Following Wednesday, I was out buying books and the phone buzzed. Dinner at Marvin’s. Got into the old Honda Civic and headed out to the Gilman District. Happy to find that it was the same group. Marvin cooking pasta. Eggs on the counter so I guessed carbonara. He was pouring an Italian white, kind of thin but in a good way. We started downing it like water. There was some music on and Dino and Patti were dancing. A nice group. Pasta and lots of jokes. Some pot with a silly name, something like Purple Urkel, but maybe I have it wrong. We were on the couch again, sides touching sides, and I was thinking about the different ways you can melt into somebody’s flesh, how the luckiest accident of birth is to be bisexual.
My brain came up for air. Marvin back in the kitchen making coffee. Said something about a neighborhood association, but not an official group. They would like us to talk to the CEO, a sort of delegation. I spaced out again since I don’t live in the neighborhood. My corner of Southside is still scruffy. Gentrification is months away. When I zeroed back in, they were talking about fleets of luxury cars and drones flown from the roof. The kind of thing you’d expect from techie CEO types. I was beginning to get bored, but then they asked me to go along because he had a bodyguard and an extra presence could help. I used to box Golden Gloves and I stay in shape, and occasionally I need to defend myself when doing my “detective” work, but I don’t look like a bouncer either.
I was feeling a little floaty and thinking that the walk would do me good. The Gilman District isn’t pretty. I guess somehow that’s part of its charm, or always was, but now it’s different. Couples making midsix figures or more sucking up the urban experience, then spitting it out cleaned up and with a get-off-my-lawn mentality. Live-work castles full of toys, set among the junkyards and bad roads.
For some reason we were walking close together, lots of touching. At some point I turned into Dino, kissed him, and all at once everybody giggled. I felt something hard in his pants — not the thing I was looking for, though. A handgun. Old joke. Dino lives, um, outside the law, so no surprise, but I was hoping for something sweeter.
And again to this palace that rose gleaming from the squalor yet was somehow uglier than the street where it lived. Patti stepped back and faced a security camera, announced us. Gilman District neighborhood watch. The warehouse-style door opened slowly, old-fashioned pulley, and it seemed that someone had called central casting and found a goon. Square jaw, shaved head, you know...
Patti sucker punched him, then kicked him going down. Great pair of boots! I wondered where she found them. The action seemed very stylized, or does now in retrospect, like a scene in a Melville policier. Her short hair shook just right and I zeroed in on the back of her neck. I wanted to fuck her.
They seemed to know the way upstairs. Recognizance? Looking back, I’m surprised that I went along. I’ve been through cases and capers with these people, but I didn’t even know the circumstances. I knew he owned TalkLike. Tried to remember his name. Something vaguely Swedish.
No need to describe the enemy. “You’re either at war or you’re not,” Marvin told me later. The guy had no idea. They played with him for a while, doing up the neighborhood association drag. We’d like you to turn down the security lights, we’d like to see you at the meetings. He smiled and clichéd for a while, then was “tired” and would like us to go.
I turned to go, then looked back and Patti was Ingemar Johansson, Hammer of Thor. She had donned a single black leather glove, left hand. Solar plexus, then again a kick to the CEo’s head. Dino pulled out the handgun. Three shots. Who would hear shots in a bunker? And then, who hadn’t heard shots in this neighborhood?
I felt some panic. I had touched the desk, possibly something else. Thought about DNA and started to sweat.
“Shall we go?” This from Marvin, and so we did, but not before Dino hit the bodyguard with a couple to the head. Did it kill him? Wouldn’t it have to?
We go, but not fast. Just walking. I shoot Marvin a puzzled expression.
“Don’t look so worried. A fixer will be along soon to clean up our mess, and, yes, they’ll break the cameras. It’s all set.” And then, walking ahead a little, “We piss on them from a higher place.”
It isn’t easy to get to Marvin’s roof, not simple like mine. You have to crawl out a window and lift yourself on a makeshift ladder, and after all that, the view isn’t much, just a bunch of buildings, the view of the bay blocked long ago by upscale rental properties. We did it anyway. It was a warm night, rare for Berkeley, and we needed a little air. We didn’t talk about what happened, we just sat there close until it got cooler, then went downstairs and showered. When there’s shooting and fighting, you need to wash it off. Marvin disappeared into the kitchen and I bathed with Patti and Dino. This was our after-party, skin and soap.
Came home late, fed the cat, looked out my window at the traffic triangle where Telegraph meets Dwight then runs south into Oakland. The usual scene, homeless guy playing conversational solitaire, a couple of sleeping dogs, a couple of lumps under ratty sleeping bags. I reflected a little on the day’s “work,” if that was what it was. Revolutionary fervor would have carried Patti and Melvin, but Dino must have been paid. My motivation was a mystery even to me. Sometimes you just go on your nerve.
I didn’t have occasion to see Marvin for a couple of weeks. When I did it was to do a book buy in Concord, art books and a few decent novels. After we did the deal, we stopped at a nondescript brewpub. “Okay, Marvin, what was up with the home invasion.”
A shrug, then, “It’s a small step away from your other adventures but we wanted to take you there. It isn’t your first righteous kill and it won’t be your last. You wanted it, based on the guy’s style and his toys. You got the gestalt and went along. If we weren’t old pals I’d say this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We will piss on them from a higher place.”
We finished our burgers and beer, got in his van, and headed back to the Gilman District.
About the Contributors
Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s short story collection, Lava Falls, came out in 2018, as did her most recent novel, The Evolution of Love, which takes place in the East Bay. Her fiction has won an Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, a Pushcart nomination, and an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. Bledsoe has also participated in two National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists & Writers Fellowships, a Yaddo Residency, and a California Arts Council Fellowship.
Summer Brenner is the author of a dozen books that include crime fiction, poetry, youth novels, and short stories. Her novel Nearly Nowhere was translated into French by Gallimard’s imprint Série Noire. About I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex, R. Crumb wrote: “It has a quality very rare in literature: a subtle, dark humor that’s only perceivable when one goes deep into the heart of this world’s absurd tragedy, or tragic absurdity.”
Thomas Burchfield’s nomadic life began in Peekskill, New York, and eventually led him to the Bay Area. He’s the author of the Prohibition-era gangster noir Butchertown and a contemporary vampire novel, Dragon’s Ark. His film reviews and articles have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, theStrand Magazine, and Filmfax. When not working on his next novel, Captain Zigzag, he is communing with nature, and hanging with his wife, Elizabeth.