Noir Car, Episode 8

…sacks of oranges that’d been beat against something hard for an hour or two. She ran two fingers over the ass of her piece and pushed through the door, muttering a few words recalled from a thick book with gold leaf.

The haze of the joint, the cruel fog of blood and booze that settles on a place after years of bad tidings, reached out and tugged her inside. Shirley Valentine was trapped inside the jukebox, wailing about strangers in love. Shirley had a good voice, once, but after it was filtered through this room it sounded like a mortally wounded cat. With a headache.

A smattering of thugs swiveled their stools to memorize her hips through small eyes that took cover in their sockets like soldiers hunkered in foxholes. These men looked as if they could never have been babes in their mother’s arms. These men looked like they had just come off a greasy conveyor belt at the end of some desperate, ugly machine.

She passed them, keeping as much femininity out of her stride as possible. She tried to walk like her Father, who had worked all those docks all those years, and had only bestowed one piece of parental wisdom: Don’t wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was certain, as she pulled up to the end of the bar and motioned to the man with the apron, that given her current situation, she was not heeding her Pop’s advice.

Someone whistled, a low, drawn-out sound aimed at her derriere, emerging from the murky darkness of the card tables in back. She pulled back her coat a bit, so that the electric red of the neon beer signs reflected the steel tucked into her waist. The barkeep, who had aimed to ignore her by polishing a glass, put his towel down. The room shifted into second gear as tension arrived like a swarm of flies on a hot pile. Blurred edges became sharp, standing at attention. It was the feeling a can of napalm gets when it hears a match get struck.

TO BE CONTINUED
episode 8 by Tim Sanders