Taste of Tenderloin (17 page)

But after what he’d
confirmed about Sweet Jane, and especially his shameful lack of
real feeling about it, he cut off the medical advice and took the
bottle, trying to drown the lingering trace of his
guilt.

They ate the sandwiches,
caught up on old times, and drank wine for the rest of the
morning.

After they scored a
hundred
and forty-seven bucks with their
sax gig on Tuesday afternoon, Micky D sank into a pattern as the
next few days rolled by: sleep late, find Blue, then hang out and
drink more and more. He put off plans to see his new caseworker
until Friday. Taking his meds only at night helped keep his
thinking clear during the day and restored a little attitude to his
walk. After talking it over with Blue, he had every intention of
going over to the Harrison Street Gym and getting back in
shape…real soon. He was only thirty-four, and with proper medical
clearance there was a good chance he could get his license back
from the state. Who knew, maybe he had another championship fight
still in him.

Friday, Micky D made it
over to see Mr. Rollo at Social Services. He filled out the forms
to get temporary assistance until his SSI kicked back in, picked up
some rent and food vouchers, and came back to the ‘loin feeling
pretty good. He still hadn’t checked into psychiatric outpatient
services at UCSF Hospital as he’d promised Dr. Gee, but that could
wait. Shoot, his head was even clearer than before the MRI had
revealed the cerebral bleeding after the championship bout three
years before. No weird thoughts at all, and he sure as hell wasn’t
hearing or seeing anything strange…at least nothing stranger than
the normal weird shit in the ‘loin.

His key stuck, and
he
rattled his door impatiently. Across
from him, Jenna cracked her door and peeked out into the hallway,
all bundled up in her coat and scarf.

“
Ah, Mr. Micky D,” she
said, extending her hand. “My current guest just disappeared out
the door a moment ago. Their coming and going at all hours
bothering you?”

When he took her hand, he
felt an electrical jolt; his whole arm tingled. It reminded Micky D
of a ninth-grade science experiment when they all held hands in a
circle while the teacher cranked up a magneto hooked up to them.
Back then, a tingling electrical charge had run up one arm, across
his shoulders, and down his other arm to the next person. This was
the same jazzy feeling, only kind of sexy, too. Jenna smiled as if
she knew, the nostrils of her finely shaped nose sort of pinched
like she was
peeking outside into weather
below zero. Her lips were full, se
nsuous.
And her beautiful eyes...Jesus, it’d been a long time.

“
Micky D, you didn’t
answer.”

“
Oh,” he said, blinking and
stammering. “I-I…no, your guests aren’t bothering me.” But the late
night moaning...

Unobserved by Micky D,
someone had walked up on them from the direction of the roof
stairwell: a young guy wearing a black and silver Raiders jacket, a
thick mop of unruly red hair, and an expression full of confident
attitude. “Hi,” he said to Micky D, grabbing one of Jenna’s hands.
“Fog’s coming in, babe, it’s getting too cool for the roof,” he
announced to her.

She nodded and shivered.
“Let’s go back in, do something to warm up.” She backed up and
cracked the door wider. A humid gush of tropical air escaped and
hit Micky D in the face almost as hard as a left jab. “Bye,” she
said as she disappeared with her redheaded guest.

Micky D stood for several
minutes until he heard the first of the intimate sounds beginning.
It was Jenna making most of the noise. He couldn’t help wondering
what she looked like without the coat and scarf.

The next morning he
left
his apartment just as the door to
sixty-five opened to let out the guy wearing the silver and black
jacket. His appearance shocked Micky D. The unruly red hair was
heavily streaked with grey, and the young man had aged at least
forty years. His confident expression was gone, and he avoided eye
contact with Micky D as he limped off down the hall.

“
Jesus,” Micky D swore
under his breath. He snapped his fingers and stared at Jenna’s
apartment door, realizing why she had struck him as so familiar.
Sure, there was a familiarity to her face, her pinched nostrils,
and the clouded-ice eyes, but the sight of the transformed guy
triggered the recall. Just like Rashad had described up in P Ward
at the hospital.

Jenna was one of the
Visitors.

They’d been playing
dominoes in
the rec room, but had stopped
to listen to Rashad when he had begun to talk about meeting an
alien.

“
Well, maybe not exactly an
alien,” Rashad said, struggling to control his high-pitched
excitement. He looked across the table at Micky D. “She told my
next door neighbor, Petey, that she actually came from the future,
a time of a big red sun, where it was really muggy hot and
everybody lived underground. A bunch of them were here in the Bay
Area, collecting energy. She called them Visitors. Like I said, she
was scary-looking, man. Platinum hair, piercing icy eyes, pinched
nostrils, pale, bundled up and always cold, you know. And what she
did to my friend and all them other guys…” Rashad’s voice trailed
off.

“
What did she do?” Micky D
asked, putting the dominoes away. The game was over for the day;
after his rap, Rashad would be too jumpy to concentrate and
play.

“
Well, she was sucking the
life out of them—”

“
You mean like a
vampire?”

“
Nah, not exactly, not
blood, but their youth, you know; like these young guys would go
into her apartment and come out old men.”

Micky D just kept
quiet.

“
She was screwing them
silly, but somehow sucking all the youth out of them in the
process.” Rashad’s brow was wrinkled deeply; his eyes looked off
into space, obviously vividly picturing the memory. “Yeah, and she
finally got poor Petey, too. Jumped his bones and put thirty years
on him. But it must’ve been worth it, because after I saw him that
last night when he looked to be fifty-five or sixty, he said he was
going home with her.”

“
Home?”

“
Yeah, the future, or
another dimension, or wherever the fuck she came from, you
know.”

After that, Rashad kind of
sagged at the table as if just the memory of the Visitor had sucked
the life out of him.

“
Well, what actually
happened to your friend?”

“
There was a fire in her
apartment that last night,” Rashad said, looking off again at the
green ward wall. “I got to her place quickly, but it was empty.” He
shrugged. “That was it, man.”

“
What do you mean, that was
it?” Micky D said, irritated by the abrupt conclusion of the
story.

“
They never found either of
their bodies,” Rashad said, sighing. “She’d obviously taken him
home. The life force she’d claimed from Petey and them other guys,
maybe even the fire, helped provide the energy she needed to
transport them both. I’m not exactly sure of the mechanics. But I
am sure that she was one of them Visitors.”

At the time Micky D
had just dismissed the story as no more crazy than
others he’d heard or would hear at Napa in his six months there.
But now, staring at the door to apartment sixty-five, he knew
Rashad’s story was true. Jenna was indeed one of the
Visitors.

Jesus, he had to tell
someone right away.

But
who
?

The cops? His
caseworker?

He’d be back up to Napa in
a New York minute if he went to them with a story about Jenna being
a Visitor from the future.

Blue. He had to tell
Blue.

But as Micky D left his
building, he heard multiple sirens up near Van Ness, wailing like
wounded animals.

He hurried up the climb on
O’Farrell and saw a group clustered at the mouth of the alley just
down from the Korean’s. Cops. And an ambulance easing through the
crowd of gawkers. Micky D followed, finally spotting someone
doubled up with his face to the ground. Micky D could make out the
Ranger patch on the guy’s green Army jacket, and the sight made him
suck in a deep breath.
No, it can’t
be,
he thought.

He pressed
closer.

A cop rolled the guy
over.

It
was
Blue.

“
Let me in,” he cried,
trying to push closer. He saw the chest of his friend’s jacket
soaked with blood. “That’s my buddy.”

“
Whoa,” a cop said, roughly
pushing Micky D back. “Give us room here, pal. This is a crime
scene.”

“
Yo, Micky D,” someone
said, tugging at his pant leg.

It was Short Stuff, a
legless guy sitting on his scooterboard, shaking his head sadly at
Micky D. “Too late, dawg. Blue gone.”

Stunned, Micky D shifted to
keep his friend in view as the EMTs checked Blue. He managed a
hoarse whisper. “What happened, Double S?”

The legless man shook his
head sadly and said, “C’mon back here, man, where we kin hear. I’ll
tell ya.”

Micky D followed Short
Stuff back beyond the edge of the crowd. Double S stopped and
passed up a small brown paper bag from his lap. “Take a heavy hit,
man.”

Micky D gulped down a fiery
drink from the half-pint of Wild Irish Rose. The cheap whisky
burned all the way to his gut. Another hit and the warmth began to
spread out from his belly. He nodded gratefully.

Double S took the bag back,
fortified himself, then began to explain what had happened. “Blue
been runnin’ a little bidness onna side, las’ six months or so
since ya’ll been down. Scorin’ extra scripshun meds from other vets
at the clinic—vikes, oxies, whatever. Street dealin’ here at the
Korean’s, ya unnerstan’ what I’m tellin’ ya?”

“
I’m with you,” Micky D
said, his throat still raw from the whisky.

“
Well, dude hit on him this
mornin’ an’ Blue ain’t holdin’, ya see. Dude goes off, gets up in
Blue’s face. Blue pushes him, dude whips out a blade.” Double S
paused to lubricate his vocal cords with some more of the Rose.
“Blue’s number up, man, ‘cuz the dude stuck him right in the heart.
Dead ‘foh the Man got here, ya know what I’m sayin’?”

“
Ah, Jesus,” Micky D
murmured under his breath as he watched them load the covered body
into the ambulance.

“
Keep it fo’ the las’
taste, Micky D,” Double S said, handing him the brown
bag.

Micky D tapped the legless
man’s fist as he turned and walked away from the noisy scene, his
vision tunneling down. But his feelings deep inside? Not much more
than the brief twinge of guilt he’d felt hearing about Sweet Jane.
His eyes were dry.

Man, something must be
wrong with me,
he thought. Maybe the Puerto
Rican had bruised more than his brain the night of the
championship, scarred something deep inside him, hurt his ability
to feel much of anything. Or maybe it had happened gradually, over
the course of his professional career—an accumulation of damage. A
lot of veteran fighters worried about that, constantly reminded of
the possibility by the slurred, drunken speech of the old punchies
hanging around the gyms. But this wasn’t the Parkinson’s syndrome
thing, he decided; it was more like he’d finally lost the capacity
to really care. If so, he knew Dr. Gee wasn’t going to be able to
fix it with any therapy or pills. No way, man. What could anyone do
for a seriously battered and scarred soul?

Even without taking his
meds, Micky D slept all day and late into the night.

Thumping.

Loud knocking.

Someone
shouting.

The sounds distorted, like
distant echoes in a long tunnel.

Micky D struggled up into
consciousness like a drowning man breaking the surface in murky
water. He finally burst into the waking world, gasping greedily.
His body was covered in clammy sweat, his heart pounding, his
stomach muscles clenched in a painful knot.

“
Mista Donahue, Mista
Donahue!” Someone was shouting and hammering away at his apartment
door.

Micky D escaped from the
tangled damp sheets and trudged across the darkened room in his
shorts. He pulled open the door and faced the heavyset manager, Mr.
Robinson. His shiny face was agitated as he stood in the hall, fog
swirling about him. “Come quick, mon!” he said, too
loudly.

“
What—?”

It wasn’t fog out there, it
was smoke. Choking clouds of it engulfed the hallway. How could he
have slept through a fire?

The manager pointed down
the hall to the stairs, sputtering almost incoherently, “Grab ya
pants, get out.”

“
Okay,” Micky D said. He
found his jeans and shower shoes and slipped them on, then he made
it back to the door.

“
I gotta leave now,” the
manager explained, “help de old ones down lower.”