THE AFTERNOON MOVED ON, galloping toward sundown. The trees, buildings, and automobiles along Market Street were pink, gray, and black. In the smoggy distance was the Maria Alicia Apartments, a three-storied stucco low-income housing project. An SRO hotel used to be at the site—the Gartland Apartments—but it was destroyed in an arson-related fire in December 1975. Twelve residents died in the conflagration. Seventeen others were never found. People said the landlord did it, but nobody could prove it.
Waiting for his wife to emerge from Martuni’s Lounge, a Market Street bar, a vexed Jeeter Roche analyzed his marriage. Chiclet had been getting loaded all day long. First the Valium and now Placidyl, a controlled substance classified as a hypnotic. She had downed two pills an hour ago, and when she didn’t feel them right away, she took two more. Then it hit her all at once.
How long had him and Chiclet been married, a couple of months? How she carried on, dabbling in dope and messing around with that idiot Stiv Wilkins—as if it was a secret—Jeeter could swear it had been a century. Maybe the age difference between them was the problem. Jeeter had a good twenty-five years on Chiclet, most of them spent in prison.
To complicate things, Chiclet didn’t share his love for literature. Books bored her and this pained Jeeter to no end. He couldn’t tell his woman about the Brazilian writer Amado. Couldn’t tell her about a world that was better than getting high, and better than the one they were living in.
Jeeter saw a police car jet east on Market Street. The cruiser ran the red light on Gough Street, and then the red light on Franklin Street. The sole thing him and her ever talked about was the price of weed. That was his fault. After all he provided the dope and the money and kept her in the drug room to look after their enterprise.
His reverie was cut short as Chiclet, fixing her makeup, paraded out of the bar. The green anorak she had on was skanky and marked with cigarette burns. A quartet of pimples tattooed her chin. Her hair was mussed, draggling over her nose, and getting in the way as she applied cobalt blue lipstick to her mouth.
Richard Rood studied the dope dealer and his wife from behind a parked Saturn sedan. They were a diorama of white people and their problems. He could see them in a museum of the future: urban primitives and their mating rites. They were fools is what they were. He gobbled at them, his gravelly voice carrying across the street: “Yo, baby, yo.”
Jeeter froze when he heard Rood. Nothing was worse than that man. Not pestilence. Not disease. Not starvation. Not even death. Too bad the black dealer wasn’t a figment of his imagination, the aftermath of taking too many drugs and seeing too many things that weren’t there. “Goddamn it,” he said to Chiclet, pinching her arm. “We’ve got company.”
Eating up the asphalt in his Timberland boots, Richard Rood made a beeline toward the Allen’s property manager. His eyes were somber. His fists were balled. Four inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than the white man, he transmitted enough hatred to scare the heebie-jeebies out of Jeeter Roche.
Richard gazed at Jeeter, targeting him with a reptilian stare that had taken thousands of hours to perfect in front of a mirror. “I’ve been looking for you, boy. Been wanting to talk to your ass.”
Jeeter was in a lightweight North Face goose down parka held together with duct tape. Corralling his emotions into a semblance of coolness, he twisted his chapped lips and answered, “I could care fucking less. You know why?”
“Why?”
“You were at my house earlier and you were messing with Chiclet, you turd, that’s why. What the fuck is wrong with you? You lost your mind or what?”
Richard was terse. “You got something to say about it?”
Jeeter could smell the shabbiness of Richard’s patent leather suit. “Yeah, I do. This is my wife we’re talking about. What did you have to freak her out for? It was unnecessary. You’re out of line.”
Richard was nonchalant and hawked a lunger on the ground. “I didn’t do nothing untowardly to her.”
“Bullshit.” Jeeter was excited. “You were trying to intimidate her.”
“Who says? That cow?” Richard Rood picked his nose and then motioned at Chiclet. “She’s all high.”
Jeeter’s goose down parka billowed in the wind. “You seriously suck, dude. You’ve got no respect for nobody or nothing. You’re an animal.”
“Too bad.” Richard spread his arms, indicating serenity. “You dig me?” Nourished by the mounting acrimony, he offered an invitation. It seemed like the manly thing to do. Move the debate to a higher level. A tremor of undiluted hate blanched his face when he said, “You want to fight?”
Jeeter flung the parka on the sidewalk like a bullfighter’s cape. “Hell, yeah. I can’t have you dogging my old lady.”
Taking the initiative was Jeeter’s first mistake. The combatants squared off under the streetlights and Richard made contact. He lashed out at Jeeter, feinting left hooks, and connecting with right jabs in the gut, all the while saying, “C’mon, you want a piece of me? What are you waiting for?”
Jeeter retreated a pace, windmilling his arms. Getting jabbed in the stomach hurt. Made him want to toss his cookies. He wasn’t ready for no boxing match—and that became his second mistake. Richard snapped off a punch that clipped Jeeter on the nose; a gout of blood streamed from the white dealer’s nostrils as he rocked back on his heels.
Richard Rood crowed, “You gonna cry, little pussy? You want your mommy?”
Afraid that Jeeter would get pulverized, Chiclet stepped in between Richard and her husband. Her neck was buried to the chin in a cashmere scarf. The anorak’s upturned collar scalloped her high-boned cheeks. The wind coming off the street had burned her skin crimson red. She placed a hand on her hip and said to Richard Rood, “What do you want from me and Jeeter?”
Richard dropped his fists and targeted her with a disingenuous smile. A smile that had several subtexts: repugnance, interest, and abhorrence. He schooled his eyes on Chiclet’s body with undisguised and scientific interest. He’d never been with a woman. Not in the Biblical sense. Technically, he was a virgin. Wouldn’t know a vagina if it hit him in the face. Personally speaking, he was a child of sodomy.
He examined her breasts, their roundness showing through a ratty cardigan ski sweater. He appraised the lines of her buttocks bunched inside a pair of melon pink capris. He measured the narrowness of her ankles and the Indian sandals on her feet, the emerald green nail polish on her toenails. She was as queer to him as an alien from another galaxy.
Chiclet brushed away a strand of dyed blonde hair from her triangular face. Richard’s belladonna black eyes made her head reel. He was more unnerving than a bad acid trip. It was like flirting with a rattlesnake. If you ventured too close, you’d get bitten and die. She blustered, “So what do you want?”
“What do I want?” Richard read her body language and said with impatience, “You need to do something about them pimples, you hear me? But fuck it. Let’s get down to brass tacks. I’m looking for someone.”
Chiclet had broken the thread of violence. Plasma trickled out of Jeeter’s busted nose, proof that his hardness was complete fabrication. He was too old for brawling. Jeeter pointed one foot at Richard. His left shoulder was hitched high. His slanted feline eyes were askew. There wasn’t anything about him that was in sync. He said, “Who’s that? Anybody we know?”
Richard was emphatic. “Damn it, yeah. It’s a buddy of yours. One of your honchos.”
“And who would that be, huh? Who do you know that we know? You and me ain’t got shit in common.”
“Yes, we do. This white dude.”
“Most of my friends are white. Which one are you talking about?”
“That punk rock faggot.”
Jeeter’s resistance was melting faster than ice cream left out on the hot pavement. Tiredness tickled his throat. It was nightmarish to have Richard Rood breathing down your neck. Wanting to put an end to it, Jeeter ventured, “You mean Stiv Wilkins?”
Richard’s eyes softened. “Uh huh. I mean Stiv.”
“He ain’t my buddy.”
“He ain’t? What exactly is he to you?”
“The pissant is just a tenant in my building.”
“Your building? You own it?”
“No.”
“Then what does that make you?”
“I oversee the Allen and all the shit that goes down in it.”
“Is that so? You must be one very important motherfucker in the scene over there.”
“I am.”
“But you do know Stiv, don’t you?”
Jeeter confessed without shame. “I admit to that.”
“Well, then.” Richard Rood stroked his chin sagaciously. He toed a beer can into the gutter. “I’m looking for the dickhead. Have you seen him?”
“Damn, right, I have.” Jeeter said. His tongue burned with a snitch’s lust to be truth speaking. He practically strangled on the words when they petered out of his mouth. “The fucking runt sold me a lousy gun earlier. He said it was good. I believed him. Then I went to test it at the Lake Merced shooting range and the thing exploded in my hand.”
“Stiv’s a goddamn lizard. He sucks. I hate him.”
“But where is he?”
Jeeter Roche unbuttoned his shirt and used the tails to soak up the blood on his face. “How the hell would I know?”
There was little else to say. Richard wanted to insult Jeeter, just to fuck with him, but decided to reserve his energy. Cooler that he should hold back and stay blasé. He said, “Okay.”
The flu had him going downstream in a river of incomprehension. His fists were sore from rearranging Jeeter’s face. He didn’t know what his next step was, but it wasn’t hanging around these dolts. He had no time for trashy-assed losers. Jeeter and his woman were good for doodly squat. Richard Rood bid them a curt farewell. “Hey, I didn’t mean to fuck with your evening or bring you down, but it had to be done, you know?”