Los Angeles Noir

and you were dead. Case closed. 9mm had no stopping power. Man could walk forever with a 9mm slug in him. Yancy was proof of that.

The girl was unhurt. Hysterical, of course. She found her voice after he killed Mason and PJ, the girl screaming so loud he could hardly wait to leave.

Funny… he had made such rapid progress toward the Queen Mary at the beginning, but now he seemed to be moving slower and slower. He walked along the edge of the water, where the sand was hard-packed. He kept walking but didn’t seem to be getting any closer. It was like… he was being allowed to approach his goal, get it in sight, but there were limitations. Like the Queen Mary was off limits. Going to be dark soon. At this rate… he was never going to get there.

He just wished he could figure out why he did what he had done at the house on Pomona. Killing Mason… how could he explain that? Mason was making the right move. The girl had seen them. Could ID them. Rules were rules. Mason followed the rules… it was Yancy who had broken them. PJ was a hothead and Yancy knew he wouldn’t work with the kid again, but Mason and he had partnered for three years. Mason had thrown him a party when Yancy killed his twelfth man. His first dozen. Mason made a big deal about it, rented a suite at the Four Seasons and hired a couple of hookers for each of them. Top-quality ladies too. Mason talked too much and stank up the car with fish tacos and jalapeno burritos, but Mason was dependable. Yancy was the one who’d had a change of heart, and that bothered him. It was like his whole life up until now was wrong somehow.

The girl didn’t remind him of anybody. She wasn’t particularly pretty or gentle or sad or any of that other crap that always made the movie bad guy spare her life. And that bit about her trying to protect the baby… he didn’t even like babies, and besides, that was just a reaction on her part. No courage or nobility to it. She probably didn’t even know what she was doing. Yancy coughed, spit blood into the water. He was too tired to convince himself, but what he had done in that split second at the house gnawed at him. Throwing away his life, that’s what he had done. Nothing wrong with his life… nothing… and yet he had tossed it aside with the squeeze of a trigger. Blowing away Mason and PJ… Now what was he supposed to do? Ask James to get him a job at the port?

Yancy stumbled up onto the dunes. Soft sand with not a speck of oil on it. Sand like sugar, heaps of it… and he had a perfect view of the big boat. He sat down. Just a little break. A little rest before starting back up again. He lay back on that pure white sand. Stretched out his arms, scooped them back and forth. Made sand angels. He and James used to do that when they were kids. Spreading their arms wide, the two of them making flapping sounds. Wings big enough to carry them to heaven. Now, though, his sand angel was sloppy and uneven… broken somehow. Yancy lay still, arms poked out at a crooked angle. Just a little rest, that’s all he needed. He watched the Queen Mary floating there in the blazing sunset. Every seam and rivet in sharp focus. Ship of gold. Close enough to touch.

WHAT YOU SEEBY DIANA WAGMAN

Westchester

It was a street like any other street in Westchester. Small square homes lined up on either side like kindergarteners on their first day of school. Tidy but timid, they were little houses where your neighbors might live, where your mother might live, where you might live if it was all you could afford in Los Angeles. Two bedrooms, one bath, sometimes a small sun porch in the back. On Orange Street it was still 1965. The yuppies hadn’t found it and torn up the green lawns to do drought-tolerant landscaping with native plants.

Orange was my childhood street and I was stuck there. I’d inherited the house from my mother and I had nowhere else to go. After living in New York City and other points east, I’d come back to L.A. to take care of her. Not that she needed me; she was dying and there was nothing I could do. But I moved right back into my childhood room. I slept in my twin bed with the brown plaid polyester bedspread. My blue ribbon from freshman football was hanging where I’d stuck it in ninth grade on the bulletin board over my desk next to my picture of Bruce Lee. Everything in my room was the same as I’d left it, but covered in a shroud of dust. It made me sneeze. My mother would call out while she still could: God bless you.

Sneeze.

God bless you.

Some days it was our only communication.

Then she died and I stayed in my room and she went to Heaven. At least that’s where she had always told me she was going. And I wasn’t. She would be singing with the Heavenly Choir and I would be roasting in the flames of Eternal Damnation. If only I had died before I was twelve and got caught jerking off in the Sunday school teacher’s car. My mother never forgave me. The Sunday school teacher wouldn’t let me back in her class. From puberty on, everyone agreed I was just like my father, the missing felon.

The first few days after she passed away, I watched a lot of TV and didn’t eat anything. I wanted to see how long I could go without food. It was just something to do. The commercials made me really hungry. So, after eighty-one hours and twenty-two minutes, I ate. Whatever she had in the house. Cans of peaches and kidney beans. Dried prunes. I even made a devil’s food cake from a box mix that had probably been on the shelf since the last time I’d been home. My birthday, three years earlier. We’d had a fight and she’d never made me the cake.

Once I was eating, I started pacing. I made a route from the TV to the kitchen to the back door. Touch the door. Turn around. Kitchen to my mother’s room, and touch the headboard on her stripped bed. Turn around. Into the bathroom. Touch the glass poodle on the window ledge. Turn around. Into my room. Touch the empty fish tank, the blue ribbon, and the row of James Bond books. Back to the TV.

The glass poodle broke. Guess I tapped it too hard that time. It fell on the tile floor and shattered. After that I was careful to wear my shoes. Even in the middle of the night. I enjoyed the crunch when I went into the bathroom to pee in the dark. It sounded as if I were walking on potato chips. That made me laugh. I pretended I was an explorer in the Amazon and I was crushing cockroaches the size of hamsters. I imagined I was king of the world and I had jewels strewn before me wherever I might walk-even to take a shit. Eventually the pieces were all broken down in a fine, annoying grit that stuck to my rubber soles. When I started trailing glass dust all over the house, I cleaned it up.

Cleaning was good. I cleaned a lot. I moved the TV cabinet and cleaned behind it. I found a Christmas card from 1979 when I was six years old. I remember that Christmas. I remember wanting something so badly and praying for it as hard as I could, but what I got was something different. I liked it too, but it wasn’t what I’d been asking for. I can’t remember what it was, only the want like a tight place in my chest. I pushed the couch to the middle of the room so I could get the dust bunnies along the baseboard. I hoisted the armchair on top of it. That looked pretty good to me, so I climbed up and sat in it. Of course I tipped over and fell. I banged my arm hard on the colonial-style coffee table. As if they had coffee tables in the Colonies.

Immediately, I carried the coffee table out to the curb. That was enough of that. Someone driving by would take it home to his mother and she would be so happy. The front door opened in the house across the street. I didn’t know those people. Out came a young black girl, in candy-pink capris and a tight white tank top with glitter in a heart on the front. The neighborhood was mostly black people now. Not that it mattered to me or my mom- even before she was dead.

The girl was carrying her car keys, but she stopped at the door to her little red Chevette. “Sorry about your ma.”

She made me notice the flowers in the yard next door and the blue sky.

“She was old,” I said. “And sick.”

“You puttin’ out that little table?”

“I always hated it.”

The girl laughed. Her teeth were as white and sparkly as her shirt. She nodded. She knew what I meant.

“Do you live there?” I asked.

“It’s my brother’s house. I’m just staying with him for a while.”