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

One of the marine choppers was overhead now, working in a widening gyre. The wind had shifted and you could smell the smoke from the prison.

“Is it hard?”

“What?”

“The memories?”

“Of the war, you mean.”

“Yes, the war.”

I didn’t know what to say. “A lot of people on both sides,” I made a vague gesture. “Us or them. Sometimes, the differ­ence, I don’t know.” I felt the confusion inside of me. I saw the dead Japs in their nest. “I don’t know what pulls people through.”

She looked at me then. She smiled. “Love.”

“What?”

She was a little shier now. “Something greater than themselves. A dedication to that. To someone they love. Or to something.”

“To an idea?”

“Yes,” she said. “An idea.”

What she said, it didn’t explain anything, not really, but it was the kind of thing people were saying those days—in the aftermath of all the killing. I felt myself falling for it, just like you fall for the girl in the movie. For a moment, she wasn’t Anne anymore, the girl from The Heights. She was something else, her face sculpted out of light.

She smiled.

“I’m old-fashioned,” she said. “Why don’t you get me a taxi?”

Then I had an idea. I didn’t have to go to Reno. I could just walk up Columbus with Anne. We could catch a taxi. And we could keep going. Not out to Dolores Heights, or Liberty Heights, or wherever it was she lived. But beyond the neighborhoods… beyond the city… out through the dark­ened fields… carried along on a river of light.

Then from behind came a loud voice. It belonged to the Brit and it boomed right through me.

“Anne,” he said. “I have gotten us a taxi.”

I felt her studying me, reading my face. I felt her hand on my back. The Brit opened the taxi door.

My legs were shaking as I headed down the alley. I could hear the copters still, and the sirens along the waterfront. As I walked deeper into the neighborhood, I heard the old sounds too. An aria from an open window. Old men neighing. Goats on a hillside. I was drunk. At some point I had taken my father’s gun out of my pocket. It was a beautiful little gun. I could have gotten into the taxi, I supposed. Or I could find Anne tomorrow. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I had other responsibilities. I hadn’t been in The Beach for a while, and I was disoriented. The alley was familiar and not familiar. Rome, maybe. Calabria. An alley of tradesmen, maybe an accountant or two, in the offices over the street. I saw a figure ahead, coming out of a door, and I recognized the corner. Judge Molinari had his office upstairs. Had for years. But this was a younger man. He turned to lock the door. Go the other way, I thought. Don’t come toward me. But on he came. Jake Molinari, the judge’s son. With the war behind him and a bride waiting. I hadn’t planned to be here, but here I was. There are things you don’t escape. In the dark, he was smiling to himself. Or I thought he was. He raised his eyes. He saw me. He saw the gun in my hand and his mouth opened. I thought of my father and Julia Fusco, and I shot him. He fell against the alley wall. Then all I could see was Anne. Her face was a blinding light. A flash in the desert. The man lay at my feet now. I shot him again.

At the top of the hill, I paused to look back. I knew how it was but I looked anyway. The sky over the bay was red. Alcatraz was still burning.

The one with the missing front teeth. He’s the one who shot me. Before his teeth were missing.

Getting shot was, in a way, my fault. I heard them coming when they were still a mile away. I could’ve run. But running never suited me, even before I got this piece of German steel in my hip. My Helper. Plus I’d been heating the stones for my sweat lodge since the sun was a hand high above the hill. I run off, the fire would burn down and they’d cool off. Wouldn’t be respectful to those stones.

See what they want, I figured. Probably just deer hunters who’d heard about my reputation. You want to get a trophy, hire Indian Charley.

Yup, that was what it had to be. A couple of flatlanders out to hire me to guide them for the weekend. Boys who’d seen the piece about me in the paper, posing with two good old boys from Brooklyn and the twelve-pointer they bagged. Good picture of me, actually. Too good, I realized later. But that wasn’t what I was thinking then. Just about potential customers. Not that I needed the money. But a man has to keep busy. And it was better in general if folks just saw me as a typical Indian. Scraping by, not too well educated, a threat to no one. Good old Indian Charley.

Make me a sawbuck or two, get them a buck or two. Good trade.

I was ready to say that to them. Rehearsing it in my head. For a sawbuck or two, I’ll get you boys a buck or two. Good trade. Indian humor. Funny enough to get me killed.

I really should have made myself scarce when I heard their voices clear enough to make out what the fat one was saying. It was also when I felt the first twinge in my hip. They were struggling up the last two hundred yards of the trail. That’s when I should have done it. Not ran, maybe. But faded back into the hemlocks.

Son of a bidgin’ Indin, the heavy-footed one said. And kept on saying it in between labored breaths and the sound of his heavy feet, slipping and dislodging stones. The other one, who wasn’t so clumsy but was still making more noise than a lame moose, didn’t say anything.

I imagined Heavy Foot was just ticked off at me for making my camp two miles from the road and the last of it straight up. It may have discouraged some who might’ve hired me. But it weeded out the weaker clientele. And the view was worth it, hills rolling away down to the river that glistened with the rising sun like a silver bracelet, the town on the other side that turned into a constellation of lights mirroring the stars in the sky above it at night.

The arrowhead-shaped piece of metal in my flesh sent another little shiver down the outside of my thigh. I ignored it again. Not a smart thing to do, but I was curious about my visitors.

Curiosity killed the Chippewa, as my grampa, who had also been to Carlisle, used to joke.

For some reason the picture of the superintendent’s long face the last day I saw him came to mind. Twenty years ago. He was sitting behind his desk, his pale face getting red as one of those beets I’d spent two summers digging on the farm where they sent me to work for slave labor wages—like every other Indian kid at the school. The superintendent got his cut, of course. How many farmhands and housemaids do you need? We got hundreds of them here at Carlisle. Nice, civilized, docile little Indian boys and girls. Do whatever you want with them.

That was before I got my growth and Pop Warner saw me and made me one of his athletic boys. Special quarters, good food and lots of it, an expense account at Blumenthal’s department store, a share of the gate. Plus a chance to get as many concussions as any young warrior could ever dream of, butting heads against the linemen of Harvard and Syracuse and Army. I also found some of the best friends I ever had on that football squad.

It was because of one of them that I’d been able to end up here on this hilltop—which, according to my name on a piece of paper filed in the county seat, belonged to me. As well as the other two hundred acres all the way down to the river. I’d worked hard for the money that made it possible for me to get my name on that deed. But that’s another story to tell another time.