The Losers

“Maybe it’d be better that way.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Sam’s dyin’. He’s got the lung cancer. Y’know that?” “You told me. Let’s get you off the street, okay?” “I’m goin* someplace.” “Where?”

  Tobe thought about it. “I forget.” His face was almost purple, and his eyes were yellowish and puffed nearly shut. The stale wine reek of his breath was so sharp and acrid that it was close to being overpowering.

  “Why don’t we go over there and talk?” Raphael suggested, pointing at Tobe’s lawn. “Sure, ?l’ buddy.” They crossed the street.

  “They got ?l’ Sam so doped up he don’t even know what he’s sayin’ no more,” Tobe said. “You know, he even tol’ me he didn’t want me comin’ out to see ‘im no more. Can you imagine that?”

  “Those drugs can do funny things to you.” A sudden cold, sharp memory of the endless, foggy days in the hospital came back to Raphael as if it had been only yesterday.

  “That wasn’t ?l’ Sam talkin’.” Tobe stumbled over the curb.

  “That was all that dope he’s got in ‘im. ?l’ Sam, he wouldn’t say nothin’ like that to me, would he?” “Of course not.”

  “Poor ol’ Sam. Helluva damn thing, him dyin’ on me like this. We been together twenty years now, I ever tell you that?” “Once, I think.”

  “I’d rather lose a wife than lose my ol’ buddy like this.”

  “I’ve got to run. I’ve got a lot to do this afternoon. You think you can remember to stay out of the street?”

  “What the hell difference does it make?”

  “If the cops come by and catch you, they’ll call the wagon and haul you out to detox again.”

  “Can they do that?” Tobe looked frightened.

  “You bet your ass they can.”

  “That’s a terrible place out there.” Tobe shuddered.

  “Stay out of the street then, okay?”

  “Sure, buddy. Hey, if you wanna use my truck anytime, you just lemme know, okay?”

  “Sure, Tobe.” Raphael turned.

  Across the street Patch moved silently by, his face dark and mournful. At the corner he stopped and looked back at Raphael and Tobe.

  “Who is he?” Raphael asked. “Who?”

  “That fellow on the corner there.”

  Tobe squinted, swaying back and forth. “I don’t see nobody.” Raphael turned back quickly. The Indian was gone.

  “Anytime you wanna use my truck, you jus’ lemme know, ol’ buddy,” Tobe said. “Anytime at all. Night or day, don’t make no difference to me. You jus’ lemme know.”

  “Okay, Tobe. I’ll do that.” He crutched on across the street.

  “Anytime at all,” Tobe called after him.

  iv

  “Very well, Mr. Taylor,” Frankie said briskly. “This is just a periodic report. We need to know what kind of progress you’re making.” She was very businesslike, even abrupt.

  “Getting by,” he replied laconically, leaning his chair back and looking down at the street.

  “You know better than that, Raphael. I can’t just put ‘getting by’ in an official report.”

  “I’m getting better at repairing shoes, Francesca. It only takes me about fifteen minutes a pair now. Of course they pay me by the hour, so it doesn’t really make any difference. Put down ‘job satisfaction.’ That makes them pee their pants. The defective is so resigned to his lot that he even enjoys it. I see you’re still pissed off at me—about Jane Doe, I mean.”

  “You’re a stubborn, inconsiderate asshole, Raphael.” She waved her hands at him. It was a cliché, but Frankie couldn’t talk without waving her hands. “Your poor Jane Doe is going through a pregnancy without any prenatal care. Does that make you happy?”

  “You’re wrong, Francesca.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “I think I will. I like it. It’s a beautiful name. You’re still wrong, though. Jane Doe went back home. Her family’s taking care of her now—prenatal care, support, love—all the goodies, and no strings attached. I guess that means that I won, Francesca. I beat your system—again. I saved her from you. You’ll never be able to assign her a number, you’ll never be able to control her life, and you’ll never get your hands on her baby. She got away. It’s not much of a victory, but a man in my position has to take what he can get. I’m sort of proud of it, actually.”

  She stared at him, her huge soft eyes very wide and her lower lip trembling. Then with a wail she turned and fled.

  v

  On the first of September Raphael went in to work early again. His mailbox was still vulnerable, and although he had the best of intentions, he forgot each month to request the banks involved to make the transfer of funds automatic.

  It was very early. The streets of Spokane were quiet, and the morning sunlight was bright in the clear air. Later, of course, when the exhaust fumes began to collect, it would begin to grow murky.

  Denise let him in, speaking only briefly. Since that terrible evening they had, as if by mutual consent, limited their conversations to business or the weather or other totally neutral subjects. Frequently they passed each other in the store without even speaking. The other employees, those who had watched their growing friendship that summer, were convinced that they had had some kind of fight-—a lovers’ quarrel. At first, of course, neither had spoken to the other because of the lacerating embarrassment over the things they’d had to reveal to each other. Then, as time went on and their taciturnity had become habitual, they became embarrassed at the thought of breaking the pattern, of intruding upon each other. And so they were silent, each wishing that the other would speak first, and each afraid to say anything to break the long silence.

  Raphael went to his bench, switched on the light, and sat down. He turned on his machine and began to repair shoes. Always before he had rather liked coming to work. Now the job seemed suddenly tedious and boring. After a while of bending over the machine, his hip and back began to ache, and faint flickers of phantom pain began skittering like spiders up and down the thigh and knee of the leg that was no longer there.

  He kept at it doggedly. There were not that many shoes in the bin, and he wanted to finish them all before he left. They piled up quickly, since shoes are the kind of thing that everyone throws away, and to leave even one pair would mean that he would start his next day’s work in the hole. He began to take shortcuts, and some of the work was not entirely the sort that he took any pride in, but he managed to finish by nine.

  He signed out, nodded briefly to Denise, and left.

  As soon as he reached the street the depression that had settled on him and the vague ache that had begun in the missing leg vanished, and he felt good again. It was still early, and he drove to a small restaurant he knew and treated himself to breakfast. He was still puzzled by Frankie’s reaction when he had told her of the escape of the girl on the roof. Irritation or anger or another outburst of lyric Italian swearing he could have understood. Frankie was sometimes a bit volcanic, but tears? That was not at all like Frankie. He wondered how the girl on the roof was doing back in Metalline Falls. Then he sighed, got his crutches together, and left the restaurant.

  It was almost eleven by the time he got home, and his arrival only moments before the mailman came down the street earned him a savage scowl from a greasy-haired adolescent loitering on the corner.

  It was quite warm by the time he reached the roof, and so he sat in his chair on the roof watching the frenzy of Mother’s Day in the streets below. A car pulled up in front of the house where Heck’s Angels lived, and a man got out. He seemed tense, as if he had been working himself up to do something unpleasant. The man seemed familiar, and Raphael tried to remember where he had seen him before. Flood was sitting on the front porch with Marvin and Little Hider as the man came up the walk. “I’d like to speak with Mrs. Collins.”

  “She ain’t here,” Marvin said flatly. “When do you expect her back?” “Beats me.”

  “Lo
ok, friend,” the tense man said, “I don’t have time for the kind of games you people like to play. I told her last week that today was the deadline. Now, either she comes up with the back rent by midnight tonight, or you’re going to have to move out—all of you.”

  Little Hitler stood up and swaggered down the steps. “And what if we don’t?” he demanded.

  “Then I’ll put you out.” The tense man’s voice tightened even more.

  “Now that I’d like to see,” Little Hider said. “Hey, Marv, did you hear that? This shithead says he’s gonna put us out. You, me, Jimmy, Heintz, Jake—all of us. All by himself he’s gonna fuckin’ put us out.”

  “Maybe he’d like to start right now,” Marvin said, also coming down the stain. “Maybe he’d like to try to put you and me out.”

  “I won’t be the one who’ll be moving you out,” the man on the walk told them. “That’s what the sheriff gets paid for.”

  “Too chickenshit to do it yourself, huh?” Little Hider sneered. “Gotta run to the fuckin’ pigs.”

  “Friend, I’m too busy to be bothered with all this happy horse-shit. You tell Mrs. Collins to get that money to me by tonight, or I’ll go to the sheriff tomorrow. That’s it.”

  Flood ambled to the front of the porch and stood leaning against one of the pillars. “I don’t think you can do that without due process, sport,” he said pleasantly.

  “Watch me, sport. I’ve been in this business for fifteen years, and I’ve bounced a hundred of you welfare bums out of one house or another. Believe me, I know exactly how it’s done—who to see and which papers to have signed. If I say you’re going to move, you might as well start packing, because you are going to move.”

  “Who you callin’ a bum,” Little Hider demanded hotly.

  The man on the walk looked him up and down. “Are you working, boy?”

  “None of your fuckin’ business.”

  “That’s what I figured. I won’t apologize then. You just tell Mrs. Collins what I said.” “And what if we don’t?”

  “You’re making me tired, boy. You can tell her or not—it doesn’t make diddly-squat to me—but if I don’t get that money by tonight, I go to the sheriff tomorrow, and you’ll be in the street by the end of the week.” He turned and went back to his car.

  “Chickenshit bastard,” Little Hider called after him.

  The man at the car looked at him for a moment, then got in and drove off.

  “Why didn’t you take ‘im?” Marvin asked Little Hitler. “Shit!” Little Hider stomped back up onto the porch. “The tucker had a piece.”

  “Oh?” Flood said. “I didn’t see it.”

  “You can take my word for it. All them fuckers carry a piece when they come down here. You seen ‘im, didn’t you, Jake? I mean, he stood right up to us. There was three of us, an’ he didn’t back down an inch. Take my word for it, the fucker had a piece.”

  Big Heintz roared up, his motorcycle popping and sputtering. “Where’s the girls?” he demanded. “I need some bread. This hog’s gotta go into the shop.”

  “They’re out buyin’ groceries,” Marvin replied, “an’ we got a problem. Powell was just here, an’ he says we gotta pay ‘im the back rent or he’s gonna call the sheriff—have us evicted.”

  “Fuck ‘im. My bike’s gotta go in the shop.”

  “He means it,” Little Hider warned. “We ain’t gonna be able to put ‘im off no more.”

  “Fuck ‘im. There was three of you. Why didn’t you take ‘im?”

  “The fucker had a piece,” Little Hider said without much conviction. “You can take my word for it, the fucker had a piece.”

  Heintz grunted. “How much does he want?” He went up onto the porch.

  “All of it, man,” Marvin replied. “Every fuckin’ nickel.”

  “Bullshit! That’d flat wipe us out for the whole month, an’ my bike’s gotta go in the shop. The bastard’s gonna have to wait. We’ll give ‘im a few bucks and put ‘im off till next month.”

  Flood looked at the big man. “I don’t think it’ll work, Heintzie. I think the man’s made up his mind. If you don’t settle up with him, he’ll call in the pigs and you’ll be picking deputy sheriffs out of your hair for a solid week.”

  “Fuck ‘im,” Heintz bunt out with a worried frown on his face. “My bike’s gotta go in the shop.”

  “Christ, man,” Marvin said. “We sure as shit don’t want no cops pokin’ around in the house there. We got coke in there, man. We could lose our whole goddamn stash.”

  Jimmy’s battered car came squealing around the corner, made a sharp right, and drove up onto the lawn. “I seen ‘em,” he said breathlessly, getting out. “I seen the motherfuckers.”

  “Who?” Heintz demanded.

  “The fuckin’ Dragons. They’re camped out down in People’s Park. Must be thirty or forty of the bastards down there. Bikes all over the fuckin’ place.”

  “I knew the bastards hadn’t left,” Heintz exulted.

  “What are we gonna do?” Marvin asked, his voice also excited.

  “We’re gonna pass the word. Get hold of Leon. All the guys stop by that gas station of his, an’ he can get the word out. Tell ‘em we’ll all get together tomorrow night in that big field out toward Newport where we had the party last month. We’ll put this thing together, and then we’ll fuckin’ move, man. We’ll waste them fuckin’ Dragons once and for all, man—I mean once and for fuckin’ all.”

  “You want just our guys, Heintz?” Jimmy demanded breathlessly.

  “Yeah. No, wait a minute. Have ‘im pass the word to Occult, too. Them guys got a hard-on for the Dragons same as us. With us and Occult, we oughta be able to raise sixty, seventy guys. We’ll flat waste them fuckin’ Dragons. They won’t never come back to fuckin’ Spokane after we get done with ‘em.”

  “What about Powell?” Marvin asked him.

  “Fuck Powell! We ain’t got no time to mess with that shithead now. We got a fuckin’ war on our hands. Crank up your ass, Jimmy. Get to Leon an’ pass the word.”

  “Yeah!” Jimmy dived back into his car.

  Like some general marshaling his troops, Big Heintz began barking orden. Marvin and Little Hider scurried away on errands, and Heintz stood spread-legged on the porch, his chest expanded and his beefy arms crossed. “War, Jake,” he said, savoring the word. “It’s gonna be a fuckin’ war. We’re gonna cream them fuckin’ Dragons once and for fuckin’ all.”

  “ ‘Seek out the enemy and destroy him,’ “ Flood quoted.

  “What?”

  “Von Clausewitz on war,” Flood explained. “That’s what it’s all about.”

  “Yeah,” Big Heintz growled enthusiastically. “Seek and destroy. Seek and fuckin’ destroy. I like that kinda shit, don’t you?” “It’s got a nice ring to it.” Flood grinned tightly. “You comin’ tomorrow night?”

  “I might tag along. I think the Dragons still owe me for a few broken ribs, and I always collect what people owe me.”

  “That’s the stuff.” Heintz slapped Flood’s shoulder.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow then.” Flood walked down onto the street in the bright glare of noon. His shoulders were braced, and there was a slight swagger to his walk.

  A couple of minutes later he came up onto Raphael’s rooftop.

  “Well, well,” Raphael said dryly, “if it isn’t the newest recruit in Big Heintzie’s limp-brained little army.”

  “You were listening,” Flood accused.

  “Obviously. You’re not seriously going to participate in this shindig, are you?”

  “Only as an observer, Angel.” Flood laughed. You’re the physical one in this little group. I do anticipate a certain satisfaction out of watching the punks who kicked in my ribs get theirs, however.”

  “That’s stupid. Either you’re going to get yourself arrested, or you’re going to get the crap stomped out of you again.”

  Flood leaned over the rail to look down at the street. “Not this time, Angel,” h
e said in a quiet voice.

  Raphael looked at him sharply. Almost casually Flood raised the back of his jacket to let his friend see the polished black butt of an automatic pistol protruding from his waistband at the back.

  “Have you completely lost your mind? If you get picked up with that thing, they’ll put you away forever.”

  “I’m not going to get picked up with it, Raphael. I’ve been carrying it for several weeks now, and nobody even notices that it’s there.”

  “You wouldn’t actually use it.”

  “Oh?” Flood replied in that same calm voice. “It holds fifteen, Raphael. That gives me plenty of time to make up my mind, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You’re starting to sound just like those morons up the block. Get rid of that goddamn thing.”

  “I don’t think so.” Flood’s eyes were flat.

  Raphael stared at him and suddenly realized that he had not really been looking at Flood lately, but rather at some remembered image. Certain subtle changes had taken place sometime in the last month or so—a tightening around the lips, a kind of agate-hard compulsion to violence in the eyes, an expression that seemed to imply that Flood had somehow been pushed into a corner and would explode at the next nudge—no matter what the consequences. It was, Raphael realized, the look of the loser.

  It was a certainty now. Flood was gone. The street had claimed him.

  vi

  After Flood left, Raphael sat staring sourly down into the teeming street. The Mother’s Day hysteria was upon the losers. The children ran shrieking up and down the sidewalks, and the men who lived off the women and their welfare checks brushed up on their technique for wheedling just a few extra dollars.

  Raphael had always been able to watch this monthly outburst objectively before, even with a certain amusement, but today he found it all enormously irritating. He realized quite suddenly that he was totally alone now—even more alone than he had been before Flood’s arrival last spring.

  “District One,” the scanner said. “One. Go ahead.”

  “We have a report of a possible suicide attempt on the east side of the Monroe Street Bridge.” “Is the subject still there?”