Free Kansas City Noir by Steve Paul Page B

Plaza and north toward Midtown.
    I laced up a pair of my old army boots and went out front with a can of beer so that I could measure the snow for myself with a good walk. I peered up into the falling snow and imagined myself an animal in the wild. A buck, a horse, a pig, a fox. I wanted to see the stars. I wanted to feel placed in my heart. But I couldn’t see them because there was still too much light in the other parts of the city.
    I threw the beer can toward the door of the apartment building and walked toward the Art Institute. It felt good to walk in the snow with my breath blooming in front of me. The campus was dark from the outage. I had wanted to see the lights that usually guided someone across campus. School was out for the winter, so it was quiet. I crossed to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and stood in the middle of the large lawn. A few cars hummed past in the street. Mine were the first prints in the snow.
    “Where now?” I whispered to the sky. I took a step and turned myself in a circle, forcing a smile. “Who now?”
    There are days we must feel as far from ourselves as the ocean feels from the moon.
    Let me admit it here, I missed her when she was not around. Yes, we had parted ways, but we had never resolved anything. She said as much. Two weeks together had left us shattered against the rocks of the other. But I wanted more shattering. I wanted a year of her. I wanted a year and a day, at least.
    Let me admit this as well, Alice was never her real name.
    Boys, note this well: women make poor receptacles for your dreams.
    Girls, note this well: men make poor receptacles for your dreams.
    We are not chalices to be filled with hope.
    Yet I long for someone to prove me wrong.
     
    * * *
     
    Her father killed forty-five women in ten years across the Pacific Northwest. My father murdered fourteen women across eight years in upstate New York and into Canada. The towns had names and so did the victims, but I will leave them out in this account, because so far as I know there are no ghosts haunting those towns. So let them sleep where they may, those ghosts.
    I joined the army shortly after my father’s arrest. Part of me wanted to get away from the media. Another part simply wanted to see the world. It was only later that I recognized what I really wanted was a sense of atonement for crimes I never committed. I moved to Kansas City after spending a few years watching the dirty work of empire up close in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was in and out of a marriage almost immediately. Then I read the article in the paper about the convention and so I went, and so I met her.
    She was smart and shy, beautiful, of course. And then a week passed and everything that had felt right about our being together started to feel wrong. Once again, we were owned by our guilt for reasons we couldn’t explain.
    There was a documentary on about her father the other day. It’s always returning to us, the past.
     
    * * *
     
    I drove through the empty, snow-covered streets of downtown to the art house cinema near 20th and Grand. I’d worked at that cinema the summer I moved to the city. I think she knew this and it must have been why she invited me to go with her.
    I’d always liked working at the art house for the owner, Patrick. The theater sold PBR by the can for a dollar and Patrick didn’t mind those days we drank a few through our shifts. The theater also had a nice old wooden bar off the balcony where Patrick and I used to sip scotch with our PBR while we listened to the sound of the movie coming through the curtains. I left the job when the fall semester started at UMKC.
    She’d invited me to see Breathless . I had seen it before, but couldn’t remember it other than the gesture of his thumb rubbing his lips. I couldn’t remember whether love was celebrated or destroyed in the film. Or whether love was some vacant cause.
    Patrick smiled when he saw me. He opened a can of PBR and handed it to me. I took a sip and