Robert Coover - Noir

You shrug (knowledge: lighter than air; you can just blow it away), tell him to take the drawers home with him, cut an extra leghole in them and see if they fit the twins, and you poke blearily through the other stuff. There’s a city map with pier four marked on it, a pawn ticket, a clipping of one of your toy soldier ads, a prescription for painkillers, a lucky rabbit’s foot, and a bent black-and-white photo. It’s a younger Hammer sitting on the edge of what could be a park bandstand with a shit-eating grin on his mush and some doozie standing behind him, only her southern hemisphere in the photo.

Who’s the Jane with the classy shanks?

Don’t know. You study the legs, trying to keep your eyes from crossing. Those beautiful calves. The widow a few years back? The camera angle from below allows a glimpse up her skirt into the shadows past her dimpled knees. The Hammer has his hand up there behind the legs somewhere. Instinctively, you turn the photo over to look at her backside, and see written there: Today is already yesterday. You feel a certain heartache. Or maybe it’s just the chili soup. Your head’s spinning. You need some air. Anyway, Snark’s gone, you don’t remember when. He was complaining about having to give up pretzels for cold toast and filling his mug again and then he wasn’t there anymore. You unload a few bills for the night’s repast (can’t count them, the kid behind the counter seems happy enough, not yours anyway) and buy a caramel-frosted strawberry and pepper-corn doughnut for the old panhandler, don your reclaimed lid and head out into the night.

ONE THING YOU’VE DETERMINED NOT TO DO TONIGHT IS follow the panhandler on his dark drizzly route, but that is what you are doing. Trenchcoat collar turned up, fedora brim tipped toward your nose, a wet fag in your mouth, your fried head a bundle of confusions. You sidle along walls to be sure no one’s behind you, doing a sequence of spiraling 360s when crossing streets, which probably gives the impression of being staggering drunk, which you are. Blitzed. Smoked. Damn that bottomless Snark. The panhandler continues on his rounds oblivious to your boozy dance behind him, clutching his frosted doughnut. Looking for a bin to put it in maybe; trade it in for some brown lettuce or an old sock. Except for his lifting and lowering of trashcan lids, his soggy shuffle and yours are all that can be heard in the dense clammy night. The tattoo on your butt is itching but that may be because, with all your looping turns, you are in effect following yourself.

No light but for the dull yellow puddles spilled by streetlamps, the cheap rainbow glitter under stuttering neon signs advertising refuges long since shut down. Even when the sun is allegedly out, it never seems to reach back into these claustrophobic back streets, your streets, where you’ve so long plied your trade that sunnier ones now seem alien to you. You used to spend a lot of time, even when not on a case, chasing the black seam on the back of women’s stockinged legs through these streets, these streets and any others where they might lead you. Sometimes up creaky unswept stairwells into sad little adventures that rarely ended well. That was back when you were young and everything was interesting. Some days you would be so focused that all but the legs would disappear, and then they’d be gone, too, just the black seams scissoring along. When you told Blanche about this and asked if you were going crazy, she said, no, you were just a foolish man pursuing your perverse and wayward dreams, an occupational hazard that could lead to a bad ending and jeopardize your career. She recommended that, whenever it started to happen, you should stop in the nearest cafeteria and have a glass of warm milk. You told her you always drank a lot of milk at the Star Diner and it didn’t seem to do any good. Blanche’s stockings, you assumed, were probably woolly and seamless, but you never looked.

One day, when the seams scissored around a corner and you chased after, you crashed into the dolly who had been sporting them. You have been following me, she said, as though solving a case.

It’s my job, lady, you said back, picking yourself up and brushing yourself off. Private eye.

Has someone hired you to do this, Mr. Eye?

Noir, ma’am. No, just practicing as you might say. Keeping my hand in.

Your hand in where?

Wherever I can keep it warm.

But why me, Private Noir?

Just call me Phil, sister. What can I say? I like your legs.

My legs?

That’s right, sweetheart. Both of them. And everything in between.

Best you could remember, you’d never said these words before, but it felt like you had. Some kind of catechism, learned before learning. So when she shrugged and said all right, Mr. Sister, I see, if that’s what you want, and started taking off her clothes, you were not entirely surprised. This was happening at a busy intersection, the sun doing its strange blazing thing, with café tables set out on the sidewalk like in moviehouse travelogues of island resorts. She stepped out of her underpants and stretched out on one of the tables like the dish of the day. She was gorgeous, the girl of your dreams, and you knew you were suddenly and crazily in love, but out here in the middle of traffic and pedestrians, you weren’t sure you could penetrate whipped cream. Worse, you feared that’s what it would feel like. Something airy and not quite there. But, hey, life’s a mystery, what the hell. You dropped your pants and Blue, chancing by, arrested you for indecent exposure. Wait a minute, what about her? you asked, but the dame had vanished, taking her clothes with her. You seemed to remember her perfect butt, flashing in the sunshine (it had already started to rain again), but maybe you just made that part up in your head and then went on believing it, the way that hoods and killers make up their innocence and never after doubt it. Blue was still slapping you around when Blanche turned up with the bail money and a habeas corpus writ and what you wanted to know was why it took her so long.

WHILE YOU’VE BEEN AROUSING YOURSELF WITH THESE technicolor reveries, you have lost sight of the old panhandler. Maybe one of your 360s was only a 180. You pick yourself up from the running gutter where you’ve fallen and stumble into a doorway’s shadow, head spinning from your drunken revolutions, and consider your options. Also your fate. You consider your fate. It has a flophouse look about it. You take the folded handkerchief out of your lapel pocket and blow your nose in it. Fuck it, you think. You’re getting too old for this shit. Back to the office. The sofa. A friendly bottle to suck. Sanctuary. You step out, step back again. Police car. Rolling through the watery street, light wheeling. But in dead silence. As if floating an inch or two above the puddles. No, that’s right, can’t go back to the office. Blue will have it staked out. What’s that sonuvabitch up to anyway? Did he invent a body and send you off chasing phantoms, just to land you in trouble? Probably. But then what really happened to the widow? Or her remains? You wish you could talk to her again. She was afraid, seemed drawn to you. You were so slow to apprehend. Yet any move you made got you nowhere. And what does all of this have to do with Mister Big? Her dead hubby’s partner. His murderer maybe. Hers. And Blue: does he, like everybody else in this fucked-up city, work for Big? Big knows you’re after him, so Blue gets sent to nail your ass. But then, Blue has always been out to nail your ass. Is Blue Mister Big himself? Your head is aching with these insane ideas. Should just get the hell out of this pestilential hellhole, disappear into some primeval forest somewhere. But what would you do there except die? Sweating like a sick pig in your woolly pinstripes and spotted tie. No, no way out of here, not for you, mister sister. You were born in the city and are destined to live out your life in it. What’s left of it. Too little, you suppose. When you told the story in Loui’s that night of the crazy broad on the sidewalk café table, Joe the bartender said, yeah, he knew the twist, she’s happened to a lot of mugs, and so far as he ever heard, it always ends the same way. Dangerous dame. Scary. So, what would you do if she and her black seams turned up again? Same goddamned thing.