“Does he come in often?” Raphael asked the clerk at the cash register.
“Bennie the Bicycler?” the clerk said with an amused look. “All the time. He makes the rounds of every store in this part of town every day. If he’d spend half as much time looking for work as he does looking for bargains, his family could have gotten off welfare years ago.” The clerk was a tall man in his midthirties with a constantly amused expression on his face.
“Why do you call him that?” Raphael asked, almost startled by the similarity to the little name tags he himself used to describe the people on his block.
The clerk shrugged. “It’s a personal quirk,” he said, starting to ring up Raphael’s groceries. “There’s a bunch of regulars who come in here. I don’t know their names, so I just call them whatever pops into my mind.” He looked around, noting that no one else was in line or standing nearby. “This place is a zoo,” he said to Raphael in a confidential tone. “All the weirdos come creeping out of Welfare City over there.” He gestured vaguely off in the direction of the large area of run-down housing that lay to the west of the store. “We get ’em all-all the screwballs in town. I’ve been trying to get a transfer out of this rattrap for two years.”
“I imagine it gets depressing after a while.”
“That just begins to describe it,” the clerk replied, rolling his eyes comically. “Need anything else?”
“No,” Raphael replied, paying for his groceries. “Is there someplace where I can call a cab?”
“I’ll have the girl do it for you.” The clerk turned and called down to the express lane. “Joanie, you want to call a cab?”
“Thanks,” Raphael said.
“No biggie. It’ll be here in a couple of minutes. Have a good one, okay?”
Raphael nudged his cart over near the door and waited. It felt good to be able to talk with people again. When he had first come out of the hospital, his entire attention had been riveted upon the missing leg, and he had naturally assumed that everyone who saw him was concentrating on the same thing. He began to realize now that after the initial reaction, people were not really that obsessed by it. The clerk had taken no particular notice of it, and the two of them had talked like normal people.
A cab pulled up, and the driver got out, wincing in obvious pain. He limped around the cab as Raphael pushed his cart out of the store. The driver’s left foot was in a slipper, and there was an elastic bandage around his grotesquely swollen ankle.
“Oh, man,” the driver said, looking at Raphael in obvious dismay. “I told that half-wit at dispatch that I couldn’t handle any grocery-store calls today.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I sprained my damn ankle. I can drive okay, but there’s no way I could carry your stuff in for you when we get you home. Lemme get on the radio and have ’em send another cab.” He hobbled back around the cab again and picked up his microphone. After a couple minutes he came back. “What a screwed-up outfit. Everybody else is tied up. Be at least three quarters of an hour before anybody else could get here. You got stairs to climb?”
“Third floor.”
“Figures. Would you believe I did this on a goddamn skateboard? Would you believe that shit? My kid was showin’ me how to ride the damn thing.” He shook his head and then looked across the parking lot at a group of children passing on the sidewalk. “Tell you what. School just let out. I’ll knock a buck off the fare, and we’ll give the buck to a kid to haul your stuff up for you.”
“I could wait,” Raphael offered, starting to feel ashamed of his helplessness.
“Naw, you don’t wanna stand around for three quarters of an hour. Let’s go see if we can find a kid.”
They put Raphael’s two bags of groceries in the cab and then both got in.
“You know,” the driver said, wheeling out of the lot, “if I’d been smart, I’d have called in sick this morning, but I can’t afford to lose the time. I wish to hell the bastard who invented skateboards had one shoved up his ass.”
Raphael laughed. He still felt good.
They pulled up in front of the apartment house, and the driver looked around. “There’s one,” he said, looking in the rearview mirror.
The boy was about fourteen, and he wore a ragged denim vest gaudy with embroidery and metal studs. He had long, greasy hair and a smart-sullen sneer on his face. They waited until he had swaggered along the sidewalk to where the cab sat.
“Hey, kid,” the driver called to him.
“What?” the boy asked insolently.
“You wanna make a buck?”
“Doin’ what?”
“Haul a couple sacks of groceries upstairs.”
“Maybe I’m busy.”
“Sure you are. Skip it then. There’s another kid just up the street.”
The boy looked quickly over his shoulder and saw another boy on a bicycle. “Okay. Gimme the dollar.”
“After the groceries are upstairs.”
The boy glowered at him.
Raphael paid the driver and got out of the cab. The boy got the groceries. “These are heavy, man,” he complained.
“It’s just up those stairs.” Raphael pointed.
The cab drove off, and the boy looked at Raphael, his eyes narrowing.
“I’ll go up first,” Raphael told him. “I’ll have to unlock the door at the top.”
“Let’s go, man. I ain’t got all day.”
Raphael went to the stairs and started up. Halfway to the top, he realized that the boy was not behind him. He turned and went back down as quickly as he could.
The boy was already across the street, walking fast, with the two bags of groceries hugged in his arms.
“Hey!” Raphael shouted at him.
The boy looked back and cackled a high-pitched laugh.
“Come back here!” Raphael shouted, suddenly consumed with an overwhelming fury as he realized how completely helpless he was.
The boy laughed again and kept on going.
“You dirty little son of a bitch!” a harsh voice rasped from the porch of the house directly across the street from Raphael’s apartment. A small, wizened man stumbled down the steps from the porch and staggered out to the sidewalk. “You come back here or I’ll kick the shit outta ya!”
The boy began to run.
“Goddamn little bastard!” the small man roared in a huge voice. He started to run after the boy, but after a couple dozen steps he staggered again and fell down. Raphael stood grinding his teeth in frustrated anger as he watched the boy disappear around the corner.
The small man lay helplessly on the sidewalk, bellowing drunken obscenities in his huge rasping voice.
After several minutes the wizened little man regained his feet and staggered over to where Raphael stood. “I’m sorry, old buddy,” he said in his foghorn voice. “I’da caught the little bastard for ya, but I’m just too goddamn drunk.”
“It’s all right,” Raphael said, still trying to control the helpless fury he felt.
“I seen the little sumbitch around here before,” the small man said, weaving back and forth. “He’s always creepin’ up an’ down the alleys, lookin’ to steal stuff. I’ll lay fer ‘im-catch ‘im one day an’ stomp the piss outta the little shit.” The small man’s face was brown and wrinkled, and there was dirt ingrained in the wrinkles. He had a large, purplish wen on one cheek and a sparse, straggly mustache, pale red-although his short-cropped hair was brown. His eyes had long since gone beyond bloodshot, and his entire body exuded an almost overpoweringly acrid reek of stale wine. His clothes were filthy, and his fly was unzipped. In many ways he resembled a very dirty, very drunk banty rooster.
“Them was your groceries, wasn’t they?” the small man demanded.
Raphael drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He realized that he was trembling, and that angered him even more. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, even though it did.
“Was that the last of your money?”
“No.”
“I got a idea. I’ll go get my truck, an’ we’ll go look fer that little bastard.”
Raphael shook his head. “I think it’s too late. We’d never catch him now.”
The little man swore.
“I’ll have to go back to the store, I guess.”
“I’ll take you in my truck, an’ me’n Sam’ll take your groceries upstairs for ya.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t hafta.” The little man’s voice was almost pugnacious. “I wanna do it. You come along with me.” He grabbed at Raphael’s arm, almost jerking him off balance. “We’re neighbors, goddammit, an’ neighbors oughta help each other out.”
At that moment Raphael would have preferred to have been alone. He felt soiled-even ashamed-as a result of the theft, but there was no withstanding the drunken little man’s belligerent hospitality. Almost helplessly he allowed himself to be drawn into the ramshackle house across the street.