Portland Noir

by Kevin Sampsell

  “She wanted to spy on you.” Zeke’s voice has a bitter edge. “She thought it was funny. It never occurred to her you’d turn the camera on her.” He drops his chin. “You stupid bitch, I told you to stay away from this guy. But no, you and doinkus here”—he thrusts a thumb at Hamilton—“have to go draw his attention. And that retarded stunt last night … well, he ended up with the pictures anyway, didn’t he?”

  That shuts everyone up. Ella stubs out her smoke. Zeke fumes into his chest. Hamilton picks up the CF card, gazes at it with a rueful smile. “So, what do you want, detective?”

  Detective. I’m back on the case.

  When I was still a cop, that question wouldn’t have even come up. My job was to make cases, not express personal desires. But now I’m a guy living on a barely sufficient pension, without prospects. I don’t give a shit about their scam. “I’ll settle a full five night’s pay, and the promise you’ll throw me a little work every now and then.” I look Hamilton in the eye.

  “And I’m telling you right now, I don’t write invoices.”

  GONE DOGGY GONE

  BY JAMIE S. RICH & JOËLLE JONES

  Montgomery Park

  VIRGO

  BY JESS WALTER

  Pearl District

  My side of the story … you want my side of the story?

  That’s funny. The suits at the newspaper said the same thing when they fired me—that I should give my side of the story.

  As I usually do, I chose to say nothing, and the next day the Oregonian ran its “Public Apology to our Readers” full of righteous puffery about how I “acted maliciously and recklessly,” how I “broke the sacred trust between a newspaper and its readers.”

  Well, here we are again … someone pretending to want my side of the story, as if the truth were a box that you could simply flip over when you want another version. Well, there are no sides, no box, no truth.

  We both know you don’t want my side of anything. You don’t want to understand me, you don’t want to know me, and you sure as hell don’t want to feel what I felt.

  This is what you really want to know: Why did he do what he did?

  Fine. You want to know why I did it? I did it to let her know how much she meant to me. That’s why I did it, all of it—for her.

  This all began in late October. We’d had the same old fight, with the same stale grievances Tanya had been lobbing at me for three months, almost since the day I moved in: Blah, blah, stalled relationship; blah, blah, stunted growth; blah, blah, I worry that you’re a psychopath.

  I said I’d try harder, but she was in a mood: “No, Trent. I want you out of here. Now.” I gathered my things. Carried four loads of clothes, shoes, CDs, action figures, and trading cards down to my car. I was about to drive away when I saw … him.

  Mark Aikens, Tanya’s missing-link ex-boyfriend, was loping up 21st like some kind of predator, like a fat coyote talking on a cell phone. She had moved to Portland for this loser, even though she made twice as much as he did. She requested a transfer from the Palo Alto software company where she worked and found a small condo in the Pearl District, but she wasn’t in town six months before he’d slept with someone else and she tossed him out. Mark Aikens was a cheating shit.

  He swung around a light pole and skipped up the steps of our old building. She buzzed him up. A sous chef at Il Pattio, Mark Aikens was one of those jerkoffs who acts like cooking is an art. She always said he was sensitive, a good listener. Now he was up in our old condo, listening his sensitive, cheating ass off. For two hours I sat in my car down the block while this guy … listened. It had grown dark outside. From the street, our condo glowed. I knew exactly which light was on—the upright living room lamp. She got it at Pottery Barn. Through our old third-floor corner window I could see shadows move across the ceiling from that light and I tried to imagine what was happening by the subtle changes in cast: she’s going to the kitchen to get him a beer; he’s going to the bathroom. How many fall nights had I snuck home early from work and looked up to see the glow from that very light? It had been my comfort. But now that light felt unbearably cold and far away, like an astronomer’s faint discovery, a flicker from across the universe and the icy beginning of time.

  I might have gone crazy had I stared at that light much longer. In fact, I’d just decided to ring the buzzer and run when the unimaginable happened.

  The light went out.

  I sat there, breathless, waiting for Mark Aikens to come down. But he didn’t. My eyes shot to the bedroom window. Also dark. That meant she was … they were …

  I tooled around the Pearl having conversations with her in my head, begging, yelling, until finally I crossed the bridge and drove toward my father’s little duplex in Northeast. I parked on the dirt strip in front and beat on his door. I could hear him clumping around inside. My dad had lost a leg to diabetes. It took him awhile to get his prosthetic on.

  When he finally answered, I said: “Tanya threw me out. She’s seeing her old boyfriend. She said living with me was like living with a stalker.”

  “You always did make people nervous,” my father said. Dad was a big sloppy man, awful at giving advice. Since my mother’s death, he’d been even less helpful in these father-son moments. He sniffed the air. “Have you been drinking?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Christ, Trent.” And he invited me inside. “Why the hell not?”

  Before all of this, I loved my job. And I’m not talking about the job as portrayed in my five-year-old performance evaluation, the low point of which (one flimsy charge of harassment stemming from an honest misunderstanding involving the women’s restroom) the newspaper found a way to dredge up in its apology to readers. No. What I loved was the work. As a features copy editor, I pulled national stories off the wire, proofread local copy, and wrote headlines for as many as five pages a day, but my favorite (because it was Tanya’s favorite) was “Inside Living”—page two of the features section, the best-read page in the O—with syndicated features like the crossword puzzle, the word jumble, celebrity birthdays, and Tanya’s favorite, the daily horoscope. That’s how we’d met, in fact, four months earlier, in a coffee shop where I saw her reading her horoscope. I launched our romance with the simple statement: “I edit that page.” Within a week we were dating, and a month later, in late July, when I was asked to leave my apartment because the paranoid woman across the courtyard objected to my having a telescope, Tanya said I could move in with her until I found a place.

  Now, to some, I may indeed be—as the newspaper’s one-sided apology to readers characterized me—strangely quiet and intense, practically a nonpresence, but to loyal readers like Tanya, I was something of an unsung hero.

  Each morning during those three glorious months, she would pour herself a cup of coffee, toast a bagel, and browse the newspaper, spending mere seconds on each page, until she arrived at “Inside Living,” her newspaper home. I couldn’t wait for her to get there. She’d make a careful fold and crease, set the page down, and study it as if it contained holy secrets. And only then would she speak to me. “Eleven down: ‘Film’s blank Peak’?”

  “Dante’s.”

  “Are you sure you don’t see the answers the day before?”

  “I told you, no.” Of course, I did see the answers the day before. But who could blame me for a little dishonesty? I was courting.

  “Hey, it’s Kirk Cameron’s birthday. Guess how old he is.”

  “Twelve? Six hundred? Who’s Kirk Cameron?”

  “Come on. You edited this page yesterday. Now you’re going to pretend you don’t know who Kirk Cameron is?”

  “That celebrity stuff comes in over the wire. I just shovel it in without reading it. You know I hate celebrities.”

  “I think you pretend not to like celebrities to make yourself appear smarter.”

  This was true. I do love celebrities.

  “Hey, look,” she’d say finally. “I’m having a five-star day. If I relax, the answers
will all come to me.”

  It’s painful now to recall those sweet mornings, the two of us bantering over our page of the newspaper, with no hint that it was about to end. And this is the strange part, the mystical part, some might say: on those days Tanya read that she was to have a five-star day … she actually had five-star days. Now, I don’t believe in such mumbo-jumbo; it was likely just the power of suggestion. But I did begin to notice (in the journals in which I record such things) that Tanya was more open to my amorous advances when she got five stars. In fact, after our first month together, I began to notice that the only time Tanya seemed at all interested in being intimate, the only time she wanted to … you know, get busy, bump uglies, bury the dog in the yard … was when she got five stars on her horoscope.

  Then one day in early October, when we’d stopped having sex altogether, I did it. I goosed her horoscope. Virgo was supposed to have three stars and I changed it to five.

  So sue me. It didn’t even work.

  Obviously, though, that’s where the idea came from. And yet I might have simply moved on and not launched my horoscope warfare had Tanya not fired the first shot at me by filing a no-contact order a mere two weeks after throwing me out. A no-contact order! Based on what, I wanted to know.

  “Well, you do drive over there every night after work and park outside her place,” my dad said as he nursed a tumbler of rum.

  “Yeah, but eight hundred feet? What kind of arbitrary number is that? Shall I carry a tape measure? How do you know if you’re eight hundred feet away from someone? There’s a tapas place around the corner from her condo. Am I just supposed to stop eating tapas?”

  “There’s a Taco Bell over on M.L. King.”

  “Tapas, Dad. Not tacos.”

  Dad poured us a drink, then turned on the TV. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you, Trent. You make people uncomfortable. When you were a kid I thought something was wrong with your eyelids, the way you never blinked. I used to ask your mom if maybe there wasn’t some surgery we could try.”

  This was my father. A woman breaks my heart and his answer is to sew my eyelids shut. But I suppose he tried. I suppose we all try.

  “Life just isn’t fair,” I said as the old widower hobbled away on his prosthetic leg to get another drink.

  “Yeah, well,” he replied, “I hope I’m not the asshole who told you it would be.”

  The very next day, November 17, Virgo got the first of thirteen straight one-star days. “Four stars: your creativity surges. Keep an eye on the big picture,” Virgo was supposed to read that day. I changed it to: “One star: watch your back.” It was glorious, imagining her read that.

  Horoscopes are cryptic and open-ended: “You’ll encounter an obstacle but you are up to the task. A Capricorn may help.” In fact, I could argue that what clearly began as a way to spoil my girlfriend’s day became a campaign to make horoscopes more useful. And I won’t pretend that I didn’t like the voice, the power that changing horoscopes gave me. In the office, I kept my own counsel, going days without speaking sometimes, but with these horoscopes I could finally say the things I’d been holding inside all those years. For our new drama critic Sharon Gleason, I wrote, “Libra. Three stars: those pants make you look fat.” For the arrogant sports columnist Mike Dunne, “Taurus. Two stars: I hope your wife’s cheating on you.” For the icy young records clerk Laura: “Cancer. Four stars: would it kill you to smile at your coworkers?”

  Of course, there were complaints about the late-November horoscopes (thankfully, they were all routed to the “Inside Living” page editor … me.) In my defense, some people actually preferred the new horoscopes. Not Virgos, of course, since they were treated to day after day of stunning disappointment—“One star: you should try to be less vindictive and disloyal … One star: hope your new boyfriend doesn’t mind your bad breath … One star: you’re not even good at sex.”

  I’m the first to admit that I went a little far on November 24, the day I read in the crossword puzzle that the clue to 9-Across was a Jamaican spice, saw that the answer was Jerk and changed the clue to Mark Aikins, e.g. Yes, it was petty, but I was being forced to wage a war without getting within eight hundred feet of my enemy.

  Yet, despite my constant barrage of single-star Virgo days and crossword puzzle salvos, I got no response from either of them. Tanya knew this was my page. She had to know I was behind her run of bad horoscopes. But I heard nothing. Some days I thought she was taunting me by not responding; other days I imagined she was so deeply mired in one-star hassles (traffic snarls and Internet outages) that she was incapable of responding.

  Another possibility arose on the last day of November. I had just called in another phony customer complaint to Il Pat-tio (“The chicken breast was woefully undercooked, having symptoms consistent with salmonella.”) and driven back to the house I now shared with my dad. That’s when I found him on the kitchen floor, slumped in a corner, his artificial leg at an odd angle, fake foot still flat on the floor.

  He was in what doctors called a diabetic coma—an obvious result of his nonstop drinking. “You need to take better care of him,” the ER nurse said. But it wasn’t until I filled out the insurance paperwork that I understood exactly how I’d failed my dad. I copied his date of birth from his driver’s license: August 28, 1947. I knew his birthday, naturally, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.

  My father was a Virgo.

  In their glee to portray me as a bad employee, the suits failed to mention that on the very day my dad was fighting for his life in a hospital bed, I still reported to work. Of course, it was also that day, November 30, that my section editor responded to a complaint from the features syndicate, investigated, and called me into her office.

  In the frenzy of meetings and recriminations that followed, I somehow got one last altered horoscope into the paper. Again, I don’t mean to portray myself as some kind of primitive, moon-worshipping kook, but the next day, Virgos across Portland read the heartfelt plea, “Five stars: you’ll get better. I’m sorry.”

  Dad pulled out of his hypoglycemic coma and returned home to live dryly, me at his side. I have purged his little house of alcohol. Dad drinks a lot of tomato juice now. Since I’m not working, we play game after game of cribbage, so much that I have begun to dream of myself as one of those pegs, making my way up and down the little board. I recently shared this dream with my court-ordered therapist. She wondered aloud if the dream had to do with my father’s peg leg. So I told Dad about my dream and he said that he sometimes dreams his missing leg is living in a trailer in Livingston, Montana. I’m thinking of asking him to come to counseling with me.

  And Tanya? Even after the story in the Oregonian—from which I hoped she’d at least glean the depth of my feelings for her—I never heard a word. My probation officer and therapist have insisted, rightly I suppose, that I leave Tanya alone, but this afternoon I went to the store to get more tomato juice for Dad and I found myself down the block from her building again.

  This time, however, it was different. I know it sounds crazy, but I’d begun to worry that my little prank had somehow caused her to become sick. And I take it as a positive sign that I didn’t want that for her. I really didn’t. I sat in my car down the street and gazed up to our third-floor corner window, just hoping to get a glimpse of her. It’s winter now and the early night sky was bruised and dusky. Our old condo was dark. It crossed my mind that maybe she had moved, and I have to say, I was okay with that. I had just reached down to start my car when I saw them walking up the sidewalk, a block from the condo. Tanya looked not only healthy, but beautiful. Happy. The big, dumb, sensitive, cheating chef was holding her hand. And I was happy for her. I really was. She laughed, and above them a streetlight winked at me and slowly came on.

  There was a line in the newspaper’s apology that stunned me, describing what I’d done as “a kind of public stalking.” I shook when I read that. I suppose it’s what Tanya thinks of me too. Maybe everyone. That I’
m crazy. And maybe I am.

  But if you really want my side of the story, here it is:

  Who isn’t crazy sometimes? Who hasn’t driven around a block hoping a certain person will come out; who hasn’t haunted a certain coffee shop, or stared obsessively at an old picture; who hasn’t toiled over every word in a letter, taken four hours to write a two-sentence e-mail, watched the phone praying that it will ring; who doesn’t lay awake at night sick with the image of her sleeping with someone else?

  I mean, Christ, seriously, what love isn’t crazy?

  And maybe it was further delusion, but as I sat in the car down the block from our old building, I was no longer wishing she’d take me back. Honestly, all I hoped was that Tanya at least thought of me when she read our page.

  I really do think I’m better.

  And so when I started the car to go home, and they crossed the street toward Tanya’s condo, I was as surprised as anyone to feel the ache come back, an ache as deep and raw as the one I felt that night in late October when I first saw the lamp go out.

  I told the other officer, the one at the scene, that I didn’t remember what happened next, though that’s not entirely true.

  I remember the throaty sound of the racing engine. I remember the feel of cutting across traffic, of grazing something, a car, they told me later, and I remember popping up on the sidewalk and scraping the light pole and I remember bearing down on the jutting corner of the building and I remember a slight hesitation as they started to turn. But what I remember most is a spreading sense of relief that it would all be over soon, that I would never again have to see the light come on in that cold apartment.

  THE RED ROOM

  BY CHRIS A. BOLTON

  Powell’s City of Books

  Jacob Black catches the kid’s reflection in the window of the bookstore coffee shop and can tell right away he’s the one. He knows nothing about his potential client—the brief, terse e-mail exchange only led to Powell’s City of Books as the meeting place. Jacob IDing himself by the pile of books next to him: The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and The Postman Always Rings Twice.