Kevin Sampsell - Portland Noir

“We were downtown partying one night and we had some words with some hicks in a big lifted truck,” Manny says. “Guys from Gresham, for sure. Fucking hicks, you know? So we pulled up next to them at a stoplight, and I jumped up in the bed of their truck and started bouncing that shit up and down. Startled the shit out of them! And then they just fuck-ing took off, blew right through the red light, almost got fuck-ing bashed by an oncoming. They drove around like maniacs, taking hard turns, just to fuck with me. I thought for sure we were going to flip over and die, man. Scariest shit ever. So finally I just jumped out and rolled about fifteen times across the asphalt. Rolled myself right into the hospital,” he says, trying to laugh, but it makes me feel bad, because he’s fucked up bad and there’s something not right about him now, and it’s not like he’d ever been totally right, but still.

8) I wake up in the middle of the night because someone’s knocking on the van door. I look out and it’s the girl, the one from the mattress, and she’s out there shivering in the rain, and I can tell she needs something. The light is misty, chemical orange from the streetlamps up on the bridge.

“You need a blanket?” I ask, sliding the van door open.

“No,” she says. “A blanket’s not what I need.” She looks hungry, but not for food. She takes two fingers and smacks the inside of her elbow.

“I don’t have anything like that,” I say.

“Please?” There’s something in her eyes, something pure behind all the makeup and crust.

I invite her in out of the rain and pull a couple beers out of the cooler, even though I know that’s not what she needs. Her skin’s pale and strung with little beads of rain; she smells like sweat and like the sky. She shakes her hair out like a dog and I can feel the rain from her hair on my face.

“Why don’t you ask your boyfriend?” I say. “Where’s he?”

“I don’t know.”

“He leaves you here alone in the middle of the night?”

“He takes care of me,” she says. “You don’t know him.”

I crack a beer. She sits down on the edge of the bench where I’d been sleeping, runs her hand across my pillow. She looks around my van, at my stacks of clothes and dishes and skate decks and fruit. “You live in here?” she asks.

“Right now,” I say. “Just while I find a place.”

“It’s nice,” she says.

“It’s a van,” I say.

“You seen where I sleep? Believe me, this is nice.”

No argument there. I take a sip of beer.

“I watch you skate sometimes,” she says, looking me in the eye now. “It’s like you’re on fire, or you want to die or something. Everyone watches out for you.”

I look out the window, at the park’s darkened curves and lips. I take some pride in the way I skate, in the fact that I scare people. At a place like Burnside, this says a lot.

She stands up and reaches for the beaded necklace hanging off my rearview mirror. It was something I made for Amber back when I worked at the summer camp, during arts-and-crafts time with the kids. Amber liked it for some reason, wore it all the time. It’s one of the few things of hers I have left. The girl takes it off the rearview and starts to put it around her own neck. Before she can do that I grab it out of her hand.

“I think you better go now,” I say.

“I’m sorry, I just wanted to try it on. It’s pretty.”

I open the van door for her.

“Wait,” she says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. Was it your ex-girlfriend’s or something?”

I don’t say anything.

“I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll make you feel better. I’ll suck your dick if you want me to. Seriously.”

Blood rushes to my head. The same way it does every time. I’d stayed up all night drinking and fucking so many times in Hawaii, but still the blood rushes to my head, because temptation does that to you, even when you remember all the mornings you woke up feeling empty and sick and regretful, so many mornings, but still, this girl’s mouth is so young and full.

“What’s your fucking story? Why you sleeping at Burnside with some crackhead?” I ask, doing the concerned-citizen thing, even though I’m still considering her offer, wondering if she swallows.

And then I hear a shout from the upper parking lot, up where the mattress is, and I know who it is and that he’s looking for his girl, and I imagine going out and beating the living shit out of him, but I’m tired and it’s raining and I’m honestly not all that excited about going bodies with a dirty addict sleeping on a mattress at Burnside. The girl hears the shout too. She reaches out and takes my hand, pries my fingers open one by one. She buries her thumb into my palm, just enough that it feels good, and looks up at me with those eyes. Then she takes a Sharpie out of her pocket and writes in my hand.

Please don’t help me, it says.

9) A text message from Manny wakes me up a few hours later, around 4 a.m. I think I might be an angel , it says.

10) It’s hard being back in Portland, back here where it all happened. I drive past where Amber and I used to live before she got sick, our little green bungalow in Southeast, over by St. Francis Park. Some other family is living in the house now, some people with a Subaru and a swingset. They put a garden in the side yard where my mini-ramp used to be.

I park the van and walk up into the yard and peer through the front window. I can’t see anyone but it looks like someone’s home. I hate them, whoever they are, but at the same time I wouldn’t mind if they invited me in for a sandwich.

I walk over into the garden, where everything is mostly dead, this being wintertime, except for a few onions. They have rust-colored skins with green shoots coming out the tops. They feel firm and ripe so I pick a couple. Then I turn around and there’s a little blond kid standing there looking up at me. He’s wearing rollerblades.

“This your garden?” I ask.

He doesn’t say anything.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I used to live here.”

But by the look on his face I can see that this only makes it worse. He turns around and tries to skate off toward the porch, as fast as he can, but he falls down and skins his knee and starts crying, and then there’s a woman’s face looking at us from out the window, and here I am, this big bearded fucker standing over her crying kid, with a couple of her onions in my hand, and her face disappears fast, and I want to do the same, so I make my way toward the van, and from behind me I hear someone shouting, Hey , a man’s voice, the voice of a not particularly tough man trying to sound a little bit tough.

I start up the engine and drive off.

11) I’ve been on this program, eating fruit and making the sign of the cross and skating Burnside every morning early, and not too much drinking, and my head was feeling cleared out a little, but then stuff kind of started going downhill after the thing with that family and their garden. Or maybe it was the thing with the girl, I don’t know.

Manny and me start drinking early at the skatepark, getting all sloppy. I take a bad slam on my elbow. I lie there for a while, looking at the underside of the bridge, all black and sooty and painted with pigeon shit, like an old cathedral. My elbow turns into a swellbow, the size of a baseball, the way it always does. And then these art school girls who Manny knows show up with some bottles of champagne, and we decide to celebrate my swellbow, and we’re all drinking out of the bottle at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, and it’s good, you know, the way freedom can be good.

Then these art school girls want to hit the strip clubs, which is just fine with Manny and me, and we end up at Magic Gardens, where the ceilings are low, and one of the strippers swings her hair around all crazy and gets it stuck in the heating vent above the stage. I’m embarrassed for her a little, all naked and hanging there by the hair, but that doesn’t keep me and Manny from looking and laughing. Then the bartender, this fat Asian, comes out with a pair of scissors.