Berkeley Noir

by Jerry Thompson

  José Félix's military victories in the conflict would later buoy him to the presidency. Six months later, he dissolved the legislature and suspended the constitution to write his own, granting himself sweeping powers. Six months after that, almost to the day, he perished in a plane crash en route to his summer residence. José Félix's constitution remained in effect until 1971. But this wasn't the story Louise told me that day as she stared into the fire. No, the story she told me was a story of Green Hell. The price Cordelia Zenarrutza paid to become First Lady of Paraguay, however briefly.

  "Cordelia never wrote to us about her time in Boquerón. She didn't put it into words for me until after she and my niece and nephews were back in California." That was when Louise looked away from the flames briefly and straight at me. "But she didn't have to. Those weeks she spent in Boquerón, I didn't sleep well at all. Every night I was visited by demons. They pinned me down and ripped at my sweaty nightgown. Mother was shocked at the noises I made beside her in our twin beds, and at how much water I drank. I was insatiably thirsty."

  I noticed a cataract in Louise's eye, like a passing altostratus cloud.

  "I'll never understand how José Félix could bring his young bride there, to that Green Hell . . . When Cordelia came back to us and described it, I already knew what it looked like. The thatched roof on the Boquerón outpost, the tall, tall pole with the Paraguayan flag, the only water source a well miles away at Isla Poí. With decomposing bodies floating in it." Louise moved her gaze back onto the composite log. "We were the only women there . . . I've never killed anyone. But I know what it's like. My sister did it for me."

  That night was the last time I ever went to the Essex Hot Tub. I tried a few times after that, but my code no longer worked. I remember the heady scent of blossoming trees as I walked down Stuart. It's common knowledge what happened at the hot tub that night. And I told you already, I don't want to talk about Bob. It's like the punch line to that joke: What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs floating in a pool?

  How could I have ever thought that I could get away from my ex-husband by fleeing to his hometown? It turned out Bob was within the radius of six degrees of separation from me all that time. And in the center, dead in the center, was the Essex Hot Tub. Did we have the same entrance code?

  The Church of Núria, now located in Normandy Village, is just batshit. As wrongheaded as a cargo cult. Sure, there've been moments where I enjoyed the attention, especially from that sweet soul-integration teacher, Penny. I will say this, though: I'm done. You're the last pilgrim I will entertain. I don't know why babies shit so much. Or little dogs. Or men. I don't know why women are expected to clean that shit up. I can't explain these things for you. Please, stop asking for the answers to your questions. I don't know why marriage is rape and why war is rape and why rape is rape and why tea is good and coffee is evil.

  All I know is that Cordelia Zenarrutza took her three children to Pasadena, put the Green Hell and the Palacio de los López behind her, and didn't remarry. Louise and I never finished that book on Miró, on the twentieth century, and on the difference between good and evil. And despite what you've read in the papers, and the attempts at extradition, for many years I wasn't sure whether I'd actually killed Bob, or whether I'd just added him to the list of mistakes. And then thrown it away.

  "LUCKY DAY"

  by Thomas Burchfield

  Berkeley Public Library

  The rule was simple: no patrons were to be admitted to the library before it opened, no matter how hard they knocked on the big glass doors. The staff wouldn't even bother with eye contact. Patrons could knock till their knuckles broke and complain till their voices cracked, but they weren't getting in.

  Mason, a cautious man who'd been working at the Berkeley Public Library as an aide for only three weeks (sneaking back into Berkeley after four years away, following his mother's death and his family's turbulent dissolution), understood this immediately.

  He'd arrived at nine a.m. that morning with the manager of the day, Slim, an enormous languid fellow with spiky yellow hair and a wart on his nose that turned red during heavy rain, such as had been whipping the Bay Area the last three days with frenzied enthusiasm. BART service was sputtering even more than usual and ACT busses were detouring around flooded areas. Most everyone else would be late.

  Except for Mason who, for his own reasons, left his closet-sized studio apartment near the Ashby Street BART extra early and took carefully planned detours.

  Once Slim had punched the alarm codes to the Bancroft Street employee entrance and let Mason in, he apologized profusely. The new library director was arriving today, first day on the job, loose ends with the catering for the welcome reception. Slim would only be a few minutes. Would Mason mind being left alone, just for a while? Then he dashed back out into the rain.

  Too new to object, Mason got right to work, opening the sorting room, checking the phone messages—sure enough, even Cleve, his manager, was mired in traffic. (Oh well. It was three hours until opening.) Mason next pinned the daily assignment sheet to the bulletin board. His first-hour duty: clean up and straighten the new bookshelves on the first floor, the first thing patrons saw as they entered from the sunken plaza.

  The task was mundane to anyone but Mason, who sank into happy reverie: this was the best time to be in the library, alone, before anyone else arrived, among all the minds great and small, talented and not, that could fit on the shelves. As always, he found some of these minds had fallen or slumped over since yesterday; others had been picked up and abandoned far from home and now lay rejected, lost, and unloved. Mason took them all home. He'd edge the rows of books until the spines were perfectly snug (except for books by his favorite authors—those he brought forward out of line just a fraction). Then he'd run his fingertips over the rows of Mylar mirrors, each spine labeled NEW in red block letters, shining with promise.

  Deep in his fun, he only heard the pounding on the glass door as a murmur from far above. When it finally penetrated, desperate and persistent, he swam awake like a drowsy fish. Then his irritated glance turned into a double take.

  It was Sharpie banging at the door. He was a regular patron, one of the two kinds of characters who made the library a second home. The first were those who had someone to take care of them; the second, the majority, were those who had no one—the homeless.

  Sharpie was among the latter. He was still very young, his fuzzy face not yet cured red by exposure; friendly, boyishly handsome, but clearly hapless. He wore the same tracksuit every day, black nylon with yellow stripes, and grimy black-and-yellow cross-trainers with loose heels that slapped against his bare feet as he walked. Extremely claustrophobic, his usual spot was the first-floor reading room, by the romance novels, an enormous greasy backpack, swollen with his material life, by his side. He'd spend most of his day reading the romance novels, or seeming to. It was strange, Mason's fellow staffers remarked—a young man reading romance novels, a homeless young man.

  It was Mason who said, "I bet that's where he finds love." Then, blushing, he added, "I mean, he's not finding much of it anywhere else, is he?"

  And now here he was, over two hours early, without his backpack, clutching his left side with one hand, thumping on the glass with the other, smearing it with reddish-brown paste, while outside the three-day storm was whipping into day four.

  "Help me!" Sharpie cried, a sad voice under the hard rain. "Help me, man! I'm hurtin'!"

  Rising to face a real emergency, Mason's conscience brushed the rule off the table.

  He let Sharpie in.

  The plan, a quick gel in Mason's mind, was to sit him down, then thumb 911. But as he took Sharpie by his cold, wet nylon arm, bony and trembling, and started to guide him between the new fiction shelves to a nearby bench, the door banged again, so violently it shook. This time, someone was calling—no, barking—Mason's name, like the knuckles on glass. As Mason turned to look, Sharpie slipped out of his grasp.

  Mason
grew sick as his vision shook, spun, and tilted. He'd been dreading this moment ever since he'd snuck back into Berkeley—his big brother Harry, long lost and best forgotten; Harry pounding on the blood-smeared door as he shouted Mason's name. His fevered face and rusty-gray beard ran and dripped with rain. As the brothers faced each other through the glass, Mason's reflection stared back out, a homely big-eared ghost under his brother's brilliant sharp bones. A memory of their mother's face briefly joined them and Mason once again heard her last words, from years ago, and a promise he'd made.

  "Hey! Ma-son!" Harry banged again on the door, his cracked grinning face still handsome as a god, though one left out in the weather for too long. No matter what happened, Harry's corpse would be a beautiful ruin, handsomer dead than Mason alive.

  Mason crept toward the door, drawing out his wallet, fumbling out a tenner. He opened the door just enough to insert his face: Hi, Harry, gee, what d'ya know! Uh, I'm busy, nice to see you; sorry, Harry, the library doesn't open till noon; here, ten bucks, take it, Harry; get outta the rain, buy a sandwich at the E-Z Stop Deli.

  But, like a big camel, once Harry got his nose in, he took the whole tent. He slapped the door open and passed through Mason as though he were mist. "My brain's so big," Mason remembered him saying, "I don't see the world. It's just some shit to play with."

  Nope, no telling Harry what to do when or when to do what.

  Mason turned to follow him, but Harry suddenly spun about and pulled him into a rib-bending embrace.

  "Bro! Awwww, my little broaaaa! Where ya been, Big Ears!?" Mason's feet left the floor as Harry spun him around like a dance partner. Close up, his face looked flayed and pitted by the weather, his pupils widening, turning his eyes into black pits. A wet bouquet of the street steamed from the fake-fur collar of his thick coat. His breath was a cloud of stale tobacco and dead animal.

  Harry set Mason down hard enough to bend his knees. Mason, now facing the door again, tried to glance behind him. Where'd Sharpie—

  Harry punched his arm, that familiar hard-knuckle jab: "Wake up, Mase, y'twerp! You ain't seen me in more years than I got fingers left." His mutilated right hand stole back into its stinky coat slot, where he preferred to keep it. "So, how's it goin', buddy?"

  "Um, all right. Harry—"

  His brother blew right past him: "Never mind. You don't give a shit. I don't give a shit."

  Mason stood staring for a few seconds out at a small crowd that was filling the sunken plaza in the dismal downpour. Someone held up a smartphone. A young girl was now banging at the door—young and fresh (but not for long), shabby in a strangely boutique manner, homeless du jour. But Mason's mind was a frozen swamp of panic, so there'd be no more early entries. He turned to find his brother had passed through the security gate and was now pretending to marvel at the blond-wood bookshelves on wheels.

  "Wow! Workin' the library! Mighta known you'd be workin' for The Man! Good hustle there, bro! Are these all the pwecious tomeths?"

  "Just the new ones. Got 'em on the back wall, there too. And the DV—look, Harry—"

  "Whoa, lovely beautiful building, man." He gazed around with his wide black eyes. "Love those green art deco walls outside." He shoved one of the shelves so it moved. "But here you got these dumbass shelves on wheels." He rolled his eyes. "Cheap, cheap, cheap," he sang. "You're so brilliant, you work in a library that uses Ikea shelves." Then he sneered. "Of course, you can read. You're dyslexia freeee, y'stuck-up little shit."

  "You're not supposed to be in here, Harry," Mason dropped his voice and tried to enunciate like Harry, each word a hammer tap. "We don't o-pen un-til noon—"

  "You're not supposed to be in here, Harry," the big man mimicked, a skill that once rolled waves of laughter across a room. He jabbed a finger right at his little brother: "You just let some other asshole in, Mase." His voice scraped like a file, his eyes two black marbles. "I saw you." He splayed his good left hand over his chest, nodding. "And I—me—I'm your lonnnng-lost bro-ther." Harry's lips curled and split apart to show his brown teeth, a bad omen. "How long you been back in town? You been avoidin' me since you got this job. I seen you, man. I seen you peekin' up over the BART steps, like a little prairie dog! Too chickenshit to go outside!"

  Mason's eyes skittered about. He was still all alone in the building. The manager hadn't returned. Maybe an assistant had arrived, or another aide, better that, they'd be more likely to help him cover his mistake—no, mistakes. He'd made two of them—no, that was one mistake, twice in a row. He needed assistance, but by no means wanted it. Better, much better, if he could shovel this mess out the door all by himself, so no one would ever go What the fuck? and—what—what about—

  The new library director! Ohhh, fuck me! New boss, first day on the job, maniacs crawling the floor before the doors even—

  "Whoa! What's this!?" Harry fixed his bullet stare on the floor at his feet, right by the "Lucky Day" shelves, which housed especially popular books.

  "Blood!" He fully bared his big brown crumbling teeth, the gums shrunk to the roots. He marched deeper into the library, toward the circulation desk, following the blood spatters.

  "Wellll, what the fuck we got here? Trail of blood! Ooo! That could be the title of your next shitty screenplay, Mase! I'd say someone's hurt! What d'ya say we go help him!?" He stopped and turned to Mason, his face aghast, slapped his good hand over his mouth. "Oops! I forgot! Ssshhh in the library!" Then he pointed the finger, whispering, "And you'd better hush too, lil' bro." He turned back to the hunt. "Fuck libraries, man," he whispered loudly. "Can't read, can't talk like I like to. Can't be myself." He swayed as he followed the trail of little red splashes, dissolved from rainwater, toward the first-floor reading room.

  "Harry . . ." Mason maintained his library voice, compressed and quiet, sitting on the dreary apprehension that he and his brother were rebooting the same goddamn movie.

  Harry spun around again, pointing, suddenly growing larger and larger, until Mason began to feel neck strain.

  "Mase, mind your own fuckin' business for once, will ya? Three, four years and I'm still findin' you under my feet!" His finger was shaking. It was a familiar pattern. The angrier he got, the more his brain, sloshing with chemical imbalances and bad wiring, would misfire. "All the times I kicked you and . . . y'just didn't learn . . ."

  As Harry ranted away, Sharpie slipped out of the reading room behind him and up the old main staircase, still clutching his side. Harry must have seen Mason's eyes shift, because he turned back toward the reading room in time to see the tail of Sharpie's shadow paint the steps. He turned on Mason again, his fist raised. Mason flinched and ducked. Harry laughed. He laughed harder as Mason feebly patted at his pants pocket, where he kept his cell phone.

  "Playin' with yourself in public again!" Harry teased. "Never could keep your hands off your pecker!" Then his face darkened further. "Or is that a gun you got there? Better not be. 'Cause I got . . . this!"

  Harry yanked a little pistol out of his pocket. It was a .22, dull black, brown taped handle. It was much too small for his huge hands and with two fingers of his gun hand missing—ring finger and pinky, blown off while juggling a lit cherry bomb—Harry's grip on it was clumsy at best. But even a bad shot can wound or kill.

  "Harry! Harry, what're you doing?" Mason cried as his brother started up the steps.

  Harry stopped to stare down, offended: "What am I doin'? I'm killin' the little fuck I caught screwin' my girlfriend in my tent! Do you know what that does to a man!? No, ya don't. 'Cause you've never been a man. Now you stay down here like a good boy, or I'll shoot your funny ears off!"

  Then he stomped on up the stairs. "Sharpie, you fuck!" he called, hissing like a rattlesnake. "I'm comin' for ya! Fuckin' better run, Sharpie, 'cause I'm the fuckin' Term-in-a-tor! I'm gonna shoot your dick off and stuff it in your mouth!"

  Then he tripped and the pistol fell from his hand, clattered on the landing. He picked it up with his left hand, his not-gun hand.

/>   Mason ran to the bottom of the stairs. "Listen, Harry—"

  Harry spun around on the landing, pointing the pistol: "No, you listen. You promised Mother you'd look after me. And you didn't. See what happens when you don't keep a promise, Mason? You pay! Now you stay there, got me? This ain't none of your business."

  That's not what she said, Mason wanted to argue, but arguing would have been madness. Instead, as Mason dashed up the stairs after Harry, he did what he should have done the second he saw Sharpie at the door: he pulled out his cell phone. He fat-fingered the keypad as he tripped up the steps: 011, 912, 921, finally: "Berkeley Police Department Emergency Services . . . Slow down, sir . . . What's the address again? . . . Is this a medical or police emergency? . . . How many intruders, sir? . . . One of them is armed? Your name again, please—"

  BATTERY LOW, the little screen broke in. And then it closed its eye with perfect timing as a gunshot cracked from the reading room, echoing through the whole building. Mason jumped and so did his phone, right out of his hand.

  He now stood in the grand old former lobby. He turned to the high-ceilinged reading room to see Sharpie dashing out from the Japanese-Spanish section, clutching his side as he scurried behind the double row of long reading tables. He ran into the far corner, into the modern world and US history section. Harry came out from between the Chinese DVDs and nonfiction, awkwardly clutching the little gun in his big hands. His fingers would barely fit in the trigger guard. No wonder Sharpie was still alive.

  "Oopsie! Sorry, Mase!" Harry waved the .22 in the air. "I forgot my silencer! Next time!" Then he disappeared behind the first row of the 910s, the travel books: "Sharpie, you little shit!"

  He moved in on Sharpie, winding from shelf row to shelf row. He fired again, then again, aiming through gaps in the shelves. The first bullet banged off metal. The second bullet, fired from the 920s, the biographies, broke the spine of Deirdre Bair's Al Capone biography. As the book shuddered and slumped over, the bullet ripped out the other side and sent a Gandhi biography sprawling to the floor.