Blackhorse
One of the Regulars
- Messages
- 129
- Location
- Portland, Oregon - USA
Fawcett’s Dark City Fedora…in which our hero gets a brand new bash.
Look down there…see how he moves down that street in absolute silence. It’s dark down in that alley, a seedy part of town right off Lovejoy Street. He melts right in like part of the wet black pavement. Two of the three backdoor streetlights are broken out…shattered only an hour ago by a weasely little runt in a straw pork pie that sported an unbelievable orange band. He started by throwing rocks but after ten or twenty sailed by the first light missing it by over a foot on a good throw he resorted to his revolver. He was much better with the gun, and is still close by, waiting.
Now the big guy, the one that just showed…for such a big guy, he’s quick, almost graceful…certainly deadly. The way he moves you can tell he’s done this before. He moves ahead almost eagerly, like a bull seeking an opportunity to stomp something flat. Notice how when he pauses he seems to sink into the darkness while scanning ahead for anything that doesn’t fit, a sound, a movement, anything that doesn’t feel quite right. All you can see is the dull glow from the end of his cigar, a Toro, fittingly so. Most locals will know him on sight, that big cigar, the heavy black wool topcoat and his trademark Fawcett custom fedora, dark gray it looks heavy with it’s tall crown and wide turned down brim, that ‘30s style center crease bash and stark signature black feather… he wears it like a helmet. He fits into this city like a dark cloud fits a November night in Portland. You can almost here him thinking down there…
Portland can be a hard town to find your way in, even if you know her all the way from the slippery cobbles of these Oldtown alleys up into the posh West Hills where all the money sleeps easy. And though sometimes hard, she’s mine. I’ve been prowling these streets most of my life…since I was a kid selling eels off the end of my homemade frog sticker to the gypsies for a quarter each, and even I get turned around on a dark night when the rains comin’ down hard enough. Yeah, the rain’ll get to you. It’s not like that gray misty stuff they have up in Seattle or those warm showers off the Pacific San Francisco gets now and then. In Portland it really rains. In winter it’s a cruel rain…right through your clothes in a matter of seconds if you get caught out in it. It’ll steal any comfort or warmth you’ve got hidden away and sometimes even what little hope you’ve been able to hold on to. All too often it seems that if it isn’t raining right here, right now, its either just finished or it’s thinking about raining again, and soon.
Sometimes it comes down so hard the river sneaks up her banks and spreads hungry wide fingers out onto the flood planes and even up into Waterfront Park where a lot of the bums sleep. They use those old camping mattresses they get from the Salvation Army and newspaper blankets made out of sections of the Oregonian and the Journal. If they’re lucky they’ve got a big piece of cardboard from the warehouses along the east side made into some kind of shelter. But that won’t help ‘em if they’re really on a bender and wasted when they crash cause that old river can catch them and float them away still asleep. They’ll bob along for quite a while on their little pads till eventually they slip off and go under, groggy and surprised all the way to the bottom to settle in that sticky ooze for a bit before the current shoves them right into Charon’s boat for that final ride.
On mornings after the park floods like that the punks will sit along the riverside to sip their cheap wine and count out that grim fleet as one by one they drift by headed for eternity…betting on whether they’ll see them go under. That’s pretty hard, but then Portland’s a hard town in the winter. And it’s winter now, and raining that cold, hope stealing, wino floating rain.
He moves further down along the alley, keeping to the left side staying in the shadows. He knows the darkness will hide and shelter him. There are two others out here tonight as well. One is down at the end there, behind that second dump box. That one’s asleep not for better but for good. Two neat holes in his back and a dark pool beneath him. Then up on the fire escape there’s the other one, the shooter, the weasely little rat in the pork pie. That one’s not asleep. Four chambers are empty and he’s waiting to empty the his last two.
If the town is hard the streets are harder. When Fisheye Bob’s boys over in Chinatown or the Vietnamese cowboy gangs out in Felony Flats are dishing it back and forth the cops take a hard line. And be sure about this…you don’t want to twitch even an eyebrow if the cops stop you for a late night chat. They smoked an out of town salesman down in the Pearl last month. The poor sod was drunk and had a cold and sneezed and they put seventeen slugs in him before he hit the sidewalk. Cops said he was "making threatening movements." Yeah, like he was gonna give ‘em AIDS by sneezin’ on ‘em. Sometimes they’ll smoke two or three a week if they’re feeling the right kind of way. Portland cops don’t stop pulling the trigger till you hit the ground a pound of lead heavier maybe still thinking about what you were going to have for dinner. They should call it the Copper Diet. A deadly diet high in minerals.
Right now it’s a dead heat between Fisheye, the Cowboys and the trigger happy boys in blue. So far this November eighteen have been scraped off the pavement, and four of those were cops. Unusually tough month. With bodies piling up on all sides, I steer clear of everyone and everything. Except the one I came here to find tonight. I want to make his acquaintance in the very worst way.
The one on the fire escape tenses, ready. He thinks maybe he should have reloaded, but now doesn’t dare. He looks at the pull-down ladder he used to climb up, now returned to it’s topmost position. It’s ready to slam downward with just a good shove…and that PI is headed right down the wall toward it.
A small scoundrel mutt sporting one of those curlicue tails scoots nervously across the alley there near the end, carrying a grisly trophy he’d won in a tussle with the stiff up the street. A big Tom sees the mutt, and is so hungry that he thinks about it for a bit, weighing his odds, then moves off unheard and unseen looking for an uncontested trophy. Animals are often a lot smarter than people.
You have to watch out every moment you’re out here. It’s like in the war…a running firefight from dawn till dark, and then things get even more interesting. One way or another it’d be way too easy to end up either feeling sorry you’d gotten up in the morning or not feeling anything at all. Me, I’m on my own. I help out people with troubles of one kind or another, for a price. I’ve only had to answer to the DA on a few occasions. Usually there’s not a problem though. I’ve got more than a few favors over there that I can call in, so I’m left pretty much alone, and by the police. Yessir, I’m clean…at the moment. It feels OK, but I never let myself trust it. You start feeling good and you relax even a twitch and then they find you the next morning out behind some meth house with a cowboy hatchet between your eyebrows. I feel better and a whole lot more at home when things are just a little bit dirty. You know, like with the dames. Like out here on Lovejoy tonight.
He grinds his teeth as he eases his way down the murky alley. Despite the cold night several lines of sweat work their way down his temple. The leather headband inside his Fawcett custom sticks to his forehead. Art, the maker, called it the "Dark City" model. It fits perfectly, so well he can hardly feel it ten minutes after putting it on. It fits him and it fits the dark night down there in the alley.
I know my black wool topcoat is too much even for this cold weather, but I need the dark to hide me and it soaks up light like a Burnside bum soaks up the promise of cheap booze. Yeah, I’ll settle for a little sweat so long as it hides me.
He moves around dank fetid puddles sliding from shadow to shadow like a beating waiting to happen. A beating that smells like a dead cigar butt drowned in stale Mad Dog and creosote and blood…and he’s just the one to give it out.
He’s mad. More than mad. Right now he’s half crazy with the hunger for revenge. Ivancie’s boys had worked over a friend of his…took their time and enjoyed it. Oh, she’d make it, but she’d never feel clean again. Inside, where it counted she’d always feel used up and empty…just like this part of Old Town.
"Lovejoy" Street. What a joke. Even all this rain can’t wash away the kind of scum that prey here. The cleanest thing on the block is this Colt .38 Super of mine
He holds the automatic a bit high, an old friend to his right hand, out before his passage…left hand brushing lightly along the surface of the building’s brick facing giving him balance and some feedback as to where he is in relation to the street. If the one he was seeking was watching from one of several black door frames further down the street they might swear that the Colt was leading him down the street by the hand. But it wasn’t the Colt that led him, it was hunger. He had a need for "justice" tonight, and someone was going to pay the tab for a feast.
Hold it! Something up ahead!
His pace quickens as he senses what he thinks is his prey and he moves forward like a panther, dark, low, narrowing his focus. But what he sees isn’t the one he seeks. The cat sounds a warning.
Damn! It’s just an alley cat
A flicker of movement above him and just as he starts to pivot back to his left, clutching toward the wall with that outstretched left hand, his knees flex forward so his head can move back and downward, away from…a staggering shock…stars bloom around him beneath the clouds. He goes down backwards heading toward one of the bigger puddles and sees a leering face below a slash of orange above him…sees it like it’s down at the end of a dark narrow tunnel. But he’s got just enough left to shift that hungry Colt slightly as he’s going over and the bright orange band comes into focus again - he squeezes - not hearing the blast that sends the slug spiraling on it’s way and the cat about four feet straight up and then out the end of the alley like a rocket. The last thing he remembers seeing is that nasty leer exploding upward into a red mist and a little straw hat popping upward in shredded little pieces of straw and orange fabric. As everything fades to black the last thing he remembers thinking is that he’d screwed up for the last time but at least it was good not going to bed still hungry.
Now, a .38 Super fired off in the wee hours of even so miserable a night in downtown Portland isn’t an easy thing to ignore. It wasn’t long before a light comes on here and there, a window casing is wrestled up for a furtive look and a phone call is made to the local constabulary. The bits and pieces left behind by the brief struggle are bagged and tagged and when it’s quiet again the next afternoon only one chalk outline remains as grim testament to the clash.
I wake up in a hard narrow bed to the smell of perfume and the rustle of a crisp white skirt. The DA is standing at the end of the bed trying to make time with a nurse wearing one of those funny little hats…the nurse, not the DA. "Oh, you’re back with us," she exclaims, looking both surprised and relieved that she has something to save her from the DA’s hustle. I feel like hell. Turning my head slightly to see more of the room shoots pain through my forehead and back down my neck. I groan. Loud. That hurts too. "For goodness sake, don’t move, you’re supposed to stay still.!" she gushes, "You’ve got a nasty concussion!" She makes a few notes on my chart, and gives an icy, "Excuse me," to the DA as she hangs the clipboard back on the foot of the bed. On her way out she turns and winks at me, "You big Palooka!"
The DA leans over the bed’s railing, smiles, "Now, that’s a nice one," he said, "Real nice. You’ve got all the luck, Horse."
Our patient moves his eyes around the bed and the room in silent indication of his surroundings and what they say about his so-called luck.
The DA laughs quietly, "Yeah, yeah, I know…but at least you’re here. That guy you popped over on Lovejoy two nights ago wasn’t so lucky. They’re still trying to hose what’s left of him down the gutter." A slight frown creeps across his face, "Just what kind of bullets do you use in that automatic of yours, anyway? They found pieces of his straw hat four stories up the fire escape where you nailed him. Moron ought to know better than to wear a straw hat like that up here in the winter anyway. Whole thing was a real mess."
A kind of calm creeps over me. So, I had made out all right after all. I thought I was a goner, but instead here I am with pretty nurses that smell nice and think I’m a damn hero…well, maybe they do. Anyway, they damn sure smell better than Lovejoy Street!
"Yeah," the DA goes on, "that little straw job went all to pieces. Not like that big hat of yours," he muses, sounding impressed. "You know, I’ll bet that thing probably saved your life. When the little stiff shoved that fire escape ladder down on your head that big fedora cushioned you just enough so that it didn’t take your head off!" I realized that he was probably right.
"Where is it?" I mumble, trying not to move anything and still make the words come out. "Oh, it’s right here in your closet," he said as he ducked through a small door, coming out with a dark lump of felt. He holds it up admiringly. "Man, that guy of yours down in Medford does some good work," he beamed.
The brim is a bit worse for wear in the front and as he turns it slowly around you can see that the center dent is mangled and at a new, slightly akimbo angle.
"Looks like that ladder gave you a new bash!" he chirped brightly. I want to wring that chipper little neck of his, but our eyes meet for just a second and the twinkle I thought I’d lost out there comes back in a flood. He sees my look. Then he busts up…completely loosing it.
The DA holds on to the rail with one hand and lifts up the "Fawcett Dark City Fedora" in the other, too damn proud of himself.
"A NEW BASH…har, har, har," he chokes out. Tears are running down both our faces. His at his bad joke and mine because when I laugh it feels like my head is coming right off.
So things turn out OK for a while. The nurse threw him out and now he owes me another favor…and the hat thing plays so big in the Journal that Art, my hat guy, is going to make me up a new "Dark City", all black, gratis. Though he’ll have to wait a few more weeks if he needs to measure my head again…at least until the swelling goes down, that is. But I don’t know…I kind of like my old one. It has history, good history, a save my skull kind of history.
And, you know, I kind of like the new bash too. Yes indeed, a little off center…a little crooked…and a little lucky…just like me.
Well boys and girls, that's it. Thanks for tuning in, be sure and come back next week...same time, same station, for the thrilling conclusion!
