Romeo's Rules Read online

  Another knock, then a voice. “It’s Ehrlich.”

  One last, desperate flailing. A final, muffled cry under the holy pillow.

  Knock knock.

  Jimmy Short Hairs stopped moving.

  I took the scissors from his neck.

  Harder knock.

  I cut the duct tape around my ankles and ripped it off, got to my feet, stepped near the door, blades ready.

  Another voice, further away, said, “What’s up?”

  “No answer.”

  “Let’s come back.”

  “What? We come all the way out here?”

  “You want to go in?”

  “Why not?”

  “You want to do the paperwork?”

  “I hate this detail.”

  Law. Probably U.S. Marshals.

  “Let’s go grab a bite, call back in half an hour. He doesn’t answer, we do the whole place.”

  Sounds like a good idea, boys.

  Footsteps receding, then the slamming of car doors. The car took off.

  I looked myself over. My black jeans didn’t have much blood on them, but my shirt was soaked with it. My Nikes were spotted.

  This place would be a DNA and fingerprint bonanza. But my biological markers were not in any database—that I knew of, anyway. The New Haven cop worked me over on the sly, such was his style. This would be the start of things. This would put my genetics on file.

  Nothing to be done about that now. As Epictetus, that old Greek stoic, taught, the key to life is not to worry about things you cannot affect. I peeled off my shirt and wrapped the scissors in it. I walked into Jimmy’s bedroom. There was another painting of a nude black woman over his bed. Scented candles on a dresser. A bottle of Stoli sitting on a little table. A flat-screen TV on the wall facing the bed.

  All the comforts of home.

  I opened the dresser and found a white tee shirt that fit. Jimmy was shorter than me by a long shot, but big across the shoulders and chest. I wrapped my bloody T-shirt with the scissors in another T-shirt of Jimmy’s. Then I washed up in the bathroom. I used a wet towel to wipe as much blood off my shoes as I could.

  I looked at my sorry self in the mirror.

  My face felt two sizes bigger. My eyes were cement bags. My skull was the thing Thor’s Hammer practices on.

  You’re a long way from the life of the mind, aren’t you, bud?

  A week before I thought I might heal. Thought Ira might turn out to be right after all. That the thing from back east, the skin-scraping guilt, would somehow go away if I just quit running and let a friend into my life again.

  Stupid to believe it. I should have listened to Achilles. You can’t fight fate.

  So where was I?

  I took the bloody T-shirt roll to the back door, looked out. There was a patio and a cactus yard. It was a desert place. Maybe Palm Springs?

  I went out the door and to the back wall. There was an alley on the other side. My body was a symphony of aches and shooting pains, which made hopping the wall a dicey proposition. But I made it.

  I walked to the street, a residential, followed it to a main drag. There was a bus stop with a trash can. I put the bloody shirt and scissors in. The bus bench had a real estate agent’s ad on it. A big smiling face of a woman, and in bold letters: CALL CONNIE HACK AND START TO PACK!

  In smaller script: Your Phoenix Expert.

  Phoenix?

  Hell’s stove.

  I had to get out of this place.

  I had business back in L.A.

  I HOOFED ANOTHER mile or so, to a public park. A nice old woman in big sunhat was walking her Chihuahua. The little fella paused at a signpost warning dog owners to pick up poop, lifted its leg and peed.

  The spirit, if not the letter, of the law suffered a setback.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m new around here and want to get to a Greyhound station.”

  “Gracious,” she said. “Your face.”

  “I apologize for it.”

  “You’ve been in a fight, haven’t you?”

  “Not of my choosing.”

  “You shouldn’t fight, a nice young man like you.”

  “You’re so right, ma’am.”

  “There is a station, a Greyhound station, all the way on the other side of town. My son-in-law used to work there.”

  “How far?”

  “Oh, ten miles at least. You can catch the local right there.” She pointed to a bus stop. “You’ll need exact change.”

  Something I overlooked. I should have taken Jimmy’s money.

  “You look like you’re in trouble,” the woman said.

  Her Chihuahua was now sniffing my leg. I kept one eye on him.

  “Trouble seems to be on the prowl these days,” I said.

  She smiled. “You don’t sound like a homeless person.”

  “Do I look like one?”

  “Much worse, I’m afraid.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a couple of dollar bills. “This will get you there. Take it all the way to Buckeye Road.”

  “This is certainly nice of you, ma’am.”

  “I believe in second chances,” she said. “Do you have a job waiting for you?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “A big one.”

  “Then good luck to you. Come along, Carlos.”

  Ah, Carlos, you’ve got it made. May you steer clear of coyotes and cars and trouble for the rest of your doggie years. I am not so lucky as you.

  SO THERE I was waiting to catch a ride out of the butane flame of the United States. I looked to the side and saw a kid in a sandbox. He was alone in the corner, was maybe seven, and was sticking a plastic shovel in and out of the sand, just sticking it like the sand was a vampire and the shovel was a wooden stake and he had to make sure it was dead.

  I knew with one look what was going on inside that kid. Because there were three other kids, two boys and a girl, in another part of the box, laughing, and the kid who was alone was fat. He was me when I was that age. I was the fat kid. Not included in the games.

  There were three women on a bench on the other side of the box and they were the mothers for sure, caught up in their conversation.

  I wanted to go over and play in the sandbox with the kid. Without a mom screaming bloody murder and grabbing her kid away. Without the kid being afraid of me. I wanted to tell the kid it would turn out all right. Even if I didn’t believe that myself.

  Instead, I waited for the bus under the overhang. There was one other person on the bench, an old man who slipped to the edge, as far away from me as he could get.

  IT WAS AN uneventful trip on a hot bus going through a hot city with a bunch of hot people looking at me like I was a stiff in the coroner’s office. They weren’t far wrong.

  And then it started to hit me. I’d killed again. The second time. The first time was back in New Haven, when I was twenty, and it was the reason I was on the run, the thing I had not shared with Ira. Or anybody for that matter. Fifteen years of running with a new name.

  This time I’d killed in pure self-defense. But it doesn’t make a difference.

  Killing a man does something to your soul.

  Gamers and movie producers would have you believe otherwise, have you think that Sylvester Stallone, hopped up on human growth hormone, can shoot people in the head and disembowel others with knives, and walk away with sleepy eyes and monosyllabic wisecracks as if killing was nothing more than blowing his nose on his sleeve. Liars and fakers and massacre makers, all of them, and some stoner in his basement thinks it’s all cool and the voices in his head start telling him about the school nearby and the guns in his father’s closet.

  Yeah, I’d killed a man who was going to kill me, but it still feels like there’s an account sheet up there, on Olympus or under a quill held by St. Peter, or maybe it’s all just an evolutionary delusion, but whatever it is, when you’re on a hot bus in Phoenix and a man is dead because you made him dead, it messes with you and you don’t really know how it’s going t
o turn out.

  I never wanted to be a killer. What I wanted to be, when I was twelve, was chess champion of the world.

  They say what you want to be when you’re twelve is what you should try to be when you grow up.

  That wasn’t going to happen. It’d been a long time since I’d played a game with a clock.

  I fell asleep thinking about the Falkbeer Counter Gambit.

  When I woke up we were at the Greyhound station. My head was starting to clear. I thought of Ira. He’d be worried.

  But I had no way to get hold of him. I didn’t have a phone and I hadn’t memorized his number. And I had to get out of town fast.

  They’d set up the station like an oasis—palm trees outside, air conditioning inside. I was about to avail myself of that benefit, wondering how I’d get the money for a ticket, when a cop car rolled into the parking lot.

  Maybe there was no connection. Nobody here had a visual on me. But I looked like a guy who’d been in a fight. I was not in the mood to answer any questions.

  I started walking toward the main street. And I just kept going, the sun so hot it was like walking under a giant fajita skillet.

  I kept up with the walking until I came, sweaty and tired, to a gas station with a big truck near one of the bays, engine idling.

  I waited.

  A minute later a guy with a walrus mustache came out of the convenience mart, chewing the first half of a candy bar.

  “Help you?” he said aggressively. He was about 5’10”, a little chunky around the middle.

  “Your rig?” I said.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Fight,” I said.

  “You ought to stay out of those.”

  “I’m looking for a ride.”

  “Can’t take riders,” he said. He stuffed the last of the candy bar in his maw, and mumbled, “Sorry.”

  “I would not ask you to violate the rules,” I said. “But there could be an offsetting value.”

  He frowned.

  “You’d be doing me a favor and in a small way contributing to justice.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’d be doing a fellow citizen some good.”

  He looked like he was truly sorry he’d even stopped to talk to me. “Can’t be done.” He went for the door of his truck.

  “You are a man of principle,” I said. “And that’s not a bad thing.”

  But principles weren’t going to get me to LA.

  Then a man who’d been pumping gas into an old pickup about ten yards away stuck his head around the pump and said, “Need a ride?”

  He was a Latino gentleman of solid years and working man’s arms. And right now, an angel of mercy.

  ONCE WE GOT rolling on the highway, a hot desert sea on either side of the rickety truck, the driver said, “I am a dealer in old things.”

  “Antiques?”

  “Junk.” He laughed. “I am picking up metal parts in Blythe. I will turn that into silver maybe, eh?”

  “It’s a good plan,” I said.

  “From there you look for a ride or take the bus to L.A.”

  “Have to be a hitch,” I said.

  “You have money?”

  “Flat.”

  He paused. “No, I’ll get you a ticket.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said.

  “You have had bad luck. You need some good luck, I think.”

  “Good luck would be a fine thing. What’s your name?”

  “Rolando.”

  “Mike.”

  “Your luck will change,” Rolando said. He drove with his left hand, and pointed upward with his right. “One time I was broke. That is something that happens in this business. But this time it was very bad. My son, he was four and I did not know how we would get him, eh, clothes. One day I was driving, a dirt road, I was weeping, I do not care if anyone knows it. I looked and saw a house with a big tree in the front. A house alone. Under the tree was a motorcycle. It was beat up.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said.

  Rolando smiled. “That is one unlucky motorcycle, I thought, and I slowed down to look at it. From behind the tree came an old man. He waved at me. Then he came to me and said, ‘Would you take this piece of junk away for me? I can give you ten dollars,’ he said. That was a treasure from heaven! He gave to me a ten-dollar bill. He said to me do what I want to with the motorcycle. I take the motorcycle and I fix it up. It is very old, I know. I think maybe I can sell it for a hundred, eh, maybe two. It was an Indian.”

  “That was popular at one time.”

  “I make advertisement in the local paper. A man came out and looked at it and said he would give me five hundred dollars for it. He was very excited and before I took all of his wonderful money, another car drove up and another man got out, and he was yelling at me not to sell anything until he saw the motorcycle. The first man said, ‘Sell it to me now!’ The second man said, ‘No! I will give you one thousand dollars cash, right now!’ Then the first man said, ‘No! I will give you two thousand dollars right now!’ These two men, they almost got into a fight.”

  I was enjoying this.

  “It was the second man who said, ‘Ten thousand dollars for this motorcycle.’ The other man went away with bad cursing in his mouth. I told the second man that maybe now I should have the motorcycle looked at by, eh, an expert, and he said that he was an expert and that if I sold it right now he would give me fifteen thousand dollars, but that was all. I said, ‘Thank you, but if you can make it twenty thousand I will be happy.’ He said he would make it seventeen thousand and five hundred, and I said that would be good. And so that is how I had good luck, just by driving when I was sad. So I will say to you, my friend, keep driving, even when you are sad. You never know when your luck will change.”

  “That,” I said, “is about the best philosophy of life I’ve ever heard, Rolando. Thanks.”

  WE PULLED INTO Blythe, which is not exactly like the Queen Mary docking in London. But it had a bus station and Rolando took me there and went in to buy me a ticket.

  I waited by a trash container that said Keep Blythe Clean!

  I’ll go with you that far, Blythe! Keep it clean, inside and out, heart and soul and face and feet, and do the same for me, Blythe, because if you don’t I’m going to do something bad. And you know what, Blythe? Maybe I just don’t care. Should I pitch my soul in your trash bin, O Blythe, O little town in the sand? Should I stay in you and you in me, world without end? Because if I keep going west, it’s bound to happen. Somebody’s going to end up dead, and it might just be me.

  Rolando came out with my ticket, shook my hand, wished me luck again.

  I had a couple of hours to spare in Blythe, California. The city is made up of some buildings, patches of sagebrush, islands of dirt, and two Starbucks. Yes, Blythe has two Starbucks. Blythe has arrived.

  In the bathroom of one of them I threw some cold water on my face, looked at myself in the mirror, and decided I used to be good looking.

  And for a second, I thought about finding an island somewhere, where I could tend bar, read books, settle down with a nice island girl. Never go anywhere again.

  But no, I knew I wouldn’t do that.

  There were scales out of balance.

  You can’t let it go when they mess you up. All that’s left for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

  Well, I wasn’t that good, but I was the best I had at the moment.

  I went back to the bus station. My bus to L.A. finally arrived. It was air conditioned. It was comfortable. For a short time it was peace on earth.

  And the last peace I was to know for a long time.

  I MADE IT to a homeless shelter in the heart of Skid Row. I knew that because it had a sign on the wall that said Urban Hope, a homeless shelter serving the heart of Skid Row. If you wanted to disappear for a while but stay in the city, this was the place to do it.

  They had a secure entry and I was about to hit the buzzer when a low voice s
aid, “You don’t go in there.”

  At first I couldn’t see who it was. It seemed to be the voice of the night itself. But I was finally able to home in on a form crouching behind an empty lawn chair. Even though there was a light on over the security door, the form was in the shadows.

  I pressed the button.

  “You going into hell.”

  A woman’s voice, scratchy now but perhaps once feminine.

  I ignored the one-headed Cerberus, waited.

  “Unless you the devil!” Cerberus said.

  No, but he’s been pounding around outside my doors for seventeen years now. If you see him, tell him to back off.

  “Don’t you do it!”

  A man’s voice came over a speaker. “Yes?”

  “The devil!” Cerberus shouted.

  To the speaker I said. “I need a bed for the night.”

  “Were you referred?”

  “No.”

  “Where have you been for the past twenty-four hours?”

  “I’ve been out of town. I came in by bus.”

  “Are you HIV positive?”

  “No.”

  “Have you had unprotected sex in the last month?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a sexual partner you can stay with?”

  “Definitely no.”

  “Any family?”

  “No.”

  Cerberus shouted, “That’s the devil talkin’!”

  “I’m a little nervous out here,” I said.

  That got the door to buzz open for me.

  There was another inner door that was locked. A smallish man with a white walrus mustache looked at me through the wire-mesh window. I thought he’d look good guarding the doors of Oz.

  THEY SAID I was lucky, they had one open bed, and I could have it for the night and in the morning they would interview me to see if I could stay on.

  It was in a room the size of the jail cell and just as homey. There is a school of philosophy that holds no one is free, we are all just effects of previous causes. We are living out inevitabilities, we are just chemicals in motion, so why try to do anything?

  The thing is, you can’t disprove it. They may be right. But I wouldn’t want to go to a party with any of these people.