San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics

by Peter Maravelis

  The front wall was brick and stone, and the windows had wide waist-high sills. I leaned across one, looked through the salt-caked glass, and saw the open sea. I was at the front of the fort, the part that faced beyond the Golden Gate; to my immediate right would be the unrestored portion. If I could slip over into that area, I might be able to hide until the other rangers came to work in the morning.

  But Gottschalk could be anywhere. I couldn’t hear his footsteps above the infernal noise from the bridge. He could be right here in the room with me, pinpointing me by the beam of my flashlight …

  Fighting down panic, I switched the light off and continued along the wall, my hands recoiling from its clammy stone surface. It was icy cold in the vast, echoing space, but my own flesh felt colder still. The air had a salt tang, underlaid by odors of rot and mildew. For a couple of minutes the darkness was unalleviated, but then I saw a lighter rectangular shape ahead of me.

  When I reached it I found it was some sort of embrasure, about four feet tall, but only a little over a foot wide. Beyond it I could see the edge of the gallery where it curved and stopped at the chain link fence that barred entrance to the other side of the fort. The fence wasn’t very high—only five feet or so. If I could get through this narrow opening, I could climb it and find refuge …

  The sudden noise behind me was like a firecracker popping. I whirled, and saw a tall figure silhouetted against one of the seaward windows. He lurched forward, tripping over whatever he’d stepped on. Forcing back a cry, I hoisted myself up and began squeezing through the embrasure.

  Its sides were rough brick. They scraped my flesh clear through my clothing. Behind me I heard the slap of Gottschalk’s shoes on the wooden floor.

  My hips wouldn’t fit through the opening. I gasped, grunted, pulling with my arms on the outside wall. Then I turned on my side, sucking in my stomach. My bag caught again, and I let go of the wall long enough to rip its strap off my elbow. As my hips squeezed through the embrasure, I felt Gottschalk grab at my feet. I kicked out frantically, breaking his hold, and fell off the sill to the floor of the gallery.

  Fighting for breath, I pushed off the floor, threw myself at the fence, and began climbing. The metal bit into my fingers, rattled and clashed with my weight. At the top, the leg of my jeans got hung up on the spiky wires. I tore it loose and jumped down the other side.

  The door to the gallery burst open and Gottschalk came through it. I got up from a crouch and ran into the darkness ahead of me. The fence began to rattle as he started up it. I raced, half-stumbling, along the gallery, the open archways to my right. To my left was probably a warren of rooms similar to those on the east side. I could lose him in there …

  Only I couldn’t. The door I tried was locked. I ran to the next one and hurled my body against its wooden panels. It didn’t give. I heard myself sob in fear and frustration.

  Gottschalk was over the fence now, coming toward me, limping. His breath came in erratic gasps, loud enough to hear over the noise from the bridge. I twisted around, looking for shelter, and saw a pile of lumber lying across one of the open archways.

  I dashed toward it and slipped behind, wedged between it and the pillar of the arch. The courtyard lay two dizzying stories below me. I grasped the end of the top two-by-four. It moved easily, as if on a fulcrum.

  Gottschalk had seen me. He came on steadily, his right leg dragging behind him. When he reached the pile of lumber and started over it toward me, I yanked on the two-by-four. The other end moved and struck him on the knee.

  He screamed and stumbled back. Then he came forward again, hands outstretched toward me. I pulled back further against the pillar. His clutching hands missed me, and when they did he lost his balance and toppled onto the pile of lumber. And then the boards began to slide toward the open archway.

  He grabbed at the boards, yelling and flailing his arms. I tried to reach for him, but the lumber was moving like an avalanche now, pitching over the side and crashing down into the courtyard two stories below. It carried Gottschalk’s thrashing body with it, and his screams echoed in its wake. For an awful few seconds the boards continued to crash down on him, and then everything was terribly still. Even the thrumming of the bridge traffic seemed muted.

  I straightened slowly and looked down into the courtyard. Gottschalk lay unmoving among the scattered pieces of lumber. For a moment I breathed deeply to control my vertigo; then I ran back to the chain link fence, climbed it, and rushed down the spiral staircase to the courtyard.

  When I got to the ranger’s body, I could hear him moaning. I said, “Lie still. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  He moaned louder as I ran across the courtyard and found a phone in the gift shop, but by the time I returned, he was silent. His breathing was so shallow that I thought he’d passed out, but then I heard mumbled words coming from his lips. I bent closer to listen.

  “Vanessa,” he said. “Wouldn’t take me with her …”

  I said, “Take you where?”

  “Going away together. Left my car … over there so she could drive across the bridge. But when she … brought it here she said she was going alone …”

  So you argued, I thought. And you lost your head and slashed her to death.

  “Vanessa,” he said again. “Never planned to take me … tricked me …”

  I started to put a hand on his arm, but found I couldn’t touch him. “Don’t talk anymore. The ambulance’ll be here soon.”

  “Vanessa,” he said. “Oh God, what did you do to me?”

  I looked up at the bridge, rust red through the darkness and the mist. In the distance, I could hear the wail of a siren.

  Deceptions, I thought.

  Deceptions …

  THE KING BUTCHER OF BRISTOL BAY

  BY OSCAR PEñARANDA

  Manilatown

  (Originally published in 2004)

  Who knows?

  Some say he escaped from a jail in California. The “captain,” a small, weather-beaten, battered, mousy old man, said that the guy was wanted by the law somewhere. That was one thing about the cannery community and life in general in the small villages along the Naknek River in Bristol Bay, Alaska: Talk traveled fast. He may have looked like a man who was running away from something, yet to others he looked more like one gathering resources to get back to something. But who was going to ask? For the man in question was the King Butcher himself, the man who handled the biggest blade in the cannery.

  From the outside window, two young onlookers disappeared in the flash that the glint the sun and blade had made when Kip Benito, the King Butcher, slashed the big king salmon’s guts, the conveyer belt still moving, cleaning the enormous fish with one swift, smooth stroke upward; and then, after flipping it over, a downward stroke to scrape and cut the rest of the clinging entrails. And he would tap the fish and the table each time he completed a fish, as people from all around the cannery, including the two young spectators, would shove each other, edging to get a better look at Kip working his magic with the terrifyingly beautiful King Butcher knife.

  The foreman now walked past the docks outside, framed by that same window that held the onlookers. “That,” he told the two boys, for they were college students, “you won’t find in the books. Guaranteed,” he said. “Heh, heh. Guaranteed.”

  * * *

  At dusk sometimes, a veil of mist lingers in the twilight over the city. Coming home from the Golden Gate Fields racetracks in the winds of March, a loser in many more ways than just playing the horses, driving over the Bay Bridge, Kip Benito, an American citizen for two years now, mused over that delicate gauze curtain clinging over the jagged gray skyline of San Francisco. On the hills behind and beyond, a penciled, wispy line of cloud pointed at rows of houses and buildings baring their teeth. Windows goldened in the fading twilight, streaks of pink and magenta glowing in the darkening sky.

  He was on his way to Blanco’s to down a few beers and bullshit a bit with Rudy the bartender. He was worried about Nena�
��s pregnancy and their planned elopement this Saturday. He was going to borrow money from Rudy. A lot of money.

  He was down two thousand: He had lost his cousin Mando’s fifteen hundred dollars that he needed for Nena’s “going away” money, for she was starting to show.

  But he couldn’t lose, he had said to himself. He couldn’t lose. Hard-luck stories he only liked in books, not in real life. He’d lost so many times before. “Just this once, God, let me win,” he pleaded in Cebuano. “And after this, you can let loose on me as much as you want.” He did not know whether he was bargaining with God or the devil.

  Just yesterday, less than twenty-four hours ago, his wallet was comfortably padded with eighteen hundred-dollar bills that he had accumulated from various winnings here and there. Will, discipline, nerve, stamina, and smarts were ingredients for winning in that crucible of poker, dice, and horses that helped him get by in those past few months. But it still had not been enough. If he paid back Mando the fifteen hundred, that would only leave three hundred for him and Nena and Seattle and Alaska and a new life—maybe. That was their original plan.

  Preparing himself to be satisfied with winning two or three hundred, he had instead lost it all, all of the eighteen hundred-dollar bills. He had borrowed five hundred more from friends at the tracks and lost that too. That day, everything fell through. And that was when he decided to go to Blanco’s and see Rudy.

  Nena had been going to stewardess school and had decided that upon finishing she would head to the main office in Denver where there were more opportunities. But when she missed her period, she started to worry and told Kip about it—and he began to worry.

  This money situation really started some time back when Mando was talking to him in a small Pinoy hangout on Kearny Street called the Palate of Fine Arts—right beside Mike’s Pool Hall across from Ramona’s Café, and beside the Bataan Restaurant in Manilatown. Mando was talking about money. He had tried to persuade Kip to join up with him. He would be a perfect collector, Mando urged him.

  “Collector?” Kip had laughed. “Mando, I hate those guys! The blood of champions runs in my veins—and yours too,” he told his cousin in Filipino.

  “Is that why you accepted three thousand dollars to marry?” Mando answered curtly in English, before softly adding: “C’mon, Kip. Everybody is stained. We’re just people.”

  Shortly after the conversation, Kip accepted a loan of fifteen hundred dollars from Mando.

  I can’t lose now, he had said to himself as he crossed the Bay Bridge to go into the Golden Gate Fields racetrack that morning and remembered the feeling. Everyone else had already lost. His friends had all lost, his relatives, his sometime opponents in the ring, everyone had already lost. He approached the ticket window to put in his first bets on Comes the Dawn and The Seventh Sun. “Box it,” he told the man at the window, and handed him a hundred dollars.

  Well, Comes the Dawn came in around midnight and The Seventh Sun, a seven-to-one shot, came in seventh. Everyone had already lost; he couldn’t lose now. But he did.

  And he was down two thousand dollars when he took the Broadway exit at the end of the bridge to head for Blanco’s. It was a good bar and a good location—two blocks down from Broadway, the tourists’ Sin City attraction, and nestled cozily between Chinatown on one side and North Beach, the Italian section, on the other. Though Kip Benito was not a regular at the bar, he understood the feeling of the place, a little corner of the world with your seat and your place and yourself. It was a refuge, he admitted—a haven, yet a battlefield. Once in a great while, when he’s had too much to drink, he felt this. Kip tried to express it in words many times, in both English or Filipino, but he just couldn’t do it. Only Nena understood the unspoken inside of him. If blades or fists were words, he would be a poet. He thought Rudy the bartender might be a poet in his own way. He did not falter with words, and Kip envied and admired that.

  When Kip sat down at one end of the counter, several stools beside him empty, Rudy was already explaining something to several tourists complaining about the hills.

  “But the city is hills,” he said. “That’s just another part of her sex appeal. See, you can’t drive in this town, no. You gotta ride it, up and down, in and out of alleyways, hard and soft turns, and then up and down again. All the time up and down, you see … ?” Without looking down, Rudy pulled a towel from under the counter and wiped his forehead and neck quickly but gracefully, not skipping a beat, then stuck it right back under and continued: “Hills are nothing but mounds and curves …” Hidden behind the towel rack was a bolo, a long blade similar to the Mexican machete, a souvenir that he had bought from a pawnshop in Reno. It hung terrifyingly beautiful against the back panel under the counter.

  Kip didn’t know exactly what the hell Rudy was telling the tourists this time, but it sounded like another one of his dirty jokes. Kip was getting drunk and horny.

  “She’ll dictate the rhythm,” Rudy said carefully, “by which you must get to your destination.” And he dropped a fist firmly on the counter just as Kip downed his fourth beer. Rudy quickly turned to Kip all the way on the other end and said, “Be right with you, champ,” and continued regaling his audience of five or six tourists. “You see, Coit Tower, for those of you who don’t know, is supposed—or was supposed—to have been the phallic symbol of San Francisco. Some rich old lady named Coit, what a name, built it because she had a thing for firemen, see.”

  “Firemen?” one of the tourists said.

  “Yeah, the hose, you see. The nozzle, you know?” And his right hand dove under the counter, swept his brown mustached face with the towel, and disappeared again under the bar. From the jukebox, Sam Cooke was wailing “… It’s been a long, a long time comin’, but I know, a change gonna come, oh yes it will …”

  Kip looked at Rudy from the other end of the counter.

  “Sure,” Rudy said, sniffing and touching his nose as he looked around, “I live by there, below and behind. And in front of it is the bay, with its vessels of ferries and ships and tankers and tugboats and sailboats and cruise liners. On light windy days like this, it’s like a big parade out there.” Rudy was getting carried away with his descriptions again.

  “Right, Rudy, hey?” Kip laughed from the other end of the counter.

  “You’re chuckling over your glass again. You’re getting drunk, my man,” Rudy said, walking toward Kip, and as he got closer, whispered in his ear, “C’mon inside, man. I gotta show you something. Harry!” Rudy called, and a man approached the bar. “Harry, I know you’re the wrong man to put behind a bar, but what the hell. I got no choice. You got seniority.” And the men sitting at the table where Harry came from exploded in laughter and derision. “Take over for a few minutes, will you?” Rudy said.

  Kip got up quickly, too quickly, but, graceful to the end, he managed to keep his balance by bending his knees slightly. He lifted the split board at the end of the counter and followed Rudy to a narrow hallway and into a small room. Rudy switched the light on.

  “What is it?” Kip asked the bartender.

  “Nothing,” Rudy said. “I just wanted to get you outta there. What’s up, my man? What’s eating you, champ?”

  “Rudy,” he said, “I need some money.”

  “I knew I asked a stupid question.”

  “I gotta borrow some money, Rudy. You gotta help me out.”

  “How much do you need? I’m afraid to ask.”

  “Two thousand.”

  “Dollars?”

  “No, pesos. Of course, dollars!”

  “Jesus Christ, who’d you kill? Two thousand dollars, Jesus Christ!” After a moment, a change came over the bartender’s face. “It’s that bad, huh?”

  “It’s bad, Rudy. You know me. I never asked you for nothing …”

  “I know. I know that, champ. Maybe I can come up with some of it, but …”

  “Whatever you can, Rudy …” And he told the bartender about Nena and himself and the racetracks that afternoo
n.

  Kip, the son of a blacksmith in the Philippines, had arrived about seven years ago. Rudy had put him up for a while to help him get started because, as he said, “I believed in the kid. He had potential.”

  Some years back, Kip had doffed his blades of burning steel for a pair of leather gloves and became the champion of four divisions of boxing in the Philippines. Now only in his thirties, he had whirlpooled into calamity after calamity, disaster upon disaster, bad luck upon bad luck.

  “Sometimes I feel I have degenerated into something untouchable. In my prime, Rudy. In my prime!” he told the bartender in Filipino. Rudy spoke no Filipino, but he understood enough of it.

  Rudy’s cousin, who visited the Philippines frequently, had told him that he had seen Kip fight. According to him, Kip would sing and cry after winning each championship title. The Crooning Champion from Cebu, they called him. He was a sight to behold. Blood streaming from cuts on his face and sweat glistening, he would belt out a mushy love song from his heart … and weep right there in the ring. He was the only fighter in the history of Philippine boxing who had held four titles simultaneously. He had lost them all, of course, one by one. Bad management, age, and time, the most corrupt of all handlers, drove and sucked him into the nightlife of fast women, drinking, and gambling, and those were not really in his nature. When he came to Rudy five years ago, he was sleeping by the benches and sidewalks and enclaves of Howard Street and the Tenderloin district. After Rudy got him the job as a cab driver two years ago, Kip became pretty stable. During this time he married a woman from a prominent family from the Philippines, for papers only. Her people had given him some money.