fallen near me and he was going the wrong way. I felt a sudden strong urge to haul off and kick him in his blind
newsboy’s ass.
Instead, I bent over, got his stick, and tapped him lightly on the hip with it.
Peoria turned, quick as a snake, and snatched it. Out of the corner of my eye I could see pictures of Hitler and the
recently deceased Cuban bandleader flapping all over Sunset Boulevard–a bus bound for Van Ness snored through a
little drift of them, leaving a bitter tang of diesel fumes behind. I hated the way those newspapers looked, fluttering
here and there. They looked messy. Worse, they looked wrong. Utterly and completely wrong. I fought another urge, as
strong as the first one, to grab Peoria and shake him. To tell him he was going to spend the morning picking up those
newspapers, and I wasn’t going to let him go home until he’d gotten every last one.
It occurred to me that less than ten minutes ago, I’d been thinking that this was the perfect L.A. morning–so perfect it
deserved a trademark symbol. And it had been, dammit. So where had things gone wrong?
And how had it happened so
fast?
No answers came, only an irrational but powerful voice from inside, telling me that the kid’s mother couldn’t have won
the lottery, that the kid couldn’t stop selling newspapers, and that, most of all, the kid couldn’t see. Peoria Smith was
supposed to be blind for the rest of his life.
Well, it’s got to be something experimental, I thought. Even if the doctor up in
Frisco isn’t a quack, and he probably is,
the operation’s bound to fail.
And, bizarre as it sounds, the thought calmed me down.
“Listen,” I said, “we got off on the wrong foot this morning, that’s all. Let me make it up to you. We’ll go down to
Blondie’s and I’ll buy you breakfast. What do you say, Peoria? You can dig into a plate of bacon and eggs and tell me
all ab–”
“Fuck you!” he shouted, shocking me all the way down to my shoes. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, you cheap
gumshoe! You think blind people can’t tell when people like you are lying through their teeth? Fuck you! And keep
your hands off me from now on! I think you’re a faggot!”
That did it–no one calls me a faggot and gets away with it, not even a blind newsboy.
I forgot all about how Peoria
had saved my life during that Mavis Weld business; I reached for his cane, meaning to take it away from him and
whack him across the keister with it a few times. Teach him some manners.
Before I could get it, though, he hauled off and slammed the cane’s tip into my lower
belly–and I do mean lower. I
doubled up in agony, but even while I was trying to keep from howling with pain, I was counting my blessings; two
inches lower still and I could have quit peeping for a living and gotten a job singing soprano in the Palace of the Doges.
I made a quick, reflexive grab for him anyway, and he brought the cane down on the back of my neck. Hard. It didn’t
break, but I heard it crack. I figured I could finish the job when I caught him and ran it into his right ear. I’d show him
who was a faggot.
He backed away from me as if he’d caught my brainwave, and threw the cane into the street.
“Peoria,” I managed. Maybe it still wasn’t too late to catch sanity by the
shirttail. “Peoria, what the hell’s wrong
with–”
`Ànd don’t call me that!” he screamed. “My name’s Francis! Frank! You’re the one who started calling me Peoria!
You started it and now everyone calls me that and I hate it!”
My watering eyes doubled him as he turned and fled across the street, heedless of traffic (of which there was currently
none, luckily for him), hands held out in front of him. I thought he would trip over the far curb–was looking forward