“Okay. Do you have an ambulance on the way?”
“What’s a forty-two?” Flood demanded.
“Auto accident,” Raphael told him, “with injuries.”
“Terrific.” Flood’s tone was sarcastic. “They talk in numbers-‘I’ve got a seventeen and a ninety-three on my hundred and two. I think they’re going to twelve all over the eighty-seven.’ I don’t get much out of all that.”
“It’s not quite that complicated. There’s a sheet right there on top of the bookcase. It’s got the numbers on it.”
Flood grunted, picked up the sheet, and sat on the couch with it.
“Attention all units,” another dispatcher said. “We have an armed robbery at the Fas-Gas station at Wellesley and Division. Suspect described as a white male, approximately five-foot-seven. One hundred and forty pounds, wearing blue jeans and an olive-green jacket-possibly an army field jacket. Suspect wore a red ski mask and displayed a small-caliber handgun. Last seen running south on Division.”
“Well now.” Flood’s eyes brightened. “That’s a bit more interesting.”
“Sticking up gas stations is a cottage industry in Spokane,’ Raphael explained.
While they ate they listened to the pursuit of the suspect in the ski mask. When he was finally cornered in an alley, the anticlimactic “suspect is in custody” call went out, and the city returned to normal.
“That’s all you get?” Flood objected. “Don’t they report or something? How did they catch him?”
“Either they ran him down and tackled him or flushed him out of somebody’s garage.”
Flood shook his head. “You never get any of the details,” he protested.
“It’s not a radio program, Damon. Once he’s in custody, that’s the end of it. They take him back for identification and then haul him downtown.”
“Will it be in the paper tomorrow?”
“I doubt it. If it is, it’ll be four or five lines on page thirty-five or something. Nobody got hurt; it was probably only about fifty or sixty dollars; and they caught him within a half hour. He’s not important enough to make headlines.”
“Shit,” Flood swore, flinging himself down on the couch. “That’s frustrating as hell.”
“Truth and justice have prevailed,” Raphael said, piling their dishes into the sink. “The world is safe for gas stations again. Isn’t it enough for you to know that all the little gas stations can come home from school without being afraid anymore?”
“You know, you’re growing up to be a real smartmouth.”
Raphael went back to his armchair. “So you’ve decided to stay in Spokane for a while.”
“Obviously. The town intrigues me.”
“Good God, why? The place is a vacuum.”
“Why are you staying here then?”
“I told you. I need some time to get it all together again. This is a good place for it.”
“All right.” Flood’s eyes were suddenly intent. “I can accept that. But what about afterward-after you get it together? You’re not going to stay here, are you? Are you going back to school?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll feel better about it later. Sure, it’s going to take a while to get squared away, but you ought to make some plans-set some goals. If you don’t, you’re just going to drift. The longer you stay here, the harder it’s going to be to pull yourself away.”
“Damon.” Raphael laughed. “You sound like you just dug out your freshman psychology text and did some brushing up.”
“Well, dammit, it’s true,” Flood said hotly, getting to his feet. “If you stay here, you’re going to get so comfortable that nobody’s going to be able to blast you loose.”
“We’ll see.”
“Promise you’ll think about it.”
“Sure, Damon.”
“I’m serious.” For some reason it seemed terribly important to him.
“All right. I’ll think about it.”
They looked at each other for a moment, and then let it drop.
Flood leaned down and looked out the window. “What the hell?” he said, startled. “What in God’s name is he doing?” He pointed.
Raphael glanced out the window. “Oh, that’s just Crazy Charlie. He’s shaving his head again.”
“What does he do that for?”
“Hard to say. I think God tells him to-or maybe one of his cats.”
“Is he really crazy?”
“What do you think? He hears voices, he shaves his head like that once a week or so, and he’s got a whole set of rituals he lives by. Doesn’t that sound sort of schizophrenic?”
“Is that his real name Charlie?”
“I don’t know what his real name is. That’s just what I call him.” “What’s he doing now?”
Raphael glanced out the window again. “That’s where he keeps his towel. He always wipes his head down with the same towel after he shaves. He has to lean way over like that because he’s not allowed to step on that spot in front of the cupboard-either there’s a big hole that goes straight down to hell or there’s a dragon sleeping there, I haven’t quite figured out which yet.”
“Why don’t they haul him off to the place with the rubber rooms?”
“He’s harmless. I don’t see any reason to discriminate against somebody just because he’s crazy. He’s just one of the losers, that’s all.”
“The losers?” Flood turned and looked at him.
“You’re not very observant, Damon. This whole street is filled with losers.”
“The whole town’s a loser, baby.” Flood went back to the couch and sprawled on it. “Wall-to-wall zilch.”
“Not exactly. It’s a little provincial-sort of a cultural backwater-but there are people here who make it all right. The real hard-core loser is something altogether different. Sometimes I think it’s a disease.”
Flood continued to look at him thoughtfully. “Let’s define our terms,” he suggested.
“There’s the real Reed approach.”
“Maybe that’s a disease, too,” Flood agreed ruefully. “Okay, exactly what do you mean when you say `loser’?”
“I don’t think I can really define it yet.” Raphael frowned. “It’s a kind of syndrome. After you watch them for a while, it’s almost as if they had big signs on their foreheads-`loser.’ You can spot them a mile off.”
“Give me some examples.”
“Sure, Winnie the Wino, Sadie the Sitter, Chicken Coop Annie, Freddie the Fruit, Heck’s Angels-”
“Hold it,” Flood said, raising both his hands. “Crazy Charlie I understand. Who are all these others?”
“Winnie the Wino lives on the floor beneath Crazy Charlie. She puts away a couple gallons of cheap wine a day. She’s bombed out all the time. Sadie the Sitter lives on the other street there. She baby-sits. She plops her big, fat can in a swing on her porch and watches the neighborhood while she stuffs her face-with both hands. She’s consumed by greed and envy. Chicken Coop Annie is a blonde-big as a house, dirty as a pig, and congenitally lazy. She makes a career of sponging. She knows the ins and outs of every charity in Spokane. She’s convinced that her hair’s the same color as Farrah’s, and every so often she tries to duplicate that hairdo-the results are usually grotesque. Freddie the Fruit is a flaming queen. He lives with a very tough girl who won’t let him go near any boys. He has to do what she tells him to because her name’s the one on the welfare checks. Heck’s Angels are a third-rate motorcycle gang. There are eight or ten of them, and they’ve got three motorcycles that are broken-down most of the time. They swagger a lot and try to look tough, but basically they’re only vicious and stupid. They’ve lumped together the welfare checks of their wives and girlfriends and rented the house up the street. They peddle dope for walking-around money, and they sneak around at night siphoning gas to keep their cars and motorcycles running.”
“And you can see all this from your rooftop?”
Raphael nodded. “For some reason they don’t look up. All you have to do is sit still and watch and listen. You can see them in full flower every day. Their lives are hopelessly screwed up. For the most part they’re already in the hands of one or two social agencies. They’re the raw material of the whole social-service industry. Without a hard-core population of losers, you could lay off half the police force, ninety percent of the social workers, most of the custodians of the insane, and probably a third of the hospital staffs and coroners’ assistants.”
“They’re violent?” Flood asked, startled.
“Of course. They’re at the bottom. They’ve missed out on all the goodies of life. The goodies are all around, but they can’t have them. They live in filth and squalor and continual noise. Their normal conversational tone is a scream-they shriek for emphasis. Their cars are all junkers that break down if you even look at them. Their TV sets don’t work, and they steal from each other as a matter of habit. Their kids all have juvenile records and are failing in school. They live in continual frustration and on the borderline of rage all the time. A chance remark can trigger homicidal fury. Five blocks from here last month a woman beat her husband’s brains out with a crowbar after an argument about what program they were going to watch on TV.”