Chicago Noir [Anthology]

Mike first saw people scrubbing their windshields with greenpads at a truck stop near Kimball. The insect guts darkened the glass like window tint, but his remained clean enough to see Susan’s reflection without spots shadowed on her face. They must have hit an odd stretch of air, he thought. Smiling guys with RVs stood upon stepladders and worked their elbows, watching Susan walk for the rest room, her hand squeezing her purse strap. Look at the ass on her, their faces said.

“You can’t get the bugs all the way off with a squeegee,” a man in a cowboy hat told him. “Not out here. Go get you some green pads at the Wal-Mart in Brownson.”

Mike nodded that he’d make do and the man shrugged his shoulders. He went looking for Susan because that morning she’d cried on a Texaco toilet seat outside Cheyenne, sobbing so hard her eyes were still swollen at noon. He’d stood outside the door, his shadow broken on a propane tank, asking her what she wanted from him. My eyes are all puffy, she’d said.

“Remember,” the man called out, “it’s the bugs’ world in Nebraska and we just live in it.”

Mike drove off and set the cruise at eighty-five and read the mileage sign for North Platte, Kearny, Omaha. Sure, Tex, he thought of the man. It’s probably just like you say.

Ogalala was a hundred miles away when the bugs came out of the white sky like spilled coffee. They stitched the windshield. He looked hard through the smears and heard them hitting while Susan searched the radio for a stronger station. He couldn'’t see and the bug shadows spotted her cheeks. She scanned and listened for a half second, caring more about a clear signal than the music.

In Chicago, they went on dates again. Just the two of them. They were making steps, like they talked about in the mountains, and meeting at restaurant bars, the same places from ten years ago, an Italian place on Racine, or a Lebanese bistro far north on Clark. Then, they’d drunk martinis because people were doing it again, he Stoli, she Absolut, and laughed about inside jokes with friends they last knew had moved to Seattle. Lance was Heineken, then Bombay and tonic when he bloated. Elizabeth liked Cosmopolitans. It was the pretty glass, the faded red vodka. In those days, they were all just off work, the loop or the near north side, where women swung Coach bags and pigeon feathers fell in the puddles. They sang Nat King Cole songs with the jukebox and thought things were one big wave.

Tonight, Mike and Susan ordered their martinis and sat alone at Rico’s. The bar was clean, but scratched. She played with her olive stick. Mike wanted to tell her there wasn'’t enough air in their apartment for two, and it was good they left the place to fill back up. Open windows, a hard wind, the curtains pushed to the ceiling. But she would only look at him, her eyes becoming wet. We were just in Colorado for two weeks, she’d say. Air isn’t the problem. Now, they sat where they once drank grappa like they knew something special, and said nothing about him becoming a cop. She was sure he’d pull the plug, that it was already an old idea he had of himself. You wait, he thought. I can’t lose in that world.

Mike watched the waiters watch the 6 o’clock news. There was a fire west on Harrison, around Cicero, an eight-flat lit up like a wedding party. Kids aped for the news camera.

“You think Lance and Elizabeth ever married?” he said.

“No. She left him for a doctor.”

“How do you know?”

She pointed to the rest room through a doorway, by a pay phone. Two busboys looked at her where they folded silverware into cloth napkins.

“We used to talk in there. She was scared Lance’s dreams were too tied up with him going out.”

“He wanted to design computer games.”

“She said he only ever had plans on barstools beside you.”

“He knew what he wanted to do.”

“I bet the doctor dumped her after she left Lance.”

“Where’s this coming from?”

“That girl was like a monkey with men,” she said. “She always had her hand on a branch before she swung. One has had to break.”

“You want to get a table?”

“You really thought Elizabeth was something.”

“Maybe we should finish our drinks here.”

“Whatever you want to do.”

“She was our friend.”

“He was your friend. Women make the best of being stuck together.”

Mike kept quiet and drank, letting the cold vodka numb his gums before he swallowed.

Later, he left Susan lying awake and ran the city dark with an open smile. He caught the raindrops in his mouth and sprinted between the rat-proof garbage cans while the garages dissolved from the rain. He felt good, he’d drunk light, and the shoes were taking the shock while he hit puddles behind used car lots and donut shops with chained dumpsters. The clouds sopped up the city lights. He stretched his legs and he felt only the cold rain stinging his throat.

Back home, he stood in the bedroom doorway, sweat and rain wet. His wife lay in the TV light with the cat across her leg. When she’d first heard him, she started making sobbing noises, though now she was done with that. He knew she’d tried crying, but stopped after her ducts gave no water. On their third date she’d cried as badly, telling him about her college abortion over vodka tonics and T-bones beneath the Sinatra pain'ting at Rosebud on Taylor Street.

“Six miles in forty-one minutes tonight,” he said. His running shorts still stuck to his thighs.

Susan said nothing, her eyes sad and dry. He still found them beautiful, like chocolate syrup, the way he told his buddies after their first hook-up, but now, after twelve years, her brown eyes demanded an emotional admission he was afraid to stop paying because his buddies were all gone.

“Forty-one minutes,” he said again. “I'’ll sleep through the police academy. Remember at Rico’s when we’d watch the fat trainee cops run down Racine?”

Susan was silent. Mike wanted to put his finger in her face, but he didn'’t. She looked at the cat while she stroked its cheekbone. He knew he couldn'’t touch his wife even if he put his hand on her mouth.

One day he’d remind her they were from different towns, but the same Illinois with brown rivers and cornfields running to the sky. He needed to get that straight again, remind Susan of her limitations.

“I know Harvard accepted you senior year of high school,” he’d tell her. “You wrote an essay on Freud and dreams for a contest, then presented it to the Rotary Club in a long dress. You had slides of diagrams and spoke into a microphone. The bored, gray men sat in folding chairs with their legs crossed.”

Susan would shake her head. Her eyes might blear while her finger pointed at his nose.

“You have no idea,” she’d tell him. “There is no way you could know a thing.”

“The day the envelope came,” he’d say, “you saw the rain dance on pickup hoods parked amongst the clapboard houses. The gutters were high with muddy water from the flooded fields. You held the letter and watched the weather coming over the interstate, the paper flecking wet, knowing your mother would worry all night about the creek rising behind the house. You cried with closed eyes, alone beneath the willow tree, happy you could blame your wet face on the rain.”

“I didn'’t see any of it. Not the way you say.”

Mike told his wife nothing. He only watched her look away and rub the cat’s ear between her thumb and forefinger. He knew they liked fighting more than understanding, and because of it, they’d forced each other away. She was there for the cat, not him, and he could feel good about that if he let himself. Either way, he thought, he’d jog different alleys tomorrow night, dreaming he could run until the dawn broke over the two-flat roofs, the morning light coming fast, chalky, then the palest blue.