Portland Noir (9 page)
On television, detectives always begin their investigations by going door-to-door, asking the neighbors if they’ve seen anything. But I can’t risk that. Start ringing doorbells around here, people will just call the “home” and say another old loony is on the loose. Turn me in. I’d be finished before I got started. Maybe when I get closer to Oaks Bottom itself I can find someplace to ask questions.
But after a few blocks, I have to stop and rest. The weariness just keeps getting worse. I think my only energy for the last few years has come from caring for Dorothy. It’s what’s kept me going. Without that, I’d probably be in the crypt by now, dead of exhaustion, locked away in the big mausoleum there overlooking the musement park. Or I’d be technically still alive but sitting in a chair all day while time comes and goes, comes and goes.
Now it’s a few minutes later, I think. Could be more than a few. Truth is, I’m not sure exactly where I am. But that’s because my eyes aren’t any good in the dark, not because I’m lost. I’m right above Oaks Bottom, somewhere. It’s just that the landmarks are hard to make out. But there’s a tavern here. I don’t remember seeing it before. But it’s so old, I must have seen it without noticing. Or noticed without remembering. That’s what getting old is, I tell you, nothing but solitary seconds adding up to nothing.
I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here. Or why I’m in front of this new old building. Squat little windowless place looks like it’s made out of tin, painted white and red, with a tall sign in the parking lot:
Riverside Corral.
Then I remember: I should drop in for a quick minute and find out if anyone’s seen Dorothy. Could have happened. The old dame knew her booze. Maybe she dropped in to the Corral for a quick Scotch on her last rambling.
I take a deep breath. Which at my age is something of a miracle right there. And figure I have maybe another couple of hours before I’ll need to head back to the “home,” before they might start to miss me. So this can’t take long.
I walk in, planning to sidle up to the bar and question the keeper. But the music, if that’s what it is, is loud, and what I see stops me dead: two stages—one dark, one light—and on the stage lit in flashing colors a naked woman with long light hair swirling as she gyrates above the money-filled hands of two men who look like twins.
Is that …? It’s Dorothy! I’d know those broad shoulders anywhere. How could … no, wait, I blink and see now it’s not her. Of course it’s not. I’m confused. What else is new? But for a moment there …
I would give anything to see her again. To touch her again. To stand here near her again.
“What can I get you, old-timer?” the bartender asks. He’s twelve. Well, probably mid-twenties, pointy blond hair and a hopeful scrub of mustache.
I forget where I am, forget why I’m here. Looking around, seeing the dancer again, I say, “My wife.”
He smiles. “I don’t think so.”
Then I’m walking through the parking lot, using my flashlight so I can access the trailhead and make my way down the steep bluff toward the trail. I’m too old for this, I know it. All the walking could kill me, even though I’m in pretty good shape. But I can feel through the soles of my feet that Dorothy has been here, and if it kills me I’m still going to find her.
A series of switchbacks gets me to the bottom, though I’m so turned around I’m not sure which way to walk. Time comes and goes like the wind, and I see the moon blown free of clouds as though God himself has turned a light on for me. It shines across the lake. Looking up through a lacing of treetops, I see the now-moonlit mausoleum. So that’s where Dorothy must be.
I begin walking north. Maple, cedar, fir, wild cherry, black cottonwood. The water makes a lapping noise just to my left. It sounds spent. Stumps sticking out of the shallows create eerie shadows that seem to reach for my ankles.
Rising out of the water, just beyond a jagged limb, I see a figure stretch and begin to move toward me. From the way it strides, I know it’s my son, it’s Jimmy. He’s wearing some kind of harness that weighs him down, but still he seems to glide on the lake’s surface, so light, so graceful.
Jimmy was never trouble, even when he got in trouble. That time, when the cops came to our door, it was only because he’d gone to protect his best friend, Frank. Johnny Frank. Or maybe Frankie John. I don’t remember. A wonderful boy, just like my Jimmy, but a scrapper, and that one time he was surrounded by thugs and Jimmy went in there and—
Oh, Dorothy was so good with our son, all that time they spent at the musement park, and Jimmy lost all fear of the things he’d been so afraid of. Came to love the rides, the scarier the better. Of course, that’s why he went into the service, why he ended up in flight school, why he ended up in a plane over Cambodia, shot down where he wasn’t even supposed to be. Dorothy told me once it was all her fault. I took her in my arms, told her all that was her fault was how wonderful our son turned out to be. And now look, here he is, still wearing his parachute harness, coming home to us at last.
“Come on, Jimmy. Help me find your mother.”
“Where is she this time?”
I point toward the mausoleum. He follows my finger and nods, and just then the clouds return, and the mausoleum fades into the night, its sandy face turning dark before my eyes.
Jimmy can see anyway. He leads me and I follow. The trail rises and dips, follows the contour of the bluff. I think I’m doing well with the tricky footing for an old man. Then I realize Jimmy is carrying me.
No, he’s stopped walking and now he’s the one who’s pointing. We’re very close to the mausoleum. Up ahead, standing against the building where Jimmy’s ashes are stored, where my ashes will be stored, where—I remember now—Dorothy’s ashes are stored, I see my wife smiling. She is leaning back against the wall just under the legs of that giant painted-blue heron.
The wind rises. The clouds unveil the moon again and the building lights up. But no one is there after all. No one and nothing but a wall on which a hundred-foot-tall heron is preparing to fly toward heaven.
1
A
t 2 a.m. I woke up and drove to the distribution station, a humid concrete bunker behind a rolling metal door, just off a street of coffeehouses and boutiques in Northwest Portland which stood dark and empty at that hour. A thin layer of greasy newsprint ink covered every surface inside the station: it varnished the old wooden worktables to a dark sheen, fell in a sticky gauze over the obsolete headlines on the leftover papers stacked in the corners, and became waffle-shaped prints left by the deliverers’ shoes and boots on the wooden stairs that rose to the loft level, where the manager sat behind a plywood desk with an old black phone. The ink also stained the deliverers’ fingers, and showed as dark smudges on their faces where they wiped their foreheads or scratched their chins or cheeks, and it especially streaked the sink beneath the cracked and spattered mirror in the little bathroom, where a roll of paper towels lay on the floor in place of toilet paper.
2
The manager—wincing, pale, middle-aged, with tightly curled hair that rose into a ragged afro—looked down over the deliverers as they inserted ads, folded and slipped the papers into plastic bags, and stacked the bagged papers in shopping carts. He introduced himself as Carl, and pressed a piece of worn cardstock paper grimed with newsprint into my hand. Smeared fingerprints laced the edges of the card, surrounding the handwritten directions to my route. The delivery addresses were written in large block letters, and between the addresses were smaller printed directives that mentioned which streets to turn on and how far to go until the next capital letters. Below us, deliverers pushed their loaded carts out the garage door to dump their papers into their sagging backseats or rusted truck beds, while others returning pushed their carts back into place so they could fill them again.
“You understand this is a seven-day-a-week job?” Carl asked. I said yes, I was fine with it. “I’m strapped tonight,” he said. “Think you can try it on your own right off the bat?” I said I didn’t see why not.
And so the first night was a disaster of missed addresses, cursing, and driving in circles.
3
Things got better after that, though. With every newspaper I threw those first weeks, I improved my accuracy and efficiency as I drove the deserted industrial streets of my route, slinging papers in a high arc over the roof of the car or flipping them backhand away from the driver’s side. I watched the papers slap against the scratched aluminum garage doors or bent black metal stairs at the backs of warehouses, watched papers skid across empty parking lots to hit curbs near walkways, sometimes tumbling to perfect stops against glass doors on which an all-caps
OFFICE
was stenciled in white. Once, after rocketing a paper up against the garage door of an auto parts warehouse and listening with satisfaction to the sharp report of news against metal, I made a tight turn and nearly ran over the body of a huge deer that lay motionless in the middle of the empty lot. As I drove carefully around it, I saw that there was no head—the neck ended in a meaty stump, from which a thick black stream of blood ran downhill. Misting rain had collected on the deer’s fur in pinpoint droplets that shone silver in the night, and I drove away thinking I should call someone to report it. I didn’t, though, and when I returned to the warehouse the next night, the body was gone.
4
Two weeks later, at 3:30 in the morning, I saw the boy. It was only for a moment, through a screen door, from a distance. I was moving; he was in shadow. He looked three or four, but he was wearing a one-piece sleeper, the kind that zips from a toddler’s ankle to his chin, so he was possibly younger. He stood behind the sagging mesh of the front screen door and looked out—at that time of night, he could only have been looking at his small dark lawn, and beyond the lawn my car, and within that car myself, throwing a newspaper toward his house. Beyond my car was only the summer night, humid and pointless: a rusted freight train went about its rumbling business; a million insects hissed their muted roar. Beyond that, there was nothing.
5
A young woman doctor at a local clinic diagnosed my injury. Her high cheekbones, green eyes, and long strawberry-blond hair were pleasant distractions as I sat shirtless on the paper-covered vinyl table, regretting my pale body. I recognized the woman—she’d treated my daughter Olivia just a year previously, after a bright red rash had blossomed across Olivia’s face and her eyelids began to swell shut while my wife Sara and I played with her in the park. Unaware of the grotesque change in her appearance, Olivia had smiled when the doctor ruffled her wispy, translucent hair that day, and giggled as the woman laid her fingertips against Olivia’s chubby cheeks and smooth forehead. The doctor had proclaimed Olivia cute, told us the rash was a reaction to sunscreen, and prescribed a bath.
When I sat before the same woman a year later, Sara and Olivia were with Sara’s parents in Seattle, and the doctor told me it was the first time she’d seen a repetitive motion injury from throwing papers. I received the news with a measure of pride. “You’ll want to take a few days off,” she said, “the joint needs rest.” I explained the seven-day-a-week nature of my job, and she frowned at the wall behind me for a moment, then delivered a short lecture on the mechanics of throwing motions, followed by some demonstrations of stretches to do before and after delivering. “You should treat the job as if it’s an athletic event, or things will just get worse,” she said, and when she bent to write on her prescription pad, I imagined trailing my fingers down the curve of her lower back, imagined her skin soft and smooth and warm beneath her white medical coat and green blouse. She tore the sheet from her pad and handed it to me. “Talk to the other deliverers,” she said. “See what kind of motion they use. If you don’t change anything, you’ll just be back here in two weeks.”
6
I got the prescription filled at a grocery store and took one of the cylindrical blue pills with some water as soon as I got home. Then I walked around the house, awaiting dramatic effects. If I didn’t go into my daughter’s room and didn’t open my wife’s closet or any of her drawers in the bedroom, it was almost as if there had never been anyone else there. The dirty dishes in the sink were my dirty dishes. The clothes in the hamper were my clothes. The conceit dissolved in the basement, though, where there were other reminders. The dusty wind-up swing Olivia had fallen asleep in as a newborn lay abandoned in the corner next to her first playpen, with the fabric toys that dangled down: a felt star, a plastic ball, and a plush purple octopus the size of my palm. Occasionally I would catch the toys swaying a bit—a response to some phantom draft, I suppose. Or maybe the toys had their own vague, blunted intentions.
Other things that belonged to my daughter had disappeared: the plastic blocks she liked to scatter across the carpet, for instance, and her empty bottles on the kitchen counter, waiting to be cleaned of their formula slick. I thought about her little fists, the way she clung to my shirt when I picked her up, or how she bounced her palm against my cheek and then waved her arms and gave a surprised peal of laughter when I tossed her in the air. The nights were oddly still without the sound of her crying, that persistent, desperate wail of hunger, fear, or confusion. Sometimes, when I used to go in and pick her up in the night, she would shove her hand in my mouth, and I could feel her relax as the sharp nails of her chubby little fingers picked their way along the contours of my teeth.
After half an hour of pacing the rooms, I raised my arm experimentally—though the shoulder still ached, the shooting, knifelike pain was gone. The simple fact that the medication had done what it was supposed to do cheered me, and I slept soundly for the first time in weeks.
7
I was already particularly aware of that house, because the people there were always awake. When I reached it each night at 3:30, braked to a slow roll, and prepared to throw their paper, I often saw a male silhouette standing on the warped boards of the small wooden porch, shoulders hunched, moodily sucking a cigarette. When the figure was absent from the porch, he was certainly one of the people I saw through the front screen door, one of three or four men and women who sat on a low couch in a narrow room, their faces lit by an unseen television whose shifting blue light illuminated a haze of cigarette smoke. I didn’t have many residential deliveries, and the ones I had were to properly dark, quiet houses. It bothered me not only that the people in that house saw me deliver their paper, but that I found myself unable to avoid looking in as I drove past. I wondered why they weren’t asleep. What they did. Why they couldn’t at least close the door.