Pittsburgh Noir

by Kathleen George

  “Are you in some kind of trouble, Laurie?” Dr. Feingold had asked, there in his dental office. His gentle eyes were worried behind his round-framed glasses.

  I lied to him. Told him I’d fallen off a ladder while setting up the Christmas tree.

  During the holidays my family intervened—expressing genteel concern and dismay. A restraining order, they urged. So I went to the police station and blushed the whole time I told impassive officers my dirty story. They asked awful questions. About the sex. Had I liked it at first and then got second thoughts? What else? I told them as much as I could stand, and that he’d begun to hit me. The police took photos of my bruises. I admitted that he’d threatened to do worse.

  The restraining order didn’t stop Dennis, though. I’d called 911 and had him arrested twice—the first time during a Twelfth Night party where friends watched aghast—which only made him more furious with me.

  My mother started having angina attacks. What could I do but move off the family estate to spare her? So I’d come to the boat and hoped I could resolve things myself.

  In a hard voice, Nolan said, “Did you see him last night, Laurie? You can trust me.”

  “No.”

  “Because …”

  I saw a change in Nolan’s face. “What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Nolan turned his head away. “He was supposed to meet me last night. To give me something.”

  “Give you what?”

  After a heartbeat, Nolan said, “He had pictures.”

  “From the gallery?”

  “No.”

  It didn’t take much to figure out what he meant. Photos. Blackmail. The word made my insides twist with pain. I’d brought ugliness into so many lives. First Dennis had gone to my family and now to Nolan, threatening to show my mother what I’d become. All this awfulness because I’d yearned to walk on the wild side.

  I said, “He wanted you to pay him for pictures.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of me.”

  “Yes.”

  I knew exactly which photographs he meant. A night long ago, when Dennis was still deliciously naughty and fun, he’d snapped a few shots in bed. After I’d had too much wine. When it hadn’t taken a lot of convincing. Dennis brought out something in me that I then realized had been lurking inside all along.

  My face burning, I said, “Did he show them to you?”

  “Only one.” Nolan’s voice sounded hollow.

  “Well, I hope it was a good one.”

  I shoved through the door, and slammed it back on its hinges. On the deck, I gulped fresh air to fight down nausea. The water was rougher than before, but the rain had let up a little. I grabbed the railing for support. The tree had rolled away from the boat, I thought. Maybe the thing that snagged it had shifted too. I fought down the nausea that rushed up from inside me Nolan came out of the cabin and said nothing.

  He’d never think of me the same way again, that was for sure. I’d never be the pretty girl at the country club, sipping cocktails on the veranda and talking about the Impressionists. Him brushing a ladybug from my yellow dress, thinking I was the kind of girl he could take home to his family.

  In a while, I said, “How much were you going to pay him?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “That kind of thing never stops, you know. You pay him once, he’ll come back for more until you’re broke.”

  Gently, Nolan put his hand on the small of my back. His touch felt as if he wanted to go dancing. “Let me take you to your mother’s house, just for a couple of nights, okay? When the weather settles down, we can—”

  “No,” I said.

  “I want to help.”

  “I don’t need help!”

  “The hell you don’t.”

  “Not from you,” I snapped and spun around.

  He pulled his hand away and tightened it into a fist. “You’re not the only one who has a dark side, Laurie. Maybe I’m not who you think I am either.”

  If only he were, my problems might be over.

  Ralphie came back outside of his own houseboat across the dock from mine. He’d put on a shirt and shoes, but that didn’t make him look any more respectable than before. His ball cap was on backwards, with greasy hair sticking out around the back of his neck. He made a big show of stretching his arm over his head and yawning. His jeans rode low, showing a line of pubic hair on his belly.

  Then he called, “Everything okay over there, Laurie?”

  “Who’s he?” Nolan asked me.

  “We’re fine, Ralphie!”

  Ralphie squinted at us. “Your friend bothering you?”

  “He was just leaving.”

  “Laurie—”

  “Go, Nolan,” I said, low-voiced. “I didn’t ask you to come. I don’t want you here. I don’t want you mixed up in my problems.”

  “Too late,” Nolan replied. But he turned away. He pulled his car keys from a pocket. “Will you call me if you have to get away fast? I can be down here in half an hour. I’ll pick you up, take you home.”

  I’m never going home, I almost said aloud. It would be like dragging barrels of poison through the front door.

  But I said, “Thank you.”

  “Is your cell phone charged?”

  “Go, Nolan. I’ll be fine.”

  He went. He glanced back over his shoulder once, doubtfully taking in Ralphie again. For all I knew, he wondered if I’d given up Dennis, and rejected him too, for the likes of Ralphie now, a houseboat rat who drank too much. Who dealt drugs, peed in the river when the need arose, who ate Slim Jims for dinner and probably never heard of the Impressionists.

  When Nolan had climbed into his truck, started the engine, and backed out of his parking space, Ralphie vaulted over the railing of his own boat and landed on the dock in his sneakers. His sweatshirt read, Steelers, in faded black and yellow letters.

  He said, “Old boyfriend?”

  “I guess that’s what you could call him.”

  “Not anymore, you mean?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You have a lot of those, don’t you?”

  Ralphie had a whippy kind of strength in his body and a loose, happy smile. He might have been a sexy ladykiller once, before he went to seed. He leaned playfully on my railing, absorbing the surge of the boat with his arms. But his gaze was full of something darker than mischief.

  When I didn’t answer, he said, “Water’s still rising.”

  “I see that.”

  “I expect it’ll come up a few more feet before it’s all over.”

  “Yes.”

  “If we get more rain, and then it’ll wash everything away. Maybe us too, but everything else, for sure.”

  He nodded at the tree, still riding the river’s current alongside the dock. The branches twisted, the few remaining leaves wriggling as if in death throes.

  Around the tree, the water ran muddy brown, full of silt from upstream, so it was impossible to see below the surface of the river.

  But eventually the water would clear, and the view to the bottom would be unobstructed. Dennis’s car would be clearly visible.

  Last night, when the car disappeared into the dark water at the end of the boat launch, I thought it was gone for good. But choking back tears, I had watched the turn signal flash for hours. At some point the light stopped blinking like a heartbeat—short-circuited at last. Or maybe the car had rolled over, burying the light in mud. Whichever it was, I had finally gone to bed.

  But this morning I had seen ripples on the surface of the river where the car lay submerged.

  When the tree had slammed into the sunken car I thought maybe, just maybe, the tree might push the car out into the channel, deeper into the river where it would never be seen or found. If the river’s current strengthened, if the tree continued to push, perhaps the car would wash into oblivion.

  If it didn’t wash away, the car would be discovered when the flood receded and everybody came back to put their boa
ts into the river again.

  I was in trouble. Deep.

  Ralphie said, “We just need another day of rain. Then it’ll wash his car away. Nobody’ll ever see it.”

  He grinned at me, and I felt my heart lurch.

  Conversationally, he asked, “Did you shoot him first?”

  “Yes.” I swallowed hard.

  Ralphie shrugged. “I was drunk last night, and maybe I slept like a rock, but something woke me up. Must have been your gun. I came outside and watched. I saw everything. You dragging him up to his car, shoving him behind the wheel, putting the transmission in neutral. Where’s the gun now?”

  “In—in the car.”

  Ralphie slipped a wet lock of my hair behind my ear, and his touch lingered there. “Was he dead when you pushed the car down the ramp?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  If Dennis had lived long enough to make a phone call from the sinking car—perhaps desperately dialing as the cold water enveloped his bleeding body—well, I couldn’t think about that.

  The river surged around us with a dull yet rhythmic roar. Listening to it, I decided it sounded like the pulse of God.

  Ralphie took off his ball cap and plunked it on my head. He was smiling at me. “Don’t worry, honey. If this rain keeps up, the car will wash down to the dam and get lost in all the crap down there. Nobody’ll ever find it. Or him.”

  He put his arm around me, nuzzled my throat, and breathed the fumes of his first beer of the day into my ear. He ignored my shudder.

  “Let’s go inside for a while, huh?” Ralphie slid his hand down inside the back of my jeans and cupped my butt. “You’d like that, right? We’ll fool around a little, you and me. Get to know each other better. And all we have to do is pray it keeps raining, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  A MINOR EXTINCTION

  BY PAUL LEE

  Carrick

  The river that persisted namelessly in his dreams seemed to be all rivers at once, black and collusive and oceanic. It carried him along a swift path beneath a star-spattered firmament, and though he knew the water to be ice cold it seemed to his skin to have been stripped of temperature. He was a silhouette projected on the water, in conveyance to a place that was strange and logical, cruel and intimate. And how the stars teemed so impassively above him as he lay in bed, drowning in sleep … how they burned small and cold and bright in all of that unfathomable blackness, like grains of fossilized fire strewn in pitch, as the river pulled him across the earth in a fugue of stark and limitless dread and longing.

  He was working in a room of increasing white when he was told the latest news about the elder Gorski brother. It was noon, and they were painting another empty old house in Carrick whose inhabitant had moved or died. The floors were sheathed in plastic. The interior walls had sallowed to the shade of animal fat, and, hearing the news, Mark continued to work as though he had not heard a thing, rewetting the long-handled roller in the pan and applying to the stale walls lucent strips of dripping, viscous white, a slathered rendering of reversed time. “Couldn’t stop his brain swelling,” the other painter was saying sidelong from his perch on the stepladder. He seemed unslighted by Mark’s silence, even a little deferent to it; he had also gone to Carrick High years ago and was still held by the residual sway of Mark’s single year of seniority and former status as a varsity hockey player—the old teenage hierarchy. “Real sad about that family,” he was saying.

  A rumor had been circulating that Zacharias Gorski had been, uncharacteristically, blind drunk while driving home through Mount Oliver three nights ago. Mark had heard only that he had hit a tree and been thrown from his car, but the rest seemed as clear to him as if he had been in the passenger seat: the upstanding surviving brother, college-educated and betrothed, swept down a fast black road almost against volition, headlights swinging wildly around a sharp corner, propelled into the night by drunkenness and the brute laws of random chance. It was as if Mark was witness to the stillconscious Zacharias being launched headlong through exploding glass and flung into the hollow that the headlights had dug out of the darkness, as if he heard Zacharias’s skull striking something hard, a rock or a tree trunk, at the edge of those woods. He heard it as the same sound—not an identical sound but the very same sound repeated—as the one he had heard when the younger brother died, when Mark accidentally killed Levi Gorski eight years ago. It was as though the eight years were a canyon and he was just now hearing the echo of the original impact undiminished from the opposite side. Sad about that family. And from here he could see that irrevocable night occurring across the canyon. Seventeen-year-old Levi shivering skinny and half-naked by the river, his face lit up by the flashlight, downy black mustache soaked in mud and bloodied snot. And underneath those vast stars made tiny by distance, beside the strand of water that was the Monongahela: just the slightest flick of movement. The shear streak of the Maglite, a small figure toppling backward, fragile head meeting the edge of a rock somewhere in the dark. And if that rock had not been there. Or if I had not been here.

  If Mark Braun had not been here he would be a twenty-six-year-old Korean living amid a countryful of Koreans, maybe attending electrical school the way he had been planning for years now, and perhaps knowing of Pittsburgh only by way of Hines Ward. Levi Gorski would still be living, probably still a fuck-up, and Zacharias Gorski would not be brain-dead. But instead Mark was adopted by an American couple before he learned to speak and transported from Korea to Pittsburgh, brought here to be the Chinese boy in Carrick with the German last name. And instead he was raised on fish sticks and pierogies, surviving all the bullying and taunting, learning eventually to mock the few other Asian kids he encountered with even greater cruelty. And instead he grew up athletic and crew-cut and thick-necked and played hockey, never a star player but always solid enough to stay off the bench. He guzzled beer and bum wine with the best of them. Yet on some level he still sensed, even in people he had known since childhood, that they continued to perceive in him a touch of the simulated life—that, to them, each perfectly formed American word that came from his mouth remained perennially a small astonishment, the uncanny product of some tortuous craftsmanship that was occurring somewhere behind that face.

  And there was something of the weight of this continental displacement behind the blow that killed Levi Gorski—Levi, a mangy kid who was rumored to have once eaten a sporkful of shit for twenty bucks, who had obliquely called Mark’s thengirlfriend Abigail—a white girl—a “gook” after she whirled and called him shiteater for squeezing himself indecently past her in the hall. Mark had betrayed nothing as she recounted the incident to him later that night. Outwardly he had only mirrored her casual disgust. But already he had felt himself being taken up by a fast-moving current, one he mistook for self-determined rage, a current which seemed to carry him to—and then leave him just a few beats after—the moment that found him by the river, flanked by two of his hockey buddies, drunk on Mad Dog 20/20 with the Maglite poised above Levi’s head. They had earlier found Levi smoking by himself in the dark near his house, the three boys crudely flush with purpose and wildness after four-wheeling through Mount Oliver in Nathaniel’s truck. It was still an incipient spring, a night when the wind seemed to be cutting in from the expired winter. They had forced Levi into the backseat like mobsters and sped to Riverfront Park, bloodying his nose along the way, with Isaac nearly singing about how they would beat him unconscious and leave him by the river to freeze. But Mark later understood that he was impelled toward the scene of Levi’s death not by the exuberance of adolescent violence but by the force of that ruthless current, which proved strong enough to sweep up the other three boys along with him, strong enough even to deliver Levi’s older brother to his fate eight years later.

  They had parked near the Birmingham Bridge on a bleak vacant street lined with warehouses. In warmer weather they might have seen another parked car or two, signs of teenagers tucked away in the dark to smoke weed or make o
ut, but on this night they were alone. They forced Levi to the riverside, their victim first squirming and yelling, but after being smacked quiet letting his boots drag in what seemed a parody of nonviolent resistance, then finally stumbling along with his head bowed: the consciously bland submission of someone, outnumbered and outpowered, who can at last only hope that his aggressors will soon grow bored of his meekness. The river, opening up wide before them, ran calm and tranquil, its edges lapping up in ragged doglike waves onto the dirt, and with the Maglite switched on they turned and navigated the black thread of scraggly wilderness along the water while shoving Levi shirtless into the jagger bushes, the bugs biting, behind them the civilized world quietly receding, seemingly from existence, the four of them hiking through that wooded darkness until about ten minutes later they stopped randomly at some sufficiently removed spot that afterward seemed predestined, and Mark, before even willing it, swung hard at Levi and knocked him to the hard-packed dirt, maybe even as surprised as he by the connecting impact of that first real uninhibited effort to inflict human damage. There had hung a beat of silence when he hit the ground. Then the three lit upon him, kicking and thrashing at the prostrate shape in the dark. The memory of this remained for Mark only as shredded sensation: the scribble of the flashlight over Levi’s curled backside, the panting of exertion, the guttural grunting when they would wedge a hard kick in the soft of his belly. They forced his head up and shoved a fistful of riversludge into his mouth, calling him shiteater, then batted him around again, all of them reluctant to be the first one to let up. And strangely, Mark could not even remember now whether or not he had felt any rage over Levi’s offense while in the act of assaulting him, any remnant of that burst of raw heat that had originally resolved him to beat this white boy into repentance. It was as though the record of that retributive heat, if there had indeed been any, had been expunged by the running river, leaving for memory only a cold, passionless violence even more savage for its bloodlessness. As though passion in the end had no bearing upon the governing forces of life and death, and at the river the four had unknowingly given themselves up in violent ritual to that greater logic which was inexorable in its progression. And it was on this force that Mark pulled Levi to his feet for the last time—his motility gone sluggish and boozy, his shivering torso thorn-scratched and slick from sweat and mud, the four of them in that instant a tableau of miniature figures seen from across a canyon of eight years—and without thinking brought the butt of the Maglite down on his head. Levi fell—seemed to backfall a distance far deeper than his standing height, with a force far heavier than his falling weight. They heard a blunter, meatier echo of the blow that sent him down, then nothing.