It was just before closing, Melissa says. Mike and Lyle were shooting pool. Gene was in his usual spot. She remembers Mike saying he was about to close. Then he let her stay and the four of them had beers and got stoned after Mike locked up.
Gene got stoned? I say.
Yeah, Melissa says.
I hadn’t heard that part before.
Evening
Fran tells me that instead of doing a geographic, I should go with her to visit her sister in St. Louis. It would be cheap, she says. No hotel or eating-out expenses.
Sounds okay, I say.
Did you order a pizza?
Not yet, I say. I’m tired of pizza.
What do you want?
I don’t know. Shit, what’s up with all the questions?
Fran goes into the kitchen. I hear her making herself a drink. I try calling Gene. I gave Gene my cell number one night. He called me a few times before he disappeared but I could never make out what he was saying. He had a sandpaper voice that came at you like radio static. What’s that? What’s that, Gene? I’d say, and then he’d hang up. I’d call him right back but he’d never pick up. He doesn’t pick up now. I get one of those female computer-generated voices telling me to leave a message. I’d like to talk to Gene, I say, and hang up.
Next day
Anybody hear anything about Gene? I ask.
Lyle shakes his head. Melissa and Tim look at Lyle and shrug.
Getting to be awhile, Lyle says.
Yeah, awhile, Mike says.
I shout in Bill’s ear and ask him what he knows. Well, he says, speaking like he’s got a mouth full of cotton, I spoke to one of his sons in San Antone. Yes, San Antone it was. Gene gave me his number when he stayed with me. An emergency contact, he had said. Well, let’s hope this isn’t an emergency because Gene’s son wants nothing to do with him. One of those kind of deals, if you know what I mean. Still a lot of water under that bridge, I guess. Anyway, I told his son, I just want you to know your father is missing. We haven’t seen him for the longest. Maybe he’s headed your way. But his boy said again he wanted nothing to do with him. What can you do?
He doesn’t expect an answer and I don’t give him one because, well, what can you do? Melissa, Tim, and Lyle go out back to smoke. Mike steps into the kitchen. Bill stares at his glass. I tell him that today for no good reason I was reminded of this private, a young gal. We got mortared and she got all messed up. She lay on the ground, her right arm ripped to shit like confetti. Some medics put her on a stretcher and got an IV in her, and her shirt rose up exposing her flat stomach and full tits and despite all her screaming I thought she was beautiful. I went over to see if I could help and she looked at me wide-eyed and said, Am I going to die? No, I said. You’re fine. You’re going to make it.
Do I know if she did? No, I don’t. That bothers me.
What you say? Bill says.
Evening
I call Fran from the union hall on Admiral Boulevard, shouting above the traffic noise of cars backed up overhead in the tangled mess that is I-70 and I-29 looping around one another. I only worked a few hours this afternoon, I tell her. I stuck around for something else to come up but nothing did. Can you pick me up?
Okay, she says.
By the time she gets me, I’m pissed off. Pissed I had only four hours of work today, pissed I couldn’t get a ride home, pissed I had to wait around until Fran got off her job at Walgreens to get me. I was 360 degrees pissed off is what I’m saying.
I get in the car, ball my hand into a fist, and press my knuckles against Fran’s right temple. She tilts her head away and I keep pushing with my fist until her head is against the window and I feel the vein in her temple pulse against my knuckles.
Stop it, you’re hurting me, she says.
Next day
Mike, I’ll have another one, Melissa says.
She’s dating this gal, Rhonda, a school teacher. I don’t know how old. Younger, I’d say by the look of her in a photo Melissa passed around. I don’t care that she’s gay. I mean lesbian. She corrected me one time. Men are gay, women are lesbian. Okay. What do I do with that bit of knowledge? Keep my mouth shut is what I’m saying.
Melissa talks about how nice it is to be involved with a woman who doesn’t trip when Melissa has to work late. Doesn’t ask a thousand questions to make sure that nothing is wrong. It’s nice to be with someone who’s an adult, Melissa says. She says that a lot. Nice to be involved with an adult. Like she’s trying to convince herself that it’s nice. Like maybe the confidence of her lover makes Melissa wonder what she’s doing.
I’m going home, Tim says. Make some dinner.
What’re you going to have? Lyle says.
I don’t know.
What you say? Bill says.
Fuck you, Bill, Tim says, and he and Lyle laugh. It’s not as funny as the first time he said it. It’s starting to get old but I can’t help smiling a little.
Gene and I had dinner together one night. I met him in the parking lot behind the Sun Fresh Market off Southwest Trafficway. I didn’t know then that he was sleeping in his car. Just ran into him there and he asked me if I was hungry. Come to think of it, I said.
A bunch of clothes were heaped in the backseat of his station wagon. An old rusty job with wood paneling peeling off the doors. He had rigged a towel to take the place of a window that would no longer roll up. Laundry day, he said, explaining away the clothes.
We drove out of the parking lot to Mill Street and followed the curve into Westport to a little joint called The Corner. Some bums who might have been hippies years ago stood on Broadway wiping down car windows at a red light while the drivers waved them off. Gene and I sat down and a waitress cleared our table. I ordered a burger. Gene had the meatloaf special.
The Corner closed not long after that. A big For Rent sign hangs above the front door along with the name of some real estate company. I went by it the other day and noticed the table where Gene and I had sat surrounded by other empty tables made all the more empty by the emptiness of the place.
Evening
Fran’s mother sits with me in the kitchen. Her perfume gives me a headache. I stare at her hair all puffy and piled up on her head and bleached so blond it’s almost white. She twirls the lazy Susan with a finger, touches the corner of her mouth, and then goes back to spinning the lazy Susan, her finger skating along on a film of lipstick she rubbed off.
What’s it taste like, your lipstick?
Why would you want to know? What kind of question is that for a man to ask?
I don’t know, it just came to me, I want to say, but don’t. One night, I was walking to the shitter and mortars started coming in. We were always being mortared. This is the real deal, baby! someone yelled. And then, the blasts lifted an eighteen-year-old private into the air, tossing him backward like a rag into all this dirt and noise and smoke; his blood sprayed over my face. I can still taste it.
Where’s Fran? her mother says.
School, I say.
Have you thought of going back to school?
No.
Is it your plan for Fran to do all the work while you sit around? Fran’s mother says. Have you thought about being more than an electrician?
No, Mrs. Lee, I haven’t.
Well, it shows.
I apply a piece of Scotch tape to a corner above the cabinets where the wallpaper is peeling.
Fran’s mother gets up and walks to the sink. I listen to the linoleum creak beneath her shoes.
When do you plan to clean these? she says of the dishes. Or are you waiting for them to pile up to the ceiling?
I throw the tape down and face her. She steps back, a little aren’t-I-clever smirk on her face, and I turn the hot water on in the sink and pour in some soap. I find a sponge beneath the sink and start wiping down a plate. My fingertips turn white from squeezing the plate so hard. A littler harder and it would break. I want to feel it break but I ease up; put the plate on the rack. I start cleaning anot
her one.
You two should get married, Fran’s mother goes.
I keep washing the plate.
You’re living together, she says. Not having a job hasn’t stopped you from doing that. Married, you’d at least be official. It would show responsibility. Now wouldn’t that be something?
I rinse the plate, set it on the rack. I lean on the sink, arms stiff.
I’m leaving, I say.
You’re leaving. Where you going?
Montana.
Montana. What are you going to do in Montana?
Work.
Work. Work here for a change. You think some cowgirl is going to put up with you?
I raise my hand before she says anything more. There’s this nasal termite sound to her voice that chisels into my head. I press my fingers against my eyes. My neck feels hard as a tree trunk.
Fran’s mother stands beside me. I ignore her, work on another plate. She runs a finger over the dishes in the rack and shows me a spongy speck of pizza crust glued to her fingertip.
You can’t do any better than that? she says.
I smash the plate on the edge of the sink and throw the jagged piece still in my hand against the wall. Fran’s mother steps back, her eyes betraying panic, her finger still poised accusingly, and I grab her finger with a fury that fills me with a terrible heat and force it back until she kneels, screaming. A pasty white color washes through her face when the bone breaks, and I feel something break in me and I keep pressing back on her ruined finger, until the bone tears through the skin and into my palm. Her eyes swell like something wide and deep rising out of the ground, bubbling tears, and her screams take on a new level.
I let go of her hand and jam my knee into her solar plexus and put all my weight on her chest. She gags and spits up whatever she ate this morning. I rise up and then drop my knee into her chest, and her neck and face go all purple, and I do it again until I feel ribs crack under my knee. I sink into her chest and down to her spine like falling through ice. Blood geysers out of her mouth and then her eyes roll back. Her tongue lolls out of her mouth like a slug and I smell her bowels. I push myself off her and sit at the table. The silence is almost as loud as her screams. I focus on the hum of the refrigerator. White noise. I take up my knife. My hands shake and at first my throws are way off. Then my breathing steadies and I get my rhythm back and throw it once, twice, three times into the baseboards, the refrigerator humming behind me.
Next day
Rhonda’s not answering, Melissa says, looking at her iPhone. Why isn’t she answering?
The front door swings open.
Hey, Heidi, Mike says.
Hi, Mike, Heidi says.
She plops down beside Lyle, her mop of curly red hair flouncing on her shoulders. The two of them started dating not too far back. She tends bar here on the weekends. Has two kids. Their daddy dealt drugs and got busted. Lyle sells drugs, but hasn’t been busted. I think she can do better. I bought books for her five-year-old daughter. I figured she’d appreciate that. Little picture books. But she started seeing Lyle and I quit the book thing. Maybe books weren’t what I should have been giving her in the first place. But I was with Fran so books seemed appropriate. Neutral. Not too over-the-top is what I’m saying.
I force a smile at Heidi but I don’t strike up a conversation. I’m not really here. Yesterday seems far away and today doesn’t feel like today. I hear Heidi and Lyle talking but it’s all background noise to Fran’s mother dying. That’s how I look at it. She died. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Something snapped inside me and she died. It was not me who killed her but something working through me I can’t define. That something left me afterward as suddenly as it had come on and I almost fell asleep in the kitchen throwing my knife. But then the old me came back and I knew I had to clean up the mess left by that something else.
I carried Fran’s mother into the garage and put her in the trunk of my car and covered her with a blanket. Finding a mop, I returned to the kitchen and washed the floor. Back in the garage, I looked for a box of five-, ten-, and twenty-pound weights Fran had bought at a yard sale when she got it into her head she was going to exercise. Dust and cobwebs covered the weights and clung to the hair on my arms, and I felt each hair released when I wiped the cobwebs off.
I put some rope and the weights in the trunk and drove to Troost Lake. Clouds sealed the sky so that no stars shone. I followed Troost Avenue to the turnoff into the lake, and the road narrowed and wound around the lake and my car lights skimmed over the oil blackness of the water and the wet stone walk where old men fished during the day. I parked the car under some trees, opened the trunk, and trussed Fran’s mother up with the rope. She wasn’t too heavy even with the weights I’d wedged beneath the rope. I held her and listened to what I thought was an owl. Shadows rose and dipped above me and then darted away and I could only assume they were bats. I waited for the owl to stop calling. In the vacancy left by its silence, I rolled Fran’s mother down a hill and she splashed into the water and was absorbed into its darkness leaving only ripples that spread into nothingness.
Evening
When I’m with Fran, I think of her mother. I don’t need that. I sit alone in the kitchen while Fran sleeps and punch my temples until my head feels like it will explode and thoughts of Mrs. Lee shatter into bits. I think of Gene and what he would say.
The last time I saw him, he was standing in front of a Church’s Chicken near Gillham Plaza and 31st Street. It was hot and the wind blew trash and some napkins were pinned against Gene’s knobby white knees. We said hello and he offered me a ride but I told him I had my car. I’m getting some coffee, I said.
When I went back outside, he was still there. I looked at him and he gave me a knowing wink like we were both in on something no one else would understand. I don’t know what that might have been. But I’m thinking now he might have done some awful things in Korea besides killing gooks and letting their bodies freeze, and I think he saw in me the ability to do some awful things too, and then Fran’s mother died and he was proved right. I’m just saying. I don’t know. Gene didn’t say and I never saw him again.
Next day
Okay, Mike, I’m outta here, Tim says. After one more.
I’ll do one more too, Mike, Lyle says.
What you say?
Fuck you, Bill.
Lyle and Tim stand and walk outside to smoke. Melissa follows them tapping a number into her iPhone. Heidi looks at me and smiles. She asks Mike for a cigarette. Watch my purse, she says. Then she goes outside too. Mike puts two bottles of beer on the bar for Tim and Lyle. I wave him off when he looks at me. I feel all hemmed in. The beer congests me. It’s difficult to breathe.
I’ll pay up, Mike, I say.
Evening
In bed Fran rolls over with her back to me, her head on my right arm. I grit my teeth. Her touch sends shock waves through me and I get all jittery. I edge away from her. She says she has called her mother a few times but no one answers. It’s not like her, she says. Her mother doesn’t have an answering machine so Fran is going to go by the house in the morning.
That settles it. I’m out of here. When Fran leaves for work I’ll be right behind her but headed in another direction. It will still be dark. I’ll take 39th to Broadway and hang a right by the Walgreens and drive into downtown. A few blocks east, I’ll see the glow from the Power & Light District keeping the sky open like an illumination mortar, and I’ll cross the Broadway Bridge and get on I-29 north until I reach I-90 and then it’s a direct shot west to Montana and wherever.
I feel my arm falling asleep beneath the weight of Fran’s head. I curl it to get some circulation and realize I could choke her no problem. I drop my arm and slide it out from beneath her head and punch my temples with both fists until the pain overwhelms my thoughts.
I kick off my blankets; get my legs out from under the sheets. I long for a breeze. I imagine Fran’s mother at the bottom of Troost Lake. I think of Tim’s puppi
es and then I think of Kandahar and of other things I’ve seen. My head throbs. I shut my eyes against the room closing in on me, get up, and go sit in the kitchen. I find my knife, hands shaking. I start tossing it but can’t establish a rhythm.
I drop the knife, think of Gene and of dead Koreans calling to him. I imagine he is sitting in his car miles away parked beneath a streetlight unable to sleep. Moths bounce against the windows. Flies strike the windshield. Beetles scuttle across the hood. I tell him that when I was a boy, my friends and I would drop grasshoppers into empty trash barrels and then we’d scream into the barrels and listen to our voices ping-pong against the sides like shrapnel, crumbling antennae, wings, legs. We’d pluck the grasshoppers out barely alive and bury them. I see them now, their jaws working furiously, filling with dirt. Hear the crunch-scrape of seeking mouths sucking air.
LOOT
BY JULIE SMITH
Garden District, New Orleans
(Originally published in New Orleans Noir)
Mathilde’s in North Carolina with her husband when she hears about the hurricane—the one that’s finally going to fulfill the prophecy about filling the bowl New Orleans is built in. Uh-huh, sure. She’s been there a thousand times. She all but yawns.
Aren’t they all? goes through her mind.
“A storm like no one’s ever seen,” the weather guy says, “a storm that will leave the city devastated . . . a storm that . . .”
Blah blah and blah.
But finally, after ten more minutes of media hysteria, she catches on that this time it might be for real. Her first thought is for her home in the Garden District, the one that’s been in Tony’s family for three generations. Yet she knows there’s nothing she can do about that—if the storm takes it, so be it.
Her second thought is for her maid, Cherice Wardell, and Cherice’s husband, Charles.
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