He was growing impressed with this quick logic when the back door to the house slammed shut. Ben spun around just in time to see a shadow streak through the security light’s halo and out the side gate. The hedge clippers forgotten, Ben took off after the guy.
By the time Ben reached the sidewalk, the stranger was a block away, moving at a steady clip with his shoulders hunched forward and a backpack jostling against a puffy waffle-print coat that was too heavy for the spring evening.
The stranger somehow sensed that he was being pursued and whirled around. Ben threw himself behind a sycamore tree before he could be seen. He listened to the man’s frenzied whispers, tried to make out his words but couldn’t. After surveying the lay of shadows all around him, he decided to venture a peek. Half a block away, the stranger rocked back and forth, his head pivoting as if he had been scanning the sidewalk behind him and some internal gearshift had gotten stuck. A nearby porch light illuminated his matted shoulderlength hair but not his face.
The stranger backed up until he was at the mouth of an alleyway that ran behind the businesses on Santa Monica Boulevard, a once-important West Hollywood thoroughfare that had born the nickname Vaseline Alley before the sheriff’s department had planted traffic barriers at either end to keep the predators from cruising it after dark. When the stranger saw this new path of escape, he turned on his heel and entered it.
As soon as he reached the mouth of the alleyway, Ben called out to the stranger, who backed away from a dumpster he was trying to open with one hand.
“Jawbone,” Ben whispered.
The resident lunatic stared back at Ben with cue-ball eyes, chapped lips parted over yellowing teeth. Not a porn star. Not an Ivy League graduate. A deranged drug addict. He held a bulging black backpack in his right fist. The front flaps of his waffle-print coat were smeared with blood and it looked as if the bag was as well, even though the color partially masked the stains. Jawbone’s lips were moving rapidly, forming words Ben could barely hear.
“’Cause he wasn’t listening none, that’s why. ’Cause that thing was a-blowin’ and he wasn’t listenin’ none to what I say, so I had to… had to… had to…”
Displaying both of his palms at waist level, Ben started moving toward the man, trying to put nothing but supplication on his face even as he strained to hear the content of Jawbone’s frenzied speech, made even less intelligible by his heavy Southern accent.
“See I was tryin’ to get him to come out and see that there wasn’t somethin’ in his trash. Somethin’ movin’, alright? But he couldn’t hear me none over that blower…”
The leaf blower. Ron had been using that damn leaf blower and for some reason Jawbone, blitzed out of his head, had come into the yard, wanting his attention.
A few steps away from Jawbone, Ben lifted a hand and opened his mouth to speak. But before Ben made a sound, Jawbone spun, pulled the dumpster’s lid open with one hand, and tossed the black backpack inside. Then he took off running.
Everything inside of Ben seemed to rear up, trying to force him to chase Jawbone down the alley. But by the time this physical intention resolved itself into a coherent thought, Jawbone was gone. Go back to the house, Ben told himself, even as he pried open the dumpster’s lid with both hands. They weren’t fucking. Go back to the house now. But a more reasonable-sounding voice in his head told him that Jawbone had simply robbed them, that the blood stains all over him had been old, probably the result of some accident, and who knew what stereo equipment or old watches were stuffed inside the bag he had been so eager to get rid of.
Ben pulled a trash can over to the side of the dumpster, lifted the lid with one arm, and reached down for the bag with the other. When his fingers finally grazed a strap, his center of gravity shifted and suddenly he was eating plastic, having landed face-first on the mess of trash bags inside. The lid slammed shut and he jumped to his feet, pushing it back open, and set the bag down on the trash can’s lid.
Once his feet were on the pavement again, he heard a rustling sound behind him. He turned. The bag was rolling toward the middle of the alley, each revolution slightly lopsided, leaving a trail of blood smears across the pavement.
As soon as it came to a stop, Ben crouched down over it and tugged the zipper open.
He was still kneading the matted hair inside, wondering if all hair felt the same once a person’s head had been removed from his body, when a harsh spotlight pierced the alleyway and fixed on him. For a few dazed seconds, he thought the sheriff’s cruiser would continue on, leaving him alone with his lover’s severed head. Then he heard the clipped, hollow-sounding voice of the deputy speaking into his radio, followed by the squeak of rubber boots heading toward him.
When the deputy was a few feet away, Ben peered up at the squat shadow standing in the spotlight’s unrelenting glare, his right hand resting gently against the holster he had just unsnapped. Ben heard himself say, “I need to go home now.”
ONCE MORE, LAZARUSBY HÉCTOR TOBAR
East Hollywood
Before they found the gun, they were running through the trenches at a construction site, throwing dirt clods at each other. But for their overgrown adolescent bodies, an adult standing nearby might have mistaken them for grade-school boys playing cowboys and Indians. They’d stand up in a trench, “fire” at the boy in the next trench over, and laugh and duck when the clod exploded on the other’s shirt, leaving a faint brown circle of clinging dirt crumbs. Throwing dirt clods was more fun than vandalizing the tractor and the backhoe, both of which were immune to much vandalism anyway, sitting there stoic and yellow-metalled at one corner of the construction site, impervious to dirt clods and rocks and globs of tar and even a splash of urine. It was Elliot who peed on the tractor treads, to little or no effect other than the stinking mist he sent into the air, and it was Elliot who found the gun a few minutes later, lying on the bottom of the trench.
Actually, Elliot stepped on the gun. Or, to be more accurate, he tripped over it. This is what he told Detective Sanabria. Elliot was an especially bright fourteen-year-old, and he sensed that telling the story to Detective Sanabria with all its details was going a long way toward exculpating him of any guilt, and that each little twist and turn he could remember was keeping him out of the squad car now parked at the edge of the construction site. The gun itself needed no describing, having been photographed by Detective Sanabria, and then catalogued and tagged and carried away in a plastic bag. Elliot said he thought it was a toy at first, and this was true, until he picked it up, at which point its mass gave away its identity instantly, as did its intricate assemblage-the tiny screws above the trigger, the patterned indentations in the handle, the mysterious metal latches and slides, and the letters stamped into the black metaclass="underline" CAUTION: capable of firing with magazine removed.
Detective Sanabria had grown up in this very East Hollywood neighborhood, gone to the very school across from the construction site, and could imagine the scene as if he had lived it himself. Danny, the victim, was the first bystander to run over, drawn by Elliot’s sudden stillness and silence before the object he was holding. Soon that same wordlessness had overtaken all the other boys, their shouts and laughter replaced by the identical frozen Os of their stunned adolescent mouths. Across the street, sinewy thirdand fourth-grade girls were running and playing tag and kickball on the school playground, without a clue about what these older kids were up to. Elliot slipped out of the momentary trance, smiled wickedly at the other boys, and raised the weapon and pointed it at the ponytailed girls. The girls didn’t notice, they just bounced a red ball rhythmically against a narrow wall that jutted like a sail from the playground’s asphalt blacktop, singing a song, while Elliot closed one eye and pretended to aim, looking down the stubby barrel.