Portland Noir

THE CLOWN AND BARD BY KAREN KARBO

S.E. Twenty-Eighth Avenue

Charlotte is sprawled on the bathroom floor of my apartment on Southeast Ankeny, the one I rented because I thought she’d like it. Rundown but arty, with forced-air heat and bad plumbing. High ceilings, creaking stairs, walls plastered in thick, sharp stucco. The lobby smells like mold and cantaloupe two days past its prime. The couple downstairs has a pirate flag tacked over their front window, and the landlord is twenty-three and walks around her apartment in a red thong and T-shirt. The building is shaped like a V, so I can easily see into her windows. She has a small wrought-iron balcony where she grows orange flowers in green plastic pots.

Since Charlotte deceived me with the film critic, I’ve done pretty much whatever I’ve wanted to do. Free rein is what I’ve got. She bombed the country and I’m just looting the shops. She would say I mixed my metaphors right there. That’s what being married to Charlotte got me. Now I know about mixed metaphors, and how it really is possible to feel someone pull your heart straight out of your chest like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, then stomp on it.

I drop the toilet lid-bang!-and sit down. It’s possible Charlotte’s not dead. This is just the sort of thing she would do to make me feel bad. Like all chicks, she’s a drama queen. I stare down at her head, angled like she’s trying to lay her ear on her shoulder. Blood trickles out of one perfectly round nostril. There’s no blood coming out of her ears that I can see. Most likely she’s just conked out.

Charlotte thought she had the right to have an affair with the film critic because I occasionally found myself associating with Lorna, my ex-wife, the mother of my son. Once in a blue moon, after I’d taken Ray Jr. to the zoo or Malibu Grand Prix, I’d return him to Lorna’s apartment and we’d knock one out for old time’s sake. It was like looking through a photo album. Associating with someone after you’ve been married is not the same as meeting a film critic at the bar in Esparza’s, where you share a plastic wooden bowl of chips and hot sauce and listen to Patsy Cline and comment on the stuffed armadillos hanging on the ceiling and then share an order of ostrich tacos, all the while talking arty crap.

The film critic has more hair than I do.

Once, when Charlotte refused to show me respect by answering whether she was in love with the film critic, I was forced to shove her into a bookcase, so she knew we weren’t just having one of our usual arguments. I meant business.

I said, “This thing with the film critic is a dalliance, right? There’s nothing to it, right? Answer me. Yes or no.”

She said, “He’s actually more of a film reviewer.”

She bruised her back on the edge of the shelf. It wasn’t that bad. What’s a little bruise? She’s hardy. Skis and ride horses and takes kick-boxing classes. Most of the top row of books rained down upon her head and neck. They were only paperbacks. Still, she bitched to anyone who would listen, her herd of sympathetic friends, her therapist, her divorce lawyer, and of course the ostrich taco-loving film critic. Charlotte wouldn’t touch an ostrich taco when she was with me. Now it’s the new white meat.

Now Charlotte’s lying on my bathroom floor, wedged between the hot water pipe and the toilet. Is it laying or lying? Charlotte would know. She has a master’s degree and a daily subscription to the New York Times. The hot water pipe serves the whole building, and why it goes through my apartment I don’t know. At night it’s hot enough to leave a blister. Charlotte hit it on the way down, which caused her to twist her body, which caused her to lose her balance and hit her head on the edge of the tub. I stare at her head. Her curly hair is coming out of its scrunchie. She doesn’t look like she’s breathing. I stare at her tits. I wonder if she still wears an underwire.

It’s possible she’s holding her breath just to piss me off, to punish me for going to Prague.

She acted like I planned this. That’s what Charlotte never got. I’m a simple guy. I take life as it comes. When I mentioned going to Prague I was just talking, just filling the air with my words. She should know how it is. She’s fucking a film critic.

It was the last week in August. The leaves hung exhausted on the trees. I was still living over on Northeast Sandy. We met for dinner at the Kennedy School. The film critic was at the Sundance Film Festival. I told her the next time we met he had to be in town, for her to prove to me there was still hope for us.

“I don’t think there’s any real hope for us,” she said.

“Then why are you here?” I asked.

“I wonder that myself,” she said. She ordered a gin and tonic.

“That’s what he drinks, gin and tonic? Tanqueray and tonic?”

“Sometimes in the summer I’ve been known to order a gin and tonic,” she said. “Jesus.”

She lied. She was a liar.

She used to love me. Now she picked fights. Like about the gin and tonic. I buttered a piece of bread and put it in front of her. She folded her arms and looked out the window at the parking lot. A guy wearing a red plaid skirt pushed a shopping cart full of empty bottles. I could tell she was itching to get out of there. The back of my neck got hot, the way it did when she was pissing me off.

Suddenly, I said I had something to tell her. She looked back at me, but it was polite. She was so polite. I’d been fired from the pest control company out on Foster Road and was now working at a place that made clamps, couplings, screws, and knobs. They also made a really nice brass drawer pull. The week before, in the break room, one of the machinists was talking about quitting and moving to Prague, and then the HR chick, who’d never looked at this guy once, was practically in his lap. She said she’d always wanted to go to Prague.

“I’m going to Prague,” I said.

“Prague? What’s in Prague?”

“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

“You have?” Her green eyes were on me. She leaned forward on her pale forearms. I could smell her grapefruity perfume, something called Happy I’d given her one Christmas. This was where she should have said, Ray, you are so full of shit. This is where her master’s degree failed her, where all her books and snooty left-wing websites let her down.

Did I say she worked in R &D at Intel, designing stuff she wasn’t allowed to talk about? Something to do with microchips and biology. When I met her I didn’t know what R &D was. She used words like ebullient just to make me feel stupid. Who was the stupid one now? Yeah, I’m off to Prague. The only foreign place I’d ever been before was Ensenada.

“Is this work-related? Like when they sent you to Chely-abinsk?”

“Sure,” I said. “A business trip.”

I’d forgotten I told Charlotte I’d done a business trip to Chelyabinsk.

Last year Donnie, a guy at the knob company, had found a terrific and extremely hot Russian wife on the Internet. Her name was Olga but she liked to be called Bootsie. She was a great gal. Once Donnie surprised Tootsie with a subscription to Self and she fell to her knees and sobbed with gratitude. She wrapped her hands around his heels and laid her forehead on his shoes. She then gave him the best blowjob he’d ever had, after which she went into the kitchen and whipped up a roast.

Donnie had given me the name of the website where he got his wife and I thought, Why not? Charlotte didn’t love me anymore. She was off drinking gin and tonics with the film critic. So one night after work, after I’d had a few beers, I typed in Charlotte’s height, weight, hair, and eye color, and out came Agnessa Fedoseeva.

She was studying to be something called an esthetician, but was hoping to find a big strong man she could love and kiss with enthusiasm. She was anxious to inquire if I was a big strong man. She was curious how many flat-screen TVs I had. She sent me a videotape of herself dressed in a red, white, and blue teddy and high heels, dancing around her living room with a sparkler sizzling in each hand.

I put the trip to Chelyabinsk on a credit card, and told Charlotte I was being sent there by the knob company, to set up a new factory.

“But why are they sending you?” Charlotte had wanted to know. “I think it’s great. Really exciting, and really good for you. You need to have the dust of the world on your feet. But you don’t speak Russian.”

“They’re impressed with my work ethic.”

“You do work hard,” said Charlotte. “When you have a job.”

I’m tired of staring at Charlotte laying or lying on the bathroom floor, playing passed out, milking the situation, doing her best to make me look like the bad guy.

I walk back down the long hallway to the kitchen. I sit in the dark at my kitchen table. Outside, the streetlights shine on the snow, filling my front rooms with that weird aquarium light. I look out the window at the Laurelhurst Theater marquee. They’re showing Alien and Meatballs. Charlotte would think that was funny. Agnessa spoke no English, but she’d laugh anyway.

Charlotte will come out of the bathroom eventually. For being so smart, she is so predictable. That’s how she works. If I stand over her and wonder whether she’s dead, she’ll act dead on purpose, just to piss me off. But if I turn my back on her, leave the room, she’ll come marching out and wonder what’s going on.

The back of my neck feels hot. None of this would have happened if she had let the Prague business go. It was just something I’d said to get her attention. Then I found myself saying I was moving in September, just after Labor Day, and would be there for at least six months.

“Six months?” she said, eyes big.

“Maybe a year.”

I thought she’d forget about it. She’d go home to the film critic and they’d open a bottle of merlot and discuss the early films of Martin Scorsese.

Charlotte started e-mailing me. Where would I be living in Prague? Did I know Prague was settled in the fourth century? Prague Castle was the largest castle in the world. There was also an entire wall of graffiti dedicated to John Lennon. I should definitely check out the museum of the Heydrich assassination. She sent me links to websites, and guidebooks she’d ordered on Amazon. She gave me books by Czechoslovakian writers. Who the fuck is Kafka? She signed the e-mails with xo.

Agnessa read romance novels. She loved stuffed animals. She was thirty-one and still lived with her mother, who needed new teeth and an operation. I’d sent her an international calling card and she rang me every evening. She confessed she had two other men who wanted to marry her, one who lived in Indiana and had four flat-screen TVs, and one who lived in Florida and had three flat-screen TVs. Did I know how dear I was to her, that she was still interested in me even though I only had one TV?

Charlotte and I started meeting on Wednesdays for coffee at a place that served stale pastries and had too many free newspapers. Every so often I’d take Ray Jr. out of school for the morning and bring him along, just to remind Charlotte what a good dad I could be. Being a good single dad is better than having a pit bull puppy when it comes to attracting women. I made Ray drink his orange juice and study his spelling words. Charlotte said she was really going to miss me.

One day I got her to go with me to Hawthorne to shop for presents to give to the family who would be putting me up in Prague, before I had my own apartment.

“Who exactly are we shopping for?” she asked. We nosed around a crowded shop that sold expensive journals, massage oil, and funny greeting cards. The rain had started. The shop smelled like wet dog and patchouli.

“There’s a thirty-one-year-old living at home, a girl who loves stuffed animals.”

“Is she…” Charlotte looked at me, narrowed one eye a little like she does. I could feel my pulse in my forehead. She was going to ask me if there was something going on with this girl, if somehow I was going to Prague to see her. It was all over her face. Behind her a woman was trying to get at the wire card rack. I just looked at her. Go ahead, ask me. I waited. “… mentally disabled or something?”

I thought of Agnessa and her living room sparkler dance.

“It’s possible,” I said.

Charlotte picked out a hand lotion that smelled like apple pie and a stuffed panda.

I sent them to Agnessa, who loved the gifts. I loved Agnessa, for being so easy to please. I spent entire paychecks sending her shampoo, socks, Levi’s and one of those mesh bags girls stick their underwear in before it goes in the washing machine. I sent her some Happy too. Fuck Charlotte.

I gave notice on the apartment I was living in off Northeast Sandy. I told the landlady I was moving to Prague. Elaine was a chick with cats who worked in a bookstore and had a stack of books on Wicca beside her bed. She believed in the power of crystals and Match.com. I struck up an association with Elaine. It was an association of convenience. She was lonely. She liked helping me define just how evil Charlotte was, how slutty and duplicitous. Elaine volunteered to put a spell on Charlotte. I told her to stop; I wasn’t looking for a commitment. When I told Elaine I was moving to Prague she smirked, “Prague, Minnesota?”

“Uh, no,” I said.

“Where are you really going?”

“I got a new place on Southeast Ankeny, across from that yuppie wine bar.”

“Noble Rot, where wine is a meal.”

When Charlotte kicked me out she said I could take anything I wanted, so I did. The heavy stainless steel pots and pans we got as a wedding present. All the DVDs we’d watched together, and what the hell, the DVD player. The books she told people were her favorites. The flannel duvet cover with the roses. A black sweater that smelled of Happy, and a few pairs of her underpants, fished out of the dirty clothes hamper. Our wedding album, and from the freezer, the top layer of our wedding cake. It looked like a hat wrapped in waxed paper.

Elaine showed up on a Saturday afternoon to help me pack my stuff. She’d brought some empty boxes from the bookstore and started on the kitchen. The only things in the freezer were a few blue plastic ice cube trays, a pair of chilled beer glasses-a trick Charlotte taught me-and that damn frozen wedding cake. Elaine said I should toss it, didn’t know why I was holding onto it. I said, “I’m a good guy, I got a sentimental streak a mile wide, so sue me.”

Charlotte took me out for American food the day before I left. Before meeting her I had a sighting of Extreme the Clown’s art car, parked near the Starbucks on Burnside. The art car looks like a Mayan temple on wheels with hundreds of heads sculpted into the sides and a pyramid-altar thing rising from the roof. It’s well known that an art car sighting means good luck. I’m luckier than most people, but as I passed by I touched one of the open-mouthed heads on the trunk. The leaves on the maples were red and gold. I found myself wondering what the weather would be like in Prague, even though I wasn’t going to Prague.

Charlotte took me to Esparza’s. I’m sure she enjoyed the irony, bringing her ex to the same restaurant where she betrayed him with another, but I was having my own private last laugh-my new place was just across the parking lot. I could see into my new kitchen on the second floor. I could see my box of pots and pans sitting on the kitchen table.

I could be in R &D too. I could have my own secret projects.

After we ordered margaritas she pulled out a red suede pouch. Her hands shook as she unsnapped it. She pulled out her engagement ring, the one we’d bought together, the one she’d paid for, technically, since at the time I was between jobs. I’d said anything less than a single karat was hardly worth the effort and she’d agreed, and there it was and she was giving it to me, saying she wanted me to have it, to take it to Prague, to keep it in a safe place, and to think of her.

“I’m just really proud of you, taking this big step. I’m sorry we didn’t work out. I really am. But this is better. You’re going to really see the world.”

She cried. Her mascara ran. I made an old joke, about how she needed to get another brand of mascara, one that didn’t run every time she cried. Every T-shirt I owned had a smudgy black stain on the shoulder. I could have definitely gotten some that night, but there was nowhere to take her. My flight was leaving in the morning, and I’d told her that I was sleeping on Elaine’s fold-out couch. I liked to drop Elaine’s name now and then, just to make sure she was paying attention.

A week passed, then two. I went to work at the knob factory, where my job was quality control. I sat on a tall stool in a room with no windows, making sure our wall brackets had the right amount of screw holes. At night I drank Czechvar beer and played World of Warcraft and kept an eye on the parking lot of Esparza’s Tex-Mex to see if Charlotte and the film critic ever showed up.

I didn’t tell Agnessa I’d moved to Prague, though I did give her my new address and phone number at Southeast Ankeny. Agnessa was getting impatient. Her other suitors were starting to tug at her heart ropes. She was running out of Happy.

One cold night the server crashed and I couldn’t get back onto WoW, so I called up Agnessa and told her she should apply for a fiancée visa. What the hell. I’d spied Extremo the Clown’s art car again that day, parked in the lot at Wild Oats. Lucky me, and lucky Agnessa. I figured at least I could get her to Portland. Get her out of Chelyabinsk, where her family thought nothing of eating moldy bread spread with rancid butter. I liked this idea, saving Agnessa from her difficult life. A fiancée visa lasted for ninety days. I figured then I could decide whether to ship her back or not.

“Oh, Ray!” she breathed. “Thank you, I love you, thank you.”

“We’ll get the fiancée visa and then let’s give it a shot. Let’s send the engagement up the flagpole and see who salutes. Let’s take the idea of us out for a test drive.”

“Ray? Ray-I-uh-I…” I could hear her moist gasps of confusion.

“We’ll give it the ol’ college try,” I said.

Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors. I admit I misled Agnessa, but she’d get over it. And I’m actually a good guy. To make things right I bought a black velvet box at Fred Meyer’s, and sent her Charlotte’s diamond, Federal Express. Agnessa called when she received the ring and wept. I should hope so. That ring cost Charlotte four grand. She sent me another sparkler video and some Russian chocolate. In the video, she showed off the ring and threw kisses into the camera.

Prague is eight hours ahead of Portland, or maybe it’s nine. I e-mailed Charlotte at 1 a.m. so she would think I was writing to her first thing in the morning, when I arrived at the knob factory. The factory was in a suburb of Prague. I told her I had to take a bus to get there, along with the other workers. I even had a lunch pail, filled with sandwiches made with dark bread. In the evenings I strolled along the Charles Bridge. I saw the world famous astronomical clock (Wikipedia has a good picture) and discovered a great bar called the Clown and Bard, where the barmaid admired my tattoo and served me some dill soup, on the house.

Charlotte started writing, Love, C, at the bottom of her e-mails.

One rainy night after work I went to Holman’s, around the corner from my apartment. The storm drains were clogged with soggy Cornflake-looking leaves. My Vans got soaked. I ordered a patty melt and a Bud Light. A woman a few tables over was wearing Happy. I smelled it over the cheap disinfectant and grilled onions. Ah hell. I used my calling card to call Charlotte from the pay phone.

She answered on the first ring. I told her I was calling from the Clown and Bard.

“Ray, are you all right?”

I loved that concern in her voice. I said I was fine, while making sure I didn’t sound fine at all. I wanted her to think that maybe I’d had some food poisoning. Maybe a worker on the bus beat me up for being an American. Maybe I was dying of loneliness. Anything could happen in Prague.

“It’s 3:30 in the morning. I thought you didn’t have a phone in your flat.”

“You were being missed,” I said. A roar went up from the bar. Monday Night Football on the TV. “I’m at the Clown and Bard. They’re watching football. You know, soccer.”

She didn’t understand what I was doing at a bar at 3:30 a.m. I told her I couldn’t sleep.

“So, what, you’ve just been out walking the streets?”

“I was hungry.”

There was a long pause, as if she’d never heard anything so ridiculous in her life. I covered my mouth so I wouldn’t laugh. Then it all went bad. It was the beginning of how I find myself at this moment, with her laying unconscious on my bathroom floor.

“Is it that woman?” she asked. “The one with the learning disability? Is that why you’re out so late? You’ve been out with her?”

“What are you talking about?” What was she talking about?

“The one you sent the hand lotion to?”

I forgot I’d told her Agnessa lived in Prague.

The more I denied seeing Agnessa while I was in Prague, the more Charlotte believed I was lying. I said, “I haven’t seen her. And anyway, we’re non-touching friends.” Charlotte went bat-shit crazy when I said that. It was true. I’m a good man. I don’t lie unless I have to. When I was in Chelyabinsk, Agnessa let me hold her elbow when we crossed the street. Donnie said that’s how these Russian women are. Until they receive a victory rock, there’s no hope of any action.

“I haven’t seen Ag in months,” I said. “She’s a friend. She reminds me of you. She’s got that sense of humor, but not so cutting. And answer me this, why are Slavic women either as short as they are wide, or super models?”

“She’s a super model?”

“It’s usually the really old ones who are short and fat. The ladies who sweep the streets.”

“Ray, just tell me. Is there anything going on with this woman or not?”

“Did you know they serve patty melts at the Clown and Bard? Bizarre, huh?”

Charlotte hung up on me. I paid for my half-eaten melt and walked home. If I left the lights off I could sit in the living room and drink a beer and watch my landlady paint her nails in her thong and T-shirt. Charlotte had given me an idea. As soon as Agnessa’s fiancée visa came through I’d tell Charlotte my work in Prague was finished. I’d tell her I was coming home with my friend Agnessa, who wanted to start a new life in the States. Of course, she would stay with me until she found a place of her own. Charlotte would lose her mind. Maybe Agnessa and I could double date with Charlotte and the film critic. It would be fun.

My calls to Charlotte started going to voice mail, my emails went unanswered. My landlady got curtains. I took Ray Jr. to IMAX to see a movie about coral reefs. He vomited into my lap. I was counting on associating with Lorna a little, but she clapped her hand over her nose and told me to go home. There was a message on my voice mail from Agnessa, wondering whether I’d made her airplane reservations. Nothing from Charlotte after two full weeks.

I decided it was time to come home.

The forced-air heat comes on. Outside, big messy snowflakes blow out of the sky. From my window I can see across the snowy street into the Noble Rot, where wine is a meal. Once Charlotte stops playing possum and gets up off the bathroom floor I can take her right over there. Show there are no hard feelings. She thinks I am a vengeful type, controlling, but she has me all wrong.

Playing possum. I have to laugh. It is how we met, how she fell for me. I was still at the pest control company out on Foster Road. One spring morning she’d called up fairly hysterical. There was a dead possum in her tulips. A few of us were in the break room, shaking the snack machine to see if we could free a half-released bag of Doritos. The supervisor came in and thought we might want to draw straws. Charlotte lived in Lake Oswego, where the ladies tend to have nothing better to do than go to yoga, get their nails done, and flirt with the hired hands. Sometimes you can even get lucky.

Charlotte came to the door wearing baggy shorts and a University of Michigan T-shirt. Reading glasses on her head and a pen and sheaf of papers in one hand. Mint-green toenail polish. She held the backdoor open for me.

“I would have just tossed him in the trash but the garbage isn’t until next Wednesday. That didn’t seem very, I don’t know, hygienic.”

But when we got to the side yard where the tulips grew there were only a few flattened stalks, a petal or two strewn about.

“He was just here,” she said, then whirled on her heel and startled me by punching me in the arm. She had a great loud laugh. “He was playing possum. Oh my God.”

She offered me a beer for my trouble, and I told her that possums don’t actually play dead, that they’re so frightened they fall into a real coma. Then, after a few hours, they rouse themselves and go on their way. Charlotte thought that was fascinating. She made me sit down at her kitchen table and tell her more.

Not many women have ever looked at me that way.

Tonight she came over to my apartment uninvited. I’d sent her an e-mail two days ago telling her I was home from Prague, in case she cared. I didn’t tell her where I live. I figured I’d let it slip next week, after Agnessa arrives from Chelyabinsk.

“Hello!” she said, stomping the snow off her red cowboy boots before coming right on in. She walked around my front room. Touched the DVDs stacked on top of the TV, picked up the empty Czechvar bottle on the desk beside the computer. Flipped through a stack of mail on the end table beside the couch.

“You settled right in here, didn’t you?”

“It’s good to see you,” I said. It was good to see her. She wasn’t wearing any perfume.

“I got your new address from Elaine,” she said. “How’s the jet lag?”

“Who?” I knew who. Elaine was the only person who was aware I’d moved to Southeast Ankeny.

“I had a dream about you last night.” I didn’t know where I was going with this, but chicks always liked to hear that you had a dream about them.

“I came to get my ring back,” she said. She was in one of those moods. Fine.

“Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get it.”

She pulled her hair out of its scrunchie and pulled it back up on top of her head. She didn’t sit down.

I took my time. I walked down the long hallway to my bedroom. I sat on the bed in the dark. It occurred to me that Agnessa was going to need someplace to put her clothes. I didn’t have a bureau, but instead used the top two shelves in the closet. I walked back down the hallway. Charlotte wasn’t there. From the kitchen I could hear the freezer door open, then Charlotte’s loud laugh. Ha!

I stood in the middle of my front room, stared at a poster I’d taken from our old house, black-and-white, a young couple kissing on a Paris street. It had some name in French.

“This wasn’t something I wanted to tell you over the phone, but one night someone broke into my flat in Prague and stole your ring,” I called into the kitchen. I was glad not to have to look her in the eye. “They took my wallet too. And my passport.”

She came back into the living room holding the frozen top layer of our wedding cake. “I can’t believe this.”

“It’s our wedding cake,” I said.

“Yeah, I know what it is. How is it you still have it?”

“You said I could take anything I wanted.”

“What did you do with it for the two months you were in Prague?”

“I got a sentimental streak a mile wide, so sue me.”

She started shaking her head. She shook her head and laughed. Laughing and crying, mascara running. “At first I thought Elaine was the nut job, but it’s you! I didn’t believe her when she said you didn’t even go to Prague. It was impossible. No one is that crazy. She said if I didn’t believe her to check the freezer.”

“Elaine is a nut job,” I said. “She thinks she’s a witch.”

“Stop, Ray, just stop.”

“She wanted to put a spell on you but I wouldn’t let her.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“The guys broke into my flat when I was out one night with Agnessa,” I said. “You wanted the truth and this is the truth. I’m in love with Agnessa.”

“The girl who lives with her parents and likes stuffed animals?” She put the wedding cake on the table so she could cross her hands over her chest like she does and throw her head back, the better to laugh her guts out. She was lucky I didn’t throttle her right there and then.

I said that I strolled across the Charles Bridge with Agnessa, and admired the astronomical clock with Agnessa, and that Agnessa’s family actually owned the Clown and Bard.

She said, “God, Ray, could you be a bigger loser?”

I stared at her. She wasn’t supposed to say that.

“That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.”

She stalked down the hall to the bathroom to find some tissue to wipe her eyes. I followed her, and when she turned around I grabbed her by the neck and gave her a good shake.

Grabbing a woman by the arm is a loser’s game. They throw your hand off and shriek, “Don’t touch me!” and act as if you’re some low-life abuser. I just needed her to shut her up, and the neck is the pipeline to the mouth. I will admit that after she got quiet, I tossed her against that scalding-hot water pipe just to get my point across. So sue me.

Back in the kitchen, I put the frozen wedding cake back into the freezer. I looked out the window. Down on the street a girl rode past on her bike, the flakes setting on her hot-pink bike helmet. Portland is cold enough to invite snow but too warm to keep it. It has something to do with the Japanese current. Charlotte could tell you, but she isn’t coming out of the bathroom anytime soon.

The snow stops like I said it would. I put on my Vans and locate my passport in the top drawer of my desk. Outside, the air feels good on my arms. The back of my neck is nice and cool. The forced-air heat was way too much in that place. In the parking lot I pull the plates off my truck, crunch across the snow, and stuff them into the dumpster behind Esparza’s. Just as I’m closing the lid, I hear the slow koosh-koosh of bald tires on snow and look up to see the art car rolling down the street. I tell you, I’ve always been lucky.

At PDX I call the phone company to turn off my service. I’m doing Agnessa a favor. I only want the best for her and it’s best for her to go with the guy with the multiple TVs. Then I call 911 and report an intruder. I give my address and tell them its right across the street from Noble Rot, where wine is a meal. Then I buy a ticket for the next plane out. Like I said before, I’m a simple guy. I take life as it comes.

JULIA NOW BY LUCIANA LOPEZ

St. Johns

There was a photo pasted under the wallpaper, next to a note written on the wall. Dear Julia, We both know the truth. RIP. Henry.

“What’s that?” Josh asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. Josh was wearing his painter’s pants, even though we weren’t planning to start painting for a while yet. There was no furniture in the dining room either, just the two of us, peeling off the old, faded wallpaper, a sort of peach brocade. We’d only just moved into the blue bungalow a week ago, in St. Johns, the only Portland neighborhood left where we could afford a house that wasn’t already occupied by wildlife.

Josh read the note aloud, then whistled through his front teeth. He took the photo from my hands to inspect it. A woman, a little plain but not actually ugly, glared back at us, standing at a kitchen sink-our kitchen sink-in a blue housedress, a cigarette dangling between her lips. She’d turned her head to look at the picture taker, and except for those fierce dark eyes, her face showed no expression.

“Guess they lived here before us, huh?”

I rolled my eyes. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

He shrugged, then kissed my nose. We’d been together five years. My mother was dying for him to propose; somehow marriage never seemed to come up between us. Buying the house together had been his idea.

“RIP. So she’s dead,” I said.

Josh laughed. “That’s usually what it means, yeah.”

“There’s a date on the back of the photo. August 8, 1957,” I read. Josh had already turned back to the wall, tearing off wide strips of the paper. Small frayed fragments dusted his brown hair, like bits of lace floating down. One landed in his eye, and he wiped his face with an impatient motion. Peach dust turned his brown hair pale.

I like to go running at night, after dark. Josh had joked once that I’d make a great mugger, the way I like to stay quiet and jog past at night. This was my first run in St. Johns. We lived a few blocks off the neighborhood’s main drag, so we hadn’t seen much else of the area. The sun had just set awhile ago, and the orange light was fading, streaking into dark blue out in the west. I set off with no particular direction in mind, just turning and turning and running down whatever street caught my eye. Some of the houses here were quite nice, big and roomy and expensive-looking. Many were like ours: tidy, modest, with well-kept lawns and painted trim, sometimes with roses or other flowers growing in the garden. Up-to-date. Important enough for someone to care about. They were small, but there was pride of ownership. I liked to see those houses.

Some were small and unkempt; dirty or peeling paint, weed-choked yards, fences missing slats. These houses looked old, and tired. Longtime residents, probably. People who’d lived here since it had been a working-class neighborhood, blue collar, the kind who lived paycheck to paycheck.

Portlanders have fuzzy bunny reputations as liberals, knee-jerk tree-huggers, and soft touches. But now that Josh and I owned our place, our house, I found myself looking at the rundown buildings with a more critical eye. How easy it would be to, say, mow that lawn, or to tear out that tacky fence. The fake tiki torches, or the sagging porch. Why don’t these people do something about this? I was breathing easily now, in the middle of my run, the place where I feel I can go forever, until suddenly I can’t. I passed a couple arguing in the street, the woman leaning out of a rusted car with plastic over where the rear passenger window should be. Then a woman pushing a baby stroller. Kids riding their bikes in the street. On my left was a store selling tobacco products; on my right, across the street, a small Thai restaurant with a buzzing neon sign.

This neighborhood could be so great, I thought, with just a few fixes. Once it had been considered too far from downtown for people like Josh and me to consider living here. But it was only about seven or eight miles-not so far, after all, as people discovered when the real estate boom meant a starter home in close-in neighborhoods went as high as $300,000 or $350,000. In the 1800s, St. Johns had been a separate city, but got absorbed into Portland in 1915. In many ways it still felt like a separate place, tucked into an odd triangular corner of the city’s north end. It was awkward to get here, either through an ugly industrial area on the Southwest side, or through a stretch of commercial road and trucking companies on the opposite. The lack of scenery made it feel a bit cut off in some ways.

It could all be so great here, I thought. We can make this place really special. It could always have been special, but maybe now was its time.

I felt the pounding rhythm in my knees. A big black dog barked from a yard, behind a chain-link fence. I smelled roses from a nearby garden. Another batch of kids on bikes waved to me. “Hey, runner,” they called out. “Hey,” I called back, puffing just a little.

The next day I woke up with their names on my mind, where they stayed as I brushed my teeth and took my shower and combed my hair and got dressed. At our breakfast table, still the same beat-up oak hand-me-down from our apartment, I looked over at Josh as he read the paper. I could see the headline; a new Starbucks had gotten its windows smashed in, way over in Southeast. St. Johns had a Starbucks too, but it was hard to imagine anyone caring enough to vandalize it. “Henry and Julia,” I said aloud, “Who do you think they were?”

He looked at me for a second around the Metro section. He was already wearing a suit and tie, his white shirt crisp and starched. I wore faded jeans and a puffy white peasant shirt. He was an accountant; I was a bike repairwoman. That’s how we’d met-I’d stopped to help him fix his bike on the side of the road one day, got it patched up after he got run off by an SUV. Even in Portland, probably as close to American bike nirvana as there is, that sort of thing happens.

“Probably just people who lived here before,” he said. “It was fifty years ago; they’re probably dead by now.” He gave me a wry smile to take the edge off his words and went back to his paper. I grabbed the front section of the paper and read it as I ate my cereal. It had taken us months of living together before we could simply be silent in each other’s presence, and now I relished the velvety quiet between us. Josh was thirty-two and I was twenty-seven. I was 5'2
, he 6'2
, so much taller than me that his big toe was the same length as my pinkie finger. At night he liked to smell my hair, inhaling deep into his lungs, before falling asleep. It made me feel like he wanted all of me, even my scent, loved every bit about me.

I rose from the table first and kissed him goodbye. We used to live downtown, where our commutes were each less than a mile. Now we were more like seven or eight miles from our jobs. Josh drove, so it wasn’t long for him, but I biked, riding south along the Willamette River until I crossed the water into the Southwest side. It was beautiful now that it was the summer, crisp, humidity-free weather with a vault of clear blue sky above. In the winter, in the rainy season, well, I’d probably bike then too. I was stubborn that way.

Henry and Julia. Henry and Julia.

I was early at the bike shop. Truth be told, I’d known I was setting out too early from home. This way I could kill some time at the library.

The downtown library branch was only a few blocks away. I locked up my bike and strolled over. The building was imposing, stone and red brick, tall and grand. I’d always been proud of Portland for having a place like this, even if I didn’t use it a lot myself. It made me feel like we were a real city, a real, important place.

The reference librarians sat behind a massive desk on the first floor. There were three people there now: an older woman, a middle-aged woman, and a cute guy with red hair and gold wire-rimmed glasses. I walked up to the desk, but before I could get the cute guy’s attention, the middle-aged lady glanced up at me.

“I’m looking for information on some people,” I blurted out. I was cracking my knuckles now, an old nervous habit, and the pops sounded crass to me in the silence of the room.

“Which people?” she asked. I realized how stupid my answer-Henry and Julia-would sound.

“Well, maybe a place would be better to start,” I said. “My house. I mean, the house I just bought, but the people who owned it before me. Us. Who used to live there.”

Maybe I should have told Josh what I was doing. Maybe he already knew. When I was a kid I’d been the one to touch the poison oak to see if it was really that bad; it was, but the physical itching still burned less than my curiosity had.

The woman took down my address and suggested a few places to start-county property and tax records, some property websites, even, she suggested, the Oregonian archives, our daily paper. “How far back do you want to go?” she asked.

“August 8, 1957,” I replied.

She nodded, as if unsurprised. “This could be tough. Those kinds of records can wind up all over the place.”

I thanked her, said goodbye, and headed off to work. Josh would already be in the city by now, I thought to myself. Josh and Allison. Not quite the same ring as Henry and Julia, but nice in its own way, I thought.

Over dinner that night, I told Josh what I’d done. “She said it might be hard, but possible. But that maybe I’d have to do some digging.”

Josh put down his fork with a sigh. He’d made apple-stuffed pork chops and baked potatoes; I usually dated guys who liked to cook, since, left to myself, I’d have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner every night. “Allison, we just got here. Can we maybe work on the house a bit first, maybe do some of the renovations and changes we talked about before you go flitting off into something else?”

I could feel my brow furrowing, and I tried to smooth it out. I know he hates it when I get, as he puts it, pouty; I wanted to make him happy. “But don’t you want to know who these people are? What the truth is? All that? I mean, maybe there’s Spanish doubloons buried in the backyard! How cool would that be?”

“Honey, we just got here, we have so much to do. Why waste your energy on this?” He was in sweats by now, though I still wore the same jeans and blouse as earlier in the day. Across his sweatshirt was written, in gold, Minnesota. My mom loved that he was a Midwest boy. I didn’t care either way. He grinned, his perfect teeth lined up like a picket fence. “And anyway, maybe Julia’s the one buried in the backyard.”

“My point exactly. Wouldn’t you want to know that?” I asked, pointing my fork at him. A tiny sliver of apple fell off the tines onto my plate. Josh reached out with his own fork, speared the apple slice, and popped it into his mouth. He didn’t speak until he’d swallowed it.

“No,” he answered. “I really wouldn’t.” He went back to his pork chop, and the sound of his chewing filled our small kitchen. Beneath the table, though, I felt his foot slide across to mine and rub the inside of my arch. His bare foot was warmer than my own, and I rubbed his foot back.

It took me three weeks of running back and forth among county agencies. One place had ownership records, but not on computer, so I had to go request the file in person. Henry Lewis, it turns out. The house was in his name alone, so I tried tracking down a marriage certificate for him-Julia Crosby, Julia Lewis after 1951. Henry had owned the house until only ten years ago, when someone had bought the place and moved in. Then it had been sold again, a year ago, renovated, and sold to us. So few people separated us from Henry and Julia.

There wasn’t much other information about them in the county files, no matter where I looked. Maybe they had simply led quiet, unassuming lives, I thought. Then I remembered what the librarian said, and checked the newspaper archives. The electronic records didn’t go back to the ’50s, only the ’80s, so I had to go to the paper in person. The Oregonian’s building sits at the south end of downtown. It looks like a holdover from the ’70s, from that moment in American architecture when all taste seemed to have left us as a nation. Plain and squat and industrial looking, and no better inside, where nothing seemed to be of any particular color.

But I found Henry Lewis in the records stored there. And I found Julia Lewis. She’d been killed by a burglar, the newspaper said at first, coshed on the head. She’d bled to death on her kitchen floor. My kitchen floor. Then: Husband arrested for murder of wife. Then, a few days later, a brief, brief story: Henry Lewis had been released. Police had nothing to say; they let him go. And Julia Lewis’s name disappeared from history. If they had known back then who killed her, the newspaper never mentioned it. If Henry Lewis had been guilty or innocent, they never said. Only that she was dead, and he was released.

“Let it go!” Josh yelled at me from the bathroom. “Just let it go! She’s dead fifty years, he’s probably dead somewhere too. Just let it go and forget about it!”

I’d been talking about Julia and Henry for the past month now, since I’d discovered her murder. She stayed on my mind. I’d put her photo on my nightstand. Every day, her face looked up at me when I groped for my glasses.

“You’re not Nancy Drew,” he said. He was in socks and pajama bottoms, standing in the hall outside our door, kitty-corner to the bathroom door. There was only one bathroom in the house so far, but we planned to change that, to put in a half bath, maybe a full bath. Our contractor said that would increase the house’s resale value.

“I’m not trying to be Nancy Drew,” I answered. I was in bed, sitting up, with the newspaper on my lap. We never had time to read the paper in the morning, when it was delivered. Who does these days, anyway? “I just want to know more about them.”

“You just think you can fix this,” he said. “Baby, it’s been fifty years. She’s so dead she’s not even a person anymore, just bones buried somewhere. And he’s probably dead or senile or moved on. Why can’t you just let it go?”

“Because!” I answered. “Because… I don’t know why. Except that I can’t. They lived in this house, in our house, and they did all the things we do, and Julia’s dead and Henry knows the truth. And I want to know the truth too.”

Josh ducked back into the bathroom. I heard him spitting out toothpaste, running the faucet. I turned off my bedside lamp and snuggled under the covers, closing my eyes. I was facing the wall. Maybe he would take the hint.

When he returned to the bedroom, he turned off the light and got into bed next to me. He reached over to hug me, and I felt the slight dampness on his face. He had strong arms. That was something I’d always liked about him, and I could feel his strength now when he put his arms around me. After the brief embrace, he reached over me, to my nightstand. He picked up the picture of Julia, brought it over to his side of the bed, and put it into a drawer in his nightstand. I heard him close the drawer. Then he turned back to me, buried his face in my hair, and took the night’s deep breath. I pressed my back into him, to feel him next to me. The way we curved together, like two cats asleep together.

“Let’s just sleep, okay?” he whispered. “We’ll wake up tomorrow and forget all this.”

Obviously I couldn’t tell Josh anything more, I decided. I left Julia’s picture in his nightstand. I didn’t even try to sneak it out when Josh wasn’t home, just in case he’d somehow know. That was all right, though; I’d looked at the picture enough to have it practically memorized. And now I knew they were Henry and Julia Lewis, I didn’t need the photo anyway. There were other ways to find Henry. Julia I didn’t need to find; I already knew where she was. The newspaper obit had been brief and to the point. Donations, please, to the ASPCA; service at St. George’s; buried in a cemetery not far from here. I kept meaning to go to her grave, but somehow I never found the time.

Henry, though, Henry was harder. He hadn’t owned a house in Portland, that I could tell, for at least a decade. He didn’t have a hunting or fishing or pilot’s license. He didn’t have any court records. He hadn’t gotten sued or tried to sue anyone. Not even a parking ticket! The librarians and court clerks were tired of me; I’d visited the Oregonian twice more; and I’d called the St. Johns Sentinel, as well as some of the other neighborhood papers. I was starting to think he was dead.

I was running almost every night now. I looked at each house I passed, wondering if he lived in any of them. I puffed schoolyard chants under my breath, with his name: Henry and Julia, sitting in a tree… Mr. Henry had a steamboat… Sometimes I chanted aloud, softly. The people I passed by looked at me oddly, but the chants helped me stay focused, helped me keep my pace up. At night I thought I saw her form standing at our kitchen counter, or ducking into the bathroom. Stupid, of course. The house had been renovated since she’d lived in it; the rooms probably weren’t even arranged in the same way as they were back then. My kitchen wasn’t her kitchen; it was and wasn’t the same house.

Sometimes, when I got very tired, I just used their names as a cadence, over and over. Henry and Julia, Henry and Julia, Henry and Julia. They had shared something, some burden. I wanted to be the one to lift it from them, to take it for them.

“I found a Henry Lewis,” Josh said one night at the dinner table. It was dark out, far darker than where we’d lived downtown, where the streetlights fuzzed out the stars. We were eating spaghetti with meatballs, one of the few recipes I could make well. Josh held a forkful of pasta up to his mouth, examined it for a second, and ate it.

“What?” I said. I almost spilled my wine on my T-shirt. “You found Henry? My Henry?”

Josh shook his head. He was wearing a T-Shirt emblazoned with The Shins, one of Portland’s favorite indie-rock bands. Personally, I hated them, but that’s not the kind of thing you could really say in Portland, where indie musicians who manage to chart are the closest thing to gods. I’d never told Josh how I felt about them.

Josh shrugged, chewing. After he swallowed, he spoke again. “I don’t know if it’s your Henry Lewis, but it’s a Henry Lewis. He’s about the right age, and he lives in St. Johns, so maybe it’s your guy.”

My eyes welled with tears. “How did you find him? I didn’t even know you were looking.” I felt overwhelmed to think we’d been searching for the same thing after all. It made me immensely grateful.

A shrug. “I didn’t so much find him as he fell into my lap,”

Josh replied. “When I was at Roosevelt High this week.”

I nodded. We’d both approved of his volunteer activities; it was like giving back-and coincidentally, I told myself, if it helped raised the high school’s test scores, it would also raise our property values.

“Well, one of the volunteer clubs there helped out Meals on Wheels for a few weeks. Some kind of senior project or something. And one of the guys getting delivered to is this Henry Lewis guy. Kid says he’s short, a little fat, definitely old. Never tips or makes cookies for the kids or anything. It’s just him, alone. So I got the kid to give me the address. They’re not supposed to, but I made up some bullshit story about reconciling the group’s gas expenditures and their status as a school group. Easy.”

Josh took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and slid it across the table to me. Henry Lewis, 9911 N. Central, in some kid’s messy blue-inked scrawl. It had been two months since we’d found the photograph and the note.

I got up from my chair and circled around the table to hug Josh. “Thank you,” I whispered into his ear. A strand of his hair got into my mouth, laying the taste of shampoo onto my tongue.

Henry Lewis lived alone, in a white bungalow less than a mile away. From the outside the houses looked similar; a lot of houses in St. Johns had been built off the same or only slightly modified plans. It had been the kind of neighborhood where people just wanted to own a house of their own, whether or not five others on their block were identical.

I felt like I was ten again, knocking on his door. I’d sold Girl Scout cookies back then, back when we still went door-to-door, our moms in the cars behind us. I knocked once and got no answer, so I knocked again, harder this time. “Mr. Lewis?” I called out. I was wearing gray slacks and a light sweater, pale pink, with short sleeves. Nice, nonthreatening, neutral.

Shuffling noises inside. The door opened with a creak, and he stood in the doorway. So this was Henry Lewis. He looked his age; his skin was lined and saggy, the wrinkles especially deep around his mouth. Most of his hair was gone, except for fringes of gray around the bottom of his head. He wore jeans and a faded red T-shirt and bright white sneakers, the kind that people who think walking in the mall is exercise wear.

I waited for him to say something. Nothing came.

“Mr. Lewis,” I started. “My name is Allison Priest, and my husband and I just moved into 9535 North Leonard.”

Nothing.

“Your old house?” I hated myself for making that a question, but it skipped out before I could stop it. “It was yours, right?”

He nodded.

“Well, I’m hoping I can ask you a few questions about Julia.” I pulled the photo out of my purse. “We found this in the walls. It’s Julia, isn’t it?”

No nod this time, he just motioned me in. The living room was in shade. Not dark, exactly, but with a certain yellow light, a bit dim. Henry Lewis sat down in a brown easy chair; the velour on the arms was faded. The way he sat, his gut protruded forward. I saw a cane in the corner, though he hadn’t carried it to the door. I stood for a moment, trying to adjust to the light. I sat down on a blue sofa, across from him. The cushions were firmer than I’d expected.

“I’m here about Julia,” I said.

“Julia’s dead,” he replied. He made a noise, half clicking and half sucking, with his cheek.

“I know,” I said. “And I know you were involved.”

He snorted. “Involved all right.”

“What does that mean? What happened?”

He glared at me. “You a reporter? Cop? Lawyer?”

I had been leaning toward him, but now sat back in surprise. “No, of course not. I fix bikes.”

He shook his head, a slight sneer on his lips. “Women shouldn’t do that sort of thing. Can’t fix anything worth a damn.”

I felt the old defensiveness rise in my throat. Steady, he’s old. Steady. “How were you involved in her death?”

Was he falling asleep? His eyes were closed, and his head seemed to nod forward.

I raised my voice: “How did she die? What happened?”

His head was still down, and now he seemed to be wheezing. Unreal. I wanted to poke him with something, but the room was bare. “Hey, you!” I spoke as loudly as I could, to try to wake him. “What do you mean, involved? What does involved mean?” I was shouting by the end of the sentence, I knew. I could feel my muscles tighten up all over.

His head snapped up. “I killed her, you fool. You stupid woman, I killed her.”

When I tried to speak, my throat was so dry the words got stuck. I tried again. “You did kill her? You did it?”

He nodded. “Yep.”

“But-the note? And the photo, under the wallpaper?” I heard the wail in my own voice. “I found them. The truth, you said. You both knew the truth.”

Henry Lewis chuckled, a wheezy sound, reedy and almost boyish. “That was just my little joke,” he said. “Julia and I were the only ones who knew. Everyone else thought they knew-but they never knew why, or how. And they never knew what I knew: she deserved it. She knew it too, knew I was gonna do it and knew she deserved it.”

He shifted, settled back into his chair.

“I’d been seeing this little yellow-haired gal on the side.

Sally or Sara or something. Anyway, she’d been good to me, real good. Better’n Julia ever was. Me and Julia were high school sweethearts, got married, I went to work. Dumb kids. We didn’t know nothing. After we got married, well, Julia just about froze up. In bed she was nothing, just laid there, and she kept a terrible house. She hated it here, y’see. She hated the rain in the winter, hated the dampness. I told her we’d leave, but after we got married I started working for the railroad, and the money was too good to give up. I told her we were staying put. She didn’t like that, and she just froze up on me then. When she wasn’t froze, she was crying. When she wasn’t crying, she was screaming. Man has a right to his house, to some peace and quiet. And Sally moved in a few doors down, and she was three years younger than Julia, still in high school. Pretty, sweet. Sally liked a man with some spending money. Julia found out. I told her I had a right to a girl who wanted me. She said she’d divorce me, take all my money, get me fired. All this crap.”

He paused. I couldn’t say anything. There was no sound from outside, either.

A cough, and he began again. “One day I came home from work and killed her. Hit her on the head with a frying pan.” That wheezy dry chuckle. “She went down in a heap. I remember the blood came from her head here”-he pointed to a spot above his left ear-“like it was a drinking fountain. I wiped off my fingerprints and dropped the frying pan and ran outta there to pick up Sally for a movie. When I came home, I called the police and said I’d just found her like that, and that I hadn’t been home at all that day cause I’d been out with my girlfriend. Sally backed me up-pretty girl, but dumb as dumb-and they could never prove a thing.”

“So the truth was that…?”

“The truth was that I killed her. She knew I was gonna do it, right up until I did it. And then she was dead and by God she really knew it. She wouldn’t ever cross me no more.” The chuckle again, and now its thinness sounded like wires rubbing against each other, scraping and raw. “Some people thought it was me, sure enough, but couldn’t no one ever prove it. And no one ever knew how much that bitch needed killing.”

I could feel the tears begin in me, the pressure building in my eyes and my sinuses. I swallowed, and my spit seemed to grate along my throat.

“What’s so funny about that?” I asked. “How is that a joke?”

He just wheezed and shook his head some more. I felt the hair on my arms stand up, but I forced my face into impassivity.

“None of my other girlfriends or wives ever tried any of that shit with me again,” he said at last. “Expect they heard about Julia and knew they’d have to shape up. Buried two wives, had girlfriends the whole time. They knew how to keep quiet.”

“You kept cheating?” I asked. I took pride in my voice’s evenness.

“Hell, I’m a man, ain’t I? All men cheat.”

“Mine doesn’t,” I said.

Henry Lewis laughed out loud, a choking sound that brought up something from deep in his lungs. “He cheats,” Henry Lewis said. “You ain’t caught him, but he cheats.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

The wheezing chuckle now, with a shake of the head. “Little girl, you ain’t know shit about men. You and Julia, thinking you can tell a man what to do, how to act. No one can! That’s what makes us men.”

“Why are you telling me this? If they never caught you, why are you telling me this now?”

“Maybe just cause I feel like.” He gave me a hard look.

“You come in here with your little purse and your expensive haircut and the way you pretend you belong here. You ain’t here. None of you are here. It’s like a play for you folks. And maybe I just feel like reminding you it ain’t. Now get out. I’ve got better things to do than teach you how the world is.”

I stood up, smoothing my pants with my left hand. I gave him a hard, long look; he returned part of it, then turned away. Not scared. Bored. He had killed her, and he didn’t even try to deny it. I suppose no one could touch him now, more than fifty years later. Who would believe me, anyway? He started reading a TV Guide as I stood there. He was old now, a lifetime older. I was fit, twenty-seven, healthy.

I watched him for a moment.

“You’re Julia now,” I hissed. He looked up, turning a page. I walked over to him, ripped the magazine from his hands, and tore it in half. The paper was all twisted in my hands.

He didn’t move, not even his face. That same bored look. He wheezed when he breathed, and his knuckles seemed too big for his hands. The whites of his eyes looked dull, like overcooked eggs. I was panting, my breath like sandpaper in my throat. He gave me another second of that vacancy, then closed his eyes and folded his hands on his chest, as if he were going to sleep. I dropped the mangled magazine, turned, and walked stiffly out of the house, banging the screen door behind me. I could still hear him wheeze.

Josh was sitting at the dining room table at home, going over swatches of paint. I saw shades of eggplant spread out before him. Very tasteful, all of them. They were for the living room; we were hoping to paint next week. He looked up at me. He was wearing his oldest jeans, the ones all torn up at the hem that my mother thinks make him look like a tightwad. A piece of a leaf perched on top of his brown hair.

“How’d it go?” he asked me, his hands flat on the table now.

“He did it,” I answered. I took the seat opposite Josh. “He admits it, doesn’t even care anymore. We bought a fucking murderer’s house. One who lives all of fourteen blocks away.” I could feel the heat in my eyes, the quiver trying to move my chin.

Josh shrugged. “We bought the house, we bought the house,” he said. “Anyway, Lewis is an old coot now. He can’t do anything to us. And if he tried, I’d fix him.” Josh grinned at me. His teeth were so white, so very white, that I thought I could see my reflection in their gleam. Like a dog’s teeth, constantly wet and shining. He stood up, walked over to me, and gave me a quick one-armed hug.

Then Josh swept out of the dining room; I heard him rooting around the fridge, pulling something out. A pop, a fizz. A can of beer, then. The drink gurgled going down his throat. I heard the backdoor open, then close. Maybe he was sitting on the back porch. Maybe he was just standing in the kitchen.

Henry Lewis was within a few hundred meters of us, somewhere, maybe a kilometer or so at most. He too could be on his porch this night, drinking a beer and thinking of nothing.

The backdoor banged open, then slammed shut. I couldn’t hear Josh anymore. I didn’t know where he was. The dining room was almost all dark now. My hands began to shake. I couldn’t stop them.

WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE BY ARIEL GORE

Clinton

The kids lined the wall outside the Clinton Street Theater in the sepia-lit mist, waiting to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The girls with their big purple hair and skimpy dresses; the boys in tight black bodices or boxy leather jackets. Cold November night. They clutched their rolled-up newspapers and cups of rice, hid water guns in their pockets. I squinted at them through the drizzle-a time warp to the ’90s, to the ’80s, to the ’70s. Bygone eras. I ducked into the dim red of Dots Café, slipped into a soft gold booth. The waitress had a tattoo of a hamburger on her shoulder. She nodded at me. “The usual?”

I winked up at her. Absolute martini. And spicy fries with tofu sauce.

As she walked away from me, I tried to recall when it was that I’d gone from being a housewife who’d occasionally sneak out for a midnight drink to a regular with a “usual.” I glanced around the joint. Marie Claire, the sexy Midwesterner who ran the Italian restaurant on the corner, sipped a Rumba with one of her young dishwashers. Wilhelm, the frumpy commercial landlord from down on Powell Boulevard, sat alone, adjusted his Coke-bottle glasses as he studied the menu. Nameless hipsters huddled at their smoky tables, too cool with their bleached fashion mullets and pegged pants. I once read in Nylon magazine that you can’t get away with retro fashion if you’re old enough to have worn it the first time. Puts me out of the running for skinny jeans and dangling earrings, I guess. I looked down at my boot-cut cords, fingered the oversized holes in my lobes. For all appearances, a washed-up ’90s girl. I’d recently signed up for NiftyWebFlicks, so I averted my eyes when the bearded guy from Clinton Street Video walked in. He sauntered up to the bar to drown his sorrows. A bygone business, video rental.

I got up to use the bathroom. No Ladies and Gents at Dots Café. Just It, Doesn’t, and Matter. I walked into Matter. The tan and white tiles on the walls gave me a weird sense of vertigo. On my way back to my booth, I passed Wilhelm. He muttered something unintelligible, adjusted those ridiculous glasses.

A couple of drinks and a pile of spicy fries later, I was back outside, feeling too sober for the cold. Some nights after drinks at Dots, I ambled down to my secret spot on the river, sat there watching the flow of things. But that night I headed home. Little fliers picturing some missing woman were stapled to the telephone poles that marked my path. Catherine Smith, in bold letters. Grown people were always going missing in this town. A fire glowed from inside an old Victorian, the smell of smoke in the damp night. I zigzagged home through the rain, cut across the rail yard south of Powell, my shoulders hunched. I held my hood tight over my head; a feeble attempt to stay dry. As I rounded the last corner, a shadowy figure flickered into my field of vision. She was so thin, I didn’t recognize her at first, but she said my name in a whisper loud and urgent: “Ruby-”

I was startled, took a minute to take her in. She looked like a wet Chihuahua after a flood, that cute little buzz cut I remembered all grown out now. Still, I’d have known her face anywhere. “Mustang?” I felt my chest tighten. She’d been a lover of mine back before I married Spider, but she ran off to Chicago amid a whirlwind of rumors. “My God, Mustang. What are you doing here?”

How long has it been? Seven years? I couldn’t tell if she’d been crying or if it was just the rain on her pale face, but her mascara trailed down her cheeks like mud. She’d never worn makeup when we were together. Soft butch. I opened my mouth to speak, but I felt something hot in my throat.

Mustang cocked her head to the side, tried to give me a meaningful look, but it was like she was staring through me, at something on the other side. “I need a place to stay. Just tonight.” Her whisper was gravel and whiskey. She moved closer, gripped my arm. Even through my hoodie, her short fingernails felt like little claws in my skin.

I thought about Spider asleep inside. He was prone to silent jealous rages when it came to ex-lovers-and he didn’t much like unexpected guests. Anyway, I hoped he’d slept through my midnight escape. “Did you already knock on my door?” I asked Mustang.

She shook her head, narrowed her eyes. Her thin lips quivered a little. “C’mon, Ruby. We’re family, aren’t we? Even after all these years?”

I remembered that accusatory pout. I sighed, already defeated, and I wished I’d had another drink back at Dots. “Let me go inside first; give me ten minutes, then knock, all right?”

When I heard her at the door a few minutes later, I pretended to be awakened from deep sleep, I pretended to be groggy, I crawled out of bed real slow, but my charade was all for the night. Spider snored like an emphysemic sailor after a night at port.

As I led Mustang through the dark of the living room, floor boards creaking, she breathed hard. I pointed her down to the guest bed in the half-finished basement. “It’s all yours, babe.”

She squeezed my hand, whispered, “Thank you.” I felt that tightening across my chest again, shook it off.

Spider got up at the crack of dawn, a perverse rod of morning energy even on Sundays. He took his cold shower, headed off to work in his new Prius, none the wiser. Or so I thought.

I lay in bed, just looking at the ceiling. I wondered, fleetingly, if Mustang’s appearance in the night had been a dream.

When she staggered upstairs a few hours later, I was making coffee in my pajamas. I offered her a hot cup.

She still looked bedraggled. “It’s fuckin’ cold in your basement,” she mumbled. “Where’s Spider?”

“Are you gonna tell me what all the drama’s about?”

She sipped her Stumptown brew, took a crumpled pack of American Spirit yellows from her hoodie pocket, lit one up. She held the pack in my direction. How long has it been since I’ve had a cigarette? I remembered the hot pulse of the nicotine patches I wore for a year. But what the hell? I reached out.

Mustang looked down at her scuffed Converse. “I need to talk to Spider,” she said.

“Spider?” The round of the cigarette felt strangely familiar in my mouth.

Mustang offered me a flame.

I leaned in, inhaled.

Her big brown eyes brimmed with tears again as she dragged on her cigarette. The smoke she exhaled looked musty and brown. “I need a lawyer, Ruby. I might be in pretty big trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” Spider was a weed lawyer. And somehow I couldn’t quite picture it-Mustang in trouble for weed? Booze had always been our drug of choice. The smoke from my cigarette burned my throat. I pretended not to feel light-headed. “You been running pot?” I raised an eyebrow. It had been itching since I’d gotten it repierced.

Mustang gave me that accusatory pout again. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She hunched her shoulders a little. “A lawyer’s a lawyer. You can get Spider to help me. We’re family, Ruby. Aren’t we?”

It grated on my last nerve that she kept saying that-family. But she didn’t want to talk to Spider. He’s a weed lawyer. And I knew he’d never take her on-not even for weed. My cell phone beeped from the counter. A text message from Spider: get that bitch out of my basement by the time i get home. I flashed Mustang the screen, shrugged. “Sorry, babe, you better go.”

“Ruby-” she pleaded with me now.

I kept smoking, silent.

“I’ll go,” she finally said, shaking her head like she had any right to be disappointed in me. “But meet me later? When does Spider get home, anyway? Why’s he working on a Sunday?”

He worked every day. “No telling when he’ll be back,” I admitted. “Probably not before 8.”

“Meet me at that Italian place kitty-corner from Clinton Theater at 6,” Mustang said, straightening her back and running her fingers through her hair, gathering some of her arrogance. “I’ll explain.”

I frowned, crushed my cigarette on a plate. Maybe I still had a soft spot for her-or maybe I was just bored-but even as I told her I wasn’t sure about my plans for the evening, I knew I’d meet her.

I headed down to the basement to change the sheets on the guest bed. I vacuumed the carpet remnant that covered the cement floor. I spent the rest of the morning and a tip of the afternoon doing laundry, sweeping the linoleum of the kitchen, mopping it, washing dishes. When the house was clean, I scanned the fridge for dinner prospects. Spider liked to have his food ready when he got home-whether it was 7 or midnight. I usually made a lentil loaf or a tofu-spinach lasagna-something I could reheat. I tossed a salad and left it undressed.

Early afternoon and I was already tired. I slipped an old movie into the DVD player, eased into the couch. This was how days passed now. Ever since Spider made partner at the weed firm and I decided to quit my job at the New Season’s cheese counter to focus on my artwork, I’d fallen into this dull routine. See, I couldn’t paint until the house was clean. It just didn’t feel right. But once I’d spent the morning cleaning, I hardly had the energy to mix paints or stretch canvases. By the time my movie ended, it was getting dusky outside. I clicked the remote. Sports and travel shows, mostly. Sunday-afternoon network TV.

No art today? Spider would say when he got home. He always kind of smirked when he said that.

No. Not today, I’d sigh.

And then he’d check out his dinner and nod approvingly.

When we first met, Spider seemed so dark and complicated. I’d been an out lesbian since Hosford Middle School, but Spider wooed me with shots of brandy and a penchant for poker; that long, lanky body that signaled both strength and vulnerability to me. He wore high heels on our second date. I liked the way he wasn’t afraid of his feminine side. But the truth, it turned out, was that Spider just needed someone to control.

It had even dawned on me recently that maybe Spider didn’t much mind that I wasn’t doing my art. For all I knew, he’d set this whole scene up on purpose. He had control issues. Ask anyone. Now he had me right where he wanted. Like a fly in a web. I wasn’t making two dimes of my own money-I couldn’t leave if I’d wanted to. I mean, sure, a girl can always leave a place, but it’s different when you’re broke and you’re not twenty anymore. It’s different when you’ve made this big deal to everyone about true love and then about quitting cheese for art. It’s not like he was abusing me.

“No art today?” Spider had asked me one night when he got home, particularly late.

I’d been nursing a pricey bottle of vodka. “Fuck you, Spider,” is all I said.

He just shook his head-that same self-satisfied smirk. “Anger is the enemy of art,” he clucked. And then we just sat down to our lentil loaf and side salad.

I clicked off the television now, threw on some makeup, grabbed my Queen Bee bag, headed up to Clinton Street.

Marie Claire poured me a glass of Chianti.

I looked up into her dark eyes. “What happens under the rose?” I asked her softly.

She winked. “Stays under the rose,” she promised me.

“Well, you remember Mustang?”

But Mustang never showed up.

I had my Tuscan bean soup, my penne with pesto. I ordered a Northwest by Southeast pizza to go, downed another glass of Chianti, checked the time on my cell phone, paid my bill.

Outside, it was cold and clear. I wanted a cigarette. I squinted at the flier of the missing girl on the telephone pole on the corner. Catherine Smith. I hadn’t recognized her straight name, but now I saw the face. Birdie. A young artist. Successful in a local kind of a way-First Thursdays and Last Fridays and whatnot. Birdie. It surprised me that anyone paid enough attention to her daily life to make a flier. If you want to know the truth, Mustang cheated on me with Birdie back in the day. But to think of it now didn’t make my chest tighten and ache the way it once did. It was water under the bridge. I nodded slowly at the color Xerox, breathed in her straight name. Catherine Smith. Last seen seven days ago exactly.

“You know her?” Marie Claire’s voice startled me. She’d stepped out the backdoor of her restaurant into the dark.

“Acquaintance,” I said. The moon hung in the night sky like a bad piece of art.

“I hear that investigation’s getting intense.” Marie Claire hugged herself against the cold, her voice low and steady. “The police questioned Wilhelm, the landlord who owns all those buildings down on Powell. People are saying she was last seen at Edelweiss Sausages. Talking to him.”

Wilhelm. I nodded. Wilhelm had actually been a client of Spider’s once. Tricky case. Mostly because he‘d been so desperate to keep his name out of the press. It was one thing to get busted for running a few pounds of weed up from Hum-bolt, after all, but quite another to have all those businesses on Powell Boulevard implicated in the whole fiasco.

“Well,” I shrugged, “I hope she’s all right.”

Marie Claire just squinted at me, didn’t say a word before she slipped back into her restaurant.

I eased across the street and into Dots Café.

The waitress with the hamburger tattoo sat at a corner table, smoking American Spirit blues.

“Hey,” I approached her real slow. “Can I borrow a cigarette?”

She exhaled a plume into the dark, handed me one.

I tried to sound casual: “You don’t happen to remember a girl named Mustang who usta live around here?”

The waitress nodded. “Sure. She was just in here-I don’t know-maybe three hours ago? Looked like hell. She had these dark bruises on her upper arms. I asked if she was all right, but she seemed pretty spooked. Ran outta here.”

I nodded my thanks, ordered an Absolute martini at the bar, threw my debit card down. The owner shook her head at me. After all these years, I still forget. Only cash or checks at Dots. I got a twenty out of the ATM. Bastards at the bank get me with their little fee every time. I headed home with my pizza. I knew Spider wouldn’t be thrilled to see takeout, but what was he gonna say?

How about: “Why’d you let that bitch into my basement?”

That’s what he said when he finally walked in, loosening his batik neck tie. I’d always hated that tie.

“Jesus, Spider. She’s not a bitch. She’s an old friend. She just needed a place to crash.”

“Well,” he shrugged, softening a little. He grabbed his glass pipe from the mantle, took a hit, and closed his eyes. “I just don’t like the way she treated you-that’s all. Anyway,” he sighed, “did you borrow my car the other day?”

I didn’t see Mustang again that night. Or the next. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, best I could. I had a lot going on, personally. A lot of changes I could feel bubbling up inside of me. A lot that I felt on the brink of. I snuck out to Dots at midnight, sometimes made my way down to the river. Then Thursday around noon I was clicking the remote. Brenda Braxton on KGW news: a body had surfaced in the Willamette. Just downstream from Ross Island. Catherine Smith. They showed her face, that same picture from the flier. The police believed she was strangled, but they were waiting for autopsy results. They talked about her art. She’d always thought she was so special with her swift birds paintings and her ravens-like an artist named Birdie painting birds was avant-garde rather than straight-up cheesy. And now here she had to be dead to even get on the local news. Brenda Braxton said she’d gone to Evergreen.

Brenda Braxton looked a little sad.

I watched the story, surprised by my own lack of emotion. Lack of connection, really.

And then just this morning I get the news about Mustang. From the cops. A detective shows up at my door, plain-clothed and questioning. “Did Mustang have something to do with that Catherine Smith thing?” I ask, feigning cluelessness. The officer shakes his head. “Her body was found this morning.”

“Mustang’s?”

He nods real slow.

I invite the detective in, but he declines my invitation. He wants to stand on my doorstep. The incessant drip-drips from my eaves land right in the middle of his bald spot, but he doesn’t move. I lean into my doorframe as I tell him my story-everything I’ve just told you. Well, almost everything.

He takes his notes, sniffles, finally slaps his little book shut, caps his pen, thanks me. As he turns, I think I hear him sigh-like he already feels defeated.

I slink back inside, clean the house. When it starts to get dark outside, I turn the news on again. The second body in the Willamette in as many days. Just downstream from Ross Island.

Spider comes in real late. We eat zucchini casserole by candlelight.

“No art today?” Spider asks.

And I shake my head. “Not today.”

“Did you borrow the Prius yesterday?”

“When would I borrow the Prius?” He always had that damn car with him at work. I don’t tell him about the detective or about Mustang. I just eat with him, silent. I wash the dishes while he showers. I climb into bed next to him and wait.

As soon as he starts snoring, I’m out. I pull on my cords and my black hoodie, tiptoe across the living room and out the front door. I cut through the rail yard, cross Powell. Birdie’s picture still clings to the telephone poles that mark my path.

As I step inside Dots, I take a look around the joint. The dark red feels like home. All the regulars sipping their usuals. I head to the bathroom, go into Matter. The tan and white check of the tiles doesn’t make me feel so unsteady tonight. I apply some lipstick in the mirror. Back out at the bar, all the hipsters and the business owners are huddled closer together than most nights-abuzz with the news. One of the kids with a bleached mullet thinks it’s a serial killer targeting lesbians. He seems impressed with his own theory, ashes his cigarette in a glass tray.

Marie Claire shakes her head, sips her Rumba. “The two women used to be an item,” she says gravely. “It’s not random lesbians. It was either murder-suicide or a Romeo and Juliet kind of a thing.”

The bleach boy snickers. “You mean Juliet and Juliet?”

No one acknowledges him.

His hipster girlfriend breathes in my ear all sultry, “I heard they both recently joined NiftyWebFlicks.” She glares at the guy from Clinton Street Video.

The waitress with the hamburger tattoo nods. “He’s a loose cannon, that one.”

I can’t tell if she’s talking about the guy from Clinton Street Video or about Wilhelm, who plays pool by himself, refusing to make contact with anyone.

The waitress shrugs, looks down at me. “Absolute martini?” She asks it like it’s a rhetorical question, but I’m ready not to have a usual anymore. “Bombay,” I tell her. “Bombay martini.”

I tap the table as I wait, consider the theories.

As soon as the gin hits my throat, I feel strangely distracted, inspired. My mind bends and wanders.

Pretty soon, the regulars have changed the subject. They’re on to a new mystery: someone has stolen the little picture of Marie Claire from the bathroom in her restaurant. That picture was so cute-Marie Claire at age six or seven, her geeky cat eye glasses, her hair askew, hardly a hint of the beauty she would become. I down my last drink. Was that three? Four? I don’t even feel the cold outside as I float home, cut across the rail yard, slither in the front door and across the living room, floor boards creaking.

In the light from the neighbor’s back porch through our bedroom window, I watch Spider as he sleeps. I don’t know if you’ll understand me when I tell you this, but there are people in this world who’ll do you wrong. No matter what Oprah says, there are people in this world you can’t forgive. There are people who, just the sight of them makes your chest go tight, your throat hot. Even when they’re sleeping, the rise and fall of their chests just fills you with this sudden panic and you think: No one will ever love me. And you think: You tricked me. And you’re right. And then that panic morphs into a quiet kind of a rage that radiates from the center of you and tingles down your arms and into your fingers. It used to frighten me, that feeling. I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know how to make it go away.

I watch the vein on Spider’s neck as it pulses life now. He shifts a little, snores, then shifts again, goes silent, that pale neck at once vulnerable and inviting.

Anger is the enemy of art. Spider said it himself. Smirked when he said it. But there was a lot Spider didn’t know. He tried to make me believe that the anger lived inside of me-like it was something intrinsic I couldn’t exterminate even if I wanted to. He thought he had me, like a fly in a web. Just like Mustang once thought she could pull the wool over my eyes. Just like Birdie. I chuckle, only a little, when I think of Birdie’s stupid face. Did they really think I’d just let it go? Family, I laugh, sigh. I study Spider’s neck and smile. Did he really think I was so stupid? That I’d never figure out how to handle an enemy of art? I feel those Bombay martinis in my very blood now, making things clear. As I reach for Spider’s neck, for that stupid vein, I’m filled with a perfect sense of calm. I think about all the paintings I’ll soon make-all the shows I’ll have at First Thursday and Last Friday and whatnot. I glance up at the picture of Marie Claire on my nightstand and I think: You’ll still feed me, won’t you?

ALZHEIMER’S NOIR BY FLOYD SKLOOT

Oaks Bottom

It was about 10 at night when I saw her walk out the door. Now they’re telling me, No, that’s not what happened, she wasn’t even there.

I_I don’t buy it. The room was dark, the night was darker, but Dorothy was there. We were in bed and her curved back was against my chest. She wore the pale yellow nightgown I love, with its thin straps loose against the skin of her shoulders. My arm was around her, my hand cupped her breast, we were breathing to the same rhythm. Then she slipped from my grasp and I felt a chill where she’d left the sheets folded back. She drifted like a ghost over the floor, down the hall, and out the front door that’s always supposed to be locked. I saw her fade into the foggy night.

They tell me I’m confused. What else is new? I’m also tired. And I have a nasty cough from forty-six years of Chesterfields, even after two decades without them. And I don’t sleep worth a damn. That’s how I know what I saw in the night. Confused, maybe, but the fact is that Dorothy is gone.

For three, four years now, Dorothy is the one who’s been confused. That’s what we’re doing in this place, this “home.” She has Alzheimer’s. We had to move out of the place where we’d lived together around sixty years.

“Jimmy,” she’d say to me, “you look so much like Charles.”

Well, I am Charles. Jimmy’s our son, gone now forty-two years since he went missing over Cambodia, where he wasn’t even supposed to be.

It broke my heart. Filled me with despair, all of it: Jimmy gone too soon, then Dorothy slowing leaving me, now Jimmy somehow back because of her confusion so I have to lose them both again, night after night.

I miss her. Where is my Dorothy? I saw her walk out the door that’s supposed to be locked. Because Alzheimer’s people wander. They try to get out of the prison they’re in, who can blame them? I feel the same way, myself.

But at eighty-two I still have all my marbles. Thank God for that. Memory? Bush Jr., Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Carter, then what’s-his-name, then Nixon, Jackson, no, Johnson, Kennedy, and I can go all the way back to Coolidge but I don’t want to show off. Or I could do 100, 93, 86, 79, 72, 65, and so on.

I saw her fade into the foggy night. The staff here can’t remember to lock the front door, and I’m supposed to believe them when they say what I saw with my own eyes didn’t happen? It’s a crime, what they did. What they’re doing. Negligence. It’s like they’re accomplices to a kidnapping. Anything happens to Dorothy, I hold them accountable.

Truth is, I’m not sure how long she’s been gone. I thought it was only a few hours, but then I look outside and see the day’s getting away from me. Dark, light, dark again. Makes me weary.

“Let me use the phone,” I say to Milly, the big one, works day shift.

“Sorry, Mr. Wade. I’m not authorized to do that.”

Always the same thing. “Look, Dorothy wandered away! No one here’s doing it, so I need to call the police and file a missing-persons report.”

“What you need is a rest.”

“What I need is a detective.”

Milly shakes her head. “We’ve been through this ten times today.” The phone is in a locked closet. She tests the door on her way to the kitchen.

I saw Dorothy fade into the foggy night. They tell me that’s not what happened, she wasn’t there, but I don’t buy it. Her curved back against my chest, the chill, her long white hair fading as she drifted like a ghost over the floor, down the hall, and out.

Well, okay then, it’s up to me. I’ll have to find her myself. Be the detective myself.

Why not? I’m used to hunting around, discovering lost old things. Forgotten old things. For fifty-plus years, I had my own antiques business here in Southeast Portland, just a short walk from Oaks Bottom. Sellwood, the neighborhood’s called, and that’s just what I did: sold wood. Found my niche with bookcases-Italian walnut, mahogany, inlaid stuff with wavy glass doors-and then with other library furnishings, and rare books eventually. Always liked antiques. I just never planned on turning into one.

Wait a little while longer till it gets dark, till the other residents are in bed and the night staff is “resting” like they do. No doubt with a rum, a beer, whatever they drink. What I’ll do is sit here in the old rocker, a perfect reading chair I found at an estate sale in Estacada, must have been ’48. Dorothy wouldn’t hear of me trying to sell this thing. Nursed Jimmy in it.

I find her at the Dance Pavilion. I knew she’d be there. With her long lean body and long blond hair, she’s easy to spot. Lights reflect off the polished wood floor that’s marred by years of dancing feet. The low ceiling makes for good acoustics, and in the temporary silence I hear Dorothy laugh. I walk right over to her and take her hand.

No, that was 1945, just after the war. I’d met her two weeks before, and she told me where I could find her if I wanted to. Oaks Park, the Dance Pavilion, not far from the railroad tracks and the totem pole. I’m nineteen and it feels like it’s happening right now. Like I’m at the Dance Pavilion with her hand in mine.

I wake up in the rocker, still eighty-two. Stiff in every joint, I creak louder than the old oak itself. What I need is a shot of good Scotch. The kind that’s been aged twelve years, the last two years in port barrels, say, with a hint of chocolate and mint. Nothing peppery. Even when she was going away into Alzheimer’s, Dorothy remembered her stuff about Scotch. I enjoyed kidding her about it. The old dame knew her booze. How I’d love to toast her at this moment, to look across the room and see her gorgeous back exposed by one of those bold dresses she wore in the heyday, see her head turn so those green eyes twinkle at me, her hand rising to return my gesture, the amber liquid in her glass filled with light.

I find her tucked against the bluff in Oaks Bottom, looking up at wildly whirling lights. Discs, that’s what they are, silvery and thin as nickels, and they’re maybe forty or fifty feet above the ground, spinning in circles, blazing with cold fire. Mesmerized, Dorothy doesn’t see me yet. She can’t take her eyes off them, these flying saucers. But I dare not risk calling out and alerting the figures moving toward her in the mist. Any luck, I’ll get to her before they do. Before they can kidnap her and whisk her onto their ship.

No, that was 1947, when she was pregnant with Jimmy. Dozens of people down there in Oaks Bottom screaming, pointing toward the heavens, saying the aliens were landing. All over Portland they saw these things. Cops, World War II vets, pilots, everybody saw them.

I find her sitting with a half-dozen women on the bluff overlooking Oaks Bottom. All their chaise longues face north, upriver, with a clear view of Mount St. Helens. It’s twilight, but steam plumes are clearly visible and what feels like soft rain is really ash. Mount St. Helens has been fixing to erupt for months now.

Dorothy waves me over. She spreads her legs, flexes her knees, smoothing her flowered dress down between them, making room for me to join her on the chaise. I sit there on the cotton material she’s offered to me and it’s still warm from her body. I lean back against her, waiting for the mountain to blow.

No, that was 1980, when she was thinking the world might come to an end. Hoping it would, I believe. We were tired of it then, so you can imagine how we feel now.

No, we’re not watching the mountain. We’re watching Fourth of July fireworks from Oaks Park like we do every year. Surrounded by kids, happy kids, full of life.

Ah, Jesus.

It’s time to go find her. At least there’s no rain. Always rains around here, often deep into June, and that would make it harder to track her. Not that a little rain would stop me. I have a warm jacket, a Seattle Mariners baseball cap, a flashlight. Nothing will stop me because I think this is it, the last chance. Because I don’t know how long Dorothy’s been gone. Floating down the hall. The dark. The night.

The only thing that makes sense is that she’s lost somewhere in the woods again over in Oaks Bottom. That’s her place, all right. One of the big reasons I decided to move into this “home” instead of some of the others we looked at was because it was in Sellwood and close to the bluff above Oaks Bottom. Clear days and nights, we can see across the wetlands and the little lake to the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster and the Dance Pavilion there at Oaks Park. Jimmy called it the musement center. Loved to ride the merry-go-round, spend a whole afternoon at the roller-skating rink. Sometimes now we hear the kids screaming as they spin or plunge on the rides. We hear the thunder of wheels on tracks. Lights flicker. I think Dorothy thinks it’s him calling. Jimmy.

Even after Jimmy was gone, she liked to walk in Oaks Bottom. Not go over to the musement center, of course, but wander along the trails now that the city has turned all that land into a refuge. She’d stroll along the trail and name the trees: maple, cedar, fir, wild cherry, black cottonwood. I think maybe she was pretending to teach young Jimmy. Breaks my heart. She’d stroll along and smell the swampy odor, stumps sticking out of the shallow water, ducks with their ducklings. She’d-

Then she started to get lost in there. One time I found her walking past the huge sandy-hued wall of the mausoleum and crematorium, up at the edge of the bluff. How she managed to climb there from the trail I never understood. She was silhouetted against the building, eight stories high, its wings spread like a giant vulture. Or like the great blue heron painted against a field of darker blue on the building’s center wall. She was drifting vaguely north, and I hated to see her there, of all places. I had nightmares about that for months afterwards. Another time I found her ankle-deep in water at the lake’s edge, swirling her left hand through algae then looking at it as though she hoped her fingers had turned green. There were three little black snakes slithering around and over her right hand where it braced her body on the bank. One time I found her on the railroad tracks at the western end of the wetland. Just standing there like she was waiting for the 4:15 to Seattle.

Dorothy has stamina. I can’t be sure where she might have gotten to this time. Or who might have found her and done something awful to her. Those neighborhood kids in their souped-up cars she always used to annoy, telling them she’d call the cops.

I’m quiet leaving my room, quiet going down the hall, with its threadbare carpet, its dim lighting, quiet opening and closing the unlocked front door. But I don’t have to be. No one is watching. I head off down the street like I’m going to buy a carton of milk, don’t turn to look at any cars hissing by, just make my slow way toward the river and Oaks Bottom. It’s not far.

On television, detectives always begin their investigations by going door-to-door, asking the neighbors if they’ve seen anything. But I can’t risk that. Start ringing doorbells around here, people will just call the “home” and say another old loony is on the loose. Turn me in. I’d be finished before I got started. Maybe when I get closer to Oaks Bottom itself I can find someplace to ask questions.

But after a few blocks, I have to stop and rest. The weariness just keeps getting worse. I think my only energy for the last few years has come from caring for Dorothy. It’s what’s kept me going. Without that, I’d probably be in the crypt by now, dead of exhaustion, locked away in the big mausoleum there overlooking the musement park. Or I’d be technically still alive but sitting in a chair all day while time comes and goes, comes and goes.

Now it’s a few minutes later, I think. Could be more than a few. Truth is, I’m not sure exactly where I am. But that’s because my eyes aren’t any good in the dark, not because I’m lost. I’m right above Oaks Bottom, somewhere. It’s just that the landmarks are hard to make out. But there’s a tavern here. I don’t remember seeing it before. But it’s so old, I must have seen it without noticing. Or noticed without remembering. That’s what getting old is, I tell you, nothing but solitary seconds adding up to nothing.

I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here. Or why I’m in front of this new old building. Squat little windowless place looks like it’s made out of tin, painted white and red, with a tall sign in the parking lot: Riverside Corral. Then I remember: I should drop in for a quick minute and find out if anyone’s seen Dorothy. Could have happened. The old dame knew her booze. Maybe she dropped in to the Corral for a quick Scotch on her last rambling.

I take a deep breath. Which at my age is something of a miracle right there. And figure I have maybe another couple of hours before I’ll need to head back to the “home,” before they might start to miss me. So this can’t take long.

I walk in, planning to sidle up to the bar and question the keeper. But the music, if that’s what it is, is loud, and what I see stops me dead: two stages-one dark, one light-and on the stage lit in flashing colors a naked woman with long light hair swirling as she gyrates above the money-filled hands of two men who look like twins.

Is that…? It’s Dorothy! I’d know those broad shoulders anywhere. How could… no, wait, I blink and see now it’s not her. Of course it’s not. I’m confused. What else is new? But for a moment there…

I would give anything to see her again. To touch her again. To stand here near her again.

“What can I get you, old-timer?” the bartender asks. He’s twelve. Well, probably mid-twenties, pointy blond hair and a hopeful scrub of mustache.

I forget where I am, forget why I’m here. Looking around, seeing the dancer again, I say, “My wife.”

He smiles. “I don’t think so.”

Then I’m walking through the parking lot, using my flashlight so I can access the trailhead and make my way down the steep bluff toward the trail. I’m too old for this, I know it. All the walking could kill me, even though I’m in pretty good shape. But I can feel through the soles of my feet that Dorothy has been here, and if it kills me I’m still going to find her.

A series of switchbacks gets me to the bottom, though I’m so turned around I’m not sure which way to walk. Time comes and goes like the wind, and I see the moon blown free of clouds as though God himself has turned a light on for me. It shines across the lake. Looking up through a lacing of treetops, I see the now-moonlit mausoleum. So that’s where Dorothy must be.

I begin walking north. Maple, cedar, fir, wild cherry, black cottonwood. The water makes a lapping noise just to my left. It sounds spent. Stumps sticking out of the shallows create eerie shadows that seem to reach for my ankles.

Rising out of the water, just beyond a jagged limb, I see a figure stretch and begin to move toward me. From the way it strides, I know it’s my son, it’s Jimmy. He’s wearing some kind of harness that weighs him down, but still he seems to glide on the lake’s surface, so light, so graceful.

Jimmy was never trouble, even when he got in trouble. That time, when the cops came to our door, it was only because he’d gone to protect his best friend, Frank. Johnny Frank. Or maybe Frankie John. I don’t remember. A wonderful boy, just like my Jimmy, but a scrapper, and that one time he was surrounded by thugs and Jimmy went in there and-

Oh, Dorothy was so good with our son, all that time they spent at the musement park, and Jimmy lost all fear of the things he’d been so afraid of. Came to love the rides, the scarier the better. Of course, that’s why he went into the service, why he ended up in flight school, why he ended up in a plane over Cambodia, shot down where he wasn’t even supposed to be. Dorothy told me once it was all her fault. I took her in my arms, told her all that was her fault was how wonderful our son turned out to be. And now look, here he is, still wearing his parachute harness, coming home to us at last.

“Come on, Jimmy. Help me find your mother.”

“Where is she this time?”

I point toward the mausoleum. He follows my finger and nods, and just then the clouds return, and the mausoleum fades into the night, its sandy face turning dark before my eyes.

Jimmy can see anyway. He leads me and I follow. The trail rises and dips, follows the contour of the bluff. I think I’m doing well with the tricky footing for an old man. Then I realize Jimmy is carrying me.

No, he’s stopped walking and now he’s the one who’s pointing. We’re very close to the mausoleum. Up ahead, standing against the building where Jimmy’s ashes are stored, where my ashes will be stored, where-I remember now-Dorothy’s ashes are stored, I see my wife smiling. She is leaning back against the wall just under the legs of that giant painted-blue heron.

The wind rises. The clouds unveil the moon again and the building lights up. But no one is there after all. No one and nothing but a wall on which a hundred-foot-tall heron is preparing to fly toward heaven.

THE SLEEPER BY DAN DEWEESE