The dark undergrowth surrounding them was swarming with movement and whispers, with desperate accolades and ejaculations of fear.
"Where do you want to go?" Reuben asked.
The man pointed to the darkness beyond the low-hanging oaks. Reuben lifted him and carried him under the low boughs. The earth was dry and fragrant here. The matted vines formed veils. A shack of broken boards and tarpaper hung amid the swallowing ivy and giant shuddering ferns. Reuben put the man down on his nest of rags and woolen blankets. He shrank back amid the bundles that surrounded him, pulling the covers up to his neck.
The scent of dusty cloth and whiskey filled the little enclosure. The scent of raw earth surrounded them, of wet and glistening green things, of tiny animals burrowing in the dark. Reuben pulled away as if the little man-made space were a form of trap.
He moved off, quickly, taking to the sturdy treetops, arms reaching for one limb after another, as the forest grew thicker, moving back towards the dim yellow lights of Stanyan Street with its steady traffic hissing on the asphalt along the eastern border of the world of Golden Gate Park.
He seemed to fly across the breadth of the street, into the soaring eucalyptus trees of the Panhandle, the narrow arm of the park that went east.
He traveled as high as he could in the giant weedlike eucalyptus, breathing the strange bittersweet scent of their long thin pale leaves. He followed the ribbon of park, almost singing aloud as he moved from giant tree to giant tree with fluid movements, and then he made for the roofs of the Victorians that climbed the Masonic Street hill.
Who could see him in the darkness? No one. The rain was his friend. He went up over the slippery roof tiles with no hesitation and found himself traveling to the blackness of yet another small woodland - Buena Vista Park.
Out of the low simmering melee that was the voices, he picked out another despairing plea. "To die, I want to die. Kill me. I want to die."
Only it wasn,t spoken aloud; it was the drumbeat behind the moans and cries he heard that were beneath or beyond language.
He landed on the roof above the victim, high atop a grand four-story mansion that bordered the steep hill leading up to the little park. Down the front of the house, he made his way, clutching the pipes and ledges, until he saw through the window the ugly spectacle of an old woman, skin and bones and bleeding sores, tied to a brass bed. Her pink scalp shone beneath her thin hanks of gray hair in the light of one small lamp.
Before her on the tray was a plate with a steaming pile of human feces, and the hunched figure of a young woman across from her held out a spoon of the loathsome mess, pressing it to the old woman,s lips. The old woman shuddered and was near to fainting. Stench of filth, stench of evil, stench of cruelty. The young woman sang her bitter taunts.
"You never fed me anything but slop in all your life, you think you will not pay for it now?"
Reuben shattered the mullions and the panes as he broke into the room.
The young woman screamed and backed away from the bed. Her face was full of rage.
He bore down on her as she scrambled to pull a gun from a drawer.
The shot rang out, deafening him for one split second, and he felt the pain in his shoulder, sharp, ugly, disabling, but at once, he moved beyond it, a deep growl rising out of him as he snatched her up, the gun falling, and slammed her into the plaster wall. Her head broke the plaster; he felt the life go out of her, the curses dying in her throat.
In a snarling frenzy, he hurled her through the broken window. He heard the body strike the paving of the street.
For a long second he stood there, waiting for the pain to return, but the pain didn,t return. There was nothing there but pulsing warmth.
He moved towards the wraithlike figure that was tied with tape and bandages to the brass headboard. Carefully he ripped loose her fetters.
She had her thin face turned to one side. "Hail Mary, full of grace," she prayed in a dry, whistling whisper, "the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus."