Pittsburgh Noir

by Kathleen George

  After thirty, forty minutes, Shag pulled up in an old gray sedan. He was a long skinny man. Going bald. He almost didn’t have to lean over to roll down the passenger-side window.

  “Who are you, boy? What you want?” He didn’t seem all that fucked up over anything. Just suspicious as anyone who finds somebody on his porch in the middle of the day.

  “I’m Demario. I used to go to school with your nephew Amp.”

  Shag didn’t exit the car. I started thinking he wasn’t as calm as I first thought. Seemed like he was figuring something out. Maybe he thought I had a gun or something. All I had was a few books and a hammer in my backpack. And my grandmother’s blade. I had that in my back pocket.

  “I saw what happened to him last night,” I told Shag.

  People were saying the dudes who’d killed Amp hadn’t been caught, that was true for the moment. People were saying some sort of drug shit was involved, it didn’t seem like that to me. I’d seen them but the stupid dog was the only one to notice me. He barked with the gray hair up on his neck. But it wasn’t his usual wild, territorial bark. There was urgency in it. Fear. I probably imagined it. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a minute or two.

  I cleared my throat. “I think it was a couple of dudes who been renovating those houses on Euclid.”

  That was my theory. It should have felt good to tell him, but it didn’t.

  “Come here,” he said, waving me to the car window. He glanced up and down the street in a way that made me nervous. But what else could I do? Couldn’t run with him right there looking at me. I walked over to him with my hand stuffed in my pockets.

  “What they do with him? You tell the cops?”

  “I don’t know what they did. That’s why I came over. See how he doing.” That was mostly true. I’d come hoping Amp was alive, hoping the rumors were lies. But really, I just didn’t want Shag to ask why I hadn’t helped his nephew survive. I’d seen Amp fighting back. The dog was barking at me. Like it was saying, They’re gonna kill him, they’re gonna kill him, do something! Amp broke free, running off into the darkness of the alley with the men behind him. Maybe his dog barked at me just a beat longer before it realized I wasn’t going to do anything. It turned, running after them. I didn’t follow.

  “Well, he ain’t here …” Shag said, getting out of the car.

  “Okay.” I could see it in his face, he was lying to see if I’d know he was lying.

  “You should come in with me and wait for him, he’ll be back soon probably,” Shag said.

  “No, I got some errands to run. I might come back by later.”

  Shag chuckled slightly and said, half to himself, “Nigga talking about errands.” He was jingling his keys.

  “I’ll come back later.”

  “Man, come on in the house,” he said. Then, a little bit softer: “I got something I want you to do.”

  “Amp ain’t alive is he?” I said. Blurted.

  “No, he ain’t,” he sighed. “He ain’t.”

  He opened the door and I followed him up a flight of stairs to the second floor where he and Amp and Amp’s mother lived. I don’t know where she was. Bawling at the East Liberty precinct. Picking out caskets. I thought the air smelled funny. Damp, salty with grief maybe. She might have been locked in her bedroom dreaming her son was still alive. We moved down a tiny hallway to a tiny den. I recognized Amp in the woodcolored face of a boy on an end table. His first or second grade school portrait. His grin was so wide it showed every one of his teeth. He had a small gold stud in his ear. I remembered he’d been the first of the boys our age to get pierced. Instead of the white-collared shirts we were supposed to wear for our school uniforms at Dilworth, he wore a loose white T-shirt.

  “Amp did that shit,” Shag told me, pointing to where the thick blue carpet was yanked back revealing a perfect hardwood floor beneath it. “Told his momma he was going to fix this place up with his tools.” Shag sat down on a plaid sofa that took up nearly all the space in the room. I saw the edge of a bedsheet spilling beneath it and figured it was where he slept.

  “You want to smoke,” he asked, pulling out a sandwich bag full of weed. He was settling in, I hadn’t sat down yet.

  “No,” I said. Though I wanted to get high, really. What I really wanted was something to lift me from the ground. Up through the roof, up on above Penn Circle sitting like a bull’seye in the middle of our neighborhood. Up on out of Pittsburgh. But I told him no and watched him roll a blunt.

  “I told that nigga he was gone get jacked up for stealing them boys’ shit,” Shag said. He told me to sit down, but he didn’t seem to care when I didn’t. “I told his momma too. His room’s full of their shit. Some dusty safety goggles, screwdrivers, dirty work gloves, dirty work boots, a fucking sliding T-bevel. You know what a T-bevel is? Amp didn’t know either, but he got one in there.”

  Shag’s phone buzzed on his hip but he didn’t answer it.

  “So I need you to do me a favor, youngblood. We need to ride over to where them motherfuckers are working and I need you to point them out to me.”

  “I didn’t get a good look at them.”

  “That’s all right. I want you to try. Just point in the right direction, know what I mean?”

  He reached between the cushions of the sofa. I saw the butt of the gun just as his phone started buzzing again. This time he answered it. He smiled at me, then stood and walked from the room.

  I sat down on the couch and touched the gun handle where it stuck out like the horn of an animal. I thought for a second about taking it and the bag of weed. Instead I got up, tipped to the hall, and listened. I could see into Amp’s room. There were a pair of sneakers and a dog leash on his bed.

  “No, I’ll probably head to Newark. Atlanta. Somewhere with more black people than there are here.” I could hear Shag taking a piss in the bathroom while he talked. “You ain’t good for shit, you know that, right? No. No, nigga, just stay there. I got somebody here gonna ride over there with me.”

  I thought again of the gun. Shag would want me to drive while he shot from the window. Or worse, he’d drive while he made me shoot. Either way, what I’d seen meant I’d have to be a part of what was going to happen.

  I tried to be quiet running out of the house. I kept thinking I could hear a dog barking behind me. Amp’s dog. The ghost of his dog. I didn’t look back until I was panting around the corner. I was a few blocks from Star’s house. But I turned toward Euclid where the new houses were being built.

  There was a young white woman working in her yard. Planting flowers or something. Trimming the hedges. She glanced at me, then stared as I walked up the steps of the big empty house standing next to hers. There was no one there. I rattled the doorknob looking through its window into the wide bare rooms. I glanced back at the white woman who was pulling off her gardening gloves and still watching me. I pulled the hammer Amp sold me from my book bag and used it to smash the window on the door. The woman rushed inside her house. I reached through and tried to grab the door latch, but couldn’t. I walked across the porch and hammered at the pane of the living room window until it broke open like a mouth with its teeth knocked out. It was loud as hell. I didn’t fucking care. I guess I got cut. My blood dripping on the shiny hardwood floors almost looked like a trail of pennies.

  I wanted to carve Amp’s name somewhere no one would find it. Not for another fifty years or so. Not until the house had been lived in by rich white people, then rented out to poor black people, then renovated for white people again. I wanted someone in the future to strip back the sheetrock and find Amp’s named carved into a beam. There was nowhere to carve it, though. Nowhere discreet. The kitchen didn’t have cabinets yet. The bathroom on the first floor had no toilet. Wires hung from the ceilings and walls. Just an empty house. My grandmother said—she used to say this all the time—that people, black or white, would always fight over dirt but nobody could ever really own it. She said the land could only belong to the land. The
rivers belonged to the rivers. The air was still air no matter who claimed to own it.

  On the second floor I stood at a window in the master bedroom. Brick and sky, metal and wood, concrete and dirt, you already know what I saw out there: all the shit that gives air something to lean on. I knew the cops were on their way. And I’d have to do something. Say something. I thought I could already hear the sirens. I thought I could hear dogs trying to match the sound. I sat in the middle of the floor with the hammer in my lap. I had blood on my shirt and pants. I wasn’t crying. I was barely breathing.

  When I dialed Star’s number, the dial tones echoed around me. We’d talked on the phone, but I hadn’t seen her in weeks. Wasn’t that I was afraid of Amp or his fucking dog. I just kept thinking she’d ask me over eventually. Soon as Amp fucked up, I figured she’d want to see me. And really, when I heard he was dead, I thought it was a reason to see her. Pregnant or not. I was going to be there for her. I was going to be with her.

  Star didn’t speak a word when she answered. “Hey,” I said after a few seconds. I said it just as I’d said it to my mother when we came home from my grandmother’s funeral. Sort of like it was a question. Softly. Slowly. It embarrassed me the same way when I said it then. “Hey.”

  DUPLEX

  BY STEWART O’NAN

  Bloomfield

  She thought when Evelyn died she might finally get the second floor. She was not a selfish woman—a mother, a grandmother, used to doing for others—but in this one instance, after more than forty years of dealing with the soot and the street noise and people creeping through the alley and peeping in her windows, Anna Lucia felt she’d earned her reward.

  She expected Eddie would leave and find his own place rather than live surrounded by his mother’s old furniture. He was a dwarf and a drinker. He’d retired on full disability from the public works, and Evelyn had left him everything. Anna Lucia figured he’d take the money and buy one of those new condos over by Highland, since he spent most of his time in the bars along Penn anyway. Instead, a couple of months later he brought home a girlfriend twice his size and half his age.

  She was last-call trash, a tall blonde, but ugly, a big-nosed Russian, right off the boat, like a mail-order bride who’d bailed at her first chance. Eddie had ruined his back in the sewers. He was paunchy and bald, hardly a catch. As far as Anna Lucia could tell, the girl didn’t work.

  Didn’t cook either. Every night while Anna Lucia was fixing dinner for herself, they came clumping down, banging the outside door shut. She watched from her front window, frowning as he waddled to the car and held the passenger door for the girl, as if she was a lady. As if he was in love.

  If so, that was even sadder. In the hospital, Evelyn had asked Anna Lucia to watch over him. She’d done her best, but Eddie was a grown man, and after all his problems, he deserved some happiness, even the fleeting kind.

  Suddenly acquiring a new neighbor after having lived there alone for most of her adult life confused Anna Lucia. Out of shame, maybe, Eddie didn’t introduce her. It was only by surprising them one evening on their way out that she learned the girl’s name: Svetlana.

  “Pliz to mit you,” the girl said, shaking hands like a man.

  She was taller than Dominic, with pitted cheeks and too much blush and her things falling out of her top. Not in a million years would Anna Lucia have let Roseanne leave the house like that, but Eddie seemed happy, dressed up like they were going somewhere fancy, and Anna Lucia was left to wonder exactly where as she picked at her leftovers.

  They came back after the bars closed, laughing and making a racket on the stairs. Under the covers, she heard them moving from room to room, listened awhile, then settled back to sleep.

  Some nights that was the end of it, but some nights they fought—no surprise, given their condition—and deep into the morning she woke to shouting and something heavy being knocked over, something being broken. Like most of the old row houses on the block, this one was brick, with plaster walls and high ceilings, so she couldn’t make sense of what they were saying, only bursts of words that shocked her heart. She clamped her extra pillow to her ear, picturing the two of them squared off in Evelyn’s living room, trading threats and accusations, destroying her precious snow globes and commemorative plates to make a point.

  When their fights went on longer than Anna Lucia thought she could bear—when they sounded as if they were scuffling directly above her—she debated whether or not to call the police. She kept the phone Roseanne had given her on her nightstand. It would take so little. All she had to do was punch three numbers, yet every night, no matter how bad it sounded, she held off, not only because she suspected nothing would happen, but because they’d know it was her.

  The mornings after these battles, she staked out the staircase, hoping to witness the damage—a puffy eye, a split lip— as if to prove she hadn’t imagined the night before. Rarely was anything visible. Once, Eddie came down with a large gauze square taped to the side of his neck, maybe covering a scratch or a bite mark. The girl appeared untouched, though it was hard to say, with her long sleeves and all that makeup. They acted like everything was hunky-dory.

  “Good mornink, Mizziz Nardinny.”

  “Good morning, Svetlana,” Anna Lucia enunciated. “How are you liking Pittsburgh?”

  “I like Pizzburr very much.”

  “Well, you couldn’t ask for a better person to show you the city. He knows it inside out—literally.”

  “Ha, nice one, Mrs. N.,” Eddie said, herding the girl toward the door.

  “Have fun,” Anna Lucia called after them, then stood there at the bottom of the stairs, biting the inside of her cheek, listening for his car to start.

  She’d been waiting for this chance, but still wasn’t sure. Her plan was to take the spare key Evelyn had given her and go up and see what condition the place was in. Right after Evelyn died, Anna Lucia had been a frequent visitor, carrying up a pan of lasagne or some tomatoes from the Tomassos’ garden, but since the girl moved in, Eddie always stopped Anna Lucia at the door as if he was hiding something.

  The key was in her little china teapot in the kitchen cupboard, along with her bingo money. All she needed was five minutes. She put the chain on the outside door for insurance and hurried up the stairs.

  The place stank of cigarettes and old bacon grease. They’d rearranged everything. In the living room, on the antique sideboard where Evelyn had kept her family pictures, was a flat-screen TV. It faced her green velvet couch, covered with a flowered sheet spotted with burn marks. On the coffee table, beside a chipped glass ashtray piled with butts, as if waiting for their return, stood a half-full bottle of whiskey. Though her first instinct was to pour it down the sink, she made a point of not touching anything, kept silent as if someone might be listening.

  The rug hadn’t been vacuumed in ages. The kitchen floor was sticky, the counter crowded with glasses. Her plants were dry and dying. At least Eddie had left Evelyn’s room alone— here were her snow globes and plates, exiled but safe—though he obviously never dusted. The bed in his room was mussed, a pair of pink sweatpants with JUICY written across the bottom draped over the headboard.

  As she turned to leave, she noticed some money on his dresser—a wad of twenties folded in half, as if waiting to go into a wallet. She wondered if he was really that trusting or if he’d left it sitting out as a test. Whichever, it seemed wrong— like the girl’s sweatpants, a taunt to all that was decent—and with her lips pinched in concentration, she stepped to the dresser, peeled two twenties from the wad, and slipped them into her pocket.

  It was only after she added the bills to her teapot that she remembered to take the chain off.

  She didn’t say anything to Roseanne over the phone about her little visit, just let her know their fighting was getting worse.

  “You want to hear fighting, you should hear Frankie and me going at it over the stupid insurance. People fight. Whatever it is, it’s their business, not yours.”


  “They drink and they fight. It’s different.”

  “Ma, listen to what you’re telling me. Drunk people fight. That’s not news.”

  “You’re telling me I should have to listen to it every night?”

  “I’m telling you it’s what people do. It doesn’t matter if they’re big or small, black or white, Russian or whatever.”

  “I worry about Eddie.”

  “That’s good of you, Ma, but it sounds like Eddie’s doing what he wants to do.”

  “It’s not right.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s a lot of things in the world that aren’t right, like the insurance companies, but we’re not going to change them either.”

  “I’m just telling you, I’m not happy about it.”

  “Oh my God, will you stop?” Roseanne said. “Your complaint is registered.”

  That night they came home late, stumbling up the stairs. In bed she waited for them to begin. She tried to justify taking the money, telling herself it was for his own good, that Evelyn would want the girl out of her house. Anna Lucia had resolved to call the police once they got started, but after what seemed an endless silence—had they passed out?—instead of shouting and banging, she heard their footsteps cross the ceiling to his bedroom, and then that other, even more unwelcome noise she didn’t want to picture.

  The next night while they were out, she chained the door again and took three twenties, leaving six, and then, seeing an opportunity, tore off the last of the toilet paper so there was just a thin square hanging from the roll.

  It was a Friday, and they were later and louder than usual. They were already fighting out in the street. They continued the argument in the hall and then above her, the normal back-and-forth. There was no point calling the police until things got physical, and she lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling as if they might come falling through, until, after a long lull, finally there was a rumble of someone—maybe both of them—running, then yelling, and glass breaking, bottles possibly, china, and a thunderous crash that sounded like a dresser going over. Yes, that was what she’d been waiting for. Another crash, and then something smashing, maybe a plate. Someone or something big fell. She sat up and turned on her light, reached for her glasses and then the phone. The girl was screaming—keening, not making words at all—as Anna Lucia punched the buttons and calmly gave the dispatcher her address.