Kansas City Noir (11 page)

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.

“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.”

“I called her a newswhore,” Hodge said. He stole a breath that pained him. “Said she instilled fear, encouraged white flight, sharpened needling noses for misfortune. She maintained she did her job; I told her she shits in her own sandbox. She threw a Vodka Collins. Look. I was an SOB. I recall my honest moments.”

“Lots of folks like her on TV.”

“They like her face; it’s a nice one.”

“And it’s on TV. So you gonna press charges?”

“Against my love of liquor? My smart mouth?”

“Hell,” Dell said. “Call when you get out. I’ll buy if you keep that piehole shut.”

The day faded on him, bed backlit with fluorescent light, window illumined with pollen-yellow dark. Dell had left a cutting of lavender from his wife’s garden in a styrofoam cup. Hodge reached for it, hand steady—phenobarbital, benzos, Dilaudid. He’d have to ask a nurse once he tracked the call button.

* * *

“Ain’t you got AC?”

“Old car.”

“How old you got to get for no AC?” Somehow, she’d worked her skirt above her underwear, which was plain white cotton. “I do it all now,” she said.

“As opposed to when?”

“You’re a funny one,” she said.

Cars fled past, watery sounds rushing in, nowhere to stand. He’d swum in the Pacific once, sand shifting underfoot, which unsettled him. The rest of the day he made drip castles on the beach with Lilah while Rachel dived at curling waves.

“I said we weren’t happening,” Hodge said.

The woman slung her arm onto the top of the seat. A car pulled from behind them, but the T-bird remained, headlights shuttered against the coming dark.

“I got a four-year-old,” the woman said. “Want to fuck you some of that?”

“What?”

“Charge you more, but that sweet young body? Honest goodness costs.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“Honeydew, you need you sweet and pure but can’t find it. She do you right, now.”

“Get. The fuck. Out of my car.”

“Jesus ran with our kind.” She drew a forefinger down the back of his ear. “Scripture says.”

“Goddamnit.”

Already she’d slammed the door, though, blending into blue dark. Legs trembling, Hodge got the car into first. The cassettes were gone from the floorboard; no big deal except for the Julia Lee, a bootleg from Milton’s Tap Room in 1949. Hodge’s old friend who’d transferred the recording off a Tefifon was dead of AIDS; the lover had finagled through the courts his friend’s property, then trashed it.

“Jesus wept,” Hodge said. The T-bird floated past him, the prostitute on the passenger’s side flicking ash from a filtered blunt. Hodge let out the clutch and eased into the lane. He tracked the silhouettes of risen birds on the taillights.

* * *

“You did what now?” Dell said.

“Spent the night.”

“In your car.”

“North side of what’s left of Fairyland,” Hodge said. “No numbers on the door. Streetlamps’re out.”

Dell poured milk onto frosted flakes. Gloria and Georgia had come to the table in pajamas, blue eyes shifting over their cereal. “Darkness makes for good business,” Dell said.

“I got to get back there.”

“For cassettes?” Dell had his spoon halfway to his mouth. “You ain’t got to do nothing.”

“If there’s some girl—” Hodge glanced at Gloria and Georgia. In a cornsilk-green nightgown Elaine leaned on the kitchen counter, coffee pot in hand. “It’s got to be stopped.”

“Stop what, Daddy?” Georgia said. The elder at age ten, she called police work obscene; Dell agreed.

“More coffee, Hodge?” Elaine said, but she poured before he answered.

“If—” Dell worked his cereal to the side of his mouth. “Then it ain’t your business. If they don’t, still ain’t. Make it yours, you got a death wish.”

“I know the neighborhood. I read a route there.”

“Meters? Twenty years ago? Sweet-faced college boy? Over a case of Little Kings once, you waxed rhapsodic about some joint that made urinal cakes on the east side. All because you’d never considered some souls actually had to make urinal cakes.”

“What’s a urinal cake?”

“Gloria,” Elaine said.

“Ain’t twenty years ago, Hodge,” Dell said. “Know why your piece-of-shit car’s missing its antennae?”

Elaine set the pot back on the burner. “Dell.”

“He drives it every day.”

“Little pitchers,” Elaine said. “Big ears.”

“Worse on TV.”

“Drunk broke it, I guess.”

“Crackhead,” Dell said. “Needs a pipe to smoke what-all. Crack, smack, the next big thing.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, picked up his coffee, then set it down. “Fairyland, right? Chain-linked scrub taking over coasters and rip-off amusements? What was it? Fifty cents to get in? Joint nickel-and-dimed you for everything after. Their double drive-in gave it a go, though. Remember? Skin flicks and Disney.” Dell snapped his fingers twice. “What was that ad before they went under?”

“
Fairyland is Fun
.”

“I don’t care if you spent a night stargazing and tracking fireflies. Some shit’ll be watching you.”

Elaine cinched her robe.

“There’s a line, Hodge. You know that. Troost. Prospect. It’s a gray line, but it’s a line. They shoot at EMTs even. God knows what’d come of your lily-white self.”

Hodge placed his mug on the table. “Somebody’s got to do something.”

“You ain’t somebody.”

Elaine snatched up Dell’s cup and dropped it in the dishwater.

“What I mean is—ain’t nobody the somebody. Look. You can’t know that was just some talk. Weird her working so far off the avenue too.”

“Girls,” Elaine said. “Go play.”

“I’m not finished,” Georgia said.

“You can’t just hear about something like this,” Hodge said.

Pushing back from the table, Dell set his cap square on his head. “You hear worse. It just don’t sit in your car and make conversation.”

Hodge turned the handle of his coffee cup toward him.

Dell kissed his girls, his wife. He bent over Hodge and kissed him on the cheek, then patted his shoulder twice. The girls giggled, and Elaine shushed them. “Friends do me no good,” Dell said, “if they ain’t still standing.”

* * *

Hodge made calls: sex crimes unit, social services, departments of blah, blah, and blah; each conversation curled back on him:

“Now how are you related?”

“I’m not. There’s maybe a child involved. The woman stole some stuff; that might be proof enough. You understand?”

“And you have the address?”

“Tags, make of car. What I believe is the address. Empty lots all around, no house number. Didn’t you get this down?”

“Sir, there’s really not much we can do in this situation.”

“Situation?”

“I understand that you’re frustrated. We just can’t do much with this.”

“I’ve been misinformed,” Hodge said. “I thought your organization helped people.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“You ain’t the only one,” Hodge said.

* * *

He’d run the route six times in three years. So dismal a neighborhood no full-time reader wanted it: abandoned houses, copper pipe and wire ripped from walls; roaming dogs, swollen trash bags in alleys; blowflies. It took two hours, though—if he ran—for eight hours pay and offered luminous moments: scent of frying bacon; Howard Tate blasting through clapboards; once, hems of lace curtains huffed out an open bay window into a tangle of smoke tree and flowerless lilac, and Billie Holiday sang from a record stuck on a scratch:
Willow weep, willow weep, willow weep—for me.

Then there was the woman who’d stepped onto the porch as Hodge tromped over Virginia creeper running along a limestone retaining wall. “Excuse me,” she called. Down the street a mower started, died. One hand tucked behind her, she wore a flimsy white halter, calf-length jeans. Her hair was shellacked and sculpted. “You the gas man?”

“No, ma’am. Kansas City Power & Light.”

“You the water man?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Oh, you the light man.”

“Yeah. I’m the light man.”

She turned her bar top–brown back to him. “Can you tie this?” Down the street the mower sputtered, revved. She pinched the drawstrings of her top between her thumb and forefinger. Hodge glanced around for witnesses. Cicadas squawked from a catalpa.

“I guess,” he said. He climbed worn stairs, the woman smiling down on him. Behind the front screen a daytime game show blathered from a black-and-white. He sensed someone in the dim back room.