Fogtown by Peter Plate Read Free Book Online Page A

later,” he said. “Give me a couple of hours.” He lifted his arms. As the elastic in his lime-green boxer shorts was stretched out, the motion caused the underwear to slide off his bony hips and drop to the floor. His pimpled buttocks wereluminous in the hallway’s murk. He put a hand on Chiclet’s arm and said, “Listen.”
    Literal-minded Chiclet didn’t hear anything. The hall was as silent as a cemetery. She said, “Listen to what?”
    “No, no, listen to me. I want to see Jeeter.”
    “What for?”
    “I’ve got a deal for him.”
    Chiclet wasn’t enthused. “We don’t need any more drugs, Stiv. We have everything under the goddamn sun.”
    “It ain’t drugs that I’m talking about.”
    “Yeah? What is it then?”
    “I have something extra special.”
    She was wary. “Oh?”
    “Yeah. A piece.”
    “A gun?”
    “Yup. Cheap, too.”
    Chiclet was solemn. She thought about Stiv’s proposal for a moment, running it through the corners of her mind. She saw nothing wrong with it, saying, “You’re in luck. Jeeter’s been looking for one lately. I’ll tell him you have something for him. Come on over in an hour. Can you do that?”
    “Sure can.”
    “You know where we’re living these days?”
    “Near the Otis Street welfare office, right?”
    “Right.”
    Chiclet bussed Stiv on the cheek and said good-bye. She proceeded downstairs to deliver an eviction notice to a tenant on the fourth floor. Stiv watched her descend the staircase and touched the spot on his skin where her lips had been. Then he pulled up his boxer shorts and went back to his room.
    Getting dressed was easy. Stiv leaped into a pair of silver-buckled engineer boots, his favorite T-shirt, and the motorcycle jacket, and then stuffed the Saturday night special in his waistband. Leaving theroom was harder. He opened the door, slithered into the hall, shut the door, and bolted the lock. He checked it, did it again, and two more times after that. He took a couple of steps toward the exit and went back to check the doorknob a fifth time. His agoraphobia was getting out of hand.
    Tearing himself away, Stiv bounded down the rear stairs to the ground floor and burst out of the emergency exit onto the sidewalk. Walking in the tepid sunshine to the Muni bus stop at Franklin Street, he finished a joint, the last pinch of what he’d taken off Richard Rood.
    A turn-of-the-century F-line car from the Castro pulled up to the stop. Jumping aboard, Stiv looked around the overcrowded carriage. The only vacant seat was in a compartment by a quartet of armed transit cops with two German shepherd guard dogs, and he decided not to sit down. The train conductor’s disembodied voice wafted over the car’s loudspeaker: “Next stop … Civic Center.”
    Rattling toward the Civic Center, the trolley pitched from side to side. One of the cops attempted to make eye contact with Stiv. He looked the other way and paid close attention to the street as it whizzed by the train. A Public Health Service ambulance was at the corner of Larkin and Market; medics were loading a homeless man onto a stretcher.
    Getting Sharona pregnant had been a colossal accident. The stupid things you did when you were lonely were amazing. You’d sleep with anyone without a rubber on, so long as they were warm and breathing. And having a kid had become an error of monumental proportions. That became evident on the night the baby was born. Straight out of jail, Stiv visited Sharona and the brat in the welfare maternity ward at General Hospital.
    Holding the pointy-headed creature that was supposed to be their son in the crook of her elbow, Sharona said to Stiv, honeyed and dulcet-toned, “I need to tell you something.”
    The triumph in her voice made Stiv paranoid. “What is it?”
    “You have to become a responsible parental figure.”
    She might as well have been speaking in Hebrew. He said, “What in the hell are you barking at?”
    “It’s like this,” Sharona