It wasn’t an alcoholic beverage he wanted, though he wouldn’t turn down a beer, but water, just that, something to wet his mouth and dribble down his throat. He made a failed effort to rise, and then somehow his feet found their place beneath him and he shoved himself up and snatched his cap off the pavement in a single graceless lurch. He let the blood pound in his ears a minute, then scanned the street for a source of H2O.
To be homeless, in July, in a tourist-infested city on the coast of Southern California, wasn’t as bad maybe as being homeless in Cleveland or Bogotá, but it wasn’t what he was used to. Even at his worst, even when he got going on the bottle and couldn’t stop, he was used to four walls and a bed, and if not a kitchen, at least a hotplate. A chair. A table. A place to put his things, wash up, have a smoke and listen to music while dreaming over a paperback mystery — he loved mysteries and police procedurals, and horror, nothing better than horror when you’re wrapped up in bed and the fog transfigures the streets and alleyways outside till anything could be lurking there. Except you. Because you’re in bed, in your room, with the door shut and locked and the blankets pulled up to your chin, reading. And smoking. But Dana’s face was like a cleaver, sharp and shining and merciless, and it cleaved and chopped till he had no choice but to get out the door or leave his limbs and digits behind. So now he was on the street, and everything he did, every last twitch and snort and furtive palpation of his scrotum, was a public performance, open to interpretation and subject to the judgment of strangers. Idiotic strangers. Strangers who were no better than him or anybody else, but who made way for him in a parting wave as if he was going to stick to the bottom of their shoes.
Across the street, kitty-corner to where he found himself at the moment, was a gas station — it floated there like a mirage, rippling gently in the convection waves rising up off the blacktop — and a gas station was a place where all sorts of fluids were dispensed, including water. Or so he reasoned. All right, then. He began to move, one scuffing sneaker following the other.
HE WAS RUNNING the hose over the back of his head when he became aware that someone was addressing him. He didn’t look up right away — he knew what was coming — but he made sure to twist off the spigot without hesitation. Then he ran his fingers through his hair, because if there was one thing that made him feel the strain of his circumstances it was unwashed hair, knocked the hat twice on his thigh and clapped it on his head like a helmet. He wasn’t presentable, he knew that. He looked like a bum — for all intents and purposes he was a bum, or at least making a pretty fair run at becoming one — and it just didn’t pay to make eye contact. Raymond rose slowly to his feet.
A man was standing there in the alley amidst the debris of torn-up boxes and discarded oil cans, the sun cutting into his eyes. Five minutes from picking himself up off the burning sidewalk, Raymond was in no condition to make fine distinctions, but he could see that whatever he was the man was no outraged service station attendant or hostile mechanic, no cop or security guard. He had a dog with him, for one thing, a little buff and yellow mutt that seemed to be composed entirely of hacked-off whiskers, and for another, he was dressed all in blue jeans, including two blue-jean jackets but no shirt, and none of the ensemble looked as if it had been washed and tumble-dried in recent memory. Raymond relaxed. He was in the presence of a fellow loser.
“Nice hat,” the man said. He looked to be in his thirties, long hair slicked back close to his scalp and tucked behind his ears, the beard neatly clipped, big hands dangling from his doubled-up sleeves. He was grinning. At least there was that.
“Oh, this?” Raymond’s hand went reflexively to his head. “It’s just…it’s nothing. It used to belong to my girlfriend.”
“Yeah, I guess so, because why would a guy wear a hat like that, right?”
The hat — it was a cheap baseball cap made of plastic mesh — featured a black badge on the crown, and a legend, in a tiny, looping, gold script, that read: You Can Pet My Cat, But Don’t Touch My Pussy. To Dana’s mind, this was the height of subversive humor and she insisted on wearing the thing whenever they went out bar-hopping, which was every night except when they gave up all pretense and got a bottle at Von’s and drank at home in front of the TV. He’d snatched it off her head the night she shoved him out the door with nothing but the clothes on his back, and it served her right, because she had his boombox and his other pair of shoes and his books and bedroll and shaving kit, and by the next afternoon the locks had been changed and every time he went over to demand his things back she just sat there in the window with her knifeblade of a face and waited for one of the neighbors to call the cops.
Raymond was new to all this. He was shy, lonely, angry. It had been something like five or six days now, and during that time he’d kept away from the street people, bedding down wherever he could (but not on the sidewalk, that was crazy, and he still didn’t know how that happened), eating when he felt like it and steadily drinking up what was left of his last and final paycheck. He ducked his head. “Right,” he murmured.
The man introduced himself through his shining wet-toothed grin, because he was just there to get a little drink of fresh H2O himself, and then he was thinking about maybe going into the convenience store on the corner and picking up a nice twelve-pack of Keystone and maybe sitting down by the beach and watching the A-types jog by with their dogs and their two-hundred-dollar running shoes. His name was Schuyler, Rudolph Schuyler, though everybody called him Sky for short, and his dog was Pal.
The light was like a scimitar, cutting the alley in two. Raymond didn’t think he’d ever seen a line so sharp, a shadow so deep, and that was a kind of revelation, a paean to what man had built — a rectilinear gas station and a neatly proportionate fence topped with a spray of pink-tinged trumpet flowers — and how God had come to light it like a photographer setting up the trickiest shot of his life. And there was a shot just as tricky played out over and over throughout the city, the country, the world even. He patted down his pockets, felt something there still, a few bucks, anyway. When he looked up at Sky, when he finally looked him in the eye, he heard his own voice crawling out of his throat as if there were somebody else in there speaking for him. “Am I hearing you right, or is that an invitation?”
AFTER THE FIRST twelve-pack, there was another — Raymond’s treat — because the great and wise and all-knowing people who brewed the beer in their big vats and sealed it in the shining aluminum cans that were like little pills, little individual doses delivered up in the convenient twelve-ounce format, had foreseen the need and stocked the shelves to overflowing. “You know,” Raymond said, easing back the flip-top on a fresh can, “I read in the paper a couple years ago about that time the mudslides put Big Sur out of business, I mean going both ways on Highway 1—did you hear about that? They had no beer, I mean — they ran out. You remember that?”
Sky was leaning back against one of the polished boulders the city had dumped along the beach as a seawall, both jackets spread out beneath him, his bare chest and arms exposed to the sun. He was tanned right down to the roots of his hair, tanned like a tennis pro or maybe a diving instructor, somebody vigorous and clean making a clean living under the sun. Out here, on the beach, he didn’t look like a bum — or at least not one of the mental cases you saw on the streets, immured in the walking dungeon of their own stink. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe. I mean, I don’t know — no beer?” He laughed. “How’d they survive?”