Portland Noir (14 page)

The door opened to let in a big slice of midday sun, traffic, and exhaust. It was Rebar, his shadow joining the dark with the rest of us. He saw my red beer. “Shaking off a hangover, Angel?”

I said, “Wish I had a hangover angel. Somebody to come rub the aches away.” This time it wasn’t a hangover I wanted to shake, but a life of mistakes, wrong men, places like this dive I found myself in all over again.

Rebar said, “Here I am.” Like he was my angel.

His black hair stood up in front. His jeans were stained with cement mix, from the rock wall he’d been building before he got picked up. Instead of his work boots, he was wearing Sketchers, tennies right out of Payless Shoes. They were as out of place as hospital slippers on Rebar’s big feet. But still he was beautiful, wiry and strong, an olive-skinned James Dean. He was comic-book thin, muscled and taut. He said, “Got a hello for me?”

I stood, let him pull me close. He lifted me off my feet, squeezed my ribs, tipped me out of my stilettos. I lay my arms over his shoulders. He’d been gone for months. Now he smelled like soap and shave cream. He smelled like a man on parole, trying to do things right. That wouldn’t last. When he let go I said, “Didn’t they wash your clothes in that place?” I sat, to put a tiny table between us.

He said, “Maybe. This stuff doesn’t come out.”

“Maybe nothing changes.”

Rebar put his fingers around my wrist. “Maybe I changed.” His fingers were handcuffs.

Before Rebar went in the hospital, he hadn’t been sleeping. He hadn’t been drinking in the last days of his crazy spell, but was talking to strangers in sounds that weren’t real words. That’s against some kind of law, I guess, because the cops knocked him flat on the sidewalk, tased him in the bus mall outside of Pioneer Square, did what they called “subdued.” They hauled him off.

Now, between the rash of razor burn and a scar on his forehead where he hit the sidewalk, he had the face of a baby and an old man at the same time. Least he wasn’t wide-eyed, wired, ready to crack someone’s jaw. He didn’t look electric. He said, “Feels like I been gone for years.” His voice was shaky. That wasn’t new. His voice was always shaky.

I said, “Just stay off the sauce.”

He nodded, and squinted at that soundless TV on in the corner. “Got a bracelet.” He pulled up his pant leg. I’d never seen him wear shoes without socks before. His calve was wrapped in a brown plastic band with two boxes, one on either side. “Transdermal, they call it. Scram.”

“Scram?” I thought he wanted me to leave. I was more than ready. I reached for my pocketbook, pulled it to my lap.

“Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor,” he said. “SCRAM. I don’t think this sucker works, though. Supposed to read your alcohol level through sweat. Five percent of everything you drink comes out through the skin.”

“They made you take a class in it.” I could tell, by the way he talked.

“If I don’t drink, they won’t know I been here, right?”

“Booze leaches through the walls in this place. It’s in the air.” I sipped my red beer. I ran my fingers over the glass. I ran my hand, wet from the glass, over my forehead and across my neck.

Alcohol-induced psychosis. That was the theory doctors offered for Rebar’s tripped-up month, like he drank more than anyone else. He sure didn’t drink more than the men who lined the counter, those old sea gulls on their posts. It didn’t mean anything—he was crazy. Drinking made him crazier.

I turned a clean amber ashtray over in my palm, felt the weight of it, sharp edges of beveled glass. That ashtray was solid. My plan was to quit taking things I didn’t need. I didn’t need anything. I’d already filled Rebar’s shack with salt and pepper shakers, coffee cups, sunglasses, doormats, hood ornaments, construction barricades. I had a plastic lawn Santa to watch me all year long, keeping tabs, naughty or nice.

The ashtray was a sure thing, hard and sharp. I slipped it in my purse. Rebar rolled a cigarette. I shifted one end of the tavern’s orange curtain to see the street and knocked a curled and faded
Help Wanted
sign from the window. There was no one outside except traffic, and hardly anyone in the tavern. Rebar’s eyes on me, his body so close, made the place crowded.

“You need to start eating,” I said. I threw a piece of popcorn his way.

“Did you miss me?”

“I’m glad you’re better.”

“Yeah?” A fleck of tobacco danced on his lip. When he reached for my fingers, I pulled my hand back. He held on. “You don’t give a rip.”

I pushed with my other hand against the rock of his forearm. His skin was a thin cover over muscle. “I want to drink my drink,” I said.

He pulled me closer, until my ribs leaned into the side of the table. My hand grew hot; a candle burned in a red glass globe on the table below. Rebar whispered, “When I was crucified by those cops, you were the voice in my ear. You were laughing, but you were at my side.” He let go of my arm and I fell back, tipped the rickety table enough to slosh red beer against the rim of my glass. Slosh wax against the inside of the candle’s little world. I lifted my glass and let beer drip.

Taki put the
Help Wanted
sign back in the window. He ran a rag over the table. “Don’t break anything, you hear?”

“Like my arm,” I said.

Taki said, “You okay?”

I nodded. My wrist felt the residue of Rebar’s strength. I tried to rub it out. His cigarette burned in the ashtray, a long ash off the end. I couldn’t stand that smell, and yet I lived in a cloud of smoke. I said, “If you’re going to smoke, smoke. Don’t burn ’em like incense.”

Rebar said, “So, when do I get my place back?”

I knew it’d come around to that. “Thought they set you up, a place to stay.”

“Only till I can prove I got my own.”

“You’ll have it back. Just give me time to pack, wouldya?”

“You could stay,” he said, and his eyes got soft in that way that made me want to head for the door.

I found lipstick and a compact in my purse. I painted my lips red. “With you? A happy home, all over again?”

He nodded, watched me.

“Not in the least likely.” I clipped the lid back on the lipstick. Dropped it in my purse and signaled Taki for another drink.

Then Tino came in the alley door and went up to the bar without looking our way. He held his jeans pocket down from the outside with one hand and pulled money out from inside the pocket with the other. He bought a six-pack of cans to go, in a bag, and one beer in a bottle to have opened. His hands didn’t shake when he counted out change. When his hands didn’t shake, that meant he’d been drinking already.

Tino worked as a narc for Lincoln High, catching truants, once in a while patting them down for weapons. On the side, he’d confiscate drugs from kids and sell them back to the janitors. Janitors sold the same score back to kids. Tino wasn’t getting rich, but kept his head out of water.

Rebar followed my look. His neck was stiff; he had to turn in his chair. Tendons came to the surface. He said, “Your boyfriend’s here.” He rapped a foot against the leg of the table. It might’ve been more of a kick, but those Sketchers softened the blow.

I caught the table, stopped it from rocking. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

If Rebar hadn’t been there, just out of the psych ward, working hard to not drink and keep his head together, maybe I would’ve walked over and reached for Tino. Maybe I’d call him a boyfriend, or close enough to it.

I never did get the dating thing, where it stopped and started.

Tino saw us. He said, “Hey. What’s up?” He looked tired, his eyes ringed with circles. His top lip was chapped, cracked in a brown spot of dried blood.

Rebar said, “When do I get my Dr. Martens back?”

Tino half-laughed, blew it off.

I said, “Criminey. Not the shoes again.”

Rebar’d lost his Dr. Martens to Tino in a minor drug deal. Rebar made his dough in construction, old houses, but that didn’t always come through. He’d been broke that day. The shoes, as a trade, were a compromise. Rebar couldn’t let it go.

He said, “Serious.”

Tino said, “I’m not a hawk shop, friend.” He was wearing the shoes.

I said, “Rebar’s fresh out of the funny farm. Trying to put a life together. Those shoes might be part of the picture.”

Rebar’s house was a bigger part of that picture.

Tino said, “Down here, or up on the hill?”

“I was up on the hill,” Rebar said, and he said it so quiet his mouth barely moved. He shook his head, like he didn’t get it himself.

Tino said, “I’m headed to Good Sam.”

Rebar said, “You going nuts too?”

“Going to see Eileen.” He turned a chair backward, sat on it that way, then lit a cigarette. “She had an aneurysm in her brain.” He pointed to his head with the orange tip of the smoke, his thumb aimed at the ceiling. His hand was like a gun, at his own head.

I said, “No way.”

Rebar said, “Who’s Eileen?”

I said, “Waitress at Chang’s, dyes her hair.”

Tino said, “Living with Ray Madrigal.”

That was the part I didn’t want to say, and didn’t want to hear, the reason I knew who Tino meant—Eileen and Ray. Ray, who I’d lived with, before. I pulled the ashtray out of my purse, kept it hidden by my palm, and put it back on the table. I didn’t need that ashtray. But I couldn’t let go. I moved it to my purse again.

Tino said, “They cut her head open and clamped a vein or something shut. She’s fine, but she’s bald.”

I slid a salt shaker into my purse and said, “No shit?” Ray’s new girl, with hardware in her head.

The bathroom at the Marathon was down a glowing turquoise hall, like a pool drained of water, and it smelled from mildew. It was the hallway to the rooms for rent upstairs. Just outside the women’s bathroom somebody had written in black marker,
MEN WHO FATHER CHILDREN LIVE HERE
. I read those words every time I turned the corner. I’d memorized the writing—all capital letters and jagged angles. The sentence stuck with me. It seemed wrong, reversed, blaming the men for where they lived instead of what they did, maybe even asking for sympathy, or renovation on the building.
MEN WHO LIVE HERE FATHER CHILDREN
, it should say.
MEN WHO LIVE HERE ARE BAD
—but the men in the building weren’t bad, only lost and lazy. Drunks. Only men nobody should have kids with in the first place. Men who father children live everywhere.

I came out of the bathroom. Tino was in the hall. We went out back, to the alley between buildings, beside the dumpster.

Tino pulled a pipe from his coat pocket.

Pot smells good in the cold. There’s the density of it, that soft sweetness. I’d like to find that same sweet edge in something solid.

Tino passed the pipe to me. I didn’t reach for it. “You shake down a freshman for that herb?” I said.

“Maybe.” He was still holding smoke in his lungs. “What’re you doing with Rebar?”

“Helping him out.” I shrugged.

Tino said, “Watch him close. I don’t want to lose more teeth.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“They don’t come back.” He smiled, to show a gap at the side near the front. His eye tooth, his dog tooth. A fist, a party. Like two years before, but it seemed forever. I put my lips to his cracked lips, kissed his gap-toothed mouth, breathed his secondhand pot smoke. I held onto the fake sheepskin of his Sears corduroy coat. Tino’s skinny body blocked the wind. One time, when he was still underage, Tino’d been busted for dealing and his folks sent him off to boot camp in Idaho. He broke out, hitched home, and hid in Forest Park at night when he couldn’t find a place to crash, until he hooked up with me for a while. I don’t know what happened to him out there in Idaho, but now, best thing about Tino was he wouldn’t leave the neighborhood. He said it himself—he’d never go anywhere he couldn’t walk home from.

One of these days I’d go as far away as I wanted, and I knew he’d be there, home, when I got back. Tino was home, and he was mine.

We went back in the tavern. Rebar worked his muscled jaw. Maybe it was time for more meds, I had no clue.

Someone said my name,
Vanessa
, in the hiss of a whisper. I looked. The men lining the bar had their backs to our table. Music rattled under bad speakers. Nobody said my name. It was just noises, a cloud of tavern sounds; my name was a patchwork put together from scrap.

Tino said, “Come see Eileen. She’d like it.”

My hands were light and far away with the cold. I rubbed them together. “I don’t think we should visit Eileen. I’m fine here.”

Rebar said, “Jesus, Vanessa, she had brain surgery.”

I said, “Hospital-land. It creeps me out. All that mortality.” Then again, the bar was lined with vulture fodder.

Rebar said, “I started to like it.”

Tino said, “Ray won’t show up.”

I said, “You going?”

Rebar shook his head.

I said, “Okay.” So I’d shake off Rebar. Maybe I’d get lost on the way too. Except when I stood, Rebar stood. He said, “Swap shoes with me, man.” He kicked off a Sketcher. Tino ignored him. Rebar worked his shoes back on and hustled to catch up, snagging my arm to hold me back.

The hospital halls were miles of white, somebody’s idea of a sterile heaven, broken by red emergency phones and inset shrines of faded saints. Rebar put his arm over my shoulder. I hadn’t shaken anybody. He stooped to bring his face closer to mine and said, “Where I was, we had big rooms and new carpets. We had coffee machines.” His big feet swung out, ready to knock things down.

I heard my name again, in a whisper:
Van-ess-a, Van-ess-a
… It was under the swish of clothes and the wheels of the carts. Rebar’s coat sleeve rustled against my ear.

Tino skipped the reception desk.

“You been here before?” Rebar asked me.

“I was born here, but never been back.” The hospital was its own world, all clean, creased green uniforms. Aluminum carts, Formica. It was a different place from the world outside. In the hospital, pretty much I didn’t know anybody.

Rebar, Tino, and me—we were a walking cloud of tavern air, smoke, and beer breath. I reached a hand, laced one finger through Tino’s belt loop.

Vanessa.