Hanson opened his eyes, clasped his hands behind his head, and listened to the house. It was quiet. The rain had gone away during the night. A good omen. He had two days off to deal with, putting off his first drink of the day for as long as possible.
He pulled on cutoff jeans, drank a beer to smooth out his hangover a little, and walked back to the sagging screened-in porch, barefoot and shirtless. Sparrows and house finches, gray and ragged as street people, flew off when they saw him, then circled right back to the feeder. A brazen rufous hummingbird streaked away, then, a moment later, just…appeared, his wings a blur, hovering just beyond the screen, watching Hanson. Goldfinches, tiny and impeccable, yellow, black, and white, clung sideways and upside down from the mesh bag of thistle seed Hanson had put out. Hanson smiled, delighted by all the activity, gone, out of himself for a moment. He went back in the house and put on a black tank top and electric-blue track shoes for a run around Lake Merritt.
Hungover, but he’d felt worse, he told himself, dodging pedestrians, parking meters, and parked cars without losing his rhythm. He watched his reflection slide across the window of Tao Seafood, then he spun and sidestepped through the outdoor tables at Café Noir. Crossing Grand at an angle toward Walden Pond Books, he saluted Marshall, the owner, who was watching from the window.
Some kind of cramp, down low on his right side, had started throbbing with his heartbeat, eating up into his ribs. He picked up his pace beneath the marquee of the Grand Lake Theatre—PSYCHO II—ran the light at the intersection, past Blues Burger, where black girls wearing red-and-white uniforms and paper hats worked behind rotating bulletproof windows.
Farther down the block, through the glare on the plate-glass windows, he could see, in the lobby of the transient hotel, all the old men with no one to take them in, who sat there all day, waiting to die. He glanced at the upper windows, cornices, and ledges, imagining some young ex-con looking out the window toward the bay. Fresh out of San Quentin, out of money and behind on his rent, he’d be trying to think of someone he could call who might help him line up a score, already knowing he’d be back in the joint soon.
He stopped in front of the hotel and, his hands clasped behind his back, looked down through the glass at the jade plants, dozens of them on a shelf below the window. The soil in their pots was dry and cracked, the sun shining directly on them most of the day.
He walked through the door, a bell ringing as he opened it, all the old men looking up at him. The desk clerk was a fat white kid, and this was probably the best job he’d ever get. He was in a little nook set back almost out of sight from the front desk, leaning back in a folding metal chair, looking at a Hustler magazine. When Hanson walked up to the front desk and peered around at him, the kid pretended not to notice him. Hanson suddenly grinned, recognizing him from Portland. He hit the little silver bell with the heel of his hand. Nothing. He lay over the counter on his belly, legs dangling, and twisted his head to look up at the kid. “Hi. Young man. I must talk to you.”
He didn’t look up from the magazine.
In a peeling mirror behind the desk, Hanson saw the people in the lobby watching to see what this was about. What would happen? He tapped the bell softly, with one finger, repeatedly—dingdingdingdingdingdingding—not stopping till the kid looked at him. Hanson smiled, his eyes open wide, looking dorky, but also insane. His Shirley Temple eyes. The kid dropped the front legs of the chair on the floor, stood up, rolling the magazine in his hand, and walked to the other side of the counter from Hanson.
“What?” he said, and Hanson laughed, delighted at the kid’s tough-guy act.
He batted his wide eyes at him, dorky crazy to the max. “I need to show you something,” Hanson said. “Those jade plants by the windows.”
“What?” the kid asked, more bewildered than surly this time.
“Look at me,” Hanson said, closing down the Shirley Temple eyes. “It’ll just take a few seconds. Let’s walk over to the window.”
“Are you a cop?”
“I’m going over there now, and I’m gonna wait for you. Okay?”
Hanson walked across the lobby in his cutoff Levi’s and black tank top, sweeping his eyes across the lobby like searchlights. He stopped at the window, licked his thumb, and wiped a streak of dust off one of the jade plants. He dug his thumbnail into the dry, cracked dirt. Cigarette butts had been stubbed out in most of the pots. It pissed him off. The desk clerk was watching anxiously, still behind the desk. Hanson gestured to him with one hand and mouthed the words “Come ’ere.”
The kid lifted the hinged end of the desk and walked over, his arms out from his sides as if he was so muscular that he couldn’t bring them any closer to his body. He flipped his head to swing his hair out of his eyes. When he got to where Hanson was standing, he assumed a sort of sumo wrestler stance, his groin thrust out, arms hanging at his sides, utterly vulnerable.
“This is called Jade Plant. When was last time you watered him?” Hanson said in a Russian robot voice.
“I dunno. Ugly fuckers look the same as when I started working here.”
“Hero plants. Still alive. Never watered. Still alive. Used for ashtrays. Still alive.”
“Shit,” the kid said, about to turn away.
Hanson stepped on his foot, and the kid glared at him, but only for a second. Hanson’s scary-calm evangelist’s look ate the anger, leaving the kid with fear in his eyes. “What is your name?”
“Marvin.”
“What is my name? Marvin. Look at me,” he said, reaching down and taking one of the kid’s fat hands in both of his, not letting go. “You do not remember me? Lion of the Avenue. Fierce Tiger of North Precinct. The nice guy who wrote up not one, but two criminal complaints on you in such a way that the DA threw them away? Open your eyes.”
“Hanson.”
“Perfect. I’ll see you in a couple of days. Start watering those plants, just a little at a time. Okay? Good to see you, Marvin.” He walked out the door, the little bell ringing behind him, then looked through the window at Marvin as he shifted his weight from shoulder to shoulder like a boxer, grinning.
The pain down in his ribs was still there, insistent. He’d forgotten about it. He leaped the curb, dodged a cab turning left, and picked up his pace once more.
In front of the Chevron station, he jumped a brown patch of sidewalk. One evening the week before, two black guys had pulled their car in front of a nineteen-year-old white junkie walking past the station. They got out of their car, each with a length of heavy chain, chain-whipped him until he was bloody and dead, got back in the car and drove off. That was the word, but there were no witnesses. Nobody saw it happen. OPD detectives had shown up the next afternoon, but had no suspects or motives. The owner of the gas station had hosed the blood off the next morning, but it had set overnight. The stain must be bad for business, Hanson thought, cutting back across Grand to the path around the lake.
Barely midmorning and Lake Merritt was steaming. The Chinese men and women in bright silk tunics and flowing black pants were out along the grassy bank, well into their tai chi routines—rising, turning, holding…sweeping into the next form. Gray-haired, slight in build, their serene detachment kept the thugs and drunks and lunatics who prowled the lake well away.
Out in the middle of the lake a gleaming white nineteenth-century whaleboat with bright blue trim moved smoothly away, rowed by eight women in their seventies, a ninth, the coxswain up front, leaning into her oar to bring the heavy boat around toward the opposite shore. The women wore white trousers, white middy blouses, white hats, and scarves that were the same shade of blue as the boat trim.
Seagulls waddled along the muddy shore, and at the far end of the lake, black cormorants dove, disappeared for ten or fifteen seconds, then popped back up in some different spot, tipping their heads back to swallow silver fish. A line of pelicans flew six feet above the water, banking, changing direction, and holding their altitude, big ponderous birds in unison alternating several wing flaps with a glide, as smoothly as a flight of heavy bombers. On the strip of grass between the lake and Lakeshore Drive, two young black dudes in their early twenties worked out with weights, a faint clang each time they added plates to their curl bar.
Hanson was bent over, elbows on his knees, catching his breath and wondering if the knife in his ribs was a heart attack, when a runner with a dog almost ran him over.
N/M, Hanson thought, cataloguing him. Negro Male. Six one, one eighty, dark complexion, shaved head, diamond studs in both ears.
He’d blown past never looking at Hanson, as if saying I don’t even see you, motherfucker, a golf club in one hand and a studded leather leash in the other. His pit bull puppy ran ahead, tongue lolling out, crabbing to one side, then the other against the rhythm of the cast-iron weight plate hung from a chain around his neck. The dog looked happy.
Hanson watched them jog away, then tried walking the heart attack away down toward the weight lifters. He felt worse now than when he’d left home, sweating tequila, cursing the pain in his side. One of the weight lifters had walked off to talk to a couple of white girls in a BMW, and the other one, who Hanson thought he recognized now that he was closer, was sitting on a weight bench in the shade of a New Zealand tea tree, watching Hanson.
“Hey. Homeboy,” he called to Hanson.
“Yes, sir,” Hanson said.
“How about spotting me for a minute, Homey?” He was wearing baggy pleated khaki pants with running shoes, his shirt hanging from a tree branch. He was buffed and pumped up from the lifting he’d already done.
“Sure,” Hanson said, walking over, surprising him. He looked more closely at Hanson, then swung around and lay beneath the weights. Hanson stood at the head of the bench, hands gripping the bar on the outside of the weights. They looked at each other, their faces upside down.
“Ready when you are, boss,” Hanson said. “How many reps?”
“Twelve.”
“Lotta weight,” Hanson said, looking theatrically at one end of the bar, then the other.
“I got it.” He did five reps, then paused, the weight straight up, looking at Hanson’s eyes. “What’s your name, man? I know you from somewhere.”
“Hanson.”
He grunted and pushed out more reps. “Where I know you from?”
“Raylene’s Discount Liquors. You asked me if you’d broken some law when you weren’t paying attention.”
“Damn,” he said, finishing his twelve reps without breaking a sweat.
“I look a lot different when I’m not wearing that uniform. You’re Tyree, as I recall.”
“Tyree,” he said, setting the bar in the cradle.
The Tai Chi people moved as smooth as shadows on the lake, where the ladies, rowing their impeccable whaleboat, left an endless V behind them. The pelicans began landing, hitting the water like plane crashes, then gliding gracefully off.
The other guy, Tyree’s partner, had come back from talking to the girls in the BMW and was standing ten feet away, watching Hanson. Tyree sat up and told him, “This is that cop I told you about, who stood on the hood of his patrol car and broke up that street dance. And stopped Uncle Fee just the other night.”
His partner smiled.
“Show us what you can handle, po-lice,” Tyree said, standing up and gesturing toward the weight bench. “I’ll spot you.”
Hanson looked at the bar. It weighed almost as much as he did.
“Unless you don’t feel up to it.”
Hanson straddled the bench, sat, then lay down flat. He extended his arms, gripping the bar from below and Tyree helped him slip it out of the cradle and take the full weight, slowly let him have the full weight. Even without a hangover, it was too much weight for him, but he managed seven reps through all the blind will and pain he could muster. After lowering it to his chest for an eighth rep, he was able to raise it only partway, knew he couldn’t do another rep, and lowered the bar to just above his chest, his arms still bent at the elbow. Without help, he’d have to try and tip the bar to one side, slide the end into the ground and crab out from beneath it or topple it onto the ground. If Tyree wanted to, he could shove the bar down into Hanson’s ribs and claim that Hanson had dropped it on himself. At best Hanson would look clumsy and weak getting out from under the bar, and at worst, if Tyree shoved it down, he’d have broken ribs and maybe a punctured lung.
“Push that iron,” Tyree said, looking down at him, cupping his hands around both ends of the bar. “Come on, po-lice. You can do it. Do it.”
Hanson focused everything on the bar, his arms quivering, slowly raising it, slowly, raising it almost to the lip of the cradle, where Tyree took just enough of the weight himself so Hanson could roll it into the cradle. He looked up through the gnarled gray branches of the New Zealand tea tree, breathing hard, thinking it over, his arms feeling as if they might float out alongside him. “Thing is,” he said. “About weight. How much. You can lift. Can’t fake it. With iron. Either you can. Or can’t.”
“Did good…” Tyree began.
His partner said, “Yeah.”
Tyree continued, “…raising that weight mostly with your mind. If you took better care of yourself, though, go into training, you could be bad.”
Hanson laughed, exhausted, and sat up. “Thanks for the help.”
“You know what I’m sayin’.”
“I do,” Hanson said.
“You off duty?”
“Officially? Off duty.”
“You live around here?”
“Yeah.”
“In Oakland?”
“Yeah.”
“An’ don’t even have a piece with you?”
“Can’t run for shit carrying one. Nowhere to hide it either. Worried somebody might see it. Blow me up. Say it was self-defense.”
“Police say that all the time.”
“I worry about them the most,” Hanson said.
“Me,” Tyree said, “I’m not packin’.”
Hanson looked at his partner.
“That’s my partner. I been knowin’ him since I was five years old. We look out for each other. You need somebody watch your back in this world.”
“I used to trust some people like that, but they’re gone, mostly dead now.”
“How’d that happen?”
“It just happens.”
“You right about that.”
“What’s his name?” Hanson asked Tyree, then turned to face his partner. “Excuse my bad manners,” he said. “I should ask you, if you don’t mind.”
“My name Quintus.”
“A pleasure, Quintus. I appreciate you lookin’ out for me and Tyree. Unarmed in the park, like we are,” Hanson said, standing up.
“I been wondering something,” Tyree said, “thought I’d aks you about. Since you’re right here. If that’s okay.”
Hanson looked at him. “Sure.”
“The other night at the liquor store, did you notice anything, you know, unusual, in the car, when you was talkin’ to us?”
“You mean the Uzi the older gentleman in the backseat had under his coat?”
Tyree looked over at Quintus, then looked back at Hanson. “How come you didn’t call it in?”
“Just a lot of trouble, for nothing. Extra paperwork for me. It was an accident I saw it, you all didn’t let me see it, to see what I’d do. Disrespect me, test me. I’d have had to arrest you for that. We were all reasonable with each other, polite, no problem. I don’t care if you got an Uzi as long as you don’t try to shoot me with it, or if you don’t”—he smiled—“use it responsibly. Uzis all over Oakland. Good seeing you again, Tyree,” Hanson said. “Quintus,” he said, nodding, “a pleasure. You all be careful now.”
He was walking away, limping a little, when Tyree said, “You be careful. I hear it’s some bad brothers out there where you work.”
Hanson stopped and turned around. Tyree was holding his right hand up, brown palm out. Hanson smiled, put his heels together, and gave him a little salute. Then he walked on. He was feeling better now and began a slow jog back toward Grand Avenue.
He turned in a circle, running in place, taking in the Tai Chi people, the classy old women in the whale boat, Tyree and Quintus down there laughing about something—probably him—next to the weight bench.
Maybe he was doing okay out there on the job. Building a support base. For a moment he thought about going to see Libya. She sure beat a cop groupie at the bar across from the Justice Center, and he didn’t have to spend time with drunk cops either. He hadn’t imagined it, the way they couldn’t stop looking at each other. They had eyes for each other. But that was insane, going to see her. He started running again, onto the sidewalk along Grand Avenue.
When he heard the tick, tick, tick of Weegee’s card-in-the-spokes bicycle coming up behind him, he raised his hand and stopped running, catching his breath.
“Hi, Officer Hanson,” Weegee said, coming to a stop beside him on the grass. “Liftin’ weights with Tyree and Quintus,” he said, smiling, shaking his head. “I never seen ’em talk to the police before. Never. They talkin’ to you, though.”
“Weegee, I think you know everybody in Oakland. Like the CIA. A one-man CIA on a bike.”
“Well,” Weegee said, modest, a little embarrassed, pleased, “I get around.”
“It’s always good to see you, young sir,” Hanson said. “Keeping an eye on me, let me know how I’m doing.” He was glad to see him. It wasn’t just that Weegee was smart and funny. Hanson forgot about himself whenever he was around. “Why don’t you pace me, ride along with me up to the Grand Lake Theatre and we’ll get some ice cream if you want to. I’d sure like some.”
“Okay,” Weegee said, and Hanson began an easy jog, the pain in his side gone completely now. Weegee kept pace, rearing his bike up on its back wheel, making circles around Hanson. “The CIA, that’s the Central Intelligence Agency. They’re the spies. The C-I-A and the F-B-I. I know these things, Officer Hanson.”