St. Louis Noir

by Scott Phillips

  Anderson stood in between the couches, his hand on the butt of the Luger sticking out of his jeans. He loved guard duty so much that he magically kept that let-me-tell-you-something mouth of his shut during business hours. I assumed he was trying to perfect his gunslinger glare.

  We sold to the chatty punks who heard about us through that narrow, gossipy St. Louis grapevine. We sold to the darting-eyed preps who needed all the college-prep help that SLUH or Priory wasn’t giving them. We sold to the occasional strung-out adults, those stringy-haired and pop-eyed wraiths who said they just needed something to get through the week. We sold to a hundred people who could have been undercovers and put us all away for decades

  We should have been picked up in a month and would have been eventually. But we were white people selling to white people, and that will always give you an edge in St. Louis.

  Within a week the house’s name had a new meaning. Everybody was buzzing. Our teeth rattled in our heads. Sleep was just a memory. The lights never turned off.

  I had enough money to start buying groceries, and from the brand-name aisles. The Cutlass wasn’t always running on fumes.

  I even had a girlfriend, of sorts.

  Paul, for Pauline, was a vinegary spitfire still in her junior year but easily five years older than me intellectually. She had no patience for Gene’s skinhead politics or our business.

  “Hey, Curly 2,” Paul would snap at Gene when walking into the Pillbox like she lived there. “Where’s Curly 1?”

  She called all skinheads Curly. I was number 1, so that was something.

  Paul worked nights behind the counter at an old storefront diner up on Manchester. It had been forgotten by everybody in the world except for me, Gene, and the four crypt-ready old men who spent all day arguing about the Cardinals and how the city was going to hell. We liked the endless refills and cheap doughnuts. She read worn-out paperbacks I didn’t recognize by Proust and Borges and did her best to ignore everyone else. I considered it a triumph when she said more than three words to me.

  She was a careless beauty with keen blue eyes and angled birdlike features underneath her spiky ruff of hair which changed hues on a three-week rotation. I fell for her at a party in the Central West End thrown by some slumming art-collector friends of Anderson’s who liked rough trade. In the middle of my desperate conversation-making ventures, she caught sight of a mohawk poseur shoving his girl to the floor. Paul stalked over and uncorked an uppercut at the guy like she had taken sparring lessons. We found his tooth in a fishbowl on the other side of the room. The applause rattled the glassware.

  I loved that underneath the crust she was a diligent West County girl who went to St. Joseph’s Academy and was going to get a full academic ride—somewhere with ivy-covered walls—without breaking a sweat. Once my pestering wore her down, I couldn’t get enough.

  She was angry like me. But at least she had reason. Paul told me one night about what happened to her friend, the one they found last year dumped in the River des Peres, that glorified concrete drainage ditch not far from the Pillbox. It had been a huge story, a St. Joe girl getting murdered like that. Nobody could remember such a thing happening. But the case eventually went cold and the news moved on to other horrors.

  Paul told me about what she would do to her friend’s killer. I didn’t think it was just hyperbole. I knew that I would want her avenging me.

  At least once a week we exploded in some argument or another. I’d suggest she go fuck herself. But then I’d tell her she was right and she’d cock an eyebrow at me: “Of course I’m fucking right, Curly. Are we going to keep listing obvious things all night?” After those fights, we’d end up in my bedroom at the Pillbox. But she never stayed long.

  Paul had one year of school left; she was blowing town the second she was done. It was clear as the pain on her face. As was the fact that I wouldn’t be going with her when she left. But that summer, we flew high and ran fast. I was nineteen and suddenly indestructible. It was 1989 and anything was possible.

  Then it all changed.

  * * *

  The August pickup started as just another night in Sauget. Since my life in the criminal underground had begun, I had barely exchanged words with Tom. Just a nod and a back clap if we crossed paths at a show. I was fine with this arrangement; he always put me on edge. It was as though he was quietly expecting something from me that he never articulated. The packages came in and the money went out. That was all it needed to be.

  But that night I arrived earlier than normal and saw Tom getting out of his red Ford pickup. Because of the heat, he’d taken his T-shirt off. I parked one row away in the mostly empty lot. I was fixing on my fakest grin and adjusting the thick packet of cash bulging out the front pocket of my gray Dickies when I got a look at Tom’s bare chest. If I hadn’t remembered the insignia from history class, I would know it from all the illustrated books Anderson left around the Pillbox.

  The tattoo was over a foot wide, covering Tom’s gym-inflated pectorals. The eagle’s wings were unfurled in a stiff art deco flourish, its head perched to one side, with a swastika inside a circle at its feet. A Wehrmacht eagle.

  Tom saw me looking at it and slid his T-shirt back over his head slowly, as though performing some horrific reverse striptease.

  I kept my stupid grin on and walked up, meaning to keep on going toward the bar. He turned to stride beside me.

  “Business is good?” he asked.

  I kept my voice even: “I don’t have much to compare it to, but yeah. Seems to be.”

  “Good. Chicago says they’re happy. It’s a good business. Nice and clean. No messing around, you know?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Randall . . .” He paused, and I felt a question coming that I would not want to answer. “Let me ask you this.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know that the business is good. But it can’t be just about business for us. I need to know something. Do you have Pride?”

  He said it just like that. As though I should hear the capitalization in his voice.

  I said, “Of course.” As though I knew what he were talking about.

  “Good,” he said.

  We showed IDs to the doorman, who couldn’t have cared less. Tom put his arm around me as we walked inside; it felt heavy with muscle. His mouth was right at my ear.

  “The white man needs all the help he can get these days.”

  I didn’t say anything. We did our business in the back, the owner said what he always said, and Tom and I returned to our vehicles.

  “Say hi to Gene for me,” Tom said.

  I nodded.

  Tom’s face tensed, as though he had just thought of something important. I steeled myself, not wanting to hear it. Instead, he flicked a Sieg Heil into the air. He waited, his arm stiff and his eyes wide in the dim, buzzing glow from the moth-shrouded lights mounted on the roof of Ugly Debby’s.

  I yanked open the Cutlass’s long, heavy door and threw myself inside. The engine roared to life and I peeled away. Looking back in the rearview, I saw Tom still standing there watching me, his salute slowly dropping.

  * * *

  Gene put on a disturbed look when I told him what happened. But he didn’t think we needed to do anything rash. I told him I was done and that he needed to be too.

  Paul was the most furious I had ever seen her. She hadn’t been above prevailing on us to slide a few oranges her way, especially those nights when we stayed up until dawn and she had to work a morning shift. But then she told me she wouldn’t have taken a fucking one of them if she knew where they came from. I countered that she hadn’t seemed too curious about the source at the time. She batted that line aside like it was a mosquito.

  We were on the porch, trying to decide what to do. The house was empty for once and the Christmas lights were off for good.

  Paul tore into me first for not thinking about who I was getting involved with. As a skinhead, how could I not have known that 4/20 sto
od for Hitler’s birthday?

  Then she turned on Gene: “You know that Tom tells everybody he knows Metzger, right? Don’t you think they’re in with some people who don’t need an excuse to have a boot party?” She pointed at me. “This idiot is so green he doesn’t even know what color laces to wear in his Docs. He doesn’t know those guys. You do. What the fuck were you thinking?” She folded her arms and waited. No good answer was forthcoming and she knew it.

  I said I would take care of it. We would sell our month’s supply in bulk back to Tom and Drexel, take whatever kind of loss we needed to. Just to get rid of it.

  Then it would be back to the lumberyard.

  “No,” Gene sighed, “I’ll handle it. I hope you like working for a living.”

  * * *

  Two nights later, Paul and I were sitting in the kitchen by the Pillbox’s one operational phone. Gene was supposed to call after the hand-off. “Easy payday for them,” he had assured us. “They’ll find somebody else to do this in five minutes.”

  Paul fiddled with the black laces on the still-gleaming oxblood Docs I had bought her with last month’s take. They were the most expensive present I had ever bought anybody. Now I was worried she was going to see them as tainted by blood money.

  The wall-mounted phone rang. I jumped up and snatched the receiver. It wasn’t Gene.

  “Is that Randy?” Tom asked.

  “It is,” I answered. Paul watched me, her hands still. We both vibrated in the kitchen’s dead air.

  “Are you one of the mud people?” Tom asked.

  There was a ringing in my ears. I couldn’t comprehend why I was talking to him and not Gene.

  “What?”

  “I want to know, Randall, who your people are. Where do you come from?”

  My mother was German-Irish. My father too, though he always claimed to have some Apache blood. In his mind, that excused his “wild” behavior. “Why do you care?” I asked.

  “Because I’m convinced that only somebody with mud in their veins would stoop to such betrayal. Like your mongrel friend. He admitted that he couldn’t prove pure Aryan heritage. I think that was the last thing he said. Except for, Please don’t, of course.” He chuckled.

  I gripped the receiver. Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that I had just two friends to speak of in the world.

  And now one of them was gone.

  I was given instructions and directions, then the line went dead.

  Paul stood and put her arms around me. She never did that. For a moment I imagined the two of us just leaving. Isn’t that how stories about teenagers in love should end? With the lovesick couple escaping to the west and leaving all their troubles behind? One problem was that I hadn’t said that I loved her yet. The other problem was that I had been told what would happen if I didn’t follow instructions. To me. To her.

  They told me to meet them at a parking lot downtown, just north of Washington Avenue. I looked around at Manchester as I passed through, taking my time at all the lights and scanning for police. I pulled in just after midnight. It was a perfectly dead place, just another blank concrete slab that had probably once been a row of tenements housing the Irish back in the nineteenth century and then the blacks who came up from the South early in the twentieth.

  Tom’s truck and Drexel’s white police surplus Chevy Caprice were parked at a right angle to each other, their hoods almost touching.

  I stepped out into the stifling, Mississippi-sodden August night air. Not far away in one of the warehouse clubs on Washington, some band was making a painful-sounding noise. I couldn’t see or hear a single car. There were no pedestrians, of course. Urban renewal at its finest.

  No words were spoken. Tom was standing by the back of his truck, with Drexel to his side. Both looked casual and all too pleased with themselves. They were both dressed the part, with polished Docs, cuffed jeans, white T-shirts, and braces up. I walked over quickly to get it done with and looked at what lay underneath the tarpaulin in Tom’s truck.

  Even in the dim light cast by the city’s few-and-far-between streetlights, I could see that Drexel and Tom’s boots had done their work and then some. Gene’s favorite T-shirt, the Specials, was covered in blood and gravel and tar after he had been kicked from one set of steel toes to the next. His face was stippled with bloody smears, swollen and dark like it had been injected with some purple liquid. I was only thankful his eyes were closed.

  My fists clenched so viciously tight I thought my knuckles would snap.

  “What do you think, Mud?” Tom said, flipping the heavy tarp back over Gene’s stupid, trusting face.

  I worked on keeping my face blank. I remembered Paul. “I think Gene panicked and did something stupid,” I told him.

  “You got that right,” Drexel said, leaning back against the hood of his car with a grin.

  “Yes, indeed,” Tom said, leaning in close to me. His voice softened, as he shifted from intimidation mode to soothing. “There’s no reason that business can’t go on like before, is there?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Good. And I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more of you from here on out.”

  “I don’t see why not.” My molars were grinding together so hard now I was sure that both of them could hear the sound.

  Tom smiled, his teeth like falling-over tombstones. “Well, get on with it, then. Just liked we talked about.”

  I nodded, walked back to the Cutlass, and popped the trunk. I put the keys back in my pocket and leaned down. I clocked the time.

  What happened next was all Paul’s idea.

  After the call came from Tom, we had stood in the kitchen, unable to move. Our nerves were screaming. Disengaging her hug, Paul placed her hands on my shoulders and looked up at me. She was quiet for a few seconds. Then she told me what to do. I didn’t make a sound until she was done. Then I repeated it back to her, twice.

  Tom had told me I was responsible for disposing of Gene’s body. To help make up for all this inconvenience.

  So when I straightened up from the trunk, Tom and Drexel were expecting to see me with a blanket. They didn’t look surprised by the heavy yellow work gloves I wore at the lumberyard. It was going to be a messy job, after all.

  The Mossberg in my hands was more of a shock.

  Drexel was farther away and so a bigger risk for escape; he went first. I fired from the hip, not trusting myself to get the shotgun up to my shoulder in time. The slug caught him in the chest. It tore a glistening fist-sized hole in his T-shirt and knocked him back over the hood of his car. The sound echoed back at me from the dark hulking buildings scattered one and two blocks away.

  I had been shooting the thing for so long in the Pillbox basement, in the proper stance with ear guards on, that I wasn’t prepared for the flat boom and savage recoil. I almost dropped the shotgun in surprise.

  Tom was just as stunned as I was. That gave me time to shift the shotgun to one hand and pull the Luger out of the trunk.

  I looked at Tom, remembering how he had just thrown the tarp back over Gene like he was covering up something disgusting, and wanted to pull the trigger right then. But I remembered what Paul made me repeat to her. I walked toward Drexel’s Caprice, keeping the shotgun held high and pointed at Tom’s face.

  “Take it easy,” I said to Tom, as I reached Drexel. “You don’t need to panic.”

  I had never actually seen the blood drain from somebody’s face.

  “First time you’ve had a gun on you, right?” I asked him, standing at a slight angle between him and Drexel so he couldn’t see what my left hand was doing.

  He tilted his head in what I assumed was agreement.

  I shrugged. “Well, I can’t say I know how it feels. But I’m sure it’s not pleasant.”

  The adrenaline surging through me was making every hair stand on end. There was a roaring sound in my ears. Time was tight. But still, I needed to say something.

  “I didn’t even like Gene that much, you know.
We spent a lot of time together, but it wasn’t necessarily by choice. In a different life, we wouldn’t even have been friends.”

  “So, why?” Tom finally asked me, his heavy brow wrinkled in confusion.

  “I should say that it was because he took me in, kept me from turning homeless, that I grew to appreciate him the more time we spent together. But that’s not what this is about. I don’t have a lot of friends to spare, you see. And you just murdered one of them. Beat him to death.”

  I had reams of words ready to go, more than I had ever said at one time. Then I realized it was enough; I had already said it all.

  I pivoted to the side, bringing Drexel’s right hand up with my left. My gloved finger barely fit over his underneath the trigger guard. But when I squeezed, the Luger cracked off a round all the same.

  I didn’t wait to see if the first one hit. Given the awkward angle and me using my bad hand, I couldn’t take chances. I pulled three or four more times; to this day I couldn’t tell you exactly how it all went. At least two hit.

  One blew a hole into Tom’s upper chest, just above his tattoo, that was probably nonfatal on its own. But another round sailed right through Tom’s throat, spraying a scarlet mist behind him that seemed to hang in the air for a moment as his body crumpled.

  I don’t remember much of the rest, except for fitting the Mossberg into Tom’s hand, racking another shell, aiming at the air over Drexel, and pulling the trigger one last time.

  More echoes. My time limit was already past.

  I tossed Tom’s truck, finding the padded envelope of pills in a pile of flattened Budweiser cans and White Pride leaflets.

  I didn’t look at Gene again. I had three dead faces I would now be seeing for the rest of my life. I didn’t want those memories to be any fresher.

  When I pulled away, Drexel was still sprawled over the hood of his car like a piece of road kill. One of his boots dangling off the side kept twitching.