Santa Cruz Noir Read online

  “Yo, Carlos. I need a gram—”

  “Keep walking, blondie. It’s hot.”

  I’m sure they’re not looking for me, but just in case I take the back way into Beach Flats, through the community garden. The cops have the basketball court taped off. Eight of my neighbors are sitting on the ground, handcuffed. I go around the block and cut through my yard. On the back door, someone tagged, FUCK YOU. How dare they? Fucking beaners. No class. And they left their spray can on the ground next to their paper bag still wet with activo. Huffers, no less. Brain-dead lumps of shit.

  I can’t buff this today so I take the can and paint the F into a B and then turn the Y into an L and I’ll just double the U.

  BUCK LOW. That’s a bit better.

  The faded sheets covering my windows give the living room a pleasant soft pink glow. I dig a roach out of the ashtray, get comfortable on the couch, and nibble on some pretzels. Little boyfriend will come by. He can’t resist the opportunity to hold something of hers. He probably loves her. I cook up a shot of chiva and coke. It’s good. I wish I had some speed. I shoot some more coke and then some chiva which evens me out a bit.

  There he is, I hear him on the steps. I slide the works under the couch and wait for him to knock.

  “Come in,” I say as I open the door.

  “This is my friend Owl,” Katie’s friend says.

  “That’s fine,” I say. This has become a bit more difficult than I anticipated, but I’m almost unable to contain my joy. “Come inside. Please, make yourselves comfortable.”

  I lock the dead bolt, latch the chain, walk past them, and sit on the couch. Owl takes a seat on the La-Z-Boy. Boyfriend stays standing in the middle of the room.

  “You like my place?” I say.

  “So, where’s her stuff?”

  “This is my grandparents’ house. The neighborhood has changed a lot since I was a boy.” I pull out some weed from beneath the couch cushion and start rolling a joint on the coffee table. “It was mostly hippies, artists, in the sixties and seventies, and then in the 1980s the Mexicans came and took over.”

  “Really, that’s great.”

  “Her heart was so pure, just a perfect angel,” I say. I light the joint take a hit and pass it to Owl. “I miss her.”

  “No thanks,” Boyfriend says.

  “Hey, don’t be rude,” I say. “I’m trying to be hospitable.”

  “Stop fucking with me and just give me her shit.”

  Owl is hitting the joint.

  “Fine,” I say, and get off the couch and open the door to the bedroom. “In the box, under the bed.”

  “Stay in the living room. And Owl, watch my back.”

  “Hey, man, chill out. Mi casa es su casa.”

  I can see the kid through the doorway as he pulls the box out from under the bed. I back up a few steps until I’m right behind Owl, who is still puffing on the joint. I take the knife out of my pocket, open it up, and then grab Owl by his dreads and slit his throat. He makes a sound somewhere between a wheeze and a whistle. The blood gurgles, runs down his chest, and he gets up, leaps for the door, fumbles at the knob, and falls to the ground. The boyfriend is in the bedroom doorway, stunned, holding onto Katie’s patchwork Hubbard dress. I pounce and drive the knife deep into his gut. With my hand over his mouth, I stab him over and over again.

  I black-bag both of them, tape up the seams, and lay them side by side. Then I cut the black oversized trash bags and wrap up the La-Z-Boy. It was my father’s chair and I’m a bit reluctant to get rid of it but it’s covered in Owl’s blood. I’ll dump everything up north, near Pittsburg or Alameda, in the backwater of the San Francisco Bay.

  I keep my grandfather’s old panel van parked in my garage. Inside, I’ve got my kit: quickset concrete, extra-large duffel bags, exercise weights, black contractor trash bags, duct tape, a hacksaw, bleach, gloves. I load the bodies in first and then the carpets and cover everything with a furniture blanket before putting the chair on top. Cal’s Plumbing “The Local Pro” is still proudly painted across both sides of the van. When the logo shows some wear, I touch it up, keep it looking fresh. I apprenticed under my uncle. It’s a family business and a good trade.

  I get high and lock up the house while the van idles in the garage, and pull out and drive north onto Highway 1. The moon is waning but still full and bright, so after Davenport I turn off the headlights and drive by the moonlight.

  Katie is close by. Passing the beach where she’s buried, I almost pull over so we can spend some time together before I set off on the road for a while. But leaving my van parked on the side of the highway with these two assholes in the back is a bad idea. I keep driving north, switch on the headlights, and light up a joint. I should be in San Francisco by dawn.

  One night, long ago, just out of high school, I wandered through Golden Gate Park with a tire iron beneath my parka. A few people were around. I checked out a couple of kids my age passing joints, bottles of beer. I followed two bums until they cut through a hedge to a secret hollow in a thick patch of bush. I stalked a lone dog walker past the windmill to Ocean Beach. Unable to get up the nerve, I turned around and walked back toward the Haight until I came across the buffalo paddock. They were just standing there, cowlike and tame. So I climbed over and cornered the smallest one. It was just a baby, really. I clubbed it in the back of its thick skull. It wobbled, ran, I chased it down and whacked it again—and again, until it fell.

  On its side, in the grass, the little creature’s boney chest rose and fell with deep, slow breaths. Unconscious, she seemed at peace, and I reached out, running my hand through her wooly fur. Then I put my ear to her side and her great heart was still thumping in its cage. I laid down beside her, spooned up against her back, nuzzled my face into the long, fine hair along the nape of her neck. In the languid warmth of the dying beast, I found a wonderful peace.

  * * *

  At sunrise, I pull off the highway at Pacifica and into a service station. As I pump gas and the surf rolls into Rockaway Beach, I know the tide has changed the estuary’s course. The sand has shifted. Katie has become unburied.

  I hang up the nozzle, screw on the gas cap, go inside the mini-mart, and buy two bundles of firewood. I open the back of the van and toss the bundles on top of the bodies of Owl and Boyfriend. I notice that the blood has pooled beneath the furniture blankets and is now seeping under the door and over my rusted chrome bumper. I need to get rid of the mess in the back as planned, clean up the van. I should stay away from Santa Cruz for a bit, head north, lay low.

  But I can’t just leave her back there.

  A workman’s truck pulls up on the other side of the gas pump. A man in coveralls gets out with an oversized coffee mug and walks into the mini-mart. I wipe down the bumper with some paper towels and scan the parking lot before I throw all my bloody towels into the trash.

  The man exits the mini-mart, coffee steaming in the cold morning sunlight. I get in the van, start it up. I can see her there, on the beach. Her blond hair is tangled in the windswept dune grass and her face is open to the bright sky. I put the van into gear, wave at the guy, and pull away from the station. He smiles and nods. In the side mirror, I watch him lean against his truck, put his mug down on the hood, and holler to the gas station attendant as I turn left onto the highway and head back south.

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SKINNY JANE?

  by Ariel Gore

  Pacific Avenue

  The acid was just coming on. Bob Innes, the lead singer of Fleece the Rich, took the Catalyst Club stage—and there was his girlfriend, rushing on to join him like panic with faint tracers. She wore this see-through Indian dress with a stuffed pillowcase underneath, like she’s pregnant, right?

  And in the middle of the show, when they’re singing,“I awoke in a sweat from the Amerikan dream / Our rage against the war machine,” the girlfriend just started SCREAMING—I mean, bloody-murder-shrieking—and she’s performing a spontaneous miscarriage with all these bloodred fabrics f
rom the pillowcase spilling out.

  I think it’s part of the show—hell, it’s the Catalyst on Halloween—but Bob Innes and everyone else just looked like they’re trying to keep going.

  “Their trickle-down fuckonomics obscene / Their ‘freedom’ is a pyramid scheme.”

  The girlfriend’s still shrieking and then she started pulling handfuls of real blood from herself and what looked like small body parts and I remember thinking: Shit, I wish I had a girl like that.

  I didn’t even think of myself as gay or straight back then, but I knew I was attracted to the fucked-up.

  The room spun tangerine. Shrieks became hysterical laughter and “Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Guilty” and yes, I wanted a girl like Innes’s girl.

  And, you know, sometimes I think I conjure people right up.

  Does that sound crazy?

  * * *

  It’s the next day and I’m down at the Clock Tower ’cause Food Not Bombs is serving lunch without a permit and I’m not hungry or anything, but I just dropped another tab and I’m in the mood to start some shit with the police. Before I even get a chance, here comes this skinny girl in a skirt and no fuckin’ shirt on and she’s all limbs and yellow hair and tiny pink tits and she’s hungry—she’s practically starving, right?

  So, fuck the police—I’ve got my steel-toed boots on and I’m gonna to get this skinny girl some food so I’m dodging SCPD billy clubs and I’m made of steel and the Food Not Bombs guy with his goatee is serving his grub fast, and it’s all sirens and pigs trying to shut it down, and I get this girl some lentils and I’m kind of sheltering her with my body as she spoons stew into her mouth, and when she’s done, I say, “What’s your name, sweetie?”

  And she says, “Jane.”

  I mean, who’s named Jane, right? You can’t make this shit up. So I say, “Pleased to meet you, Jane, I’m Apex.” And obviously she’s new in town or I’d know her already and she smiles real sweet like something you could crush and I think, I gotta have this girl.

  I say, “I don’t know if you’ve already got a place to stay, Jane, but I’ve got a tent at San Lorenzo Park—” And right then I look up and the Food Not Bombs guy is shaking his head and smirking like that’s the oldest line in the book, like next thing, I’m gonna say, What’s your sign? and start reading to her from Real Astrology.

  I wink at the Food Not Bombs guy, but also kind of scowl. I mean, motherfucker can back up off my action. I look back at Jane and she’s got the face of a hummingbird but I play it off like I don’t see that and I take her fluttering hand and that’s the day I moved skinny Jane into my tent and everything smelled damp like sea salt and eucalyptus.

  Now, I won’t lie: all the other dropouts and runaways in San Lorenzo Park say my girl Jane was psycho right from the get-go, like they could tell by lookin’ at her skinny, smiling face.

  But I said, Don’t judge, man, and Who cares, anyway? I mean, her parents had her locked up at Agnew’s for kissing girls and slitting her own wrists, but you’d probably try and kill yourself too if you were stuck in that god-awful pale-blue suburban tract house with your straight-ass parents for all eternity. Did you know Agnew’s was once called the Great Asylum for the Insane and fell down in the 1906 quake and all the lunatics ran out when the building crumbled?—never got caught.

  * * *

  We were never going to get caught neither. I liked the way Jane needed me to hold her at night, the way she asked me to pin her arms to her sides real gentle-like, but tight.

  She had nightmares.

  She whispered stories about serial killers to soothe herself back to sleep. She whispered, “You ever hear of the Coed Killer, Apex?”

  And truth is, I hadn’t.

  I had Jane’s arms pinned to her sides and she’s whispering to me about this 1970s serial killer, and she lets her voice get kind of raspy when she whispers. She says, “He hated his mother, that was the thing, and his mom worked at the university and he had an IQ of, like, 145, and he was a giant too, maybe six foot nine, and heavy. His mother was completely narcissistic and abusive, so this giant grew up to be this homicidal psycho—he killed his grandmother when he was a teenager, and when his grandpa got home, he killed him too, and he served maybe five years in the Atascadero State Hospital, but they released him back to his mom up in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1969.”

  I tried holding her just a little bit tighter, but Jane wanted to keep talking.

  “He started killing girls he picked up hitchhiking. He buried one girl’s head in his mother’s garden like it was this twisted joke because he said his mom always wanted people to look up to her.” Jane’s breath kind of settled as she talked, like other people’s terror calmed her own.

  “He hung out in this cop bar on Ocean Street called The Jury Room and he befriended all the detectives so he could keep a step ahead—and not ONE of them suspected him. They just filled him in on the case, night after night. Finally, he killed his mother and her best friend—maybe her lover—and he ripped out her vocal cords and blasted them in the garbage disposal, and then he felt better! Cops never would’ve caught him, but he was done. Over it. He turned himself in. Confessed to everything.” Jane took a deep breath and sighed in my arms. “Apex?”

  “Yes, Jane?”

  “You’re gonna think I’m fucked up.”

  My heart raced. “No, baby.”

  “Sometimes I have this fantasy that I get strangled and somebody severs my head and buries, buries me looking up . . .”

  I held her arms so tight. She finally trailed off and fell asleep.

  * * *

  We lived like that in my old tent in the bushes for almost three weeks. But the rains were coming on, and the cops were getting crazy on everybody, not just us—coming through at sunrise like they owned the place and kicking everybody awake. I’d already sold all the LSD I came to town with, except for my personal stash, and the outlook seemed pretty bleak. So when my girl Jane came running across the grass one morning, skinny limbs flying in every direction, scaring the ducks in the pond and yelling that she got us a room at the St. George Hotel, I wasn’t about to ask her how she pulled that one off.

  I mean, for all I knew she had her suburban parents wire her money straight from their Costco lasagna dinner in Cupertino. I just packed up my tent and followed her skinny ass across the river and onto the Pacific Garden Mall.

  I’m telling you, the old St. George was the best. Seedy and fancy at the same time, art deco and cracked plaster, creaking floors and red carpet. I was high, I admit it, but I knew that old-fashioned elevator was a portal to another realm the minute I stepped inside of it and pulled the metal grate door closed and the machine heaved us up, just rope and iron.

  Jane said right then, “All the ifs are gonna become is,” and I wanted to kiss my girl so hard right then, but I didn’t.

  Our room had black-and-white tile floors and a blue lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Who let Joni Mitchell in here? Me and skinny Jane had a place to get us through mudslide season.

  “Or until the culmination,” Jane whispered.

  I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. We could’ve been happy there.

  Jane pulled the blinds closed against the morning gray and killed all the lights except the blue one. The place glowed dark like it was moonlit and Jane’s eyes gleamed. Her face looked so thin.

  She said, “Now we can listen to it,” and she unzipped her backpack and pulled out an old cassette tape and a boom box and said, “This one is gonna blow your mind.”

  “Should we smoke a bowl?”

  “Don’t you have any acid?”

  So I reached into my wallet and we each put a tab on our tongue and we stretched out on our thrift-store blankets and my Jane pressed Play with her big toe and grabbed my neck.

  She said, “Listen.”

  And it’s Edmund Kemper on tape, the Coed Killer himself, confessing his whole life. All calm. He said: “It started with surrogates at that,
uh, nonhuman level. Physical objects: my possessions, other people’s, destruction of things that are cared about. And then to destruction of things that are living, on a lower level: small animals, uh, insects, animals, and then finally people.”

  I opened my eyes and everything, every single thing, was indigo.

  “He just started with objects that were cared about,” Jane whispered.

  I wondered if we’d ever have anything we cared about. I imagined painting birds on canvas and blue glass goblets we could cherish and smash and that’s when I noticed the walls of our room were becoming less solid, melting like wax, maybe, melting like confines.

  Kemper’s voice reverberated against the unsolid walls. He said: “If it’d been in a city, I’d have been a mass murderer at age fifteen. I would’ve killed until they gunned me down. I wouldn’t have been able to reason my way out of it. I was scared to death and I was violent. I felt my back hit that wall. I was the rabbit that always ran, that always backed away; always burned his bridges.”

  * * *

  My girl Jane says, “You ever burn your bridges, Apex?”

  The acid came on. I get up on all fours and close my eyes and concentrate until I turn myself into a rabbit and I’m running—like scampering down the Pacific Garden Mall—and Jane says, “Apex! Let’s hitchhike.”

  Her words pop my rabbit spell and I open my eyes and say, “Hitchhike where, baby?” ’Cause we didn’t have any damn place to go, but I look around our room just then and the walls have completely vanished.

  Kemper is saying: “I was losing a grasp on something that was too violent to keep inside forever. As I’m sitting there with a severed head in my hand, talking to it, or looking at it, and I’m about to go crazy, literally . . . I told myself, ‘No, it isn’t. You’re saying that, and that makes it not insane.’”

  Kemper’s voice is all there is. I’m my own rabbit again and I’m running, but I’ve been decapitated, a headless rabbit, and I’m trying to catch my breath. Then I’m human again, just us under the blue light at the St. George.