The Octopus on My Head Read Free

forked over the ten bucks.
    â€œNow we need a phone.” He held out the other hand.
    I looked at Ivy over the tops of my sunglasses. “You don’t have a phone?”
    â€œI don’t have a phone.”
    â€œBut Ivy, they’re giving phones away.”
    â€œWho is?”
    â€œThe Providers, I think they’re called.”
    Ivy dismissed them with a gesture.
    â€œNot to Ivy Pruitt,” I surmised. “Ivy Pruitt can’t get credit.”
    â€œTrue story,” Ivy affirmed. “I don’t regret a thing.”
    I handed him my phone.
    He dialed a number. “It’s being forwarded.” We both heard the three beeps of a pager. “What’s the number for this thing?”
    I told him.
    Ivy tapped it into the keypad and rang off.
    â€œThat’s it?”
    He draped his forearms over the peeling 2x6 that served as the deck’s bannister. “Give it a minute.”
    The heat waves had ceased to issue from the brick chimney. A raven perched on its rim and looked into it. A hearse drove out of the columbarium’s parking lot, doglegged around the northwest corner of the vast cemetery, at the top of Cardoza Street, and disappeared.
    At that corner, in front of the cemetery’s high stone wall, stood a fire department callbox. About five feet high and a very sunfaded red, its column was festooned with heart-shaped Mylar balloons and plastic leis. Two flower pots, each sprouting a red, dessicated poinsetta, stood at its foot, the whole pediment encircled by empty pony bottles, shoulder to shoulder like the posts of a stockade. The balloons, too, were past their prime. Though still listlessly aloft, each was obviously helium-deprived and softening. The strings that tethered them to the post were slack catenaries in the windless afternoon. One, violet and silver, bore scarlet letters outlined in gold glitter that spelled, WE MISS YOU. Wilted metallic fronds, dangling off the fluted post, must have been balloons which had expired completely.
    â€œIt’s a memorial,” Ivy explained. “A kid was gunned down on that corner two weeks ago.”
    â€œFor what?”
    Ivy shook his head. “Gang turf, a bad dope deal, a mistake—who knows? His mother had moved him and herself out of here a few months beforehand, trying to head it off. She went all the way to Vallejo. But the boy got on the bus every day and came back, just like a commuter. He commuted to hang out.” Ivy gestured around us. “It was the only world he knew.”
    â€œHow old was he?”
    â€œSeventeen.”
    â€œYoung.”
    Ivy shook his head. “Not if you’re black and male. He was the third kid in as many months to be murdered within a couple of blocks of here. A fourth victim was an older woman, also African American, who got caught in a crossfire. Thirty rounds in less than a minute. She was climbing the steps to her porch and never knew what hit her. Even though it was broad daylight, nobody else got a scratch, nobody saw it of course, and nobody got caught either. Not only that but she happened to be the same lady who had embarrassed the city into picking up the refrigerators and TVs and couches off the sidewalks around here and towing away all the dead and stolen cars. It took her two or three years. She harangued them into it with petitions, confrontational public meetings and hearings, and by calling the newspapers and who knows what else—the kind of involvement with city hall and the community that nobody else wants to get into. The irony is troubling.” He pointed the phone. “That punk up there might easily have been party to her death. He might just as easily been in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like her. See those bottles? Jack Daniels, Bombay Sapphire, Couvoisier—quality is important. The fellas drink a toast to the dead seventeen-year-old, leave the empty at the foot of the memorial, and go get shot