Kansas City Noir (20 page)
She thought she remembered the river as having been busy with barges and tugs, but there were none that she saw now. It was as treacherous looking as she recalled, however, full of rough current and dangerous eddies. She watched a big log pop up and down, get caught, sucked under, and then turn up again downstream. It made her stomach feel funny, like being on a roller coaster, as if she’d ever been brave enough to actually ride one.
I’m braver than that now
, she thought.
She leaned harder against the railing so she could stare deeper down into the river. In the back of her mind she heard her own scared, childish self, yelling,
Back up, Daddy! Back up!
Judy put her right foot on the lower bar of the railing.
“I swear that river could shoot us all the way to St. Louis!” her mother had exclaimed that day in the Chevy, during the great flood in Kansas City.
Judy climbed to the top rung and brought her legs over until she could sit on the railing. The bar was slick with moisture, and it was easy to lose her grip
S
MOKE
& M
IRRORS
BY
A
NDRÉS
R
ODRÍGUEZ
Milton’s Tap Room
Like lightning, Milton was gone. He disappeared as Tom was pulling down a fifth of Tanqueray from the glass shelf behind the bar. Tom had grabbed the gin and saw Milton’s face in the mirror reflected among the multicolored bottles, a cigar clamped between his teeth. When Tom turned around the owner had vanished. But not into thin air. Milton’s Tap Room was fat with the smoke of Kools, Lucky Strikes, Pall Malls, and the ubiquitous Macanudos, all commingled with smells of beer, scotch, gin, and bourbon. Customers didn’t breathe so much as absorb the unbroken gray vapors that furred everything like fog in the middle of the night. Tom, the oldest of the bartenders, surveyed the dimly lit space, with its backlit, cutout panels of saxophones and trumpets hung near the walls, its small tables and chairs and low patent-leather black sofas. He noticed the empty stool by the door.
Maybe he’s gone to the head or stepped outside, Tom thought. But several drinks and songs later, the stool was still without an occupant. The cool, dark vibe inside Milton’s felt different. An argument broke out at a table in the back, and for the first time in twelve years Tom moved from behind the long wooden bar to break it up. Regulars were amazed he had legs instead of wheels—bowed legs like old twigs and just as thin. For the rest of the night he was on edge, spilling drinks each time the door opened and someone strode past the empty stool.
At closing time, Tom and Myra—the sole waitress that night—looked at each other, unsure what to do.
“Did he say anything to you?” Tom asked Myra as he flipped the last chair on end.
“He just told me some joke about the ether bunny when I arrived. Then I got busy with that group what started the bullshit. Man, were they blotto! What about the till?”
“Take it home with you,” said Tom, “and bank it in the morning.”
Tom and Myra were trusted employees, but tonight Tom felt uneasy about the money. He walked Myra to her car around the corner and then returned to the tap room. Something was tugging at him. He stared at the rows of LPs above the turntable and instinctively reached for Clifford Brown. “Yesterdays.”
Da da da dum, da da da dum
, the bass and piano began, followed by strings finer than rain. Then the trumpet entered, dancing among the tables, swaying here and there, rising, falling, moving beyond the smoke-submerged tap room.
Tom looked away from the photo of Milton and Count Basie at the sound of knocking on the heavy front door. Normally he’d never think of opening once the bar was closed, but his mind was running in several directions at once. Wouldn’t Milton use his key to get inside his own bar? Wouldn’t he use the back door anyway, where all the employees arrived and departed? Did he forget or lose his key? Or had some drunk simply heard the music and decided the bar was still open? He scratched the record lifting the needle from the turntable.
“Yeah, what?” he said, opening the door a crack, but leaving the chain in place.
A small man in shabby clothes stood on the other side. “Um—Milton Morris?”
Tom held his breath, straining in the four a.m. darkness to see the little man’s features. “What about him?”
The stranger stepped back and looked up and down Main Street. As the corner traffic lights changed, his profile glowed phosphorescent green. He was about to leave when Tom unchained the door and swung it open. “Come in.”
The little man stepped inside the silent tap room.
Tom closed the door and went behind the bar. “Sit down,” he said, pointing at a stool directly in front of him. “What’s your poison?”
He sat at the end of the bar and looked around the room.
“No, he’s not here,” Tom said. “I was hoping you’d tell me where he is.”
“Took a powder, did he?”
“Can’t really say,” Tom replied, annoyed by the question.
“This joint hasn’t changed a bit … still the same dive after forty years. What are you charging for drinks these days, a buck, four bits?”
“What, are you liquor control?”
“If I was, you’d be in big trouble—reopening after hours, offering booze to a city official … This ain’t the old days, Tom, when your boss was chums with Pendergast. Things are different. Or didn’t you notice when you got back from ‘Nam?”
“Get your ass out of here!”
Milton Morris never kept a piece in the tap room because he didn’t need to. Nobody had ever tried to hold him up precisely because the old-time city boss Tom Pendergast and his people liked him. But that was then. Now Tom wished he had a .38 in his hand, anything, even a shillelagh. Though he didn’t dress the part, this guy talked like a hood. He slid off the stool and faced Tom.
“Your boss better show up before too long, coz he’s gonna have to talk with us … or else, you know how it is, Tom, shit happens.”
That, he remembered, was what every GI used to say, whether he bought it in Vietnam or made it home. Tom accepted that life was a bitch. It left you lying in a rotten mess. Shit happened, all right. You couldn’t stop it. Yet the little man’s threat reminded Tom that the shit bothered him still. He cared about the regulars he joked with every night, and the music of the tap room that blew through his empty soul, and Milton Morris himself, his only friend, a sort of father figure, though
father
was not a word Tom would have ever said. Nor would Milton, who never had a family, ever call him anything but Tom.
“How do you know my name?”
“I know a lot more than that. I know you can’t stand this place. I know you’d like to get out. All the way out. If you’re smart, you’ll bail while you can, Tom, coz shit happens!”
The little man put his hand in his pocket and deftly retrieved a cigarette, which he lit with a Zippo in one crisp motion with his other hand. Then he pushed the door open and left. As he passed the window, he looked like any bum Tom saw in Midtown—anonymous, ragtag, just another city dog padding along the street.
Tom had worked for Milton Morris twelve years. He remembered the first time he entered the tap room on Main Street. It was 1962. He was still in high school, or rather, avoiding high school, when he found himself walking the spine of the city. At 32nd and Main, he paused in front of a window with blood-red Venetian blinds behind a Miller High Life neon sign and listened to a stream of shimmering notes leaking from within. He opened the door, pulling in the pavement dust.
In the pitch black, his eyes were useless. Slowly he made out a burning red tip moving in an arc, and then a shaded lamp glowing dimly in a corner. Starting forward, his hands instinctively tried to grab hold of an invisible guide. The cement floor, with its funk of booze and tobacco, seemed to rise up under his feet. In this darkness then, as if a curtain was pulled back, he suddenly saw a man right in front of him, sitting on a wooden stool, his arm leaning on a narrow shelf attached to a pole, in his hand a glass of Cutty Sark, two rocks. A dark god made him. Or maybe he was the god of this underworld. His round face was pale as a cave-grown flower—but there was shrewdness in the look. He never got up from his stool, only looked at Tom until a mild smile came over his face, and Tom felt worthy to pass and enter this Hades, this haven.
After weeks of coming to listen to Milton’s juke box of jazz records, Tom became friends with the man who had run saloons in Kansas City since Prohibition. Milton idolized the old mob days and the wide-open city, Tom learned, and he had no qualms about minors coming to his bar to hang out and drink. “If you’re hip enough to dig the music,” Milton told him, “you’re old enough to start a tab.”
Tom paid his twenty-dollar tab the day he was drafted into the army. From boot camp he went straight to Vietnam, where shit happened every day—to everybody. Guys in his outfit disappeared while on patrol: KIA or captured. A fair number deserted, found their way to Scandinavia or settled down with a woman in some remote part of ‘Nam. He often wanted to disappear himself, but where was there to go? Either you came home in a body bag or the jungle swallowed you up. But Tom wished he’d had the balls to disappear. He remembered his friend Silky Jones who went to Sweden and wanted Tom to join him there. Instead, Tom returned to Kansas City when he was discharged, and reentered the life he had made in Milton’s Tap Room.
Back home, he was wound tight all the time. He needed to calm himself, to get to the real echelon, so he bartended every afternoon and night, listening to Milton’s jokes, stories, and reminiscences. People of all sorts walked through the front door: musicians, mayors, professors, hustlers, rich men, secretaries, and lonely souls. They all came to dig the cool sounds. Every year he watched Milton run for governor on the same platform—legalized gambling; and every year he heard Milton’s message to countless bad check writers who drank for free in his tap room: “I ain’t mad at nobody.”
Tom lay awake in his apartment, remembering his and Milton’s yesterdays. He didn’t want to remember anymore. It wasn’t that he wanted to erase his memories. He simply wanted to prevent them from contaminating the present. But the present wasn’t all that good. It was filled with some very uncomfortable things: Milton was gone, Tom hadn’t lived his life, and he needed to be mad at somebody or something. At five a.m. he was awakened by the phone.
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“Hello, Cheri.”
Milton’s wife was twenty years younger than Milton, a Kansas girl with Turner’s syndrome. You couldn’t miss her in a crowd—if you could spot her in the first place. She was under five feet but looked like Mae West, with an hour-glass figure, platinum-blond hair, and deep blue eyes. Men fell immediately in love with her, including Milton Morris. But Cheri was no kewpie doll; she was loud, whiny, manic-depressive. Tom called her Bubbles, though never to Milton’s face.
“Well, where is he? He’s not in his office and he didn’t come home and he’s got no excuse to go carousing!”
That wasn’t exactly true. When Milton hired Sana, a tall, athletic waitress from Finland, Tom told him he was going to ask her for a date. “She’s all wrong for you, Tom,” Milton had said. The next day Tom saw her come out of the boss’s office, pinning her hair back up and zipping her skirt.
I’ll be goddamned
, he thought. Could Milton’s disappearance be about another woman? What was he supposed to tell the man’s wife?
“I don’t know where he is,” Tom said.
“Whadd’ya mean you don’t know where he is? Did he vanish into thin air?”
“I mean, one minute he was there and the next he wasn’t.”
“You mean he took a powder.”
“I don’t know.” Tom’s eyes were throbbing from lack of sleep.
“Well, he wasn’t lifted up and taken to heaven, was he?”
Tom began to wonder: was Milton hiding from the mob or from his wife?
He’d better talk with us
, the little guy had said. Did the mob want to take over Milton’s Tap Room? What would be the point of that? And Bubbles … Tom knew that in one of her manic moods she wasn’t likely to be doing housework. She had left Milton twice, ran off to California, though he talked her into coming back home both times.
“Look, Cheri, maybe Basie’s in town, you know, an unplanned visit, and the two of them are getting together with Claude, Big Joe, or who knows who. He didn’t tell me anything.”
“I’m worried as hell,” she said.
Tom could hear voices in the background. He couldn’t tell if they were real or the garbled sounds from a TV or stereo. “Don’t worry,” he said. His sympathy sounded hollow to himself.
“I don’t like being left alone.”
“I’m sure there’s nothing wrong.”
“Who said anything about wrong? I just wanna know where the hell he is, and why the hell he isn’t here!”
“Would you like me to look for him?”
“Call me the instant you know anything.”
It was nearly Easter. There had been a torrent of rain for two nights, knocking all the blossoms of dogwood and catalpa to the sidewalk in splurges of color that soon turned black and globby. And in the storm sewers, the spring damage and leftover winter leaves lay together seeping like an undrinkable tea.
Tom asked another bartender to cover for him at the tap room and spent two nights driving around town in search of his boss and friend. On the third night the sky was starless and the streetlights shrouded by a dark nimbus as Tom drove in circles. The instant he thought of rain his windshield began to boil with droplets. A sudden roar filled the air. He looked up to see the collision lights of a low-flying plane diving toward the downtown airport. The sound soon faded, but Tom remembered the thunderous explosion of helicopters and supply planes knocked out of the sky. He snapped on the wipers which squeaked like dying birds.
Parking in front of the tap room at five a.m., he began canvasing the neighborhood. A hooker slowly passed him on her habitual toe-walk up and down Main Street. He could tell she did heroin and cocaine by the living skull look. Ten years before, she could have been Miss Teen America.