St. Louis Noir Page 11

I set my drink on the edge of the empty umbrella stand and threw my arms around his neck and buried my face against the slightly stiff collar of his maroon sports shirt. It was an expensive-looking shirt. One I’d never seen before. I had to touch him. To feel his skin against mine.

  But instead of holding me, he put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me away so that I upset the drink. It splashed on my bare legs, but I didn’t care.

  “Becca, stop it.”

  “You came. Why are you here?” I said it even though I knew he was here to take me home. The crappy apartment melted away from us. Yes! I’d been an idiot. So had he. He knew we’d come to the wrong decision about my leaving.

  He looked over my shoulder into the darkening, empty living room, then back down at me.

  “You called me.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Had I called him? I couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t I remember?

  “You asked me to bring you the extra keys to the Suburban. But you’re drunk. You shouldn’t be driving anywhere.”

  Even in the dim light I could see contempt in his eyes. It wasn’t any different from the last time I’d seen him. And why didn’t he smell like himself? He had a faint scent of flowers about him, like expensive perfume.

  “But you know what, Becca? I don’t give a shit if you kill yourself.”

  Then he did the most violent thing I’d ever seen him do. He threw the keys as hard as he could against the wall. Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I saw tiny chunks of plaster fly into the air.

  I laughed. “That was fucking mature.”

  He stared at me. He looked sick, his face twisted like I’d never seen it before. His breath came fast and short, and the cords of his neck stood out in relief. He was thin, and looked older than his thirty-five years. He hated me. I could see it now. I had been the one who was confused.

  “Don’t call me. Don’t come by the house again because I’ll have you arrested. I’m having the locks changed. Stay the fuck out of my life, Becca. You’re fucking poisonous. You killed . . .” He stopped.

  “What? What were you going to say?”

  “You killed . . .” But again the words wouldn’t come.

  I thought of the lemonade and gin soaking into the carpet and didn’t care. I thought of the neighbors who might be looking in the windows and didn’t care.

  “I have to get out of here. I can’t be here with you.” His hands had balled into fists at his sides, a fighter at the ready. He would kill me if I said another word. I could feel it.

  But I didn’t care. I started to move away. Out of his range.

  “Wait,” I said over my shoulder. “Wait a second.”

  Somehow I knew he would wait. He was frozen. Mesmerized just as surely as he’d been on our first date, and on our first walk on the beach together in Cabo, when the wind off the water had blown my hair back and misted us with spray, and Gavin had held my hand so tightly.

  “Wait,” I called again from the kitchen. I found his things in there. He should have them.

  The living room had darkened further. I held out the coffee grinder, lifting it up so he could see.

  “I took this. It wasn’t fair. I don’t even drink coffee.” I laughed. Did I sound nervous? Yes, I’m sure I did, because I was.

  He wouldn’t even look at the grinder, but stared at my face. God, he was so handsome. Yet he’d spoiled it all.

  Finally he turned away from me. Rejecting me, and everything I had to offer. He had come to see me just to show he could be without me again. Had he ever loved me at all? Loved Jeremy? Seeing him now, I understood we’d been in his way. I couldn’t let him leave.

  I dropped the coffee grinder where I stood, hardly noticing when it hit my foot. But he kept moving toward the door.

  I stabbed him just above his belt on his left side first, in the soft part of him I knew so well. I’d caressed him there as he guided himself into me so, so many times. I almost fell against him, surprised at the easy way the knife seemed to guide its way into him. He’d always insisted that we keep our knives sharp. “They’re actually much less dangerous that way,” he liked to say. “A regular table knife can do much more damage.”

  He cried out and stumbled, but kept moving. He reached for the doorknob.

  I wanted to see his face. “Stop, damn you!”

  Removing the knife was a little harder, but I got it, and without looking at the blade, I aimed for his neck. It didn’t go in solidly but sliced the side of his neck just as he got the door open. Even in the near darkness I could see the spray of blood coat the doorframe. I felt it too, tepid and wet on my face like water from a sun-warmed ocean.

  Gavin arched forward, but didn’t fall to the ground. Then he was coming back up, as though he would stand. He teetered a moment, his head collapsed onto his chest, then began falling, falling back toward me, so that I had to jump out of the way.

  He hit the rug.

  The boy stood before me in the doorway, his shirt and face, the entire right side of his body, covered in blood. He had caught Gavin as he’d fallen forward, and now he pushed him back inside.

  * * *

  Had I fainted?

  I opened my eyes to see eyes, white in the darkness, white in his blood-splashed face. I squeezed my own eyes shut, trying to remember. I scrambled up, still dizzy, but the boy held onto my arm so I wouldn’t fall.

  “Look at you,” I said.

  He didn’t respond for a moment. He looked down at Gavin and I followed his gaze. Gavin’s face was turned to the wall. It was dark enough that his hair, his ruined neck, his shirt appeared to all be the same color: an infinitely deep gray. Not quite black.

  “Did that man hurt you?” The boy used the sleeve of his bloody shirt to wipe one eye clear.

  “He hurt me.” Was it a statement of fact? I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t think. My brain was cloudy and words felt thick in my mouth.

  He tugged on the hem of his shirt. God, his shirt! The poor thing.

  I led him to the window to get a better look at him. He looked so helpless. I touched his cheek with my finger.

  He stood in the bathroom doorway, watching, as I ran the tub water. I had plenty of thick towels and a couple washcloths. We had so many. Two full bathrooms for the three of us, and it was shameful the way I was always buying new shower curtains and towels. When the tub was about halfway full, I knelt and bent my hand back and pressed my wrist to the water’s surface. It was a little cool. I made the water mix a bit hotter.

  Then I stood up. “Look at you. What a mess!” I extended my hand and he came slowly to me. “Hold up your arms.”

  I lifted his T-shirt over his head, tucking my hand into the neck of it so it would stretch over his face without bothering him. There were stains on his torso where the stuff on his shirt had come through, and the sun had left lines on his upper arms so that he looked as though he were wearing a shirt of pale ivory. I felt vaguely guilty about that. Children should always wear sunscreen. Only bad parents let their children go outside without it in the summer.

  He coughed and I looked closely at him. Was he ill? Maybe a summer cold. He was shivering.

  “Hurry. Get in the water.”

  He turned around and slipped his shorts off and got into the tub.

  I looked around for toys. Something for him to play with. But there was nothing.

  “Let’s get you clean.” I took the bar of soap and washcloth and wet them in the water—which had quickly clouded to a deep shade of pink—beside him. I rubbed the washcloth with soap until it was foamy and took his chin in my hand. He closed his eyes as I wiped his face, rinsing the washcloth in slow running water from the spigot. When I started on his neck, he put his hand up to take the cloth from me.

  “I can do it.”

  I laughed and let the cloth go, sitting back on my heels. Children! They were always so anxious to be independent. “Get behind your ears. You don’t want potatoes growing back there.”

  The bathroom light was bright yellow and cozy
but the dark of the hallway was leaking inside. It was as though we were on an island. Safe.

  Idly, I looked at his clothes on the floor, wondering how I would get them clean. First, I thought, they needed a good soaking. I got up and stoppered the sink before filling it with cold water. I put the clothes in and watched the water color like the bath. I tried to remember how he’d gotten so soiled. I liked washing clothes in the sink, liked the way the cold water felt on my skin.

  “I’m done.”

  “That was fast.” I tried to keep the skepticism from my voice. He hadn’t washed very long. “What about your hair? You have to wash your hair.”

  He grinned and held his nose and slid beneath the pink water, which made him look bigger than he was. It was like a trick. An optical illusion.

  I waited for him to come right back up again. He had let go of his nose and was lying in the water, perfectly still. Now his eyes were open. Staring. My breath caught and there was a cold spot in my chest.

  “Stop it!”

  No response. His hair floated around his face.

  “Jeremy!”

  I leaned over the pink water and pulled him up by the shoulders, which were narrow and slick. He coughed, spewing water, and shook his head wildly, making more droplets of water fly.

  “Don’t do that! You scared me!”

  Lying at the bottom of the tub. His eyes open. A single perfect bubble escaping his mouth and rising to the surface, breaking into the air.

  He coughed again. “Let go.”

  “You have to wash your hair.” I let go of him, but my hands were still shaking.

  “I want to go home now.”

  I took the bottle of shampoo from the end of the tub and squeezed a quarter-sized puddle into my hand. The water dribbled from the spigot, but I set the shampoo bottle down and turned the water up with my free hand.

  He put his hands on the edge of the tub and tried to stand, but I pressed my shampoo-soaked hand against his chest. He wasn’t clean! He needed to be clean! His skin made a loud stuttering noise as it slid over the surface of the porcelain, and he landed on his bottom.

  He began to scream, opening his mouth wide so that I could see his teeth. Several were brown. Half-rotted. How was that possible? All those trips to the dentist. The way I’d helped him brush his teeth every night—what I was seeing couldn’t be true.

  “Stop it, please! Sit. Down.” I tried not to yell at him. I really tried. Grabbing his arms, I forced him further into the water, tried to get his head under the spigot.

  Scattered bruising. A clear mark on his throat. Aspirated water in the lungs.

  “I’m just going to wash your hair, Jeremy. Stop it. I’m not going to hurt you. Be still!”

  No defensive wounds. Water contamination of the evidence.

  But he wouldn’t stop. Now he was twisting, his mouth open. Water spraying everywhere. If he didn’t stop, he would hurt himself. He needed to calm. To be clean again.

  He gave another wrenching twist, and my slickened hand slipped so that he was able to reach me with his mouth, with those brown, broken teeth. They scraped my forearm then got purchase, and I felt the skin pop, and at the center of the pain I had an image of Jeremy poking his finger into a package of ground beef I’d left on the counter. Pop-pop-pop. Laughing, watching me with those bright shining eyes. Pop-pop-pop. Running away to the living room, laughing at me from behind the couch.

  I drew my arm to me, putting my own mouth against the emerging blood as he shot from the tub, knocking me back. On the way out of the bathroom he slipped, but grabbed the doorframe to right himself. One of his feet pushed against my thigh, and I reached to grab it. Then he was gone.

  Again.

  I ran after him down the dark hallway to the living room. Through the rectangle of the open doorway I could see the glow of the streetlight reflecting off the window of the house across the street. He was already down the steps of the porch, his painfully thin form outlined in a halo of yellow. As I got closer I saw there were other people too, standing in the street, heedless of any cars that might want to get through. I quickly stepped over the still form in the doorway and onto the porch in time to see him dodge past them. Not one reached out to stop him.

  When I called after him he didn’t look back, but kept running. I watched him run up the porch steps, so clean. But I feared his feet weren’t clean enough. He hadn’t had time to scrub them. He was just a boy. A little boy. And little boys don’t really care about things like that, do they?

  Finally, a light came on in the window beside the door where he stood banging so loudly that I thought the wood might splinter and break. I wondered who was on the other side, and felt sad that it wasn’t me.

  I watched until the door opened and the boy hurried inside, but I never saw who let him in. Out in the street the people standing beneath the streetlight shifted into two groups: the larger one moved toward the boy’s house; the second approached the curb in front of my apartment. Were they coming to welcome me? I glanced around my empty living room. Everyone would have to sit on the floor, and I had very little in the way of food for a crowd. There was nothing I could do. They would have to understand.

  I looked at the man lying on the floor. His arms were flung outward as in a ready embrace. He looked awkward, and someone might trip. I knelt beside him and arranged his arms so they lay neatly against his sides. Just so.

  Have You Seen Me?

  by Jedidiah Ayres

  Frontenac

  The body is found in the walk-in closet. Not yet a body, still a person. The person is, among other things, a woman, a mother, and a model. In her system are trace amounts of alcohol, cocaine, oxycodone, semen, and a half-digested seafood dinner.

  No note. No signs of struggle. No 911 call. The body is found by the maid. Who calls her boss rather than the EMTs.

  An hour later Betts looks down at the body, pops an antacid, and thinks again of the black-and-white photo in his wallet. The one printed on cheap paper stock with the words, Have you seen me? beneath the girl’s face.

  Maybe.

  Betts feels the itch to call the number again.

  * * *

  The first time Betts called the number he’d just listened.

  A quiet and nervous woman answered. “Hello . . . Hello? . . .” Then, with more urgency, “Have you seen my daughter? . . .” A hairline crack in the voice, “Teresa? Is that you?”

  He’d hung up. The feeling was too much. Too raw. It upset his stomach, but he held onto the flyer. He kept it folded in his wallet, sensing that he would call again. Another time.

  It was the day after he’d seen her at the vacant property where she and her gutter-punk crew had been squatting. Betts was harvesting bricks from the site, taking out the entire west wall of the duplex just east of the park off North Florissant near the ice-cream place. He worked for a man named Kinds who worked for the man—Citizen Number One—who owned half the condemned and abandoned properties in the city and in counties to the west and south through various incorporated ventures. When Betts had loaded his truck he’d haul it to a warehouse on the west side of Jefferson. Foreman would pay him cash. Broad daylight job. Cops didn’t bother them. Nobody cared about what they were doing, and other than the odd hand-wringing op-ed by some liberal white do-gooder with a fetish for all things poor and black and “authentic,” his work drew little attention. The city was eating itself and he was part of the digestion process. The wild reclaiming the urban landscape. Now when he drove the streets he didn’t see homes, businesses, communities—only money. Redbrick gold. Unused and unrefined building blocks to be reclaimed and repurposed. The neighborhood was littered with two- and three-walled structures being broken down in stages.

  On his lunch break, Betts had gone into the house to take a piss. There was no plumbing anymore. No toilet, sink, or bathtub, nor an ounce of copper wiring left in the walls. But it seemed more proper than watering the weeds outside. Next to the closet that used to be the bathroom was a wal
l covered in flyers for missing children. Runaways and abductees. Many of them were vandalized. Eyes X-ed out with pen, cartoon cocks pointing at their faces, apocryphal legends claiming somebody’s homo-faggot or dumb-nigger status. But a few of them were more carefully displayed, hung like family portraits on the wall. Betts had seen this kind of thing in other abandoned properties. Sometimes the long-term squatters made it homey by putting up pictures of their friends living and otherwise. He read them all. Every single one. Every time. He’d learned to swallow the catch in his throat before he choked.

  When he came through the front door, he’d surprised the girl who was working on removing one of the flyers. It had been stapled into the rotting drywall and she was trying to be gentle with it, the stained, folded-up piece of paper impaled inside a building abandoned by the owner and being harvested for raw materials. She stood five foot nothing, fifteen going on fifty, black hair stuck up in bunches. Conspicuous hygiene disguised as style. Slight gap between her front teeth that she had the self-possession to make work for her. She was using a knife to pry the staples out of the corners when Betts entered the room. The girl was wary, but not skittish. She let him see her knife, but was casual about it.

  He put his hands up, palms out. “Whoa, it’s okay, girl, nobody gonna bother you.”

  She paused a moment to test the claim before returning to her work. Her hands were gentle, but the paper tore easily. Betts squinted at the poster she was removing. From the fading blue page the face of a boy, maybe ten years old, smiled at him. “He a friend of yours? Lamar? You know him?”

  Without turning to look at him she said, “Lamar dead.”

  Betts felt something slip inside, but rallied. “You been living here?”

  “I just wanted a picture.” Her patience for him running low.

  “Go ahead, I ain’t stopping you.” A staple fell to the floor and she moved on to the final corner. Betts gestured with his chin at the bottom of the poster. “Anybody called that number?”

  “What you think?”

  “I’d like to. Somebody should get word to Lamar’s family somehow, let them know.”