“How far is this place?”
“Not much farther. Lemme handle it when we get there, okay? I know the guy. You want a place where you can cook?”
“No. Not right away.”
“That’ll make it easier. There’s a pretty good little restaurant just down the street. You’ll wanna be on the main floor. The place don’t have an elevator.”
The cab pulled up in front of a brick building on a side street. The sign out front said, THE BARTON. WEEKLY-MONTHLY RATES. An elderly man in a well-pressed suit was coming out the front door.
“Sit tight,” the driver said, climbed out of the cab, and went inside.
About ten minutes later he came back. “Okay,” he said. “He’s got a room. It’s in the back, so there’s no view at all, unless you like lookin’ at alleys and garbage cans. He’s askin’ ’bout thirty-five a month more than what you wanted to pay, but the place is quiet, pretty clean, and like I said, there’s that restaurant just down the street where they ain’t gonna charge you no ten bucks for a hamburger. You wanna look at it?” ‘
“All right,” Raphael said, and got out of the cab.
The room was not large, but it had a good bed and an armchair and a sturdy oak table with a few magazines on it. There was a sink and a mirror, and the bathroom was right next door. The walls were green-every rented room in the world is painted green-and the carpet was old but not too badly worn.
“Looks good,” Raphael decided. “I’ll take it.” He paid the landlord a month’s rent and then went back to the Ridpath to get his luggage and check out. When they returned to the Barton, the driver carried his bags into the room and set them down.
“I owe you,” Raphael said.
“Just what’s on the meter, man. I might need a hand myself someday, right?”
“All right. Thanks.”
“Anytime,” the driver said, and left. Raphael realized that he hadn’t even gotten his name.
The weather stayed wet for several weeks, and Raphael walked a little farther each day. Quillian had told him that it would be months before his arms and shoulders would develop sufficient strength to make any extensive walking possible, but Raphael made a special point of extending himself a little more every day, and he was soon able to cover a mile or so without exhausting himself too much.
By the end of the month he could, if he rested periodically, cover most of the downtown area. He considered sending for the rest of his things, but decided against it. The room was too small.
Spokane is not a particularly pretty city, expecially in the winter. Its setting is attractive kind of basin on the banks of the Spokane River, which plunges down a twisted basalt chute in the center of town. The violence of the falls is spectacular, and an effort was made following the World’s Fair in 1974 to convert the fairgrounds into a vast municipal park. The buildings of the downtown area, however, are for the most part very old and very shabby. Because the city is small, the worst elements lie side by side with the best.
Raphael became accustomed to the sight of drunken old men stumbling through the downtown streets and of sodden Indians, their eyes a poached yellow, swaying in bleary confusion on street corners. The taverns were crowded and noisy, and a sour reek exhaled from them each time their doors opened. In the evenings hard-faced girls in tight sweaters loitered on street corners, and loud cars filled with raucous adolescents toured an endless circuit of the downtown area, their windows open and the mindless noise of rock music blasting from them at full volume. There were fights in front of the taverns sometimes and unconscious winos curled up in doorways. There were adult bookstores on shabby streets and an X-rated movie house on Riverside.
And then it snowed again, and Raphael was confined, going out only to get his meals. He had three or four books with him, and he read them several times. Then he played endless games of solitaire with a greasy deck of cards he’d found in the drawer of the table. By the end of the week he was nearly ready to scream with boredom.
Finally the weather broke again, and he was able to go out. His very first stop was at a bookstore. He was determined that another sudden change in the weather was not going to catch him without something to read. Solitaire, he decided, was the pastime of the mentally deficient. He came out of the bookstore with his coat pockets and the front of his shirt stuffed with paperback books and crutched his way on down the street. The exercise was exhilarating, and he walked farther than he ever had before. Toward the end of the day he was nearly exhausted, and he went into a small, gloomy pawnshop, more to rest and to get in out of the chill rain than for any other reason. The place was filled with the usual pawnshop junk, and Raphael browsed without much interest.
It was the tiny, winking red lights that caught his eye first. “What’s that thing?” he asked the pawnbroker, pointing.
“Police scanner,” the unshaven man replied, looking up from his newspaper. “It picks up all the police channels-fire department, ambulances, stuff like that.”
“How does it work?”
“It scans-moves up and down the dial. Keeps hittin’ each one of the channels until somebody-starts talkin’. Then it locks in on ’em. When they stop, it starts to scan again. Here, I’ll turn it up.” The unshaven man reached over and turned up the volume.
“District One,” the scanner said, “juvenile fifty-four at the Crescent security office.”
“What’s a fifty-four?” Raphael asked.
“It’s a code,” the man behind the counter explained. “I got a sheet around here someplace.” He rummaged through a drawer and came up with a smudged and tattered mimeographed sheet. “Yeah, this is it. A fifty-four’s a shoplifter.” He handed Raphael the sheet.
“Three-Eighteen,” the scanner said. The row of little red lights stopped winking when someone spoke, and only the single light over the channel in use stayed on.
“This is Three-Eighteen,” another voice responded.
“We have a man down in the alley behind the Pedicord Hotel. Possible DOA. Complainant reports that he’s been there all day.”
“I’ll drift over that way.”
“DOA?” Raphael asked.
“Dead on arrival.”
“Oh.”
The lights went on winking.
“This is Three-Eighteen,” the scanner said after a few minutes. “It’s Wilmerding. He’s in pretty bad shape. Better send the wagon-get him out to detox.”
Raphael listened for a half an hour to the pulse that had existed beneath the surface without his knowing it, and then he bought the scanner. Even though it was secondhand, it was expensive, but the fascination of the winking flow of lights and the laconic voices was too great. He had to have it.
He took a cab back to his hotel, hurried to his room, dumped his books on the bed, and plugged the scanner in. Then, not even bothering to turn on the lights, he sat and listened to the city.
“District Four.”
“Four.”
“Report of a fifty at the Maxwell House Tavern. Refuses to leave.”
“Spokane Ambulance running code to Monroe and Francis. Possible heart.”
“Stand by for a fire. We have a house on fire at the corner of Boone and Chestnut. Time out eighteen-forty-seven.”
Raphael did not sleep that night. The scanner twinkled at him and spoke, bringing into his room all the misery and folly of the city. People had automobile accidents; they went to hospitals; they fought with each other; they held up gas stations and all-night grocery stores. Women were raped in secluded places, and purses were snatched. Men collapsed and died in the street, and other men were beaten and robbed.
The scanner became almost an addiction in the days that followed. Raphael found that he had to tear himself from the room in order to eat. He wolfed down his food in the small restaurant nearby and hurried back to the winking red lights and the secret world that seethed below the gloomy surface of the city.
Had it lasted much longer, that fascination might have so drugged him that he would no longer have had the will to break the pattern. Late one evening, however, a crippled old man was robbed in a downtown alley. When he attempted to resist, his assailants knifed him repeatedly and then fled. He died on the way to the hospital, and Raphael suddenly felt the cold constriction of fear in his stomach as he listened.
He had believed that his infirmity somehow exempted him from the senseless violence of the streets, that having endured and survived, he was beyond the reach of even the most vicious. He had assumed that his one-leggedness would be a kind of badge, a safe-conduct, as it were, that would permit him to pass safely where others might be open to attack. The sportsmanship that had so dominated his own youth had made it inconceivable to him that there might be any significant danger to anyone as maimed as he. Now, however, he perceived that far from being a guarantee of relative safety, his condition was virtually an open invitation to the jackals who hid in alleys and avoided the light. He didn’t really carry that much cash on him, but he was not sure how much money would be considered “a lot.” The crippled old man in the alley had probably not been carrying more than a few dollars.