Free Portland Noir by Kevin Sampsell Page B

all fear of the things he’d been so afraid of. Came to love the rides, the scarier the better. Of course, that’s why he went into the service, why he ended up in flight school, why he ended up in a plane over Cambodia, shot down where he wasn’t even supposed to be. Dorothy told me once it was all her fault. I took her in my arms, told her all that was her fault was how wonderful our son turned out to be. And now look, here he is, still wearing his parachute harness, coming home to us at last.
    “Come on, Jimmy. Help me find your mother.”
    “Where is she this time?”
    I point toward the mausoleum. He follows my finger and nods, and just then the clouds return, and the mausoleum fades into the night, its sandy face turning dark before my eyes.
    Jimmy can see anyway. He leads me and I follow. The trail rises and dips, follows the contour of the bluff. I think I’m doing well with the tricky footing for an old man. Then I realize Jimmy is carrying me.
    No, he’s stopped walking and now he’s the one who’s pointing. We’re very close to the mausoleum. Up ahead, standing against the building where Jimmy’s ashes are stored, where my ashes will be stored, where—I remember now—Dorothy’s ashes are stored, I see my wife smiling. She is leaning back against the wall just under the legs of that giant painted-blue heron.
    The wind rises. The clouds unveil the moon again and the building lights up. But no one is there after all. No one and nothing but a wall on which a hundred-foot-tall heron is preparing to fly toward heaven.

THE SLEEPER
    BY D AN D EWEESE
Highway 30
    1
    A t 2 a.m. I woke up and drove to the distribution station, a humid concrete bunker behind a rolling metal door, just off a street of coffeehouses and boutiques in Northwest Portland which stood dark and empty at that hour. A thin layer of greasy newsprint ink covered every surface inside the station: it varnished the old wooden worktables to a dark sheen, fell in a sticky gauze over the obsolete headlines on the leftover papers stacked in the corners, and became waffle-shaped prints left by the deliverers’ shoes and boots on the wooden stairs that rose to the loft level, where the manager sat behind a plywood desk with an old black phone. The ink also stained the deliverers’ fingers, and showed as dark smudges on their faces where they wiped their foreheads or scratched their chins or cheeks, and it especially streaked the sink beneath the cracked and spattered mirror in the little bathroom, where a roll of paper towels lay on the floor in place of toilet paper.
    2
    The manager—wincing, pale, middle-aged, with tightly curled hair that rose into a ragged afro—looked down over the deliverers as they inserted ads, folded and slipped the papers into plastic bags, and stacked the bagged papers in shopping carts. He introduced himself as Carl, and pressed a piece of worn cardstock paper grimed with newsprint into my hand. Smeared fingerprints laced the edges of the card, surrounding the handwritten directions to my route. The delivery addresses were written in large block letters, and between the addresses were smaller printed directives that mentioned which streets to turn on and how far to go until the next capital letters. Below us, deliverers pushed their loaded carts out the garage door to dump their papers into their sagging backseats or rusted truck beds, while others returning pushed their carts back into place so they could fill them again.
    “You understand this is a seven-day-a-week job?” Carl asked. I said yes, I was fine with it. “I’m strapped tonight,” he said. “Think you can try it on your own right off the bat?” I said I didn’t see why not.
    And so the first night was a disaster of missed addresses, cursing, and driving in circles.
    3
    Things got better after that, though. With every newspaper I threw those first weeks, I improved my accuracy and efficiency as I drove the deserted industrial streets of my route,