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snakes and mean-looking crocodiles.
Lucy loved watching the animals. She always had, ever since she was little.
Some of them didn't look as if they ought to live on Earth at all. If a hippo
wasn't the most ridiculous thing in the world, what was?
Everyone once in a while, Lucy wondered about that a little. When a hippo
yawned, its tusks didn't look ridiculous at all. They looked ready for
trouble.
Ivy and other plants crawled all over the enclosures and up the slopes behind
them. Ivy was a perfect plant for San Francisco. Winters hardly ever got below
freezing, so the stuff never died back. It just grew and grew and grew.
Gulls wheeled overhead. Other birds hopped and flew in and out of the ivy:
little brown sparrows, screeching jays with heads of blue so dark it was
almost black, hummingbirds whose backs were rusty and green. The hummingbirds
mostly ignored the others except the jays, which they didn't like. But they
went after one another like fighter planes. They zoomed and darted and made
angry buzzing noises. Once Lucy saw two of them collide in midair with a sound
like a fist smacking into an open hand. She'd had to pay a quarter to get in,
but they put on their show for free.
She wondered why they quarreled so much. What did hummingbirds have to fight
about? Bugs? Nectar?
Lady hummingbirds? Whatever it was, it didn't seem like enough. They should
have just been pretty and peaceful.
She laughed. To a hummingbird, the things she worried about would have seemed
silly, too. Money? The
Triads? Curious Notions? No, none of them would have made any sense to a
bad-tempered little bird.
Sometimes she wished they didn't make any sense to her, either. Some of them
didn't, in fact. And those were the ones she wished she knew more about! A
hummingbird wouldn't have understood that at all. Lucy didn't fully herself.
One sunny afternoon, she splurged on a wiener. Her mother would click her
tongue between her teeth at the dime gone forever. Lucy sniffed. Didn't her
raise entitle her to a little fun? She knew what Mother would say. She'd say
Father's time in jail had cost so much, they still had to watch every penny to
say nothing of dimes.
Lucy found herself telling Peggy a little about Paul Gomes. "I like him," she
said, "but he's so strange."
"Boys can be like that," Peggy said, which wasn't the kind of sympathy Lucy
wanted. Peggy had a boyfriend, and thought Lucy needed one, too. Lucy wasn't
so sure. Didn't she have troubles enough? She didn't think she liked Paul that
way, anyhow . . . and she decided she'd probably made a mistake saying
anything at all to Peggy.
While her friend gave her advice she didn't much want, she finished the
wiener. That, she enjoyed. If you couldn't even have a wiener once in a while,
what kind of a life was that? But she knew what kind of life that was. It was
the kind people only a little un-luckier than she was had to live. It was the
kind she would have had to live, too, if the Feldgendarmerie hadn't let Father
out of jail.
That they had still amazed her. What kind of connections did Paul and his
father have? Lucy would have tried to learn that for the Triads in a minute.
He'd mentioned Fatty Horvath and that city lawyer. Who else?
Could Stanley Hsu and his friends have got Father out? Maybe. Some of them
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were important people. But would they have bothered? She doubted it not from
what she'd seen of Mr. Lee.
"Thirty-third Avenue," Lucy muttered.
"What?" Peggy said.
"Nothing." Lucy couldn't, wouldn't, believe Paul had grown up in the heart of
the Sunset District. He would
have been a different person. He would have been a different kind of person.
If he'd grown up in the
Sunset District, it was a different Sunset District from the one she'd always
known.
She laughed at herself. That was absurd, and she knew it. How could there be
more than one Sunset
District? It was like imagining more than one San Francisco. Lucy laughed
again. If she could imagine any
San Francisco at all, what would it be like? It would be a place where people
could make more than eight dollars a week more than fifteen dollars a week,
too. It would be a place where Feldgendarmerie men with Alsatians couldn't
poke their noses in wherever and whenever they wanted to. It would be a place
where the gadgets Curious Notions sold weren't anything special. It would be a
place where anybody everybody could afford gadgets like that.
What kind of Sunset District would a San Francisco like that have? One nicer
than the tough, grimy horror that held Thirty-third Avenue here? One that was
nice enough to have turned out somebody like Paul
Gomes?
Lucy laughed one more time. You're crazy, she said to herself. A sparrow
hopping around by her feet looked up at her. It didn't think she was crazy. It
just wanted a piece of her bun. She tossed down a few crumbs. The little bird
got one. More sparrows and pigeons nabbed the rest.
But even though Lucy kept laughing, she kept thinking hard, too. Another San
Francisco made more sense the longer she looked at the idea. It would explain
how she'd felt Paul was telling the truth and lying at the same time when he
said he'd grown up here. It would also explain how Curious Notions got curious
things.
Simple they just came from that other San Francisco.
The golden city on lots of hills, she thought. Had the Triads had the same
idea? Was that why Stanley Hsu had told her to ask Paul where he was from? The
notion would explain everything except how Paul and his father and everything
in Curious Notions got to this San Francisco, to everyday, ordinary San
Francisco.
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