Oakland Noir

by Jerry Thompson

  * * *

  After four months of blissful residency in the Garden of Eden, our cat disappeared. This would lead directly to my initial display of handiness. But first, for two days, the loss of our beloved Cricket threatened to capsize Laurie’s unbridled determination. Did I mention empathy was one of her overwhelming traits? She could not function with Cricket gone. Thoughts of the cat injured, crying for help, killed by a predator—all too much to bear.

  We were walking back from our third round of posting Missing Cat notices when Laurie heard a tiny meow overhead, from the deck of our apartment. Cricket, I surmised upon closer inspection, had strolled between the posts of the guardrail, slid down the shingled eaves, dropped into a rain gutter, and instead of clawing her way back up the shingles, had gone under them, into a tiny crawlspace beneath the deck. The hundreds of long nails that attach the shingles had been hammered right through—the poor cat couldn’t crawl out without getting impaled.

  I rang our landlady’s doorbell. She came to the door wearing a silk robe and a frightened expression. It was already dark, but we couldn’t stand the thought of Cricket alone for one more night.

  “It’s our cat,” I explained. “We found her but can’t get to her. She’s stuck right up there, under the deck.”

  “Why you not get her?”

  “I have to cut away part of the roof. The nails, there’s hundreds of ’em, all in at an angle. She can’t get past them.”

  She considered this for a moment, then said, “No back up. Tire damage.”

  I laughed. “Exactly.”

  “You can do? You cut hole, you put back—good as new?”

  “Of course. Good as new. Better.”

  She knew I was a bullshitter, but didn’t seem to care. All she said was, “You do now. Must do tonight. Tomorrow, no noise.”

  “Thank you so much, thank you, Phi.” It was the first time I’d called her by name. Trotting down her porch steps, I tried to figure out how I’d pull off this rescue mission.

  “Hey!” she called after me. “Mr. Fix-It. You need tall ladder. One in back. I show you.”

  * * *

  That old saw about necessity being the mother of invention—I proved the fuck out of it. Before midnight Laurie was cradling Cricket in her arms, and Phi was shining a flashlight on the shingles I’d replaced after cutting out an escape hatch for the cat. There were seams—I wasn’t a professional yet—but Phi had to squat down and stare intently through her wire-rims to see the cuts. I’d even vacuumed the sawdust from the rain gutter.

  “Everyone happy,” she said, standing up and patting my chest a few times. “You handy.” She scratched Cricket’s head and smiled up at Laurie: “He very handy.”

  The following day was a Saturday and Laurie came down from the upstairs office about two p.m. I’d fixed some leftovers for lunch and we both doted goofily on Cricket, taking ridiculous pleasure in watching her sleeping in a patch of sunlight, her furry belly rising and falling peacefully. Her ears suddenly perked at a clanking noise outside, and I went to the window to check it out. A white van was out front, its side doors open and a lift-gate extended. A guy in a wheelchair was being rolled onto the platform by a uniformed orderly. Phi scurried up the driveway to meet them. I couldn’t see much of the handicapped guy; he was wrapped in a blanket, wore a lopsided baseball cap, and seemed comatose.

  “What’s this about?” Laurie asked, coming up beside me.

  “No idea.”

  Phi clasped the orderly’s hand and slipped something into it before waving goodbye. She pushed the wheelchair and its unmoving occupant up to her house.

  “Huh—so that wooden ramp is practical,” Laurie said. “I thought it was just another cool part of the landscaping.”

  When the van’s doors closed, we saw the writing on the side: Veterans Administration Hospital.

  * * *

  Two nights later, just after two a.m., the screaming started.

  Laurie and I bolted upright in bed. “Holy fuck,” she gasped. “What the hell is that?” Cricket was at the foot of the bed, her back up, wide eyes staring at us.

  The sound was coming up from the floor directly below. A tortured wail, worse than anything in a horror movie. This was anguish—real, primal, and terrifying. Laurie clutched Cricket, trying to keep her calm. I paced around, muttering, “What the fuck?” under my breath each time the howling started.

  “Maybe you should go down and see what’s happening,” Laurie whispered.

  “No, listen,” I said, “it’s not an accident or something. It doesn’t change. He’s just . . . screaming.”

  “It’s so painful.” Laurie began to cry.

  Those forty minutes were an eternity.

  * * *

  It didn’t happen every night. But from then on our sleep was fitful at best. The expectation of the screaming was almost as excruciating as actually hearing it. We took to having sex in places other than the bedroom, fearful that the sudden howling might contaminate our lovemaking forever. After enduring a dozens or so fits, Laurie began working later and later in the attic office, sometimes until three a.m. I’d come up and find her crashed out, head on the desk, and she’d be irritable all the next day. Over dinner one night, peering out into the darkness, she said morosely, “It was all so perfect before.”

  I can’t explain it, but I felt her disappointment was somehow my fault.

  * * *

  Coming home from work one day I found Phi hunkered in the garden beside the koi pond. She was rigging a cage on the rocks bordering the small pool.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Raccoon got fish, goddamnit!” I almost laughed at her cursing like a redneck. “Now I get raccoon.”

  “Why not just put a wire cover over it?”

  “Not look nice. And raccoon too smart, too strong. Lift cover.”

  “But he’ll just waltz into a cage? That wouldn’t be smart.”

  “I use bait. Fig Newton and fish sauce. He not able resist.”

  “Really? Where’d you learn that?”

  “I know many things,” she said, flashing that younger woman’s smile. “Not born yesterday.”

  That got us talking, which, of course, no one ever does with a landlord. I was just looking for some clues about the screaming, and whether there was any hope it would end. But after a few minutes, I’d forgotten about the nocturnal horror shows and was listening intently—parsing through her pidgin English—as she gave me her life story, telling me things that Laurie and I would never have thought to ask.

  Her father worked for the Vichy government in Vietnam during World War II. Her mother was Japanese, part of the occupation of French Indochina. They had to keep their love a secret. Her father pulled strings to get her into the best schools. She eventually trained at a university to be an architect. She loved art history, made it her minor, with a special focus on painting. Her father was killed by communist insurgents who wanted to run the French off the Indo-Chinese peninsula. Then America decided to wage war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the centerpiece of its global campaign against communism. Her mother was killed in the early sixties; collateral damage. War, she feared, was all she’d ever know. There had to be beauty in the world, she figured, because she’d seen it in art, in paintings. She grew up in hell, but survived. It was a skill, she explained, like sailing or carpentry. As the war was ending she volunteered at a military hospital, where she met a shell-shocked GI, Corporal Paul Gennaro. He’d lost an arm, part of a leg, and maybe more. He had no family, no home to be shipped back to. As Saigon fell, she proposed to him, promising she’d always take care of him. It got them both shipped stateside.

  For more than eighteen years she’d been married to the screaming.

  To be honest, the history lesson was hard to follow, since Americans don’t know jack-shit about the world, or the wars we get into. I pieced most of this together later, from library books. At the moment, all I could say was, “Wow, you’ve sure had an amazing l
ife.”

  “America save me,” she replied. “But you know what I do now? Only one thing. Woman like me, here I only able do one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Own property. America not see me, people here never see me. They see money. See my money good. Eight property in Alameda. Vietnam, I design building. Here, I just own them.”

  My only response was, “Huh.”

  Then she said: “You hear him, my husband. You hear him in night.”

  “Sometimes, yeah.”

  “I sorry. Very bad. They keep him hospital but now only for short time, each time. Drugs they give make worse, not better. I so sorry. Not want to bother you. No, no, no. You and your wife work hard. I see—she hard worker. Like me once.”

  * * *

  There was a big commotion out front a few days later. Cricket was freaking out, bouncing all over the living room. I realized what was happening and ran outside.

  The raccoon was huge, practically filling the cage. It shook the trap viciously, its eyes burning red. Phi was standing casually nearby, staring at it. She had a baseball bat in her hands.

  “Fig Newtons and fish sauce,” I said. “I’ll never doubt you.”

  She handed me the bat. “Here. You do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Kill it.”

  “Kill it? I’m not going to kill it.” I was stunned. “There are people you can call, they’ll take it into the hills and turn it loose. Let’s just do that.”

  “That cost money,” she scoffed. “You want to pay? It eat fish, eat my plants.” She shoved the bat into my hands. I took it, just to keep her from doing anything drastic. “I open cage,” she said, gesturing. “You smash quick.”

  By now Laurie had appeared, rushing out in a robe and bare feet. She took one look, made an awful crying sound, and rushed back inside.

  “I’ll pay to have it taken away,” I said. “I won’t kill it.”

  She studied me. It felt like I was being examined under a microscope. “Maybe you not so handy.”

  Later, when Raccoon Removal Service came to take the poor thing away—alive—Phi came out and stood next to me, watching them load it into the back of a van, where several other traps were already stacked, a half-dozen caged raccoons glowering warily. A guy in coveralls and heavy gloves did all the work. His partner sat in the passenger seat, wearing mirrored sunglasses. He only watched, a small grin never leaving his face.

  Phi read my mind: “That one do killing.”

  “Don’t say that,” I moaned.

  “Your cat get hit by car, cannot walk. What you do?”

  “Take care of it the best we can, of course.”

  “It in pain, all the time. You think you help. But it in pain all the time. All it know—pain.” She stared up at me, her usually squinted eyes sharp as glass. “All it feel, ever—pain. Maybe then you do it. Maybe then you do what need be done.”

  * * *

  The screaming went on. And despite the misery—which had us seeking refuge at night in the living room, on separate couches, wearing earplugs—Laurie persevered. She started selling to stores in the area and steadily grew the account list and her territory. At all hours the fax machine in her office chugged away—a welcome sound in the night—spitting out orders from new buyers.

  We’d succeeded. We’d achieved what all bright, young, hardworking American couples were supposed to achieve—but frustration was always there. We weren’t happy here anymore. Our heaven-sent sanctuary had been snatched away. We were living above a psych ward, its night terrors erupting just when we thought they might be over. The VA, I found out, had cut off any further in-hospital care for Corporal Paul Gennaro.

  * * *

  Laurie met her twin at a local craft show, a jewelry maker named Remy. She was soon spending more and more time at Remy’s studio loft in Jack London Square. They talked about teaming up to create a more expansive and profitable product line. Whenever they were together I was the outsider—even though I was the financial backbone of the operation. And though the business was growing, it was a long way from being in the black.

  Then a terse e-mail notice arrived in my inbox at work: the company was moving to North Carolina. It was a shock, completely out of the blue. This was a gigantic firm, a cornerstone of Oakland’s economy. The idea that it could just abandon the city, dumping thousands of employees, was unthinkable, at least to a human being. But then, human beings don’t think like CEOs. Or their masters, the shareholders.

  There was no way Laurie would move—she couldn’t uproot a business she’d worked so hard to build. If I relocated, regularly sending back paychecks until her business was self-sufficient . . . well, that wouldn’t work, either. I didn’t trust she’d need me when I came back. I convinced myself that losing my salary, losing my benefits, losing the monthly rent—it meant losing her. I had to find another job fast, or somehow replace the income I was about to lose.

  Actually, that’s probably all bullshit. Just a way to rationalize what happened next. Something else entirely was at work, some gnawing part of me I didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand. Something I’m only now starting to comprehend, all these years later.

  * * *

  Laurie was at a trade show in Los Angeles—with Remy, of course—when the screaming, incredibly, got even worse. Instead of jamming in the earplugs, or finding an after-hours bar, or getting a hotel room for the night, I stretched out on the bedroom floor, closer to it than ever, and absorbed the brunt of its horror.

  If she could stand it, down there in hell’s black belly, so could I.

  In the morning, before dawn, I rang Phi’s doorbell. She answered, looking drawn, haggard, and devoid of hope.

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” I said. “But it has to be tonight or tomorrow. Laurie will be back Monday morning.”

  She stepped onto the porch and pulled the door closed behind her. I laid out my conditions and she nodded sadly.

  It happened that night, just as I figured. She’d been waiting a long time and wasn’t about to let the chance go by. She let me in a little after ten p.m. No one was on the streets and the televisions would still be on in nearby houses. The place was dark but what I could see, just as I expected, was tidy and immaculate. The floor plan was almost identical to ours, so it wasn’t difficult to navigate the shadows. She led me down the central corridor to the rear of the house. The place smelled strange, like incense mixed with disinfectant. We stopped at a closed door, directly beneath the bedroom Laurie and I shared.

  She clutched the front of the black nylon jacket I was wearing and pressed her head against my chest. She made no sound, but I felt her sobbing. “No one even notice,” she said softly. “I promise. No one notice.”

  She quietly opened the door, not looking inside. She didn’t go in with me.

  A small desk lamp cast a meager light. I didn’t see him at first, just a shape in the corner, then I made out the wheelchair beside a small, unmade cot. His back was to me. That would make it easier, I figured. I approached, careful not to make any sound. But he moved his head, as if he knew. I saw that his left arm was gone. Then he jerked suddenly, like an animal sensing a predator, and in the half-light I glimpsed his wet eyes staring out madly from the scarred and discolored flesh that had been his face.

  I took the cord from my pocket and clenched it in both hands. He looked right at me, right into me, the entire time I killed him.

  In the years since, I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries—when they don’t chase me out—reading everything I can about what happened to soldiers in Vietnam, trying to understand what I saw in his eyes. Trying to find some kind of explanation. There isn’t one. He’s still looking at me. Right now.

  * * *

  Days later, Laurie answered the downstairs bell to find Phi on our doorstep.

  “Let me show you,” she said, taking hold of Laurie’s hand. “Get your husband. Want show him too.”

  She walked us around the bright, sunny g
rounds, proudly showing off the yard work she’d had done after the recent rains. The place had never looked better. Everything all cleaned up. She pointed to several big black bags of yard waste piled in the driveway.

  “You take to dump?” she asked. “Please.” She stuck a couple of twenties in my hand.

  As I got my coat, Laurie asked, “Why would she ask you to do it?”

  “I’m guess I’m handy.”

  * * *

  Three months later, Laurie went looking for a bigger office and never came back. Well, only to get her stuff. And the cat. I don’t blame her. I was now the one screaming my head off in the middle of the night.

  My company moved, but I stayed—even though there was nothing holding me here. I had no job, but Phi let me stay on upstairs—that was the deal, of course. No more rent, ever. The screaming stopped—my magical solution to saving our happy home.

  With Laurie gone, I hated the place. Phi told me I could live out back above the carport, in the garret she used for storage. I’d need to fix it up—no problem for a handyman. A few weeks later I was watching a new young couple giddily take over the home in which Laurie and I had wanted to spend the rest of our lives.

  Phi’s properties always needed maintenance of some kind or another. She dutifully gave me fix-it jobs, even though I was pretty shitty at it. But I figured things out and got better at manual tasks. Odd jobs got me through a few rough years. At least until the morning an ambulance came and took Phi away on a gurney. She died in Alameda Hospital the next day. I kept a vigil in the waiting room until they made me leave. I wasn’t next of kin. “There is no next of kin,” I told them. Her next of kin was long gone, somewhere six feet deep in Indochina.

  The state, of course, took her house.

  Learning to be handy has served me well the past few years. It’s helped me survive on the streets. I know how to jury-rig shit like I never imagined. I spend a lot of time at public libraries, reading mostly, and eventually I stopped typing Laurie’s name into the computers. But I don’t get jobs anymore. The roadside Mexicans have the day-labor market locked up. At least I’ve learned to sleep so lightly I never wake up screaming. I’m like a soldier in his tent, always on alert, living by his wits, hunkered down in the middle of a fucking war zone. Who knew it would ever get this bad—whole villages of us camped under freeway overpasses living hand-to-mouth. And wouldn’t you know: from where I am tonight, out of the rain but freezing my ass off, I can see the top floors of the empty office building on Harrison Street, where once I had a view of the lake.