Raphael watched also, and was also silent.
And then in a troop, a large, rowdy group of more or less young men and, with a couple of exceptions, younger women moved into the big old house from which the tattooed Indian girl and her black boyfriend had been evicted.
They were nearly a week moving in, and their furniture seemed to consist largely of mattresses and bedding. They arrived in battered cars from several different directions, unloaded, and then drove off for more. They were all, for the most part, careful to be away when the large, tense-appearing man who owned the house stopped by. Only the oldest woman and her five children-ranging in age from nine or ten up to the oldest boy who was perhaps twenty-remained.
After the landlord left, however, they would return and continue moving in. When they were settled, the motorcycles arrived. In the lead was a huge man with a great, shaggy beard who wore a purple-painted German helmet. The front wheel of his bike was angled radically out forward, and his handlebars were so high that he had to reach up to hold them. Two other motorcycles followed him, one similarly constructed and ridden by a skinny, dark-haired man in a leather vest, and the other a three-wheeled affair with a wide leather bench for a seat and ridden by another thin fellow, this one with frizzy blond hair and wearing incredibly filthy denims. None of the motorcycles appeared to be equipped with anything remotely resembling a muffler, and so the noise of their passage was deafening.
After they dismounted, they swaggered around in front of the house for a while, glowering at the neighborhood as if daring any comment or objection, then they all went inside. One of the young men was sent out in his clattering car and came back with beer. Then they settled down to party.
Their motorcycles, Raphael observed in the next several days, were as unreliable as were most of the cars on the block. They bled oil onto the lawn of the big old house, and at least one of them was usually partially or wholly dismantled.
With the exception of the big, bearded man in the German helmet, whom they respectfully called Heintz, the bikers for the most part appeared to be a scrawny bunch, more bluster than real meanness. In his mental catalog Raphael dubbed the group “Heck’s Angels.”
At his ease, sitting in his chair on the roof, Raphael watched them. From watching he learned of the emotions and turmoil that produced the dry, laconic descriptions that came over the police radio. He learned that a family fight was not merely some mild domestic squabble, but involved actual physical violence. He learned that a drunk was not simply a slightly tipsy gentleman, but someone who had either lapsed into a coma or who was so totally disoriented that he was a danger to himself or to others. He learned that a fight was not just a couple of people exchanging a few quick punches, but usually involved clubs, chains, knives, and not infrequently axes.
As his understanding, his intuition, broadened and deepened as he grew to know them better-he realized that they were losers, habitual and chronic.
Their problems were not the result of temporary setbacks or some mild personality defect, but seemed rather to derive from some syndrome-a kind of social grand mal with which they were afflicted and which led them periodically to smash up their lives in a kind of ecstatic seizure of deliberate self-destruction.
And then they were taken over by the professional caretakers society hires to pick up the pieces of such shattered lives. Inevitably, the first to arrive were the police. It seemed that the police were charged with the responsibility for making on-the-spot decisions about which agency was then to take charge-social services, mental health, the detoxification center, child protective services, the courts, or on occasion the coroner. Society was quite efficient in dealing with its losers. It was all very cut and dried, and everyone seemed quite comfortable with the system. Only occasionally did one of the losers object, and then it was at best a weak and futile protest-a last feeble attempt at self-assertion before he relaxed and permitted himself to be taken in hand.
Raphael was quite pleased with his theory. It provided him with a convenient handle with which to grasp what would have otherwise been a seething and incomprehensible chaos on the streets below.
And then Patch went by again, followed by that strange hush that seemed always to fall over the neighborhood with his passage, and Raphael was not so sure of the theory. Into which category did Patch fit? He was totally unlike the others-an enigma whose dark, melancholy presence seemed somehow to disturb the losers as much as it did Raphael. Sometimes, after he had passed, Raphael felt that if he could only talk with the man-however briefly-it might all fit together, the whole thing might somehow fall into place. But Patch never stopped, never looked up, and was always gone before Raphael could call to him or do anything more than note his silent passage.
Omnia Sol temperat puris et subtilis
i
In the end Raphael took the job at Goodwill Industries more because he could find no reason not to than out of any real desire to work. The sour hunchback who was moving to Seattle to live with his sister taught him the rudiments of shoe repair and then, without a word, got up and left.
“Don’t worry about Freddie,” the pale girl with the dwarfed right arm said to him. “He’s been like that ever since his family ganged up on him and made him agree to move to Seattle.”
The girl seemed always to be hovering near the bench where Raphael worked, and her concern for him seemed at times almost motherly. She was a very fair young woman with long, ash-blond hair and a face that was almost, but not quite, pretty. Her name was Denise, and Raphael forced himself to think of her as Denise to avoid attaching a tag name to her as he had to all the sad losers on his block. A nickname for Denise would be too obvious and too cruel. Denise was a real person with real dignity, and she was not a loser. She deserved to be recognized as a person, not oversimplified into a grotesque by being called “Flipper,” even in the hidden silences of his mind.
The dwarfed arm bothered him at first, but he soon came to accept it. Although it was somewhat misshapen and awkward, and the tiny knuckles and fingers seemed always chapped and raw as if it had been brutally windburned, it was not a totally useless appendage. Denise wrote with it and was able to hold things with it, although she could not carry much weight on that side.
There were others who worked at Goodwill also, assorted defectives, the maimed, the halt, the marginally sighted, dwarves, and some who seemed quite normal until you spoke with them and realized that anything more than the simplest tasks was beyond their capabilities. They were not, however, losers. Common among them was that stubborn resolve to be independent and useful. Raphael admired them for that, and wished at times that he could be more like them. His own work record, he realized, was spotty. There were days when he had to go to therapy, of course, but there were other days as well, bad days when the phantom ache in thigh and knee and foot made work impossible, and other days when he deliberately malingered simply to avoid the tedium of the long bus ride to work.
On one such day, a fine, bright day in late April when the trees were dusting the streets with pale green pollen and the air was inconceivably bright and clear, he called in with his lame apologies and then crutched out to his chair and his roof to watch the teeming losers on the streets below.
“Try the son of a bitch again,” Jimmy, one of the scruffier of Heck’s Angels, called from under the hood of a battered Chevy convertible parked on the lawn of the house up the street.
The car’s starter ground spitefully, but the engine refused to turn over.
“Ain’t no use, man,” Marvin, the frizzy-haired blond one sitting in the car, said. “The bastard ain’t gonna start.”
“Just a minute.” Jimmy crawled a little farther into the engine compartment. “Okay, now try it.”
The starter ground again, sounding weaker.
Big Heintz came out on the porch holding a can of beer. “You’re just tannin’ down the battery,” he told them. “Give it up. The fucker’s gutted.”
Jimmy came out from under the hood, his face desperate. “It’s gotta run, man. I gotta have wheels. A guy ain’t shit if he ain’t got no fuckin’ wheels.”
“The fucker’s gutted,” Heintz said again with a note of finality.