Yellow Mama E zine

A Tattered Coat Upon a Stick

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by David Hagerty

 

       Sirens woke me, then lights strafed my face. Out the windshield of my pickup, I saw three police cars surround our encampment, their blue and red light bars circling. Quickly, beat cops walked between the tents, rousting people with flashlights. I ducked down low in my bucket seat until one cop rapped on the glass of my side window.

       “Step out,” he said.

       Face to face, I measured several inches taller, but months of hunger had withered my strength, whereas his build said he’d been overfed. His stare combined the fatigue of the job with the arrogance of power. To take the advantage, he shined his beam into my face, forcing me to squint.

       “Name?” he asked.

       “Julius.”

       “You sleep here?”

        Rather than admit the obvious and out myself as unhoused, I stayed quiet. Since people started losing their beds in the Great Recession, the city of Sacramento had kept an unspoken pact with the residents of The Warren, as everyone called our community: out of sight, out of mind. Anyone caught sleeping on a bench or in a vehicle downtown would be forcibly relocated, but this bank along the riverfront was a safe zone for those of us with nowhere else to go.

        “You become aware of any disturbance last night?” the cop asked.

        I examined the weedy dirt patch the size of a basketball court where people had pitched their tents and built their shacks. The crisp, cold air of early morning dried my nostrils, but I still smelled the briny mung of the waterfront, the char of a dead fire, and the sap of a nearby pine. I recalled only train whistles passing every few hours and a dog barking.

        “No,” I said.

        “You’re familiar with the residents here?” The cop angled his beam toward a muddy patch where his partners stood watch over half a dozen of my neighbors.

        “Some.”

        He led me to a spot in the center, where a pale, balding man lay sprawled on his back, blood running from his head. He wore the designer clothes of a person with money—definitely not one of us—but no shoes. Once we’d established that I didn’t know him, nor have any idea why he’d invaded a homeless encampment, the cop asked what I was doing during the night. Before answering, I looked at my neighbors, who acted just as cornered as I felt.

        “Just sleeping.”

        “You must sleep heavy to have missed this. You never woke up, heard anything?”

        I recalled only sitting in the bucket seat, reading by moonlight. The book in my lap when they woke me proved it. After months in the camp, I’d learned to sleep through all kinds of disturbances. Still, I kept this to myself and said only, “no.”

       An ambulance arrived and two paramedics shouldered past with heavy medical bags.

       “Let me see your shoes,” the cop said.

         I stared at my brand name sneakers, which I’d bought in better times thinking they’d never end.

       “Why?”

       “Take them off.”

       “They’re my only pair.”

        “Take them off.”

        “You’ll give them back?”

        “Depends.”

         The cop examined the soles as though the waffle print contained some hidden clue. He touched a spot of mud and inspected his finger, which came back dry.

         Meanwhile, the cold dirt chilled my toes. What would I do if he kept them? I’d worn out all my others and couldn’t afford new. I could go to the local secondhand shop, see if they had any in my size, but if they didn’t I’d be barefoot.

        After my feet had numbed, the cop handed back the sneakers without a comment. “Stand over there,” he said and pointed to a bare spot at the perimeter of the camp.

        I retreated to this time out zone and swayed in place to keep warm while the paramedics removed the body on a stretcher, its head and torso strapped down like a football player injured on the field. Unlike an athlete, the spiff didn’t raise a finger or wiggle a toe as encouragement to the crowd. Was he unconscious, paralyzed, dead? The way the ambulance took off, spraying dust as it sped away, suggested at least still living.

       Meanwhile, the cops interrogated everybody in the camp: old Mr. Chang, who leaned on his cane for support; Gigi, who also preferred the warmth and security of her sedan to the vulnerability of a tent; the Bundys, as everyone called them, a young couple who bickered about everything. However, the cops concentrated on two men: The Frizz, so named for his wild, uncombed hair, who constantly muttered and cursed to himself. They wouldn’t get anything coherent out of him. Suspect number two was Rolo, who’d joined us a few months back after getting paroled from prison. He was short and stocky, with an inmate’s hard stare.

       Once they’d braced us all individually, the cops stood us in line while they searched our few possessions. Gigi’s dogs kept barking, raising the alarm about these intruders in our midst, but everyone else kept their cool, accustomed to being targeted by the army of society. Under his breath, Rolo called it “worse than a lockup shakedown,” but he knew better than to resist. After tossing everything we owned into the dirt, including the few clean clothes in my truck, one cop emerged from Rolo’s tent with a shiny pair of loafers and a new model cell phone.

       “Where’d you get these?” the fat cop asked him.

       “The street,” Rolo said, his face dark and glowering.

        Like many indigent inmates, Rolo fed himself by dumpster diving behind supermarkets and convenience stores. Sometimes, he found things he could resell—children’s toys that needed repair, clothes from a prior season, even cigarettes if the wrappers had been torn. That week, he’d salvaged a box of expired candy, which he’d shared with us all.

        The cops kept Rolo’s shoes and cell but left us to ourselves with threats to return. As we collected our things, I studied the scene. Beside these scant possessions, it teemed with garbage: ripped t-shirts, candy wrappers, a paperback torn in half. Apparently, the cops didn’t care enough about the investigation to log any of it as evidence.

        I poked through the debris with a toe, turning over each item and logging it mentally. Plenty of footprints appeared in the dusty ground as well, from the rescuers and residents alike, too many for the cops to separate one from another. Their inspection of my shoes was a bluff, a discomfort meant to sweat me, but I recognized several of those prints: Mr. Chang’s slippers, Gigi’s boots, Rolo’s high top Chucks, the bare feet of The Frizz, and my own gym shoes. I also saw the flat tread of the victim’s loafers, which circled the whole encampment.

       Since the others ignored our suspect status, I tried to start a conversation.

       “Anybody know who he was?”

       No one spoke. Instead, they focused on reclaiming what was theirs.

       “Or see anything last night?”

       I looked around until Mr. Chang returned my gaze. Like a lot of us, he joined the encampment after losing his house during the Great Recession. The bank had sold him on a reverse mortgage with escalating interest rates. Once he couldn’t pay the vig, the money lenders tossed him into the street despite an old workman’s comp injury that caused his limp. He’d labored a lifetime for a small social security allowance, which wouldn’t cover rent in Cali, so he’d built himself a shack out of discarded pallets and tarps.

       “After dark, down here, how we see?” he said.

       He had a point. No street lamps illuminated our squat. On moonless nights, if you wanted to use the toilet—really a porta-potty the city left unlocked so we didn’t crap in the bushes—you had to feel your way through the foliage. Between cleanings, it stank so bad I chose to piss in a bottle, but others tolerated it to act more civilized.

       “What’d you tell the cops?” I asked Mr. Chang.

       “That I don’t know him.”

        Mr. Chang moved away slowly, leaning on his cane as he gathered his cook pots and sleeping bag. Despite our living conditions, he rarely complained, accepting his homeless status as he did his adopted country. Sometimes, I wondered if he’d be better off back in China than subject to the winner-take-all capitalism of the U.S., but he so hated the Communists he preferred living on the street to listening to their agitprop.

        Next I tried talking to Rolo, who was picking up some candy bars taken from his stash. Like many recovering junkies, Rolo controlled his cravings with chocolate, so there were plenty of Hershey’s and Kit Kats and Milky Ways. I’d heard his nickname came from his favorite sweet, those round drops as compact and intense as he was.

       “What’d they ask you?” I said.

       “The usual: where was you, what was you doing?”

       “What’d you say?”

        “That I was asleep! I’m not out here after dark looking for fights.”

         Since he was still agitated by the interrogation, I left him to his cleanup.

         Nearby, the Bundys were going at it as always, bickering about their meal for the morning. Al wanted leftover burrito while Peggy favored begging for bacon and egg money.

         “I’m not going out,” Al said.

         “But it’s Sunday,” Peggy said. “People give more after church.”

         I interrupted to ask what they remembered from the night.

         “Nothing,” he said.

         “Liar. You woke up when the dog barked.”

         “Those dogs always bark.”

         As if to prove the point, one of Gigi’s protectors growled at some phantom threat. Unlike the others, Gigi didn’t try to recover the items that had been stripped from her car. Instead, she stood by a vacant field of tall grass that abutted our encampment where she let her dogs run off leash to exorcise their animal aggressions. I pushed through the weeds to talk to her.

         “Al heard barking last night,” I said. “Did you wake up, too?”

        She wrapped her arms about herself as though chilled, though she wore a heavy wool coat. In the oncoming light, I saw the delicate features of her face, which many would call pretty, but it had dried and chafed from too many months of exposure. “Why would I?”

        “Your dogs stay in the car with you.”

        She waived off the idea. “Having them lets me sleep.”

         “So you didn’t see or hear anything else?”

         Before she could answer, an approaching train sounded its horn even as the wheels squealed on the metal tracks, providing plenty of warning for any waiting hobos. Rather than shout over the racket, she let it rumble past, then replied.

         “What d’you care?”

         “Safety. I can’t live with a sneak attack artist.”

          Previously, I’d seen only petty theft within our encampment, but even that was rare, as people without locks needed to trust their neighbors. A political scientist would call it a social contract, a concept I learned at community college before I lost my place in society.

           This life included untouchables like The Frizz, who I assumed had some mental illness, though I’d never heard a diagnosis. Regardless, I’d met enough unfortunates while camping out that he didn’t scare me. The man was more a threat to himself than anyone else, wandering the streets, oblivious to traffic and other people, raving to no one. At night, he quieted enough to mumble himself to sleep, but his baseline was agitation.

         When I approached, he was sifting through some candy wrappers, examining them one at a time, then replacing them where they’d fallen. I couldn’t see any sense in his methods.

         “Were you awake last night?”

        “Like a golden bird on a bough.”

         “You see anything?”

         “Mementos of my own magnificence.”

         He spoke like that, in verbose fragments of uncommon vocabulary. I assumed he’d enjoyed education at some point prior to his disability, and this florid language was the residue of that former life.

        “How about who attacked that guy?”

        “A tattered coat upon a stick.”

        He continued sorting through the effluent, appraising each piece as if it were treasure.

        “You find anything good?”

        “What is past, or passing, or to come.”

         “Like what?”

          He held up a Reese’s that had been crushed underfoot. I recalled Rolo saying he disliked peanut butter and guessed he’d left it on purpose, so I said, “Tell me if you do,” and left The Frizz to his foraging.

          By that point the others had retreated to the privacy of their tents and shacks. Since I lived behind a windshield, I couldn’t keep up that pretense, so I piled my scattered things into the truck and took off toward the city library, the one place I could still feel a part of society. Even though patrons there stared with pity and judgment, the staff tolerated me.

         When I’d bought my pickup ten years back, I’d felt proud of its plush seats and sunroof. Now it stank of my muddy clothes. The fan belt squealed, the tires squeaked, and the motor vibrated. I couldn’t guess how much longer it would last, but I’d bet not long.

          I’d moved into that truck after the mortgage bubble burst along with my job prospects. I figured it would be temporary, but six months later I was still sleeping in a bucket seat. What once sounded degrading now felt normal, as though I’d passed through some invisible barrier to a new world that offered no return.

       During the drive, the words of The Frizz kept repeating to me. He’d made even less sense than usual that morning. “Mementos to my own magnificence” sounded too poetic for a disturbed mind. It could’ve been just agitation from getting grilled by the police, but I sensed some insight in the phrase, so at the library I put my name in the cue for the computers.

          Meanwhile, I settled by the newspaper rack to read about someone else’s problems. Usually, I’d claim I was improving my mind, but on that day I wanted to escape it. The “slow recovery” from the Great Recession continued, the journalists wrote. Some scoundrels on Wall Street were being questioned by Congress about the meltdown they’d caused, much too late to reclaim any of the profits. Typical.

          Once my turn came for screen time, I searched the Frizz’s dialogue online, which came back with a similar phrase from “Sailing to Byzantium,” a poem by W.B. Yates. The exact quote was “monuments to my own magnificence,” but I allowed The Frizz some license. Several more of his sayings were also allusions, like “golden bird on a bough,” and “what is past or passing or to come.”

         So I’d proven The Frizz was more schooled than he appeared, but what did that add? The poem seemed to be about an old man who escapes death by going to some mythical place and remaking himself into a statue. A nice fantasy for those of us with nowhere to call home, but hardly proof enough for a criminal case.

        Rather than waste my remaining computer time on quotes, I checked the want ads. I found one lead that would solve all my problems: a gig as night clerk at a chain motel, including a free room. Odds were, I’d have to beat out fifty other guys for the flop, but it represented my best chance in months at escape. The ad said to apply in person.

         In the library’s bathroom mirror I saw a ragged man with rumpled hair and three days of stubble. I practiced some homeless hygiene in the sink—washing my pits and groin, then dunking my head like it was a baptism. All the clothes in my truck had mud on them from being tossed by the cops, so I grabbed a coat someone had left hanging off the back of a chair and told myself it was redistribution of wealth. Then I headed to the motel, hoping I’d beat the other mopes to it.

         The manager gave me an appraising look and asked about my experience. I talked up five years in the service sector, which was true, and omitted my current unemployment, explaining that I’d collected my last paycheck from a failed restaurant. The manager skimmed the rest of my application, then promised to call. Since I didn’t have a phone, I said I’d check back with him in a day and left feeling a pulse of optimism. On the way out, I swiped a couple soaps and a clean towel off the maid’s cart so next time I could improve my presentation.

I wanted to avoid the inevitable: a return to the Warren. I checked my gas gauge, which touched the red line, and debated siphoning a few gallons off some car parked in the shadows, then leaving town.

          Instead, when daylight gave out, I headed back to my only home. A police cruiser idled in my usual spot. Rolo sat in the back seat while two uniforms read him his rights, as if he had any.           “I told you, I never—” Before he could finish, the cops slammed the door.

          Although I could understand Rolo capitalizing on the ill luck of another, I couldn’t imagine him causing it. He may have been a drug user and a former prisoner, but that didn’t make him violent. Truth was, I’d have taken the vic’s shoes and phone too if I’d seen him first. We all did what we had to for survival.

        As the squad car hauled off Rolo, two cops tore down his tent and rolled up his things into a ball, just as they would have in prison. Then they told us to pack up, too.

        “What for?” Al said.

        “This encampment is illegal,” one said.

        “Where are we supposed to go?” Peggy said.

         “You have thirty minutes to clear out.”

         As the others gathered their things, I walked to Gigi, who like me kept all her possessions in a car.

         “What happened?” I said.

         “The stiff’s on life support. May not wake up. They think Rolo robbed and beat him.”

         “But why?”

         “That phone they found in his tent,” she said, “belonged to the stiff. Same one he used to call the cops before he passed out. They say they heard Rolo’s voice in the background.”

          “You don’t believe that?”

         She snorted with disgust.

         “If they got their man, why’re we being evicted?”

         She turned to ensure the cops couldn’t overhear us. “It’s payback for us not cooperating with their so-called investigation.”

         “But nobody knew anything.”

         She leaned into me. “That comatose guy . . . is my ex.”

         She pronounced ex with the same hatred most people do pimp. Although I’d never met him, I’d heard plenty: how he beat her until she fled his house. How she’d adopted two guard dogs to protect herself. How she’d rather die on the street as live under his roof again.

        “You tell the police that?”

         “They oughta know. I called plenty of times after he hit me. They never did a thing about it. Sent me to a shelter for battered women. Except he chased me there. Cops told me the best they could offer was a restraining order, which didn’t restrain anything, just set him off more. They protected him because he’s a rich banker and I was his property.”

          “Rolo knocked him out to protect you?”

         She remained silent, staring into the distance with such intensity that I didn’t ask again.

         Meantimes, I helped the others pack. Typical for him, Mr. Chang took it stoically, eating a peanut butter cup as I stashed his things into the bed of my truck. Then I recalled The Frizz holding up that candy and muttering about “a tattered coat upon a stick.” Up until then, I assumed it was a random quote from the poem, but the way his mind free associated, The Frizz may have been cluing me in. I noted Mr. Chang’s walking stick, which would do plenty of damage if applied to someone’s head, and his old overcoat.

          Then I watched the others. I suspected they all knew what had happened and conspired in keeping quiet. On the streets, we’d all learned that silence is the best response.

         Not that it mattered. The cops had their patsy, an easy one given his record. They weren’t likely to let him go based on a candy wrapper or the ravings of a madman.

         Except we were all being punished. Without The Warren, we’d be forced to wander the streets, subject to nightly harassment and eviction. Or we’d have to find an even more remote squat that not even the cops would patrol.

          Sure, I was mobile and could relocate easily, but what about Mr. Chang or The Frizz? No place would shelter them. I hoped for a return to the rat race of civilization—if I got that job.      Without it, we’d all become tattered coats battered by the wind.

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     David Hagerty has published four novels in the Duncan Cochrane mystery series and more than 40 short stories online and in print, including two in Yellow Mama and half a dozen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. You can read more about him and his work at https://davidhagerty.net. 

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     Kevin D. Duncan was born 1958 in Alton, Illinois where he still resides. He has degrees in Political Science, Classics, and Art & Design. He has been freelancing illustration and cartoons for over 25 years. He has done editorial cartoons and editorial illustration for local and regional newspapers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His award-winning work has appeared in numerous small press zines, e-zines, and he has illustrated a few books.