Sleep Tight, Shaggy Maggie

Down on Broad Street, the crackheads drift like dirty wraiths through the ruins of their burned out squats and homeless men in baggy jackets push shopping carts full of soda cans past the shattered windows of dead stores. It’s an autumn midnight and the bars are closing, so the hookers lean against chipped brick walls here on the fringes of downtown, one eye out for business and the other out for the cops.

Nights like these, when the river fog rolls in, Shaggy Maggie makes her bed in the lee of the last bus bench on Broad Street, where it crosses Las Posadas Road at the bottom of the hill. Shopping cart pulled up tight against the Plexiglas pane of the covered shelter, she arranges her grocery sacks and trash bags tight around her feet and wraps up snug in layers of tattered blankets. Then she takes a last swig from her whiskey flask and shouts out her goodnights to the stars and the moon and the trees.

Sometimes the crackheads holler back. Sometimes the hookers tuck her in, like a favorite granny, and tiptoe on past. Sometimes Officer Saldana, cruising in his cop car, shines a light into her corner and slides on, satisfied. No matter who or what walks Broad Street in the night, Shaggy Maggie sleeps safe.

Pit Stop and Little Z hit the streets at three in the morning. Newly liberated from a Greyhound bus off the coast, they’ve arrived in Soledad City hungry and sweaty and dead flat broke.

Pit Stop’s cousin’s baby mama moved here from LA last year. He’s got a vague address in his head and a plan to lie low at her place until the heat blows over from that thing down at the beach last week. Little Z tags along because he thinks Pit Stop is grander than God. Everybody needs a groupie.

So they shoulder their backpacks and stretch stiff muscles and set off down the alley behind the bus station. At the far end, the streetlamps of Broad Street hang disembodied in the river fog, curving like ghosts down the slope of Las Posadas Road. At the bottom of the hill, a blob of red and yellow neon advertises Quarter Horse Diner Open All Night.

From behind a dumpster, a voice quavers up.

“Hey boys. Spare a dollar? “

Pit Stop kicks the dumpster so hard it rattles. “ Go to hell, motherfucker.”

The voice trails off muttering. Little Z clutches his backpack against his skinny chest. On the edges of his sight, white shapes flicker, vanishing if he looks straight at them. The fog wraps him like a clammy blanket and chill droplets trail down his neck.

There’s fog in LA too, but it’s a different fog. Friendlier.

Pit Stop marches on. Little Z hustles to catch up. “Hey Pit Stop.” Pit Stop keeps walking.

“Hey.” Something breathes cold into Little Z’s ear. He snags the sleeve of Pit Stop’s sweatshirt. “Listen, Pit Stop.”

Pit Stop rounds on him.“What the hell you want?”

Little Z points to the diner sign. “Maybe, maybe we could go down there and get us some breakfast, huh? Some eggs. I could go for some eggs, with bacon and maybe toast, you know?” Little Z talks fast when he’s nervous. And Pit Stop’s angry eyes make him very nervous. He begins to think Pit Stop doesn’t have a plan after all.

“How we goin to do that? We ain’t got no money.”

“You could, you could, you still got the gun, right?” Little Z dodges a gleaming puddle. His reflection ghosts alongside, wanly reflected in the shattered window of an abandoned wig store. One last mannequin head leans askew in the corner, staring at him with blank white eyes.

Pit Stop seizes him by the collar, shakes him hard. “You shut up, shut up about that. Why you think we’re here? Start wavin a gun, anybody puts two and two together -- if I end up back in County, you are dead meat, understand?”

Little Z understands. Oh yes he does.

An early city bus slips up, headlights slicing through the fog. It glides down the hill like a fish, slowing briefly at the single stop at the bottom. Suddenly illuminated, a heap of rags behind the bus bench stirs, stretches, turns over.

Pit Stop glances at Little Z, who gets the drift. Don’t need a gun to roll a bag lady. Sometimes they got a little money. Maybe something to sell, tucked away under all those tatters. You just never know.

So they ease their way down the hill till they close in, one on each side of the bus shelter.

Reek of whisky and the sharp tang of the streets: the tumble of blankets and sacks curls against the Plexiglas, snoring gently. Pit Stop and Little Z exchange a look.

Then Pit Stop swoops in and grabs a ratty duffel bag from under the sleeper’s head. Right behind him, Little Z seizes a couple of the grocery sacks.

“What you doing?” A shape rears up, dreadlocks flying. “Put that down.”

Pit Stop bolts back up the sidewalk toward the top of the hill. Little Z pelts after him.

“Put that down, I said!” The owner of all those sacks throws off the blankets and heaves herself to her feet. ‘They stealin from me! They stealin from Shaggy Maggie, boys!”

Shaggy Maggie begins to howl. It’s a howl like you might hear from wild things in the deep night, a howl that carries all the way to the moon, a howl that wraps around Pit Stop and Little Z like the sullen fog of Soledad City.

Halfway up the hill, Pit Stop stumbles on a crack in the sidewalk and bangs into Little Z. Tripped up, Little Z careens into a tree dedicated to the beautification of the Posadas district. The duffel bag in Pit Stop’s hands comes to squirming life; the grocery bag clutched against Little Z’s skinny ribs twitches like it’s full of angry cats.

And from the doorways and the alleys, from behind the dumpsters and up from under the manhole covers on Broad Street, Maggie’s boys come creeping: motley shapes, some dark, some light, some with nothing but holes where eyes should be and others with way too many eyes at all. They move like the fog in the wind, short and tall, most on two legs, some on four, blocking the way to the top of Las Posadas Hill.

Pit Stop and Little Z slow down. Maggie’s boys drift silently, circling.

“They ain’t real,” Pit Stop says. “Go!”

A hand, shifty and chill as the Soledad night, falls on the nape of Little Z’s neck. The circle closes. He can smell them now; scents of standing water and rust, piss and rotting wood.

“Yeah,” he tells Pit Stop. “They is.”

Shuffle and slap of feet on the sidewalk: Shaggy Maggie pushes through the gathering army of her boys. Some giggle; others growl. But they all move aside to let Shaggy Maggie pass.

Shaggy Maggie's dreadlocks bristle like horns and there’s a grin on her smudgy face. She gently plucks her grocery bags from under Little Z’s arm, hooks the duffel bag out of Pit Stop’s nerveless fingers. “Come here, babies,” she tells the sacks. “Come to Mama.”

The sacks squirm and quiver. Something in the duffel bag commences a low-pitched hum. Shaggy Maggie strokes the sacks with a tender hand and smiles at her boys. Then she looks at Pit Stop and Little Z.

“They’s real, for sure,” she tells them. “And they’s hungry.”

Then Shaggy Maggie walks slowly back down the hill toward the bus stop, crooning to her grocery sacks.

The shadow boys eddy closer, closing the circle around Pit Stop and Little Z. When the screaming starts, nobody pokes out a head to see; this is Broad Street, after all.

These Soledad nights, Shaggy Maggie sleeps safe behind the bus bench with her bags snuggled like kittens beside her. The crackheads wish her a good night and the hookers tuck the blankets up. Officer Saldana drives on by.

You don’t mess with Shaggy Maggie.

Behind the Scenes: "Sleep Tight, Shaggy Maggie" is another of the stories inspired by my years of crisscrossing Los Angeles at strange hours, travelling through desolate inner city streets filled with fog and desperate souls. Shaggy Maggie herself was inspired by a woman I used to see sleeping behind a bus stop on Lincoln Boulevard, wrapped up in blankets against the chill. But of course in the fictional Soledad City there's magic involved.