Dirty in Cashmere (10 page)

 

FORTY

On Tuesday at dawn air raid sirens blared from Noe Valley to Chinatown. Exercising his office's powers, Lackner had ordered the evacuation of the Tenderloin—with approval from the feds. The neighborhood was emptying with a steady line of vehicles snaking west on Lombard Street to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Among the evacuees were Rita and 2-Time. They were in the last row of the early morning Greyhound bus bound to Fort Bragg in Mendocino County. Unluckily, due to extreme traffic, the bus had been stuck on the bridge for an hour.

2-Time rearranged himself in his seat. He smoothed the
San Francisco
Chronicle
newspaper in his lap. An article in the business section held his attention:

DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICIAL ATTEMPTS SUICIDE.

The story reported Branch, despondent over recent financial setbacks, coupled with an inability to pay his mortgage, had overdosed on alcohol and cold tablets. He was in critical condition at General Hospital.

2-Time relaxed, ignoring the bus restroom's Lysol odor. His broken legs ached, but the pain was bearable, thanks to the river of Percocet in his bloodstream. He stared out a window. Coit Tower and the Bank of America building were stapled against the tan sky. Navy helicopters flew above Alcatraz Island. The Fukushima waste mass was serenely cruising toward Berkeley, a northwesterly wind molesting the incoming waste, plastic containers inscribed with Japanese script bobbing in the shoals.

2-Time pondered over recent events, assembling all the bits of hearsay that'd come his way since the previous day. Doolan had been found unconscious in his Russian Hill condo, his face blanketed with lesions. At a UCSF clinic surgeons performed an emergency tracheotomy on him and removed a malignant growth from his esophagus, but he'd died on the operating table.

Heller was recuperating in a convalescent home in Palm Springs near his retired parents. His used car lot had been left abandoned, in lieu of unpaid back taxes.

2-Time and Rita's landlord had taken possession of Eternal Gratitude and was leasing the property to Chinese investors who planned to revamp the space into a restaurant. Then the Honduran cartel that Heller and 2-Time had jacked put out a contract to snuff them. Then there was Bellamy. The big hero with a cushy job as an Emergency Management consultant.

“Hey, folks,” the bus driver's voice crackled over the intercom, “traffic is slacking off. We're moving.”

The Greyhound coach inched forward.

2-Time elbowed Rita, wanting company. “You know what I think?”

Drowsily, Rita turned in her seat to face him. “What's that?” She wanted to sleep for a thousand years. But it wasn't possible with 2-Time at her side. He was a burglar and her peace of mind was a house he broke into whenever it pleased him.

“Ricky Bellamy is one screwed up kid.”

“That's because he really is an oracle. Don't you understand anything? He was put on this planet to absorb the ugliness in life so the rest of us could live in harmony.”

“He's an asshole. Isn't it strange how things worked out? Look at us. We're broke ass refugees on the run. Messing with him was a stupid mistake.”

“It wasn't wrong.”

“The fuck it wasn't. He tore our lives apart. He caused living hell. Nobody needs that crap.”

“Ricky has a unique talent. We should be thankful for it.”

“That's bullshit, Rita. Total bullshit. He has an illness.”

All of a sudden 2-Time saw me walking down the bus aisle toward him. With each step, the Zegna's ragged hem flapped around my kneecaps. My mouth was set in a petulant moue.

“2-Time! You owe me money!”

“Fuck, dude! I don't owe you a thing!”

2-Time's mind, addled by Life, was playing tricks on him. I wasn't there, nobody was, only the piled up memories of the preceding days, the easy moments and hard moments in 2-Time's benighted life.

 

FORTY-ONE

The Fukushima waste mass made landfall in Berkeley, right by the interstate freeway. Drivers could see it from the road. Witnesses said they smelled it from a mile away. The Highway Patrol was rerouting traffic south toward Fremont.

I got to the Emergency Management Center's command post on Tuesday evening, a half hour past my appointed time. Lackner met me in the doorway, his gray face seamed with rage. He raised a hand, index finger pointed at my head.

“You're a fucking fraud, Bellamy. You said more airborne contamination was gonna strike today. Then it didn't. Do you know how many millions of dollars we lost on this fiasco?”

He should've been happy there was no more contamination. But what did I expect? I let people boss me around, and when things got funky, as they inevitably did, I danced in limbo.

“C'mon, man, relax.”

“You fucked up very badly. You're fired.”

“For what?”

“Criminal malfeasance.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you're going to jail.”

“Am I getting any severance pay?”

“No.”

My self-esteem was shattered. The one skill I had was gone again. Like Heller once said, I was a failed oracle. This was the moment I had been waiting for, the punctuation to my shitty life. It didn't matter that I used to see the future. I was a has-been. My name had become a lesion. I wasn't going to Jerusalem.

Lackner shrilled into his intercom, “I want security personnel up here. On the double.”

That was my cue. I cut and ran into the corridor, my sore leg following my good one. I cantered down a staircase to the ground floor lobby and then out the main entrance. I hauled ass to the corner of Turk and Laguna, new condominiums in front of me, the Page Street projects on my right, and hightailed it to the closest bus stop on Market Street.

Three hours later I got to Guadalupe Terrace. The Hondurans' bungalow was sectioned off from the lane by yellow crime scene tape. The bungalow's chimney, the only part of it standing, was girdled by burnt redwood beams, hydro lamps, charred pipes, and wiring.

At Spike's house the porch was bare. The sofa and chairs were gone. The outside walls had been repainted primer white. The broken windows had new panes of glass. The garbage was swept up and stashed in plastic bags, two rows of them by the front steps. A “for sale” sign was planted in the lawn.

Spike had been evicted.

I wished I was young again with no bullet in my head. I drew my coat around me, but I could find no solace in the cashmere's pungent familiarity, my sad and sorry magic cape. In utter misery, I fell to my knees and howled until my throat was raw and all the sorrow in the world was squeezed out of my heart. Shadows swarmed around me, shadows that hardened into death's saccharine white light. I saw the last time I took a tab of Life, the chalky double-barreled pill dissolving on my tongue, the head rush hitting seconds later, inducing a nosebleed, killing the contamination in me. I saw the afternoons at Branch's house, when Doolan went to the Kaiser hospital on Geary Boulevard to re-up his morphine prescription. Branch was drinking port at his office desk, saying: “I fucked up.”

And then I fainted. From the Hunters Point shipyard to Islais Creek Channel, to the downtown skyscrapers and the North Beach cafes, over Grace Cathedral and south to Mission Dolores, the Fillmore and Haight-Ashbury, the city looked at me, but all I saw was the white light.

 

FORTY-TWO

I regained consciousness moments later to find four masked cops in blue overalls and shiny riot boots unceremoniously pulling me to my feet. I was hoarse with fear.

“What are you doing?”

“You're under arrest.”

“Say what?”

“Trespassing on private property.”

If I let myself get cuffed and stuffed into the paddy wagon sitting by the mouth of Guadalupe Terrace, they'd find out who I was and I wouldn't go to the city prison at 850 Bryant. I'd be transported to General Hospital and Dr. Hess. So I took off running, shouldering past an officer, bowling aside the others. Clutching my coat, I chugged up the lane, putting one foot in front of the other, pumping my arms, twisting my ankle in a mole hole.

My ability to see the future had been a stage where Heller and 2-Time, Branch, Doolan, and Lackner plotted and dreamed of ambitions bigger than themselves. Failure punctuated everything. From somewhere in my head, 2-Time hectored me: “What did you expect? A party? You didn't see this coming, did you? Fucking dumb ass. You're stupider than ever. You never knew what you were doing. Look at you.”

The cops opened fire, getting off a sparse, diffident volley, muffled in the contaminated air. The first bullet clipped my neck, spinning me in circles. Then a fusillade riddled my back, three more slugs driving home into my lungs, blood dappling the Zegna.

My last thought was a magnificent sunset of recognition.

The magic cape wasn't bulletproof.

The rain had softened the ground under me and with the ardor of a remorseful lover hours late for a hot date, it cracked open, riving a fissure in the earth—I plummeted into a hungry sinkhole.

A black cowl enveloped me as I tumbled downward. I was falling with the speed of death. Soon enough, I saw the very thing I feared most. In single file my mom and dad and my dog Butch approached me. My parents had smiles on their faces. Butch did, too. I did not smile. I started to scream, and as far as I know, I'm still screaming.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Plate taught himself to write fiction while squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of many books, including his eight neo-noir “psychic histories” of SanFrancisco.