St. Louis Noir

by Scott Phillips

  One evening, Sharon went into the Keyhole after work. (Cooking was not her thing.) She loved their fried tripe sandwiches, famous as the best in St. Louis. She noticed Carla at a back table flirting and sitting on a man’s lap. Looking closer, Sharon saw that the man was Willie, her boyfriend. She squinted as Willie grinned down Carla’s bosom. When he looked up, Sharon was slipping around the crowded tables and he deftly shoved Carla to the floor before flinging his arms wide open. He laughed, gurgled, “Here comes my baaaaaabbbby! Hey, baby, come sit down and join me!”

  Sharon flipped the table over and glasses, beer bottles, and innocent bystanders went flying everywhere. Two backhanded slaps and Willie was off the chair. Swiftly turning, she repeatedly kicked Carla in the ass as she scurried along the floor. Bending over, Sharon was ripping at the fabric down to her bosom when Unk staggered out of the bathroom. He rushed over, pinning Sharon’s arms down to her sides, picked her up like a doll, and carried her out of the joint kicking and cussing. Willie held the side of his stinging face, skulking close behind.

  * * *

  The last duel between Sharon and Carla was legendary. The really funny thing, Sharon wasn’t married to anyone in the family, but Unk called her “Wifey” because she was the only one who’d let him sleep on her floor when other women put him out. Willie and Unk were tight drinking buddies. When he was in town, three days out of seven Unk would be lying on their bedroom floor talking and drinking “Rosie O’Grady” wine with Willie all night while Sharon bitched and complained.

  Unk made it clear to everyone he’d take care of Sharon for as long as he lived. Carla fucked with Sharon every opportunity she got, as well as anyone else she thought posed a threat. Tired as she was of grift, drift, and hustling without a permanent home, Unk’s settlement could change her circumstances.

  Before their meeting, according to Unk’s various river rat sources, her circumstances were this: rich family heritage, old Main Line money that settled in Boston following the Civil War. After college she moved to San Francisco, entrenched in bohemian life choices that didn’t square with her Brahmin upbringing.

  In 1964, she returned home, swinging her malnourished three-year-old boy on her bony hips, father’s identity still unknown. What was known was her police record citing a string of heroin and cocaine convictions among miscellaneous other illegal activities. Her parents stripped her of her child, her trust-fund status, and formally stated certain boundaries. Feeling forced to leave, her pride demanded she never look back. Ever. When she surfaced in St. Louis circa 1969, needle tracks marked her inner arms, the creases the back of her legs, between her toes, and surely other, undisclosed body parts. She subsisted on a variety of drugs along with wine, beer, gin, vodka, and, on very good days, Johnnie Walker Black Label. Good days came around more often after she hooked up with Unk.

  Unk was a better entertainer than almost anyone. After his military service he tried working in Vegas show biz. He worked mostly as a porter, waiter, and whatever else he could do, until stress broke him down and he was admitted to a psychiatric ward—working long hours waiting tables, serving crown rib roasts that soon transformed themselves into talking severed heads. Between admittance in psychiatric hospitals he’d bum around the country. He could tell jokes, sing better than anybody in our family, play harmonica, and do impersonations of anyone, famous or not. He’d leave on job-hunting trips across country just to be in a different city—Minneapolis, Seattle, Tijuana—then he’d come back with two or three vagrant buddies tagging along. They’d stay in St. Louis awhile, then wander off again. Whenever he’d come home, he’d always have fascinating stories to tell us. After Carla came along he stopped wandering off alone. He couldn’t trust her to be loyal when he was in town. It wasn’t her nature.

  * * *

  After Christmas, Unk took Carla down south to meet more family. Big mistake. One town they visited was so small everyone there was kin to everyone else on either their mother’s line or their father’s line. Those countrified women welcomed them, at first. Carla flirting overtly with their men didn’t raise a hair. Until the men came home with their pockets picked clean. That did it. All of their money, earned hard in cotton fields, box-production factories, and various backbreaking, mind-sapping labor, gone. Insufficient wages that already couldn’t support huge families, gone. Some had as many as nineteen children. Gone. One woman tried to blow Carla’s head off with a double-barreled shotgun. Unk got her out of that town quick.

  In Memphis, Carla’s playing field was larger, so they lasted a bit before being kicked out. And when I say kicked, I mean kicked hard. Redneck-Confederate-Southern-Comfort hard. A cousin of Dad’s called scared to death, letting him know he was driving Unk nonstop three hundred straight miles to a St. Louis hospital. When my parents reached the emergency room, the attending doctor warned them before they went in to see Unk. Broken leg, he had stab wounds in all his vital organs and his upper thighs, broken ribs, and possibly other as-yet-unidentified bones, and kick bruises all over, including his head and face. Mama said Dad looked terrified. He leaned down to Unk’s ear and in a quivering hiss said, “Get rid of Carla as soon as you’re out the hospital. She’s either going to get you killed, or kill you herself. Ransom, you’re too old to play the fool. She’s making death come to you quicker than needs be. It’s time for you to enjoy your life brother, not step back in misery.”

  Mama says Unk’s swollen, blackened eyes filled with water, his lips trembled, when he rasped, “I can’t, I can’t. She’s in my blood.”

  Leaving, Dad turned to Mama sadly and said, “She’s going to kill him soon and all these years he waited for nothing ’cause that settlement is going up in smoke. He’s never going to have peace, even in the grave.”

  Dad’s prediction was truth. As he spoke I believe Carla had already plotted how to bury Unk. A year or so later she was so bold that Unk actually admitted he could taste poisonous chemicals in the food she cooked. One day he furiously jumped up from their kitchen table, knocking it over, and roared: “Carla! You are not going to kill me!”

  She answered, “You’re already dead.”

  Then he said, “I’m taking you with me!” And Unk clenched her throat, forcing the life out of her. As they struggled she coaxed him toward the open back door that led out to a cobbled patio. The witness, a neighbor across the alley, stood in his backyard listening to the cursing and scuffling, and shouted at Unk through the open door, “Mack! Let her go! Don’t—” just as Carla twisted, turned him, and kicked him as hard as she could.

  He fell back, busting through the screen door, falling head first down the concrete steps, banging his skull on the patio. She let him lie there. The neighbor ran into his house to call Dad and an ambulance. Unk spent three days in a coma before he died. Everybody told my father he should file charges against Carla. He refused. He said she’d regret everything she did. “My brother was good to her,” he said, “and she abused him, so I know she’s going to pay for it somehow. Just wait and see.”

  I was totally enraged, eager to fight. I was tired of being called nigger by grotesque retards at school, tired of stupid-ass teachers with correspondence-course degrees telling me I wasn’t smart enough, tired of trying to be a good Christian. Two months after Unk’s funeral, I came home from school and Carla was sitting on our front porch like a welcomed guest. I ran up the steps and jumped on her, clawing her face and throat, screaming, calling her every whore-bitch-slut name I could think of. I told her she should be dead! Dead! Mama heard me, ran out of the house and grabbed my arms, preventing me from throwing Carla off the side of the porch. Carla choked on laughter. Mom turned and slapped the shit out of her. She laughed and laughed and laughed.

  * * *

  The next spring it rained cats and dogs for nine straight days. When it stopped, the leftover, winter-scuffed potholes were filled deep with water. The sun came out big and beautiful on a Saturday morning and everyone on our block was so happy to see it, every excuse was given to be out
in the sunshine. People cleaned yards, grilled barbeque ribs and chicken, and gaggles of kids ran up and down the streets or played in puddles. Mama made salmon croquettes, a favorite of Sharon’s, and asked me to walk a plate of food around to her house. Willie had been drinking nonstop, still grieving Unk, constantly whining that he had no one to go fishing with anymore, worrying Sharon to exhaustion.

  On the way there I thought about changes at school. As a graduating senior every assignment now required careful decisions, carrying much more responsibility. When I approached Sharon’s house I saw a man sitting on the edge of a gigantic pothole at least six feet across and more than likely four feet deep. He had a fishing pole line down in the hole. Getting closer I could see it was Willie. His eyes were closed and he had the pole braced between the slats of his lawn chair. I doubled over, almost collapsed on the sidewalk. Sharon came outside onto her porch and saw me.

  Between giggles I said, “Sharon, why don’t you get him out of the street?”

  “Any fool thinks he can catch fish in the middle of Kingshighway needs to be left alone,” she said, then sympathetically shook her head. I could see the corners of her mouth sneak-creeping into a smile. She loved that old fool Willie.

  I heard a car racing at police-chase speed. I turned to see Carla’s brand-new red convertible Mustang burning rubber as she braked, skidding to a squealing stop, the car’s bumper less than a foot from Willie’s lawn chair. Sharon slyly slipped off her shoes, ducked, and eased down to street level as Carla jumped out of the car leaving the door open. On an extreme carnival speed-high, absolutely wild, Carla screamed at Willie, “Getthefuckouttathestreet!”

  Willie opened his eyes, red as stop signs, but otherwise didn’t budge.

  “Getthefuckouttathestreet!” Carla grabbed the lawn chair, shaking and yanking it—“Getthefuckouttathestreet!”—trying to pitch Willie into the pothole. “Getthefuckouttathestreet!” She must have sensed a shadow-presence then because she jumped, and spun around.

  “Oh, ho ho, here comes the little humpback troll.” Her insults were cut as Sharon pushed her into the pothole. Carla splashed, kicked, cussed. Sharon squatted down, pushing Carla’s head under filthy water as Carla blindly reached for something to grab ahold of. Nearly drowned, her head bobbed as Sharon pulled, knocked, and banged it around the edges of the hole; Carla gulped, sputtered, and regurgitated sewage. Before she could grip anything, Sharon wrapped that wench’s wet hair around her wrist until the scalp was tight to her fist. She popped the switchblade from her bosom like a jack-knifing pro, precisely cutting off all of Carla’s hair that she held in her fist.

  Sharon stood, untangling the hair, stretching out all four feet eleven inches, holding her arms up so everyone outside could see. Carla screamed through bloodied lips. Her legs hiked along the side of the hole before slipping, sliding, and falling back into it. Sharon threw the loose hair back at Carla’s face with victorious witch cackles. As she moved to her porch, I saw her slip strands of hair into her dress pocket.

  Wearily, Willie reached over in the pothole and tugged at Carla’s blouse. Her drug high was so completely blown she didn’t know if it was Sharon and jerked around, twisting and cussing, until her blouse came up, covering her face. Wearing no brassiere, her breasts hung heavy and bare for all to see. Instantly wide-eyed awake, Willie pepped up and shouted over his shoulder, “Haaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy, haaaaa, haaaaa, haaaa! Somebody come help me get this weird fish I caught with big milk-jug titties!”

  * * *

  Less than a year later, Carla called my dad almost every night, saying Unk was haunting her and she couldn’t sleep. She was scared, didn’t want to stay in her house alone. Given no Christian sympathy, nada, she awoke one night really strung out, running and screaming out in the streets until she found Sharon’s house. Sharon said she was babbling crazy, begging, “Please, please, help me, I’ll give you anything, an-y thing you want!” Sharon told her she didn’t want anything from her. The episodes went on for weeks. Then Carla had a stroke—a crippling, mind-debilitating stroke. Results? Invalid.

  Dad tracked down Carla’s family to let them know. The family’s attorney instructed him to put her into a nursing home and send the address. Someone would be getting in touch. But they never did.

  You know when that shark bites with his teeth, babe

  Scarlet billows start to spread

  Nursing home name registration: Carol Anne Adams. She’s thirty-nine years old. The only person who visits her is Sharon. And—probably—Unk.

  Attrition

  by Calvin Wilson

  Downtown Newsroom

  If procrastination hadn’t existed, Jarvis Trent would have been the guy to invent it. He liked to think that the more time he spent not doing something, the better the results would be when he actually got around to doing it.

  That went a long way toward explaining why Trent turned up early one November morning in a downtown St. Louis newsroom, with no one else around except an intern who was unlucky enough to be working the cop beat. Trent moved past rows of bare desks—unadorned by photos or flowers due to a series of layoffs—before finally settling into one that was as far away as he could get from the chatter of the police radio.

  He unzipped his fake-leather folder, pulled out a tape recorder, and flipped it on. The third-billed star of a clichéd indie movie about corruption in a small town began to ramble on about her commitment to doing one for the industry, one for the art.

  Trent started to yawn when he felt the presence of someone behind him. Before he had time to turn around, he heard a voice: “Are you a professional?”

  “What?”

  “I said, are you a professional?”

  It was his new boss, Tatiana Briggs. Brought in to replace Sid Murdoch, whose midlife crisis had dictated that he relinquish his post as A&E editor to become a writer/editor-at-large, concocting think pieces that no one was particularly interested in reading, but would give him something to do until he retired and eventually died.

  “That story should have been filed yesterday afternoon, at the latest,” Briggs brayed. “You’re way past deadline. We’re running a wire story instead.”

  “But I just have a few more quotes to—”

  “You should have gotten it in on time.” Briggs was clutching her handbag as if she was afraid he might grab it. “We’re not having any more of this,” she said, adding just as she turned to leave, “That’s not the way I run things.”

  Management had brought in Briggs, who had been a business writer at a San Antonio weekly, to impose law and order on the arts and entertainment writers who had gotten into the habit of turning in copy too close to deadline. In her grayish pantsuits and sensible shoes, she looked like every self-centered prig you’d ever had to put up with your whole life.

  Trent was a general assignment arts writer, and up until now he had liked his job. Mostly he wrote about things that the other writers on staff were unaware of, uninterested in, or too busy to handle—things like jazz (which the pop music guy said hurt his ears) and modern dance (which was situated in a black hole that neither the theater critic nor the classical music critic cared to explore).

  But with Briggs on board, the Monday planning meeting had become his own special ring of hell. Where Murdoch had conducted it with a lighthearted pragmatism, Briggs was nothing but business. And for someone who had been appointed A&E editor, she didn’t know much about art, film, books, theater, or music—neither classical nor pop. When Claire Shannon, the book review editor, mentioned that she was considering a freelancer’s review of a Samuel Beckett biography, Briggs thought she was referring to the character on the nineties TV show Quantum Leap.

  Later, Trent asked Claire what she thought of that exchange.

  “Oh, you can’t expect her to know everything,” Claire said.

  “She’s an arts editor and she doesn’t know who Beckett is?”

  Claire just shrugged and busied herself at her desk, her nose back in her books. It figured. She
was just like the other writers, too frightened of losing her job to do anything but acquiesce to an idiot.

  Trent wouldn’t have described himself as easygoing, and some people might have described him as prickly. But considering the vast array of personalities he’d encountered in his years in the newspaper business, he could honestly say that he had never experienced anything more uncomfortable than strong dislike. That is, until Briggs showed up.

  As the weeks went by, Trent could feel himself getting more and more resentful of her presence. The way she’d assign stories as if she actually knew what needed to be covered. And the high-handedness with which she shot down good ideas and promoted bad ones. It also galled him that everyone else seemed to be kissing up to her.

  Trent could remember visiting his uncle in Memphis years ago and playing with two other boys. It was a boring afternoon, and his aunt’s cat was hanging around. When the cat ducked under a chair, Trent got an idea: he persuaded the other boys to help him corner the cat. The chair was up against a wall, and the boys were positioned so the cat couldn’t escape.

  Before long, it began to hiss, but Trent—who was stooping at the front of the chair and looking straight at the cat—had an instinct about these things. At what he imagined was the exact moment before the tabby was about to scratch his face, he backed off. The cat bolted from under the chair to God knows where. No harm done.