Pittsburgh Noir

by Kathleen George

  Abigail spoke, still looking out at the river which ran long and dark beside them. “We were house shopping,” she said, just audible over the truck. “Every weekend we’d go out and look at houses. Once we even bid on one.”

  “Where?” asked Mark when she fell quiet.

  “Carrick. Of course Carrick. He was actually more into the whole thing than I was. He didn’t want us to get married and then have to come back to the same apartment.” Then she added, “He would have been a good father.”

  Mark nodded, though she was not looking at him to see it. The road continued to grow darker, the stars clearer. He remembered that he had seen her with Zacharias on a weekend afternoon not long ago, conferring in front of a house with some woman in a red pantsuit. He had thought nothing of it then, but felt now as though he had stolen a glimpse into an abrogated future, being for a moment privy to the unstomachable processes of fate permanently altering its course.

  “I need to move out of Pittsburgh,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see those houses again, and they’re all over Carrick. I can’t keep living here.”

  As they crossed the creek into McKees Rocks, a smaller road opened up, following the bend of the river. Mark swerved onto it, rattling across the train tracks, then pulled off the road onto the first gravel yard that sat off the riverbank, one still patched with snow and littered with beached rundown motorboats. He stopped the truck and climbed out into the night, his face turned up to the sky as the gravel crunched under his boots. The wind was sweeping raw and hard across the water but he did not feel cold. Five miles downstream from where he had once deposited Levi Gorski into the water, he was staring at the stars now to see whether he would recognize them, thinking, If they are not the same, then when I die my memory will die and their memory of me will die with it. They shone clearer here than ever, each a vivid puncture in the night, but as he looked and strained to look, they seemed to grow only increasingly ambiguous in arrangement, until he found he could no longer see anything in them, could not recognize whether they were familiar or strange, until they seemed just meaningless points of light spread flat and trivial across the sky.

  He had left the headlights on. For a while Abigail sat in the fading warmth of the truck, watching his shape moving then going distant in the dark. He seemed submerged in it, a dimly rendered figure sluggish and incipient in dark liquid. From within the truck she could hear the wind battering the windows with an animal energy, wild and invisible. “What are you doing?” she finally called out to him, rolling the window down a crack, but her voice seemed to fly away in the wrong direction.

  And standing in the untamed grass that lined the river, Mark thought he saw something floating silently on the water.

  You killed him, didn’t you? he heard Abigail say out of the darkness, her voice almost inaudible in the wind.

  He froze, something terrible expanding in his chest.

  Did you kill him? she murmured.

  When he turned he saw her climbing out of the truck in the distance and walking toward him against the wind with her hair blowing back, clutching a beer in her hand. For a moment she was lit garishly by the headlights. She stepped from the gravel onto the concrete between them, and then he saw her suddenly going down on a patch of ice, falling messily but somehow retaining an impression of lightness, like a bird knocked to the earth by a gust. When he went back to her she was still sitting on the concrete with her hand held to her stomach. Her mouth was skewed and rigid. “Goddamn ice,” she said. She took a stubborn drink from her beer, which she had somehow managed to save, before allowing him to help her up. Her hand remained on her stomach, and her mouth remained rigid.

  “You all right?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “I can drive you back.”

  She shook her head again and walked stiffly ahead of him toward the river. He joined her where she stood on the grass gazing at the sparse black trees of Brunot Island. “I’m fucking pregnant,” she said finally over the wind. The words seemed to race toward some distant point behind them at a hundred miles an hour. “I hadn’t even told him yet,” she added. “Haven’t told anyone.”

  The island jutted like some malignant outgrowth from the middle of the river.

  “I’m getting rid of it obviously,” she said, then took another swallow of beer as if to drive the point home. As the bottle fell back to her side he reached to take it from her, attempting in the last instant to mask the effort in casualness as if they had been sharing the bottle. She let him take it. But when he raised it to his own lips he found it mostly empty, the last mouthful of beer warmed by her hand. She looked at him strangely, then moved away from him, wandering upstream beside the black water, just beyond the reach of its ragged waves.

  Something began to take shape dimly at the back of his mind. He turned the empty bottle over in his hands, then pulled his arm back and hurled it by the neck. He could not see it fly, but he thought he could hear it ringing for a few seconds, the whispering friction of air on glass, until it was blotted out by the water. When he glanced over, Abigail was the clearest object in the near distance, her white winter jacket catching the scant trickle of light offered by the night sky. And this seemed to be enough; for now, her pale and heatless luster was sufficient to draw him, to allow himself to be drawn, to incite something real or imagined in his blood. “Abby,” he said, moving toward her, feeling some vestigial pull when he spoke the name, the two rudimentary syllables that had once been so common on his lips. She looked at him as he drew near. Veiled by the dark, the hard specificity of the lines etched upon her face by recent days were all but erased.

  “Why did you come today?” she said then before he could continue. Finally asking. Her tone was not harsh, not accusatory, but quietly demanding, deliberate.

  He faltered. “I don’t know,” he answered, thinking of the terrible slackness on Levi’s muddied face after he had fallen, the empty face looming under the beam of the flashlight like a moon in the dirt. He amended, “I can’t really explain.”

  “Try.”

  He let out a breath of frustration. “ I wish I could tell you.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I can’t. If you knew, you’d understand.”

  She was quiet, seeming to respect this response enough not to push again.

  Then a softness fell into his voice. “But I did want to see you.” He believed this now, though it might not have seemed true to him earlier. They stood side by side as he struggled to gather the effort to conquer his own resistance. And then, hastily, he put his arm around her in a way that he had not done since high school. He slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her toward him, almost roughly, and could feel through her thick jacket the once-familiar shape of her waist as she shivered against the wind. She did not resist, and he pulled her closer.

  “You know,” she said distantly, “even though the way he went was terrible, how sudden it was, I still prefer it over the way you went. Just going silent for no reason, like you just checked out without telling me.”

  There was something pliant in her voice now, despite its distance. And with Abigail pressed to his side, Mark thought he could detect the current of his fate shifting again, merging now with hers and with the Gorskis’. Without even thinking he began to plot a future, one that seemed to unfurl before him upon the remainder of his life: he would learn to love Abigail again; he would father Zacharias’s baby as his own; he would attend electrical school and buy them a house. He would make himself useful and productive. In his mind this was less a decision than a hard, lifelong indenture that he would accept without resistance, even gratefully.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Are you?” she asked vaguely.

  And with what seemed both impulse and a summoning of will, he pulled her to him full-on in the dark, then pressed his mouth blindly to hers, kissing her with a fervor that was hard and passionless and bitter, almost bludgeoning. She responded at first in kind, pres
sing back with empty abandon, but moments later he felt her mouth breaking up under his, suddenly going shapeless with grief. Even as he realized it was useless he clenched the back of her neck and continued to hold her to him, stubbornly, until she tore herself away in tears, grieving at last, her sobs ragged and guttural and bearing no resemblance to her crying during their fights long ago. There was nothing to say and he said nothing as she turned from him, as she retreated into the darkness, her sobbing figure going dim, then disappearing.

  In the distance behind him, the door of the truck banged shut. The wind was skating hard over the surface of the water, agitating it into a jagged roil, and the river seemed wide and long and turbulent with life, destined to run and accumulate in endless and unthinking self-perpetuation. And Mark stood on its bank, quietly breathing. He saw nothing floating on the water now, no corpses, no specters. He saw only water drowning in water, minute perturbations collecting on a mass scale.

  Overhead the stars looked on. Clustered along a galactic belt they now appeared not static but lazily adrift in everchanging configuration, in a refusal to be schematized. And Mark thought, without believing, how each of those trillion dots had its own set of planets, its own revolving worlds. Without believing he thought of all the obscure forms of life that must be springing from their soil; he imagined shadowy figures standing on alien riverbanks in alien Pittsburghs, each bearing the terrible weight of some tiny murder—crimes and lives and lineages as ephemeral as a dream disintegrating with consciousness. He held to this thought, trying to siphon from it a breath of solace, but the image was too tenuous to sustain. As he stood by in the dark, his imagined counterparts seemed to recede from plausibility, to dwindle into the night, until finally there was only the river and the wind and the weight of Levi Gorski’s murder, close and deafening and undeniable.

  WHEN JOHNNY CAME SHUFFLING HOME

  BY K.C. CONSTANTINE

  McKees Rocks

  Johnny Giumba graduated from high school on June 6, 1944, the same day the Allies invaded Normandy. A week later, he enlisted in the army, determined to kill Nips or Nazis—didn’t matter which. All he needed was a gun and bullets. Everybody he knew said we needed to get them before they got us. Johnny agreed, at first. But then he remembered Pearl Harbor and he thought, they already got us, didn’t they?

  After basic training, he boarded a troop ship to England with an M1 Garand slung over his shoulder, just like everybody else aboard ship who wasn’t a non-commissioned officer. But after training for a month in England, when he finally landed in France at the end of September, his first sergeant ordered everyone in his platoon to turn in their M-1s. Then they were all issued M1 carbines. Johnny didn’t understand. Carbines were for the NCOs: staff sergeants, technical sergeants, master sergeants. Except for the NCOs in his platoon, nobody else was even a private first class.

  His first sergeant told them not to worry about what kind of weapon they were carrying. The only Germans they were going to see would either be captured, wounded, or dead. They wouldn’t have to shoot any of them. Then the first sergeant told them they were being reassigned to Graves Registration.

  Johnny had never heard of Graves Registration. Neither had anyone else. He wanted to know what it was.

  Don’t worry, his first sergeant said. You’ll find out soon enough.

  His squad leader told them they were going to need their full field transport packs. Since all they’d done in France was stand around and wait, all they had to do was pick up their packs and put them on. Johnny wanted to know where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there.

  We’ll find out when we get there, his squad leader told him. There’s a truck coming for us, he said. Other than that I don’t know any more than you do.

  They climbed into the back of the truck just as it was starting to rain. It rained the whole two hours the truck kept moving, never once getting up to more than twenty miles an hour. Sometimes the mud was up over the axles. Once they had to get out and push. Johnny and two of the others slipped and fell to their knees in the muck, and then got showered with mud as the tires finally got traction.

  Just when Johnny thought he couldn’t get wetter, muddier, or more miserable, he heard artillery. For the last few minutes or so, he’d been thinking it was thunder. He should’ve known it wasn’t because he hadn’t seen any lightning. And now the noise was growing sharper. Louder. More distinct. The explosions were coming in bursts of two, three, four, only seconds apart.

  Johnny felt rumbling in his stomach. His throat was suddenly dry and felt like it was closing. It was getting harder to breathe. He was okay, he told himself. This stuff I’m feeling, it’s just fear. Everybody’s as scared as I am. They might not let on, but everybody’s looking at where the sound of the explosions is coming from and nobody’s saying anything.

  Johnny’d felt the same way the time Billy Pristash talked him into going out on the river in his uncle’s rowboat. He kept telling Johnny he was going to row straight into the wake of the sternwheeler that was heading downstream. At first, Johnny thought he was joking, but the more Johnny said he was crazy the more he laughed. That rooster-tail’s ten feet high, Johnny said. You row into that it’ll toss us around like a coupla corks. This boat will come down on our heads.

  Billy said, That’s the point, dummy. It’s better’n Kennywood. Way more fun than the Racer or the Jack Rabbit. Especially cause that captain’s looking right at us and any second now he’s gonna blow the whistle. But that’s all he can do. He knows we’re gonna do it, and it’s pissing him off real bad, but he can’t do nothing but blow his whistle. Listen to him, there he goes, ha-ha! And here we go!

  And there they went! Billy stroked fast as he could and rowed right into it, the crazy son of a bitch. And up and over they went, just like Johnny knew they would. Johnny dove left cause he didn’t want to be under the boat when it flopped over to the right. The oars went flying like a coupla popsicle sticks, and Johnny got scared stiff cause he hadn’t thought to take a big breath and didn’t know which way was up and must’ve swallowed a quart of water. God knows what was in it.

  Johnny finally popped to the surface, no thanks to himself. Just dumb luck. When they righted the rowboat and climbed in, Billy asked if Johnny had swallowed any Allegheny whitefish.

  Never heard of that kind of fish, he replied.

  Christ, you don’t know nothing, do you? That’s a rubber, dummy. They’re all over the river. Probably swallowed a nigger fish too.

  A what?

  A turd, nitwit. Dumb as you are, I don’t even know why I’m friends with you.

  I’m not as dumb as you think, Johnny said. I only got two B’s last year.

  Two B’s! Well goody for you! But that’s school crap, it don’t make you smart.

  That’s not what my dad says. Or my mom. They told me I keep getting grades like that, I could probably go to Carnegie Tech. Be an engineer.

  An engineer! You go to Carnegie Tech so you can wind up driving a damn train? Boy, I heard everything now. We get back on the dirt, do me a favor. Pretend you don’t know me.

  Okay with me, Johnny said. ’Bout five minutes ago, I thought you were gonna kill us both.

  Well are you dead now? Huh? Don’t look dead to me. Hell, you don’t even know when you’re having fun. That was fun, dummy.

  No it wasn’t!

  Aw, go home to your mommy and daddy. But don’t forget what I said. From now on, you don’t know me and I don’t know you. Carnegie Tech. Christ Almighty.

  Johnny remembered the conversation as though it had happened that morning, before he’d climbed up into the truck.

  Fifteen minutes after they got to where they were going and were told what they were going to do and had started doing it, Johnny had already vomited twice. He was actually glad because retching made his eyes watery, so for a little while at least he couldn’t really see what he was trying to pick up, trying to match up with other pieces and parts he’d already picked up. Th
en he vomited again. And again. All that came up the last time was saliva.

  Every day was the same. Johnny woke up and marched to the chow tent and tried to eat. As soon as he went out to start picking up the pieces, his breakfast came back up. He picked up more pieces. Tried to match them with still other pieces. Then they ate noon chow, and as soon as Johnny started work, the noon chow came back up. The vomiting got so bad, Johnny tried not to eat. But a day or so later, his squad leader caught on and ordered him to eat. Eat or die, his squad leader said. If you don’t eat, eventually you die, everybody knows that. So Johnny tried to eat again. He tried hard. But nothing he put in his mouth would stay down. Or if it didn’t come right back up, in a little while it would come out the other end, watery, until he was raw from wiping. Every time he swallowed he tasted acid. Then he started sniffling. He didn’t know whether he had a cold or the flu or whether he was crying. His whole body ached like he had the flu. He had chills that made him shake. But he didn’t have a fever. His nose wouldn’t stop dripping. His eyes kept filling up with tears.

  He wondered whether what was happening to him was happening to anybody else. When he looked around, the only thing he noticed was that nobody was looking anyone else in the eye. Everybody seemed to be slouching around, head down, trying to not see. Worse, it looked like they were trying to not be seen. The only guys who seemed to be talking, saying anything at all, were the NCOs who never left their bivouac area. And those guys didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping their food down.