Denver Noir by Cynthia Swanson

Author:Cynthia Swanson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books

NORTHSIDE NOCTURNE

BY MANUEL RAMOS

Northside

I didn’t give it a second thought when the young white man was shot outside Gaetano’s at Tejon and Thirty-eighth. Way I saw it, that wasn’t news. People been shot in the Northside for years, didn’t matter that the Chicano barrio was quickly turning into something else, something whiter, something with more money.

I figured the dead guy was new to the neighborhood, part of what Petey, my cousin who went to college, said was gentrification, and that he’d crossed the wrong homeboy. Most of the time I didn’t understand Petey and this was one of those times. All I knew was that the Northside was changing, and white people were buying up houses, tearing them down, and building two or three ugly boxes on lots where gente like my Aunt Julia had lived in one house for fifty years and more, and where she’d raised five children, four cats, and about a dozen parakeets.

Some of us natives stayed, we weren’t totally gone, but no denying it was different. For years, brown had outnumbered white on the Northside, but now raza was back to being a minority. I didn’t recognize the old hood, and I felt like a stranger in my hometown.

Change ain’t never easy, conflict and drama and that kind of bullshit, and even I’d tangled with a couple of the newcomers stepping out of one of the remodeled breweries after last call over on Thirty-second. The drunks were loud and rude and belligerent, and it looked like it was chingasos time until Petey stepped in, risking his pretty face, and calmed down me and the two bearded jerks.

The guy who crashed through Gaetano’s plate-glass window must’ve tried too hard to win the argument, and without Petey’s negotiation skills in play, it wasn’t hard to imagine that the situation spiraled out of control until someone said, Hell with it, and concluded that only a bullet through the throat could end the conversation.

Like I mentioned, I didn’t give it much thought. I’d learned long ago to mind my own fucking business. Not that I wanted to intrude. Not my style. Not anything I needed. I didn’t mingle with young white boys or old-school bangers with guns. But when a second young white guy was shot a week later, this time coming out of Chubby’s with a beef-and-bean special in his hand, I admit it gave me pause. It looked like someone had declared war on gentrification, and odds were that I knew that someone. I’d probably gone to Horace Mann Middle School with the dude, and if he hadn’t dropped out or checked into juvie or knocked up some shorty and was hiding out from her old man, we might’ve sat in the same row of desks in Mrs. Calabrese’s history class at North High.

The second shooting caught everyone’s attention. “The Denver Shooter” became the hot topic at family dinners or when we watched the Broncos games. Old friends I ran into had wild opinions and speculations about

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