Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [87]
I have a good route, down to Burnside and up to Johnson Creek. The gams of a true old-time beauty. Lila’s suitcase was still in the corner. Her clothes on me look only approximate, like a memory.
The city wants to plant roses, up and down Eighty-second, to make it peaceful.
Later, my mother’s accordion was sold for a song to a man who slivered the keys off and carried them away in a bag, clacking like teeth. When I dream of Lila there is a tattoo on her chest, a mask, and in the eyes of the mask I am faceup over her heart.
There are sirens outside of the Tik Tok every night and I wait. The waitress refills my coffee. Across the parking lot there is always a lit window with the curtains drawn tight across it. Inside the Tik Tok, the clocks move at once, slowly, like a song written all in the same sad note.
PEOPLE ARE STRANGE
BY KIMBERLY WARNER-COHEN
Sandy Boulevard
Whoever said Portland was a friendly city stated it from the comfortable vantage of already knowing people. Aside from the middle-aged clerk at 7-Eleven, who smiled with yellow teeth and attempted broken conversation when she walked across the busy intersection at Eighty-second and Sandy to buy cigarettes and a Big Gulp, Kara had spoken to less than ten people since she arrived four days ago. That included the woman with an eye patch behind the desk at the Cameo (closest non-chain airport motel she could find), Kara already thinking when she paid for a week in advance that it was a mistake coming here. Shouldn’t have strayed from her habit of putting her finger randomly on an atlas and going.
Strangers didn’t start casual conversations with her in bars, usually moved a seat over. Wasn’t simply that Kara could be best described as plain, known since she could recognize her reflection that she would never be one of the blessed few who glided through life; it was the contempt in her eyes that drove them off. Being passed over was a relief, feigning interest in people’s lives irritated her. Happier to sit at the end of the row in some seamy tavern where light didn’t penetrate through grimy windows. Bartenders took pity and threw her an extra drink or two as the clock edged past 1:00 and other patrons sought someone other than her to share the night, or at least fifteen minutes, with.
Kara pulled the battered and stained white plastic fob with 17 printed on it in chipped gold paint from her back pocket, balancing her dinner: a fifth of Bushmills and a barely edible pizza from the dingy store across the street from the massive Safeway.
Would’ve eaten at the pancake house attached to the motel, where she had platter-sized portions for the past three mornings, but Kara couldn’t stand the sympathetic stares from the fat, bored waitresses anymore. Same with the bar down the block, where day workers stopped in after long hours working too hard for too little money; stared her up and down before turning back to their conversations, shaking their heads. Better to stay in the room tonight, as she jiggled the wood turquoise door open that, like all the others, looked as if it’d been kicked in during an episode of Cops.
She could have just as easily slept at one of the chic boutique hotels downtown, with what her parents left her. Car accident when she was thirteen, Father having too many Rob Roys during one of the many charity events they attended throughout the year. Her aunt and uncle took her in after the funeral, shuffled from one affluent suburb to another.
Aunt Suzanne was barren and they doted on Kara. Decorated her bedroom as if she was five years younger (always loathed cotton candy–pink but didn’t have the heart to