driving by that had been pretty bloodthirsty when I was on trial.
No complaints, I was lucky to be alive and free. A backwoods place like Stagger Bay, I reckon they would’ve saved the state a lot of money in the old days; maybe just strung me up from a tree, photographed themselves smiling around my stretch-necked corpse and sold copies of the snapshot as souvenir postcards.
Chapter 8
I turned east on E Street and cut across Fifth, the one-way main drag paralleling Fourth in the opposite direction. I was in the neighborhood Angela, Sam, and me had once called home.
When we first bought our house it was what realtors liked to call a ‘neighborhood in transition,’ meaning property values were low enough for a family starting out to leverage themselves a mortgage – as long as they didn’t mind drug dealers to one side of them, and nightly drunken brawls on the other. No biggie: I chastised the worst neighbors into minimally acceptable behavior after we finagled a mortgage out of my double shifts on the loading dock.
There’d been a reason for the neighborhood’s chaos, and for all the riffraff that used to infest Old Town. Round about the time we first came here, in a celebrated class-action lawsuit resulting from Stagger Bay’s refusal to pay General Relief to qualified professional transients, a federal judge forced the county to pay the highest disbursements in the state.
Welfare offices as far south as San Diego handed out flyers to their ‘customers,’ informing them of the windfall awaiting them up here. LA Cops passed out one-way bus tickets to Stagger Bay to the Southland’s homeless vagrants. The Big City, dumping it’s parasites in the lap of Small Town America: it was a historic mass movement of people; one that, curiously, was never discussed in the media.
The resulting influx of aid recipients was large enough Stagger Bay quickly had one of the highest per capita percentages of people on assistance in the nation. All those high payouts had almost bankrupted the city, and put its treasury into its current downward spiral.
Another side-effect of all those newcomers was a severe housing shortage. Rental owners capitalized on the tight market by subdividing existing homes into shoebox-sized apartments.
For a while it was a cottage industry for local landlords to buy one rundown Victorian after another, subdivide them, and pack them as full of Section 8 Housing Assistance recipients as topologically possible – slum-lording as a growth career. That income property boom led to severely inflated home prices; outside money had gobbled up a lot of houses too, ‘smart’ investors figuring Stagger Bay’s yokel tenants could pay their mortgages and property taxes for them.
Before we bought the house we’d gotten a lot of dirty looks from the old family locals – they assumed we were on AFDC, part of the invading unwashed horde of big city welfare barbarians that had crowded Stagger Bay to bursting.
I’d never been on the dole myself. When I was a kid me and Karl was all the way carnivores: we’d steal from you honest, to your face, like good thieves. But after I hooked up with Angela and had Sam, I’d always worked for a living – to my brother’s ridicule I might add.
Still, it had been an eternity since we bought our own little slice of the American Dream here, and there were few living-wage jobs in Stagger Bay anymore. Except, judging from what I’d seen on my bus ride in, for members of the construction industry.
I stood in front of the home that was ours once. The stucco exterior had been tan when we lived there. The new owners had painted it a bright chalk-yellow with light purple trim; it looked pretty nice, a stylish color scheme I wished I’d thought of when the decision had been mine to make. A Big-Wheel trike and other toys lay scattered around the well-tended front lawn.
A Ram pickup truck was parked in the driveway, twin to the one I’d once owned. The only difference? This truck was red and had a big shiny steel tool locker mounted directly behind the cab; my truck had been black, and I’d never been a toolbox kind of guy. Looking back, had to admit the Ram had just been a big boy’s toy; a status symbol to help me make believe I’d made the grade.
Studying my old house, I had the crazy notion for a second that all I had to do was step through the front door, and the past seven years would turn out to be a dream: Angela would be putzing around the kitchen, Sam would be watching TV or playing a video game, and both would smile at me as I entered, happy to see me.
I shook it off fast. I didn’t live here anymore, and never would again.
Chapter 9
I headed toward the Bay. Fourth and Fifth Streets doglegged inland here and came together to form Broadway, a fast four-lane drag sprinting south between the Mall and the cemetery past a small patch of nondescript light industrials encroaching the wetlands of the Bay, past both our car dealerships and out the bottom edge of town toward SF, which was a day’s drive away on winding mountain roads. Up ahead was the place I used to work: a soda distributor supplying the entire county.
This was the first and only straight job I’d ever worked, and I’d been surprised to find I loved it. I’d sweated those loading docks when I was a family man, spent most of my waking hours there: unloading stacks of soda cases from 48-foot big rig trailers out of the Bay Area, doing the basic split for all the delivery trucks, ensuring every little string town in a county the size of Connecticut got their daily allotment of name-brand carbonated sugar water.
Sixteen hours a day in exchange for my own house, food on my family’s table, and no life at all. Still, it looked mighty damn good from where I stood now.
I walked into the office and saw only two faces I knew from the old days: Bonnie, who was still a secretary after all these years; and Takeshi, a Japanese kid who’d been a route driver when I got busted.
Bonnie gasped when she saw me and busied herself with the paperwork on her desk. She’d put on some weight.
As for Takeshi? He hustled me out the office as soon as he recognized me. He offered a cigarette but I shook my head. He shrugged, sparked his own coffin nail, and looked across the parking lot at the shimmering tidal mudflats of the Harbor.
I was the one who’d gotten Takeshi his job here; Angela and Tak’s girlfriend Tiffany had been coffee buddies. Tak and Tiff had come over to our house more than once for potlucks or drinks, or for card games. We’d considered them friends.
Takeshi had put on a little weight his own self, but he still had that thick mop of black hair combed straight back Eddie Munster style. He’d grown himself a thin, scraggly little mustache and soul patch that were probably more trouble to shave around than they were worth. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a clip-on tie; he'd graduated to managing the distribution center.
Today Tak appeared old. But then, I was no spring chicken anymore myself. “How are you, Markus?” he asked, exhaling a stream of cigarette smoke out the side of his mouth.
“Well enough,” I said. “I’m just looking around the old place, seeing what’s what. How’s Tiffany?”
He smiled, looked at the coal on his cigarette. “She’s great. You know we got a bambino now? His name is Kobi; he just turned two last week.”
“Well hell, I’ll be sure to send something when I get on my feet.”
“I got you a job here, Markus – if you want it.”
That actually felt pretty damn good; I’d always had this dorky pride in how well I humped the docks when I worked here. “Well, that truck platform probably ain’t been run right for the last seven years. You know I was the best they had. I’ll bet it took three guys to do my job after I left.”
Tak’s face put on a pained expression. “It couldn’t be the loading dock, Markus – I’d have to keep you out of sight. Janitorial or something, I’ll figure it out.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “You know I was cleared, right Tak? I didn’t do it, I’m innocent.”
