The Cage Keeper (9 page)

“The motherfuckers,” Barry says. “Why don’t they put ’em closer to the friggin’ parking lot?”

Freeze turns and walks fast to the bank’s green glass door, near the drive-in teller’s window. Barry and Lorilee follow, Lorilee walking slow and guarded, the way she does whenever men start to shout. Freeze slams the glass with his open hand.

“Cocksuckers.”

“What?”

“They closed at noon.”

“Fuck, man.” Barry steps closer to the building and pulls the bottle out of the bag, opens it and takes a big sip, then with his cheeks full, reaches back into the bag for the plastic container of Coke. He swallows the rum then chases it. “Nothin’ we can do, buddy.” Barry offers Freeze the bottle.

“The motherfuckers.” Freeze takes the rum then drinks it until Lorilee sees two big air bubbles move up then pop in the bottom of the bottle pointing to the sky. Freeze lowers it fast to his side, his face spread tight. Barry holds out the bottle of Coke.

Freeze ignores him, looks to his left and right then at Lorilee. “What the fuck are you looking at? Get over here.”

Lorilee walks into the shade of the building, stands next to Barry leaning against the drive-in teller window. Barry reaches over, grabs her buttocks, and squeezes.

“
Goddamn,
” Freeze says, lighting a cigarette.

“Paisan. We can’t do shit about this ’til tomorrow so don’t worry about it, all right?”

“
You
don’t worry about it. I ain’t got thirty something bucks.”

“Waters’ll lend it to us, won’t you, Lore?” Barry puts his arm around Lorilee’s shoulders, pulls her into his soft chest. “Won’t you?”

Lorilee feels her face smile. She purses her lips over her teeth. “I don’t have any money.”

“No shit,” Freeze says, handing the bottle over to Barry. “And if you could fucking read we’d be cruising with some tunes right now.”

Barry begins to sip from the bottle then stops and holds it under Lorilee’s flushed face. She lets him tilt it up then swallows until she coughs. Barry laughs, his face looking to Lorilee as smooth and plump as a clown’s. Then he drinks and Lorilee puts her arm around his back, pulls herself in as close as she can.

“Freeze, baby,” Barry says. “Let’s just do the toot and then friggin’ flow with it, all right?”

Lorilee looks at the way Freeze is drawing in on his cigarette like it’s the last breath of air on earth.

“Yeah, fuck it.” He drops the butt then steps on it. “Let’s go.”

LORILEE IS SITTING on the ground against the brick wall of the restaurant with her knees drawn up to her breasts watching Freeze divide the small pile of powder into thin straight lines on the glass. He is doing it with Barry’s knife, his little pocket mirror resting on his Indian-crossed legs, and Barry is standing between the wall and the Dumpster looking at Freeze then back over his shoulder toward the metal-clanging, water-spraying sounds coming through the screen door of the kitchen. Freeze looks up at Barry.

“Chill out, General. Nobody in there gives a shit what we’re doing.”

“How do you know?” Barry drinks from the bottle of rum then the Coke.

Freeze holds his stare on Barry. “Because they’re a bunch of wetback chinks, dummy. What the fuck are they gonna do?”

Barry turns a metal milk case on its side and sits against the Dumpster across from Lorilee. He looks at her face. “You look peek-ed.”

Lorilee smiles and lowers her head, the shadow voices stretching like flatworms inside her, long and thin, twisting through her middle; they smile there in her dark. Barry holds the bottle to her. Lorilee stands up and walks over to him then sits on the ground between his legs, her back against him. She takes the bottle dangling in front of her and drinks. She looks at Freeze lowering his nose to the tightly rolled one-dollar bill. She lays her head against Barry’s soft belly, her arms resting on his legs, but she gets no peace from his stillness. She turns on her side and lays her ear on the hardness in his pants. Barry rests a hand on her head but they are not slowing down:
You fucking
dumb
ugly bitch.
And she smells her father’s boozy yelling mouth spraying spit in her eye, on her nose and lips, and she thinks of men and women in white washing her in a bath she must stay in for days then giving her shots and more shots. She cannot remember it ever getting this bad, her flesh feeling so tender that very soon her body will split wide open with the whirling pus of all that she has done. She raises the bottle to her mouth again. Then she has moved and a smile pulls itself across her face. She is holding one nostril closed with her finger, trying to keep the rolled dollar steady in her hand, breathing in and making a snorting noise. Then she sits back against the wall and looks up at Freeze and Barry watching her, Barry smiling, his face looking so round, his head big and ugly with no hair. She looks at his face as if for the first time; she sees every faint wrinkle and line in his forehead, then a small white scar on his nose; and little indentations where flesh is stuck to bone, and pimples she has not noticed, and she imagines herself tiny enough to lie between the black nubs of whiskers, where oil lies on his pores. Naked, she would look out at the world holding on to the hair roots of his chin, fighting the slip of it with her feet. She begins to laugh, sees Barry’s clown face laughing too, and she laughs so hard she is bent over, her breasts swaying and bobbing under her shirt. She raises her laughing head to see Freeze on his feet doing a dance with Barry’s knife, the light blue veins coming out in his lean arms. He swings open the blade, letting it click against the air, then jabbing with it, his face reddening. Lorilee stops laughing when Freeze takes knife swipes at flies buzzing up and away from the Dumpster.

“
Hiiiyuh.
” Freeze kicks his leg high in the air between them, then spins around, slashing the space his foot has vacated.

Barry laughs so hard Lorilee can see a vein come out on each side of his forehead leading into his skull. Freeze stands still. He holds the knife in his right fist at his side, his arm extended in front of him. He turns and narrows his eyes straight ahead at the brick wall above and behind Lorilee. “Ho go sho tau.”

Lorilee hunches her shoulders slightly when Freeze’s face lets go.

“Iiieeee-
fuck.
” He snaps the knife forward in his right hand, pulling back his left.

Lorilee shrieks as Freeze squats in front of her, his eyes two dark slits. He rests his left arm against the wall then runs the flat of the blade cool along her cheek. “Don’t fuck with Mastuh Fleeze, mama-san.”

“Don’t, Freeze.”

Freeze lowers the blade to the soft of her upper lip, lets it rest there. “Call me mastuh, white bitch.”

Lorilee feels the tickle of a tear as it rolls down over her swollen cheek. She presses the back of her head against the brick.

“Come on, High Master, you’re scarin’ the piss out of her.”

Lorilee looks from Freeze’s tight lips to his eyes, and just before his face spins away from hers, she sees in them the dark gaze of a child. He springs and spins out of his crouch, lands on his feet in front of smiling Barry who raises his hands, then turns his head to the slam of the screen door, to the short Oriental man in a white T-SHIRT who stops as soon as he sees them, a bulging plastic green bag hanging beside each leg.

“Hey, you get out of here.”

Freeze steps away from Barry then turns toward the man. Lorilee wipes the tears from her good cheek and starts to stand up when she sees the man’s eyes lower to the blade. Freeze goes into his stance, his left arm stretched out, his right hand raising the knife in front of him.

“You got a problem? Chink
fuck?
”

Lorilee sees the man’s face stay as flat and as unmoving as in a picture. She looks at Barry slowly bending over to pick up the brown paper bag from the liquor store.

“Huh?” Freeze steps forward over the grease-soaked ground. “You fuckin’ deaf? Motherfucker no speak English?”

Lorilee is shivering. She crosses her arms then holds back a scream that wants to come. She sees a fly land on the man’s forehead just before his face changes and he drops both bags, jerks open the screen door, and runs back into the kitchen.

“Book it,”
Barry says, hurrying past Freeze; then Lorilee is running too. Hearing Freeze behind her, she bends low under a metal box built into one of the brick walls then turns on the sidewalk where Barry did. She ignores the alternate lift and jarring pull of one breast then the other and runs wide-hipped and heavy through the clean cotton smell of tanned people after his bald head and moving blue-jeaned back, after Barry Raymond, who Glennie used to call a moron shitbag.

THE SUN HANGS FIERY in the haze above Sausalito Hills and Dave remembers studying maps every night of his first week west, sees himself sitting on the floor under the eye-numbing glare of his fluorescent light. Using his weight bench as a desk, he drew diagrams of all the major parallel streets then tested himself by sketching in the ones that intersected them and at what point. By the end of the week he felt ready enough to walk off San Pablo Street into the tiny fake marble-floored office of City Cabs, to lease a taxi from the huge woman behind the counter, a dirty red Peterbilt cap on her head, the name Ernestine printed on a black nameplate in front of her.

After his second night working the city he drove down Market Street looking for a place to park his cab and get a beer. He had just passed the darkened lobbies of tall office buildings, had looked through the ground-floor windows of some and seen the red-and-green light from security lamps reflecting off their shiny marble floors. Then he got to the plaza with the statue of the sailor in the middle. Before turning left onto Seventh he glanced over and saw them for the first time: all the men and women who live there at night. Under the hazy lime of the streetlights they lay curled up on the benches around the base of the green bronze statue, where, during the day, he had seen office workers sit to eat their lunches and read their papers. But then, his hands on the wheel, oblivious to the flash and tick of his indicator, all he saw were faces, some caked with drool and blood-vomit, the men’s heavy-whiskered, the women’s sagging, a few with soft fuzzy-looking beards under their chins. Another cabbie honked behind him, so Dave took the turn to the corner of Seventh and Market then locked his cab and walked into the neon light of the sidewalk past the open doors of bars breathing out electric beats heavy with bass. And just before stepping into the piss-wood cigarette smell of The Cat House Lounge, he looked over his shoulder at the plaza, a shiver skipping down his back.

Then he was walking out of the jukebox dark of it into a cold rain. The taste of peanuts and draft beer on his tongue, his hands in his pockets, he rocked back slightly on his heels, then caught himself when a man dressed in tight jeans and a bright red athletic club T-shirt stopped in front of him.

“God it’s cold and wet, isn’t it?”

But Dave was looking across the street to the rain-mist under the streetlights of the plaza, turned to the man as cool as if he had just been interrupted in conversation and said, “Yep.” Then he crossed the slick asphalt of Market Street alone, and when he got to the sidewalk was already shaking his head. The rain was coming down slowly, but the droplets landed cold and heavy on his forehead and nose. He saw close to thirty of them lying on the benches, each in a cardboard box, their heads sticking out one end, their legs out the other. He stood and watched them, his shoulders hunched in his jacket.

Dave looks over his shoulder and backs out of the space, then drives straight ahead and turns left off Citadel Drive down the hill toward Berkeley. In the last gold light of day he passes neatly fenced-off gardens and trimmed lawns in front of wood and brick houses. He stops at the bottom of the hill then turns right onto Telegraph into the thick of the afternoon traffic. He looks to either side of him at students and well-dressed working people and a few of those scraggly-haired bearded creatures in torn clothes he knows someday he will be able to help, but not right now, not tonight. And he turns on the radio that is only AM but gets Springsteen rapping out a Jerry Lee Lewis beat. He begins to tap the wheel in time, moving his head to the screaming saxophone, smiling out his rolled-down window at two of those brown-eyed beauties walking on the sidewalk who he knows have probably lived in the States their whole lives and are as American as he, but still he can’t stop seeing them on a torchlit veranda in white dresses, their black hair pulled to one side of their faces, the sky dark with stars over a mesquite desert; he would dance with them all night long over creaking boards, would kiss, then lick the taste of lime and salt out of their mouths. “I’m going to find one of
you,
” he says loud enough for the two women to hear; they turn their heads to him and he puckers his lips for a kiss.

The red taillights of the cars ahead of him look brighter now. He drives past the cafés and bookstores of Berkeley, and he sees in them the comforting light that those places always seem to have. He looks to his left down San Jacinto, the sun completely gone now behind the dark stretch of hills across the bay, the sky filled with long thin clouds that hang crimson against the tangerine Pacific air. Tomorrow he would write that letter before he did anything else and if his father didn’t like it then too goddamned bad because he wasn’t paying for it anyway. Then he is looking straight ahead again, reaching to change radio stations, when he sees to his right just before the dark arch of the brick tunnel that takes San Pablo Street under a hill into El Cerrito, three people, one of them dark and slim, wearing sunglasses and a sleeveless denim jacket, his thumb out in the air.

WHEN THE BIG yellow taxi pulls over with a screech in front of Freeze, Lorilee turns her face away from Barry’s warm open mouth and says, “But we don’t have any money.”

Barry looks at her with half-closed eyes. “Don’t worry about it, Waters.” Then he pulls her after him and Freeze, who has just opened the front door at the passenger side and climbed in. A hot wave rolling through her stomach, Lorilee follows Barry into the backseat then pulls the door shut beside her.