Perdition, U.S.A.

by Gary Phillips

  “What?” Edison repeated, his total focus drawn to the short barrel invading his personal space.

  “I want the woman here to open the tool box you have on your lap.”

  As if Monk’s words were suddenly translated for him, Edison gestured to the woman. “Open the box, Judith, open the goddamn thing, will you?”

  Sucking in large gulps of air, she reached over, unlatched the box and pulled the lid back.

  Monk growled, “Turn on the dash lights.”

  Judith flipped a switch and a pale arc illuminated the area under the dash. Monk stepped back, his gun pointing at the special effects man. He said, “Empty the contents out.”

  “What?” Edison asked.

  “You got a learning disability? Empty the contents out on the sidewalk.”

  Edison spilled out a clatter of parts and tools that was louder than Monk had anticipated. A momentary alarm struck him as he strained his hearing, listening for anything untoward. Satisfied, he allowed himself a look at the contents. There was no gun, but there were two empty crack vials among the screwdrivers, pliers, and small gears and pulleys.

  “Fuck.”

  His oath made them jump. The crack seller spoke up. “Hey, if you want my supply, you can have it, man.”

  Embarrassed, Monk looked at the gun on the end of his hand as if it were a tumor. He put it away in the pocket of his windbreaker. “I’m not here to take anything from anybody. I’m a private detective looking for the Shoreline Killer.”

  Edison said, “And you thought I was that guy?”

  “The killer drives a red Jeep. And you were robbed at gunpoint last year and pistol whipped in Pacific Shores.”

  The special effects man turned to the blonde who grimaced apologetically. “I was making a buy when the dude decided to roll me. I was all for keeping it quiet, but Judith thinks I ought to have justice and calls the cops. So then, of course, I’ve got to make up a story to cover my ass.” He fumed at her.

  “Damn.” Alice Vickers said, pulling on a pair of lavender panties. “I like your style, Tom.”

  Grant began to get angry, thinking the woman was confusing him for some other man, then remembered that was the name he’d given her. “I like you too, Alice.”

  She came over to him as he lay propped up in the bed, the early morning light playing through the bedroom’s curtains. She bent down, and he playfully nibbled on one of her nipples. “I’ll go make us some breakfast,” she said. Vickers got on a terry cloth robe and left the bedroom, humming.

  Grant got out of the bed and ambled into the can. He finished and came out, eyeing a walnut chiffonier set against the wall. Carefully, he pulled open its drawers. In the third one, sifting through a layer of sweaters, he came upon an ornate keepsake box inlaid with ivory. It was locked.

  “Do you want some coffee?”

  Grant just about had a coronary. He was relieved when he found that Vickers wasn’t standing in the doorway. “Yes,” he called back to her in the kitchen.

  He got the box out and his Swiss army knife from his pants.

  Naked, and standing next to the bedroom’s doorway so he could hear if she came back, he effortlessly got the box open without leaving scratches.

  Inside were personal items like rings, pins, and other knick-knacks, and a diary and several letters. The letters were all from John Vickers, with a return address in a town called Perdition in Washington state. “I’ll be there in a minute,” she said.

  “Oh, I’ll come on in the kitchen,” Grant replied, as he peered through the open slits of the envelopes.

  “No, no,” she giggled, “I’ve got a little something to whet your appetite.”

  “All right, doll.” In one of the envelopes was a Polaroid snapshot. It was a grouping of young white men, and a few women, with beer, bats and gloves in their hands. Some of the men were bare chested and everybody else wore white T-shirts. It could have been the John Deere softball team on Main Street, Anytown, U.S.A.

  Except some of these All-American youths were Sieg heiling, their right arms outstretched in the nazi salute of yore. Standing next to a dark-haired woman with a ring through her nose was a tall, pasty-faced man. A sardonic smile, a week’s growth of stubble, and his shock of snowy hair gave him an eerie, alluring cast. He could have been the model for a new line of men’s fragrance, Aryan Winters.

  Vickers was coming back and Grant rushed the box back into its drawer. He made like he was coming out of the bathroom as she entered with two cups of coffee. Her robe was open and despite, or because of, his anxiety, Grant found himself being aroused. She put the cups on top of the chiffonier and placed her hands against his body, gently shoving him against the chest of drawers. “Who are you really?” she said, gazing up into his face.

  “Who I say I am,” he muttered humorously.

  “Shit, my late husband was in Korea.” She touched one of the bullet wounds on Grant’s leg. “You haven’t always been a salesman like you say.”

  “I was in the service, too. But in the European theater in the big one.” He could feel his pulse going up, giddy from lust and the fear of being discovered.

  “Well, well.” She took a sip of coffee and sunk to her knees in front of him. Her eyes bore into his as her head moved back and forth, making loud, boisterous sounds.

  Grant exhaled in pleasure and shut his eyes. The death’s-head grin of the man with the bone-white face filled his mind.

  Chapter 17

  Clarice watched her child sleeping in a baby swing on the porch of her house. She was sitting on the balustrade, gently rocking the swing with her foot. “You look tired,” she said watching Monk approach the house.

  “Thinking too much,” he answered, stepping onto the enclosed porch. He leaned against one of the pillars and folded his arms. Her face was still puffy on one side, and there was a discolored sash running diagonally across her cheek. “How you feeling?”

  The foot stopped its motion and Clarice turned to look directly at him. “Six in one hand, half a dozen in the other.”

  “That’s a pretty old saying for someone so young,” Monk observed.

  “My mom always says it,” she shrugged. “Seems it’s always like that for black folks, huh? No matter what year it is. Doin’ our best just to stay even, and happy when we can manage that.”

  Monk didn’t respond but smiled at Shawndell’s inert, calm form. No cares to weigh her down save eating and sleeping and getting attention from her mother. But all too soon the cruel caprice of a world not of her making and not hers to control would intrude forcefully on her existence. It would seek to tear from her the comfort of her family and plant doubt and fear in place of security and love.

  Yet fear was okay, good in fact, if you could use it to hone the raw stuff tumbling out of your psyche. Use it to create the engine to plow through the landscape of the hostile environment. But for what goal?

  “Is that your girlfriend?”

  That made him blink. “Pardon?”

  “The picture of that Oriental honey in your office,” Clarice elaborated.

  “Yes,” he said with a halting confidence.

  Clarice didn’t try to hide a sly lift of her mouth.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he prodded her.

  “Nothing,” she dodged. “So what’s happening?”

  “I’m going out of town for awhile.”

  “What’d you find out?” she demanded excitedly.

  “I’m not sure yet, Clarice. But it may be something.”

  She was up, standing close to him. “You be careful, all right?” Her hand touched his arm.

  “Of course.” But he didn’t want to be careful. Being careful didn’t ensure an even chance for a kid like Clarice or Shawndell. There was too much already in place against them. And clearing it away might take more blood and scorched earth than the sane could stand.

  “Thanks, man.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet, Clarice.”

  “Yes you have.” She h
ugged him and Monk hugged her back.

  Chapter 18

  Three hours after his plane descended into the enveloping grayness of Portland, Monk had already passed through more seasons than L.A. saw in a year.

  After landing, he’d picked up his reserved rental, checked his map, and left through a nasty gloom that was neither fog nor rain that soon gave way to a full bore storm. He got through the Columbia Gorge, the wide river on his left and high-walled cliffs rising and spearing clouds on his right. Rain beat a staccato rhythm on his windshield and the car rocked like a wobbly bassinet. Concentrating to maintain control, he was reminded of times he’d gone up California’s Grapevine with the wind whipping off the Tehachapis. But at least then it wasn’t raining. Now he had to worry about being blown off the road or sliding across the double-yellow into oncoming cars.

  Eventually the green and grey turned imperceptibly into brown rolling hills and a placid blue sky. Past one of the huge dams that plugged the river at various intervals, Monk turned north and crossed the water into Washington State. He left Highway 97 and wound back and forth along switchbacks, got turned around once, and finally came to a tawny plateau. The plain was nearly treeless, the Columbia lost to his vision.

  He descended again into another valley as a mist lifted, blowing back into the passes of the Cascades. His car passed acre upon acre of freshly tilled wheat fields. The grain was straw blonde and so evenly cut it was like looking at the top of the head of a submerged Scandinavian giant. Several rows of irrigation sprinklers maintained a steady drum of water.

  A sign off to the side of the road read: “Perdition,” with “Pop. 53,968” centered below the name. He sped past, eagerness and trepidation vying for his attention.

  He came to an intersection which had a Burger King on one corner and diagonally opposite, a Rexall drug store with green shades in the windows. Overhead, the signal lights swayed lazily, suspended from electric cables where pigeons and crows perched. Monk believed the birds eyed the hood of his car greedily as he took a left and entered the city proper.

  The downtown was mostly flat and long, lined with solid three-and four-story brick buildings. The main section ran between two east-west thoroughfares named after the twin summits of American civilization, Commercial and Liberty.

  He rolled past several brick buildings the color of dried Tabasco lining Commercial. The air was dry and the sun shone brightly. All the rain coming over from the west side of the mountains was a distant memory.

  Presently, he glided to a stop near a restaurant with a large picture window and the name, “Lonely Miner,” in bold dimensional script stenciled across it. Monk parked on a grade of gravel and got out of the car, stretching. Off to one side were several big rig trucks resting like sleeping mastodons.

  Two white men, dressed in heavy coats and high boots, stepped out of the restaurant. The duo walked toward a mud-caked Ford Ranger, an occupied rifle rack visible through the vehicle’s rear window. The one getting behind the wheel looked at Monk, grinned and said something to his companion. They both laughed. Monk figured the twitch in his stomach was because he was edgy after his drive. He opened the door to the diner.

  Inside was a buzz of plates being bused and the unmistakable din of lunch time eaters. At the counter men wolfed down their food. Waitresses served families sitting at the tables. Monk sat at the counter next to a long-haired man wearing a T-shirt with Kurt Cobain’s face on it. Beneath the dead King of Grunge’s image were the words: “Gone to a Better Show.” The trucker gave him a casual glance and continued devouring his Porterhouse steak and eggs.

  One of the waitresses, a heavy but handsome Latina with a streak of alabaster white in her very black hair, came over and placed a cup before him. She was dressed in a faded pair of Levi’s, a cotton work shirt and construction boots.

  “Regular or decaf?” she asked, opening the menu flat on the counter for him to see. “You look like you haven’t had your first cup.”

  “You got that right,” he said, perusing his choices. “Make it regular, and could I have the half chicken, rice with gravy. And the soup?”

  “It’s split pea, pardner.”

  “Righteous.”

  She retrieved his preference and poured him a measure. “You in town to fish or hunt?”

  “Neither,” he said after taking a gulp. “I work for a software company and I’m scouting possible locations. We may open a service branch and interactive division in this area.”

  “Yeah, there’s a lot of that on the other side of the mountains, but it hasn’t seeped this way yet.” She scrapped off some excess food into a plastic tray below the counter.

  “I heard a dude in Portland say the other day their plan is to kick butt when it comes to all that Pacific Rim business. San Francisco and Seattle, look out,” the trucker in the rock star’s shirt contributed.

  Monk raised the cup to his mouth. “Like I said, I’m just up here looking around for now.” In a few minutes, his order came and he and the trucker exchanged a few tidbits of conversation that veered from computers to monster truck and tractor racing. Which his breakfast companion competed in back home in Nevada.

  “How is it you picked an out-of-the-way place like Perdition to check out?” the waitress asked him, clearing away the empty plates.

  “The lure of cheap land primarily,” Monk said.

  She rubbed the tip of her tongue briefly over her bottom lip and turned to look at the other patrons in the place. She looked back at Monk, a tightness tugging the sides of her mouth down. “Well,” she said in a rushed tone, “get a good look around, pardner.”

  Monk asked, “Where would you recommend I get a room for a couple of days?” He kept his gaze on her. “You know, someplace where I can be comfortable.”

  She knew what he meant. “Oray’s Rooming house over on Hollis at Third.”

  “A boarding house, really?” he exclaimed, “complete with Aunt Bee and Gomer?”

  “Pardner,” she replied, resting her arm on the counter, “Juanita don’t believe in three-dollar titles like Bed and Breakfast, okay? She runs a place her husband and she bought when Sly and the Family Stone were number one. And it’s a for-damn-sure rooming house.” She picked up her tip and went back into the kitchen.

  He left and drove around the town. According to the guide book, the city was founded in the early 1880s around wheat and timber concerns. It got its name from a wooden-legged, one-eyed, three-fingered miner named Weljkava who’d immigrated from Sweden, or Poland depending on which version of the story you heard.

  He’d come to the new country to make his fortune and bought into a sawmill after finding some gold in Idaho. But his bad luck had followed him and he got his chest crushed in an accident at the mill. Dying, the man was reported to mutter “damn this perdition of my life,” and the name stuck.

  During the thirties, FDR’s New Deal brought in planned irrigation and cheap electricity and the town diversified its economic base by raising barley, corn, soybeans, alfalfa, and other such plantings that could subsist in the semi-arid region. It was also then—and he got this information from other sources—that Ira Elihu became the patriarch of the town.

  Elihu was a self-styled magnate who in reality was a junior-league Rockefeller. He’d made money in the east hauling coal and aggregate (and booze in the bottom of some of those trucks). But lost a good chunk due to an avaricious appetite for flappers and the crash of the stock market. Scraping together what he could, Elihu made his way west, went bust in San Francisco, and came north, winding up in Perdition.

  Unlike Weljkava, Elihu realized some measure of his dream. He did arrive in Perdition at the right time. The Roosevelt Administration had introduced massive building projects, forest regeneration, and spurred the construction of hydroelectric dams that dwarfed the pyramids. Elihu made his money not from the soil, but from what was under it—stone, gravel and sand—the basic materials for the dams and highways that the federal government built to put the unemployed to
work. Elihu became a baron of the Northwest, with views as rigid as the rock he loved.

  By the time of his death in 1957 at the age of eighty-eight, Ira Elihu had the pleasure of testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he was working double time to rid his businesses of red provocateurs. In other words: union sympathizers, uppity blacks, back-talking Mexicans, and women who wouldn’t wear skirts in his canning factory. He’d also managed to get the biggest park in town re-named after him.

  Monk wound past Elihu’s bronze statue. If it was true to its model, Perdition’s patriarch had been a tall, stout man with lamb chop sideburns and overgrown knotty hands. The eyes were deep set and, even in metal relief, relayed a predator’s ruthless nature.

  A knot of white youths, male and female and some in skinhead attire, walked diagonally through the park’s playground with purpose.

  Monk slowed the car and waited. They passed out flyers to the three or four older white people sitting in the park and stapled several of them to a few telephone poles.

  They began to walk in the direction where Monk had stopped and he got out of the car. His .45 was in a bag in the trunk but he wasn’t about to get caught slipping as a troop of neo-nazis strolled by. Hostile eyes glared at him and one of them did an exaggerated version of a “pimp walk,” if such a thing were possible. They laughed and sauntered past, handing out their broadsheets as they went.

  Monk read one of the flyers. In a black and red motif, the message announced that Bobby Bright would be holding a rally for ARM in conjunction with the local War Reich in Perdition on the coming Saturday. A picture of the supremacist leader dominated the thing. Adopting a fire and brimstone preacher pose, he was at a podium, gesticulating and shouting to an unseen audience. Today was Tuesday.

  He snatched the flyer down and folded it up. Turning, Monk watched a green and white Perdition P.D. patrol car ease up behind his rental.

  A uniform, thick but solid in the middle with legs like iron cylinders, got out of the cruiser. He wrote down the rental company’s name from the sticker on the rear bumper, and looked into the car. He straightened as Monk got close. “This your vehicle?”