Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  Her father was a man who heated beans on the pilot light of the stove to save a few pennies.

  “It’s not important,” I said softly.

  “Tell me, so I know, all right?”

  “It’s not your business, Dolores.”

  This made her furious. “Oh, and it wasn’t your business when I told you just about every last thing about myself, about how some guy raped me on the Brooklyn Bridge and everything?” She sank down onto the chair, the fingers of her right hand pulled together in a point that supported her forehead. Her shoulders shook, just a little. She looked up at me then, her eyes mad and wet. “You don’t understand how hard some people got to work just to make a couple of hundred bucks,” she said. “I mean, Hector, my husband, some of the things he did to make money . . .”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “What do you mean yes?” she snapped. “You don’t know anything, you’re just some rich—white—asshole like some people are always talking about. I never really understood it, like, how unfair it was.”

  We didn’t speak for a few minutes.

  “I’m going out,” Dolores announced.

  “C’mon. It’s ten-thirty.”

  But she was already heading down the stairs.

  “Will you listen if Maria wakes up?” she called back.

  “Sure, but—”

  “I’m going to be a while.”

  I followed her down the stairs. “When will you get back?”

  “Maybe two hours.”

  “I can’t ask where you’re going?” I said in exasperation.

  “No.”

  She closed the door on the way out, and I worried immediately that she was going to go see Hector, that she would call him for some sort of rendezvous. But how? As of that morning, Hector didn’t know where she was. I couldn’t leave the house to follow her; if anything happened to Maria while I was gone I would never forgive myself, nor would Dolores. I looked out the front door. She was halfway down the block. It was long past dark, when the streets of Brooklyn change, new populations creeping out from the shadows. I stood at my door worrying. Across the street a tall, slender homeless man foraged through the cans.

  I stepped outside. “Hey,” I called.

  He lifted his head and looked around. “Yeah, who?”

  “Come here, I want to talk a minute.”

  He saw me and slowly pushed his shopping cart across the street. When he drew close to my gate I walked down the stone steps. “You want to make some money?”

  “I’m makin’ money this minute, soon as I find me my next can.”

  In the lights I saw that his face was cave-cheeked with ruin.

  “No,” I said, “I mean some real money, say a hundred bucks.”

  He squinted at me in contemplation. “Sound dangerous. I don’t do that kind of work.”

  “No,” I said, “this is easy.”

  “Why you payin’ so much?”

  “Because I’m stupid. See that woman?” I pointed down the street. “She just—there—she just turned the corner.”

  “I seen her.”

  “I want you to follow her and find out where she goes.”

  “That could be anywhere.”

  “I think she’s going to stay on foot. No car. Just walking.”

  “She in trouble?”

  “No, not necessarily. But it’s private business.”

  “Private enough t’get me shot?”

  “You follow her, and I’ll give you fifty bucks now and fifty when you come back.”

  “That could be all night, my man.”

  “No, she told me she’ll be back in three hours or less. And if she’s not, then you come back in three hours.”

  “Got the fifty?”

  I opened my wallet and handed the bills to him. “What are you going to do with your cart?”

  “Take it with me.”

  “You’re going to push it along? Why not leave it here, in the bushes here.”

  “ ’Cause some guy like me come along an’ snatch it, that’s why.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be back.”

  “Come back before she does, just see where she goes.”

  “You got it.” And off he went, with new purpose in his stride, pushing the shopping cart back out onto the street, its contents rattiing and flapping. I went back inside, wondering if I’d just thrown away fifty bucks.

  But I hadn’t. Almost two hours later I heard a discreet knocking on the door. I opened the inner door and looked through the glass. It was the same man and I slipped outside.

  “So?”

  “That is a strange woman,” he muttered with wild excitement, and I could see he’d been drinking. “I go just like you tellin’ me, an’ that woman can walk, she can’t even slow down for thirty blocks, an’ then she goes into this lounge up out there on Sixth Avenue an’ maybe Twenty-fourth Street, right?” His face was shiny. “An’ so I think that’s the deal. She’s gonna slip into one of these places an’ meet some dude an’ that was what you wanted me to find out on her. I’m thinkin’ that you was pretty slick to put the spyin’ eye on her like that, I was congratulatin’ you an’ me,’cause I got some money out of it there, you know, an’ I slipped into a liquor store an’ bought me a pint an’ I figured I’d come back here, get my other fifty, but then I see she’s comin’ out an’ I expect some sugar daddy be somewhere ’round, somewhere good, right, I mean, I been watching her butt go back an’ forth for forty-five minute, but there ain’t no dude, just another woman, some woman what got some kinda big ole ass like a Sunday turkey, an’ they talk an’ I can’t hear nothing, I’m on the other side of the street—cool, you know.”

  I leaned back against the doorjamb, worried now. “All right,” I said. “Then what?”

  “Then she starts walking again an’ it ain’t back here. No sir. An’ I’m like, shit, this ain’t over yet. She got some kind of bag in her hand now, not too big, a shopping bag. So then we start off again but this time she’s going down to Fifth Avenue an’ Twenty-third Street, in there, an’ I’m thinkin’ so she’s goin’ to meet the dude at his house, maybe she just called him from the lounge. It’s gonna be some dude with some money or crack or somethin’ because she’s a good-lookin’ woman, right?” He cackled. “I mean that’s why the fuck anybody cares where the fuck she at, right?”

  “Where’d she go next?” I asked tersely, not interested in his analysis, but whether Dolores was safe.

  “We go to that cem’tery right there on Twenty-second Street, you know, that Greenwood Cem’tery where they got so many people buried?”

  I knew it—rolling acres of tombstones, shadowed by many old trees, surrounded by a high spiked iron fence.

  “—an’ I’m thinkin’ I ain’t goin’ in there, it’s dark an’ them places is full of guys with guns an’ shit, some serious shit goes down in that cem’tery sometimes, you know, because they got all those freshly dug graves an’ shit an’ I heard tell some dudes talkin’ ‘bout how you can put someone in there an’ then never find ‘em once the grass grows over it an’ nobody want to go lookin’ for a body in somebody else’s grave ‘cause you gotta get a court order an’ shit, so I’m thinking damn if she ain’t goin’ to go messin’ around in there. I mean it’s got a chain out on the main gate but there’s gotta be a hundret ways to get in where the fence be broke, an’ so she goes in one of those! Like it’s the fuckin’ supermarket. An’ fuck! I’m thinkin’ this is one motherfuckin’ brave bitch, she be goin’ messin’ around in a cem’tery full of murderers an’ ghosts an’ shit an’ so now I can’t take it no more, I’m gettin’ worried an’ shit, thinkin’ I’ma lose her, so I ditch the cart in the bushes an’ start following her, quiet.”

  His face was bright with excitement and he drew a deep breath. “She know just where she goin’. She got it figured, right? We ain’t in the section for the rich graves with all them statues an’ tiny houses made out of marble, it’s the poor sec
tion where the graves is small an’ then we go to where the graves is flat an’ about the size of a piece of paper, an’ you know that’s where it can’t get no poorer than that. You be poorer than that, you dead, right? Course you dead anyway, heh! An’ then I see some guys way off, one of them got a lighter on, doing crack or some such shit, killin’ somebody or somethin’, an’ I’m thinkin’ so she goin’ to see them an’ they’re goin’ catch me an’ kill my ass. But your woman just go real slow like an’ then find the thing she’s lookin’ for an’ it’s one of them tiny poor people’s graves, an’ she stops there an’ kneels down an’ I’m maybe thirty feet away, quiet you know, an’ she lights these little candles an’ starts chanting an’ something, like a moan. Sort of like she’s sad an’ sorta like she’s gettin’ fucked. An’ then these other guys, they see something is goin’ on an’ they’s laughin’ an’ I can tell they been drinkin’ some, the way they was laughin’ an’ so I take my hit off’m my bottle, you know, an’ then they start comin’ over like they gonna fuck somebody up an’ then your woman there says, ‘Don’t mess with me, I’m praying.’ Somethin’ like that. Like you better be able to say it right the first time or else there ain’t goin’ be no other time. They goin’ laugh an’ stick you quick. She said it good, but these niggers think that’s real funny. That’s the funniest thing they ever heard an’ so they come closer with theirflashlightsan’ shit an’ then they get close enough see she’s a woman an’ you know they thinkin’ about rapin’ her. I mean, I been thinkin’ about it for a hour. But then she pulls somethin’ out of the bag she’s got an’ it be alive! It’s a bird or a chicken or somethin’ an’ that stops them an’ they see she’s got a little knife an’ she screams somethin’ in Spanish an’ then cuts that bird’s head off an’ throws the body up an’ it starts runnin’ like, without its motherfuckin’ head. An’ I’m fucked up! I’m drinkin’ now, boy, an’ these fuckin’ homeboys see that an’ they fucked up bad by that an’ they get the fuck out of there, go runnin’ off, go kiss they momma’s tit, an’ I hear a couple of gunshots like they think they’re shootin’ at the chicken or somethin’, an’ then mister I just got the fuck out of there myself an’ I don’t know if she saw me or what all, I just want my fifty dollars so’s I can get me some rest.”

  I stared at him in disbelief.

  “That’s it, my man.”

  “Is she coming back?” I asked anxiously.

  “Back any minute. Now, that fifty.”

  I gave it to him. He’d earned it, too. “You’ll get some food with that?” I asked hopefully. He drew a greasy, blackened piece of twine from within his clothing. On the end of it was a small bag and he quickly secreted the money in the bag and the bag back in his clothes.

  “Food?” he answered. “I’m goin’ to get me some steak, boy.”

  Dolores came back not long after that, turning the key in the front door lock. She walked in and without looking at me dropped onto the couch, her dark hair wild and damp, her skin flushed, eyes sullen. I sat in a chair across from her clutching the arms, not ready to talk to her just yet, unnerved by how different she looked, wild and tough, clearly the daughter of a sturdy Dominican woman. She was brazenly disheveled, as if she had just been with a lover, though I knew differently. And in that moment, the antique mantel clock ticking politely, Dolores raised her dark eyes to mine.

  “What’re you looking at?” she spat.

  “I know where you went,” I told her.

  Her lips became a bitter half smile. “I doubt it.”

  “The cemetery.”

  Dolores’s dark eyes burned at me. “You left Maria?”

  “No, I didn’t leave her.” I kept my voice as even and reasonable as possible. “I had a homeless guy follow you. He told me the whole thing, about the chicken, the whole thing.”

  “You had no fucking right to do that.”

  “He told me you visited a grave.”

  Dolores stared at me, then let her eyes drift past me.

  “My father,” she finally said in a low voice.

  “Oh.”

  “Okay?” she asked irritably, cutting her eyes back at me.

  “Did you need to go at night?”

  “I wanted to.”

  “You could have been hurt. I don’t want you running around at night like that. You’ve got Maria here, and—”

  “And what?”

  “And I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  She contemplated this. Her face didn’t soften. “I could have gone out dancing,” she said scornfully. “That’s what I should have done.”

  “I’d be jealous,” I said.

  “You and Hector.” There was nothing but disgust on her face. I realized then that unlike many women, she didn’t fear men, not at all. Perhaps this was what I found so exciting.

  “He’s pretty jealous?” I said.

  “He knows what I’ll do,” Dolores told me, running her fingers through her hair. “I did some things, you know. He didn’t know about them, but he knew about them, if you know what I mean.”

  “For instance?”

  “You don’t want to know,” she said again, her voice laced with meanness. “It’s not like the ladies at your office, it’s not like your wife.”

  I said nothing.

  “You want the worst?”

  “Sure.”

  She checked my expression to see if I was serious. “I guess if we’re going to be hanging out together, you should know some stuff. But you’re not going to like it.”

  I was tired and strung out from work and fearful about what awaited me the next day: I had to plan the arrival of the NewMedia project, check with DiFrancesco, figure out the meaning of the Chairman’s presence at the computer system meeting. And I still hadn’t told Dolores that Hector was looking for her. Things were getting ahead of me. But I understood that Dolores was ready to cut new ground with me, and I felt a headlong intoxication at the mystery of her. “Tell me, Dolores,” I said. “I can take it.”

  “We better go up on the roof with some of that wine,” Dolores said, “if you really want to hear it.”

  “I did some things I shouldn’t have done. I don’t regret doing them, you know? But still I shouldn’t have done it. This was when Hector and me were not getting along so well. I used to think Hector was the strong one.” The wind was whipping Dolores’s hair. “I used to think I was lucky I got him. He was so strong and macho and confident, you know. But I got it wrong. I was too young to see it. That was his best, right? When Hector was twenty-four, he was the best he was ever going to be.” She smiled. “He used to fuck me so much, it was like breathing. We even did it three weeks before the baby came, even though the doctor, he said no. But later we had some little problems.”

  “What?”

  “Just . . . money and everything. He was having trouble keeping a job and was unhappy a lot of the time. He was messing around with some girls who hung out at this bar nearby. I don’t think he was really doing anything. But I was pissed, you know, and he wasn’t paying much attention to me. I was just kind of unsatisfied with everything.”

  She had been shopping in the corner bodega, Dolores said, when she noticed a couple of fire engines outside an apartment house down the street and walked toward the scene, looking for smoke or flames. When she got near, it was apparent that there was no real emergency, just a bunch of Irish firemen standing around in their fire pants and big rubber boots turned down at the knee so you could read their names written on the inside while the fire chief checked everything out. One of the firemen was disconnecting a hose from a hydrant and she asked him what had happened.

  “Ahh, nothing much,” he responded, not looking up. “They got some old guy smoking in bed. Just a smolder. Didn’t do nothing.”

  The fireman had taken off the heavy yellow rubber coat and was working in his blue T-shirt with NYFD in white letters across his back and Dolores watched the large muscles in his arms. And a funny jolt of desire ran through her: she realized
that she wanted him to do something to her. He pulled the hose off the hydrant.

  “Just a little fire, huh?” she said.

  The fireman stood up. He was pure Brooklyn Irish, big all over, someday a man with a gut but now a twenty-seven-or twenty-eight-year-old with thick short hair and eyes blue as a mailbox. He looked at her. “Yeah. What’s your name?”

  “Dolores.”

  “Well, Dolores, you want to fuck?”

  She looked at him in shock.

  “That’s the real question here, ain’t it? I can’t talk now but that’s the question, far as I can see. You’re a hell of a good-lookin’ woman. I drive by this corner when I get off my shift, at ten o’clock, so if you wanna meet me here then, let’s go.”

  There it was. As simple as that. The fireman went back to work. He was clearly an asshole, Dolores thought, but there was something about him, perhaps a little like Hector used to be, and she wanted sex so badly. And the fireman was white. And he couldn’t have AIDS because everybody knew they didn’t let gays be firemen. And so that night she arranged for her girlfriend to watch the baby, and to tell Hector she was out if he came home before she did. She didn’t really give a damn what he thought. And she stood on the right corner at ten o’clock and after a few minutes a Trans Am pulled up and flashed its lights. She got in and they didn’t say much. He drove her to his home, a split-level on Staten Island, and they had some drinks in his living room and then he came over to her and turned out the lights. She worried he might hit her but he didn’t. His name was Patrick, and he gave her a hard kiss and they started taking off their clothes. . . .

  Dolores’s voice filled the dark air above us, seemingly existing of its own accord, a voice of anger and frustration and appetite, and I wondered what it was that had driven Dolores to betray her husband so casually. I still did not understand why her marriage to Hector had disintegrated so quickly but before I could ask about that, Dolores continued. “We did the usual stuff, you know, but then he wanted to put it in my ass. Hector never did that, he said it was bad luck. And I thought that was going to hurt, and it did hurt a little, but he was careful. And then he reached for this little drawer next to the bed and pulled out . . . one of those long rubber penises, a dildo, you know, and he had me on my hands and knees with him going in and out of my ass and then he asked me if I wanted the other thing. And I didn’t know. I was afraid it was going to hurt . . . I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. He said he knew what he was doing and that it wouldn’t hurt. If it hurt we would stop. So he reached around, you know, and he did it, both at the same time, the dildo in front, and I have to admit it was something . . . it was something I’d never felt before, both at once like that. I just sort of shut my eyes and I was biting my lip. It was . . . so strange, it hurt but it was good. And it was so strange that a Catholic girl like me was doing this, and I was married and a mother. I sort of hated myself and I sort of didn’t. And later when he drove me home he asked me if I liked it and I said I guess so and he wanted to know if I’d do it with him and his two friends if I looked at them and said they were okay. And I was thinking, did I get hurt tonight? No. I felt a little weird. But I felt kind of happy too, like I discovered something that I wasn’t supposed to do and it wasn’t so bad . . . I wasn’t hurt or beat up, right? And so I told the guy okay I’ll consider it. And so maybe a week later I got out of the house again without Hector knowing and this guy Patrick picked me up and we drove to his house again. And his two friends were there, Irish guys like him, but they were cops. And married, too. And I looked at them and thought they didn’t look so bad. I mean they were clean, not fat and disgusting. And they lowered the shades and we started to drink and one of the guys started to do some coke but I said no thanks . . . and they had some music on, the guy who plays the saxophone, you know, Kenny G., and Patrick asked me to strip and I did. Then the other guys did too and I told them if they were rough with me then forget it, I didn’t care if there were three of them. Not to mention their guns on the table. So everybody took off their clothes and we did it, you can imagine, and the guys switched around a lot and I remember somewhere in there I laughed and they asked why and I said because we’re all Catholics, that’s why, and they laughed, too. Ha, ha, we’re all Catholics. Then they went at it pretty good and they called me a spick and . . . it got, you know, it got a little rough. But I remember that even though it was bad, I was bad, I liked all those men being on me. I kind of expected they would be mean but they weren’t mean. They didn’t hurt me. They said some things, you know, but that was really for the others and it was exciting for them and we all sort of knew it was going to be the only time. I mean, I know it was degrading, like when I was on my back