Soon the Rest Will Fall

Market Street was a no-man’s-land of hookers and lonesome sidewalks at midnight. Half-built condominiums were skeletal in the rainy, red moonshine. Leafless trees did a drunken bolero in the wind. Winos clung to the doorway of the Donnelly Hotel. For rent signs cluttered the windows of long-abandoned storefronts. Since the cut-backs in bus services, hardly anyone went downtown after dark.

Under the Orpheum Theater’s marquee a troop of homeless women and men had converted shopping carts, suitcases, clothes, tarps, and strips of cardboard into a shanty fort. Robert tarried at the intersection of Ninth and Market with the Mossberg shotgun under his jacket, studying the liquor store. Slatts was by his side, fiddling with the crude bandages on his head.

The shotgun strained against Robert’s jacket. “Let’s go.” The shop’s windows advertised ATM services, Lotto ticket sales, and groceries. Despite these attractions, there were no customers in the place. It was a retail graveyard. Petrified fruits and fossilized vegetables languished in a bin. A miniature vinyl Christmas tree adorned the cash register.

The proprietor was behind the counter dressed in a wide-lapelled brown tweed suit, white shirt with no tie. He was engrossed in a crossword puzzle. A radio in the back room coughed out James Brown’s “Please, Please, Please.”

The surveillance sensors let off a shrill beep when Slatts streaked in the door. The shopkeeper looked up, surprised to see another human being in his establishment. It had been hours since the last one. He had no time to say anything. Not even to say hello, because another fellow had entered the premises.

Brandishing the Mossberg like it was a dowsing rod, Robert slipped in the doorway. His boots had no traction, and he started to fall. A billion things went through his head. How clumsy he was. How the strife between him and Harriet had caused his hairline to recede. At the last possible moment he recovered his balance with a ballerina’s effortless grace and pointed the weapon at the merchant. “Open that fucking safe, will you?”

The demand befuddled the man. He’d have said it was a prank, but the gun made it serious. Pushing off from the counter, he clambered to the vault, brushed aside the newspapers on it, and piddled with the combination. The lead-lined door opened merrily with a well-oiled click.

Robert flung the shopkeeper aside and stuck his nose in the vault. He’d been waiting for this. Been fantasizing about it at night. Armed robbery was a poor man’s nirvana. What he saw gave him a hemorrhage. Except for a stack of expired food stamps, there was nothing in it. “What is this shit?” he asked.

In every criminal’s career there is a flirtation with failure. The vocation demands it. Robert had been down that lane countless times. Was he a loser? Only god could judge him. He fixed the shotgun on a cardboard beer advertisement. It was a life-sized color shot of a young white woman at a Caribbean resort.

The coast was clear. The two robbers booked from the liquor store. Slatts split away and evanesced to Larkin Street and the park in the Civic Center. Robert fit the shotgun under his jacket and slunk in the other direction toward Market and Seventh.

It was still drizzling. Fog crested the public library’s roof. Sea gulls scattered over the UN Plaza. A tape loop of events replayed itself in Robert’s head as he walked. Two days ago he was on the bus to the soup kitchen at Hamilton Church in the Haight-Ashbury. A passenger had left behind a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. He glommed the paper and turned to the obituaries section. At the top of the page was a photograph of one of the narcs that had collared him in Pacific Heights. In the picture the dead cop was smoking a cigarette.

That same night he and Harriet had finally had sex. It was at five in the morning, before sunrise. The dog barked in the bathroom. Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Serenade to a Cuckoo” was on the stereo. As he made love with his wife, holding her tight, drinking in her hair and skin, caressing her soft tits, all he’d been able to think about was Slatts.

Lost in his recollections, he didn’t see the two black-and-whites converging at Eighth and Market until it was too late. Another squad car skidded in front of the liquor store. A policeman in a white riot helmet jackknifed out of the cruiser and unholstered his service weapon. The shop’s owner rambled outside to join him.

If Robert had known a prayer, he would’ve said it. Instead he backed up, hotfooted it onto the hood of a parked Ford station wagon, then sprang to the next auto at the curb, a late model Saab. Skinning his knees on the windshield, he leapfrogged to the street, dodging a taxi and a newspaper delivery truck, and bolted toward the Odd Fellows Temple and the Bargain Bee variety store.

Running to the corner, he glanced backward. Patrolmen were pursuing him; the closest one was fifty yards away. Without thinking, he pivoted and hurdled a wood fence into the Embassy Theater’s lot. It wasn’t a slick move—he collapsed in a lagoon of sidewalk garbage and sprained his ankle. He tried to get up and couldn’t.

The moon was in between pillowy rain clouds. The street’s lights were afire. The Strand Theater was a blackened silhouette. Doves cooed on the telephone wires. A kitty meowed from the lot. Robert propped himself up with the shotgun in a bed of orange rinds, apple cores, dog food cans, and computer parts, and waited for the cops.

Six policemen bustled up the street, ghostlike in the rain’s pitter-patter. Robert gave them a dirty look. The wheel of anger in his gut turned. There were two ways to play it. Let the motherfuckers arrest him. Or get killed. He laughed into his collar because neither choice made sense.

A blitzkrieg of faces surged from the darkness to bedevil him. People he hadn’t seen in ages. There was Stephen who took two bullets in the back at a telephone booth on Twenty-fourth Street, Victor who’d had a coronary watching a Giants ball game on television, and Vance who’d gotten his throat cut attempting to rob a burger stand in Hunters Point. Last were Jimmy and Donald, taken by AIDS.

He imagined himself back in San Quentin napping in the upper bunk of his cage, the air rich with marijuana smoke. Slatts was spooning him from behind, the thread-bare blankets in a noose around his neck, the teddy bear by his head. The guys in the cell next door had John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” on the radio.

The picture melted into a fresco of the Trinity Plaza Apartments. He and his daughter were in the parking lot. She was in a poplin shift, a straw bonnet with ribbons on her head. He had on a leather biker vest. A blue jay landed on a fence post and sunned itself. Diana picked up a round stone and snuffled, “I want to kill it.” She pitched the rock at the jay, breaking its neck. The girl ran to Robert. He swung her upward onto his shoulders. Her satiny cheeks were baked apples, warm against his unshaven face. “Bull’s-eye,” he said.

Harriet came into his thoughts. She was at the Golden Gate Bridge in a spandex one-piece bathing suit. Her skin was unblemished, oiled with coconut cream and toast-brown from the sun. Her legs were shaved, sprigs of blonde pubic hair protruded from the swimwear. There was lipstick on her teeth when she smiled. “I love you, daddy.”

The rain performed its muted ballet, pissing silently on Market Street. The police hit the corner, and he gave them a blast from the Mossberg—coins of buckshot arced into the lightless intersection. The pavement was showered with gold, silver, and white sparks. The shotgun’s heavy-duty recoil knocked Robert flat on his back.

Then the cops were on him. The smallest cop grappled with Robert’s legs. Another patrolman seized his arms. The sergeant in charge whomped him with a baton in the ribcage. Somebody else drop-kicked Robert in the temple with a steel-toed riot boot, deploying the ex-con’s head like it was a well-seasoned soccer ball. The largest officer kneeled on his stomach, hollering, “You’re fucked, asshole! It’s all over!” and handcuffed him.

Robert recited his catechism. He whispered it so that nobody could hear him. Everything was cool. Things would get better. Just not right now. He turned his face to the lights on Market Street.