A bright hot July day. Traffic on the Viaduct overhead picking up. The tires of a garbage truck doing fifty-five sang angrily across the elevated cement and asphalt. A dozen cars, campers and pickups made zooms behind, beside and in front of the ten-wheeled behemoth hurrying garbage from one end of town to the other.
Wil Hoit stood up from the flattened cardboard boxes he had been sleeping on. From the steadily-growing rumbling mindless symphony above, he judged it to be the beginning of the noon rushhour. He rubbed his gray stubble-beard, coughed and spat, then started pawing his way out of the blackberry patch.
Thorns ripped his already-ripped clothing and stabbed and frayed his skin. Wil cursed and looked down at his forearm, where the ruined sleeve of his shirt dangled. A fresh cut streaked from hand to elbow. He reached down and squeezed either side of the gash. The scaly skin went white. Dull red oozed from the new hurt. He let go of his skin. Grunted. Thrashed a few feet further, till he stood outside the dusty pigeondung and motoroil stained clump of blackberries. He craned his head. Winced up at the ribbed understructure towering thirty feet above.
There were worse places to camp out downtown. Most of the parks, any of the alleys. As for sleeping on the streets themselves – a guaranteed rolling, a likely beating, plus a possible getting bumped off just for the hell of it by some maniac wandering the night. Also, hidden away in the blackberries under the Viaduct, there was slim chance of police harassment. What cop in his right mind would ever go behind an abandoned parkinglot, climb halfway down a steep slope; double back through ten yards of chest-high blackberries… just to drag out and toss some bum in the tank for the night?
Not that Wil ever had much trouble with cops anymore. When he first hit the road, after his wife hung herself and drink cost him his job, when he was in his late thirties, cops delighted in putting him behind bars for vagrancy, public drunkenness and general worthlessness. Once he even did ninety days in Tucson, waiting to be arraigned for assaulting an officer. He was released and the charges dropped when it came to the attention of the captain of the department that in actuality the arresting officers had mauled the suspect. Who had been subsequently charged with assault to cover up the officers' bringing in such a freshly battered specimen.
He lowered his head and spat into the dust at his bare feet. No, cops didn't bother much with Wil Hoit anymore. Sometimes they were even so considerate as to cross the street when they saw him coming. He wiggled what was left of his toes. Twenty-five years of riding the rails, hitching, and drinking and sleeping outside had left him a meager total of three stubs at the ends of his swollen feet.
He lifted his ratty jeanjacket and sniffed the stench the filthy garment carried up from his unwashed body. No, he mumbled to himself, no cop wanted to get closer than fifty feet to Wil Hoit – even upwind. The last time he had been arrested, eight summers ago, back in Denver, the cop had not only foregone the personal touch of clapping on the cuffs, but had made Wil walk five paces behind. The cop turning now and then to menace over his shoulder with a billyclub; the whole hike to jail, Wil uncertain whether the repeated gesture meant Hurry up! or Keep your distance!
He climbed the steep slope and emerged into the bright sun of the cracked, warped parkinglot left over from the forties. Behind and still slightly above him, traffic crashed like surf. The four-lane Viaduct was definitely building up for the lunch-crunch.
Thinking how he hated automobiles and cities and the people who inhabit, work in and drive automobiles through cities, Wil sulked across the uneven asphalt toward a wooden stairway leading up to the shored-up west end of Union Avenue. Traffic would be up there, too.
He stepped over a vine growing out of the ruptured asphalt. The cut on his forearm throbbed. His stomach growled, uncurling gas along the ulcerated lining of his alimentary canal. He farted and was unaware of the extra odor. He paid no attention to the congealing cut. Neither did the ache in his gut affect him consciously, although it did cause a grimace to distort his chapped face as he shuffled up the stairway. It was just another damn morning, and he was going out to scrounge for breakfast and wine-money.
There was no additional pain to be felt. His cup ran over with agony, nausea and torment. Not even hatred afforded solid ground in his bayou of anguish. Although he constantly indulged in hate. He hated the traffic of the Viaduct he was leaving behind. He hated the snarled downtown traffic he was hauling himself up to. He hated every sound and sight of his surroundings with each wheezing breath he drew.
But Wil Hoit wanted to stay alive. Not because he had any hopes or dreams. He was a penniless drunk teetering on the brink of dying from half-a-dozen complications to his pickled and malnourished organs. He knew where he stood. He knew he would not survive another winter out on the street. And his ghost would not in the least be surprised to find itself liberated from his decrepit body before the end of the week. Hope was a butterfly he hadn't glimpsed during the course of the past ten ice-hearted years.
He wanted to go on living merely because doing so gave him further opportunity to relish his hatred for life. There was no other excuse for Wil Hoit. He was all that was left of a man who savoured every twist of the knife.
Connoisseur of pain that he was, he knew the spice came in two almost equally piquant varieties: bad and less bad. Bad hit with the claustrophobia of thrown in jail, kept in the hospital or stuck in a slithering bureaucracy. Less bad was the ache in his tortured guts and the stings of his arthritic limbs and eczematous skin. Hunger, horniness and despair at abandoned outdoors were also less bad. On the other hand, despair at being detained and ordered about by vicious men in clean clothes was bad.
The hospital wouldn't get him, not unless he passed out and was picked up. The cops didn't want him. He wasn't about to walk into the office of some public agency looking for help. So he had only a day of less bad pain to make his way through. He grabbed the banister with a knobby hand and continued up the stairs.
His breath coming hard, he contemplated the two breeds of bum he scorned the most – the mooches and the mealticket boys. The mooches hung out at the Market, or down in the tourist district. They panhandled with lines like, "Gimme forty-nine cents for a bottle of wine so me and my poodle can get drunk out on Gig Harbor!"
Sure, he could have come up with lines like that. Spat them at passersby for a daily net of five or less bucks. He was that close to the edge; the twin caterpillars of alcoholism and malnutrition had gnawed his brain long enough to make him that snappy and charmingly insane. But he disdained talking to people. Even on the impersonal level of wino patter. He preferred to scrounge for his sustenance.
Neither was he a mealticket boy. He hadn't entered a welfare office since being marooned in Fresno five years back… the dead of summer, a hundred in the shade. He wanted to get the hell out of town. But the bulls were too vigilant in the yards. The freeways were clogged with vacationers in campers, snooty hippies in VW's and millionaires in airconditioned Cadillacs. After he'd done a little screaming and broken a few chairs, the welfare people gave him a voucher to get on a Greyhound for San Francisco. Where he hopped a freight to cool, drizzly Portland.
And they wouldn't let him into any of the downtown missions. He smelled too bad. Besides, he flatly refused to sing hymns for tired soup and stale sandwiches. The mission saps, like the welfare patsies, all the mealticket boys, could go screw themselves and continue to eke out an existence behind their whimpers. Wil Hoit wasn't going to stand in any snafu-ed breadline. He was at the corner of Fedup and Starvedout. But he wasn't about to limp across the street and fawn at the heels of any paperwork choked charity ward. Wil Hoit was an ugly fart who despised such organized cockteasers of the poor, the lost, the crazed, the dying.
He gained the top of the stairs, gasped a few times to steady the dizziness. Ambled up the sidewalk toward the intersection of Union and 1st. The air hung hot and still. Many people passed. Horns honked from congested traffic. Melting into the crowd, he crossed 1st. Continued uphill till he came to the alley off Union between 1st and 2nd. He weaved in. Headed for the nearest dumpster.
He lifted up the top and looked inside. All manner of garbage greeted his nose and eyes. He reached in and rooted till he came up with two soft brown grapes and a rind of cantaloupe. The grapes he slipped into his mouth; mashed with toothless gums; swallowed.
He noticed the cantaloupe rind was dusted with cigarette ash. A splinter of a plastic straw stuck out. He removed the jagger. Daubed at the ash with his fingers. Two of which were only one joint long, due to something that had happened hopping a freight out in the Midwest, the details having years ago rotted from his memory; but succeeded only in rubbing the ash into the slick of orange fruit left on the rind. With the growl of a senile hound, he shoved it up to his mouth and squeezed the juice against his abscessed gums.
His mouth was not as pustulent as it could have been. Alley dumpsters and gutters yielded lots of spoiled tomatoes and oranges. The ascorbic acid in these tidbits kept the severest ravages of scurvy at bay. He gulped two mouthfuls of ashen cantaloupe juice. That would slake the worst of his hangover thirst. Help quiet the coughing. A few morsels of not-too-stale bread, and breakfast would be complete.
A loud rattle of steel on brick suddenly echoed behind. He dropped the rind back into the dumpster and jerked around to confront a legless man wheeling up on a piece of grimy plywood. He moved the platform his trunk sat strapped to by pushing against the ground with both hands in a dryland dogpaddle. The amputee had a full black beard, wore a soiled baseball cap, sooty t-shirt, torn black shorts with the legs tied up tight like sausage ends. He looked in his early thirties. Product of Vietnam? There were blue anchors and red tigers tattooed on each of his thick arms. He stopped his platform. Glared up at Wil.
Other bums meant little or nothing to Wil. People with jobs, people who owned land and automobiles and houses, people who dressed in new clothes and hurried by on sidewalks, people who ate in restaurants, shopped in department stores, slept between clean sheets and under dry roofs – these people Wil despised. They were ultimately responsible for every piece and chip of bad pain. They kept the cities going. Their taxes paid the cop and the rat-eyed bureaucrat. Their well-fed smiles were a shibboleth he would never again be able to stutter out.
But often other bums didn't even constitute less bad pain. They were the empties and butts of humanity. Worth only a glance and a sniff to make sure of their uselessness. Then move on, try not to notice another one like that for a while.
But just on a whim to be rid of this joker, Wil dipped into the dumpster, fished out a bitten apple and flipped it down. The sour-faced amputee caught it in his calloused hands before it hit the plywood at the base of his trunk.
"Throw it in my lap!" the mutilated man shrieked. "Like I had a lap, ya sombitch!"
Wil drifted down the alley lined with mortar and brick laid at the Turn of the Century. The apple sailed past. Spattered against a loading dock at the kitchen entrance to a 1st Avenue hotel and restaurant. Vaguely Wil considered turning back and kicking the freak in the face. But he let it pass. The legless pissoff could stew in his own juices. Besides, Wil's foot might snap in two if he kicked anything hard, such as that furious bearded face two feet off the ground. Wil kept his mattered eyes down; reminded himself he was looking for the rest of breakfast.
Turning up nothing more interesting than a strewn newspaper and a broken wine jug, he emerged into the scorch of University, crossed the crowded street and slipped into the alley's continuation. He paused at the dumpster behind the Y; always a good one for bread. Often whole loaves were dumped, with only one furry splotch on the crust.
But a stout Indian lay snoring on top of the dumpster behind the back wall of the six-story Y. Wil cursed. Nothing short of abdominal stabbing awakes a drunk Indian. And Wil had no knife, no energy and no desire to do anything other than let snoozing winos lie. He moved on, eyes down on the mortar and brick, stomach over-anticipating a little baked flour and water.
When he first passed the white, red-yellow-and-blue lettered sack, nothing crossed his crotchety, ill-connected brain. Till finally a neuro-electric switch tripped. He turned on his heels. Made his way back to the Wonderbread sack.
White bread was his favorite. He could even manage to munch up and swallow a little of the crust on white bread. For the same reason, he was the least fond of stale French bread. Not that Wil really gave a shit what his stomach or his gums thought. When he forced himself to eat "breakfast" – his single meal of the day – it was only to quiet his guts enough so he could hold down sufficient wine to get drunk.
He hoped it wasn't pigeon crumbs some absent-minded tourist had dropped in the alley. Pigeon crumbs were impossible as gravel. Without gizzards, pigeons would never be able to handle what is tossed them.
Wil fumbled open the knotted sack. No smell of bread. Instead of squirming into action, his salivary glands shriveled. The oily perfume of money escaped. The ironmen sang out. A wad of fresh bills. Big
denominations.
Wil stuffed the sack down his jeans and quickened his arthritic limbs. Puffy feet slapped warm brick. The honk and rumble of traffic – out on 1st and 2nd, back on University, ahead on Madison – filtered through. Triple fantasies assailed his frazzled brain.
In one:
He ran up Madison to the nearest swank hotel. Registered. Ordered a barber, a whore and a blue plate. He was slow getting erect. But the whore took her hundred-dollar time. Toothless Wil leaned on pillows. Grinned for the first time in twenty-five years. His cheeks were clean of stubble. His belly crammed with lobster and steak. He sighed, listening to the whore moan and carry on.
In the other (sped after the first):
Three youths in leather jackets and greasy hair screamed from the shadows. Chased him down the alley. He sprinted a few steps, then fell. Breaking both knees. Eyes squinted in agony, as the youths brought knives down on his back and he sucked blood in over three cold blades. They took the wad and left him to asphyxiate on the blood bubbling from his own lungs.
In the third, which had been building all along; like a long-held chord from deep in the orchestra of his shock:
At first it sounded like the skate wheels under the amputee's platform grating over the bricks a block back; resonating off the buildings flanking the alley. Till the familiar notes fell into the known sequence – someone with a throaty voice was humming Amazing Grace.
Wil turned around just in time for a black man in sunglasses to stab a forefinger into his chest.
"You!" yelled the blind man, furrowing the brow above his sunglasses. "You are gonna give dat money away and save you soul, you whiteass blowed-out ole wino!"
Like rats fleeing fire, naked people spilled out of the closed doors and shuttered windows on either side of the alley. Their mouths moved in primeval lust for food, shelter, sustenance, luxury, money – the very cash wadded in the sack Wil clutched inside his pants.
The sightless minstrel wailed a final chorus. Wil threw the bills into the air, like a madman spewing semen at a mirror. Amazing Grace lingered; fading to what he realized was the ringing his pounding heart created in his ears.
He stood staring down the alley. He had run less than ten yards. The fantasies consumed no more than five seconds. He hawked phlegm, frail head woozy atop scrawny neck. The Indian on the dumpster back by the sunlight of University was the only living creature visible. Although he did not think in such terms – his abstract functions having years ago been all but destroyed by drink and poor diet – the following emotional equations balanced just below consciousness, as Wil beheld the still form curled on the green dumpster.
Greed. Fear. Charity.
Buying a whore, a room and a dinner would get him nowhere. He was too far gone to muster the wherewithal to feel pleasure, digest properly or appreciate good liquor. Being murdered and robbed meant equally nothing – he would be robbed of something he could not use; his murder would be a scant mercy closing a life of bad luck, hard times and pain coupled to pain. While charity amounted to mere fear of greed – a double nothingness, a double waste of time, a void within a void.
But an echo of Amazing Grace drew him out of his daydream. Something about giving the money away… that was what to do with this empty windfall. Wil shuffled back in the direction he had come. Not the tune itself, but the sadly-comforting phrasing stuck in his mind. Guided his feeble steps through the riot of University. Again down the alley where the amputee had surprised him. Right on Union. Across bright, blinding, crowded 1st. Back down the wood stairs to the decayed parkinglot.
He descended the slope. Trotted under the Viaduct fast as brittle legs allowed. Staggered across busy Alaskan Way, losing his breath, chest tightening, broiling asphalt sticking to bare feet. Out onto the nearest pier.
Clutching the sack, coughing like a junker with a broken fanbelt crossing the desert, he pulled himself along the railing. At last made the pier's edge. Slumped over. Sneezed. Shivered. Spat fifteen feet into the black-green Sound.
A seagull swooped from one pier north, and skirted a gob of saliva a wavelet dashed against a creosote-blistered pylon. The bird returned to the pier it had swooped from, squealing in frustration, as it moved white wings through humid air.
Slowly the wheezing died. Wil's watering eyes steadied. He listened a moment to the hollow slops the wavelets repeated against the pylons. He straightened; balanced himself with elbows on the railing. He opened the sack and removed the bills. A breeze caught two hundreds, blowing them out over the water.
Where had so much money come from? Wil focused on the roll in his scarred fist.
The same place as the cantaloupe rind. The same place as the pennies he dipped out of public fountains. The same place as coins in the gutter, on the sidewalk, inside pay phones – somebody had left, tossed, lost or stashed it. The money was his. It was now the only kind of currency he understood – cash for today's wine.
Other of the bills seemed to be hundreds. He peeled off three. Let them flutter into the Sound, where they failed to fool any of the gulls.
Anchoring the wad under an elbow, he pulled out one of the bills and smacked it twice in the sunlight. The stylized face of a dead rich man named Benjamin Franklin gazed up at him.
The honorable Mr. Franklin viewed the mug of Wilhelm Rainer Hoit – born and raised in Pittsburg, of Pennsylvania-Dutch extraction. A man who had drowned himself in wine since 1956. A former construction worker. A present bag of bones and pus one sharp breath from death.
No real memory of the reason his wife had suicided. Only the barest recollection of how he once earned a living. Wil Hoit was another one for the books not to mention.
He tore the rest of the hundreds, the fifties, the twenties, the tens, the fives into confetti that bobbed out with the lazy tide. When he again focused on what he was doing, there were three one-dollar bills in his fist. He rumpled them into a pocket of his filthy jeans. Headed back down the pier.
Today he would buy two bottles of Thunderbird. A double ration of poison. It didn't matter that he hadn't eaten any bread for "breakfast." This was going to be an exceptional day. The thought of the excitement almost attained his consciousness.
