Robert Coover - Noir

You don’t have to go on chasing the panhandler, though. You gave him the doughnut, he gummed a bite, told you a story, and shambled off, you on his tail as though you had no choice. Now you’ve lost him. Good. You’re free. So what next? You can smell the waterfront. You could follow your nose and hole out in a back room at Skipper’s. But before you can lean out in that general direction, the old panhandler shuffles by like a silent rerun, bearded chin on his sunken chest, long white hair cascading down past his face and over his shoulders, rainwater dripping from his tattered fedora brim. He clutches his plastic bag to his sunken midriff with both arms, his topcoat tails dragging through the wet street. You lose him momentarily when he turns a corner, and when you catch up to him, he is dead. Sprawled in front of an open bin, strangled, his milky blue eyes glazed and popping. A dirty yellow necktie with purple polkadots knotted around his scrawny throat. You used to have a tie like that, but Blanche made you throw it away. When you gave him the doughnut tonight, he replied as usual with a story. They was this lady walkin’ backwards wavin’ at somebody and dropped down a manhole, he said. She never come back up and nobody seen it but me, so I reckon she’s down there still. He stared up at you. That’s purty funny, mister. And you ain’t even grinnin’. He spat in disgust past the tooth in his mouth and walked away. Now you wish you’d laughed at his story, cheered the old fellow up once more before he bought it. If you’d not been so blotto, you might have. Reminded you of the old joke: Watch out for the cliff! What cli-i-i-i-ifff-ff. .? Worth at least a nod and a grimace, and you let him down. But what does it matter? Dead’s dead, no residue, all’s as if it never was. The oldtimer is still clutching the doughnut with the half circle gummed out of it. Not to waste it, you pry it out of his grip and take a bite. As you do, you get a whiff of that special fragrance. Can’t place it. But you know what comes next.

NO DREAM THIS TIME. UNLESS YOU COUNT THE THOUGHT you had in the split second between fragrance and blow, which you seemed to go on thinking after being sapped: in short, that the city was as bounded as a gameboard, no place to hide in it, no way but one to leave it, you alone and defenseless in it, your moves not even your own. Not much of a thought. A split second was more than enough time for it.

YOU COME AROUND WITH A HALF-CHEWED BITE OF PEPpery doughnut in your jaws and a busted head. You know where you are without opening your eyes. Call it a private dick’s hunch. There will be glass cases full of toy soldiers and a pedicurist’s chair. Welcome, Mr. Noir, says a voice. They said you wished to see me.

Not they, you say. She. When you open your eyes, you’ll finally see Mister Big. You’re not sure you want to see Mister Big. You are mad as hell. At him, at the dead widow who got you into this, at the sick city, sick world, your own meaningless fucked-up life. Your head hurts so, you almost can’t think. You’d like to kill somebody. A client, you add bitterly, spitting doughnut. Late lamented. Whose corpus delicti has gone missing. How do you explain that?

I have no idea, Mr. Noir. Is this a riddle?

Yeah. And the answer is murder. You open your eyes to see at last Mister Big himself. But: not himself. Yourself. You’re Mister Big. Gazing at you from across the room. You refuse to be surprised by anything. But you’re surprised. Mister Big looks surprised, too. You thought (whiff of cigar smoke?) you caught a glimpse, out of the corner of your eye, of Fat Agnes in his white linen suit fleeing the scene. By way of the window. Right through the heavy drawn curtains as if they weren’t there. Maybe they aren’t there. Maybe this is the dream you didn’t have.

In that case, you would seem to be the answer’s answer, says Mister Big; your other you over there. Looking surly. They tell me you’ve been on something of a spree. He speaks without moving his lips, tough-guy style. You yourself talk that way. Why do you dicks all have that granite look? a client once asked you. Do you take injections? Not only have you apparently done away with a lot of people, he says, but you’re also wanted as a thief, pederast, trafficker, and counterfeiter. The sonuvabitch looks sicker than you expected. He’s wearing a crushed fedora down over his ears. Ugly scowl on his unshaved pan, doughnut crumbs on his chin. He has stolen your chili-stained tie. There’s a twitchy flat-faced mug with a gat standing behind him, and behind the mug a painted hide of some kind in a carved wooden frame. You have the feeling there’s a mug behind you. Also twitchy. It’s like looking in a mirror. Wait a minute. You see now the backwards “4” on the hide. You are looking in a mirror.

Mister Big steps out from behind it. Stringy white hair and beard, watery blue eyes, old pants held up with a sashweight cord: the panhandler. There’s something wrong about this, but your head hurts too much to think what it is. They was this here feller come round, he says, lookin’ for a body. What’s wrong with the one you got? I ast. The feller laughed him a nasty laugh, and says, it ain’t got what I need right now, y’ole coot. He was a feller liked to talk mean and live hard and I seen he was headin’ for a bad end. His beezer was broke in so many places, if somebody’d tole him to folla his nose, he wouldn’ta knowed which way to go. He was carryin’ a filthy darkness round insida him like a canker and he was a chump for the femmes. He talked hardboiled but was really a soft egg and easy to crack. And what mostly made that feller a loser was he didn’t want nuthin’ bad enough.

You recognize now the twitchy thug with the punched-in kisser in the mirror, the one behind you with the popper pointed at your hatband. The taxi driver. Fingers’ ugly sideman. Pug. The.22 he’s holding could be yours. Things are beginning to fall into place. On the wall behind him, behind you, Michiko’s flayed hide, spread out like a mercator projection, is emitting its own messages, as if making a last effort to help Phil-san. Not easy to read. Besides the mirrored “4,” only the equator (the raccoon-dog, the bull’s eye) is at all legible from where you sit. That whiff of cigar smoke earlier: probably just stale body powder. You can smell it now. Maybe that is the message. If you wept, you might weep for Michiko, but what the hell, it’s not the worst end. Everyone croaks. The rest of us end up ash, she’s a work of art. It’s a glitzy joint with a lot of fat furniture, mahogany tables, framed paint blotches on the walls, layers of exotic rugs, figurines on the fireplace mantel, vases, pots of flowers, and glass cases full of toy soldiers. You recognize the ones you photographed. Maybe the ones. Maybe not. What do you know? If Blanche were here, she could tell you. But the light’s odd. Striped as if coming through venetian blinds. But there are no venetian blinds. Hard to focus on anything. The old scarecrow of a panhandler, as out of place in here as a ketchup stain on a tuxedo shirt — or a pearl onion on a banana split, as someone has said — seems sliced up by the light, coming apart and reassembling himself as he shuffles through it.

I tole him they was plenny a live ones out there lookin’ for a sweetie, why was he chasin’ a dead one? She paid me, he says, showin’ how dumb he was, I owe her. Mostly, though, on accounta somebody don’t want me to. Well, sonny, says I, if that somebody’s who I spose it is, you’ll be beddin’ down tonight in cold mud.

All the fleabags and flophouses I’ve bunked in, you say now, cold mud would be an upgrade. How about a fag?