San Francisco Noir

by Peter Maravelis

  “What should I do?”

  “Keep waiting for the ambulance.”

  “Is he sick?”

  All the interrogatives vexed Slatts. Like he wasn’t tense enough already. “No, he isn’t. So relax, okay?”

  He hardly got the words out of his mouth when a black-and-white police van oozed to the curb. Three husky officers in midnight-blue combat overalls jumped out. Their scuffed riot helmets gleamed in the torpid sunlight. Slatts couldn’t believe it. This was bad karma. The dope dealers had snitched on him. That wasn’t kosher. It was disgusting. The wimps couldn’t handle their own business. There was no honor among thieves.

  Hefting the .357, he pressed the trigger. A lonely bullet flowered out of the revolver’s barrel and sped forward in slow motion, burying itself in the pot store’s window. The music of breaking glass rippled in the flat air. The cops scrambled for cover and returned the fire. A slug ricocheted off the pavement, catching Slatts in the wrist. The .357 went sailing into the bushes.

  It was funny how things never worked out. Like he was falling through a mirror into a black hole. The cops dashed to the doorway, pushed aside the dead man, knocked Slatts onto his stomach, and handcuffed him in a pool of blood. An officer kneeled on the ex-con’s legs and brayed, “Merry Christmas, baby,” then shot him in the ear.

  The blast loosened Slatts’s bowels. A jet of warm shit trickled down his thigh. A pillar of unsavory steam rose from the Santa Claus suit. The ground was painted red and pink with bits of his earlobe. The pigeons on the phone lines shrieked with indignation. A moody cloud passed over the sun.

  The gods of crime were not smiling on Market Street that afternoon.

  DECEPTION OF THE THRUSH

  BY WILL CHRISTOPHER BAER

  The Castro

  Jude opened her hand and the panic of blind horses seized her. The washcloth was marked with a bloody knot of red in the shape of a gouged eye. She sat naked on the edge of the bathtub and tried not to hyperventilate. She pushed from her head the uneasy idea that her blood on a white washcloth was the single source of primary color in a strange bathroom yawning black and white around her. She stared at the locked door across from her and counted to ten, and when the horses died away she took stock of her situation.

  She was seventeen and it was a school night.

  Her left arm was so bruised it looked like it belonged to someone else, the bruise running so deep she was sure she could smell it, as if the blood pooling in there had gone bad. Her legs were cold to the touch, her thighs rippled with goose bumps, and when she pulled her hands from her knees they left marks slow to fade. She wondered if it were true that fingerprints could be dusted from human skin, and made a mental note to look that up.

  She had locked herself in this bathroom two minutes ago, not counting a few too rapid heartbeats, and by her estimation she could safely remain another four minutes more. Any longer and he might get suspicious and come to the door to ask in a soft threatening voice if she were all right, and she couldn’t bear that. She needed to exit the bathroom without prompting.

  Already it had taken her twenty-two seconds to pee, another thirty-six seconds to run water over the washcloth and bathe herself as instructed, and it sickened her to realize she had been staring at the knot of blood for nearly a minute, trying to organize her thoughts into any linear progression that made sense. She had a sudden overwhelming sense that had there been a window in the room, she would be scrambling with torn fingers for the roof, regardless of the screaming black vertigo in her stomach that said she was tucked away in a corner apartment on the nineteenth floor of a downtown tower with windows that were sealed shut and a sleepy doorman out front, where no one would ever think to look for her.

  Nonsense.

  The voice in her head was her father’s, and she nearly glanced over her shoulder.

  Animal urges, her father said.

  Her father had often told her that some predators were comfortable only on familiar ground, and never strayed far from home. These were not the most skilled hunters, he said, but they were unpredictable, and dangerous as hell, because they hunted on impulse. Others followed the prey, shadowing the herd. But the smartest hunters roamed far from home, where the rabbits would not recognize them. He always laughed, telling her this. And he was right. It was more likely that she was still somewhere in the Castro, where she had been pretending to shop earlier in the day, because the man who waited for her on the other side of the bathroom door seemed the sort of predator who hunted near to home. And it didn’t matter. She had to first get outside, then worry about where she was.

  The bathtub was long and wide as a coffin.

  Jude fought off the childish urge to crawl into the tub and shut her eyes and tell herself that if she couldn’t see him, he would not see her. Her memory was splintered, so much so that she saw the landscape inside her head in the thousand and one reflections of a shattered mirror in the sun, and she had no idea how to sort the images, the sprawl of information. The first shall be last, she thought, and was briefly comforted to seize on something familiar, though she couldn’t remember if that line came from the Book of Matthew or Mark, or what it meant.

  The sisters would not be proud if they saw her now, she thought.

  Jude was in her senior year at Sacred Heart, a private Catholic school for girls that was so old the halls smelled of raw earth and, according to her father, boasted tuition fees that could only be described as obscene. Jude had once calculated that, taking into account her spotty attendance record and history of expulsions, her education to this point had cost her father in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars per day. She was forever restless and bored to the edge of psychosis by the curriculum, and she had a tendency to get into fights. Two years ago, in a dispute over a borrowed jacket, she had hit a Brazilian girl named Noel much harder than she meant to, damaging the other girl’s larynx. Only the fact that Noel threw the first punch had spared her father an expensive legal headache, but to be safe Jude had taught herself to be invisible ever after, to move through crowds of people without a ripple. She wished that a thousand people had noticed her today, but they hadn’t. Because she had been practicing. She had been a shadow, her hand slipping in and out of their pockets.

  She would regret being invisible if she woke up in a box tomorrow.

  Jude lived with her parents in Pacific Heights, sixteen blocks from school. And though she left the house promptly at 7:00 each morning, she so rarely arrived at Sacred Heart it was unlikely that anyone would notice if she disappeared for a week. She still wore the uniform most days, because it prevented her mother from getting agitated. When her mother became agitated she tended to go overboard with her medication, a too generous cocktail of amphetamines and painkillers that pushed her into episodes of such extreme paranoia that she once nailed shut the door to her bedroom and burrowed into her walk-in closet with a hammer and small axe and tried to dig a tunnel to a neighboring room that existed only in her head.

  Jude wore the uniform because it soothed her mother.

  The sight of Jude in the familiar outfit gave her mother the temporary illusion that the inside of her head was in order. And because her mother was a near bottomless source of guilt for her, Jude wore the uniform.

  But she would have worn it anyway, because it was so practical.

  By the time she entered middle school, Jude had discovered that if she moved her hips just so and let the tiny blue-and-black skirt flutter at her thighs, the men and boys in her immediate vicinity became hushed, compliant. She crossed her legs and sneezed and the man nearest her trembled and handed her a tissue. She crouched on the sidewalk to dig through her purse with her knees pressed together and hair blowing in her mouth and her butt just touching the heels of her black Mary Janes, and even the stoned hustlers and street artists stopped to ask if she were lost. She twisted her white shirttails into a bow that exposed an inch of bare belly and a college boy would buy her a coffee. And if she tugged her socks up over her k
nees, cab drivers offered her cigarettes and took her wherever she wanted to go.

  She would give anything to be in the back of a yellow cab right now. She would ask the driver to take her to the one place that felt like church to her, the ruined baths just up the hill from Ocean Beach. She would close her eyes as they sailed through the sunset, and thank God she wasn’t on her feet, because she was so sore, so raw inside. The soft pink hidden flesh in what her mother perversely referred to as her special prize felt as if it had been flayed with a chunk of glass.

  Again she looked at the washcloth, the smear of red against white.

  This was not menstrual blood.

  Jude had the altered internal clock of a long-distance runner and rarely had a regular period. She ran nearly seventy miles per week through the rain and mist in the Presidio, and trained with weights and worked out every other day with a tae-kwon-do master class, and this regimen combined with birth control pills and the amphetamines she skimmed from her mother’s cave had pretty much cancelled her cycle. This was the blood of trauma, and now it struck her that she would never forgive herself if she left even a drop of it behind.

  Jude pushed herself up from the edge of the tub and crossed unsteadily to the sink, where she turned on the hot water. She rinsed the cloth with liquid soap and scrubbed it with her fingernails until the water ran clear, trying not to glance at herself in the mirror, though not because she disliked her body.

  The opposite, rather.

  She was aware that most of the girls her age, the ones she ever bothered to talk to, suffered intense body-image issues and eating disorders that haunted and consumed them. Jude had never known what to say to them, though she had tried to feel what they did, thinking it would be a useful emotion or psychosis to access. Her own body was a product of conditioning that Bruce Lee would not have scoffed at, and the genetic gift of a Thai mother and Irish father speckled with Israeli blood. She was long and lean with fine yellow skin and small breasts with large brown nipples that paralyzed men and boys without fail. Her stomach was flat and hard, though not yet the washboard she coveted. Thousands upon thousands of pushups had brought out the shadow of definition in her arms and shoulders, and although she considered her ass to be on the smallish side, it was tight and curved and fit perfectly in the palm of the pool boy’s hand, or so it had when she was twelve and shaped like a wisp of smoke and he was still unafraid to touch and pet and wrestle with her.

  The pool boy was four years older than Jude, but small. He was just a whisper of bone and muscle. He had a pretty pink mouth and green eyes, long blond hair and the perfect sharp ears of an elf, and he seemed always to be tan, regardless of season. He was sweet and playful and Jude supposed she had suffered a temporary crush on him, and she used to hang around the pool in her red racing bikini and watch him while he worked. And sometimes she was able to lure him into the pool when he was done cleaning it, provided her father was not around. The pool boy was afraid of him, and rightly so. Jude’s father had terrorized him often. But when her father was away on business, Jude and the pool boy wrestled and chased each other underwater, skin bright and flashing, and sometimes the pool boy retreated from her with a bulge in his swimsuit and a look on his face that she found fascinating. Jude was strong even at twelve. And one day, without meaning to, she held the pool boy under the surface too long, she held him down until he struggled and freaked out, and only when he scratched open her arms with his fingernails did she realize what she was doing. When she released him, the pool boy withdrew from her, pale and gasping, and ever after had avoided her.

  Jude knew why she had done it.

  Her father had thrown her into the swimming pool when she was five and not yet a confident swimmer. He stood watching from the pool’s edge as she panicked and thrashed and finally went under. Her father had allowed her to drown, then revived her, and she was never sure if his intention was to teach her not to fear death or to remind her that he had the power of life over her. She had decided that it was both of these, and became wary of him. But aside from offering advice with math and soccer, her father left her alone until she was nine, when he drove her up the coast and made her hike through the woods in the dark until they reached the beach. He armed her with a knife and compass, then abandoned her there, telling her she had one hour to find her way back to the highway. He promised her that if it took her longer than an hour, the car would be gone.

  And not long after her tenth birthday, he began teaching her to be a pickpocket. He allowed her to practice on him for exactly one day, in the relatively intimate space of his closet at home, before taking her for a ride on BART during the afternoon commute so she could try the real thing. He selected easy targets for her at first, then ever more challenging ones. The worst of these had been a burly, sweating man in a rumpled suit and tie with needle-bright eyes, who scratched at his arms and kept swiveling his head left and right. Jude had failed to come away with even a pack of cigarettes, but neither had she been caught with her hand in the twitching man’s pocket. And when she returned with empty hands to her father’s side, he gave a shiver of a smile and touched her face with one hand, and though she couldn’t yet verbalize it, she comprehended that he was telling her to choose her targets with care, that the burly man had been a junkie day trader of some kind, chemically altered and paranoid and therefore not a suitable mark.

  Her father was pathologically reserved with praise and affection. He touched her so rarely that Jude could number on one hand the times he had kissed her forehead or patted her knee. But when he wanted her to understand something important, he touched her face. He took her cheek and jaw in the hollow of his hand and the world fell away. So when she was thirteen, Jude had been surprised and curious to discover that the sudden proximity of her body made him uncomfortable. She first assumed this had to do with her resemblance to her mother and the natural spin of echoes and nostalgia that entailed, then she read Nabokov and understood.

  And since then she watched herself through her father’s eyes.

  Jude looked into the mirror through his eyes and tried to grasp what it was about the curves and angles of her body that made her father uneasy. She stared at herself through the pool boy’s eyes, through the eyes of men she passed on the street, studying her body for its strengths and weaknesses and trying to see precisely what these men saw, to access the rush of desire they felt when confronted with her flesh. She tried to conjure their secret, violent thoughts, staring at herself until she grew dizzy and her image wavered and she thought she might fall into the mirror and drown.

  But this was not the mirror in her bedroom, where it was safe to sink below the surface. She could not afford the chance that the image of herself naked and bruised in a strange bathroom would make her feel small, because when her four minutes expired she was going to kill the man in the next room, and she was afraid that if she felt small she might be unable to. Jude had to kill him not because he had so ravaged her with his hands and mouth that she bled, not because he had abruptly shoved her from the bed and told her in a soft cold voice that her pussy tasted of rot and to go wash herself, but because she knew he wasn’t finished with her.

  Drugged and disoriented though she had been, she had noticed the pink cell phone on the mantle, the rollerblades in the corner. The red cowboy boots on an end table, the baseball glove in a box, the tiny black T-shirt nailed to a wall. These were trophies of past kills. And there was a faint smell in his kitchen that made her think of maggots.

  She calculated that two minutes remained.

  The washcloth was white again. Jude turned away from the sink and gathered the remains of her clothes, the plaid skirt and thin white tank top. She had chosen not to wear a bra today, a move she made breezily in the rosy light of her room a half day ago that now felt like a lifetime stuck in amber, and while she remembered being satisfied this morning by how snugly the cotton tank fit her, she was less thrilled about it now. And as she pulled it over her head, she could smell him. She shrugged
this away and concentrated on the task of fastening her skirt at her hips. She only wished she were wearing her shoes. Jude felt more vulnerable when barefoot, which she supposed qualified as irony. She hazily remembered kicking off her shoes upon entering the apartment, and knew she had done so because she was aware that men preferred that she appear small. A vaguely defined business associate of her father’s had seized her and lifted her up once, without warning, in their kitchen when she was fifteen, his hands gripping her firmly and touching more of her chest than she liked, and he remarked that it was like holding a doll. His face had flushed brightly as he released her.

  She had left her damp socks on the radiator by the window, and by then she had been truly dizzy, the room warped and turned sideways, the building tipping on an axis that wasn’t there. Jude remembered the man had removed her underwear without her help, and without asking if she minded, after she sat down, or collapsed, in a leather armchair. He had pulled the pale pink boy shorts over her thighs and down with care, not ripping them as she expected but handling them as if they were a captured butterfly he was reluctant to crush. She thought it inaccurate to call that moment a memory because she had seen it happen from a faraway overhead view, as if she had briefly vacated her body and climbed to higher, safer ground. She had no idea what he had done with her shorts after that, whether he had stuffed them into his pocket for luck, or calmly eaten them.

  Jude had seen but not touched her white shirt on her way to the bathroom, crushed at the base of a wall like rejected flowers, splashed with blood and one sleeve torn from the body. The blood had puzzled her, because she didn’t remember spilling it. But now she saw another wide-angle bird’s eye shot of herself on top of him, rising and falling in slow motion and underwater light, and remotely she was aware that he was inside her and she saw that her nose was bleeding, not because he hit her but because some critical piece of wiring had come unmoored in her head. The disconnected wiring and foreign, splintered memories that came with it were the result of an unknown drug in a cup of hot chocolate that she had lifted to her own lips. These broken memories and disturbing out-of-body images of herself were never intended for her, because the hot chocolate had not been hers. She had taken the cup in place of another, and as she drank she heard her father’s voice telling her to be unafraid.