USA Noir - Best Of The Akashic Noir Series

by Johnny Temple (Editor)

  He reached down to the door and pulled on a handle but he couldn’t get the door to open. He guessed the power locks had shorted out. He tried to bring his legs up so he could kick out one of the shattered windows but his seat belt held him in place. The water was up to his chin now and rising. He quickly unsnapped his belt and tried to move again but realized it hadn’t been the impediment. His legs—both of them—were somehow pinned beneath the steering column, which had dropped down during the impact. He tried to raise it but couldn’t get it to move an inch. He tried to squeeze out from beneath the weight but he was thoroughly pinned.

  The water was over his mouth now. By leaning his head back and raising his chin up, he gained an inch, but that was rapidly erased by the rising tide. In less than thirty seconds the water was over him and he was holding his last breath.

  He thought about the coyote that had sent him over the side. It didn’t seem possible that what had happened had happened. A reverse cascade of bubbles leaked from his mouth and traveled upward as he cursed.

  Suddenly everything was illuminated. A bright light glowed in front of him. He leaned forward and looked out through the windshield. He saw a robed figure above the light, arms at his side.

  Clewiston knew that it was over. His lungs burned for release. It was his time. He let out all of his breath and took the water in. He journeyed toward the light.

  * * *

  James Crossley finished tying his robe and looked down into his backyard pool. It was as if the car had literally dropped from the heavens. The brick wall surrounding the pool was undisturbed. The car had to have come in over it and then landed perfectly in the middle of the pool. About a third of the water had slopped over the side with the impact. But the car was fully submerged except for the edge of the trunk lid, which had come open during the landing. Floating on the surface was a lifelike mannequin dressed in old jeans and a green military jacket. The scene was bizarre.

  Crossley looked up toward the crestline to where he knew Mulholland Drive edged the hillside. He wondered if someone had pushed the car off the road, if this was some sort of prank.

  He then looked back down into the pool. The surface was calming and he could see the car more clearly in the beam of the pool’s light. And it was then that he thought he saw someone sitting unmoving behind the steering wheel.

  Crossley ripped his robe off and dove naked into the pool.

  OUR EYES COULDN’T STOP OPENING

  BY MEGAN ABBOTT

  Alter Road, Detroit

  (Originally published in Detroit Noir)

  She always wanted to go and there was no stopping her once she got it in her head. Her voice was like a pressure in the car, Joni’s mother’s Buick, its spongy burgundy seats and the smell forever of L’Air du Temps.

  Joni was game for it and I guess we all were, we liked Keri, you see, we admired her soft and dangerous ways. So lovely with her slippery brown hair lashed with bright highlights (all summer spent at the Woods Pool squeezing lemons into her scalp), so lovely with her darted skirts, ironed jeans, slick Goody barrettes. She was Harper Woods but, you see, she transcended that, so we let her slide, we let her hang with us, even let her lead us sometimes, times like this. Her mother put every dime of her Hutzel Hospital nurse’s salary into her daughter’s clothes, kept Keri looking Grosse Pointe and Keri could pass, pass well enough to snare with her pearl-pink nails, fingers spread, a prime tow-headed, lacrosse-playing Grosse Pointe South boy, Kirk Deegan, hair as blond as an Easter chick and crisp shirts with thin sherbet-colored stripes and slick loafers, ankles bare with the fuzz of downy boy hair. Oh my, did she hit the jackpot with him. Play her cards right, she could ride him anywhere she wanted to go.

  None of us, not even anyone we knew, was supposed to cross Alter Road, even get near Alter Road, it was like dropping off the face of the Earth. Worse even than that. The things that happened when you slipped across that burning strip of asphalt, the girl a few years older than us—someone’s cousin, you didn’t know her—who crossed over, ended up all the way over on Connor, they found her three days later in a field, gangbanged into a coma at some crack house and dumped for dead, no, no, it was three weeks later and someone saw her taking the pipe and turning tricks in Cass Corridor. No, no, it was worse, far worse . . . and then it’d go to whispers, awful whispering, what could be worse, you wondered, and you could always wonder something even worse.

  But there Keri would be, nestled in the backseat, glossy lips shining in the dark car, fists on the back of the passenger seat, saying, Let’s go, let’s go. C’mon. What’s here, there’s nothing here. Let’s go.

  How many nights, after all, could be spent sloshing long spoons in our peanut butter cup sundaes at Friendly’s, watching boys play hockey at Community Ice, huddling down in seats at Woods Theater, popcorn sticky on our fingers, lips, driving around trying to find parties, any parties, where new boys would be, boys we’d never met, but our boys, they all wore their letter jackets and all had the same slant in their hair, straight across the forehead, sharp as ice, and the same conversation and the same five words before your mouth around the beer can begging for the chance to not talk, to let the full-mouthed rush of music flood out all the talk and let the beer do its work so this boy in front of you might seem everything he wasn’t and more—how many nights of that, I ask you?

  So when Keri said, Let’s go, maybe we let ourselves unsnide our tones, let our tilted-neck looks loosen a bit, unroll our eyes, curl into her quiet urging and go, go, go.

  * * *

  When he was around, Joni’s brother, he’d buy us beer, wine coolers, and she’d hide them in the hedgerow underneath her bedroom window until we needed them. But he was at Hillsdale most of the time, trying to get credits enough to graduate and start working at Prudential for his dad. So there was Bronco’s, right off the Outer Drive exit, and you could buy anything you wanted there, long as you were willing to drop twelve dollars for a four-pack of big-mouth Mickey’s, or a tall 40 of Old Style, the tang of it lingering in your mouth all night.

  Bronco’s, it was a kick, the street so empty and the fluorescent burst of its sign rising like a beacon, a shooting star as you came up the long slope on I-94. Sometimes it made your heart beat, stomach wiggle, vibrate, flip, like when the manager—a big-bellied white guy with a greasy lower lip—made Keri go in the back with him, behind the twitchy curtain. But he only wanted to turn her around, only wanted to run his fingers studded with fat gold over her chest and backside, and what did any of us care? It was worth the extra bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill he’d dropped in our paper bag. Hell, you always pay a price, don’t you? Like Keri said, from the dark of the backseat, how different was it from letting the Blue Devils football starters under your bra so you’d get into the seniors’ party on Lakeshore where the parents had laid out for six cases of champagne before heading to Aruba for the weekend? How different from that? Very different, we said, but we knew it wasn’t.

  And it wasn’t only Bronco’s. Bronco’s was just how it started. Next, it was leaving a party on Windmill Pointe, hotted up on beer and cigarettes and feeling our legs bristling tight in our jeans and Keri saying, Let’s go that way, yes, that way, and before we knew it, we’d tripped the fence.

  Goddamn, Alter Road a memory.

  We pitched over the shortest curl of a bridge, over a sludgy canal not twelve feet across, and there we were. But it wasn’t like over by Bronco’s. It was just as deserted, but it didn’t look like a scarred patch of city at all. The smell of the water and trailers backed up onto the canal, abandoned trailers, one after another, rutted through with shimmering rust, quivering under streetlamps, narrow roads filled with rotting boats teetering on wheels, mobile homes with windows broken out, streets so narrow it was like being on the track of a funhouse ride and then, suddenly, all the tightness giving way to big, empty expanses of forlorn, overgrown fields, like some kind of prairie. Never saw anything like it, who of us had? And our breath going fast in the car
because we’d found something we’d never seen before. And it was like our eyes couldn’t stop opening.

  We’d let the gas pedal surge, vibrate, take us past sixty, seventy on the side streets, take the corners hard, let the tires skid, what did we care? There was no one here. There was no one on the streets. All you could see was shivering piles of trash, one-eyed cats darting. What did it matter? There was no one left. I tell you, it was ours.

  But Keri, she kept finding new streets and her voice, soft and lulling, the Grosse Pointe drawl, bored-sounding even when excited, hot under the eyes, all that. She’d say—and who were we to decline?—she’d say, Turn left, turn left, Joni, there, Joni, there, and we’d find ourselves further in, further in, down the river, the slick brew of the canals long past now, and trembling houses cooing to us as the wind gasped through their swelling crevices, their glassless windows, their dark glory. That’s the thing Keri showed us. She showed us that.

  It’s beautiful, she said without even saying it.

  If we’d all been speaking out loud, we’d have never had the guts to say it.

  And eventually, we saw people.

  First, a stray cluster of figures, young men, walking together. A man alone, singing softly, we could hear, our windows open, radio off, we wanted to hear. Do you see? We wanted to hear. He was singing about a lady in a gold dress.

  A woman, middle-aged, clapping her hands at her dog, calling him toward her, the dog limping toward her, howling, wistful.

  But mostly small fits of young men standing around, tossing cigarette embers glowing into the street.

  At first, Joni’d pick up speed whenever she saw them, chattering high-pitched and breathless, about how they’d try to jack her mother’s car and take it to a chop shop—there’s hundreds of them all over the city, there are—and in twenty minutes her mother’s burgundy Buick Regal would be stripped to a metal skeleton. That’s how it works, she’d say. That’s what they do.

  None of us said anything. We felt the car hop over a pothole, our stomachs lifting, like on the Gemini at Cedar Pointe.

  Then, Keri: This time, Joni, go slow. Come on, Joni. Let’s see what they’re doing. Let’s see. And Joni would teeth-chatter at us about white girls raped in empty fields till they bled to death, and we let her say it because she needed to say it, had to get it out, and maybe we had to hear it, but we knew she’d go slower, and she did.

  And then we’d be long past Alter, past Chalmers even, into that hissing whisper that was, to us, Detroit. Detroit. Say it. Hard in your mouth like a shard of glass. Glittering between your teeth and who could tell you it wasn’t terrifying and beautiful all at once?

  * * *

  His voice was low and rippled and yeah, I’ll say it, his skin was dark as black velvet, with a blue glow under the streetlamp, and he was talking to his friends from the sidewalk and we could almost hear them and God we wanted to and there was Keri and she had her hands curled around the edges of the top of the car door, window down, and he was looking at her like he knew her, and how could he? He didn’t, but he couldn’t miss that long spray of hair tumbling out the window as she craned to get a better look, to hear, to get meaning.

  “You lost, honey?” is what he said, and it was like glass shattering, or something stretched tight for a thousand miles suddenly letting loose, releasing, releasing.

  “Yes,” was all she managed to whisper back before Joni had dropped her foot down on the gas hard and we all charged away, our hearts hammering . . .

  . . . and Keri still saying, Yes, yes, yes . . .

  You have to understand, we didn’t know anything. We didn’t know anything at all about conditions, history, the meanings of things. We didn’t know anything. We were seeing castles in ruin like out of some dark fairy tale, but with an edge of wantonness, like all the best fairy tales.

  * * *

  Keri, by the lockers Monday a.m., doors clattering, pencils rolling down polished halls, she leans toward me, cheek pressed on the inside of my locker door, swinging it, rocking it. She says, Remember when Joni drove the car real slow and let us get our eyeful and he looked at me and in his eyes I could see he knew more than any of us, more than all the teachers at school, all the parents too, he knew more in that flashing second than all the rest of everyone, all of them sleeping through forever in this place, this marble-walled place. In his eyes, what I could see was he was someone more than I could ever be.

  Keri, she tells us, first date with Kirk Deegan, he resplendent in Blue Devils jacket and puka shell necklace from a December trip to Sanibel Island, he winds his way from his hulking colonial on Rivard to her faded one-story in Harper Woods, can smell the pizza grease from the deli on the corner and he won’t come inside. No, he stands one foot on the bottom porch step, Ray-Bans propped, and says, “Nah, where would I fit?”

  I should’ve seen it coming because who wanted to keep doing the same thing, which was fun at first, but where could it go, in the end? You couldn’t get out of the car. It was for kicks and you did it until the kicks stopped. This time, it worked like this: Joni started dating a De La Salle boy and he had a car anyway and evenings were now for him and I was starting up tennis and there were new parties and Keri, we saw her more like a long-haired flitter in the corner of our eye. We barely saw her at all. She was there in the Homecoming Court, glowing in her floral dress, smiling brightly, waving at everyone and standing ramrod straight, face perfect and still. Face so frozen for all the flashing cameras, for all the cheering faces, for all of us, for everybody.

  It was her last of everything that year. It was her last. You could kind of see it then, couldn’t you? It was there somehow, making everything more special, more like something, at least.

  Later, at the dance, willowing around Kirk Deegan, he towering over her with that bright wedge of hair, the blackwatch plaid vest and tie, that slit-eyed cool, he who never let another boy come near, even touch her shoulder, even move close. What boy ever kept me so tight at hand? What boy? I ask you. He loved her that much, everyone said it. He loved her that much.

  Sidling up to me in study hall, eyes fluttering, red, Keri’s voice tired, slipping into my ear. How was the party? she’s asking. Was Stacey mad I didn’t go? I just smiled because of course Stacey was mad, because Keri was supposed to come and bring Kirk, because if Kirk came, so would Matt Tomlin, and she was angling for Matt Tomlin, was so ready for him she could barely stand it.

  Where’d you guys go? I asked. And she gave me a flicker of a smile and she didn’t say anything. And I said, Did you and Kirk . . . and she shook her head fast.

  I didn’t see him. It wasn’t that.

  And she told me Kirk was too wasted to go anywhere, showing off some old scotch of his father’s and then drinking three inches of it, passing out on the leather armchair like some old guy. So she took his Audi and went for a drive and before she knew it she was long past Alter Road, long past everything. Even the Jefferson plant, the Waterworks. She said she drove all around in his car and saw things and ended up getting lost down by some abandoned railroad.

  She was crazy to be doing it and I told her so and she nodded like she agreed, but I could tell by the way she looked off in the other direction that she didn’t agree at all and that all she’d realized was that she wouldn’t bother telling me about it anymore. But she didn’t stop going. You could feel her rippling in her own pleasure over it. Like she was someone special who got to do things no one else did.

  I met some people a few weeks ago, she said. They invited me to a party at this big old house, I don’t even know where. You could see the big Chrysler plant. That was all you could see. The house, it had turrets like a castle. Like a castle in a fairy tale. I remember I wanted to go to the top and stand in the turret like a lost princess and look out on the river, waving a long handkerchief like I was waiting for a lover to come back from the sea.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. I never heard anyone talk like this. I think it was the most I ever heard h
er talk and it didn’t make any more sense than Trig class to me.

  The house was empty, she said. The floors were part broken through. My foot slid between the boards and this boy, he had to lift me out and he was laughing. They were playing music and speakers were all over the house, one set up on an old banister thick as a tree trunk and everyone dancing and beer and Wild Irish Rose, wine so red like bloodshot eyes and smoking, getting high, and the whole place alive and I danced, one of them danced with me, so dark and with a diamond in his ear and he said he’d take me to Fox Creek, near the trailers, and we’d shoot old gas tanks, and I said I would, and he sang in my ear and I could feel it through my whole body, like in lab when Mr. Muskaluk ran that current through me in front of the class, like that, like that. It was this. I could do anything, no one cared. I could do anything and no one stopped me.

  “What did you do, Keri?” I asked, my voice sounded funny to me. Sounded fast and gasping. “What did you do?”

  Anything, she whispered, voice breathless and dirty. Anything.

  * * *

  Did I have time for that, for that kind of trashiness? Don’t you see, Joni said, she’s Harper Woods. She may look Grosse Pointe, she may have one on her arm. But that’s a flash, a trick of the eye. Deep down, she’s five blocks from the freeway. It all comes back. You can fight it, but it comes back.

  So we dropped her and it was just as well because lots of things were happening, with boys’ hockey starting and everyone’s parents taking trips to Florida and so there were more parties and there was the thing with the sophomore girl and the senior boy and the police and things like that that everyone talked about. Other stuff happened too—I’d dropped out of tennis and then dropped back in—there was a boy for me with a brush of brown hair and the long, Adam’s-appled neck of a star basketball player, which he was, and I took him to the Sadie Hawkins dance and he took me to parties and to parents’ beds in upstairs rooms at parties and slid his tongue fast into my dry mouth and his hands fumbling everywhere, and his car, it smelled like him, Polo and new sneakers and Stroh’s, and when it was over and I smelled those things, which you could smell on a dozen boys a day, it was him all over again, but then before I knew it, it was gone. He was gone, yeah, but the feeling that went with it too. Just like that.