Noiryorican

  NOIRYORICAN

  Short Fiction

  Richie Narvaez

  PRAISE FOR NOIRYORICAN

  “It strikes an authentic tone that rings true to my seasoned ear. The array of characters encompasses the Nuyorican experience devoid of sentiment or artifice. Score one for the home team.” —Edwin Torres, author of Carlito’s Way

  “With considerable style, poise, and humor, Richie Narvaez’s Noiryorican unpacks a world of grifters, street punks and hangers-on just trying to get by in the big city when the odds are stacked against them. At his street poet best Narvaez gives Jonathan Lethem and Junot Diaz a run for their money. I loved this collection.”—Adrian McKinty, bestselling author of The Chain

  “In this eclectic collection of noir stories, Narvaez takes the reader across the boroughs of New York City, Puerto Rico, LA, and Texas. Open this book and take this ride through the mazes of Narvaez’s imagination.”—Ivelisse Rodriguez, author of Love War Stories

  Collection Copyright © 2020 by Richie Narvaez

  “The Godfather of Williamsburg” is new to this collection; all other stories have been previously published.

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Zach McCain

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Noiryorican

  Introduction

  Good Fences

  The Godfather of Williamsburg

  Merry Xmas from Orchard Beach

  Withhold the Dawn

  Meet Me at the Clock

  Pale Yellow Sun

  Blackout

  How to Kill a Brown Girl (Or Black, White, or Halfsie)

  Black Friday

  Bobo

  Old Pendejo

  La Volcana

  Southside Valentine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by the Author

  Preview from Deep Red Cover by Joel W. Barrows

  Preview from Rattlesnake Rodeo by Nick Kolakowski

  Preview from Don’t Shoot the Drummer by Jonathan Brown

  This is for my Aunt Terry, who showed me the way to escape

  INTRODUCTION

  Why not write about nice people?

  The truth is I’m not very interested in nice people, at least not when it comes to writing. I like having beers with people who call their mothers every Sunday and who recycle, but I’d rather write about contract killers, con men, and crooked cops. And for my subgenre of choice here—noir—there are few if any nice people. As Megan Abbott has noted, “In noir, everyone is fallen.”

  Now, “noir” is one of those labels that gets misused a lot, like “organic,” “gluten-free,” and “great.” Too many readers see “noir” and picture private eyes and femme fatales bantering in offices dim with carcinogens. But that’s hard-boiled fiction, errant knights and damsels in distress, fine stuff, but more film noir than literary noir or roman noir.

  I like to think of “noir” the way Charles Ardai does: “Noir depicts lives beset by disappointment, frustration and cruelty, in a universe that is indifferent at best and malign at worst.”

  In other words, you won’t find any happy endings in this volume.

  At the same time, these stories in this book heavily feature Puerto Rican or Latino/a/x/e characters, people you don’t see much of in crime fiction or in most popular fiction at all. I thought it was important to give characters who come from the same background as I do, who often end up as little more than background, starring roles at the front of the stage. Oh, FYI:

  NOIRYORICAN = NOIR + NUYORICAN (New York-born Puerto Rican)

  In case you were wondering.

  You might also wonder: Why take a group of people who so often and so cruelly get maligned as criminals and associate them in any way with crime? Well, every other group has their crime fiction, everyone else has their shot at a piece of the pop culture pie, why not us? Latina/o/x/e people are of course as complex as anyone else. Many of the people in these stories are broken, depressed, desperate. They make really, really bad decisions. You’ve made a few of those, haven’t you? And sometimes you might find them laughable or pathetic. But that doesn’t mean the journeys they take are any less compelling, instructive, or human than your own.

  As to the stories themselves:

  “Good Fences” is one of several flash fiction pieces sprinkled throughout the book. It was originally written for a zine I used to publish called Zeeno. Get it? Moving on. This story was also one of the first crime fiction tales I ever wrote, and it is based on story told to me that is either true or a very bizarre lie. Two tough-guy cops who happen to be neighbors have an unneighborly encounter incited by dogs leaping over a fence.

  “The Godfather of Williamsburg” is a prequel to the story “Roachkiller,” which was published by Murdaland, one of a wave of literary crime fic magazines from early this century. That story was an also-ran in The Best American Mystery Stories of 2008, and it opened the door for me to several anthologies. People have often asked about the hitman protagonist, who has an unusual habit of referring to himself in third person, so I invited him back. This story, which appears here for the first time, is based on a real-life kidnapping that took place in Brooklyn in 1979 and involved the numbers runner my father worked for back then. Which is a tale for another time.

  I have great memories of going to Orchard Beach as a kid. Eating bologna sandwiches and cold fried chicken from the cooler, running from the heat into the greenish water. It’s a man-made beach, shaped like a crescent, and tucked up high in the Bronx. Because of its popularity with my people in the ’60s and ’70s, it became known as the Puerto Rican Riviera. I went back a few years ago and was upset at how the architecture had been left to decay. There are frequent calls to revive the area, but the Bronx is still waiting. That visit inspired the story “Merry Xmas from Orchard Beach.” I liked the idea of juxtaposing a non-beach holiday onto a beach setting, and then Heather Rincon’s charmingly abrasive voice popped into my head.

  Another flash fiction story drafted during my zine days, “Withhold the Dawn” was originally written in script form as a parody of an old-fashioned crime radio melodrama. I read about the call for “flash noir” for the anthology Tiny Crimes: Very Short Tales of Mystery and Murder, and I dug up this old story and revised it heavily. I wrote it with full freak flag flying, and, even though I tweaked its form, it retains much of my unadulterated, unadult humor, such as it is. Sincere apologies to Don McLean.

  Written for an anthology called Grand Central Noir—and just that title is a fantastic setup—“Meet Me at the Clock” is another story built from setting. I had only an inkling of what to write. Then I took a trip to the bustling Beaux-Arts commuter hellhole, and in exploring its beauty and its bowels, I found Platform 13, an isolated area that looks like it’s been abandoned since WWII. That gave me the idea to make the protagonist a man in the wrong time, and it gave me a perfect spot to set the climax.

  Nordic noir, that blue-tinted, breath-frosted, emotionally muted crime fiction of fro
zen territories, had become extremely popular in the 2000s, threatening to overtake the noiriness of warmer climates, where most roman noir had been set since the ’50s. My dear friend Annamaria Alfieri invited me to contribute to an anthology she and author Michael Stanley were putting together called Sunshine Noir. They wanted to swing the focus of noir back to where the mercury climbs. For this story, I took a (mental) trip back to Puerto Rico and read up on recent events. The island has been struggling for a long while under a recession, massive debt, and corruption. Then I found the story of a floundering Puerto Rico golf club/resort that a certain billionaire was supposed to save. That was the spark for “Pale Yellow Sun.”

  I met Ehsan Ehsani, the mind behind Mystery Tribune, when he came to a Mystery Writers of America meeting just after he’d launched his literary crime fiction magazine, and he was looking to meet people in the community. I introduced him around as best I could, I think he bought me a drink, and we’ve been friends ever since (not just because of the drink), hanging out at all the crime fiction fêtes in town. I’d done some articles for him, but for years I struggled for the right fiction piece to send to MT. This was it. Many readers believe a noir story must involve a private investigator, but that’s not even true in film noir. But here, just for them, is a private eye story. “Blackout” comes with a heavy pour of schadenfreude, one of the chief ingredients of noir.

  The online journal Shotgun Honey publishes short, sharp flash fiction, 700 words tops, no exceptions. This story was written expressly for them and is a parody of “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)” by Junot Diaz. Once I studied the voice and came up with the premise, “How To Kill A Brown Girl (Or Black, White, Or Halfsie)” came together—if not in a flash, at least within a week.

  Cannibalism and noir: two great tastes that taste great together. Dana C. Kabel, another author I met through the New York City crime-writer scene, asked me to contribute to his anthology Skin & Bones. It features a menu of stories by the likes of Lawrence Block, Tess Makovesky, Stuart Neville, just to namedrop a few, so I’m glad I was lucky enough to, er, make the cut. In most cannibal stories, the element of anthropophagy appears as a twist. But in “Black Friday,” I started out tongue in cheek. Sorry. Useless trivia note: The surname “Arens” is a reference to a professor-mentor of mine at Stony Brook who wrote the book The Man-Eating Myth, which hypothesized that cannibalism was never a socially accepted practice and that calling a group of people “cannibals” was particularly insidious kind of Othering.

  Author Angel Luis Colon emailed me in 2018 and said he was putting together a noir anthology called ¡Pa’que Tu Lo Sepas! Stories to Benefit the People of Puerto Rico and that the profits would go to help people affected by the disaster of Hurricane Maria. I volunteered a story immediately. Of course then I had to write it. For inspiration, I turned to the folk legend Juan Bobo from the island and for form, well, I had always wanted to do my version of Ring Lardner’s “Haircut.” The unreliable narrator in “Bobo” speaks in my head just like my uncle Jose.

  As a writer I believe one should not live by one genre alone. For the sake of variety, here’s a horror story for you. But don’t worry, crime fiction fans, it has violence and death. You might sum up “Old Pendejo” as Old Yeller meets Night of the Living Dead. FYI: “pendejos” is Spanish for “short hairs,” and you can figure out where on the body these are located. But to call someone a “pendejo” is slang, meaning that person is an “idiot” or “pain in the neck.” Add the word to your vocabulary to entertain friends at parties.

  I grew up on a steady diet of Justice League, Batman, The Incredible Hulk, Deathlok, The Demon, on and on. Comic books and superheroes were my bible and my Jesuses. So of course I’ve always wanted to write superhero stories, and I did do some freelance work for DC Comics in the ’90s, mostly children’s book stuff, coloring books, all for hire and not my own creations. So when I found out about A Thousand Faces, a literary journal that published superhero stories, I immediately put on my Green Lantern ring, started typing, and out flew “La Volcana.”

  The final story, “Southside Valentine,” is not noir, but I thought you might need respite from all the tragic endings. It’s a flash story, which developed from the title, two words that popped into my head and that I was determined to make a story out of. This once again takes place in my old neighborhood, my favorite writing ground, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

  Richie Narvaez

  Bronx, New York

  January 2020

  Back to TOC

  GOOD FENCES

  Jose walked out his front door on Metropolitan Avenue, down the stoop, and over to his neighbor Frank’s door. He rang the bell twice.

  “I want to talk to you about your dogs,” Jose said.

  Frank was sixty-eight, a retired cop, just like Jose. Well over six feet tall, Frank stood behind the barely opened door and blocked any view of the inside. His bushy eyebrows didn’t move. His big, dried fig of a face stayed blank. He said, “Yeah?”

  “They bark all day. They never stop barking. Then they do their business right there by the fence. You can smell it. It brings flies.”

  Frank said, “What do you want me to do about it? They’re dogs. They gotta do what they gotta do.”

  “But they never stop barking.”

  “Cheapest burglar alarm known to man,” Frank said, sipping from the beer can in his hand.

  “So we got burglars trying to break in all day long?” Jose said, trying to be funny.

  Frank didn’t laugh.

  Through his thirty-five years on the force, of seeing the dark things that people could do to each other, Jose had kept up his optimism, his hope. He thought people were essentially good eggs.

  “Listen,” he said, “could you chain ’em up, at least? They jump the fence sometimes. Do me that favor, will ya? I would sure appreciate it.”

  “Righto,” Frank said. “Don’t you worry.”

  Just that Labor Day, a few weeks before, Jose’s daughter had visited and told him to get out more. “Don’t just sit here in your own stink,” she’d said. “Use the backyard.” He told her about the dogs. “It’s your backyard, Pop. Screw the dogs.” So, trying his best to ignore the barking and the smell, he started up his old grill. He got out two two-pound burgers seasoned just the way his wife used to like it, garlic powder, lots of pepper. The phone had rung. He went inside to answer it. When he came back, he saw the butcher’s paper in the middle of the yard, shiny, empty. Over the short fence, the dogs, for once, were not barking. They licked their lips, looking at Jose to see what else he had to offer.

  A month after the talk on the stoop, Jose looked over the fence into his neighbor’s yard. The two dogs—mutts with a lot of German Shepherd blood—were connected on a long, thick chain, chained to each other but nothing else.

  And still they barked. And still the smell, still the flies.

  Frank had gotten the dogs to keep him company after his wife had divorced him and hotfooted it to Kissimmee. He had marched the mutts through the house and into the backyard, and they never went inside again. He had taken one of the doors off his old plastic shed and let them sleep in there. He liked to sit in his kitchen and watch them. He liked watching the dogs dig up and shit on anything that was left of his ex-wife’s flower garden.

  Soon after he got the chains for the dogs, Frank came back from a long walk around the neighborhood—what he liked to think of as his beat—and saw a brand-new, six-foot tall fence between his side and his neighbor Jose’s.

  “Son of bitch,” Frank said.

  Jose had splurged, spending more money than he could afford. Years ago, it had been fun to be neighbors with another fellow on the job, have parties, drinks. But really it had been their wives who were friends, never the men. Jose loved the new fence with its faux grass weave. It made him feel like he was in a forest. The dogs kept up the barking but now Jose didn’t have to see them—or smell them—as much. He wou
ld do some planting this week, but today he would finally sit out in his own backyard with the paper.

  First he made himself iced tea and a bologna sandwich. Then he remembered the lawn chair was in the basement. So he went downstairs to get it, and, look at that, there was a picture of his beautiful Cecilia on top of a box, one of the many he still had to go through and clean out like his daughter had been nagging him to do. So he found the lawn chair, opened it, and got one of the boxes, and under one of his wife’s old hats—it still smelled like her perfume—under it he found an envelope full of photographs. Cecilia at a party. Cecilia at a restaurant. He didn’t recognize any of the places. And then there was Cecilia with two men. Neither of which was him. A hotel room, it looked like. They were all naked. He recognized one of the men, the guy with the dried fig face. Tears fogged Jose’s thick glasses.

  Meanwhile, over at Frank’s, the dogs barked, louder than ever, feral, rasping barks. Two six packs in, Frank shut the blinds and cranked up the radio and took a nap. The alcohol in his system woke him up only a little while later. In the john, he realized something was missing and then he realized what it was: he couldn’t hear his dogs.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  Frank went out the back door and then saw something that surprised him, even after all the horror he had seen on the force. One dog hung over his side of the fence, tongue bloated, sticking way out. He walked to the fence and stood on a cinder block to look over. Sure enough, on the other end of the chain, the other dog hung down, tongue bloated, sticking way out.