One Foot Off the Gutter (20 page)

For the first day in one hundred and ten years, the abandoned building would not feel the ocean's mist in her walls. Earthquakes and storms had come and gone. Murderers and thieves had passed into oblivion after exiting her rooms. She'd given refuge to those people who had needed it. There had been times when she thought she'd last forever.

The building began to fall over. Walls, windows, woodwork, plumbing, wiring and sheetrock convulsed, then contracted, then rocketed one hundred feet into the air.

Twenty-first Street was immersed in a cloud of ashes.
Beleaguered families in their pajamas were carrying sacks and boxes on their backs. Everyone was fleeing the fire, scrambling like ants toward the safety of Mission Street.

 

I watched the abandoned building incinerate. I paid attention to every detail. It was a catechism in destruction for me. Never in my entire life had I seen a building disintegrate with such indisputable finality. It was a vision that I never wanted to see again.

A cop waved to me. “Heavy stuff, eh, Coddy? I hope Bellamy gets better soon.”

“Something of myself died in that building,” I replied.

“Beg your pardon?” the cop asked politely.

“Never mind.”

In those empty rooms, I'd thought I could change my life. I'd risked Bellamy's life and I'd threatened my own future by gambling on an abandoned building.

I didn't have any regrets. I was without remorse. Emotions like that were pointless; they impeded movement to a higher ground. I'd believed in what I was doing. Bellamy and the girl had been dispatched to the hospital. When the girl recovered from her wounds, I meant to ask her what she'd been doing in the building. She might not want to tell me at first, but I could afford to be patient with her. She was going to be in jail for months. With Bellamy, I wasn't so sure of what to do. I owed my partner big time. And the dead man? I would see him in the afterlife.

A chorus of flames rode the last of the building's walls down to the pavement. That was all I could take. Enough was enough. I jammed the riot helmet over my ears and
made my way past a crush of fire trucks and emergency vehicles. Up and down the street, medics were escorting women, men and children in their bathrobes toward a makeshift first aid center inside the Whirl-o-mat.

I took one last look at where the abandoned building used to be. The squad car used to be over there, too, before it had been burned into a state of nothingness. Now that was depressing. I didn't know what I was going to tell Alice. I was sure it would be incomplete; an impression, not the whole story.

The bus ride back to Novato was going to be miserable, what with the blood stains on my overalls. Maybe when I got back to the apartment, I'd rest for awhile watching the news on television. I could lay in bed with Alice. She'd smell fine like she always did when she stepped out of the bathroom. I'd stay in bed and think of another plan, and listen to Alice's breathing.

If I snuggled in bed with Alice and didn't say a word, it might be better than trying to explain what had happened on Twenty-first Street. We could kiss and hug, and I'd think about other buildings. There were plenty of them in the Mission. The district was a forest of abandoned buildings. I'd coax up a dream about one when I fell asleep. Then I'd start again the next morning. Alice wouldn't mind: she'd understand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

h
ow I got myself off the bus and down the five blocks on Ignacio Boulevard to the apartment complex, I didn't know. The only thing I recalled was that I'd fallen asleep for a few minutes during the ride home, and had a dream about my mother. She'd been taunting me, deriding me, cursing me: you little cock-sucker.

On the walk from the bus stop I saw nobody. The street was deserted, save for the tapping of my riot boots on the sidewalk and the rustling of the maple trees.

At home, I dragged myself through the living room. I spied Alice's coat on the couch while I blundered into the kitchen over to the sink. I turned the water on and ducked my head under the tap, smacking my lips and making nonsensical noises. Water soaked my overalls, running off the gun belt onto the linoleum floor. Some of the water ran up my nose. I hocked a big lunger into the sink, watching
it swirl down the drain. It took me a moment to become aware of Alice standing by my side.

“I missed you today,” she said.

Words rattled around in my throat. A piece of a word about love; another syllable of a word that described the future. Clumsily, I grazed Alice's breasts with my smoky fingertips. The blunt, suggestive move was so unlike me, Alice didn't know what to do. She tried to focus on my face, but her eyes kept crossing. I wanted to ask her how she did it, why she continued to stay with me. Two questions predicated by the knowledge that I didn't have anything to offer her.

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, thank you,” I said loudly.

“What's that for?”

Alice had never heard me ask for deliverance before.

“It's for you.”

“For me?”

She reached up and touched the dollar-sized sunspots on my crown. I took her in my arms and cradled her against my pot belly.

I didn't have any money. I didn't have a Cadillac. I didn't even have a car anymore. But I knew a simple rule governed a complex universe: I was thankful for what I had.

“Do you want to got to bed, honey?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure,” I replied nonchalantly. I yielded to Alice like it was the most natural thing for me to do, bending my soul inside the small wishes that made up her spirit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

b
ellamy showed up at my doorstep three months later. It was raining, as it had been every day since the end of October. Bellamy was drenched wet. He was wearing a denim prison jacket over a pair of khaki safari shorts that showed off the bullet wound scars on his leg. The scars were a tandem of thick red welts that snaked up and around his calf. The slug he'd taken in the arm, that scar was covered by a polo shirt of an indiscriminate color. It was a secondhand shirt, probably donated to Bellamy by a Catholic charity organization. All of Bellamy's garments smelled with the cheap laundry soap homeless men used when they were staying in the city's emergency shelters.

“I'm here, Coddy. I bet you'd never thought you'd live to see this day.”

I stood at the door, looking at my partner. Doleful was how he made me feel. Bellamy had aged overnight.
Patches of gray hair had fallen out of his transplant. His acne scars stood out in bold relief against his cheekbones. Trauma had cleaved away the fat on his face. I wagged my head and muttered, “What the fuck, Bells. Why didn't you tell me you were coming today? I thought they weren't going to let you out until next week. Why didn't you call us, you dork? I could have come and picked you up.”

Bellamy leaned against his cane and deadpanned, “With what, Coddy?”

“I don't know. We would have figured something out.”

Looking at Bellamy's sallow face, I realized that I hadn't asked him to come inside the apartment. I never brought anyone home, leading me to believe that I was turning into a recluse. But this was something unique, a precedent for me. I was reluctant to talk with my partner.

Bellamy was uppermost in my mind at all times in the spot where difficult thoughts were positioned. I was feeling guilty. About what, I wasn't sure. I was just surprised that Bellamy had shown up ahead of schedule.

“So you gonna ask me in, Coddy, or do I get to conduct this conversation standing out here in the fucking rain?”

“Come in. Come in already.”

Bellamy hobbled past me into the living room. Before I closed the screen door behind him, I gazed outside. Two long rows of cars in the parking lot were drowning in the rain near an empty swimming pool filled with gravel and leaves. A seven-foot-high chain-link fence circled the back of the apartment complex, separating it from a sewage
trench that had a few cattails growing on its soft, moldering banks. It was a lovely view.

Without saying anything, simply pasting a contrite grimace on my lips, I squeezed by Bellamy in the narrow hallway. I gestured with my hand for him to follow me into the kitchen. My jaws were sore, talking was painful. The dentist said I had acquired a chronic nervous condition that was going to ruin my teeth.

Bellamy was dragging his injured leg across the linoleum tile on the floor. The sound made me break out in a spontaneous chill. Bellamy's visit wasn't getting off to a good start and I apologized.

“Sorry, I didn't come around the hospital much. I was busy.”

After visiting Bellamy in the charity ward a couple of times, I had stopped coming by the hospital. It was too sad. They put the cops who'd been wounded on the job in with the welfare cases. The citizens didn't give two hoots. There was no respect for the police. I succumbed to denial, didn't want to think about it. And I hoped Bellamy wouldn't talk about it. With everything else I had on my mind, I didn't want to be burdened with guilt.

“When I was laying there on that bed, Coddy, I thought about everything at least a dozen times. I went over every tiny thing. I'm a lot smarter now.”

“Well, you're better, and that's what counts.”

I couldn't tell the distinction between how I felt about Bellamy, and what I should do for him. It was the difference between obligation and responsibility. The sharp lines of each emotion melted together, losing shape, leaving no
form. Only guilt remained. I opened the refrigerator, stuck my head inside the box, letting the freon peel my face. I turned around to worry a look in Bellamy's direction.

“You want a beer?”

Bellamy smirked. “You bet.”

The two of us settled down at the kitchen table, gingerly nursing our bottles of Budweiser. I straddled my chair and took a second, more opinionated look at Bellamy. It was remarkable how gunshot wounds in the limbs, such as Bellamy's arm and leg, managed to knock the man's entire posture out of alignment. Bellamy slouched in his chair like he'd contracted polio of the spine. His head was sunken in at the chin.

“Didn't they feed you over there at the hospital, Bells? You look sort of malnourished.”

Bellamy pursed the leaden blue lips of his mouth and sneered. Bellamy's lips were a striking contrast to the pewter gray three-day stubble on his cheeks.

“I didn't feel like eating. I felt like dieting,” he said.

“At least this beer tastes good,” I said with begrudging respect. A whirl of white spume appeared on my mouth, then dropped back to evaporate on my tongue. “I never thought I'd live to see the day when a fucking Budweiser would this taste good.”

We fell quiet and listened to the downpour. The rain had been coming down steadily since the end of Indian summer. Since the night Bellamy got shot.

My luck had turned with the weather. My fortune had changed with the temperature, turning from hot, dry, and red into something brown, sodden, and heavy.

Bellamy started talking about his nightmares while I got us another couple of brews.

“I keep dreaming of getting shot again. I always see a young woman looking at me from an angle, giving me a taste of her profile, which is burnished by a fire. The fire is at the center to every nightmare. The girl's there, too, always at the fire's side with a gun in her hand. She keeps whispering shit I shouldn't be listening to.”

I debated as to whether Bellamy had been seeing a counselor in the hospital. It wasn't likely, given my partner's education and personality. A certain degree of self-reflection on Bellamy's part was showing through. A nearness to death could do that to a man.

Alice would be coming home soon. I speculated on how she'd get along with Bellamy. They'd had some trouble hitting it off when they first met. In musing about them, I also contemplated my own rapport with Alice. Domestic life had been gnarly lately.

Bellamy said, “I don't blame you for what happened, Coddy. But I have to tell you. I think it could have been better planned. Myself, I'm not one to rush into things. I think you've got to take your time and chart out every step of your strategy.”

Bellamy's face was hard to read. I didn't know if he was making fun of me or not. Not that it concerned me. Everything was going to turn out like it was supposed to. There had been a slight delay but I was back on track. I had a new plan.

“I'll take you for what you say, Bells. No hard feelings?”

“Nah. No hard feelings, Coddy.”

The plan had emancipated me. I didn't have to take any chances. There were no more risks in my life. Only the plan. I heard the rain through the kitchen window. I saw it crying against the glass. I felt the rain in the apartment itself, how the moisture got into the acrylic carpet, leaving an odor in the volatile plastic.

“Me and Doreen broke up,” Bellamy announced.

“So that's what's on your mind. You want to talk about it?”

I didn't know what to say. It might be a touchy subject. Most relationships were. When Alice came home and saw Bellamy, it would remind her of the shootout. Things had changed between her and me since then. Her confidence in my ability to make a productive future, to make it work for us, to get a home for our yet unborn child; her confidence had been shaken loose from its moorings. Bellamy's presence would reinforce all of that for Alice. On some days, Alice believed in the plan like she used to. On other days, she looked at me as if I were a stranger trying to sell her bogus jewelry.