Сьюзен Стрейт - Orange County Noir

That’s when I jumped into his chest, head down. I slammed him over the side bar of the dying man’s bed and started punching his sides. I know I hit Rick, but I also hit the bed rails, and I hit IV tubes, and I punched the dying man’s chest, and one landed hideously on his ventilator tube. Rick clawed at my back. I felt that he had both hands on my back, which meant he didn’t have the gun. I smelled piss from the catheter bag spilling to the hardwood floor, and a moment later Rick and I were sloshing in it, the dying man’s bed rolling off sideways like a drifting luxury liner, me still punching at Rick’s guts, because that’s where you hurt a man. Idiots punch heads. I’m not tough, but I know that much. I kneed him in the balls repeatedly until he was making sounds like a little kid and spit bubbled slowly from his mouth. I did it hard enough for my knee and thigh to start hurting.

By the time Doc pulled me off of him, I think I was ready to kill the guy. I never saw that coming. I was willing to let him kill me, but I hadn’t anticipated the savage rush I was still feeling. I was briefly sickened by the notion that my father, in all his animal brutality, would have been, for once, proud of me. I felt like puking in a corner.

Doc held the gun and Sandra busily tried to reattach the tubes and wires I had ripped out of her patient, whose machines, I now noticed, were all going faster and louder than before. I didn’t know if the guy was worse off, or if I was just in some adrenaline-fueled space where noises were louder. Rick was at my feet clutching his balls in a puddle of the dying man’s piss. I was drenched from the piss, from the tub, and from sweat, which flowed out of me like my pores had tripled in size.

Doc said, “Sandra, we’re going to take what we came for.”

She nodded. “What about Rick?”

“We could call the cops after we leave,” I suggested.

Sandra shook her head. “If he talks, cops are going to start asking me questions.” She paused. “And then they’ll talk to you.”

We should kill him, I thought. This is not a thread to leave loose. My father would have killed him.

I said, “Maybe you don’t know us as well as you really do. When Rick wakes up, you tell him we’re strangers.”

Doc turned to me. “He’ll come looking for us.”

I said what I was thinking: “It’s that or we kill him. And the biggest idiot cop on the planet would connect the dots to us in one interview with her.” This was when it occurred to me that if we killed Rick, we’d have to kill Sandra. But that would still leave way too much connective tissue from us to this scene. And I couldn’t believe I was even thinking about it. I at least had enough sense to pull back. Rick rolled around semiconscious on the floor. Doc kicked him in the thigh. Then again.

“Fucker.” Doc shook his head. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

I got my bag. Doc put the gun in his pants and started to collect more of the patches and pills from Sandra, who I’m guessing already had the money, or else she was too scared to ask about it.

Regardless, I went out the side door I’d noticed earlier. Doc followed me. I walked by the recycling and garbage cans and out the side yard gate. The driveway had a newer Lincoln next to Doc’s car. Rick’s car, I logged, in case I ever saw it again. I stopped, glanced left, away from the dead end and toward 17th Street, my hair still wet and the sun warming me as I peered down the street and then walked toward Doc’s car, trying hard to look like what I was. A man stepping into the passenger side of a car on a beautiful day.

We got in. Doc took a deep breath and then another and had both hands on the wheel without starting the car. He lit a cigarette and said, “Dude, you were a fucking hero in there.”

I didn’t look in his eyes. Lawn sprinklers whirled on at the neighbor’s house. He fired the ignition and we pulled out of the driveway, away from the Lincoln I hoped to never seen again in my life.

Doc said it again. “Dude, you are fucking heroic.”

And this time, just to shut him up, just so I’d never have to hear it again, I said, “Yeah.”

Seal Beach

Rae was Hank’s daughter. She had it and she flaunted it, and though some of it was starting to sag, when you’re on the downside of your sixties and living in Leisure World, you can let stuff like that pass.

So when Hank suggested walking to the pier, and that Rae — who’d been staying with him for a month or so — would pick us up and have lunch with us and drive us back, I couldn’t say no. Sheila was still my world, but a guy can have fantasies. So I told Hank yes and we met at the giant metal globe out by the guard gate and crossed to the other side of Seal Beach Boulevard, by the Naval Weapons Station. We figured they were up to something diabolical over there, like in that movie The Mist that Hank got on Netflix, where the military types open a rift to another dimension and giant insects show up and eat everyone. We thought it would be fun watching three-foot dragonflies chasing down the ladies from the quilting club.

Someone coming the other way might’ve thought we were brothers. It was more than just the old-white-haired-man thing. Our faces were the same shape and our eyes the same watery blue and our mustaches were like caterpillars from the same batch. Every once in a while we’d catch someone looking. I’d never had a brother, and it was kind of fun having at least a pretend one.

Maybe a quarter mile along some moron had taped a campaign sign to the fence that kept the riffraff out of the naval base and the overgrown cockroaches in. The senatorial election propaganda had started showing up lately, on bumpers and stuck in lawns and stapled to light poles. I planned on voting for Roger Elliot. He wasn’t much of anything, but his heart seemed in the right place.

The other guy, Tim Swift, was a right-wing maniac better suited for a turn-of-the-century hanging judgeship than the U.S. Senate. Which was how he’d gotten elected to Congress for eleven terms in Orange County. But I guessed it wasn’t enough for him, because since he’d gotten himself nominated for senator, he’d ramped up the Neanderthal stuff. Truth be told, the guy scared me, especially after that reporter got roughed up. Swift was playing for keeps.

The sign taped to the fence was his. A Real American , it said, like Roger Elliot was only playing one on TV. I muttered, “Goddamn politicians.”

Hank looked at the sign. Something started to come over his face, but he got hold of it before I could figure out what it was. I said, “What?” and he said it was nothing and that we should pick up the pace.

Things were a little off the rest of the way down the boulevard and onto Electric Avenue, like I’d stepped over some line I didn’t know about. But just before we hit Main Street he looked at me and said, “Sorry I got weird. Some shit I’m dealing with.”

I almost asked if it was about what had happened back in ’92. Which he didn’t know I knew about. Instead I said, “Want to talk about it?”

“Nah. No big deal. Getting-old shit. If it ain’t one thing it’s another.”

“You can say that again.”

We turned the corner. More foot traffic there on Main. Lots of kids out of school for the summer, yelling and screaming and running around like wild Indians. Lots of young ladies with skimpy outfits. We dodged the kids and took in the view. Just a couple of old coots out for a walk.

After a while we passed the Jack Haley Community Safety Building and stepped onto the pier. My back was hurting a little and my legs a lot, but I didn’t mind. It seemed right. Pain I’d earned, as opposed to the gallbladder I was missing through no fault of my own.