Soon the Rest Will Fall

The Trinity Plaza Apartments was a 377-unit building at the corner of Eighth and Market, a memento to Cold War architecture with a flat roof and functional Bauhaus lines. The tenants were retirees, restaurant and laundry workers, single moms on the dole, and low-end office employees. Typical of many older dwellings on Market Street, the complex was slated for demolition in January.

Harriet and Robert’s one-bedroom apartment was on the second floor. The living room was furnished with mustard-colored shag carpeting, a Sears and Roebuck couch upholstered in gray vinyl, a glass coffee table with brass legs, and a portable television. The kitchen had a four-burner gas stove, a self-defrosting refrigerator, a yellow formica-topped dining table, and four chairs. The balcony overlooked the UN Plaza, the Orpheum Theater, and the public library.

The parking lot at the Trinity Plaza Apartments was a graveyard of vehicles and dunes of trash bags. The buckled asphalt was littered with broken glass. In the center of it was Robert’s ride, a secondhand two-tone Hillman sedan. The car’s gray and red paint job glowered in the smog-encrusted sunlight.

In the afternoon Robert curled up on the living room couch with Harriet. The window shades were drawn. The air conditioner struggled against the heat. Robert had the parole lady’s number in his pocket, but a force field of lethargy stopped him from calling her. He just couldn’t get himself to do it. He had no energy. It was too damn hot. Talking to that broad could wait.

He explained his strategy to Harriet. “Now that I’m out of the joint, I plan to stay away from the police and the criminal element. I’ve turned over a new leaf.” Done with his speech, he asked for her approval. “What do you say to that?”

Parole was akin to reentering the stratosphere after being in deep space. There were several dimensions to it. There were the traps the cops placed in a felon’s path, hoping that he’d self-destruct. Then there was the process of getting reacquainted with one’s spouse. Either way, a dude couldn’t afford to make any mistakes.

Harriet held his hand and wondered when she and Robert were going to have sex again. It had been thirty-six months. She was concerned. “I hope so, daddy.”

A couple of hours later, Robert Grogan was steering the sedan east on Market toward the piers at the Embarcadero. A platinum moon hovered over Market Street. It welled above the fog and the heat and backlighted the Golden Gate Theater against a blue velvet sky. Half the storefronts between the Burger King on Eighth Street and Hallidie Plaza were abandoned. The shoe store at Sixth and Market was gutted. Merrill’s drugstore was closed down. Play Fascination had shuttered its doors. The St. Francis Theater was boarded up. Spear points of fog drifted offshore from Rincon Hill into the bay.

Robert had an open can of beer between his legs, driving with his right hand on the wheel and smoking a cigarette with his bad hand. Harriet was riding shotgun; her hair was pulled back in pigtails. Their daughter was in the backseat wearing tennis shorts and a Ramones T-shirt. Robert looked at her in the rearview mirror and did a double take. The brat had the grill of a hardened convict, colder than the bore of a sawed-off shotgun. Her eyes were ancient. She intercepted his gaze and flipped him the bird. He asked Harriet, nodding at the kid, “How come she has a shaved head?”

The floor in the backseat was piled high with weapons—a pump-action Mossberg shotgun, a bolt-action Winchester 30-06, and a Browning semiautomatic rifle. Robert had gotten his rifles from storage and put them in the car. Guns were his first love, hunting his vocation.

He hung a right and followed Third Street over the Lefty O’Doul Bridge, past the Mariposa Yacht Club, the dry docks in India Basin, and the nightclubs at Mission Rock. He drove south beyond the abandoned Potrero Hill police station, the pump house at Islais Creek, the post office in Bayview, the Hunters Point housing projects, and the Cow Palace.

A mile outside the city’s limits, he pulled the sedan off the road near the Southern Pacific rail yard. Lights stretched from Visitacion Valley over to Mount Davidson. The control towers at the international airport scintillated on the shoreline. The San Mateo Bridge was luminous with car headlights. Over the water the burgs of Fremont and Hayward were penciled yellow in the fog.

The faint grooves of a dirt track on the eastern slope of San Bruno Mountain were visible in the moonlight. Robert chased the trail to the mount’s bald crest. Off to the west Fort Funston’s ramparts and the streets of suburban Daly City were coated in mist. The ocean surf boomed under the bluffs for miles. At the top of the hill he shut off the ignition and let the sedan coast to a stop in a fallow cow pasture.

It occurred to Harriet that he was up to no good. “What are you doing? I thought you were taking us somewhere pleasant.”

Robert sat motionless behind the driver’s wheel. The salty air made him giddy, mad with glee. Prison hadn’t smelled this good. For a long time nothing had. Not even Slatts. He intoned, “There’s deer out here, babe. Millions of them.”

“That’s right. They’re going to come out and nibble on the straw in this field. When they do, I’m going to get me one and shoot its ass.”

He rebuked her. “You forget you’re talking to a professional.” Her husband’s coarse skin was oily and prison pale; his brown eyes were electric in their sockets. “I can conjure up a deer. Just watch me.”

Taking a final swig of beer, Robert reached over the seat and scooped up his Winchester bolt-action rifle. A tingle ran through his fingers as he caressed its polished maple stock. He pushed open the driver’s door; the reek of alluvial soil and rotting ferns gusted in. Winchester in hand, he gamboled out of the sedan. A coyote was caterwauling on the hill. “I’ll be back shortly,” he said. “You and the girl chill out.”

Harriet watched him move into the fog and then lit a Parliament cigarette. Well, she rued. Things were back to normal. Before Robert went to prison, he always dragged her to places like this. Forests. Gullies. Hilltops. Ravines. Swamps. Thickets. It was his notion of romance. Having a chick in the car and a gun in his arms. Robert was a hunter who saw everything that moved as potential food and cash. Hunting boar in upstate New York or alligators in the swamps of Florida—for every season, there was a different geographic destination and new game to slaughter. Fuck him, she thought.

Robert knew his deer. How their minds worked. What they wanted. What they hated. Getting adjusted to the gloom, he glanced around. It was too hazy to do any shooting. Couldn’t see for shit in the fog. And something was off. The vibe wasn’t right. The hair on his neck bristled. Before he could fathom what it meant, flashlights cut across the field and touched on his sallow face.

He lifted the Winchester to his shoulder. Figures were running across the hillside toward him. It was an ambush. He was in hot water. It was just his luck. Lowering the weapon, he sputtered, “Goddamn, they got me again.”

A brassy voice rang out: “This is the police! Put that gun down, asshole! We’ve been waiting for you, fucking poacher!”

A dozen cops burst from the shadows and surrounded Robert. His reputation had preceded him. His movements were well known to the local lawmen. A flashlight was aimed in his face, illuminating his acne scars and underscoring every sleepless night he’d had in the pen. Knowing it was all over, he surrendered with a listless shrug and raised his hands. A foolish grin crept across his supple mouth.

The rifle was wrenched from his grip, and he was handcuffed. Dancing inside a circle of flashlight beams, Robert told the cops the gun wasn’t his. It belonged to his wife. A police officer limped over to the Hillman, stuck his head in the car. He said to Harriet, “Is that true?”

She puffed on her fag. Nothing would ever change. Robert was still Robert. The cops were the cops. It would be like this until the end of time. She saw a jet flying overhead, its lights blinking white and red, zigzagging toward the airport. She observed the stars in the inky molten sky and prayed for a space ship to rescue her. She looked at the policeman and wished he were dead. “Yeah, it’s mine. Is this going to be a problem, sir?”

The cops bought her alibi. They decided Robert wasn’t worth busting. It was too late at night for more bullshit. The manacles were removed from his wrists. An officer saw the kid in the Hillman’s backseat and reached in the window to chuck her under the chin. “Hey, you okay?”

Diana was dehydrated and too weak to scream, so she vomited into his gloved hand. The policeman stepped back from the sedan as if he’d been electrocuted. The wind was rising, whistling, blowing in from the ocean. The fog thickened, uncoiling in a white-gray bank over San Bruno Mountain. It was Robert Grogan’s first night out of prison.