A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

“And send for Emergency Medical for this guy,” I added. “I’ll stay here till they come.”

I looked down at the drunk. His eyes were blue, a watery, no-color blue with all the life washed out of them. Uncle Paul’s eyes.

Uncle Paul, blurry-faced and maudlin, too blitzed to care that I’d come home from school with a medal for the best English composition. I’d put my masterpiece by his chair, so he could read it after dinner. He spilled whiskey on it; the blue-black ink ran like tears and blotted out my carefully chosen words.

Uncle Paul, old, sick, and dying, just like this one. Living by that time more on the street than at home, though there were people who would take him in. His eyes more red than blue, his big frame wasted. I felt a sob rising, like death squeezing my lungs. I heaved, grabbing for air. My face was wet with tears I didn’t recall shedding.

I hate you, Uncle Paul. I’ll never be like you. Never.

I walked over to the drunk, still sprawled on the platform. I was a sleepwalker; my arm lifted itself. I jabbed the butt of my gun into old, thin ribs, feeling it bump against bone. It would be a baseball-size bruise. First a raw red-purple, then blue-violet, finally a sickly yellow-gray.

I lifted my foot, just high enough to land with a thud near the kidneys. The old drunk grunted, his mouth falling open. A drizzle of saliva fell to the ground. He put shaking hands to his face and squeezed his eyes shut. I lifted my foot again. I wanted to kick and kick and kick.

Uncle Paul, a frozen lump of meat found by some transit cop on the aboveground platform at 161st Street. The Yankee Stadium stop, where he took me when the Yanks played home games. We’d eat at the Yankee Tavern, me wolfing down a corned beef on rye and cream soda, Uncle Paul putting away draft beer after draft beer.

Before he died, Uncle Paul had taken all the coins out of his pocket, stacking them in neat little piles beside him. Quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies. An inventory of his worldly goods.

I took a deep, shuddering breath, looked down at the sad old man I’d brutalized. A hot rush of shame washed over me.

I knelt down, gently moving the frail, blue-white hands away from the near-transparent face. The fear I saw in the liquid blue eyes sent a piercing ray of self-hatred through me.

If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a woman drunk. Me too, Manny, I can’t stand women drunks either.

The old man’s lips trembled; tears filled his eyes and rolled down his thin cheeks. He shook his head from side to side, as though trying to wake himself from a bad dream.

“Why?” he asked, his voice a raven’s croak.

“Because I loved you so much.” The words weren’t in my head anymore, they were slipping out into the silent, empty world of the ghost station. As though Uncle Paul weren’t buried in Calvary Cemetery but could hear me with the ears of this old man who looked too damn much like him. “Because I wanted to be just like you. And I am.” My voice broke. “I’m just like you, Uncle Paul. I’m a drunk.” I put my head on my knee and sobbed like a child. All the shame of my drinking days welled up in my chest. The stupid things I’d said and done, the times I’d had to be taken home and put to bed, the times I’d thrown up in the street outside the bar. If there’s one thing I can’t stand…

“Oh, God, I wish I were dead.”

The bony hand on mine felt like a talon. I started, then looked into the old man’s watery eyes. I sat in the ghost station and saw in this stranger the ghost that had been my dying uncle.

“Why should you wish a thing like that?” the old man asked. His voice was clear, no booze-blurred slurring, no groping for words burned out of the brain by alcohol. “You’re a young girl. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

My whole life. To be continued…

One day at a time. One night at a time.

When I got back to the District, changed out of my work clothes, showered, would there be a meeting waiting for me? Damn right; in the city that never sleeps, A.A. never sleeps either.

I reached out to the old man. My fingers brushed his silver stubble.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Paul,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

New Moon and Rattlesnakes WENDY HORNSBY

Wendy Hornsby (b. 1947) was born in Los Angeles and educated at UCLA and California State University, Long Beach. Since 1975, she has been a Professor of History at Long Beach City College. Her first novel, No Harm (1987), featured history teacher Kate Teague, who figured in one more case before she was succeeded by the better-known documentary filmmaker Maggie MacGowen in Telling Lies (1992) and several subsequent books. Though both series characters are technically amateur detectives, their law enforcement connections put Hornsby’s books into the police procedural category. Asked to identify influences, Hornsby pays obeisance to the California hardboiled triumvirate of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald but identifies as her real role model the wife of Macdonald, Margaret Millar. Outside the mystery genre, she noted in Deadly Women (1998), “As a kid I read my way through Dickens, a huge influence on a budding hard-boiled writer, and Mark Twain who is the master of characterization, and Ambrose Bierce because he was so wicked.”

In recent times, the distinctions between tough and cozy, masculine and feminine approaches to crime fiction have become less pronounced and in most cases less important than they used to be.

Hornsby’s “New Moon and Rattlesnakes” is a noir-ish story that would have been right at home in the great 1950s digest Manhunt, a periodical to which few women writers contributed.

Lise caught a ride at a truck stop near Riverside, in a big rig headed for Phoenix. The driver was a paunchy, lonely old geek whose come-on line was a fatherly routine. She helped him play his line because it got her inside the air-conditioned cab of his truck and headed east way ahead of her schedule.

“Sweet young thing like you shouldn’t be thumbing rides,” he said, helping Lise with her seat belt. “Desert can be awful damn dangerous in the summertime.”

“I know the desert. Besides…” She put her hand over his hairy paw. “I’m not so young and there’s nothing sweet about me.”

He laughed, but he looked at her more closely. Looked at the heavy purse she carried with her, too. After that long look, he dropped the fatherly routine. She was glad, because she didn’t have a lot of time to waste on preliminaries.

The tired old jokes he told her got steadily gamier as he drove east out Interstate 10. Cheap new housing tracts and pink stucco malls gave way to a landscape of razor-sharp yucca and shimmering heat, and all the way Lise laughed at his stupid jokes only to let him know she was hanging in with him.

Up the steep grade through Beaumont and Banning and Cabazon she laughed on cue, watching him go through his gears, deciding whether she could drive the truck without him. Or not. Twice, to speed things along, she told him jokes that made his bald head blush flame red.

Before the Palm Springs turnoff, he suggested they stop at an Indian bingo palace for cold drinks and a couple of games. Somehow, while she was distracted watching how the place operated, his hand kept finding its way into the back of her spandex tank top.

The feel of him so close, his suggestive leers, the smell of him, the smoky smell of the place, made her clammy all over. But she kept up a good front, didn’t retch when her stomach churned. She had practice; for five years she had kept up a good front, and survived because of it. Come ten o’clock, she encouraged herself, there would be a whole new order of things.

After bingo, it was an hour of front-seat wrestling, straight down the highway to a Motel 6—all rooms $29.95, cable TV and a phone in every room. He told her what he wanted; she asked him to take a shower first.