The Hitchhiking Effect

Balance-1

BALANCEAt 6:55 a.m., when Declan Mulcahy first stepped out onto O’Farrell Street from his apartment building, the Tenderloin of San Francisco appeared sunny and warm, but uncharacteristically deserted and quiet—a brief lull between changing shifts. Most of the dealers, junkies, and hookers had called it a night; the homeless were still asleep in their cardboard tents somewhere; and the neighborhood street cops were all up at Happy Donuts doing police work.

Declan walked a block up the street from his apartment and met only an old Asian lady coming from the opposite direction, pulling a little red wagon stacked with two baskets of dirty clothes, obviously headed for the nearby You Do It Laundromat. He crossed the street and saw one other person, a black dude waiting for the Korean’s grocery store to open. He was about Declan’s age, late twenties to early thirties, wearing dreadlocks and frayed camouflage utilities—no name tag or unit designation; only the faded Army patch remained intact over his heart. Declan had seen him around in the last month or so, often leaving the Korean’s with a small brown sack. Sometimes he wondered if the black guy had been in the Storm, too? But he never asked, only nodded, like today.

Actually, Declan was wound pretty tight this morning: up most of the night, his mouth almost too dry to ask anything, his underarms and crotch gritty and damp with clammy sweat. He sniffed, reminded that sweat smelled different depending on the type—work sweat had kind of a neutral odor, mildly offensive at worst; s*x sweat lingered on you, smelled good, especially when mixed with traces of perfume; booze or dope sweat the morning after had a stale, nauseating smell; but the absolute worst smell of all was nervous-fear sweat—sharp, sour, and biting. Right now the sharp stink was flaring his nostrils, making them itch.

He rubbed his nose, sucked in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and centered for a moment to settle his nerves. Then, at 7 sharp, Declan followed the guy in Army cams into the store.

Mr. Pak himself had opened the front door and stepped back behind the service counter. He bowed politely to his two early-morning customers in his self-deprecating way—an old-world mannerism that neither of his teenaged children practiced, both growing up on the mean streets of the ’Loin, attending local public schools.

Declan nodded back, wandered over to the video machine, and waited impatiently for the black dude to pick out his Old English forty-ouncer from the drink box, pay, and get the f**k out of the grocery. Then it would be only Mr. Pak, alone in the store, his two kids either in back where goods were stored or in the family flat upstairs getting ready for high school.

Declan slipped to the back of the store and took a quick peek through a round window in the swinging door leading to the storage area. The boy was back there, occupied with cutting open cases of various canned items. Declan tilted his head, listened intently, and could just make out the girl moving around upstairs. The entire family was on the premises and accounted for at this early hour, just as planned. Yes, indeed.

After the black dude carefully counted his change, twice, and finally left the store with his brown bag, Declan stepped up to the counter.

The middle-aged Korean grocer looked at him curiously and asked in accented English, “You no find something…?”

Declan shook his head, closed his eyes, and concentrated…Mr. Pak, you know the reason I am here, right? he thought. Then he blinked, steeled himself, reached under his dark green USF sweatshirt, and slipped the recently purchased Colt Python .357 out of the front of his Levi’s.

At first Mr. Pak nodded and smiled, as if answering Declan’s silent question; then the smile froze on his face and his eyes widened when he spotted the gun. Both hands flew up in a defensive stop gesture, as he said in a shaky voice, “You no stealy-boy. Why you do this?”

Declan didn’t answer, as time, movement, and his thinking seemed to alter dramatically into super-slow motion…On a pre-programmed kind of autopilot, he gently squeezed the handgun’s trigger.

The gunshot made a sharp, high-pitched whine, characteristic of a .357, shattering the stillness in the store, the sudden, sharp sound actually making Declan’s ear drums vibrate painfully. He hadn’t anticipated this trait of the .357 and had neglected to use cotton earplugs. He ground his teeth against the pain.

The Korean grocer was tumbling backward into the wall behind the checkout counter, a crimson flower slowly appearing over his right eye, as he finally slid inelegantly to the floor.

“Papa…Papa!” a voice screamed to Declan’s far left, the teenage daughter frozen on the bottom step of the staircase leading to the family flat upstairs. She held her hands up to either side of her round face, as if holding her head on her shoulders, a shocked, disbelieving expression glazing her dark eyes.

Swinging his gun hand slowly around in her direction, Declan squeezed the .357’s trigger again…The round hit the young woman in the chest.

Unlike her father, she fell forward facedown, after her right leg buckled and slipped off the last step. Declan watched as a thick pool of blood spread out from the upper body of the young woman.

For a brief moment he closed his eyes, feeling time and place slipping away from his mental grasp, like so many other times in the last few years…felt himself pulled back to the Storm, the night his Force Recon unit was surprised and almost wiped out under a thundering barrage of friendly rocket fire—

“No,” Declan whispered hoarsely, blinking and resisting the pull of the past and reliving the pyrotechnic horror show again.

Turning his back on the fallen father and daughter, Declan glimpsed a frightened face in the round window of the door at the rear of the store. Still moving in slow motion, he took five giant steps down the nearest aisle and pushed the storage room door open with his free hand, pointing inside with the Colt.

The boy was trying to escape, bounding slowly up and down, heading for a rear exit into the alley behind the store. But Declan’s third shot hit him in the lower back, sprawling the teenager forward onto all fours, a red stain spreading across the back of his white T-shirt. Legs useless, the boy still struggled for a moment or two toward the alley exit, pulling himself along the floor with his arms in a kind of awkward swimming motion. Making little progress, he looked back over his shoulder, his face a grimace of pain, and said something. But it looked like only lip-synching, because by now Declan was completely deafened by the three high-pitched blasts from his .357. He moved alongside the boy, leaned over, and gently placed the weapon at the back of the young Korean’s head. Then he fired a fourth time, mercifully ending the teenager’s agony.

The operation was over, mission completed. Probably less than two minutes. Declan slipped the weapon back under his sweatshirt, down into the front of his Levi’s.

Then, weak-kneed and shaking slightly, he managed to make it to a sink in the corner of the storeroom. He expected to throw up, like after the slaughter of his unit during the Storm, but he was only slightly nauseated. He used his finger and gagged forcefully twice, managing only to make his eyes water heavily. He should feel bad, feel some remorse for the Pak family, who had always been polite and helpful; kind, even…No, he chastised himself, you can’t think like that. They were, all three, volunteers, helping to counteract the Law of Catastrophic Isostasy.

Sometime shortly after the last shot, Declan’s thinking and perception sped back up to real time. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, took a deep breath, washed his face with cool water, and straightened up from the sink, the ringing in his ears subsiding.

Then Declan pushed the swinging door back into the store, at about the same time that a neighborhood bag lady shuffled in the front door and looked around, frowning angrily. “Say, boy, where’s that ole Gung Ho or one of ’em young’ns? I needs a coffee, bad, y’all unnerstan what I’m sayin’?”

Declan shrugged, turning his face down and away as he pushed by the impatient old woman on the way to the street, mumbling, “Dunno.”

He crossed O’Farrell, looked anxiously back over his shoulder once, realized no one was following, and hurried down the block back to his building, the street still relatively empty of pedestrians and traffic. Everything had gone real smooth, according to plan. Yes, indeed.

Inside his studio apartment, Declan glanced around cautiously. The tiny room, sparsely furnished, appeared undisturbed, everything neat and in order. He stepped toward the corner where he had put a chipped desk his social worker had given him and realigned the three pencils parallel with the edge of a writing pad. Yes, everything was neat, simple; just like his room had been at the V.A. Hospital in Martinez. Except there, he had to go into the dayroom to see TV. Here in his apartment, Declan sat down on his one folding chair and stared at the portable black-and-white with rabbit ears, centered on a slightly tilted card table in the far corner, near the window looking out on O’Farrell. But he didn’t turn on the TV, just stared intently at the blank gray screen and waited patiently—a skill he’d developed in the dayroom during his stays at Martinez over the years.

After a few minutes a figure materialized on the screen, a woman looking just like the blindfolded statue down at the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant Street. Only now the scales held by the TV Justice were balanced evenly.

Declan sighed deeply with relief.

At that moment a feminine voice in his head announced, You did very well, Declan Mulcahy. Very well indeed, considering it was your first assignment. I am quite impressed by your effective and timely performance. But, to validate to yourself that we have indeed counteracted the Law of Catastrophic Isostasy, please peruse the San Francisco Chronicle tomorrow morning, noting the complete absence of any reported disasters.

Declan nodded and smiled as Justice faded from the blank screen. Yes, he promised himself, I will definitely check the newspaper tomorrow.

Early the next morning, Declan walked up O’Farrell, glancing nervously across the street as he passed the Korean grocery, roped off now with SFPD yellow crime scene tape; quite a few cops still on the scene, talking to pedestrians up and down both sides of the street. And a TV van from Channel 7 was set up over there too. It looked like that Melendez lady talking into the camera. But none of the policemen seemed the least bit interested in stopping Declan, asking him questions. Apparently they hadn’t interviewed the bag lady, or maybe she wasn’t able to ID him. Either way, he breathed easier and walked quickly past the cops.

Declan continued two blocks up to the corner of Jones and crossed over to Homeboys, a liquor store, to buy a Chronicle.

Back out on the street, Declan anxiously thumbed through the newspaper…No Oklahoma City bombings, no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no tornados, no floods, not even a thunderstorm reported in the Midwest. His held breath trickled out across his dry lips. The voice in his head, the Lady Justice, had been right. The intervention had definitely worked; they had managed to keep the scales balanced.

Jacked up by the results of the successful covert operation, Declan turned to head back home, grinning at the black dude wearing the Army cams, who was apparently coming in to get his morning taste of Old English up here, now that the Korean was out of business.

The guy nodded and spoke as he passed Declan entering the liquor store, “Whassup, dude?”

Declan didn’t answer, surprised by the verbal greeting. First time in a month or so of exchanging nods. He strolled back on down O’Farrell, the Chronicle tucked under his arm.

Back in his tiny apartment, Declan went through the newspaper page by page more carefully, making sure he hadn’t missed something. But he’d been right the first time. No disasters, man-made or natural, reported anywhere across the country. He smiled to himself, feeling pretty good.