Johnny Temple - USA Noir - Best of the Akashic Noir Series

“Didn’t you hear?” the sailor answered, swinging the girl on his hip. “We dropped some kind of big bomb on Japan. They say it’s the end of the war. They say the war is over!” Then he forgets about Charlie and bends the girl back and kisses her again.

And all along Pacific Beach people are hugging and kissing, laughing and crying, because the war is over.

Charlie Decker, the hard case, goes and sits in the sand.

He peers across the ocean toward a city that has burst into flame and people burn like torches and he knows he will never get the smell out of his nose or the pictures out of his brain. Knows that he will wake up crying that he can never go back.

Ask anybody—his shipmates, his captain, his family back in Davenport if they’ll talk to you about him. They’ll all tell you the same thing.

Charlie’s no good.

Now, broken, he sinks back onto Pacific Beach.

Evening

Fran’s at night school studying for her associate’s degree. I don’t feel like watching TV so I get out the knife one of the interpreters gave me in Kandahar and start throwing it at the wall. He said he got it off the body of a bad guy who blew himself up laying an IED in the road, but I think he stole it off one of our guys, because it’s a Gerber and it doesn’t look like it was in any explosion. The terp could throw it and stick it every time. I’m not that good, but I throw it at the wall anyway. I can do it for hours.

I was a contractor over in Kandahar. Electrician. Worked there for twelve months. When my year was up, I flew home to Kansas City and took up with Fran and a couple of months later moved in with her. Mr. Fix It, the soldiers called me. Did some plumbing too. A little out of my league, but at two hundred tax-free grand a year I was more than willing to say I could do anything. I got used to the noise: mortars, sniper fire, return fire, .50 calibers, AKs, generators grinding all night, guys living on top of each other telling dead baby and fag jokes. Awful quiet now that I’m back. Behind Fran’s house, I hear buses turn off Prospect and onto 39th Street, drone past and slice into the night until I don’t hear anything again. The knife helps. I like the steady repetition of tossing it. The precision of it. Like fly fishing. Gene understood. He fought in Korea.

The trick with the knife, I told Gene, is you got to establish a rhythm. You do that and the silence becomes part of the flow and the plink the knife makes when it enters the wall interrupts the silence, and the small suck sound it makes when you pull it out, and then the silence again until you throw it, again and again.

Right, Gene said.

Next day

This is the third week I haven’t seen Gene at Mike’s Place. Out of all the regulars, he’s the only one missing.

Melissa isn’t here but we all know where she is. A public defender, Melissa has a court case this afternoon. I overheard her tell Lyle yesterday she would be working late. And Lyle? He may have a job painting or installing a countertop or a new floor or fixing someone’s shitter. What I’m saying is, Lyle’s around. He’s a handyman. He’ll be in later, as will his buddy Tim.

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.