The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 39

  “Some people,” said a volunteer at my elbow, a guy named Albert who said his people were from Colombia, “will never leave the street, even for a meal, because they won’t be separated from their stuff. Not even long enough to use an indoor toilet.”

  Lots of the needy find their way downtown to Skid Row, because that’s where most of the services are. Too, that’s where the begging is best, at the interface between the commercial districts and the slum.

  But more and more, the worst of the hopeless were ending up in South Central, near this last-ditch haven of the ABC. Addicts so far gone they sit in their own urine and feces, because nothing is worth any effort except getting drugs. You see addicted hookers with their children—the kids still soft and round, but the boys already with that swagger and fuck-you look, the girls heartbreakingly wise to what’s most likely in store for them.

  I spoke to the people who came through the line. “Hello, sir. Good soup here.”

  “Hello,” most said politely. “Hello. Thank you.”

  The crazy ones either avoided eye contact or gave me a suspicious glare.

  Some wore tattered gray bandages—say, on a hand—that were either protecting a wound, or had simply become a habit long after the wound had healed.

  “What’s with the wheelchair thing?” I asked Albert.

  “You mean why so many in wheelchairs, why so many who don’t look like they have bad legs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, their health is bad, their coordination is awful, and one reason or another a lot of them receive a wheelchair. You see the amputations from diabetes. But others—well, they get their chair, it’s supposed to be temporary until they get well, but they hang on to it. They barter ’em, and they steal them from each other.”

  “How come?”

  “When you’ve given up on your life, a wheelchair’s an easy thing to sink into.”

  Eating with their small children on one side of the cafeteria was a group of mothers, chattering and laughing. Looking more closely, I saw there were actually two groups, sorted between Latina moms and African-American moms, speaking two languages. There had been morning classes in parenting and reading. The kids, all pretty tidy, mingled and ran around.

  There are gang tattoos that women will have on their necks, which can be hidden or revealed. It’s a striking moment when you see one and realize, oh God, she belongs to this gang. I noticed a few of those.

  Another couple of women with kids came through the line. Said one to the other, “So this guy says to me, ‘You speak well!’ Like he’s surprised.”

  “Stop, stop, let me guess,” said her friend. “White man, right?”

  “Yeah, my boss’s boss. They’re always shocked when you don’t sound like a sharecropper. I patted him on the shoulder and said, ‘You speak well too!’ You should’ve seen his face!” She laughed triumphantly.

  I smiled in horror. Good God, how many white people must say stuff like that?

  The pregnant ones all had that irrational upbeat glow you know so well, if you’ve been pregnant too.

  Amaryllis, who had relieved Albert serving up glasses of water and iced tea, murmured to me, “They don’t have a pot to piss in, but they’re pregnant and happy.”

  “What’ll they do?”

  “If they stick with us, they’ll be able to get work. They’ll qualify for low-income housing, and they’re getting trained in how to look after each other’s kids so they can all work. We put ’em in trios.”

  “And that works?”

  “When it works it works. Some of them are gonna end up on the street no matter how much help they get, understand that. You can’t worry about numbers or you’d quit. You can only serve for the sake of serving and hope for the best.”

  One man, holding his full tray, thanked Amaryllis with tears in his eyes. She looked him up and down and said, “You thank the Lord before you eat that, sir. He’s the one to thank. Dessert today is peanut butter cookies.”

  Something in her matter-of-fact tone made me well up with emotion. I looked out at the diners, in their rags and delusions and dreams and rock-bottom neediness. “Amaryllis,” I asked, “why?”

  “Oh, sister, don’t cry,” she said, almost gently. “Jesus himself assured us the poor will always be with us. So much of this poverty comes from drug abuse. A rock of crack costs so little, a dose of meth—so little. Five dollars this week, three next week. Heroin’s not much costlier. Funny,” she paused, thinking, “how gambling’s all but gone from here. Why put two dollars on a horse when you can get high? Hello, sir, have some ice tea.”

  I put my smile back on and kept ladling. “Hello. Hi, ma’am.” Then the staff, as multi-ethnic as the people they served, came in to eat, and the food line kept going. Some of the men on staff looked very high-mileage, as if they’d bested their demons only after a long, perilous struggle. Some women appeared that way too, but then there were others with that ex-nun look, mild around the eyes but with a tough-set mouth. The women of service you see everywhere.

  Finally us line workers helped ourselves. Gina and I took our trays to a table.

  Gina, inspecting her nail job after its exposure to the harsh bleach water, said, “Black people make me nervous. I’m not supposed to say that, right?”

  “Well, that makes you one of the more honest white people in L.A.”

  “It’s because I’m afraid they hate us.”

  “That’s what they think about us, of course.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Black people used to make me nervous too,” I confessed. “But then I realized it’s poverty that makes me nervous. Black has nothing to do with it. My friend Sylvan says that, and he’s right.”

  “Yeah. I’d like to get to know a black person really well.”

  “Well, L.A.’s your chance.”

  The smallest group of workers was the security team, only three in number today, quickly identifiable by their gray-and-red T-shirts. There was an outcasty aura about them, like the kids who smoked in the johns in middle school.

  I turned my attention back to my soup, hungry from having skipped breakfast getting Petey ready for his day.

  Gina nudged me. “Look.”

  “What?”

  “Those two.”

  I saw the security guard Wichita and another one, a black guy with a lot of hair bundled under a knit cap, disappear through the swinging kitchen doors.

  “What about them?”

  Gina dabbed a piece of biscuit into some margarine and ate it. “These are almost as good as Gramma Gladys’s. Those two went up to Amaryllis a minute ago and started talking to her. She started to look upset, like mad. Then she walked off, to the kitchen. They just followed her in. Was he the same one that showed us where the bathroom is?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t see his face either.”

  I watched the kitchen door for a minute. Everybody in the cafeteria was talking and eating.

  I stood up and said, “I wonder if there are any cookies left back there.” Gina started up too, but I signaled her to stay there.

  I went to the serving line, which we’d cleared off fifteen minutes ago, looked around, then glanced in the kitchen door. I heard voices but saw no one, so I slipped in.

  The three stood talking on the other side of a bank of storage shelves. I took one silent step forward and peeked through a gap between a carton of powdered milk and a stack of bagged rice.

  “Nobody’s asking for the world,” Wichita was saying, sounding more animated than I’d have expected, from my initial dumb, furtive impression of her. “This is a win-win situation, Amaryllis, and we can’t understand why you’re fighting it.”

  “Yeah,” said the guy, tall and deep-voiced. “You’re acting like there’s a downside, and there isn’t.”

  They sounded like a couple of junior executives, except for the menacing mood. Their backs were to me. I could see Amaryllis’s face, a study in tight resistance, lips compressed.

  She shook her
head as Wichita said, “Look, this place is so safe! For you, for everybody. The risk is so nothing!”

  “That’s right,” added the guy. “The police haven’t set foot in here since you opened the doors. What’s more, the beta test is going great. You’ve really been great.”

  “Denny’s right,” said Wichita.

  Amaryllis said, “Things are about to change. You know. I’m trying to tell you. I won’t be able to—nor do I want to—”

  “Hey,” interrupted Wichita, “you know the real risk that’s gonna come down unless—”

  “Don’t you tell that to me!” Amaryllis stared hatefully at Wichita. “You know who hurt my grandson! Just the same as—”

  “I don’t! I don’t!”

  “We don’t,” agreed Denny.

  “You’re lying dogs. I have no more to say to you!”

  Denny said in a low tone, “Hey, let’s all relax here, nobody wants bad feelings.”

  “Just think about it,” urged Wichita in an attempt to sound friendly. “That’s all.”

  Amaryllis looked hollow.

  The two security staff went out together.

  Amaryllis stood there a moment. I heard her breathing, short and angry, then longer and more regular as she got hold of herself.

  She walked out, and I waited a minute before hurrying through the back passageway to the dishwashing station, where volunteers clanged and splattered. I picked up a brush and joined them.

  Lunch was over. Clearly, I’d be in over my head if I tried to interfere with whatever was going on. Yet I wanted to know what was going on.

  When I saw Amaryllis head for the garbage bins, I strode over to help her wheel the bins to the alley. At first the stench out there halted my breath in my nostrils, but then a breeze came up, clearing the air while it lasted. I started to say something, but suddenly Gina appeared at our heels, pushing the last can out.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Amaryllis.

  Something moved stealthily in the weeds along the foot of the building.

  “Oh, my God, there’s a rat!” Gina screamed.

  To be sure. The creature emerged, gray and supple, its cold black eyes expressing ownership of this alley. Gina, in an unimaginable feat of gymnastics, leaped to the top of the dumpster, where she perched on its steel lid like a panicked monkey.

  The rat sauntered to an ant-covered apple core, chomped it, then carried it in its mouth to a knee-high cluster of rags at the foot of a drainpipe, where it disappeared.

  Amaryllis laughed so hard at Gina she almost fell over.

  By force of will I’d kept myself under control, although the instant I saw the rat I wondered whether I could outrun it.

  “Literally,” Gina confessed from the dumpster lid, “I think I’ve only ever seen one on, like, National Geographic.”

  “Well, get down from there,” said Amaryllis, “because rats can climb.”

  “And they’re attracted by the smell of herbal hair conditioner,” I added.

  “Damn you,” said Gina.

  “Forgive the swearing,” I said.

  “Makes no never minds to me,” said Amaryllis. “Do you know we served two hundred twenty-three lunches today? Goodness, but it is hot! The dog days are in full swing.”

  “What are the dog days, anyway?” I wondered.

  Gina said, “It’s when it’s so hot.”

  I looked at her like, duh. “I meant, is there some, like folk belief about dogs, or—”

  Amaryllis said, “It’s about the dog star, Sirius. It comes up during August, and the ancient people blamed the heat on it.”

  Something else rustled, and Amaryllis set her knuckles on her hips and watched. Gina clung atop the dumpster. A man rose from the pile of rags the rat had disappeared into, shook himself, and shambled toward us, talking fast under his breath. His eyes were unfocused. “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t. The Cheerios man he ain’t got nothing on me—nothing!—because when brains were handed out all he got was a circle. I got brains, but you never cared about my luck, and you never bought me that trombone.”

  The dirt on his face, neck, and hands was as worn in as if he’d grown it. He came closer. He stank unbearably; I could almost see the fleas. One wrist sported a filthy cloth bandage.

  “Eric,” said Amaryllis sternly, “go around front and get you a hygiene kit. Take it in the showers and use it. Then we’ll be able to see who you are under all those layers of dirt.”

  He mumbled something.

  “I predict you’ll feel better if you do.” She took his arm, actually making full skin-to-skin contact, guiding him toward the alley’s mouth. He wandered away.

  “That would be a dual diagnosis,” mused Amaryllis.

  “Dual diagnosis?” said Gina, clambering down.

  “Addiction and mental illness together?” I guessed.

  “Yes,” said Amaryllis. She unlocked the dumpster lid and we flung it open. “You take someone in thinking they have a problem with addiction, then you realize they’re crazy too.”

  “You keep peeling the onion,” I said.

  “You keep peeling the onion.”

  Gina piped up, as we lifted the cans and dumped them, “It’s the government’s fault.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  Amaryllis sighed.

  “Yeah,” said Gina, “they kicked everybody out of the mental institutions years ago, to save money. Mostly it was the Republicans.”

  “Jeff told me something like that once,” I said. “But wasn’t it a little more—”

  “Complicated than that?” broke in Amaryllis. She snapped the dumpster’s padlock shut. “In actuality, the Civil Liberties Union and the mental health advocates got together and decided that being crazy and free is better than being crazy and locked up against your will by the government.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “That was the core of it. They got their way. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. I understand,” said Amaryllis, “how good it feels to lay blame. But the fact is, all the money in the world can’t persuade a person to get help when they don’t want it. You see this with Eric. My door is open to him, but he stays out.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “And you know, some folks outside aren’t ill or addicted. They just don’t fit in. They choose the streets with as much purpose as you choose to go to work and live in a house.”

  The lean, smiling man who had called us to lunch duty stuck his head out and said, “Amaryllis, you’re needed on the phone.”

  “This is the Reverend Bill Culpepper,” said Amaryllis in quick introduction as we trooped back inside. “Reverend Bill, will you please escort these two ladies out?”

  “Amen, I will.”

  I said, “I thought we could stay to help out with dinner.”

  Amaryllis glanced at me. “I don’t think so. No, we’re fine for help tonight.”

  The Reverend said, “But didn’t we just lose Tony and Juanita from the Saturday night shift?”

  “No, Bill, I said we’re OK for tonight.” A look passed between them. He shut up. Amaryllis nodded goodbye to us and took off.

  Gina and I exchanged glances, then went with the Reverend Bill. He wore an all-black outfit, little preacher shirt and pants, with spongy white running shoes. His eyes, behind aviator glasses, looked tired. The glasses looked as if they’d been bent and straightened out a hundred times.

  He led us back to the lobby, where before saying goodbye, we looked out to the clusters of street people hanging out by the gates.

  I saw, past the homeless, a dog slinking along. Then I saw another one, and another, all lurking at the edges.

  Perhaps ten in number, they moved sinuously, a smooth river of dogs, led by an alert-looking dark one—a Rottweiler, I guessed, or mostly Rottweiler. He was big, not the tallest—there was a Doberman among them, and other large mongrels—but he was clearly the leader, watched by the others for cues. His short coat was full of burrs and twigs. All the dogs were dark in color.

  Calmly, the
pack hugged the scraggly bushes just beyond the gates, nosing along, checking the leader every few seconds.

  The street people moved away from them, except for the man Amaryllis had called Eric; he squatted and held out his hand to one of the smaller dogs. He appeared to be offering something edible. The dog, pied with mange, approached to within about ten feet, sniffed, barked, then rushed. Startled, Eric jerked his hand away. The dog snapped its jaws shut on the food and the homeless man’s fingers, set his front legs, and tugged. Two other street guys ran over and pounded on the dog until it let go. It swallowed whatever piece of food Eric dropped. The leader barked once, and the dog ran to rejoin the pack.

  The other street men gestured toward the mission, evidently urging Eric to go in and get help for his bleeding hand, but he moved away from them. As the Reverend Culpepper and Gina and I watched, he unwrapped the dirty bandage from around his right hand and transferred it to the left. The blood stopped dripping.

  “Shouldn’t we do something?” Gina said. “Like, you know, rabies or something?”

  “Oh, sister,” said the Reverend, and shrugged. “I know Eric. If he gets rabies, that’ll probably improve his mental capacity.”

  It hit me: “Is that the pack? You know, that they talk about?”

  “The notorious feral pack of South Central.” Reverend Culpepper looked after the dogs. “Yes. That’s them.”

  This pack of dogs has achieved legendary status in L.A. for consistently eluding the city’s animal control officers, none of whom, as you can imagine, are pantywaists. Up until then, I’d never believed the stories.

  “It’s unusual to see them in the daytime,” said the Reverend. “Mostly they move and feed at night. Did you notice the athletic fields?”

  “What athletic fields?”

  He laughed nonhumorously. “Yes, what athletic fields? When you leave, you’ll notice around back what’s become of them—gone first to weeds, then scrub, now there’s real trees growing on the fifty-yard line. The pack roams there sometimes, up to twenty strong, I’ve counted. I find myself more fearful of them than the gangs.”