San Diego Noir

The next morning I awoke alone, still chasing vague snatches of dream. I brewed coffee, watched Meet the Press, and set about accomplishing a number of deferred chores. Driving home from a grocery run, I flicked on the radio and heard, “… body was found in Kate Sessions Canyon today beneath the Spruce Street footbridge. The deceased, an apparent suicide, has been identified as Caleb Trout,

an Iraq War veteran and resident of Hillcrest.”

At midnight I walked alone through the memorial rose garden in Balboa Park. It was a new moon; the only illumination came from distant streetlights. The fragrance of roses calmed me. In such darkness, every rose is black.

Betty’s not in Hillcrest anymore, of course, but something of her remains. In the queen ordering sprinkles for his Ben and Jerry’s cone, in the corny joke told in a Fourth Avenue café, in the ubiquitous rainbow stickers, I sense both her absence and her presence. She’s the Angel’s Share.

HOMES

BY KEN KUHLKEN

Newport Avenue

Greg Mairs took a Restoril, his third tranquilizer of the afternoon. He washed his face and sat down to organize bills. Sort out which they could afford to pay. Decide which creditors might allow them to coast another month.

Visa, $150 minimum. No grace on that one. Business loan for the truck-mounted dry cleaner that would’ve doubled his commercial accounts, except he’d only had it two months before he turned into a wimp who could barely work an hour without collapsing. And even though he’d needed to sell it for half of what he owed, no grace.

Doctor Ramos. Doctor Schuetz. Sharp Cabrillo Hospital. Xray Medical. These days, more often than he prayed for miraculous healing, he prayed for a windfall that would allow him to at least pay off his medical and funeral bills. So he wouldn’t die as the louse who’d left Barb this stack of horrors, so she wouldn’t have to sell their home. He couldn’t blame his girls if they boycotted his funeral.

Latin American Childcare. He wasn’t about to shirk his pledge to orphans in El Salvador. Gas and electric, down now that summer had arrived, thank God, and the phone bill too. Barb hadn’t gabbed as long as usual with her sister in Minnesota. Her sister wanted to talk about Greg, his death, and the future. Not Barb’s favorite topics.

He slammed the lid on the rolltop desk and went to the kitchen. While he drank carrot juice, he thought maybe tomorrow, if James could abide his company, he’d join his amigo in a big glass of bourbon. “What good does carrot juice do a dead guy?” he muttered.

He sat on the porch staring down Newport Avenue, at the very place where the Silva brothers would’ve stomped him to death for knocking up Angie, their little sister. Except James saved his life by mashing Junior Silva’s head with a Little League bat.

Then James runs from a murder charge, and only returns after twenty years. He risks it all, comes back home in hopes of rescuing Olivia. And Greg does what, after James gave him the chance to live, know love, meet Barb and Jesus, become a father. “Nothing. Zip,” Greg mumbled.

He looked up and watched the fog muster out to sea and begin its advance toward the shore, and tried to imagine some grand gesture, something James would remember whenever he thought of Greg Mairs. But grand gestures usually required money.

He returned to the desk, raised the lid, and sat down. He forced himself to list the bills, almost a full page, add the total, and take the ledger out to the dining nook table where he would remember to go over it with Barb. This time they would talk about his death. Always before, she stopped him and insisted they expect a miracle. He supposed that was her excuse for not giving Chez the truth.

Chez only knew her daddy was sick and couldn’t go on the long hikes they used to take in the Cuyamaca forests, across the desert dunes, or along the beaches of Silver Strand and into the Tijuana sloughs. She knew he couldn’t work anymore, so they’d had to sell the kayaks and Mom’s car, and they watched the blurry TV, no more cable, and they couldn’t go to a cabin in snowy mountains or to Arizona for Padres spring baseball.

Tonight, he decided, he’d tell her the whole crappy truth. He tried to imagine her face when she learned he was as good as gone. Pale, he thought, with her cheeks caved in, tears big as goldfish. Shivering.

His horror at the image got interrupted when the old Toyota pickup made the turn off Guizot Street and pulled to the curb in front of their house. Chez waved. Such a beauty, he thought, with her raven hair and Kobe Bryant grace.