Bullies by Alex Abramovich

Author:Alex Abramovich
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429949064
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Dava’s friend Pilar ended up in the hospital, her scalp full of surgical staples. Trevor spent the next few days looking for her assailant, riding all over town, hassling street people, barflies, low-level criminals. No one he’d talked to would give the man up.

“I really did think that I’d find him,” he said the next time I saw him. We were at Mama Buzz, a café close to the clubhouse that was a regular pit stop on Trevor’s afternoon circuits. Trevor’s friend Billy was working the counter. “I was going to break the guy’s legs,” Trevor said.

Billy said, “Well, we can take care of the bus stop.”

Billy lived a few blocks up the avenue, in an apartment that looked down directly on the bus stop where Dava and Pilar had been mugged. He knew for a fact that drug dealers sold heroin out from under the bus stop’s glass awning and thought that they also sold speed, and he’d grown used to boozehounds and addicts who shuffled back and forth between the two shops that bookended the stop—Saigon Market, which sold beer and lottery tickets but not liquor, and the Telegraph Quality Market, which sold liquor and cigarettes but not lottery tickets. He’d see them pissing on the bus stop bench, puking, or passing out on it. Every so often he’d witnessed a mugging, a fistfight, or something worse. He’d called the police several times, but the bus stop fell under AC Transit’s jurisdiction—there was nothing the police would do—and AC Transit would always give him the runaround.

“The cops don’t like that bus stop themselves,” Billy said. “The last time I called them, they told me flat-out, ‘Why don’t you just drive a car into it?’”

Trevor leaned over the counter and lowered his voice. “We could do that,” he said. “We could get a truck, go for total destruction. Or, we could try area denial.”

“Put honey, or tar, on the bench,” said Billy.

“Roofing tar would be good.”

“Put tar on the bench and tacks in the roofing tar.”

“Spray bear spray all over the bus stop.”

“What’s bear spray?” I asked.

“Bear spray would stink up the block.”

“Get six guys with sledgehammers, smash it to shit.”

“Weld bars to the outside. Make people crawl to hang out in there.”

“Ten guys with sledgehammers.”

“Smash it to shit.”

“Or steal it. Load the thing onto a flatbed. Dump it off of the Berkeley pier.”

In the end, Trevor decided to lift the bus stop off its foundation, smash it, and leave it out in the street.

“I like it,” said Billy. “It’s simple.”

“It’ll be out there for months,” Trevor said.

That night, when the Ruby Room closed, Trevor met Billy and four other friends at the bus stop. The next day, he texted me. “All good,” he wrote. But when I drove down to meet him at Mama Buzz, I passed the markets and saw a new bus stop, standing right where the old one had been.

Trevor and Billy were out on the sidewalk outside the café. Billy had a cigarette going.

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