The Last Call

CHAPTER SEVEN

It felt good to be back in Austin. Or as good as it can feel with a mild concussion and a bunged-up foot.

The weather was hot and the traffic was heavy. About usual for mid-afternoon.

There were four of us and a dog in Dock’s Suburban, tooling down Interstate 35 toward downtown.

“Exit here and take the next left,” Julie called forward to Dock.

Only a week before our chance meeting in traffic, Julie had caught Freddie and Jake tailing her down Riverside Drive in Austin, just south of Town Lake. And of course, being Julie, she proceeded to pull a fast one.

She’d parked along Congress Avenue not a block away from the Capitol where there is an ever-present State Trooper at the front gate and only a stone's throw from the Governor's mansion, then walked into an upper-crust dress shop. A quick change of clothes and a purchase later, she ducked out the back entrance into the alley and walked a block around and hailed a cab. She paid the cabbie to sit with her for nearly an hour as she watched Jake and Freddie while they watched the front door of the dress shop. Then when the store manager came out to feed her parking meter for her, the two North Texas yahoos must have realized that something was up. They started the pickup and darted away into traffic. But not fast enough. Julie and the over-tipped cabbie trailed the two back to East Austin, just across the Interstate from downtown, to a ramshackle duplex in a lower-class neighborhood.

She simply noted where they could be found, and drove away.

After that she altered her patterns and spent whole days at a time away from her new home in northwest Austin. She didn’t tell Hank and me where she’d gone during those times and neither one of us pushed it. Julie was that kind of girl. You could only prime the pump so far, fill your bucket about halfway, and satisfy yourself that you’d be making another trip.

I was sure there was plenty more that she felt she couldn’t-or just wouldn’t-tell us. We’d find out sooner or later. But hopefully before it was too late.

Hank was up front with Dock. Under his feet there was a burlap feed sack with some guns in it.

In the backseat beside me, Julie laced her fingers with mine.

Following Julie’s “turn here-turn there” directions, we found ourselves off Chicon Street; not the best side of Austin. We were maybe ten blocks from Lawrence White’s barbecue stand.

The houses passed by. Chain-link fences sagged in places. There were not just a few overgrown lots going to seed. Dock had to slow down once so that a tamale peddler on a three-wheeled bicycle could cross the road-I’ve often wondered how those guys could make a living by selling tamales out of a small refrigerator box perched on the front of their bikes. Maybe they didn’t. Who knew?

Occasionally I caught sight of a portable basketball hoop set up in the street and looking like a howitzer.

We had our windows down and the wind felt comforting. I was sweating, though, and it was a cold sweat. Also, it felt like I had a ball of hot lead rolling around in my gut.

“It’s there, on the left,” Julie said. “Third duplex. Right side.”

Dock drove us past slow and easy and we craned our necks. There was no light-blue pickup in the driveway. The place looked like a dump. Also it looked nothing like I would have figured for the base-ops for a couple of sons of North Texas quarter-horse jockeys, but go figure.

Dock circled the block and we parked across the street from Butch and Sundance’s duplex.

Hank distributed firearms from the front seat. The thirty-eight for me and a little Walther for Julie.

“What about me?” Dock asked.

“What about you?” Hank replied.

“Where’s my gun?”

I thought Hank was going to laugh. He didn’t.

“You’re staying right here,” he said. “Now don’t raise a ruckus. Looks like nobody’s home, so I don’t think there’ll be any shooting anyhow. But if there is, for some reason, I’d advise you to duck.”

“Is that all I am? Your chauffeur?” Dock asked.

We ignored him and climbed out. Julie and I exchanged smiles.

It had been an hour-long ride and my legs felt like they needed a good stretch. I winced at my first step across the road, but the going got easier as I walked.

“You stay here, Dingo,” Hank said. The dog barked once as Hank slammed the door.

The thirty-eight felt cold in my sweaty hand.

“What're ya'll doin' over there?”

The three of us nearly leapt out of our skins.

We were hunched opposite each other, me and Julie to the left and Hank to the right of one of the duplex windows, trying to see inside and determine whether anybody was home. The voice took us by surprise.

“Good God! Glad I had on the safety,” Hank said.

It was a girl, a little kid about eight or nine, standing there at the back corner of the duplex where a section of rotted wood fencing had fallen down and an outdoor heat exchanger was converting over to rust and ruin. She had on a dirty pink paisley dress and an arm around an old cabbage-patch doll that was missing a limb. She was thin, terribly so, but there was strength in her stance and wonder and curiosity in her eyes. This was her space and we were the invaders and she looked to be not the least bit intimidated.

“You live here, darlin'?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“Of course she does,” Hank said.

“They’re gone,” the girl said.

“Who's gone?” Julie asked her.

“The bad men.”

“Oh,” Hank said.

There was a long story here, in the side yard of a dilapidated duplex in a dilapidated neighborhood, in the little girl's eyes and her wan frame. I could already see the additional trouble brewing, coming on with the inevitability of bad storm.

I looked at Julie and she was looking at the kid, seeing what I'd already figured out, maybe even more. And Julie being Julie, invited the additional trouble right on in to pull up a chair and sit a spell.

“Where's your mama, honey?”

“She gone.”

Of course she is, I thought.

We put our guns away in silent agreement.

“Where’d she go?”

The kid turned her head and gestured back toward the thicket to the back of the property, or maybe just generally back towards Greater Austin.

“Mama wasn't doing nothin' except smokin’ cheese for a whole year.”

Cheese. It was street-slang for crack cocaine in these parts, and I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't traversed certain neighborhoods in Austin where the junkies were brazen enough to shout it out to cars going by.

Hank was talking low, not moving his lips, and he was talking to Julie-as if it would have done any good. “There's agencies that handle this kind of thing,” he said.

Julie darted Hank a quick, angry look. Hank raised both hands a trifle, took a step back, and she turned her attention back to the kid again.

“Then she takes up with Melvin Hobbes one day and they go to the store, only they don’t come back.”

“How long ago, honey? And what's your name?” Julie asked.

“Keesha. Don’t know how long.” This said, Keesha hopped up and sat on the rusting AC unit and regarded us with just a little less interest. I was willing to bet that she'd heard promises and offers to help in the past.

“Those two bad men left this mornin'. I had to act like my mama was here so they wouldn't chase after me no more.”

“Very smart,” Julie said, and turned to look at me. There was a plea in her eyes. I found myself nodding, slowly.

Julie sat beside Keesha, and they chatted away. Hank and I moved around behind the duplex to have a look.

There are some places that simply don't have a good vibe to them. I expect you could probably cut the grass back, replace the bad wood, paint things and generally clean them up, but like as not that vibe would still be there, if only subdued. The ramshackle duplex where Keesha lived and where Jake and Freddie-the friendly neighborhood sniper-patrol-had set up their base camp was like that. The back yard had weeds up to three feet tall in places and had been trampled back and down where little brown feet had often stepped. There was scattered trash here and there which consisted mainly of candy wrappers and chip bags of the convenience story variety. I suspected that there was a sympathetic convenience store clerk somewhere close by that just couldn’t say “no” to sad little brown-eyed girls.

There were two brown-painted doors like twin peepers in the rear face of the building, and evidence that a hog-wire divider had existed between once separate yards. The further door stood slightly ajar on rickety hinges, somewhat crooked. No doubt it was the back door to Keesha's home. I stepped back around for a moment and gently interrupted Julie and Keesha to confirm it, then ducked back around to join Hank again.

Hank tried the back door to Jake and Freddie’s side, but it was locked. Of course. It couldn't be that easy. On a lark, Hank rambled back around to the front for a try. I waited. He came back. He didn’t say anything, but I knew the answer. I could also tell by the look on Hank’s face that he wanted to have a look inside Keesha's side of the duplex. There was the biggest part of me that wanted nothing to do with the place. I had one of those “I don't want to know” feelings that start in the pit of the gut. Somehow, though, the mystery of not knowing was even worse.

Hank ducked into the gloom through the open door.

I waited two beats, then followed.

It was dark inside. I tried a grimy light switch, knowing full well it was no use. I was right.

The place was a cave.

An unpleasant odor emanated from a clothes washer and dryer just beside the back door. Wet clothes going to mildew and rot. Hank clicked on a little mag-lite flashlight and the stark reality of conditions sprang up in the wake of his roving beam. I followed him through the squalor, seeing things I'd seen before, and some things I'd not and rather hadn't.

I'm not much of a Bible-thumper, but being the product of the deep East Texas Bible belt, tent revivals as a kid and Wednesday night Bible study, some things come to mind unbidden. I was thinking about something I was taught in Sunday School at about nine or ten years of age. Christ had purportedly stood up on a hill and lectured the crowds and said something about “the poor you will always have with you”. It had always seemed to me to be a very simple yet profound statement, and the utter truth of it hadn't altered a bit from the hour that he was reported to have spoken it. Knowing that, though, didn’t make it any easier to confront the condition that Hank and I witnessed inside the duplex.

The living room was a complete wreck. There was no television or stereo or radio or anything. Probably whatever had once served to make the place a real home had long before disappeared, a casualty of habitual drug usage. There was plenty of soiled furniture, though, rescued, no doubt, from the clutches of the quarter-annual bulk trash collector some months or perhaps years past.

Worse yet was the odor; the ever-present, distinct and oppressive scent of burned chemicals mixed with rat and cockroach droppings.

“I've seen enough, Hank,” I said and headed out the way we came in, holding my nose.

I got back outside and could breathe again. Hank joined me a few minutes later. He had some clothes under one arm and carried a small stack of photographs in his other hand.

“Change of clothes,” he said. “For the kid.”

I nodded.

“Pictures, huh?” I asked.

“Kid’s family, probably. She’d know who they are, I hope.”

We went back around to the side of the duplex. Julie had Keesha in a big bear hug. Julie looked up at me and by God there were tears in her eyes. Hank gave me a grim look.

“All right,” I said.

Julie mouthed a silent “thank you” to me and patted Keesha’s back.

*****

When we all came back around front, there was Dock fiddling with the front window.

“As a quick-getaway-driver, you’re fired,” Hank said.

Dock started.

“You scared me,” he said.

Upon seeing the dog, Keesha drew in a quick gasp of surprise and almost bolted, but Julie caught her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “That’s Dingo. She doesn’t bite.”

“You promise?”

“She maybe don’t bite,” Hank said, “but I do. Dingo’s my dog.”

Hank called Dingo over to him and by way of petting and tousling the dog around maneuvered her slowly closer to the kid. After about a minute, the child was petting the dog. The way she did it, though, left little doubt that this was her first friendly dog encounter.

While this was going on Dock quizzed us about the kid.

“She’s been abandoned,” Julie said. Her arms were crossed under her breasts and she looked down at the little girl. “I don’t trust adoption agencies. I’ve got my reasons,” she said.

The three of us men exchanged looks.

“How you doin', Child? Are you hungry?” Dock asked, leaning toward her with his hands on his knees and a grandfatherly smile on his face.

“Yes, sir. I am.”

“’Course you are. So am I. What say we go get us some dinner?”

Keesha nodded in the affirmative. The rest of us didn’t even have to confer over the answer. We hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and that had been a hurried affair in Dock’s kitchen that morning before setting out.

“That settles it,” Hank said.

There was one thing we’d learned from the trip after poking our noses against enough dirty windows and peering into the gloom: Jake and Freddie-whom I was simply dying to meet-had cleared out. There wasn’t so much as a stick of furniture in the place. There was, however, trash aplenty, which consisted of the leavings of many a take-out meal. Apparently Jake and Freddie liked Chinese food.