Carlin Romano - Philadelphia Noir

The kid with the bag got in the car and the guy behind the wheel stomped on the accelerator, almost clipping a van making the turn from Midvale. The Chevy was an old convertible with green metallic paint that glittered, a comet disappearing down Ridge toward Manayunk in a ribbon of green. Jimmy smiled, suddenly conscious of the neighborhood coiled on the hills above them, getting that way you could get under a head full of dope. Everything seemed connected; dark forces were at work moving cars and people around like pieces on a game board.

He turned back to Grace, but she was walking back inside, throwing away a cigarette. Her fingernails looked the same pale color as her fingers, some color that wasn’t yellow and wasn’t brown. There was a thin red stain on the white shirt at her hip. She wore tight black jeans and he let himself picture her stepping into them, her long legs that pale cream shade that he didn’t know what to call. He was suddenly too lonely to head back upstairs and walked around the corner to Buckets for a drink.

He stood at a window at Buckets, trying to see inside, to see who was behind the bar. A few weeks before he had swiped some change from off the counter and thought the girl bartender might have seen him do it, so now he only went in when she wasn’t there. While he was standing there, squinting through the dark glass, he saw Evan walking up toward the front door and stop. Evan waited for a short girl with hair dyed white-blond except for hard black roots and dark eye makeup. She was standing between two parked cars, rooting in her purse. He nodded at Jimmy, who smiled, his tongue out, and raised a hand.

“Hey, man. You getting a drink?”

“Oh, hey.” Evan looked at the bar, then doubtfully at Jimmy. “Ah, yeah. Well, no. Just getting something to eat.” The girl came over and hooked her arm around his. “Well, see you.”

“Man, you ever see Jesús and them?”

“Nah.” The blond girl moved a step toward the door, pulling Evan. “I got a job. At the Rite Aid.”

“Stacking boxes and shit?”

“Ah, I’m the manager. At night. You know.” Evan looked apologetic. “Anyway, Jesús went in the army.”

“No shit. Remember that time we took that grader and ran it in the creek? That was fucking retarded.”

“Yeah. Well.” He nodded his head. “I gotta go.”

Jimmy fished in his pockets and held out a bottle of blue nail polish to the girl. There was a long pause, then the girl fluttered her fingers to show him the rose tips.

“Sorry, not my color.” She turned to the door, her arm still hooked to Evan’s like they were chained together.

Evan lifted his shoulders, as if he wanted to stay and bullshit but he had to go. “Hey,” he said, looking at the bottle in Jimmy’s hand. “We carry that stuff.”

Jimmy got up the next afternoon and went to see his aunt to get more money. He walked up Stanton along the back of St. Bridget’s, feeling the heat coming up through his sneakers. The kids were in school, and he thought it was funny you could tell without seeing any sign of them, like the building gave off a kind of hum when it was full of people. He had dated a girl, Cheryll, who said he had a shaman aura, some kind of power to tell about things, a sense other people didn’t have. She had a tattoo of a tree and an owl and a pyramid with an eye in it. When he got pinched and sent to the Youth Study Center, he had been trying to steal a huge wheel of wire from the cable TV place where her brother worked. Jimmy thought she was in love with him. She was always saying what a dick her brother was, but she still wouldn’t talk to Jimmy after that, would hang up on him when he called from the center, the kids lined up behind him and tapping him on the shoulder so he’d give up the phone. So maybe she was wrong about his aura.

His aunt wasn’t really his aunt, she was his great aunt or his mother’s aunt or something. She lived near the tracks that ran in the gulley in front of Cresson, in a house so narrow he could almost reach out and touch both walls in the front room. He’d go over there once every couple of weeks and listen to her talk and leave with a couple hundred bucks. It paid for his rent, and he sold enough of the stuff he stole to stay in weed and the orange Drake’s cupcakes he liked.

The house was full of little green animals. Ceramic donkeys and horses and birds in a million different styles, but all of them green. There were also pictures cut out of the newspaper and put in crooked frames, including one that his aunt said was Princess Grace at a wedding at St. Bridget’s. Once when he came over his aunt was sitting in the dark watching movies of some kind of procession of kids dressed up in matching outfits, the colors faded into a muddled blue. The girls all had on the same uniform dress and veils, and he said, “Is this Muslims?” before he realized it was little kids at St. Bridget’s getting first Holy Communion. His aunt didn’t seem to hear him, shaking her head and saying something like, “There’s your uncle Pete,” or, “Oh, look at Mary, how young she is,” but he didn’t know any of the faces.

She made him drink blue skim milk and gave him cookies from a tin. He thought if he could get her to give him some extra money sometime, he could invest in a quarter-pound of weed. He told her he wanted to go into business.

“Doing what? You should be in school.”

“I don’t know. Selling things.”

“You’re a dreamer. You get that from your father.” She walked him to the door, stopping to look at the framed clippings. “I used to tell people we were related, me and Grace. Because of the Kelly name. I just wanted it to be true.”

Jimmy looked at a picture of Princess Grace in a green dress, her hair swept back and her body arched, like a bow.

His aunt held out a small wad of cash. “But we’re not the princess kind of Kelly, are we? We’re just the other kind.”

The next afternoon he wrote, 9/06, silver bullet lighter, AM/ PM market, in the composition book, and went downstairs, his pockets full. He had glass bottles of makeup, lipsticks in two shades. He came through the door in time to see the Latino kid handing the bag to the guy from the Chevy and saying something, his head close to the guy’s ear.

Something was going on. Jimmy watched the Chevy drive off and the kid in the doorway watching them go and then turning to look at Jimmy. The kid was big, with a shaved head and tattoos on his neck. His eyes were dark, with heavy lids that made him look sleepy, and when he looked into Jimmy’s face it was like there was a tunnel in the air between them so that Jimmy couldn’t turn away. But it meant something, the kid hitting him with an attitude.

Grace Lei came out then and said something to the kid so that he sneered at her, showing her the back of his hand. Jimmy couldn’t dope out the gesture, but he got that it was something disrespectful, and when the kid turned to go inside Grace gave his back the finger. There was shouting from inside and then she came all the way out and got a cigarette from a pack in her purse.

Jimmy stumbled a little getting across the sidewalk to offer her the lighter. She lit her cigarette and held the lighter out, but he waved her off.

“Keep it.”

She stuck it in her pocket without looking at it and turned back to the street.

He said, “That guy giving you a hard time?”

“Ah, never mind about him. That’s Luis. He thinks he’s a big deal because he’s friends with Tiger.” She pointed to the street.

“Tiger?”

“That Chinese boy who comes here every day.” She looked over her shoulder, lowered her voice. “He’s in a gang. They sell drugs. They’re idiots.”