On the Nickel Read online

  In shop windows she saw dozens of homemade missing person signs and thought of making one for Conor and Xeroxing up several hundred copies, but nobody seemed to be looking at the other sad pleas, either. The signs seemed about as effective as the lost-cat posters on telephone poles, or the famous milk carton photos.

  Maybe the new version of these was the ubiquitous sign she had started seeing at every Freeway offramp. Lose your accent. Speak English like a native. She wondered who on earth those were meant for. Would-be actors? Or just Mexican laborers tired of being treated like shit?

  A bare-chested man with big rings in his nipples strode toward her, muttering something that sounded like the blood of the lamb. Just as he reached her, his head snapped around to glare, and she smiled as unthreateningly as possible. ‘I do fear you,’ he challenged. ‘It was all slick before you came.’ And he hurried on.

  An old black woman in a flowery print dress had her back to the traffic, apparently staring in the window of a T-shirt shop that specialized in Draculas and rock stars. At first Maeve was about to approach her, and then she noticed that the bulky woman was ranting softly into her fist as if it were a microphone. ‘And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched.’

  Maeve gave her a wide berth and was just about ready to give up the search on Hollywood Boulevard for the evening when she felt a tug on a fold of her shirt. It was a little girl who couldn’t have been much more than nine, skinny and dirty looking, barefoot, her thin dress ragged. In her free hand she dangled a naked pink plastic doll that dragged one foot on the sidewalk.

  ‘Hi, honey. Can I help you?’

  ‘Millie needs to eat.’

  ‘Are you Millie?’

  ‘Huh-uh.’ She picked up the doll, utterly without a hint of affection for it, as if it were something she had just found in the gutter.

  ‘Hello, Millie,’ Maeve said to the doll. ‘Is your mommy hungry, too?’

  ‘Don’t be a pill, girl. There’s a place to eat right over there.’ She pointed across the street to a shabby-looking diner, narrow as a shotgun shack, which was named Old-Time Movies Cafe. It was at the corner and on the side street just off Hollywood Boulevard the brick was painted with big portraits of W.C. Fields, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and John Wayne. Somebody, undoubtedly after the original artist, had painted a cartoon talk balloon out of John Wayne’s sneer. It said: ‘So I walk funny. What’s it to you, Pilgrim?’

  ‘OK. Who else is eating tonight?’ Maeve had a credit card that would cover it.

  The girl glared at her for a moment as if Maeve had just taken something away from her. ‘My mommy. That better be OK or I scream.’

  The belligerence was breathtaking, and even sadder than the hunger. ‘Of course it’s OK, honey. Go get your mother. We can all eat whatever we want.’

  A woman appeared almost immediately out of a dark alcove, looking like a stretched version of the little girl, barefoot, ragged and skinny, with stringy blond hair.

  ‘Hi,’ Maeve said cheerfully, offering her hand. ‘I’m Maeve.’

  ‘Hi, Maeve. My name is Felice. We’re from San Antonio and we’re lookin’ for my old man name Clarence. You know him?’

  Maeve suppressed a laugh and shook her head. The woman showed her a tattered photo of a cocky-looking, lanky man in a Stetson. It was becoming a whole town of photo-displayers, Maeve thought. It was like after the Twin Towers, with everybody posting photos on a wall, looking for so many loved ones. She thought of showing the woman Conor Lewis, but decided there was no point. The only thing that made sense was posting it where hundreds of passersby would see it every day.

  ‘Clarence drove off one day after he was outta work long past the county checks, but he sent us money from a address in Los Angeles that don’t exist. This is awful embarrassing.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Maeve said. ‘Please think of me as your friend. Let’s have dinner. I’m very hungry.’ She didn’t ask how long the husband had been gone, because it was obviously quite a while for them to have wended their way as far as L.A.

  The little girl stabbed the button for the WALK signal over and over, and then they trooped across to the Old-Time Movies Cafe, which had several plastic booths along the blank wall, mostly free. It didn’t look like a gourmet hangout.

  ‘This is all on me,’ Maeve said, as if there might be any question. ‘I mean it. Let me treat you guys. I believe everything friendly that you do comes back to you a hundred times over.’

  ‘You’re too good,’ the woman said shamefully, but quickly she had the big plastic menu open.

  ‘Forget it. Where are you staying? Please tell me the truth.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Felice said. ‘It ain’t a good place. It ain’t even really a place.’

  ‘Aw, I can get you to a shelter,’ Maeve said impulsively. She was imagining the two living in a refrigerator box in an alley, and she wondered how close she might be to a fate like that herself if things changed just a little in her life and she found herself all of a sudden dead broke in a strange city where she had no friends. ‘You may not know about shelters, but they exist, and they’re for people like you – good people with a sudden need for a place to stay.’

  ‘God made the earth for the poor just as much as the rich,’ Felice said adamantly. ‘We mayhap look pigpen, but we ain’t unclean folk at heart.’

  ‘Of course not, I know that. You need some food and hot water and a little helping hand, that’s all.’

  ‘Rice Thibodeaux, you get away from our women!’

  He turned to glare. It was Sister Mary Rose, though she sure didn’t look much like the nuns he’d known in N’Orleans, always whacking his knuckles and his shoulder with their rulers. Those nuns wore blue serge habits in all weather and white cotton wimples over their heads. Actually, this woman reminded him more of a whippet out at the dog track at Gentilly, skinny and nervous and fast, with freckles and a lot of limp reddish hair going gray. She had an unruly energy about her that he found very disturbing in a woman. He wasn’t even sure he’d want to fuck her.

  ‘It’s a free country, sister,’ he insisted.

  ‘We have a restraining order against all John Does, and you’re definitely John Doe – Rice Thibodeaux.’

  Catholic Liberation Women’s Shelter was on the Little Tokyo side of Skid Row – that is, the north side – and it had a little lawn in front where the women and their kids could sit outside protected by tall chain link with a hoop of razor wire at the top.

  There were sometimes good pickings there, to get laid on the cheap or even free, and Rice Thibodeaux liked to drop by and look them over, chat up the likely ones a bit, the ones maybe not so good looking, maybe a little fat or plain. You knew they weren’t getting any inside there, and he could offer his services.

  The nun was smoking like a firestack, which was becoming odd in L.A. for almost anyone, let alone a nun. He knew by experience this nun never backed down on a challenge. Some day he’d carve her up a bit, show her what a little pain could make you do.

  ‘Gotta run,’ he said. ‘Gotta see a man about a walrus.’

  ‘Well, if you get hard up again, Monsieur T., you just take up with that walrus. We’re not interested here.’

  A couple of the women chuckled, and he stored that away in the get-even bin, too.

  Six distinct groups reside in The Nickel. In the outer circle are mostly women: the temporary homeless, having lost a job or a husband or a home. They often bring children along with them. Then there are ‘wino’ panhandlers who are still able to collect a few dollars in the business district several blocks away to pay for a small bottle of Night Train or Thunderbird. In the next circle, there are the drug addicted, particularly those caught up by the cheaper forms of crack and meth and PCP. There are the schizophrenics who carry on a lively intercourse with many people they think live here but are invisible to the rest of us. There are the paro
lees and hospital releases dumped on The Nickel. And finally there are the drug-dealers and criminals who prey on all these inner circles of hell.

  FOUR

  Sister Mary Rose

  ‘Buzzard’s luck,’ Art Castro murmured to himself. This would probably waste the last fragile string he had left to yank at the LAPD. On what was probably no more than a fool’s errand for Jack Liffey and his daughter. He sighed and picked up the telephone. He hadn’t really noticed the sorry state of his relations with the LAPD until a few months earlier when his contacts were almost all gone. One by one they’d taken themselves off the job or moved to other departments in Duarte or San Bernardino – or just gone off him, for some reason. Sergeant Javier Guzman was seemingly still taking Art’s calls, but he didn’t sound very happy about it. In the end, he agreed to check Missing Persons for him.

  ‘This is a favor I’m doing, Javi,’ Art Castro said. ‘It’s not a money case. I’d like to find the kid before he’s peddling his ass to all the gabachos in Bentleys at Heartbreak and Vine.’

  ‘Don’t play no raza card on me, Ar-tur-o. Not since your buddy there at Rosewood flaked on us and testified and hurried on to the White Guy Fortress up in Idaho.’

  ‘No buddy of mine, if you mean Marty Hansen. He just worked down the hall.’

  ‘Hansen, yeah, that’s the puddle of filth I mean. The guy testified he never ever talked shit like “spic” and “greasers” to anybody, oh, no, he loved Mexes like his own wife and kids, and the defense produces a tape with a hundred fifteen “spics” and “beaners” on it. Blew our case against the Garzas to hell.’

  ‘Shit, man, you got plenty of problem guys in the department, too, that nobody brown will deal with; still think the only trouble with this city is too many blacks and Mexicans.’

  ‘I hear you. But we’re evens after this, A.’

  ‘I don’t know why you want to be that way. I do you specials all the time.’

  ‘It’s tough these days,’ Javier Guzman said. ‘This new chief is all bad news on favors. I don’t want to look up some day and see some rat squad sticking a piece of paper in my hand, OK? I swear I’ll light that Shoes up. And you, too, if it tracks to you.’

  ‘I’ll keep you in my good mind, Javi, I mean it. Gracias. Never no bad shit.’

  ‘Code four, ese. Be good now. I’ll get your info-nympho.’

  The mother and daughter had devoured their Old-Time Movie meals at warp speed – Felice’s spaghetti on side-by-side burger patties (called the Sophia Loren Special, which she didn’t want to think about) and Millie had the ham steak with a pineapple ring on top (Princess Grace’s Wedding), while Maeve had picked a little at a godawful salad of near-frozen iceberg lettuce dolloped with something sweet and lumpy and pink. Everybody had refused seconds or desert, and Maeve phoned Gloria to ask about a shelter. Maeve was certain they existed, but she had no practical knowledge of their whereabouts.

  ‘So you picked up some strays?’ Gloria said evenly on the cell.

  ‘That’s not how I’d put it.’

  ‘Of course not. Mother Theresa and how many kids?’

  ‘One daughter. They really need a nice place to stay, Glor.’

  ‘You got the Beverly Hilton not too far from you.’

  ‘Be serious, please. You can point us.’

  ‘I don’t know Hollywood, hon. I was never on the job there. San Pedro I could tell you three places off the top of my head. Harbor City … Wilmington. OK, how ’bout this. I heard Catholic Liberation opened a women’s shelter downtown last year. I think it’s on Third or Fourth a little west of Alameda.’

  ‘Do the women have to be Catholic?’

  ‘No way. Nobody does that stuff.’

  ‘That’s a pretty rough area, isn’t it?’

  ‘Where are you calling from?’

  ‘OK, I get it, Mom.’ The ‘mom’ was as gently ironic as she could make it.

  ‘They’ll be in good hands with Liberation, believe me. Those women are so clean and good they frown if you make a joke.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch, Glor.’ She cut off before Gloria could get in another snide dig about picking up strays.

  ‘We got a place to stay,’ Maeve announced. She realized she should probably call ahead, but she had an inkling they might be much better off this late at night just showing up and throwing themselves on the mercy of the nuns, or whoever ran the place.

  ‘Thank you,’ Felice said gravely. ‘I wish I could give you something.’ The little girl looked very guarded, as she had all evening.

  ‘That’s OK. Let’s get your stuff.’

  ‘We’ll go fetch it and meet you right back here,’ the woman said.

  Maeve realized immediately that the woman didn’t want her to see where they were staying, but it could have meant a long walk with their possessions. ‘I have a car around the corner. Look, I promise I won’t watch where you go. I’ll wait anywhere you say and you can go out of sight.’

  Millie squeezed her mother’s arm with some message Maeve couldn’t read.

  ‘Your daughter’s tired,’ Maeve said.

  ‘Why you be so nice to us?’ the woman asked. ‘We ain’t had nothing but busted luck since we got to this awful city. People so mean here, the eating places they soak they throwouts in bleach so can’t nobody eat it outta the dumpster.’

  ‘Aw, I didn’t know that. That’s terrible. My parents taught me to be nice to folks. Don’t you think people should help other people?’

  Maeve thought she could just see tears in the woman’s eyes. The little girl, who’d obviously had her share of busted luck too, remained hard and suspicious.

  ‘Some day, when you’re back on your feet, you’ll remember this and help somebody else. That’s the way it comes around. OK?’

  The woman nodded, and the little girl thrust out the doll toward Maeve. ‘Here.’

  ‘Will you let me hold her, just for a minute or two?’ Maeve said.

  Millie nodded grimly.

  That evening, Conor had started getting used to his utterly plain room at the Fortnum. Austerity normalized, like everything else. It was a strange thing, he thought, but any resting place that didn’t devour you or call down the dogs of hell, you pretty quickly come to feel safe, even a bit homey. His only problem really was the squashed roaches on the walls, almost like a wallpaper pattern. Before him, somebody had had a contest with himself to see how many he could crush every night, and nobody had ever cleaned up. It was hard to imagine a hotel that didn’t even scrape off the dead roaches between guests, but some things were getting easier to imagine every day.

  All Conor’s life, his father had written about the poor, the working poor in America and the dirt poor in Mexico, and he really admired his father for doing that, but he realized how abstract it had all remained for him. It hadn’t really penetrated his personal reality out in suburbia, not in any meaningful way. He remembered the joke he’d heard at school about the kid at Beverly Hills High who’d written an essay about poverty. Everybody was poor, the maid was poor, the cook was poor, the butler was poor …

  He went out at night, braving the busy murmuring darkness all around, along Sixth Street and then San Julian, to Mike’s Market two blocks away and bought a sponge and some 409. He retraced his course and started wiping off the insect remains and depositing them in the plastic bag he’d been given for his purchases. Thrift, he thought. Never in his life had the reuse of a plastic bag meant anything at all to him. I’m learning a few new things here. I’m learning how other people have to live. He tried to think of rhyming lines for a song about extreme forms of thrift, but nothing would come. Bag. Tin can. Need-feed. Plastic.

  Even the roaches were poor, he thought.

  They were very careful to make her park around the corner at Cherokee Avenue, but Maeve could see the dark alley toward which Felice and Millie walked hand-in-hand. Aw, no, she thought, when they confirmed her suspicion by turning abruptly down the alley. They’d actually been living in a cardboard box, or und
er a hedge, living rough. It was inconceivable, though she had certainly tried to conceive it. No wonder they’d seemed so unwashed. She glanced down at the naked doll beside her, left in her temporary custody and nearly wept.

  ‘Sorry, dollie. I’ll get you some clothes. I promise. And your owner. My little sister.’

  They came back with a dilapidated pair of those red plaid hard-board suitcases from Kress or Newberrys that you never saw any more. She’d had a tiny one herself as a child, for weekends with her dad, before her mom had replaced it with a Gore-tex wheelie from some catalogue.

  ‘Your dollie was almost crying, she missed you so much,’ Maeve said.

  The little girl glanced at Maeve as if she were nuts, then sat in the back seat and withdrew into herself.

  ‘It’s not far,’ Maeve said reassuringly, though she was a bit nervous herself about driving into Skid Row after dark.

  She headed back along Sunset Boulevard, past gentrifying Silverlake and Echo Park, and just as she approached the cheery overlit and counterfeit Mexican tourist trap of Olvera Street, she headed south into Downtown on Main. She motored slowly east along Third Street through a stretch of abandoned buildings that grew darker and more forbidding. No center to be seen. She came back along Fourth, hoping Gloria hadn’t got it wrong.

  But eventually the shelter stood out like a radiant island on the street, with even a bit of lawn protected by a high wire fence. She stopped right in front.

  ‘You guys wait.’

  Maeve plucked up her courage and walked to the gate and called to a large black woman who was sitting on a beach chair on the lawn, smoking. ‘Ma’am. I have a mother and child who need a shelter bad.’

  ‘We full up.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Wait there, girl.’ The black woman frugally scraped the burning tip off her cigarette, tucked it into the grass beside the leg of her chair, and went inside.