Troutdale Kingdom – 3
A gaggle of Mount Hood Community girls titter past.
He puts the jab out over the invisible nose of the windy opponent to take the glare off the passenger window of (‘Why not while I’m here.’) the Lincoln; newspapers, lottery tickets, receipts. A thorough job whichever side (false or arranged) of the evidentiary fence. He remembers hearing four car door thuds and looks for a last tittering girl. Instead, he sees a woman old enough to be their mother hunching and frowning against the wind. They meet eyes in the moment he forgets to play the loon and recommence sparring the seemingly indefatigable and invisible avatar of Smokin’ Joe.
“Anyone of them could be the one. Look alert, Rawlings. Could be ordinance in the backpacks. Could be ordinance in their bras.” He shrugs and feints to sing a make-up song.
‘Strangers things are happening.
Stranger things by far.’
He spars his way to the staffroom door retrospectively comparing the students’ unfamiliar faces with the privileged half of his slim memory file on case-specific susps and perps who might resemble them if ingeniously or just affectively disguised. The advent of bob-cuts, Mohawks, and advanced wig technology further complicated matters.
‘Can’t even sign off on gender, anymore,’ he chagrinned with a loping series of right hooks followed by one great staving left to the bobbing antenna of Golden Gloves-era Frazier.
What obvious clue could anyone provide at a library? Each action so mundane as to be suspicious therefore. Because isn’t the perfect cover the one which most describes necessity? This room fenestrated with dusty shelves surrounded by tables of computer-gaping zombies; humans making magnificently legitimate, frivolous, and desperate sport here; a social service agency/gaming parlor with that old school waft of academe: What could be more nakedly legitimate? And this was the sort of democratically open floor-planned space that defied secret corners or sly displays. There could be no whispers between stacks, no pass-n-cup of notes. All was yolk-and-white aglow with eco-friendly (but firm) halogen. Mothers could entertain their child’s romp and yowl in a pastelly nurturing corner full of wooden toys splayed on plush carpet. Teens had no compunction about horsing around, yelping, and being stunningly sexual for their years. The rest of the unclean, elderly, and otherwise occupied could hope all the racket at least provided little interstical zones of anonymity to creep into and pull the covers over with an oversize on The History of Military Flight – The Graphic Version or the latest headstone-sized large-print romance with 3D illustrations by Bradford Ann Darlingbird. Today’s public library was mustless, lively, and blatant.
No matter how convincing his cover, he was still the most suspicious person around. Not having a Kingdom address he had to register for and “clearly display” a visitor-worker badge. So there he is inside the plastic badge swinging from his chest with a ponytail version of the cover wig he now wears wild to accentuate his raving (but that is not so different from his, as he puts it, “really just unfathomable” radical 99’er days when his (now very ex-) wife was still showing she loved him by combing his hair with her hands at the door each matrimonial dawn before he blew off class and then work to, as he explained to her later, “tune into some pretty heavy peaceful protesting and networking, man.”) So unless he swaps out the wig and takes some pretty advanced milieu-adjustment steps (e.g.: the shorn, pastel-preppy, card-carrying Eastmoreland Golf and Racquet Club cover of Mssr. Kerwin White L.L.P. or Malcolm Luther Jiminez, the coal-faced would-be black man attempting to disguise he is actually a Troutdale Latino by wearing an outsized and blatantly crooked afro and affecting a ludicrous brand of Latin-tinged b-boy cadence; Rawlings’ poor imitation of each stereotype meeting in a serendipitous middle ground of the generic Moron’s Patois that could be tweaked to meet just about any non-Euro cover) dude will be locally unmistakable to the great majority of Troutdalians and shopper visitors who take advantage of the Kingdom Club Card (which doubles as a visitor badge) and its illusory trumping of Portland’s sales taxlessness via cold hard bill’n’coin payouts at the end of each purchase as if you hitting the number’s going out of style. Just stowing the wig in the glove box and shaving out of the rain bowl he keeps in the truck bed to a good crisp ship-shape won’t take the veteran C.I.’s bedraggle off him. On top of the subtle yellowing of his features and the crow scratch at the corner of his eyes, he blames the sheer man-hours he has spent in the surreptitious element, indoors and out. The chameleon cover has seeped under his skin and caked up around his joints. The pantomimic affectations, limps, twitches, accents, drawls, posturings, and limitless idiosyncratic add-ons have recalibrated his entire nervous system. On the rare occasion he listens to himself talking or catches a glimpse of his reflection in a D-town window he will startle at the strange vessel containing the still familiar down deep of his soul and crux.
But when he got fool nostalgic enough in a booze-down last night he shuffled behind the Safeway and entered the Johnny on the Pot with the hand-sized mirror nailed next to the upkeep log and tried to wade through the meadow fogs of fate and happenstance spanning this strange face and its vaguely remembered predecessor. He removed the loon-wig and tried to primp the salt and pepper mccoy into a semblance of bygone form but quickly gave up. Glum-faced, he reminded himself he is just enough of a sensitive to avoid anything in the ballpark of a wifely comb-down or smoothing. Disgusted, he then barely won the battle to not slate-cleaningly shave the stringy remainder clean off and wear the monk’s dome penitent to at least give himself the liar’s impression of having checked off a long-past chapter. Wigs sitting strangely on shorn heads in the same way the sleep-sagged vehicle appears slightly off.
But he will never be boozed to the point of not remembering himself before exiting the john. The joints will re-calibrate and he’ll put a subtle stagger filtered through intact pride into his gait; boozeville lite being an acceptable variation on the loony-bomb shuffle.
“Duty, Rawlings. Duty.”
And though he knows the only person who should be in Cherry Park at 3:14 a.m. is crane-necked Dmitri over at Babushka’s watching his beloved Dynamo Moscow live via satellite beneath the ceiling corner tube. So he wills little invisible (but palpable) smoke-and-stink signals up from his flats and pits that say ‘I’m a heavy in the lightweight division of loons. Go ahead. Look at me closer. I’m as incongruous as it gets out here in Troutdale Kingdom. I’m living out of a pick-up truck with my dog fer crissakes. I restitute at the library. Look how far I’ve fallen from my sweet embezzled high. Look what McMinnville State will do to a man.’
Any half-competant C.I.’d’ve fingered him for a peer from day one. A state or feddy? Half-possible. An agent of Them? Who knows. For all we know they don’t even have one. Moreover, they probably don’t even need one since all Cherry Park, Troutdaleans seem geniuses of the bland and likely cover. Whereever you turn there they are. Seven Foot Slim the over-patient admin or Rosanna In Excelcis the powdery and pious children’s librarian. The parade of diversely unsuspicious and so type they transcend type types. All blasted the cleaner in this brain-scratching eco-lighting.
It had been har-har to Swafford’s hardy to throw him the blandest cover imaginable. Pastel children’s books, earnest how-to’s and histories, overtly sexual knitting and crochet books, technicolor pop-culture winkfests, little plastic boxes full of the thousands of movies not even tangentially about cuisine, sports, or spying; all in the meat hooks of this indelicate man with raccoon eyes, crosshatched skin, Wildman hair, and an Igor limp gifted from the stray bullet set-up-shop in his scrambled right knee.
“Ew, Sarah? … That library dude…He was staring right at you.”
Whispers through the adjacent aisle from the M.H.C.C. girls.
“Yeah, Sarah. I think he’s in luuuuuuv. He’s gonna stalk you.”
A concordance of furtive giggles.
“Shut up! Stalkers don’t work at the library. Way too obvious.”
‘This Sarah’s no fool,’ he thought. ‘I’m way more subtle.’
The library closes at 6 p.m. Saturday evening. His co-workers flash smiles and drop cordialities all around him. He grunts replies and startles at his co-workers’ voices, his ponytail whipping from shoulder to shoulder. ‘McMinnville does this to a man,’ is his slouching apology. The god-given, life-granted raccoon eyes come in handy for this effect. William Walton is skilled at mediating the divide.
“Good work in the shelves tonight, Mr. Pauling. Do you have plans?”
Pauling sticks to gruff, gravel-voiced monosylabs with traces of resignation and cynicism. He is every bit life’s likely loser, all slouches and resignation. Just the type who may need to let loose about his fringe politics in the bed of his oddly shaped truck once in a cathartic while.
“You know…Grande Ronde. Craps. Slots. Cards. You know… the uzge. Loss. Net damn loss.” Then one long mouth sigh.
The Co-workers go still. Rosanna In Excelses appears stricken. Walton is always quick to kibosh the pall.
“Well, good luck to you, Sir, and to all of us,” swiping the alarm card/door lock “a good night.”
The beeping alarm follows their puffs and foot clicks into the Cherry Park cold.
He has no tails or surveillance planned. Cruising the Kingdom’s three main thoroughfares has been a dead dry gulch. Rolling north down 238th to the Troutdale Interstate Truck Stop and changing in into Martin Luther Jiminez to hustle the cashiers, short-haul drivers, and fellow prostitutes for the slightest morsel of intel on comings and goings, delivery addresses, and any Kingdom newcomers has yielded hollow contradictions, unverifiable claims, and meatless bones. And Christ, no one, male prostitute and C.I. alike, should have to work the truck lanes in nothing but pressed tan slacks, a yellow polo, and a baby blue cardigan in the wind tunneling ice of late-September gorge air. Nor would it do any good to roll back up the hill to Olde Towne to hit one of the three bars to hobnob and flirt, extract the smallest crumb of intrigue out of one of the retail and consignment shop owners, antiquarians, hair dressers, salon workers, popular art gallerists, out-on-the- town truckers, local farmers, or seasonal workers from everyl land north of the prime meridian who’d chosen not to California this fall but stick it out for the rumored bumper apple, pear, sassafrass, hay, pumpkin, cranberry, and holiday tree crops. Blood from a stone and whatnot. Law of diminishing returns. An excuse for a decent meal out and a walkabout in the chaos of his beloved D-town.
Rawlings and Tiger are beneath the canopy of the boulevard’s worth of old-growths stretching down The Parkblocks South. Tiger is off-leash and juggling a rawhide bone in his mouth. Rawlings holds a hot pawful of Thai curry-coconut soup in a red-white container decorated with the animals of the Chinese zodiac.* (“Can you double bowl me?” he’d said to the counter jockey. “I’m gonna drink this, not spoon.” The man behind the counter had smiled placidly and obeyed. ‘Such things make a customer loyal,’ Rawlings thought. ‘That and the generous amounts of lemongrass.’ He took a protracted inhalation from the steaming pull-top hole. Tiger looked up with questions and returned to juggling the bone.) The pavement slipped away behind them and the city unfolded before them. To stroll into the bannered and sparkling fall night of an open city at the end of an election year spike in The Bombing Campaign? To have that certain sort of lame duck session joie de vivre. To bask in this interim of oh so heavenly threat! Of romantic redoubt! Of a void violently competed for! Let the threat of blooming fire – rhetorical or actual – color our cloud-pasty faces. Dance down the sidewalks in the un-syncopated tap of the superstitious who would ward off the would-be screaming daemons of pavement clapping debris. Push our bodies in tight in some speakeasy with renegade notions about smoking bans. Would that no one had to suffer to achieve such jet-plummeting closeness. Would that no one had to be unjustly treated in the name of this…happiness. This absolutely un-warlike siege without filed candidates, shadowy proxies, and chameleonic adversaries. And, forgive him, but credit to Them for, however politically expedient, keeping non-combatant casualties impressively low but not so un-lethal as to take the romance out of a good huddling in one of the little safehouses, bunkers, and foxholes of solace and pleasure dotted high and low about D-town, even underground, especially the one’s with like renegade notions about indoor pets. Yes! Let the perfume of catastrophe push D-towners and visitors alike within a plumber’s reach of one another’s pores. Let us be given the chance to have a good down deep whiff of one another again. Stipend and tax-flatter those wanting no part of it to move to Beaverton and The Couv.* (This much Duck-wise Mayor Roy had at least done.) Christ, he’d been in the Kingdom for far too long.