Hardscrabble Road (8 page)

“And killing what’s his name isn’t really an option, I take it?”

Marla would have said no, but it seemed superfluous, so she just went on stacking papers. She wished there was something she
could do to change the world so that Frank could have the rock ’n’ roll radio network he’d always wanted, and she could run
it.

Instead, she was going to have to go home with the car radio tuned in to
this station, and listen to one more good old boy with a down-home accent ranting about liberal elitists, pinko abortionists,
and the homosexual agenda.

R
ay Dean Ballard had
spent most of the evening looking out his window and wishing for snow, but the best the weather had been able to do was a
few ice crystals around five o’clock. Most of the time, Ray Dean hated snow. Snow meant the benches in the parks would be
wet as soon as anybody lay down on them. Snow meant too much traffic in the streets and too many car accidents. Snow meant
yet another story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about some homeless person somewhere pissing on the tires of a Volvo some doctor
had parked at the curb while he ran into the store for the paper and hot coffee. From a public relations standpoint, extreme
cold was much better than snow. In extreme cold, the story in the Philadelphia Inquirer was always about some homeless person
who had frozen to death under a bridge because there wasn’t enough room for him in the shelters.

There really wasn’t enough room in the shelters for nights like this, but Ray Dean knew that the homeless person who died
under the bridge tonight would not be there because he had been refused a bed. Ray Dean was twenty-six years old. He had been
out of Vanderbilt for less than half a decade, and at work in this organization for even less time than that, and he already
knew more than he wanted to about the homeless problem in America’s cities. At least, he assumed it was the same homeless
problem in all of America’s cities. Part of the problem with being young and on your first job was that you lacked the breadth
of experience you needed to judge whether your situation was atypical or not. He didn’t think Philadelphia was atypical, but
he knew he was. He couldn’t imagine a bigger difference between this place and the place he grew up. He didn’t know what it
said about him that he was fourteen years old before he rode in a car without a uniformed driver.

Why exactly he’d majored in English literature, he didn’t know. Maybe it was because he got more of an insight into the things
he was dealing with by reading Dickens than by going to lectures in sociology and social work, which always seemed to assume
that the homeless were not only a problem but a “problem,” and something to be solved.

He looked up at the chart on his wall and the arrows he’d been drawing on it all day, from the parks to the shelters, from
the soup kitchens to the shelters, from the alleys to the … where? The fact was, if they hid out in the alleys, they didn’t
want to go into the shelters. They weren’t even happy going into the soup kitchens, for fear someone would force them into
the
shelters. There was, out there in America, a wave of paranoia the like of which he had never suspected—even though he’d been
sitting in Nashville, the very heart of it. It wasn’t just the homeless people who were defensive and afraid. It was everybody.
If one half of Congress proposed the institution of a universal health care system, the other half was sure the first half
were only doing it so that they could spy on the private lives of ordinary people and force them to eat wine and Brie instead
of cheeseburgers and Cokes. If the part of Congress that was afraid of the universal health care system wanted to set up a
universal database to track serial killers who went from state to state seeking victims, the part of Congress that had wanted
the universal health care system would be convinced that the tracking project was a way to worm Big Brother into the lives
of ordinary citizens and track their every move so that they could be picked up as soon as they showed any sign of opposing
government initiatives. People owned guns not to protect themselves from crime in bad neighborhoods but in case the government
came to the door wanting to lock them up for being Christians or socialists. At least the socialists had history on their
side, if only vaguely. McCarthy had really existed. So had the Red Scares.

Even so, it was as if the entire world had gone completely insane. It was impossible to get anything done. It was impossible
to talk calmly and sensibly about solving a problem or even alleviating it. The Republicans thought the Democrats wanted to
make it a law, on penalty of imprisonment, that everybody had to exercise and eat like vegans. The Democrats thought the Republicans
were going to tamper with the new digital voting machines so that votes for Democrats would be counted as votes for Republicans
and nobody would be able to check. It had gone beyond craziness and into some Twilight Zone of schizophrenic delusion where
there were enemies around every corner, secret agendas behind every closet door, and evil lurking in the hearts of anybody
who didn’t drive the kind of car you drove, listen to the kind of music you listened to, and eat the kind of food you ate.

In the meantime, Ray Dean was sitting here worrying about 318 people who were living on the streets in this city, a good 50
of whom would refuse to come in out of the cold even when cold meant minus eleven degrees, or worse. He had exactly four vans,
each of which could carry seven people besides the driver. One of those vans was in the shop with brake problems, and one
of the others was holding two large garbage bags of clothes it had to deliver to one of the shelters, reducing its passenger
capacity to six. They were going to be out there all night, first collecting the easy ones at the soup kitchens, then going
through the parks, then looking through the alleys and under the bridges and in the abandoned buildings where the drug addicts
shot up to be out of sight of the police until they could get high enough not
to care if they got arrested. They would look and look, but they would miss some nonetheless, and tomorrow the Inquirer would
run its story about the people who had frozen to death and how the people trying to help them were understaffed and underfunded.
It was true, Ray Dean thought, they were understaffed and underfunded. The newspaper people meant well.

There was a knock at the door and he called out to whoever it was to come in. His attention had suddenly been caught by the
books on the floorto-ceiling built-in shelves that made up one of his walls: Henry James. George Steiner. W. B. Yeats. Lionel
Trilling. John Donne. His parents had expected him to give it all up and get a business degree as soon as he graduated and
come to his senses. He thought he might do that, one of these days, out of exhaustion or desperation. At the moment, he only
wondered how the two things could exist in the world at the same time: those old men dying of cold under the bridges; John
Donne telling us all that no man is an island, entire of itself.

There seemed to be many men who wanted to be islands. Women, too.

The door popped open and Shelley Balducci stuck her head in, looking frazzled. “I’ve just been on the phone to Chickie George.
He says they’ve lost Sherman.”

“Lost him? How do you lose Sherman?”

“Well, he’s wandered off, you know what he means. And the thing is, Chickie’s afraid he might be hard to spot. They got him
cleaned up. He’s had a shower, and a shave, and a haircut—does Sherman need haircuts? Isn’t he practically bald? Anyway, he’s
had all that and he’s got entirely new clothes on. So he doesn’t smell, and he might not necessarily look like a homeless
person. And they don’t know where he is.”

“Did they go down to that place, the Benedictine place?”

“Yes, they did, and there was no sign of him. The nuns haven’t seen him. And you know Sherman. He’s a creature of habit. So
they’re worried. He looks prosperous from the perspective of other homeless people and drug addicts. They’re afraid he might
have been rolled.”

Ray Dean considered this. One of the things he hadn’t expected when he first came to work here—it hadn’t been true in the
place he’d volunteered in Nashville in college—was that he would develop relationships with some of the people who needed
his services. They weren’t the kind of relationships he had with his parents, or his friends, or even Shelley, but they were
relationships nonetheless, with histories, and futures, and private understandings. He could honestly say that Sherman was
one of the people he had developed a relationship with. Sherman was not as addled as he liked to look. He could keep the contents
of a conversation in his head, if he hadn’t had too much to drink too recently, and he remembered things over time in
a way that the mentally ill homeless never could. There weren’t many clients who made Ray Dean wonder how they had ever ended
up the way they had ended up, but Sherman was one of them.

“Sherman’s pretty good about neighborhoods,” he said now. “It wouldn’t be like him to get rolled.”

“He’s pretty good about neighborhoods when he’s on his own, yes, but the Justice Project people put him up in an SRO. Not
that I said anything about that to Chickie, of course. I mean, they meant well. I just wish all the people who meant well
would think before they ran around doing things to ‘solve’ the problems of the homeless. What I’m thinking is that he’d have
had to have left the SRO room and made his way through some fairly nasty territory to get back to where he was used to, and
along the way anything could have happened.”

“Crap,” Ray Dean said. Somebody else would have said, “Shit.” He just couldn’t. There was a difference that being from his
kind of people made in the way you behaved that nobody up here had managed to call him on yet.

Shelley came all the way into the room and closed the door behind her. “The thing is,” she said, sitting down on the edge
of Ray Dean’s desk, “we don’t want anything to happen to him.”

“Of course we don’t.”

“I mean, for more than the usual reasons. You know and I know that if Sherman isn’t around to carry on with that lawsuit,
Drew Harrigan’s people are going to paste that whole sorry drug mess on him and Drew Harrigan is going to end up walking off
scot-free.”

“They’re going to try to do that even if he is around to carry on with the lawsuit.”

“I know that. But it won’t be the same, will it? Sherman might win the lawsuit and that would leave Drew Harrigan in a lot
more trouble than he would be otherwise, or Sherman might lose it and then they’d want to put him in jail and you know as
well as I do that they couldn’t put Sherman in jail without putting Drew Harrigan in too, at least for a while. Think how
it would look otherwise. Think of the political fallout.”

“So?”

“So there’s good reason for us to take a little extra time tonight and try to find him and bring him to safety. If he doesn’t
want to live at the SRO—and I don’t blame him, those places are hellholes—maybe we could bring him back here and let him sleep
in the storeroom. He wouldn’t be any trouble to anybody and he’d be warm.”

“He’d end up pissing on the printer paper.”

“No, he wouldn’t. Or maybe he would. We can always buy printer paper. What’s it worth to you to get Drew Harrigan off the
air?”

Ray Dean looked at his radio, propped up on a shelf in front of the collected works of Ernest Hemingway. “I listened to the
replacement guy tonight. He was hopeless.”

“Right,” Shelley said. “That means he was ineffective, which is definitely what we’re looking for, isn’t it? Think of it.
No more hour-long rants about how it’s all their own fault. They made their bed and they should have to lie in it. Decent
citizens shouldn’t be taxed to pay for bums who have no respect for themselves. No more letter-writing campaigns to the mayor
of Philadelphia demanding to get the homeless off the streets and put them in jail, for God’s sake. What do these people want,
a return to the days when we arrested people for being poor?”

“Did we ever have days when we arrested people for being poor?”

“We had poorhouses,” Shelley said, “and we put people in jail for debt. Or at least they did in England. It was in that book
you gave me.”

“David Copperfield.”

“That’s the one. They want to go back to that. I mean the Dickens thing. They want to punish poor people for being poor.”

“Sherman Markey’s principal problem isn’t that he’s poor.”

“I know that.”

“Poor is easy to fix,” Ray Dean said. “There’s a problem you can solve by throwing money at it.”

“We really don’t want Sherman Markey to disappear. Not now. We should have one of the vans go actively looking for him. Yes,
even in this weather and even though we have a lot of people to bring in. It’s just a matter of letting one of the drivers
know and giving him some idea of what to look for. He can pick up other people on the way.”

Ray Dean rubbed the sides of his face with the palms of his hands and thought about it. It wasn’t just Sherman Markey they
should be looking for. In fact, under most circumstances, Sherman Markey was well down on the list of people they should be
worried about, because Sherman was an alcoholic, not a paranoid schizophrenic. Unless he was too drunk to see, he knew he
could die of cold and he had nothing against spending the night in a shelter if he could find a bed. Nobody ever had to corner
Sherman at the end of a dead-end street and hope to hell he didn’t have a knife under the folds of his too-big clothes and
the will and the delusory vision to use it.

“There’s another thing,” Shelley said.

Ray Dean looked up.

“There’s Drew Harrigan’s people,” Shelley said. “Don’t you know as well as I do that they want Sherman dead? It wouldn’t take
much. They could hire some street kid for a couple of thousand dollars and that would be the last you’d see of Sherman Markey.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ray Dean said. It wasn’t just “shit” he couldn’t say. He couldn’t say “for Christ’s sake” either. You
didn’t want to be caught doing that in an area of the country where a church could have ten thousand people show up for Wednesday
evening prayer services.