel.

‘Sister said Maeve was in trouble,' the woman offered.

‘I'm her father, Jack. Who are you?'

‘Felice Stone. I been looking for my old man Clarence, from San Antone. You know him?'

Hope really was eternal, he thought. It was starting to get cold out, and he saw how thin their clothes were. ‘Sorry, no. Do you know where Maeve might be tonight?'

‘What's her trouble?' the little girl snapped out.

‘She has too much sympathy for her own good, I'd say,' Jack Liffey replied.