The expression on his face told me I should feel sorry for him, and consider him the victim here. Poor pitiful Rick. I kind of wanted to rip his fat head off and defecate down the hole, that’s how much sympathy I wanted to feel for him.
But watching him squatting there all forlorn, I flashed back to prison and the nights I lay in my cell reading the Canon, listening to a punk’s sobs and the laughter of his playmates for the evening down the tier. Listening, but saying and doing nothing except turning the book’s pages.
Rick yanked on the last knot hard enough he snapped the anchoring surveyor’s stake in two. After studying the broken piece of wood for a few seconds, he went and got another stake.
I walked back to Big Moe but he put his hand up, so I was looking at his pale palm and spread fingers. “No disrespect, Markus, but I don’t much feel much like talking right now.”
We stood apart from each other, watching them slide the gurney into the ambulance. She’d been too small for the body bag and they had it folded in half beneath her – I could have carried it under one arm.
As the ambulance left Big Moe said, “They think they’re going to run us off, but they won’t. They’ll have to cart me away too. I won’t back down. I can’t.” Despite his sad-sack demeanor and the rap video clown suit he wore so awkwardly, I saw the steel in him.
Moe looked at me like I was an insect and said, “She’s dead because of you.”
My knees wobbled and I felt dizzy as Moe turned on his heel and headed into the Gardens, leaving me alone on that windswept development.
Chapter 36
I walked back the way I’d originally come, the first night I’d stumbled into the Gardens. I walked up that broad new road, clean white sidewalks to each side with all the courts and lots laid out flat and perfect and sterile.
The new construction confronted the Gardens as if besieging them. The idle heavy equipment appeared ready to move in and do a Godzilla on those rows of bungalows the instant I wasn’t looking. Dirt fire-access roads led off into the surrounding old growth forests like radiating spokes.
I suspected any Pass I’d had in the Gardens was revoked now. I wouldn’t have even been surprised if a carload of Crips or Hmong cruised up and did a drive-by on me.
I found the trail to the marsh and worked my way through the blackberry thickets and tulie grass to the swamp proper. Carnivorous plants dotted the expanse of low mud hummocks spread in front of me.
The night I passed out here after escaping the hospital, I’d flashed back to the times I’d come to this spot with Sam when he was little. Now, in the light of day and doing everything possible not to think about that little girl, I again remembered catching spiders with Sam, and messing around with tadpoles. It had been fun seeing wild things for the first time myself, and sharing the experience with my boy.
One time we even found a raccoon skull. Sam was the one who spotted it by a bush in the middle of the marsh, and he’d just had to have it. So of course I wound up wading through knee-deep swamp bottom to reach that skull, and it turned out a yellow jacket nest was right next to it on a bush.
Apparently the yellow jackets didn’t approve of me being in their space. I danced around in the mud, yelling as they swarmed all over me stinging the shit out of me, and Sam laughed his ass off at the show I put on for his amusement. We went home, Sam with a cool raccoon skull, and me covered in stinking swamp muck and yellow jacket sting holes.
I chuckled at that bitter-sweet memory, but it wasn’t much comfort in the present. I'd been vain: I'd told myself I could do instantaneously what Karl hadn't been able to in seven years. I’d been proud: I'd told myself I was playing these kids, but my ego had been stroked to bloating by their hero worship; I’d bought into being the Crips’ token white boy OG.
Moe was right: My rage had killed that little girl as surely as if I’d wielded the knife myself. I’d poked the tiger in the sphincter with a sharp stick, thinking to bully the Driver – but he’d mirrored my anger, blazed up just as hot and nasty. It was supposed to have been me he came after to chop – instead, that little girl died screaming for my mistake.
I deserved to have the Gardens turn on me.
Chapter 37
I walked toward downtown Stagger Bay. My mind was so involved in my self pity fest that Reese or the Driver could have rolled up and had a free crack at me.
In the past I’d learned to put the darkness and self loathing where it belonged: in a box in my heart where I never had to examine it other than in dreams. But this time the box had overflowed all the way.
I was trapped by the memory of the little girl. I felt small again, just as small as when I awaiting trial for the Beardsleys. Any strength I ever might have had meant nothing.
The classics I’d read in prison were no guidance at all. The Masters were pompous hypocrites. A man couldn’t be expected to fight the impossible; it was pointless for me to even have stood up here.
I reached my destination: the same bus terminal I’d arrived at when I raised a seeming eternity ago. The same bus terminal I’d been heading toward the day it all went down at the school.
I could catch a Greyhound bus to Oakland here at the terminal if I wanted. And why wouldn’t I? If I could sink into the earth I’d do it to get away from this place.
Chapter 38
There were no buses in sight and no hangers on waiting as I neared the tiny terminal’s entrance. The sign on the door said ‘Closed for Lunch.’
I wouldn’t have to decide whether or not to ride the magic bus to East Bay freedom for another little while. In the meantime, I wasn’t about to squat in front of the terminal like a homeless mope, letting traffic goggle at me as they drove past.
The next block over toward the waterfront, the bulk of the Andersen Club towered over Old Town’s shorter interposing commercial structures. The Club, originally a mansion built by one of Stagger Bay’s nouveau riche founding robber barons to show off his wealth, had transformed long ago into a men’s club for the local wheels.
I ambled that way for a closer look, remembering all the local bigwigs were members of the Club: real estate developers and out-of-town wealth, local businessmen and politicians of all stripes.
‘Cui Bono?’ Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla always asked when the Romans investigated an affront against the establishment: ‘Who benefits?’
Looking at the Club, I realized all its members stood to profit from the current goings on in Stagger Bay.
Chapter 39
The Andersen Club was a rambling three-story Victorian, set back from the street behind a manicured lawn. The building was painted green with trim of various colors, topped with towers and cupolas, and covered with so much rococo woodwork that it resembled a giant gingerbread dollhouse or perhaps a Disneyland ride. If the Addams Family Mansion got a high-end makeover the Andersen Club would be it.
A stone wall surrounded the Club’s parking lot, flanked by a line of topiary animals. Next to the lot entrance stood a huge metal Masonic compass and T-square. Through the opening I saw an array of neatly parked luxury cars: a couple of Jaguars, several Porsches, and even what appeared to be a vintage Testerossa.
I’d heard talk about the goings on within the Club. But as none of the Stagger Bay working stiffs ever got a look inside (other than serving staff, who apparently had to sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement), our wild theories were unsubstantiated.
For myself, I’d always envisioned sex parties with shrink tubing and hair-dryers ala Zappa, or possibly even group S &M sessions with leather-clad hookers cracking whips and screaming orders at the Club members as they crawled around in a groveling circular herd, oily and naked. Unlikely stuff but not impossible, right? We low people had to imagine some kind of degrading fantasies about our betters to vent our spleen.