Criminal Carma

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Glimpsing Ozone’s private world, I decided to give him not one but ten of the Krugerrands, or the value of them, to help him get off the street and do something with his life. Both of our houses were condemned, and I didn’t want to leave him wandering homeless when I skipped town.

“Those coins are plastic,” I said from the doorway.

Ozone looked around, frightened, and turned his back toward me as if shielding himself from a blow.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said, crossing the room to stand behind him. “It’s me, your friend Rob.”

“Hi, Rob,” he sniffled, gathering up the coins.

In the light of the caged forty-watt bulb dangling above him I saw that the volume open on the floor was a children’s picture book filled with farmyard scenes. It was old and worn with torn pages, as if it had been much handled. The lush illustrations showed a red rooster crowing in front of a yellow sun, and cows and horses grazing in green pastures.

“Don’t you know those coins are worthless?” I said, trying to draw him back toward reality. “You’re not rich. You can’t spend plastic money.”

“I am, too,” he said, his pathetic tone tinged with anger. “My mom had a lot of money that she showed me. She told me we are rich.”

“Did she finally show up?”

“No,” he said miserably. “She never came back. I waited all day, but then I got scared and tried to find her. She told me not to cross Pacific so I walked down to the end of the beach, looking for her. I was afraid to go any farther. I was afraid she would come back and be mad when she couldn’t find me. She told me to stay by the palm tree. Do you think she came back while I was gone, Rob, and left again when she couldn’t find me?”

“I don’t know, Oz. When did that happen?”

“I was eight,” he said. “It was my birthday. It was summertime.”

“You’ve been waiting for your mother to come back for you since you were eight years old?”

He turned his head to look up at me, keeping his body hunched protectively, his fistful of plastic coins clutched to his chest. Tears were leaking from his eyes. He nodded.

“Sometimes I walk back down to Ozone looking for her, but then I get afraid again and come back. I think she’ll come soon, Rob, don’t you? A man came and said I have to get out of here, and I don’t have any place to go. I want to go with my mom but I don’t know where she is.”

Without wanting to, I imagined the long days he had lived through in the monotonous sunshine, days when loneliness gnawed at him until he couldn’t sit still and he trudged north along the boardwalk, retracing his childhood route to that first stopping point. It had become a Pavlovian barrier, like a disconnected electric fence still restraining horses or cattle that don’t know the shock is gone. Ozone Pacific. A nickname that took hold years before, when boardwalk denizens first noticed his odd geographical limitations.

“Look at this,” I said, taking the Krugerrand out of my pocket and holding the heavy coin out to him. “This is real gold.”

Keeping the plastic disks tight against his chest in his left hand, he reached out with his right to take the Kruger. As he grasped it, I saw that his arm was bleeding. Taking hold of his wrist, I turned his arm and saw several fresh cuts midway between his wrist and elbow. The cuts were surrounded by countless scars. The long-sleeve shirt in all weather.

“Oh, Oz, what are you doing?” The periodic misery that underlay his cheerful demeanor hit me like a knee in the gut. I guess I should have known. People who are always smiling are usually sad.

He pulled his hand free and hunched back over, holding gold in one hand, plastic in the other.

“I’m sorry, Rob. I know I’m not supposed to do it. Please don’t tell anybody.”

“But why are you doing it, Oz? Why would you want to cut yourself?”

I had heard of schoolgirls who supposedly sliced their delicate skin for some kind of perverse satisfaction, but I had never understood it. It seemed like something made up by daytime talk-show hosts to elicit maudlin tears from emotionally congested housewives, not something that actually happened in real life. I knew all about addictions to things that make you feel good, at least temporarily, like alcohol and heroin and sex, but I couldn’t comprehend being addicted to pain.

“I do it when I feel sad,” he said. “It makes me feel better. It hurts, and I think about that and forget about my mom and everything else.”

“What else?”

He leaned his head back and moaned. “All my problems. Baba Raba won’t give me my picture back, and I’m going to get kicked out of my room, and I’m never going to get out into the country. I’m all grown up and I’ve never even seen a cow. I am afraid I am going to be stuck down here forever and never see my mom or the country or anything.”

I knelt down beside him and put my arm around his thin shoulders. He leaned his head against me and wept. He smelled sour. Tears dripped from his chin, jewels of blood from his elbow. I let him cry for a minute or so to get it out of his system, then squeezed his shoulder.

“I am going to make sure you get out into the country, Oz,” I said. “Don’t worry about that anymore.”

It had occurred to me how much I owed the kid. He was the one who had put me on the trail of the necklace in the first place, and the necklace was going to make me rich. Not rich like Howard Hughes or Christina Onassis or any of the other sick superrich for whom money was a painful poison, but rich like a guy in the fairy tale who steals the ogre’s treasure and exits the story whistling, bag slung over his shoulder, hat pushed back on his head, disappearing down a country lane.

More than that, in the hollowness of late nighttime, I felt a kinship with him in his sorrow, as if he were my son or brother. He had lost his mother, who I was quite sure would never return. I had lost my daughter, whom I probably would never see again. Oz and I were sandwiched together in the darkness between two devastations.

Reggie and I would be leaving Venice the next day. Or maybe the day after. I might try one more time. Before leaving, I would hook Ozone up with some kind of social-services agency and find him a place to stay, maybe some vocational training. Something better than sleeping in alleys.

“Come on, stop crying,” I said. “Why don’t you come over and sleep on our couch tonight? We need to put some antiseptic on those cuts so they don’t get infected. What did you cut yourself with, anyway?”

He reached under the sleeping bag and pulled out a single-edged razor blade. I took it from him and slipped it in my shirt pocket, then helped him up.

“Bring your shirt and boots. We’ll wash your clothes tomorrow after you take a bath and get cleaned up.”

Following Oz out of the dim room, I tripped on some of his junk, kicking a pile of magazines so that they splayed across the floor. One of them caught my eye. It was the copy of Riviera with Evelyn’s bejeweled picture that the boy had shown me on the boardwalk. I wondered if he had two copies or if he’d forgotten that Baba had returned it to him. I started to ask him as we walked back over to the flophouse, but thought better of it. I didn’t want to challenge another of his delusions, if that’s what it was. He was upset enough already.

Though he should have been dead to the world, Budge must have heard us go into the downstairs bathroom. I was putting Bactine on Ozone’s arm when the former lineman’s bulk loomed in the doorway.

“Don’t let him see!” Ozone said, turning away.

But he had already seen.

“Oh, motherfucker!” Budge said, turning away from us and smashing his fist into the wall, punching through the plaster and lath, something I’d never seen anyone do before.

Any fool with a few drinks in him can put his fist through a piece of drywall without damaging his hand, unless he hits a stud. Most of my friends’ homes when I was growing up had a hole or two in the kitchen or living room drywall, testament to some memorable domestic disturbance, as when a drunken father objected to his wife’s shrill 2 a.m. accusations. But plaster and lath is more like concrete than half-inch drywall. My man Budge had a big punch.

“Knock it off, Budge,” I said. “Look what you did to your hand.”

He held his fist up in front of his face and looked at the blood seeping through the white plaster dust.

“Who gives a shit?” he said.

“Sharpnick will when she sees that hole in the wall.”

“Why should she? They’re gonna tear it down anyway.”

“Just behave yourself.”

After Oz’s cuts were disinfected and bandaged, I sent him to the living room to lie down on the couch.

“I’m sorry, Budge,” he said softly as he went down the hall. But Budge wouldn’t look at him.

“Let me see your hand,” I said, pulling the big goof into the bathroom. He had gashed his knuckles badly, grinding old paint and plaster into them.

“I told that little son of a bitch if he ever did that again, I was gonna kick his ass,” he said and hiccupped and began to cry.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Not you, too. Sit down on the toilet and let me see if I can do something with your hand so you don’t get gangrene.”

When Budge was patched up and back in bed, I checked the other downstairs rooms. Candyman was snoring in his berth with an anonymous companion of sizable proportions. Pete’s room was empty, the hospital corners on his bunk undisturbed. I wondered what the ex-sailor was up to at two-thirty in the morning.

Upstairs, Reggie’s room was empty, too. Probably gone to Chavi’s to celebrate the score with a blow job after stashing the rental car.

I drifted off, thinking about the next day. The first thing I would do was take the necklace and coins to Fahid. Then we’d return the car and get the five-hundred-dollar deposit back. Then call someone about Oz. Then…

I slipped over the edge of consciousness, dropping down into a deep, cool sleep.