Ambrose Bierce - San Francisco Noir 2 - The Classics

I couldn’t figure what angle he was playing. Jimmy didn’t know angles. Jimmy did the shit work for the guys who did. So, my angle was win the game and stick to the wager. Jimmy gets drunk, mopes for a day, crawls to the table to win it all back. When I have a plan and decide it’s safe to leave, Jimmy’s luck will improve.

“Sounds like a bet,” I said.

I shuffled. Jimmy cut. I dealt two hands then the flop: ace of spades, ace of clubs and the eight of clubs. The game was Sudden Death Hold’em and we could discard and draw in lieu of each betting round. By the final draw, the six of clubs and the eight of spades were face up with the others.

I called. Jimmy showed. He held a pair of clubs, the king and the two. The odds of drawing a flush in a typical game are five hundred to one. The odds against a king high flush are greater still, and if you’re Jimmy Rehab, you start writing zeros until your arms falls off. His game had indeed improved but he was still Jimmy Rehab, shark food.

“Get used to battlefield meals.” I dropped my eight of diamonds onto the flop for a full house. “You try sneaking out tonight and I’ll gut you.”

Jimmy was pale. He stood, cracked open a beer and limped toward the bunk room.

“I’ll win it all back tomorrow,” he said. That calm of his, again.

First thing, I made coffee, thirty-weight black. Jimmy hadn’t moved. I heard the deafening headphone hiss from his CD player eight feet away. Seven hours since he’d crashed and his eardrums were in shreds. I pulled the headphones away and like the spider darting up the dormant faucet, the smell hit my nose, rebounded off my brain and crash landed in my stomach. I’m supposed to say Jimmy, hey man, wake up, but I don’t bother. His lids were slack beneath my thumb, the thin skin pliant as an empty rubber glove and his eyes had gone to frost.

I hooked my knife at the cuff of his left leg and sheared his jeans, ankle to thigh. The bandages beneath were damp with something thick and yellow. The veins in his leg had darkened with the trail of infection that had run rampant for the last three days. I dug the antibiotics from the pocket of his coat, the bottle unopened and every capsule accounted for.

I dragged Jimmy to the bathroom, cradled his neck over the toilet and emptied out his blood with a knife stroke. It sounded like the time my father dumped his aquarium but lasted longer. I dropped the carcass into the bathtub and set to tearing Skinner’s place apart for the next hour, searching for tools, empty paint cans, anything.

I drew a line above Jimmy’s eyebrows and cut around his skull with a hacksaw and pulled at the top of his head until it broke suction with a loud wheezing kiss. His brain held fast to his spine until I dug into both sides with a set of screwdrivers.

“You’ve never used this thing in your life. Give it up.”

It shot loose, bouncing off the shower tile and slipping down to the drain like a lump of gray soap.

Happy Bastille Day, Jimmy.

The guts and brains Jimmy never displayed in his life lay submerged in seven different gut-buckets of paint thinner, rubbing alcohol, or vodka and sealed with duct tape.

Skinner was dead, Ralph and George weren’t going to show up. The six hundred cans of gourmet meat were mine, the two hundred fifty pounds of cat litter were Jimmy’s. I folded his arms funeral-style, rolled him into a sheet, and returned him to the bathtub, buried in Tidy Cats.

A week passed. I monitored the police and fire frequencies, that godless ocean of misery and chaos beyond the glittery tidepool of evening news. I heard dispatches to investigate suspicious odors but never for this neighborhood. Somebody was always decomposing somewhere else. Thing was, I knew those other addresses, each one. I knew the dead guys and they knew me, but they hadn’t known where I’d end up. My word kept me alive while the Numbers kept looking.

I ate canned salmon and drank warm beer. Outside, civilians drank at the Blackthorn, ate pizza by the slice and rode the N Judah through the fog. I breathed bad air and played solitaire and single-deck blackjack, betting painkillers, germ killers, matchsticks, money or cigarettes. I wagered on the closing of the Nasdaq, the next day’s weather and sports scores. I lost twenty-five tins of smoked oysters and six candy bars to the house when Foreign Object came in dead last, so I quit the ponies altogether. The civilians on Irving fell in and out of love, in and out of bars, hailed cabs and racked up parking tickets, while I mastered the dart board. I dug damp litter from the bathtub with a gardening trowel and dumped fresh litter in its place. After four fifty-pound bags, it stayed dry.

Jimmy’s face could have been cut from a rotting saddle. His lips were pulled back from his teeth for a hardened, loveless smile and his eyes were windows to nothing but the hollow of his head. I don’t have a single good reason for having exhumed him from his catbox coffin, though I have many bad ones. A steady diet of boredom and paranoia, spiked with bourbon and painkillers consumed in isolation, has impaired my judgment to such a degree that propping Jimmy in a chair seemed funny during the moment. I’d been wagering against an imaginary and anonymous house and now the house had a name.

I shuffled and cut. Watch and learn, Jimmy Rehab, or at least watch. You can do that much. I burned the top card and dealt the next two and turned them over for the high card. I came up with the two of hearts while Jimmy showed a queen.

“Your deal, Jimmy.”

I want to believe I’m still here because of my word. The truth is, between the law and the Numbers, I’d survive an hour above ground on a good day. I’m safe, and staying here is the only way I’ll ever be certain that Skinner Jones didn’t hand over a map to Plan Q before they snuffed him, which means Skinner Jones never said Johnny Pharaoh so he could walk away from the jewelry store.

Jimmy’s expression never changes. He pulls his hands close with his fingers curled inward, clinging to a phantom noose. His fingernails keep growing and I play his hands for him.

I chase my bad run with a big bet, ten thousand milligrams to break even. Jimmy deals me a hard twenty, two kings against his six up. My luck’s turning but Jimmy doesn’t flinch. I split the kings for a hard twenty and a hard seventeen before I stand.

Jimmy draws a five. Jimmy draws an ace. House rules call it a soft twelve so he hits. The king breaks his winning streak and I drag twenty thousand milligrams into my bottle. My luck is changing but Jimmy Rehab doesn’t say a word, doesn’t blink. It’s unnerving, I tell you. He stares right through me like he’s been doing for weeks.

Tenderloin

The Zombie had a room in a residential hotel in the Tenderloin, next to a “health club,” and on Sundays he sat in Boedekker Park and listened to the whores say, “Wherever you be going, I be going,” and he watched the dark gray pigeons fixed like statues on the roof-ledge of the building adjoining Big Red’s Bar-B-Que, while old women sat across from him, combing their hair for hours. Here he whiled away the day, tasting blood as he licked his decaying gums. (The Other did the same.)—“If you ain’t got nothin’ else, then ’bye ,” he heard a whore say. Pigeons gurgled and chuckled and waddled fatly. A man in a black hat leaned against the lamppost smoking, and the smoke was thick like milk. A woman in a tan coat sat bent over her knees, scuffing her tennis shoes to keep the flies away, and then suddenly raising her graying head, more or less as a jack-in-the-box will pop abruptly out of its gay metal coffin. The Zombie saw that she was weeping. Beside her sat The Woman Who Laughed.