Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  Vale flung his hands up. “Jesus Christ. Is he dead? He sounds like he should be fucking dead.”

  Casper frowned at him, turned to the doctor. “So what does that all mean? Where does that leave him?”

  Dr. Torrance looked at his watch. “At this point? It’s anyone’s guess. He was intubated but now he’s breathing on his own. He’s got a fever. There seems to be an infection that might be taking root. We’re trying to stem that before it gets a foothold. Mr. Deitz’s age and physical health aren’t necessarily in his favor.” He seemed to read their looks then, and said, “Still, he’s relatively stable right now. And you never know about these things. The body is an incredible machine capable of salvaging itself, of repairing itself after a lot of trauma. Right now, we’re waiting and monitoring.”

  Vale pulled at Casper’s shirtsleeve. “Doctor-speak,” he said behind his hand.

  Dr. Torrance smiled. “I’ll keep you both posted.” And here he bowed down slightly and raised his voice, as if Vale was slightly hard of hearing or possibly in another room. “Mr. Vale, we’re going to need this room in a few hours, but in the meantime, you just rest. And I’d like to have one of our clinicians come and speak to you about your issues with alcohol. Would you be willing to talk to someone?”

  5

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  I was born Marvin Deitz in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The fact that I had been born twice in a row within the United States, especially after arranging to have Bill Creswell’s record collection shipped to Portland, was something I considered to be a very good sign. An indication of something positive. (It does amaze me that after six hundred years I still look for things to be grateful for. Every time, it’s as if the Curse cackles and rubs its claws together. What a chump.)

  I was the youngest of four children, all of us boys. My parents had met at a beer hall in South Milwaukee. We were raised in an apartment complex on Wisconsin Avenue that took up the entire block. Milwaukee, even more than New York, was a city that seemed built entirely of stone. But beautiful, ornate; even our two bedroom apartment, with its clusters of rat shit in the hallways and its clanging pipes, buckling floors, contained crumbling stonework of such caliber that it left me openmouthed.

  I remember that most about my boyhood: the iron-gray sky limned against the buildings of Milwaukee as I stared up at them. It was an analogy I could comprehend. Milwaukee was an industrial town then, and a robust one, but it was also a dirty, bustling city full of crime and corruption. It was, for America, an old and ravaged city even then, but one bursting with hidden beauty—all of those cornices and gargoyles and gilded stanchions.

  I had never seen such things in my previous lives, which simply meant that I hadn’t been looking. It jolted me. As a child, my mother’s standard admonition would start with, “Watch where you’re going!” I walked gazing up at the tops of buildings, enmeshed in the details of place.

  Also of note: I was born whole and unblemished, which meant only that my disfigurement was forthcoming, expected.

  There were a group of boys that roamed the neighborhood. Hard-nosed boys, tough boys, with my brothers soon enough joining their ranks. It was the late sixties, and they idolized the low-level mob men who stood smoking outside the betting parlor across the street.

  Milwaukee had heavy Chicago mob ties in those days and the men across the street, with their muttonchops and suede jackets, their twenty-five cent cigars and hip flasks, their Polish jokes, were typical of numbers men, punch-men of the era. The butts of their revolvers sticking out of the back of their chinos. Men willing to break a guy’s arm or swing a blackjack against his skull.

  My brothers and the rest of them would run errands for these men, bring them their sandwiches from the deli down the street, shine their shoes. The men tolerated it, laughingly called the boys Krauts and Polacks, occasionally shared their flasks with the older ones. I knew trouble courted trouble and that when my ruination came, it would probably come from there.

  I checked out books from the library about Portland, Oregon, gathered whatever information I could. I dreamt. I wondered if Bill Creswell’s records really were waiting for me or not, if the will had been executed. If things had gone according to plan.

  Our parents worked hard. I admired their tenacity: they were first-generation immigrants and decent people run ragged with the needs of four boys. I was almost always left in the care of my brothers, or occasionally by Mrs. Rackowski down the hall, when my mother had to work late at the laundry and my father got overtime at the bottling plant on State Street.

  Our mother, in a rare show of exhaustion, sent us outside to play; she had a headache, the fumes from work wracking her. She shooed us out the door, told us to come back in an hour. My brothers, of course, headed straight for the hard boys on the corner.

  “I don’t want to go over there,” I said, and my brother Henry, the kindest of my siblings and three years older than me, grabbed me by the collar and said, “Come on, Marv. Mom said you gotta come with.” We were in the hallway outside our apartment. He put me in a headlock and my hat fell off and Henry picked it up and handed it to me. I remember thinking neither of my other brothers would have done that.

  Outside, the air was brittle and crystalline with the threat of more snow. “Ah,” one of the men cried in mock anguish when he saw the group of us crossing the street, “it’s the Polish army, Joe! Hide your wife, I know how she likes the kielbasa!” He blew into his hands and the men around him chortled like trolls.

  I remember the sound of tires through salted slush, the grayed rinds of snow mounded against the base of the buildings. The three men were drunk. I pressed myself against the wall of the building and squinted in the night, looking up at the cornices of our building across the street.

  And how do such things happen? Joe took offense. Joe, his wife’s honor infringed upon, defended her. The other man responded with a laugh, which is almost always the wrong thing to do, and followed it with another joke about Joe’s wife’s chastity, which was certainly the wrong thing to do. Joe, staggering, his eyes glassy with booze, pulled his revolver from his waistband. It made a sad little coughing noise when he fired it.

  Joe’s bullet hit the wall at least a foot above the other man’s head and ricocheted off the brick. It grazed the surface my eye, severing the ciliary muscle. It shattered the bridge of my nose and then lodged in Henry’s throat. The odds of a marksman managing a shot like that on purpose were—I’m sure—astronomically high, though the Curse regularly trafficked in such things.

  The other numbers men pulled the revolver from Joe’s hands and proceeded to beat him to death. My brothers fled as Henry and I lay on the sidewalk, the old gray snow darkening with our blood.

  I tried to staunch Henry’s bleeding, my hands at his throat, pressing, but both he and Joe were dead by the time the police arrived. The men had vanished, my face bloodied, my sleeves red to the elbows.

  It’s an unfair question, not that I expect an answer. (I’ve been asking it for a while, after all.) But we’ll give it a shot anyway. Rhetorically, you understand.

  What is the point?

  To any of it? When every question gets the same answer? When every action ends in the same terrible, hurtful result?

  If I learn whatever there is to be learned, will I be forgiven?

  • • •

  The little yellow coat hung from a chain over Joan’s heart. I reached for her and the room washed away and she became this shifting tide, became all of my mothers and my fathers, all of my poor dead daughters and sons. My husbands and wives. Friends and brothers and sisters. Enemies. This sea of faces.

  She stood before me and became Time, and Death, and Love, too.

  The yellow coat swung on a chain.

  All of these faces morphed and ran into each other. A tide of them. Joan pulled away from me and she was Casper—and Casper became Cauchon, who became (I knew it without ever having seen him) little Mellie’s brother. And he became Esme,
and Julia, and Luc. And Suyin. On and on and on, this unspooling cavalcade of faces and history that spanned both centuries and a moment.

  Everyone was connected—I saw it, felt the expansiveness of it, but also understood that such knowledge needed to be parsed into a necessary blindness: to comprehend the magnitude of it would be too much. As much as I had lived, in all my years, I had seen but a corner of the tapestry. A thread.

  It was such a large and unknowable thing.

  Joan leaned toward me and her lips brushed my forehead like a whisper.

  Do you see?

  “Yes.”

  You have a purpose, Marvin. All of the hate and ruination and loss. A reason for it all, finally. Do you know it? Do you see it?

  I wept then, bitterly, the yellow coat swinging from its chain in front of my eyes. “No. Please tell me.”

  I will. But first, I need to tell you something else. Something you’ve wondered and feared the answer to.

  And oh, I knew what she spoke of, and I wept like a child at its mention, these jagged sobs that tore from me. “Yes. Okay.”

  She pressed her lips to my ear and laid her hand on my cheek. And in a voice like wind, like the ceaseless tide, like the howl of stars, she said, I forgave you before you laid flame to tinder.

  Marvin, listen to me.

  I forgave you the moment I saw you.

  THURSDAY

  1

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  “As you can see, Marvin, the place is not gigantic,” Avril Noonan had said, all those years ago.

  “But the location,” I said.

  She held up a finger. “The location is nice, true.” Randy, maybe thirteen or fourteen at the time, rolled his eyes. He stood there in the doorway with his arms crossed. He had a rattail and his acne was so bad it looked like someone had spattered his face with gore. Just exuding hormones like a fog. He’d been such a hard kid to like, but when I remembered him like that, it made it easy to feel a little sorry for him.

  I was twenty-one years old and had recently acquired the keys to the storage facility out in Gresham that Bill Creswell had paid for in perpetuity for over two decades. The storage room had been air- and temperature-controlled, and the albums, all seven thousand of them, were in pristine condition. I’d flown out of General Mitchell Airport with four thousand dollars in an envelope in my jacket—my life savings up to that point.

  “So this is okayed for retail space?”

  Avril smiled and tucked her hair behind her ear. “My husband left me the building, hon. It’s okayed for whatever I say it is.”

  “I’m thinking of a record store, maybe.”

  She nodded. “That sounds wonderful. This is a great city for music.”

  Thirty-five years later Randy would step through those doors with his Boston accent, his mother long dead, and evict me under a pretty impressive pretense. But at the time, dust motes whirled slowly in the windows and I remember hope jangling inside me like a loose wire. Even then, still dumb enough to hope.

  Another tumble in the barrel, I thought. Another stumbling shot at the relentless act of living.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  • • •

  Dr. Torrance sighed, unhappy. “This is not advisable, Mr. Deitz. This is not a sound medical decision.”

  “But it’s my decision,” I said as I pushed my foot into a shoe, grimacing.

  “You were critically injured less than a week ago, Mr. Deitz. I mean, the risk for infection or complications are serious. I urge you to reconsider. You shouldn’t even be walking, frankly.”

  I leaned down to tie the shoe and found I couldn’t. It wasn’t even close—there was a deep, red-edged pulling in my chest by the time I started leaning over. The stitches. Casper took a knee and tied my shoe for me.

  I managed to smile at Dr. Torrance. Sweat popped out on my forehead. “I appreciate your help.”

  “You understand that we’ve stitched your lung, Mr. Deitz? Your abdominal lining? Your recovery has been impressive, but really, you shouldn’t be moving around at this point.”

  Casper had bought me a new t-shirt in the gift shop, navy blue with the name of the hospital on it. As if people would want to be reminded of the place, like it was a particularly good concert they’d been to. I took my gown off, the starched fabric rustling as it fell to the floor. I stood there in sweatpants, my chest a shaved horror wrapped in gauze and bandages. Casper hovering like a toddler’s mother as I started the gymnastics routine of putting my shirt on. Again I needed his help. I lifted my arms and Casper slipped the shirt over me.

  I said, “I’ve really got to go, Dr. Torrance. Thank you for everything you’ve done. You’re a hell of a surgeon.” Before the bandages had been changed earlier that day I’d hazarded a look at myself: my torso was bruised purple up to my throat. A bullet had exited above my hipbone, among other places, and I needed a walker to stand up, much less move. My arm was in a sling since the other bullet had shattered my collarbone. I was on a pretty meaningful cocktail of painkillers. Casper joked that Vale and I were keeping the pharmaceutical industry aloft.

  Dr. Torrance puffed out his cheeks and let loose a long sigh.

  “You’re seriously going to go through with this?”

  “I am. I need to get home.”

  He held up a hand. “Well, I’m calling someone down from legal, then. I’d appreciate it if you’d wait until then. I want them down here, preferably with a goddamned video camera, when you triple-sign your release forms.”

  2

  Up I-5 then, back the way they’d come.

  Another rental car, some sleek new thing, the van still in some LAPD impound lot. Casper drove with a timidity Vale found both irritating and a little endearing. Marvin lay sweating in the back seat adrift a tide of pain pills.

  Vale tuned the radio to a jazz station and got “Round About Midnight,” one of the few jazz tunes he recognized. He thought of Basquiat that day outside the gallery all those decades before, the various effluvia that the man had dropped in Vale’s hands that day, the random castoffs of his living. Outside the car, the world was full of strip malls and gas stations and parched yellow hills. The sky threatened rain and Vale welcomed it; these stunted dry fields needed some water. The world seemed brittle, ready to light at the slightest random spark.

  Marvin cleared his throat and from the back seat said in a husky voice, “Can you guys change this, please?”

  “You want us to change it?”

  “I hate this song.”

  Vale turned the station.

  “I really do,” Marvin rattled, his voice hoarse. “I hate that song with a passion.”

  Casper whipped his head back as he changed lanes, and Vale said quietly, “You’re doing fine, Casper. Chill, man.” He tapped his splint against his leg and felt his heart inflate, this thing inside him that threatened to break through his chest. It felt so good it almost hurt. He had pieced together five days of sobriety now. Five days! He had a backpack full of verbose and heavy-handed medical literature about alcoholism that he told himself he may look at someday in the future, and a prescription for Xanax that he wanted desperately to fill but was trepidatious.

  And still he was struck with this feeling in his heart—like the Moment if the Moment was jacked on steroids—at least a few times a day. It was a crazed, intense feeling of expansiveness. Like anything was possible. Like everything was beautiful. This simultaneous tenderness that paradoxically, when he was in it, made him feel like he could rip phone books in half and French kiss a Doberman and save old ladies and cats from burning buildings. These little half-minute starbursts of savage, leaping joy. They afforded him a gratitude, suffused him with it, that had to be annoying as hell to be around. It was the novelty of sobriety; he knew he was coasting on the high of it but didn’t give a flying shit.

  Because five days.

  Holy shit, five days. Man.

  The three of them drove in silence save for the radio, pop songs n
ow, auto-tuned and saccharine, until Marvin said from the backseat, “That song. You know, I shot dope with John Coltrane a couple times.”

  Vale looked back at him. Marvin lay sprawled out in the back seat, his face pale. Sweat ringed his collar. His eyes were unreadable behind the sunglasses Casper had bought him in the gift shop.

  “You hurting? You can have another pain pill if want.”

  “I did, Mike,” Marvin said.

  Casper laughed uneasily and turned the radio off. He looked in the rearview mirror.

  Marvin took off the sunglasses and tossed them on the seat. He palmed sweat from his forehead and Vale saw the drooping, empty eye socket. “I shot a boatload of dope into my foot. Killed myself from it. It was 1961. That summer was hotter than shit, I remember that. I wanted to impress that man so bad. You just meet people sometimes and they’re like their own star. Give out their own light. And I just didn’t give a damn anymore. Again.”

  “You’re not making any sense, bud. I want you to drink some water,” Vale said, handing him a plastic bottle. Vale, Mister Five Days of Sobriety, was now a big proponent of hydration. Water: his solution to everything. Marvin was clearly beginning to hallucinate, and Vale turned to Casper and murmured, “If he’s like this in another hour, we’re going to the hospital. I don’t care where we are.”

  Marvin laughed and then winced. Leaned his head against the window. “I’ve sawed men in half because I was told to. Because it was expected of me. Listened to them beg for their lives. Pleading for mercy! And this song can piss me off more than any of it.” He drank some of the water. Some of it ran down his chin. “I was an idiot. I’m still an idiot.”