Free Slide by Gerald A Browne

she’d decided to hell with the rain and for her sanity’s sake let the children go outside to play. Each time they came in soaked to the skin she stripped them and threw sneakers and all into the dryer. As many as four changes a day. Not a bad mother, she told herself .
    Smart too, she thought. If not for her they might be in real trouble now, like those families whose houses were in danger of sliding down. She’d been against getting that house up on Mulholland, no matter how good a buy it was. She had stood her ground and they had stayed where they were: on a street off Beverly Boulevard north of Whittier. The last house on a cul-de-sac. She preferred calling it a cul-de-sac rather than a dead end .
    For one reason “dead end” was too close to the truth. The rear of their lot bordered on the slope of a cemetery. Rose Hills Memorial Park, second in size, statuary and grave sites only to famous Forest Lawn. Fortunately, that part of the so-called park was higher than their house, and the rest of it lay beyond out of view. Anyway, they had become so accustomed to it, even the many bouquets and growing flowers at the graves on the hillside no longer reminded them .
    The clothes dryer began buzzing to let her know it had completed its cycle. At the same time she realized the children were inside, shouting for her. They came into the bedroom, and she was about to scold them for tracking when her daughter said she’d brought a surprise, presented it in her open hand .
    â€œWhere did you get this?”
    â€œFrom the lady.”
    It was a ring. It appeared to be authentic, a round-cut diamond of about five carats flanked by two baguettes .
    â€œWhat lady?”
    They would show her, were eager to show her. They’d had lots more fun playing outside today .
    At the back of the backyard was a coffin .
    An expensive coffin of brushed bronze. Sitting there in the rain. It was open. Tufted white satin inside and what remained of a woman who had been dead ten years. In a white silk crepe dress. The rain had made the material almost transparent. Another ring, this one with a large emerald stone, had fallen down a fingerbone to the tip where it and the tip lay loose .
    Two, three more coffins were partially exposed, slipping out of the saturated earth at the foot of the hill .

8
    Lonnie “Spider” Leaks was in automatic, doing with his body but not with his mind. That way, like a machine, he couldn’t feel low, get bad or anything — just work. Something he had learned to do while in slam.
    His job at the supermarket was lugging boxes of groceries out to people’s cars. It was the second job since he’d been let out of San Quentin three months ago, a year early for ordinary behavior. His parole officer had made him quit the other job at the Bim Bam Car Wash in Balboa. At the car wash Spider had started as a wheel and bumper scrubber inside the conveyor, and because some guys kept not showing up for work he got to be one of the finishing crew that wiped and shined with chamois in the sun and had a chance for tips.
    Then someone at the Bim Bam got busted for booking numbers and horses. Not one of the brothers, either. The white manager.
    Spider’s parole officer, a sixty-some-year-old named Mrs. Graham, wouldn’t stand for Spider being even close to trouble such as that. No matter that Spider had stayed mainly straight, caused no hassles, even passed up some easy chances — she had to lose that job for him and tell him he was better off being a box boy.
    BOX BOY.
    That was what it said after his name on his time card.
    As for things going on, practically everyone there at the supermarket was into some kind of ripoff. A couple of guys in the meat department left every day with five or six pounds of top sirloin or filet mignon wrapped in plastic and taped to their lower legs under their trousers. In the receiving department, some of the clerks intercepted and put whole