17
It’s a full-time job being homeless. It’s a full-time job being poor. That’s what those who bitch about the underprivileged not going out there and finding work fail to understand. They have a job already, and that job is surviving. You have to get in line early for food, and earlier still for a place to sleep. You carry your possessions on your back, and when they wear out you spend time scavenging for replacements. You only have so much energy to expend, because you only have so much food to fuel your body. Most of the time you’re tired and sore, and your clothes are damp. If the cops find you sleeping on the street, they move you on. If you’re lucky, they’ll give you a ride to a shelter, but if there are no beds free, or no mats available on the floor, then you’ll have to sleep sitting upright in a plastic chair in an outer office, and the lights will be on full because that’s what the fire code regulations require, so you go back out on the streets again because at least there you can lie down in the dark, and with luck you’ll sleep. Each day is the same, and each day you get a little bit older and a little bit more tired.
And sometimes you remember who you once were. You were a kid who played with other kids. You had a mother and a father. You wanted to be a fireman or an astronaut or a railroad engineer. You had a husband. You had a wife. You were loved. You could never have imagined that you would end up this way.
You curl up in the darkness and you wait for death to kiss you a final, blissful goodnight.
Shaky was back on the streets. He’d been tempted to stay at one of the shelters and find a mat on which to sleep. His arm ached. It always pained him in winter, leaving him with months of discomfort, but it had been hurting more since Jude died. It was probably – what was the word? He thought and thought – ‘psychosomatic’, that was it. It had taken him a good minute to recall it, but Jude would have known the word instantly. Jude knew about history, and science, and geography. He could tell you the plot of every great novel he’d ever read, and recite whole passages of them from memory. Shaky had once tested him on a couple. He’d jokingly remarked that, for all Shaky knew, Jude could have been making up all of those quotations off the top of his head. Jude had responded by claiming that Shaky had impugned his honor – that was the word he’d used, ‘impugned’ – and there had been nothing to do but for the two of them to head down to the Portland Public Library on Congress, where Shaky had pulled The Great Gatsby from the shelves, along with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lolita, The Grapes of Wrath, As I Lay Dying, Ulysses and the poems of Longfellow and Cummings and Yeats. Jude had been able to quote chunks of them without getting a word wrong, without a single stumble, and even some of the librarians had come over to listen. By the time he got on to Shakespeare, it was like being in the presence of one of those old stage actors, the kind who used to wash up in small towns when there were still theaters in which to perform, their costumes and props in one truck, the cast in another, and put on revues, and comedies, and social dramas, or maybe a condensed Shakespeare with all of the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings.
And there was Jude in his old checked suit and two-tone shoes, the heels worn smooth and cardboard masking the holes in the soles, surrounded by curious readers and amused librarians. He was lost in words, lost in roles, someone other than himself for just a little while, and Shaky had loved him then, loved him as he basked in the glow of pleasure that emanated from Jude’s face, loved him as his eyes closed in reverie, and he said a prayer of gratitude for the presence of Jude in his life even as he wondered how one so clever and so gifted could have ended up scavenging in Dumpsters and sleeping on the streets of a city forever shadowed by winter, and what weakness in Jude’s being had caused him to turn away from his family and his home and throw himself to the winds like a leaf at the coming of fall.
Shaky’s pack weighed heavily on him. He thought again about the shelter. He could have left his belongings there – even without a bed for him, someone might have been willing to look after them – and returned to pick them up later, but increasingly he found the presence of others distressing. He would look at the familiar faces, but the one he sought was no longer there, and the presence of the rest only reminded him of Jude’s absence. How long had they been friends? Shaky could not remember. He had lost track of the years a long time ago. Dates were of no consequence. He was not marking wedding anniversaries, nor the birthdays of children. He left the years behind him, discarded without a thought like old shoes that could no longer fulfill even his modest needs.
He was near Deering Oaks now. He kept returning there, coming back to the place in which Jude had breathed his last. He was a mourner and a pilgrim. He stopped outside the house, its windows now boarded. Someone had placed a new lock and bolt on the basement door since Jude’s death: the police, he assumed, or the owner, assuming it was still owned by a person and not a bank. Crime scene tape had been placed across the door, but it was now torn. It drifted in the night’s breeze.
Shaky had no sense of Jude at the house. That was how he knew that Jude had not taken his own life. Shaky didn’t believe in ghosts. He didn’t even believe in God, and if he turned out to be wrong, well, he and God would have some words about the dogshit hand that Shaky had been dealt in life. But Shaky did have a certain sense about people and places. Jude had it too. You needed it if you wanted to survive on the streets. Shaky instinctively knew who to trust, and who to avoid. He knew the places in which it was safe to sleep and the places, though empty and apparently innocuous, in which it was best not to rest. Men and women left their marks as they moved through life, and you could read them if you had a mind to. Jude had left his mark in that basement, his final mark, but it didn’t read to Shaky like the mark of a man who had given in to despair. It read to Shaky like the mark of one who would have fought if he’d had the strength, and if the odds had not been against him.
He walked down to the basement door and took the Swiss Army knife from his pocket. It was one of his most valuable possessions, and he maintained it well. There was one blade that he kept particularly sharp, and he used it now to make two signs on the stonework beside the door. The first was a rectangle with a dot in the center, the old hobo alphabet symbol for ‘danger’. The second was a diagonal line joined halfway by a smaller, almost perpendicular line. It was the warning to keep away.
He spent the rest of the night asking questions. He did it carefully and discreetly, and he approached only those whom he trusted, those he knew would not lie to him or betray him. It had taken him a while to figure out what he should do. Talking to the detective had crystallized it for him. Someone had taken Jude’s money, and the contents of his pack. It might have been those responsible for his death, but it didn’t seem likely that they’d then call in his hanging corpse to the cops. Neither would they have taken the money if they wanted his death to appear like a suicide. Anyway, from what Shaky had learned, Jude was dead for a day or more before his body was found.
All this suggested to Shaky that the person who had called in the killing, and the person who had taken the money and rifled Jude’s belongings, were one and the same, and it seemed to Shaky that it might well be one of their own, a street person. One of the city’s homeless had either stumbled across Jude’s sleeping place by accident or, more likely, had gone looking for Jude to begin with. The word was out: Jude was calling in his loans. He needed money. The unknown person could have been seeking out Jude in order to pay his debts, but equally there were those on the street who would not be above hunting Jude down in order to steal whatever cash he had managed to accumulate. It didn’t matter: either way someone had found Jude hanging in that basement, and looted his belongings in the shadow of his corpse.
Shaky well knew that $127 was a lot of money for someone who struggled by on a couple of bucks a day. The instinct would be to celebrate: booze or perhaps something stronger; and fast food – bought, not scavenged. Alcohol and narcotics made people careless. Rumors would start to circulate that one of their own had enjoyed a windfall.
By the time he returned to his tent at Back Cove Park, Shaky had a name.
Brightboy.
18
The next morning Shaky didn’t join the line for breakfast at the shelter. He kept his distance and fingered the note in his pocket. It had been pinned to the bulletin board at Preble Street. The detective wanted to talk. Shaky had memorized the number, but he still kept the note, just in case. He knew that the years on the streets had raddled his brain. He would sometimes look at a clock face, and see the hands pointing at the numbers, and be unable to tell the time. He could be in a store, the price of a six-pack or a bottle of liquor clear to read on the sign, his change laid out in his hand ready to pay, and fail to make the connection between the cost of the booze and the money in his possession.
Now, as he stood in the shelter of a doorway on Cumberland Avenue, he repeated the cell phone number over and over to himself. He had considered calling the detective and telling him what he knew, but he wanted to be sure. He wanted to present the detective with hard evidence. He wanted to prove himself, both for his own sake and for Jude’s, so he stood in the shadows and watched his fellow homeless gather for breakfast.
It didn’t take him long to spot Brightboy. He arrived shortly before eight, his pack on his back. Shaky’s keen eyes were drawn to Brightboy’s boots. They were tan Timberlands, better than what Brightboy usually wore. It was possible that he’d found them, but equally they were the kind of Goodwill purchase that even a moron like Brightboy might have the sense to make while he had money in his pocket. A good pair of boots would keep your feet warm and dry, and make days spent walking the streets a little easier. He watched Brightboy exchange greetings with those whom he knew, but for the most part he kept to himself. Brightboy had always been a loner, partly out of choice but also because he couldn’t be trusted. There were those with whom one could leave a pack and know that it would be safely looked after, that its contents would not be searched and its valuables – socks, underwear, a candy bar, a can opener, a permanent water bottle – looted. Brightboy was not such a man, and he had taken beatings in the past for his thievery.
Shaky had learned that Brightboy had been on a drunken tear these last few days, and a serious one too: Mohawk 190 Grain Alcohol and Old Crow bourbon, bottle after bottle of it. As was his way, Brightboy had declined to share the contents of his portable liquor cabinet. Had he done so, there might not have been quite so many whispers of discontent.
Shaky didn’t follow Brightboy into the shelter, but instead waited on the street and nibbled on a bagel from the previous day’s bake. Shaky was known in most of the city’s bakeries and coffee shops, and rarely left them without having something to eat pressed upon him. He was careful to spread his lack of custom evenly, and by now he had his weekly routine down: this place on Monday morning, this one Tuesday, this one Wednesday … They had grown to expect him, and if he missed a visit questions would be asked of him when he returned. What happened? Were you ill? You doing okay? Shaky always answered honestly. He never played sick when he wasn’t, and he never lied. He didn’t have very much, which made retaining some semblance of dignity and honor all the more important.
Brightboy emerged an hour later. Shaky knew that he’d have eaten, and used the bathroom. He would probably have half a bagel or a piece of toast wrapped in a napkin in his pocket for later. Shaky let Brightboy get some distance ahead of him, then followed. When Brightboy stopped to talk to a woman known as Frannie at Congress Square Park, Shaky slipped into the Starbucks across the street and took a seat at the window. With his damaged arm, and the slight stoop that came with it, he felt like the unlikeliest spy in the world. Undercover Elephant would have been less conspicuous. It was fortunate that it was Brightboy he was following. Brightboy was dumb and self-absorbed. He was nearly as bad as the regular folk in his failure to notice what was going on around him.
Portland was changing. The old Eastland Hotel was being renovated by a big chain – Shaky had lost count of the number of new hotels and restaurants the city had added in recent years – and it looked like part of Congress Park, the old plaza at Congress and High, would be sold to the hotel’s new owners. A Dunkin’ Donuts had once stood at the corner of Congress Park, and it became a gathering spot for the city’s homeless, but it was long gone now. The businesses that had occupied the space over the years sometimes seemed to Shaky as transient as some of those who frequented its environs. Over the years it had been a laundry, a Walgreens, the Congress Square Hotel and, way back, a wooden row house. Now it was a brick-and-concrete space with a sunken center and a few planting beds, where people like Brightboy and Frannie could conduct their business.
Brightboy’s encounter with Frannie ended with the woman screaming abuse at him, and Brightboy threatening to punch her lights out. Shaky wished him luck. Frannie had been on the streets for a decade or more, and Shaky didn’t even want to think about the kind of treatment she’d endured and survived in that time. The story was that she’d once bitten off the nose of a man who’d tried to rape her. This was subsequently described as an exaggeration: she hadn’t bitten off all of his nose, said those who knew of such matters, just the cartilage below the nasal bone. Shaky figured that it must have taken her a while because Frannie didn’t have more than half a dozen teeth in her head worth talking about. He had a vision of her holding on to the guy by his ears, gnawing away at him with her jagged shards. It gave him the shivers.
He kept after Brightboy for two hours, watching him search for coins in pay phones and around parking meters, and halfheartedly rummaging through garbage cans for bottles and soda cans to redeem. At the intersection of Congress and Deering Avenue Brightboy took a detour on Deering past Skip Murphy’s sober house. He lingered outside for a time, although Shaky didn’t know why. Skip’s only accepted those who were in full-time employment, or students with some form of income. More to the point, it only took in those who actually wanted to improve themselves, and Brightboy’s best chance of improving himself lay in dying. Maybe he knew someone in there, in which case the poor bastard in question would be well advised to give Brightboy a wide berth, because Shaky wouldn’t have put it past Brightboy to try and drag someone who had embarked on a twelve-step back down to his own level. It was the only reason why Brightboy might offer to share a drink. Misery loved company, but damnation needed it.
Brightboy moved on, Shaky trailing him, and at last they came to Brightboy’s stash, where he kept the stuff that he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, carry. There were some who used a shopping cart to haul their possessions, but they were mostly the ones who tried to make a bit extra by scavenging. Brightboy didn’t have that kind of resolve. He had hidden whatever was worth keeping behind a warehouse on St John Street, stashing it in the bushes beside a Dumpster that didn’t look like it had been emptied since plastic was invented. He was crouched over the bushes when Shaky turned the corner, and so intent on whatever he was doing that he didn’t hear him approach.
‘Hey,’ said Shaky.