South of Broad (33 page)

“Who told you that?” Bunny’s paranoia is gaining speed at a breathtaking rate.

“We just need a number for our records,” Molly says, writing down every word he speaks. I take a measure of the man from my reclining position on the street, and I think it likely that he can kill Niles, Ike, and me with ease and without breaking a sweat. He exudes a dreadfulness and the fragrance of an evil that seems to come naturally to him. I fear for the lives of our two women.

“Are you familiar with Operation Open Hand?” Sheba uses a voice that is affectless and untheatrical. “They think you’re taking care of some gay men. They’re very grateful to you, but wondered if you might need help feeding them.”

“I hate faggots, and I live alone here,” Bunny says. “Now, you two broads, make like nice cunts and continue on your way. For your information, we never had this conversation, and you never saw me. What are those two eggplants looking at?”

He shields his eyes from the sun with a hand the size of a dinner plate as he stares across the street. Ike and Betty stare back. I cannot tell if their fearlessness is something you learn to fake as a cop, or something natural that runs deep in their characters.

“Tell Open Hand that I hope every fag in the world dies of AIDS. Tell your fucking bishop that I hope he dies of AIDS.”

“Have you ever been a practicing Roman Catholic, Mr. Buncombe?” Molly asks.

Then, from somewhere deep in the rear of the house, we find the proof we finally need that Trevor Poe is alive, even if he is not well. We hear the sound of a piano playing, and it is not the beauty or the flawless artistry Trevor brings to the task of his deft musicianship that tells us we have come to the right place. He is giving us a sign that he knows we are there by playing a song that he made a centerpiece in all of our lives. Deep inside that decadent, deflowered Victorian house, the secret piano plays an old song, “Lili Marlene.” I see Niles sit up in recognition, and I watch the subtle changes in the expressions of Ike and Betty as they stand fast in their sentinel-in-the-night poses across the street.

“Why, Bunny,” Sheba cries. “You must own a player piano. Since you live alone, and all that.”

“Shut that fucking piano up,” Bunny yells back into the house, directing his voice up the stairs. “How’d you know people call me Bunny?”

“Everybody on the street calls you Bunny,” she says.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Buncombe,” Molly says. “Both the bishop and the ladies’ auxiliary thank you for your time.”

The two women walk down the stairs, then go across the street and into the sandwich shop, passing by Ike and Betty, who are heading straight for a confrontation with Bunny. Niles and I limp our way into the Delmonico Hotel. Niles lays a fifty-dollar bill in front of the guy at the front desk.

“We’re going back to South Carolina tomorrow,” I say. “We wanted to say good-bye to some of the guys again.”

“For fifty bucks, you can say good-bye to the whole city, for all I care,” he says, kissing the money with overdone affection. Niles and I race up the first landing of stairs. Niles takes the stairs two at a time, sometimes three. When we reach the top floor, the door to the rooftop is locked, but the door breaks into three sections when Niles throws his shoulder into it. He reaches into his bag and arms himself with a hunting knife the size of a rhino’s tusk, then he hands me a tire iron. We sprint across the rooftops until we are directly across the street from the sandwich shop. Sheba comes out of the store flashing a thumbs-up sign, and we hear Bunny screaming at Ike and Betty. Ike is screaming back, and that does not augur well for Bunny.

Niles says to me, “I’m going down to get Trevor. Then I’m going to bring him back upstairs, out onto the roof, and take him over to the Delmonico and down to the street. If Bunny comes up the stairs, you’ve got to give me some time to get Trevor out of there. You hear me, Toad? You’ve got to hold him off. If you have to use that tire iron, don’t hold back. Hit him in the face. He may weigh four hundred pounds, but his jawbone’s breakable just like anyone else’s. Can you believe how smart Trevor is? ‘Lili Marlene’!”

“It was like he wrote his name in the air,” I say, still moved by the sound of the song. All teenagers develop a list of those totemic, signature songs that define their coming of age, but this was a bit different: the World War II song made famous by Marlene Dietrich became the clarifying song of our group because of the arrival of the Poe twins into our lives. As a team, Trevor and Sheba entered a talent show in the first month of school, and their winning performance of a song we’d never heard, “Lili Marlene,” was the talk of the town for weeks.

There is a cheap, flimsy door leading into Bunny’s house. Niles grabs the tire iron from me, demolishes the door handle with a single swipe, then kicks the door in. But the noise is loud, and Bunny’s profane yelling at Ike ceases in an instant. I hear Ike yell even louder to cover our illicit entrance: “I’m going to have to call me all kinds of cops, Bunny. I’m going to have cops crawling all over your house, you fat blimp.”

“Hurry,” Niles says to me. “We’ve got to get to the third floor before Bunny does.”

Niles sprints down the stairs at a pace I can barely keep up with, but my adrenal glands are pumping away as the pure terror of our situation begins to overwhelm me. The lawlessness of our actions hits me as an afterthought as I see Niles throwing his shoulder against a blue door on the third floor. When the shoulder fails to achieve the desired result, he kicks the door in, splintering its hinges, then he races inside. He lifts a skeletal figure into his arms like a child, and I hear him say, “I told you that sucking dicks would get you into trouble, Trevor Poe.”

“My hero” is the response I hear. Though it does not look like Trevor Poe, I would know that voice anywhere in the world. Then I hear heavy footsteps lumbering up the stairs.

“Hold him off, Toad,” Niles says as he races past me.

I take my position at the top of the stairs. When Bunny starts up to the third floor, I pray to the Old Testament God who gave David the strength to slay the giant Philistine, Goliath. I pray for the strength granted to blind Samson when he brought the temple down on the heads of Delilah and her cohorts.

When Bunny lifts his eyes and sees me, he says, “You are a dead man, motherfucker. Who the fuck are you?”

The ex-Raider is coming at me one step at a time, but with caution: I am wielding the tire iron like I know what I am doing. My answer surprises me. I scream back: “I am Horatio at the Bridge, you fat son of a bitch. And you, pal, shall not pass.”

“You are one crazy bastard,” Bunny says, still advancing. “Who are you?”

“Horatio at the Bridge,” I yell again. I have not thought about that lost, elemental fragment of my childhood for years. When I was a young boy, my father used to read poetry to his sons before we went to sleep. Steve became enamored with “Horatio at the Bridge” by Thomas Babington Macaulay, and he and I memorized parts of it. A stanza comes back to me as I face this gargantuan man inching up the stairs. I scream the stanzas and stop him on the middle stair. I appear deranged as I spit out poetry to him in that shameful house full of dying men. From the corner of my eye, I see several of them stagger out of their rooms to witness our drama playing out. I begin to recite maniacally:

Then out spoke brave Horatio,
The Captain of the gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods.”

I wish I had memorized more of the poem, but it makes little difference because that is when Bunny makes his charge. His mistake is trying to take my feet out from under me with his massive arms, which exposes his face, and I hit his right cheekbone with a short, deadly flick of the wrist. The tire iron rips into his face with a savagery that surprises us both. He stumbles backward, breaking his fall by catching onto the banister, which collapses under his weight. He falls into the stairwell, the right side of his face covered with blood.

That is all Horatio sees, because Horatio has begun some serious ass-hauling. It startles me how fast I can run when I think a four-hundred-pound killer is in pursuit. I can hear the sirens of police cars bearing down on the Tenderloin from points far and wide. Flying down the stairs of the Delmonico, I feel like something winged and fleet and uncatchable. Murray is waiting for me, and I leap into a door that Molly holds open. When the door closes, the driver steps hard on the gas, and we shoot away from the Delmonico and head for a hospital on California Street that Sheba has already alerted about Trevor’s imminent arrival. Niles holds Trevor in his arms, wrapped in a warm blanket. Sobbing, Sheba holds her brother’s hand. I hug him and kiss his cheek, too spent to speak.

“Did I hear you reciting poetry to Bunny?” Niles asks.

“Shut up, Niles,” I say, trembling all over.

“You’ve always been weird, Toad,” Niles says. “But reciting poetry to a psychopath …”

“I won’t let you say a discouraging word to Leopold Bloom King, the only one of us to be named after a fictional character in an unreadable novel,” Trevor says weakly.

“Shut up, Trevor,” I say hoarsely, getting my voice back. “I just hit a man with a tire iron. I’m a respected columnist for a decent newspaper, and I just hit a psycho with a tire iron. I could end up in prison being butt-fucked by weight lifters.”

Trevor says, “Sounds like heaven to me.”

Sheba laughs. “Some things never change.”

“I’ve missed your depraved wit, Trevor,” I say. “This has been terrible.”

“We’ll be back in Charleston tomorrow, Trevor,” Molly says. “We’re going to take care of you. We’re taking you home.”

O
n our last night in the city of San Francisco, we gather late in the Redwood Room in the Clift Hotel to perform the sacrificial rituals to mark our final hours as Californians. For more than two weeks our souls have belonged to and suffered in the most golden city in the most myth-intoxicated and most improbable of states, the one that shoulders an entire continent against the tides of the Pacific Ocean. The Redwood Room is always the final stop that Trevor insists upon as a last rite of passage when any guest of his leaves San Francisco to live out their sullen and lesser lives in duller towns.

I am the first of our group to arrive at the Redwood Room, dressed in my best clothes according to the strict laws of protocol Trevor Poe had once cut in stone about leave-taking from the great city. Tonight, we will all assemble in this place of farewell as though nothing has changed. But we did not make this trip for pleasure the way we always did when we came to visit Trevor. This time we came to see if we could still love in the simplicity that gathered our fates together as teenagers, to measure ourselves against the innocence of those kids who once found themselves caged by time in the same soft prison cell in Charleston. When we leave San Francisco tomorrow, we won’t be leaving a city recognizable to Trevor, nor will we look back on the way to the airport. Trevor’s city of gold and laughter has turned into our city of the voices and terrified eyes of lovely men who await a firing squad that lacks rifles or an appointed hour. Tomorrow, we leave behind those desperate eyes, which changed everything about us.

Someone kisses me lightly on the lips, then takes a seat beside me. By the faint scent of Chanel No. 5, I know it is Molly before I open my eyes.

“Just got the word. Trevor’s pretty good for all he’s been through,” she tells me.

“Wonderful,” I say, and concentrate on my drink.

Molly and I have still not spoken privately since that blissful night she came to my bed; we’ve been too caught up in the desperate search for Trevor. But even now that we have him, there is still hesitancy between us, more on her part than mine. We have not talked about it, and I do not know if the bafflement is due to second thoughts, or because she has decided she loves Chad after all, or because Fraser so publicly revealed our secret. I do not know and do not ask; I am too terrified of her answer.

For the night, it is enough that we have Trevor, and we sit there like strangers at a bar, sipping our drinks till the others, except Niles, make a clamorous entry behind us, pouring through the giant doors and swarming all around us. Sheba begins to weep as she kisses and holds each one of us tightly. Ike wraps me in a bear hug and dances me around the dance floor. Betty, flushed with excitement, fills in the events of the day for Fraser. A piano player performs “Try to Remember” as Ike waltzes me along the polished wooden dance platform.

“People are going to get the wrong idea about us, Ike,” I say.

“Let ’em.” He grins. “This is the only city in the world where you and I look like a normal couple. Relax and enjoy it.”

“Where’s Bunny?”

“Jail, baby. It’s going to be his home for the rest of his life. They also arrested that social worker who was his partner in crime, and that guy started singing like a mockingbird as soon as the cuffs went on.”

“How’d Bunny get Trevor?”

“Found him wandering the streets. According to Trevor, Bunny may have accidentally saved his life.”

“Ike, I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But could we stop dancing?”

Ike roars with laughter. “I was starting to like the way your tits felt crushed against mine.”

We both laugh and make our way back to the table, then enter into the rapid-fire conversation of the girls of our lives. Betty is holding court, telling in rich detail about the interrogation of Bunny Buncombe. “Here’s the funny part, Toad,” Betty says. “Bunny insisted that the San Francisco police conduct a dragnet of the city to find you, the lunatic who assaulted him in the sanctity of his home. He kept referring to you as a lunatic. He said you were huge and out of control and were screaming obscenities at him. Bunny thinks you hit him with brass knuckles.”

Ike laughs. “He kept saying ‘the sanctity of my own home.’ Betty and I liked to have bust a gut when he said it. When our friendly detective asked for a description, he said you were at least six-ten, weighed three hundred pounds, and a fat-assed white boy. And I swear to God, Leo, I’m not making this up: he said you had crazed eyes that reminded him of a hoppy toad.”