Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [77]
Amy shouts for the keys and I toss them to her. She sprints ahead to the car and has the engine started before I even reach the passenger door.
We burn through signals regardless of their color and pull onto the freeway. The blood on my hand slowly dries and turns brown. Amy stares straight ahead, a death grip on the wheel, her chest heaving. Her right foot is planted to the floor. The album is still blasting from the stereo and we don’t turn it down.
Stand up so I can see you
Shout out so I can hear you
Reach out so I can touch you
This is our emergency
This is our emergency
A moment turns into half an hour. I make Amy turn around at Multnomah Falls, the scenic area thirty miles east of where we started.
“I don’t want to go to Idaho,” I say. I try to make it funny but she doesn’t respond.
Amy quietly, slowly pulls the car around. She looks left and right three times. Stops. She finally speaks: “Do you think we lost him?”
In the dark night, it’s so funny, all I can do is laugh, and finally Amy laughs too, and I say, “He never even had us.”
SHANGHAIED
BY GIGI LITTLE
Old Town
Eight o’clock
So, I’m walking down this seedy street in Old Town with Kit and Rhonda, silently lamenting my sorrowful existence—how rent’s going up again, how I need some new clothes, how good cheese is so fucking expensive—and up ahead, on the next corner, here’s this old woman begging. How’s that for juxtaposition?
In other words, I’m a pathetic, whiny bitch.
She’s squat like a folding chair. Hunched, head straight out from the crossbar of her shoulders. Hand out at the people walking by. And this funny look on her face, this little twisted thing with her lips, almost a smile—and, damn, look at her eyes. She’s got crooked eyes. Like she’s wearing crooked glasses, but she’s not wearing glasses at all.
“Spare change?” she says. “Pretty jewelry?”
And that’s the thing that really has me reaching into my purse. Pretty jewelry. Because Jesus, I mean, just look at her.
All right, it’s not the dress—that’s just some old house-dress. Yellow faded to white. Some splattery stain covering it that, when I step close enough, turns out to be what was once a pattern of flowers. But her hat. That’s bright blue velvet. With one of those little feathers at the side and some torn net hanging from the brim. And her jewelry. Trying so hard to be pretty. She’s covered in junky plastic—big earrings, clinking bracelets—old and broken. And what looks like—step closer—clippings of wire circled around her fingers. Necklaces made of tied-together pieces of gutter-stained string and buttons and faded sequins. Step right in front of her now, and the brooch pinned to her chest is an arthritic metal claw with no rhinestones.
She looks her crooked eyes down my face to the pearls at my neck. “Pretty jewelry?”
I’ve got a fistful of coins and I step up and hang it over her open hand and let go.
Her other hand comes up fast. Takes a jabbing snatch at me.
Her rough, knobby fingers around the four of mine.
The top of my head does that scared thing where it feels like someone’s cracked a raw egg up there. I hang my mouth open but my brain forgets what screaming’s for, and then she lets go. And now we’re walking away, Kit glancing back. That touch still on my fingers. The way the squirm hangs around in your stomach after the scare’s over.
Rhonda’s good enough to wait until we’re one step away from being out of earshot. “My friend,” she says, “you are such a sap.”
Nine o’clock
After a couple hours walking through the dungeons and opium dens below the streets of Portland you need a drink. It was thick hot down there, and dark. They gave us flashlights and said, Now, direct your attention to this corner where, in eighteen-hundred- and-I-can’t-remember, men were held captive in foul prison cells.
Rhonda had the reaction I thought she’d have: “Shanghai Tunnels? Shit, that was more like the Shanghai Basement.”
But if you enjoy good lore and don’t mind close, dark spaces where the air is like breathing dirt and it’s so hot you could keel over but for being