beneath the approach of westbound jets from Chicago and points east, the block was battered twenty times each hour by the roar of Boeing and Lockheed engines being throttled back for a landing.
The noise from LAX had killed everything. The lawns were parched and brown, even in April, and the windows of most of the houses were covered with thick rectangles of plywood nailed directly into the external walls. No one was home, and no one was coming home. But the mailboxes were functional, and the mailboxes were all I cared about.
Eleven-six-eighty-six was a cramped single-decker the color of spoiled Dijon mustard. Casement windows, framed in aluminum, bravely faced the streets without the benefit of plywood to shield them from the thunder. The lawn was relatively green, and two hardy hibiscus plants framed the front door, their flowers cocked upward with wide, orange-lipsticked mouths, gobbling the gathering dusk as though straining it for sunlight. Compared to the other houses on the street, 11686 looked almost inhabited. I could understand the mailman's mistake.
Saturday afternoon was waning as I approached the front door. It wasn't daylight-saving time yet. The sun was most of the way down, and Alice was parked bravely in front. The remaining light was richly fertilized with airplane exhaust. A jumbo jet ripped through the clouds overhead as I knocked, laying down a footprint of noise so loud that it wiped out the sound of my knuckles on the wood. Either no one answered, or else I couldn't hear them. I chose the former and tried the knob. It turned easily, and the door swung open.
The first thing that came to mind-prompted, perhaps, by Birdie's shelter-was the neutron bomb, the miraculous technological advance that eliminates everything living and leaves only objects behind. The living room was cramped and dingy and linoleum-floored, and still furnished. The smell of urine hovered above the floor like a cloud of flies. A brown couch, frozen in the act of exploding, shed cotton stuffing and steel springs. Over it, a standing lamp swayed at a drunken angle. A coffee table with three unbroken legs sagged in front of the couch, and a false fireplace, jammed full of wadded-up newspaper, made a shallow dent in one wall.
My foot hit a ball of crumpled newsprint, sending it skittering across the floor. There was a closed door at the other end of the living room, and I thought I heard something move on the other side of it before another jet plowed through the turbulent air above the roof.
My heart was pounding, but this time, for once, I had a gun.
It felt heavy and cold and reassuring in my hand. It felt as reassuring as the remote control for a couch potato's TV set. If something dangerous was on the other side of the door, maybe I could change the channel.
Crumpled newspaper was an old trick. It was the hoodlum's burglar alarm. Stepped on in the dark, a crumpled newspaper could be the difference between dying and staying alive.
Even though my boots had soft crepe soles, I eased them off. I turned them around with my toes and left them facing the door with the precision of a character in a cartoon who thought he might need to jump into them for a sudden exit. Then, my footsteps cushioned by thick white athletic socks, I headed for the door.
There was no more sound from the other side. Not a shuffle, not a breath. I hefted the gun, took a few deep breaths, and tried the knob. It turned easily.
There was no one there, I told myself while I counted slowly to fifty. And if I were wrong, if there
While I reasoned, I checked the gun to make sure that the bright coppery hollow-points were in position, ready to eviscerate anyone on the wrong end of the barrel.
They were. Good. At least I didn't have to make the piercing clicking sound that announces an automatic being snapped into killing position.
And then another jet roared overhead, and I lifted my right leg and kicked the door open.
It didn't open very far. It hit something and bounced back toward me, and someone moaned into the noise of the receding jet, and I kicked the door again and this time somebody yelled, the sound carrying over the
I had the gun pointed at his forehead even as I caught the flash of someone else moving away from us, and it took all my strength to overpower the impulse to pull the trigger. On its back in front of me was something that might once have been a person, as a person is defined by the state, which is to say a human being with clothes that belong to him, paper with his name on it, and someplace to go whenever what's happening is finished. The one who had flashed down the hallway had been smaller.
“Tell her to come back,” I said, the gun up in marksman's position and aimed at the bridge of his nose. He looked up at me. He couldn't have been more than eighteen, and his face was very dirty.
Flat on his back, he waved his hands in front of his face as though the hands could deflect bullets. “No one,” he said, “there's no one.”
“Get her out here,” I said. “Do it or you're dead.” I gave the gun a little up-and-down wiggle for emphasis.
“Holy Mother of God,” he said, rolling onto his stomach. “Mother of God, protect me.”
There was a flurry of motion to my left, and a small figure darted through the door, looking down at the one on the floor. “You son of a bitch,” the small figure said to me. It was wearing two green plastic trashbags, sweat pants, and a brave hat that said dodger blue above its brim. “You leave him alone.” The one on the floor moaned.
“Move and I'll shoot you,” I said, just for insurance. I looked at the two of them. Probably they were part of the new community on this abandoned block, human hermit crabs who had hoped to shrug the deserted homes onto their backs as protection against a rolling tide of social indifference. “Put your arms over your head,” I said to her. She seemed the more dangerous of the two, if only because of her fierce determination to protect him. She looked at the gun and then down at him, and raised her hands.
“Whatever you want,” she said, “we haven't got it. Except if you want us to move, we'll move.”
“I don't want you to move,” I said. “I don't really want much of anything. It's just that you scared me.” I held the gun up, away from both of them, and gave it a little shake. Then I tucked it into my pants. She crouched down next to him, still distrustful. The smell of fear and failure rolled off the two of them.
I held up my empty hands and gave them a hearty politician's smile. “I don't suppose,” I said, sitting down on the floor, “that either of you got twenty thousand dollars in the mail recently.”
When everyone had finished laughing, I gave them each ten bucks and they told me what time the mailman came and gave me a remarkably accurate description of the person who'd checked the mailbox for the last couple of days. We shook hands all around and I got back into Alice and drove home. At home I could drink Singha until the image of Junko floated away. At home I could finish making friends with Woofers. And at home I could finally tuck myself away into the warm dark until the start of business hours on Monday, until the time I could twist thumbscrews through the nails of Birdie Skinker.
24
The kid who carried the envelope to Birdie was skinny, eager, and as fraudulent as a campaign slogan. I'd found him jingling a fat tin can half-full of change up and down the sidewalks of Sunset, inspiring guilt in the patrons of the expensive shops just east of Tower Records and west of Mrs. Brussels', demanding donations to send nonexistent children to a nonexistent camp. It was the usual social scenario: the right money in the wrong place. When I'd offered him twenty bucks to carry an envelope to an address half a block away, his face had lit up like a Borscht Belt comic being booked into Caesar's Palace.
“Twenty bucks?” he'd said. Then, squinting with the ready suspicion of the deeply dishonest, he'd added, “I only gotta deliver one?”
“For now.” I waved another twenty in front of him, and his eyes followed it like a lizard homing in on a mosquito. “There's a parking lot behind this building,” I said. “Come back and tell me how he reacted, and you'll get this too.” I palmed the twenty and made it disappear for effect and then materialized a ten in my other hand. “Come back in five minutes, and you'll also get this.” It had taken me hours with the
