The Losers (32 page)

“Christ, man,” Marvin said. “We sure as shit don’t want no cops pokin’ around in the house there. We got coke in there, man. We could lose our whole goddamn stash.”

Jimmy’s battered car came squealing around the corner, made a sharp right, and drove up onto the lawn. “I seen ‘em,” he said breathlessly, getting out. “I seen the motherfuckers.”

“Who?” Heintz demanded.

“The fuckin’ Dragons. They’re camped out down in People’s Park. Must be thirty or forty of the bastards down there. Bikes all over the fuckin’ place.”

“I
knew
the bastards hadn’t left,” Heintz exulted.

“What are we gonna do?” Marvin asked, his voice also excited.

“We’re gonna pass the word. Get hold of Leon. All the guys stop by that gas station of his, an’ he can get the word out. Tell ‘em we’ll all get together tomorrow night in that big field out toward Newport where we had the party last month. We’ll put this thing together, and then we’ll fuckin’ move, man. We’ll
waste
them fuckin’ Dragons once and for all, man—I mean once and for fuckin’ all.”

“You want just our guys, Heintz?” Jimmy demanded breathlessly.

“Yeah. No, wait a minute. Have ‘im pass the word to Occult, too. Them guys got a hard-on for the Dragons same as us. With us and Occult, we oughta be able to raise sixty, seventy guys. We’ll flat
waste
them fuckin’ Dragons. They won’t
never
come back to fuckin’ Spokane after we get done with ‘em.”

“What about Powell?” Marvin asked him.

“Fuck Powell! We ain’t got no time to mess with that shithead now. We got a fuckin’
war
on our hands. Crank up your ass, Jimmy. Get to Leon an’ pass the word.”

“Yeah!” Jimmy dived back into his car.

Like some general marshaling his troops, Big Heintz began barking orden. Marvin and Little Hider scurried away on errands, and Heintz stood spread-legged on the porch, his chest expanded and his beefy arms crossed. “War, Jake,” he said, savoring the word. “It’s gonna be a fuckin’ war. We’re gonna cream them fuckin’ Dragons once and for fuckin’ all.”

“ ‘Seek out the enemy and destroy him,’ “ Flood quoted.

“What?”

“Von Clausewitz on war,” Flood explained. “That’s what it’s all about.”

“Yeah,” Big Heintz growled enthusiastically. “Seek and destroy. Seek and fuckin’ destroy. I like that kinda shit, don’t you?” “It’s got a nice ring to it.” Flood grinned tightly. “You comin’ tomorrow night?”

“I might tag along. I think the Dragons still owe me for a few broken ribs, and I always collect what people owe me.”

“That’s the stuff.” Heintz slapped Flood’s shoulder.

“I’ll see you tomorrow then.” Flood walked down onto the street in the bright glare of noon. His shoulders were braced, and there was a slight swagger to his walk.

A couple of minutes later he came up onto Raphael’s rooftop.

“Well, well,” Raphael said dryly, “if it isn’t the newest recruit in Big Heintzie’s limp-brained little army.”

“You were listening,” Flood accused.

“Obviously. You’re not seriously going to participate in this shindig, are you?”

“Only as an observer, Angel.” Flood laughed.
You’re
the physical one in this little group. I
do
anticipate a certain satisfaction out of watching the punks who kicked in my ribs get theirs, however.”

“That’s stupid. Either you’re going to get yourself arrested, or you’re going to get the crap stomped out of you again.”

Flood leaned over the rail to look down at the street. “Not this time, Angel,” he said in a quiet voice.

Raphael looked at him sharply. Almost casually Flood raised the back of his jacket to let his friend see the polished black butt of an automatic pistol protruding from his waistband at the back.

“Have you completely lost your mind? If you get picked up with that thing, they’ll put you away forever.”

“I’m not going to get picked up with it, Raphael. I’ve been carrying it for several weeks now, and nobody even notices that it’s there.”

“You wouldn’t actually
use
it.”

“Oh?” Flood replied in that same calm voice. “It holds fifteen, Raphael. That gives me plenty of time to make up my mind, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’re starting to sound just like those morons up the block. Get rid of that goddamn thing.”

“I don’t think so.” Flood’s eyes were flat.

Raphael stared at him and suddenly realized that he had not really been looking at Flood lately, but rather at some remembered image. Certain subtle changes had taken place sometime in the last month or so—a tightening around the lips, a kind of agate-hard compulsion to violence in the eyes, an expression that seemed to imply that Flood had somehow been pushed into a corner and would explode at the next nudge—no matter what the consequences. It was, Raphael realized, the look of the loser.

It was a certainty now. Flood was gone. The street had claimed him.

vi

After Flood left, Raphael sat staring sourly down into the teeming street. The Mother’s Day hysteria was upon the losers. The children ran shrieking up and down the sidewalks, and the men who lived off the women and their welfare checks brushed up on their technique for wheedling just a few extra dollars.

Raphael had always been able to watch this monthly outburst objectively before, even with a certain amusement, but today he found it all enormously irritating. He realized quite suddenly that he was totally alone now—even more alone than he had been before Flood’s arrival last spring.

“District One,” the scanner said. “One. Go ahead.”

“We have a report of a possible suicide attempt on the east side of the Monroe Street Bridge.” “Is the subject still there?”

“The witness advised us that the subject has already jumped.” “I’ll check it out.”

Raphael shook his head. The Monroe Street Bridge was the most surely lethal place in town. It was not that it was so high, for it was not. A leap into the water from that height would prove fatal only if the jumper suffered from extremely bad luck. The bridge, however, overlooked the foot of the falls of the Spokane River. The riverbed broke there, and the water hurtled savagely down a polished basalt chute. It was not a straight drop where the force of the water is broken by the impact at the bottom, but rather was a steeply angled and twisting descent where the water picked up terrific speed and built up seething, tearing currents that swirled with ripping force around the jumble of house-sized boulders in the pool at the bottom of the falls. To jump there quite frequently meant not only death, but total obliteration as well. Bodies often were not found for a year or more, and sometimes not at all.

“District One,” the scanner said.

“One.”

“Are you at the scene?”

“Right. There are several citizens here who state that the subject definitely did go over the side.” “Any possibility of an ID?”

“There was a jacket draped over the rail. One of the citizens states that the subject took it off before he jumped. Wait one. I’ll look through it.” There was a silence while the red lights of the scanner tracked endlessly, searching for a voice. “This is District One. There’s a card in this jacket—identifies the subject as Henry P. Kingsford, 1926 West Dalton. He appears to be an outpatient from Eastern State Hospital.”

Numbly, Raphael got up and went over to the scanner. He

switched it off, then went slowly to the railing and looked across at the rightly drawn shades in Crazy Charlie’s apartment—the shades that had been drawn ever since that day when Flood had so savagely turned on the strange little man. Raphael turned and went into his apartment, feeling a pang of something almost akin to personal grief. Of all the losers, he had been watching Crazy Charlie the longest, and his apparent suicide left a sudden gaping vacancy in Raphael’s conception of the street upon which he lived.

Finally, after several minutes, he picked up the phone and dialed the number of the police.

“Crime Check,” the voice came back.

“I live on the 1900 block of West Dalton,” Raphael said. “I’ve got a police scanner.”

“Yes, sir?” The voice was neutral.

“I just heard a report that one of my neighbors, Mr. Henry Kingsford, has committed suicide.”

“We’re not really allowed to discuss things like that over the phone, sir.”

“I’m not asking you to discuss it,” Raphael said. “All I wanted to do was to tell you that Mr. Kingsford was a recluse and that he’s got six or eight cats in his apartment.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Don’t you think it might be a good idea to notify the Humane Society?” Raphael said, trying to control his temper.

“I’m not sure we’re authorized to do that, sir. Maybe a neighbor—or a friend—”

“The man’s a recluse—a crazy. He doesn’t have any friends, and none of the neighbors here even know he exists.”

“How about you, sir? Maybe you could—”

“I’m a cripple,” Raphael said bluntly. “It’s all I can do to take care of myself. Tell you what—either you can get hold of the Humane Society in the next day or so, or you can wait for a couple of weeks and then get hold of the health department. It doesn’t really matter to me which.” He slammed down the phone.

The apartment was suddenly stifling, and the thought of looking

at the street anymore was unbearable. He felt an insistent nagging compulsion to do
something.
To simply sit passively listening to the scanner was no longer possible. Although he had used the word “cripple” in describing himself to the officer he’d just talked with, he realized that it was probably no longer true. Somehow, somewhere during the last summer, he had without realizing it crossed that line Quillian had told him about. He was no longer a cripple, but rather was simply a man who happened to have only one leg. “All right,” he said, facing it squarely. “That takes care of that then. Now what?”

A dozen ideas occurred to him at once, but the most important was to get out, to go someplace, do something. He pulled on a light jacket because the evenings were cool and he was not sure just how long he would be out. Then he crutched smoothly out of the apartment and across the rooftop, conscious of the grace and flow of his long, one-legged stride. The stairs had become simplicity itself, and even the once-awkward shuffle into the front seat of his car was a smooth, continuous motion now.

He drove then, aimlessly, with no goal or purpose in mind, simply looking at the city in which he had lived for more than half a year but had never considered home.

The Spokane River passes east to west through the center of town and then swings north on its way to meet the Columbia. The gorge of the Spokane on its northward course ends the city in that quarter. The streets do not dwindle or the houses grow farther apart. Everything is very paved and neat, landscaped and mowed right to the edge of that single, abrupt gash that cuts off the city like the stroke of a surgeon’s knife. Raphael had never seen a place where the transition from city to woods was so instantaneous.

The rock face of the gorge on the far side of the river was a brownish black, curiously crumbled looking because of the square fracture lines of the volcanic basalt that formed the elemental foundation of the entire region.

And then, of course, he looked at the river, and that was a mistake, really. It seemed more like a mountain stream than some docile, slow-moving urban river. The water thundered and ripped at its twisted rock bed. Somewhere down there Crazy Charlie, broken and dead, turned and rolled in the tearing current, his shaved head white—almost luminous—in the dark water. The dragon on his floor would no longer threaten him, and the voices were now forever silent.

Raphael turned away from the river and drove back through the sunny early-autumn afternoon toward town.

Sadie the Sitter was dead, old Sam was dying, and now Crazy Charlie had killed himself. Bennie the Bicycler rode no more, and Willie the Walker had not strode by since early summer. Chicken Coop Annie and Freddie the Fruit had moved away, playing that game of musical houses that seemed part of the endless life of Welfare City, where moving from shabby rented house to shabby rented house was the normal thing to do. Everything was temporary; everything was transitory; nothing about their lives had any permanence. They were almost all gone now, and his street had been depopulated as if a plague had run through it. There were others living in some of those houses now, probably also losers, but they were strangers, and he did not want to know them.

Raphael suddenly realized even more sharply that he was absolutely alone. There was no one to whom he could talk. There were not even familiar faces around him. The victory that he had only just realized had been won sometime during the summer was meaningless. The fact that he was no longer a cripple but rather was a one-legged man was a fact that interested not one single living soul in the entire town.

It was at that point that he found himself parked in front of the apartment house where Denise lived. He could not be sure how deep the break between them was, but she was the only one in the whole sorry town who might possibly still be his friend. He got out of his car, went up the steps to the front of the building, and rang the bell over her mailbox.

“Who’s there?” Her voice sounded tinny coming out of the small speaker.

“It’s me—Rafe. I have to talk with you.”

There was a momentary pause, and Raphael felt himself shrivel inside as he considered the possibility of refusal—some easy, offhand excuse. But she said, “All right,” and the latch on the door clicked.

She was waiting warily at the door to her apartment. Mutely, she stood to one side and let him in.

“I think it’s time we got this squared away,” he said as soon as he was inside, knowing that if they started with vague pleasantries, the whole issue would slide away and they would never really come to grips with it.

“There’s no problem, really.” Her voice had that injured brightness about it with which people attempt to conceal a deep hurt.

“Yes, there is. We know each other too well to start lying to each other at this point.”

“Really, Rafe—” she started, but then she glanced up and saw that he was looking very intently at her, and she faltered, “All right,” she said then, “let’s go into the kitchen, and I’ll make some coffee.”