The Bum's Rush (8 page)

"Boyfriends?" A shrug. Not that they knew of.

"Girlfriends?" Again, a no.

"I think she'd just given up," said Williams. "I mean, dating "

"You'd have to be single to understand," Alleman said.

"I am," I confessed. "I know what you're talking
about. After a certain age, dates are like four-hour job interviews."
We all agreed on that one. I tried again. "No social life at all?"

"She worked almost all the time," Williams said.

"Sometimes she did volunteer work at an AIDS hospice."

"And she read," DeeAnn added. "Incessantly."

"Mysteries."

"She'd read all the mysteries before they ever got to the shelves."

I pecked away at them for another fifteen minutes.
The picture wasn't good. The girl seemed to be one of those urban
animals who fill city apartment buildings, surrounded by their fellow
travelers and yet isolated amid the clamor, reduced to routinized
replays of previous days and consuming personal interests. These
disconnected refugees from hope are always the toughest to find.

When it became apparent that I'd gotten everything
I was going to, I thanked them for the time and took the elevator to
the street.

A breeze had freshened the air, pushing the pedestrians along
with their collars up. I headed downhill toward the Fiat. Three blocks
down, the King County Office Building's honeycombed face caught my
attention. Selena Dun lap. Five-four-one, eight-two, six-threesix-seven.

The Overnight wind had driven the remnants of the
inversion deep into Idaho, leaving the city rubbing its eyes, blinking
like a mole at the dry clarity of a Northwest winter morning. Relieved
of the blanket of sludge, Puget Sound, the sky, and the Olympics now
competed for the eye in complementary shades of acrylic blue, animated
here and there by fast-moving patches of shade, as railroad car clouds,
still deep gray at the edges, rolled east across the sun.

I parked the Fiat at the top of South Washington,
next to the Nippon Kan Theater, and limped across the street. My body
felt like a knuckle that needed to be cracked. I could feel every stair
I'd rolled down Sunday night. My aching shoulder blades were grateful
for the heat of the sun on the back of my jacket. The last of the
season's leaves, curled tight about themselves on the ground, were now
unfurling, coming loose and beginning to tumble about haphazardly in
the swirling breeze.

I think the official name of the place is the Danny
Woo International District Community Garden. Danny Woo had been a major
mover and shaker in the Chinese community. He was sort of the Asian
equivalent of my old man. Whatever you wanted in Chinatown went through
Danny Woo. President of Gee How Oak Tin Family Society, board
member of the Chinese Alliance Society and the Hop Sing Tong. The list
went on and on. The guy had clout.

Back in the mid-seventies, faced with a sticky
bribery rap, Danny had practiced a little image enhancement. With a
great deal of fanfare and media hoopla, he'd donated this little shard
of earth to the Asian community, which in turn had taken the incredibly
steep piece of dirt and terraced and planted it into a model intensive
community garden, whose carefully tended plots seemed almost to grow
directly from the nearby skyscrapers. On a fine summer day, with the
city lost behind you and the slope of the land blotting out all but the
sky, it was easy to imagine yourself momentarily transported to some
rural Chinese province.

I always come by once in the spring and again in
late summer, when the ancient gardeners, speaking in their exotic
singsong tongues, smile beneath their straw hats as they turn and
smooth their allotted spaces. The smell of the loam and the incongruity
of a place so pastoral existing within the very gullet of the city
somehow always sends me home with a smile.

The city had been less amused. Not to be outdone by
any Chinese restaurant owner, it took the remaining sliver of land
between the garden and the freeway and developed the Kobe Terrace Park.
They placed an enormous stone lantern at the uphill entrance. No matter
that it was Japanese. Asian was Asian, wasn't it? So what if these were
the same people who had packed the entire Japanese community off to
desert concentration camps just thirty years before? They could damn
well build a park too.

The garden was deserted now. The homeless stay out
of it. They seem to know intuitively that to lie down in such a place
would be to return from whence they came, voluntarily to become mulch. They prefer the park,
with its paved walks and comfortable benches snuggled beneath imported
cherry trees.

I stopped at the first fork in the path, where
Danny's gravel met the city's hardtop, and ran my eyes down over the
terraced hillside. Out in the middle, by the toolshed, old bok choy
leaves, strung between poles on heavy twine, flapped like stiff brown
flags. At the extreme left, all the way down by the front wall of the
garden, a remnant rhubarb grew resplendent candy-apple red. Here and
there among the empty plots and the white five-gallon buckets, tall
yellow chrysanthemums stood nodding, stalks shattered and bent, leaves
and petals brown at the edges, but still finding sustenance somewhere
deep in the ground. In the distance, out over the top of the Panama
Hotel, the Kingdome squatted like a segmented cement shiitake.

I found her right where George said she'd be,
camped out on a green bench at the top of Kobe Terrace Park, grinning
into the morning sun, picking her teeth with a matchbook. She must have
started early. At ten-forty-five in the morning, already she was
seriously shitfaced.

"I knew I hadn't seen the last of you," she said
when she blinked herself into focus and figured out who was on the
bench next to her.

"Oh, really? How'd you know that?"

" 'Cause you remind me of a dog I had years ago."

"A dog. I can't believe it. I'm crushed. After all we've meant to each other, you say I remind you of a damn dog?"

"Nice little black Lab. Lucky was his name. Good
dog, friendly like Labs are, you know. 'Cept this fool just couldn't
keep his nose outta things. Nothin' he liked better than a fresh cat
box or a live porky pine. The cat box wasn't so bad. You know, if a dog
wants to eat cat shit, long as he don't spread it around the floor or breathe in
my face, I guess that's his business. You know what I mean." She leaned
against the back of the bench, smoothing the sun on her round cheeks.

"A rule to live by," I offered.

She sat back up. "But now porkypines, that's a
whole 'nother matter. Every time that dumbass dog would get outside,
he'd find him a porkypine and then come back whinin' on the porch with
a nose full of quills. We'd hold him down and yank 'em out and he'd
walk around with his muzzle all swole up for the next week, and then
the dumb shit would just go off and do it again."

"Must have been in his blood," I said.

"Once in a while, he'd get 'em so bad we had to
take him to the vet. Get 'em through his tongue and all, you know. Vet
would charge us forty bucks to get 'em out and 'fore they was even
healed the dumb shit would go and do it again. Well, Bobby that was my
husband about the third time he had to come up with the forty bucks, he
took that old Lucky dog out behind the woodshed and put one in his
ear." She shrugged. "To Bobby's way of thinkin', havin a good dog was
one thing, but making monthly payments on one was another."

"You're not going to take me out behind the woodshed, are you?"

She laughed. "Not me, Leo. I myself am startin' to
get fond of you, but my guess is that you keep stickin' your nose in
where it ain't wanted, sooner or later somebody gonna put you down."

"It's been tried before."

She grinned again. "I just bet it has, Leo. I just
bet it has." She reached under the bench and retrieved a bagshrouded
bottle. I watched her throat work as she made a serious dent in it.
Finished, she motioned toward me with the bottle. I declined.

"I ain't got cooties," she said.

"I'm getting old, Selena. I drink in the morning, I need a nap."

She slapped her knee. "Me too, Leo." This sent her into spasms of laughter.

I waited until she calmed down. "So listen--" I started.

She shook her head. The movement seemed to make her
dizzy. She grabbed the bench with her free hand, closed her eyes, and
composed herself. "No, you listen, Leo. Don't think I don't 'predate
what you're trying to do. But--"

"I only--"

She waved me off. "Button it, will ya," she said.
"I'm makin' a speech here." She took a deep breath and a big dry
swallow. "Nothing's gonna change anything. Maybe if--" She closed her
eyes again. "Who knows," she said when she reopened them. "Who knows.
If--ah, shit--" She broke into hearty laughter. "If my grandmother had
wheels, she'd be a bus. It's done. Over. That's it." This time she
waved herself off. "Let it go, Leo. Just let the damn thing go."

"It's in my blood," I confessed.

She groped around for her bottle, found it, and stood. "Time for that little nap," she said.

"I just wanted to know how you felt about being dead, that's all."

Her eyes narrowed as she weaved over me. "Ain't no
reason to get nasty. Don't be gettin' nasty, Leo; it don't suit you.
I'll have to smack you with this here bottle, you get nasty," she said
with a smile.

"I'm not being nasty. I'm trying to tell you that according to King County and the State of Washington,
you've been dead for years." I reached in my pocket and pulled out a
copy of her death certificate.

She looked at my hand like I was trying to pass her some of the aforementioned cat shit.

"What's that?" she asked, making no move to take it.

"That's your death certificate. Cost me eleven dollars, too."

"Eleven bucks just to say I'm dead?"

"Yep."

"I coulda told 'em that for nothing." Again, she
collapsed in great whoops of laughter. Selena's mirth was beginning to
attract attention. A black man of about forty had spotted her bottle.
He wore a dirty blue athletic jacket and an elongated yellow stocking
cap tipped at an angle. At the sound of the laughter, he began to
stumble over in our direction. When he got within ten feet or so, I
turned to face him. "Need something, buddy?" I asked.

His eyes were nearly solid red, littered about the
rims with some sort of seepage that looked like coarse yellow sand; his
knees quivered in the breeze. He licked his cracked lips and opened his
mouth.

I moved closer and said, "Take a hike. This is a private party."

"Heh, heh, my man--" he started.

"Beat it," I said.

Selena stood at my elbow. "I'll talk to ya later,
Rodney. Here. Take the rest of this." She extended the bag containing
the bottle. He groped for it until Selena grabbed his wrist, put it in
his palm, and closed his shiny black fingers around it. Satisfied, he
lisped his thanks and tottered back up the hill. Two steps forward, one
gravity step back, but at least he was making progress.

Selena pulled the paper from her pocket and
appeared to study it. I watched her eyes. They didn't move from left to
right and back, but instead seemed to attack the words at random.

"Can you read?" I asked.

She punched me hard in the chest with the paper.

"I'm not ignorant," she said, her eyes suddenly hard and focused.

"I didn't say you were," I said. "I just asked if you could read."

She turned her back on me, smoothed the paper out on her leg, and mumbled something into the breeze.

"What?" I asked.

"I read a little," she said without turning. "Where'd you get that thing, anyway?" she added.

"I was doing a little work downtown yesterday.
Paying off our bill to Jed. I figured that, you know, as long as I was
there, so I walked down to the County Office Building, punched
five-four-one, eight-two, six-three-six-seven and your name into the
computer, and lo and behold you came up dead as a plug herring."

"It ain't right."

"No, it's not," I agreed.

"I never made no trouble. I dinna want nothin'. I just--"

She turned to leave. She took three steps and
stopped. Rodney, having now mojo'd his way up to the steep part of the
path, managed two mincing steps forward before falling backward for
three. The old boy was losing ground. I calculated that, at his present
rate, in three months he'd run out of terra firma and shuffle backward
into the Sound.

Her wide shoulders again shook with laughter.

"What you call that dance, Rodney?'' she hollered, starting after him. "That the cha-cha you doin'?"

Rodney turned his feet in a series of small ski
turns. When he was satisfied with his purchase, he took a hefty pull
from the bottle.

"Na. Ain't no cha-cha, Lena. Heh. Heh. What it is, girl. That there's the pigeon shit shuffle, is what it is."

The Steering Wheel pressed into my chest; I hung
suspended from my seat belt harness as I eased the squealing Fiat down
the face of South Washington. Reaching flat ground, I huffed a sigh of
relief, turned right on Fourth Avenue, and headed uptown. As I wiggled
myself back into the seat, I pulled my notebook from my jacket pocket
and flipped it open. Karen Mendolson lived at 905 Union. First Hill. No
problem.

I climbed Pike all the way to Minor, hooked a
right, drove one block, and turned right again on Union. Nice apartment
buildings, mostly tilt-ups from the late sixties, on both sides of the
street. Numbers in the eleven hundreds. I moved slowly down the block
checking the numbers. One thousand and six was the last number before
Union dead ended on Terry. Dude.

Figuring 905 must be on the other side of the
interstate, I backtracked, crossing the freeway at Pine, then cut over
to park by the Eagles Auditorium at the head of Union. I got out and
walked to the comer. Across the street, the first building on the other
side was the Union Square Grill, number 621. Double dude.