Twin Cities Noir

by Julie Schaper

  Greer kept plunging further south, and I was blindly determined to stay on his tail, for what purpose I still had absolutely no idea.

  He eventually pulled into the parking lot of a desolate-looking strip motel. The sign out front was faded and dark, and if it weren’t for the presence of several pickup trucks backed up to rooms, the place would have appeared abandoned. I passed it and turned into the first street that I came to on the opposite side of the highway. I swung the car around and parked. The motel was perhaps two hundred yards away, and I could still see Greer’s brake lights in the parking lot. The driver’s side door was half open, illuminating the car’s interior. Greer was clearly visible to me, and it appeared he was leaning over in the seat, studying something.

  I popped my trunk, got out of the car, and fished a tire iron from the wheel well. Without thinking I dashed across the highway and crept along the edge of the service road toward the motel.

  There was a cluster of scrub maples and weeds at the southern edge of the place, and I crouched in the darkness, breathing heavily, waiting for Greer to make a move. It seemed like I waited a long time. Greer remained slumped in the front seat. I could hear strains of rock music coming from the open door of the car.

  Tiptoeing from the brush, I managed to get within perhaps twenty feet of the Impala, where I took shelter behind one of the trucks. I could smell marijuana, and peering across through the windows of the truck’s cab I could see Greer, almost reclining, his head tilted back and his eyes closed, taking a long drag from a joint.

  I crawled around the back of the truck and moved to a position directly behind the Impala. It took me perhaps two seconds to lunge forward and fling the car door wide open. Greer sat up straight, started to speak, and then turned his upper body away from me. The first time I swung the tire iron I hit him directly across the back of his head, almost at the base of his neck. When he hunched forward over the steering wheel, I hit him again, and he rolled over onto his back in the front seat. His eyes opened wide for a moment and then closed, and I heard a pitiful moan as I turned and ran.

  Back at my car I settled in behind the wheel and tried to stop trembling. I rolled down the window and flung the tire iron out into the grass. I’d never really hit anyone in my life, and it was a strange, almost euphoric experience. The combination of rage and ecstasy is a feeling that I would have certainly described at that moment as wonderful. I tried to remember if I had said anything to Greer before I swung the tire iron, but I had no recollection, and regretted that I had not made some memorable statement. I also tried to recall at exactly what point, if ever, my actions had been premeditated. Did I even have what I could classify as a real memory of the moment I decided on a precise course of action, the instant I went to the trunk and removed the tire iron? I honestly don’t believe I did. The whole thing just happened, but I felt an immense sense of satisfaction, and had absolutely no regard for potential consequences.

  The bottom line was that Francis Greer had ruined my life, perhaps once and for all. And at that point, sitting there in the darkness alongside the highway, I truly didn’t care. In that moment, for the first time in my life, the future literally did not exist in my mind.

  I started driving back into the city. Somewhere en route I turned off highway 52 onto a dark little county road. There was no real thought involved in this decision. The road was entirely unfamiliar, but maybe I just felt like driving, and had some weird faith that I’d end up where I needed to be. I thought about all my days on the straight and narrow, all the times I’d awakened surprised to find myself where I was, and doing whatever it was I was doing; surprised by the clean-shaven face I’d see in the mirror every morning and the smiling man I’d frequently encounter staring me down from the family portraits around my house and on my desk at work. Some guys I suppose get a sort of disoriented feeling when they study a picture of themselves from an old high school yearbook. I’ve always had that same feeling whenever I see a photograph of my present self. I’m not saying I feel embarrassed or abashed; it’s more a feeling of befuddlement, almost like I’ve literally never truly recognized myself in whomever I was pretending to be at any given moment.

  I don’t know, perhaps these thoughts came later. Maybe I wasn’t really thinking or feeling anything that night other than the blank rush of adrenaline. I know I was driving very fast. They’ve told me that much. And then all of a sudden there were a pair of bright lights hurtling toward me down that dark road. I saw the approaching car swerve into my lane, and then the driver—some punk, I’d later learn, eighteen years old and roaring on Old Style—killed his lights.

  I was in the hospital for almost two months, most of it spent in rehab learning to crawl back into my body. It was like my body was this empty suit in the corner and I couldn’t do anything until I learned all over again how to put it on and move around in it. The whole time I was in that hospital there was a card from Francis Greer on the stand next to my bed. “Tough break, Richie,”it read. “Better luck next time.”

  The doctors tried to tell me that I had to learn to remember, and that I had no recollection of what happened the night of the accident. That’s not true. I have a very precise memory of the accident; in fact, I know it was no accident at all.

  The whole thing was deliberate, a game of chicken. The kid challenged me. I remember there was an instant when I could have jerked the wheel and conceded the lane, a moment when the collision could possibly have been avoided. I’d already yielded once; maybe two hundred yards before the crash I had instinctively swapped lanes with the oncoming car, but the other guy had followed my lead. And in those last few seconds I resolved I wasn’t going to budge again. I’d done enough budging.

  The kid who was driving the other car was killed instantly, and I’m told that neither of his surviving passengers had any memory of the accident. I know exactly what happened, though. The little bastard would too, if he’d lived: I won.

  TAKING THE BULLETS OUT

  BY MARY SHARRATT

  Cedar-Riverside (Minneapolis)

  For over two decades, Neil had worked as a nurse in the emergency room at Hennepin County Medical Center. Many people burned out after only a few years, but he stuck to it the way he stuck to everything else. Someone had to extract the rubble out of a motorcycle accident victim’s raw thigh with a pair of tweezers. Someone had to be there to hold the hand of a teenager who’d just had a bottle of sleeping pills pumped out of her stomach. Neil never failed to comfort, even after seeing the fifth gunshot wound on a single day, the third woman with her teeth knocked out. He cleaned and disinfected their wounds. He bandaged them. He administered painkillers and spoke to them in a soft lulling voice. This routine had become such a part of him, he could practically do it with his eyes closed. He often wished he could indeed work blindfolded. In his twenty-five years in the emergency room, he had seen too much pain.

  He tried to put it behind him the instant he stepped through his garden gate. In summer, he practiced his flute on the back porch, losing himself for an hour or more, playing Mozart, Debussy, or the Gaelic airs he had learned from his grandfather. But one particular evening, when he sat down to play, a string of obscenities exploded on the other side of the fence. The guy next door was yelling at his girlfriend again.

  Neil hadn’t had much luck with neighbors in recent years, now that the neighborhood had become so rough and seedy. In 1969, when he and his former wife Gina had bought this little Victorian house, Cedar-Riverside had been vibrant and alive, the Twin Cities’ answer to Haight-Ashbury. A poet used to live next door. Neil and Gina had kept their back door unlocked to welcome the stream of friends into their kitchen. He used to leave his bicycle out on the porch all night. In those days, Neil could live off his music and odd jobs. He played with a folk band, had gigs in the Triangle, the Riverside Coffee House, and once in Dania Hall. Like so much else, those venues had vanished. Dania Hall had burned to the ground.

  Nobody stuck around for long anymore. People mov
ed in and out of the rundown old houses; they came and went in a blur of rowdy parties and blaring television sets. Neil tried to be tolerant, but nothing disturbed him more than loud domestic arguments. His twenty-five years in the emergency room had shown too well where these fights could lead. Lowering his flute, he stared at the trembling leaves of the Virginia creeper he had trained to grow on his eight-foot chain-link fence. It was no good calling 911. That was what he had done during their last fight. The cops had come far too late, and the next day the neighbor, a ratlike young man with a thin face and thinner lips, had told Neil to mind his own goddamn business. The guy was not a person you could argue with. He had informed Neil that he owned a gun and knew how to use it.

  On the other side of the fence, a door slammed. The boyfriend took off, leaving the girl behind. A few times Neil had passed her on the sidewalk. He remembered how she had gone bright red in the face when he made eye contact, how she had ducked her head. Now he listened to her jagged sobs. If he were a woman, he could go over and check on her, offer sympathy and support, but he was a man, and her boyfriend was jealous, a gun owner. He raised his flute and began to play, although the peace his music usually provided seemed quite beyond him. Still, he practiced his scales before launching into Debussy. If only his music had the power to obliterate and transform. The sun disappeared over the top of his fence, glittered faintly through the Virginia creeper and chain-links, then faded.

  Listening to the Mustang tear out of the driveway, Becky pulled herself up from the bathroom floor and groped for a washcloth, a towel, a bar of the jasmine-scented soap her mother had given her before she gave up on her daughter completely. She wet her hands and lathered her face, splashed herself with cold water, as if this would change anything. The first time he hit her, she had said, “I’m leaving.” But here she was. Stuck. You’re fucked up, she told herself. This could only happen to someone who was hopelessly fucked up.

  “I didn’t hit you,” he said the first time. A slap with an open hand didn’t leave a mark, didn’t cause any real damage— it only stung a little. Hank’s dad used to wallop him with a leather belt, used to beat the crap out of him. Hank told her she didn’t know what real hitting was. Once when some guy at the Viking Bar tried to pick a fight, Hank followed him outside and busted his jaw. But slapping her, shaking her, pushing her to the floor or up against a wall—that was small stuff. A few weeks ago, she made the mistake of trying to confide in one of the other waitresses at work, an older woman named Joanne, who just rolled her eyes. “Do you have any idea what a real battered woman looks like?”

  “You are a mess,” she said aloud to the grubby walls and mildewy shower curtain. She turned her back to the mirror, didn’t want to know what she looked like right now. Something awful and twisted inside her had drawn her to him, of all people. She was twenty. Last year at this time, she’d been in college—Mankato State—learning about the nineteenth-century English novel. When her financial aid had fallen through, her dad said, “Well, you weren’t exactly college material, anyway.” Becky sprang from a long line of failures. Her parents lost their farm when she was eight, and her father had been driving semis ever since. Her mom worked in a high school cafeteria. Originally Becky had wanted to study to be a teacher. “You, a teacher?” her dad roared. “Yeah, right. The kids would take one look at you, crumple you up in a ball, and toss you out the window.”

  Hank had been the one to comfort her. “What do you need college for? Why do you want to pay all that money for four years of B.S.? I never learned anything that really counted in school. You don’t have to take that shit from your father, either. I never took shit from anyone.” Hank had made her feel so reckless and wild. They used to go out on country roads late at night. He let her drive that old Mustang as fast as she wanted, egging her on until her foot ground the gas pedal into the floor and the wind roared through the open windows, whipping through her hair and bringing tears to her eyes. He said it was the closest she would ever come to flying.

  When she started getting serious with Hank, his divorce had just come through. Although he was only five years older than she was, he already had two kids and a pissed-off ex-wife. But he told Becky that she was the real love of his life, the one he had been saving everything up for. Then his ex called Becky’s mom and told her what a slut her daughter was. Becky’s father said, “That’s enough. Either break up with that loser or move out.”

  So she left with Hank for Minneapolis. On her better days, she told herself that they would work everything out. He could be so tender when he begged her not to leave. Sometimes he even wept. “I can’t help it if I go crazy each time I think of you with another guy.” The trigger for their last fight had been Becky getting a ride home from work with Ty, who was black and made her laugh. Hank looked out the front window and saw them laughing together in his car. When she came inside the house, he exploded. “I saw the way you were looking at him! You know, if there’s one thing I can’t forgive, it’s betrayal.” What would he do if she really tried to leave? She thought of the guy with the busted jaw.

  Becky held her breath, wondering how long it would take for her face to turn blue. Eventually she would pass out from lack of air. At moments like this, she understood why people did drugs. She wanted to go numb, not feel anything. In the silence of not breathing, she heard her neighbor play his flute. That music drove Hank crazy, made him bitch and turn up the TV full blast. For Hank’s sake, she had always acted like she hated it, too, but now that she was alone with the music, she had to admit she kind of liked it. It was pretty in a strange, sad way.

  Going to the bedroom, she changed from her shorts and T-shirt into a black sweatsuit, dressing with the lights out and the dusk filtering through the window screen. She loved this time, which was neither day nor night but twilight, when everything seemed beautiful, even the condemned house across the street. She loved trying to blend into the twilight, imagining herself invisible and untouchable. Stepping out the back door and past the gutted wreck of Hank’s old motorbike, she crept to the chain-link fence, metal cooling her cheek as she peered through the Virginia creeper. If Hank caught her doing this, he would twist it into something perverted, accuse her of having some obscene crush on the guy. But she just liked to look into his yard, which wasn’t anything like her mom’s and her aunts’ with the marigolds and plastic deer. His garden was luxuriantly overgrown with all kinds of flowers bursting up between the vegetable beds. At dusk, the place was a mysterious darkened tangle with a few fireflies darting through it.

  The neighbor had the porchlight switched on; she could see him as clearly as if he were under a spotlight. Even though he had to be at least fifty years old, he still had long hair. There was something about him, the way he could play for hours as if he were playing for his plants so they’d grow better. It seemed like the kind of thing a person from the ’60s would believe in. Her neighbor was old enough to be her father, and yet he was as different from her father—and from Hank—as a man could be. How different would she have turned out if she’d had a father like him? His music infected her, the way it danced around her, drawing her to his fence.

  Becky pressed her body against the metal mesh until the flute notes tapered off. She listened to the click as the neighbor went inside, locking the door behind himself. Lights went on and off in his kitchen and bathroom. How safe other people’s houses looked from the outside. His face appeared in the bedroom window before he pulled down the shade. He never saw me, she reminded herself. I was watching him the whole time, but he never knew. That knowledge made her shiver and feel a little creepy, as if she were some kind of ghost.

  * * *

  Hank kept his gun in the top dresser drawer. Becky often saw him take it out and oil it. He was very proud of his gun. She had never been able to ask him why he bought it or what he intended to use it for. When he was gone, she opened the drawer and just looked at it. Would she ever have the nerve to aim it at someone, pull the trigger? Would such an act make her
weak or strong, a heroine or a coward? Aim it at Hank? At her dad? Jesus, she was crazy to even be thinking like that. But sometimes when she wiped the counter at Denny’s on East Lake Street, she imagined herself acting out a scene from Thelma and Louise,imagined the exploding bullet and seeing him—Hank, her father, their faces blurring together—crumple backwards, away from her, a puddle at her feet.

  Neil picked bruised windfall apples from under the tree in his front yard. This earthy, brainless task calmed him. He tried to breathe deeply, rhythmically—his pulse was still ragged from the emergency room. Alicia, his favorite colleague, had a breakdown that day. They had wheeled in a ten-year-old boy with knife wounds from a fight that had taken place on the grounds of his elementary school. Alicia had an eight-year-old who went to the same school. She had started wailing, and the head doctor sent her home. The anguish on her face still haunted Neil.

  He tried to focus on the garden. When he finished picking the fallen apples, he would throw them in the compost heap out back, then go to work picking tomatoes and zucchini, which were growing faster than he could eat, freeze, and can them. As he reached down, he felt a shooting pain near his lumbar vertebrae. Cautiously he pulled himself upright. A slipped disc was all he needed. He tried to reason with his body. It’s just muscular tension. Have a hot bath and it will be fine.

  Breathing in slowly, he heard footsteps coming down the sidewalk. Through the metal links of the front gate, he saw the young woman from next door lug a bulging sack of groceries. She staggered with each step. He raised his hand, about to call out something friendly, but her face was shadowed, downcast. He didn’t want to startle her. Her grocery bag was printed with the logo of the local supermarket, which was understocked and exorbitantly priced. Why didn’t she shop at North Country Co-op, he wondered, or one of the East African groceries? As she moved out of his range of vision, he thought of her emptying her wallet to buy mushy hothouse tomatoes, waxy apples, and rubbery broccoli in the zenith of the garden season.