Portland Noir (23 page)

I start up the engine and drive off.

11) I’ve been on this program, eating fruit and making the sign of the cross and skating Burnside every morning early, and not too much drinking, and my head was feeling cleared out a little, but then stuff kind of started going downhill after the thing with that family and their garden. Or maybe it was the thing with the girl, I don’t know.

Manny and me start drinking early at the skatepark, getting all sloppy. I take a bad slam on my elbow. I lie there for a while, looking at the underside of the bridge, all black and sooty and painted with pigeon shit, like an old cathedral. My elbow turns into a swellbow, the size of a baseball, the way it always does. And then these art school girls who Manny knows show up with some bottles of champagne, and we decide to celebrate my swellbow, and we’re all drinking out of the bottle at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, and it’s good, you know, the way freedom can be good.

Then these art school girls want to hit the strip clubs, which is just fine with Manny and me, and we end up at Magic Gardens, where the ceilings are low, and one of the strippers swings her hair around all crazy and gets it stuck in the heating vent above the stage. I’m embarrassed for her a little, all naked and hanging there by the hair, but that doesn’t keep me and Manny from looking and laughing. Then the bartender, this fat Asian, comes out with a pair of scissors.

“You cut that girl’s hair and I’ll fucking knock your teeth out,” I say. “Bring me a screwdriver and I’ll get it done right.”

But the bartender isn’t having that, so I slap the scissors out of his fat hand, and then I’m in a headlock and the bouncer and the bartender are dragging me out. They’re sorry they let me go out on the sidewalk, though, because now the bartender needs some dental work, as promised.

So then we hit Mary’s, where I wash my bloody knuckles in the sink while Manny looks at his crushed face in the mirror. The bathrooms at Mary’s are tiny and filthy, post–lap dance come stains on the wall next to the urinal.

“Sometimes I think I should’ve gone ahead and died,” Manny says, tracing the scar line up around his eye.

“You know what the smell of blood does to me,” I say. “Right now I could kill you with one punch.”

He turns away from the mirror and looks at me. “You’d do that for me?” I’m surprised to see that he’s serious.

“Come on, man,” I say. “You don’t really want to die.”

His face turns disappointed. “I’m supposed to die so I can come back as an angel.” Then he walks out. Like I said, something’s not right with him.

What happens next is better than Christmas morning, or winning the lottery, or the resurrection of Jesus, or any of that miraculous shit. I finish washing my knuckles, and in through the swinging door comes that sketchy fucker from Burnside, carrying a bent spoon, eyes all red.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I say, grinning. This isn’t something I usually say, but using the word “fancy” here in this bathroom strikes me as fucking hilarious.

It takes a few seconds for him to recognize me, and then I can see the fear in his eyes. I smack the spoon out of his hand. He goes down on the piss-sticky floor, crawling around like a dog, looking for it.

“Just give me a couple minutes,” he says. “Just let me take care of something and then we can—”

I kick him straight in the mouth.

I thought that would do the trick, but then he’s up and on me, and stronger than I thought, or not stronger but more desperate maybe. I’m fighting for fun, for the girl; he’s fighting for his life, for his next fix. But still, I’m not the right person to fuck with, not ever. I bear hug him, crack his forehead open with a head butt, then break the bathroom door open with his body and we spill out into the bar, me on top the entire time. Blood: there’s a lot of it. I think Manny even got a few shots in, or maybe it was Manny who pulled me off him, it’s hard to remember.

12) Manny figures it might not be the best idea for me to sleep at Burnside, but I don’t give a fuck. Right now this place belongs to me.

Sketchy and the girl are nowhere to be found. My best guess is the hospital. I sleep sound, until there’s another knock on my van.

The girl again.

She looks scared. A fresh purple bruise under her left eye.

“Is he okay?” I ask, yawning.

“No, he’s not fucking okay,” she says, climbing into the van. She smells like sweat again, and like something burning. Incense, maybe. Or charcoal.

“I just gave him a friendly beat down. He got what he deserved.”

“It’s not what you did,” she says. “It’s something else.”

“What, the bouncers rough him up after I finished?”

She looks around nervously. “You have any more beers?”

I reach back into the cooler and grab a couple. When I turn around she kisses me hard, and I can feel that she already has her shirt half off. The way she smells does something to me, like the smell of blood does something to me. But this is different. She smells like the ocean and like fire, and the way she’s all over me and hungry is like being out on a big day in Hawaii, when you bail hard and get tumbled all over the fuck-ing place, held under a thousand gallons of seawater, churned around like a dirty sock in a washing machine. Then you finally come up for air and you know you’re probably not going to drown and it feels so good to breathe that you thank God, whether or not you’ve ever set foot in church, and this girl all over me with her hot mouth and her soft tits is like that but better. And then it’s my turn to be on top, and I keep asking to make sure I’m not hurting her, because I’m big—I make girls cry in a good way, most of the time—and the girl promises me it’s in a good way, her crying, and then she begs me to come in her mouth so that I know for sure.

When it’s over she lies totally still, almost like she’s dead. Or catatonic. But she’s breathing, and she’s soft, and I kind of like her all quiet like this. I fall asleep with my hand on her stomach.

She shakes me awake. Half an hour later? Three hours? I have no fucking clue.

She has that strung-out look again, like the first time she got in my van. I ask her what’s the matter, and she just sits there shivering until I touch her cheek.

“It’s okay,” I say. “You don’t have to worry about him anymore. I’ll take care of you.”

She shakes her head. “I know,” she says. “I trust you.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I killed him,” she says.

“You what?”

“I killed him. I really did. He came back here after you beat him up and he punched me in the face, so I took his knife and killed him.”

I rub my face and try to let this sink in, the fact that I just fucked a murderer.

“Okay, so you killed him. What the fuck did you do with his body?”

“That’s what I need your help with,” she says.

13) She leads me up the dirt path to the upper parking lot. She holds my hand the whole way. Sobbing. “He’s up here,” she says. “I pulled the mattress over him.”

We climb further up to the spot, and sure enough, there’s the mattress, all covered in bloodstains, and there’s a big long lump underneath that looks a lot like a body. The girl falls to her knees and starts sobbing again. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking up at me with pleading eyes. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. Fucker had it coming.”

And then from out of nowhere something bashes me on the back of the head, dropping me straight to my knees, my vision crackling with little white fireworks. Then a hard kick to my ribs that knocks the wind out of me.

I don’t even have to look up, I know who it is. But I do look up, and he’s got a gun and I can see that he’s pretty serious about wanting to use it. I laugh. “I know a guy who’ll pay you to shoot him,” I say.

“You stupid motherfucker,” he rasps, the gun trained right on my eye socket.

But then the girl is on his back, still crying, begging him not to.

He shoves her away and I make a move for him, but he stomps on my face. And again. And then again. Somewhere between the time I pounded on him at Mary’s and now he found a pair of heavy boots.

14) I wake up on the mattress, my pulse punching from inside my head. What looked like the shape of a body at first is actually a pile of rocks and broken concrete chunks, which I highly don’t recommend sleeping on. I feel around in my pockets; as expected, my van keys are gone.

15) I wake up again, maybe half an hour later, and Manny has me by the legs. His skateboard’s underneath me like a little hospital gurney, and he’s facing forward, pulling me by both my feet. One of my shoes is gone.

I try to open my mouth to thank him, but it hurts to talk.

He tows me from under the bridge, and out there it’s a bright sunny morning, the first I’ve seen in Portland for a while. I’m looking straight up into the sky, from my one good eye, at the clouds and the sun and lampposts and power cables. Manny pulls me across the street, through a crosswalk, and I can see a lady in a Volvo looking out at us like,
What the fuck,
this man pulling another man like a rickshaw, both our faces wrecked, mine with fresh blood. I know Manny’s taking me to the hospital, because everyone who skates Burnside knows where the nearest hospital is, and I don’t have to ask about my van because if it was still here he’d be driving me. I picture Sketchy and the girl—I never did learn her name—driving south to California, the way Amber and I used to drive down there in the winter, heading toward the sun. And it’s here, with Manny pulling me toward help and me picturing those two driving my van, that I start to feel how bad it hurts, everything I’ve been through, and I wonder if maybe the girl will wear the beaded necklace, the one I made for Amber at camp. It would look good on her, I think. It definitely would. And Manny’s humming now while he pulls me, like this is no big deal, like this is what he was born to do.

HUMMINGBIRD

BY
Z
OE
T
ROPE
S.E. Eighty-Second Avenue

A
my doesn’t want to go to Cathie’s. I don’t care. “You deserve orgasms!” I tell her.

She flushes and pushes her long, sideways bangs out of her eyes. “Shut up,” she says, and turns up the volume on the TV. We’re watching
Ace of Cakes
on the Food Network in my parents’ basement. Again.

“Luke doesn’t make you come, right?”

She doesn’t answer, which means yes.

I stand in front of the television. Amy crosses her thin arms and looks past me, focusing on Duff Goldman, the chef, who is up to his elbows in fondant. She can be pissy sometimes, but we’ve been friends since we were both straight. That was sixth grade. Then puberty hit and Amy fell in love with Samir Rajkumar, who, after two dates that involved making out at the movie theater, admitted to her,
I think I like guys
. Then the universe decided to donkey punch Amy because I told her that I was into chicks on the same day. She asked if gay was going around like the flu.

“Amy, come on. It’ll be fun. I’ll buy you a coffee.” She ignores me and changes the channel. There’s a lady on the news with pink lipstick and bad hair talking about a sexual predator on the loose.

“The suspect is a twenty-five-to-thirty-year-old white male …
”

“Who is this guy?” Amy asks as an artist’s sketch lingers on the screen.

“Some meth head who’s been ‘harassing women outside a local nightclub.’” I wiggle my fingers in the air, putting quotes around the second part.

“What does that mean?”

I smirk. “He’s been harassing dykes outside E Room, asking if he can help them come. That’s what Julia told me, anyway.”

“How would she know?”

“Her friend Emma works there.”

“With our luck, we’ll run into some guy like that at the porn shop.” Amy gestures at the screen and wrinkles her tiny, cute nose.

“Cathie’s is very classy,” I assure her. “It’s women-owned. Minimal meth head exposure, I promise.” Her green eyes move from the screen to my pleading, grinning face. “Orgasms, Amy!” I do my Martha impression, which she loves: “It’s a good thing.”

Amy cracks a smile, turns off the TV, and picks up her tiny purse from under the coffee table. I see her pull out her phone as she gets into my car.

“Who are you texting?”

“Luke.”

“Gonna let him know that you’re going to buy his competition?”

She doesn’t say anything as we drive down Eighty-second, past Vietnamese restaurants and brothels with names like Honeysuckles Lingerie and The G Spot. I wonder what she’s writing.
what r u doing tonight?
I pull into a strip mall with a Russian deli, a teriyaki joint, a nail salon, and a bubble tea café.

There’s techno music playing in the café, which is mostly deserted except for a guy checking his e-mail and two teenage girls reading magazines in the back. Amy orders a latte. “I hate the way those bubbles feel in my mouth,” she says when I order a taro root smoothie with tapioca pearls. “They’re so slimy.”

“Nah, they’re kind of like candy,” I explain.

Amy argues, “I don’t think you should have to chew your drink,” and adds another packet of sugar to her cup. She grabs two swizzle straws and pushes them through the hole in the lid.

We drive further south, past the community college, the Taboo porn shop, and two enormous Chinese restaurants.

I ask Amy if she came with her last boyfriend, Del, who she dated her junior year. He was tall and tan like a Ken doll. I liked him, right up until he called Samir a faggot behind his back. I did the only thing a sensible lesbian would do—I gave him a black eye. Del snitched to his parents, telling them a crazy dyke tried to kill him, and I had to spend time with my mom and a juvie youth counselor talking about why I was such “an angry young woman.” I got probation. Amy broke up with Del and didn’t talk to me for a month.

Amy shakes her head about Del. I suck the bubbles up from the bottom of my cup. “That blows,” I say.

She stares at her phone, mid-text. “His dick was too big. It hurt.”

“Okay, well, moving forward. Top 10 best things about vibrators. I’ll start. They come in shapes like dolphins and beavers. Your turn.” Amy will play Top 10 anything. It’s my way of making her feel okay about things she doesn’t want to do. One time we played Top 10 best things about abortions.