Berkeley Noir

by Jerry Thompson

  "My old school, and Aquatic Park."

  "Me too! Maybe we can be run buddies."

  Aquatic Park. Not far from me. Hell. This was almost too easy.

  I pressed the crooked gate to the back entrance of my illegal in-law. My monitor shone blue in the dark, casting shadows from book towers onto the furniture of my old life. Love seat. Futon. Books. Mail about debt.

  One job. Two grand. Fifty-Seven Hours of Teaching.

  Thucydides warned about immediate and long-term causes for landmark events. Empires don't fall because someone dies. Wars don't start because an emperor is shot while on tour. The Soviet Union didn't crumble because Reagan was chosen by God to defeat the Evil Empire.

  Beside my futon was my camera bag.

  I checked the BP website.

  Hey, Russel. Wanted to touch base. Bernie's parents have requested that Bernie find another teacher after the incident you reported. While we understand their desire, I want you to know that Berkeley Prep is proud to have you and stands by your assessment. You've done so well mentoring our most challenged students, and we know that summer is difficult in terms of hours and you'd like to maintain more than ten hours a week (believe me, I know!). I promise that we will fill your roster as soon as possible. Hold tight, Dr. Walker!

  Sonja K. Tempest, BSc

  Director of Student Relations

  I checked my student report.

  RUSSEL FIELDS—Student Evaluation. I apologize for the use of feminine pronouns but in the interest of time I will use she as Bernie continues to change her mind on which she prefers. Bernie arrived at class fifteen minutes late. When asked why she said "bus" even though I saw her in study hall in the period before class. As I e-mailed you earlier, the assignment sent via e-mail by Bernie was only two pages long, not ten. When I asked why it was so short she said, "I write concisely." I indicated that was no excuse and the paper was, as it stood, a failure. She said, "So what?" I said that meant she would have to repeat the entire class again. When she said, "I don't care," I informed her that without a proper paper she would fail history and not be eligible for graduation and thus could not apply to college.

  At this point Bernie stood and swung her fist in front of my face while calling me a liar, someone who talked behind her back, and then called me a "cunt."

  An hour after that report, I'd found 5Chan's emergency e-mail. My message? Can shoot.

  * * *

  Ducks hustled for an upper-class family's artisanal crumbs from Acme Bread on a patch of exposed pathway that ran beside the lagoon. A chunk of property that was grassy, with a parking lot for early-morning stoners and kayakers. A sax player sat on the only bench, a cut tree stump keeping him shining bright as he ran scales through game-show themes: Wheel of Fortune, The Price Is Right, and Jeopardy! before he trailed off.

  I shuffled in beige, exhausted from another useless night on Indeed. I sat beneath the tree, adjusting the lens of my geriatric Canon, and then assumed the position of a bored thirtysomething taking in nature's splendor because he didn't get laid the night before. Cars rumbled behind me to find empty spots to smoke up. Behind us all, Amtrak blew its way the hell out of Berkeley. My warm-up was shooting the parade of Aquatic Park:

  —One unicycle teen with handlebar mustache.

  —One forty-year-old white woman in black with full makeup who pushed a five-hundred-dollar covered stroller holding a Chihuahua who eyed all with the indifference of Molotov.

  —One black man and a Latina in red exercise gear, weights tied to their ankles, lapping the old man in the gray tracksuit who was almost as overweight as me.

  —Gaggle of stoner chicks in black and too much purple eye shadow and band T-shirts, shambling and laughing and speaking like texts.

  —A gray homeless fortysomething in long sleeves who smelled like sun-bleached urine, pulling a trolley of corporate beer cans with craft labels and Coke bottles.

  Ten burning minutes later, the bouncing blonde emerged from behind the red cabin that rents three-wheeled bikes to the disabled. Sonja: fit but chubby, unable or unwilling to kill her freshman fifteen. A white-and-blue Stanford shirt and pink trunks. No sunglasses (5Chan would be ecstatic).

  I focused. Then I shot her face a hundred times, tracking her, then switched from photo to video.

  "You."

  I released the trigger.

  Bernie stood above me. Again. Baggy striped sweater. Elbows angular. Brown trousers and terra-cotta clogs. I kept his preferred pronoun in mind.

  "Morning."

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Relaxing. You?"

  "I always walk the park. I never see you."

  I nodded. "Guess I'm like a ghost outside the school."

  Bernie stinkfaced. "You do photography?"

  "Sometimes."

  Bernie had three emotions: rage, indifference, and excitement if we were talking about the manga and anime that he liked. Bernie's eyes tracked Sonja and mooned, countenance starved.

  The next move would dictate my future. So I said nothing.

  Bernie blinked. "5Chan?"

  I exhaled and smiled.

  Bernie did not. "No way."

  I shrugged. Sonja had already run the exposed patch and into the thicket of shadows made by Aquatic Park's winding corridor of trees.

  "You can't tell."

  I put my camera down. Still recording.

  "You can't say anything. I'll tell them you sent them to me."

  Bernie was smart but scared and talking dumb. No one made him spend two grand of his parents' cash for pictures of teachers he wanted to fuck.

  I had him. Better than a black eye he refused to give me. I stood. Bernie backed up. Leaves cut shallows of light across his sweating face. "I'm sorry you won't be in my class anymore, Bernie. I was looking forward to your paper on the Pink Triangles as victims of the Holocaust."

  "Huh?"

  "We made good progress." I took a step back. "Hope you can find a teacher who understands you and your interests, Bernie."

  Tiny fists shook so hard I expected them to leak red and white.

  "I think that's what I do best. Understand students. Help them get what they want and I get paid for it."

  I tapped the camera, next to the red light.

  Bernie recoiled, then stopped. "I don't get it."

  I hit pause. "I'd love to be a photographer full-time. I'm really good. Especially faces." I sighed. "But not enough money in it, so I have to keep teaching. Wish I had more clients. Until then I may have to keep teaching. Including you."

  Bernie's face scrunched.

  "Take care, Bernie. Enjoy what you see in the park."

  Hey Russel! I'm sorry but I haven't found any new students yet, but trust me I am trying! As soon as we have some. And thanks for taking over Camera Club! We've had some new hires and we need photo ID and pictures for the teacher wall. Can you be here at 8:00, Dr. Walker? And thanks for the specs on making it more glamorous! I can't wait. My old one has me looking like a hag! LOL!

  S

  * * *

  "Dude, I told you. I fucking told you." Ashby BART was a concrete bunker that could have probably taken a non-nuke ICBM hit. 5Chan and I walked the perimeter, him in the lead, puffing vape in my face. "We're blowing up. I got so many orders I may need to hire more shooters."

  I shrugged. "Might increase the risk."

  "Shit. You're right. Dude, we are going to clear close to fifty K this quarter if you can do what you do."

  I smiled.

  "My work is sick and getting sicker. This last one was like sticking your weird lesbian aunt into a slasher flick and vine. I almost kept a copy. Almost."

  I nodded.

  "Damn, bro. Say something! You're making enough to have one of your own. Hell, I'm feeling magnanimous. I'll do a freebie. Just name it."

  Never saw any of the finished work. What 5Chan did with the carousel of other people's fantasies. Bank teller. Bus driver. Clerks in designer women's dress shops. Lots of waitresses, ba
rtenders, and other service personnel. Nurse. Hygenist. Teachers. So many teachers. Weekends in Walnut Creek, Concord, and San Leandro at gyms, outside yoga classes, and in downtown Berkeley near the theaters. And that awful parking lot at Trader Joe's.

  "Really?"

  5Chan held in his vape stream, then let it out his nose. "Name it."

  "The one you made for the client who wanted Sonja Tempest."

  He ssssss'd. "Can't do it, bro. That's the 5Chan guarantee: one-of-a-kind work for one-of-a-kind clients."

  "You said name it." I shrugged.

  He huffed a laugh. "Okay, okay. Just this once. Because we are on the cusp of a renaissance. But don't judge, okay? We're all entitled to our fucked-up shit."

  * * *

  I pushed the USB inside the port. The screen went black before Microsoft Silverlight read the file and readied it. No credits, just a fade.

  There was Sonja. Sorta.

  Alone on the edge of the bed, legs crossed, arms braced on the black mattress. Dirty-blond now. The outfit was official. Pencil skirt and caramel stockings. Black heels and purple blouse. But fuck if that wasn't Sonja's face.

  "Hey there," she said in a voice twenty years and packs of Luckys older. "I know that right now, things are hard." She unbuttoned her blouse. "And it seems like there's no escape. And you're so alone." My gut sank. "You're different. So different there's no one you can talk to." Sonja caressed the space between DD breasts held back by a frayed black bra. "But there is someone who likes you. Who thinks about you all the time." Sonja bit her lip. "So I want you to watch this when you feel like no one notices you. No one cares. No one sees." Sonja pulled her legs open. Her cock was red and throbbing. "But I do. You make me want to touch myself. You make me want you. You make me do this . . . I know this is what you want, and I can't help it. You make me do it! I don't . . . have . . . a choice!"

  Hey, Russel. I totally get it. We all need to find ways to make it and I'm sorry your time at BP is now over. I'd just gotten off the phone with Bernie's parents who had reconsidered their decision. So much uncertainty! Thanks so much for helping so many of our students. You'll be missed.

  ST

  BOY TOY

  by Jim Nisbet

  Yacht Harbor

  Captain Ron Tagus was pairing a whiskey with a weather check when his phone rang. He glanced at its display: 2:35 a.m. Blocked. He finished the pour, turned down the VHF, and took the call. "What's up, boss?"

  "We're going out."

  "Sure." Captain Ron glanced over his shoulder at a calendar tacked to the bulkhead behind him. "What day?" He set down the bottle and drew the flat stub of a carpenter's pencil out of the folded brim of his watch cap.

  "Tonight."

  He moved the tip of the pencil to a square labeled Monday. "What time?"

  "What time is it now?"

  "Two thirty-six."

  "Let's shoot for three fifteen."

  The faceted lead of the knife-sharpened pencil hovered above the empty square. "That's not tonight. That's this morning."

  "Your circadian hair-splitting is of no interest to me at the moment." That was the boss's carefree vocabulary all right, but the tone was off. Brittle, like.

  Ron turned away from the calendar. "Regan—"

  "Under sail," the boss added.

  Captain Ron glanced at the darkened porthole that topped the whiskey bottle like the dot on a letter i. "There will be a little weather."

  "All the better."

  Pause. Ron asked her where she was.

  "On the bridge."

  "How fast are you going?"

  "A hundred and three."

  He believed her. "Hey."

  "Hey what?"

  "You okay?"

  "Just peachy." She hung up.

  Before reverting to its matrix of icons, the display informed him that the call from Blocked had lasted fifty-three seconds. Captain Ron dropped the phone into a gimbaled cup holder and chased it with the pencil. On the bulkhead behind the settee on the other side of the chart table hung a handsome analog barometer, an antique with a six-inch bezel of tarnished brass. Its arrow pointed almost straight up, and Captain Ron could easily discern its reading of 29.3 inches of mercury. He slid off the settee to administer the glass two taps of a fingernail, and the needle dropped a single mensuration, to 29.2. It had been falling all day, creeping counterclockwise over the lovely italic script of the word Change inked onto the card covering the instrument's face, leaving the telltale behind at 30.1. For a couple of days, Stella, the common name around the waterfront for the female version of NOAA's weather-reading robot, and Stanley, her male counterpart, had been predicting a blow, with winds hooting into the thirties bringing one to two inches of rain. A typical winter storm. The cube of ice capsized in the dram of whiskey. A gust tugged at the trucks. A standing wave rippled through the lengths of the paired staysail halyards, taut along the mizzen, so that they clattered up and down the mast like a little girl running from one end to the other of a hardwood floor in her mother's shoes. The elevating pitch of crescendoing whistles and whirring shrieks, peculiar to a couple of acres of masts and rigging as a rising wind combs through them, virtually encouraged windward vessels to crush their fenders between hull and dock, and the lines of leeward vessels to stretch their snubbers, so that the otherwise deserted marina was phantomic with sound. We won't even take the cover off the main, thought Ron, as he took up the glass of whiskey. Boy Toy could certainly be sailed under a reefed mainsail; but as she went short sail, being a ketch, she handled much better under a foresail with mizzen and no main at all, a suite commonly known as jib and jigger. We'll motor out of the harbor, of course, a series of tight zigzags, and once out we'll stay out. After the low pressure has made its way down the coast we'll come home, and not until. It'll remain a little rough in front of the breakwater, shoal as it is there, but we'll be coming back by daylight. He glanced at a light-blue line that undulated across the calendar week—by daylight and on the flood. Altogether, the makings of an excellent excursion. He downed the whiskey at a go, tossed the ice cube into the sink, parked the empty glass next to it, and set about stowing anything that wasn't nailed down.

  If it takes time to rig a sloop, with its single mast, it takes approximately twice as long to rig a ketch, with its two. Tonight the timing would be about the same as the latter because, despite leaving the main furled, he wanted to switch out the jib. After little debate he went with the No. 4, which was 80 percent of the foretriangle, instead of the spitfire, at 35 percent the smallest sail aboard. A spitfire would be flown only in the most extreme conditions, to keep headway on the vessel sufficient to maintain steerage, a situation in which, so long as Captain Ron had been in charge, Boy Toy had never found herself. Ron rigged the mizzen first, a simple matter of removing the canvas cover and shackling the halyard to the head of the sail. Dropping the rolled cover down the companionway as he moved to the bow, he unrove the sheets from the clew of the No. 2 jib, moved the sheet leads forward to a mark on each genoa track, and unbent the 125. Despite the rising wind and because of a big motor cruiser called Pay Dirt, three stories high and seventy feet long, to windward, whose bulk blanketed the dock between her majesty and Boy Toy, he managed to fold the 125 into its bag without spending the rest of the night keeping both on the dock and out of the drink. He was reboarding with the sail bag when a chirp of tires alerted him to a car, and he looked up in time to see a pair of headlights swivel off Spinnaker Way into the parking lot. This would be a Jaguar roadster, green as a pool table, with two leather seats, many horsepower, and, inevitably, its top down. The roadster's brakes locked up and it skidded to a stop in its reserved parking place. Bits of gravel tumbled down the riprap to the water, just in front of the Jaguar's front bumper. A little hasty.

  The sky had darkened considerably, leaving no stars visible, and the north wind that had chauffeured the storm down the coast now backed southwest. At perhaps twenty knots the wind made quite a racket as it foraged through the h
uddled shipping, on the prowl for the unbattened, the unstayed, the carelessly lashed. Even as Ron made this observation, an improperly secured roller furler aboard Cohiba, a sixty-five-foot sloop with an eighty-foot mast docked on the other side of the marina, unspooled the better part of its charge in less time than it takes to tell it, leaving a thousand square feet of high-tech fabric thundering to leeward, sheets aflail.

  That's an easy ten or twelve grand worth of trouble, thought Ron. The spreaders will tear that sail to shreds if somebody doesn't soon get it under control; dangerous, too, even in broad daylight. It's hard to comprehend how much power a big sail like that has until you get launched off a boat by one. Meanwhile, back on Boy Toy, there would be no such thing as raising the No. 4 dockside in order to double check the positioning of the sheet leads. Not in this wind. Captain Ron backed down the companionway ladder, dragging the sail bag after him. He gathered up the mizzen cover in passing, and as he backed along the cabin sole with his arms full of textile, he caught a glimpse, through the chart table porthole, of a pair of open-toed stiletto heels, red with a pedicure to match, and heard them overhead as they boarded the boat. When Captain Ron came out of the forward locker bearing the No. 4, Regan Ellis was standing at the chart table, half turned away from him, downing a shot of whiskey, after which she promptly poured another. The neck of the whiskey bottle made a little tintinnabulation against the rim of the glass, for her hands were trembling. Feeling the skipper's presence, however, Regan pulled herself together. But she didn't greet him, nor did she meet his eye. Okay, thought Captain Ron, we've had a rough night at the office. I'll just go about my business. To get himself and the sail through the narrowest point in the saloon, he backed around her, turning as he went, so that he and the sail bag swiveled from facing forward to facing starboard to facing aft.

  Despite his determination to manage otherwise, their eyes met, and Captain Ron could draw only one conclusion: tonight, a woman he knew for her remarkable self-possession was a mess. "What's up?"