Soon the Rest Will Fall (16 page)

There are angels in heaven and demons in hell. Men dance in madness on earth. With his last ounce of energy, Slatts unloaded a fusillade of right hooks and left upper-cuts, and artfully reorganized Dirt Man's mouth. Cut all his
knuckles doing it. The booty bandit capsized, holding onto a stool. He jettisoned an incisor, getting blood on his spiffy denim jacket. In Robert's opinion, it was time to split. While the bartender telephoned the cops, he hurried Slatts out the door.

In the pitch-dark street a blood-warm shower was coming down, the first rainfall in weeks. Thunder and lightning crackled in the bilious skies north of the city. The rain cascaded with reckless fury, beating down tempo on the heated sidewalks. The number 19 Polk bus skimmed by, splashing water on Robert's jeans. Car headlights were mirrored in pools of rain in the road. Too drunk to feel the lacerations on his head, Slatts yelped triumphantly at Robert, “You see what I did to that dude?”

Market Street was a no-man's-land of hookers and lonesome sidewalks at midnight. Half-built condominiums were skeletal in the rainy, red moonshine. Leafless trees did a drunken bolero in the wind. Winos clung to the doorway of the Donnelly Hotel. For rent signs cluttered the windows of long-abandoned storefronts. Since the cut-backs in bus services, hardly anyone went downtown after dark.

Under the Orpheum Theater's marquee a troop of homeless women and men had converted shopping carts, suitcases, clothes, tarps, and strips of cardboard into a shanty fort. Robert tarried at the intersection of Ninth and Market with the Mossberg shotgun under his jacket, studying the liquor store. Slatts was by his side, fiddling with the crude bandages on his head.

Robert was all business. “You down for this?”

Slatts hiccupped a bloody spitball. “Yeah, sure.”

“Okay. You go in the store first.”

“Then what?”

“You distract the clerk.”

“From doing what?”

“Whatever the fuck he's doing.”

“And then?”

“I'll take it from there. Any more questions?”

“Nope.”

The shotgun strained against Robert's jacket. “Let's go.” The shop's windows advertised ATM services, Lotto ticket sales, and groceries. Despite these attractions, there were no customers in the place. It was a retail graveyard. Petrified fruits and fossilized vegetables languished in a bin. A miniature vinyl Christmas tree adorned the cash register.

The proprietor was behind the counter dressed in a wide-lapelled brown tweed suit, white shirt with no tie. He was engrossed in a crossword puzzle. A radio in the back room coughed out James Brown's “Please, Please, Please.”

The surveillance sensors let off a shrill beep when Slatts streaked in the door. The shopkeeper looked up, surprised to see another human being in his establishment. It had been hours since the last one. He had no time to say anything. Not even to say hello, because another fellow had entered the premises.

Brandishing the Mossberg like it was a dowsing rod, Robert slipped in the doorway. His boots had no traction, and he started to fall. A billion things went through his head. How clumsy he was. How the strife between him and Harriet had caused his hairline to recede. At the last possible moment he recovered his balance with a ballerina's effortless grace and pointed the weapon at the merchant. “Open that fucking safe, will you?”

The demand befuddled the man. He'd have said it was a prank, but the gun made it serious. Pushing off from the counter, he clambered to the vault, brushed aside the
newspapers on it, and piddled with the combination. The lead-lined door opened merrily with a well-oiled click.

Slatts wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help. “Robert?”

“What is it?”

“You need me for something? I mean I'm just standing here doing nothing.”

“Just be quiet, will you?”

Robert flung the shopkeeper aside and stuck his nose in the vault. He'd been waiting for this. Been fantasizing about it at night. Armed robbery was a poor man's nirvana. What he saw gave him a hemorrhage. Except for a stack of expired food stamps, there was nothing in it. “What is this shit?” he asked.

The owner was matter-of-fact. “We never have any dough.”

In every criminal's career there is a flirtation with failure. The vocation demands it. Robert had been down that lane countless times. Was he a loser? Only god could judge him. He fixed the shotgun on a cardboard beer advertisement. It was a life-sized color shot of a young white woman at a Caribbean resort.

“We have to get the fuck out of here,” he said to Slatts.

The coast was clear. The two robbers booked from the liquor store. Slatts split away and evanesced to Larkin Street and the park in the Civic Center. Robert fit the shotgun under his jacket and slunk in the other direction toward Market and Seventh.

 

It was still drizzling. Fog crested the public library's roof. Sea gulls scattered over the UN Plaza. A tape loop of events replayed itself in Robert's head as he walked. Two
days ago he was on the bus to the soup kitchen at Hamilton Church in the Haight-Ashbury. A passenger had left behind a copy of the
San Francisco Chronicle
. He glommed the paper and turned to the obituaries section. At the top of the page was a photograph of one of the narcs that had collared him in Pacific Heights. In the picture the dead cop was smoking a cigarette.

That same night he and Harriet had finally had sex. It was at five in the morning, before sunrise. The dog barked in the bathroom. Rahsaan Roland Kirk's “Serenade to a Cuckoo” was on the stereo. As he made love with his wife, holding her tight, drinking in her hair and skin, caressing her soft tits, all he'd been able to think about was Slatts.

Lost in his recollections, he didn't see the two black-and-whites converging at Eighth and Market until it was too late. Another squad car skidded in front of the liquor store. A policeman in a white riot helmet jackknifed out of the cruiser and unholstered his service weapon. The shop's owner rambled outside to join him.

If Robert had known a prayer, he would've said it. Instead he backed up, hotfooted it onto the hood of a parked Ford station wagon, then sprang to the next auto at the curb, a late model Saab. Skinning his knees on the windshield, he leapfrogged to the street, dodging a taxi and a newspaper delivery truck, and bolted toward the Odd Fellows Temple and the Bargain Bee variety store.

Running to the corner, he glanced backward. Patrolmen were pursuing him; the closest one was fifty yards away. Without thinking, he pivoted and hurdled a wood fence into the Embassy Theater's lot. It wasn't a slick move—he collapsed in a lagoon of sidewalk garbage and sprained his ankle. He tried to get up and couldn't.

The moon was in between pillowy rain clouds. The street's lights were afire. The Strand Theater was a blackened silhouette. Doves cooed on the telephone wires. A kitty meowed from the lot. Robert propped himself up with the shotgun in a bed of orange rinds, apple cores, dog food cans, and computer parts, and waited for the cops.

Six policemen bustled up the street, ghostlike in the rain's pitter-patter. Robert gave them a dirty look. The wheel of anger in his gut turned. There were two ways to play it. Let the motherfuckers arrest him. Or get killed. He laughed into his collar because neither choice made sense.

A blitzkrieg of faces surged from the darkness to bedevil him. People he hadn't seen in ages. There was Stephen who took two bullets in the back at a telephone booth on Twenty-fourth Street, Victor who'd had a coronary watching a Giants ball game on television, and Vance who'd gotten his throat cut attempting to rob a burger stand in Hunters Point. Last were Jimmy and Donald, taken by AIDS.

He imagined himself back in San Quentin napping in the upper bunk of his cage, the air rich with marijuana smoke. Slatts was spooning him from behind, the thread-bare blankets in a noose around his neck, the teddy bear by his head. The guys in the cell next door had John Coltrane's “A Love Supreme” on the radio.

The picture melted into a fresco of the Trinity Plaza Apartments. He and his daughter were in the parking lot. She was in a poplin shift, a straw bonnet with ribbons on her head. He had on a leather biker vest. A blue jay landed on a fence post and sunned itself. Diana picked up a round stone and snuffled, “I want to kill it.” She pitched the rock at the jay, breaking its neck. The girl ran to Robert. He
swung her upward onto his shoulders. Her satiny cheeks were baked apples, warm against his unshaven face. “Bull's-eye,” he said.

Harriet came into his thoughts. She was at the Golden Gate Bridge in a spandex one-piece bathing suit. Her skin was unblemished, oiled with coconut cream and toast-brown from the sun. Her legs were shaved, sprigs of blonde pubic hair protruded from the swimwear. There was lipstick on her teeth when she smiled. “I love you, daddy.”

The rain performed its muted ballet, pissing silently on Market Street. The police hit the corner, and he gave them a blast from the Mossberg—coins of buckshot arced into the lightless intersection. The pavement was showered with gold, silver, and white sparks. The shotgun's heavy-duty recoil knocked Robert flat on his back.

Then the cops were on him. The smallest cop grappled with Robert's legs. Another patrolman seized his arms. The sergeant in charge whomped him with a baton in the ribcage. Somebody else drop-kicked Robert in the temple with a steel-toed riot boot, deploying the ex-con's head like it was a well-seasoned soccer ball. The largest officer kneeled on his stomach, hollering, “You're fucked, asshole! It's all over!” and handcuffed him.

Robert recited his catechism. He whispered it so that nobody could hear him. Everything was cool. Things would get better. Just not right now. He turned his face to the lights on Market Street.

The hunter's flight into the wilderness had begun.

The thermometer broke one hundred degrees in the nighttime's hush. While it rained, a power outage in Chinatown and Russian Hill browned thousands of households. An accident on Market Street—a head-on collision between the coroner's wagon and a limousine for hire—eliminated bus services from the Tenderloin to the Castro district.

The next morning, Diana waited patiently for Robert on her grandmother's stoop. She was in her church clothes. A starched white dress with beaded shoulders. Knit socks and little black booties. The old lady was in a long-sleeved wool smock. She sat in a lawn chair on the porch and fanned herself with a newspaper. “Your daddy is a liar,” she said. “That damn weasel ain't returning here for you.”

When the phone rang neither of them made a move to answer it. The horn dinged on and on. Finally the kid scooted indoors and grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”

Harriet's voice was labored. “Hi, precious.”

“Where are you, Mommy?”

“I'm in Oregon. This is about your dad.”

“Where is he?”

“I made a few calls to find out.”

“And what happened?”

“I got hold of his parole officer.”

“What did she say?”

“The police want him. He's not coming back, snoopy. He's going to jail.”

The slow jog of memory did its haunted dance for the girl. When Robert was in San Quentin one of his oldest friends in the Tenderloin had contracted spinal meningitis from shooting dope with a dirty spike. Harriet had tried to nurse the guy back to health. He had abscesses all over his body and died. Junkies broke into his pad on Pine Street and stole his belongings. Took his old photographs. Took the refrigerator. Her mother had tried to explain it in the same tone of voice she was using now.

Harriet was running wild at the mouth. “I'm staying in Portland and applying to schools up here. It's a friendly place with lots of trees. You'd love it. When I get some money, I'll send for you. We can have a picnic in the woods somewhere. Won't that be exciting?”

It was Christmas. Robert had broken his promise. Harriet was missing in action. Diana put the phone down, cutting off her mom in midsentence. Her grandma bellowed from outside. “Who the hell you talking to in there?”

She wasn't the priestess of family secrets anymore. “Nobody.”

Peter Plate, whom the
Review of Contemporary Fiction
calls “one of the most intriguing novelists writing now,” is a self-taught fiction writer. His eight novels include
One Foot off the Gutter
(1995),
Snitch Factory
(1997),
Police and Thieves
(1999),
Angels of Catastrophe
(2001), and
Fogtown
(2004), all published by Seven Stories Press. In 2004 Plate was named a Literary Laureate of San Francisco, where he lives.

Seven Stories Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City, with distribution throughout the United States, Canada, England, and Australia. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Octavia E. Butler, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Gary Null, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Our books appear in hardcover, paperback, pamphlet, and e-book formats, in English and in Spanish. We believe publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights wherever we can.

 

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