USA Noir Noir

by Johnny Temple

  “Don’t cuss at me,” she said.

  “I want to see you.”

  She sighed. “No. You can’t see me.”

  “I’m coming by.”

  “Just stay there. Wait for Shag . . . Come by after you speak to him.”

  So that’s what I did. I sat on the steps with my hands in my pockets. Had there been no baby, maybe Star would have gotten back with me. Had there been no baby and no Amp, maybe she could have let herself fall for me. I ain’t bad looking. Amp was just a little taller. But he had these long dreadlocks, where I just have this little nappy afro. Not even enough to braid into cornrows. Once when we were hanging out at Highland Park, Star said she liked my Asiatic Black Man eyes. She grabbed my jaw and looked right into them like she was reading something. Fuck, I hadn’t ever heard the word Asiatic before.

  People thought my grandmother had some Asian in her. She had a pudgy face—before the cancer got at her—she had a pudgy face and these slanted eyes that made her look like she was just waking up. If you were on her bad side her face looked full of NotToBeFuckedWithness. I know dudes who just moved and nodded when they saw her walking their way. But if you were on her good side, the same face, the same expression, just seemed real mellow. She’d nod back to those brothers almost without moving her head. She really wasn’t to be fucked with, though, that’s for sure. She kept a fat switchblade in her bra. I got it now.

  After thirty, forty minutes, Shag pulled up in an old gray sedan. He was a long skinny man. Going bald. He almost didn’t have to lean over to roll down the passenger-side window.

  “Who are you, boy? What you want?” He didn’t seem all that fucked up over anything. Just suspicious as anyone who finds somebody on his porch in the middle of the day.

  “I’m Demario. I used to go to school with your nephew Amp.”

  Shag didn’t exit the car. I started thinking he wasn’t as calm as I first thought. Seemed like he was figuring something out. Maybe he thought I had a gun or something. All I had was a few books and a hammer in my backpack. And my grandmother’s blade. I had that in my back pocket.

  “I saw what happened to him last night,” I told Shag.

  People were saying the dudes who’d killed Amp hadn’t been caught, that was true for the moment. People were saying some sort of drug shit was involved, it didn’t seem like that to me. I’d seen them but the stupid dog was the only one to notice me. He barked with the gray hair up on his neck. But it wasn’t his usual wild, territorial bark. There was urgency in it. Fear. I probably imagined it. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a minute or two.

  I cleared my throat. “I think it was a couple of dudes who been renovating those houses on Euclid.”

  That was my theory. It should have felt good to tell him, but it didn’t.

  “Come here,” he said, waving me to the car window. He glanced up and down the street in a way that made me nervous. But what else could I do? Couldn’t run with him right there looking at me. I walked over to him with my hand stuffed in my pockets.

  “What they do with him? You tell the cops?”

  “I don’t know what they did. That’s why I came over. See how he doing.” That was mostly true. I’d come hoping Amp was alive, hoping the rumors were lies. But really, I just didn’t want Shag to ask why I hadn’t helped his nephew survive. I’d seen Amp fighting back. The dog was barking at me. Like it was saying, They’re gonna kill him, they’re gonna kill him, do something! Amp broke free, running off into the darkness of the alley with the men behind him. Maybe his dog barked at me just a beat longer before it realized I wasn’t going to do anything. It turned, running after them. I didn’t follow.

  “Well, he ain’t here . . .” Shag said, getting out of the car.

  “Okay.” I could see it in his face, he was lying to see if I’d know he was lying.

  “You should come in with me and wait for him, he’ll be back soon probably,” Shag said.

  “No, I got some errands to run. I might come back by later.”

  Shag chuckled slightly and said, half to himself, “Nigga talking about errands.” He was jingling his keys.

  “I’ll come back later.”

  “Man, come on in the house,” he said. Then, a little bit softer: “I got something I want you to do.”

  “Amp ain’t alive is he?” I said. Blurted.

  “No, he ain’t,” he sighed. “He ain’t.”

  He opened the door and I followed him up a flight of stairs to the second floor where he and Amp and Amp’s mother lived. I don’t know where she was. Bawling at the East Liberty precinct. Picking out caskets. I thought the air smelled funny. Damp, salty with grief maybe. She might have been locked in her bedroom dreaming her son was still alive. We moved down a tiny hallway to a tiny den. I recognized Amp in the wood-colored face of a boy on an end table. His first or second grade school portrait. His grin was so wide it showed every one of his teeth. He had a small gold stud in his ear. I remembered he’d been the first of the boys our age to get pierced. Instead of the white-collared shirts we were supposed to wear for our school uniforms at Dilworth, he wore a loose white T-shirt.

  “Amp did that shit,” Shag told me, pointing to where the thick blue carpet was yanked back revealing a perfect hardwood floor beneath it. “Told his momma he was going to fix this place up with his tools.” Shag sat down on a plaid sofa that took up nearly all the space in the room. I saw the edge of a bedsheet spilling beneath it and figured it was where he slept.

  “You want to smoke,” he asked, pulling out a sandwich bag full of weed. He was settling in, I hadn’t sat down yet.

  “No,” I said. Though I wanted to get high, really. What I really wanted was something to lift me from the ground. Up through the roof, up on above Penn Circle sitting like a bull’s-eye in the middle of our neighborhood. Up on out of Pittsburgh. But I told him no and watched him roll a blunt.

  “I told that nigga he was gone get jacked up for stealing them boys’ shit,” Shag said. He told me to sit down, but he didn’t seem to care when I didn’t. “I told his momma too. His room’s full of their shit. Some dusty safety goggles, screwdrivers, dirty work gloves, dirty work boots, a fucking sliding T-bevel. You know what a T-bevel is? Amp didn’t know either, but he got one in there.”

  Shag’s phone buzzed on his hip but he didn’t answer it.

  “So I need you to do me a favor, youngblood. We need to ride over to where them motherfuckers are working and I need you to point them out to me.”

  “I didn’t get a good look at them.”

  “That’s all right. I want you to try. Just point in the right direction, know what I mean?”

  He reached between the cushions of the sofa. I saw the butt of the gun just as his phone started buzzing again. This time he answered it. He smiled at me, then stood and walked from the room.

  I sat down on the couch and touched the gun handle where it stuck out like the horn of an animal. I thought for a second about taking it and the bag of weed. Instead I got up, tipped to the hall, and listened. I could see into Amp’s room. There were a pair of sneakers and a dog leash on his bed.

  “No, I’ll probably head to Newark. Atlanta. Somewhere with more black people than there are here.” I could hear Shag taking a piss in the bathroom while he talked. “You ain’t good for shit, you know that, right? No. No, nigga, just stay there. I got somebody here gonna ride over there with me.”

  I thought again of the gun. Shag would want me to drive while he shot from the window. Or worse, he’d drive while he made me shoot. Either way, what I’d seen meant I’d have to be a part of what was going to happen.

  * * *

  I tried to be quiet running out of the house. I kept thinking I could hear a dog barking behind me. Amp’s dog. The ghost of his dog. I didn’t look back until I was panting around the corner. I was a few blocks from Star’s house. But I turned toward Euclid where the new houses were being built.

  There was a young white woman working in her ya
rd. Planting flowers or something. Trimming the hedges. She glanced at me, then stared as I walked up the steps of the big empty house standing next to hers. There was no one there. I rattled the doorknob looking through its window into the wide bare rooms. I glanced back at the white woman who was pulling off her gardening gloves and still watching me. I pulled the hammer Amp sold me from my book bag and used it to smash the window on the door. The woman rushed inside her house. I reached through and tried to grab the door latch, but couldn’t. I walked across the porch and hammered at the pane of the living room window until it broke open like a mouth with its teeth knocked out. It was loud as hell. I didn’t fucking care. I guess I got cut. My blood dripping on the shiny hardwood floors almost looked like a trail of pennies.

  I wanted to carve Amp’s name somewhere no one would find it. Not for another fifty years or so. Not until the house had been lived in by rich white people, then rented out to poor black people, then renovated for white people again. I wanted someone in the future to strip back the sheetrock and find Amp’s named carved into a beam. There was nowhere to carve it, though. Nowhere discreet. The kitchen didn’t have cabinets yet. The bathroom on the first floor had no toilet. Wires hung from the ceilings and walls. Just an empty house. My grandmother said—she used to say this all the time—that people, black or white, would always fight over dirt but nobody could ever really own it. She said the land could only belong to the land. The rivers belonged to the rivers. The air was still air no matter who claimed to own it.

  On the second floor I stood at a window in the master bedroom. Brick and sky, metal and wood, concrete and dirt, you already know what I saw out there: all the shit that gives air something to lean on. I knew the cops were on their way. And I’d have to do something. Say something. I thought I could already hear the sirens. I thought I could hear dogs trying to match the sound. I sat in the middle of the floor with the hammer in my lap. I had blood on my shirt and pants. I wasn’t crying. I was barely breathing.

  When I dialed Star’s number, the dial tones echoed around me. We’d talked on the phone, but I hadn’t seen her in weeks. Wasn’t that I was afraid of Amp or his fucking dog. I just kept thinking she’d ask me over eventually. Soon as Amp fucked up, I figured she’d want to see me. And really, when I heard he was dead, I thought it was a reason to see her. Pregnant or not. I was going to be there for her. I was going to be with her.

  Star didn’t speak a word when she answered. “Hey,” I said after a few seconds. I said it just as I’d said it to my mother when we came home from my grandmother’s funeral. Sort of like it was a question. Softly. Slowly. It embarrassed me the same way when I said it then. “Hey.”

  WHITE TRASH

  BY JEROME CHARYN

  Claremont/Concourse, The Bronx

  (Originally published in Bronx Noir)

  Prudence had escaped from the women’s farm in Milledgeville and gone on a crime spree. She murdered six men and a woman, robbed nine McDonald’s and seven Home Depots in different states. She wore a neckerchief gathered under her eyes and carried a silver Colt that was more like an heirloom than a good, reliable gun. The Colt had exploded in her face during one of the robberies at McDonald’s, but she still managed to collect the cash, and her own willfulness wouldn’t allow her to get a new gun.

  She wasn’t willful about one thing: she never used a partner, male or female. Women were more reliable than men; they wouldn’t steal your money and expect you to perform sexual feats with their friends. But women thieves could be just as annoying. She’d had her fill of them at the farm, where they read her diary and borrowed her books. Pru didn’t appreciate big fat fingers touching her personal library. Readers were like pilgrims who had to go on their own pilgrimage. Pru was a pilgrim, or at least that’s what she imagined. She read from morning to night whenever she wasn’t out foraging for hard cash. One of her foster mothers had been a relentless reader, and Prudence had gone right through her shelves, book after book: biographies, Bibles, novels, a book on building terrariums, a history of photography, a history of dance, and Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, which she liked the best, because she could read the little encapsulated portraits of films without having to bother about the films themselves. But she lost her library when she broke out of jail, and it bothered her to live without books.

  The cops had caught on to her tactics, and her picture was nailed to the wall inside post offices, supermarkets, and convenience stores; she might have been trapped in a Home Depot outside Savannah if she hadn’t noticed a state trooper fidgeting with his hat while he stared at her face on the wall.

  Pru had to disappear or she wouldn’t survive her next excursion to Home Depot or McDonald’s. And no book could help her now. Travel guides couldn’t map out some no-man’s land where she might be safe. But Emma Mae, her cellmate at Milledgeville, had told her about the Bronx, a place where the cops never patrolled McDonald’s. Besides, she hadn’t murdered a single soul within five hundred miles of Manhattan or the Bronx. Pru wasn’t a mad dog, as the bulletins labeled her. She had to shoot the night manager at McDonald’s, because that would paralyze the customers and discourage anyone from coming after her.

  She got on a Greyhound wearing eyeglasses and a man’s lumber jacket after cutting her hair in the mirror of a public toilet. She’d been on the run for two months. Crime wasn’t much of a business. Murdering people, and she still had to live from hand to mouth.

  She couldn’t remember how she landed in the Bronx. She walked up the stairs of a subway station, saw a synagogue that had been transformed into a Pentecostal church, then a building with a mural on its back wall picturing a paradise with crocodiles, palm trees, and a little girl. The Bronx was filled with Latinas and burly black men, Emma Mae had told her; the only whites who lived there were “trash”—outcasts and country people who had to relocate. Pru could hide among them, practically invisible in a casbah that no one cared about.

  Emma Mae had given her an address, a street called Marcy Place, where the cousin of a cousin lived, a preacher who played the tambourine and bilked white trash, like Prudence and Emma. He was right at the door when Pru arrived, an anemic-looking man dressed in black, with a skunk’s white streak in his hair, though he didn’t have a skunk’s eyes; his were clear as pale green crystals and burned right into Pru. She was hypnotized without his having to say a single syllable. He laughed at her disguise, and that laughter seemed to break the spell.

  “Prudence Miller,” he said, “are you a man or a girl?”

  His voice was reedy, much less potent than his eyes.

  Emma Mae must have told him about her pilgrimage to the Bronx. But Pru still didn’t understand what it meant to be the cousin of a cousin. His name was Omar Kaplan. It must have been the alias of an alias, since Omar couldn’t be a Christian name. She’d heard all about Omar Khayyam, the Persian philosopher and poet who was responsible for the Rubaiyat, the longest love poem in history, though she hadn’t read a line. And this Omar must have been a philosopher as well as a fraud—his apartment, which faced a brick wall, was lined with books. He had all the old Modern Library classics, like Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, books that Pru had discovered in secondhand shops in towns that had a college campus.

  “You’ll stay away from McDonald’s,” he said in that reedy voice of his, “and you’d better not have a gun.”

  “Then how will I earn my keep, Mr. Omar Kaplan? I’m down to my last dollar.”

  “Consider this a religious retreat, or a rest cure, but no guns. I’ll stake you to whatever you need.”

  Pru laughed bitterly, but kept that laugh locked inside her throat. Omar Kaplan intended to turn her into a slave, to write his own Rubaiyat on the softest parts of her flesh. She waited for him to pounce. He didn’t touch her or steal her gun. She slept with the silver Colt under her pillow, on a cot near the kitchen, while Omar had the bedroom all to himself. It was dark as a cave. He’d emerge from the bedroom, dressed in black, like some Satan with pier
cing green eyes, prepared to soft-soap whatever white trash had wandered into the Bronx. He’d leave the apartment at seven in the morning and wouldn’t return before nine at night. But there was always food in the fridge, fancier food than she’d ever had: salmon cutlets, Belgian beer, artichokes, strawberries from Israel, a small wheel of Swiss cheese with blue numbers stamped on the rind.

  He was much more talkative after he returned from one of his pilferings. He’d switch off all the lamps and light a candle, and they’d have salmon cutlets together, drink Belgian beer. He’d rattle his tambourine from time to time, sing Christian songs. It could have been the dark beer that greased his tongue.

  “Prudence, did you ever feel any remorse after killing those night managers?”

  “None that I know of,” she said.

  “Their faces don’t come back to haunt you in your dreams?”

  “I never dream,” she said.

  “Do you ever consider all the orphans and widows you made?”

  “I’m an orphan,” she said, “and maybe I just widened the franchise.”

  “Pru the orphan-maker.”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  “Would you light a candle with me for their lost souls?”

  She didn’t care. She lit the candle, while Satan crinkled his eyes and mumbled something. Then he marched into his bedroom and closed the door. It galled her. She’d have felt more comfortable if he’d tried to undress her. She might have slept with Satan, left marks on his neck.

  She would take long walks in the Bronx, with her silver gun. She sought replicas of herself, wanderers with pink skin. But she found Latinas with baby carriages, old black women outside a beauty parlor, black and Latino men on a basketball court. She wasn’t going to wear a neckerchief mask and rob men and boys playing ball.

  The corner she liked best was at Sheridan Avenue and East 169th, because it was a valley with hills on three sides, with bodegas and other crumbling little stores, a barbershop without a barber, apartment houses with broken courtyards and rotting steel gates. The Bronx was a casbah, like Emma Mae had said, and Pru could explore the hills that rose up around her, that seemed to give her some sort of protective shield. She could forget about Satan and silver guns.