Halfway House Read online

  Kanga made it about halfway when the red-haired man shouted something that was lost to the waves.

  The man on the couch stood, his fragile body birdlike as it swayed slightly in the onshore breeze. His head was also shaved, but he was thinner than the other, like a junkie, his arms almost girlish in their lack of musculature. Too thin. Bobby remembered a loner at the rail yard in Kansas City who’d once warned him against thin men. “They’ve used something up inside them,” the old man had drawled, his voice caught somewhere between whiskey nights and beating screams. “I see them all the time. Them that are too thin need something you don’t want to give. Drugs. Food. Sex. You don’t know, and you don’t want to know.”

  The man’s face was his resume. A wicked long scar tortured his right cheek, drawing his lips into a permanent smile. Teardrop tattoos dripped one, two, three from his left eye. Ex-con. The teardrops could represent murders he’d committed, friends who’d been killed in prison, or any combination of the two.

  Bobby shivered slightly as he hastened to keep up with Kanga. Surely the old man had seen the tats. This guy was a killer. Maybe he and Kanga should just get their stuff and move on down the beach. Bobby had spent enough of his life roughing it in the elements that one more night wouldn’t matter. He moved to say something, but Kanga beat him to it.

  “Ho there.” He raised his right hand in the air and held it there—from Roman to knight to surfer, the symbol for weaponless conference hadn’t changed in two millennia.

  “We gave at the office, old man,” the red-haired man giggled. He had a tattoo of Woody Woodpecker across his chest. By the way he giggled, it was no mystery why. He glanced at the thin man, then hushed as the other made a silencing gesture with a downward slice of his hand.

  “That’s far enough,” the stocky boy growled, his fists still wringing invisible necks.

  Kanga marched to within two feet of him and stopped. He didn’t make eye contact. His focus was on the thin man. From this distance he couldn’t miss the teardrops. Bobby hurried to a stop just to the left and behind Kanga. He finally saw the girl, her doped eyes moving dully above a princess nose and pouty lips. She seemed the type to be more at place in a mall chasing sales than here in a beach shack, in the dark of night, and on the edge of culture. The thin man’s right hand rested on her shoulder proprietarily. She grasped it, pressing it to her cheek.

  Junkie, indeed.

  Bobby suddenly understood the relationships of the four in front of him: junkie, dealer, and hoods.

  “Nice place you got here.” Kanga smiled as he said it, but his humorless voice wasn’t lost on the thin man.

  “A little damp, but we call it home.”

  “And who might you be?”

  “Why don’t you introduce you and your friend?” the thin man countered. “It’s not polite to come into someone’s home and demand their names.”

  Kanga made a fist. The pit bull focused on it, ready. But then he opened it and continued. “I’m Kanga and this is my friend Bobby. Say hi to the nice men, Bobby.”

  “Hi.”

  “So you’re the famous Captain Kangaroo.” The thin man strode to the front of the shack. Three steps and six feet of sand separated him from Kanga. But the movement was void of any threat of violence. For the first time the lips on the left side of the thin man’s face matched the right, and he smiled.

  “So you know me?” Kanga said.

  “I thought you’d be older,” the thin man replied.

  The redhead giggled. “And fatter.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  Bobby wanted to circle around, but knew he couldn’t move without distracting the two hoods. He glanced at the sand, wishing it was good old-fashioned pavement. He always seemed to move like a drunk in the sand, the constant shifting of the granular material keeping him just off balance. He looked at the human pit bull, whose eyes were pinned on Kanga’s hands. The man might as well have been the dog.

  “It always happens that way,” the thin man said. “It’s a special moment in time when you match the face with the legend. Sadly, they never seem to fit. You live up to your disappointment.”

  “If you know me, then you know this is my place.”

  “Yeah. We know.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “To deliver a message.”

  “From who?”

  “Marley Macklin.”

  “I haven’t heard that name in twenty years.”

  “You wouldn’t have,” the thin man said, his voice getting tight. “He doesn’t get around much anymore.”

  Silence for a ten count.

  “What does he want with me?” Kanga asked.

  “If you don’t know, then you aren’t Captain Kangaroo.”

  “Ahhh.” The word came like the sound of a body releasing its last breath. “It’s like that, is it?”

  “Yeah. It’s like that.”

  Kanga licked his lips and ran his left hand through his hair, conscious of the way the breeze tossed it back and forth before his eyes. Pit bull’s eyes followed the movement, and as Kanga brought the hand back down to his side, he made his move. Snapping his neck forward, he head-butted the pit bull, sending the stout boy reeling back toward the fire. He was able to stop himself just before falling, and with a strangled cry, ran at Kanga, his hands low and ready to rip. Kanga threw himself to the sand. He grasped at an arm of his opponent as the man passed above him, trying to spin him around. Kanga’s fingers closed on the other’s right wrist as he twisted and jerked. The wrist snapped, the sound like a pine log in the fire. Pit bull went down in pain. Kanga completed the maneuver on his back, capturing the arm in an arm bar, his feet pushing against the man’s shoulder as he pulled. Pain and strain colored the pitbull’s face.

  The redhead leapt to join the fray, but Bobby stepped forward and brought his hands up. He shook his head. “Stay back, motherfucker. You’ll get your turn.” He wished he had an Anderson bat, a weapon he’d befriended in the Kansas train yards. But he wasn’t exactly a beginner with his hands, either, so he would do all right.

  “I take it that’s your answer?” the thin man asked.

  Struggling to maintain the hold against the younger man’s greater strength, Kanga grunted and nodded twice.

  “Fine then. I’ll take your answer back to Marley. He’ll decide how best to proceed.”

  Kanga released the pit bull who clearly wanted to redeem himself but was held back by the glare of the thin man and the aura of his own pain. Within minutes, the four interlopers were trudging down the beach, heading for the path back up the cliff to greater southern California suburbia.

  Bobby watched to make sure they wouldn’t return, and then asked the question he’d been dying to ask. “Who is Marley Macklin?”

  Kanga plopped onto one of the couches and stared off into the night. “Someone I should have killed a long time ago.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I left him alive. That is my sin.”

  Bobby wanted to ask more questions, but he was silenced by the sea of self-loathing awash in Kanga’s eyes. Instead, Bobby decided to fetch the beer and burritos they’d left stashed up the trail. He could use a cold one. Hell, he could use a dozen.

  Obituary from the Daily Breeze

  John Henry Watson passed away last evening with his life partner at his side in his Rancho Palos Verdes home of a long-standing illness. Born in Twin Falls, Idaho, in 1943, John served honorably in Vietnam, receiving two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for Valor. He went on to become a professor of Political Science at the University of California at Dominguez Hills, winning the Estes Kefauver Award for his essays on political corruption which appeared nationally in both literary and popular journals. Memorial services will be held at the Wayfarers Chapel followed by interment at Green Hills Memorial.

  He shot free from the withered frame that had held him in thrall for so long, his soul finally unburdened from decades of disease and depression. No longer was he a man b
attling AIDs. No longer was he one to decry the state of medicine, research and government oversight. No longer was he hollow bones and mottled skin. He’d returned to his prime, that starry-eyed youth who’d quit college his senior year to fight for a country that he loved in an obscene jungled land far away from the rolling hills of Idaho. He rippled with the vibrancy of a twenty-three-year-old, his soul thrumming with power, a bottle rocket soaring across the sky.

  The homes of Los Angeles were lit like fireflies along the dark loam of a California night. Headlights from a million cars made the city’s arteries glow with life. The ocean crashed against the coast, a thousand miles of momentum dashed in an instant. Then a light pierced him from everywhere and nowhere. Feelings of welcome and love suffused him. He felt himself smile although he had no mouth. He felt warm although he had no body. He felt belonging right down to his soul.

  Then he was ripped from the light by a violent force. Cold darkness surrounded him. Gone was the welcome. Gone the love. Gone, the promise of salvation.

  Was this hell? What had he done that was so terrible? Was it the men he’d killed under color of war, or was it the way he’d lived with his life partner? Could it be true that so much love could be so bad?

  He was ripped from the darkness. The lights blurred beneath him as he flew toward a tired red beacon amidst a gray vortex. As he got closer he recognized shapes within the swirling cloud, a head, a hand, sometimes a body fully formed. Faces passed, forlorn and without hope. The maelstrom rose hundreds of feet into the sky, centered on a light inside a building somewhere along the water’s edge of San Pedro. The souls, for that was what they had to be, were caught in the winds drawn inward toward the light.

  Like moths to a flame, came a horrible thought.

  Even more horrible was that he’d become a part of the strange vortex and had thus become a moth. And as he uncontrollably circled the red, pulsating light, he couldn’t stop the incremental creep toward it.

  Where once was grace and hope, now was pure despair. For wherever he was, and whatever he was doing, had nothing to do with God, the devil, salvation, or damnation.

  Chapter 2

  The next morning found Bobby sipping coffee at a sidewalk table of the Lighthouse Deli, a Greek-owned restaurant resting at the end of South Pacific Avenue near Sunken City. A little upscale, Bobby helped the cooks set up most mornings in exchange for a free breakfast. If there was one thing he loved about California, it was the food. He could have anything his heart desired. Nothing was off-limits. This morning it was a nopales cactus omelet, home fries, flour tortillas and lots of coffee. He was on his fourth cup but needed another two or three just to get his body functioning.

  They had kept drinking until three in the morning. Kanga had been in rare form. Once the adrenaline from the fight had dissipated, Kanga dispatched five metallic red cans of the Mexican beer before he’d said word one. When he finally did speak, it was to the ocean.

  “Marley and I had been best friends since high school. We used to ditch afternoons and chase the waves up and down the coast. We were inseparable. You ever have a friend like that? Ever have a friend who you did everything with?”

  Bobby had thought about his life in the Graceland Home for Children. He’d made friends, but most left before a few months had passed, leaving Bobby for their new mommies and daddies. Making friends was easy, sure. Keeping them, well, that was another problem entirely.

  “We were brothers from other mothers, and no one could keep us from our friendship. Even when I got Suzanne pregnant with Laurie, it was Marley I'd been faithful to. He wanted to go to South America, so I went with him. Then we hit Australia, where we spent the next five years. Let me tell you, Bobby, five years in Bell's Cove felt like five weeks. My God, the time went by so quickly. By the time we even thought of coming back. It was too late.”

  Bobby understood. In the orphanage, during those few times when the sisters were able to sucker some lonely woman into being his mother, he’d watch the hours waiting for the attack he knew was coming. Sometimes it happened in the beginning of a visit. Sometimes it happened smack dab in the middle. He remembered once at the zoo throwing peanuts at the blue-faced baboons, when one minute he and his soon-to-be-mommy were laughing, and the next he was flopping along the sidewalk doing the grand mal hustle. The woman couldn’t get him back to the orphanage fast enough. To her he wasn’t a boy, but a broken toy, to be returned and replaced. But Bobby couldn’t be replaced. Bobby couldn’t even be fixed. Epilepsy was permanent.

  “Mind if I join you, Bobby boy?”

  Caught daydreaming as he dug absently at his eggs with a fork, Bobby broke into a smile, stood, and pushed out the chair next to him. “Of c-course,” he stammered.

  Bobby admired Laurie as she sat, catching her in a moment of self-possession. Her long brown hair. The band of freckles across her nose. Her sapphire blue eyes. She reminded him of a young Susan Dey from old reruns of the Partridge Family. She wore a tank-top that showed off her tanned arms. Smallish breasts, but they seemed perfect for her. She caught him watching and smiled. He turned away, his heart ballooning.

  They sat at the first of four cast-iron bistro tables along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant’s entrance. The other tables were filled with neighborhood regulars. Dressed mostly in fleece jackets, shorts, and flip-flops, they were ensconced in the LA Times, reading the cover story about the MS-13 Attacks in Boylston Heights. A chauffeur with her black limo parked down the street had a black and white Harlequin Great Dane hitched to a chair, the leash dangling and almost unnecessary as the immense yet placid animal pretended to sleep, all the while eyeing opportunities to sneak food.

  “Where’s your mind today?” she asked.

  Ensnared by her gaze, he tried not to smile, but couldn’t help it. He wished he’d gotten out more as a kid, as ingloriously unprepared for the dating scene as he was. Luckily, the waitress saved him.

  As Laurie ordered, Bobby allowed himself one more free memory, knowing that he’d need all of himself if he wanted to impress this girl. It was the dog that reminded him of Sister Agnes. She’d been like a mother to him at the home from the day he’d been dropped off as a swaddled infant, through all the hopes and seizures, all the dark nights when he’d cried himself to sleep, even the day he was hit by a bus.

  As a nun, she wasn’t allowed many possessions. A pet was definitely out of the question, but her love of dogs wasn’t to be deterred. She couldn’t own real dogs, so she adopted two-dimensional ones. An entire wall of her office was covered from floor to ceiling with pictures of dogs of all shapes and sizes. These were her dogs and she had a name for each of them, and even better, she gave them to her children—the lost ones of the orphanage. Everyone got to pick out a dog for themselves.

  At first, Bobby thought this the silliest thing he’d ever heard, but the more the others talked about it the more he wanted in. Finally, after spending two hours examining each and every canine on Sister Agnes’s wall, he chose an immense Great Dane who stood cocksure on top of a stage like the Rock and Roll King of dogs. This was his dog. And during the long nights when the other kids whispered and coughed and screamed in their dreams, he imagined playing with his dog, his Great Dane, his dog Elvis.

  “Did you ever have a dog?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “What kind?”

  “A Chihuahua. Her name was Salad Bowl.”

  “Salad Bowl?” Bobby snorted. “What the hell kind of name is that for a dog?”

  Laurie grinned. “She was a Teacup Chihuahua. Just about the cutest, tiniest little thing you’d ever seen. My first day home with her, I was showing her off and I put her on the table. Next thing I knew, an hour had passed. I was worried she’d decided to jump down. I thought the height would kill her. Instead, I found her curled up in a salad bowl, her head resting on a slice of tomato.”

  “So you called her Salad Bowl.”

  “Yes. What about you? Did you have a dog?”

 
After a moment’s hesitation, Bobby told her the story of his two-dimensional dog. When he’d finished, she looked at him, her eyes scrunched, her lips twisted in a half-smile. “You had a paper dog named Elvis?”

  “It was really cool for a while.”

  “That doesn’t strike you as odd?”

  He grinned as he shook his head. “Two words. One concept. Salad Bowl.”

  “Ha. But at least my dog was real.”

  “Elvis was real to me.” Bobby picked up his fork and began to eat.

  An old man on a skateboard turned the corner and propelled himself toward them.

  Bobby smiled in recognition. Ratman Caruthers was a fixture in San Pedro and someone who was a lot more than he seemed to be. On the surface he looked like any other Los Angeles homeless man, the only difference his mode of transportation. Not too many seventy-year-olds had the agility or know-how to operate a street board. But necessity was the engine of invention. The old man needed a way to get around, and at the age of forty he’d learned how to longboard down the suicidal hills of Rancho Palos Verdes. He’d been using this particularly California mode of transportation since 1972. But his board was far from normal. The slick wheels had been replaced by thick-tread, off-road tires meant for remote control jeeps, which were mounted on extra-wide trucks for stability and better control.

  Ratman pulled to a stop and popped his board upright. He leaned it against the doorjamb and headed into the restaurant. Had Sid Vicious survived to his dotage, he might have looked like Ratman: black Converse shoes, skintight jeans across thin thighs, a black T-shirt, with a ripped leather jacket completing the look.

  A few moments later, Ratman came back out with coffee in a Styrofoam cup and a croissant. He took a sip of the former and held the latter near the opening of his jacket. A tiny white head poked free, sniffed a bit, and was followed by the rest of the rat’s body. Ratman ripped off a chunk of the croissant and fed it to the rat that now sat atop his shoulder. He shoved the rest of the croissant in his jacket pocket, lowered his board, then cruised downhill, sipping his coffee.