USA Noir - Best Of The Akashic Noir Series

by Johnny Temple (Editor)

  Something in him is broken and he can’t fix it.

  Now what he wants to do is get drunk, stay drunk, and lay on the beach, but she won’t shut up.

  “You have to go back, Charlie,” she says.

  He stares into his cup and takes another drink.

  “If you go back today it will be all right.”

  He shakes his head.

  Then she says it. “It’s okay to be afraid.”

  Charlie throws the cup at her. He doesn’t really know if he meant to hit her or not, but he does. The cup cuts her eye and splashes coffee all over her face and she screams and stands up. She wipes the coffee out of her eyes and feels the blood and then stares at him for a second and says, “You son of a bitch.”

  Charlie doesn’t answer.

  “Get out,” Millie says. “Get out.”

  He doesn’t move except to grab the bottle, take a drink directly from it, and lean back into the chair.

  Millie watches this and says, “Fine. I’ll get you out.”

  She heads for the door.

  That gets him out of the chair because now he remembers what she said she’d do if he hit her again, and he did hit her again, and Millie is the kind of girl who does what she says she’ll do, and he can’t let her go and call Shore Patrol.

  Charlie grabs her by the neck, pulls her into his chest, and then wraps his arms around and lifts her up, and she wriggles and kicks as he carries her toward the bedroom because he thinks maybe it can end that way. But when drops her on the bed she spits in his face and claws at his eyes and says, “You’re real brave with a woman, huh, Charlie? Aren’t ya?”

  He hauls off and pops her in the jaw just to shut her up, but she won’t shut up and he hits her again and again until she finally lays still.

  “Now will you behave?” he asks her, but there’s blood all over the pillow and even on the wall and her neck is bent like the broken spine of a ship and he knows he can’t fix her.

  She’s so small, what do they call it—petite.

  Charlie staggers into the bathroom, pushes past the stockings that hang from cords, and washes his bloody hands under the tap. Then he goes back into the bedroom, where Millie is lying with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He puts on the loud Hawaiian shirt he bought at Pearl, the one Millie liked, and a pair of khaki pants, and then sits down next to her to put on his shoes.

  He thinks he should say something to her but he doesn’t know what to say, so he just gets up, goes back into the kitchen, finds the bottle, and drains it in one long swallow. His hands shake as he lights a cigarette, but he does get it lit, takes a long drag, and heads out the door.

  The sun is blinding, the concrete hot on his feet.

  Charlie doesn’t really know where to go, so he just keeps walking until he finds himself at the beach. He walks along the boardwalk, which is crowded with people, mostly sailors and their girls out for a stroll. He pushes his way through and then goes down the steps to the sand and under the pier where him and her held each other and danced to the radio.

  Maybe it’s the same radio playing now as he stands there listening to the music and looks out at the ocean and tries to figure out what to do next. They’ll be looking for him soon, they’ll know it was him, and if they catch him he’ll spend the rest of his life in the brig, if they don’t hang him.

  Now he wishes he had just gone back like she told him to.

  But it’s too late.

  He stares at the water, tells himself he should run, but there’s nowhere to run to, anyway, and the music is nice and he thinks about that night and knows he should never have left the beach.

  Then the music stops and a voice comes on and the voice is talking like he’s real excited, like the radio did that day the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.

  Charlie turns around to look up at the boardwalk and all the people are just standing there, standing stock-still like they’re photographs or statues. Then suddenly they all start to move, and whoop and yell, and hug each other and kiss and dance and laugh.

  Charlie walks to the edge of the boardwalk.

  “What’s going on?” he asks this sailor who has his arm around a girl. “What’s going on?”

  “Didn’t you hear?” the sailor answered, swinging the girl on his hip. “We dropped some kind of big bomb on Japan. They say it’s the end of the war. They say the war is over!” Then he forgets about Charlie and bends the girl back and kisses her again.

  And all along Pacific Beach people are hugging and kissing, laughing and crying, because the war is over.

  Charlie Decker, the hard case, goes and sits in the sand.

  He peers across the ocean toward a city that has burst into flame and people burn like torches and he knows he will never get the smell out of his nose or the pictures out of his brain. Knows that he will wake up crying that he can never go back.

  Ask anybody—his shipmates, his captain, his family back in Davenport if they’ll talk to you about him. They’ll all tell you the same thing.

  Charlie’s no good.

  Now, broken, he sinks back onto Pacific Beach.

  MISSING GENE

  BY J. MALCOLM GARCIA

  Troost Lake, Kansas City

  (Originally published in Kansas City Noir)

  Evening

  Fran’s at night school studying for her associate’s degree. I don’t feel like watching TV so I get out the knife one of the interpreters gave me in Kandahar and start throwing it at the wall. He said he got it off the body of a bad guy who blew himself up laying an IED in the road, but I think he stole it off one of our guys, because it’s a Gerber and it doesn’t look like it was in any explosion. The terp could throw it and stick it every time. I’m not that good, but I throw it at the wall anyway. I can do it for hours.

  I was a contractor over in Kandahar. Electrician. Worked there for twelve months. When my year was up, I flew home to Kansas City and took up with Fran and a couple of months later moved in with her. Mr. Fix It, the soldiers called me. Did some plumbing too. A little out of my league, but at two hundred tax-free grand a year I was more than willing to say I could do anything. I got used to the noise: mortars, sniper fire, return fire, .50 calibers, AKs, generators grinding all night, guys living on top of each other telling dead baby and fag jokes. Awful quiet now that I’m back. Behind Fran’s house, I hear buses turn off Prospect and onto 39th Street, drone past and slice into the night until I don’t hear anything again. The knife helps. I like the steady repetition of tossing it. The precision of it. Like fly fishing. Gene understood. He fought in Korea.

  The trick with the knife, I told Gene, is you got to establish a rhythm. You do that and the silence becomes part of the flow and the plink the knife makes when it enters the wall interrupts the silence, and the small suck sound it makes when you pull it out, and then the silence again until you throw it, again and again.

  Right, Gene said.

  Next day

  This is the third week I haven’t seen Gene at Mike’s Place. Out of all the regulars, he’s the only one missing.

  Melissa isn’t here but we all know where she is. A public defender, Melissa has a court case this afternoon. I overheard her tell Lyle yesterday she would be working late. And Lyle? He may have a job painting or installing a countertop or a new floor or fixing someone’s shitter. What I’m saying is, Lyle’s around. He’s a handyman. He’ll be in later, as will his buddy Tim.

  Bill’s here. He’s retired from working construction and basically sits at the bar all day drinking up his disability. And Mike, of course. It’s his bar. The floor dips and the stools wobble, all of them, and the top of the pool table’s got a big slash in it and someone walked off with the cue ball, but it’s a good place—cheap, and it’s only a couple of blocks from Fran’s.

  Then there’s Gene. Or was. He drove off is how I look at it. Flew the coop, as they say. Well, that’s it. I’m leaving too. Montana is what I’m thinking. I’ve been considering a move for a while. I mentioned Montana t
o Gene. He thought it was a good idea.

  Wide open, no people, he said.

  Absolutely, I said.

  I’ll tell Fran tonight.

  Evening

  What’s on at seven?

  Golden Girls reruns.

  Oh.

  You’ve had beer.

  I was at Mike’s.

  Well, you missed my mother.

  Oh . . . yeah?

  Yeah. It’s all right. I wasn’t expecting her.

  Fran’s mother does that; drops by without calling. She’s divorced and bored. Good thing Fran was here instead of me. Her mother nags me when Fran’s not around. She knows I’m not going out on many jobs. I’ve told her we’re okay. I earned a bundle in Afghanistan. She thinks I should have stayed another year and made even more.

  I’m going to Montana.

  Montana?

  Yeah.

  When?

  I don’t know.

  Oh.

  I play solitaire, spreading the cards across the blanket of our bed. I tell Fran not to move her legs beneath the blankets and disturb the cards but she does anyway.

  Why Montana?

  It’s wide open.

  Fran doesn’t look up from her book, The General and the Spy. A man on the cover wears an open red tunic and some tight-ass white pants a real guy’d never wear. His skin’s the color of a dirty penny and he has no hair on his chest. A woman’s got her hands on his stomach, ready to rip into those pants I bet.

  Fran folds the corner of a page, closes the book, and wipes tears from her eyes.

  Nobody cries over those kinds of books, I tell her.

  Montana?

  I’m thinking about it. Gene’s missing.

  Who?

  A guy I know.

  Fran goes, Let’s change the channel. Then let’s talk.

  Go ahead. Change it.

  I changed it last time.

  What do you want to watch? I ask.

  I don’t know.

  She picks up her book and puts it down again. We stare at the TV, the remote between us.

  Next day

  Bill sits beside me at Mike’s, buys me a beer. Crass old fucker Bill. Bald as a post and bug-eyed. He’s always hunched over and rocks back and forth and makes these sick jokes about his neck being so long he can lick his balls like a dog. Deaf as Stevie Wonder is blind.

  Hey, Bill, Tim says.

  What you say? Bill asks.

  Fuck you, Bill, Tim says.

  What you say?

  Tim laughs. Laughs loud and talks loud like we’re all deaf as Bill. He sits at the end of the bar where Gene always stood, wipes his hands on his sweatshirt and jeans. Tim works in a warehouse in the West Bottoms. Refrigeration parts. Something like that. Comes in grimed in grease and oil. Starts at five in the morning and works all the time, weekends too. With jobs the way they are, is he going to say no when his boss offers him extra hours? I don’t think so. Not with paying out child support to his ex.

  His money being so tight is why he killed his dog’s puppies. At least that’s how he explains it. The dog, a brown and white mix between this and that, had a litter of seven. He put six of them in a pillow case and dropped them in Troost Lake. Then he shot the dog. Easier than getting her fixed. I stopped sitting next to Tim when I heard about the puppies.

  Every time I think of them, I’m reminded of these Afghan laborers in Kandahar. One afternoon they found some puppies when they were collecting trash. A trash fire was burning and they threw the puppies into the fire. You want to hear some screaming, listen to puppies being barbecued. I hear them now. I ball up my fist and right hook my temple once, twice, three times, waiting for what I call relief pain to wrap my skull and take their shrieks out of my head. Tim and Bill look at me. I open my fist.

  Fucking mosquito, I say and smack the side of my face again.

  Big-ass mosquito, Tim says, still looking at me.

  It’s strange seeing him in Gene’s spot at the end of the bar. Gene never sat, just stood. No matter how cold, he always wore shorts, a T-shirt, and a windbreaker. Brown shoes and white socks. Legs skinny and pale as a featherless chicken. Wore a cap that had the dates of the Korean War sewn in it. He told me that Kansas City winters didn’t compare to a winter in Korea.

  I saw frozen bodies stacked like cord wood covered with ice, Gene said. Some of them I put there.

  It got cold in Afghanistan too, I said.

  I remember one time when this truck driver got to Kandahar in December. Brand new. Just off the bus. He was so wet behind the ears I had to tell him where the chow hall was. He kept rubbing his hands together and I pointed out the PX where he could buy some gloves. He went on his first convoy an hour later. This guy, he got in his rig, took off, but realized he was in the wrong convoy. He turned back to the base and approached the gate fast because he was out in no man’s land by himself. You didn’t approach the gate fast. You didn’t do that. But he was scared. Some Australians shot him five times with a .50 cal. I mean, he was obliterated. They had to check his DNA to figure out who he was. Less than two hours after I showed him the chow hall, I saw them put his body pieces in bags.

  Evening

  Fran tells me what I’m planning is called a geographic. Moving to get a new start somewhere else in the mistaken belief you’ll leave your bad habits behind is how she puts it. She studied psychology last fall and thinks she can pick apart my mind now.

  I mean it. I’m gone, I say.

  She goes, When you decide to do it, just go. Don’t bother telling me because I’m not going with you. Men have left me before. I survived. I’ll survive you. Leave before I come home. Make it easy on us both.

  I will, I say. I can do that.

  Okay, she goes, okay.

  Next day

  Just me in here this afternoon.

  What’s the latest on Gene? I ask Mike.

  Haven’t heard a thing, he says.

  Mike has owned Mike’s for ten years. He was in a band, got married, and had a kid. In other words, time to get a real job. So he bought the bar and named it after himself. He’s divorced now, sees the kid every two weeks, plays gigs occasionally, and runs this place. Says if he ever sells it, the buyer will have to keep the name. Years from now nobody will know who the hell Mike was but his name will be here. A piece of himself nobody will know and can’t shake off. That’s one way to make an impression.

  I first came to Mike’s by chance. I used to drink at another bar on the Paseo but one night it was packed. After Kandahar, I couldn’t handle crowds, so I left. On my way home, I stopped at Mike’s. Some lights on but barely anyone in it. I had a few beers and came back the next night. Two nights in a row and Mike figured he had himself a new regular. He bought me a beer and said his name was Mike. We shook hands. Sealed the deal, as they say.

  I met Fran here. She was shooting pool by herself. Bent over the table, her ass jutted high and round against her jeans, and any man with a nut sack would have known that if she looked that nice from behind she’d be more than tolerable face-to-face. And, if she wasn’t, so what with an ass like that. But she was fine all the way around.

  She had light brown hair and a determined look. My glance moved down past her chin and rested on a set of perky tits that pressed just hard enough against her T-shirt that my imagination did not have to strain too hard to know what would be revealed when she undressed. I asked to shoot pool with her and we got to chitchatting. One thing led to another is what I’m saying.

  I’m not sure when I noticed Gene. I just did. I remember seeing this old man at the end of the bar and thinking how solitary he looked, how he was off in his own world. He had one of those faces that sort of collapsed when he didn’t talk, mouth and chin merging into a flat, frowning pond. When he took off his hat, the light shined on his bald, freckled head. He’d still be standing in his spot when I left a couple of hours later, the same bottle of Bud he had when I first came in half-empty and parked in front of him. He barely said a word to me in th
ose days. Just nodded if we looked each other’s way. But then as I began showing up every night, he started saying hello and I’d say hello back.

  Evening

  Fran and I drop our plates onto the crumb-graveled carpet for our beagle to lick. Partly chewed pizza crust, orange grease. Slobbered up in seconds. I reshuffle the cards.

  I’m going to sleep, Fran says.

  Say what?

  Turn the TV off.

  I’m still up.

  Turn it down then.

  It’s not loud.

  Please.

  But it’s not.

  Shhh.

  I shut off the TV, go out to the living room. I sit in the dark fingering my knife. The way Gene has vanished, an eighty-year-old man. I can’t help but notice the empty space at the bar. Like a radiator turned off. All that dead air, dead space.

  Funny what you learn about a guy after he’s gone. For instance, Tim and Lyle said that Gene would come to Mike’s at eleven in the morning. He would stay all day and apparently be pretty toasted by the time he left at closing. Really, he never seemed messed up to me. Maybe he kicked in and drank like a horse after I left.

  One night, Gene told me he had taken his landlord to court. It wasn’t clear to me why. I believed him, and whatever the reason, he made it seem like he’d won the case. After he disappeared, Bill told me Gene lived in his car. There never had been a court case or a landlord. Bill had put him up in his place but not for long. Said Gene wandered around the house with nothing on but his skivvies. I couldn’t have that, Bill said. Not with my wife in the house and the grandkids coming over. I don’t care if he is a vet.

  Next day

  Hey, Lyle, Mike says.

  Mike, Lyle says, and takes a seat near Tim. He has his hair roped back in a ponytail and wears an army fatigue jacket that hangs well past his hands. His feet dangle off the bar stool and tap the air. He reeks of pot.

  I was just getting ready to leave, Tim says.

  No you’re not, Lyle says.

  He turns to me.

  What’s going on? Working?

  Absolutely, I tell him. Staying busy.

  You were in Afghanistan, weren’t you? How was that?