Low Life Read Free Page B

Austin, Texas, police
station when he was only three months old – used to smoke Camel Filters and often exhaled through his nostrils. When he was a small boy he thought it was the coolest thing in the world, how
someone could take smoke into his mouth and exhale it through his nose. It seemed like it must be some kind of magic.
    He continued walking south. He made it only seven steps before something terrible happened.
    It began with someone saying, ‘You got the time?’ But not to him. The voice came from across the street. Simon looked over there and saw a tall guy with a neck tattoo standing only a
couple of feet from an old man wearing a moth-eaten yellow cardigan.
    ‘Let me see,’ the old man said. He had a German accent, his voice thin and reedy.
    He pushed back the left sleeve of his cardigan, revealing a silver watch which glistened in what was left of the light. He squinted at the numbers, pulling his head away from his own
outstretched arm, apparently far-sighted and without his glasses.
    ‘I think it’s about—’
    Two other men stepped out of the shadows of a brick apartment building – one with a Dodgers cap on his head, the other’s bald pate slick as a polished bowling ball – grabbed
the old man’s arms from behind and started pounding at his kidneys. He cried out once or twice, but then his breath must have been gone because after that all he managed were sad little
grunts. His legs gave, knees buckling, but the other men held him up and continued to punch at him for a while, his feet dragging on the concrete beneath him as he was punched and jostled, making
quiet scuffling sounds like whispers. Then they emptied his pockets of a billfold, removed his watch, and let him crumple to the sidewalk, let him simply fold on top of himself. The guy with the
neck tattoo gave him three more kicks to the gut, and then said to one of the others, ‘Get his shoes. I can wear ’em to church.’
    ‘Get ’em yourself if you want ’em. They’re not my size.’
    The guy with the neck tattoo cursed, ‘Lazy bastard,’ and then pulled the shoes off the old man’s feet, revealing plaid yellow socks that matched the cardigan.
    ‘Hey,’ Simon said, after snapping out of his stunned silence. ‘What are you guys doing?’
    But they weren’t doing anything. They’d finished.
    ‘You want some too?’ the bald one said.
    ‘No, thank you.’
    ‘Forget about him,’ said the one with the neck tattoo.
    ‘It can be a two-for-one night.’
    ‘No. Fuck him. I’m hungry. Let’s get a taco.’
    ‘You lucked out this time, fucker!’
    They turned and walked away from there. Simon stood motionless a moment or two longer – wanting to make sure they weren’t going to return – and then jogged across the street to
where the old man lay motionless.
    He knelt down – cigarette dangling from his dry lips, smoke wafting into his eyes, making them water – and felt for a pulse. He felt nothing. If ever a pulse had been there, it was
in the wind now. The old man was dead.
    When he reached Wilshire he found a pay phone, a small metal box set against a brick wall, and called the police. He did not want to call from his home telephone because he did not want the
police to show up and question him for hours about something that had lasted thirty seconds. He told the woman who answered that he had witnessed a mugging. Three men had accosted an old man with a
German accent. He told her where it had happened and described the three men as well as he could given the distance and the dim light. He told her that the old man was dead. When the woman asked
him his name he simply hung up and walked away.
    He walked through the empty lobby and up the creaky stairs and across the leopard-spotted corridor floor to his apartment. He could hear the Korean couple four doors down
yelling at each other (though he couldn’t understand them), and somewhere else nearby someone was watching a situation comedy which kept