It was a certainty now. Flood was gone. The street had claimed him.
vi
After Flood left, Raphael sat staring sourly down into the teeming street. The Mother’s Day hysteria was upon the losers. The children ran shrieking up and down the sidewalks, and the men who lived off the women and their welfare checks brushed up on their technique for wheedling just a few extra dollars.
Raphael had always been able to watch this monthly outburst objectively before, even with a certain amusement, but today he found it all enormously irritating. He realized quite suddenly that he was totally alone now-even more alone than he had been before Flood’s arrival last spring.
“District One,” the scanner said.
“One. Go ahead.”
“We have a report of a possible suicide attempt on the east side of the Monroe Street Bridge.”
“Is the subject still there?”
“The witness advised us that the subject has already jumped.”
“I’ll check it out.”
Raphael shook his head. The Monroe Street Bridge was the most surely lethal place in town. It was not that it was so high, for it was not. A leap into the water from that height would prove fatal only if the jumper suffered from extremely bad luck. The bridge, however, overlooked the foot of the falls of the Spokane River. The riverbed broke there, and the water hurtled savagely down a polished basalt chute. It was not a straight drop where the force of the water is broken by the impact at the bottom, but rather was a steeply angled and twisting descent where the water picked up terrific speed and built up seething, tearing currents that swirled with ripping force around the jumble of house-sized boulders in the pool at the bottom of the falls. To jump there quite frequently meant not only death, but total obliteration as well. Bodies often were not found for a year or more, and sometimes not at all.
“District One,” the scanner said.
“One.”
“Are you at the scene?”
“Right. There are several citizens here who state that the subject definitely did go over the side.”
“Any possibility of an ID?”
“There was a jacket draped over the rail. One of the citizens states that the subject took it off before he jumped. Wait one. I’ll look through it.” There was a silence while the red lights of the scanner tracked endlessly, searching for a voice. “This is District One. There’s a card in this jacket-identifies the subject as Henry P. Kingsford, 1926 West Dalton. He appears to be an outpatient from Eastern State Hospital.”
Numbly, Raphael got up and went over to the scanner. He switched it off, then went slowly to the railing and looked across at the tightly drawn shades in Crazy Charlie’s apartment-the shades that had been drawn ever since that day when Flood had so savagely turned on the strange little man. Raphael turned and went into his apartment, feeling a pang of something almost akin to personal grief. Of all the losers, he had been watching Crazy Charlie the longest, and his apparent suicide left a sudden gaping vacancy in Raphael’s conception of the street upon which he lived.
Finally, after several minutes, he picked up the phone and dialed the number of the police.
“Crime Check,” the voice came back.
“I live on the 1900 block of West Dalton,” Raphael said. “I’ve got a police scanner.”
“Yes, sir?” The voice was neutral.
“I just heard a report that one of my neighbors, Mr. Henry Kingsford, has committed suicide.”
“We’re not really allowed to discuss things like that over the phone, sir.”
“I’m not asking you to discuss it,” Raphael said. “All I wanted to do was to tell you that Mr. Kingsford was a recluse and that he’s got six or eight cats in his apartment.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Don’t you think it might be a good idea to notify the Humane Society?” Raphael said, trying to control his temper.
“I’m not sure we’re authorized to do that, sir. Maybe a neighbor-or a friend-”
“The man’s a recluse-a crazy. He doesn’t have any friends, and none of the neighbors here even know he exists.”
“How about you, sir? Maybe you could-”
“I’m a cripple,” Raphael said bluntly. “It’s all I can do to take care of myself. Tell you what-either you can get hold of the Humane Society in the next day or so, or you can wait for a couple of weeks and then get hold of the health department. It doesn’t really matter to me which.” He slammed down the phone.
The apartment was suddenly stifling, and the thought of looking at the street anymore was unbearable. He felt an insistent nagging compulsion to do something. To simply sit passively listening to the scanner was no longer possible. Although he had used the word “cripple” in describing himself to the officer he’d just talked with, he realized that it was probably no longer true. Somehow, somewhere during the last summer, he had without realizing it crossed that line Quillian had told him about. He was no longer a cripple, but rather was simply a man who happened to have only one leg. “All right,” he said, facing it squarely. “That takes care of that then. Now what?”
A dozen ideas occurred to him at once, but the most important was to get out, to go someplace, do something. He pulled on a light jacket because the evenings were cool and he was not sure just how long he would be out. Then he crutched smoothly out of the apartment and across the rooftop, conscious of the grace and flow of his long, one-legged stride. The stairs had become simplicity itself, and even the once-awkward shuffle into the front seat of his car was a smooth, continuous motion now.
He drove then, aimlessly, with no goal or purpose in mind, simply looking at the city in which he had lived for more than half a year but had never considered home.
The Spokane River passes east to west through the center of town and then swings north on its way to meet the Columbia. The gorge of the Spokane on its northward course ends the city in that quarter. The streets do not dwindle or the houses grow farther apart. Everything is very paved and neat, landscaped and mowed right to the edge of that single, abrupt gash that cuts off the city like the stroke of a surgeon’s knife. Raphael had never seen a place where the transition from city to woods was so instantaneous.
The rock face of the gorge on the far side of the river was a brownish black, curiously crumbled looking because of the square fracture lines of the volcanic basalt that formed the elemental foundation of the entire region.
And then, of course, he looked at the river, and that was a mistake, really. It seemed more like a mountain stream than some docile, slow-moving urban river. The water thundered and ripped at its twisted rock bed. Somewhere down there Crazy Charlie, broken and dead, turned and rolled in the tearing current, his shaved head white-almost luminous-in the dark water. The dragon on his floor would no longer threaten him, and the voices were now forever silent.
Raphael turned away from the river and drove back through the sunny early-autumn afternoon toward town.
Sadie the Sitter was dead, old Sam was dying, and now Crazy Charlie had killed himself. Bennie the Bicycler rode no more, and Willie the Walker had not strode by since early summer. Chicken Coop Annie and Freddie the Fruit had moved away, playing that game of musical houses that seemed part of the endless life of Welfare City, where moving from shabby rented house to shabby rented house was the normal thing to do. Everything was temporary; everything was transitory; nothing about their lives had any permanence. They were almost all gone now, and his street had been depopulated as if a plague had run through it. There were others living in some of those houses now, probably also loser, but they were strangers, and he did not want to know them.
Raphael suddenly realized even more sharply that he was absolutely alone. There was no one to whom he could talk. There were not even familiar faces around him. The victory that he had only just realized had been won sometime during the summer was meaningless. The fact that he was no longer a cripple but rather was a one-legged man was a fact that interested not one single living soul in the entire town.
It was at that point that he found himself parked in front of the apartment house where Denise lived. He could not be sure how deep the break between them was, but she was the only one in the whole sorry town who might possibly still be his friend. He got out of his car, went up the steps to the front of the building, and rang the bell over her mailbox.