Kansas City Noir (2 page)

Bill’s here. He’s retired from working construction and basically sits at the bar all day drinking up his disability. And Mike, of course. It’s his bar. The floor dips and the stools wobble, all of them, and the top of the pool table’s got a big slash in it and someone walked off with the cue ball, but it’s a good place—cheap, and it’s only a couple of blocks from Fran’s.

Then there’s Gene. Or was. He drove off is how I look at it. Flew the coop, as they say. Well, that’s it. I’m leaving too. Montana is what I’m thinking. I’ve been considering a move for a while. I mentioned Montana to Gene. He thought it was a good idea.

Wide open, no people, he said.

Absolutely, I said.

I’ll tell Fran tonight.

Evening

What’s on at seven?

Golden Girls
reruns.

Oh.

You’ve had beer.

I was at Mike’s.

Well, you missed my mother.

Oh … yeah?

Yeah. It’s all right. I wasn’t expecting her.

Fran’s mother does that; drops by without calling. She’s divorced and bored. Good thing Fran was here instead of me. Her mother nags me when Fran’s not around. She knows I’m not going out on many jobs. I’ve told her we’re okay. I earned a bundle in Afghanistan. She thinks I should have stayed another year and made even more.

I’m going to Montana.

Montana?

Yeah.

When?

I don’t know.

Oh.

I play solitaire, spreading the cards across the blanket of our bed. I tell Fran not to move her legs beneath the blankets and disturb the cards but she does anyway.

Why Montana?

It’s wide open.

Fran doesn’t look up from her book,
The General and the Spy
. A man on the cover wears an open red tunic and some tight-ass white pants a real guy’d never wear. His skin’s the color of a dirty penny and he has no hair on his chest. A woman’s got her hands on his stomach, ready to rip into those pants I bet.

Fran folds the corner of a page, closes the book, and wipes tears from her eyes.

Nobody cries over those kinds of books, I tell her.

Montana?

I’m thinking about it. Gene’s missing.

Who?

A guy I know.

Fran goes, Let’s change the channel. Then let’s talk.

Go ahead. Change it.

I changed it last time.

What do you want to watch? I ask.

I don’t know.

She picks up her book and puts it down again. We stare at the TV, the remote between us.

Next day

Bill sits beside me at Mike’s, buys me a beer. Crass old fucker Bill. Bald as a post and bug-eyed. He’s always hunched over and rocks back and forth and makes these sick jokes about his neck being so long he can lick his balls like a dog. Deaf as Stevie Wonder is blind.

Hey, Bill, Tim says.

What you say? Bill asks.

Fuck you, Bill, Tim says.

What you say?

Tim laughs. Laughs loud and talks loud like we’re all deaf as Bill. He sits at the end of the bar where Gene always stood, wipes his hands on his sweatshirt and jeans. Tim works in a warehouse in the West Bottoms. Refrigeration parts. Something like that. Comes in grimed in grease and oil. Starts at five in the morning and works all the time, weekends too. With jobs the way they are, is he going to say no when his boss offers him extra hours? I don’t think so. Not with paying out child support to his ex.

His money being so tight is why he killed his dog’s puppies. At least that’s how he explains it. The dog, a brown and white mix between this and that, had a litter of seven. He put six of them in a pillow case and dropped them in Troost Lake. Then he shot the dog. Easier than getting her fixed. I stopped sitting next to Tim when I heard about the puppies.

Every time I think of them, I’m reminded of these Afghan laborers in Kandahar. One afternoon they found some puppies when they were collecting trash. A trash fire was burning and they threw the puppies into the fire. You want to hear some screaming, listen to puppies being barbecued. I hear them now. I ball up my fist and right hook my temple once, twice, three times, waiting for what I call
relief pain
to wrap my skull and take their shrieks out of my head. Tim and Bill look at me. I open my fist.

Fucking mosquito, I say and smack the side of my face again.

Big-ass mosquito, Tim says, still looking at me.

It’s strange seeing him in Gene’s spot at the end of the bar. Gene never sat, just stood. No matter how cold, he always wore shorts, a T-shirt, and a windbreaker. Brown shoes and white socks. Legs skinny and pale as a featherless chicken. Wore a cap that had the dates of the Korean War sewn in it. He told me that Kansas City winters didn’t compare to a winter in Korea.

I saw frozen bodies stacked like cord wood covered with ice, Gene said. Some of them I put there.

It got cold in Afghanistan too, I said.

I remember one time when this truck driver got to Kandahar in December. Brand new. Just off the bus. He was so wet behind the ears I had to tell him where the chow hall was. He kept rubbing his hands together and I pointed out the PX where he could buy some gloves. He went on his first convoy an hour later. This guy, he got in his rig, took off, but realized he was in the wrong convoy. He turned back to the base and approached the gate fast because he was out in no man’s land by himself. You didn’t approach the gate fast. You didn’t do that. But he was scared. Some Australians shot him five times with a .50 cal. I mean, he was obliterated. They had to check his DNA to figure out who he was. Less than two hours after I showed him the chow hall, I saw them put his body pieces in bags.

Evening

Fran tells me what I’m planning is called a
geographic
. Moving to get a new start somewhere else in the mistaken belief you’ll leave your bad habits behind is how she puts it. She studied psychology last fall and thinks she can pick apart my mind now.

I mean it. I’m gone, I say.

She goes, When you decide to do it, just go. Don’t bother telling me because I’m not going with you. Men have left me before. I survived. I’ll survive you. Leave before I come home. Make it easy on us both.

I will, I say. I can do that.

Okay, she goes, okay.

Next day

Just me in here this afternoon.

What’s the latest on Gene? I ask Mike.

Haven’t heard a thing, he says.

Mike has owned Mike’s for ten years. He was in a band, got married, and had a kid. In other words, time to get a real job. So he bought the bar and named it after himself. He’s divorced now, sees the kid every two weeks, plays gigs occasionally, and runs this place. Says if he ever sells it, the buyer will have to keep the name. Years from now nobody will know who the hell Mike was but his name will be here. A piece of himself nobody will know and can’t shake off. That’s one way to make an impression.

I first came to Mike’s by chance. I used to drink at another bar on the Paseo but one night it was packed. After Kandahar, I couldn’t handle crowds, so I left. On my way home, I stopped at Mike’s. Some lights on but barely anyone in it. I had a few beers and came back the next night. Two nights in a row and Mike figured he had himself a new regular. He bought me a beer and said his name was Mike. We shook hands. Sealed the deal, as they say.

I met Fran here. She was shooting pool by herself. Bent over the table, her ass jutted high and round against her jeans, and any man with a nut sack would have known that if she looked that nice from behind she’d be more than tolerable face-to-face. And, if she wasn’t, so what with an ass like that. But she was fine all the way around.

She had light brown hair and a determined look. My glance moved down past her chin and rested on a set of perky tits that pressed just hard enough against her T-shirt that my imagination did not have to strain too hard to know what would be revealed when she undressed. I asked to shoot pool with her and we got to chitchatting. One thing led to another is what I’m saying.

I’m not sure when I noticed Gene. I just did. I remember seeing this old man at the end of the bar and thinking how solitary he looked, how he was off in his own world. He had one of those faces that sort of collapsed when he didn’t talk, mouth and chin merging into a flat, frowning pond. When he took off his hat, the light shined on his bald, freckled head. He’d still be standing in his spot when I left a couple of hours later, the same bottle of Bud he had when I first came in half empty and parked in front of him. He barely said a word to me in those days. Just nodded if we looked each other’s way. But then as I began showing up every night, he started saying hello and I’d say hello back.

Evening

Fran and I drop our plates onto the crumb-graveled carpet for our beagle to lick. Partly chewed pizza crust, orange grease. Slobbered up in seconds. I reshuffle the cards.

I’m going to sleep, Fran says.

Say what?

Turn the TV off.

I’m still up.

Turn it down then.

It’s not loud.

Please.

But it’s not.

Shhh.

I shut off the TV, go out to the living room. I sit in the dark fingering my knife. The way Gene has vanished, an eighty-year-old man. I can’t help but notice the empty space at the bar. Like a radiator turned off. All that dead air, dead space.

Funny what you learn about a guy after he’s gone. For instance, Tim and Lyle said that Gene would come to Mike’s at eleven in the morning. He would stay all day and apparently be pretty toasted by the time he left at closing. Really, he never seemed messed up to me. Maybe he kicked in and drank like a horse after I left.

One night, Gene told me he had taken his landlord to court. It wasn’t clear to me why. I believed him, and whatever the reason, he made it seem like he’d won the case. After he disappeared, Bill told me Gene lived in his car. There never had been a court case or a landlord. Bill had put him up in his place but not for long. Said Gene wandered around the house with nothing on but his skivvies. I couldn’t have that, Bill said. Not with my wife in the house and the grandkids coming over. I don’t care if he is a vet.

Next day

Hey, Lyle, Mike says.

Mike, Lyle says, and takes a seat near Tim. He has his hair roped back in a ponytail and wears an army fatigue jacket that hangs well past his hands. His feet dangle off the bar stool and tap the air. He reeks of pot.

I was just getting ready to leave, Tim says.

No you’re not, Lyle says.

He turns to me.

What’s going on? Working?

Absolutely, I tell him. Staying busy.

You were in Afghanistan, weren’t you? How was that?

Good. It was good.

That’s good.

Actually, it was kind of crazy.

Crazy can be good, Lyle says, and he and Tim laugh.

Mike, I’ll have another, Tim says.

I notice Melissa come in the back door.

Hi, Melissa, Mike says.

Hey, Melissa, Lyle says.

Melissa, what’s up, Tim says.

Hey, Melissa says.

She sits next to Lyle and orders a Bud Light and a shot of Jack. She has on heels, gray slacks, gray jacket, and a white blouse.

Won my case, she says. Got him off.

Since none of us know who she’s talking to, we all nod at the same time. Melissa smiles. She starts talking about the first time she came in here as she always does. I don’t know why it bears repeating. I mean, I’ve got the story memorized. But she likes telling it. Maybe it gives her a sense of seniority. After Lyle she has been coming here longer than the rest of us. Like it makes her feel she belongs is what I’m saying.

It was just before closing, Melissa says. Mike and Lyle were shooting pool. Gene was in his usual spot. She remembers Mike saying he was about to close. Then he let her stay and the four of them had beers and got stoned after Mike locked up.

Gene got stoned? I say.

Yeah, Melissa says.

I hadn’t heard that part before.

Evening

Fran tells me that instead of doing a geographic, I should go with her to visit her sister in St. Louis. It would be cheap, she says. No hotel or eating-out expenses.

Sounds okay, I say.

Did you order a pizza?

Not yet, I say. I’m tired of pizza.

What do you want?

I don’t know. Shit, what’s up with all the questions?

Fran goes into the kitchen. I hear her making herself a drink. I try calling Gene. I gave Gene my cell number one night. He called me a few times before he disappeared but I could never make out what he was saying. He had a sandpaper voice that came at you like radio static. What’s that? What’s that, Gene? I’d say, and then he’d hang up. I’d call him right back but he’d never pick up. He doesn’t pick up now. I get one of those female computer-generated voices telling me to leave a message. I’d like to talk to Gene, I say, and hang up.

Next day

Anybody hear anything about Gene? I ask.

Lyle shakes his head. Melissa and Tim look at Lyle and shrug.

Getting to be awhile, Lyle says.

Yeah, awhile, Mike says.

I shout in Bill’s ear and ask him what he knows. Well, he says, speaking like he’s got a mouth full of cotton, I spoke to one of his sons in San Antone. Yes, San Antone it was. Gene gave me his number when he stayed with me. An emergency contact, he had said. Well, let’s hope this isn’t an emergency because Gene’s son wants nothing to do with him. One of those kind of deals, if you know what I mean. Still a lot of water under that bridge, I guess. Anyway, I told his son, I just want you to know your father is missing. We haven’t seen him for the longest. Maybe he’s headed your way. But his boy said again he wanted nothing to do with him. What can you do?

He doesn’t expect an answer and I don’t give him one because, well, what can you do? Melissa, Tim, and Lyle go out back to smoke. Mike steps into the kitchen. Bill stares at his glass. I tell him that today for no good reason I was reminded of this private, a young gal. We got mortared and she got all messed up. She lay on the ground, her right arm ripped to shit like confetti. Some medics put her on a stretcher and got an IV in her, and her shirt rose up exposing her flat stomach and full tits and despite all her screaming I thought she was beautiful. I went over to see if I could help and she looked at me wide-eyed and said, Am I going to die? No, I said. You’re fine. You’re going to make it.