On the Nickel (9 page)

What
was
that, anyway? People mostly glanced away quickly as if you were a schizophrenic who was about to sit beside them on a bus and tell them all about the tinfoil hat that kept out the rays from space. While children stared hard at you, sizing up a freak for the entertainment value, for tales to pals. The life of Cain.

But another advantage: he now had the opportunity of experiencing two different lives in a single lifetime, learning something to convey to the remains of the normal one from the new one. Able and disabled. Conventional and challenged. Pre-crippled and crippled. Normal and lame. John Doe and Gimp. Like everyone else, he had pushed the thought of what it meant to be ‘like that' aside for most of his life. Now there was no choice. He
was
like that. Exiled to this lesser world and deprived of so many simple things, left a kind of intelligent jellyfish to be moved out of the way of those who were doing real things. But still loved, he thought, still with Gloria's fingers running through his hair.
Yes, count your blessings, Jack Liffey. Keep me in a crate in your closet, you great big unsentimental woman.

‘H
e be fiddlin' his fiddle with the symph-harmonic at that Disney Hall,' a skinny bearded man said in a screechy voice that was like lawn furniture dragged across cement. Then he guffawed to give his declaration the lie. ‘Whyfor you wantin' Eddie?'

‘I like his music.' Conor had run into Eddie Coltrane Monk the day before and then earlier today in Pershing Square, serenading the pigeons and one or two tourists. Liszt both times – pretty good but not that great. Still, passable Liszt.

‘Say what?' the man said from his post just outside the hotel.

‘I want to talk to him about music,' Conor said.

‘Well, Eddie can't be disturb.'

‘What do you mean? Do you know where he is?'

‘Worth a buck to you?' A long scar stood out in ashy gray on the length of the man's cheek. He wore very short floodpants, his hair hung in dreadlocks, and all he really needed was a parrot to look like Long John Silver, Conor thought, almost laughing aloud. Somehow, in the daylight, he was less frightened by this unreasonably tormented universe of abject poverty.

‘It's worth a quarter,' Conor said. ‘That's all I got.' He figured he'd have to start drawing lines in the sand sooner or later. He dug out a quarter and held it up to show he was serious, not talking about imaginary quarters.

‘Shit. Take that and rub it wid' two more you still ain't can buy nothing a man would want.'

‘It's better than a poke with a stick, isn't it?'

‘Gimme.'

‘Where's Eddie?' Conor retracted his hand with the quarter.

He'd set out to hear Eddie play again because his own recollection of the playing worried him, and he wanted to give the man another shot, and anyway he'd liked him as a person. Conor wondered if he might have judged him wrong – expecting only mediocrity and then hearing a false mediocrity in his head. Who was he to judge? Anyway, he'd bought Eddie lunch yesterday and they'd got on well.

‘Suck my Johnson, kid. Eddie's in San Julian Park, where he always be, serenading the bums. Gimme.'

Conor flipped the quarter softly, and the man bobbled it a few times with swollen dirty bandage-wrapped hands before corralling it against his chest.

‘Thank you, sir,' Conor said politely.

Another man down the road told him for free where San Julian Park was, and he set out westward on Fifth, a street where much of the curbing and even some of the sidewalk itself had crumbled away, and nobody had bothered to repair it, as nobody had bothered to sweep up the mounds of rotting vegetable-and-piss-smelly cardboard that had collected in the gutters. Small knots of black men lounged against brick buildings or sat on what was left of the curb like basking cats trying to stay in the lozenges of winter sunlight that squeezed down between the tall buildings.

McCall and Thibodeaux had watched the young kid exit the building and talk to a couple of the bums before even thinking of getting out of their jacked-up truck. McCall had no idea what a teenager was doing there, but there was no sense stirring up somebody who was dressed so well, might have influential connections, and obviously didn't have any legal tenure in the Fortnum. The friendless old Jews, they were the target, and McCall was having trouble keeping his strongarm confederate from yanking out the Mexican switchblade at every opportunity. The guy could still be held down with a combination of reason and pure energy.

‘S'up, professor?' Thibodeaux said.

‘We got to run an R.F. here. That means a rat-fuck, if you Orleanies don't follow the idiom. The Big V says to use some tricks to get the Yids out.'

Thibodeaux slowly nurtured a private grin that made McCall uncomfortable.

‘Not
that
way.'

‘I wish you wouldn't. You keep spoiling mah doldrums.'

McCall wondered if he meant
daydreams.
‘What's that, pard?' He knew better than to provide an opening, but he asked anyway as they stepped out of the truck.

‘Know thyself,' Thibodeaux announced as they reached the Fortnum's plywood window. ‘Consult Nietzsche. The righteous man don't never run out of well-honed proposals.'

Thibodeaux lingered a moment on the empty sidewalk behind, forcing McCall to stop and look back. Thibodeaux flicked open his switchblade, and swiped a big T in imitation of Zorro's Z into the plywood covering the Fortnum window. Then he grinned and slammed the blade closed against his leg. The gesture left a small cut in his jeans and blood began to run down the well-worn pants. They both watched it trickle for a moment, irresistible to the eye.

‘Blood is my captain,' the little man said nervelessly.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,' McCall said, disturbed to his core. ‘Forget it, man. No way. We got orders to screw up the doorlocks, to ruin the elevator for good, to kill the heat and tell the night manager to fuck off forever. That's the program. Get with the program. Do you hear me?'

‘Oh, sure. I'm a lifelong pacifist, jus' like yo' dead mama.'

‘I don't need a comedian for a partner. Straighten up and fly right, Waldo.'

Maeve found Mike's Market and parked about a block north of it, where things looked a little more like part of the world that she was used to. The market was an oblong of eroded brick with an iron security gate set into a jumble of abandoned warehouses and blank walls. Even the sign over the door had been hand lettered by an amateur, with wobbly letters. The whole aspect suggested tiny packets of offbrand foodstuffs past their expiration dates.

She didn't often play hooky from high school, but today she was a practicing truant, and maybe she'd forge a note from her mom in time for tomorrow. Maybe she'd do it like the old joke, just for the hell of it:
Maeve was sick yesterday – My Mom.
What could they do to her? Send her back to middle school?

She had waited until rush hour traffic cleared out, about ten, then headed straight over to the Harbor Freeway on Redondo Beach Boulevard. On the way there was a big furniture store that for years had flown a really big barrage balloon shaped like a sofa as a come-on. Weirdly, five or six men were clinging to the sofa's mooring cable now, being towed eastward along the street by the onshore wind and calling out to others for help. She didn't know whether she should root for the men or the sofa, but it was definitely a tale to save for her dad.

She got off the Harbor at Sixth Street downtown, and drove right past the south end of what had long ago been the city's main park, Pershing Square. Recently it had been paved over with multi-colored concrete slabs and filled with giant concrete shapes to make it distinctly unpleasant for anyone to hang out – particularly, of course, the homeless.

As she stepped into the gloomy interior of Mike's Market, a tall African-American security guard watched her with a hawkeye. The Asian clerk (could he be Mike?) was protected by a wall of thick woven wire and sheets of bulletproof glass at the counter, where the access porthole was surrounded by racks of tiny bottles of Thunderbird, Night Train, Big Dog, Fairbanks Cream Sherry and several other wino wines she'd never heard of. She saw the freestanding ATM that Conor had probably used, looking like a solid steel pillar anchored to the floor by bolts that would have stopped a bus dead in its tracks.

In order to buy herself a right to be there, she looked around and found a rack of small potato chip bags. It wasn't her particular weakness, but she knew her dad loved them so in his honor she picked up a bag of plain chips and took them to the small orifice. At least they had no animal content, she thought.

‘Hello, sir. Could I ask you a question?'

‘Missy?'

She slipped him the photo of Conor. ‘This boy used your ATM. Have you seen him?'

‘No know, sorry.' The reply was almost automatic.

‘Please,
sir. Look at the picture. He's a good friend.' She wondered if her lie sounded as obvious to others as it did to her.

Reluctantly the clerk actually took a look and grumbled something indistinguishable.

‘Is there a problem here, Tan?' The African-American security guard had come up behind Maeve, and his intimidating presence was sucking up all the air within several feet.

‘Come on, man,' Maeve said to the guard. ‘I'm just looking for my friend. You know what this city can be like for a lost kid.'

‘We're just a mini-mart, ma'am. We ain't a lost-and-found for bad boys.'

‘Please – just be human for a minute, sirs.'

The black man studied her peculiarly, wrinkling up his eyes, and then turned to the clerk. ‘You seen this kid, Tan?'

‘I seen. He come that way one time. Buy 409. No more.'

The clerk had pointed to the door and then to the left, and she passed him a dollar for the potato chip bag.

‘One-sixty-nine,' he said.

It was an outrageous overcharge, but she dropped three quarters into his pass-under tray and then started away. ‘Thank you, sir,' she said as she passed the guard.

He chuckled in a conspiratorial way. ‘I think I'd rather go back to re-poing Cadillacs. But in this job I get to get shot closer to home.'

Young men were playing a quick and aggressive three-on-three basketball game at several courts, with a lot of arm-hacking and trashtalk. None of the hoops had nets, but the balls looked firm if thoroughly scuffed raw.

The whole park was only about a tenth of a city block, but it had some grass and benches and was surrounded by a forbidding spiky ten-foot fence. Not many of the parks he knew in northern San Diego County looked like this, but not many of those parks were dense with homeless black men either. Eddie might be here somewhere, or at a similar one called Gladys six blocks away – or even at Pershing Square near the Biltmore a half mile west, where Conor had seen him the day before playing Liszt for tourists under Beethoven's statue.

‘Why not Beethoven?' he'd asked the man.

‘Hell, kid, he's damn hard.'

Conor wondered why any city agency had bothered to build a park at all for people who didn't pay taxes and didn't vote. Some weird kind of civic guilt about poverty, maybe – like building them a miniature carwash that they could push their shopping carts through. A big passenger jet rumbled overhead, surprisingly low as it came in to LAX ten miles west, and something about the contrast of worlds struck him. How many tens of thousands of tourists and business people passed directly over Skid Row every day without even knowing it was there? While the poor down here knew perfectly well that the rich were up there, sitting in rank after rank in the silver birds.

Near the entrance to San Julian Park there was a small group of men with long straight black hair who appeared to be American Indians, but they were all asleep or passed out beside small bottles in brown bags. This group was patrolled by bobbing pigeons, hunting for something edible. Beyond, he could see card games at fixed cement tables, some chess matches, and even an obvious drug deal, men passing a little baggy, but no one anywhere playing violin.

There were lines at each of the port-a-potties along the fence, and he wondered if Eddie had just taken a pee break, but a five-minute wait outside the one marked for wheelchairs produced a forbidding-looking woman on a walker, definitely not Eddie. These were ordinary port-a-potties, like the ones at construction sites, not the strange new ones that some civic power had scattered here and there around Skid Row. The new ones were just too weird to try. They looked like art deco escape pods from some old science fiction movie. In between each user they seemed to lock themselves up and roar and groan, almost rocking with the effort, spraying themselves clean according to one old man who sat watching.

A very light-skinned black man on wooden crutches waited alone just outside the park, staring into space, and Conor approached him on the dubious theory that the handicapped might know one another.

‘Sir, do you know Eddie Monk?'

The man's eyes focused gradually on Conor without seeming to see anything that interested him. ‘Jus' saw da man hisownself. Stan' up in a dumpster over on Seventh.' He gave a shudder of horror. ‘Same ol' same ol'. Dis hoojy man had him a big coat, jus' be stan' dere in da greenie. Stare at me, you know? King Jesus. He don' move no muscle atall. You friend of dis guy?'

‘Don't know him, sir. I haven't been over on Seventh.'

The man shook his head, as if sorry for Conor's deficiency. ‘Learn the greenies, boy. You think about it. Metal proteck you from alla rays.'

‘Thanks for the advice.'

‘You don't believe me, do you?'

But Conor was already walking away, as politely as he could, with a nod and a smile back to the man. He had no real reason to fear the man, but something told him that somebody that far gone could suddenly stick a knife in you, for no reason. Watching his back, he was startled by a voice ahead.

‘Game, kid?' A tall man in sweats with a basketball resting on his hip.

‘You'd skin me alive, sir.'

‘Two on three. You with the three. We make it fun.'

Conor raised his leg. ‘Bad ankle, sorry.' He'd expected a blast of scorn but got only commiseration in return.

‘You take care of that ankle. You don't get none but two of them in this life. Though one day you got to give them both up.'

‘I guess.'

‘Dudley – it the absolute truth.'

Conor backtracked along Sixth to Gladys, a smaller version of San Julian Park, but Eddie wasn't there either, and then he headed for Pershing Square, an altogether different version of parkland surrounded by ritzy hotels and office buildings. You could see it coming for a long way by a twenty-story tower of purple cement with a huge red ball stuck into a window cut out of it at the top. This park was a full city block but most of it was cemented up and very strange. He headed for the side where he'd met Monk before, where he found the statues of a striding Beethoven, plus a general on a horse and some other soldier from one of the black-and-white wars. He wondered what these three figures had in common, but they were meeting now with a ten-foot orange concrete pingpong ball, a canon, a dozen vertical pink cylinders and several palm trees in a cat's litterbox. It was the kind of sight his mom and dad used to say you needed to take dope to appreciate. He had a feeling all this stuff was just left over from other parks that had been closed. The area around this strange assembly was paved to a hot griddle, and there was a distinct smell of human shit on the air.