Robert Coover - Noir

I think it was a shooting.

Well, maybe he drowned himself, and then shot himself. Or vice versa. I’m sure it was him.

What I need to know, Snark, you said, scraping at your tie, is how do I get to Mister Big?

Well, he has a weakness for pedicures.

I don’t do toenails.

Also toy soldiers.

Toy soldiers?

Yeah, they tell me his office walls are lined with glass cases full of them. He dresses up and plays out battles on his billiard table.

Hmm. Any specialty?

Medieval. He digs the Dark Ages.

WHEN SNARK LEFT, YOU BOUGHT A DOUGHNUT DIPPED IN pink sugar and took it out to the old panhandler. He tipped his crumpled fedora and, staring up at you with watery blue eyes curtained by long strands of dirty white hair, said: They was a woman had a dog that done tricks. The dog got sick and died and the woman got sick and died. Don’t know which come first. But no one remembers the tricks the dog done. Just me. If you ever need to know, mister, just ask me. He put the pink doughnut in one of his plastic bags and shuffled away. Was he going to eat the doughnut? Sell it? Bury it? Where was he going? What else was in his bags? On a hunch, you followed him. What were you thinking? That he might reveal something about the city that you didn’t know. Something that would be a kind of clue. On the principle that opposites attract, you thought, he might even lead you to Mister Big. Why not. Besides, you were restless. You’d slept all day, drunk too much, needed to walk it off. Snark was heavy duty.

The old panhandler’s route was a twisty one down bleak abandoned streets, ever narrower, darker, and more labyrinthine. A wind was blowing down them, chasing scraps of rag and newspaper, causing signs and hanging lamps to squeal and sway. Sometimes all you could see were the blown newspapers and the panhandler’s long white hair and beard flowing along in the shadows. There seemed no pattern to his wanderings, though he stopped at each trashbin and poked around, so maybe he was making his nightly rounds. Doing his collections, straightening up the city, he the only feeble sign of life within it. You’d been trailing along and no longer knew where you were. Didn’t matter. Though you wished you’d remembered to pack heat, you were at home nowhere and anywhere. And there was something about these dark nameless streets going nowhere that resonated with your inner being. The desolation. The bitterness. The repugnant underbelly of existence. Well, you’d eaten too fast. The doughnuts and chili hadn’t settled well. As the old fellow stooped over some gutter refuse, you stepped into a doorway, cupped your hands around a struck match, lit up. You smelled something familiar. And then the lights went out.

THE CITY AS BELLYACHE. THE URBAN NIGHTMARE AS AN expression of the vile bleak life of the inner organs. The sinister rumblings of the gut. Why we build cities the way we do. Why we love them the way they are even when they’re dirty. Because they’re dirty. Pissed upon, spat upon. Meaningless and deadly. We can relate to that. Here’s a principle: The body is always sick. Even when it’s well, or thinks it is. Cells are eating cells. It’s all about digestion. Or indigestion. What in the city we call corruption. Eaters eating the eaten. Mostly in the tumultuous dark. It’s a nasty fight to the finish and everybody loses. Cities laid out on grids? The grid’s just an overlay. Like graph paper. The city itself, inside, is all roiling loops and curves. Bubbling with a violent emptiness. You have often pondered this, especially after suppers at the Star Diner. You were pondering it that night when some semblance of consciousness returned. Pondering is not the word. Your buffeted mind, its shell sapped, was incapable of pondering. It was more like an imageless dream about pain and the city. Almost imageless. You were being dragged through an old film projector. Your mazy crime-ridden gut was on view somewhere. Your sprocket holes were catching, tearing. Your head was caught in the mechanism. Fade out.

BEFORE YOU COULD SEE ANYTHING, YOU COULD HEAR water sloshing lazily against stones like crumpling metal. The dirty spatter of rain, squawk of gulls. You were down at the waterfront. They must have dragged you here. You opened one eye. Everything in shades of gray, slick with rain. Could be twilight. Probably dawn. You were lying on your belly on wet rocks and broken concrete under an old iron bridge down in the docklands at dawn. In the rain. Everything hurt. Head felt cracked open. To rise up on one elbow took an heroic effort, but you were a hero. Your clothes were a mess. But your tie had been laundered.

Captain Blue was sitting on an old truck tire in a police slicker and rain hat, smoking a cigarette. He tossed you the pack. It was your own. One left. You fumbled for matches but they were wet. Blue came over irritably (you were wasting his time) and let you light your cigarette off his, then he sat down again. So what are you doing down here, dipshit? he asked. They throw you out of your flophouse?

I had a yearning for the bracing seaside air, you said, and felt your pockets.

You were lucky, Noir. It wasn’t robbery. When we found you, you still had your bankroll.

Oh yeah? Where is it?

I shared it out with the guys. Reward for saving your useless fucked-up life.

What do you mean, saving my life? What did they do?

It’s what they didn’t do. Pretty mean old boys, Noir. Now where did that big roll come from?

Client of mine. At the bottom of an empty pocket, a nearly empty pocket, there was a wrinkled scrap of paper. The name the widow scribbled out for you. You tried to remember that familiar smell you noticed just before they brained you, but your sinuses were clogged now with the odor of dead fish and machine oil.

Don’t bullshit me, scumbag, your clients don’t have that kinda money. What are you up to?

You sighed. Even that hurt. So the sigh was more like a groan. You’d smoked the cigarette down to the point where it was burning your lips, and you badly needed another. You flicked the tiny fagend toward the water where rotting pilings from collapsed wooden docks reared up out of the greasy water like ancient stalagmites, black bones, and said: Collecting for police charity.

I oughta take you over to the station, wiseass, and work you over just for the pleasure of it. But somebody’s already done that for us.

Who do you think that was?

I don’t know. My guess is you’ve picked up a tail.

Is that a guess or inside track?

Educated guess, let’s say. Out in the dead black water, pimpled with rain, rusting barges with angular bent-neck cranes sat like senile old geezers having a mindless bath. You don’t know why you notice such things. You’re a nosy guy, Noir, Blue said, and nosy guys attract the curiosity of other nosy guys.

Crushed beer cans. An old shoe. Rusting hubcap. Broken crate slats. Piece of sewer pipe. Bent plastic bottles. Debris of the shore, snuggling in the rocks. Integers. Adding up to nothing. Still, you keep on doing the fucking math. You staggered to your feet, feeling like shit. Think I’m going to have to change the mattress, you said.

Snark says there’s a woman involved.

Yeah, my mother. She misses me. Take me home to her.

You’ve got a head wound, numbnuts. You should go to hospital and have it treated, get an X-ray.

An X-ray might break it. I’ve got work to do.

Your funeral, chump. I don’t have a free car, he says, but here. . He peeled a tenspot off the roll in his pocket. I’m feeling flush. I’ll pay for your cab.