“They don’t sell on the bridge?” 137 “Well,” Chevette said, “yeah, they do, hut not so much. And when they do, they’re quieter about it. You don’t get offered on the bridge, so much, not if they don’t know you.”
“So how is it like that?” Tessa asked. “How do people know not to? Where does the rule come from?”
Chevette thought about it. “It isn’t a rule,” she said. “It’s just you aren’t supposed to do it.” Then she laughed. “I don’t know: it’s just like that. Like there aren’t too many fights, but the ones there are tend to be serious, and people get hurt.”
“How many people actually live out here?” Tessa asked as they walked up the ramp from Bryant.
“I don’t know,” Chevette said. “Not sure anyone does. Used to be, everyone who did anything here, who had a business going, they lived here. ‘Cause you have to. Have to be in possession. No rent or anything. Now, though, you get businesses that are run like businesses, you know? That Bad Sector we were in. Somebody owns all that stock, they built that storefront, and I bet they pay that sumo boy to sleep in the back, hold it down for them.”
“But you didn’t work here, when you lived here?”
“Nah,” Chevette said, “I was messin’, soon as I could. Got myself a bike and I was all over town.”
They made their way into the lower level, past boxes of fish on ice, until they came to a place Chevette remembered on the south side. It had food sometimes, sometimes music, and it had no name.
‘They do good hot wings in here,” Chevette said. “You like hot wings?”
“I’ll let you know after I’ve had a beer.” Tessa was looking around at the place, like she was trying to decide how interstitial it was.
It turned out they had an Australian beer Tessa really liked, called a Redback, came in a brown bottle with a red spider on it, and Tessa explained that these spiders were the Australian equivalent of a black widow, maybe worse. It was a good beer though, Chevette had to agree, and after they’d both had one, and ordered another, Tessa ordered a cheeseburger, and Chevette ordered a plate of hot wings and a side of fries. 138 This place really smelled like a bar: stale beer, smoke, fry grease, sweat. She remembered the first bars she’d ever gone into, places along rural highways back up in Oregon, and they’d smelled like this. The bars Carson had taken her to in LA hadn’t smelled like anything much. Like aromatherapy candles, sort of.
There was a stage down at one end, just a low black platform raised about a foot above the floor, and there were musicians there, setting up, plugging things in. There was some kind of keyboard, drums, a mike stand. Chevette had never been that much into music, not any particular kind, although in her messenger days she’d gotten to like dancing in clubs, in San Francisco. Carson, though, he’d been very particular about what music he liked, and had tried to teach Chevette to appreciate it like he did, but she just hadn’t gotten with it at all. He was into this twentieth-century stuff, a lot of it French, particularly this Serge Something, really creepy-ass, sounded like the guy was being slowly jerked off while he sang, but like it really wasn’t even doing that much for him. She’d bought this new Chrome Koran, “My War Is My War,” sort of out of self-defense, but she hadn’t even liked it that much herself, and the one time she’d put it on, when Carson was there, he’d looked at her like she’d shit on his broadloom or something.
These guys, now, setting up on the little stage, they weren’t bridge people, but she knew that there were musicians, some of them famous, who’d come out and record on the bridge just so they could say they had.
There was a big man up there, with a white, stubbly face and a sort of mashed-up cowboy hat on the back of his head. He was fiddling with an unplugged guitar and listening to a smaller man in jeans, wearing a belt buckle like an engraved silver dinner platter.