Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

doing?”
    “She was sleeping in a cardboard box.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Well … as seriously as you can sleep in a cardboard box.”
    Now she was really exasperated. “Why are you making light of this?”
    “Because, ladylove …”
    “Don’t call me that. Not while you’re being an asshole.”
    “Shawna … listen.” Otto’s tone remained calm, maddeningly enough. “I think you’re getting a little ooga-booga about this. I see these people every day, and most of them are seriously loony and dangerous. It’s not as quaint and Dickensian as you think.”
    “Did I say that? Did I say it was quaint and Dickensian?”
    “Okay. Fine. Sorry.” He held his hands up in placid surrender. “Want me to show you where she is?”
    She was surprised by the offer, until she realized the reason for it. “You don’t want me going down there on my own.”
    “That’s right. I don’t.”
    “Okay.” She gave him a half-smile to show that he was back in her good graces. “I can live with that.”
    “When do you wanna go?”
    “When do you think?” she replied.
    T HEY FOUND PARKING ON G ROVE Street, not far from City Hall, then cut across the plaza toward the library, passing the organic garden that Mayor Newsom had installed to demonstrate his support for sustainable agriculture. The rustic split-rail fence around the garden stood in ludicrous contrast to the grim-faced granite buildings in every direction. In the daytime, the plaza struck Shawna as a black-and-white movie; at night, even the shadows seemed to have shadows.
    “What were you doing here, anyway?” she asked Otto.
    “There was a matinee up at the Opera House. Sammy and I were working the crowd outside. We came down to Burger King afterwards.”
    It unsettled her when he spoke of the monkey as if they were a couple, but she never let herself say that. Sammy, after all, was why she had fallen for Otto.
    “By the way,” she said, “they call her Leia. As in Princess Leia.”
    Otto looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh … the woman, you mean?”
    “Yeah. It’s her nickname on the street.”
    “Did she use to wear her hair like that or something?”
    “Who knows?”
    “Well, it’s appropriate.”
    “Why?”
    “Because,” said Otto melodramatically, “I am about to take you to a galaxy far, far away.”
    They followed Grove past the library into the heart of the Tenderloin, entering an extended hellscape of junkies and whores. This was always a shock to Shawna. You would never guess that some of these streets stretched all the way across town to Russian Hill with its cable cars and postcard views of the bay. To make the two-mile journey from there to here was to witness firsthand the gradual degradation of a city’s soul.
    Instinctively, Shawna moved closer to Otto. “I thought you said she was in the Civic Center?”
    “Well … two or three blocks away.” He turned and looked at her earnestly. “Do you wanna call it off?”
    “No. Do you?”
    Otto just smiled dimly and kept walking. Ahead of them, on the corner, was a vacant lot with a low wall of concrete blocks on two sides, presumably to keep people from parking there. To Shawna it looked like a deserted construction site, or maybe the rubble-strewn remains of a demolition. A billboard on a neighboring building depicted the eyes of an elegant dark-skinned woman gazing over the rim of a whiskey glass, with a tagline that read THE NIGHT KNOWS WHAT IT WANTS . The cold white light from the billboard made it easier to spot Leia’s box, but, mercifully, stopped just short of it.
    The box wasn’t huge—refrigerator-size, Shawna guessed. There was certainly room enough for someone to lie down in there, though who that someone might be was currently obscured by a layer of black garbage bags. Shawna stopped about ten feet from the box, wary of frightening the resident, and shot a quick glance at Otto.
    “What should I do?” she whispered.
    He shrugged. “Say hello, I guess. You’re asking me ?”
    Otto was obviously pouting, but she didn’t have time to humor him. She had already noticed several scary-looking knots of men on the other corners. The Orpheum Theatre was just down the street, reassuringly armored in neon, but this was one of those neighborhoods where you knew to stride briskly, eyes fixed straight ahead, if you had somehow made the mistake of passing through. And here they were, stopping.
    “Excuse me,” she called. “Leia?”
    There was no response. The garbage