Stagger Bay (4 page)

Welfare offices as far south as San Diego handed out flyers to their ‘customers,’ informing them of the windfall awaiting them up here. LA Cops passed out one-way bus tickets to Stagger Bay to the Southland’s homeless vagrants. The Big City, dumping it’s parasites in the lap of Small Town America: it was a historic mass movement of people; one that, curiously, was never discussed in the media.

The resulting influx of aid recipients was large enough Stagger Bay quickly had one of the highest per capita percentages of people on assistance in the nation. All those high payouts had almost bankrupted the city, and put its treasury into its current downward spiral.

Another side-effect of all those newcomers was a severe housing shortage. Rental owners capitalized on the tight market by subdividing existing homes into shoebox-sized apartments.

For a while it was a cottage industry for local landlords to buy one rundown Victorian after another, subdivide them, and pack them as full of Section 8 Housing Assistance recipients as topologically possible – slum-lording as a growth career. That income property boom led to severely inflated home prices; outside money had gobbled up a lot of houses too, ‘smart’ investors figuring Stagger Bay’s yokel tenants could pay their mortgages and property taxes for them.

Before we bought the house we’d gotten a lot of dirty looks from the old family locals – they assumed we were on AFDC, part of the invading unwashed horde of big city welfare barbarians that had crowded Stagger Bay to bursting.

I’d never been on the dole myself. When I was a kid me and Karl was all the way carnivores: we’d steal from you honest, to your face, like good thieves. But after I hooked up with Angela and had Sam, I’d always worked for a living – to my brother’s ridicule I might add.

Still, it had been an eternity since we bought our own little slice of the American Dream here, and there were few living-wage jobs in Stagger Bay anymore. Except, judging from what I’d seen on my bus ride in, for members of the construction industry.

I stood in front of the home that was ours once. The stucco exterior had been tan when we lived there. The new owners had painted it a bright chalk-yellow with light purple trim; it looked pretty nice, a stylish color scheme I wished I’d thought of when the decision had been mine to make. A Big-Wheel trike and other toys lay scattered around the well-tended front lawn.

A Ram pickup truck was parked in the driveway, twin to the one I’d once owned. The only difference? This truck was red and had a big shiny steel tool locker mounted directly behind the cab; my truck had been black, and I’d never been a toolbox kind of guy. Looking back, had to admit the Ram had just been a big boy’s toy; a status symbol to help me make believe I’d made the grade.

Studying my old house, I had the crazy notion for a second that all I had to do was step through the front door, and the past seven years would turn out to be a dream: Angela would be putzing around the kitchen, Sam would be watching TV or playing a video game, and both would smile at me as I entered, happy to see me.

I shook it off fast. I didn’t live here anymore, and never would again.

Chapter Nine

I headed toward the Bay. Fourth and Fifth Streets doglegged inland here and came together to form Broadway, a fast four-lane drag sprinting south between the Mall and the cemetery past a small patch of nondescript light industrials encroaching the wetlands of the Bay, past both our car dealerships and out the bottom edge of town toward SF, which was a day’s drive away on winding mountain roads. Up ahead was the place I used to work: a soda distributor supplying the entire county.

This was the first and only straight job I’d ever worked, and I’d been surprised to find I loved it. I’d sweated those loading docks when I was a family man, spent most of my waking hours there: unloading stacks of soda cases from 48-foot big rig trailers out of the Bay Area, doing the basic split for all the delivery trucks, ensuring every little string town in a county the size of Connecticut got their daily allotment of name-brand carbonated sugar water.

Sixteen hours a day in exchange for my own house, food on my family’s table, and no life at all. Still, it looked mighty damn good from where I stood now.

I walked into the office and saw only two faces I knew from the old days: Bonnie, who was still a secretary after all these years; and Takeshi, a Japanese kid who’d been a route driver when I got busted.

Bonnie gasped when she saw me and busied herself with the paperwork on her desk. She’d put on some weight.

As for Takeshi? He hustled me out the office as soon as he recognized me. He offered a cigarette but I shook my head. He shrugged, sparked his own coffin nail, and looked across the parking lot at the shimmering tidal mudflats of the Harbor.

I was the one who’d gotten Takeshi his job here; Angela and Tak’s girlfriend Tiffany had been coffee buddies. Tak and Tiff had come over to our house more than once for potlucks or drinks, or for card games. We’d considered them friends.

Takeshi had put on a little weight his own self, but he still had that thick mop of black hair combed straight back Eddie Munster style. He’d grown himself a thin, scraggly little mustache and soul patch that were probably more trouble to shave around than they were worth. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a clip-on tie; he'd graduated to managing the distribution center.

Today Tak appeared old. But then, I was no spring chicken anymore myself. “How are you, Markus?” he asked, exhaling a stream of cigarette smoke out the side of his mouth.

“Well enough,” I said. “I’m just looking around the old place, seeing what’s what. How’s Tiffany?”

He smiled, looked at the coal on his cigarette. “She’s great. You know we got a bambino now? His name is Kobi; he just turned two last week.”

“Well hell, I’ll be sure to send something when I get on my feet.”

“I got you a job here, Markus – if you want it.”

That actually felt pretty damn good; I’d always had this dorky pride in how well I humped the docks when I worked here. “Well, that truck platform probably ain’t been run right for the last seven years. You know I was the best they had. I’ll bet it took three guys to do my job after I left.”

Tak’s face put on a pained expression. “It couldn’t be the loading dock, Markus – I’d have to keep you out of sight. Janitorial or something, I’ll figure it out.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “You know I was cleared, right Tak? I didn’t do it, I’m innocent.”

He took another drag off his cigarette, and I realized he hadn’t looked at me once since we’d come outside. He dropped his cigarette and ground it beneath his heel, then gave me a flat look. “It’s the best I can do for you, Markus. There’s people around here I got to listen to, to keep my job. I got my own family to think of.”

I turned away and headed toward Broadway. I heard the office door open and close behind me, probably Takeshi going back inside – but I didn’t bother looking.

Chapter Ten

I crossed Broadway and walked uphill toward Stagger Bay Center, which had passed for a downtown shopping center back in the days of doo-wop and Petula Clark. Here were our two supermarkets, our hospital, our twin water towers, our bank, and our two elementary schools: one Catholic for the upper crusties, the other public.

Down the block our local burger drive-in was opening up, the smell of heating grease reminding me I hadn’t eaten in a while. Clumps of students of varying ages hurried down the sidewalks en route to school. That big old Cougar, the one that had a close encounter with Sam’s Lincoln, squatted in the drive-in parking lot aimed at me like a sleeping rocket; the big blond driver looked my way, waiting for whomever.

It was still the same all-American time warp here that Angela and I tried to submerge our family into. But now there was nothing for me in Stagger Bay, nothing to keep me.

I was an invisible man here at best; at worst, someone this town obviously wished would just go away. Well, I knew how to oblige when I was in the mood, even if it felt suspiciously like surrender.

Oakland looked better and better, even if I had no idea what I’d do down in my hometown once I got there. I’d come too far just to crime spree ‘til I got chopped, or drown myself in the bottle in a cardboard mansion. But I wouldn’t be in Stagger Bay anymore, which was the main thing – I wouldn’t see the reminders of my failure everyday.

It was time for me to swing back to the Greyhound station and disappear all the way.

Chapter 11

Up ahead was Sam’s old elementary school. Back before I went in, sometimes I was so beat when I got off at dawn after working a double shift that I’d be hallucinating from sleep deprivation as I walked Sam to school.

But I never missed walking him once, even though sometimes my tired legs had a hard time keeping up. The sun rising, strolling with my boy whilst knowing I’d survived everything life had thrown at us when so many of my homies hadn’t? It was magic, man.

And whenever we got to his school and stopped at the entrance, Sam always let me squat down and give him a hug and a kiss. Every day I’d dreaded the time my son would be too old to let his daddy kiss him in public. Every day I’d known he was getting older, every day needing me a little less. I can admit now that scared the hell out of me.

The day of my homecoming, that crisp early morning air was wasted on me. I had no appreciation for the morning sun spilling onto my face like liquid gold. Whatever magic I’d ever felt was gone, as I strolled along examining the exposed wreckage of my life.

I was walking past the main gate in the cyclone fence. The playground was empty, and the wind seemed to mock me as it moaned through the childless swings. From out of sight in the direction of Stagger Bay Center, I heard gunfire; multiple pistol shots that made me stop and stand in place, jolted by a rush of adrenaline as I tried to see where the unseen shooter was.

The gunfire didn’t end; instead the pistol was joined by other weapons. I could identify the spaced booms of a shotgun, and even the stutter of what had to be something fully automatic. I couldn’t tell you what went through my mind as I listened to that invisible fire fight, other than there was no sense of relief when the shooting finished up with some sort of drastic explosion.

I had to squint against the early morning sun when that battered blue step-van lurched around the corner a few blocks down in the direction of the shooting, its stereo system blasting out Spencer Davis Group’s ‘Gimme Some Lovin.’ The van slalomed a bit from side to side and then accelerated right toward me. I was disconcerted, both at how fast it was coming on, and at how many sirens I now heard, all closing rapidly.

A black and white skidded howling around the same corner, right on the van’s ass. The cop in the passenger seat leaned out his window and started shooting, the noise of his pistol fire slapping through the air like the cracking of a whip. The spang of rounds hitting metal proved that at least some of his shots were on target.

My jaw dropped open, hung and dangled that way as a grenade arced out the side door of the van and bounced a few times on the asphalt. It exploded as the cop car drove over it, shredding the front tire and lifting that corner of the roller on a loud BOOM-ball of fireworks.

The cop car’s rear end fishtailed as the front wheel landed and bounced, and its shattered front rim ground along the street, smoking tatters of rubber flapping as sparks and chunks of asphalt flew. One tire jounced up over the curb and that was all she wrote: the cop car flopped onto its side and slid to rest along the playground fence with a skirling clash, its siren still wailing like a grieving widow. The cop who’d been leaning out the passenger window was pretty much smeared in half beneath the car, but the driver commenced an aimless squirming as she hung suspended in her seat harness.

I’d scampered for cover and hit the deck on my belly when the grenade exploded. Old reflexes die hard; it took me right back to the streets of Oakland where we always took a noise like that personal and we always sought full prone when firefights blazed. I lay still as a statue in the tall grass by the schoolyard, watching the step-van lean forward on its shocks as it scuffed to a halt in the middle of the street.

Spencer Davis still blasted from their system, Steve Winwood singing ‘So glad we made it. So glad we made it.’ These boys had the bass turned up a little high for the mix – too much distortion.

A tall kid with big ears hopped out the van with a revolver in one hand and a grenade in the other. He trotted back to the overturned black-and-white, staring in a hungry fashion at the crushed pulp of cop extending rag-doll-like from beneath the car.

He aimed his pistol at the driver, who strained to free herself from her seat belt. The woman stopped struggling and looked at him as she became fully aware of her fate.

I saw her face clearly for eternal endless moments before Big Ears grinned and fired three times like it meant nothing, starring the safety glass into whiteness and obscuring her face forever from my sight. Her dimmed silhouette sagged all slow motion boneless in her harness as the gunman yanked the pin from the grenade with his teeth and dropped it in her open window.

Gild the lily why don’t you, motherfucker?

Big Ears was loping back to the van even as the grenade went off, shattering every window in the black-and-white with a roar. The roof of the car bulged as if the Hulk had tried to punch his way out, and a cloud of safety glass chunks expanded in all directions to shower the ground like a short lived hailstorm, or like the geyser of water splashing back down after a diver did a cannonball. The siren finally shut the fuck up.

Three other men stooped out the open van door, whooping and laughing as they leaned from the dark interior to admire their friend’s handiwork. They all had heavy weapons in their hands; they all appeared high as kites.

A good-looking black kid high-fived Big Ears as he clambered back inside. “Way to go, Slash. Next level, bro,” the kid said in a squeaky voice.