Gods Go Begging (48 page)

“So now comes the big day. It’s the shortest day of the year, so the bank is still open when it’s dark outside. My boy had checked the calendar and chose this day for the auspicious lighting conditions. He has thought of everything. Following their master plan, he dropped his partner in front of the bank and took up his position around the block. His buddy puts on his generic, secondhand ski mask, pulls out his untraceable pistol, turns on his stolen walkie-talkie, then saunters into the bank. In a few minutes, just as planned, he screams into the walkie-talkie, ‘Come and get me, man. Come and get me.’

“Just as planned, my man jams on the gas pedal and starts his triumphal tour around the block. Now my man is grinning from ear to ear. This is going to be a walk in the park. My man is so confident in this score that he closes his eyes and counts out the stops and the turns just like he practiced.”

The table was buzzing. Now the key to the story had been placed in front of them. There it was: the incredible hubris of a four-time loser. The potential for irony was staggering.

“So now the gunman is running like a madman out of the bank, the alarm is ringing behind him. The wheelman is speed-shifting with his eyes shut. In his excited condition what he doesn’t realize is that he is moving at twice the speed of his practice runs. He makes the first turn all right only because the parking lot at that corner is empty. He runs over a few shrubs and a tricycle and steers that Oldsmobile right down the sidewalk toward the bank.”

“Oh, Christ,” moaned Jesse.

“My wheel man is dreaming about what he’s gonna do with all of that money. He’s dreaming about drinking wine from bottles that have corks; he’s dreaming about buying a whore who uses deodorant and has all of her teeth. He’s even thinking about an ocean voyage over to East Oakland.”

“He’s thinking big,” said Matt Gonzalez.

“On the seat next to him the walkie-talking is squawking, ‘Come and get me, come and get me,’ the bank alarm is getting louder and louder, there are sirens in the distance and frightened pedestrians on the sidewalk are diving left and right to avoid his speeding bumper.

“So my man arrives at the bank, throws open the door, and looks around but can’t see his partner anywhere. He gets on the walkie-talkie but there’s no response. Now he’s pissed. He thinks the bastard has run off with the take. So he steps out of the car and the moment his feet hit the pavement—
boom!
,
boom!
—a bullet slams through each ankle. Screaming in pain, he falls to the ground with his arms raised in the air. ‘I ain’t armed,’ he screams over and over before he realizes there ain’t no cops on the scene, not a single cop. There’s nobody around.”

No one at the table dared to breathe or even swallow their coffee as they waited impatiently for the arcane denouement that must certainly follow. Chris paused a long moment to make his friends suffer, then began once again.

“Here he is, lying on the ground, his ankles are bleeding profusely, the car is running, and my man thinks his double-crossing partner has made off with the take and shot him in the feet to keep him from following. As he’s lying there bleeding on the sidewalk, he begins to hear a faint whisper. He stops groaning a moment to listen and the whisper grows louder. Now he can just make out the words that are being repeated over and over again, ‘You stupid motherfucker.’ ”

Now the table of lawyers was alive with that tension and human energy that precedes unrestrained laughter.

“My man looks carefully around himself and suddenly realizes that his partner is right there next to him … lying just a few feet away.”

“Under the car …”Jesse’s head fell back in amazed disbelief.

“Under the car,” repeated Chris Gauger.

Now the entire table exploded with laughter.

“You mean to say,” said a breathless Matt Gonzalez, “that when the gunman exited the bank he was run over by the getaway car?”

Chris nodded in the affirmative. “Smashed by a daydreaming fool who was driving with his eyes shut.”

“The gunman was six feet from the door when he was hit. The car dragged him thirty feet. He was so pissed at the driver that he used his last ounce of strength to shoot him in the ankles. It seems that he had recognized the boots that they’d purchased for the robbery at a local navy surplus. There they were, lying in the street, their blood mixing to form a small lake, the ratpack of bills spewing red ink all over them. They see all of that ink and think they’re bleeding to death so they’re screaming like banshees. The guy under the car was still screaming, ‘Stupid motherfucker’ into his walkie-talkie when the police cars arrived.”

The human energy burst forth in waves of laughter, filling the corridors and hallways that communicated with the House of Toast. Never a laughter of ridicule, it was rather the laughter of sympathy, of frustration at the futility of crime at the street level, at curb level. It was laughter at the perfect robbery.

“My boy went to trial in his custom, motorized wheelchair. So did the codefendant. Those two wouldn’t even look at each other. They spent the entire trial trying to short out the other’s battery pack. They never spoke a word during the entire proceeding.”

“Where are they now?” asked Freya.

“They’re both in Folsom Prison now, campaigning righteously for wheelchair access to the mess hall.”

All of a sudden the smile on Jesse’s lips faded. At the entrance to the House of Toast stood Manny Valenzuela, the bailiff from his trial court. The bailiff signaled to Jesse, who rose from his seat just as the little gnat lifted off from the napkin. The jury had a verdict.

Calvin “Biscuit Boy” Thibault walked jauntily down Seventh Street, the Hall of Justice disappearing in the fog behind him. He was wearing a large smile and the new, used suit that his lawyer had purchased for him. It was a three-button, single-breasted Italian suit. This very morning he had bidden adieu to his time machine; he had rolled up the mattress and blankets of his jail bed and cast one long last look at the torn cocoon from which he had emerged. The entire jail had celebrated his release.

He turned up Mississippi Street and made the long climb up to Twentieth Street. At the corner he cast a short glance to his right and caught a glimpse of what was once the Amazon Luncheonette. The street was cast in full sunlight now, the darkness of that night somewhat dispelled. Someone had converted Persephone and Mai’s lovely building into a drab laundromat. His eyes did not linger there long.

Straight ahead was the hill that had once been his home. But now nothing about it was familiar to him. Now he saw with new eyes, eyes like a starlight scope, tuned to foreign spectrums. Now he saw what he had never seen before: roaming squads of fatherless boys, single mothers living on C-rations, marauding bands of tiny mercenaries proudly wearing their insignia of rank and assignment. On the side of the hill he saw the killing zone where four boys had gone down. Biscuit Boy gazed upon his own hill of birth and saw dimly what had once been his own impoverished life.

Calvin smiled to himself once more. What had his lawyer said to him so often? When desire is stripped of humanity? Now he saw the truth of it in every corner, cupboard, and crevice of Potrero Hill. Desire was there, leaking from the drainpipes and heading for the ocean untreated. Desire was leaping electrically down the wires that dangled from all the rusting antennas that clotted the rooftops. Desire was being pumped into gas tanks and rammed violently into the chambers of cheap weapons. Desire was being smoked in crack pipes and injected into the crooks of arms.

Humanity was hard to come by on this hill, but desire was everywhere. Calvin could never have suspected that naked desire was leering at him at that very moment from an apartment window on the hill. He could not have known that purest desire stripped of humanity was sizing him up, evaluating his strength, and moving into a position of strategic advantage.

High up on the hill there were old friends beckoning him back, welcoming him back to his old world. Biscuit could see their arms waving, their cell phones and guns glinting in the sun, but he turned his back to them. “Where are you goin‘, man,” they screamed at him. “You can’t make it out there, even in them new threads. Is you crazy?” they yelled. “Is you out you brain? Ain’t nothin’ out there but the enemy.”

His little brother Angelo the Pickle was up there, too, waving him away, telling him to never come back.

Duá bé giao bánh bích quy.
Biscuit Boy considered kickin’ back with the fellas, firing up a pipe full of crack cocaine, and tellin’ all the boys about his murder trial—about how he had walked scot-free. He glanced up toward the apartment of Princess Sabine. He knew she was at home. She was always home. A mental image of her naked body made him grin. She had shown her photos to every boy on the hill. He hesitated for a moment while Sabine’s face slowly dissolved into the face of beautiful Mai. Biscuit Boy raised his voice as he turned and walked away from it all.

“If that there library over in Alexandria, Egypt, was still around here today, there sure as shit could be plenty of homeboys on the moon,” he called out to his old friends as he walked down Missouri toward Eighteenth Street. “Brothers on the moon.” He imagined a golden BMW cruising the lunar surface, the woofers of a boom box flailing vainly in a vacuum.

Biscuit Boy never heard the bullet that sent him to the coroner’s office.

When the padre heard the gunshot, it was broad daylight. The sound of a high-velocity round snapped him out of his meditations. He immediately laced up his steel-arched jungle boots and bolted from his hooch. The ancient book that had been on his lap tumbled to the ground. Triangulating echoes, he ran as hard as he could toward the source of the sound.

He ran up Mississippi Street to Twentieth, and when he saw what waited for him there he let loose a cold howl of fathomless grief that could be heard by all on the hill. Every living human being on Potrero Hill was chilled to the marrow by the depth of sadness in the scream. Bones decomposing on the hill near Laos shivered in their root-bound graves when the cry reached them. Upon hearing the voice of a long lost son, the Mekong sloshed and swelled its recognition. Bodies buried in her silt trembled and rose surface-bound, as if anxious to hear the howl.

Lieutenant Calvert, Padre Carvajal, Mr. Homeless, Vô Dahn found the Biscuit Boy shivering spasmodically and spurting blood on the sidewalk, his arms still clutching the large manila envelope of personal items that all released prisoners are given. Just this morning the padre had witnessed the exaltation at Biscuit Boy’s acquittal on all charges. There had been joyous volleys of gunfire all over Potrero Hill. There had even been a celebration at the homeless encampment. Now, this afternoon, happiness had suddenly transformed into mourning. There was blood on the boy’s new secondhand suit. His face was filled with the look of helpless disbelief that the army chaplain had seen so often.

Strewn in a wide circle about Calvin’s body were paperback books and dog-eared pieces of notepaper. The paragraphs that he had written at his lawyer’s direction were bloodstained now, fluttering and tumbling off to join all the other windborne litter that was destined to embrace the gutter and curb. Calvin was bleeding profusely, breathing sporadically, and coughing up lumps of black bile onto the cement beneath his head.

The bullet had entered at his neck below the jaw and had exited just beneath the right ear. The sidewalk behind him had been splattered with cartilage and hair.

The chaplain knelt by Biscuit’s side. He had knelt just this way for the two beautiful women. He held Biscuit’s hand and bent down to brush his left ear with his lips.

“Ta là loì nói. Ta là dao.
I am the Word. I am the Way.”

He had begun to pray when he chanced to look up and see his own violent death coming for him. But the chaplain refused to budge—he refused to bend to terror or turn away from his flock as he had done so long ago. On this day he would stand fast and properly send the boy to meet the Father. As death advanced, he spoke aloud for all the hill to hear.

“God damn every deskbound colonel in Da Nang.”

The first round missed his head by inches as he made the sign of the cross on the boy’s forehead. The second round, just seconds later, entered at Vô Dahn’s back, entering near the bridge of a Sephardic violin.

Months before, on this same street, the padre had run from the bodies of Persephone and Mai, the fingers of his hands still wet with their blood, his face wrenched and distorted with agony. He had staggered down to the homeless encampment and crawled into his hooch, where he had sat davening and shivering for hours, bathed in yellow candlelight and clutching an ancient, earth-stained bag made of oiled lambskins. Just a few years ago he had returned to his ancestral home—the collapsing house on the pockmarked hill in Mexico—and unearthed his written inheritance. In recent months his songs in Ladino and Yiddish had brought tears to the eyes of his homeless comrades.

Sometime near dawn, after the police, the ambulance, and the medical examiners had left the scene at the Amazon Luncheonette, carrying with them the bodies of Persephone and Mai, the cantor had emerged from his hovel and walked quietly across the compound to the poorest of the hooches. In his right hand was the tallis he had removed from his ancient copy of the Torah.

The thick woven cloth had been pressed between those scrolls for ten generations. Kneeling down beside a sleeping Little Reggie Harp, he had wound the ends of the tallis around his palms and stretched it between his hands. Then after a short Southern Baptist prayer and a request for forgiveness in Yiddish, he had strangled the life from a yellow-eyed boy who had chosen not to struggle.

After Reggie’s shoes were removed from his feet, a black homeless veteran—a Marine corporal with enormous dreadlocks—had sung “Day Is Done” in a perfect tenor. The padre had thought fondly of skinny Cornelius as he listened while preparing a small monument to the dead boy. He had placed a metal crucifix in the left shoe. It had been removed from the body of one of Reggie’s victims just as the poor dying boy had breathed his last. The padre himself had pulled it from the boy’s neck.