Too Close to the Edge (3 page)

“Liz Goldenstern,” I muttered to Pereira. Pereira raised an eyebrow in question. I held up a hand. Later, I could tell her that Liz Goldenstern had spearheaded the campaign to force every new business on the Avenue to comply with wheelchair access regulations. More than one shopkeeper complained loud and long when he realized he would have to give up rack space to create wider aisles. And Liz’s crusade to move the street artists back a foot closer to the curb hadn’t won her friends either.

I leaned back behind the fig tree. When I was on beat here, I’d handled enough of the demonstrations Liz ran. Liz had raised hackles, even among her supporters. She had little sympathy for excuses, and from a person with a disability she often seemed to expect greater persistence than was reasonable. I had never seen Liz leave a picket line—regardless of rain, cold, or wind—or cancel one scheduled during a rare heat spell or the Super Bowl. I had once run into her picketing outside a head shop in a downpour. Three weeks later, suffering from a cold and barely able to breathe, she was back picketing the same store, berating a man with two four-pronged canes who had deserted the line, and giving him a wink when he trudged back in.

Now the taller man moved the alpaca sweater an arm’s length away and pondered it.

Clearly Liz Goldenstern had had enough. “How about choosing the right look
out
of the pathway,” she demanded.

The sweater-holder spun around, his mouth pulled back in anger. It didn’t take a great mind to guess what his next word was likely to be. He glanced down at Liz, hesitated, then moved aside. “No need to be a bitch about it,” he snapped as she passed.

She backed up the chair. “You’re not doing me a favor, you know. This is a sidewalk, not a waiting room.”

“Look, lady, I moved.”

“Big fucking deal.”

“You people expect the world to make way for you. Just because you screwed up your life doesn’t mean the world has to look out for you.”

Behind them the sweater seller methodically packed his wools. Altercations on the Avenue were standard fare of the day. The shoppers who stopped to watch kept their distance as they stood, shifting from foot to foot, around the edges of the display table. Uncomfortably, they eyed the access to the street, then looked back at the combatants. A woman in a wheelchair being hassled by a guy about to lay out seventy-five dollars for a sweater seemed a natural for the underdog-conscious of Berkeley. But despite her flaccid legs and those hands that were moved from the shoulder, Liz Goldenstern was no underdog. Had an onlooker the temerity to ask her if she needed help, she would have responded, “Bullshit!”

Even the sweater-buyer seemed to be having second thoughts. He clutched the llama-pattern to his chest. “Listen lady, I …”

“Just move, huh?”

He hesitated, searching for a face-saving exit line.

“Hey, come back here, you,” a barefoot man across the street yelled. Midway down the block a thin figure in a cap ran, skirting strollers, cutting between tables of jewelry onto the street. Dangling from one hand were a pair of silver and brown running shoes.

A
S THE SHOE THIEF
rounded the corner Pereira leapt over the cafe railing. “Get out of the way! I’m a police officer.”

Taken by surprise, Liz Goldenstern backed her chair into Pereira’s path. Pereira veered away toward the wall. Her hand hit Liz’s arm. Liz jolted hard to the right.

“Go on,” I yelled to Pereira. I jumped the railing, grabbed Liz’s slight body, and pulled her upright. “You okay?”

“What do you think?” she snapped.

Across the street Pereira was running full out. I couldn’t see the thief at all.

“I don’t
know
how you are,” I said to Liz. “That’s why I’m asking. I can get medical help.”

She moved her head experimentally. “And how many hours would that take?”

The onlookers inched closer, their former wariness fading. A confrontation between a wheelchair activist and a cop was perfect for an evening’s diversion, and Liz was among the best at catching the crowd. There was an appealing delicacy to her face, somewhat like Brad Butz’s. But while Butz’s skin had the density of porcelain, looking at Liz was like gazing through a steamy window at the fire inside. And her eyes were where the steam escaped. They were never still. They flashed with anger, gleamed with satisfaction. The day we’d had cappuccino, I had seen them glisten, as Liz talked about a time before the accident when she had run a fishing boat for the Capellis, one of the biggest family-run fishing operations in the East Bay. One of the few women in the trade, she had also been one of even fewer women captains. It was a fog-thick February night on San Francisco Bay that she’d told me about when, gambling on rumors that the herring were running off Sausalito, she had steered without lights or radio between the fleet boats and yanked net upon net of herring up over the side of her boat until it rode so low in the water that the rip tide could have scuttled it. “In thirty-six hours the limit was gone. We had a bottle of champagne for breakfast and slept the rest of the day. And we made five thousand dollars.” As she talked I could see her braced on the stern of her boat, muscles tensed, eyes glowing as they were now. More than once, I had seen men stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk and stare at those eyes. Then their gazes would fall to her chair, and Liz’s eyes would narrow in contempt. “They like their cripples to look normal,” she’d muttered angrily then. “Like the lion with the burr in its paw. They think they could pull it out and have their own lion, grateful forever. If it were my face that was paralyzed …”

But it wasn’t. And Liz knew how to use what she had. If she chose to make the most of this confrontation with me, I didn’t have any illusions who would end up playing the bad guy. “I’m asking you if you’ve been injured,” I said.

“I don’t know yet. Maybe I won’t know for days.”

“If you’re not sure, you should see a doctor now.”

“Look, I don’t need you to tell me about my body. I’ve seen more doctors than you’ll go near in your lifetime. I can’t drop everything and camp out in emergency for hours so some intern can say mine is an unusual case and he can’t tell me if anything new is broken or shifted out of place without seeing every x-ray I’ve ever had taken, and he can’t get ahold of those for days.”

Shoppers, street sellers, and students crowded in behind Liz. The two men she’d been arguing with had vanished. I moved closer to her and lowered my voice. “I’ll take you. They work faster for the police.”

She raised hers in response. “Let me make it simple. No matter how long I wait, the doctors in emergency aren’t going to take the chance of committing themselves on a ‘complicated case’ like mine. They figure if they’re wrong I’ll sue.” A shade of a smile flickered at her mouth. “And I would.” She shifted her shoulders to one side, then thrust them back to the other. “And I’ll tell you another thing,” she said, “I don’t like this cowboy attitude in the police. Whatever it is you’re doing here, you’ve got no business running over people. With you guys on the loose, a block of the Avenue is like the gantlet.”

“Okay.” The onlookers moved in.

Berkeley Detective Harasses Paraplegic. I didn’t need that on the news. I said, “If I can’t take you to a doctor, what is it I can do for you?”

“Nothing. Just get out of the way.” She shifted her arm forward so her fingers encircled the drive lever, clasped it, and using her whole arm pushed it forward. The chair didn’t move. She pushed again, but clearly the battery was dead.

“Well, that’s all I need! I have to be at a meeting at seven; I don’t have time to sit here and watch the traffic roll by.”

“I’ll call wheelchair repair,” I said, glad to be able to take some positive action. The city of Berkeley has a sort of AAA for wheelchairs.

“Forget it. By the time they come for me and let me sit around while they diagnose the break, it’ll be too late. It’s not like dropping your car at the garage; there are no loaners with power chairs.” She lowered her chin and breathed in short, thick breaths. “And if they’re backed up, too bad. Every chair’s an emergency. Someone’s stuck without it.” She dipped her chin and breathed again.

The onlookers had crowded closer. Behind them the traffic on Telegraph had slowed as passengers leaned out their windows for a better look.

“Get back,” I shouted at the growing crowd. “Give her some air.” I glared at the nearest, a middle-aged man with a bag under his arm. He edged back into the thick of the group.

Liz strained for each breath. In spite of the chill wind, a fine film of sweat coated her forehead and the inner edges of her cheeks. Sitting in the stilled power chair, she looked like the late-night, make-up-removed, ashen version of the peppery woman of ten minutes ago. Even her eyes were lifeless. She hunched forward, and I could hear the labored pull of her lungs. Then her breaths became softer, more regular. She hooked her upper arm around the back post of the chair and pulled her shoulders back.

“Clear off,” I snapped at the crowd. “I’m a police officer.” This time I chose an Avenue regular as the object of my glare, a guy who had reason to move when a cop told him to. I held my gaze until he and two friends turned and ambled off. The crowd wasn’t hostile, not yet, but despite the three departees it was growing. If it got much larger it could ignite by spontaneous combustion regardless of what Liz Goldenstern or I did. And calling for a back-up could fan the flames.

To Liz, I said, “Where do you live?”

“Dana.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “Why?”

“I’ll give you a push.”

She hooked her arm more firmly around the post. As I stepped behind her I could see the side of her face; she looked almost like she was grinning. “Strong lady,” she said, more clearly.

It took me a moment to grasp the full import of her assessment. When I pushed the chair, I understood what she meant. It didn’t move. But I didn’t have a choice, I had to get her, and me, out of here now. I bent lower and put my back into it. It inched forward, cumbersomely, like a car with its brakes on. I had forgotten that the chair itself would weigh over a hundred pounds without Liz Goldenstern in it.

Behind us footsteps thudded on the sidewalk. I didn’t turn to see how much of the crowd was following.

“Christ, I hate being pushed, like a sack of dog food in a Safeway cart,” she muttered as I engineered the chair down the slant of the lowered curb to the street.

“I’m not crazy about this, myself,” I said.

“Look, I didn’t ask you to do me a favor.”

“I know that. Half of Telegraph Avenue knows. Pushing you home is just the easiest way to deal with things. But it doesn’t make your chair any lighter.”

“And it was built so as not to make me a burden.” There was a smile at her mouth.

I laughed. I’d known about Liz Goldenstern too long to take her outbursts personally.

As I turned the corner onto Dwight, a sandy-haired man in a Cal sweatshirt ran out of the crowd and alongside the chair. He thrust his yellow pad toward Liz’s right arm like a greeting. “I’m a reporter for the
Daily Cal,”
he said, with unhidden pride. The
Daily Californian
was the university newspaper, but its readership spread beyond the campus, across the city. Nearly twenty-five thousand people picked it up every day. “You’re Liz Goldenstern, right?”

“Right.”

The crowd moved around the sides of the chair. I quickened our pace.

“Cops knocked you out of your chair, right?” the reporter demanded, his pad opened for business.

Liz’s jaw tightened. I could almost see her weighing the options. Momentarily, I was tempted to move forward into her view, but I didn’t kid myself that that would make a difference. If she planned to make use of this situation, I would just be part of the backdrop. Finally, she said, “Not now. I’m tired.”

“It’s news now.”

“Not now,” Liz repeated.

“If you wait, it’ll be too late,” he said, a mixture of rage and disappointment reddening his freckled face.

“If I change my mind I’ll let you know. You can leave me your card.”

With a sigh, he stuck the yellow pad under his arm, pulled his wallet from a rear pocket and extricated a card. Replacing the wallet, he started to speak, then changed his mind. He looked down at Liz’s fingers, braced around the control lever. His own fingers tightened on the card. He glanced at me, questioningly—wouldn’t I take it? Ignoring him, I stopped the chair.

The crowd had thinned to ten or twelve. They kept their distance now.

Shifting her shoulder, Liz raised her arm. She separated her first and second fingers. “Give it to me,” she said, in a tone she might have used with a well-meaning child.

He swallowed audibly and thrust the card between the fingers, hard into the webbing. I could see Liz’s jaw tighten with the pain as she forced herself to grasp it.

But the student reporter was too unnerved to notice. “Jason Hillerby,” he said, then headed hurriedly, gratefully, up the sidewalk behind me.

I watched him go, then waited until the others began to amble off before I shoved the chair forward. I had seen Liz angry many times. But her forgiveness of this adolescent awkwardness was something I hadn’t witnessed before. I wondered if this, too, were part of her public performance.

“Use the driveway here,” she said. We were on Dana now. “This is my block. Dammit, look at this! The airhead who lives there”—she pointed to a Victorian on the corner—“locks his bike to the sign post and leaves it halfway across the sidewalk.” I glanced from the protruding rear wheel—out just far enough to make it impossible for the chair to pass—to Liz. In the tight set of her jaw, I could see the toll her restraint had taken. Her pain, at least, was no performance. The bicycle owner was lucky to be elsewhere.

“Does it every time,” Liz grumbled, as I pushed the chair down a driveway. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told him, explained what the problem is, but do you think he can keep it in his head for a week? He’s always sorry when I complain. He doesn’t do it intentionally; he just doesn’t think. But what difference does that make? I could keep on him, but, you know, you just get tired. I’m tired of having to spend two hours getting up and dressed in the morning. I’m tired of having to arrange my time so I can have the catheter in or out, so I don’t get infected, so the infection doesn’t shoot up into my kidneys, so I don’t die.”