Portland Noir

by Kevin Sampsell

  15

  A hazy, half-realized scene of my wife and daughter backing out of the drive in the car began repeating on a short loop in my memory. I couldn’t even remember if I’d kissed Olivia before they left—I could just see her strapped securely in her car seat, looking at me as I waved to her through the side window. What remained clearest, the thing my memory rendered with the finest, most delicate detail, was the confused expression on Olivia’s face. The memory didn’t include the expression on my own face, of course—how could I see my own face?—but since children are such skilled mimics, maybe my daughter wasn’t actually confused, but was simply mirroring what she saw in my own expression. Or maybe both of our expressions were authentic, and the same. It’s a tough thing to unravel, the origin of an expression.

  16

  The next time I saw the boy, I was glancing through the screen door as I always did, my eye scanning the bright rectangle of light. The adults were there as usual, smoking cigarettes and watching television, but standing at the door was the child in his sleeper, looking back at me.

  After I drove away from the house and accelerated back onto the highway, I found myself so angry that I had to pull the car to the side of the road to try and compose myself. I stood on the gravel-covered shoulder and watched a freight train roll past until its whistle pierced the air for no apparent reason, and then I climbed back into the car and waited for a logging truck to go by. Its trailer was filled with the trunks of felled trees stacked eight or ten high—strings of wet, pendulous moss hung from the trunks, swaying heavily in the breeze as the truck roared away down the road. I pulled back onto the highway to resume my route, but the image of the boy in the doorway stayed with me. The night was one of the warmest of the summer, and though I was sweating profusely, I also felt chilled. I opened the vial in my console to retrieve another pill, but my fingertips found nothing, and I became confused, unable to decide whether the vial had simply gotten low without my noticing, or if I’d lost track and had accidentally taken too many pills. I felt jittery and anxious, and almost started laughing as I watched my hand shake when I reached to turn on the car’s heater. By the time I threw my last paper, a bitter nausea had risen in my stomach, as if my intestines had become entangled within some slowly winding gear.

  17

  I made it back to the station and into the bathroom in time to disgorge the contents of my stomach into the dirty toilet. After spitting the last of the humid brown stew from my mouth, I sat on the bathroom floor, my back against the wall. When I looked up a few minutes later, the Deadhead was standing in the doorway. “Your car’s running,” he said.

  “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “You need anything?”

  “I’m just a little sick,” I said. “If you could just leave me alone for a few minutes …”

  I closed my eyes, but I could sense him standing there, studying me. “What’s your problem?” he said.

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said.

  “What’s going on, Dale?” I heard Carl ask, and when I looked up he was standing next to the Deadhead, looking at me like I was an animal that had wandered into the station.

  “He’s sick.”

  “Is his route done?”

  “It’s done,” I said.

  “You can’t spend the night here.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said. “I just need a minute.”

  Carl disappeared from the doorway, but the Deadhead, whose name was apparently Dale, remained. “Why are you even doing this?” he asked.

  “Why are you bothering me now?” I said. “Why at this moment?”

  “Because this is a shitty job I do because my life is fucked up. You walk around here like you’re better than us, which makes you an asshole. But you’re probably right. So what are you trying to prove?”

  I hoped that if I ignored him, he would go away, but he didn’t.

  “You should at least take better care of yourself,” he said.

  “Especially since you have a kid.”

  “How do you know I have a kid?”

  “You were just talking about her last night. Or can’t you remember last night?”

  “Listen,” I said as carefully as possible, “I don’t need your help right now.”

  “You just puked into that shitty little toilet and now you’re laying on the floor, but you don’t need help. I used to say shit like that too.”

  “So then you probably know how much I wish you would leave.”

  “Have a nice day,” he said.

  I heard his footsteps recede, and I was alone again.

  18

  Later, I stood up, splashed some water on my face, and walked out into the empty station. An oscillating fan on a stand had been left on, and it nodded back and forth, as if speaking to someone it was unaware had left the room. When I stepped outside, my car was still sitting exactly where I’d left it, the radio on and the engine running. It was the only car in the lot.

  19

  The next time I talked to my daughter on the phone, she informed me that Doggy make a walk with a flower sky flower. When the phone was transferred to my wife, I asked if they’d gotten a dog now too. “No, but we did buy flowers,” she said. She was focused on her new job as a receptionist in a real estate office, and I was the only one of us, it seemed, who realized Olivia was delivering important information. I’m sure my wife didn’t write out our daughter’s sentences on notebook paper and study them the way I did, with a mix of pride and concern.

  “You don’t sound good,” my wife told me.

  “I’m just tired,” I said. “I’ve been working a lot.”

  “Other than the newspapers?”

  “No, the newspapers are every night. It’s not easy.”

  “How long are you going to do that?”

  “As long as I have to.”

  I heard her sigh, and could picture her expression, the way she pursed her lips when she was frustrated. “Why haven’t you ever, even once, asked about coming up to visit us?”

  My jaw tightened. I could feel the blood pounding in my head. “Are you trying to get me to?”

  “Don’t start that,” she said.

  “We own a house here. This is where I live.”

  “I don’t even know why you’re saying that. What does that mean?”

  “It means I have to work to pay bills, to pay the fucking mortgage.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

  “So you don’t know what I mean, and I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I’m going to say goodbye now,” she said. “Don’t call me again tonight.”

  20

  I was still rehashing that conversation when I got to the distribution station later and found a rubber-banded stack of white envelopes on my table. I asked what they were, and the woman in the purple sweatsuit said, “It’s bill night. They should be in the order of your route. You just keep them next to you and slip them in right when you’re about to throw the paper.”

  “That’ll take forever,” I said. “They’re ruining our night so they can save the price of a stamp?”

  “They’re penny-pinchers,” the Deadhead said. “They don’t give a rat’s ass about us.”

  “You know what?!” Carl yelled down from the loft. “I’ve had enough of listening to all of you bitch and moan. If you don’t want to deliver the papers tonight, with the goddamn bills in them the way they need to be and the way it’s your job to do, then you can just walk out the door right now. And you won’t ever have to come back, because I’ll replace you tomorrow with someone who’ll just shut up and do the work.”

  Nobody said anything. It was the second time that day I’d felt like a schoolboy being scolded, and it disgusted me that I could still be made to feel that way. I bagged my papers as fast as I could, and left without saying a word.

  21

  I tried to sort through the bills and shove them into the papers while I drove between addresses, but it was almost
impossible to mess with the papers while driving. I hated the fact that my route was taking so long, and I replayed both the phone conversation with my wife, and Carl’s challenge, over and over in my head, savoring my anger. When I reached the boy’s house, rolled to a stop, and looked through the screen door to see a woman holding him in one arm while she smoked a cigarette with her free hand, I slammed the car into park and got out. The gravel ground beneath my shoes as I walked up the drive, but the woman turned and walked deeper into the house as if she heard nothing. When I reached the door and knocked on the wooden frame, two men sitting on the couch inside—they might have been brothers—looked over in surprise. The one closest to me, who had a dark mustache and a thin strip of beard that followed his jawline, stood and came to the door. He wore a plain gray T-shirt and blue jeans that were turned up at the ankle above his bare feet, and as he came closer I could see that his hair hung to his shoulders in the back. “Can I help you?” he said through the screen.

  “I’ve got a bill here,” I replied, “for your newspaper.” He opened the door and I handed him the envelope.

  “Who is he?” the man on the couch said.

  “It’s the newspaper boy, delivering the bill.”

  “Ask him if he wants a beer,” the man on the couch said, raising his bottle as he returned his attention to the television. Though I was at an angle to the set, I recognized the images of a motocross race. Motorcycle after motorcycle flew into the air from behind a dirt hill, the riders in gear and helmets that made them appear only slightly less mechanical than the machines they rode.

  “This isn’t due right now, is it?” the man at the door asked.

  “No, I just wanted to make sure you got it,” I said. “A lot of people don’t notice it in the bag.”

  The woman I’d seen earlier stepped back into the room. “Who is it?” Her cigarette was gone, but the boy was still curled in her arms. He was in his sleeper as always, and I could see that it was gray, with a pattern of small blue cars and red trucks. His head lay on the woman’s shoulder as if he were ready to go to sleep there, but his brown eyes were open, and he looked at me with a combination of curiosity and fatigue. Both he and the woman were younger than I’d thought—the woman seemed in her early twenties, and the boy murmured unintelligible babble as he ducked his head further into the point between her shoulder and neck.

  “The newspaper boy’s dropping off the bill,” the man said.

  “Does he take checks?”

  “We don’t have to pay, he’s just delivering it.”

  “We have the money, though,” she said. “He’s standing right there. I’ll get the checkbook.”

  The woman left the room again, and the man looked at me uncertainly before opening the door a bit wider with his foot. “All right,” he said. “You might as well come in.”

  I stepped inside and heard the screen door bang shut behind me. The man tore the bill open and examined it. “We don’t even read it,” he said.

  “You’re collecting money all night?” the one on the couch asked.

  “No, I just saw you were awake.”

  “Aiming for a tip, huh?” he said, and laughed as if he’d made a tremendous joke.

  22

  The woman returned, holding a checkbook in the hand she wasn’t using to hold the boy. She tried to press it open on the back of the couch, then stopped and leaned toward us. “Go with Daddy now,” she whispered to the boy. He raised his head obediently and stretched his arms to the man at the door, who took him. The boy curled up on the man’s shoulder the same way he’d been on the woman’s.

  “I’ve seen your son in the doorway sometimes when I deliver the paper,” I said. “He’s cute.” I reached to ruffle the boy’s hair then, but the man twisted away, moving the boy just beyond my reach. Both of our movements had been automatic, I think, but my hand was left in the air in front of the boy and his father until I dropped it back to my side.

  The man looked harder at me. “Sometimes he has a hard time sleeping,” he said, and then, studying the bill, added: “And this isn’t due today.”

  “It’s not,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” the woman asked.

  The man on the couch slapped his leg and laughed wildly. He pointed at the television, where a number of motorcycles were tangled on the ground and riders scrambled to pull themselves from the mess. “Always the same turn,” he managed between laughs, “they always fuck up the same turn.”

  “How much is it?” the woman asked.

  “We don’t have to pay,” the boy’s father said, looking at me as if I’d claimed otherwise.

  “But he’s right here,” the woman said.

  “Take the baby and put him in his crib.” The man’s voice was tense, determined. “He should be sleeping.” He handed the child back to the surprised woman, who looked at me once more, and then headed from the room, patting the boy’s back and whispering to him. When she was gone, the man turned to me. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Travis,” I told him.

  “Listen, Travis. Next time you have a bill for us, just deliver it the same as you do to everyone else. I don’t care if you see our light on, and I don’t care if you see my son. Just throw the paper on the fucking lawn and move on. Understand?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I don’t give a shit if you’re sorry. You don’t knock on our door in the middle of the night asking for money.”

  I nodded and closed the screen door behind me as I let myself out, then walked up the drive to my car. I didn’t look back until I put the car in gear and pulled away, and when I did, I saw the man standing in the doorway, watching me leave.

  23

  My hands shook so badly as I made my deliveries to the next few houses that I could barely manage to get the bills into the bags, and when I pulled back onto the highway again and headed further north, I drove past the turn I was supposed to take. It was just a small access road that led back down into the industrial area where I would deliver to a couple dozen more warehouses before being done for the day, but suddenly it was behind me, and I was still going. It was easier to drive straight and fast on the highway instead of continuing to struggle with the newspapers, whose plastic bags snapped in the breeze roaring past the open window. After a few minutes, as an experiment, I dropped one of the papers out the window of the car and turned for a moment to watch it tumble crazily along the road behind me.

  The sky was starting to brighten in the east, which meant that I was way behind schedule. I knew that if I just kept going north, though, I would cross the Columbia River soon, and would be somewhere new when the sun rose. I pressed the gas to the floor, and the car strained to pick up speed. And when I tossed the stack of bills out the window, I watched in the rearview mirror as they exploded into a mass of fluttering shadows, like a flock of birds in the night.

  PART II

  CROOKS & COPS

  THE WRONG HOUSE

  BY JONATHAN SELWOOD

  Mount Tabor

  I’m working the pry bar along the north side of Mount Tabor Park trying to scrape together enough to make a buy off the Mexicans on 82nd. Normally I cop from Voodoo Mike downtown, but I’m already into that dreadlocked cock-sucker for almost a hundred.

  The neighborhood is practically virgin this far up the hill, without a single security door along the whole block. I start off with a well-kept dark blue Victorian that looks like it got flipped right before the housing market went to shit. There’s an old Sam Adams campaign poster still on the lawn and not one but three of those stupid plastic horses wired to the iron hitching ring on the curb. One of the smaller side windows is painted shut, but not latched, so I loosen it with the bar and slip in through what turns out to be a bathroom.

  Inside the house, the primary décor is giant action photos of a middle-aged lesbian couple climbing, biking, and even riding an elephant in some Third World country. The place is stuck in the last millennium when it comes to electronic
s—they’re still using a fucking VCR—but I score big with a dresser drawer full of heirloom jewelry and some antique-looking carved Buddha heads on display above the fireplace.

  The sliding glass backdoor of the neighboring split-level ranch isn’t locked, so I just walk right into what turns out to be medical marijuana central. Even congested and junksick, the place smells to me like a flatulent skunk doused in patchouli. I spend a good twenty minutes turning the place upside down, but despite finding a bunch of dope scripts and a collection of vaporizers rivaling the Third Eye, I never manage to locate the actual weed. On the plus side, the place is a fucking gold mine of game consoles. By the time I’m out the door, I can barely zip my piece-of-shit duffel closed.

  As usual, the jonesing part of me wants to just hoof it straight down the hill and see what Tearoom Timmy will give me for it all, but popping these rich fucks’ houses is like shooting monkeys in a barrel. It’d be sin not to rip at least one more.