No Beast So Fierce (11 page)

The powder became a semiclear liquid. Augie sucked it into the eyedropper through the dab of cotton. The needle fitted snugly over the threaded end. Holding the outfit delicately poised in one hand, he used the other to pull off his belt. Deftly, he wrapped his wrist and pumped his hand until the veins on the back became hard ridges. The veins were outlined by blackish-blue scar tissue from countless earlier needles. He tapped the needle's point into fresh scabs. A streamer of blood backed into the eyedropper, indicating he'd entered the vein. He squeezed the potion into his system.

Ten seconds—and Augie sighed blissfully. Torment was gone, so was worry. His swollen pupils contracted into tiny black points. The labored breathing slowed. His heartbeat had gone down, too.

Nothing had been said while he was fixing. There'd been no room for conversation. Now he gestured to the remaining balloon. It contained enough for five fixes for someone not hooked. “Take a taste,” he said. “It's pretty good smack.” His voice was slurred.

I'd been tempted, but finally decided. I shook my head. Augie's brow wrinkled in disbelief. “You use stuff.”

“I quit.”

“You're jiving. Are you sure?”

“I'm sure.”

“I'll clean this mess up.” He repackaged the outfit, slipped it in his pocket. He washed the spoon and rinsed his face in the sink, examining a stubble of a beard. “I need a shave.”

“Shave here.”

While he shaved he talked. Paroled a year ago, he'd worked as a punch press operator, happy to be free. Then the dreary treadmill had chafed him. He began taking a fix on payday—a few hours of well-being as great as anyone's. Then he added a second fix right after the weekly nalline test. His wife (he was married and had three children) began riding him about what he was spending for drugs. Each balloon cost ten dollars, the smallest buy he could make. Twice a week came to eighty a month, a substantial expense for a working stiff. Instead of stopping him, his wife's nagging drove him to peddle a few ten-dollar bags in the evening—just to pay for what he was shooting. With more heroin available, he used more. He began waking up needing a fix to go to work; he was hooked. He could no longer pass the nalline test, which meant he'd go to jail. So he disappeared into the city's swarm, a fugitive from parole. Fugitives cannot hold jobs, nor would any job pay enough to keep up his habit. He began peddling more ten-dollar bags. Every morning he'd spend fifty on a quarter of an ounce, package it into a dozen balloons, and go downtown, walking or sitting in coffee shops and bars. The addicts would find him. He'd sell enough to pay his rent and buy food and he'd shoot the rest. He carried two balloons in his mouth. The rest he stashed. A week ago he'd gone to visit his wife. Two detectives had been there—not for the parole violation but with a warrant charging him with sales of narcotics. He'd sold to an undercover agent.

“Wasn't your last beef for stuff?”

“All my beefs are stuff.”

“Damn, brother, you're facing fifteen mandatory years. What the fuck are you doing wandering the streets?”

He shrugged; in heroin euphoria he was unable to experience fear or harsh reality. “What am I gonna do?”

“Blow this motherfucker! Get out of the country. Mexico. They'd never bring you back.”

“I don't know anybody over there. I wouldn't know what to do.”

His tacit surrender was horrifying. “Man, you're hooked like a mountain trout. They're gonna pick you up sooner or later. Get a biscuit and rip something off—a bank, anything! Get enough money to run for it. If you're gonna get busted, hold fuckin' court right on the street. You've got nothing to lose.”

“Fuck it. If they bust me, I'm busted.”

“For fifteen years.”

“I've been locked up all my life anyway. The food's okay in the pen and I can play handball. I've got more fuckin' troubles when I'm out than when I'm in.”

It was said in irony, but was too truthful to snicker about. His future was frighteningly clear. He'd stay as drugged as he could for as long as he could, continuing to make small heroin sales to exist. It would be a minor miracle if he lasted three months, especially when he existed in police-infested neighborhoods. They'd apprehend him and he'd spend fifteen years in the tomb of walking dead.

He patted shaving lotion on his haggard cheeks, combed his hair, and straightened his clothes. He sat down to rest a few minutes before plunging back into the maelstrom of the streets. He looked around the cheap room. “Not too bad. Most of these flops don't even have a carpet.”

“A flop is a flop.” I was angry because he allowed himself to be destroyed without anger. Whatever he was (and I didn't think it was bad, but tragic), and whatever society's right to protect itself, his survival right said he should struggle to the last gasp.

“When did you raise?” he asked. Before I could answer, his head drooped forward so his chin neared his chest. He jerked it erect. “Goddam! I'm nodding. What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

He grunted and nodded again. I'd known him since he was a shiny-faced youth. Now the face had lines deeply etched. His shoulders, once thick and powerful, were bony—and his hair was riddled with gray. He jerked from the stupor again. “Hey, Max. I know you just got out, but can you let me have a few pesos?”

I'd planned to give him five dollars of my meager resources. Instead I gave him ten. “It isn't much. I'm on my ass too.”

“It'll help. I've got that other balloon for tonight. I'll be sick in the morning but the connection is going to give me some stuff on consignment.” He stood up and put on his shirt. “I gotta split. Are you gonna be staying here awhile?”

“A couple weeks.”

“I might drop by.”

I watched him depart down the hallway, moving with nonchalant swagger, one arm swinging exaggeratedly, shoulders rolling in a hipster's stroll. Affected in youth to show toughness, it had become habitual. Such a stride—like blue, hand-made tattoos—were a give-away that a man had spent some of his youth in institutions.

I'd thought about going to a neighborhood movie, but that was before meeting Augie. The ten-dollar drain changed my mind. I read for an hour and dozed off. After midnight I woke up hungry and walked to a coffee shop on Alvarado. The sidewalks were still full, brassy music escaped from beer joints and cocktail lounges. The giddy laughter of couples coming out of these places aroused my envy. Everything magnified my yearning to be out on the Strip, or in Malibu—anywhere with good clothes and money in my pocket to enjoy life.

I settled for coffee and a piece of stale pie.

8

T
HE
next morning, a Friday, I telephoned Olga Sorenson at the temporary employment agency. I wanted to hold down two jobs, if possible, and get money for clothes and some kind of automobile. She promised to keep me in mind, took the hotel's telephone number, and said that she would keep it on her desk. She'd be in the office over the weekend and wanted me to call again Saturday afternoon.

Then I called Abe. He, too, was glad to hear from me. A lawyer would be waiting for us at 5:00
P.M.
in the parking lot of the Central Jail. He'd wasted no time in arranging the visit.

At 4:30, Abe picked me up on a Wilshire Boulevard intersection and headed toward the freeway. He was wearing a suit of light gray iridescent silk, elegantly tailored. On his little finger was a fourcarat diamond pinky. It would buy me several suits—and an automobile. Taking it would be easy: wait in the alley behind the club and jam a pistol in his ribs. I could even walk him back inside and clean out the safe. I suddenly realized what I was thinking and stopped it.

He noticed my withdrawn mood, mistook its source. “Don't worry,” he said. “There's no sweat with Stan. He's up the creek without a paddle. He helps us and we'll help him stay away from a habitual criminal sentence.”

“Maybe the kid won't listen to him,” I said.

“Oh, he'll get the message between Stan, Stan's wife, and you. We might even put him onto something good, get him a whore. Anybody that young can be dazzled.”

“For your sake, I hope you're right.”

“Mmm, maybe for my sake, but probably for his. I'm not a sitting duck. I can throw a little muscle when I have to—better believe it! And I've got money. I'll hire what I can't put out.”

I said nothing, but I silently modified my evaluation of Abe Meyers. He was riveted together with anxieties. Fear always sat on his shoulder. Yet it wasn't the kind of fear that paralyzes. Under pressure he could be dangerous. And he was cunning—probably too cunning for the youngster.

Leaving the freeway, we wound through ghetto streets, passed scrap yards. Suddenly we were on a dingy street where the sidewalks were lined with plywood bungalows, each with a sign: Bail Bonds, 24 Hours. The jail was nearby.

Moments later we could see the jail, across the street beyond a trimmed lawn and trees. The huge, beige concrete building was brand new, totally bland—yet it was the most modern and expensive structure in a square mile.

Word had come to prison that the new jail was worse than the old—that brutality was more freely dispensed—and I remembered being fifteen years old in the other one and having a fight with another juvenile. Three deputies handcuffed me to a drainpipe and took turns punching me in the body. After breaking three ribs they threw me in the hole, a steel box on wheels. It was utterly dark; I couldn't see my hand an inch from my face or know if it was noon or midnight. A quart of water and three slices of bread were the daily food ration. Every three days they brought a paper plate with a gruel of oatmeal sprinkled with raisins. Kneeling in the darkness, I lapped it up like a dog. Nineteen days later they took me back to the reform school (it was when I was captured on the escape) and I collapsed. I had pneumonia. And even if I'd now changed my life, I hadn't changed my loathing for such places and those who ran them.

Abe turned into the vast parking lot. “There he is,” Abe said, indicating a man leaning on the fender of a brown Rolls Royce.

“Whose Rolls?”

“His … and the finance company. They've been trying to repossess it for nine months. Allen McArthur is the world's greatest dead-beat.”

“That's Allen McArthur—the infamous motherfucker?”

“You know him?”

“Just about him. He took money for a friend of mine's appeal and let the time limit lapse. And he's done worse to others, so I hear.”

“He's okay, for what he is.”

“He's a piece of shit to me. Shyster lawyers are worse than stool pigeons.”

“Hold it. We need him right now.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Abe parked in an empty space near the Rolls Royce. Allen McArthur came over and Abe introduced us. I took his handshake, but my lip was curled. The hand was delicately boned, and the face had a sunken chin, rheumy eyes, and acne-pitted visage. He saw my hostility and put Abe between us as we walked toward the building.

Entering the attorney room required passing through two electrically controlled gates ten feet apart, synchronized so that only one would open at a time. It kept anyone from rushing the gate. A deputy sat in a bulletproof control box between them. Allen McArthur showed his attorney credentials and filled-out forms. The deputy dropped them in a pneumatic tube for delivery to another part of the jail. The second gate opened and we went in to wait for Stan Bergman. The room was forty feet long; four lines of tables ran lengthwise. Along the center of each table a plexiglass partition was chin high to a seated person. A deputy stood at the end of each long table, able to watch down it and make certain nothing was passed over the divider without permission and examination.

It was the jail's supper hour and the room was only half-filled. Usually the room was jammed with lawyers, bondsmen, parole and probation officers—everyone involved with criminal justice except judges. The prisoners sat on one side, jail-pallored (the blacks turned a sickly gray), haggard, reduced to urchins by wrinkled denim with County Jail blazoned in orange paint across knees and butt and chest and back.

Even half-filled the room babbled, each person in his own crisis, unaware of anyone else. Lawyers with calculating eyes drained every penny. They were selling hope, and the price goes high. Frequently they discarded the money-drained cadaver, or traded it to the district attorney's office for one who paid more: “I'll plead this one guilty. You give that child molester probation.”

The room's clamor and my curtness to Allen McArthur stifled small talk. We sat in a row, Abe in the middle.

Stan Bergman appeared, stopping to check with a deputy at the door, his eyes meanwhile swinging over the room, seeking his visitor. I knew his worried thoughts. He wanted to be prepared for detectives.

Abe waved and beckoned. Stan came down the row between the tables. It had been years since I'd seen him. He'd aged two decades. He was stooped; his shirt seemed to be on a clothes hanger more than shoulders. His hair was gone and his eyes, sunk into cavernous hollows, burned with sick ferocity. In a single moment of utter and blinding clarity I was able to view existence through his eyes—a forty-year-old three-time loser waiting trial on armed robbery.

He recognized Abe from a distance and scowled—but when he got closer and saw me the scowl became a huge grin. We were friends, but hardly such good friends as to justify the radiant expression. It was his desperate predicament that added luster to his feelings. Abe had been right to bring me. I'd have influence.

Nodding terse acknowledgment to Abe and McArthur, Stan sat down directly across from me. The rules forbade handshakes. “Hot damn, Max! When did you spring?”

“A few days ago.”

“Me and the Horse were cutting you up last night. He said you were short.”