Waves crashed into the black rocks under the penitentiary's yellowed walls. Spotlights moved back and forth over the gun towers. The barbed-wire fences were luminescent white. A squad of guards equipped with truncheons, riot helmets, flak vests, and gas masks milled at the Adjustment Center's entrance.
Robert was dragged off the motorbus under a sign that said: “Receiving and Release.” He was stripped naked inside the induction room. Prisoners catcalled at him, whooping how they were going to pull a train on his ass. A guard told Robert to bend over from the waist and spread his butt cheeks. The screw squirted crystallized delousing powder up his rectum.
He was assigned to a cell with a forty-year-old Mexican from Riverside. The vato had stage-two lymphoma. He'd received chemotherapy, but the illness was aggressive. A tracheotomy had been punched in his throat. The guy had a penchant for hand-rolled fags and puffed them like a chimney. He exhaled the tobacco smoke through the hole in his neck. He died a month later, and Slatts moved in.
SEVENTEEN
That afternoon Robert Grogan spurred the Hillman down Illinois Street toward India Basin, the bayside neighborhood of rotting wharves and piers, marshes, dry docks, textile factories, and live-work lofts east of Potrero Hill and Highway 101. Because it was Christmas, the downtown merchants had pressured the cops to relocate hundreds of the homeless from Market Street into the area.
A homeless convoy of vans, school buses, and pickup trucks with camper shells had dropped anchor in the parking lot of a beach at the end of Illinois Street. Datura grew in the picnic area. Bumblebees zigzagged through patches of orange poppies. Dragonflies hummed. Flies chirred. Mosquitoes sang. Chiggers and mites said nothing. A portrait of Malcolm X was stenciled on a footpath leading to the waterline. The smells of low tide hung above the shore.
Egrets, falcons, geese, and herons cavorted on the shoreline. Cormorants hunted for crabs in the shallows. Seals sunbathed on the rocks. Truck tires and shopping carts, mattresses, children's toys, shoes, and spray paint cans bobbed in the water. Herring and salmon were abundant
in nearby Islais Creek. In the distance were the blue gray lines of Oakland's hills.
A corona of flies attacked the sedan, forcing Robert to roll up the windows. The dog was raising hell in the backseat. Robert stopped the car to let the mutt out. Then he and his daughter got out.
Selecting a gun from the trunk, Robert hefted the Browning semiautomatic and then gave it to Diana. He mashed a spider into the dirt under his boot heel and addressed the girl. “Now you know who Slatts is. Your mom can't stand him.”
Diana didn't want to hear it. Robert and Harriet were idiots. They were children, no smarter than a pair of five-year-olds. “Does Slatts love you?”
“Uh, yeah. More than your mother does.”
The beach's sands were mined with beer cans, glass shards, bullet casings, centerfold pages from gay porno magazines, newspapers, stereo speakers, and the charred remains of a campfire. A snowy white heron sat on a finger of sandbar. A black-winged falcon jetted over a shipwrecked dinghy. The breeze, flavored with brine and sewage, changed direction.
“Over here.” Robert pointed at a spit of mud. “This is where you can shoot. I'll get a bunch of targets for you to work with.”
He found a few tin cans and set them up on an algae-colored rock. Then he trotted back to his kid. Putting an arm around her shoulders, he said, “The savvy hunter empties her mind. She sees nothing but the target. She meditates. She is one with her gun. The best technique is to make believe the target is someone you hate.”
That was easy. Diana pictured her mother, her father, and
the dog, in quick succession. Harriet had her hair in a ponytail. Robert had a bad hand. The dog had fleas. Harriet was self-centered. Robert couldn't tie his own shoelaces. The German shepherd didn't care for kids. Neither did her parents. They all deserved to die.
Raising the rifle, she squeezed the trigger. Bullets flowered out of the muzzle in all directions. They pulverized weeds, rocks, and bushes to smithereens. A raven was nicked by an errant bullet and crash-landed in the shoals.
He snatched the Browning from her grip. “What are you doing?” Robert's black eye was brown with self-pity. The cops hated him. Harriet didn't trust him. Slatts thought he was a flake. The kid was against him. It was enough to drive him bananas. He threw the rifle on the ground.
Diana hung her head in the dazzling light, her shorn scalp gleaming like a hubcap. Sweet hatred roared in her ears. “I don't like you.”
“Why?”
“You were in prison.”
“I was only away for three years.”
She did the arithmetic. Three years was thirty-six months. Thirty-six months was 1,080 days. Gone as if they'd never existed.
“I mean, come on,” he begged. “A lot of, uh, kids have dads inside the joint for longer than that. You were lucky. So was I. We should count our blessings.”
His daughter contradicted him. “They don't have Slatts to deal with.”
Robert hemmed and hawed. “What's he got to do with this?”
“You love him more than you care about me.”
“I don't, baby.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Hold your horses.” Robert wasn't going to lie. Nor was he was going to tell the truth. He preferred the middle ground. Hoops had to be jumped through. Tensions needed to be worked out. “Slatts is my wife. You're my daughter. Which makes him your stepmother.”
“What about Mommy?”
“If she's smart, she'll get with the program. But I really doubt Harriet is gonna do that.”
He shaded his eyes and watched two geese bobble toward Islais Creek. All the pieces of his life were in place. Each piece had a destination. Every piece had a shape. He was on a roller-coaster ride to an uncertain fate.
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The heat had the day moving slower than molasses. After visiting with Simone, Harriet came home. She stripped down to a pair of short-shorts, a gingham blouse, and rubber sandals. Puttering in the hall she tripped over the sleeping bag that Slatts had been using. It was on the floor by the linen closet and had dog hair matted all over it.
Picking up the bag, she had a sniff. It smelled of the felon's cologne, an expensive brand. This made her insecure. Everything Slatts did rubbed her the wrong way. Like with the bathroom. Whenever she wanted to use the can, he was in there, doing his thing. It was obvious he had a yen for Robert. She'd seen him mooning over her husband more than once.
The doorbell went ding-a-ling, interrupting her thinking. Harriet walked to the peephole, squinted in it. Her junior high school flame, a stocky Mexican speed dealer named Zap Rodriguez, looked sideways at her through the glass. His red eye patch gloried in the menacing
December sunlight. The rest of his face was as gray as night. A white Kangol cap was raked over his pointy ears. He had on a houndstooth suit jacket, leatherette flares, and a silver conch belt. In his pocket was a five-shot .32 Colt revolver. The gun was insurance. Just in case Robert was hanging around.
Harriet cracked the door a smidgen. Zap blossomed like an orchid upon seeing her. His good eye watered with joy. “Hey, mama, merry Christmas.”
There were two kinds of friends in Robert's circles. There was the inner ring of felons and there was the outer circle of poseurs. Zap was a poseur. Wished he'd been in the penitentiary. Harriet dismissed him with a simple command. “You can't be coming around here, dude.”
He wilted under her edict. His eye patch sagged. “Why the hell not? Ain't I good enough for you?”
“No, you ain't.”
“It's like that, huh?”
“And Robert doesn't care for you either.”
“You need to wise up to him. That chump is no good for you.”
“Says who?”
“I do. You can do better than that goddamn fruit.”
“Who are you calling a sissy?”
Zap thumbed his nose. “Your husband.”
The accusation was a slap in the face. “You're talking shit.”
“I'm talking reality, baby. Everyone in the street knows what Robert does.”
The Mexican sounded just like her mother. Even down to his scolding. The men in orbit around her husband were badly damaged asteroids. They were from outer space and
had traveled long distances to crash into his life. “Robert ain't your concern.”
“Yeah, uh, uh, maybe he ain't,” Zap admitted. “But he's got that she-boy of his staying with you. That's some foul shit if you ask me. You know what I mean?”
The sun flayed the patio. It had no mercy for anything that breathed, dreamed, and lived. Harriet couldn't believe it was Christmas. The apartment was as hot as a pressure cooker. It was hot enough to commit homicide. Hot enough to kill a man just to watch him die.
Slamming the door shut on Zap, she double-locked it. The speed dealer was undaunted. He shouted from the hall, trilling with heartfelt exuberance. “Robert's betraying you! I'll mess up the motherfucker if you want me to, chica! Anytime! Just let me know, all right?”
EIGHTEEN
Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people. The holidays had inaugurated a spree of armed robberies in the Tenderloin. The police had roped off the Thai eatery at Sixth and Market after the recent shooting. The law was all over Market Street.
An electrified blues duo was taking advantage of the sunny weather to perform in the UN Plaza. The bassist was a young black woman in a burgundy windbreaker and jeans. The guitarist was an older white guy with gray side-burns. They played the Chicago gutbucket style popularized by Hound Dog Taylor in the 1950s. The audience was a throng of winos drinking short dogs, cops on bicycle patrol, and homeless men pulling carts of books, blankets, and clothes.
A sleep-deprived Slatts Calhoun lingered at a pay phone by Seventh and Market, garbed in a musty Santa Claus suit stolen an hour earlier from a Salvation Army volunteer. To go along with the costume he had on a fake white acrylic beard and a stocking hat. A tarnished blue .357 Smith & Wesson revolverâone of Robert's thingsâwas stuck in his belt.
Reaching into his pants pocket, he extracted a cloth
billfold and withdrew a photo. The color print was tattered almost beyond recognition. It was a picture from San Quentin. Robert and a bunch of dudes from the Aryan Brotherhood were in the weight yard. Standing around with no shirts on. Everyone looked buffed except Robert.
Now that Slatts was out of the joint, nothing was the same as before he went away. The black guy from Hunters Point who used to sell him reefer had hepatitis C and was thinking of moving to Florida to get a liver transplant. Two brothers he knew, former Norteño gang members from Twenty-fourth Street named Andy and Jimmy Hernández, had enlisted in the army to avoid prison sentences. They were shipped to Iraq, where Jimmy was killed. Andy, the younger one, was wounded and now lay in hospital in Kuwait.
Slatts put away the wallet, lit a cigarette, his last one. He eyeballed the medical marijuana club up the block. Ever since weed became legal in the city, pot stores were everywhere. They were a venereal disease. It was impossible to get away from them. At last count, there were twenty clubs on Market Street. This one was a former bookstore wedged between a dentist's office and a sandwich shop. It had porous concrete walls inscribed with graffiti, a tar paper roof garlanded with razor wire, a hostile surveillance camera, and a tinted window. An outdoors bulletin board had photos of snitches pinned to it. The place resembled a police station.
Slatts loped to the dope shop, stopped in front of the security gate. He struck a pose for the camera and buzzed the bell. Nothing happened. He waited a second and repeated the procedure. A Mexican hippie in paisley surfer
shorts and a vintage Clash T-shirt came out to inspect him. “Well, well, if it ain't Santa Claus. How the fuck you doing today?”
Keeping the gun concealed, Slatts said what came to mind. His first day out of the pen had been a hassle. Between Robert, Harriet, and the dog, everything was haywire. Slatts didn't even have enough money to take the bus to the welfare office. As a bonus, the beard was making his skin itch. “I'm cool, homeboy. What's up with you?”
“The same old bullshit. You got your ID for me?”
To gain entry into the club, a customer needed a physician-approved Department of Health identification card. Private doctors where handing them out at two hundred dollars a pop. Slatts didn't have a card, no solid place to sleep, or any food in his belly. “No, I don't. Can I come in and talk to you about it?”
The pot worker's smile became a cynical tic. He was prematurely aged by the needs of dope fiends. “Hell, no.”
“C'mon, vato, give me a break.”
“I can't do that, dude. It's against the law. You've got to have a card to get in.”
“Listen to me, asshole. I want some fucking weed.”
“Too bad, home slice. I don't give a shit.”
“Fuck you, man. It's goddamn Christmas, you know what I'm saying?”
Slatts lost his cool in a delicious surge of adrenaline. It was time to introduce the revolver into the conversation. It would help move the dialogue along. He crammed the gun's three-inch barrel through the gate's latticework and hooked the dealer in the nose with it. Reaching in, he joggled the lad forward. Then he groped the kid's shorts for the keys, found them, and unlocked the door.
Santa Claus was in the house.
Flaunting the heater, Slatts lurched into the retail room. His mouth was dry with excitement. This was better than winning the lottery. Cheap reefer was hard to find in the street. Not only that, it was usually low-grade crap. Another worker, a lithe tanned blonde girl in patched denim overalls and Birkenstock sandals, advanced on him. Her oval face was a flower, open and questioning. “May I assist you?”