San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics

by Peter Maravelis

  And then he met Nena. That is, he met Nena again. They’d met in the Philippines before, in Cebu City, at some party. But she was very young then. She was nineteen and he, the multidivision champion, was twenty-three. Her older sisters and their friends had thrown Kip Benito a party; Nena was just a tagalong. They hardly noticed each other. That was years ago. Kip was still the champion then, and Nena, who knew nothing of boxing, could not have cared less about his athletic prowess. But Nena, now in her mid-twenties in San Francisco, probably cared even less. All she saw in him was a soft-hard man, quick and graceful in some ways, but awkward at times. Later on, and above all else, she saw in him a man who did not quite know how to lie.

  Kip was not a frequenter of Blanco’s. He was not a drinking man to begin with, though he always kept a bottle of Jack Daniel’s around. Even in his days of debauchery and squandering, he had never acquired a taste for hard liquor, and beer just made him full after two or three bottles. Crowds often made him uneasy, though he enjoyed people and company. He did not feel comfortable drinking liquor and he did not feel comfortable drinking with a crowd. And the crowd at Blanco’s, well … it was Rudy that really prompted him to visit Blanco’s every now and then. But not this time. This time it was for something else.

  He told Rudy everything: that he needed the money for Nena’s “going away,” that they planned to go to Seattle but he had lost it all at the racetrack. She would rent a place near a relative of Kip’s in Seattle. He would go to Alaska and work, then, after a couple of months, return to her in Seattle. And from there, with money in hand, they could make more permanent plans together.

  They wouldn’t get married even if they could, not right away. For Kip was already married, and his wife’s family had paid him two thousand dollars, and were giving him an additional five hundred every three months until their divorce. It had now come to the end of the third year and Kip was going to collect his last five-hundred-dollar installment of the marriage deal. For such an arrangement, he’d had to do some things that inconvenienced him, and probably his wife, too, now that he thought of it. They’d had to see each other a couple of times a month, spend a weekend with each other, and be seen together in public every now and then. But that had not become a chore for Kip until he met Nena again.

  “Call me after you get the five hundred from your wife,” Rudy told him. “I’ll see what I can come up with.” And they both headed out of the little room and back into the bar. The tourists were now sitting down at a table, talking and drinking.

  Kip sat back down on his stool and said, “Bartender,” wiping the counter in front of him, “one more for the road.”

  When Rudy came with his drink, there were two white men sitting beside Kip. They were drunk and harassing him. Kip had had a few drinks too many, this he knew, but he did not allow the two men to bother him much. His mind was on more important things. He managed to wiggle his way out and leave. He caught Rudy’s eye as he did so, and they gestured each other goodbye.

  Out in the night and under the garish lights from streetlamps, Kip stopped by a phone booth near the City Lights Bookstore and called Nena.

  “Hello?” Her voice sounded a bit hoarse.

  “You still up, Mahal?”

  “I’m waiting for you.”

  “Don’t wait up for me. How are you feeling?”

  “Okay, I guess. Well, not really.”

  “Okay, I’m coming home now. Want me to get you something to eat?”

  “God no. Don’t bother. There’s food here for you.”

  “All right. Be right there.” He would visit Nena briefly before going to see his wife’s people for the five hundred dollars. And he would not tell her about the loss at the racetracks. Yet.

  Nena had moved out of her parents’ house two weeks before, telling everyone that she was going to Colorado for the stewardess program. Kip had gotten her a room at the International Hotel for forty-two bucks a month, a nice one too, a curtain-partitioned space with a bedroom and a bathroom. “The bridal suite,” Manong Freddie had said to Kip. “Espesyal por you two.” And for those last two weeks, Kip had been biding his time by going around making and taking bets.

  At the hotel, he entered her room and removed his jacket while fumbling for the light switch. He could faintly see Nena through the half-drawn bedroom curtain sitting upright on the bed.

  “Don’t get up,” he said. “I’ll be right there.” He accidentally kicked one of her shoes as he entered. He picked it up and put it back in place as he put his coat on a hanger by the door. “I thought you might have fallen back to sleep.” Through the open window, he felt a slight breeze puff up a fresh tide of mist. “Aren’t you cold?” he asked.

  “It’s good for you,” she replied pleasantly.

  “You sounded tired over the phone,” Kip said as he sat down on the bed. “I was just going to sleep on the floor.”

  “I’d never let you sleep on the floor. What’s the matter with you? What are you talking about?” Then she added flatly, “Not without me.”

  “Well, I mean, just to rest—for a while. I gotta go get my money from her people,” he said without looking at Nena.

  “Tonight?”

  “Why not? Get it over with and out of the way—so we’ll have plenty of time to prepare to leave here Saturday. I got the tickets already,” he lied. “Pan Am. 4:50 p.m.” He had to cover the lie with two or three more because he didn’t know how to lie very well.

  “That’s good,” she said.

  “I gotta get everything done before Saturday.” They looked at each other for a while, then embraced.

  “Ay, I don’t know anymore. If things should happen—if things should fall apart, Kip, let’s make a pact now. I don’t know anymore. Do you?” Then she lapsed into Filipino: “It’s such a crazy world out there … it’s such a fucked up, crazy world. I don’t know anymore. We’ll have to put some sense, some meaning into it. Let’s make a pact.” She got up from the bed and walked to the couch in the TV room.

  “What do you mean?” he laughed lightly. He tried to remember the last time he had heard her swear.

  “Lovers always make a pact,” she said.

  “Wow, you’re starting to talk like Rudy. What kind of beatnik shit talk is that?” Kip got up and went to the bathroom cabinet. When he returned, Nena had switched on the little TV in the living room. He poured each of them a double shot of Jack Daniel’s. “But I like the idea,” he smiled.

  “Me too,” she said.

  “Let’s do it.”

  And they drank to that, emptying their glasses.

  “Is it okay for you to do this?” he asked, just barely swallowing.

  “It’s still early on; and that’s all I’ll be drinking, anyway, so why not? … Okay, then, if anything should happen, if things don’t work out, we’ll contact each other somehow … no matter how late it is in our lives. But just once. Because once,” she continued, “we were each other’s one and only.” She raised her drink. “Without any notice?” she asked.

  “With or without,” said Kip, taking another swig in celebration.

  “With or without,” echoed Nena. And she took the remainder of Kip’s glass and downed it. She looked at him and almost shrugged a shoulder but caught herself, smiled softly, and raised her own drink.

  “Even in her silence,” said Kip, placing his arms around her shoulders, “she says something.”

  “Salamat,” she said.

  Nena had a small mole on her left cheek that many people called her beauty spot. But for Kip, her beauty spot was something else. For Kip, her smile was shelter in silence. Her smile was a shelter from both the noise outside and the silence inside him. And she smiled effortlessly, with body and soul.

  “I got a right to depend on you; you’re the man I love. The others I never took nothing from them, because I didn’t love them. But you’re the man I love. I expect that from you. It’s okay if you help take care of me. But I can take care of myself, too, thank you.”

>   “I know, I know,” he stammered. “But only a couple more months. Babalikan kita. I’ll be back with some cash from Alaska to take care of all this crap. And we can start again.” His face flashed a quick glow, then died again when he added, “Just a couple more months. Pumayag ka na, mahal.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  He could tell her anything and she still would be afraid. He offered answers, encouragement, tender touches, anything and everything, and still she would be afraid.

  And she asked again, “Are you sure?” She slowly raised her eyes to him. “What kind of life are we going to live?”

  “The best,” he answered quickly, erasing everything, almost jokingly, with a mystery of casualness. “The best.”

  “What about the money, Kip? You’re still a couple hundred short.” She stood, picked up a brush, and started drawing it through her hair.

  “I got it all in the bank already,” he lied. This time he did not have to worry about whether she was going to believe him or not. She was no dummy, that was one thing. He had to laugh a little.

  “You’re laughing again, eh? At me?”

  “Why the hell do you get up and brush your hair at midnight, just so you can go to sleep and mess it all up again?”

  She thought for a while and answered, “I never looked at it that way. You’re the weird one. Who would look at it that way?” When she laughed, Kip was already holding her nodding head in his arms. “Happy ending, tayo,” he said, “ha?”

  “Oo,” she answered softly, “yes.”

  Kip looked at his hands and he thought of all the things they once held—the anvil when he was a boy, leather gloves in a square ring in adolescence and youth, and now, with manhood, the texture of chips and cards, torn tickets from betting on horses and ball games.

  * * *

  “You’re an old soul,” Nena told Kip from the couch where they were watching TV.

  “Everybody’s odd, right?” he retorted quickly.

  “I said old, darling. Not everyone is an old soul, but you are.”

  “I like this,” he said, touching the top of her forehead.

  “That’s my widow’s peak. You like that?” she replied, getting up from the couch.

  “Scary name for it, isn’t it?”

  “For you, maybe.” And they both laughed.

  “Maybe I better not divorce my wife, then,” he said. And the two laughed some more, but they both quieted down awkwardly as they remembered what Kip had to go do.

  “You should go,” said Nena. “We all have our obligations.”

  “I’m going right now.”

  “Okay. Good, get that over with.”

  “Get some sleep.”

  “I will, my happy, married man.”

  “I am. I truly am,” he said in Filipino, and walked out into the city night.

  * * *

  Kip had a small apartment on California Street near his wife’s place in Pacific Heights. He decided to stop by his apartment and call them from there. He’d get a chance to pack a little bit and put things away for the upcoming trip.

  In his room, looking outside at the delicatessen’s neon sign across the street, Kip decided not to ask for an additional loan from his wife. The five hundred dollars that her family owed him would be enough. Rudy would hopefully get about a grand together by Saturday. That would only make him five hundred short and he should be able to raise that before he left.

  The phone rang. He looked at it, and after the second ring, he bet himself five hundred dollars that it would be a woman calling. Then he picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “How much did you come up with?” It was Rudy.

  “I had five hundred, but I just lost it,” he said jokingly. “I thought you were my wife.”

  “Say what?” Rudy sounded as if he were in a hurry.

  Kip looked at his watch; it was 1:30 a.m. How in the hell was he going to call his wife’s people at 1:30 in the morning? “Sorry, I was just thinking out loud. I made a bet with myself, and I lost.”

  “Well, anyway, all I could come up with was a grand.”

  Kip did not know what to say but, “Talaga? All right!” and breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks, Rudy. You’ll get it when I come back from Alaska in the next month or two. You’ll get all your money back. Pare, that was pretty fast. You could come up with a quick thousand, just like that, you son of a bitch? I thought it would take you till at least tomorrow night.”

  “I caught them at the right time,” said Rudy. “I got ’em running when they should have been fightin’, and fightin’ when they should have been running. Walang marupok na baging sa magaling maglambitin, right? Isn’t that what you use to tell me?”

  “That’s right. There’s no brittle vine for the person who knows how to swing.”

  Rudy’s voice suddenly faded away from the receiver. “Good night, gentlemen. And remember, ride her on your way home.” Kip could hear some weak laughter in the background.

  “Don’t tell me you played some cards.”

  “Yeah, tourists. They wanted to play. So I obliged. I closed the bar right after you left. Slow anyway.”

  “Same ones you were talking to when I was there, those tourists?”

  “I don’t remember.” After a pause, Rudy asked, “How much did ya get?”

  “I’m just going out to get the five hundred from my wife’s family right now.”

  “Pal, I’m holding onto this money till the day you leave.”

  “But I got to pay for the tickets before that,” Kip pleaded.

  “Then get your ticket from that five hundred. I’ll hang onto this till I drop you off at the airport.”

  “Thanks, Rudy. You’re all right.”

  “I’ve spent money on worse things. But right after Alaska—”

  “I’ll pay the whole thing right here.”

  “Right where is that?”

  “I mean right there, at Blanco’s.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks,” said Kip again, and hung up.

  * * *

  It was drizzling the next evening when he drove up into the the lamp-lighted hills of Pacific Heights where his wife’s people lived, one of their houses, anyway. After parking his car, he crossed the street under a billowing lamp whose beam fought fiercely to ward off the uneven mist surrounding it.

  He did not stay long at the house. A few hellos and goodbyes and very-good-working-with-you and all that, and by the time he walked out of the house, everybody was happy. He had taken his last five hundred from her.

  When he entered Blanco’s, he embraced Rudy. “I got the five hundred,” he said softly, and discreetly showed his friend the roll of bills.

  “Terrific,” Rudy replied quickly, covering the wad and pushing it away at the same time. He headed for the back, while Kip moved toward his usual place at the counter. There were two white men near the barstool as Kip sat down. He couldn’t remember whether or not they were the same men who had been there the night before. Immediately, however, they started harassing Kip. Of all the times in the world, Kip said to himself. Of all the times in my life, these clowns gotta show up now. So he tried to ignore them.

  There were some people like that, Kip thought, hasslers, not necessarily hustlers, just hasslers. If you ignored them or got aggressive with them, they stopped or moved on to their next victim. But tonight, somehow, it seemed that these two just did not, could not, leave Kip Benito alone. When he couldn’t take any more of it, he started to leave. He left his unfinished beer on the counter and walked out the door, signaling Rudy goodbye. The two quickly followed.

  Less than ten seconds had passed when the people in Blanco’s all heard a violent scream outside. In a flash, Kip Benito came running back into Blanco’s, the two white men close on his heels, across the floor, around and behind the counter, and, within seconds, back again into full view, rushing back out into the street. Everyone at Blanco’s hurried out after Kip, who now had a wide metal knife tucked along
his forearm, blade pointing straight up but mostly hidden. For a moment, the night swallowed the three men. They seemed to have completely disappeared. But only for a moment. The fighters emerged into the blinking neon light as one solid mass of heaving and weaving, with bursts of grunts and groans. The rush of onlookers slowed down when they saw all three slump over and fall to the ground. Then, only one got up. Kip Benito. Rudy dashed forward, but he was too late. The deed was done. Just a fraction of a moment and people’s lives are changed forever. Yet Rudy didn’t have much time to dwell on this thought. He saw Kip Benito leaning against the alley wall, bloody, clothes tattered, disheveled. He was gripping something tightly in his left fist. From his right hand, with a weakening hold, dangled the sharp blade. The other two men lay motionless in a pool of moonlight beneath the streetlamps of the city.

  “They tried to rob me, Rudy,” Kip explained. “Thought I was drunk and tried to rob me. But this is not just about money, Rudy. You know that.” He stuck out his left hand—rolls of bills began to unfold from his grip.

  “I know that, champ,” Rudy said as he scooped up all the money that sprung from Kip’s fist. Rudy felt the crowd gathering behind him.

  Kip quickly turned and sliced the blade across his own forearms, shoulders, and thighs. When Rudy looked back to check the crowd, he couldn’t tell whether or not they had seen Kip cut himself.

  “They tried to rob me!” Kip repeated to the stunned audience. “They tried to kill me!” He looked around slowly and menacingly, seeming to absorb everyone’s features. Then he said, as if spitting out a piece of phlegm, “No one saw what happened tonight. No one. I will remember all of you.” Then he fled into the night.

  Kip Benito was going to Alaska that summer for the salmon canning season in Bristol Bay, anyway. He was just leaving a little sooner than planned.

  * * *

  It was during the afternoon of the next day, just before work, that Rudy decided to go see Nena at the International Hotel. He parked his car in the small employee lot of Blanco’s and walked over. The sky was overcast, gray and drizzly, and the news he was about to bring Nena was no different. Rudy was the only person other than Kip who knew about Nena staying in this place.