Street Raised Page 18

  There was a gate in a fence and he peeped over it to examine the lawn under the moonlight. The biggest lesson he’d learned from doing this in Philly? It wasn’t enough to just look for dog poop in a strange backyard – it was important to examine the size of the dog poop.

  Other than an antique claw foot bathtub being used as a planter, this yard appeared clear. Ghost opened the gate and stepped through. He walked around the back of the house, crept onto the porch and tried the knob. It was locked.

  He walked across the lawn to the fence, scuttled atop it like a daddy longlegs, did a visual poop check again and dropped into the next yard. That backdoor was locked too.

  But in the next backyard he hit the jackpot: the porch door was unlocked. That was the signal he was looking for, giving permission for Ghost to come inside. The people here wanted him in their life. It was all their fault, and if Ghost had needed a conscience it would have been clear.

  Ghost crept through the unoccupied ground floor, snuck up the carpeted stairs, slunk down the hardwood hallway toward the front of the house and through the open bedroom door.

  A girl was lying on a bed in there. Ghost entered the room almost boldly, not bothering to be so furtive now in the home stretch.

  She appeared to be in her early twenties, wearing a teddy. Long, thick blonde hair fanned out across her pillow, and her teeth gleamed pearly and almost phosphorescent between her slightly parted lips.

  Ghost supposed she was beautiful – but it was her vulnerability that excited him, that made the bulge in his pants grow ever larger. He moved to the bedroom window and shut the curtains far enough to ensure privacy, but not far enough to completely block off the light outside – he wanted to be able to see everything.

  Ghost stood next to the bed and untied his hoodie, pushed it back to expose his medusa locks and face completely for his hostess. He leaned forward, letting his crooked shadow crawl up over her face with deliberate slowness; it finally covered her eyes, blocking the light spilling through the partially closed blinds. He waited, enjoying the anticipation.

  Sensing the change in illumination even in her sleep, the girl’s eyes opened. For an instant she stared at the ceiling, her blue eyes clouded with slumber. Then – as her wakening gaze rolled toward the black backlit silhouette looming over her and full awareness entered those wide beautiful orbs – Ghost smiled down at her.

  Chapter 14

  Fat Bob drove them through the skyscrapers of Broadway’s high-rise steel canyon, the Valiant adding its own contribution to the claustrophobic steel echoes from surrounding traffic. As it was the tail end of rush hour here in Downtown Oakland, mobs of people pounded the pavement.

  The 19th Street Bay Area Rapid Transit entrance was thronged with commuters coming up or down the stairs from the underground train station. In addition to BART, Broadway was also an Alameda-Contra Costa Transit trunk-line offering bus transfer service to anywhere in the East Bay. All the many bus stops were crowded with tired worker bees waiting to go home and gird their loins for another day of labor, another stint amortizing their irreplaceable time for their betters’ profit.

  So many memories for Speedy, here in Downtown. When him and Willy first left home, before they’d figured out what was what, they wouldn’t have slept ‘indoors’ at all if not for the AC Transit all-nighter buses. They’d quickly sussed out which drivers were cool. A quarter each had bought the brothers a precious hour or two of catnapping in the back of the bus as it rumbled and weaved and belched its way along its route. Of course, inevitably, the driver would always pull up to the last stop on his route before turnaround, open the front doors and intone to the otherwise empty bus, “End of the line.” Then it was pavement time again, rain or shine.

  As Bob drove them down Broadway, in old habit Speedy cataloged whatever was visually distinctive about each person on the crowded sidewalk. He had to look for whatever seemed to be common similarities between them – he needed those patterns and exceptions within the gestalt to assess his options, to try and predict which way to jump.

  As always sniffing for the money first, Speedy noticed that the midlevel briefcase crowd still existed of course. The male specimens tended toward unimaginative pin-striped suits with narrow lapels and skinny ties; weighty looking digital watches with metal bands adorned their wrists. The female examples tended toward business clothes covered with gold, gilt and glitz; they also seemed to favor designer jewelry like diamonds and pearls.

  All these well dressed young professionals seemed enthralled with themselves and the image they were projecting. Speedy didn’t bother hiding his mocking smile: they could ape their betters as much as they wanted to, but they was still riding the BART and the AC Transit after all.

  Eying the fashions worn by the lower rank-and file folk, it was obvious the world had passed through a time warp and out of the era of disco while Speedy was away. No more polyester for one thing, as best he could tell by eyeball. There wasn’t a single pair of bell bottoms in sight, even though back before Speedy did his time nobody would have been caught dead with straight leg pants.

  But for some reason it was the hair that brought it home to Speedy that he was a dinosaur, and that he didn’t blend in here at all. Speedy didn’t see a single afro among all the brothers and sisters in the crowd, nor afro-picks or rakes dangling from any black person’s hair neither. The black girls seemed to be more into elaborate weaves and extensions these days. Most of the white men he saw had short, neatly groomed hair, a lot of them slicking it back with mousse – other than him and Little Willy, Speedy couldn’t see any other guy with his hair in the anarchic shoulder-length mop top Speedy had worn since his teens.

  Despite their variety of dress there was a sameness to all these people, even between the whites and the blacks, making it feel to Speedy that they were all members of the same club. While Speedy was out of circulation someone had finally put a stake through the 70s’s heart without consulting his oh-so-important opinion.

  The 80s were here in full swing and without advance warning, wielding its own brand new way of doing things. But this new ‘normal’ felt like some kind of Bizarro world to Speedy, an alternate ultramodern dimension he could only infiltrate as an impostor from out of time.

  Just past De Lauer’s 24-Hour Super Newsstand at 13th, they hit a red light. At a bus stop on the corner, Speedy watched a three-card-monte team trolling for chumps.

  The player was a blood with corn rows, sitting lotus fashion and flicking his bent trio of cards onto the sidewalk in front of him with dexterous rapidity, taunting onlookers to find the one red card with an unimaginative patter honed by many repetitions. The Monte Man’s features were scarred and abraded as if his face had had frequent intimate contact with the pavement in its time. Perhaps his skills weren’t all they should be?

  Speedy scanned the crowd for the Monte Man’s shill and spotted him easy: a hulking blonde farm-boy-looking redneck pretending to be a mouth-breathing moron (but with eyes that missed nothing, eyes that belonged on someone with a lot higher I.Q. than his face revealed to the foolish world). Salt & Pepper teams: always conspicuous to the Man, but strangely effective against the squares.

  Sensing Speedy attention, Farmboy’s gaze locked with his. Farmboy arched his brows as if in recognition and grinned wide like he and Speedy were sharing a secret. Speedy nodded back in politeness, feeling as if he were seeing himself in a cracked mirror. But he looked away quickly, not wanting to inflict the rudeness of staring too long at a fellow predator.

  As he averted his gaze, Speedy focused past Farmboy at the Oakland Tribune Building one block over on Franklin. That Big-Ben-style tower thrust priapically up amongst all its neighbors, its glowing clock dial displaying the time across the entire East Bay. As the stoplight turned green and they drove away, Speedy could see the street corner at the Tribune Tower’s base where he’d watched Remmy get stabbed to death years before.

  Next to the 12th Street City Center BART entrance, Speedy saw another D
oggie Diner and winked at the dachshund in greeting, thinking ‘We’ve got to quit meeting like this.’

  Just before 11th they passed the Pussycat. Beneath the adult theater’s vertical red neon sign, its marquee read THAT LUCKY STIFF P*L*U*S! SEKAS FANTASY.

  Speedy recalled when this particular member of the Pussycat chain had been called the Regent. Once he and Willy had figured it out as homeless kids, the seamy little grind-house was as close to a motel room as they were going to get – it had been a step up from the AC Transit all-nighter buses, for sure. The two brothers had often been just about the only white faces in the audience, but one of them could catch some ZZZs while the other one stood guard – Speedy remembered all those afros bulking to block his view of the lower part of the screen as the pot smoke billowed, his feet glued to the floor in spilled sticky wine as the audience howled obscene commentary to the good parts of the movie.

  Fat Bob turned left at 11th then hooked a block over and took the Tube underneath the Estuary to Alameda. Whenever they drove through the Tube, Little Willy always had to point out that this was the second oldest underwater auto tunnel in America, junior only to the Holland Tunnel; had to mention that this was the same length of tunnel where George Lucas filmed the chase scenes for his first movie THX-1138. Willy did so now as if by rote. Also as if by rote, Bob and Speedy ignored him – they were accustomed to all Willy’s monologs from the old days.

  The engine sounds of the car moaned back in echo from the smog-filthy tiled tunnel walls as they passed beneath the countless tons of water overhead. Traffic was light.

  They emerged onto Webster Street, the Island City’s main drag. Bob immediately slowed to the crawling speed limit jealously enforced by Alameda PD: ‘25, Island Wide.’

  This was the Webster Strip, specializing in sailors on liberty from Naval Air Station Alameda, the largest military base in the Bay Area. Webster was wall-to-wall squids on any given night, but this evening it was especially crowded.

  But hadn’t Ronny said something about building up to a 600 ship Navy? Little Willy remembered seeing that commercial, something about a bear in the woods (meaning Russia, he supposed).

  ‘Isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear?’ the guy narrating the commercial had asked the audience. Willy couldn’t answer one way or the other, but he was unsure how all those new boats could be more than a speed bump when Ray-Gun pushed the button and the Russian missiles arced past ours through the stratosphere above.

  Outside Sambo’s a deck ape projectile-vomited into the gutter on his hands and knees while his buddies jeered and their girlfriends for the evening looked on, snapping their gum in indifference. As our boys drove further, they watched the homesick, horny swab jockies mobbing Webster’s sidewalks wandering their nightly migration patterns: running up tabs at Croll’s or the Fireside Lounge or one of the other dive bar watering holes; getting hustled at pool; or being inked at Ricky Tattoo Studio.

  Given the prevalence of CVN-65 hats being worn by the sailors, Speedy assumed the Big ‘E’ – the Enterprise – was in town. A lot of sailors were wearing those cheap Filipino Subic Bay print-screen tee-shirts, making Speedy presume that they were fresh back from a WESTPAC deployment in the Far East.

  One squid’s shirt had a picture of a mushroom cloud over the caption ‘Made in America – Tested in Japan.’ Another sailor had a shirt displaying a ballistic missile ‘boomer’ sub sailing along with 24 empty tubes, and multiple mushroom clouds on the horizon in the background, over the words ‘And now, it’s Miller Time.’ A third wore ‘The Last Great Act of Defiance,’ depicting a mouse insulting a stooping hawk by flipping it off, while simultaneously holding a .45 automatic pistol behind his back. Funny guys, these Navy boys.

  Speedy remembered separating these NAS Alameda sailors from their money as a kid. Speedy and friends had memorized the military paydays as their own back then; on any given date they could’ve told you what ships were in port, which ships were leaving and the names of the boats that were on their way in. Of course that’d been before they graduated to bigger game.

  Passing the third freakin Doggie Diner of the evening, Little Willy had Bob hang a louie at the next corner. After a few blocks Willy had Bob turn left again on Chapin, into a tree glutted residential neighborhood near the waterfront. After a couple more turns Fat Bob pulled over to idle at the curb, awaiting further instructions.

  “That’s the place three houses down,” Willy said, whispering unnecessarily.

  Little Willy’s erstwhile home was a charcoal colored slate-shingled house about the size of a postage stamp, with an F-150 step-side pickup parked in front. The truck had one of those yellow-on-black KOME 98.5 diamond-shaped decals on the rear windshield.

  “Park as close as you can,” Speedy instructed.

  Bob pulled out from the curb and rolled up to the house, parking in front of the pickup truck. The kitten chose that moment to dart around beneath Speedy’s seat, its little claws scrabbling in the floor’s carpet.

  “What’s that?” Willy asked, startled.

  “Kitten,” Speedy said, staring at the front of the target house.

  “Ooh, let me see,” Little Willy asked, eyes wide and bright.

  “I don’t think now’s the time, Willy,” Speedy said.

  Fat Bob sat trembling in the driver’s seat like an excited hunting dog anticipating the taste of blood – he sure hoped Speedy wasn’t gonna play this one too diplomatic.

  The crew climbed out the car and moved past the untrimmed azalea hedge up the front walk, stopping at the base of the porch steps. The outside light was off.

  Music leaked through the door, Van Halen’s ‘Jump.’ The song was playing loud, but not quite loud enough to warrant the neighbors calling the cops – these were domesticated ‘gangstas.’

  “A’ight,” Speedy said. “You know the drill. I’ll go in first. Bob, you follow and back my play. Willy, you pull rear guard – wait a skosh before you come in.” He gave Willy an assessing look. “You still have the door key, don’t you?”

  Little Willy handed the key over with an open grin of triumph, earning his brother’s nod of approval.

  Speedy made a last quick scan of the neighborhood. All the surrounding households were silent as tombs, other than a few windows flickering in evidence of the inhabitants getting their nightly TV fix. But there was no traffic and no pedestrians – just the night wind sighing through the trees in the front yards.

  Speedy led the way up the steps onto the porch followed by Fat Bob, who snapped his fingers and strutted in time with the music coming through the door. Willy tagged along at the rear.

  Speedy stuck the key between his teeth and drew the sawed-off from the pocket of his field jacket. He pulled back the hammers, cocking both barrels, and depressed the safety button. Holding the sawed-off in his right hand, he used his left to insert the key in the lock’s slot and rotate the plug. The pins aligned in the cylinder, and the bolt unlocked with a metallic thud that Little Willy was certain everyone in the house could hear even over the music.

  Speedy removed the key and handed it back to Willy. Willy put the key away then touched his .45 where it was stuck down the back of his waistband under his Pendleton, even as Bob waggled his Louisville slugger in gentle arcs like a lazy sorcerer waving a magic wand. Speedy grasped the knob and rotated it until it wouldn’t turn anymore. He pushed the door open and took one long stride into the room.

  “How do,” Speedy drawled.

  Through the open doorway, Little Willy saw all five heads in the pot-smoke filled room whirl in unison to face Speedy. From Speedy’s left, Darla – a green-eyed hellcat of a girl – came charging at him; a hulk to Speedy’s front – wearing a Members Only jacket – was fumbling for something in his armpit.

  Speedy lunged forward and stuck his shotgun against the bridge of Members Only’s nose, hard enough to break the skin. Members Only’s hand arm froze under his arm.

  Glancing to the side as Darla scuttled his way to park he
r nails in his face, Speedy used his greater reach to place the palm of his hand against her face instead, shoving her hard enough she flew backwards through the air with her claws still outstretched. Darla crashed against the wall and dragged several black light posters with her as she slid down it. Speedy returned his full attention to the shotgun he was still holding unwavering against Members Only’s nose.

  Speedy’s lunge had cleared the doorway enough for Bob to follow him in. Fat Bob held his bat in a choked-up double-handed grip due to the close quarters of the room. Bob was careful not to block Speedy’s field of fire as he moved to the right to make the box, threatening all the people in the room between him and Speedy: the marks couldn’t focus on either of the bandits without laying themselves open to the other one.

  Willy didn’t wait to see any more. He shut the front door from outside and leaned against it as he stared at the rest of the sleepy block, pulling rear guard. His pistol was still in his back waistband under his Pendleton but he kept a firm grasp on it with one hand, ready to draw and throw down fast. He looked for any sign that the neighbors had noticed anything; he didn’t think anyone had.

  Through the door Little Willy heard a muffled conversation he couldn’t make out, then the sounds of another short, sharp commotion. Willy giggled quietly, but he went expressionless and silent as the door opened to reveal Speedy standing in the opening looking at him.

  “C’mon in and do the frisk,” Speedy said.

  On the stereo David Lee Roth was pointing out that you might as well jump, and Little Willy reentered the house he’d been so rudely evicted from so long ago.

  Sergio and T.J., his metal-head roommates, were gaping and goggling at him as they sat dazed on the sofa. Their gazes bored holes in him, and they both had the usual expressions of stupid surprise on their faces. The woven tapestry nailed up above and behind the two men – embroidered dogs playing poker – displayed no sympathy Little Willy could detect.