Portland Noir

I invite the detective in, but he declines my invitation. He wants to stand on my doorstep. The incessant drip- drips from my eaves land right in the middle of his bald spot, but he doesn’t move. I lean into my doorframe as I tell him my story-everything I’ve just told you. Well, almost everything.

He takes his notes, sniffles, finally slaps his little book shut, caps his pen, thanks me. As he turns, I think I hear him sigh-like he already feels defeated.

I slink back inside, clean the house. When it starts to get dark outside, I turn the news on again. The second body in the Willamette in as many days. Just downstream from Ross Island.

Spider comes in real late. We eat zucchini casserole by candlelight.

“No art today?” Spider asks.

And I shake my head. “Not today.”

“Did you borrow the Prius yesterday?”

“When would I borrow the Prius?” He always had that damn car with him at work. I don’t tell him about the detective or about Mustang. I just eat with him, silent. I wash the dishes while he showers. I climb into bed next to him and wait.

As soon as he starts snoring, I’m out. I pull on my cords and my black hoodie, tiptoe across the living room and out the front door. I cut through the rail yard, cross Powell. Birdie’s picture still clings to the telephone poles that mark my path.

As I step inside Dots, I take a look around the joint. The dark red feels like home. All the regulars sipping their usuals. I head to the bathroom, go into Matter. The tan and white check of the tiles doesn’t make me feel so unsteady tonight. I apply some lipstick in the mirror. Back out at the bar, all the hipsters and the business owners are huddled closer together than most nights-abuzz with the news. One of the kids with a bleached mullet thinks it’s a serial killer targeting lesbians. He seems impressed with his own theory, ashes his cigarette in a glass tray.

Marie Claire shakes her head, sips her Rumba. “The two women used to be an item,” she says gravely. “It’s not random lesbians. It was either murder-suicide or a Romeo and Juliet kind of a thing.”

The bleach boy snickers. “You mean Juliet and Juliet?”

No one acknowledges him.

His hipster girlfriend breathes in my ear all sultry, “I heard they both recently joined NiftyWebFlicks.” She glares at the guy from Clinton Street Video.

The waitress with the hamburger tattoo nods. “He’s a loose cannon, that one.”

I can’t tell if she’s talking about the guy from Clinton Street Video or about Wilhelm, who plays pool by himself, refusing to make contact with anyone.

The waitress shrugs, looks down at me. “Absolute martini?” She asks it like it’s a rhetorical question, but I’m ready not to have a usual anymore. “Bombay,” I tell her. “Bombay martini.”

I tap the table as I wait, consider the theories.

As soon as the gin hits my throat, I feel strangely distracted, inspired. My mind bends and wanders.

Pretty soon, the regulars have changed the subject. They’re on to a new mystery: someone has stolen the little picture of Marie Claire from the bathroom in her restaurant. That picture was so cute-Marie Claire at age six or seven, her geeky cat eye glasses, her hair askew, hardly a hint of the beauty she would become. I down my last drink. Was that three? Four? I don’t even feel the cold outside as I float home, cut across the rail yard, slither in the front door and across the living room, floor boards creaking.

In the light from the neighbor’s back porch through our bedroom window, I watch Spider as he sleeps. I don’t know if you’ll understand me when I tell you this, but there are people in this world who’ll do you wrong. No matter what Oprah says, there are people in this world you can’t forgive. There are people who, just the sight of them makes your chest go tight, your throat hot. Even when they’re sleeping, the rise and fall of their chests just fills you with this sudden panic and you think: No one will ever love me. And you think: You tricked me. And you’re right. And then that panic morphs into a quiet kind of a rage that radiates from the center of you and tingles down your arms and into your fingers. It used to frighten me, that feeling. I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know how to make it go away.

I watch the vein on Spider’s neck as it pulses life now. He shifts a little, snores, then shifts again, goes silent, that pale neck at once vulnerable and inviting.

Anger is the enemy of art. Spider said it himself. Smirked when he said it. But there was a lot Spider didn’t know. He tried to make me believe that the anger lived inside of me-like it was something intrinsic I couldn’t exterminate even if I wanted to. He thought he had me, like a fly in a web. Just like Mustang once thought she could pull the wool over my eyes. Just like Birdie. I chuckle, only a little, when I think of Birdie’s stupid face. Did they really think I’d just let it go? Family, I laugh, sigh. I study Spider’s neck and smile. Did he really think I was so stupid? That I’d never figure out how to handle an enemy of art? I feel those Bombay martinis in my very blood now, making things clear. As I reach for Spider’s neck, for that stupid vein, I’m filled with a perfect sense of calm. I think about all the paintings I’ll soon make-all the shows I’ll have at First Thursday and Last Friday and whatnot. I glance up at the picture of Marie Claire on my nightstand and I think: You’ll still feed me, won’t you?

ALZHEIMER’S NOIR BY FLOYD SKLOOT

Oaks Bottom

It was about 10 at night when I saw her walk out the door. Now they’re telling me, No, that’s not what happened, she wasn’t even there.

I_I don’t buy it. The room was dark, the night was darker, but Dorothy was there. We were in bed and her curved back was against my chest. She wore the pale yellow nightgown I love, with its thin straps loose against the skin of her shoulders. My arm was around her, my hand cupped her breast, we were breathing to the same rhythm. Then she slipped from my grasp and I felt a chill where she’d left the sheets folded back. She drifted like a ghost over the floor, down the hall, and out the front door that’s always supposed to be locked. I saw her fade into the foggy night.

They tell me I’m confused. What else is new? I’m also tired. And I have a nasty cough from forty-six years of Chesterfields, even after two decades without them. And I don’t sleep worth a damn. That’s how I know what I saw in the night. Confused, maybe, but the fact is that Dorothy is gone.

For three, four years now, Dorothy is the one who’s been confused. That’s what we’re doing in this place, this “home.” She has Alzheimer’s. We had to move out of the place where we’d lived together around sixty years.

“Jimmy,” she’d say to me, “you look so much like Charles.”

Well, I am Charles. Jimmy’s our son, gone now forty-two years since he went missing over Cambodia, where he wasn’t even supposed to be.

It broke my heart. Filled me with despair, all of it: Jimmy gone too soon, then Dorothy slowing leaving me, now Jimmy somehow back because of her confusion so I have to lose them both again, night after night.

I miss her. Where is my Dorothy? I saw her walk out the door that’s supposed to be locked. Because Alzheimer’s people wander. They try to get out of the prison they’re in, who can blame them? I feel the same way, myself.

But at eighty-two I still have all my marbles. Thank God for that. Memory? Bush Jr., Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Carter, then what’s-his-name, then Nixon, Jackson, no, Johnson, Kennedy, and I can go all the way back to Coolidge but I don’t want to show off. Or I could do 100, 93, 86, 79, 72, 65, and so on.

I saw her fade into the foggy night. The staff here can’t remember to lock the front door, and I’m supposed to believe them when they say what I saw with my own eyes didn’t happen? It’s a crime, what they did. What they’re doing. Negligence. It’s like they’re accomplices to a kidnapping. Anything happens to Dorothy, I hold them accountable.

Truth is, I’m not sure how long she’s been gone. I thought it was only a few hours, but then I look outside and