Phoenix Noir

by Patrick Millikin

  A homeless shelter.

  He leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and feels the sun on his face.

  Her feet sweat in the tight shoes.

  What’s bothering Evie more than anything right now. Her feet are swollen from the heat and the damn shoes are too tight anyway. Red Fms and skintight jeans that grab her harder than a fourteen-year-old boy in the back of a car. Sunlight glistens off the sequins on the body shirt that shows her stomach, not as tight as it used to be after two kids.

  What she’s doing out on VB at noon, two kids, a pimp, and an ice jones to support, you put in the hours. Got popped by vice just two nights before too—her third bust so she’s headed for a stretch and needs to make some before she goes. They gonna take her kids too, ’less she can get her auntie to take ’em first. Except auntie ain’t gonna take no kids unless they come with a little cash attached. She got troubles of her own, her own rent to pay, and the liquor store don’t give the vodka away.

  Evie keeps an eye out for the cops. They’re everywhere these days—“cleaning up Van Buren.” They already closed three of the motels where she took johns. The rest are closing on their own, anyway. Won’t be nothing left of VB soon, it’s just fading away.

  Van Buren, Van Buren.

  Used to be a girl could make a living here, you call it living. She looks down the street and sees the guy coming. Black ball cap, big old blue polo shirt hanging loose over new jeans. One more middle-aged white guy trying to hide his thinning hair and spare tire. She’s looking for a john to jack and he could be the one. Take him in the alley behind the dumpster and while he’s busy thinking about her mouth on his thing and all those sweet noises she’ll be making that wallet will pop out his back pocket like that button on the turkey when it’s ready at Thanksgiving. Even if he wakes up, what’s he going to do? She has a blade in her back pocket and can fillet him like a fish. Johns don’t go to the cops neither, because what they gonna say? Cops will put in about one second flat, worrying about that wallet. What you deserve, you go looking to nut on Van Buren. Take that back to New York. “You wanna date, honey?”

  Man keeps walking, like he can’t see her, like she’s invisible. She walks alongside him.

  “Honey, you wanna date?”

  “Not today.”

  “I’ll show you a good time.”

  “I’m sure you would.”

  “You can be sure.”

  “Another time, baby. I’m busy.”

  I ain’t your baby, baby. I ain’t nobody’s baby, baby baby baby. “What other time, baby? I’m out here all day.”

  The man just keeps walking. Walking and sweating. Maybe she’ll see him on the way back from wherever he’s going, he’s so busy.

  Her feet hurt.

  Itching in the heat.

  Jerry finds the Tahiti Inn.

  Just in time too, because another two minutes he might have passed out. Last freaking job I take in the desert, he thinks, in the summer anyway. They want some guy taken off the roster in Phoenix in August, they can call somebody else.

  The money is good, anyway. Do the job, hit the airport, fly back to Providence, and take Marcy on a little weekend to Block Island, like she’s been bugging him. Not much to ask, and she’s a good baby, Marcy, she don’t make too much trouble.

  He walks past the big sign with the goofy tiki mask. The main office is shaped like a Tahitian hut, or what they think it looks like, anyway. Jerry doesn’t know—he’s never been to Tahiti or even Hawaii. Maybe he should spend a dollar and take Marcy to Hawaii, might not be a bad idea to get a little distance after this. Sit on the beach, watch the girls do the hula, maybe get Marcy fired up a little to lose those last five pounds.

  Room 134.

  They told him Rosavich is in 134.

  Good. No stairs to go up or down.

  He finds 134, pulls out the gun and holds it behind his back, then knocks on the door.

  Abe dances with Estelle.

  In his waking dream, the sun having lulled him into semisleep. In this dream that is not a dream, he’s in the old El Capri Ballroom, whirling her around, little dots of perspiration on her neck as she looks up at him and smiles. She wears a cornflower-blue dress and a string of pearls.

  They had come down to Phoenix after the thing with Sol Hirsch went bad. Poor, stupid Sollie, hanging from the rafter in that loft while they took baseball bats to him. He finally told them what they wanted to know, but Abe had felt sick after that, and tired, so he’d said to Estelle, “Let’s take the new Buick down to Phoenix, stay on Van Buren. Do some dining, some dancing, get a tan.” She wouldn’t sit out in the sun, though, she said she liked her skin white and so did he. The few minutes she would sit out with him she’d wear that big floppy sun hat, even in the pool; she did the breast stroke and kept her head above the water. Then she’d go into the room, into the cool dark, and read paperback books and nap until he was ready to go to dinner.

  That night at the El Capri she was so pretty.

  He was young and handsome.

  Van Buren was beautiful.

  He sees Sollie Hirsch, his hand jerks, knocks the glass of grapefruit juice over, and he wakes up. Wonders where he is and then sees he’s on Van Buren under a white hot sun.

  She don’t find nobody.

  Cars go by but don’t even slow down to take a look. No one walks by—everybody has found a cool, dark place to be.

  Everybody except me, she thinks.

  Ain’t no cool, dark place for me in this bleached-out world.

  The door opens and Jerry steps into a world of darkness.

  So dark after the bright sun that he can’t see Benny Ro-savich spring cat-quick with the knife.

  Rosavich plunges the blade into Jerry’s leg and then slices sideways, severing the femoral artery. Jerry screams and backs out the door, which slams shut in front of him. The pistol falls from his hand and clatters on the baked concrete. He grabs his leg, trying to hold the blood in, but it pours around his fingers as he staggers out past the goofy sign and the Tahitian hut, onto Van Buren Street.

  Abe looks down from his balcony and sees the man stumble up the sidewalk. A disgrace for a man to be drunk this early in the day. A disgrace and a shame. The man stops as if he’s lost and Abe wonders for a moment if he has sunstroke, then he sees the trail of blood and the man pirouette in an almost graceful dance before he staggers on.

  Evie sees him come back.

  Walking all goofy, like he’s messed up on glue or paint or something. She looks for the gold ring around his lips but doesn’t see any and then she realizes that he’s really messed up, his pant leg all bloody. He looks at her and this time he doesn’t call her “baby,” he just says, “Help me, please,” and topples at her red shoes.

  Evie looks around, don’t see nobody but some old man trying to stand up on the motel balcony. She reaches down and slips the wallet from the man’s back jeans pocket where it was all snug and tight against the new fabric.

  Then she walks up the alley into a thin slice of shadow.

  Jerry rolls over.

  Toward the sun.

  Feels it in his face. It’s warm, and good now, because the rest of him is cold and he’s shivering.

  He looks up at the sweet sun and smiles. Then the world goes white.

  BY THE TIME HE GOT TO PHOENIX

  BY DOGO BARRY GRAHAM

  Christown

  for Larry Fondation

  Luis wanted to go and get Catboy, but he knew he couldn’t. The cops might be watching the apartment, and even if they weren’t, they would certainly have forced their way in by now. They would either have taken Catboy to the pound or just ignored him, in which case he would be on the street. Luis fought a temptation to drive around and look for him.

  He knew he’d better get out of town right away. At first he thought that the cops would think he’d left by now, so it might be safer to stay put and hide. But where would he hide? Too many people knew what he looked like and might call the cops as soo
n as they saw him. He knew there would be many vatos getting pulled in for questioning and fingerprinting on the off-chance that they might be him. Once he was far from Santa Fe he’d be safer, and safer still when he was out of the state. They’d be looking for him to head for Mexico, but that was okay with him because he wasn’t going to Mexico …

  The place Vanjii moved into was in an apartment complex on Phoenix’s west side. There was a public phone out front with a sign that said, in Spanish, YOU CAN CALL MEXICO FROM HERE. Someone was always using it. Most of the people in the complex had jobs, some had phones and some didn’t, and none of them had any money.

  Vanjii shared the apartment with two other people. Carlos, who’d been introduced to her by an old high school friend, had come to Phoenix from Santa Fe to learn to be an auto mechanic. He was hardly ever home. School and work kept him busy during the days and evenings, and he spent many of his nights at his girlfriend’s place.

  The other roommate was Jaimie. She was a native of the city, and had been doing well in her life until she’d suffered a head injury when a stranger stomped her for no reason that anybody knew of. Now she was frightened all the time, and never left the apartment unless she had to. She would often forget what she was talking about in the middle of a sentence. She worked part-time as what she called a “telephone actress,” talking dirty to men who called a phone sex company which patched the calls to her home number.

  After paying her rent in advance, Vanjii had less than forty dollars. Her father had given her the money for the rent and the bus trip to Phoenix. She knew it wouldn’t be hard to find a job, but she didn’t have a car, and the bus service was a joke.

  The apartment was on Seventeenth Avenue and Highland, about a mile away from the Spectrum Mall. On her third day in Phoenix, Vanjii walked to the mall and talked a clothing store into hiring her.

  The walk to work was dreamlike. Some of the streets had no sidewalks, so she walked in the gutter. Everything seemed too huge, fast, and loud to be real. The cars blasted by, the drivers sometimes yelling at her just because she was walking. She felt so tiny. The only other people she saw walking were homeless, and they always came up to her, and they always said the same thing. Hey. Hey, I ain’t panhandling. It’s just that my car ran out of gas a couple miles away, and I lost my wallet, and my wife and kids are in the car, and … Vanjii had nothing she could give them.

  The heat didn’t seem too bad while she was walking. But when she headed into the mall, with its air-conditioned chill, and sat down, the sweat came out so fast she felt like it was spurting out of her pores. She’d go into the restroom, take off her shirt, and wipe herself down with paper towels, then put on some deodorant. She’d work all day, stopping only to eat the lunch she’d packed. When she walked back home, it would be getting dark and she’d be nervous, but she knew it wouldn’t be long until she’d have saved a few hundred dollars and could buy a car.

  Vanjii wondered about Luis, but it all seemed so far away that it didn’t hurt as much as she’d thought it would.

  Luis had been in a bar on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe when it all started to go to shit. He was talking to a guy about selling a little pot, something to make some quick money, to keep eating and maybe pay next month’s rent. It was about 7 in the evening, happy hour in the bar. The place was crowded, and the parking lot was full, so Luis had parked in a small lot across the street.

  Luis crossed the street in the darkness and walked into the lot. When he reached his car, he saw that it had been wheel-clamped.

  He stood and looked at it. Then he got in the car and sat there. “Fuck!” The word came out on a breath of laughter, but his face was wet with tears. He wiped his face with his hands and sat breathing quietly, trying to get ahold of himself. Then he stepped out of the car and walked around the building, hoping it was still open. It wasn’t.

  As he moved back to his car, a white man approached him.

  “Is this your car?”

  “Yeah.” Luis pointed to the clamp. “I don’t get this.”

  “I did it. I’m Dan Ward, I’m a partner in this company—”

  “What company?”

  He pointed at the building. “This company. We’re a security company. This parking lot’s private property.”

  “I didn’t know … Sorry. I didn’t see no sign.”

  “It should be obvious that this isn’t public parking.”

  “Yeah. Sorry. I had to meet a guy in the bar over there, I couldn’t find a place to park. I didn’t see nobody here, so I thought it’d be okay.”

  “Well, you can see that it’s not.”

  “Can you take that thing off my car and I’ll go?”

  Dan Ward nodded. “Sure. If you want to pay me your fine now.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a forty-dollar fine for parking here.”

  “Bullshit. You can’t do that. You can’t just decide to fine somebody. You can tell me to get out of your parking lot, that’s all.”

  “I’m not interested in a legal debate. I’m telling you there’s a clamp on your car, and it’s not coming off until you give me forty dollars.”

  “I don’t have forty dollars.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Honest to God, I got about twenty, and I need that. It’s all the money I got.”

  Ward looked at him and said nothing.

  “Look, how about if I give you my address and you can—”

  “Yeah, sure.” Ward laughed. “How about if you come back here when you’ve got the money, and you can have your car back.”

  “Okay,” said Luis. “Okay. I’ll give it to you now. Here …” He reached inside a pocket of his jacket.

  When he had the knife out, Luis swung it in a big circle, holding it with both hands, like someone swinging a baseball bat. It went into Ward’s body with such force that Luis felt the impact like a car hitting a wall. The momentum threw Luis to the ground and he held onto the knife and tore it across Ward’s lower abdomen and then slid it out. Luis jumped back up, still holding the knife, and saw that Ward was running away from him, letting out a noise that sounded like a mule braying. Ward made it a few steps, trying to ignore the things that were spilling out of him. But some of his intestines were trailing on the ground, and when he stepped on them his head seemed to shatter in a scream that never made it past his lips as he fell and the pain swallowed him.

  Luis stood over Ward, raised the knife, hammered it into his spine, and left it there. Then he walked to the car, unlocked the door, got in. Blood was dripping from his hands. His body was shaking but he felt calm. He opened the glove box and removed a few things—sunglasses, the break-up letter from Vanjii, the Bulldog .44 she had hated. He put the sunglasses and letter in his jacket pocket and stowed the gun in the waistband of his jeans.

  He walked out of the parking lot into the street. As he moved, he felt his wet shirt chafe his skin. There was a 7-Eleven a couple blocks away. It had a phone outside. Luis dropped two quarters into the phone and dialed Miguel’s number.

  He got voice mail. “Hey, it’s me. Something just happened … you’ll probably hear about it. If you can, come and meet me tomorrow morning at the place where you hurt your ankle that time. Bring me some clothes. Come at around 9 o’clock. If you don’t want to, that’s okay. Later.”

  He hung up the phone and walked away. After a few minutes he stopped, turned around, and walked back to the 7-Eleven.

  The guy behind the counter was named Randy. He was twenty-two. There were no other customers in the store when Luis walked in, trembling, clothes bloody, blood in his hair, head swiveling, glancing around the place.

  “Hey, man, you okay?” Randy asked. “You need an ambulance or something?”

  Luis pulled the Bulldog and pointed it at him. “Open the register. Give me the money. Don’t touch an alarm or I’ll fucking kill you.”

  “Please don’t fucking kill me.” Randy opened the register, started taking the cash from it and putting it on the count
er.

  “Hey! What the hell!”

  The voice came from behind Luis. He turned, saw a young woman who had come in the door and was now on her way back out. Her name was Laura, and her two-year-old daughter was outside in her car, fastened into the child seat. Luis pointed and fired. The sound of it concussed the air in the room. The bullet propelled Laura out the door—went in through her lower back, tore through her bladder, and exited through her side. She lay on the asphalt and cried for her child as the life leaked out of her.

  “Please don’t fucking kill me,” Randy said again, but he was leaning over the counter, terrified, pawing at the gun in Luis’s hand. Luis fired again, and most of Randy’s face came apart.

  Luis pocketed all the bills from the register and left the store. He knew where he was walking to, but he didn’t know if he would get there before a cop grabbed him. It would depend on how long it took before somebody found the bodies at the 7-Eleven, or the body at the parking lot. Even if that happened soon, he might still make it. He would have to elude the patrol cars, but there was a strong wind blowing, so there would probably be no police helicopters cruising tonight. It was out of his control, so there was no use in worrying about it. Better just to keep walking, stick to the dark residential streets wherever he could, just keep walking, and either he would make it to Hyde Park or he wouldn’t.

  The stew was bubbling on the stove. Vanjii stirred it with a wooden spoon. It contained beef, carrots, tomatoes, and potatoes, and was seasoned with pepper, garlic, and cumin. Luis had shown her how to make it.

  Carlos was out with his girlfriend. Vanjii was going to share the stew with Jaimie, who was in the living room taking a phone call that had been forwarded by the sex line. Vanjii could hear her talking in a put-on, lisping, little girl voice. “Yeah, honey … Feel me contracting my ass around your cock … Oh, yeah …”

  Vanjii stuck her head in the living room, looked at Jaimie, and mouthed, Contracting? Jaimie grinned and shrugged. She had been watching TV when the call came, and she was still watching it, though she had muted the sound. The show was Beavis and Butt-Head.