The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  Elgin just kept plying him with Beam, knowing Blue's lack of tolerance for it, and pretty soon Blue passed out on the couch, his pitted face still red with rage.

  "He's never been exactly right in the head, has he?" Shelley said.

  Elgin ran his hand down her bare arm, pulled her shoulder in tighter against his chest, heard Blue snoring from the front of the trailer. "No, ma'am."

  She rose above him, her dark hair falling to his face, tickling the corners of his eyes. "But you've been his friend."

  Elgin nodded.

  She touched his cheek with her hand. "Why?"

  Elgin thought about it a bit, started talking to her about the little, dirty kid and his cockroach flambés, of the animal sounds that came from his mother's trailer. The way Blue used to sit by the drainage ditch, all pulled into himself, his body tight. Elgin thought of all those roaches and cats and rabbits and dogs, and he told Shelley that he'd always thought Blue was dying, ever since he'd met him, leaking away in front of his eyes.

  "Everyone dies," she said.

  "Yeah." He rose up on his elbow, rested his free hand on her warm hip. "Yeah, but with most of us it's like we're growing toward something and then we die. But with Blue, it's like he ain't never grown toward nothing. He's just been dying real slowly since he was born."

  She shook her head. "I'm not getting you."

  He thought of the mildew that used to soak the walls in Blue's mother's trailer, of the mold and dust in Blue's shack off Route 11, of the rotting smell that had grown out of the drainage ditch when they were kids. The way Blue looked at it all—seemed to be at one with it—as if he felt a bond.

  Shelley said, "Babe, what do you think about getting out of here?"

  "Where?"

  "I dunno. Florida. Georgia. Someplace else."

  "I got a job. You too."

  "You can always get construction jobs other places. Receptionist jobs too."

  "We grew up here."

  She nodded. "But maybe it's time to start our life somewhere else."

  He said, "Let me think about it."

  She tilted his chin so she was looking in his eyes. "You've been thinking about it."

  He nodded. "Maybe I want to think about it some more."

  In the morning, when they woke up, Blue was gone.

  Shelley looked at the rumpled couch, over at Elgin. For a good minute they just stood there, looking from the couch to each other, the couch to each other.

  An hour later, Shelley called from work, told Elgin that Perkin Lut was in his office as always, no signs of physical damage.

  Elgin said, "If you see Blue..."

  "Yeah?"

  Elgin thought about it. "I dunno. Call the cops. Tell Perkin to bail out a back door. That sound right?"

  "Sure."

  Big Bobby came to the site later that morning, said, "I go over to Blue's place to tell him we got to end this dog thing and—"

  "Did you tell him it was over?" Elgin asked.

  "Let me finish. Let me explain."

  "Did you tell him?"

  "Let me finish." Bobby wiped his face with a handkerchief. "I was gonna tell him, but —"

  "You didn't tell him."

  "But Jewel Lut was there."

  "What?"

  Big Bobby put his hand on Elgin's elbow, led him away from the other workers. "I said Jewel was there. The two of them sitting at the kitchen table, having breakfast."

  "In Blue's place?"

  Big Bobby nodded. "Biggest dump I ever seen. Smells like something I-don't-know-what. But bad. And there's Jewel, pretty as can be in her summer dress and soft skin and makeup, eating Eggos and grits with Blue, big brown shiner under her eye. She smiles at me, says, 'Hey, Big Bobby,' and goes back to eating."

  "And that was it?"

  "How come no one ever calls me Mayor?"

  "And that was it?" Elgin repeated.

  "Yeah. Blue asks me to take a seat, I say I got business. He says him too."

  "What's that mean?" Elgin heard his own voice, hard and sharp.

  Big Bobby took a step back from it. "Hell do I know? Could mean he's going out to shoot more dog"

  "So you never told him you were shutting down the operation."

  Big Bobby's eyes were wide and confused. "You hear what I told you? He was in there with Jewel. Her all doll-pretty and him looking, well, ugly as usual. Whole situation was too weird. I got out."

  "Blue said he had business too."

  "He said he had business too," Bobby said, and walked away.

  The next week, they showed up in town together a couple of times, buying some groceries, toiletries for Jewel, boxes of shells for Blue.

  They never held hands or kissed or did anything romantic, but they were together, and people talked. Said, Well, of all things. And I never thought I'd see the day. How do you like that? I guess this is the day the cows actually come home.

  Blue called and invited Shelley and Elgin to join them one Sunday afternoon for a late breakfast at the IHOP. Shelley begged off, said something about coming down with the flu, but Elgin went. He was curious to see where this was going, what Jewel was thinking, how she thought her hanging around Blue was going to come to anything but bad.

  He could feel the eyes of the whole place on them as they ate.

  "See where he hit me?" Jewel tilted her head, tucked her beautiful red hair back behind her ear. The mark on her cheekbone, in the shape of a small rain puddle, was faded yellow now, its edges roped by a sallow beige.

  Elgin nodded.

  "Still can't believe the son of a bitch hit me," she said, but there was no rage in her voice anymore, just a mild sense of drama, as if she'd pushed the words out of her mouth the way she believed she should say them. But the emotion she must have felt when Perkin's hand hit her face, when she fell to the fl oor in front of people she'd known all her life—that seemed to have faded with the mark on her cheekbone.

  "Perkin Lut," she said with a snort, then laughed.

  Elgin looked at Blue. He'd never seemed so... fluid in all the time Elgin had known him. The way he cut into his pancakes, swept them off his plate with a smooth dip of the fork tines; the swift dab of the napkin against his lips after every bite; the attentive swivel of his head whenever Jewel spoke, usually in tandem with the lifting of his coffee mug to his mouth.

  This was not a Blue Elgin recognized. Except when he was handling weapons, Blue moved in jerks and spasms. Tremors rippled through his limbs and caused his fingers to drop things, his elbows and knees to move too fast, crack against solid objects. Blue's blood seemed to move too quickly through his veins, made his muscles obey his brain after a quarter-second delay and then too rapidly, as if to catch up on lost time.

  But now he moved in concert, like an athlete or a jungle cat.

  That's what you do to men, Jewel: you give them a confidence so total it finds their limbs.

  "Perkin," Blue said, and rolled his eyes at Jewel and they both laughed.

  She not as hard as he did, though.

  Elgin could see the root of doubt in her eyes, could feel her loneliness in the way she fiddled with the menu, touched her cheekbone, spoke too loudly, as if she wasn't just telling Elgin and Blue how Perkin had mistreated her, but the whole IHOP as well, so people could get it straight that she wasn't the villain, and if after she returned to Perkin she had to leave him again, they'd know why.

  Of course she was going back to Perkin.

  Elgin could tell by the glances she gave Blue—unsure, slightly embarrassed, maybe a bit repulsed. What had begun as a nighttime ride into the unknown had turned cold and stale during the hard yellow lurch into morning.

  Blue wiped his mouth, said, "Be right back," and walked to the bathroom with surer strides than Elgin had ever seen on the man.

  Elgin looked at Jewel.

  She gripped the handle of her coffee cup between the tips of her thumb and index finger and turned the cup in slow revolutions around the saucer, made a soft scraping noise that
climbed up Elgin's spine like a termite trapped under the skin.

  "You ain't sleeping with him, are you?" Elgin said quietly.

  Jewel's head jerked up and she looked over her shoulder, then back at Elgin. "What? God, no. We're just ... He's my pal. That's all. Like when we were kids."

  "We ain't kids."

  "I know. Don't you know I know?" She fingered the coffee cup again. "I miss you," she said softly. "I miss you. When you coming back?"

  Elgin kept his voice low. "Me and Shelley, we're getting pretty serious."

  She gave him a small smile that he instantly hated. It seemed to know him; it seemed like everything he was and everything he wasn't was caught in the curl of her lips. "You miss the lake, Elgin. Don't lie."

  He shrugged.

  "You ain't ever going to marry Shelley Briggs, have babies, be an upstanding citizen."

  "Yeah? Why's that?"

  "Because you got too many demons in you, boy. And they need me. They need the lake. They need to cry out every now and then."

  Elgin looked down at his own coffee cup. "You going back to Perkin?"

  She shook her head hard. "No way. Uh-uh. No way."

  Elgin nodded, even though he knew she was lying. If Elgin's demons needed the lake, needed to be unbridled, Jewel's needed Perkin. They needed security. They needed to know the money'd never run out, that she'd never go two full days without a solid meal, like she had so many times as a child in the trailer park.

  Perkin was what she saw when she looked down at her empty coffee cup, when she touched her cheek. Perkin was at their nice home with his feet up, watching a game, petting the dog, and she was in the IHOP in the middle of a Sunday when the food was at its oldest and coldest, with one guy who loved her and one who fucked her, wondering how she got there.

  Blue came back to the table, moving with that new sure stride, a broad smile in the wide swing of his arms.

  "How we doing?" Blue said. "Huh? How we doing?" And his lips burst into a grin so huge Elgin expected it to keep going right off the sides of his face.

  Jewel left Blue's place two days later, walked into Perkin Lut's Auto Emporium and into Perkin's office, and by the time anyone went to check, they'd left through the back door, gone home for the day.

  Elgin tried to get a hold of Blue for three days—called constantly, went by his shack and knocked on the door, even staked out the tree house along I-95 where he fired on the dogs.

  He'd decided to break into Blue's place, was fixing to do just that, when he tried one last call from his trailer that third night and Blue answered with a strangled "Hello."

  "It's me. How you doing?"

  "Can't talk now."

  "Come on, Blue. It's me. You OK?"

  "All alone," Blue said.

  "I know. I'll come by."

  "You do, I'll leave."

  "Blue."

  "Leave me alone for a spell, Elgin. OK?"

  That night Elgin sat alone in his trailer, smoking cigarettes, staring at the walls.

  Blue'd never had much of anything his whole life — not a job he enjoyed, not a woman he could consider his — and then between the dogs and Jewel Lut he'd probably thought he'd got it all at once. Hit pay dirt.

  Elgin remembered the dirty little kid sitting down by the drainage ditch, hugging himself. Six, maybe seven years old, waiting to die.

  You had to wonder sometimes why some people were even born. You had to wonder what kind of creature threw bodies into the world, expected them to get along when they'd been given no tools, no capacity to get any either.

  In Vietnam, this fat boy, name of Woodson from South Dakota, had been the least popular guy in the platoon. He wasn't smart, he wasn't athletic, he wasn't funny, he wasn't even personable. He just was. Elgin had been running beside him one day through a sea of rice paddies, their boots making sucking sounds every step they took, and someone fired a hell of a round from the other side of the paddies, ripped Woodson's head in half so completely all Elgin saw running beside him for a few seconds was the lower half of Woodson's face. No hair, no forehead, no eyes. Just half the nose, a mouth, a chin.

  Thing was, Woodson kept running, kept plunging his feet in and out of the water, making those sucking sounds, M-15 hugged to his chest, for a good eight or ten steps. Kid was dead, he's still running. Kid had no reason to hold on, but he don't know it, he keeps running.

  What spark of memory, hope, or dream had kept him going?

  You had to wonder.

  In Elgin's dream that night, a platoon of ice-gray Vietcong rose in a straight line from the center of Cooper's Lake while Elgin was inside the cabin with Shelley and Jewel. He penetrated them both somehow, their separate torsos branching out from the same pair of hips, their four legs clamping at the small of his back, this Shelley-Jewel creature crying out for more, more, more.

  And Elgin could see the VC platoon drifting in formation toward the shore, their guns pointed, their faces hidden behind thin wisps of green fog.

  The Shelley-Jewel creature arched her backs on the bed below him, and Woodson and Blue stood in the corner of the room watching as their dogs padded across the floor, letting out low growls and drooling.

  Shelley dissolved into Jewel as the VC platoon reached the porch steps and released their safeties all at once, the sound like the ratcheting of a thousand shotguns. Sweat exploded in Elgin's hair, poured down his body like warm rain, and the VC fired in concert, the bullets shearing the walls of the cabin, lifting the roof off into the night. Elgin looked above him at the naked night sky, the stars zipping by like tracers, the yellow moon full and mean, the shivering branches of birch trees. Jewel rose and straddled him, bit his lip, and dug her nails into his back, and the bullets danced through his hair, and then Jewel was gone, her writhing flesh having dissolved into his own.

  Elgin sat naked on the bed, his arms stretched wide, waiting for the bullets to find his back, to shear his head from his body the way they'd sheared the roof from the cabin, and the yellow moon burned above him as the dogs howled and Blue and Woodson held each other in the corner of the room and wept like children as the bullets drilled holes in their faces.

  Big Bobby came by the trailer late the next morning, a Sunday, and said, "Blue's a bit put out about losing his job."

  "What?" Elgin sat on the edge of his bed, pulled on his socks. "You picked now—now, Bobby—to fire him?"

  "It's in his eyes," Big Bobby said. "Like you said. You can see it."

  Elgin had seen Big Bobby scared before, plenty of times, but now the man was trembling.

  Elgin said, "Where is he?"

  Blue's front door was open, hanging half down the steps from a busted hinge. Elgin said, "Blue."

  "Kitchen."

  He sat in his Jockeys at the table, cleaning his rifle, each shiny black piece spread in front of him on the table. Elgin's eyes watered a bit because there was a stench coming from the back of the house that he felt might strip his nostrils bare. He realized then that he'd never asked Big Bobby or Blue what they'd done with all those dead dogs.

  Blue said, "Have a seat, bud. Beer in the fridge if you're thirsty."

  Elgin wasn't looking in that fridge. "Lost your job, huh?"

  Blue wiped the bolt with a shammy cloth. "Happens." He looked at Elgin. "Where you been lately?"

  "I called you last night."

  "I mean in general."

  "Working."

  "No, I mean at night."

  "Blue, you been"—he almost said "playing house with Jewel Lut" but caught himself — "up in a fucking tree, how do you know where I been at night?"

  "I don't," Blue said. "Why I'm asking."

  Elgin said, "I've been at my trailer or down at Doubles, same as usual."

  "With Shelley Briggs, right?"

  Slowly, Elgin said, "Yeah."

  "I'm just asking, buddy. I mean, when we all going to go out? You, me, your new girl."

  The pits that covered Blue's face like a layer of bad meat had faded some from all
those nights in the tree.

  Elgin said, "Anytime you want."

  Blue put down the bolt. "How 'bout right now?" He stood and walked into the bedroom just off the kitchen. "Let me just throw on some duds."

  "She's working now, Blue."

  "At Perkin Lut's? Hell, it's almost noon. I'll talk to Perkin about that Dodge he sold me last year, and when she's ready we'll take her out someplace nice." He came back into the kitchen wearing a soiled brown T-shirt and jeans.

  "Hell," Elgin said, "I don't want the girl thinking I've got some serious love for her or something. We come by for lunch, next thing she'll expect me to drop her off in the mornings, pick her up at night."

  Blue was reassembling the rifle, snapping all those shiny pieces together so fast, Elgin figured he could do it blind. He said, "Elgin, you got to show them some affection sometimes. I mean, Jesus." He pulled a thin brass bullet from his T-shirt pocket and slipped it in the breech, followed it with four more, then slid the bolt home.

  "Yeah, but you know what I'm saying, bud?" Elgin watched Blue nestle the stock in the space between his left hip and ribs, let the barrel point out into the kitchen.

  "I know what you're saying," Blue said. "I know. But I got to talk to Perkin about my Dodge."

  "What's wrong with it?"

  "What's wrong with it?" Blue turned to look at him, and the barrel swung level with Elgin's belt buckle. "What's wrong with it, it's a piece of shit, what's wrong with it, Elgin. Hell, you know that. Perkin sold me a lemon. This is the situation." He blinked. "Beer for the ride?"

  Elgin had a pistol in his glove compartment. A .32. He considered it.

  "Elgin?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Why you looking at me funny?"

  "You got a rifle pointed at me, Blue. You realize that?"

  Blue looked at the rifle, and its presence seemed to surprise him. He dipped it toward the floor. "Shit, man, I'm sorry. I wasn't even thinking. It feels like my arm sometimes. I forget. Man, I am sorry." He held his arms out wide, the rifle rising with them.