Baltimore Noir

she’d turned in her chair and spotted him through the crack of the kitchen door, her red mouth forming a perfect O

And then Slink died.

Technically, it was the fault of the Brewster’s frisky Chesapeake Bay retriever, Sandy. And also a nameless squirrel. Sandy had been accompanying the children on their way to the school bus stop when she suddenly took off after the squirrel that was crossing directly in front of Slink Ridgely’s milk truck. Slink spun the wheel, but by mistake he slammed down on the accelerator pedal instead of the brake. The square truck broke through the picket fence of crabby Gus Fulton’s place, bounced across a corner of the yard (the perfect pile of raked yellow leaves going up like an explosion), and toppled over sideways at the roadside ditch just as the school bus was coming down that steep part of Caves Road way… too… damned… fast.

The milk truck was lying half on and half off the road. After the collision, it lay completely on the road, twice spun and partially crushed. Bottles of white milk and chocolate milk trundled along the pavement like errant bowling pins. As the crowd gathered, no one noticed the Brewster dog at the edge of Gus Fulton’s yard, happily lapping up milk and pebbles.

The kids in the bus were fine. Frightened out of their wits, but fine. The driver of the school bus suffered a bloody nose. But Slink Ridgely was dead. Crushed ribs. Broken neck. His arms were snaked so thoroughly through the spokes of the steering wheel that it was like solving a puzzle trying to get him freed up and out of the truck.

Seven-year-old Annie Brewster felt horrible. She’d been the one holding Sandy’s leash on the way to the bus stop, but she hadn’t held it tightly enough when the squirrel darted out from the trees. Now I’ve killed a man, she thought. I don’t deserve to live Children think this way. She stood saucereyed, staring at the dead milkman, while anguish planted itself deep, deep in her belly. He’d been at their house just fifteen minutes ago. He’d brought those sugar donuts. She remembered the toothpick the milkman was always chewing on. She remembered how he always tilted his cap back whenever he talked to her mom. That very morning he had turned to her-to Annie-and winked at her. And now he dead She felt her tiny heart being slipped into a box and the flaps being folded closed. She spotted something on the road and she reached down and picked it up. It was a toothpick, slightly gnawed on one end. She put it in her pocket and made a vow to keep it forever.

Slink saw all of this from his new vantage point. The dead one. He watched as his body was pulled from the truck and set down on Gus Fulton’s grass. He watched as the children were ushered off the bus, and he joined in the sense of relief that they all seemed fine. His eyes rolled as he spotted Ellen Matthews making her way down the street in her robe and worn fluffy slippers. The woman’s gait listed somewhat, and Slink worried that when her feet stopped moving she’d topple forward onto the pavement. But she didn’t. She came to an unstable stop some ten feet from Slink’s body, then folded her hands together and muttered a tearful prayer into the autumn air.

The funeral was held at Druid Ridge Cemetery three days later. Slink’s cronies were there. Pale Sally presented the wreath from Cloverland. A few of the drivers banded together to wear their uniforms to the grave site, which Slink thought was pretty classy. It was a beautiful crisp autumn day. Yellow leaves fell from the trees, cascading down like a rain of canaries. Slink watched the proceedings from several dozen angles, one of the many benefits of being dead that he was already catching on to. He was especially touched when little Annie Brewster, who had insisted to her parents in a foot-stomping fit that she be allowed to attend, stepped forward to add a single rose to the flowers already atop the casket. Annie hesitated after carefully placing the rose, then removed her black wool gloves and set them, palms down, next to the flower. She stepped back between her parents and thrust her hands into her coat pockets. There, in the left pocket, she fiddled with Slink’s toothpick as the color began to rise into her frowning face.

Her parents were already worried.

Slink took to his new condition like a kid to a sliding board. No problem. Being dead-he discovered-was a lot like dreaming. Or, for that matter, like the feeling that comes from a bellyful of old-fashioneds. The altered state. The affairs of the living were a lot more comical and nonsensical from the perspective of being dead, much the way dreams are freakish and pointless to the living. Tit for tat, figured Slink. And time-he also discovered-was completely irrelevant. The school bus had hit him twenty years ago, the school bus had hit him yesterday. No real difference. The borders between today and yesteryear were completely blurred and he could move back and forth at will. Studebakers and bigfinned Chevrolets in the Memorial Stadium parking lot? That would be Jim Gentile on first and the amazing Luis Aparicio filling the hole at short. The Light Rail pulling into the Camden Yards station? That would be the whole new set of over-priced bums.

Other spirits appeared to Slink and he spent time-whatever that was-with them. He still went to Pimlico to watch the races, only now, if he wanted, he could ride with the jockeys as they lumbered into the homestretch. And now, of course, he knew the winners. For what it mattered. He kicked around the long-gone fish market at Market and Pratt, where he had ventured sometimes as a kid. The fishmongers in their high rubber boots shot their hoses right through him and had no idea. Even dead, the smell of the place was still rank and briny. Slink and another dead crony took in some shows at the Two O’clock Club, but Slink had found Blaze’s act a little too agitating, even in his dreamy dead state. That became his joke. “I ain’t dead yet.” And he’d laugh. But he’d also feel an uncommon warmth in the area of his heart and he discovered that what he was was sad. Being dead brought with it a melancholy streak that was brand new to Slink, something he hadn’t experienced much in his living days. It wasn’t bad feeling necessarily. The feeling made him thoughtful. Reflective. Gave him something to chew on. Threw a new light on things. Slink meandered into the tiny backstage dressing room at the Two O’clock and watched Blaze playing mother to a tearful dancer, and he was so filled with sadness and joy he didn’t know what to do with himself.

“This dead thing,” he said to one of his cronies, “it’s really something, isn’t it? I had no idea.”

And he kept his eye on Annie Brewster. That move with the gloves and the flower at his funeral, that stuck with him. He worried about her. A month after his funeral, Slink had watched Annie in her bedroom, jabbing his toothpick against her thighs over and over, just to make it hurt. She was a peculiar kid, cracked odd jokes at odd times, didn’t harvest much in the way of close friends. Her teachers called her “artistic” when they weren’t calling her “problematic.” Annie liked to spend time alone. She read depressing books, she liked to draw, she liked to get into fights with boys. Slink drifted forward to when Annie was sixteen and watched her almost get into some serious trouble with the Burton boy. It was one thing when they were both eleven and pudgy Ted Burton had a loyal puppy crush on her. Then, Annie’s little cruelties didn’t hit home so much. But later, Annie carelessly plucked a ripe nerve in the hulking boy and he nearly pinched her arms off shaking her the way he did.

Slink worried.

“I feel responsible,” Slink told another dead person as they were looking in on the incredible 1958 Colts-Giants game. “She blames herself for my death. You can see it, it’s really screwed her up. That’s not a healthy girl there. It’s like I’m haunting her or something.”

Slink checked things out in Annie’s sophomore year at Bennington. It was none of his business, he knew, if she was sleeping with her roommate’s boyfriend. But he also knew-he’d seen-how she would willfully misplay the affair when it came to light in the spring and earn herself a half-dozen solid enemies. Or the following year, when she would nearly cause her faculty adviser to be tossed out of the school.

And he knew what was coming. He’d been there over and over again already.

“She’s got no self-regard, you know what I mean? Poor crazy kid. You just open yourself up for big-time trouble. She’s a sitting duck. I feel rotten about it.”

Slink attended Annie’s graduation. The day was steamy and thick. Everyone, the guests, the students, the faculty, were fanning themselves with their programs. The commencement speaker-a famous actor with an equally famous wife-urged the new graduates to “seize the day” and “to march to their own drum.” Annie squirmed in her folding chair and laughed derisively. She contorted the advice, and when she met the actor at a reception following the ceremony, she held firmly to his hand and leaned forward to whisper into his ear, “Seize the drum.”

Slink watched sadly as the two refreshed their drinks and sought a quiet corner to chat. Slink moved forward two months to watch the end of the affair, the famous wife arriving unexpectedly at their Manhattan apartment.

“Who the hell is this little thing?”