Of course, the collection could not be complete without giving some rebels the mic. “Two to Tango” by Jamie DeWolf and “The Wishing Well” by Kim Addonizio put the ride into high gear. Eddie, I think we share a mutual attraction for what lives in the shadows. Would you say that the shadows are teaching us or guiding us?
EM: That’s an interesting way of looking at it. I don’t think the shadows do either. I think they’re just there, always. It’s up to us whether we learn anything traipsing through them. These days, writers and readers aren’t denying the darker parts of our existence as much as they used to, especially in crime fiction. Some writers just do it for fun, because it’s become the fashionable way to get published. You know, “gritty violence” and all that bullshit. The genuine darkness in noir stories comes from two places — the cruelty of the world’s innate indifference, and the cruelty that people foster within themselves. If you’re not seriously dealing with one, the other, or both, then you’re not really writing noir.
JT: I see the stories in this collection as manifestations of thousands of unfinished conversations, gang songs, street hustles — lovers and haters creating art from their pain and regret. Oh, you better believe the Black Panthers are in these stories, as are the next wave of hip-hop noir rappers, like Ise Lyfe, Cookie Money, and Thizz Nation, who are slapping big beats behind their pains and passions. Oakland is a city of black power, brown power, people power... Let’s roll, people!
Eddie Muller & Jerry Thompson
Oakland, California
January 2017
Part I
Not a Soft City
The Bridge Tender
by Nick Petrulakis
Fruitvale Bridge
“Are those sirens? Gotta be. What do you think? Fire? Police?” She tilted her head and tried to catch more of the siren symphony below us. Whether or not the sirens were headed to the bridge depended on which side the call came from. If it came from the Alameda side, those sirens were ours; if the call came from the Oakland side, the sirens wouldn’t be headed our way, not yet. Always too much going on in Oakland, never enough in Alameda.
“You were talking about your boy,” I said, and that made her look back at me.
Because the sun lay low — and behind — her face was shadowed by her black curls, making it hard to see the eyes that were soft brown, a shade lighter than her skin. But just the mention of her son made her smile. I had to remember that.
“You’d like him,” she said. Then the wind got strong and she had to finger some of those curls away from her face. She’d started crying again so she took a deep breath and then released it, slow. “Close your eyes,” she said, yelling because of the wind.
I did, shut out the deepening sun, and everything got louder. The wind against my ears, the traffic from the bridge below us. But not the sirens, they’d grown faint — so they hadn’t been for us.
“You close your eyes strange,” she said.
I cupped a hand behind my ear.
“Salty people,” yelling again. “You make your eyes all squinchy when you close them. Rest of us? We just close our eyes when we close our eyes.”
I smiled, but then a gust shot up from over the water, shot up from way down, buffeted hard against me, and I rocked back, scared again, because when you’re sixty-five feet in the air — legs dangling from the side of a railroad bridge, and your eyes are closed, and you feel an unexpected blast of wind against your chest — you fucking rock back and clench your hands even harder against the rail, digging grit into your palms, slicing your skin with flaked paint, and you involuntarily breathe in and hold it, and then realize that only two seconds have passed since you smiled.
I wanted to check my fingers, see if I’d cut them, but I’d have to open my eyes and loosen my grip to do that.
Exhale.
“No peeking,” she said, still loud. “Now, make a picture of my boy inside your head. First, think about chubby cheeks. But chubby cheeks with attitude, am I right? Now amp up the cute. Definitely amp up the attitude.” The wind quieted. “I used to have cheeks like that.”
I pictured her reaching up, almost touching her face with her delicate hands, then stopping.
“It was time for the talk,” she said. “You know? The Talk. Everyone thought he was too young.”
Dead air.
With my eyes shut I was left to wonder what she was doing in the sudden still of the day. Smoothing her dress? Strumming the nylon rope with her left hand?
“They don’t know how curious he is. My boy kept asking questions, real crazy ones. ’Specially after he got Hammer.”
I missed what she said next because of the wind. It rushed at me again and I opened my eyes. It was bright, and she was lovely in the bright light — lovely in her yellow dress, her red sneakers.
Lovely and close. But not close enough.
I squinted from the light and tried not to gawk at her. Or the view — one of the best things about working bridges. The Coliseum in front of us with the hills after; San Francisco behind us with its bay. Its own bridges, its own views.
She stopped talking, seemed to judge the distance between us. Had it changed? Had I moved closer? No, not yet. So she started in on the rope again, tapped it with a fingernail painted as red as her shoes.
“Everybody said getting a kitten was stupid. That I was stupid. For getting my boy a cat. And a black cat? Bad luck, am I right? But my boy said that was dumb. Thinking black brought bad.”
She smiled again and started crying. Visions of her boy kept her doing that. Cry, smile, cry.
“A female kitten, right? But he called her Hammer. MC would’ve made it a boy’s name, but just Hammer? He didn’t see a problem with that.”
The wind stilled again and a toddler’s shriek cut up through the hush. We peered down at a mom — dressed as Cinderella ready for the ball — pushing a faded green stroller along the bridge below, then I looked at the water churning under that bridge, swirling, the surface of the estuary curling out like breath, the waves an exhalation, angry immediately under us but the whorls calming the farther they spread.
“What’s that mom see when she looks up?” she said, and let go of the rope, pointing down, the slanting light catching a flash of shiny red from her nails.
“She’s not looking at us,” I said as we heard another shriek, “she’s got that baby to worry about. And even if she did look up, Cinderella wouldn’t notice us, not with those clouds.”
If she could let go of her rope, I could let go of the rail, so I did, hitched one thumb over my shoulder at those beautiful clouds, did it fast and then grabbed the rail again. The grit under my palm familiar now, comforting.
“You want me to look at some pretty clouds?” She shook her head. “Not me, I’m past all that.”
“Okay,” I said, “okay.” And I held the rail tight. As long as I clutched the rail I was safe, I wouldn’t fall. “Cinderella, she’d see this rail bridge we’re sitting on, suspended by those tall, Erector Set towers.” I nodded at one, then the other. “That tower in Oakland, that one in Alameda, separated by six hundred feet of water.”