Modern Masters of Noir

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  In my second week on the job I entered the men’s ward for the first time. A patient had come in the night before through emergency and I was to verify the insurance on him. My papers said he was twenty years old and he had been shot in the leg.

  Shot? Now wasn’t that an interesting injury? It beat gallstones and the maternity ward all to hell.

  I wandered through the big open ward blushing at the whistles and hoots coming from the beds. Men of all ages sat up on their pillows, swiveled their bodies at my passing, and generally had a good time making me uncomfortable. “Bobby Tremain?” I called out above the din. “Where is Bobby Tremain?”

  “I’m right here,” came a deep male voice behind me. “I’m Bobby.”

  I turned and was at once awestruck by his beauty. Blond, curly haired, features chiseled fine and noble as the face of Jesus in the Pieta I had seen in the New York World’s Fair. From what I could see beneath the sheet he also possessed the physique of Michelangelo’s David. I must have appeared dumbfounded because Bobby cocked his beautiful head and said, “Well? Did you want me?”

  The way he said want me sent shivers running. Did I want him? Oh yes, absolutely, I wanted him clothed or unclothed, bedridden or healthy, in his hospital bed in full view of thirty men or alone on a deserted mountain top before the eyes of heaven. A terrible thing for him to ask, did I want him.

  I managed to move to his bedside. “Hi . . . I’m supposed to . . . uh . . . ask you some questions . . .”

  “Ask away.” He punched the pillow behind his neck. Overhead pulleys held his right leg in traction, the massive cast covering it from groin to toe. He winced when he moved and even his grimace was an appealing sight. For the first time in my life the maternal instinct flared. I wanted to mother and protect, take a stranger into my arms and soothe away the pain. That emotion should have alerted me. You don’t mix mothering with sexual attraction. Not if you have two years of college under your belt, something you’d think would make you immune to psychological transgression.

  “Oh, this?” he asked, noticing my stare. He lightly slapped the blinding white cast on his thigh. “It looks like I’ll have to wear this baby for months. I guess I’d better get used to it.”

  “Who shot you?” This was not on the questionnaire, but it was of the uppermost importance to me. I already felt my anger building at whoever committed the desecration of a perfectly Adonis-like creature.

  “Cop. Cop did it.”

  “No.”

  “Yep. But I guess I deserved it. I was running away.”

  “Why?”

  “I was scared.”

  I nodded my head. Of course he had been scared, poor baby, who wouldn’t be scared of a cop? Everyone trembled when confronted with people who carried guns. “What had you done?”

  He smiled, casting a silver net of shivers over me again. There was something menacing in his smile, enough menace to make it fascinating, mesmerizing. “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I swear it was all a mistake.”

  To anyone else, to someone older and less naive, to someone more worldly wise and cynical, his words would have condemned him from the outset. Criminals always swear innocence. It’s to be expected. But I was not fully mature or wise to the ways of the world. I was a girl on the lam from parental authority, heading for the hippie revolution that had bypassed middle America, and I believed when people spoke, they spoke the truth. What profit a lie? To a stranger? A girl come to verify insurance? What profit that?

  “You see I was driving with an expired license. A cop car pulled up behind me with his lights on and I panicked. He said later I was speeding, but I don’t think I was. I knew, though, I’d get in trouble about the license so I did something dumb. I tried to get away.”

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  “Don’t I know it! It was the dumbest move in my life. I got it into my head that I’d outrun him and get home. I turned down streets and took a wrong turn somewhere and got lost.”

  “You could have stopped.”

  “Not by then. You don’t know cops. You run from the bastards and you’re in deep shit. Well, this wrong turn led to a deadend. I did have to stop then. I was cut off. I got out of the car and in the glare of the headlights, I ran up a hill to a high fence. I was climbing over when he shot me.” He shrugged as if to say that’s life, you win a few, you lose a lot, big damn deal, it happens all the time.

  My outrage boiled over. “Just for climbing on a fence? Didn’t he say ‘halt’ first or anything?”

  Bobby, having enlisted my sympathy, shook his head.

  “He just started shooting without even warning you first?”

  Bobby nodded, eyes shyly downcast.

  “Oh, you should get a lawyer and put that cop in jail. He had no right to shoot like that. He might have killed you.” The thought of Bobby Tremain dying, hanging from a fence in the dark with bullet holes in his back made me sick with fury. How dare a trigger happy cop shoot down such a pretty boy just because he panicked over an expired driver’s license! It was obscene. It was the establishment bulldozing down the youth of America. You couldn’t do anything you believed in, you couldn’t change the system, you couldn’t save yourself and the future from the bloodsuckers. It was a travesty.

  It was also love. Now I had an inkling of what Jerry felt for me. I lived, breathed, dreamed Bobby Tremain. Every day at the hospital I used my ward-hopping privilege to look in on him. I brought him magazines and candy bars from the hospital gift shop. I plumped his pillows and held the water glass to his fine lips. I told him how I had never been farther west than Texas and how I yearned to see the Pacific ocean. How it was like a narcotic and I was a junkie, just had to make it out West before I died from the cold sweats and the hot tremors.

  “How will you get there?” he asked.

  “I’m saving my money. I have a hundred and twenty dollars saved so far.”

  “That’s not a bad sum,” he said. “That would buy gas.”

  “Oh, I’m going by bus. I want to see Salt Lake City and Reno. Besides, I don’t have a car.”

  “I do,” he said and my head went faint. Was this a proposal we travel together? If I supplied expenses would he take me in his car? I feared to hope. Bobby was too beautiful for me. Angels do not consort with fragile, flawed earthlings.

  Bobby remained in Louisville General six weeks. He confided he must go to court and face charges the day he was to be released. “They’re going to hang me,” he said. “That cop’ll make sure of it.”

  “What about your parents, didn’t they hire a good attorney?”

  He laughed and turned away his head. “I don’t have parents. Not so you’d notice. I left home when I was fifteen. I haven’t seen them since so I’m on my own in this deal. They’ll railroad me into prison where I’ll never see daylight again.”

  “You can’t let that happen, Bobby.”

  He turned back to me, eyes brimming, the sky blue of the irises thunderhead dark and troubled. “I have a car,” he said. “It was impounded, but a friend of mine got it out for me. I’ve always wanted to see the land west of the Mississippi.”

  I trembled in ecstasy at the thought of having Bobby all to myself even though I was not ready to abandon Louisville and my good job yet. What would Jerry say? What would my supervisor and the personnel director say? Then there was the fact I would be abetting a felon or something along those lines. All I knew about cops and the law came from television. I did know that what Bobby proposed meant flight from justice and without me and the money I had saved, he couldn’t do it.

  “I don’t know, Bobby . . .”

  He caught my hand where I stood next to him and drew me down toward the bed. In front of God and the whole men’s ward he kissed me to the accompaniment of catcalls and shrill whistles. I was signed, sealed, stamped, and delivered. Just exactly what Bobby wanted.

  “Meet me here at six in the morning,” he whispered. “A court appointed officer is coming for me at ten. I have to get ou
t before then. We’ll have to be very quiet about it.”

  “But your hospital bill . . .”

  “Let the state pay it. That’s what they’re good for.”

  You don’t listen to pretty boys, that’s what my grandmother told me. You don’t listen to silky promises from the cunning lips of an angel in disguise. Even Lucifer was pretty. The prettiest. And look what he is responsible for, she said.

  These thoughts plagued me all night while snow swirled down from a night sky onto Chestnut Street. The one window in my first floor efficiency apartment was barred and looked out on a narrow alley. On the other side of the alley stood a fence and on the other side of the fence reared an ancient structure that housed the Juvenile Detention Center. Cries and howls from my unfortunate neighbors often startled me awake in the night where I lay in the dark imagining the horrors taking place mere feet away from my window.

  The snow had stopped by five in the morning. I sat on the ratty brown sofa with two suitcases parked next to me. This was a momentous decision, maybe more important than the decision to quit college or to take up Jerry on the offer of a ride to Louisville.

  The apartment, bare and depressing before, now bore down my spirit with the full weight of its poverty. There was a long uneven rip in the linoleum starting at the bathroom door and zigzagging to the foot of the sagging double bed. Roaches marched in hordes across the white porcelain sink counters, unafraid of interference. Pine wood shelves, once painted black but now peeling, separated the dining alcove from the living-sleeping room. The shelves were barren of the odd decoration, the few books of poetry I owned, the bunch of dried flowers Jerry had brought to show he was a good sport when I landed the job at the hospital.

  What was I giving up by leaving with Bobby? Nothing but an experiment in low living, Friday night gin rummy games with the out-of-work couple down the hall, Saturday night forays to the YWCA where we all sat around sipping tepid Cokes and listening to the latest bad folk singer strum and sing of the times they are a’changin.

  I craved more excitement than Louisville offered. I wanted to taste the adult life, get myself into corners and out again, pay my own rent, buy my own navy blue pea coats for Kentucky winters, talk myself into better jobs. And I wanted Bobby. How I wanted Bobby.

  It was in Reno that I left him. I knew I had to by the time we drove across the Utah line toward Salt Lake City. It wasn’t just the pistol he’d secreted in the car pocket. That scared me, but I could have found a way to understand it. No, it wasn’t just that. The angel was tarnished as greening brass. Outside the sterile hospital atmosphere, Bobby let down his guard and showed a cruel, hateful, manipulative side. On the outskirts of Reno he was complaining how his leg hurt and how my excited chatter got onto his nerves.

  “Do you always blabber on this way?” Sarcasm dripped from his voice. It coated the air inside the car, turned it as frigid and disgusting as frozen vomit. I cringed against the door. “Don’t you ever shut up? God, you’d think you had something to say.”

  Yes, I thought I had. It’s possible I was wrong about that the way I’d been wrong about Bobby.

  On a dim side street we took a room from a smirking hotel manager and fought in the rickety elevator about whose fault it was we stayed in fleabag hotels. The room, the only one in the city we could afford, overlooked a shadowed, windswept shaft cornered by the backsides of three smog-grayed buildings. Bobby had been too tired from the trip for making love, even once, and I thought perhaps the glorious event might occur in this tawdry room and make it a magical, special place. Something had to happen to save me from jumping into the shaft. But Bobby was ill-natured as a dog in pre-heat and continued to rag me about everything.

  “Who needs to go to San Francisco,” he bitched. “Anyplace will do. Why not L.A.? I should go to Hollywood.”

  “Hollywood’s phony.”

  “And you think your pukey friends hiding out in Haight-Ashbury are for real?”

  “Bobby don’t.” We had already been over this particular terrain before. Hippies to him meant acid heads, free love, and panhandling. He wanted nothing to do with riffraff. He was about enlightened as some of my southern redneck relatives.

  “I’d have some kind of chance in Hollywood. I have the looks to get into the movies.”

  He was right about that, but at this point I could have told him he didn’t have the personality. Hollywood might be shark-infested, but as far as I knew they hadn’t yet found interest in mean-spirited gila monsters.

  “Bobby, love me. Make love to me.” I expected the logistics to be difficult considering the leg cast, but any sort of impossible maneuvering was preferable to listening to Bobby bitch. The more he opened his mouth, the more I loathed him, the more I wished I were back at Louisville General with my clipboard and my wards to wander.

  “Is that what you want?” he asked. “Is that all you’ve ever wanted from me? One good fuck?”

  I wilted under his gaze. “I only want you to love me, Bobby.”

  “Love!” He let go a splutter of breath, exasperated. “What do you know about love? What do you know about anything for that matter? You really bought that story I told you, didn’t you?”

  “Don’t tease me.”

  “I won’t tease you. I won’t tell you what a fucking dunce you are. What a damn brainless dummy you are.”

  “Bobby, please.”

  “I won’t tell you that cop shot me because I drew on him. I won’t tell you if he hadn’t shot me in the leg, I might have splattered his idiotic brains all over the sidewalk. No, I won’t tell you anything truthful because you’ll believe any lying bullshit I feel like making up.”

  “You wouldn’t kill a cop.”

  He laughed and of course it was true, he would do it, he would kill if pressed to it, he would destroy like the avenging angel he was if he felt the slightest whim. He was right. I was a fucking dunce. I was the biggest fucking dunce ever came down the fucking pike.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m getting my suitcase.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m leaving now, Bobby. I don’t have to take this anymore.”

  “Hey, wait a minute. What is this bullshit?”

  “It’s goodbye shit, that’s what it is.” I was at the door. Bobby lay disadvantaged where he had fallen onto his back on the bed when we entered the room. He struggled to get the cast to the floor and lever himself onto his feet.

  “Don’t you dare walk out that door. It’s my car. My car, you bitch!”

  “And it’s my money, Bobby. I worked months for it. It’s my dream, this trip. It was your escape and I was stupid enough to provide it for you. But it’s my dream. I’ve done all I mean to ever do for you.” I had the door open and one foot in the hallway.

  “I’ll find you if you dump me here.” He was onto his feet and tottering, reaching for the cane he used where it leaned against the arm of a busted-spring chair. It all pressed down then, swallowing the two of us in a murky cloud. The window facing the airshaft. The gloom, the faded rose bouquet wallpaper, the smell of urine spilled and soaked over a period of years, the old bad scent of dried semen, the stench of despair, of dreams trounced and smashed and lying without pity upon the floor.

  “You mean you can try to find me. You won’t, though. If I were you I’d be careful running red lights and skipping out on hotel bills. Which is what you’ll have to do here because I’m not leaving you a penny, Bobby, not a penny.”

  “Aw, don’t be that way. I was just kidding ya. My leg’s hurting, that’s all, I was outta my head, baby. I’m in a bad mood but I wanna apologize. You don’t believe that crap I said, do you? I made it up, really, come here, baby, let me do to you what you want, let me make a little . . .”

  “Goodbye, Bobby.” I was into the hall. He approached the door, his face red and livid with splotches. He was not so pretty now. He was not at all pretty. How could I have been so blind as not to see? “By the way,” I said, making for the el
evator while he painfully followed, leaning against the aged wallpapered wall for support, the heavy cast clumping along the floor. “I threw away your goddamned pistol in Salt Lake. I found it and threw it in a garbage can at a service station.”

  “I’ll . . .”

  The elevator door slid shut before he reached me. The chugs and clangs of the cables rang in my ears as I descended to the lobby floor. “Goodbye, Bobby,” I whispered. “I wish I could say it had been fun.”

  There weren’t many pretty boys in Haight-Ashbury. It’s hard to be pretty when you’re stoned and vacant-eyed. LSD trips do not make for pretty. The ones I found there I left as pickings for other, weaker girls. Someone should have told them not to get involved. Pretty boys either die stubbornly of pneumonia or they do crime like crime wants to be done. Either way they aren’t worth the bother to spit on.

  Bobby found me two months later. I didn’t think he could, but the street talked. That’s what the street did best in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, talk and sell shit.

  Someone told him I’d crashed with a girl everyone called “Petunia,” Pet for short. She had a two-room dump on the ground floor of a dilapidated, condemned building just three blocks off the main drag. The only working toilet was on the second floor and the way it worked was we poured a bucket of water into it. Bathing, when it was done, came from the same bucket. But the pad was free, who was going to complain?

  I was nearly bummed out with the hippie crowd. That’s what you said then—bummed, crashed, talking shit in the pad. I thought hippiedom would be fun, the sex fantastic, the drugs more than adequate. The truth was the people in the midst of this revolution were crazy as hell, the sex, when you could get it, was listless and uninspiring, and the drugs gave me ultra-paranoid dreams where ten-foot tall cats tried to scratch out my eyeballs. So much for the Golden West and the counterculture movement. Just one more demonstration of bad taste.