Given World (13 page)

Later some of the drivers gave him a hard time. “Isn’t she a little young for you?”

“I wasn’t hitting on her. I was helping her. Any of you assholes could have done the same.” They grumbled, walking away. Didn’t like being called assholes, but sometimes the truth hurt. And she wasn’t that young. And it’s not like he was so damn old.

Another time she got jumped in the alley coming to work. Gave up her wallet and still got kicked in the head. She was bleeding like crazy—the way head wounds do—when she got to the plant, but just wadded up a handful of newspaper and held it over the cut ’til it stopped bleeding. It wasn’t a really big cut—didn’t need stitches or anything, just a butterfly—but the bruise around it was pretty scary looking. This time a few of the drivers tried to talk her into going to the hospital, but she wouldn’t. She took some aspirin, and after a while started whistling, because most of the money she had on her was in her boot. She wouldn’t even call the cops.

“Five bucks,” she said, and shrugged. “He probably needed it more than I do.”

There were other incidents: cuts, more bruises, falls off the dock or a slick bumper; Frank thought maybe she was a little accident-prone—some people just were—but she’d always put her head down and go back for more.

Tracking her wasn’t easy. It’s not like she was either soft or hard, just . . . accepting, or something Frank didn’t have a word for. Zen. Maybe. Like a little monk, though he couldn’t see her liking the comparison, so he never said it out loud.

He could tell she liked working the dock okay, but what she loved was driving the big trucks, the bobtails. Back then you didn’t need your Class C, just a regular driver’s license and a right arm strong enough to shift the gears. On Sundays they’d send her out with the overflow: the bundles that wouldn’t fit in the small trucks. She’d take the ones for the Avenues to a bank on the corner of Geary and Arguello, stack them against the brick wall all nice and neat, then go trade extras for just-made, still-hot bagels and hand them out when the drivers came to pick up their loads. It was nice, like a little oasis in the middle of the night; a place to stop and catch your breath, to find you weren’t totally alone out there.

When Frank worked the Sunset, he’d see her truck sometimes—late, when she was done—at Ocean Beach or somewhere along Great Highway, the girl looking so small in the driver’s seat, forehead resting against the steering wheel, staring through it at the ocean while the sun rose behind her. Or not, since out there the sun didn’t always rise. Sometimes he’d stop and talk to her, but he learned to recognize a certain look that said probably best to leave her alone.

Not everyone was comfortable around her. They’d always been an all-boys club, and letting a girl in meant something had gone haywire, seriously. She took some grief from a handful of blabbermouths, and mostly rolled with it, but a couple of times she went off. The way it looked to Frank was the ones she went off on had it coming. Even when she wasn’t taking down some joker talking about her ass or whatever, she had a mouth on her that would surprise a fellow, for real. He was glad she never got mad at him.

There was one driver she got close to early on: Eddie, who everyone suspected and later found out for sure was gay. A fag, then. A homo. “Gay” wasn’t even a word yet, at least not one any of them had ever heard. Anyway, Frank would see them together a lot, and the thing he noticed was how often Eddie could make her laugh. It was nice to see, nice to know she could do that. Some of the guys referred to them as “the girls,” but Frank didn’t. Because he didn’t think it was all that funny.

One morning she and Frank were coming in at the same time after last call, driving side by side on Geary. It was a warm day already and they both had their doors slid open. She had her whole left leg out the driver’s side, her foot up on the side mirror bracket—a total gangster lean. A car pulled up next to her in the turn lane, and the guy driving yelled through his passenger window: “Is that a good job?”

“This is a
great
job,” she said. And she was smiling wide, bopping her head to some happy song inside it. She threw a paper to the guy through his window and took off waving when the light turned green.

After they got back to the plant and checked in, she and Frank walked out together.

Riley said, “You want to go get a beer? I know it’s kind of early, but—”

“Early? We just finished an eight-hour shift.”

They walked over to the M&M, drank a pint, ate some fries, and talked about the job, the clueless supervisors, the chance of rain on Sunday (rainy days were a pain in the butt). He asked her about Wyoming, and she looked puzzled for a second.

“Oh. You mean Montana.”

“Yeah, right. Montana, sorry.”

“It’s okay. Easy to confuse those places, I guess, if you’re not from there.”

She told him about the farm, the dog, her parents. “They’re pretty laid-back,” she said. “They’re really nice people.” She hesitated, gnawing at her lower lip. “I should probably write to them or call more often. I bet they worry about me, off in the big city. Especially my dad. You know how dads are.” For a second, she looked about twelve.

“Why did you leave?”

“It was time. I wanted to see the ocean something awful. I think I may have been a fish in a past life. Like a flounder. Both eyes on one side of my head.”

“That would be interesting,” he said. “Make it kind of hard to drive.”

She picked up a french fry and put it back down on the plate. Straight-faced, she nodded. “That’s true.”

It was easy for her to make him laugh.

He asked if she had more family, brothers or sisters. She made a movement with her head, but he couldn’t tell if it was a nod or a shake. She took a long drink of beer and said, “Have you ever seen a barn cat?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“Really? A guy from Texas?”

“Not a lot of barns in Dallas.”

“Oh. I see.”

She told him how they jump, springing into the air like grasshoppers, or those tiny African bush babies she’d seen once on TV.

“When you open the barn door,” she said, “it’s like the whole place comes alive. All these scrawny little cats climbing the walls or shooting straight in the air like bottle rockets.”

“Did they have names?”

“Yeah,” she said. “They still do, I bet. My dad names them all Slick or Slim. Or some variation, like Slick Britches or Slim Bob.”

“He can tell them apart?”

“Mostly. He’s like that. Pays attention to things he thinks need attention paid to.” She turned her head toward the window. Frank looked to see what she was seeing, but it was just another day on Howard Street: construction, double-parked cars, a guy passed out at the bus stop, still holding tight to an empty Colt 45 bottle. He figured she was probably missing home, which was perfectly natural. We all miss home sometimes.

She insisted on paying. “A shitload of overtime last week,” she said.

Eventually she had enough seniority to get her own home-delivery district, where she got to hire her own kids and teach them all the tricks she’d learned from Primo, and some new ones she’d taught herself. She ran a tight ship, and the kids did a good job for her. Later on, when she started calling in sick, hers was the best district to sub on, because you knew there wasn’t going to be any trouble. Just get the papers out to the corners, and the kids would do the rest. No complaints, no hassles, no showing up late or not at all. It was sweet; she kept it that way by treating them right, like adults, like human beings. And for a time it seemed like she’d found her spot, a place she could be contented, a place she felt like she knew what she was about.

She and Frank met regularly for coffee during work, helped each other with down routes, killed time together at random corners waiting for complaints or last call. Sometimes Eddie would join them; sometimes one or two of the other drivers. She said they should form a band, call themselves the Vampires.

Before too long, she was hanging around Frank’s apartment like she lived there, lying on the floor using Spot for a pillow; tooling around with the Martin (she knew a few chords, but got frustrated trying to make the changes); pulling books down off the shelf and asking Frank about poems, stories, certain words. She wanted to know what everything meant, and he tried to explain that most of the time there was no single meaning; a lot depended on who was trying to figure it out, and what they brought with them to the show.

“The show?”

“Yeah. The show. Life.”

She liked that. “The life show,” she said.

One time she asked him if he’d gone to Vietnam. She was playing his guitar, not looking at him; the question came out of nowhere.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t have to go. And they wouldn’t have let me even if I’d wanted to.”

She looked up. He read in her expression,
How does that work?

He tapped his chest. “My ticker. It’s a little bit broken.”

“Oh,” she said. And maybe it sounded like there was something in that small story she doubted, or didn’t like, or hadn’t wanted to hear, but he was probably hearing things himself, filtered through the unavoidable fact of all those other guys going and him staying behind. Probably.

It was something, in any case, they didn’t talk about anymore.

•  •  •

The wheels started coming off slowly at first. Since bad behavior at the paper was more common than not, and people rarely got fired for any of it, those wheels took their time. First Riley became something of a regular at Hanno’s, a bar in the alley behind the plant. She had a few new pals by then who were pretty good drinkers, and it didn’t take long before her car—this incredibly beat-up Mustang—would be out there from quitting time at eleven o’clock to three or four in the afternoon, and sometimes later. Much later. Like going-back-to-work time.

And there was a lot of coke filtering into and around the city; a lot of the drivers, including Riley, were snorting it pretty regular. Frank tried it, but he didn’t really enjoy it, and the hangovers were awful, jump-off-a-bridge depressing. He got some from her a few times before he realized he was trying too hard to like it. She wasn’t dealing, just sharing with a select few. Seemed like she bought in bulk, so she always had extra. Not pillowcases full or Colombian cartel lots, but plenty. The thing was, she was making pretty good money, like everyone else, and the only person she had to support was herself. And the hours didn’t help. If you wanted to stay up days and pretend you were normal (after a fashion), it helped to have a little bump, and coffee wasn’t going to do it. Aside from the illegality of it, and the cost, it could seem like a really good idea—assuming you could handle the aftermath.

Except then it got to be more habit than play, and she thought it would be even better to try balancing one high out with another, like Jim Beam with beer backs, pills, and other kinds of powder, and pretty soon she wasn’t coming to work, or she was coming to work still high. They looked the other way for a while because she’d always done such a good job, but then one night some new supervisor, thinking he’s going to butter some butts downtown, yanks her off her district at four in the morning and sends her over to S.F. General for a drug test. Game over. Goddamn it.

It’s not the seventies anymore, and Eddie’s boyfriend Lucas is one of the first to die from a disease they haven’t even decided on a name for yet, and Riley’s no help at all because she’s living out at Haight and Stanyan in a tent (because they towed her car and she can’t come up with the scratch to bail it out, to move back into it) with a bunch of vets who can’t seem to get their shit together (imagine), and she’s their mascot.

•  •  •

Frank knew he wasn’t the only one who was a little in love with her, and he was pretty damn sure he had about zero chance of ever being able to do anything about it. He saw how natural it was for her to gravitate toward damaged, and he wasn’t nearly enough of that. Not that he wasn’t a little wrecked—it sort of came with the territory—but not sufficiently. He never asked her out on a real date, brought her flowers, nothing like that. But he kept an eye on her after she got fired and started living out in Golden Gate Park. He’d go pick her up and take her to breakfast, trade papers for bagels and bring them to her and her crew. Those ’Nam guys didn’t like him much—him with his truck, job, clean-cut clothes and combed hair—but she’d give them a sign, some tilt of the head or sly smile at the corner of her mouth, to let them know he didn’t mean any harm and that he wasn’t going to steal her.

But he did. Not because of them, but just because. Because he couldn’t leave her out there.

He knew this bar, the Wild West End. It was up in Bernal Heights, off the beaten track, and he’d go there sometimes when he didn’t feel like seeing anyone he was already too familiar with. They had a garden out back and it was a nice place to unwind, to watch a football game, shoot some pool. It was a girl bar, more or less, but they’d let anyone in, and no one bothered him so long as he wasn’t an asshole, which he wasn’t. He got to know one of the bartenders, and one day she told him they were having a tough time covering all the shifts; she didn’t want to work more than she was already working, and did he know anyone who was looking for a job—someone who could put up with a little crap.

He brought Riley in—spent some time talking her into it—and her interview consisted of smoking a joint with the owner and the owner’s sidekick, this queen named Andy, in the ladies’ room, and after that the job was hers. Pretty soon it was like she’d been born there. They took her in like an Easter chick and it looked like she never looked back, at least not at the part about getting up to go to work just when everyone else was leaving the bars. He knew she had to miss it, though: the independence, the sunrises from the top of Jackson Street, the kids, the ocean, the balling it down the grade toward the Golden Gate Bridge on a deadhead run, scaring the crap out of tourists in their lane-wandering Winnebagos.

So he started picking her up when her late shifts ended, to ride with him, to keep him company, and she’d fold the papers and throw her side of the street, and he’d take her to breakfast when the sun came up, and when she let him kiss her a few times, he thought they were both in love. But they weren’t. But he was. And what she offered him in return went like this: