Sleep Tight,Shaggy Maggie

Jean McKinney

Sleep Tight, Shaggy Maggie

a Soledad City story

Jean McKinney

Copyright 2016 all rights reserved

Luna Blue Studios

Sleep Tight, Shaggy Maggie

Down on Broad Street, the crackheads drift like dirty wraiths through the ruins of

their burned out squats. In the shadows deep with midnight the prostitutes lean against

chipped brick walls, one eye out for business and the other out for the cops.

Down on Broad Street, Shaggy Maggie makes her bed in the lee of the bus

bench at the bottom of Los Posadas 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 and wraps up tight 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 Hill. At

the bottom of the hill, a blob of red and yellow neon advertises Red’s Diner Open All

Night.

From behind a dumpster, shadows rustle. 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 them 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 down the hill. “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 glass panes of

abandoned storefronts.

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 the slammer, 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 swoops in, grabs a ratty duffel bag from under the sleeper’s tobogganed

head. Little Z seizes a couple of the grocery sacks.

“What you doing?” The bag lady 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 bag lady 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.

Pit Stop stumbles on a crack in the sidewalk; Little Z careens into a tree

dedicated to the beautification of Soledad. The duffel bag in Pit Stop’s hands comes to

squirming life; the grocery bag clutched against Little Z’s skinny ribs twitches like 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, nothing but holes where eyes should be. 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.

“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. Her dreadlocks bristle like horns and there’s a grin on her

smudgy face.

Shaggy Maggie 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 up at her boys..

Then she looks at Pit Stop and Little Z.

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

The shadow boys shift and eddy closer, closing the circle. Some giggle; others

growl. But they shift aside to let Shaggy Maggie pass.

Shaggy Maggie walks slowly back down Las Posadas, crooning to her grocery

sacks. 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. You don’t mess with Shaggy Maggie.

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Luna Blue Studios 2016