Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny

by Keillor, Garrison

  “I may need your protection, Lieutenant.”

  McCafferty chuckled. “Lots of people maybe need my protection, Noir. Fourteen-year-old girls out on their first dates may need my protection, and folks purchasing a home unaware of the plumbing problems, and folks who leave the potato salad sitting in the sun too long, and maybe someone has taken too big a bite of porterhouse steak and isn’t chewing it properly, but we can’t protect everybody, can we? Somewhere this very minute a blind man may be crossing a busy street against a red light. Somewhere there are oily rags close to a frayed extension cord. I’m not Clark Kent, pal.”

  I mentioned to him that as a peace officer, he had an obligation, and he held up his hand—“I don’t know nothing about it, Noir, and I wasn’t here, and anybody who says so is a liar.” And he finished his whiskey and upped and left. The door clicked shut, and my heart jumped. It sounded like the hammer of a gun.

  I SAT IN MY OFFICE, and I tried to scope out a plan. Nuts to Scarlett and Pfizer. I’d clean out my savings account and head north. Birch had a cabin on Lake Watab near Avon. I could cool my heels in the woods and catch up on my reading and wait for Mr. Banana to get bored and go away. I removed a couple ceiling tiles where I’d stashed a hundred packs of Elongate and my old .38 snub-nosed revolver and a box of shells, and I fished my Rolodex out of the debris and dropped it all in a Dayton’s shopping bag, and then my phone rang. UNKNOWN CALLER, it said on the screen. A second ring. ANSWER THE PHONE, it said. A third ring. HEAR ME, MR. NOIR?? So I clicked answer.

  A voice at the other end sounded like a load of gravel sliding down a chute. “Mr. Noir, this is Johnny. Johnny Banana. I’d like to meet with you. Right away.” It was the voice of a man who’s been drinking whiskey on a daily basis with battery acid for a chaser and smoking acetylene cigarettes. If concrete blocks could talk, they’d sound like that voice.

  “What a pleasant surprise,” I said. “I was hoping you had come to town to see me. It’s been a long time, sir.”

  “A long time since what?”

  “We met once before. In Chicago. At Benny’s.”

  I was lying through my ears. Also I was sneaking down the stairs as tippy-toe as possible toward where my car was parked, in the alley by the back door to Nacho Mama.

  “Benny?” he said. “Benny who?”

  “Well, he went by a whole bunch of names.”

  “You mean Benny Brunello?”

  “Yeah. The big guy. With the eyebrows. Right?”

  I was in the alley now and putting the key in the car door.

  “What’s that sound?” he said. “You on your way somewhere?”

  “On my way to wherever you want to meet,” I said. “But you better hurry because my battery is about to die. In fact, I think—” And I clicked off the cell phone. I got in the car and raced onto I-94 heading north toward Avon. Traffic was light through the Loring Tunnel and past the Basilica of St. Mary. I had six grand on me. I wondered if I should go back to the bank and get more. I got off the freeway and circled around behind the basilica to meditate on what to do. It’s a big basilica, and it casts a long shadow. I punched in Birch’s number on the phone and was about to call her and ask where the key to the cabin was hidden—on the porch, under a bait bucket, I thought—and there was no answer. Naomi. I dialed her number, and—a miracle!—she answered. “Namaste,” she said. I heard water bubbling in the background and women ululating, accompanied by drums and tiny bells.

  “Namaste yourself, babes. This is your security man, and I am about to go into a permanent weight-loss program, the kind you do underground in a narrow wooden box.”

  “I can’t deal with this right now.”

  “You can’t? Well, think how I feel.”

  She was at a spa in the Adirondacks called Serenity Springs. Lying in a hot mineral bath while someone named Jorge massaged her face with mint leaves. He was whispering something to her, something about leaving all anxiety and conflictedness behind.

  “My yoga session is at two. I’ll call you afterward,” she said in a serene voice.

  “There is no afterward. Afterward doesn’t exist. Serenity is not applicable here. I’m in deep trouble, kid. My little boat is drifting toward Niagara, I need to get ashore.”

  She sighed. “I wish you the inner peace of a harmonious heart,” she said. And then she said, “Oh, wow.” And then dial tone. I pulled out of the basilica parking lot and back onto I-94 and put the pedal to the metal, thinking about Birch’s little cabin in the pines, also estimating how long I could live on six thousand dollars. And then I saw movement in the rearview mirror, and a man’s voice behind me said, “Easy does it, Mr. Noir. Let’s pull off at the next exit and have us a little conversation.”

  I TOOK THE DOWLING EXIT and drove west to Crystal Lake cemetery and drove in, slowly, and stopped next to a statue of a weeping angel and a headstone that said, BELOW THIS HUMBLE MONUMENT THERE LIES, MUZZLED WITH DUST, HER SOUL IN PARADISE, OUR CHERISHED DAUGHTER QUICKLY FLED TO THE IMMORTAL LIVING FROM THE DEAD. CORINNE.

  The man in the backseat slipped slowly out of the car and stood by my window for a moment and then strolled around the front of the car and opened the door and sat in the shotgun seat. He was short and plump, with moisturized skin and caramelized hair, in a black short-sleeve silk shirt and black spangly pants, skintight, and sandals with tassels. If he was packing a gun, he had concealed it awfully well. He smelled of an exotic fragrance, sweet and lemony, and he smiled an insincere smile. “I’m Cliff Kress, chief acceptance officer, Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Noir.” He snapped open his billfold and flashed an ID with a gold seal on it.

  “What a coincidence. I was just about to call you, Mr. Kress.”

  He shook his head, as if I had said something very dumb. “Please spare me the persiflage, Mr. Noir. I’m not in the mood.”

  I pressed on. “I have so much I want to tell you, Mr. Kress. I don’t know where to start.”

  “Let’s start with you shutting up,” he said. I could see by his bemused expression that he was onto me. He looked like Miss MacDonald looked when I told her I had forgotten my book report on the bus.

  “I am a private investigator, Mr. Kress, and I’ve been working undercover trying to get the goods on these shysters who are selling parasites to the American people. And I finally have succeeded in tracing the chain of command up to Mr. Big. An old man named Joey. And he asked me to make you an offer. One hundred thousand-dollar bills, the ones with Mr. Grover Cleveland on them. We can have them in your hands by tomorrow morning. Nine a.m.”

  “I’m not for sale. Been bought already.” He laughed a hard, worldly laugh.

  “Mr. Noir, you and I are grown men. Let’s not waste time playing footsie. You’re selling a drug called Elongate. You’re earning a lot of money from it. Uncle Sam doesn’t like it when you put a drug out there without asking permission. The FDA has lawyers who practically come to climax at the thought of prosecuting people like yourself.”

  I was about to say something about the presumption of innocence, and he held up his hand. “Hear me out, Mr. Noir. It’s not what you think it is.” He reached over and switched on the radio.

  “Just in case your car is bugged, sir.”

  It was a jazz station. A breathy woman sang:

  I get no kick from cocaine.

  Mere crystal meth doesn’t take away my breath

  But kick me, darling, please do

  And I’ll get a kick out of you.

  Mr. Kress leaned over and said in a quiet voice: “I’m retiring from the FDA in three weeks, Mr. Noir. And I’m taking a job with Pfizer. I’m leaving public service at $71,000 a year, and I’m joining Pfizer for $385,000 a year. Not a difficult decision. So I guess you can figure out why I’m here. Two months ago, my friends at Pfizer would’ve been ha
ppy to negotiate a deal with you, but the time for talk has passed, Mr. Noir. You stood up Scarlett Anderson an hour ago. That wasn’t very smart of you.”

  “I went up to my office to get the stuff she asked for and someone had trashed the place.”

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded paper.

  “Just sign this, Mr. Noir, and your troubles are over.”

  I glanced at the paper. It seemed to be a transfer of all rights pertaining to Elongate or any weight-loss product whatsoever.

  “What about Naomi? What about Mr. Ishimoto?”

  “They’ve signed it already.”

  “What about Johnny Banana?”

  Mr. Kress turned a slight shade of pale. “What about Johnny Banana?” The name set off Mr. Kress’s internal alarm system, no doubt about it. Very interesting.

  “I just sold him my interest in Elongate this morning. I’ve got his number here if you want to call it.” I lied in a calm businesslike tone, the way a person is supposed to. I scrolled up the call register and gave him McCafferty’s number.

  I couldn’t tell if Mr. Kress was buying the story or not. “I’ll get back to you,” he said. He turned the radio off and pulled out his cell phone and pressed a button, and a minute later I could hear a helicopter descending. It landed about fifty yards away, and he walked to it and climbed in. On the fuselage it said: PFIZER. And up it went into the sky, the air pounding with the beat of the rotors until it disappeared beyond the river, heading east.

  He hadn’t told me to wait around so I didn’t. I turned the car around and headed toward St. Paul on I94. There would be no Avon for me until I could reach Naomi. I was 100 percent sure she had signed no transfer of rights whatsoever. Well, I was 85 percent sure—anyone who had written a book called The Blessing of Less was conceivably capable of throwing away a fortune. I called Mr. Ishimoto, and he denied having signed a paper for Mr. Kress. His voice sounded odd on the phone, though. Like maybe someone had a loop of piano wire around his neck.

  “Is someone holding a gun to your head right now, Mr. Ishimoto? If the answer is yes, say ‘I don’t know.’”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “And is it a bunch of guys in pinstriped suits, and is one of them named Johnny Banana?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And have they found the worms, sir?”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You’re sure they haven’t?”

  “Positive.”

  “Good luck, Mr. Ishimoto.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.” And then the line went dead.

  I had a weak moment right then. Panic made me do it. I gave Lieutenant McCafferty a jingle and told him that an armed killer was after me and what was he going to do about it. I pleaded for my life. He was unmoved. “It’s a jungle and there’s not much I can do, Noir. You can’t keep the cougars from hunting the deer. Violence is part of life. The mouse is in the cornfield, shopping for his family, and suddenly there is a rush of owl wings, and he feels a sting in his back, and then he is very high in the air. The vultures and jackals who wait for their dinner to die a natural death before they move in are not the animals we admire. The killers are the ones we name our football teams after. I didn’t make the world, Noir. I just enjoy looking at it.”

  I PULLED OFF THE FREEWAY onto the road that ran along the Mississippi and pulled into an overlook under the Franklin Avenue bridge, its great concrete arches leaping the river gorge. A tow of eight empty barges plowed two abreast downstream, riding high in the water, pushed by the tug, its big engines hammering whump whump whump. The nameplate on the pilothouse said, WHITNEY MACMILLAN. A deckhand stood in an open door, a young dude, shirtless, smoking a cigarette. Suddenly I wanted to be him, watching the world go by, the houses on the leafy bluff, the cars in the long driveways, the patient daddies on their rider mowers, knowing that none of it pertained to me, feeling the liberty of the great waterway. Minnesota suddenly seemed less hospitable to me. I had ended a pleasant interlude and now had come to a plateau from which one descends into the deep, cold valley of reality. There, attempting to cross a bridge into the future, I would encounter an ugly troll who would seize my billfold and chase me down a road paved with bricks of sorrow that leads to a cliff, and I would fall off it and hit the ground and be old and fat and misunderstood—and life would go on as it had before, except even more so. Unless I could make a bold leap now—like the dude on the deck. Fly to New York. Rent a car. Drive to Southampton and find Naomi and the Rama Lama Monongahela before they could fly off to Paris together.

  Better yet, get over to Mr. Ishimoto’s and go head to head with Johnny Banana and his pinstriped goons. Hey you. Banana. Looky here. It’s Noir, calling your bluff, Man with Fruit Name. Put up or shut up. The way to deal with brutes and bullies is to poke ’em in the snoot. Subtlety and subterfuge don’t work. Pull up your jockstrap and walk up to the big bruiser and give him what for. He’s expecting you to wheedle and whimper, and instead you sock him in the beezer, whammo. Shock and awe.

  That’s what a Noir would do, said a still small voice. When did a Noir ever back away from a fight?

  The still small voice didn’t know my family very well. The still small voice was ignorant of the facts. We’ve been dodging fights ever since Great-Grandpa William Tecumseh Noir waltzed away from the draft in 1917. His older brother Robert E. Noir was a steward aboard the RMS Titanic and leaped into the first lifeboat, wearing a lady’s wig and a shawl, elbowing aside small children. Ulysses S. Noir collected wristwatches off the bodies of investors who leaped from high windows on Wall Street after the Crash of 1929, and though the watches were broken and the hands stuck at the time of impact, he tried to sell them at full price twenty-four hours later. His son, Stonewall Noir, was an airman at Pearl Harbor that December morning and pedaled his bike away from the burning buildings as fast as he could and took shelter in a joint called Honolulu Lou’s and got drunk and fell off his bike on the way back to the base and was awarded the Purple Heart. Audie Noir had a sore throat on D-day and went to the infirmary rather than go ashore at Normandy and lay in bed sucking cream soda through a straw. George S. Noir named names to the McCarthy committee in 1953, some of them Communists, some Methodists. Douglas Noir was drafted during the Korean conflict, and aboard the troopship to Seoul he suddenly started weeping and babbling and tearing his hair out, which other men did, too, but he did it with more force and conviction and was declared unfit to serve due to mental instability and girlish tendencies and was sent back to Texas, where he resumed his studies in chiropractic. Omar Noir was a physicist at Los Alamos and fell in love with a waitress named Natasha, who turned out to be a Soviet agent and asked him to turn over nuclear secrets, and he said, “Do that again what you did a moment ago, and I’ll start writing out formulas.” Uncle Dwight D. Noir commandeered a chopper and flew solo away from the American embassy in Saigon as the city fell in April 1975, and flew to Bali and treated himself to three weeks at a luxury resort with money he’d embezzled from the USO.

  So in keeping with family tradition, I gave up the fight. I stopped at the bank and cleaned out my account—“What’s her name, Mr. Noir?” said Charlene. “Who’s the lucky girl you’re going to Paris with?”—and hustled over to St. John the Lesser Episcopal Church on Wacouta Street to beg for sanctuary.

  18

  The mother church

  I KNEW THE RECTOR, FATHER Bert Smalley, from the Five Spot. He was a thirsty man. He liked vodka martinis. Sanctity is hard work for low pay, and after a long day of reverence, Father Bert liked to stroll in and put a quarter in the jukebox and belly up to the bar and toss down two martinis in succession as the Revelators sang:

  Why do men act that way

  And break our hearts every day

  Why do we bother to love?

  Men wear their pants down lo
w

  Playing with their video

  Why do we bother to love?

  Why do they lie to you

  And say I do when it isn’t true.

  I love them cause I know I should

  But I know they’re no darn good.

  And he sat chewing the olives and ordered his third martini, the one that loosened his tongue, and he’d start babbling about the sorrows of his life, the uncertainty of his calling, his faith journey, blah blah blah.

  It was an odd parish, St. John the Lesser. A gray stone Cass Gilbert castle on a block jammed with bars and pawnshops, a church with a tiny congregation, mostly gays and lesbians, and an enormous endowment, thanks to a horse farm bequeathed to it by the late Brewster Wylie (of Wylie, Warburton & Wordsworth). The farm had been subdivided and planted with mansionettes, and the millions in revenue enabled St. John the Lesser to put on the dog in a big way. The gays and lesbians were radical in politics and conservative in liturgy, and every Sunday morning the place was aswirl with cassocks, chasubles, albs, and surplices—and not army surplus surplices but fancy silk, gold-embroidered, with Italian cinctures—a flock of acolytes bearing a six-foot cross and candles and an embroidered banner (Veni, Creator), a tall black woman with shaved head and shining raiment swinging a censer like a house afire, smoke billowing up, and another woman with a crew cut flinging holy water from a silver tube—and bringing up the rear, the great mass of Father Smalley, his alb swishing, genuflecting grandly, hurling blessings left and right, as the choir of men and boys in starched ruffled collars chanted seventeenth-century plainsong. Henry VIII would have been quite comfortable attending mass at St. John, except for the homily, which tended to call for revolution and the overthrow of the privileged classes, including (presumably) Brewster Wylie, their great benefactor.

  I found Father Bert in his office, listening to a jazz quintet play the bejesus out of “Caravan,” and I described my predicament. He was a fan of detective novels, and he was intrigued when I told him about Johnny Banana dogging my trail. I told him I needed to take sanctuary in his sanctuary, and he said, “Oh, that is thrilling. What an opportunity for grace.” He ran around poking into closets, and soon I was enveloped in a black woolen cassock with hood and leather sandals and a pectoral cross the size of a fence post. “You hit someone with that, and they’re gonna get visions,” said Father. He led me off behind a statue of the archangel Michael, arms outstretched as if pleading with an umpire, to a small, windowless room off the vestry. There was a black leather couch and a low table piled with Sunday bulletins. “This is the acolytes’ lounge,” he said. “You can bed down here for the night, and we’ll work out a long-term plan tomorrow. There’s a retreat center up in Bemidji. You could go there, but you’d be expected to spend four hours a day in prayer.” He handed me a couple fat cigars, a snifter of brandy, some dark chocolates, and a can of Mace. “If the sons of bitches come in the night, brain them with the cross and squirt some Mace in their faces. That’ll slow ’em down.” For a man of God, he seemed quite enthused about violence. “I wouldn’t mind sticking around and duking it out with them myself, but I have to go visit a parishioner in the morning who’s getting a new kidney. But if you ring this buzzer”—he pointed to a button by the couch—“I’ll hear it and come down and kick the crap out of them. By the way, what are they all riled up about?”