Kansas City Noir

by Steve Paul

A long sigh set her firmly in my arms. “You can’t go.”

  “Is it because you don’t like me?” I asked.

  “Oh my God,” she said, pulling my hand away and looking in my eyes. “Do you not hear my heart for you?”

  We gently tumbled through more of the rough pleasure.

  “Fuck me from behind,” she said.

  When we finished and lay side by side, she covered our eyes with her hands. “Tell me that we don’t own each other.”

  I told her.

  “What was your favorite part?” she asked.

  “About tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you poked me in the eye,” I said.

  She hid her face against my neck and laughed. “I didn’t know where you were going.”

  “What was yours?”

  “Guess,” she said, looking at me.

  “All of it.”

  “Yes,” she said, turning to peer at the door.

  “Mine too,” I said.

  She got out of bed with her back to me and put on a white robe. “Do you like waffles?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well I’m having a waffle.”

  I dressed and then went to the kitchen and watched her as she made the waffles. She ate at the table across from me. She looked up now and then and tried on a smile for me.

  “I wish time was the great healer,” she said.

  “Time is the softest crime,” I said.

  “Do you ever talk to your father?”

  “Every now and then I’ll write him a letter. Were you talking to your father at the end?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He knew he was dying. He told me he was sorry.” She cut a piece from her waffle but didn’t eat it. She moved it back and forth in a path of syrup then put her fork down. “But I’m afraid he was only sorry that he got caught.”

  “Will you ever forgive him?” I asked.

  “Time,” she said. “You?”

  “Time.”

  She picked her plate up and put it on the counter. She hadn’t eaten very much. I stepped behind her and hugged her for a long time.

  “You should go,” she said.

  “I can stay for a little longer.”

  “I have to finish packing,” she said. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  I went back to her bedroom and sat on her bed and finished putting on my clothes. I tied my shoes and glanced around. I ran a hand over the blanket on her bed. There was a glass on her nightstand. There was lipstick on it. I touched the imprint of her lips.

  She stood by the front door looking down. She put a hand on my chest, then took my hand and placed it on hers.

  “I would have run away with you,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “What was all this for?”

  “I wanted you to know how much I’d miss you,” she said.

  The light from the hall came in under the door.

  “Kiss me once more,” she said.

  I did.

  “What did you change your first name to?” I asked.

  She looked at me.

  “Give me something to touch,” I said.

  She pulled my head down toward hers and looked me full in the face as she whispered her new name.

  “I always thought we’d end up together,” I said. “I thought yours would be the last name I’d ever say.”

  I stepped into the hall and closed the door gently behind me.

  It had grown colder out, and the snow had stopped. I crossed the street and walked to the end of the block. I turned and looked up toward what I knew was her window to see if she would be there, to see if she might wave or touch her lips with a kiss. But there was nothing except the darkness of an already empty apartment.

  And it’s been a year and a day and I’m waiting for that phone call to tell me to meet her at the airport. It’s been a year and day and what will I tell her when I see her again?

  I’ll tell her we are our fathers’ children. I’ll tell her it is love, for the hurt is long in leaving.

  I’ll say here is your last good kiss when she steps into my arms. I’ll say here is the last name you’ll ever say.

  Then we’ll heal all our crimes.

  YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE

  BY PHILIP STEPHENS

  Midtown

  Hodge gave up easy to the yellow at 39th and Broadway, rolling his fossil-gray Futura slow enough to the crosswalk that the driver of the Jaguar tailgating him laid on the horn—some sort of -ologist, Hodge postulated, on the quick to an evening round at Saint Luke’s. Hodge waved, his attention fixed, though, on the windowpanes of Gomer’s Liquors crowded with decrees set in black and purple ink: Boulevard Pale, Old Granddad Rye, Boodles. He thumbed sweat from his upper lip and reached for the radio, gripping a gut of wires before he remembered: safety glass from the driver’s-side window leached daily from the floorboard, and cassettes lay scattered—Claude Williams, Julia Lee, Bennie Moten. A Stroh’s truck idled beside him.

  The passenger’s-side hinges squawked, and a woman scooted onto the bench seat and slammed the door. His son, Matthew, would have called her jazz, given acetate and vinyl Hodge had spun for the boy.

  “Hey, stranger,” she said.

  Sweat glistened beneath her cropped curls, and her top clung—salt staining fuchsia fabric at her armpits and abundant cleavage. An ammoniac, loamy odor. Skirt of pleather. Elevated cork sandals were laced to her ankles with denim straps, and a dirigible-shaped scar stood out on her shin. She smiled and lifted tortoise-shell frames, black lenses reflecting the ceiling. Her eyes were dilated. A zircon in her left foretooth glistened.

  “What?” Hodge said.

  “Seen you coming round. More than once, twice. Don’t say you didn’t.”

  “You had a silk carnation,” Hodge said.

  She patted at her ears. “Shit.”

  Hodge checked the rearview. A champagne-colored Thunderbird inched toward the Stroh’s truck, signaling to slip behind the Jag. “Just getting air,” he said.

  “Don’t y’all soak it through your skin?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Like salamanders? Pale things in caves? Your air. That’s what I figure.”

  The esoteric knowledge stymied him.

  “Buy me a drink?” she said. “For all my troubles?”

  “I ain’t got that kind of money.”

  “Gentlemen open doors for the ladies,” she said. “Your goddamn door’s a bitch. Heard of WD-40? Read up Emily Post?” She crossed her legs.

  “We ain’t happening,” Hodge said.

  “Now I’m the real deal.” She ran a forefinger down her chest, revealing red lace.

  “No doubt,” Hodge said.

  “You remain to be seen.”

  The doctor granted his horn full voice.

  “Pole ain’t gonna turn green,” she said.

  “Miracles happen.”

  “When?”

  Hodge popped the clutch, squealing from Gomer’s corner. At the bus stop south of 39th, a legless man on a rolling platform waved with both hands as if to stop a train.

  * * *

  Hodge had lost custody of his son three years ago, his wife arguing in court that he’d become a threat. Hodge drank. Had drunk. The judge nodded at the close of each of Rachel’s tearful stories. He sucked at his bicuspid after she related how one Christmas Eve, Hodge yanked at the coral-fish bathmat when Matthew refused to sit down in the tub. Suction cups pop-popped, the boy flopping to the porcelain, the blow raising an egg on the back of his head. “You don’t sit down,” Hodge had said, “you fall.” The bump was a good thing, he told Rachel; wounds you couldn’t see were the ones that got you. She called him something foul. He couldn’t remember what.

  The judge didn’t much care that Rachel had engaged in liaisons with Hodge’s friend and friend’s wife for more than a year; both of them worked at the advertising agency where Hodge once endured days in an overpriced warren of egos.

  His wife, friend,
and friend’s wife had recorded their proceedings on VHS—bad lighting, adequate sound—including a blurred scene where Rachel had said “yes” one too many times. Hodge had done video work for the agency, though he preferred the vagaries of print—double entendre, metaphoric marsh.

  The judge refused to allow the tape as evidence. Now Rachel shared a condo in Topeka with a state representative who maintained a tidy comb-over and elaborately concealed natural-gas holdings he fed to Koch Industries in Wichita, which, in turn, funded his campaigns. They owned a plyboard mansion in Leawood. She belonged to Kansas. Mission Hills had fluoridated her teeth. The head of Kansas City Southern and his wife were her godparents—Episcopalians versed in the Ecclesiasticus, which didn’t apply to them; big in the horsey set, they were. Rachel wouldn’t let Hodge near Matthew, and Hodge no longer maintained enough savings to hire another lawyer to roll over and play dead. He freelanced and busboyed part-time at Plaza III, where he labored unrecognized by former clients and coworkers amid remains of chops and steaks. Like Reagan with the Russians, Rachel and her cardiologist daddy—205 angioplasty patents to his name—had outspent him.

  To Hodge, Matthew had been a blessed error, his arrival sixteen years after his daughter Lilah was born, and two months before she had driven her mother’s BMW inside the garage of a Victorian off Bell Street, shut the door, and let the engine run. Owners of the house discovered her after they’d returned at two a.m. Often Hodge had cruised the city with Lilah: East Bottoms, where air stank of rendered chicken fat; West Bottoms, its faint evidence of long-gone abattoirs; a grandly deteriorated Northeast, where working girls stalked; lumber-lunkhead mansions in Hyde Park—good to know the ground under you. Hodge had read meters for Kansas City Power & Light to get through college. He’d strode questionable neighborhoods: rats in muddy basements where children slept on bare mattresses; a man who conversed with a taxidermied collie; a woman who’d pressed her naked self to the inside of her sliding-glass door as he passed; gunshots. He’d mentioned once to Lilah how he’d like to live in that Bell Street house. From a desk at the third-floor window, he bet, you could stare down Kansas sunsets or study the sparse skyline of Kansas City—decent, quiet, removed.

  “Only madmen work with views,” Lilah had said.

  “Such as?”

  “Hitler,” she said. “For one.”

  “You got yourself educated.”

  “Your money.”

  “Your po-po covered a bit.”

  “You’ve paid,” Lilah said. “Balloons in arteries. I mean, doesn’t that strike you as funny?”

  “The man’s yet to amuse me.”

  “Prolongs the inevitable,” she said.

  “We tend to prefer that.”

  “People are all messed up.”

  “I take them different sometimes.”

  Lilah shrugged. “Have to.”

  He still could not parse why she’d opted to drown on fumes, or in the garage of that house. After he’d quit the juice, Hodge contemplated drowning more than he figured healthy. Gulp and gone, he called it. He liked to watch the Missouri River, no more than a wing-diked drainage canal of silted effluent guarded by cottonwoods and roiling by old-brick and glass-faced buildings. A body could be drowned there and buried at once.

  * * *

  Stroh’s turned left. The Jaguar whipped around, and Hodge flowed with a crowd of cars down Broadway. Framed in the rearview, the legless man kept waving; Hodge checked long thighs beside him. Rare working girls had tapped his passenger’s-side window with coins; none had gotten in his car. Blame economics; George H.W. Bush; one-in-ten-years wars; crack. If times weren’t hard, then, as Lilah might have it, they were all messed up.

  “Thirsty?”

  “Known to be,” Hodge said.

  “You sweat like a whore in church.”

  “Your denomination?”

  “Shit,” she said. “Buggered, blessed, or both. That’s church, Honeydew.” She took from a fringed leather bag a fifth of sloe gin and proffered it.

  Hodge refused the syrup, pulled off below the Record Exchange, and considered going in for a Ray Charles album that he’d visited, so she’d give up, but he lacked green leaf and didn’t want to leave her with his ride. Four car lengths back, the T-Bird drifted to a stop, a blocky headlamped sixteen-footer; its curb feelers shimmered; late light obscured the driver.

  She tucked away the sloe gin and took from her bag a Mickey’s Big Mouth. Green glass sweat in her hand, and when she passed it over, he caught a glimpse of her pager. How many in her line carted cold booze in purses? He twisted off the cap and sniffed, then handed back the bottle.

  “I like the smell.”

  “What else you like?”

  * * *

  He’d white-knuckled his way off juice, loath to admit to the maddening tedium of cold turkey. Writhing on the floor of his rental house off Gillham, he swore truths left his mouth but couldn’t determine if they’d originated in his head. He clung to the crapper. He sweat, chilled, cramped, twitched, dreamed, told himself this was but a dream, crying out the child’s song for comfort. Scissor-tailed birds scratched along the baseboards of his lathe and plaster shithole, their beaks long and glistening. He killed knots in the hardwood floor.

  Hodge lay curled on linoleum tiles of the breakfast nook when a cabal of middle-aged men entered: camel-hair coats, stingy-brim fedoras, brown boots, toes rigged with silver blades. “Out to Hey Hay,” the darkest man said, “two bits straighten you out.” The others chuckled.

  “I want a steak,” Hodge said to a square of tile. He thought he might throw up.

  “White boy down to Milton’s get him a steak. Rare cuts just waiting on you.”

  * * *

  He attended one meeting but knew too many people, and his bad habits were not their business, so he drove the city—like with Lilah—riding swells of street as if he were a pilot maydayed out at the controls of a plane gone down in gulf waters.

  Hodge rarely thought on the events leading him to quit. He took an elbow from Lou or Hugh or Drew, bouncer nonetheless, and fell against the front door of the Grand Emporium. Onstage, a glistening bald man labored over an Asus7, heavy with watery reverb, the tune bearing no relation to any blues Hodge knew. His shoulder blades pained him. The door didn’t give until someone employed a fist to Hodge’s face, and his carcass dropped into hard currents.

  “Who knows what the drowned have to say,” Hodge had said sometimes, “but for the washed up?” Lame pun, and puns were for people, Lilah said, who couldn’t be bothered to immerse themselves in jokes, let alone conversations. Patrons set upon him, their shoes fitting gaps in his ribs. They lacked the decency to drag him to a back alley. The owner stepped from his club, worrying his fey soul tag with his teeth, and Hodge crabbed to the curb, asked for air, but tasted blood. An orange Fiesta fumed past.

  “Excuse me,” someone said; the crowd backed off to reveal man and woman—arms linked for an evening promenade. He wore a navy-blue pin-striped suit, a yellow tie loosened from his starched collar. Her sequined skirt flashed like perch at docksides, and her silver shoes matched—Dorothy in Baum’s Oz. “Look it up,” he’d told Lilah, when at age six she’d requested sparkling red pumps for Halloween. “They ain’t ruby.” The woman seemed distorted by thick glass—long tanning-booth legs, substantial bust, too-tight cotton blouse. Her teeth were large and bluish. Not long ago she’d played Barbie Ferraris on pressure-treated decks in Lenexa, maybe, a quarter mile from cornfields. She crossed the state line monthly from Johnson County to buy cocaine.

  “Oh, hey, Hodge,” the man said, stepping over him.

  Blood clouded Hodge’s eye. The woman smiled. “It’s me. Remember? Lilah.” She was not Lilah; Lilah was long dead. After that he failed to remember.

  * * *

  For two days of a five-day visit to Truman Medical Center, Hodge lay unconscious. If he’d had visitors, they left neither notes nor flowers. On his third morning, a uniformed cop stood at the foot of his bed.r />
  “Dell,” Hodge said.

  Hodge and Dell had wreaked mild havoc at Southwest High. They’d streaked the Nelson-Atkins one night, their teenage frontal lobes too underdeveloped to comprehend twenty-four-hour surveillance on grounds where billions of dollars of art were stored. Hodge’s father picked him up naked at the downtown jail. Dell’s father left him for two days; he’d worked CIA in Indochina four years past the Kennedy assassination. Dell heard his father scream some nights from his parents’ bedroom. Now he patrolled Central, but lived over the river—Northland. “Know what goes on down there?” he once said. “I wouldn’t run my girls through that.”

  “Same as anywhere,” Hodge replied, but he knew. On a Sunday-morning drive he witnessed one man blow another outside UMB bank downtown; the recipient paid with bagged rock—all while Hodge waited on a light.

  “Tip of the iceberg,” Dell said.

  Dell loved a nervous blond wife, Elaine, who rubbed his thick neck and cooked casseroles Campbell’s style. His two girls could sing the score of Oklahoma!: everything was up-to-date in Kansas City; they’d gone about as far as they could go.

  But now, Dell stepped to the bedside, tapping his wedding ring on the rail. “Told me you weren’t quite with us yet.”

  “That’s news?”

  “Bruised spleen, three cracked ribs, busted molar, severe concussion, internal bleeding. Here’s what I like—four fractured bones in your hand. You hit back, Hodge.”

  “You gone sorting through my bills?”

  “Nurses find it queer when cops ask after juiceheads.”

  “You weren’t my savior, were you?”

  “Wasn’t even on duty. You plan to press charges?”

  “At fists and feet?”

  “People attached to them. Know what got you here?”

  “Bottom-shelf gin.”

  “Insulted a woman,” Dell said.

  “Newscaster,” Hodge said. “Half Vietnamese. Fox.”

  “TV station? Or is that a description?”

  “Full hour of fire, murder, and mayhem.”

  “Folks find it compelling,” Dell said. Hat in hand, he scratched his hairline, his left arm sunburned. “Ain’t my show.”