Street Raised Page 26

  She walked unsteadily up to the Baron, grinning toothlessly with her eyes wide in excitement. No one else existed in the room for her – she only had eyes for her daddy. She came to a halt directly in front of the Baron and beamed adoringly up at her father as he smiled back down at her.

  The Baron took a deep drag from the pipe, removed it from his mouth and pursed his lips as he leaned over and slowly exhaled, breathing a thin stream of marijuana smoke into his daughter’s face. The little girl’s eyes were half-closed and her toothless mouth gleamed wetly as she sucked the shotgun hit of smoke down, slobbering as if she were nursing at her mama’s tit.

  “God-DAM,” Bob roared, rocketing to his feet.

  The Baron started to reach behind his back and the blanket dropped to the floor as Speedy slammed the drum magazine into the Tommy gun and worked the action, chambering the first round of oh-so-many.

  Deb evaporated from the room with cockroach instinct and Speedy found himself between Bob and the Baron, hovering over the older man with the Tommy gun’s barrel poised in the Baron’s face, ready to rock and roll.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Speedy chided the Baron – or was he speaking to Fat Bob, bouncing up and down behind him?

  The Baron’s hand froze, then slowly came back into view as he sat splay-legged on the stool leaning back against the wall, as far away from the insistent muzzle of the Tommy gun as he could get. His sweaty face was gray but carefully blank as he pointedly displayed his empty hands.

  Something slapped against Speedy’s leg once, then again, and he looked down in wonderment. The little girl was hitting Speedy, swatting his pants leg over and over with her pudgy little hand.

  “Dada,” she wailed.

  She was crying, the sticky tears streaming down her fat red terrified baby face as she gulped air between sobs.

  Speedy turned abruptly away and picked up the wool blanket. He deliberately kept his back to the Baron as he wrapped the Tommy gun, hoping the Baron would reach for his piece again. But he didn’t.

  Fat Bob was still bobbing up and down in front of the Baron, barely able to restrain himself but somehow managing. The baby plopped down on her diapered ass and commenced caterwauling at the world in general.

  “We’re leaving now,” Speedy said.

  Speedy didn’t look at the Baron as they bailed, but he could feel Deb’s gaze burning into his back as he walked out. The baby’s anguished wails could still be heard even as they reached the sidewalk. Behind them, somebody quietly shut the front door and threw the bolt.

  Speedy looked around the neighborhood he walked fast down the sidewalk with the blanket wrapped Tommy gun in his arms. Usually, outlaw bikers like the Baron lived in colonized enclaves on dead-end streets: this block should have hogs parked in front of every house; the Baron should have been enjoying the safety in numbers that brothers would supply. Instead the Baron was living alone up here by the M-B.

  Was the Baron an independent nomad rider, or was he on the outs with his particular Club? Speedy wondered as he hurried toward the car with Fat Bob close behind him trying to catch up. Speedy decided he didn’t really give a fuck one way or the other.

  Neither man spoke a word until they reached the Valiant and Speedy slid the bundled gun onto the back seat floor, turned to face his friend.

  “What kind of idiot sells a piece with rounds in it?” Speedy’s eyes sought Fat Bob’s, but Bob wouldn’t meet his gaze.

  “You been away a hella long time, man. I got no more connections for that kind of hardware.” Fat Bob looked back along the street to the Baron’s house. “He was the best I could do.”

  Speedy realized that was as close to an answer as he was ever going to get.

  Chapter 26

  When they got back to Alameda, Willy was nowhere to be found. A few moments after they arrived, the door to Sergio’s and TJ’s room opened a crack and Pearl scooted out like someone had given her a little toss.

  The door closed with guilty slyness. Speedy went up and gave it a rap.

  “You seen Willy?” Speedy asked as the door opened.

  T.J. moped at him, with Sergio lurking behind. “I’m sorry about the kitten man, I know she’s yours . . .”

  “What?” Speedy asked. He looked at the kitten, then back at T.J – nothing these guys did could possibly matter to Speedy as long as they didn’t dime. “Hell, knock yourself out. Where’s Little Willy?”

  “He said something about going down to the Estuary.”

  While Fat Bob stayed at the house to swill one of the many beers they’d so adequately stocked the fridge with, Speedy ambled up Sherman Street to Atlantic, then onward toward the waterfront.

  Speedy walked past the eight-story Marina View Towers on his right. To his left was a leveled 80-acre grassy expanse of nothing.

  Speedy saw Little Willy up ahead, next to the Oakland Yacht Club’s marina. Willy was just standing there oblivious in the middle of the walking path, staring out past all the OYC’s stink-pot motor yachts and rag merchant sloops moored in their slips.

  Including the Alameda and Oakland Yacht Clubs – on this, the near bank of the Estuary – at least half a dozen private marinas were visible on both sides of the water. The Estuary itself was thronged as always with pleasure boats and working craft. A dredging barge, with tug in attendance, was hard at work deepening the channel. Sail boats and cabin cruisers darted and flitted amongst their larger blue-collar brethren.

  Marin's Mt. Tamalpais was in the background to the north off Speedy’s left shoulder – Mount Tam’s distant silhouette was obscured behind brownish smoke from wildfires elsewhere in the state. To his right at Coast Guard Island in the middle of the Estuary, a tug was warping a cutter away from its mooring to commence patrol.

  The real star of this vista lay across the Estuary, however: Port of Oakland, the fourth busiest container port in the United States – the place where they’d invented container-shipping, actually. Had they made the stevedores stand in line and turn in their bailing hooks like a defeated army on the day the Port made the changeover?

  To the left the Estuary curved out of sight in the direction of the Turning Basin, where the tugs square-danced circular attendance upon incoming and outgoing cargo freighters, getting the ships lined up to either dock or head out to sea through the Golden Gate. 1500 feet across the water at the Charles P Howard Terminal, a ship at Berth 67 was being loaded by one of the big white container cranes. Oakland Ferry Terminal and Jack London Square lay right next door. Directly across from Speedy and Willy were the old Ninth Avenue Terminal and the floating island of barge cranes that anchored and/or moored together there; the masts and wheelhouses of all those clumped barges bristled like a forest.

  Sensing Speedy’s approach, Willy turned and smiled welcome.

  “Check it,” Willy said, jerking his chin across the water.

  The tide was running, the water in the Estuary was surging past from right to left at several miles per hour – even a powerful Olympic human swimmer wouldn’t be able to make headway against that current.

  A cormorant was paddling upstream against the flow, on the hunt about twenty-five yards out from the brothers. As Speedy and Little Willy watched, the cormorant dove and stayed under for an endless time before surfacing almost a hundred yards up-current against that full-bore tide, with a fish wriggling in its beak. The fish only managed a few seconds of struggle before disappearing down the cormorant’s snake-like throat and into its gullet. They watched the cormorant dive one more time, but it didn’t surface again within their eyeshot.

  That bird in action was the coolest thing Speedy had seen in a long time. Nobody owed that cormorant squat. It lived its life knowing it had nothing coming, uncaring that everything it acquired to serve its needs would be interpreted – by some portion of the Universe at least – as theft or murder. Willy sharing this made Speedy feel a closeness between them he hadn’t been sure they’d ever be able to share again.

  As a backdrop, the horizon behind th
e Port was dominated by Oakland’s Central Business District’s skyscrapers flanking the Lake Merritt Channel. All the nautical activity on the channel’s forefront made a jaunty counterpoint to the sprawl of the Downtown skyline, a third of a mile away across the water.

  “Aren’t they beautiful too?” Little Willy asked of that clump of high-rise buildings so near and yet so far. “I wonder what the view’s like from the top.”

  Speedy snorted, even though he knew he wasn’t apprehending much out of the layered rococo reality his little brother saw. “The only way we’ll ever get up there besides robbing them is to shine their shoes, maybe mop the floors.”

  “Yeah,” Willy said, voice a little sad. He turned and looked back at the 80-acre void he and Speedy had crossed to reach here. Speedy turned to follow his gaze, wondering what Willy was looking at while simultaneously knowing he’d never be able to see everything his little brother saw.

  Willy was focused on the ghost roads meandering through the wasteland, where he knew employee housing for Todd Shipyard’s Alameda Works used to stand. Todd, with its six immense shipways, its turbine machine shop, and an entire township worth of onsite homes for workers – all gone for three decades, since the 50s.

  Now the expanse was mainly blank fields permeated by roads leading to houses and buildings that were no longer there, demolished long ago. The little brick Union Iron Works Powerhouse still held court in the southwest corner of the wasteland though; and the old concrete ammo blockhouse still squatted to the northwest. Other than that, all that was left of Todd’s proper was the huge, decrepit sprawling multistory Turbine Machine Shop on the north side of the 80 acres, a pigeon-haunted cyclopean expanse of shattered windows staring down crumple-faced off Thau Way.

  Speedy was less interested in regional history – his attention was drawn off to the east of the Machine Shop, where the smaller (but still immense) rectangular drive-in screen of the Island Auto Movie loomed, safe behind its corrugated metal fence.

  On Saturdays and Sundays the Auto Movie was home to the Alameda Penny Market, the biggest thieves’ market in the Bay Area, where you could buy or sell anything: C-4 explosive and antique samurai swords; macrobiotic sandwiches and mandolins; drugs, human skulls, counterfeit money by the bushel – and even sex, if you didn’t mind climbing in the back of a van with one of the vendor girls who hooked on the side. The Penny Market was thronged by hippies, bikers, survivalists, outlaws and general mutant freaks. Rip-offs and con games were nonstop, it was a place where you always had to keep one hand on your wallet.

  Before Speedy had gone in – other than the Auto Movie, the ruins of the Shipyard, the Marina View Towers and the Yacht Clubs – no other structures had marred this undeveloped 80-acre parcel of Alameda wasteland. You could come here at night and use any of its roads-to-nowhere as lover’s lanes or party spots.

  Now, it appeared a strangling ring of prosperity and progress was oozing in from the surrounding outskirts to erase this historic area: there was new construction on the brink of commencement, all around the former Shipyard area. Its surface tension of solitude would be broken and it would fill to bursting in short order. He wondered what they’d build over it.

  Speedy grimaced as a wave of bitter nostalgia flowed through him, as he thought back over an inalterable past that receded ever faster in memory. He thought back to the ‘good old days,’ when it was just him and Little Willy and Fat Bob: an endless succession of couch surfing and garages (motel rooms when they were flush). Speedy, Willy and Bob united against all, tearing off chunks of cash from the soft underbelly of the square world.

  Speedy, schooling reluctant Willy how to field strip and clean a weapon, how to carry it and how to use it. Speedy, trying to teach Willy how to survive in a friendless Universe. But there’d always been a part of Little Willy that had resisted Speedy’s teachings, as if Willy had thought ‘the Life’ to be as meaningless as everything else.

  That had confused Speedy no end, even as he’d admired his little brothers’ defiance. A Buddhist bandit, Speedy thought, eying Little Willy sidelong and smiling inside at the thought.

  Little Willy should have been in college before he’d even grown his first pubes. Willy should be a Professor now up at UC Berkeley, or doing something really advanced and esoteric in a high-end think tank somewhere. Speedy’s internal smile leaked all the way out at the mental image of Willy in a patch-elbowed tweed coat, gesturing dismissively at some academic rival’s feeble arguments, maybe with a lit pipe in his hand to emphasize his disdain.

  But all that would never be. It never could have been, even to begin with.

  Speedy felt low, filled with a nameless frustration. Was it shame he felt? Remorse? Whatever the emotion was, it was unaccustomed.

  Still, what he wouldn’t give for a second chance to make things right for his little brother . . .

  “I’m sorry I got you busted, Speedy,” Willy said, interrupting his train of thought.

  “You didn’t get me popped,” Speedy insisted. “You know Louis gave me the choice, I took the fall of my own free will, in exchange.”

  “The drugs were mine,” Willy said, voice harsh. “The warrant was in my name.”

  Speedy tossed a shoulder. “I guess Louis figured I could handle the time better than you. We’re lucky he convinced the other cops to let me take the weight, let me claim it as my own.”

  “Louis was wrong,” Willy said, his eyes belying the words even as he uttered them. “I could’ve done the time easy. It didn’t have to be you instead of me.”

  There was no way Speedy was going to respond to that one, so he just buttoned his lip and sparked one of the Red Dots he’d filched from Carmel. The tobacco tasted sweeter somehow, coming from her pack.

  “There’s someone I want you to meet,” Speedy said after Little Willy calmed down a little.

  Chapter 27

  Speedy carried the Thompson cradled in its woolen swaddling cloth as he and Little Willy walked up to Carmel’s front door. But she opened the door before either of them could knock, as if she’d sensed Speedy’s approach like she had on his previous visit.

  The sight of Carmel gave Speedy a spasm of pleasure like they’d been apart for ages, even if a clock wouldn’t have measured their separation as having been all that long. That’s when Speedy realized he didn’t mind having Carmel around.

  “Come on in,” his girl said.

  Speedy propped the blanket-wrapped Thompson against the wall while Carmel commenced brewing some coffee and Willy went straight to the bookshelves.

  “Carmel, this is my brother Little Willy,” Speedy said.

  “You mean like the song?” Carmel asked.

  “Fuck the song,” Willy said absently, squatting to scan the titles in Carmel’s library.

  Carmel studied Willy’s profile as he whispered to himself over her books, seeing how his red hair fell lank to his shoulders just Speedy’s. She sensed the aura of energy glowing off this short skinny little guy, saw how his eyes widened in epiphany every few seconds.

  She looked at the bundle leaning against the wall by the door. “And who’s your other friend?”

  Speedy brought it to the table as Carmel got down some coffee mugs and filled them with java. To Carmel he looked like a little kid unwrapping a Christmas present, peeling back the blanket with reverent hands to reveal the Tommy gun’s sleek deadliness.

  She’d seen Thompsons in old gangster movies of course, but the reality was totally different. It had a brutal power to it, every line of the submachine gun screaming the fact that it was only good for one thing: to bring death and suffering into the world. She hated it instantly, as if it were a person and not merely an industrial artifact.

  “I have an affair to wrap up before I can leave with you,” Speedy said as he sipped casually on his coffee. “There are issues with where I’m staying right now, and I need to stash her here for a day or two.”

  At first Carmel couldn’t believe her ears. Then anger flowed, surprisingl
y hot. “The sawed-off I could see maybe. Self defense, whatever. But this? This thing is obscene. I don’t want it in my house.”

  Speedy nodded, started to wrap his steel bitch in her wool blanket winding cloth. It irked Carmel that he didn’t argue, like it didn’t bother to him one way or the other what Carmel had to say.

  Little Willy piped up, “You have good taste in books.”

  It was Carmel’s first clear look at Willy’s face, and she was shocked at what shone from his lonely eyes. He had the demeanor and visage of someone who’d spent a lifetime forced to lift rocks and study what squirmed beneath them concealed from the light of day. But he’d done it for too long, and now he was lost.

  “You’ve got Philip K. Dick here, and Jack Vance,” Little Willy said, as if not noticing the pity that filled Carmel’s face as she studied him. “Did you know they’re both from the East Bay? Jack London too. You know, like the Square?”

  Carmel shook her head, not willing to speak. Willy continued studying Carmel’s library with open wistful pleasure, muttering to himself joyfully like he always did when he was around books.

  “Has he always been like this?” Carmel asked Speedy, voice low.

  “Well, he used to be a lot sharper, but he took some blows to the head when we were kids,” Speedy said, voice equally quiet. “He hasn’t been up to snuff since. He sleeps a lot too, sometimes for days. He has these spells, you know?”

  “Here’s a question,” she said. “How’d they ever let you two fall through the cracks?”

  Speedy snorted. “Who says they did?”

  Carmel watched Little Willy move on to the next shelf of books, not even noticing or caring they were talking about him.