A Twist Of Noir 486 - Michael Fontana

SKEWED WORLD - MICHAEL FONTANA

West took a call from his boss to pick up a package. He dressed in anonymous drag. A bulky brown winter coat covered up his lean frame. A black stocking cap hid his receding hairline. Nothing could hide the lines around his eyes.

He made a series of turns in his VW. The pick up was a brown box left outside a Chinese restaurant door in a part of town where hobos made their homes in dumpsters. The box was sealed in luminous tape to stand out. No one would touch it because it had stickers pasted all over it indicating that it was radioactive waste.

West figured himself a waste. He was errand boy to Jimmy Claxton, a fat man with a glass eye that followed you around the room. Jimmy was partial to sweaters and silk slacks. His gray hair grew long and was tied back with rubber bands. He had the complexion of raw steak. But he was also calculating, licking his fingers as he made calls that resulted in the extermination of his enemies.

West had edged into the job by dumb luck. One day he was getting a shoeshine at the airport, one of the last outposts in America where shoe shines were available and a public sight. The kid whacking the rag against West’s alligator shoes had fingers permanently black with polish.

Claxton had crossed the concourse with a big black bag on wheels. One of the wheels broke off and the bag hit the floor. It opened up and out spilled countless dolls.

West had failed to recognize these as expensive Japanese dolls: samurai Gosho dolls and Mitsuore dolls from the Meiji period; Ichimatsu ningyo dolls from the Taisho period; and dozens of others. Later, he would learn about them from catalogues that Claxton had kept on his coffee table. They were worth thousands of dollars on the legit market, much more on the black market.

While he had failed to recognize the value of the dolls in the airport, West had recognized the fluster on Claxton’s face. To see this fat man, on the floor, trying to scoop up little girls’ dolls, his already-red face beeting further, seemed too much denigration to West for anyone to endure. So he left his seat at the shoe shine stand and helped the man out. Since West was more compact, it was easier for him to slide to the floor, gather up some dolls, and put the wheel back into place. This kind gesture had impressed Claxton, since no one in his line of work put much stock in kindness. He offered West a job.

West at that point had been working at the gas company, filing customer complaints that he wished he could burn to a crisp. He had no trouble taking the offer, figuring nothing could be worse. Errand boy was not worse. It simply involved him leaving the comfort of his home at a call from Claxton, no matter what hour or day or whatever else he might be doing.

The faux radioactive box was destined for a house in the suburbs, one that seemed empty except that the garage door rose as soon as he approached. He walked inside the garage. There sat a green recycling bin with a cardboard sign taped to it:  BOX HERE!

West took the message to be directed toward him, so he made the drop and headed back out to the car. He situated himself back behind the wheel, turned the ignition, and prepared to drive away. That’s when he felt the cold nose of a pistol just behind his left earlobe.

“Off with that,” the gunman said.

West reached over with jittery fingers and turned the key the other way.

“Now you walk with me?”

Even though the gunman’s voice added a question mark at the end, there clearly wasn’t any doubt as to the answer. Following commands, West left the car, put his hands together on top of his head, and stepped slowly forward toward the garage. He felt the pressure of the gun on his back even through the coat.

Once inside the garage, the gunman closed the door. Immediately the space turned pitch dark. West breathed slowly, trying to keep calm. The gunman kicked him in the back, sending him to the concrete floor. The garage smelled of ancient car exhaust, motor oil, and rainwater. The gunman put a foot on West’s head, pinning it on one side to the slab. “So now you’re going to call your boss, right? Tell him there’s been a little mix-up in the delivery. Get him out here in person, or else you’ll be Swiss cheese.”

The gunman eased off the foot and picked West up by the hood of his coat. The pressure of the gun returned to West’s back. They marched together inside the house. It was a ratty affair, with rusted and open cans of split pea soup on the perimeter of a rickety table. The sink was full of marijuana plants and an insect-killing light hung over them as if to make them grow. The place smelled of bourbon, Camels unfiltered, and a bit of homegrown Hawaiian bud.

“Dial,” the gunman said. He forced West into a circa 1970s plastic chair at the rickety table. At the center of the table sat an equally 1970s era black Bakelite phone, complete with a rotary dial. West dialed the numbers read off to him, letting his finger stay in the slot as the dial moved back and forth.

Claxton answered after seven rings. He seemed to recognize West’s voice immediately, and didn’t seem to like it. “You lost the package?”

“I didn’t quite lose it. I...I’m sure some hobo has it in his custody.”

“So why are you out in the suburbs?”

“I went to the delivery site.”

“Get back into town and find the pick up, pronto.”

“I need your help. I didn’t see it, remember? Some hobo has it.” West cringed at lying like that but he cringed even more at the cold tickle of the gun’s nose at the now exposed back of his neck.

“We’d best find that parcel or you’re stretched out on the rack, dig?”

West knew at the sound of the click on the other end that Claxton was on his way.

The gunman finally sat down, his weapon remaining poised on West. The man’s skin was jet black and he had chiseled figures, with light gray eyes and a salt and pepper afro. He wore a blue worker’s jumpsuit with a red scarf around his neck.
West looked the man square on. “So you’ll kill me now?”

The gunman laughed. “Why should I? You’ve been cooperative so far. I suspect that’s why you have the job you do. You’re so compliant.”

After a silence that hung briefly between them like a cobweb, the gunman spoke up again. “Why you in this line of work anyway?”

“Same as you, I guess.”

“Yeah, but I was born into it. Grew up in the projects and all. Bet you weren’t. So why you want so much hate in your life? You ought to check out the Buddha instead, man.” The gunman used his free hand to pull out a yin-yang symbol on a string from around his neck. “I meditate every day. Yoga, too. Kicks the stress, you know?”

They fell silent again after that until Claxton’s car approached. The gunman placed the nose of the pistol against the back of West’s head and marched him back out into the garage. The gunman took position in the shadows. West stood out in the daylight. He might have broken and run, but a bullet would have caught him. The same if he had yelled. He didn’t want to die but he didn’t want Claxton to die, either.

Claxton seemed to smell a ruse. “Why don’t you come out here to the car, since I already got it up and running?”

“Maybe we should go inside for a minute,” West said, his mouth going dry.

“There’s nobody here, lame brain. That’s the set-up. You were going to drop the package and scoot. No faces, no names, no complications. You never messed up this bad before. Why are you doing it today, I wonder?”

West tried rolling his eyes to one side, in hopes that Claxton would catch the meaning. He didn’t. “What, you’re having a seizure now?”

At this juncture, Claxton removed a pistol from inside his jacket pocket. He aimed it at West’s head. “I don’t trust you or this set-up. You’re history.”

West did what no self-respecting criminal would ever do: He fell to his knees. This startled both Claxton and the gunman. Claxton caught the figure in the shadows. The gunman knew his cover was blown. They trained their weapons on each other.

“Menafee,” Claxton said. “Long time no see.”

“Zip it, Claxton. Your time’s up. I’m running your industry from today on.”

“You were a lousy errand boy, Menafee, and you’re not much better at rip-offs.”

“I was a better errand boy than this goof.”

Menafee made the mistake of pointing at West with his pistol instead of a finger of his free hand. As soon as the nose of the gun went down, Claxton opened fire. Menafee fell with a thud. His gun clattered on the concrete.

Claxton aimed his weapon at West. “You have anything to do with this arrangement?”

“He had a gun to my head. I had to make the call.”

Claxton’s face turned obscenely red and his voice turned harsh. “You didn’t have to do a thing. You could have been loyal and taken a shot for me. You’re no better an errand boy than this stiff here.”

“Sorry, boss.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut the mustard.” Suddenly Claxton turned earnest, which West would have thought alien to the man. “Self-acceptance is key. You think I give a toot what other people think? I don’t. You shouldn’t, either. Nothing wrong with you the way you are. Now take some time off and reflect.”

“What about the package?”

“Bring it back to me when you come back to work. The recipient’s post mortem.”

Claxton tucked the pistol back inside his jacket pocket, started his car up and drove off.

West remained on the ground as if he were just another corpse.

BIO: Michael Fontana does have a bio this time. His writing has appeared in a variety of and electronic journals. His first novel, Sleeping with Gods, has recently been published. He lives in beautiful Bella Vista, Arkansas.

A Twist Of Noir 345 - Michael Fontana

NIGHT OF THE SIDEWINDER - MICHAEL FONTANA

Ignazio lit a cigarette and took it down in long deep stokes, his face collapsing with the suction, pupils dilated, skin clammy, hair kicking up in a breeze, the spotlights of the Sidewinder Hotel shattering the night, its white stucco rising out of the gravel like Stonehenge. He already had the engine running, the Nova throwing off black fumes, stink of oil and sweat in air, truckers with their long rigs standing like metallic birds at the rear of the hotel, half the drivers up in rooms with hookers who hung around the parking lot like tumbleweeds, everyone burning with speed and lack of sleep, to the point where the sky took on an orange hue and out of it emerged apparitions of bison skulls moving across the heavens.

Ignazio had just learned that certain rooms had a peephole cut into the mirror, that anyone could slide into the crawl space in the walls and locate one of these rooms and simply spy or else capture the action on film. He had been captured with his girlfriend Samantha, she so much taller and darker skinned than he, the way their bodies blended together on the bare hotel bed, the light on because Ignazio was afraid of the dark, a shotgun broken down on the other double bed for the liquor store knock-over scheduled afterward.

The heist went like a conveyer belt, one action rolling forward into the next until they all fused together into one huge image, namely him with the shotgun aimed at the owner’s head, the owner whinnying in fear, her red hair crackling with static, the bottles on the shelves refracting everything like a funhouse mirror, except there was no fun there, only the bag of money that Ignazio fled the store with. He broke down the shotgun again inside the Nova and peeled out of there in a black cloud.

Somewhere along the way Samantha caught the video, said the desk clerk at the Sidewinder had played it for her on his VCR, the film grainy but identifiably Ignazio’s face in the moments before their bodies merged together, the desk clerk having heard about the heist and knowing who was the likely candidate, remembering the dissembled shotgun lying on the extra bed as he taped their sex, threatening to take it to the cops if Samantha didn’t do him too. She didn’t because she couldn’t stand the pudgy boy. Plus she figured that one video would lead to another and suddenly she’d be tied down in pornography instead of selecting which of the truckers and transients she elected to spend time with.

The same clerk was on duty when Ignazio stood outside smoking his cigarette. When he killed the butt beneath the toe of his boot he pulled the shotgun out from the backseat and leaned over the car’s roof with it, his eyes like telescopes beading in on pudgy boy’s brain, but he didn’t immediately open fire, he wanted to play filmmaker himself, only this film would be recorded strictly in his head, reel to reel like in the old days, the grainy frame by frame cognition of military hygiene films.

Ignazio had done his time in Nam, remembering the helicopter landing with him and his buddies, its loud whimpering against the clouds, same stink of petrol as the hotel parking lot, only this was a landing in a clearing and the clearing threw off veils of dust that caught in the eyes and throat and choked a man near to death, weapon heavy in his hand, battering his arm and shoulder as he fired into bodies that might have well been apparitions undulating from smoke after rounds were spent, none of the bodies falling, all appearing and disappearing like some psychotic dance, enough to rake like claws against the skull, the Sidewinder parking lot little different, the same enterings and leavings, the gears of the trucks shrieking, the whipping past of cars in golden lines of heat and asphalt.

For some reason he just couldn’t pull the trigger there. A single blast would have ended the blackmail, would have liberated him and Samantha both, but the finger sat like stone against the trigger, sweat skittered like insects on his forehead and through his hair. Samantha finally arrived and touched the barrel of the shotgun, lowering it away from the hotel window and toward the earth, baby baby baby she said this is no way to react.

But he knew no other way to react, he had been trained by war that this was the way to be, that an enemy seen was an enemy designed to murder him, kill or be killed, all the traps dug in the earth with bamboo spikes at bottom, all the grenades slipped into gas tanks, all the villages on fire. How he wished for something peaceful but the only peace seemed to exist at the end of a field where the bodies of friends and foes lay silent with same sad red emerging from their skin, soaking the beautiful green grass. Such a field had driven Ignazio to his knees at one point and set him weeping, pulling at his hair, screams of mortars in background, flies an unholy black with wings tinted blue, swarming and rapacious, their whirring like tiny drills on an invisible machine.

Samantha took the shotgun away from him entirely but he remained braced against the Nova like he still had business there instead of the highway passing him by, the hotel still in the background, its white relief like an ornate crucifix.

BIO: Bio? Michael Fontana don’t need no stinkin’ bio.