Santa Cruz Noir

by Susie Bright

  “Stop! Juan, por favor, stop!” My voice straining over the noise.

  “Pops?” he says. For a wonder, he listens, and stops near our fence. He sees me for the first time.

  “Turn around slowly, with your hands on your head!” the cop commands.

  “Juan. Turn around. Show them you do not have a gun,” I say.

  He opens his mouth, as if to tell me something.

  “Listen to them m’ijo. Do it!”

  He breathes out a short laugh, and turns.

  I catch the glint of metal tucked into his jeans.

  “I’m taking it out now, it’s okay, I’m taking it out,” says my son, as his hand dips down.

  They shoot him. His body whirls in mad circles, while the police fire again and again. A bullet whines by my side, almost finds me. The guns roar until smoke chokes the air. Juan rests, finally, in a twisted heap by our fence, one hand curled around a post. He almost made it home.

  I cannot swallow. Cannot breathe. The stench burns my nose. I slump forward until my knees settle on the ground.

  “Back away, sir! Back away!” the police yell.

  I hold up my hands and crawl to my boy on my knees. They let me do this until I am close.

  An officer walks toward me, the calm one. He kicks Juan’s gun away. “That’s close enough.”

  Still I cannot swallow. “But he’s my son.”

  “Papa! Papa!”

  Shivers nearly knock me over. My teeth rattling in my skull, I twist my neck around. My daughter. Why is she covered in red? Blood? Not her blood, please God.

  “Papa! Mama won’t get up!”

  I frown. My eyes wander to the front of our home. I see Martha crumpled in the doorframe, dark red blooming across her blouse, spilling down the step. Her body still, as if she is sleeping. In that moment, I understand.

  I understand everything.

  Se sigue hasta que se conduce.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Wallace Baine is a critic, columnist, and editor in Santa Cruz, and the author of A Light in the Midst of Darkness, a history of Bookshop Santa Cruz. His work is nationally syndicated and his fiction appears in the Catamaran Literary Reader and the Chicago Quarterly Review. He is the author of Rhymes with Vain: Belabored humor and attempted profundity and The Last Temptation of Lincoln, from which his play Oscar’s Wallpaper was adapted.

  Jon Bailiff is a retired lifeguard EMT, union shop steward, and marine rescue guard. He’s been a blacksmith, carpenter, artist, painter, weaver, and art teacher with Creativity Unlimited, William James Association, County Office of Probation, and Hope Services. He has lived in Santa Cruz for thirty years—not a local.

  Jessica Breheny’s work has been published in Avery: An Anthology of New Fiction, Electric Velocipede, Eleven Eleven, elimae, Fugue, LIT, Otoliths, Other Voices, and Santa Monica Review. She is the author of the chapbooks Some Mythology and Ephemeride. She lives in Santa Cruz.

  Susie Bright is a best-selling author, journalist, audio producer, and editor. Her past works include The Best American Erotica, Herotica, and Full Exposure, as well as the memoir Big Sex Little Death. Bright was a screenwriter and/or consultant for Bound, Erotique, The Celluloid Closet, Transparent, and Criterion

  Collection’s reissue of Belle de Jour. She is Editor-at-Large for Audible Studios, and the host of Audible’s longest-running podcast, In Bed with Susie Bright. She is a lifelong Californian.

  Margaret Elysia Garcia is the author of the short story collections Sad Girls & Other Stories and Mary of the Chance Encounters. She is cofounder of the microtheater company Pachuca Productions. She is also completing her first nonfiction manuscript, Throwing the Curve, about the world of plus-size alternative models.

  Ariel Gore is an award-winning editor and the author of ten books, including Atlas of the Human Heart, The End of Eve, and We Were Witches. She teaches online at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers.

  Seana Graham’s short stories have appeared in the journals Eleven Eleven and Salamander Magazine, and the anthology The Very Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is the book review editor at Escape Into Life.

  Vinnie Hansen, a Claymore Award finalist, fled the howling winds of the South Dakota prairie and headed for the California coast the day after high school graduation. She is the author of numerous short stories and the Carol Sabala mystery series. Still sane after twenty-seven years of teaching high school English, Hansen has retired and lives in Santa Cruz with her husband and the requisite cat.

  Naomi Hirahara is the Edgar Award–winning author of two mystery series set in Southern California. Her Mas Arai series, which features a Hiroshima survivor and gardener, ends with the publication of Hiroshima Boy in 2018. The first in her Officer Ellie Rush, Bicycle Cop mystery series received the T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award. Her father was a native of Watsonville, California.

  Dillon Kaiser has lived in Santa Cruz County most of his life. He now lives in Sacramento with his wife and daughter, but part of him will always think of Watsonville as home. He holds a BA in comparative literature from UC Davis.

  Beth Lisick is a writer and actor. She is the author of five books, including the New York Times best seller Everybody into the Pool. She cofounded San Francisco’s Porchlight Storytelling Series, traveled the country with the Sister Spit performance tours, and received a Creative Work Fund grant for a chapbook series with Creativity Explored, a studio for artists with developmental disabilities. Lisick grew up in San Jose and attended UC Santa Cruz.

  Lou Mathews is a journalist, fiction writer, playwright, and fourth-generation Angeleno. Married at nineteen, he worked his way through UC Santa Cruz as a gas station attendant and mechanic. His first novel, LA Breakdown, was a Los Angeles Times best book of the year. He has received an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Pushcart Prize, and a Katherine Anne Porter Prize. He has taught in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program since 1989.

  Elizabeth McKenzie’s novel The Portable Veblen was long-listed for the 2016 National Book Award for fiction. She is the author of the novel MacGregor Tells the World and the story collection Stop That Girl. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. McKenzie is senior editor of the Chicago Quarterly Review and the managing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.

  Calvin McMillin is a writer, teacher, and scholar. Born in Singapore and raised in rural Oklahoma, he went on to earn a PhD in literature from UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of the short story collection The Sushi Bar at the Edge of Forever, and the editor of Frank Chin’s novel The Confessions of a Number One Son. McMillin is currently a lecturer at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, where he teaches literature and creative writing.

  Liza Monroy is the author of the novel Mexican High, the memoir The Marriage Act: The Risk I Took to Keep My Best Friend in America and What It Taught Us About Love, and Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon to Be on Fire. She has written for the New York Times, O, Marie Claire, and the Los Angeles Times. Monroy currently teaches in the writing program at UC Santa Cruz.

  Maceo Montoya has published three works of fiction—The Scoundrel and the Optimist, The Deportation of Wopper Barraza, You Must Fight Them—and Letters to the Poet from His Brother. His most recent publication is Chicano Movement for Beginners, a work of graphic nonfiction. Montoya is an associate professor in Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis. He is also an affiliated faculty member of Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer, a community-based art center in Woodland, California.

  Tommy Moore graduated from UC Santa Cruz working in film and video production. In 2013, he was one of six writers selected for a PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship. He and his wife Amie recently welcomed their first child, Charles Joseph. They live in Malibu and Moore is currently writing a collection of short stories. “Buck Low” is his first published story.

  Micah Perks is the author of We Are Gathered Here, What Becomes Us, Pagan Time, and Alone in the Woods: Cheryl Strayed, My Daughter, and Me. The Guardian rated
What Becomes Us one of the top ten apocalyptic novels. Her short story collection True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape will be published in October 2018. She has lived in Santa Cruz for twenty years.

  Lee Quarnstrom, author of When I Was a Dynamiter! Or, How a Nice Catholic Boy Became a Merry Prankster, a Pornographer, and a Bridegroom Seven Times, lives with his wife, poet Christine Quarnstrom, in Southern California. He was a legendary newspaper reporter in Santa Cruz for more than thirty years.

  Peggy Townsend is an award-winning journalist who has written on everything from serial killers to county fairs. She divides her time between Santa Cruz and Lake Tahoe. Her new mystery novel is See Her Run.

  Jill Wolfson is the author of four young adult novels. Her story in this collection stems from her decades as a writing teacher for incarcerated teens and from her son’s stint working for a local donut shop. She is a Santa Cruz–based writer whose work has appeared in many publications, including the Sun magazine and on the radio show This American Life.

  Acknowledgments

  In addition to the talent and camaraderie of the Santa Cruz Noir writers, I have critical friends and artists to acknowledge. First, the out-of-town pros: fellow noir author and editor extraordinaire Ariel Gore and Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple.

  My appreciation and thanks to: Kat Bailey, Joe Mancino, Tristan Miley-Medina, Jennifer Taillac Gustafson, Shmuel Thaler, Carter Wilson, Don Wallace, the UCSC Creative Writing Program, Bookshop Santa Cruz—let’s do a sequel. Thank you to my family, Jon and Aretha, who know every crevice of Santa Cruz better than I do. And, always by my side, my late father Bill Bright and his poet friends William Everson and Gary Snyder, for my earliest Santa Cruz memories and precontact inspirations.

  —S.B.

  BONUS MATERIAL

  Excerpt from USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

  Also available in the Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  INTRODUCTION

  WRITERS ON THE RUN

  From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, edited by Johnny Temple

  In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.

  It may not have been appropriate, but it sure was noir.

  From the start, the heart and soul of Akashic Books has been dark, provocative, well-crafted tales from the disenfranchised. I learned early on that writings from outside the mainstream almost necessarily coincide with a mood and spirit of noir, and are composed by authors whose life circumstances often place them in environs vulnerable to crime.

  My own interest in noir fiction grew from my early exposure to urban crime, which I absorbed from various perspectives. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and have lived in Brooklyn since 1990. In the 1970s and ’80s, when violent, drug-fueled crime in DC was rampant, my mother hung out with cops she’d befriended through her work as a nearly unbeatable public defender. She also grew close to some of her clients, most notably legendary DC bank robber Lester “LT” Irby (a contributor to DC Noir), who has been one of my closest friends since I was fifteen, though he was incarcerated from the early 1970s until just recently. Complicating my family’s relationship with the criminal justice system, my dad sued the police stridently in his work as legal director of DC’s American Civil Liberties Union.

  Both of my parents worked overtime. By the time my sister Kathy was nine and I was seven, we were latchkey kids prone to roam, explore, and occasionally break laws. Though an arrest for shoplifting helped curb my delinquent tendencies, the interest in crime remained. After college I worked with adolescents and completed a master’s degree in social work; my focus was on teen delinquency.

  Throughout the 1990s, my relationship with the urban underbelly expanded as I spent a great deal of time in dank nightclubs populated by degenerates and outcasts. I played bass guitar in Girls Against Boys, a rock and roll group that toured extensively in the US and Europe. The long hours on the road not spent on stage gave way to book publishing, which began as a hobby in 1996 with my friends Bobby and Mark Sullivan.

  The first book we published was The Fuck-Up, by Arthur Nersesian—a dark, provocative, well-crafted tale from the disenfranchised. A few years later Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin became one of our early commercial successes. The book was widely praised both for its classic noir voice and its homage to the people of South Brooklyn. While Brooklyn is chock-full of published authors these days, Tim is one of the few who was actually born and bred here. In his five decades, Tim has never left the borough for more than five weeks at a stretch and he knows the place, through and through, better than anyone I’ve met.

  In 2003, inspired by Brooklyn’s unique and glorious mix of cultures, Tim and I set out to explore New York City’s largest borough in book form, in a way that would ring true to local residents. Tim loves his home borough despite its flagrant flaws, and was easily seduced by the concept of working with Akashic to try and portray its full human breadth.

  He first proposed a series of books, each one set in a different neighborhood, whether it be Bay Ridge, Williamsburg, Park Slope, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, or Canarsie. It was an exciting idea, but it’s hard enough to publish a single book, let alone commit to a full series. After we considered various other possibilities, Tim came upon the idea of a fiction anthology organized by neighborhood, each one represented by a different author. We were looking for stylistic diversity, so we focused on “noir,” and defined it in the broadest sense: we wanted stories of tragic, soulful struggle against all odds, characters slipping, no redemption in sight.

  Conventional wisdom dictates that literary anthologies don’t sell well, but this idea was too good to resist—it seemed the perfect form for exploring the whole borough, and we got to work soliciting stories. We batted around book titles, including Under the Hood, before settling on Brooklyn Noir. The volume came together beautifully and was a surprise hit for Akashic, quickly selling through multiple printings and winning awards. (See pages 548–550 for a full list of prizes garnered by stories originally published in the Noir Series.)

  Having seen nearly every American city, large and small, through the windows of a van or tour bus, I have developed a deep fondness for their idiosyncrasies. So for me it was easy logic to take the model of Brooklyn Noir—sketching out dark urban corners through neighborhood-based short fiction—and extend it to other cities. Soon came Chicago Noir, San Francisco Noir, and London Noir (our first of many overseas locations). Selecting the right editor to curate each book has been the most important decision we make before assembling it. It’s a welcome challenge because writers are often enamored of their hometowns, and many are seduced by the urban landscape’s rough edges. The generous support of literary superheroes like George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom have edited series volumes, has been critical.

  There are now fifty-nine books in the Noir Series. Forty of them are from American locales. As of this writing, a total of 787 authors have contributed 917 stories to the series and helped Akashic to stay afloat during perilous economic times. By publishing six to eight new volumes in the Noir Series every year, we have provided a steady venue for short stories, which have in recent times struggled with diminishing p
opularity. Akashic’s commitment to the short story has been rewarded by the many authors—of both great stature and great obscurity—who have allowed us to publish their work in the series for a nominal fee.

  I am particularly indebted to all sixty-seven editors who have cumulatively upheld a high editorial standard across the series. The series would never have gotten this far without rigorous quality control. There also couldn’t be a Noir Series without my devoted and tireless (if occasionally irreverent) staff led by Johanna Ingalls, Ibrahim Ahmad, and Aaron Petrovich.

  * * *

  This volume serves up a top-shelf selection of stories from the series set in the United States. USA Noir only scratches the surface, however, and every single volume has more gems on offer.

  When I set out to compile USA Noir, I was delighted by the immediate positive responses from nearly every author I contacted. The only author on my initial invitation list who isn’t included here is one I couldn’t track down: the publisher explained to me that the writer was “literally on the run.” While I’m disappointed that we can’t include the story, the circumstance is true to the Noir Series spirit.

  And part of me—the noir part—is expecting a phone call from the writer, inviting me over for a smoke.

  Johnny Temple

  Brooklyn, NY

  July 2013

  ___________________

  More about USA Noir

  The best USA-based stories in the Akashic Noir Series, compiled into one volume and edited by Johnny Temple!

  “All the heavy hitters . . . came out for USA Noir . . . an important anthology of stories shrewdly culled by Johnny Temple.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

  “Readers will be hard put to find a better collection of short stories in any genre.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A must read for mystery fans, not just devotees of Akashic’s ‘Noir’ series, this anthology serves as both an introduction for newcomers and a greatest-hits package for regular readers of the series . . . There isn’t a weak story in the collection . . . Strongly recommended for readers who enjoy mysteries published by Hard Case Crime, as well as for fans of police procedurals.” —Library Journal (starred review)