Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (14 page)

“Is someone holding a gun to your head right now, Mr. Ishimoto? If the answer is yes, say ‘I don’t know.’”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“And is it a bunch of guys in pinstriped suits, and is one of them named Johnny Banana?”

“I don’t know.”

“And have they found the worms, sir?”

“I know,” he said.

“You’re sure they haven’t?”

“Positive.”

“Good luck, Mr. Ishimoto.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.” And then the line went dead.

I had a weak moment right then. Panic made me do it. I gave Lieutenant McCafferty a jingle and told him that an armed killer was after me and what was he going to do about it. I pleaded for my life. He was unmoved. “It’s a jungle and there’s not much I can do, Noir. You can’t keep the cougars from hunting the deer. Violence is part of life. The mouse is in the cornfield, shopping for his family, and suddenly there is a rush of owl wings, and he feels a sting in his back, and then he is very high in the air. The vultures and jackals who wait for their dinner to die a natural death before they move in are not the animals we admire. The killers are the ones we name our football teams after. I didn’t make the world, Noir. I just enjoy looking at it.”

I PULLED OFF THE FREEWAY
onto the road that ran along the Mississippi and pulled into an overlook under the Franklin Avenue bridge, its great concrete arches leaping the river gorge. A tow of eight empty barges plowed two abreast downstream, riding high in the water, pushed by the tug, its big engines hammering
whump whump whump.
The nameplate on the pilothouse said, W
HITNEY
M
AC
M
ILLAN
. A deckhand stood in an open door, a young dude, shirtless, smoking a cigarette. Suddenly I wanted to be him, watching the world go by, the houses on the leafy bluff, the cars in the long driveways, the patient daddies on their rider mowers, knowing that none of it pertained to me, feeling the liberty of the great waterway. Minnesota suddenly seemed less hospitable to me. I had ended a pleasant interlude and now had come to a plateau from which one descends into the deep, cold valley of reality. There, attempting to cross a bridge into the future, I would encounter an ugly troll who would seize my billfold and chase me down a road paved with bricks of sorrow that leads to a cliff, and I would fall off it and hit the ground and be old and fat and misunderstood—and life would go on as it had before, except even more so.
Unless
I could make a bold leap now—like the dude on the deck. Fly to New York. Rent a car. Drive to Southampton and find Naomi and the Rama Lama Monongahela before they could fly off to Paris together.

Better yet, get over to Mr. Ishimoto’s and go head to head with Johnny Banana and his pinstriped goons.
Hey you. Banana. Looky here. It’s Noir, calling your bluff, Man with Fruit Name. Put up or shut up.
The way to deal with brutes and bullies is to poke ’em in the snoot. Subtlety and subterfuge don’t work. Pull up your jockstrap and walk up to the big bruiser and give him what for. He’s expecting you to wheedle and whimper, and instead you sock him in the beezer,
whammo
. Shock and awe.

That’s what a Noir would do,
said a still small voice.
When did a Noir ever back away from a fight?

The still small voice didn’t know my family very well. The still small voice was ignorant of the facts. We’ve been dodging fights ever since Great-Grandpa William Tecumseh Noir waltzed away from the draft in 1917. His older brother Robert E. Noir was a steward aboard the RMS
Titanic
and leaped into the first lifeboat, wearing a lady’s wig and a shawl, elbowing aside small children. Ulysses S. Noir collected wristwatches off the bodies of investors who leaped from high windows on Wall Street after the Crash of 1929, and though the watches were broken and the hands stuck at the time of impact, he tried to sell them at full price twenty-four hours later. His son, Stonewall Noir, was an airman at Pearl Harbor that December morning and pedaled his bike away from the burning buildings as fast as he could and took shelter in a joint called Honolulu Lou’s and got drunk and fell off his bike on the way back to the base and was awarded the Purple Heart. Audie Noir had a sore throat on D-day and went to the infirmary rather than go ashore at Normandy and lay in bed sucking cream soda through a straw. George S. Noir named names to the McCarthy committee in 1953, some of them Communists, some Methodists. Douglas Noir was drafted during the Korean conflict, and aboard the troopship to Seoul he suddenly started weeping and babbling and tearing his hair out, which other men did, too, but he did it with more force and conviction and was declared unfit to serve due to mental instability and girlish tendencies and was sent back to Texas, where he resumed his studies in chiropractic. Omar Noir was a physicist at Los Alamos and fell in love with a waitress named Natasha, who turned out to be a Soviet agent and asked him to turn over nuclear secrets, and he said, “Do that again what you did a moment ago, and I’ll start writing out formulas.” Uncle Dwight D. Noir commandeered a chopper and flew solo away from the American embassy in Saigon as the city fell in April 1975, and flew to Bali and treated himself to three weeks at a luxury resort with money he’d embezzled from the USO.

So in keeping with family tradition, I gave up the fight. I stopped at the bank and cleaned out my account—“What’s her name, Mr. Noir?” said Charlene. “Who’s the lucky girl you’re going to Paris with?”—and hustled over to St. John the Lesser Episcopal Church on Wacouta Street to beg for sanctuary.

18

The mother church

I KNEW THE RECTOR, FATHER
Bert Smalley, from the Five Spot. He was a thirsty man. He liked vodka martinis. Sanctity is hard work for low pay, and after a long day of reverence, Father Bert liked to stroll in and put a quarter in the jukebox and belly up to the bar and toss down two martinis in succession as the Revelators sang:

Why do men act that way

And break our hearts every day

Why do we bother to love?

Men wear their pants down low

Playing with their video

Why do we bother to love?

Why do they lie to you

And say I do when it isn’t true.

I love them cause I know I should

But I know they’re no darn good.

And he sat chewing the olives and ordered his third martini, the one that loosened his tongue, and he’d start babbling about the sorrows of his life, the uncertainty of his calling, his faith journey, blah blah blah.

It was an odd parish, St. John the Lesser. A gray stone Cass Gilbert castle on a block jammed with bars and pawnshops, a church with a tiny congregation, mostly gays and lesbians, and an enormous endowment, thanks to a horse farm bequeathed to it by the late Brewster Wylie (of Wylie, Warburton & Wordsworth). The farm had been subdivided and planted with mansionettes, and the millions in revenue enabled St. John the Lesser to put on the dog in a big way. The gays and lesbians were radical in politics and conservative in liturgy, and every Sunday morning the place was aswirl with cassocks, chasubles, albs, and surplices—and not army surplus surplices but fancy silk, gold-embroidered, with Italian cinctures—a flock of acolytes bearing a six-foot cross and candles and an embroidered banner (
Veni, Creator),
a tall black woman with shaved head and shining raiment swinging a censer like a house afire, smoke billowing up, and another woman with a crew cut flinging holy water from a silver tube—and bringing up the rear, the great mass of Father Smalley, his alb swishing, genuflecting grandly, hurling blessings left and right, as the choir of men and boys in starched ruffled collars chanted seventeenth-century plainsong. Henry VIII would have been quite comfortable attending mass at St. John, except for the homily, which tended to call for revolution and the overthrow of the privileged classes, including (presumably) Brewster Wylie, their great benefactor.

I found Father Bert in his office, listening to a jazz quintet play the bejesus out of “Caravan,” and I described my predicament. He was a fan of detective novels, and he was intrigued when I told him about Johnny Banana dogging my trail. I told him I needed to take sanctuary in his sanctuary, and he said, “Oh, that is thrilling. What an opportunity for grace.” He ran around poking into closets, and soon I was enveloped in a black woolen cassock with hood and leather sandals and a pectoral cross the size of a fence post. “You hit someone with that, and they’re gonna get visions,” said Father. He led me off behind a statue of the archangel Michael, arms outstretched as if pleading with an umpire, to a small, windowless room off the vestry. There was a black leather couch and a low table piled with Sunday bulletins. “This is the acolytes’ lounge,” he said. “You can bed down here for the night, and we’ll work out a long-term plan tomorrow. There’s a retreat center up in Bemidji. You could go there, but you’d be expected to spend four hours a day in prayer.” He handed me a couple fat cigars, a snifter of brandy, some dark chocolates, and a can of Mace. “If the sons of bitches come in the night, brain them with the cross and squirt some Mace in their faces. That’ll slow ’em down.” For a man of God, he seemed quite enthused about violence. “I wouldn’t mind sticking around and duking it out with them myself, but I have to go visit a parishioner in the morning who’s getting a new kidney. But if you ring this buzzer”—he pointed to a button by the couch—“I’ll hear it and come down and kick the crap out of them. By the way, what are they all riled up about?”

“I’ve got something they want. A magic formula for weight loss.”

Father Smalley’s eyes widened. “Lord have mercy. An answer to prayer. Where can I get some?”

I handed him a little capsule, and he opened his mouth and down it went. “What sort of diet do I have to go on?”

“Meat and potatoes. All you like. They love pot roast.”

“They?”

“The tapeworms.”

He gave me an inquiring look and then grinned and chuckled. “You’re a funny man, Mr. Noir. A funny, funny man.”

IT IS SPOOKY, TRYING TO
drift off to sleep in an empty church. In a crowded church on Christmas Eve, listening to the sermon about how we should observe the Nativity every day of the year in our hearts, sleep comes easily, but in a little room off a big empty sanctuary, lights out, I lay for an hour, turning and tossing. I tried to think positive thoughts. I tried to imagine Marvin telling me I now had a net worth of a million dollars. I visualized my slender self in a red thong swimsuit, my proud glutes glistening in the sun as I strode out onto the diving board at the Minikahda Club. I wanted to be rich so as to free myself from envy, that creepy sin, and the greenish yearning to be cool and go to an Ivy school and not have to think about money. The Kennedy brothers were so cool, they walked around without money in their pockets, knowing that when the waiter brought the check, someone less cool would pay. Midwesterners envy the coastal people who seem not so inhibited by modesty and all the clunky moral baggage. I know better than to envy New Yorkers, being one myself and having ridden the subway all those years, but I envy a flannel-brain writer I know who wrote a TV sitcom pilot in which unattractive people throw insults at each other, and every sixty seconds there is a double take and a slow burn. He hired me to sit in cafés and write down dialogue that I heard. The sitcom got made, and he, without ever having to write another word, got a sliver of the profits, which turned out to be vast, and so he lives in a twelve-room co-op apartment on Riverside Drive with umber tile floors and rattan carpets and antique French country furniture and jets off to Paris or Peru when he likes and has more fun than I do, seeing as how I spend so much time wishing he would get Lyme disease so I could visit him in the nursing home and bring him flowers.

I lay imagining his misery, his remorse, listening to the hum of cars on the interstate nearby, and I detected some clinking and clacking not so far away. And then clicking. A definite clicking in the shadows. A series of sharp clicks, and then a whiff of perfume, and then a shadowy figure leaning over me, and a low seductive voice said, “Guy, I came to see that you’re all right.”

“Who’s there?”

“Chanterelle is my name. I’m a huge fan of yours. I’ve always wanted to meet you. This is so exciting for me.”

There was a sort of vibrato in her voice, a warble in the midrange, that normally you only hear in movies, the throb of womanly desire. I reached out and touched a bare leg.

“I don’t believe I know a Chanterelle,” I said.

“You will, in just a moment. Is there room on that couch for me?” she said. I said that I didn’t think there was. “Then I’ll just lie on top of you,” she said.

And then she did.

She was not heavy at all, I noticed. And also, she was buck naked. My hands traced her bare back, which was long and beautifully curved and led to majestic buttocks whose firmness suggested a regular exercise regimen. “Are you surprised?” she said.

“Astonished. How’d you get in?”

“Knock and it shall be opened unto you.”

She kissed my neck and unfastened my cassock. “I never made love with a man of the cloth before,” she murmured. “Have you taken vows or anything?”

I shook my head.

“Are you a believer?”

“I wasn’t one before you came in, darling, and now I’m seriously reconsidering.”

“Are you Episcopalian?”

“I could be. What about you, darling? I want to believe what you believe.”

She lay there, naked, breathing on my cheek. “Well,” she said, “what I was brought up to believe was that God had revealed Himself to us Southern Baptists and not to anyone else. The others were barbarians and we were God’s chosen, and so if we beat up on them, we were carrying out God’s will. But then I became a dancer, and now I believe that God has given all these wonderful gifts for us to share with others, no matter who they are or what they believe. Gifts like the human body, which is beautiful. Don’t you think?

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“I think that God is getting ready to bless you real good, Brother Guy.” She arose to remove my clothing, and in the faint glow from the open door and the stained-glass window of a tall bearded guy holding a sheep, I caught the silhouette of her bountiful breasts, each one a beauty, so firm, so fully formed, it was hard to pick a favorite. She was a marble goddess who stepped down off a pedestal and became flesh, a goddess of life’s generosity, with curly black tendrils like licorice candy on her head and a tattoo of an orchid on her lower belly and broad child-bearing hips and thighs so white you could’ve eaten off them. She removed the cross from my pectorals. “You have excellent taste in crosses,” she said. She clunked it down on the floor. I could tell by the careless way she handled it that she hadn’t been brought up Catholic. “Don’t you worry about a thing, darling,” she said, and her tone of voice told me that something worrisome was just about to happen. You develop an ear for falsehood in this line of work. Oddly, at the moment, I did not care that she was part of something treacherous. She took the hem of the cassock and raised it and caressed my rib cage and slipped my jockeys off. “All ready to go, I see,” she said. She said that she had never met anyone so manly as I, and she asked me what sort of things I liked, and would it be okay if she went to the little girls’ room and peed, and then a low, gravelly voice said, “You know why you can’t hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom? Because the P is silent.” And a big, hairy arm wrapped around my throat, and I felt the cold barrel of a pistol press against my temple. “Sorry to break up the party, but it’s time to talk, Noir,” said the low, gravelly voice, which of course I remembered from the telephone. “So let’s get up and talk. Beat it, babes.”

The girl got off me. “I’m going, Johnny, I’m going.” She put a hand on my cheek. “’Bye, sweetie. You take care now. I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to like you as much as I’m sure I could.” She ducked out the door, and her high heels went
klikklikklik
across the marble floor. A young woman with magnificent buttocks walking buck naked into the sacristy and past the choir stalls of St. John the Lesser. An image to conjure with, except that Mr. Banana was pressing the barrel rather firmly into my temple.

“Stand up nice and slow,” he said, “and nobody gets hurt.”

I stood up and covered myself with the cassock. My maleness, which had been at attention a few seconds before, now hung flaccid, which, I suppose, is perfectly natural when you are about to be shot in the head. I looked at Mr. Banana and chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” he said.

“That line, ‘Stand up nice and slow and nobody gets hurt.’ You been watching old Richard Widmark movies? You been reading Dick Tracy in the funny pages? What a letdown. I figured that when you nabbed me and bumped me off, at least it’d be done with style and a modicum of originality. I suppose there’s only so many ways of saying ‘Stick ’em up,’
but still.”

He jabbed me with the pistol. “Shuddup, you. When I want your literary opinion, I’ll ask for it,” he growled. But I could tell that I had struck a nerve. He nodded toward the door and shoved the pistol into my back, but his brow was furrowed, he was thinking over the line about standing up nice and slow and nobody gets hurt, rewriting it. Johnny Banana is no small-time street punk, he is a capo del capo del grande primo capo, and as such he naturally wants to walk and talk with a grand style that is his and his alone, not employ worn-out clichés, same as he wouldn’t go around in threads he got from a Goodwill store or drive an old beater of a car or order beans and wieners at a café. He pushed me out the door and past the high altar, a single candle flickering on it, and down past the choir stalls and down the steps into the sanctuary, and then he stopped.

“So what would you have said if you were me, smart guy?” he growled.

I pondered that. “I would’ve said, ‘One false move out of you, and I’m gonna fill you with more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese.’”

“Ha! That’s even worse than ‘Stand up nice and slow and nobody gets hurt,’” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, crum bum.”

I said, “I was pulling your leg—how about this? ‘Rise and shine, boy-o, and don’t be reaching for anything ex-cept air.’”

“That’s better,” he said. “But I don’t know about ‘boy-o.’ I ain’t Irish.”

“Okay, then. Try this. ‘On your feet, pal. And if I see any sudden moves, you’re going to be suddenly dead.’”

He shook his head. “Don’t sound right. There’s no rhythm to it.”

“Okay, I got it. This is good. ‘Time for the recessional, choirboy. And say a prayer that my trigger finger don’t slip and send you skidding into the hereafter.’”

He said it to himself, under his breath. “I like it,” he said. “‘Recessional’ is good, and ‘skidding into the hereafter’—very cool.” He pointed to a pew. “Siddown.” I sat. He stuck the gun in my mug and said, “Time for the recessional, choirboy.” He said it again. “I like it,” he said. “Except for the trigger finger. That doesn’t sound like me.”

“How about ‘And say a prayer that my gun don’t go boom and make your skull a part of the real estate’?”

“I like ‘skidding into the hereafter’ better.”

I nodded. He drew himself up to full height: “Time for the recessional, choirboy. And say a prayer that my gun don’t go boom and send you skidding into the hereafter.” He said it again. And a third time. Johnny Banana was, like any other capo del capo del grande primo capo, a true stylist. I could see that, looking at his pegged pants with the sharp creases, the spotless white tie against the black shirt, the padded shoulders of his silver jacket, the perfect crest of his pompadour.