“Something like that, yeah.”
“That’s an Indian bar, you know. American Indian. Indians and Gyppos don’t exactly love each other.”
“O ye of little faith,” he intoned in a pious inflection borrowed from O’B. He seemed to be having the time of his life, which made him very irritating.
She snapped abruptly, “I’m coming with you on this one.”
“Like hell.”
“I want to see the look on your face when there’s no Gyppo Cadillac.”
Ballard was silent for a moment. Then he smiled a slow superior smile. “Tell you what. You pay for the drinks here, and buy me dinner afterward, and you’re on.”
“The hundred dollars broke you, huh?”
“I’ve got three bucks.”
“That’s my Larry. Always a sucker for a woman with more in her bra than in her brain.”
And there was a wonderful thing for Giselle Marc with an MA. in history to say, she thought as they stood up. Quite enough out of you for one night, young lady, thank you very much.
As she scattered paper money across the table to cover their drinks and the tip, Ballard said abruptly, “I’m gonna really enjoy this. Eight lousy months in the field against my eight years, and you think you know all about it. Well, tonight, Giselle, the old maestro’s gonna show you how it’s done.”
Chapter twenty-one
The Rainbird Lounge, a neighborhood bar in the flats below Potrero Hill, had been rebuilt along with San Francisco after the Big One of ’06. Then known as a “bucket of blood” to the South of Market Irish who frequented it, it became a speak for the Italians during Prohibition. In World War II it was a joint — the kind you drink in, not the kind you smoke — serving cheap booze to G.I.s being shipped out to the Pacific Theater.
After construction of the James Lick Freeway in the 1950s stubbed off its street into a dead end, it should have folded. But, inspired by the name “Rainbird Lounge,” an alcoholic muralista hoping for free drinks forever — as Benny Bufano was getting free food for his fresco in a Powell Street cafeteria — painted a lurid Custer’s Last Stand across the front of it. Lots of scalped horse soldiers littering the Dakota landscape.
His cirrhotic dreams died with a sale to new owners; but the name and the mural somehow became a draw for Native Americans adrift in the big city. Tribal artifacts traded for bar tabs accumulated to lure more Indians: beadwork, clay pots, kachina dolls, doeskin moccasins, woven blankets, even an antique turquoise and beaten-silver brooch hung from a light fixture.
The Rainbird was a comfy sort of place for those who were regulars, while turning a cold shoulder to outsiders who were not Native Americans. There was sawdust on the floor and a half dozen beat-up tables with mismatched chairs. Over the bar along the right wall was a twelve-inch TV tuned to the sports channel — with the sound off so country music could blare from the old-fashioned jukebox. At the Rainbird, a shot and a beer were a mixed drink, a bag of blue corn chips haute cuisine. Patrons drank heavily and fought often, making abrupt visits from the blues of the Southeast Station at Third and 20th inevitable.
The early-season a’s game on the tube was silenced and the juke was between tunes, so Ballard could hear his entrance cut the babble of voices like ammonia squeaking on a windowpane. Every brown face in the joint turned toward his white one through the silence and pall of smoke and reek of stale beer.
There were only brown faces in the joint.
Ballard leaned across the stick and cleared his throat. “Uh... you sell cigarettes here?” He didn’t want to ask for a drink for fear of getting scalped instead.
The bartender, whose face was right off the old Indian-head nickel, wore a cowboy hat with a burst of feathers on the crown. He jerked a brown thumb toward the rest rooms.
“Machine. Back there.”
Ballard waded through utter silence to the swinging door beyond which were rest rooms, pay phone, cigarette machine. As the door shut behind him, the babble started up again.
Three minutes later, sliding in under the wheel of the company car he’d left parked in the yellow zone outside, he dropped a red and white crush-proof box into Giselle’s lap.
“I hope you like Marlboros.”
She said sweetly, “Didn’t want a drink after all?” He seemed too busy making a U-turn back out toward Vermont to answer, so she put the needle in again. “No Gypsies in swirling silks and high heels doing flamencos on top of the bar?”
“Rain dance,” said Ballard shortly and sourly.
“I told you it was an Indian place. Admit it, Larry! Your precious Yana stiffed you for your hundred bucks!”
“DKa’s hundred bucks. We’ll go eat and come back.”
“Can’t admit he’s wrong,” sighed Giselle as if in sorrow.
She actually was delighted, of course, that there had been no Cadillac out in front, no Gyppo in swirling silks and hoop earrings beating a tambourine in one of the booths.
Sonia Lovari parked her shiny new Allante in the Rain-bird’s yellow zone a scant sixty seconds after they had departed. She had no feeling of impending danger: the car was safe there, as was she. She even had told the Indians in great detail about buying it from the insurance settlement of a fictional auto accident, so there was no overt envy over her fancy wheels.
When she had first started coming here, Sonia — known at the Rainbird as Maria Little Bird — had been unnerved by the broken pates, bloodied noses, and blackened eyes on the day the government checks arrived. But now, as a regular, she felt safe and welcome even though sometimes she had to duck thrown glasses and bottles, or grab her own glass and bottle up from the table as a large body crashed across it.
She was always apologized to; being small and an obvious noncombatant, she was never nabbed in the police raids; and at the Rainbird she was careful to never work the scams, cons, and grifts that made her so unwelcome in other South of Market bars.
“You see in the papers ’bout they wanna change the name of the Redskins football team?” asked Perching Raven, the heavy old Paiute woman on the next stool. She was very wide and brown and had the serene seamed face of a desert mountainside.
“K.C. Chiefs, too,” said Comes By Night from the other side of Sonia. He was a sturdy Oglala Sioux who had been looking for work for two years and looking to live up to his name with Little Bird for almost as long. Work eluded him, and Sonia in her secret soul was a traditional Gypsy: no sex with gadje, which she guessed Comes By Night had to be since he wasn’t rom.
“Atlanta Braves,” nodded Hank Feathers, old Perching Raven’s aged husband, not to be outdone.
“Red pride,” said Perching Raven sagely.
“That’s what I think, too,” said Sonia. Being unable to read and disinterested in anything sportif except the odds, she hadn’t the slightest idea what they were talking about; but this was a safe remark. She gestured for another pitcher to share with her friends. “Us redskins gotta stick together, right?”
“Right,” echoed the others as they filled their glasses.
“Hot damn!” exclaimed Ballard. He drifted the company Ford to the curb and stopped. “Didn’t I tell you?”
Giselle looked at the spanking-new Cadillac Allante parked in the Rainbird’s yellow zone. If the motor was warm and the keys were in it, she was going to scream. Ballard already had his Gypsy case folder open on his knees under the dash light, flicking awkwardly through the repo assignments for Allantes.