But now I was at her father’s car lot, standing under a wet gray sky. No other customers were on the lot and the place looked decidedly unprosperous. I crossed over to the office and climbed the steps. It was impossible that Hector would know that Dolores and Maria were living with me, but still I felt a quietly urgent beating of my heart, knowing that it takes more physical courage to assault a large dog than it does to attack a man. I stepped nervously to the door.
“Anybody here?”
“Come in!” came a voice.
Inside, three men watched the Yankees play Oakland on the West Coast—two heavyset older men, both Hispanic, and a younger one: Hector. I had no doubt about it. He was shorter and far more handsome than I expected, dressed in a silk tie, loosely knotted on this steamy day, with a gold chain around his neck. He hadn’t shaved that morning. He glanced at me, perhaps sensing my attention, his eyes full of derision for fools. I eased inside the trailer with the bored look of a half-interested customer arranged on my face, distributing my attention to all three men, only incidentally glancing at Hector. The older man sitting behind a desk pulled his cigar out of his mouth and gave a small wet spit into a coffee can. Then he moved his red, discouraged eyes back to me. “Something I kin hep youse with, guy?” he said.
“I’m looking to see what kind of cars you might have.”
“In this rain?”
I shrugged.
He seemed to be listening to my voice. “You call a couple of days ago, yesterday maybe?”
Yes, I had, looking for Hector. But I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’m just out looking.”
“I’ll take you out.”
I wanted to be with Hector, alone.
“Tell you what,” I said, “I’d like a younger guy’s perspective, if you don’t mind. Nothing personal.”
The old guy nodded, relieved not to be wasting his time. “Sure. Hector here’ll take you out.”
Hector glanced up at me, then turned back toward the set. “Waitaminute, watch this—McGwire is gonna hit this motherfucker.”
We all stared at the set as the tall, powerfully built slugger came to the plate with million-dollar ease. He took two balls and a strike. I noticed a clean, large bandage on the side of Hector’s throat. His hair was slicked back and he gave a small grunt as he watched McGwire miss.
“Hector, why not show this man the merchandise? He come here to see a car, not you watchin’ television.”
“Waitaminute. I gotta see this.”
The man turned to me, and smiled. “We run a very professional operation, heh. But you’re gonna like our prices outside. We just ain’t had too many customers today, so we’re kind of runnin’ slow.”
I nodded. “No problem.”
McGwire fouled two away. Full count. On the third strike he crushed the ball, his torso spinning with oiled grace until his bat was wrapped around the other shoulder. The Yankees centerfielder waited for the ball, unconsciously punching his fist into his glove. Hector bent forward, watching. The centerfielder backpedaled and stuck his glove up at the wall to catch the ball.
“Ah, Jesus,” Hector said, leaning back. “Three fuckin’ inches.”
“Shit no, he didn’t even jump,” the other man argued. “He coulda jumped at least two feet. He was nowhere near a homer.”
“What kind of car you looking for?” Hector said to me quickly, finished with the baseball, sizing me up as a customer.
“Something dependable,” I answered, “easy to get around in—you know.”
“All right,” he exhaled without much enthuasiasm, “let’s go see what we got.” He stood, and there was that moment when we both realized how big we were in respect to each other. I was the taller, by a good four inches, but Hector’s shirt was tight against his chest. He had that kind of wiry strength you see in a welterweight boxer, ropy arms, narrow waist, stronger than size would indicate, tough and quick, with a mean confidence. He stuck out his hand. “Name’s Hector and I’m here to help you out, all right? You think you see something you like, let’s see if we can’t put something together, all right?” His voice had that quintessential Brooklyn confidence, the syllables thudding hard and tough—there’s a certain brutal poetry to it. Hector fingered a gold ring that circled the pinkie on his left hand. “You work with me on the car and I’ll work with you on the price.”
The rain had eased and we walked down the wooden steps.
“What’re you lookin’ to spend?” he asked me.
“Actually maybe a couple of thousand, twenty-five hundred.”
“So you’re lookin’ used, then. Very used. I was thinkin’ maybe you wanted a new car. We got a few of them, actually, basically almost new.”
“Do I look like a guy who can pop for a new car?”
He waved his hands. “Far’s I can see, anybody can pop for anything. You never know. I had a guy last week, he look like a fuckin’ crack addict, I mean he smelled bad, you know what I mean, bad, and he come in here and I asked him what he wants and he said let me have that Town Car, and before I could start talking to him about the price, he pulled out a wad of bills that was like three inches thick.”
“Well, in my case, you know I can only go up to about twenty-five hundred.”
“Got it, guy.”
We walked over to a row of cars. With the prices on the windshield, there wasn’t much to talk about. He watched me look at the cars.
“You from around here?” Hector asked. “I mean the neighborhood, or Bay Ridge, or what?” The question meant, of course, You’re a white guy and you’re not Italian or working-class Irish and you don’t speak like a guy who buys used cars.
I didn’t bother to look back at him. “Not too far away.”
“You got a regular job?”
I nodded.
“Good credit?”
“Sure.”
“I know that’s personal,” Hector said, “but you wouldn’t believe some of the customers we got, we got to run a credit check on everybody, just to see, you know. I can tell you that right now.”
“No problem.”
“Some girl come in here couple months ago and bought a old Impala. She looked okay, all kinds of diamonds and shit on her hands. We took a personal check. It cleared but then we got a call.” Hector laughed. “Turned out her and her old man, they broke up like three months before and she had a bunch a his old checks.”
I inspected car after car.
“You going on your way to work or is it for weekends?”
“Weekends.” We stared at a couple of old Chevys and Toyotas. “These are kind of small, I was looking for full size.”
“We got a nice old Caddy back there. How big are you looking? You got a family and all?”
His question presented an opportunity. I looked at the ground, with what I hoped was a glum expression. “No—I’m not married anymore.”
“Yeah, I hear you there.”
“My wife ran out a couple of months ago,” I said. “She left and she took the car and so that’s why I’m here.”
“What kind of car?”
“It was a ’90 Taurus. I was pretty happy with it. But I got to go somewhere down the scale. I’m making payments still on that car and also to her for the kids.”
Lies, my father used to preach, have no legs. But here I was, spouting them effortlessly. Hector started searching for a key among a couple of dozen he had on a chain. “My old lady left me, man, just like that, and she took my daughter so I know what you’re sayin’. Wish the fuck I knew where they was at.”
“You going to look for them?”
“I’m going to do something when I see my wife again, I’ll tell you that.”
I looked at him, and at the white bandage on his neck. “I don’t know how you deal with it,” I said. “I mean seriously, it’s fucked me up, you know?”
He gave an easy laugh and it suddenly seemed that he didn’t care what had happened to his wife and daughter. “Shit, there’s a lotta fish in the sea, man, lot of
lonely ladies out there, you know? This place you got all kinds of lonely ladies walkin’ around. Lotta fish. You gotta keep like a shark that’s gotta keep moving to stay alive. I just keep moving.” But then his voice quieted. “But when it was good, it was good, you know? I mean . . .” He broke off his sentence and unlocked the Cadillac. We both got in. “This is a fine piece a car. I can tell you that right now. Heavy, with good power. The power train is still under warranty, incidentally. Tires are good, too.”
“Why’s the price so low?”
“The backseat is torn up.”
So it was. The inside of the car was perfect except that the backseat had been slashed down to the springs and backboard. “Why didn’t they just fix it up?”
“The guy used to own it is dead”—Hector shrugged—“so he can’t do it. And nobody here wants to fix it up. Cost a lot for that upholstery job.”
“What happened?”
“The way I heard it was somebody was mad at somebody so they messed it up with a box-cutter. I say just throw an old blanket over it and it’ll be fine. The outside looks good and it rides nice. Want to go for a drive?”
“Why not?”
He gave me the keys and we got in. I slipped the key in the ignition.
“You don’t mind, maybe you could put on your shoulder belt there, guy,” Hector said. “It ain’t my business but I tell everybody that. My dad, he didn’t have one and he got clipped by some fucks in a mob garbage truck, thing just clipped him with one corner going the other way and he went right through the fuckin’ glass, seven years ago, and the lawyer said don’t try to sue them, and my moms, she still cries every day . . .”
“I’m sorry,” I said, stunned by his concern for my safety.
“Ahh,” Hector waved his hand, “it’s just one of those . . . now, all right, this is the thing”—he pointed to the car’s engine—“it’s heavier and smoother. Put the power windows up and you’re not going to hear a fuckin’ pin.”
I pulled out onto the steamy wetness of Fifth Avenue. The rain had stopped and the wind from off the bay was drying the streets and tops of cars. We cruised by the squat two-story brick row homes, past old Italian ladies sitting on newspapers out on their low stoops, tonguing their dentures, watching the street. Then I turned left onto Fourth Avenue, the crazy speedway that travels into South Brooklyn like a long needle bent twice. We rode the lights for twenty or thirty blocks, sliding past walls of graffiti: BOOSTER SHOT, ZEUS, SLICK “D” & FUNGO, XL, CHILLER Z, BUGMAN, MR. TORQUE. A truck next to a warehouse was selling wooden boxes of grapes out of the back.
“They’re gonna make wine. Lotta these older wops make their own wine,” Hector said, narrating the drive yet staring past the boxes of grapes, bright dark eyes focused on the far shore of his thoughts, his face relaxed and not set in expectation of conflict. He possessed a sweet innocence in that moment and I glimpsed the younger man he had been, the younger face that Dolores no doubt had loved.
And then he turned to me and back to the task of hawking a second- or third-hand Cadillac with a sliced-up rear seat. “You like it?” he barked out with friendly aggression. “Ride smooth, don’t it?”
“Yeah.”
We drove on and I started to wind through the Forties, where the streets were narrow and you had to be sure you didn’t hit kids or guys working on their cars, usually with a big radio coming on a wire off the battery or from extension cords out of the house. Guys underneath the cars with a speed-wrench and a beer. More graffiti ribboned along the walls in colored loops and slashes: TREY-SIX, NYNEX, STRATE, JAM MY ZAM, TENSION. The ubiquitous Brooklyn block: newsstand, barber, toy store, bodega, video store. And in most of them, the Corporation was somehow making money—even in the barber shop, where the clients might even later buy some of the music they heard while getting a haircut, songs recorded by artists under the various labels of the Corporation’s music division. Up on Eighth Avenue, at the light, I glanced into some of the Chinese sweatshops, where dozens of women worked under fluorescent lights at a sewing machine next to mountains of pieces of cloth. Slave labor. What is it that is so perversely fascinating about differences in class? The poor, of course, study the rich, can hardly avoid not doing so in our culture, but the rich and well off and “professional class” also study the poor, if only for comfort and morbid fascination. The Corporation’s various publications pumped out endless articles on the poor and how violent they are and how their babies die at higher rates and how guns and drugs wipe them out at high rates—the whole line. Well, here I was. The people didn’t look so bad. No Manhattan tension on the street. They looked more relaxed than the people I knew. “It’s hard to make decent money, nowadays,” I speculated.
“Man, I hear ya there—I know that. The guy who owns the lot is a hard-headed Guinea, doesn’t pay shit,” Hector answered. “All I been wanting is a few numbers, just give me a few numbers. I got four of them right once and won fifty-seven bucks. All I want is just a million off the lottery. Can tell you that right now. Get my wife back and take care of everybody, then invest the rest.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I’d buy me a laundry in a good neighborhood and import some Chinese,” he laughed. “I’d let my moms run the place. I had my own business once, flooring, the mob fucks got me. Hate them bastards. Ahh, turn left here and we’ll work our way back. Rides smooth, don’t it? No, my moms, she don’t know I play the numbers. I play it a lot but ain’t no gambler on it. I had dreams of winning it, though. I had it, you know?”
I laughed with him, hoping to seem at ease. We passed a wall where a teenage boy was bent over at the waist, face to the bricks, while on the other side of the street, three other boys took turns throwing a rubber handball at his rear end.
“What’s that?” I said.
“That?” Hector said. “That’s pooty. You know pooty? He lost the handball game so now they get to try to hit him in the asshole.”
We drove farther.
“See those four garage doors?” Hector pointed. “The green ones.”
It was a nondescript warehouse with pull-down metal doors and nobody outside. “Looks closed.”
“They got probably something like a million bucks’ worth of cars in there. Mercedes, Lexus, BMW, cars from Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island . . .” He glanced at me for my reaction. “Stolen. They’re gonna chop them up. Those doors are closed all day, every day, except maybe from like three A.M. to three-thirty A.M. Or sometimes they just stick them on a boat somewhere.”
“Some serious money involved there,” I said. “Big money.”
“Yeah, I learned you don’t mess with the big money.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, but that’s another story.”
The car nosed along another block.
“Actually, man, I missed my big money,” Hector went on, in a confidential voice, still looking ahead. “I coulda had it.”
“How?”
He smiled with what seemed to be real sadness. I suddenly realized, strangely, that I liked him. “I was in the army, man. Down there in Georgia. I joined, you know, to get the school money and to learn computers. Some guy stabbed me and I never sued. I coulda sued and all.”
I hit a few red fights on purpose to stretch out the conversation, and with my prompting, and with Hector comfortably nipping at the small flask he had pulled out of his coat pocket, the story came out. In Georgia, during the first few weeks of basic training at an army base he could no longer name, Hector and another recruit, a local, had gotten into a fight outside a whorehouse. The other man had pulled a long-handled fish knife out of the back of his pants and lunged at Hector’s heart. At one of the lights, he showed me how he had crouched and swung his hand up to protect himself, and the fish knife—a poor weapon to use for a forward thrust—had skittered off the meat of Hector’s thumb and caught the underside of his wrist. The sharp, serrated blade, usually used to saw through the spine sockets of thirty-pound yellowtail tuna, cut into the tendons and arteries
of Hector’s wrist below his right hand. The bleeding was immense, and when he woke up, the army surgeon was explaining the possibilities of microsurgery.
“I coulda sued them but I was young and foolish. It was between us two guys, not the army and me. They said I could get my hand fixed up and get out of the army if I wanted, since I’d only been there two weeks. So I left.”
“How’s your grip?” I asked, thinking of the manual work at his cable-installing job.
“You tell me.” He shot his hand out and grabbed the thick part of my arm above the elbow and crushed it for barely a moment.
“Jesus.” I was almost in pain. “Nothing wrong with that.” I was shocked that he was touching me. It seemed proof that we were connected, that his child and wife were sleeping under my roof.
“Yeah,” Hector went on, rubbing his hands now, “I was getting a check each month, not too much, you know, just a little something that I always gave to my moms, but then a paper came and the money didn’t come no more.”
I fiddled with the radio to see if it worked. The baseball game came on. I listened for a minute then thought of something. “Was that game on cable back there at the lot?” I asked innocently.
“You mean the TV in the trailer?”
“Yeah.”
“No, just the regular station,” said Hector.
“I’ve been thinking about getting it. Cable. Everybody seems to have it now.”
“You should, it’s pretty decent.”
“But you have to buy a whole lot of lines, right?”
“But they’re good,” Hector said. “You got Cinemax and the Disney Channel, and HBO, and the SportsChannel and CNN, which I never watch, and everything. And in Manhattan they got Channel J where all the girls do all that nasty shit.” Hector laughed. “I mean, I turned that on the other day, there was this pregnant girl lying on her back with some guy pissin’ on her. Then she says call this number to talk to her. All you could see was the splash on her face, you know? I mean, it’s fuckin’ sick. I install the lines during the week.”
Bodies Electric Page 19
