Before he left this morning he put his things away with care, just like always; it doesn’t take him long to find the items he needs. After a minute of packing up Claudio’s stuff he’s on the street again, dodging oncoming cars on the Speedway, moving with tunnel-visioned ease, like he’s lived in this neighborhood for years. Even with the sun gone and bad weather coming, the world feels disenchanted, shrunken. Stanley’s on familiar ground now, comfortable and sad.
The first big drops catch him on the boardwalk, as he’s settling onto a bench; they flash under the streetlamps, leave jagged silver-dollar-size sunbursts on the wooden planks. When they strike his skin they’re heavy and cold, like shoulder-taps from a ghost.
He watches the windows of the penny-arcade — still a block away — until he’s good and soaked, and his wet shirtsleeves have become loose reptile-skin on his arms. At this distance he can just make out faces: Whitey with a fat lip and a swollen eye, his two junior punks with minor scratches. All three look sullen, unhappy with each other and with themselves.
People pass between Stanley and the arcade in a steady stream, moving quickly in the rain: some share umbrellas, some huddle under newspapers. Their silhouettes pulse across the windows like gaps between cards on a Mutoscope spool. From time to time someone joins Stanley on his bench — a drunk, a grifter, a pervert — but Stanley won’t look and won’t say a word, and eventually they all go away.
Stanley thinks of Welles’s list of names in his pocket. He should have left it at the squat; the ink will run when it gets wet. Not much to be done about it at this point. It was probably bullshit anyway. It was a bad move, trying to play the game on Welles’s terms instead of his own. He can see that well enough now.
One of the two punk Dogs — the one farthest from the door — finally steps away from his machine, headed for the john. Stanley rises from his bench. He closes the distance in a hurry without breaking into a run, and he takes deep breaths as he goes. A couple of the people he passes must be able to read the intention in his face; they avert their nervous eyes, give him a wide berth. Soon he’s standing in the door, puddling the concrete with the rain he’s accrued. The punk is just a few feet ahead, his back turned. Whitey’s clear across the room, facing Stanley, blinded by the game he plays, or by whatever he’s thinking about. For a flickering instant Stanley thinks what he always thinks at these times: You don’t have to do this. You can walk away. The idea slows him up more than he’s used to. He feels like he’s at the first tall drop of a rollercoaster track; his eyes are squeezed tight with the effort of imagining himself elsewhere. But of course he is not elsewhere. He is here.
He takes a few quick steps, passes behind the first punk, stops, and elbows him in the kidney. A half-human moan bursts from the guy’s lips as his knees fold. Stanley drops with him, fingers tangled in his greasy hair, to drive his face into the steel coinbox.
Stanley scrambles on all fours to the corner, past the row of machines, then stands up as he circles around to Whitey. A couple of people are staring at the fallen punk; a few more hotfoot to the exit, but Whitey plays on without looking up. Stanley is close enough now to see his score: two million points, one ball left to play. The guy isn’t bad; he knows what he’s doing.
As Stanley comes up behind Whitey he peeks over his shoulder for a second at the bubbling seahorses and topless mermaids of the playfield, the flash of the silver ball. He lets Whitey keep playing until the guy feels eyes on his back, realizes that something is wrong. His concentration wavers. The ball drains.
Stanley pulps Whitey’s right hand against the cabinet’s edge with the swung blackjack. Then he hits him again on the side of the head, and keeps hitting him until he’s motionless on the concrete. A girl a few machines down screams.
The third Dog isn’t yet finished in the john, so Stanley goes in after him, kicking his stall door open, bringing the blackjack down until it connects with his face. The Dog balls up, sags against the spattered wooden panel. Through a small glory-hole over the roll of paper Stanley sees someone cringing in the next stall. Oh god, a voice says. Oh my god.
On his way back to the boardwalk, Stanley pauses to club Whitey one more time, taking care not to step in the slick of blood that spreads from his body toward the ocean, carried by the downgrade of the concrete floor.
48
It takes no more than a minute to clean out the squat. Soon Stanley’s on the street again, his dad’s fieldpack on his back, Claudio’s duffel slung over his shoulder, walking through wind-driven rain as the crack-bulbed streetlamp overhead creaks and thrashes on its black cables. He’d planned on using the Speedway, but flashing lights of squadcars and ambulances — he can’t tell how many — have congregated at Westminster, a block from the penny-arcade. He stops under a leaky canvas awning to watch as red pulses from their gumball beacons throw the gigantic shadows of rainslickered cops against the sides of buildings. Stanley thinks of black scorpions attacking Mexico City.
He doubles back to Market and heads inland, into town, taking Cabrillo to Aragon to Abbot Kinney, taking Abbot Kinney west again. As he’s making the left on Main an ambulance rockets through the intersection behind him, siren keening, and this makes Stanley feel a little better: if the guy inside was dead, nobody’d bother with the siren. At least that’s what people used to say back in the neighborhood.
Wave Crest comes up in a few blocks. As he’s crossing Pacific the clouds open up, the wind sweeps the rain into a solid-seeming wall, and he hastens to the doorway of a bakery for shelter, already firehose-drenched. This is probably where Synnøve bought last night’s bread; today it’s closed for Shabbos, its carefully labeled window racks — TEIGLACH ךעלגײט — HALVAH הבלח — HAMANTASH שאט־ןמה—bare and swept of crumbs. Stanley puts his wet nose to the glass and inhales, but it just smells like glass, like nothing.
Welles and Synnøve must have taken Claudio to the hospital by now; nobody seems to be home, which is what Stanley’s counting on. To be certain, he bangs on their front door, leaves the two packs on the stoop, and waits in the yard, crouched between the sundial and the row of dark hibiscus, out of sight from the street. Nobody answers. Stanley stands up, knocks again, hides again. To kill time, he reads the brass letters set along the sundial’s circumference. It takes him a second to figure out where to start. I snatched the sun’s eternal ray, they say, and wrote till earth was but a name. Raindrops drum against Stanley’s back as he bends to read.
He makes a quick circuit of the house to look for lights in windows and finds none. Under the shelter of the deck he crosses the side porch to the kitchen door. A burbling drainpipe pukes dark water onto the pavement; a prefab concrete channel aims the flow into the flowerbed, where it forms a puddle. The knife-edge of the peaked roof appears in the puddle’s rippling surface, black against the moon-green sky.
Stanley pulls an old roll of maskingtape from a jacket pocket; it’s swollen now at its edges from the damp. He tears off strips and tapes over the door’s lower right-hand windowpane, the one closest to the knob, until it’s covered entirely. He overlaps the strips so everything will stick. His hands are cold and stiff and badly puckered from the rain, and it takes him a while to do it. When he’s done, he puts the tape-roll back in his pocket, takes off his jacket, folds it in two, and presses it against the taped-up window with his left hand. Then he punches it with his right fist: a hard, glancing blow. The pane breaks with a flat crunch. A few slivers, smaller than rocksalt, sprinkle the porch and glitter around Stanley’s feet. He shakes out his jacket, drapes it over his shoulder, peels up the layer of tape. Almost all the broken glass comes away with it; he sets this aside. Then he reaches through the window and lets himself in.