Twin Cities Noir

TAKING THE BULLETS OUT by Mary Sharratt Cedar-Riverside (Minneapolis)

For over two decades, Neil had worked as a nurse in the emergency room at Hennepin County Medical Center. Many people burned out after only a few years, but he stuck to it the way he stuck to everything else. Someone had to extract the rubble out of a motorcycle accident victim’s raw thigh with a pair of tweezers. Someone had to be there to hold the hand of a teenager who’d just had a bottle of sleeping pills pumped out of her stomach. Neil never failed to comfort, even after seeing the fifth gunshot wound on a single day, the third woman with her teeth knocked out. He cleaned and disinfected their wounds. He bandaged them. He administered painkillers and spoke to them in a soft lulling voice. This routine had become such a part of him, he could practically do it with his eyes closed. He often wished he could indeed work blindfolded. In his twenty-five years in the emergency room, he had seen too much pain.

He tried to put it behind him the instant he stepped through his garden gate. In summer, he practiced his flute on the back porch, losing himself for an hour or more, playing Mozart, Debussy, or the Gaelic airs he had learned from his grandfather. But one particular evening, when he sat down to play, a string of obscenities exploded on the other side of the fence. The guy next door was yelling at his girlfriend again.

Neil hadn’t had much luck with neighbors in recent years, now that the neighborhood had become so rough and seedy. In 1969, when he and his former wife Gina had bought this little Victorian house, Cedar-Riverside had been vibrant and alive, the Twin Cities’ answer to Haight-Ashbury. A poet used to live next door. Neil and Gina had kept their back door unlocked to welcome the stream of friends into their kitchen. He used to leave his bicycle out on the porch all night. In those days, Neil could live off his music and odd jobs. He played with a folk band, had gigs in the Triangle, the Riverside Coffee House, and once in Dania Hall. Like so much else, those venues had vanished. Dania Hall had burned to the ground.

Nobody stuck around for long anymore. People moved in and out of the rundown old houses; they came and went in a blur of rowdy parties and blaring television sets. Neil tried to be tolerant, but nothing disturbed him more than loud domestic arguments. His twenty-five years in the emergency room had shown too well where these fights could lead. Lowering his flute, he stared at the trembling leaves of the Virginia creeper he had trained to grow on his eight-foot chain-link fence. It was no good calling 911. That was what he had done during their last fight. The cops had come far too late, and the next day the neighbor, a ratlike young man with a thin face and thinner lips, had told Neil to mind his own goddamn business. The guy was not a person you could argue with. He had informed Neil that he owned a gun and knew how to use it.

On the other side of the fence, a door slammed. The boyfriend took off, leaving the girl behind. A few times Neil had passed her on the sidewalk. He remembered how she had gone bright red in the face when he made eye contact, how she had ducked her head. Now he listened to her jagged sobs. If he were a woman, he could go over and check on her, offer sympathy and support, but he was a man, and her boyfriend was jealous, a gun owner. He raised his flute and began to play, although the peace his music usually provided seemed quite beyond him. Still, he practiced his scales before launching into Debussy. If only his music had the power to obliterate and transform. The sun disappeared over the top of his fence, glittered faintly through the Virginia creeper and chain-links, then faded.

Listening to the Mustang tear out of the driveway, Becky pulled herself up from the bathroom floor and groped for a washcloth, a towel, a bar of the jasmine-scented soap her mother had given her before she gave up on her daughter completely. She wet her hands and lathered her face, splashed herself with cold water, as if this would change anything. The first time he hit her, she had said, “I’m leaving.” But here she was. Stuck. You’re fucked up, she told herself. This could only happen to someone who was hopelessly fucked up.

“I didn’t hit you,” he said the first time. A slap with an open hand didn’t leave a mark, didn’t cause any real damage— it only stung a little. Hank’s dad used to wallop him with a leather belt, used to beat the crap out of him. Hank told her she didn’t know what real hitting was. Once when some guy at the Viking Bar tried to pick a fight, Hank followed him outside and busted his jaw. But slapping her, shaking her, pushing her to the floor or up against a wall—that was small stuff. A few weeks ago, she made the mistake of trying to confide in one of the other waitresses at work, an older woman named Joanne, who just rolled her eyes. “Do you have any idea what a real battered woman looks like?”

“You are a mess,” she said aloud to the grubby walls and mildewy shower curtain. She turned her back to the mirror, didn’t want to know what she looked like right now. Something awful and twisted inside her had drawn her to him, of all people. She was twenty. Last year at this time, she’d been in college—Mankato State—learning about the nineteenth-century English novel. When her financial aid had fallen through, her dad said, “Well, you weren’t exactly college material, anyway.” Becky sprang from a long line of failures. Her parents lost their farm when she was eight, and her father had been driving semis ever since. Her mom worked in a high school cafeteria. Originally Becky had wanted to study to be a teacher. “You, a teacher?” her dad roared. “Yeah, right. The kids would take one look at you, crumple you up in a ball, and toss you out the window.”

Hank had been the one to comfort her. “What do you need college for? Why do you want to pay all that money for four years of B.S.? I never learned anything that really counted in school. You don’t have to take that shit from your father, either. I never took shit from anyone.” Hank had made her feel so reckless and wild. They used to go out on country roads late at night. He let her drive that old Mustang as fast as she wanted, egging her on until her foot ground the gas pedal into the floor and the wind roared through the open windows, whipping through her hair and bringing tears to her eyes. He said it was the closest she would ever come to flying.

When she started getting serious with Hank, his divorce had just come through. Although he was only five years older than she was, he already had two kids and a pissed-off ex-wife. But he told Becky that she was the real love of his life, the one he had been saving everything up for. Then his ex called Becky’s mom and told her what a slut her daughter was. Becky’s father said, “That’s enough. Either break up with that loser or move out.”

So she left with Hank for Minneapolis. On her better days, she told herself that they would work everything out. He could be so tender when he begged her not to leave. Sometimes he even wept. “I can’t help it if I go crazy each time I think of you with another guy.” The trigger for their last fight had been Becky getting a ride home from work with Ty, who was black and made her laugh. Hank looked out the front window and saw them laughing together in his car. When she came inside the house, he exploded. “I saw the way you were looking at him! You know, if there’s one thing I can’t forgive, it’s betrayal.” What would he do if she really tried to leave? She thought of the guy with the busted jaw.

Becky held her breath, wondering how long it would take for her face to turn blue. Eventually she would pass out from lack of air. At moments like this, she understood why people did drugs. She wanted to go numb, not feel anything. In the silence of not breathing, she heard her neighbor play his flute. That music drove Hank crazy, made him bitch and turn up the TV full blast. For Hank’s sake, she had always acted like she hated it, too, but now that she was alone with the music, she had to admit she kind of liked it. It was pretty in a strange, sad way.

Going to the bedroom, she changed from her shorts and T-shirt into a black sweatsuit, dressing with the lights out and the dusk filtering through the window screen. She loved this time, which was neither day nor night but twilight, when everything seemed beautiful, even the condemned house across the street. She loved trying to blend into the twilight, imagining herself invisible and untouchable. Stepping out the back door and past the gutted wreck of Hank’s old motorbike, she crept to the chain-link fence, metal cooling her cheek as she peered through the Virginia creeper. If Hank caught her doing this, he would twist it into something perverted, accuse her of having some obscene crush on the guy. But she just liked to look into his yard, which wasn’t anything like her mom’s and her aunts’ with the marigolds and plastic deer. His garden was luxuriantly overgrown with all kinds of flowers bursting up between the vegetable beds. At dusk, the place was a mysterious darkened tangle with a few fireflies darting through it.

The neighbor had the porchlight switched on; she could see him as clearly as if he were under a spotlight. Even though he had to be at least fifty years old, he still had long hair. There was something about him, the way he could play for hours as if he were playing for his plants so they’d grow better. It seemed like the kind of thing a person from the ’60s would believe in. Her neighbor was old enough to be her father, and yet he was as different from her father—and from Hank—as a man could be. How different would she have turned out if she’d had a father like him? His music infected her, the way it danced around her, drawing her to his fence.

Becky pressed her body against the metal mesh until the flute notes tapered off. She listened to the click as the neighbor went inside, locking the door behind himself. Lights went on and off in his kitchen and bathroom. How safe other people’s houses looked from the outside. His face appeared in the bedroom window before he pulled down the shade. He never saw me, she reminded herself. I was watching him the whole time, but he never knew. That knowledge made her shiver and feel a little creepy, as if she were some kind of ghost.

Hank kept his gun in the top dresser drawer. Becky often saw him take it out and oil it. He was very proud of his gun. She had never been able to ask him why he bought it or what he intended to use it for. When he was gone, she opened the drawer and just looked at it. Would she ever have the nerve to aim it at someone, pull the trigger? Would such an act make her weak or strong, a heroine or a coward? Aim it at Hank? At her dad? Jesus, she was crazy to even be thinking like that. But sometimes when she wiped the counter at Denny’s on East Lake Street, she imagined herself acting out a scene from Thelma and Louise,imagined the exploding bullet and seeing him—Hank, her father, their faces blurring together—crumple backwards, away from her, a puddle at her feet.

Neil picked bruised windfall apples from under the tree in his front yard. This earthy, brainless task calmed him. He tried to breathe deeply, rhythmically—his pulse was still ragged from the emergency room. Alicia, his favorite colleague, had a breakdown that day. They had wheeled in a ten-year-old boy with knife wounds from a fight that had taken place on the grounds of his elementary school. Alicia had an eight-year-old who went to the same school. She had started wailing, and the head doctor sent her home. The anguish on her face still haunted Neil.

He tried to focus on the garden. When he finished picking the fallen apples, he would throw them in the compost heap out back, then go to work picking tomatoes and zucchini, which were growing faster than he could eat, freeze, and can them. As he reached down, he felt a shooting pain near his lumbar vertebrae. Cautiously he pulled himself upright. A slipped disc was all he needed. He tried to reason with his body. It’s just muscular tension. Have a hot bath and it will be fine.

Breathing in slowly, he heard footsteps coming down the sidewalk. Through the metal links of the front gate, he saw the young woman from next door lug a bulging sack of groceries. She staggered with each step. He raised his hand, about to call out something friendly, but her face was shadowed, downcast. He didn’t want to startle her. Her grocery bag was printed with the logo of the local supermarket, which was understocked and exorbitantly priced. Why didn’t she shop at North Country Co-op, he wondered, or one of the East African groceries? As she moved out of his range of vision, he thought of her emptying her wallet to buy mushy hothouse tomatoes, waxy apples, and rubbery broccoli in the zenith of the garden season.

In the distance firecrackers went off, or were they gunshots? Although this neighborhood wasn’t nearly as bad as Phillips or Northside, he’d read in the paper that a Somali teenager had been shot over near the high-rise apartment blocks on Riverside Plaza—where Mary Tyler Moore used to live in the television show. He couldn’t stop thinking of Alicia, how she had just lost it, unable to take in the sight of one more sliced-up kid.

Sound system blasting, the neighbor’s Mustang boomed past, then screeched to a halt. Ten minutes later, as if by appointment, the yelling started again. In summer with the windows open day and night, there was no privacy. Seeking shelter in his kitchen, he tried out to drown out their voices by running zucchini through the food processor, but when he stopped the machine, he heard, “Becky, you stupid cunt…”

He started the machine again so he wouldn’t hear the rest.

Becky opened the door to find a brown paper bag with deep red tomatoes and green and purple basil spilling over the top. Wasps buzzed around the bag. She glanced next door, but her neighbor didn’t seem to be home—no sounds came from his house or yard. Hank was meeting his buddies after work, so he wouldn’t be home until late. Hugging the bag to her chest, she carried it into the kitchen, set it down on the table, and flicked away the remaining wasps before pulling out the contents one by one, arranging them on the scarred Formica. A perfect head of romaine lettuce wrapped in paper towels. Cucumber and prickly zucchini. An old plastic yogurt container full of raspberries, a second one with gooseberries. Huge sweet bell peppers in green, red, and gold. At the very bottom, a small watermelon. After emptying the bag, she shook it upside down hoping to find a note from him, something like, Hope you enjoy the veggies, or, Compliments of my garden. But there was no message. She tried not to feel disappointed, but it would have been nice to find out was his name was.

The watermelon looked so good. Before she knew it, she had the big kitchen knife in her hand. She drove the blade through the rind and into the flesh until red juice ran over the kitchen table. After cutting herself a piece, she let the juice drip down her chin. It had been so long since she’d had really good fresh fruit. What was she going to tell Hank when he saw this stuff and asked her where it came from? She could already hear his voice, as cutting and sarcastic as her father’s. “So did you hitchhike to the farmer’s market? Or did the freak next door give them to you?”

On Sunday, Hank had caught her staring through the fence into the neighbor’s garden—the neighbor hadn’t even been home—but Hank had taken her by the shoulders. “Trying to make me jealous?”

She laughed stupidly, like someone on TV. Har, har, har. Then he hit with his closed hand, his fist. Not a slap that time. It hadn’t left an awful bruise or anything that makeup couldn’t hide, but the skin around her cheekbone was still tender.

When do you turn into a battered woman? she asked herself, holding the container of raspberries and staring into that deep redness. How bad did it have to get, how much harder would he have to hit her, before it was real?

What would she do with the fruit and vegetables? Eat what she could now and throw the rest away? But they were so beautiful, so perfect. The neighbor had given them to her. He wanted her to have them and she was keeping them. She had to rock herself and laugh at the thought of something that was hers, that she wouldn’t surrender.

Hours later, her voice dragged Neil out of a deep sleep.

“I’m warning you, Hank! If you ever do that again!”

“You’re warning me, huh? Well, bitch, what are you gonna do about it? Just what are you gonna do?”

The hands of Neil’s alarm clock hung suspended, green phosphorescence in the dark, spelling out the time—3:00 a.m.

“Damn it, Hank! I’m warning you…”

Slumped on the bed, Becky saw and tried not to see the ruined room, walls and ugly beige carpet smeared with the remains of the fruit and vegetables. What was worse was the pulp smashed in her hair and down the front of her clothes. Hank had locked himself in the bathroom and made no sign of coming out. Had he passed out in there? It was nearly 4:00 a.m. She had to get ready for work. Scooping the raspberry pulp out of her hair, she tried to hold it, then licked it off her fingers. In spite of everything, it still tasted nice, like the kind of raspberry purée she imagined they would serve in fancy restaurants.

One look at the clock—4:15—told her that she couldn’t waste any more time. She would have to wash her hair in the kitchen sink and let it dry on the bus ride to work. Dragging herself to the dresser to get some fresh underwear, she instead found herself opening the top drawer where the gun was nestled among Hank’s coiled belts. She picked it up, felt the smooth metal, its weight in her hands.

That evening there was no way to shut out the flute music. It was too hot to close the windows. The TV had been wrecked in the fight the night before. Hank stuck his head in his Discman and cracked open a beer. He acted as if the fight were a blank in his memory.

Becky didn’t dare go near the fence but just sat down on the back steps, closed her eyes, and listened. Neil, she thought. When she had come home, she found a letter addressed to him that had landed in her mailbox by mistake— from some woman in Bainbridge Island, Washington State named Gina Martinelli. Before Hank arrived back, she had slipped it into the neighbor’s mailbox.

His music was so beautiful that it pierced her. It sounded Irish, like one of those old laments. Everything was in a minor key, lovely but unbearably sad. She couldn’t hold them in anymore, these stupid tears. She hated tears, hated her mother for the way she had gone off sniveling from her dad’s outbursts, never sticking up for herself. Becky had thought she could be different, that she would never let herself cave in, but that was exactly what she was doing, crouching on the stoop and pulling her knees to her chest. Her body convulsed, arms, shoulders, neck heaving. This was it. She was losing it. Losing.

An explosion shattered Neil’s sleep. Gunshots. Sharp, metallic, irrevocable. He jerked upright. The shots were being fired next door, barely thirty feet away from his bed. Counting six shots, he listened for her voice, for screams, pleas, cries, but there was only silence. Six shots, then that gaping void. Throwing on some clothes, he crept out into the backyard. The moon was just past full, now waning, sinking into darkness. Parting the Virginia creeper, he glimpsed her through the links in the fence. She clutched herself with crossed arms like a lost soul.

He wouldn’t do it—he would not call the police or phone for an ambulance. He knew none of the neighbors would get involved. Rolling his head back, he stared at the scattered stars revolving in a dance too slow to see. Let her get away with it, he thought, shocking himself. Let her get away with murder. Going to the fence again, peering through the links at the moon-bleached woman, he called her name.

She walked numbly around the side of the house to his gate, which he unlocked for her. Shivering, she kept rubbing her skinny bare arms. The only thing he could think to do was put his arm around her and guide her through his door and into his kitchen, where she gazed blankly at the dried herbs hanging from the ceiling.

“Becky, do you want to tell me what happened?”

Turning to him, she took an unsteady step forward, then lost her balance. He caught her before she could fall. “He was too drunk to move,” she said. “I shot him in the back. Like a real coward! I just shot him in the back, and after the first shot, I couldn’t stop.”

He cradled her as she wept, stroked her soft dark hair, cut very short, exposing the fine bones of her face, her large and fearful eyes. He could feel her pulse, much faster than his own, like wings beating frantically—a small bird taking flight.

Becky awakened to insistent electronic beeps, the digital alarm. 4:04. Her hair was damp with perspiration. The sheets were clammy.

“Would you shut that fucking thing off?” Hank rolled over and covered his face with the pillow. He didn’t start work until 9:00.

Her pulse raced as she remembered her dream. She had been a bird—a barn swallow—and she had been flying. That feeling of freedom and weightlessness had been so incredible, but then the dream had shifted, and she had turned into a hawk with talons for ripping flesh. Swooping down on a rabbit, she had torn into the soft fur until blood laced her feathers. But the killing and the blood hadn’t seemed repulsive in her dream, just a thing of nature, a call she had to answer. Walking to the bus stop, she savored the dream, the sinewy power in her wings and talons. It was payday. She knew exactly what she had to do.

Neil was working overtime in the emergency room to cover for Alicia, whose breakdown had been even more serious than he had first thought—she had been hospitalized and would need to take a long leave of absence.

They always seemed to get their worst cases in August when the heat and the glare of the sun gave rise to the most sickening acts of violence. Like a factory line worker, he extracted bullets from flesh and disinfected wounds. Yesterday they brought in a homeless woman who had been raped and then stabbed twenty times. She had lost so much blood that she couldn’t be saved. Alicia was the one who used to work with rape victims—she had done it very well—but the homeless woman was so far gone, not even Alicia could have given her solace. It was getting to be too much, even for him. All week he had been having dreams that made him lurch awake in sweat-soaked sheets: nightmares of the young woman next door gunning down her boyfriend.

Yesterday a letter from Gina, his ex, had arrived. They divorced in 1981. She had been sick of the neighborhood and his lack of ambition. “Everyone else has moved on, but you’re not going anywhere,” she’d told him. “You’re stuck here like one of your plants.” She had gone to Seattle to ride the waves of the software boom and then the dot-com boom. Presently she worked freelance out of her ’20s bungalow on Bainbridge Island, her existence comfortably cushioned by investments and stock options. The one time he had visited her there, the thing that had struck him most was how white and affluent everyone was. He and Gina were still good friends. Since he was the only person on the planet who didn’t have e-mail, they wrote letters every month.

For the past few years, she had been trying to convince him to move. He was welcome to stay with her until he found a job and a place to live. Just down the street from her house was a folk club where he could play his flute. He had to admit that her offer was tempting. Gina would help him find a job in some pristine clinic where his patients would be programmers and engineers, where he would never have to look at another torn-up, bleeding homeless person. If he didn’t get out soon, he would end up like Alicia.

He arrived home from the hospital with a headache that made his garden shimmer like a hallucination. On the other side of the fence, something made of glass hit a hard surface and shattered. Then came muted grunting, the impact of a fist hitting something soft, and drawn-out weeping that didn’t even sound human. Neil ran to the fence to see the guy next door straddle the gutted motorbike and punch the ripped seat. He was shaking as hard as Neil was.

Everyone’s cracking up, he thought. There was no escape from it, no sanctuary from screaming and pain, even in his garden. Neil imagined that if someone saw his face, it would look like Alicia’s when she had lost it that day. A wave of dizziness forced him to sit down. He rubbed his temples, rehearsed what he would say to Gina when he called her that night: “As soon as I sell the house, I’m out of here.”

Something on the edge of the zucchini bed glinted in the sun. A Ziploc bag. Puzzled, he picked it up, then nearly dropped it. Inside was a gun. A note was tied to its handle, his name written in shaky ballpoint.

Under her signature, she had written, Thank you. Those two words leapt out at him—she had written them with such urgency that she had nearly pressed the pen through the paper. Thank you. What was she thanking him for—that sack of vegetables he had left on her doorstep? Then it sank in; Becky had left the guy. That fragile young woman with the matchstick arms had taken off.

On a mild September afternoon, Neil sat on the back porch and listened to the children next door squeal as they jumped into piles of raked leaves. A Hmong family had moved in after Hank left. The other day, a postcard from Becky arrived. She said she was waitressing in Madison and saving to go back to college. She got away, he kept thinking. She had to go and she went. But he had decided to stay. He had told Gina that he was too settled to pull up roots anymore. “I guess I’m going to grow old here, right in this neighborhood.”

The garden rustled and whispered to him like an old friend. Looking at his birch tree, he thought of roots sinking into the earth, then watched its golden leaves reach into the intense blue of the autumn sky. The colors sang inside him as he began to play his flute.