San Francisco Noir

THE PRISON BY DOMENIC STANSBERRY

North Beach

It was 1946, and Alcatraz was burning. I had just got back into town and stood in the crowd along the seawall, looking out toward the island. The riot at the prison had been going on for several days, and now a fire had broken out and smoke plumed out over the bay. There were all kinds of rumors running through the crowd. The prisoners had taken over. Warden Johnston was dead. Capone’s gang had seized a patrol boat and a group of escapees had landed down at Baker Beach. The radio contradicted these reports, but from the seawall you could see that a marine flotilla had surrounded Alcatraz Island and helicopters were pouring tracer fire into the prison. The police had the wharf cordoned off but it didn’t prevent the crowds from gathering. The off-duty sailors and Presidio boys mixing with the peace-time john-nies. The office girls and Chinese skirts. The Sicilians with their noses like giant fish.

In the crowd were people I knew from the old days. Some of them met my eyes, some didn’t. My old friend Johnny Maglie stood in a group maybe ten yards away. He gave me a nod, but it wasn’t him I was looking at. There was a woman, maybe twenty-five years old, black hair, wearing a red cardigan. Her name was Anne but I didn’t know this yet. Her eyes met mine and I felt something fall apart inside me.

My father had given me a gun before I left Reno. He had been a figure in North Beach before the war-an editor, a man with opinions, and he used to carry a little German revolver in his vest pocket. The gun had been confiscated after Pearl Harbor, but he’d gotten himself another somewhere along the way and pressed it into my hand in the train station. A gallant, meaningless gesture.

“Take this,” he said.

“I don’t need a gun.”

“You may be a war hero,” he said, “but there are people in North Beach who hate me. Who have always hated me.

They will go after you.”

I humored the old man and took the gun. Truth was, he was ill. He and Sal Fusco had sent me to borrow some money from a crab fisherman by the name of Giovanni Pellicano. More than that, though, my father wanted me to talk with my mother. He wanted me to bring her on the train back to Reno.

Johnny Maglie broke away from his little group-the ex-soldiers with their chests out and the office janes up on their tiptoes, trying to get a glimpse of the prison. Maglie was a civilian now, looking good in his hat, his white shirt, his creases. My old friend extended his hand and I thought about my father’s gun in my pocket.

I have impulses sometimes, ugly thoughts.

Maybe it was the three years I’d spent in the Pacific. Or maybe it was just something inside me. Still inside me.

Either way, I imagined myself sticking the gun in my old friend’s stomach and pulling the trigger.

“So you’re back in town,” said Maglie.

“Yeah, I’m back.”

Maglie put his arm around me. He and I had grown up together, just down the street. We had both served in the Pacific theater, though in different divisions. He had served out the campaign, but I’d come back in ’44-after I was wounded the second time around, taking some shrapnel in my chest. This was my first time back to The Beach. Johnny knew the reason I had stayed away, I figured, but it wasn’t something we were going to talk about.

“We fought the Japs, we win the goddamn war-but it looks like the criminals are going to come back and storm the city.”

I had liked Maglie once, but I didn’t know how I felt about him anymore.

“You going to stick around town for a while?”

“Haven’t decided,” I said.

“How’s your mom?”

“Good.”

He didn’t mention my father. No one mentioned my father.

“You know,” he stuttered, and I saw in his face the mix of shame and awkwardness that I’d seen more than once in the faces of the people who’d known my family-who’d moved in the same circles. And that included just about everybody in The Beach. Some of them, of course, played it the other way now. They held their noses up, they smirked. “You know,” he said, “I was getting some papers drawn up yesterday-down at Uncle’s place-and your name came up…”

He stopped then. Maybe it was because he saw my expression at the mention of his uncle, the judge. Or maybe it was because the cops were herding us away, or because a blonde in Maglie’s group gave a glance in his direction.

“Join us,” he said. “We’re going to Fontana’s.”

I was going to say no. And probably I should have. But the girl in the red cardigan was a member of their group.

For twenty years, my father had run the Italian-language paper, Il Carnevale. He had offices down at Columbus, and all the Italian culturatti used to stop by when they came through the city. Enrico Caruso. The great Marconi. Even Vittorio Mussolini, the aviator.

My father had been a public man. Fridays, to the opera. Saturdays, to Cavelli’s Books-to stand on the sidewalk and listen to Il Duce’s radio address. On Tuesdays, he visited the Salesian school. The young boys dressed in the uniforms of the Faciso Giovanile, and my father gave them lectures on the beauty of the Italian language.

I signed up in December, ’41.

A few weeks later my father’s office was raided. His paper was shut down. Hearings were held. My father and a dozen others were sent to a detention camp in Montana. My mother did not put this news in her letters. Sometime in ’43 the case was reviewed and my father was released, provided he did not take up residence in a state contiguous to the Pacific Ocean. When I came home, with my wounds and my letters of commendation, my stateside commander suggested it might a good idea, all things considered, if I too stayed away from the waterfront.

But none of this is worth mentioning. Anyway, I am an old man now and there are times I don’t know what day it is, what year. Or maybe I just don’t care. I look up at the television, and that man in the nice suit, he could be Mussolini. He could be Stalin. He could be Missouri Harry, with his show-me smile and his atomic bomb. This hospital, there are a million old men like me, a million stories. They wave their hands. They tell how they hit it big, played their cards, made all the right decisions. If they made a mistake, it wasn’t their fault; it was that asshole down the block. Myself, I say nothing. I smell their shit. Some people get punished. Some of us, we get away with murder.

“You on leave?”

Anne had black hair and gray eyes and one of those big smiles that drew you in. There was something a bit off about her face, a skewed symmetry-a nose flat at the bridge, thin lips, a smile that was wide and crooked. The way she looked at you, she was brash and demure at the same time. A salesman’s daughter, maybe. She regarded me with her head tilted, looking up. Amused, wry. Something irrepressible in her eyes. Or almost irrepressible.

“No, no,” I said. “I’ve been out of the service for a while now.”

She glanced at my hand, checking for the ring. I wasn’t wearing one-but she was. It was on the engagement finger, which she tucked away when she saw me looking. What this meant, exactly, I didn’t know. Some of the girls wore engagement rings the whole time their fiancés were overseas, then dumped the guy the instant he strolled off the boat. Anne didn’t look like that type, but you never knew.

As for me, like I said, I wasn’t wearing any kind of ring-in spite of Julia Fusco, back in Reno. We weren’t married, but…

“I grew up here.”

“In The Beach?”

“Yes.”

She smiled at that-like she had known the answer, just looking.

“And you?”

“I’ve been out East for a while,” she said. “But I grew up here, too.”

“But not in The Beach?” I asked, though I knew the answer, the same way she had known about me.

“No, no. Dolores Heights.”

The area out there in the Mission was mostly Irish those days, though there were still some German families up in the Heights. Entrepreneurs. Jews. Here before the Italians, before the Irish. Back when the ships still came around the horn.

“Where did you serve?”

I averted my eyes, and she didn’t pursue it. Maybe because I had that melancholy look that says don’t ask any more. I glanced at a guy dancing in front of the juke with his girlfriend, and I thought of my gun and had another one of my ugly moments. I took a drink because that helped sometimes. It helped me push the thoughts away. The place was loud and raucous. Maglie and his blonde were sitting across from me, chatting it up, but I couldn’t hear a word. One of the other girls said something, and Anne laughed. I laughed too, just for the hell of it.

I took another drink.

Fontana’s had changed. It had used to be only Italians came here, and you didn’t see a woman without her family. But that wasn’t true anymore. Or at least it wasn’t true this night. The place had a fevered air, like there was something people were trying to catch onto. Or maybe it was just the jailbreak.

Maglie came over to my side and put his arm around my shoulders once again. He had always been like this. One drink and he was all sentimental.

“People don’t know it,” he said. “Even round the neighborhood, they don’t know it. But Jojo here, he did more than his share. Out there in the Pacific.”

“People don’t want to hear about this,” I said. There was an edge in my voice, maybe a little more than there should have been.

“No,” said Maglie. “But they should know.”

I knew what Maglie was doing. Trying to make it up to me in some way. Letting me know that whatever happened to my father, in that hearing, it wasn’t his idea. And to prove it, I could play the hero in front of this girl from The Heights with her cardigan and her pearls and that ring on her finger.

I turned to Anne.

“You?” I asked. “Where were you during the war?”

She gave me a little bit of her story then. About how she had been studying back East when the war broke out. Half-way through the war, she’d graduated and gotten a job with the VA, in a hospital, on the administrative side. But now that job was done-they’d given it to a returning soldier-and she was back home.

The jukebox was still playing.

“You want to dance?”

She was a little bit taller than me, but I didn’t mind this. Sinatra was crooning on the juke. I wanted to hold her closer, but I feared she’d feel the gun in my pocket. Then I decided I didn’t care.

I glanced at the ring on her finger, and she saw me looking.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Berlin.”

I didn’t say anything. Frank went on crooning. Some of my father’s friends, I remembered them talking about the Berlin of the old days. About the cabarets and the bigmouthed blondes with husky voices who made the bulge in their pants grow like Pinocchio’s nose.

“He, my fiancé-he’s a lieutenant,” she said. “And there’s the reconstruction. He thought it was important, not just to win the war. Not just to defeat them. But to build it back.”

“He’s an idealist.”

“Yes.”

I wondered how come she had fallen for him. I wondered if she had known him long. Or if it had been one of those things where you meet somebody and you can’t escape. You fall in a whirlwind.

At that moment, inside Alcatraz, Bernie Coy and five other convicts were pinned down in the cellblock. None of us in the bar knew that yet, or even knew their names. If you wanted to know what was going on inside Alcatraz, the best you could do was climb up a rooftop and listen to the radio-but it was too far to see, and the radio was filtered by the military. Anyway, prison officials weren’t talking. They were too busy to talk. Later, though, it came out how Bernie Coy was the brains. He knew the guards’ routines. He’d managed to crow apart the bars and lead a handful of prisoners into the gun room. He and his buddies had clubbed the guards, taken their keys, and headed down the hall to the main yard; but the last door in the long line of doors would not open. The keys were not on the ring. They had all the ammunition in the world, but they could not get past that door. Now they were pinned down, cornered by the fire on one side and the guards on the other. So they fought, the way men in a foxhole fight. Our boys in Normandy. The Japanese in those bloody caves. The floodlights swept the shore and the tracer bullets lit the sky, and they fought the way desperate men fight, creeping forward on their bellies.

Sinatra was winding it up now, and I pulled Anne a little closer. Then I noticed a man watching us. He was sitting at the same table as Maglie and the rest. He was still watching when Anne and I walked back.

He put his arm around Anne, and they seemed to know each other better than I would like.

“This is Davey.” Anne said.

“Mike’s best friend,” he said.

I didn’t get it at first, and then I did. Mike was Anne’s fiancé, and Davey was keeping his eye out.

Davey had blue eyes and yellow hair. When he spoke, first thing, I thought he was a Brit, but I was wrong.

“London?” I asked.

“No, California,” he smiled. “Palo Alto. Educated abroad.”

He had served with Anne’s fiancé over in Germany. But unlike Mike, he had not re-enlisted. Apparently he was not quite so idealistic.

“Part of my duties, far as my best friend,” he said, “are to make sure nothing happens to Anne.”

The Brit laughed then. Or he was still the Brit to me. A big man, with a big laugh, hard to dislike, but I can’t say I cared for him. He joined our group anyway. We ate then and we drank. We had antipasti. We had crabs and shrimp. We had mussels and linguini. Every once in a while someone would come in from the street with news. At the Yacht Harbor now…three men in a rowboat…the marines are inside, cell-to-cell, shooting them in their cots. At some point, Ellen Pagione, Fontana’s sister-in-law, came out of the kitchen to make a fuss over me.

“I had no idea you were back in town.” She pressed her cheek against mine. “This boy is my favorite,” she said. “My goddamn favorite.”

Part of me liked the attention, I admit, but another part, I knew better. Ellen Pagione had never liked my father. Maybe she didn’t approve of what had happened to him, though, and felt bad. Or maybe she had pointed a finger herself. Either way, she loved me now. Everyone in North Beach, we loved one another now.

Anne smiled. Girl that she was, she believed the whole thing.

A little while later, she leaned toward me. She was a little in her cups maybe. Her cheeks were flush.

“I want to take you home.”

Then she looked away. I wondered if I’d heard correctly. The table was noisy. Then the Brit raised his glass, and everyone was laughing.

After dinner, Johnny Maglie grabbed me at the bar. I was shaking inside, I’m not sure why. Johnny wanted to buy me a beer, and I went along, though I knew I’d had enough. There comes a time, whatever the drink is holding under, it comes back up all of a sudden and there’s nothing you can do. At the moment, I didn’t care. I caught a glimpse of Anne. Some of the others had left, but she was still at the table. So was the Brit.

“How’s your mom?” It was the same question Johnny had asked before, out on the street, but maybe he’d forgotten.

“She’s got her dignity,” I said.

“That’s right. Your mama. She’s always got her head up.” He was a little drunk and a smirk showed on his face.

I knew what people said about my mother. Or I could guess, anyway. She was a Northern Italian, like my father, from Genoa. Refinement was important to her. We were not wealthy, but this wasn’t the point. My father had only been a newspaperman, but it had been a newspaper of ideas, and the prominenti had respected him. Or so we had thought. My mother had tried for a little while to live in Montana, outside the camp where he was imprisoned, but it had been too remote, too brutal. So she had gone back to North Beach and lived with her sister. Now the war was over, and the restrictions had been lifted, but my father would not return. He had been disgraced, after all. And the people who could have helped him then-the people to whom he had catered, people like Judge Molinari, Johnny Maglie’s uncle-they had done nothing for him. Worse than nothing.

“Are you going to stay in The Beach?” Johnny asked.

I didn’t answer. My father worked in one of the casinos in Reno now, dealing cards. He lived in a clapboard house with Sal Fusco and Sal’s daughter, Julia. Julia took care of them both.

About two months ago something had happened between Julia and me. It was the kind of thing that happens sometimes. To be honest, I didn’t feel much toward her other than loyalty.

“So what are you going to do?”

I glanced toward Anne. The Brit had slid closer and was going on in that big-chested way of his.

“I don’t know.”

But I did know. There was a little roadhouse on the edge of Reno with some slots and card tables. Sal Fusco wanted my father and I to go into business with him. To get the loan, all I had to do was shake hands with Pellicano, the crab fisherman. But my father, I knew, did not really care about the roadhouse. All he wanted was for my mother to come to Reno.

I had spoken to my mother just hours before.

“If this is what you want, I will do it,” she said.

“It’s not for me. It’s for him.”

“Your father can come back here. The war is over.”

“He has his pride.”

“We all have our shame. You get used to it. At least here, I can wear my mink to the opera.”

“There is no opera anymore.”

“There will be again soon,” she said. “But if this is what you want, I will go to Reno. If this is what my son wants…”

I understood something then. She blamed my father. Someone needed to take blame, and he was the one. And part of me, I understood. Part of me didn’t want to go back to Reno either.

“It’s what I want,” I said.

Johnny Maglie looked at me with those big eyes of his. He wanted something from me. Like Ellen Pagione wanted. Like my father wanted. Like Julia Fusco. For a minute, I hated them all.

“I know how you used to talk about going into law,” Johnny said. “Before all this business.”

“Before all what business?”

“Before the war…” he stammered. “That’s all I meant. I know you wanted to be an attorney.”

“Everything’s changed.”

“My uncle-he said he would write a letter for you. Not just any school. Stanford. Columbia. His recommendation, it carries weight.”

I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a rush of excitement-that I didn’t sense a door opening and a chance to walk into another life.

“Is it because he feels guilty?” I asked. “Because of what happened to my father? He was at the hearing, wasn’t he?”

Johnny looked at me blankly, as if he didn’t understand.

“I saw Jake yesterday.”

Jake was Judge Molinari’s boy. He was a sweet-faced kid. His father’s pride and joy. He’d done his tour in Sicily and distinguished himself, from what I heard.

“How’s he doing?”

“Getting married.”

“Good for him.”

Back at the table, the Brit raised another glass. Beside him, Anne was beautiful. The way the Brit was looking at her, I didn’t guess he was thinking about his buddy overseas.

I was born circa 1921. The records aren’t exact. It doesn’t matter. Like I said, there are times, these days, when I can’t place the current date either. It is 1998, maybe. Or 2008. The nurse who takes care of me-who scoots me up off my ass and empties my bedpan-she was born in Saigon, just before the fall. 1971, I think. French Vietnamese, but the French part doesn’t matter here in the States. Either way, she doesn’t give a fuck about me. Outside the sunlight is white, and I glimpse the airplanes descending. We have a new airport, a new convention center. Every place, these days, has a new convention center. Every place you go, there are airplanes descending and signs advertising a casino on the edge of town.

I close my eyes. The Brit gets up all of a sudden, goes out into the night. I see Anne alone at the table. I see my father dealing cards in Reno. I see Julia Fusco in my father’s kitchen, fingers on her swollen belly.

My kid. My son.

A few days ago, for recreation, they wheeled us to the convention center. We could have been anywhere. Chicago. Toronto. I spotted a couple in the hotel bar, and it didn’t take a genius to see what was going on.

You can try to fuck your way out. You can work the slot. You can run down the long hall but in the end the door is locked and you are on your belly, crawling through smoke.

No one escapes.

The nurse comes, rolls me over.

Go to sleep, she says. Go to fucking sleep.

“I was on Guam.” Anne and I were outside now, just the two of us. The evening was all but over. “The Japanese were on top of the hill. A machine-gun nest.”

One of the marine choppers was overhead now, working in a widening gyre. The wind had shifted and you could smell the smoke from the prison.

“Is it hard?”

“What?”

“The memories?”

“Of the war, you mean.”

“Yes, the war.”

I didn’t know what to say. “A lot of people on both sides,” I made a vague gesture. “Us or them. Sometimes, the difference, I don’t know.” I felt the confusion inside of me. I saw the dead Japs in their nest. “I don’t know what pulls people through.”

She looked at me then. She smiled. “Love.”

“What?”

She was a little shier now. “Something greater than themselves. A dedication to that. To someone they love. Or to something.”

“To an idea?”

“Yes,” she said. “An idea.”

What she said, it didn’t explain anything, not really, but it was the kind of thing people were saying those days-in the aftermath of all the killing. I felt myself falling for it, just like you fall for the girl in the movie. For a moment, she wasn’t Anne anymore, the girl from The Heights. She was something else, her face sculpted out of light.

She smiled.

“I’m old-fashioned,” she said. “Why don’t you get me a taxi?”

Then I had an idea. I didn’t have to go to Reno. I could just walk up Columbus with Anne. We could catch a taxi. And we could keep going. Not out to Dolores Heights, or Liberty Heights, or wherever it was she lived. But beyond the neighborhoods…beyond the city…out through the darkened fields…carried along on a river of light.

Then from behind came a loud voice. It belonged to the Brit and it boomed right through me.

“Anne,” he said. “I have gotten us a taxi.”

I felt her studying me, reading my face. I felt her hand on my back. The Brit opened the taxi door.

My legs were shaking as I headed down the alley. I could hear the copters still, and the sirens along the waterfront. As I walked deeper into the neighborhood, I heard the old sounds too. An aria from an open window. Old men neighing. Goats on a hillside. I was drunk. At some point I had taken my father’s gun out of my pocket. It was a beautiful little gun. I could have gotten into the taxi, I supposed. Or I could find Anne tomorrow. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I had other responsibilities. I hadn’t been in The Beach for a while, and I was disoriented. The alley was familiar and not familiar. Rome, maybe. Calabria. An alley of tradesmen, maybe an accountant or two, in the offices over the street. I saw a figure ahead, coming out of a door, and I recognized the corner. Judge Molinari had his office upstairs. Had for years. But this was a younger man. He turned to lock the door. Go the other way, I thought. Don’t come toward me. But on he came. Jake Molinari, the judge’s son. With the war behind him and a bride waiting. I hadn’t planned to be here, but here I was. There are things you don’t escape. In the dark, he was smiling to himself. Or I thought he was. He raised his eyes. He saw me. He saw the gun in my hand and his mouth opened. I thought of my father and Julia Fusco, and I shot him. He fell against the alley wall. Then all I could see was Anne. Her face was a blinding light. A flash in the desert. The man lay at my feet now. I shot him again.

At the top of the hill, I paused to look back. I knew how it was but I looked anyway. The sky over the bay was red. Alcatraz was still burning.

IT CAN HAPPEN BY DAVID CORBETT

Hunter’s Point

Pilgrim watched as, just outside his bedroom door, Lorene handed Robert fifty dollars and told him she wanted to visit personal with her ex-husband for a spell. Robert was Pilgrim’s nurse. He’d been a wrestler in college-you had to be strong to heft a paralyzed man in and out of bed-and worked sometimes now as a bouncer on his off-hours.

Robert glanced back toward the bedroom for approval and Pilgrim gave his nod. The big man pocketed the money, donned his hat, and walked out the door in his whites, not bothering with his coat despite the cold.

Pilgrim liked that about Robert-his strength, his vigor, his indifference to life’s little bothers. Maybe “liked” wasn’t quite the word. Envied.

He lay back in bed and waited for Lorene to rejoin him. His room was the largest in the cramped, dreary house and bare except for the $20,000 wheelchair gathering dust in the corner, the large-screen TV he was so very tired of watching, an armchair for visitors with a single lamp beside it. And the centerpiece-the mechanical bed, a hospital model, tilted up so he didn’t just lie flat all day.

Lorene took up position bedside and crossed her arms. She was a pretty, short, ample, strong woman. “Don’t make me go off on you.”

Pilgrim tilted his head to see her, eyes glazed. Every ten minutes or so, someone needed to wipe the fluid away. It was a new problem, the tear ducts. Three years now since the accident, reduced to deadweight from the neck down, followed by organs failing, musty skin, powdery hair, his body in a slow but inexorable race with his mind to the grave. He was forty-three years old.

In a scratchy whisper, he said, “I got my eyes and ears out there.”

“Corella?” Their daughter. Corella the Giver, Lorene called her, not kindly.

“You been buying things,” he said.

“Furniture a crime now?”

“Things you can’t afford, not by the wildest stretch-”

“Ain’t your business, Pilgrim. My home, we’re talkin’ about.” She pressed her finger against her breastbone. “Mine.”

Lorene lived in a renovated Queen Anne Victorian in the Excelsior district of San Francisco, hardly an exclusive area but grand next to Hunter’s Point, where Pilgrim remained, living in the same house he’d lived in on a warehouseman’s salary, barely more than a shack.

Pilgrim bought the Excelsior house after his accident, when he came into money through the legal settlement. He was broadsided by a semi when his brakes failed, a design defect on his lightweight pickup. Lorene stood by him till the money came through, then filed for divorce, saying she was still young. She needed a real husband.

Actually, the word she used was “functional.”

The divorce was uglier than some, less so than most. The major compromise concerned the Victorian. He gave her a living estate-it was her residence till she died-but it stayed in his name. He needed that. Lorene would have her lovers, the men would come and go, but he’d still have that cord, connecting them-his love, her guilt. His money, her wants.

He got $12,000 a month from the annuity the truck manufacturer set up. Half of that went to pay Lorene’s mortgage, the rest got eaten up by medical bills, twenty-four-hour care, medicine, food, utilities. He had no choice but to stay here in this ugly, decrepit, shameful house.

“Know your problem, Pilgrim? You don’t get out. Dust off that damn wheelchair and-”

“Catch pneumonia.”

“Wrap your damn self up.”

“Who is he, Lorene?”

She cocked her head. “Who you mean?”

“The man in the house I pay for.”

Lorene put her hands on her hips and rocked a little, back and forth. “No. No, Pilgrim. You and me, we got an understanding. I don’t know what Corella’s been saying-”

“I know you got men. That’s not the point here. You take this one in?”

“You got no say, Pilgrim.”

“Even folks at Corella’s church know about him. Reverend Williams, he calls himself. Slick as a frog’s ass.”

“I ain’t listening to this.”

“All AIDS this and Africa that. But he’s running from trouble in Florida somewhere, down around Tampa.”

“That’s church gossip, Pilgrim. Raymont never even been to Tampa.”

“Now you spending money hand over fist. That where it’s coming from, Lorene? Phony charity, pass the basket? Raymont? No. That wouldn’t pay the freight, way I hear you redone that house. What you up to, Lorene? You know I’ll find out.”

Finally, fear darkened her eyes. He wanted to ask her: What do you expect? Take away a man’s body, he still has his heart. Mess with his heart, though, there’s nothing left but the hate. And the hate builds.

“Pilgrim, you do me an injustice when you make accusations like that.” The words came out with a sad, lukewarm pity. She sighed, slipped off her shoes, motored the bed down till he lay flat, then climbed on, straddling him. “This what you after? Then say so.” She took a Kleenex from the box on the bed and wiped his puddled eyes, then stroked his face with her fingers, her skin cool against his. She cupped his cheek in her palm and leaned down to kiss him. “Why do you doubt my feelings, Pilgrim?”

“Send him away, Lorene.”

“Pilgrim, you gotta let-”

“I’ll forgive everything-I don’t care what you’ve done to get the money or how much it is-but you gotta send him away. For good.”

Lorene got down off the bed, slipped her shoes back on, and straightened her skirt. “One of these days, Pilgrim-before you die-you’re gonna have to accept that I’m not to blame for what happened to you. And what you want from me, and what I’m able to give, are two entirely different things.”

Robert returned to find Lorene gone. How long she leave Mr. Baxter alone? he wondered, chastising himself. He checked his watch, barely half an hour since he’d left but that was plenty of time to have an accident. And he ain’t gonna blame her, hell no. That witch got the man’s paralyzed dick wrapped around her little finger tight as a yo-yo. He’s gonna lay blame on me.

That was pretty much the routine between them. Bitch rant scream, beg snivel thank. Return to beginning and start again. Even so, Robert knew he had the makings of a good thing here. He didn’t want it jeopardized. Mr. Baxter wasn’t long for this life, every day something else went wrong, more and more, faster and faster. The man relied on Robert for all those sad, pathetic, humiliating little tasks no one else would bother with. If Robert played it right, made himself trusted and dependable-the final friend-there could be a little something on the back end worth waiting for.

Everybody working in-home care knew a story. One woman Robert knew personally had tended an old man down in Hillsborough, famously wealthy, and he scribbled on a napkin two days before he passed that she was to get $40,000 from his estate. The family fought it, of course-they were already inheriting millions, but that’s white people for you-claiming she’d had undue influence over his weakened mind. The point was, though, it can happen. Long as you don’t let the family hoodwink you.

Venturing into the bedroom doorway, Robert discovered Pilgrim trembling. His breathing was ragged.

“Mr. Baxter, you all right?” Edging closer, he saw more tears streaking down the older man’s face than leakage could explain. “Good Lord, Mr. Baxter? What did that woman do?” Pilgrim hissed, “Call my lawyer.”

Marguerite Johnstone had gone to law school to escape Hunter’s Point but still had clients in the neighborhood-wills and trusts, conservatorships, probate contests, for those who could afford them. She sat parked at the curb outside Pilgrim’s house, waiting a moment behind the wheel, checking to make sure she had the address right.

The place was small and square with peeling paint and a flat, tar-paper roof. In back, a makeshift carport had all but collapsed from dry rot. Weeds had claimed the yard from the grass and grew waist high. How in God’s name, she thought, can a man worth three-quarters of a million dollars live in a dump like this?

It sat at the corner of Fitch and Crisp-“Fish & Chips,” they used to call it when she lived up the hill on Jerrold-the last residence before the shabby warehouses and noxious body shops rimming the old shipyard. The Redevelopment Agency had big plans for new housing nearby but plans had never been the problem in this part of town. The problem was following through. And if any locals, meaning black folks, actually got a chance to live in what the city finally built up there, it would constitute an act of God. Meanwhile, the only construction actually underway was for the light rail, and that was lagging, millions over budget, years behind schedule, the muddy trench down Third Street all anyone could point to and say: There’s where the money went.

The rest of the neighborhood consisted of bland, crumbling little two-story houses painted tacky colors, with iron bars on the windows. At least they looked lived in. There were families here, holding out, waiting for something better to come-where else could they go? And with the new white mayor coming down all the time, making a show of how he cared, people had a right to think maybe now, finally, things would turn around. But come sunset the hoodrats still crawled out, mayor or no mayor, claiming their corners. Making trade. Marguerite made a mental note to wrap things up and get out before dark.

Robert led the lawyer through the bedroom door and Pilgrim sized her up. A tall, freckled, coffee-skinned woman with her hair pulled back and tied with a bow, glasses, frumpy suit, and flats. Be nicer-looking if she made an effort, he thought.

“Nice to meet you,” he said. “You come well recommended. This here’s my daughter.”

Corella sat at the end of the bed, dressed in black, down to the socks and shoes, her hair short like a man’s. His other daughter, Cynthia, was the pretty one, but she wasn’t Lorene’s child. Cynthia lived with her mother far away-St. Louis, the last anybody heard.

Corella would never move away. She was Daddy’s little princess, homely like him.

Marguerite extended her hand. “Pleasure.”

“Obliged,” Corella said.

Pilgrim shooed both Robert and his daughter from the room. Robert went quick, Corella less so. Clingy, that was the word he wanted. But bitter. He waited for the door to close.

“I got the feeling,” he said, “way your voice sounded over the phone-”

“You were right, there are problems.” Marguerite removed a thin stack of papers from her briefcase, copies of documents she’d discovered at the County Recorder. “With the Excelsior property.”

She explained what she’d found. Six months earlier, the IRS had filed tax liens for over $300,000 in back taxes against a Raymont Williams-who came with a generous assortment of aliases. Soon after that, Lorene, who worked at a local credit union, recorded the first of three powers-of-attorney, forging Pilgrim’s signature and getting a notary at the credit union to validate it. Then, acting as Pilgrim’s surrogate under the power-of-attorney, she took out a loan for $120,000, same amount as the oldest of the tax liens, securing it with the Excelsior property.

But no release of lien was ever recorded. Apparently, when Lorene realized how easily she could phony up a loan, she got the fever. The IRS could wait for its money. Two more loans followed for increasingly shameless sums from hard-money lenders. The house was now leveraged to the hilt, the total indebtedness over $600,000, and that was just principal. Worse, though Lorene had made a token effort to cover her tracks, keep up with the payments, she’d already slipped into default.

“Expects me to come to the rescue,” Pilgrim guessed.

“It’s that or lose the house to foreclosure,” Marguerite said.

“All that happen in just six months?” Pilgrim chided himself for not seeing it sooner. Hadn’t even known about this Raymont fool till recent. Why hadn’t Corella told him? She went to see her mother from time to time-not often, they didn’t get on, but often enough. Daddy’s homely, clingy, bitter little princess was playing both sides. But she’d pay. Everyone would pay.

Marguerite said, “You’ve got a very strong case against the notary, pretty strong against the lenders, though the last two are a step above loan sharks. I don’t know what Lorene told them-”

“Woman can charm a stump.”

“But they’ll want their money. They’ll know they can’t go against Lorene or this Raymont individual for recovery. And they could say they had a right to rely on the notary and turn on her, but her pockets most likely aren’t that deep either. So they’ll come after you. And my guess is they won’t be nice about it.”

“How you figure?”

“It’ll suit their purposes to stick with Lorene and her story, at least for a while. She’ll say she had your full authority to do what she did and now you’re just reneging out of jealousy. It’s not an argument that’ll carry the day, not in the end, but the whole thing could get so drawn out and ugly they could grind you down, force a settlement that still leaves you holding a pretty sizable bag.”

“Maybe I’ll just walk away from the house.”

“If you’re okay with that, why not do it now? Save yourself my legal fees.”

Pilgrim cackled. “You don’t want my money?”

“Not as much as some other people do, apparently.”

Pilgrim blinked his eyes. He could feel the water building up. “And this Raymont Williams, this phony preacher, he walks away clean.”

“I call it the Deadbeat Write-off. Meanwhile, for you, this could all get very expensive, particularly in addition to the other work you mentioned.”

Pilgrim glowered, trying to shush her. He figured Corella had an ear pressed up to the door, trying to hear his business.

“Expensive is lying here doing nothing. I can’t move. Don’t mean I can’t fight.”

That night Pilgrim dreamed he had his body back. He and Lorene were in the throes, the way it used to be-give some, not too much, take a little away, then give it back till she’s arching her spine and making that sound that made everything right. Damn near the only good he’d done his whole sorry life, pleasure that woman-that and turn himself into a quadriplegic piggy bank.

But no sooner did she make that gratified cry in his dream than the whole thing changed. He heard another sound, a low fierce hum, then the deafening broadside slam of the semi ramming his pickup, the fierce growl of the diesel inches from his bleeding face through the shattered glass of his window, the scream of air brakes and metal against metal, then the odd, hissing silence after. His head bobbing atop his twisted spine, body hanging limp in the shoulder harness. The smell of gas and smoldering rubber and that tick-tick-tick from the truck’s radiator that he mistook for dripping blood.

Raymont Williams, dressed in pleated slacks and a cashmere V-neck, Italian loafers, and silk socks, heard the doorbell ring and glanced down from a second story window. A fluffy little white fella, baggy suit, small hat, stood on the porch. Something wrong with this picture, he thought. White people in the neighborhood didn’t come to visit.

Raymont lifted the window: “Yeah?”

The man backed up, gripping his hat so it wouldn’t fall off as he tilted his head back to see who was talking. “Reverend Raymont Williams?”

No collar, Raymont thought, touching his throat. “You’re who?”

“Name’s William Montgomery. I live down the block. I received some of your mail. By mistake. The names, I guess.” He tugged on the brim of his puny hat. “Kind of similar in a backwards sort of way.”

“Shove it through the slot.”

The man winced. “There’s a bit of a snafu.” He looked at the wad of mail in his hand, like it might catch fire. “One of the letters is certified, I signed by mistake. I don’t know, I didn’t look carefully, I just…” He scrunched up his face. “I called the post office. I have to get your signature, too, next to mine, then take the receipt down to the main office on Evans. It’s a hassle, I realize-”

“That don’t make sense.”

“They were very specific. I’m truly sorry, Reverend.”

The hairs on Raymont’s neck stood up. You mocking me? “Hold on.” He closed the window, walked down the carpeted stairs to the entry. The crystal prisms on the chandelier refracted the sunshine streaming through the fanlight. In the dining room a bouquet of lilies and irises exploded from a crystal vase on the Hepplewhite side table. Lorene had this mania for Waterford lately, in addition to a number of other decorating obsessions. Out of control. They’d need to talk on that.

He flipped open the mail slot from inside. “Okay, slip it through.”

The little man obliged. Raymont took the bundle of paper, at which point the voice through the mail slot said, “Reverend Raymont Williams, a.k.a. Raymont Williams, a.k.a. Raymond White, a.k.a. Montel Dickson-you’ve been served with a summons and a complaint in accordance with state law and local rules of the California Superior Court. You must appear on the specified date or a default judgment may be filed against you. If you have any questions, you can call the number that appears on the summons.”

Why you schemey little bug, Raymont thought. He pulled himself up, booming through the door: “How dare you! Coming here, full of hostile intent and subterfuge. I am a man of the cloth. What’s the difficulty, tell me-the difficulty in simply ringing the bell like a decent man with honest business?”

Beyond the door’s beveled glass, the white man grinned, his eyes hard. He didn’t look so fluffy now. “Yeah, right. Straight up, that’s you.” He turned and started down the steps, saying over his shoulder, “You’re served.”

Raymont threw the door open, came after him, one step, two. “You listen-”

The little man spun around. “Go ahead. Lay a hand on me, I’ll sue you for every cent you’re worth.”

Raymont cocked his head, perplexed. “Will you now?” He reached out, lifted William Montgomery or whoever the hell he was off his little white feet, and tossed him down to the sidewalk. His head hit with a hollow, mean-sounding thunk. The man groaned, curled up, clutching his hat.

“Sue me for every cent I’m worth? Joke’s on you.”

The phone started ringing inside the house. Raymont slammed the door behind him, went to the hallway, and picked up. He could hear Lorene, sobbing.

“So. Lemme guess. They got you at work.”

“We got ten days-to get out. That’s my house-”

“What did you do? What did you say?”

“I tried, Raymont, I swear. But he is a stubborn, spite-ful-”

“You best try again, woman. Try harder. Try till that horizontal nigger sees the motherfucking light of goddamn day.”

“Mr. Baxter says I’m to stay in the room this time.”

Robert opened the bedroom door so Lorene could go in. She put away the fifty dollars she’d planned to pass along, tidied her hair, gathered herself. “Fine then.” She strode in like a shamed queen.

Pilgrim’s voice stopped her cold. “You come here to try to weasel your way into my good graces, don’t bother. You got ten days to quit. You and that hustling no-count you taken in. The two of you, not out by then, sheriff kicks you out.”

Lorene gathered her pride. “From the very beginning, Pilgrim, you promised-”

“Promises don’t always keep, Lorene. You crossed the line.”

Lorene sat down and tried to collect her thoughts. Crossed the line. Yes. And what an interesting world it became, across that line. The things you never thought you could have, right there. But here and now she was running out of options. Still, she reminded herself: I know this man.

With the nurse there she couldn’t be as bold as the moment called for. All she could do was lean forward, tip her cleavage into view, bite her lip. “What is it you want, Pilgrim?”

Marguerite sank back in the chair and tapped her foot. “I don’t agree with this.”

“Not your place to agree or disagree.”

“That’s not entirely true. I can withdraw.”

“Just find me another lawyer, not so particular.”

“Mr. Baxter, it may not be my place, but you might want to think of your estate plan as a way to take care of your loved ones, not settle scores.”

“I want that kind of talk, I’ll turn on Oprah.”

“All right. Fine.” Marguerite took the papers out of her briefcase. “I’ve drawn things up the way you asked. Both sets.” She glanced up. “Are you all right?”

Pilgrim blinked. His face was wet. “Damn eyes is all.”

Corella came that evening to visit and found her father sleeping. His breathing was faint, troubled. She put her hand to his forehead. Cool. Clammy.

Hurry up and die, she thought.

He’d always made no secret of his feelings. If her mother was in the room, Corella did not exist. Children are baggage. How much time had she wasted, pounding her heart against his indifference-only to melt at the merest Hey there, little girl.

As fickle as the man could be, he still had it all over her mother. That woman was scandalous. Corella had tried to be gracious, turn a blind eye to the parade of men through that big old house-even this Raymont creature-but then the woman started spending money like a crack whore on holiday and Corella had to draw a line. Woman’s gonna burn up my inheritance, she thought. That can’t stand.

She pulled up a chair to wait until her father woke up. A manila envelope peeked out from under the bed covers. Carefully, she lifted it out. The lawyer’s address label was on the front, with the notation: “Pilgrim Baxter-Estate Plan-DRAFT.” About time he got to this, she thought.

Corella had earned her teacher’s certificate just as the new governor was talking about taking pensions away and basing salaries on “merit”-meaning your career lay in the hands of bored kids cut loose by lazy parents. Schoolwork? Not even. Not when there’s curb service for rock and herb on the street, Grand Theft Auto on the Game Boy, streaming porn on the web. The American dream. She was sorry for what had happened to her father but the money was luck and she’d need all she could muster. Otherwise the future just looked too grim.

She checked to be sure he was still dozing, then opened the envelope quietly, removed the papers inside. There was a living trust, a will, some other legal documents captioned “Baxter v. Williams et al.” Not like I don’t have a right to see, she thought. He’ll need me to make the calls, transfer accounts, consult with the accountants and all.

She read every page, even the boiler plate. By the time she was done her whole body was shaking.

Raymont, wearing his preacher collar under a gray suit, stared out through the beveled glass of the Victorian’s front door at Corella on the porch. Girl’s nothing but a snitch for her father, he thought. He felt like telling her to just go away but Lorene hadn’t come home the night before. He’d rattled around all night alone in their canopy bed, like a moth inside a lampshade, wondering if he shouldn’t call the police. But, given his troubles, that could turn tricky. Besides, he figured she wasn’t missing. She was hiding.

He cracked open the door. “Your mama’s not around.”

Corella had her hands folded before her, prim as a nun. “I didn’t come to see her.”

She might as well have thrown a rock. “Say that again?”

“Turns out you and I have something in common.” She looked him square in the eye. “We need to talk.”

They sat in the kitchen, Raymont sipping Hennessy with a splash of 7-Up, Corella content with tap water as she told him what she’d learned.

“The lawsuit and eviction remain in place-against you. Everything against my mother is dismissed in exchange for her cooperation and truthful testimony.”

Girl sounds like a bad day on Court TV, he thought. “Your mama says I forced her into anything, that’s a damn lie. I may have suggested-”

“She gets the house, too. He’s quit-claiming it to her. But the debt comes with it.”

Raymont shook his glass, the ice rattled. “There’s his pound of flesh. Payments too steep. She can’t keep up, they’ll foreclose.”

Corella shook her head. “She’ll be able to hold them off for a while. And the insurance annuity that pays for my father’s care? It has a cash payout when he dies. Half a million dollars. He’s giving half of that to my mother to pay down the debt. That should make it manageable but still steep enough it’ll feel-if I know my mother and father-like punishment.”

Girl understands her blood, he thought, I’ll grant her that. “And the other half-who gets that?”

Corella shook her head, a little flinch of outrage. “It goes to the nurse.”

Raymont put down his drink. “The bouncer?”

“‘For services rendered charitably, patiently, and generously.’” Corella seemed about to cry, but there was ice in her voice, too. “I get nothing.”

“You got a half-sister floating around somewhere, too, am I right?”

He might as well have slapped her. “She doesn’t deserve anything! Where has she been? What has she done?”

“Easy. Easy. I just-”

“The nurse is bad enough. I’m the one in the family who’s been there. Every day.”

“Fine. Agreed.” Raymont juiced up his drink with a little more Hennessy. The girl was getting on his nerves and he needed to think. His mind boiled. “I’m gonna hire me a lawyer,” he said. “A real junkyard dog. You best find yourself one, too, girl, before this all gets finalized.”

Corella stood up from the table. “You’re missing the point.”

Lorene left the hotel where she was hiding and arrived in Hunter’s Point shortly after dinner to visit with Pilgrim. Robert let her in and said, “Mr. Baxter told me you and him would be wanting some private time.” She opened her purse, figuring they were back on the old payment schedule, but Robert said, “No need for that, ma’am.” He grabbed his hat, glanced at his watch, and added, “I’ll come back in an hour.”

She inferred from his cheerfulness that Pilgrim had informed him of his good fortune. Once Pilgrim executed his documents, the former wrestler and part-time bouncer would stand to inherit a princely sum. Pausing at the window, she watched him flounce out to his beat-up car. He’ll buy himself a new one first thing, she thought, something everyone will stare at. New car, new clothes, flash and trash, waste it all. But who’s the bigger fool for that-him or Pilgrim?

She went into the bedroom and stood beside the bed. Pilgrim gazed up at her. “You look tired,” he said.

She smiled grimly, thinking: You have no idea. Tired of pretending I feel for you. Tired of keeping up that charade just so I can have the one thing I want, my home and the things in it, a safe place as I grow old. Tired of watching you hang on to your miserable life with all its petty jealousy and resentment and hate. Tired of trying to convince myself I can do what you want. You think you can control my life and who I love, now and forever, even from beyond the grave. So yes. I’m tired.

It’s always the devil, she thought, who shows us who we really are. She knew Raymont was evil, but so? Love is not a choice and who would want it if it was? He’d taught her things. Fortune favors the bold. No risk, no reward. She did not intend to waste that lesson. And there were hatreds and resentments of her own to abide.

“Come here,” Pilgrim whispered. “Visit with me.”

She stepped out of her shoes, lowered the bed, climbed on, and straddled him, edging forward on her knees. Maybe you’ll forgive me, she thought. Maybe not.

“Let me move this,” she said, wrestling the pillow from beneath his head.

“Lorene, damn, careful-”

She clamped the pillow across his face and pressed down hard. The plump soft weight muffled his cries. Two minutes, she thought. That’s how long they say it takes for old folks in nursing homes and Pilgrim lacked even that much strength. The killing would leave tiny red dots in his eyes but she would call her own doctor, not his, say he’d just stopped breathing. Her doctor would take her word, sign the death certificate before anyone was the wiser. And though Robert would be suspicious when he got back-he’d be out a quarter of a million dollars-he’d be in no position to make trouble. The police would see right through him. Besides, she made out no better than he did with Pilgrim dead and no documents signed-why would she kill him?

Her heart pounded and she was drenched with sweat by the time it was over. She couldn’t bear to lift the pillow, see his face. She just leaned down, listened for sounds of breathing. Nothing.

From behind: “You just do what I think?”

Lorene spun around on the bed. Raymont stood in the doorway. Stranger still, Corella peeked out from behind him.

“We knew you’d be here,” Raymont said. “We saw the nurse leave. Corella has a key.”

Lorene held out her hand. “Help me down.”

Raymont approached her like he thought she might turn into a bat but helped her as she climbed off Pilgrim’s body. He caught her when she nearly fell. Her knees felt rubbery. She almost fainted.

“I couldn’t go through with it,” she said.

Puzzled, Raymont lifted the pillow. “You already did.”

“No, I mean go through with what he wanted me to do. Turn against you.” A shudder went through her and she began to weep softly. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right, baby, stop.” He stroked her face. “Don’t fret. We got it all figured out.”

“We?” She wiped her face.

“Corella and me. She’s the one stands to inherit, she’s the next of kin.”

“But Cynthia-”

“To hell with Cynthia.” It was Corella, holding herself so tight it looked like she might explode if she let go.

Raymont, more gently, said, “Anybody heard from this Cynthia? Anybody even know where she is?”

“St. Louis. Somewhere near-”

“No, Lorene.” He grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her. “No. Listen to me. Corella and me, we’ve come to an understanding.” He looked at Pilgrim’s body, the face exposed now. Vacant. Still. “Corella’s gonna file the probate. She’ll say she heard some talk about another daughter, tried hard to find her, couldn’t. We ransack this place, destroy any letters or anything else that might give us away, lead somebody to where she is. Hell, why can’t we pretend she doesn’t even exist?”

“What about the lawyer? The one he’s been talking to. What if he’s told her-”

“Why should she care? You pay her whatever she’s owed, she’ll go away, trust me. One thing I know, it’s lawyers.”

The next impulse took Lorene by surprise. She reached for Raymont’s face, clamped her eyes shut, and pressed her mouth so hungrily against his she thought, again, she might faint. A cold pulse ran through her, it felt like laughter. He’s dead, she thought. He’s dead and I’m free and God help me but I have lived for this moment.

Watching her mother grab the bogus preacher within inches of her father’s corpse, Corella suffered a moment of clarity so searing she nearly got sick. Nothing would change, she realized. She’d be used. These two revolting people would get what they wanted then toss her aside. She was a tool. She was, again, baggage.

Raymont had brought a gun in case Robert had to be dealt with. Corella crept up behind him, reached inside his coat pocket.

Raymont tried to catch her by the arm, missed. “What you playin’ at?”

Corella gripped the weapon with both hands, waving it back and forth, at Raymont, at Lorene, at Raymont. She was crying.

Raymont held out his hand. “Put that down.” Then: “This was your idea, girl.”

Corella fired. Lorene screamed as the bullet hit Raymont in the shoulder. He howled in pain, cursed, reached for the wound, said, “I’ll kill you,” through clenched teeth, but then she fired again, this time aiming for his face. The round went through his eye. Lorene’s screams grew piercing. Raymont tottered, reached for something that wasn’t there, and slowly collapsed to the floor.

“My God, Corella, why, Lord, what-”

Corella raised the barrel till it pointed at her mother. “Quiet,” she said, barely above a whisper, then fired. The bullet ripped through Lorene’s throat. The second went straight through her heart.

Robert came back from the Philly cheese steak shop on Oakdale he liked, chewing gum to counter the smell of the greasy cheese and grilled onions on his breath. He found the door unlocked. Odd, he thought. Careless of me. Smokehounds could just waltz in.

He went straight for the bedroom, make sure all was well, and stopped in his tracks. A man he didn’t recognize sat slumped against the wall, a bloody hole where one eye had been, another in his shoulder. Lorene lay in a heap beside the bed, ugly wounds on her chest and neck. And Mr. Baxter lay in his bed, motionless as a hunk of wood, eyes and mouth gaping.

Corella sat on the floor against the wall, clutching a pillow, staring at nothing. A pistol rested on the floor, not far from her feet.

“They killed him,” she whispered. “I came in…” Her voice trailed away. She glanced up at Robert.

Robert’s eyes bounced back and forth-the gun, Corella. “You?”

“They killed him,” she said again. Practicing.

Robert studied her, then said, “It’s all right. I understand.”

He went to the bedside, checked to make sure Pilgrim was dead, then checked the other two as well. From a box beside the bed he withdrew a vinyl glove, slipped it on his hand.

“You hurt?” he asked Corella, walking over to the gun, picking it up.

She shook her head. Then, looking up into his face, she said, “He never signed those documents, you know. You get nothing.”

Robert crouched down in front of her. “Sometimes it’s not about the money.” With one hand he forced her mouth open, with the other he worked the barrel in. “Sometimes it’s just the right thing to do.”

Two days after the funerals, Marguerite Johnstone sat in her office, meeting with Pilgrim’s surviving daughter, Cynthia. She’d traveled from Hannibal, Missouri, for the services. Her mother had stayed behind.

“Your father had me draft two estate plans,” Marguerite explained, “one he executed the last time I met with him, the other he was saving.”

Cynthia tilted her head quizzically. “Saving?”

She was quite different from Corella, Marguerite thought. She had Midwestern manners, played the cello, wore Chanel. More to the point, she was Korean. Or half Korean, anyway.

“He wanted to see how his ex-wife followed through on certain promises. Obviously, that’s all moot now.”

Cynthia shuddered. “It sounds so terrible.”

The night of the murders, the police received reports of gunfire in the neighborhood but that was like saying it was dark out at the time. No one could pinpoint where the shots came from till Robert called 911. The detectives working the case had their doubts about his story but he’d held up under questioning and passed his gunshot residue test. Besides, the new mayor was lighting bonfires up their buttholes-their phrase-because of their pitiful clear rate on the dozens of drive-bys and gang hits in that neighborhood. Last thing they wanted to do was waste time on a domestic. As it sat, the case had a family angle and a murder-suicide tidiness to it, and that permitted them to close it out with a clear conscience. If justice got served in the bargain, fabulous.

“The documents your father actually executed leave everything to you. The Excelsior house has so little equity and is so heavily leveraged, I’d consider just walking away. Let the lenders fight over it. The Hunter’s Point lot-forget the house-might bring fifty thousand. That’s a guess, we’ll have it appraised. That leaves the cash payout from the annuity.”

Cynthia looked up. “And that would be?”

“In the ballpark of half a million.”

The girl’s eyes ballooned. “I had no idea. I mean, my father and I, we weren’t in touch. My mother, she’s become more and more…traditional. She felt ashamed. She and my father weren’t married and they-” Her cheeks colored. She wrung her handkerchief in her lap. “I wrote from time to time but never visited. Not even after his accident. Corella was the one-”

“It wasn’t Corella’s decision to make. It was your father’s property. That’s the way it works.”

“But-”

“From the way he talked about it, I gathered it was precisely the fact you didn’t hang around, waiting for him to die, that made him feel benevolent toward you.”

Cynthia pondered that, then shrugged. “It still feels a little like stealing, to be honest.”

“You can’t steal a gift, not under the law anyway.” Marguerite glanced at the clock, reminding herself: billable hours. “Are there any questions you’d like to ask?”

Cynthia put her chin in her hand and tapped her cheek with her forefinger. Too cute, Marguerite thought. The innocence was beginning to grate.

“I hope this doesn’t sound crass,” Cynthia said finally, “but when will I get my check?”

Marguerite bit her lip to keep from grinning. Families, death, and money, she thought. Didn’t matter your race or creed-or how far away you lived-the poison always bubbles up from somewhere, often long before the dear departed’s body grows cold.

“That depends on the insurance company administering the annuity. Why?”

Cynthia shrugged. “Nothing. I was thinking about maybe traveling.” She blushed again. “It’s my boyfriend’s idea, actually.”

Interesting, Marguerite thought. “‘Travel is a privilege of the young.’ I read that somewhere. Why didn’t your boyfriend come with you?”

“He lives here. We just met.” The color in her cheeks deepened. “It’s sudden, I realize, and he’s really not my type, but I’ve felt lonely here and he’s very kind. He introduced himself at the church service. You may know him, actually, he took care of my father.”

DOUBLE ESPRESSO BY SIN SORACCO

Russian River

There was a festival of tiny Virgin de Guadalupe statues casting nets into the water. They hopped along the edges of the flooded soccer field, whispering about uncles who used to fish there. Huge hairy homeless men huddled in the predawn drizzle: When will the sun come out again, Mothers? The men placed large eggs in front of the statues. Or not.

Gina trudged through the little park, her mouth opened in a big yawn, her heavy eyes unfocussed, her hair flattened in wet curls from the sputtering rain. Soccer field was flooded again-they built the thing on top of one of the Mission district’s old springs. Whole place used to be one big marsh, birds and fish and everything. Maybe someone should put a couple ducks there or something. Remind folks. Except the birds would probably get eaten. Would that be a good thing or not? Gina wasn’t sure. She’d figure it out over coffee.

She was trying to savor the last moments of night before a harsh winter’s sun gave everything edges-

“Hey! Get outta my way!” An agitated man wearing burgundy plaid jogging shorts and blueberry running shoes continued pumping his legs as he glared at her.

She stared at his legs. Did he actually shave them? What was in his mind when he did that? Like leg hair would slow him down? “Shhhh,” she said. “People sleepin here.”

“Dickhead.” A deep voice Gina recognized rumbled from the depths of a sleeping bag. She saw Lucas’s head appear for a moment before he burrowed back beneath the gold-striped plastic tablecloth which covered the upper half of him. “Go home.”

The jogger’s knees lifted higher, pop pop one-two one-two, as he bounced in front of Gina. He huffed, in the direction of the tablecloth, “This is a public park! Not a hotel!”

A couple more sleeping bags twitched, someone groaned. “Every fuckin mornin.”

Lucas turtled out, muttering, “Dickhead gets up befo the sun jus to spoil our mornin.” He nodded to Gina. “Mornin, Gina.”

“Sun’s not comin up today. Go back to sleep.”

The enraged jogger hissed, “You people are crap.”

Gina put her hands on her hips. “What people? Who people? Just who izzit you callin crap?” Her hands clenched as he ran across the lawn and down the steps to his SUV parked at the curb. She hollered at his retreating butt, “You rich fuckin bastaaaard!” She turned to the park’s no longer sleeping crew. “Oh. Sorry.” She headed toward the little mall at Sixteenth and Bryant.

The people who opened Peet’s in the morning didn’t smile a lot-this was important to Gina: Just pour the damn espresso into the cup and give it to me.

Double espresso. Spoonfulla steam milk. She poured the sugar over the top, circling the cup three times-

“Got you a serious sugar jones, Gina?”

Bleary-eyed, Gina glared at her coffee, “Mornin, Lucas.

Don’t talk about jonesin before coffee.” She lifted her head and motioned at the Safeway parking lot outside the window. “Gonna be a crappy day, Lucas. Another crappy day.” She poured half her coffee into a paper cup, handed it to him.

“Yup. Yup.” Lucas rubbed his stubbly chin, scratched his do-rag back over his graying curls, grinned his seven-tooth grin. “Up before the sun again. Haaaaah.” He waved at the chaotic lot, the oily drizzle. “Yunno, the world is how ya make it.” He shrugged deeper into his baseball jacket. “Got a extra cigarette you can spare?”

Gina smiled at her grubby pal. “Pfft. They don come with extra. Only twenty to a pack.” Cocking her head toward the lot, she said, “Come on back out into the wilderness with me and we’ll bring up the sun, smokin.”

She lit two cigarettes. Not gonna share one with Lucas no matter how little he annoyed her in the morning, that man’s mouth surely been some nasty places. She watched him cough on the exhale. “Sorry I woke yas this mornin.”

Lucas blew the smoke into the sky over the lot. “Nahhh. Weren’t you. That guy got somethin wrong with him. Yunno.” He watched the crows and the cars bark and circle in the morning light. “Goin down Sixteenth this morning, Gina. Anythin you want?”

Gina snorted, an unladylike noise. “I want it all, Lucas. I want it all.”

“All Sixteenth Street?” His laugh was a sustained growl. “C’n you i-magine what it’d be like just to keep it clean?”

“Pffft. What about the DPW?”

Lucas raised a grizzled eyebrow. “Yeah. What about em?”

“Right. Let it rot.”

“No. If it’s yers…” Solemn nod, years of living at the edges. “If you want it, you gotta care for it.”

Grumpy, “Yeah. Sure. Okay.” A creek used to run all the way from where they stood, started over on Seventh, emptied into the bay. Sewer line now. “You’re right. I don’t want it.” Last drag. “What you want, Lucas? What you willin to take care of?”

“Weeeeeee-ell. I cheer you, smokin the sun come up. That about good enough for my day.”

“I’m not cheered up.” Gina smiled up at him. “Not me. Not cheerful. Not in the mornin. Nope.” She turned her head, her smile fading as she saw three cop cars slide into the parking lot, sharks circling closer to a shiny black car with three shiny brownskin teenagers inside it.

The boys were oblivious, windows down, coffee cups raised to each other, their laughter shading from ghetto falsetto to royal belly roars: “Didja see that man looooooook at us? OOoooooooh yeeeeeeah. He be one jealous muthafucka nowwwww.”

Six doors opened, six cops approached the car, three hung back, two at each side, one stepping forward. “Out. Out of the car. Now.”

Gina saw the whole morning slide straight into the shitter, the tender motion of their wild night, their grand friendship-she watched their lives slip off their faces as the cops approached.

One of the cops pawed at his gun, his shoulders twitched with anticipation.

Wind it back. Way back. To the moment of celebration. Never moving forward.

Stolen car, beautiful car pounding through the night, windows down, rockin sound, good friends. Nothing on their minds, nowhere to be. Just cruisin. Maybe drivin across the bridge to Oakland howlin at the moon, back again headin west as the sun came up behind them, racin chasin and pul-lin into Safeway’s big lot, grabbem some wake-up-the-day, no one even know the car be gonnnnne yet. Three coffees, lotsa cream, take the whole sugar jar. Oh lookit that fiiiine girl, just a fine young girl. Fine. Here’s to all the fine young girls! Here’s to a night under the moon at seventy eighty ninety a hunnert miles an hour! Here’s to friends and Here’s to Forever.

Gina’s breath came slow and shallow, her eyes riveted on the three boys standing, leaning on the car, one foot behind the other, casual, doomed. The police talked then the kids talked, waving their hands in the air. Even though she stared and stared directly at them all, she couldn’t stop the forward motion from falling into the gray nothing forever of jail.

She felt Lucas fade away to her left-a soft sound like a sucker punch-right at the edge of awareness. Her lips curled in a snarl, she flung her coffee cup at the closest police car. Failed to get a splash on the tires. Grand gesture. Didn’t save a single soul.

Gina spun away, headed out Bryant Street, following some long buried waterway, work forgotten. The sound of her boots snapped the cement into grains of sand, the glare of her eyes destroyed every condom dropped in her path. She cut up to Seventh and Folsom, creek’s mouth, digging in her pocket for bills to catch a bus ride out. North. Out of the city. Like her granma used to do when things got tight in the kitchen. Far away for a day of friendly trees. There’d be lots of green shit on the hills. Big ol winter river.

When she got to her seat she half-closed her eyes, peeking out from under her heavy lids as the city rolled by. She discovered a fondness for the city buried somewhere deep in her chest, most noticeable when she was leaving. Gina sat upright at the bridge, staring at the early-morning skyline: Dawnlight glowed on fairy tale city.

“What crap.” Gina put her head back, went to sleep.

She had intended to call Karen from Santa Rosa: Get out the bong, the booze, the shrooms. I’m headin fer the high grass. The tall trees. Comin to break the monotony of yer sheltered rural ex-is-tence.

But the River Express bus was at the station when she arrived so she just kept moving, no breaks in the rhythm, not even to call work: Got stuck up the river, road’s washed out, won’t be in today. She kept moving toward the green, away from the city drizzle that hurt her eyes. Burned her heart.

Gina hopped off in Guerneville, fog swirling from the trees at the top of the ridge, Latinos waiting on the corners for day-wage dirt jobs, no traffic on the street, slow dogs pissing on the shrubbery. Nice one-street city. Tattoo shop, couple weird art shops. Coffee shop.

“Double espresso, please.” Gina took a deep breath, felt her ribs expand in the country air. First big rib-stretcher in a long time. “Ahhhh. Please, where’s the nearest phone?”

Karen answered, melodic with country cheer, “Alhambra here.”

“Al Hambra? What? Like some Saudi cousin of Al Qaeda?”

“Giiina! How are you?” She laughed. “It’s a palace in Spain.”

“You moved to Spain? Or named yourself after a building?” Gina scowled: You let em move outta the city, they completely lose their little freakin minds.

“Hah. I just liked the sound of it. So, what’s up, little grouch?”

“I’m in Guerneville. Filled with urban angst.” For the first time Gina wondered if this had been a good idea. She decided not to mention bongs or shrooms-when people changed a perfectly good two-syllable name like Karen to something mouth-filling or edificial, you never knew what other changes might have taken place.

“Gotcha. I’ll be there inna few. Don’t go to the bridge.”

“Okay.” What the hell is that supposed to mean?

“Don’t do anything weird there. The local citizen-watch has the place bugged and videotaped.”

“You shittin me? What’s up with that?” Gina turned around, slow, careful, looking left, looking right. The vigilantes were hunkered down somewhere out of sight.

“The lower river’s tagged with being inna condition of urban blight. Garbage. And crime, Gina. Terrible crime. People smoke dope. Shoot the lights out. Make noise. The world will come to an end if the good citizens don’t document everything.”

“What should I do?” Gina asked.

“Oh hell, go to the bridge anyway. It’s the easiest landmark. Besides, the river’s huge, makes everything hum. Make ya feel alive. Meet you there.”

“Eat my shorts.”

The rain started pissing down again, it would never stop, the world was going to wash away or disappear in a poof of mold. Dozens of vultures lurked in the dripping trees by the bridge, shitting down their legs, watching Gina with lazy hungry eyes.

She walked out to the middle of the span and stared down at the wide coffee river rumbling along only a foot or two below her, the bridge itself thrumming with the crazy power of so much muddy water bombing past. Gina goggled down into deep river space then pulled her sweater off over her head, spread her arms wide open to the sprizz of the water. “Yeeeeah!”

“Hey! Get outta the way!”

Gina turned to see a skinny guy walking a purple and green painted wheelchair.

“Din’t yo mommy teach you ta watch yer back?” He stopped next to her, crowding her against the metal screen railing. He peered at the delicate vines tattooed around her left arm, at the datura blossoms inked by the same Mission district master artist on her right. “Wow.” Up and down, moving closer. “Nice ink, babe!”

Gina glared at the gimp, she slid away from him. His T-shirt exposed beef-jerky muscles covered with blackwork tattoos. Thick lines where the ink had bled through the skin made the ugly skeletal forms worse. Both lower legs were similarly covered. Badly executed fake-tribal. The whites of his eyes were dead yellow, no pupil, his face didn’t move when he spoke. Not good. “Get the fuck away from me.”

He grabbed her arm, turning it to examine it closely. “Looks like my work, here.” He leaned forward. “This here jus like my design.” He ran his tongue up her inner arm.

Relax arm, bend knees, step to the side, and twist sharp. “You simple-minded fuckhead-”

There was more she was going to say, but his fist slammed into her face, she felt her right eye crack like an egg, sudden yolk ran red down her neck. She took a deep breath, a low crooning subsonic kind of sound began in her belly, spun out of her mouth. Her toes curled back, she popped his dick with the ball of her foot, and while he crouched in the traditional male oof position, she jumped straight up in the air, clasped her hands together, and whacked his head into a steel girder. He made a satisfying clang sound.

She grabbed the wheelchair and heaved it over the railing into the river. A classic finishing move. Hoo hoo hoo.

Gina took fragile steps along the bridge, back the way she had come, muttering to herself. She snapped her fingers at the spot where she figured the camera would be: Kiss my ass.

As she stepped off the bridge she saw Karen’s lanky figure running toward her. Gina took her hand off her eye and waved, spattering drops of blood which disappeared in the drizzle before they hit the ground. Gina’s one-eye vision wobbled. Karen? Long sweater, long skirt, cowboy hat? Two long black braids swung out behind the woman as she ran.

“What happened?”

“Uhhh,” Gina said, waving at the staggering figure on the bridge. “Uhh. Tattoo pride. What can I say?”

“Put your hand over your eye, press down. Wait. No. Don’t press on it, you might make it worse. Tilt your head back. Wait, no, don’t tilt it back, you won’t see where you’re going-here, lean on me.”

Gina grinned up at her friend. “Calm down, Allllhambrah. Just point me to your car. This ain’t my first head wound, surely won’t be the last. C’mon. Let’s blow Guerneville.”

Gina wrapped her sweater around her head before she got in the car so she wouldn’t bloody-up the upholstery. Tires squealed, there was no traffic so Karen took it from zero to sixty in, well, it was an old wreck of a car so it made it to sixty in a couple, three, maybe four blocks. Held steady around the curves.

“Ahhh. That felt good. I mean, now it feels really bad-you do have dope at home, don’t you? But outside of this ex-cruciatin pain here, I been needin to do that for months.” Gina tipped her head into her hand. “I can see why they hava camera on that bridge. The Mission’s a snooze in comparison. Izzit this excitin generally?”

Alhambra spoke through her teeth, “I have some Percocet, and no, it’s not usually like that. Generally people just hang out. Yunno. But that guy-well.” A dozen turns, over a couple more bridges, onto a gravel and dirt road, some more curves, the old car still hanging tough around the corners, then bounce bounce bounce, Alhambra avoided the trees growing smack in the middle of the throughway, sharp right. “Home.”

“Hardly a spot on your brocade.” Gina’s sweater was soaked through with great splotches of blood-head wounds always bled like some animal had been gutted-she dropped it on the porch.

Alhambra picked it up. “No need to advertise to the neighbors that you’re a thug. I’ll wash this.” She looked at Gina’s bloody clothes. “Gah. Take them all off. They’ll get stiff and sticky if you don’t.”

Gina stripped on the porch, head tilted back, palm cupped over her eye. “This could be so romantic. But instead, how about you gimme some dope, like right now? Like even before I enter your Spanish palace?”

Alhambra wrapped Gina in a huge blanket, pushed her inside and onto the couch. “Here.”

“Yum.” Bright light, hydrogen peroxide, cotton balls, scissors, tape, gauze-“Thread and needle? Get away!”

“Shhh. That’s just part of the kit, darlin, you aren’t gettin the full treatment this time. Just gonna clean here and here.”

“Ow. I would be stoic, but then you won’t give me any more drugs. Ooooh owwww.”

“Shit. Stop howlin. I need ta see if your eyeball is squished.”

Gina tried to sit up, “My eyeball ain’t just squished, I heard it crack like it was a egg!” She wondered how it would be to live one-eyed.

“It looks like his ring cut your eyelid. But your eyeball isn’t scratched or cracked or anythin.” Alhambra stepped back, smiling. “Gonna hava shinerrr.”

“Crap. Come to the country. Be bucolic. Frolic. Man, this sucks.”

Alhambra fixed a gauze patch over Gina’s eye, handed her a package of frozen peas to put on her cheekbone, and set the kettle on the stove.

Gina lay back with her eyes closed. Half-dreaming, she heard the sound of chopping, then wood hitting the slate floor with a clonk, crunkle of paper, skritch of match, whomp of a fire starting-the smell of pitch pine and oak, the flicker on her eyelids of orange dancers, the whistle of the kettle. Peppermint ginger tea. Something gritty slid through her mind about rural livin bullshit and how it just ain’t true, but she let it drift away. “I miss you sometimes in the city, yunno? I got a friend, he been on the streets now for I dunno how many years, but even with him, I don’t see that reflection of who I am-like I see in your eyes.” She muttered, “Lonely.”

“You needa learn to be gentle with yourself.”

“Gentle? No.” Gina shifted, grunting. “Oh. Right. You can say that now cause you’re the medicine woman of the woods. Livin clean. Chop wood, carry water.” She took a gulp of tea. Gina thought she heard monsters roaring in the distance. “What the hell is that big noise?”

Alhambra laughed. “It’s the river! Cool, huh?”

“Not cool. Wheelchair perverts anda howlin river. And you. I mean, you gotta cowboy hat now. A full medical kit. A rifle?”

“No rifle. Just an old Ruger with the numbers filed off. It was a gift, because it’s a classic, like me.”

“What?”

“That’s what the guy said. I wasn’t all that pleased with the man, but the gun is sweet.”

Gina growled, “Convicts like us can’t have guns, Karen. Can’t have dope. Can’t do medical stuff. We aren’t allowed to protect ourselves. Not even if there’s wolves at the door. Monsters in the woods. Once a convict, always a criminal.”

Alhambra laughed, “There’s no monsters in these woods.”

“Ha. What you gotta gun for? What the hell you doin up here?”

“Safe haven, Gina. That’s all. Sanctuary.”

“Dayam. Sanctuary?”

Alhambra put her hand on Gina’s shoulder. “If it makes you feel any better, that guy you clobbered isn’t a gimp. He uses the wheelchair as a prop so people give him money. Dude’s not even poor. His daddy’s in grapes and development. Gonna shut the river down-says there isn’t enough water to go around for the fish and all the people.”

Gina listened to the growling of the river. “Seem to me there’s plenty of water.”

“Not for these greedy bastards. They’re gonna make the river dry all up in the summer. Pretend it’s good for the fish, then sell the water for development.” Alhambra chewed on one of her braids. “Can’t stand to let people just live, gotta always make money.”

Gina looked up, her one eye huge and sad. “Used to be rivers in the city. In the Mission. All kindsa fish, too. My granma told me. She told me how she’d watch her uncles go off for a day of fishin insteada goin to school. They come home drunk. But sometimes they’d catch little trouts, then everybody would come over and…Well, it’d be great. All gone now.”

Alhambra shivered. “Rivers are an endangered species. That guy’s father maybe figures if the river dies, then his toad son come back home, become a wealthy lawyer.”

“Same no matter where I go.”

Gina took the package of not-really-frozen-anymore peas from her cheek, started to get up to put it back in the fridge.

“Siddown, you. I’m in charge here. Gimme that, it’ll be pea soup innabout an hour.” A frying pan sizzled as pancetta hit it, rattle of peas into a pot.

“Smells like hot dogs.”

“Hah. Remember when we try to learn how to give a guy head?”

“Oh yeahhhhh. Stuck hot dogs down our throats till we gagged, so we gave up and cooked em. I never yet have had occasion to use whatever it was we learned. You?”

“Sure! I’m up for whatever comes along.”

“Comes? Along? Oh yuck. Did you swallow?”

“Condoms are your friend, dimwit.”

“Not my friend. I don’t go that way.” Gina leaned forward, staring into the flames. “How long has it been since I hadda fire inna fireplace? Forever? Never? You do this a lot?”

“Every night this time of year. Drops to freezin. Sometimes, if I don’t bank it right, I need to start it up again in the mornin. But that’s not hard cause the embers are still hot.”

“You learn this up here or you knew it all already? Me…Well, I sort of figure if I don’t know it, I’ll fake it.” Gina shifted her hips, trying to get comfortable. “Like, I suppose I could make a fire…” Her voice faded. “Just never expected to need to know.”

Gina watched Alhambra cook. “We always at the mercy of rich fuckers. They want everythin to be their way-mean and narrow. Oh crap! I gotta call work! I just sort of up and left the city.”

There was a huge boom. And another. Another. Gina bolted upright. The light on the table blinked, blinked, blinkblinked, then fizzed. The house was dark except for the firelight.

“But it’s already dark, as you can see. They know you’re not comin in, Gina. Besides, power’s out. No regular phone.” Alhambra placed the pot of soup on the wood stove. “Don’t worry, if the phone lines didn’t come down, you can still call out.” Alhambra left the room, hollering over her shoulder, “Let me see if the land line is workin.”

“Land line?” Gina felt around for her pack. “Jeez. What’s a land line? A shortwave radio? I’m gonna call work on like a CB? Well, I gotta tellum I won’t be in tomorrow neither.” Her voice faded to tiny mutters, she peered out at the menacing tree shapes looming over the house. “Fuckin primitive out here. Hey, Karen? You realize I only have one workin eye and this is like purgatory? I can’t see shit now.” She didn’t mention that the trees were reaching mean spiky fingers out at her. Smaller voice, “Shit. Can’t find my cigarettes.” Gina sat back on the couch clutching her backpack on her lap. “And my eye is startin to hurt. And…” She began to snicker. “And I can’t get to work.” The snickers turned into laughter. “And I can’t call because they don’t hava shortwave radio. Hah. Haaaaaah.”

Gina grabbed the blanket loosely in her hands. “And I’m up here in total blackout boonie land with my best friend. Oh yeahhhhh.”

Alhambra came up the hallway carrying a small lantern. She said, “Phone lines are down.”

Gina leaped up, flailing the blanket in the air like a huge bat. “We’ll get the boogie man! You and me, Alhambra! We’ll scare im right back into the hellhole he keep comin up out of! Every smartass self-righteous bastard that ever EVER tried to make us small. Every shitmouth rich bitch who plays the I’m-entitled card-we will smassssh her. We’ll tear the prison walls DOWN, muthafucka, DOWN!”

Alhambra put the lantern on the floor, grabbing a corner of the blanket. She raced Gina out into the night, howling, “Down, muthafuckas! Get baaaaack! Mothafuckas!”

It wasn’t until they got right to the edge of the swollen river that Gina noticed she had no clothes on. “Oh my god.” She curled forward. “Karen! You let me go outside stark-ers.”

Alhambra leaned against the huge belly of a redwood, laughter making it impossible for her to stand on her own.

Gina wrapped the blanket in tidy folds around herself. She lifted her head with a haughty twitch. “You bitch.”

Too early in the morning, Alhambra put the kettle on a small butane gas ring, the hoo when it reached a boil woke Gina. “Coffee?” she said. “Still no power, so we’ll go into town for the next cup. Phones probably work there.”

The rain rattle-crashed on the windows, the evil trees slammed their devil branches on the roof of the little house, Gina pulled the covers over her head. “Oh ow oh ow oh ow.”

“Shshshhh. You’ll annoy the demons. Be brave, oh blackheart babe, be brave.”

“Hey, I’m dyin here. One eye, purple cheek, held captive in a wilderness hellhole.”

“What time they expect you at your place of gainful?”

“When I get there. I’m just the inventory monster trapped in the basement, any shipments get there before I do, they pile up. I suit up, show up, count em, log em, sort em, shelve em. Simple. I do it inna speed-stupor. Work one all-day-all-night shift and it’s done. Commerce recommences. And I get paid. Do it again after I’ve slept some.”

“You wanta callem, or what?”

“Yeah. I better. They aren’t likely to call my PO, but they might start callin hospitals. Or morgues.” Gina rolled off the futon onto the floor, crawled around for a while patting the slate. “Cigarette? Grrr. Cigarette? Ahhh.” Inhale. “They think that highly of me. Right. Let’s hava shot of coffee here-I’ll take another Percoset, thank you-then make a break for civilization.” She held out her coffee cup.

Alhambra poured. “Not civilization. I’m not happy with civilization. Yunno? It don’t work for me.”

Gina held her coffee cup in both hands, cigarette dangling from her lips, she couldn’t figure out how to sip since the cigarette was in the way and she wasn’t about to let go of the cup with either hand. Mornings were filled with dilemma. She growled, “Civilized is soothing drugs. You have soothing drugs. Ergo. Civilized.” She sucked the cigarette down to the filter, put the cup in one hand, pinched the cigarette out of her mouth, and tossed it into the embers of last night’s fire. She held her hand out for the pill. “Thank you.”

Alhambra said, “Civilization treats pain with lectures. You know that.”

“Right. I came all the way up here to get my face mashed in so I could get properly loaded. Got it.” Gina pulled her shirt on. “Beats whatever else I had in mind.”

They rattled into town, avoiding the fallen branches, hydroplaning through the rivulets streaming across the road. Monte Rio. Vacation Wonderland. Two bridges, one street. No beach in the winter, the river ate it. There was a movie theater in a Quonset hut with an immense mural on its side, runny with water. The metal ridges of the hut blurred the painted trees into menacing shapes. Gina muttered, “And my granma tol me this place was friendly. Ha.”

A large red amanita mushroom graced the sign for the Wonderland Diner. Alhambra said, “You’ll like it here, Gina.”

Gina looked dubious, but as they entered she murmured, “Whoa. A real diner. Cool.”

Knotty pine walls, sweet breakfast smells, a waitress with a sharp take-no-prisoners grin greeted them. “Good morning. Sit yourselves wherever you’re most comfortable. Coffee?” Not even a small blink at Gina’s broken face. Maybe smashed up faces were common. Maybe the waitress was just good.

Alhambra grinned back. “Mornin. Two double espressos, please, to start.”

“Comes double. You want double double?”

“Yes, please.” Alhambra whispered to Gina, “Great coffee. They tested every kind they could get their hands on-”

The waitress pulled the handles on the old espresso machine like an Italian barrista. Serious. No shortcuts like the machines at Peet’s.

“Sounds like my kind of job.”

“Pffft. You would be the worst waitress on the planet. It’s an art.”

Grumbling, “I wanta be the taster, not the server.” Gina bit the lemon peel, sipped her double espresso. “Damn. Well. All right then.”

“Country pleasures.”

Gina didn’t respond, she got up, bringing her coffee with her, walked to the side of the diner, called her job. They hadn’t missed her, really, but they were aware that the work wasn’t done. Not to worry. She’d deal with it when the roads opened up. Sometime in May. Monte Rio had a certain appeal.

“Okay, so tell me: What do people do up here?” Gina spoke through a mouthful of biscuit ten minutes from the oven with real Maple syrup poured over. She stabbed at her bacon and spun it around on her fork, pointing the whole arrangement at her friend.

Alhambra chewed her BLT on rye, considering an answer. “Same as anywhere. Folks try to get by, grab the energy of the earth and put it to work.”

“Energy of the earth? Crap.” Gina wasn’t going to be mollified by an outstanding breakfast. “Diddlin. That’s what happens when you don’t have the energy of the city. Ya go soft in the head and spend all your time diddlin.”

“Define.”

Gina’s mouth opened, closed. She scowled. “Eh. You know what I mean.”

Alhambra looked up.

Gina felt a large ominous shadow on her right. She craned her neck, wincing for effect, focused her one functioning eye on the steel worker who stood by their table.

“I know you.”

Gina’s lips parted, starting to snarl then wiggling into a limp smile. “Yeah?”

The six-foot steel worker with the blond buzz cut spoke in a melodic soprano, she stood sort of shy, one foot on top of the other. “Uh-huh.” She shifted to another self-effacing position. Her eyebrows lifted, her head tipped to the side, one shoulder raised up-a sort of traditional body language for you-know-where-we’ve-been.

“Jail?” As soon as Gina spoke she would have eaten her own head if only she could’ve fit it in her mouth. In for a nickel. “Which one?” In for a dime.

“Bryant Street. You were on your way somewheres else, probably don’t remember me. Name’s Joey. They called me Big Rig.”

It would be impolite to admit she didn’t remember anyone quite so large, impossible to say she had no memory at all of someone who tried so hard to be small. And failed so utterly. “Ah.” Perhaps the woman was smaller then?

Joey pointed, a small movement, at Gina’s arm. “That my design, that one there.”

Gina took a long breath, blew it out. This person was too sizable to insult, but truth is truth. “No. It ain’t. It ain’t yers. It’s from the hand and mind and soul of a monster great master in the Mission. I watched it bein born in his psyche, I watched it get drawn here on my arm, and I watched him, in total tattoo trance, ink this sucker by hand with needles he tied together right there in front of me with secret knots, and with ink he ground up hisself from pine sap. So don’t give me no shit about it’s yours.” Her lower jaw stuck out: Nobody fucked with Mission history.

Joey shrunk back, her lilting voice floating as if it was a whisper of wind. “Oh. I see.”

“No. You don’t see.” Gina made a small grunt as Alhambra kicked her under the table. “Yesterday a complete toad haulin around a Day-Glo wheelchair told me the same thing.” She moved her chair back in order to speak directly up at Joey. “I apologize for bein harsh to you, but the skinny fucker popped me in the eye when I told him to go fuck himself.”

“That asshole! He been stealing my designs, calling them his own.” The color rose in Joey-Big Rig’s face, her eyes went glinty gray, her arms swelled up like pumpkins as she clenched her fists. “That gnarly bastard couldn’t put a tattoo on a fucking grapefruit.”

Gina thought better of pointing out that the design on her arm wasn’t Joey’s. Instead she nodded, glad to have support in her appraisal of the man. “Dead eyes? Mummy face? Crap ink?”

Joey nodded, her color shading to something less volcanic. “He kills people. He uses the same needles on everyone. Steals other folks’ work and twists it into something ugly.”

“Carryin bad tattoo art is death in itself.” Alhambra spoke, cool waters to soothe a restless soul.

“You know what I’m talking about, then.” Joey became their comrade again. “You staying clean and sober? Yes?”

“Yes. Well, no. I mean…”

Joey laughed, a hearty trill-it would have been a trill except it came from a mountain, so it was, well, hearty. “Been seventeen months for me. Clean. And. Sober.” The laugh stopped and her eyes went flinty. “I ain’t never going back.” She paused, looked at each of them in turn, her huge hands opening and closing in spasm. “Never. Never going back.”

The air had gone out of the diner with a psychic whoosh.

“Never. You got that?”

Alhambra sighed, softly refilling the place with air. “We got it, Joey. Good for you.”

“Good for you.” Gina’s voice clicked in her throat, stuck on something she hadn’t known was in there.

The big woman’s face shifted into a smile, she leaned forward and knocked on the table, “Good talking with yas. Hope to see yas around, then.” She straightened up, “Don’t forget what I told yas. None of us ever going back. No way. None of us.”

The door closed behind her with a small plock.

“We done here, I think?”

“Dayam. We be done and done again.” Gina stared at her hands clenched tight as two poodles fucking. “Holy crap.”

“Let’s walk down to the river and catch a breath of massive water power?”

“Wash away all our sins?”

“Take more than a river in full mud raging flood to do that.”

They passed a sign: Welcome to Monte Rio! HATE STOPS HERE.

“You guys hava different definition of hate up here than we do down in the Mission where folks aren’t all completely bonkers?”

Alhambra, lost in her own thoughts, nodded uh-huh.

They crossed the parking lot, started down a scrubby slope to the curve of the rumbling river. “Jeezuz! She’s goin in the water!”

Joey-Big Rig, hip deep where the water curled against a set of rocks, was wrestling something out of the scrub.

“Holy Christ, it’s that wheelchair I tossed.” Gina didn’t know whether to jump right in, in some goofy heroic attempt to help, or back away in shame at the calamity she had set in motion: Joey was going to be slushed away to drown.

Alhambra’s hand touched Gina’s shoulder. “She’ll be fine long as she doesn’t go past the rocks. Water boils around in there but there’s no big current, that’s more to the center. See the logs out there?”

“That’s not a log-”

One of the logs flipped upright at Joey’s side, eye-blink fast he grabbed for the chair, hissing.

“Crap. That’s the guy.”

“Too right.” Alhambra’s full lips curled up. “This is gonna be good.”

“Uh, Alhambra? Karen? Those two people can drown in there. What happened to Miss Sunshine No Sorrow?”

Alhambra stepped to the edge of the icy water, a short leap away from the spectacle. “The snake and the elephant.”

“Should we interfere? Or scream?”

The wheelchair, flung by one of the combatants, skidded on the gravel to their left. Someone screamed.

“Ah. Screaming is what we do.” But Gina didn’t scream. It wasn’t in her nature to scream. She shouted, “Tha’s right, Joey! Pound that slimy fucker! Tha’s right, Joey! Take im out!” The chant swelled, backed by the river’s grumble, “Take im out! Take im out! Take im out!”

Joey had the fake gimp’s arms twisted up behind his back, held easy in one of her huge hands, with the other she had hold of his hair, dunking him face first into the river. The muscles of her arms pumped up and down, relentless pistons pushing him under the water, out again, snap back into the river. Her eyes had gone flat and gray, her mouth twisted.

Alhambra said, matter-of-fact, “Let him get a breath now, Joey.”

Joey shrugged, lifted his head, peered at the fake gimp’s face with scientific detachment.

He gagged, green-brown river water puked from his mouth. He took a stuttering gulp of air, his eyes fluttering.

Joey shook him, wrinkled her nose, straight-armed his head back under.

Gina stepped toward the river. “That fucker isn’t never comin up.”

Bubbles.

“He ain’t worth it, Joey,” Alhambra said. Simple statement.

Gina’s voice rose up over the river’s howl, “Hey! Never goin back? Joey-you ain’t never goin back. Remember?”

Bubbles. An eternity of bubbles rising pock pock pock to the surface.

Joey looked up, took a breath. Nodded. She thrust the man from her, into the current, staggered up to the shore. “Thank you.” She popped her knuckles, tipped her head left and right to get the tension out of her neck. “Thank you.”

They watched the limp form spin in the current, catch on the next curve, and lie there for a moment before the man began to pull himself up the gravel.

Gina muttered, “Fuckers like that never die.”

Joey sighed, “I’m keeping the wheelchair though. Damn.” She folded the thing up, hoisted it over one shoulder, waved to Alhambra and Gina. “Have yerselves a jolly day. Clean and sober. Oh yeahhhh.”

The rain had let up, Gina and Alhambra were walking down the same path they’d rocketed down the night before. The only sound was the steady noise of hundreds of thousands of gallons of water rushing to the sea. Billions of gallons?

“Tell me, Alhambra. What you find up here you never got in the city?”

“Look up at the damn trees, Gina. Listen to the goddam river. Pay attention to what’s right here.”

“I want answers to questions this here river and tree world doesn’t care about-lookin at trees ain’t gonna make the hurt stop.”

“Sometimes it’s the only thing make the hurt stop. Come here and look over there across the river.”

Gina saw a power pole on the far shore with a wooden box on top. Snaggly sticks poked out in all directions.

“Young osprey built a nest up there. First year she was ready to mate, she built her nest on the only tall thing didn’t already have someone else’s nest on it. Her babies died when they hit the electric wires. One of the locals climbed up there, built her a platform.”

Gina stared at the ungainly nest in a box. She whispered, “Maybe next year the babies will live?” She looked at Alhambra. “You think?”

Alhambra lifted her shoulders, “There’s a chance. Yeah.”

Gina tipped back on her heels, hands in her pockets. “So. What you’re sayin is-what you’re sayin is?”

“Somethin like that. Yeah.”

Gina got off the bus at Sixteenth and Bryant, stretched her back, lit a cigarette, looked at the city. Not too shabby. It was home. She understood it, knew pretty much when to shift aside, when to stand firm. She headed up the steps to the park. She had a whole pack of American Spirits for Lucas, they’d smoke her welcome home, talk about rivers underfoot that were, and one that still is. For another winter season at least.

“Hey. You seen Lucas?”

“Nah. He not been here, day, two days, mebbe.”

“Hey. You seen Lucas?”

“Family trouble. He gone.”

Gina set off for the freeway underpass, right where another spring used to bubble. “Anybody seen Lucas?”

“Nope.” The man in front of the tents glared at her, made her uncomfortable until she realized the glare was permanent, one eye blind. She touched her own bruised face, said, “Mine’s only a day or two. Gettin used to bein a pirate with one eye. How long yours?” She shook out a few cigarettes from Lucas’s pack.

He smiled. “Hah. Ten years ago.” He allowed Gina to light his cigarette. “Funny you ask about Lucas. He was there. When it happen to me. Was his son’s eighth birthday. We got drunk and-” Still smiling, “Was a helluva lotta fun.”

“Where his son now?”

The man’s mouth curled down. “Where else? He in jail.” He wandered away shaking his head. “Least ways tha’s what Lucas said.”

Three boys whoopin in the parking lot. Here’s to a night under the moon, a hunnert miles an hour. Here’s to the girls that smiled at us.

Here’s to the father that loved us.

“You see Lucas, you please tellim I gotta story fer him. Yunno? So tellim I’m goin for coffee in the morning at the other place, down the street t’other way. Ain’t goin back to that Peet’s. Okay? Tellim I got to start the day off with him. Otherwise the mornin ain’t right. Yunno?”

The old man didn’t stop his slow amble away through the puddles, but Gina saw his hand raise up, as if to say, “Sure thing, girl. Sure thing.”

Under the dim freeway buttresses, several statues of La Virgin de Guadalupe dipped their bowls into the clear headwaters of the creek and, chuckling like pigeons, poured it over their heads.

AFTER HOURS AT LA CHINITA BY BARRY GIFFORD

The Bayview

Spooky backside of town, Third Street, San Francisco, late at night, in a motel office. The furnishings were shabby. La Chinita, once an elegant, Spanish-style motel built in the 1930s, was now, in 1963, run-down; paint was peeling off the walls and the wooden registration desk was chipped and gouged. A decrepit, moth-eaten easy chair and a few other rickety wickers with ripped seats and backs were placed against the walls. Hanging blinds, with several slats missing or broken, covered the glass-paned door. The office was clean, however, and presided over by a bespectacled woman who looked to be in her mid-sixties. She was seated in a lounge chair in front of the desk, knitting and humming softly to herself. Her name was Vermillion Chaney. The tune she was humming was “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” It was two weeks before Christmas.

The telephone behind the motel desk rang. Vermillion did not move. The telephone continued to ring. It was as if Vermillion did not hear it. The telephone rang eight times before it finally stopped. After the ringing stopped, Vermillion put down her knitting, stood up and walked behind the registration desk, picked up the telephone receiver, and dialed a number.

“Was that you just called?” Vermillion asked into the phone. “Um, okay. Don’t matter. What you doin’, anyway? Sure I know it’s 3 o’clock in the mornin’, I’m at work!”

Vermillion hung up the phone. She came back around the desk, sat back down in her chair, and resumed knitting. She started singing again, only this time it was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

The office door began to shake. Somebody was trying to open it but the door was locked. This was followed by a loud knocking. The knocking was hard, insistent.

From behind the door came a woman’s scream. “Open up! Open the door!”

Vermillion stopped singing and stared at the door. The knocking continued. The woman’s voice became hysterical.

“You got to help me! Open up!”

Vermillion put down her knitting, got up, and went to the door. She looked out through one of the missing slats as the woman outside continued to yell.

“Miz Chaney, it’s me! Revancha!”

Vermillion unlocked the door and a woman in her early twenties burst into the office, forcing the older woman back as she brushed past her.

“Shut it!” said Revancha. “Lock the door before he gets here!”

Vermillion stared at the young woman, who was half-dressed, wearing only a bra and panties. Clutched to her chest were other garments. Vermillion closed the door. Revancha ran back to it and fastened the chain lock.

“What’s goin’ on, Revancha? You look like a chicken in a bag full of snakes.”

Revancha retreated from the door and stopped with her back against the desk.

“He beatin’ on me, Miz Chaney! Chokin’ me! Usin’ a strap!”

“Man get what he pay for.”

“He gone too far, cat flip his wig. Call for security!”

Vermillion walked back behind the desk, reached down, and came up with a revolver in her right hand.

“This the onliest security I got tonight, baby.”

“Where’s Myron?” asked Revancha.

Vermillion shook her head. “He out the loop. Fool got hisself arrested yestiday for receivin’ stolen property. Fake beaver coats. Can you beat that? I’m alone here this eve-nin’.”

The office door started to shake.

A man shouted, “Vermillion! Let me in!” He rattled the door.

“Don’t do it, Miz Chaney!” said Revancha.

“Bitch stole my pants!”

“You’d best go on, Ray,” said Vermillion.

“Not without my pants!”

Vermillion looked at Revancha.

“You got Ray’s pants?”

“I scooped it all up, what was piled on the floor. Thought maybe he wouldn’t follow me.”

“Man ain’t gonna go away without you give up his trousers.”

Ray forced himself against the door, breaking the lock on the handle. Only the chain now prevented him from opening it. He stuck his hand through and attempted to undo the chain.

“Don’t do it, Ray,” said Vermillion. “I got a piece.”

Ray pushed against the door, breaking the chain. The door flew open and Ray entered. He was a handsome man in his mid-thirties, wearing only a half-unbuttoned white dress shirt, under-shorts, socks, and shoes. He moved toward Revancha.

“Give me my wallet,” he said.

Vermillion pointed the gun at him.

“Stop right there, Ray,” she said. “I’ll get it for you.” Ray stopped.

“I ain’t got your wallet!” shrieked Revancha.

Ray brushed past Vermillion and grabbed the garments out of Revancha’s hands. He felt around in them.

“It ain’t here.”

He dropped the garments on the floor and grabbed hold of Revancha.

“Where is it?!”

“Let go the girl, Ray!” said Vermillion.

Ray put his hands around Revancha’s throat and began choking her. Revancha screamed; she kept screaming.

“Turn her loose, Ray, or I got to shoot!”

Ray turned his head and looked at Vermillion but continued strangling the girl.

“You old whore,” Ray said to Vermillion, “you prob’ly in on the game.”

Vermillion trained the barrel of her revolver on Ray and pulled the trigger, shooting him in the side. Ray, stunned, looked down at himself and watched as blood began to stain his shirt. Revancha continued to scream. Ray looked back at the girl and tightened his grip around her throat. Vermillion fired again, this time hitting Ray square in the back. His hands came away from Revancha’s throat. He turned slowly and faced the old lady. She fired a third bullet, which entered his body in the middle of his chest. Ray dropped to his knees, holding his hands up, as if in prayer. He remained motionless in that position for several moments before toppling over onto his face.

Revancha stopped screaming. She looked down at Ray. Blood was everywhere.

From behind them came a man’s voice. “Mother of God.”

Vermillion turned and saw a short, middle-aged, long-bearded man, dressed like a tramp, standing in the doorway. He took a closer look at Ray’s corpse, crossed himself, and said, “If God knew what He was doing, He wouldn’t be doing this.”

The stage was dark. A single spotlight lit up, shining on an empty stool set in the middle of the stage. A microphone lay on the stool.

The voice of the club announcer boomed out at the audience: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment you have all been waiting for. The Blackhawk, San Francisco’s premier nightclub, is proud to welcome America’s favorite recording artist, Mr. Smooth himself, Ray Sparks!”

As the audience applauded, Ray Sparks, the man who had been gunned down in the motel office, skipped on stage.

He was nattily dressed in a sharp suit and tie. Lights came up behind him, revealing an orchestra, which began to play. Ray smiled and bowed to the audience, who continued to applaud. He then turned and picked up the microphone, sat down on the stool, and began to sing.

Twenty years later. In the corridor of a decrepit nursing home, elderly people in wheelchairs, mostly black, were either sitting in or being pushed along by attendants. One of the former, a woman in her eighties, sat in a wheelchair placed flush against a wall, ignored by the overworked staff. The woman, now blind, wearing dark glasses, was Vermillion Chaney.

“I don’t recall that night too good,” said Vermillion. “I’m old enough now I don’t recall most too good, though sometimes I surprise myself, rememberin’ the tiniest detail from way back in the day. I know Revancha was a workin’ girl, sure I did. Used to be she hung out at the Toro Club down Bayshore. Almost always she’d bring her man to the Chinita. Never had no trouble about her till that night.

“Ray Sparks? Everybody knowed Ray Sparks. Famous singer like him? Nobody miss that face. I heard he sometimes hung at the Toro, sat in with the band, after hours, like that. Maybe he just run into Revancha for the first time. Can’t say one way or another. About the shootin’, it’s like I told the po-lice when it happen, I was just defendin’ the girl and myself.”

Revancha Lopez, now in her mid-forties, was seated on a bed in a crummy hotel room. The evidence of a hard life showed in her face.

“My name is Esquerita Revancha Lopez y Arrieta. I ain’t been usin’ for six years, since before my last holiday at Tehachapi, and I won’t start again, the Good Lord wil-lin’. The street broke me. If you can believe this, I got me a straight job now, cleanin’ rooms at the Chinita. Ain’t that a twist? ’Bout that night, I heard so many stories, ’bout the man bein’ set up and all, ’bout Miz Chaney be in on a hustle, even that she and I was hired by the FBI or a black militant group to put him out the way. People make up shit like that don’t need no TV. They got enough goin’ on inside they own mind entertain’ theyself.

“I knew Ray Sparks for a while before that. He had this image, you know, clean-livin’ man, good family, still singin’ gospel some Sundays. Cat was a player! Not only that but I heard his wife was runnin’ the streets, too. I had just got back to the Toro Club after doin’ a piece of business when in walk Ray with his cousin, Anthony. Was Anthony come over to me, buy me a drink. We shootin’ the shit for a few moments, then here come Ray. Puts his arm around me, says somethin’ like, Señorita Lopez, I figure it’s about time you treat me right. I said, You got what it takes, Ray. We was playin’, straight up. He’d had a few drinks already, he didn’t want no more, and he was all over me, tellin’ me how beautiful I look, he don’t know why we ain’t got together before, makin’ me feel good. Back then, it don’t take but fifty dollars to make me feel good, but Ray, he liked to have some style, you know what I mean. He know it’s gonna cost him, but he liked to play like it’s on the house. One thing, with this girl was nothin’ doin’ on the house.

“Now I’d been with Anthony before, so Ray, he know the deal. The three of us was havin’ a good time. Ray be rubbin’ against me, I knew he was ready to do some business. Inside an hour, we get in his red Corvette, tool over to the Chinita. I ask him, Don’t you want to do better than this? He say, Baby, I’m in a hurry to get at you. Okay by me. I didn’t figure him to be a freak. I ask for a hundred dollars. Star like him can’t think under that. He pay for the privilege of bein’ a star. He took off his pants. I got to my underwear and next thing I know, he starts beatin’ on me. I mean, serious, usin’ a belt. I tell him to quit, he don’t need to be doin’ that. He say, Don’t tell me what I need! He throw me down on the bed, push my face into the pillow so I can’t scream, hittin’ me. Then he sticks his dick in from behind, finish in a hurry. Then he get up, go into the bathroom.

“When I hear him relievin’ himself, I jump up, scoop up all the clothes off the floor, and run out the room. I run to the office. Miz Chaney let me in, she by herself, lock the door. A few seconds later, Ray bust it down. Miz Chaney be afraid for her life, that’s the truth. He come at me, shoutin’ I stolen his wallet. Chokin’ me. Miz Chaney come up with a hand cannon, tell Ray to turn me loose. Next thing I know, there’s Ray on the floor, everywhere is red. It weren’t the worst time in my life, but it was sure the beginin’ of a downhill. I keep thinkin’, slide gotta stop sometime. I keep thinkin’, but it don’t really stop.”

Ray Sparks was half-seated on a nightclub stool.

“Who you looking at ain’t Ray Sparks, it’s the ghost of Ray Sparks. Here it is twenty years later, and I look the same, not like Revancha Lopez and Vermillion Chaney. You’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s a comfort to look like you did when you died on into eternity. They don’t look so good as me but they got to live a lot longer. What people do with their lives is mostly fuck ’em up. Almost no way they could do anything else. I always liked that saying, Give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself. Just some folks got themselves a longer rope to hang with.

“People like to blame other people for their own troubles. Even me. One thing I picked up on recently-in eternity, all thoughts and things are recent-is how there is no particular way to avoid what you do or how you do it. It’s like waking up in the middle of the night, hung over, and snoring in the bed next to you is an ugly whore. And you think to yourself, this can’t be me, shacked up with some nasty skank. Me is little Ray, running with my dog down along the river. Seven years old, me and my dog running next to the river and it’s about to rain. Nobody bothering us. But no mistake, it’s you in that bed, feeling like a bomb gone off in your head, and it ain’t no cute puppy lying there. You got to ask yourself why, and then if you got a lick of sense, do something to change your situation. If you never ask yourself the question Why? then you ain’t got a chance. You got to be brave.”

“Don’t you be listenin’ to that man!” said Vermillion Chaney, who rolled herself up to Ray in her wheelchair. “Talk like he sang, smooth as silk. Didn’t shoot you on purpose,” she said.

“What do you mean, didn’t do it on purpose?” said Ray. “That was on purpose as possible to be. You shot me three times. Once in the back.”

“Pistol felt light as a feather in my hand.”

“You got to like pulling that trigger.”

“Light as a feather,” said Vermillion.

Revancha walked up to Ray and said, “I didn’t mean to steal your clothes.”

“Only my wallet.”

“Your wallet was up in those clothes somewhere. I would have left it, after I took what was owed me.”

“There is no such thing as an honest whore,” said Ray.

“Man gets violent, what’s a woman to do?” said Vermillion. “God put that gun in my hand, told me to use it.”

“Better leave God out of this,” said Ray.

“When I was a little girl, eight years old,” said Revancha, “Mamacita took me down on Mission Street to La Iglesia Espiritu Santu to pray for my father, who was in the prison hospital. He had got stabbed in the stomach in a fight. We didn’t know it then, but at the same moment we was in the church, he died. I liked lightin’ the candles.

“We was about to leave when a man comes in off the street, wearin’ nothin’ but dirty rags. Had a long beard. I said, Mama, look it’s Jesus Cristo! The man started blowin’ out all the candles, then picked ’em up and stuffed as many as he could inside his shirt. He looked up at the cross and shook his fist at it. He shouted, There’s no hiding place for the damned! Then he ran out of the church, droppin’ candles as he went.

“When Mama and I got home, we found out my father was dead. I asked Mamacita, Is Papa damned? No se, she said, I don’t know.”

“I heard that after I died,” said Ray, “there was a church created in my name. The Church of Ray Sparks.”

“You coulda been a saint, Ray,” said Vermillion, “but instead you was a fool.”

“I’d like to’ve gone to the Church of Ray Sparks, shown up with nobody knowing I was coming. Got up in front of the choir and sung, ‘He’s My Friend Until the End.’”

“There ain’t no such church,” said Revancha.

“Heard there was.”

“The devil got your ear, son,” said Vermillion, “way he go about flatterin’ folks. He do that. Vain man fallin’ for the devil’s malarkey, all that is.”

“What you had to go smackin’ me around like that for, anyway?” asked Revancha. “Use me so bad.”

“Standin’ in satan’s shoes,” said Vermillion, “even back then.”

“Man spoke the truth,” said Ray.

“What man?” asked Revancha.

“One you saw in church, stole all the candles. No place to hide.”

“John the Baptis’,” said Vermillion.

“I know him, I know that man.”

“How could you?” asked Revancha.

“Look at him, sugar, a child of darkness. All the devil’s children the same. Ask him can he sing, Revancha. Go on.”

“Can you sing, Ray?”

“’Course I can sing.”

“Tell him go ahead and try,” said Vermillion.

“Sing, Ray, sing ‘He’s My Friend Until the End.’”

Ray opened his mouth to sing but no sound came out. He tried again with the same result.

“I can’t.”

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” said Vermillion. “You ain’t got no gift left, Mr. Church of Ray Sparks.”

Ray got up and walked away.

“Damn, Miz Chaney,” said Revancha, “that’s hard.”

“He ask for it.”

Revancha began to cry.

“Only time I ever have an orgasm,” she said, “is when I imagine the man doin’ me’s the one dressed in rags come in the church the day my father died.”

“God bless you, girl,” said Vermillion.

“God bless you, too, Miz Chaney.”