Easy Street Page 4

  "Lillian Byrd, how do you do? Thanks a million, Audrey Knox."

  I dashed back to the boathouse, where Porrocks was inspecting the remnants of her wall.

  "Did you find him, Erma?"

  "Yes. He'll stay where he is."

  "I couldn't find your phone, but one of your neighbors helped me."

  "Lillian, tell me what the hell you're up to here."

  "What I'm up to?"

  A cop car pulled into the driveway and she said, "You can tell me and the officers at the same time."

  The cops were basically OK, and definitely respectful once they learned that Porrocks was a retired cop. They went to look at Drooly Rick's body, and they looked around and asked Porrocks and me questions. I confessed my plan of trying to help Drooly Rick buy a bus ticket for his inamorata, Young Brenda. That was the whole main problem, you know?—my trying to help Rick.

  I was beside myself. I told the cops, "You might as well arrest me, because I as much as killed that guy."

  Porrocks grabbed my arm and said, "Don't be melodramatic with cops, OK?"

  "But, oh, Erma, if I hadn't brought him here, he'd be alive right now."

  "Alive and eating out of a garbage can," one of the cops said in what must have been a warm tone for him.

  "Well, thanks for trying to make me feel better, but I'm not sure he's happier where he is now."

  I told the cops the little I knew about Drooly Rick and his habits and explained how he came to be there, how I found him, my T-shirt, Burberry Boy keeping me too long at the hardware store. I apologized to Porrocks for not having asked permission to share the work.

  Then I noticed something. "The curtain is missing." I went to the window. "Wasn't there a curtain here, Erma? You pulled it back when we came in this morning."

  "Yes, I guess there was."

  The cops had called for a detective and a wagon, but now the wagon radioed and said they were stuck somewhere. So Porrocks and I followed the two cops into the boat well and watched them reach down and haul Rick's body out of the water. They carried him into the kitchenette, where river water ran from his clothes and puddled on the plank subfloor.

  One of the saddest things I've ever seen was that body lying there.

  Doubtless the cleanest he'd been in a long time, Rick sprawled there in rigor mortis, his left leg hitched up at the knee, as if he'd been felled trying to mount a horse. His eyes were open, engulfed by the terrible blank knowingness of death.

  "Well," one of the badges observed, "looks like alcohol might not've been his only problem."

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Look," he pointed to Rick's left temple, which showed an oval blue mark just above the eye.

  "Oh," I said.

  Porrocks reached down and flipped Rick's overcoat up, covering his face. "He could have hit his head as he fell in," she remarked.

  The Wyandotte cops looked at her, then at me.

  "I hear the wagon," said Porrocks, turning away.

  Chapter 6

  Later I went to Greektown to look for Young Brenda. She wasn't in any of the usual zones of hopelessness, and I asked around without success. There was a waiter at Pegasus who sometimes gave out stuff to the alley people; I buttonholed him, and he said he'd seen her sitting beneath the monorail when he arrived for his shift. I walked around there but she'd moved on. At least she was still ambulatory. I had to count on the police to contact the social services agencies for help identifying Rick. He must have kin somewhere.

  Neighborhoods never stay the same. Blind Lonnie, the guitarist I used to busk with, had met a woman and gotten involved. She kept him home almost every night now, and I'd heard they were planning to move to the West Coast. I missed Lonnie, the beacon of sanity among the street personalities. Listening to a few measures of Nat King Cole or Johnny Mercer would've done me some good right then.

  I went home. These days I dreaded opening the door of my flat, never knowing whether Todd would be there in body, spirit, or either. You know how when somebody is old and sick you have the growing sense that they could just up and die any day? And then, of course, they do. I know the trick is to be very Zen-like about it and not dread the moment. To accept it.

  The trouble is, I'm not a very Zen-like person.

  My heart was all jagged when I put my key in the lock, but it smoothed right down when Todd calmly rounded the corner from the dining room.

  "Hello, Toddy."

  He bumped up to sniff my shoes. I wondered if he could smell what I'd been through. If he did, it didn't bother him; he rubbed his chin first on the toe of my right sneaker, then the left, as always.

  "How're you feeling, friend?"

  He looked up at me with his button-bright black eyes.

  I got down and stroked his fur and pulled ever so gently on his ears at the base, like loosening the root of a plant. He liked that. His fur was still brown; he hadn't gone gray at all. He was an ordinary short-haired rabbit who'd been born to be a food specimen for the state fair until I took him in. Nobody would guess he was eleven. I washed his dishes, put in fresh water, and gave him a few timothy nuggets. Although I'd been finding green leaves for him from people's berry canes and so forth in the neighborhood, the autumn frosts were bringing that to an end. I'd have to buy timothy for him through the winter.

  "I'm cold, Toddy. Are you cold?"

  He followed me to the bedroom where I unbuttoned the white shirt Porrocks's neighbor had lent me, slung off my bra, and put on my blue cotton turtleneck and my red wool sweater over that. They were good colors: The blue was the true, saturated one that children in art class select for the sky, and the red was rich yet quiet, like a tomato muted by the thinnest skim of garden dust. I changed my jeans for my heavy cotton sweatpants. Before I dropped Audrey Knox's white shirt into the hamper, I stood there holding it, turning it over in my hands, feeling the cloth. I lifted it to my nose: a little bleach, maybe a trace of cologne.

  I prepared a hot-water bottle and placed it beneath Todd's bedding in case he wanted to warm up. Then we could both be cozy.

  A pan of leftover beans and rice confronted me in the refrigerator. This would make the third night in a row for beans and rice. I tried to make my hand reach for them, but couldn't. I got out my frying pan and put in some oil. I sliced up a potato and set the pieces to cook, then cut up some broccoli. When the potato was soft I pushed the pieces to the side of the pan and threw in the broccoli. When that was hot I cracked in an egg and scrambled everything around with salt and pepper. Some cheddar cheese grated in would have been nice.

  I got out one of my carefully rationed bottles of Stroh's. My little conservative voice said, You've only got two left, and you have to make them last until Porrocks pays you, if she ever does after what happened today.

  Fuck it, I need a drink.

  I ate my dinner, drank my beer, and thought about what had happened.

  If I'd been Porrocks, I'd have been furious with me. But I guess I acted so furious with myself that she didn't feel right piling on. She wasn't crude enough to tell me she didn't need the hassle of a dead guy on her property, plus the damage Rick had done before he died.

  She did ask me why I hadn't so much as mentioned Drooly Rick to her. I tried to explain, but it was like talking to a teacher who wants to know precisely why you decided to apply streaks of warm tar from the playground asphalt to your arms and legs at recess.

  You did it because you wanted to. You didn't know the tar wouldn't come right off; you wouldn't have thought to discuss it with an adult before you did it. And why is that? Well, you knew that adults didn't go around digging warm tar out of the cracks in asphalt and applying it to their bodies to see how it would feel and look. But you didn't know why they didn't do it. For all you knew, no adult had ever thought to try it. For all you knew, adults would see your tar streaks and say, "Wow! Neat! What a kid!" For all you knew, you and your tar would go down in history.

  Yet you also knew from experience that adults generally gav
e new ideas the thumbs-down. And you didn't know, but you sensed that their feeling for interesting things and sensations had grown dull. So your brain naturally shied away from trying to deal with the adults on their terms, because you knew they'd have you whichever way they wanted you. You didn't bring things up.

  And most of the time—most of the time!—your approach worked. You did stuff, and no one was the wiser. But on those occasions when things turned to shit, you saw the fallibility of your system. Still, it's hard to let it go.

  I didn't try to explain all that to Porrocks. All I said was, "I thought everything would be all right. Erma, I'm sorry."

  She said she'd talk to me tomorrow.

  Porrocks had brought her sleeping bag to her new house and told me she intended to use it for the two nights until the movers brought her stuff. I thought of her now, lying in it on the floor of her new bedroom.

  After I finished eating, I washed up the dishes and sat on my living room rug with Todd. The veterinarian had told me there wasn't much he could do for my pet, who, with his stiff little joints and failing heart, acted like an old man who knows his strength is ebbing but is determined not to save any. Every now and then he'd stop whatever he was doing and tremble. Then he'd get on with it, moving with more alacrity than you'd expect. Whenever I got down on the carpet, he'd come right over, ready to sit and be petted or play a game. We invented some new ones that weren't quite as intense as the ones we enjoyed when he was younger.

  One current favorite was Nudge the Duck, which involved me placing my toy bathtub duck between us. I would give the duck a nudge with my finger, then Todd would nudge it back toward me. It was a simple, comforting pastime for both of us.

  This night we played quite a long round of it, and afterward we just sat together, and I thought some more about what had happened to Drooly Rick.

  He got drunk, went to hang out in the boat well, perhaps wanting to relax on the couch we'd moved out there, and he stumbled and fell, hitting his head on the way down. He tore into the wall before or after he found the peach brandy. OK, I hadn't forced him to drink that alcohol. I hadn't tripped him into the water. If I'd asked Porrocks about Rick in advance, she probably would have said yes. It's likely nothing would have happened differently.

  So I should let go of feeling guilty about Rick, I should let go of feeling guilty of having brought trouble to Porrocks. The cops, after talking some more to Porrocks and me, sent Rick's body away for autopsy. Porrocks's wall could be fixed. The rest of the house was all right. The police weren't going to bother her.

  My brain stopped there. The police weren't going to bother her. I looked at the night sky out the window, the stars mixing themselves through the branches of the horse-chestnut tree.

  My brain got going again. Well, what if Rick DIDN'T die by accident? What if somebody killed him by bashing him in the temple and pushing him into the water? Porrocks had been the only one around. I said, "Pft," into the empty air of my living room. Why the hell would Porrocks want to hurt somebody like Drooly Rick? "No sense," I said to Todd. He snugged his hindquarters deeper into my lap, and we sat quietly until it was time to get ready for bed. No matter how troubled I was, Todd always made me feel more centered, more competent.

  Before turning out the light I read a ways further into Encounter in Borneo. It was absolutely excellent. Calico Jones meets up with Ingrid, the Swedish biophysicist—and wow, I was right: This Ingrid's a babe, just an incredibly radiant woman with that fiery Swedish beauty. So the basic thing is, Ingrid is part of a team of scientists funded by the socially and environmentally conscious nations of the world. This team is working on a project to reverse global warming and return the world to its normal climate. It's a machine they're working on, this astounding machine that will produce certain weather effects. The machine requires large amounts of activated charcoal, and the charcoal's got to be mined, of course, and that's another whole problem—extracting all this activated charcoal gently and caringly from the earth—plus then the charcoal has to be mixed with tiny, tiny synthetic emeralds. It's going to be a large machine—naturally, you'd expect that—and it's going to be stationed on a decommissioned supertanker and be able to go all over the world, then from remote ocean locations it's going to be switched on and gradually save the planet.

  So where does Calico Jones come in? Well, one of the scientists working on the machine goes crazy and steals all the emeralds and sells them to a corrupt government. (Guess which country it was. I'll give you a hint: one of the North American ones that didn't get on board with the Ottawa Climate Petition—and it wasn't Canada.) And he's decided to make his own machine because he wants to hold the world hostage to his insane demands for profit and power, and the horrible complication is that he isn't using safe, clinically tested materials like activated charcoal and synthetic emeralds—he's using a strain of genetically modified insect larvae! He's developing it in Borneo, where the warm, damp weather suits these larvae. Can you imagine the danger—if those larvae got loose they'd overrun the earth! Because they're genetically modified!

  So these scientists call on Calico Jones to find and stop this guy. Ingrid's the go-between. She is hot. You just know Calico's going to have the adventure of a lifetime, plus save the world. I never can remember the name of the author of these books, but I stand in awe of her talent.

  ----

  In the morning I decided I wanted to give Porrocks a token of friendship, something that might make her feel OK about continuing to know me. I wanted to keep on working for her. I wanted that money.

  I rifled my cupboards for baking ingredients and came up with half a bag of sugar and a canister of white flour, which I hadn't opened in quite a while. I did so now and peered in, the telltale black pinheads of weevils instantly informing me I'd left it for too long.

  My landlady, Mrs. McVittie, was an excellent baker and cook. I went downstairs and knocked, and she invited me in.

  "How are you, dear?" She was the kind of elderly woman who always asked other people about themselves and never complained about her own troubles. She was married to the oft-crabby Mr. McVittie, she was well into her eighties, she had Parkinson's or some kind of tremor-producing chronic illness, she was diabetic, and she had a hell of a time keeping weight on. She frequently shared food with me, in sort of a skinny-girls' solidarity.

  "I want to bake something for a friend," I told her. "I want to make a little gift. What would you suggest?"

  Her eyes lit up. "Why don't we make a pan of gingerbread, dear?"

  "You mean you'd give me your recipe?" Her gingerbread was out of this world. Although her diabetes made her forgo sweets, she loved to do cakes. She did cakes for all the family birthdays, showers, funerals—you name it.

  "Sure, but let's just make up a pan together right now!" She tottered off to her kitchen, I followed, and after about fifteen minutes of concentrated activity her dinged-up baking pan was in the oven, and about two minutes after that the smell in her kitchen was extraordinary.

  She made coffee, and we sat down and chatted until the timer beeped.

  Due to some new drug her tremor had stopped getting worse. I'd handled all the delicate tasks like cracking eggs and measuring the spices.

  "Where's Mr. McVittie today?" I asked.

  "Jeff needed help with one of his cars, so Emmett went over." Jeff was one of their sons. With both hands, she lifted her coffee cup to her lips and sipped. Though her lips were seamed and thin, her chin was strong.

  I asked, "Have you tried any of these new sugar substitutes they have in the stores?"

  "You mean in my baking?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh, I did try one kind but Emmett didn't like it, and to tell you the truth, I didn't either. I thought it tasted all right, but I just could not enjoy eating that cake. It felt wrong to eat cake after having avoided it for so many years. I started to feel a little sick! Isn't that silly?"

  "Not at all, I can understand that."

  "Force of habit."
<
br />   "Yes."

  We talked about the weather, and she asked about Todd.

  "Oh, the little guy's doing OK, I guess. You know."

  "He's my favorite bunny of all. He is just so good."

  "He is. He is, Mrs. McVittie."

  While the gingerbread cooled on a rack, I went out and got the rake from their garage and tidied up their yard. Inches of oak and horse-chestnut leaves had fallen in the last few days, and I raked them all over to a big pile at the curb. The city would come by and scoop them up in a few days.

  I took the gingerbread over to Porrocks's house with a couple of coffees from McDonald's. She let me in and protested about the cake, but once she smelled it, she couldn't wait to have a piece. I saw in her eyes that she felt sorry for me. I didn't care. We ate and drank together, and everything was all right between us.

  Chapter 7

  Porrocks didn't make me ask to keep working for her; she seemed to take for granted that I would.

  "You know, Lillian," she said as we sat on her dining room floor finishing our coffees, "except for the wall, the work you guys did yesterday was quite satisfactory."

  "Yeah, thanks. I tried to keep us on track. Oh, God, poor Rick."

  "Yes, well." She drummed her fingers on her jean-clad thigh.

  "I wonder what the autopsy will show."

  She made no comment, and my sentence hung in the air. After a minute she said, "Lillian, you shouldn't need to be told this, but there's not going to be much, if any, interest in this Rick's death."

  "What do you mean?" I asked, like a moron.

  In her precise, dry voice, she said, "The Wyandotte police have plenty to do looking after the people who live here, who pay their salaries. Assaults, property crimes, all of it. Think about the headline: Street Guy Found Drunk and Dead. Now, if you're a cop you've got these other headlines every day: Estranged Husband Beats Up Wife for Filing Divorce Papers, Armed Robbers Hit Jewelry Store, Car Thieves Target Church Parking Lot, Rival Fans Threaten Rumble at High School Homecoming Game, Speeder Ignores New Traffic Light, Kills 3. OK? Do you think those cops care about Rick? They resent Rick for having bought it on their shift. They resent you for having brought the guy here from an alley in Detroit. Even if somebody did sneak up on him in the boathouse and conk him on the head, what are we looking at? A serial killer?"