San Diego Noir

Charlie doesn’t really know where to go, so he just keeps walking until he finds himself at the beach. He walks along the boardwalk, which is crowded with people, mostly sailors and their girls out for a stroll. He pushes his way through and then goes down the steps to the sand and under the pier where him and her held each other and danced to the radio.

Maybe it’s the same radio playing now as he stands there listening to the music and looks out at the ocean and tries to figure out what to do next. They’ll be looking for him soon, they’ll know it was him, and if they catch him he’ll spend the rest of his life in the brig, if they don’t hang him.

Now he wishes he had just gone back like she told him to.

But it’s too late.

He stares at the water, tells himself he should run, but there’s nowhere to run to, anyway, and the music is nice and he thinks about that night and knows he should never have left the beach.

Then the music stops and a voice comes on and the voice is talking like he’s real excited, like the radio did that day the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.

Charlie turns around to look up at the boardwalk and all the people are just standing there, standing stock-still like they’re photographs or statues. Then suddenly they all start to move, and whoop and yell, and hug each other and kiss and dance and laugh.

Charlie walks to the edge of the boardwalk.

“What’s going on?” he asks this sailor who has his arm around a girl. “What’s going on?”

“Didn’t you hear?” the sailor answered, swinging the girl on his hip. “We dropped some kind of big bomb on Japan. They say it’s the end of the war. They say the war is over!” Then he forgets about Charlie and bends the girl back and kisses her again.

And all along Pacific Beach people are hugging and kissing, laughing and crying, because the war is over.

Charlie Decker, the hard case, goes and sits in the sand.

He peers across the ocean toward a city that has burst into flame and people burn like torches and he knows he will never get the smell out of his nose or the pictures out of his brain. Knows that he will wake up crying that he can never go back.

Ask anybody—his shipmates, his captain, his family back in Davenport if they’ll talk to you about him. They’ll all tell you the same thing.

Charlie’s no good.

Now, broken, he sinks back onto Pacific Beach.

DON’T FEED THE BUMS

BY LISA BRACKMANN

Ocean Beach

Welcome to Ocean Beach.

Please Don’t Feed Our Bums.

The stickers were all over the place. On the bumpers of cars. On store windows. Kari had even seen one on a surfboard stuck into the sand by the pier.

They sold them at The Black, a souvenir and head shop that was ten years older than she was, that had been around for forty years. The stickers were round, yellow and olive green, with a silhouette of a tall, hunched man carrying a knapsack. It made Kari think of the Boy Scouts.

It wasn’t that she liked the bums. The homeless crowd that had moved into Ocean Beach recently wasn’t like the old hippies who lived in their beat-up vans and had been around forever. These bums, they were younger, mostly, single guys, and some of them were a little scary. A lot of them were meth-heads, or so the local gossip went, and she believed that was true; with their greasy hair, the blemishes on their skin, the way their faces had hollowed out and their eyes seemed to have come loose from the sockets, rattling around like marbles in a shot glass.

But she didn’t like the stickers.

“I don’t know, I think it’s mean,” she said.

Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re just way too nice.”

They sat in the small gray patio of South Beach Bar and Grille. It was Taco Tuesday, and the tacos were all $2.50. Sam loved the mahi tacos, claimed they were the best fish tacos he’d ever had.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It makes it sound like they’re animals or something.”

“If they were animals, you’d be feeding them,” he pointed out.

She blushed a little. “I like feeding the cats. They don’t hurt anything.”

“It’s cool that you feed them,” Sam said, taking a bite of his taco.

She did like feeding the cats. The routine gave her focus, and a kind of satisfaction.

It was funny, because Before, she didn’t even want to have pets.

There was a Before and an After, and she knew that she was two different people. Except that the After just felt like Now. Everything always happened all at once; she had a hard time putting one moment before another, one moment after the next.

She knew as well that she wasn’t able to think the way she used to. Knew this mostly because people who knew her Before would let that slip sometimes. But every now and then, she’d know it herself. She’d start to think of something, something quicksilver and elusive, and she could almost catch it, but it would flash between her fingers, gone, leaving just its emptiness behind.