Portland Noir (26 page)
And then I realize: I’m right on top of her as if I’m some mugger. I feel out of control. What’s that Rhonda was saying about control? Whatever, I’ve got to stop this now. Powell’s is right at the next block. I’ll stop off there. I’ll quit.
She steps into the street, and I step in after.
Sudden blaze at the side of my eyes.
A car. Right at me.
My muscles jam up, panic-stupid, and I can’t move. Eyes pinned on Dorothy’s back. The car jerks to a stop, bumper right at my calf, and there I am standing in the middle of the street, and in my chest is the steady pound of oh-what-the-fuck-just-happened.
Headlights flash and for a moment light up the back of Dorothy’s dress. The driver shaking his hands at me. Should go forward, but I’ll run right into her. Should fucking go back, but somehow I can’t.
The guy shouts something muffled through the windshield. My lungs are a tight fist around an inch and a half of air. Dorothy finally steps up onto the far curb.
And I can move.
The car pulls off behind me. This time his fuck-you is loud enough to make out.
I walk on in a strange daze of comprehension. Down past the bookstore where I was never actually going to stop off, now, was I? Past closed-up restaurants, empty parking lots. Dark folding in. It’s a Pied Piper dark, thick and rat black. And it’s pulling me right back into Old Town. And all along I’m still asking myself what just happened, but the thing is, I know what the fuck just happened. I was pinned in the middle of the fucking street because I was not going to let that old woman out of my sight.
Ten-fifteen
Stubby, hunched buildings lumped along the sidewalk, worn-out Victorians peeling paint. Bars and abandoned storefronts.
Some guy pissing on the side of a dumpster. Wine bottle in his hand—yes, this lovely, little pinot gris has a delicate bouquet with notes of urine and rotting burrito.
If I
am
to be a crazy stalker, I might as well get my method down. I set my distance at about fifteen feet, set my pace at old-lady slow. Most stalkers probably have some idea what their plan is, but I’m new to this so I just keep following. On and on through Old Town. Stalkers should wear better shoes. We walk past windows like oil-black mirrors. And I watch Dorothy’s head turn. First to her reflection, then back to mine, then she swivels and she’s looking right at me.
I get the egg-on-the-head thing, the kick to the gut, but my eyes grab hold of hers and don’t let go. Panic turns so easy into thrill. I stare her down until she turns away.
And we’re on into the part of Old Town that’s also Chinatown. Chinese restaurants, some abandoned. Cheesy gift shops. A pile of trash in the darkness of a doorway or maybe someone sleeping. As Dorothy cocks a look back, I step up closer.
Ten feet. The stiffness of her body, the folding-in along her back as she walks—she’s totally focused on me.
Nine feet. Stray strings of tinsel at the back of her neck.
Eight feet. The clink of her bracelets, the uneven huff of her breathing.
I let my footsteps go loud on the sidewalk to make sure she hears me.
Rhonda’s right, of course. It’s all about control. But now I’m the one who has the control. Dorothy can keep walking all night, but she can’t get away.
Five feet. If I reached out, my fingertips could slip right in there at the back of her collar.
Behind me is the sandpaper scuff of shoe on pavement. I glance over my shoulder. There’s some man back there, walking down the sidewalk after us. I turn back to Dorothy, steady myself. Move away from her—slowly—so it looks like I’m not following.
Just walk now.
I try to calm my breathing. No need to freak out. Just because he was a little too close. But I swear he was looking right at me.
A brick wall gives way to a bank of narrow warped-glass windows. Our reflections are smears of color bobbling across, no way to separate one from two from maybe three.
And here, some sound is coming from Dorothy: a droning, rolling sound under her breath. Great—he’s stalking me, I’m stalking her, she’s fucking humming.
Footstep scuff right behind me. My whole body tightens.
A hand on my shoulder.
I spin, recoiling, and a scream chokes off at the back of my throat.
“Want to know what I’ve heard?” he says.
The guy’s right over me. Shaggy black beard and stocking cap, a missing tooth as he smiles. His eyes go over my shoulder in Dorothy’s direction.
“Sometimes stories are true,” he says.
He reaches to his neck, pulls a set of headphones over his ears. Tinny buzz of music like the hover of a fly.
And now he’s bobbing his head at me.
Crazy-omen-man likes rock and roll.
I step back. Turn, and Dorothy’s gone.
I get a panic kick to my gut so hard it runs a tingle out along my fingers. I scan desperate. Graffitied-up mailbox. Overturned shopping cart. I pound shoes to the corner. Dark, empty streets left, right, straight—no idea which way to go.
I go right. My eyes everywhere—in doorways, behind dumpsters, between parked cars. Panic turns so easy into anger—goddamn psycho headset freak—sometimes stories are true, like the one where the crazy bitch hunts down the old woman over nothing more than a ring.
Movement in the dark recess of a doorway. I lurch toward it, and there’s a man crouched, shirt off. I jerk back, turn. My eyes go out across the street. To fall on the figure over there in front of that boarded-up building, pulling open that rusted metal door.
Dorothy.
My heart is going at it hard—that panic and anger thing—it’s a beautiful drunk. Filling my head up like too much wine. Dorothy looks over her shoulder, and even from all the way over there, those twisted-ass eyes are right on me. Along my spine, my shoulders, the muscles tighten. She steps through the door, pulls it shut, and she’s gone.
Eleven o’clock
I drag the door open.
All black in front of my face. The Old Town air is a hot breath on the back of my neck.
Don’t hesitate—just go. Into the black, and it swallows me up, and I’ve never felt such a goddamn thrill before. I inch toward an open doorway I barely see up ahead. Doing that whole hands-out-in-front-of-you thing. Don’t hear her humming or her bracelet clink. I step through this next doorway but something makes me stop. Something says
don’t move.
For a moment I just stand here in the dark. Feel the panicanger drunk coursing lush through me. I start forward again.
My foot comes down onto nothing.
Hands out, thrashing. Clutch crazy at some metal rail. Foot finds the ledge. Stand crouched. Breathe. Hands gripping hard. The black, receding and finding shape again, settles on the smoke-thread edging of the handrail, which traces down and down.
A distant sound comes up. Dorothy’s voice. A tune. A taunt.
One foot out to find a step. Next foot out. A creak under my shoe. The lower I go, the warmer it gets. Like the devil forgot heat is supposed to rise. The smell is just this side of rot. Turn at the bottom, eyes scanning the dark for her. Then I hear a sound like air forced through a tiny hole, something breathy and shrill. And a strange scuttling. Oh shit, no.
But the humming. Flat and faraway. And so I walk.
The room just goes and goes, thin and long—what, am I about to get shanghaied, are Kit’s pirates lying in wait? The only light comes down from cracks between the wooden beams overhead. Corridors converge, and I listen, and I turn. Keep going deeper in. Hot sweat down my back. Ceiling just above my head. Walls close. What the hell is this place? Darker now. Nothing but fissures in the wood to let in something feeble and dim silver like moon going through water.
The whole black floor seems to crawl—oh Christ. Something brushes my heel—body jerks. I stumble forward. On and on under the streets of Portland. I’ve lost the way out. All I can do is hold onto Dorothy’s voice and follow. Her Pied Piper song in this Pied Piper black.
Can’t stop, can’t breathe.
Because sometimes panic just turns into more panic, and sometimes stories are true, and sometimes you’re an idiot.
My foot comes down onto something soft.
Sick squirm under my shoe.
I choke in a gasp, stagger back. For a second I’ve lost the floor.
Then, as my shoe comes down again—solid ground—there’s a click and suddenly, light.
I’m in a chamber at the end of the line. Walls full of white Christmas lights. Hanging in swags like the piping of sweet on a birthday cake.
And all up and down and ceiling to floor: pretty jewelry.
At first I can’t make it out, it’s just an enormous, blurred luster. But bring it into focus, and it’s gold and more gold, like an Egyptian tomb—gold all pressed into the walls—gold and silver and the crazy shimmer colors of thousands of jewels. Mosaics of rings, overlapped bracelets, winding chains, strings of pearls. I reach my hand out to touch. Stop.
Directly ahead, Dorothy in her faded housedress and blue velvet hat is hunched, face close to the wall, hands working. Her humming is so low I barely hear it. She has a little tube of glue. She presses something into the wall. Face smattered with beaded light and twinkle, and she turns and looks at me and smiles.
Crooked eyes dip down. To the diamonds in my ears, the drapes of pearls against my chest.
The glint in her hand is my ring.
I don’t hear a sound from behind.
I don’t hear the swift of the baseball bat before it comes down.
W
hen I saw Lila for the first time it was at the Tik Tok, at a quarter past 2 in the morning. I was there because I had this terrible loneliness in me and I couldn’t stand to be in my apartment, where the cars outside on Foster Road dragged their headlights over the thin walls. There was black mold on the shower curtain and the linoleum was peeling up and there was an ugly stain on the mattress. It didn’t matter; I slept on the sofa anyway.
I slept on the sofa and when I couldn’t sleep I sat in the Tik Tok near Powell Boulevard, watching the rows of clocks on the walls, and then Lila came in, late on a Friday night. She was tall, with rust-colored hair, and she looked like a girl I had known once, the daughter of someone who came to take care of my mother after her accident. The girl was my age and she had a puppy that she carried, with ragged, chewed-up fur, scratching its fleas and burying its head under her arm. I was eleven. I tied a red scarf around my head because I wanted to look like a soldier who had just returned from war. I dreamt the girl would hold a rag to my forehead and whisper carefully in my ear.
While her mother took care of my mother, the girl slept in the room next to mine. When she outgrew one of her dresses it was folded, washed, and put on my bed. It was blue, terry cloth, a summer dress. I wore it until I could hold it in my hands and see right through.
But then my mother was well enough and the woman left and took the girl with her. My mother sometimes stood and walked around, and changed her clothes, but her eyes were blank as marbles and her mouth was slack. Sometimes she sat and played the accordion but it was always the same wheezing note. She kept a fifth of whiskey in the top drawer of her dresser and when she slept on the recliner I would sip from it, lie in her bed, and imagine that girl. Her blue dress like water, like a calm and perfect sea.
Lila came into the Tik Tok that night and I watched her for a long time. She was beautiful. She folded and refolded her napkin, looked around as though she was waiting for someone. After ten minutes a tall man came in and sat at the table and I heard him call her by her name. It was a beautiful name, I thought. He sat there for a bit and they spoke quietly. Then he stood up and left.
I waited awhile and ordered a fried egg so that I could ask her if she wanted some food. Maybe she was hungry, I thought, and didn’t have enough money, or maybe she couldn’t decide what she wanted. I moved into her booth. She didn’t look up.
“Listen,” she said, “I’m not a dyke. I don’t lick pussy so probably you should just go back to your eggs.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” I replied. At that moment it seemed true. My apartment seemed like someplace I had resided in during a different lifetime. The job I had checking groceries was suddenly someone else’s, and I felt like I had been in the Tik Tok for days, weeks, the clocks turning their slow circles, the coffee growing cold until another waitress stretched her pale arm across the table toward my cup.
Lila shrugged. She pulled a cigarette from her pack and held it between her long fingers. Her nails were bitten. “Not my fucking problem,” she said. She put some money on the table, stood up, and walked out. I waited a few minutes and then I followed her, watched as she crossed the parking lot to the nearest motel, a ground-floor room marked
42
, and let herself in.
From there it was easy. I didn’t have any savings, but the grocery store let me cash out my retirement plan, $470, minus the taxes. I kept the apartment. The motel was closer to my work, and I liked the way it looked.
“Room 43, please,” I said, and the man behind the counter took my money and handed me a key. There was a little table with cigarette burns ringing it like years of a tree, and heavy curtains that could shut out the light even in the middle of the day. The sheets were rough and when I turned against them, their scratching reminded me that I was there, that I was waiting for something. There was even a little refrigerator and I took the 72 bus to the store and bought things that I thought Lila might like—a tin of pink salmon, almonds in a pale candy shell. Above the bed was a painting of a ship tossing in a wild sea.
Every night at 7 the tall man from the Tik Tok drove up in a van and parked outside of the hotel. Lila would leave her room and climb inside. They would be gone until 3 or 4 in the morning, when I heard her unlock the door. She would set down her purse and sit on the bed; there was a click when she dropped her heels by their narrow leather straps to the floor. The water would run; I could imagine her as clearly as if the wall had fallen away—there she was in her slip, her bare feet toeing into the carpet. I slept when she slept.