by Jeff Johnson
Dessel was at a table on the far wall behind me, drinking coffee and half hiding behind a Portland Mercury, our snarky hipster rag. Suitable torture. There was no sign of Pressman, so he was stuck in the Prius or sitting on a toilet somewhere—he had a history of bowel trouble. The other drinkers were innocuous enough. Two construction workers, tired and muddy but happy enough. A chunky boozer lady staring at a phone. Old guy with thinning hair, nursing a coffee and picking at what looked like French fries.
There was a time when I would have known at least one person in a bar like that one. I never did anymore. One of the biggest changes in the city was all around me. I’d become more anonymous than ever. People were so poor these days, too. The old guard, the heads and bodies that once filled places with cheap booze, now drank at home to save a few bucks. Or they’d moved. If you listened closely, you could always hear elements of the master evacuation plan. Rainy Portland, that had once drawn artists and musicians and misfits because of the cheap houses and the shitty weather no one else could stand, had been replaced in the swirling undercurrent of street gossip. No one came here to start a band anymore. People came to cash in on the last of the boom in the real estate market. And the dive bars had cameras. The bartender drifted back over and raised an eyebrow at my empty. I shook my head.
“I know you from somewhere,” she said, giving me the eye. “You used to work for UPS or something?”
“Nah.”
“You were on Portlandia.” She said it like I had something to do with the sore on her lip. I saluted her with the last of my beer.
“Something better. The news.”
“All the news is fake unless it’s harpooning the fake president. Which franchise?”
I motioned for her to lean in. She did.
“You see that guy behind me? Drinking coffee? Looks sort of like he lives in his mom’s basement, maybe has a weird fear of ants?”
She expertly flicked her eyes over my shoulder, then back to me. Miniscule nod.
“Fed. He’s a dick, but right now he works for me. That little piece of shit is responsible for the popularity of my face, though. I made a few changes since his promo campaign.” I touched the scar on my cheek.
“You’re the tattoo guy who went on a murder spree,” she breathed, enchanted. “You charge by the hour or the piece?”
“Depends. Whatcha lookin’ for?” I cradled my chin, casually swirled my beer.
“Something difficult,” she confessed. “Messy. Tedious. Time consuming. Trashy, but in a classic way, so blurry too.”
“Say it ain’t so.”
She laughed without much wind in it. “What the hell are you doing in my bar?”
“Getting drunk. The fed boy is following me to see if he can pick up the trail of some shithead. Long story.”
She batted her eyelashes. “I picked a bad day to have my lip act out.”
“Your hair looks nice,” I replied. “I have a girlfriend anyway. At least I do for the moment.”
“Figures. So your fed guy over there, it be better if we made him uncomfortable?”
“No.” I set my beer aside and picked up my phone. “But there is one thing you can do for me. I’m not entirely convinced he’s all that good at his job. I mean, the kid is smart as a fucker, but I’ve given him the slip one too many times. When I leave, he’ll split a minute later. You wanna do me a favor, snap a picture of whoever follows him out of here and send it to me.”
“And for this I get?”
“Extra twenty bucks.” I gave her my ready leer. “And the rest of the story.”
“Gimme your number.”
I left an hour of solitary drinking later, half wasted and just in time to hit the liquor store four blocks over before it closed. Life in the bar had picked up, mostly slumming college kids from PSU and the downtown office crowd. From the liquor store, I walked up to the Park Blocks and strolled, head down against the rain, which had turned into the light, constant drizzle Portland was famous for.
The Park Blocks had once been a hotbed of speed dealers with mullets, and that had given way to a decade of trashy punk kids, my decade, and then it had dried out and become real estate. The streetlights were gold and the trees were old and big, and I had to admit it was pretty. I stopped in front of a Mercury dispenser and took one out, then wandered over to a park bench and used it as a seat pad to keep my ass dry.
People drifted past and I watched them come and go, sipping the Beam I’d been developing an appreciation for. The overhanging trees soaked up enough of the rain to let me hang out for a little while without getting soaked, and my bomber jacket was waterproof. Eventually I set the bottle down and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke into the wet night.
Dessel was out there somewhere, watching me drink illegally in a park. Someone might or might not be watching him watching me. But I kept thinking about Hank. Hank Dildo. Hank from Empire of Shit. Delia’s fiancé.
Hank unfortunately had very dark dirt on me. About a year ago, I’d hired his entire stupid band to help me out with a shitty situation. I was desperate, and at the time I hadn’t thought Hank or any of the Empire kids were players of any kind. They’d posed as waiters while I rufied the shit out of a rich Russian man and Santiago, then the rich man’s bodyguard, and afterward they’d helped me transport them to a run-down motel on 82nd. They had no idea what happened after that, but it would be bad if they ratted on me. I’d airmailed the rich man (in a transmission box) back to Russia, where he had warrants. After I beat the shit out of him in an unfair fight, Santiago and I had made a lasting peace that had turned into a real friendship, and it could go conceivably bad for him if it came out that he had been involved with the Russian real estate developer’s untimely return home. Though he was not directly connected with the disappearance of Oleg Turganov, having the case reopened would not bode well for him. He was on probation and he was doing well with it. It was not hard to imagine an enterprising guy like Agent Dessel bending the facts and making something stick to Santiago, if only to get to me.
So beating the truth out of Hank regarding his mistress was out. Kicking his ass for fucking around was out. Essentially, it would be hard to act on Nigel’s claims without proof, and even if I got it, it would still be hard. But nothing was impossible. I put it together in different ways, turning it this way and that. It boiled down to the same thing, over and over again.
I didn’t want Delia to marry the guy.
I didn’t really care if Hank was a junkie. I didn’t give half a shit if he was in love with another woman. The kid was an idiot if he thought he could rip Delia off and get away with it, so even that didn’t especially bother me. What bothered me was that I knew, I knew, that Delia would stick with the piece of shit once she took that vow. She would, no matter what it took, stay true to her guns. She’d blame herself. She’d believe, deep down, that his running away had something to do with her, that he’d seen something in her, that in some way she’d come up short. That she just had to try harder, or differently. And that meant she would have a sad life.
Delia was a lot like me in that way. It was how I felt about Suzanne.
I got up and walked. The opera was a block down, and well-dressed people were going in. I headed up and a little north, to the nearest row of food carts. Most of them were closed for the night, but the taco wagons always held on till the bitter end. There was no line when I stepped under the awning of one of my favorites.
“Gimme, ah, five pastor,” I said. The squat Mestizo woman didn’t even nod, just got to work. While she did, I checked my phone. No new messages, no missed calls. Nothing. I thought about that as I looked out at the rain. Fake party night had a bitter, lonesome quality to it that I hadn’t anticipated.
“Seven fifty.”
I turned around and paid, then unwrapped one and ate it while she watched me with flat eyes. It was bad form to stand there, but no one was waiting. She had the heat on and the temperature had been dropping while I thought about Hank, and the spicy w
armth felt good on my face. I wolfed down one more before her gaze got to me, then headed out into the rain with a white bag of tacos and a brown bag with a bottle.
Ten minutes later I was in the alcove in front of Ming’s Boot and Shoe Repair. I tossed down my new Mercury and sat on it, fished a taco out of the bag, and ate slowly, watching the cars pass. It was a little after ten by then and it had been a long day. I was tired, but restless. After taco number four, I set the bag aside and opened the Beam, lit a cigarette. While I drank, I took my phone out again and looked through the photos I’d taken in the bar one more time.
Other than Dessel, none of them looked familiar. I used the browser button Delia had shown me and spent a few minutes typing in “Stolen Car” by Bruce Springsteen. The Patty Griffin version came up, but I was too drunk to fight with my phone all of the sudden, and I liked her version anyway. I listened and watched the rain and smoked.
A particularly scrofulous bum wandered past and stopped by the TriMet trashcan in front of me. I watched as he rooted around in it for a minute, finally coming up with a beer bottle. He peered at it, holding it closer and closer to his eyes, trying to make out the redemption value, and there was something poetic enough in it that I called out to him.
“Fancy restaurant up on Sixth, you go by around one and they set out leftovers.”
The bum looked around for the source of the voice, eventually found me with his eyes. I raised the bottle and saluted him. He ambled my way.
“You say what now?” He was painfully thin, and he’d lost his dentures too, so that he was all Adam’s apple and bulging eyes. Reflexively, I glanced at his shoes. Big, but they were filthy basketball sneakers with no laces.
“Alcott Frond,” I said. “They have specials and whatnot. End of the night they put out what’s left. Free for the taking.”
He nodded and looked out at the night. The guy was drunk as I was. I raised the bottle.
“Care for a taste?”
He squinted at me. “What is it? Beer tears me up anymore.”
“Beam.”
He took the bagged bottle in one dirty hand and raised it to his lips, took a healthy mouthful, swished it around and swallowed, repeated, then handed it back.
“Ain’t drank no Beam in goddamned years,” he said. He shook then, and I thought he might throw up, but he didn’t. A tremor passed through him and he wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Oklahoma.”
“You mean that’s where you last drank Beam, or that’s your name?”
He stared at me, confused.
“Oklahoma,” I said. He nodded.
“That’s right. Rodeo maybe. Back when I was workin’ in fencing. Cattle wire. All that’s done now.”
He got lost inside himself again. I drank and waited for him to say something or move on. When he didn’t, I remembered the last taco.
“You hungry, man? I got a taco here.”
He looked back at me, then nodded and stepped into the alcove. I passed the bag up to him and he took the last taco out and ate, gumming it as best he could. Judging from the little grunts he made, he liked pastor as much as I did.
“Tacos drop in quality the further you get from I-5,” I observed. “You got maybe all the way to the ocean on the one side, but going inland? I say maybe fifty miles. A hundred maybe if you get into farming country. Beyond that, you pretty much got shit.”
He nodded.
“Course, that’s about where steak country starts. You into food?”
He finished the taco and nodded. “Fairies in this shithole town, swear I ain’t never touching kale with my mouth again. I’ll pick it, but I won’t even wipe my ass with it, much less my tongue.”
“Right on.”
I took a cigarette out and lit it, and before I could offer him one he wandered off, headed for Burnside and the last homeless shelter. I watched him go. Once, not long ago, the typical homeless guy had been just like that. Drunk, from the south, with no idea how they got so far from home, but with no real desire to go back. But the demographic had swelled to include the working poor. There was no place to rent that a bottom-rung worker in retail or the service industry could afford anymore. For a few years, it had been feasible for them to pile into apartments two to a room, but as the class of landlord changed, so did the rules. If those rules changed and you didn’t have the money to split town, then the eviction notice was a one-way ticket to the streets. The shelters were overflowing as a result, and many of the old men and women who had relied on them most weren’t able to reliably make it in. They’d die by the dozens once winter settled in, but the news would turn them into a number, or at worst an irate whine in a gossip rag like the one I was sitting on.
The Beam had delivered me to nowhere, just as promised. I got unsteadily to my feet and stepped out of the alcove, then remembered my paper seat. I scooped it up and went to the trashcan and stuffed it through the hole, then drank the last of the booze and dropped the empty in after it. Then I turned and walked in the opposite direction the Oklahoma bum had taken, headed deeper into Old Town.
Walking drunk in the rain at night with no destination in mind is a semi-psychic maneuver, often revealing your deepest wishes or your darkest secrets, sometimes both. As the train station came into view, I realized in a lucid flash my exact place in the universe. I was a single drop of rain, falling through the darkness, ready to splatter, and at the same time I was a heavy thing in unlikely motion, like the water drawn up into the sky only to fall again. Like the rain in the clouds, I wanted down. I wanted down and out.
“How fuckin’ dumb,” I muttered to myself. I wiped water from my face and kept going.
The switchyards were past the station, but you could see them clearly from under the last awning. I stopped there and sat down on a bench, wiped my hands on my shirt under my coat until they were dry enough to light a smoke, and then I considered the dark lines of steel, all of them bound for somewhere else. I was thinking about that when Agent Dessel sat down next to me. I glanced at him and then looked back at the trains.
“I bet you just ran out of cigarettes,” I said finally. Dessel laughed bitterly.
“Even drunk as shit you . . .” He trailed off. I took my pack out and shook one loose. Dessel took it and a match flared.
“Where’s Pressman? He want one too?” I didn’t bother to look at him. He smoked for a minute before answering.
“Bob has the night off. Just me.”
“That why you just blew your cover?”
“Why are you looking at those trains, Darby? Sitting here drunk, you look like some dummy on prom night, watching his best girl bob for apples in another guy’s Camaro.”
Then I did turn and look at him. Dessel was tired. I could see it in the skin around his eyes. The handful of whiskers he’d collected in this life were three days long. He took a deep drag and I noticed his fingernails. Yellow.
“You look like shit, Dessel. I mean, worse than your usual bad.”
He shrugged and looked out at the switchyard, maybe hoping to glean some insight into what I was doing.
“What the fuck could you possibly care what I’m doing, man?” I turned on the bench to face him better. “You’re supposed to be my shadow, hunting the stalker and all that. He sees you sitting here, well.” I laughed bitterly. “My whole plan goes to hell.”
“Trains.” Dessel gestured with his cigarette. “I bet I know why you’re here. Looking at the slow ride to anywhere.” He looked almost sad. “It’s ’cause I finally beat you, Darby. You’re worn out, aren’t you? Took long enough.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
“Toast,” he continued. “Couple years of being on the radar is all the time scumbags like you have in ’em. Then they, well, they get drunk and stare at something like trains. Sometimes TV. Dreaming of a way out of all the shit, the crazy bad life they built up. The lies and the violence and the sleepless nights. They just want it over with.” Dessel took a deep breath. “The big burnout. End of
the line.”
We smoked in silence, both of us thinking.
“Delia’s getting married,” I said finally.
“Who cares.”
I sighed. “I do. You, ah, you got a girlfriend? Boyfriend, whatever? Significant other?”
He took another deep breath through his nose, let it out. “No.”
“Why? Actually, don’t tell me. I really would have sleepless nights.”
“I did have a woman I was close to.” It took him a little while to keep going. “It didn’t work out. Law enforcement is hard on relationships.”
My laugh sounded evil because it was. “Goody.”
Dessel laughed, too. “It is good! Weeds out the bad ones. Last thing I want is to have to come home and lie about what I did all day. That’s for guys like you. Not me. The details of this life, well. You know. Your story is one of them.” He laughed again, quieter this time. “The Comings and Goings of Darby Holland. It’s a colorful life. Leads to problems for me.”
“Jesus.” I gave him an appraising look. “Either you’re totally fuckin’ with me or we actually have something in common.”
It was his turn to chuckle in a bad way. “I don’t think so. Unless . . .” He squinted at me. “Suzanne.”
“Fuckin’ A right, dude.”
“Figures. She was too good for you.” He shrugged. “Loretta was too good for me. Wouldn’t it be weird if we were both total wads? I mean, I don’t like you. You break the law. You’re smug about it. Thus, a piece of shit. But you feel the same way about me. I know you do because you remind me of your profound feelings now and then. But what if they’re both right? The women in our lives, I mean.”
“Might have a point.” I thought about it. “This Loretta of yours turns eighteen, maybe her mom will let you have another run at her.”
Dessel sighed. “Smoke for the road?”
I gave him three and he stood.
“’Night, Holland. Don’t stay out too late.”
“’Night, Dessel. Hope Bob feels better.”
