Stagger Bay Page 7
The news trucks still dominated the parking lot. If anything, there were more of them than before. Satellite antennas aimed at the sky, pumping live broadcasts to viewers around the globe. Newshounds stood around in clumps, sucking on coffee and staring at the front of the hospital like a dog pack eying treed prey. Freelance photographers prowled the outskirts, scavengers awaiting the crumbs dropped by their betters in this digital Serengeti.
I slunk away to the blackberry thicket, squeezed through an opening and through the clawed, grasping branches until I reached a wide open space on the far side. The edge of a marsh was at my feet.
I knew this spot well from before prison. A large creek came down from the foothills and delta-ed into this marsh before finally draining to the southern wetlands of the Bay. It was a soggy low-lying area dotted with raised tussocks of mud, swamp grass, assorted shrubbery, and carnivorous plants. The air was moist and pungent with the smells of life and decay; the only native sounds were those of birds and frogs, insects and slow-moving water.
When Sam was a boy we’d ridden our bikes here for nature hikes on numberless occasions. There were tadpoles in season, and the big predatory water beetles they called electric light bugs, because of their habit of flopping across the ground toward any source of artificial illumination. The beetles were huge things that looked like they’d be better suited to co-starring in a Japanese horror movie than haunting a backwoods swamp.
There were crows and snakes and possums here too, as well as skunks and lots of mud. It was a little boy’s paradise and Sam always loved it. Tell the truth, I hadn’t minded it too much myself, being a big-city boy who’d never come closer to Wild Kingdom than on the picture tube of my TV.
Frogs throbbed out their mating song, the shrill chorus seeming to mock me and my current situation. Once, with Sam, this had been one of my favorite places on earth. Now it seemed eldritch and menacing in the moonlight.
Weakness overcame me and I sank to lie on my side in the mud at the edge of the water, staring into the dimness of that inhuman swamp. I closed my eye and fell asleep to the frogs’ malevolent piping and the rustlings of all the little swamp creatures going about their nocturnal business.
Chapter 17
I woke at dawn and the air was clammy; I was engulfed by a white fog that had risen off the swamp to hide the world in a numb blank swath. Despite the chill I was sweating.
I was on fire; I had a fever, bad. To add to the fun the dope they’d been pumping into me at the hospital had worn off, and my missing eye was really kicking up a fuss; the pain was the worst I’d felt since it had been blown out my skull.
I rose to hands and knees, swaying like a sickly dog as I coughed again and again, each cough a deep, gluey, rattling boom. I finally convulsed up a thick wad of chunky green phlegm, spat it onto the ground in front of me, and studied the gross little puddle clinically from a few inches above. I was in bad shape here.
I got to my feet and commenced shambling slowly through the fog, the swamp water slopping up next to the muddy path I followed. Behind me the hospital bulked up to darken the haze. As long as I was headed away from it, I was going in the right direction.
I hit a path leading uphill away from the marsh and turned that way, toiling up a slight incline that I wouldn’t have given a second thought to in better circumstances. Right then it felt like Mount Everest, and I found it harder and harder to breathe with every step. I felt like I was drowning with each labored rattling breath. My legs were rubbery stilts, stretching an infinite distance from my whirling head to the teetering ground below.
At the top of the path was a sidewalk on an empty street. The fog was thinner here but it still prevented me from seeing more than maybe twenty-five yards in any direction.
Memory failed me; my thoughts were less and less coherent. I had no idea where in Stagger Bay I was.
At random, I turned left and continued slumping along. The further I got from the marsh the thinner the fog got, until it finally disappeared.
I was on a wide street, brand new – an avenue, really. It looked out of place in this uninhabited corner. Both sides of the road were bulldozed and graded flat in preparation for construction, the lots all laid out. Surveyor’s stakes were everywhere, connected by string and fluttering with orange plastic ribbons. Cement sidewalks and curbs were poured and cured – inlets to what would be courts and cul-de-sacs broke the lonely curbing at architecturally appropriate intervals; concrete curves and spirals led off to ghost houses yet to be constructed.
I passed a bulldozer and grader parked next to a prefab contractor’s hut on concrete blocks. The wide avenue teed into a pot-holed cross street leading to my left, into a lurking cluster of identical bungalows, all of them in need of a paint job.
Now I recognized where I was: I’d stumbled my way straight to the Gardens. It was a jarring contrast between those run-down hovels and the pristine blank area I was passing through.
This was the erstwhile home of a man I’d gotten murdered at the school. Wayne, I recalled the Chief saying – his name had been Wayne. I always figured that, at a minimum, you should at least remember the names of people who die because of you.
Chapter 18
I’d always felt calling this neighborhood the Gardens had been somebody’s idea of a bad joke: a ramshackle cluster of one-bedrooms situated in a lowlands next to a swamp behind the ass-end of a hospital was not my idea of a scenic locale.
The Gardens weren’t projects; they weren’t part of any official government housing authority. They were originally little shacks built by some timber baron to house his bachelor loggers. Over time, one slum lord or another had pimped the Gardens’ hovels to whatever people were currently too poor to afford living anywhere else.
The Gardens had always been home for the few black families in Stagger Bay – people who’d been living in this white bread rural community for generations without attaining jobs paying enough to buy property of their own. While the Gardens couldn’t hold a candle to the strife and violence of any Bay Area housing project, it was like a small unofficial hick replica of one.
The Gardens also housed several extended Hmong and Lao clans out of Southeast Asia brought over to the U.S. for services rendered in Viet Nam, and then relocated from the bigger cities to a place where their government sponsors hoped they’d be better able to assimilate. Despite the Hmong being mountain folk themselves, I’d always figured the philosophy behind the move had probably been more ‘out of sight, out of mind.’
Because of the welfare influx, however, the people of the Gardens were all races: black, white, Mexican, Asian -a low-rent Rainbow Coalition. It was still the kind of neighborhood where strangers stick out and residents take immediate note of them, though – you needed a Pass here.
I staggered into the Gardens proper, walking molasses-slow down the middle of the street that was the only way in or out for vehicles. Women were cleaning their narrow porches, and folks sat on what passed for stoops. Children played on dirt patches where lawns should have been, and groups of men worked on cars that looked like they’d be better off sent to the wrecking yard.
As soon as I entered, every eye in sight was staring right at me without shyness or welcome. An old man stood from where he’d been sitting on the stoop nearest me, called hoarsely to the children playing in his front yard, and shuffled inside through the warped screen door. The kids streamed into the house after him like a pack of puppies.
“You’re him, ain’t ya?” a wide-eyed teenage white girl asked, standing right next to me even though I hadn’t noticed her approach.
I ignored her as I stumbled on. The only sounds I heard were papers fluttering in the wind all around me – flyers, posted on every door. Squinting at the nearest sheet flapping in the breeze, I saw ‘ORDER TO VACATE’ posted on it in big letters.
I was drenched in sweat and shivering. My cough had gotten much worse. And, in the blink of an eye, I was the only one on the street anymore. Except… down the block
a group of young males stood in front of a stoop, facing me with intent postures.
It was déjà vu: this wasn’t Oakland, I hadn’t been a street kid for years – but this crew appeared familiar. Like if I could just make it all the way to them without falling down, I’d see some of my childhood homies among them. Maybe I’d be as close to safe as surrounding friends could make you.
Of course, when I finally got close I didn’t recognize any of them. ‘What did you expect?’ a voice jeered in the back of my head. ‘All your home boys are dead.’
“You look like shit, dude,” one tall black kid with cornrows said.
I didn’t argue with him. My head commenced spinning and I sank to my knees. I started coughing and couldn’t stop, my booming lungs sounding like a broken washing machine.
I toppled over to lie on my side, which seemed to be becoming a habit for me. My empty left eye socket throbbed, blurring what was left of my vision; but with my good right eye I saw a circle of pants legs and shoes surrounding me.
“Hey, Natalie,” the tall black kid said. “Here’s Sam’s dad. Here’s the cracker who killed your man.”
“Bring him inside,” a woman said from the open door to the nearest bungalow.
With a feeling akin to flight, I was hoisted into the air by many hands. I felt myself being carried up the steps and onto the bungalow’s stoop, but I passed out before we got through the doorway.
Chapter 19
The next while was an endless fever dream. Movement and voices, doors slamming, people coming and going. An occasional hand touching me.
Even in my delirium I felt bone-deep shivering rack my frame. During one of my more lucid moments I felt something delightfully cool and wet mopping my brow. I opened my eye to see who was comforting me.
She was young: a tall big-boned Mexican girl with calm brown features and a long mop of curly black hair, a lit Newport cigarette dangling from her full lips. Her expression didn’t change as she saw I was awake, but she stopped mopping my brow to return my gaze. I drowned in the dilated pupils of those big brown unsympathetic eyes.
“I’m ruining your couch,” I said, embarrassed to be sweating buckets onto her furniture. A small black boy stood behind her, staring at me wide eyed.
“Go back to sleep,” she said.
“You should hate me,” I said.
“Who says I don’t?” she said, exhaling menthol cigarette smoke out her nostrils dragon-like. “You need antibiotics or you’re going to die, though.”
“No hospitals,” I said. “Please let me stay here. Don’t send me back to them.”
“I have to change the dressing on your wound or it’ll get infected,” she said. “It’s filthy.” She fumbled at it, but I slapped feebly at her hand and she stopped.
She started mopping my brow again and I fell asleep. Then I was awake again and on my feet. Somebody was on each side of me with my arms over their shoulders.
“Open your mouth,” Natalie said, fading in and out of focus in front of me. I obeyed, and she put this big horse pill on my tongue.
It was huge, and tasted like shit. I gagged, and then Natalie put a glass of water to my mouth. The glass clicked against my teeth as I guzzled that delicious water, the big pill tearing at my throat as I fought it down. I was out before they laid me back on the couch.
The ordeal with the pill was repeated again and again, I have no idea how many times. Then, out of the blue, I woke to realize my fever had broken. I felt almost fine lying there, except for the pulsing throb where my left eye had been.
The little black kid stood right next to the couch, looking down at me. He held a big butcher knife in his hand, its tip pointed at the floor.
“You killed my daddy,” he said.
“Uncle Moe says this man has to live,” Natalie said from behind us. “But I say it too.”
The boy sobbed, dropped the knife to the carpet and ran from the room. Natalie picked up the knife and laid it carefully on the coffee table instead of sticking it in me herself. She came over to the couch and dropped to squat next to me on her hams.
“You’ll make it now; you weren’t a waste of my time,” she said. She cocked her head to the side. “But you want to know why I’m doing this. You’ve got to be wondering.”
I sat up, naked except for the sheet, which I wrapped around my waist. She had a silver necklace around her neck, and she tugged it out from where it hung between her ample brown breasts. A cross dangled at the end of it, glittering and flashing in the light.
Natalie turned and looked at the wall. A big wooden crucifix hung there with a piece of palm frond wrapped around it. On a table below was a statue of Madonna and Child, staring rapt at each other.
A mirror hung on the wall next to the crucifix. I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in it: a stump-chested pale old white boy with red hair, and one side of his face bound up in filthy bandages. My pecs were still as veiny and shredded as a thousand pushups a day carved them inside. But I’d lost a lot of weight; I was pretty haggard and gaunted up.
“I’m Catholic,” Natalie said. “I was raised to forgive all trespasses against me, and to love my enemies. God is the judge, not me.”
She studied her silver crucifix. “Revenge never fixed nothing, and it sure won’t bring back the dead.”
“But how am I to find forgiveness, Lord?” she asked that cross. “It’s hard; it’s not in me right now. Least ways, not for this one.”
She slipped the cross back between those magnificent breasts and looked at me again. “My brother has use for you, or I think you’d be dead right now. Maybe it would be a mortal sin, but I still could’ve borne the weight of it.”
I couldn’t think of any comeback. “Where’s your facilities?” I asked, not trusting myself to look at her.
Chapter 20
Once I had the bathroom door closed and locked I removed my bandages, looking down as I did so as not to see my reflection in the mirror. There was some hydrogen peroxide in the medicine chest, and poured it in the open wound as I leaned over the sink.
Whilst clutching the edge of the basin to brace against the startling pain, I saw the peroxide’s foam swirling down the drain tinged with streaks of yellow. I could feel and hear the peroxide fizzing and popping on and in my face as I kept pouring until the foam finally drained a steady pink.
I found a box of sanitary napkins and a roll of duct tape under the sink. Sanitary napkins made pretty good street dressings, sterile and absorbent: I remembered once back in Oakland, watching a guy use a tampon from his girlfriend’s purse to plug a sucking chest wound in his partner, sticking it into the bullet hole.
I took out the napkins and tape, forcing myself to look at the wound for as long as it took to cover it up. The napkin deodorant’s daisy fresh scent was a little overwhelming at first.
When I was done, I took a little longer to make sure nothing showed but the undamaged portion of my plug ugly mug. I’d never been the kind of guy who was always eying his own image in reflective surfaces, but I figured me and mirrors weren’t going to be on particularly friendly terms for a while, maybe for good.
I opened the bathroom door to find my clothes on the floor outside, clean and neatly folded. There were still stains on them pre-wash would never take out, and they were pretty ragged. It looked like I was trying to make some kind of goofy fashion statement.
When I came out Natalie took one look at me and snorted, and then laughter flowed joyously through her large shapely frame. But she quickly stopped, appearing guilty.
“You look like you have a patchwork quilt wrapped around your head,” she said, as if defensively. “That’s a very creative use of feminine hygiene products.”
I smiled as if I’d cracked a deliberate joke to make her laugh. I wasn’t too proud to be this beautiful young thing’s buffoon if she’d allow it.
Her gaze dropped to my raggedy clothes. “I almost gave you one of Wayne’s shirts to wear, but I thought that would be inappropriate.”
“What makes you think you’re a guest?” she asked. “Last I heard Big Moe hadn’t given you permission to go.”
There was a knock on the door. Natalie scowled and picked up the butcher knife from the coffee table as I took a wary step backward. Her hips rolled as she stepped to the door and put up the security chain before opening it a crack.
One of the crew I’d seen in my delirium stood there. “You got a smoke?” he asked Natalie – but he stared past her at me.
Natalie pulled her pack of cigarettes from her blouse pocket, put one in her mouth, and sparked it with her butane lighter. “Not for you, Leo,” she said, shutting the door in his face.
“Leo and Wayne were partners,” she said, catching my look. “He got Wayne into boosting car stereos, got him into doing drugs and staying out all night. Wayne was a big boy, but I think if it weren’t for Leo, my man would be here with me instead of on a slab at the coroner’s office.”
She sucked at her smoke, then held it between extended fingers with her palm up and exposed. “Wayne was never any good, but he was so pretty. I guess I always hoped he’d just want to be with me, and that we could just be happy together. Is that so much to ask of anyone?”
Natalie chuckled unpleasantly. “He always liked those action movies – you know, the kind where the hero beats up all the bad guys and saves everyone?”
She stubbed out her cigarette in a handy ashtray. “In the end Wayne got to star in his own movie, only he was the bad guy, and you were the good guy.” There might have been a note of irony in her voice, referring to me as good.
“Yeah, Wayne made his own bed to lie in all right,” she said. “And now I’m the one left to make my own choices, for me and my boy.”