Ariel Gore - Santa Fe Noir

He realized, before he’d bicycled halfway to the Interfaith Community Shelter, that he’d begun the morning badly. The house fire was a ticket to panic. He couldn’t handle rehashing the memory without believing his vascular system imploded inside his rib cage. He might hit his zero/void, the point where he blanked out. Hey, stupid, stupid , he thought, why can’t ya forget to start remembering?

It may have already begun. The street traffic surrounded him like swarms of locusts. The cars blazed like flashlights inside a pinball machine. He bounced here, there, and back and forth, a pinball surrounded by sounds, brrnnngs . The flippers whacked him. Again. Again. They whacked. They hurt him like salt to his wounds. And like a wound that was too painful to touch, he couldn’t remember much without retreating to the safety of knowing he could never live like the house cats again.

Doubted it. He zero/voided too often. He blanked . The blankness where his fragile self-identity broke into a thousand reflections. But he couldn’t bring himself to look at one of them, the edges singed by chiaroscuro reflections of himself going up in smoke. He was belligerent, unresponsive, or unpredictable when he was stuck inside it.

The bell rang when Leo entered Kelly Liquor Barn, fingering two dollars in his pocket. “Hey, how about I buy one beer in a five-pack? Come on. I’ve been a good customer. When all the other bums see me buying here, they buy too. Call me the Pied Piper, right?”

The Kelly clerk straightened his shoulders, then arched his eyebrows, making Leo wait while he helped other customers. The average bum couldn’t wait patiently three minutes, so Leo beat the odds, unfolding his Santa Fe New Mexican. Remember the headline: “US and Korea Escalate Nuclear Arsenal Conflict.” Coupons. Advertising. A local news story on water-rights disputes.

The subsequent story involved a cold case. A cold case ? Sounded to him like a frozen-dinner package. Leo paused to glance impatiently at the store clerk, while he impatiently skimmed the newspaper. And?

He had a hard time following the text. The photo was conventional. The cold case suspect (roughly answering to Leo’s size, age, and height statistics) was a mangy white guy. Second-class citizen. Reported to have been homeless for stretches in the 1990s. He had been incarcerated in 2003. And? He escaped in 2011.

So was this news, or old news?

The next paragraph clarified that the escapee might be involved in several recent homicides. Police investigations saw signature evidence fitting a pattern. Circumstantial evidence led the police to investigate the possibility the suspect was behind the recent deaths of Lisa Marie Bennett by fisticuffs and strangulation, and the death of Marie-Jose Jaramillo by bludgeoning and strangulation. He is considered violent so the police ask that people do not approach him if they do see him.

Leaving Kelly Liquor Barn, Leo squatted on the steps, his hands still stuck in his pockets. No luck scoring a Camo. His hands slowly ungripped, and reached for the newspaper stuffed inside his armpits. Yep, he wanted to read the article again. He couldn’t say why he recorded the victims’ names, Lisa Marie Bennett, Marie-Jose Jaramillo. The suspected cold case killer’s name slipped his mind.

Leo visited the Santa Fe Interfaith Community Shelter twice a week.

The real name for the shelter was Pete’s Place, by the way. Leo visited when he needed basic necessities. He grabbed a shower. Swallowed a hot lunch. He never spent the night. Tensions lingered whenever he ran into that short guy, the in-house manager. The in-house manager, Schroeder, still shot him nervous looks. Funny, back when he was a cabbie, Leo remembered believing Santa Fe didn’t look like a town with many indigents. Santa Fe belonged to cultural sophisticates. But there were indeed a few poor places — barrios — on the outskirts of this fancy town for folks with second homes and favorite pets.

The building that housed the shelter had formerly been a pet store. Local citizens of this “cultural mecca” had shown their humanitarianism — their truly “impeccable refinement” — and converted the pet shop into storage space for humans beings.

Alley cats still called the shelter by the former pet store name, Pete’s Place. Yep, per usual, Leo got the irony.

’Cause an animal shelter was an animal shelter

Leo got Pete’s Place better than he got the designation shelter. Somebody was always ready to steal your bike, skim your small change. The guests included: Dope fiends. Alcohol fiends. Clowns with all kinds of maniac lunacy. Me. Me included. ’Cause sometimes I pull crap like the incident with Schroeder.

Needing a drink, Leo cut a path behind the Allsup’s; blankets and bottles littered the asphalt nooks. He checked the empties. No luck. Then he spotted Kasey and MaryAnn — a couple of sewer rats so addled and addicted they wore tatters — doing what alley cats do. Howling, while nursing Smirnoff vodka.

Leo thought, I could ask for a shot, or stick around, wait for them to start carping.

Soon enough, Kasey accused MaryAnn of seeing somebody.

MaryAnn spat, “You jerk.”

Leo played dumb. Okay, he added fuel to the fire, and disingenuously mentioned he thought she knew so-and-so, or he thought he’d seen her hanging at such-and-such. Misery loves company.

Alley cats drew blood.

Kasey reeled back and swung.

MaryAnn sobbed, caterwauled.

While they screamed, Leo nonchalantly fingered the bottle; snagged it; stuck it in his backpack. He didn’t see any point in wasting it. He biked away. Telling himself he needed it, he really needed extra alcohol before he entered Pete’s Place.

Planning on paying Kasey and MaryAnn back or something? You’re a sorry excuse — his bad conscience began picking at him. He biked to a marginal grassy area; he ducked low beneath a fence, sulking, hiding.

The Smirnoff vodka was hot on his tongue. Rather than making him slow down, the firewater sting encouraged him to gulp. And gulp. He accidentally dropped his Santa Fe New Mexican. Wiping it, he stained the newspaper worse. Too bad, because he wanted to reread the Santa Fe killings story. A homeless killer, huh? Leo wondered: Is he still on the streets? The next vodka shots began stinging in an unpleasant way. He flashed back to how his sores stung, his skin pores ached for weeks following the house fire. The house fire. Still can’t stand remembering it. He climbed on his bike; within minutes, nearing Pete’s Place, Schroeder’s name popped back into his mind. The in-house manager there still blamed him because his stay at the shelter had been a big unapologetic disaster. Forget about it. Screw it. Never apologize. Never apologize to them. Big Deal , he thought.

Big deal, huh. Things could be a bit easier. If at least ya stayed at the shelter. What happened?

Pete Place’s in-house manager, Schroeder, was a fidgety, slightly bowlegged little guy. His slightly condescending smile consumed his body. He dissolved into his twin-peaked lips. The bums who knew the score liked to claim he received $200,000 a year for marginally feeding the homeless. His manner was vaguely priestly, so his nickname was Saint Peter. Nightly, he welcomed the shelter rats. Meeting them at the end of the corridor, right before they entered heaven, he reminded the filthy masses that getting into Pete’s Place had protocols, rules, regulations. First of all: put your personal items, small change, keys (keys?) down here. Leo still heard his tiny, wheezing voice:

Please empty your pockets, please place your belongings in the tray.