USA Noir Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

by Johnny Temple

  “We gotta know who our brother is if He expects us to be keeping him, don’t we, Church? You gotta answer soon if You expect me to look out for him on our way to Your bosom. I’m gon listen to what You tell me, whatever it might be, Lord, but You gotta tell me something soon. We had a talk, me and the Lord. Know how I tell y’all bout getting down on humble knees and praying to the Most High for guidance, and mercy, and deliverance for the wicked? This time I got down to pray and asked Him for an answer, Church. Understanding’s what I was after. Do y’all hear me?”

  “Amen, Reverend,” the first balcony shouts, honey mamma Eva louder than all the rest, purple shame gone from her now. “We hear ya. Go head on.”

  “But Church, in His benevolent wisdom, I’m still waiting out an explanation from on High, Church. It’s one of them mysteries; Lord puts em down here for us sometimes, in this maze of concrete and glass. Lays rhyming riddles in the cracks of our lives. Like when He sent His son into the shadow of darkness to withstand the temptation of Beelzebub, Church—y’all remember that? Why’d He put His One Son through such tribulation? He don’t never give us no questions we can’t handle though, Church. Never an answer that’ll break us.”

  “Glory, ah-ley-lu-ya,” the woman says down below before hobbling into her pew.

  “He left me to think on it, amidst all this wicked darkness in the city Gomorrah. I sought for understanding, and I waited patient, Church. Is my brother the hustlers and the pimps and whores and crooks and killers scampering about like dark rats—is my brother Teddy Mann? Jesus the Son Himself kept even the most vile sinner close to Him as He spread the word of His coming. But that was back before Satan took over the living Earth and the minds of the lost. Lord didn’t have to think on pandemic pestilence and Tech-Nines and poison powders in the mail and flaming terror wielded by the lost. Them Romans overran Judah long before Satan swallowed the minds of the wicked, you see. Not like now—we gotta be cautious on the Mount today. It’s a good day for fellowshipping, yes it is, long as we stay cautious, Church. Y’all still with me?”

  “Amen!”

  Reverend Jack snatches the microphone from its stand and slides his wiggling Stacey Adams from the podium to spin inside the microphone cord’s electric circle, and my camera follows him just below us, broadcasting Reverend’s jig to the four corners and up above, too. The crusty-faced boy jumps wood pew to not-so-plush balcony carpet, and sweet Eva’s face turns sun-kissed as she applauds, and the balcony folk praise him on high. I try to listen still. I’m patient as the flock, as the reverend beseeches us to be. No matter I may be one of those gypsy cab Jews with loss and confusion beating against my stolen holy book. Patient, because if Jesus came now I know he’d be a gold-medallion cabbie, taking folk where they asked to go because that’s the job script, just waiting for his chance to save them from their requested destination. Church, don’t you know that gypsy-cabbie Jesus would catch the lost way switching about those passengers’ eye holes long before the ride’s end?

  “It’s time for a cleansing, Church—a rapture—time for us to start preparing the path. As He prepped the way for us into His Father’s Kingdom by shedding His own blood. We, brothers and sisters, must shed wickedness, so the city is purified for His coming. He’s riding in on that pearl white horse of His, come again to destroy the most Wicked One and deliver His peace unto the chosen. Well. Y’all know I got mercy in me, Church, y’all know it—we gon go out there and give the wicked and the lost their fair chance with the two-step test. Those that pass, we gon keep them and wait for Him to ride on to the Mount and deliver us together. The rest of them, Church? Old preachers used to talk about forsaking immoral means on the way to righteousness. But when the ends we preparing for is His return, Church, I can’t think of no means that qualify as immoral. Slick-tongued serpent lives a long, lavish life, if y’all let him do it. But it’s time for us to go bout changing this city, getting it ready, Church. Time for lies and false righteousness and double-dealing and back-sliding and all such wickedness to be cast down from the Mount and out of the city, so we can start to make a way for salvation. Y’all hear me?”

  “I hear you,” I say, as Reverend’s come to his main point in these tiny ears of mine. The answer rains with the heel stomping and the skin-pounding drum sergeant’s celebration. Honey mamma Eva sings alleluia and jumps on the red carpet like the child in Row A, and she claps those pretty hands together, more than going through motions now.

  The Reverend steps further left of the podium in the big movie screens, spinning and sliding and whirling without ever touching the cord that connects him to sound. He chants into the mic as clean sweat pours free along his brow, and the black angels sing with him. “Celebrate the Good News. Celebrate the Good News.” Mount Calvary shakes with the power of His glory, and I know the path, Church.

  Celebrate the Good News.

  I walk toward the balcony ledge once, twice, until my waist bounces against drywall and the Good News’ steel does feel so very mighty. Reverend Jack tells the truth about this, so very mighty, this message gripped in the left hand. Put it between his gray-black eyes, and the Mount is silent once again. Miracles do abound. Flock’s quiet enough even for the reading of the Word hidden against my chest. Save for this bouncing boy screaming out because he ain’t ready for the News like he thought he was gonna be when it was delivered all funked up in charcoal and war fatigue drummer skins and rhythm guitar strum, and those sweet black angel hymns. When it comes in silence, the Good News tears righteousness from the child until his eyes fill with yellow rot like mine. He is as lost as I was lost.

  Underneath this obnoxious fear, the sound of pearl hooves sound near. Klump. Ku-lump. Since the drum sergeant must’ve lost his sticks, let the Good Lord’s pony keep the rhythm for you. These boys is just scared is all, Church—don’t pay them mind. Just ain’t used to Good News without screaming in exaltation, alleluia; so feel their trepidation, amen.

  I want to look over my shoulder at Eva, feast upon her glory one last time. Finest thing to ever set foot on Mount Calvary since they strung Him to that tree and drove in the spikes. Since the Lord called eminent domain over our salvation for the price of His Own Son’s blood. Can’t look back there though, for Teddy Mann’s black steel has got me—and it’s throbbing in its hot might, shining and reflecting the gray in Reverend Jack’s movie screen eyes. I’ve never seen a yellow testifier with pupils this color; bet they never seen a Black Jew with eyes rotted yellow neither. Wicked City.

  I let go the Good News’ truth blasts, one, two, three times. For Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, though my real religion tells me to only believe in the First. Church, you hear this boy screaming wild still?

  All the black angels run down from the bandstand. One of them, the curly-headed Alabama queer who bit into thick lips as Reverend damned the sodomites last month, he dashes to the podium in time to catch Reverend before his head’s fallen from the circle, and this black angel cries as sacred life spills to turn the choir robe a darker red than Mount Calvary’s carpet. Purple-crimson sea to swallow the main point in whole.

  Celebrate the Good News, and hold on to it tight, Church, cause the wicked will make one last stand on this good day for fellowshipping, stand against the Mount until He comes to vanquish them. Yes, they must. Says so at the end of their holy book.

  Before Eva turns away from the two-step test, I swear she shines that sugar-stained smile down my way. Still no shame in her glorious face. Honey mamma smiles and runs off to the darkness before the steps, going through glorious motions again with most of the rest. She runs quivering hips from me, Church, and my Down Deep gabardines soak wet at the crotch. The church has fallen from the Mount, and the mighty temple rises once more.

  “Quit your screaming now, boy,” I say. “Wanna hear the hooves coming near. That’s the Holy Ghost almost in me.”

  Deacon Nate’s baritone sounds down in Row Two. “It’s him, that black Satan, Moral,” he yells. “Good Lord of Mercy, Church, put him
down now!”

  The wicked do come for me, just like in their Book. But they ain’t swift as the Holy Ghost or this blazing white horse riding in from Galilee.

  I leap into their path. “Praise you in me, all up in me. You in me real good.” I sing and dance my chicken dance, arms and legs and Good News flapping all about in the first balcony aisle. “Stay up in me. You my salvation, Glory. Praise you in me.”

  WHEN ALL THIS WAS BAY RIDGE

  BY TIM MCLOUGHLIN

  Sunset Park, Brooklyn

  (Originally published in Brooklyn Noir)

  Standing in church at my father’s funeral, I thought about being arrested on the night of my seventeenth birthday. It had occurred in the train yard at Avenue X, in Coney Island. Me and Pancho and a kid named Freddie were working a three-car piece, the most ambitious I’d tried to that point, and more time-consuming than was judicious to spend trespassing on city property. Two Transit cops with German shepherds caught us in the middle of the second car. I dropped my aerosol can and took off, and was perhaps two hundred feet along the beginning of the trench that becomes the IRT line to the Bronx, when I saw the hand. It was human, adult, and severed neatly, seemingly surgically, at the wrist. My first thought was that it looked bare without a watch. Then I made a whooping sound, trying to take in air, and turned and ran back toward the cops and their dogs.

  At the 60th Precinct, we three were ushered into a small cell. We sat for several hours, then the door opened and I was led out. My father was waiting in the main room, in front of the counter.

  The desk sergeant, middle-aged, black, and noticeably bored, looked up briefly. “Him?”

  “Him,” my father echoed, sounding defeated.

  “Goodnight,” the sergeant said.

  My father took my arm and led me out of the precinct. As we cleared the door and stepped into the humid night he turned to me and said, “This was it. Your one free ride. It doesn’t happen again.”

  “What did it cost?” I asked. My father had retired from the police department years earlier, and I knew this had been expensive.

  He shook his head. “This once, that’s all.”

  I followed him to his car. “I have two friends in there.”

  “Fuck’em. Spics. That’s half your problem.”

  “What’s the other half?”

  “You have no common sense,” he said, his voice rising in scale as it did in volume. By the time he reached a scream he sounded like a boy going through puberty. “What do you think you’re doing out here? Crawling ’round in the dark with the niggers and the spics. Writing on trains like a hoodlum. Is this all you’ll do?”

  “It’s not writing. It’s drawing. Pictures.”

  “Same shit, defacing property, behaving like a punk. Where do you suppose it will lead?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. You had your aimless time, when you got out of the service. You told me so. You bummed around for two years.”

  “I always worked.”

  “Part-time. Beer money. You were a roofer.”

  “Beer money was all I needed.”

  “Maybe it’s all I need.”

  He shook his head slowly, and squinted, as though peering through the dirty windshield for an answer. “It was different. That was a long time ago. Back when all this was Bay Ridge. You could live like that then.”

  When all this was Bay Ridge. He was masterful, my father. He didn’t say when it was white, or when it was Irish, or even the relatively tame when it was safer. No. When all this was Bay Ridge. As though it were an issue of geography. As though, somehow, the tectonic plate beneath Sunset Park had shifted, moving it physically to some other place.

  I told him about seeing the hand.

  “Did you tell the officers?”

  “No.”

  “The people you were with?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t worry about it. There’s body parts all over this town. Saw enough in my day to put together a baseball team.” He drove in silence for a few minutes, then nodded his head a couple of times, as though agreeing with a point made by some voice I could not hear. “You’re going to college, you know,” he said.

  * * *

  That was what I remembered at the funeral. Returning from the altar rail after receiving communion, Pancho walked passed me. He’d lost a great deal of weight since I’d last seen him, and I couldn’t tell if he was sick or if it was just the drugs. His black suit hung on him in a way that emphasized his gaunt frame. He winked at me as he came around the casket in front of my pew, and flashed the mischievous smile that—when we were sixteen—got all the girls in his bed and all the guys agreeing to the stupidest and most dangerous stunts.

  In my shirt pocket was a photograph of my father with a woman who was not my mother. The date on the back was five years ago. Their arms were around each other’s waists and they smiled for the photographer. When we arrived at the cemetery I took the picture out of my pocket, and looked at it for perhaps the fiftieth time since I’d first discovered it. There were no clues. The woman was young to be with my father, but not a girl. Forty, give or take a few years. I looked for any evidence in his expression that I was misreading their embrace, but even I couldn’t summon the required naïveté. My father’s countenance was not what would commonly be regarded as a poker face. He wasn’t holding her as a friend, a friend’s girl, or the prize at some retirement or bachelor party; he held her like a possession. Like he held his tools. Like he held my mother. The photo had been taken before my mother’s death. I put it back.

  I’d always found his plodding predictability and meticulous planning of insignificant events maddening. For the first time that I could recall, I was experiencing curiosity about some part of my father’s life.

  I walked from Greenwood Cemetery directly to Olsen’s bar, my father’s watering hole, feeling that I needed to talk to the men that nearly lived there, but not looking forward to it. Aside from my father’s wake the previous night, I hadn’t seen them in years. They were all Irish. The Irish among them were perhaps the most Irish, but the Norwegians and the Danes were Irish too, as were the older Puerto Ricans. They had developed, over time, the stereotypical hooded gaze, the squared jaws set in grim defiance of whatever waited in the sobering daylight. To a man they had that odd trait of the Gaelic heavy-hitter, that—as they attained middle age—their faces increasingly began to resemble a woman’s nipple.

  The door to the bar was propped open, and the cool damp odor of stale beer washed over me before I entered. That smell has always reminded me of the Boy Scouts. Meetings were Thursday nights in the basement of Bethany Lutheran Church. When they were over, I would have to pass Olsen’s on my way home, and I usually stopped in to see my father. He would buy me a couple of glasses of beer—about all I could handle at thirteen—and leave with me after about an hour so we could walk home together.

  From the inside looking out: Picture an embassy in a foreign country. A truly foreign country. Not a Western European ally, but a fundamentalist state perennially on the precipice of war. A fill-the-sandbags-and-wait-for-the-airstrike enclave. That was Olsen’s, home to the last of the donkeys, the white dinosaurs of Sunset Park. A jukebox filled with Kristy McColl and the Clancy Brothers and flyers tacked to the flaking walls advertising step-dancing classes, Gaelic lessons, and the memorial run to raise money for a scholarship in the name of a recently slain cop. Within three blocks of the front door you could attend a cockfight, buy crack, or pick up a streetwalker, but in Olsen’s, it was always 1965.

  Upon entering the bar for the first time in several years, I found its pinched dimensions and dim lighting more oppressive, and less mysterious, than I had remembered. The row of ascetic faces, and the way all conversation trailed off at my entrance, put me in mind of the legendary blue wall of silence in the police department. It is no coincidence that the force has historically been predominantly Irish. The men in Olsen’s would be pained to reveal their zip code to a st
ranger, and I wasn’t sure if even they knew why.

  The bar surface itself was more warped than I’d recalled. The mirrors had oxidized and the white tile floor had been torn up in spots and replaced with odd-shaped pieces of green linoleum. It was a neighborhood bar in a neighborhood where such establishments are not yet celebrated. If it had been located in my part of the East Village, it would have long since achieved cultural-landmark status. I’d been living in Manhattan for five years and still had not adjusted to the large number of people who moved here from other parts of the country and overlooked the spectacle of the city only to revere the mundane. One of my coworkers, herself a transplant, remarked that the coffee shop on my corner was authentic. In that they served coffee, I suppose she was correct.

  I sat on an empty stool in the middle of the wavy bar and ordered a beer. I felt strangely nervous there without my father, like a child about to be caught doing something bad. Everyone knew me. Marty, the round-shouldered bartender, approached first, breaking the ice. He spoke around an enormous, soggy stub of a cigar, as he always did. And, as always, he seemed constantly annoyed by its presence in his mouth; as though he’d never smoked one before, and was surprised to discover himself chewing on it.

  “Daniel. It’s good to see you. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  He extended one hand, and when I did the same, he grasped mine in both of his and held it for a moment. It had to have been some sort of signal, because the rest of the relics in the place lurched toward me then, like some nursing-home theater guild performing Night of the Living Dead. They shook hands, engaged in awkward stiff hugs, and offered unintelligible condolences. Frank Sanchez, one of my father’s closest friends, squeezed the back of my neck absently until I winced. I thanked them as best I could, and accepted the offers of free drinks.

  Someone—I don’t know who—thought it would be a good idea for me to have Jameson’s Irish whiskey, that having been my father’s drink. I’d never considered myself much of a drinker. I liked a couple of beers on a Friday night, and perhaps twice a year I would get drunk. I almost never drank hard liquor, but this crew was insistent, they were matching me shot for shot, and they were paying. It was the sort of thing my father would have been adamant about.