Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  “Get up,” a young cop with a thick neck ordered. “Who are you? Got some ID?”

  Hector produced his wallet, which was thin, almost no money in it. Dolores felt the condemning looks of the other passengers.

  “What stop you get on at?” another cop said. The radio on his hip squawked.

  “We got on at DeKalb Avenue.”

  “Bullshit,” the cop said. “You’re lying.”

  “It’s true,” Dolores protested. “He’s my husband.”

  “I’m not lying, man.” Hector wrapped his fingers around the pole that standing subway riders hang on to. Next to the cop he was smaller, powerless. “We were downtown, shopping.”

  They barely glanced at Dolores.

  “Get off the train.” The young cop put his hand on Hector’s arm. “Get off the train and answer some questions.”

  “I didn’t do anything! Ask my wife. Ask these people,” Hector said louder, sweeping his arm toward all the passengers. “Ask them, ask any of them, I got on at DeKalb.”

  “It’s true, officer,” Dolores pleaded.

  “That right? Anybody see this man get on there?”

  The other riders stared balefully, stupefied idiots. No one answered. They could see the cops were agitated.

  “Hey, man,” Hector protested, “I been on this train for twenty minutes. I ain’t getting off the fuckin’—”

  The nightstick hit Hector’s fingers. The police grabbed him by both arms and pulled him out, knocking over the bag of groceries between his feet. On the platform, they pulled him up against a tiled wall. Dolores quickly carried the grocery bag out to the platform. The men surrounded Hector except for one, who faced her, barring her from getting closer.

  “Spread your feet wider than your shoulders, bend at the waist, hands on the wall, head down.”

  “I didn’t do—”

  “Head down!” The cops searched him, one of them shoving a nightstick deeply into his ass. Then the stick went around his neck. “Where’s the fucking gun? You threw it away, you asshole, you thought you could waste a cop and then just get on the subway, right? Where’s the gun?”

  “I didn’t do nothin’!” he screamed. The sound echoed down the platform, and other riders watched impassively through the scratched windows of the train. “Nothin’ !”

  “He didn’t do anything,” Dolores cried. “He’s my husband—”

  “You know what happens to cop killers, asshole,” one of the policemen said, his voice thick with menace and his breath hot against his ear. “Where’s the gun!”

  Hector screamed. “I didn’t do it! You got the wrong guy!”

  The nightstick came up between his legs.

  Hector gave a sickening cough of pain. They were hitting him. Dolores could see that one of the men had a hand to Hector’s neck.

  “Come on, asshole, give it up—”

  “The slip!” she cried. “You stupid men! The slip! Look at the slip!”

  The policemen were stunned for a moment.

  “The slip from the store. It’s in his front pocket.”

  “Hold it, Tommy,” one of the older cops said. “Check his pocket.” They pulled out a few dollars and change and the crumpled receipt that showed on it the amount of the purchase, the time, and the address of the grocery.

  “What stop did you say?”

  “DeKalb.”

  “The store is up there around the corner, Sergeant,” one of the men said, checking the street number on the receipt.

  “All right, give me the amount,” the cop questioned Hector. “What was it?”

  “Like eight dollars, man,” he hollered, his lips an inch from the wall. “I got milk and bananas and bread—”

  “Show me that bag of groceries, lady.”

  They pawed through the bag, ripping it, checking the contents.

  “We bought some beans, soup cans—”

  “All right, shut up,” the cop said. “This paper says the time was one-fourteen. When was Dougherty shot?”

  One of them radioed. The answer was about one-fifteen. It was impossible to buy groceries and blocks away simultaneously kill a cop aboveground in Brooklyn. “Let him go,” the older policeman said, and then shoved him away, hard enough so that Hector couldn’t see the face of the man who had been holding him. Dolores rushed to hold him, putting her arms around his ribs. His shirt was damp with sweat and she felt the quick rise and fall of his chest. The pack of policemen continued down the platform, walking quickly, listening to the radio, their footfalls heavy, determined, already unmindful of Hector, as if he had never existed.

  “When we got home he got angry about things,” Dolores continued, “about how everything worked, you know, the system, the cops and everything. Everything was so frustrating. The money was tight, you know, and he didn’t want to think about it. And the new baby made the apartment smaller and needed things. And Hector was getting tired of working and getting nothing. My father was like that at the piano factory, you know. I understand that. He had these dreams that weren’t coming true, right? He and these other guys would go to all the bars, sometimes.”

  That same evening was hot, Dolores said, with the neighborhood parents standing around on the sidewalks, the younger women in spandex tops, the older ones in loose cotton dresses, the men in T-shirts or shirtless, if they weren’t too fat. She held Maria, who had just turned one, in her arms while little Hector played with the other children. Somebody put a boom box on the top of his car and ran it off the battery while he washed the wheels. Dolores and Hector’s street was relatively quiet; the drug traffic was a couple of blocks in one direction and the stores in another. Hector stood down near the corner, sucking down a bottle in a paper bag, shooting the shit with his hombres. She could hear him telling the story again about the cops, showing where they held his head down. About how the cops are always killing men and then saying that they died accidentally. Or provoked their own deaths. He was nervy and loud, wanting revenge, drinking too much this early in the evening. Yet Hector had to drink, Dolores realized; it was the only way to let the incident with the cops slip away. She hoped Hector would drink enough to relax, not so much that he would get wild. The men laughed and punched each other. They looked okay. Hector was going to be okay. Dolores turned her attention to her son. One of the guys on the street had a long-handled fifty-pound wrench and had opened a hydrant—the police didn’t care, as long as you closed it up later. Little Hector, just three and a half, and the other children splashed in and out of the spray that arced into the middle of the street, their damp feet slapping the asphalt and their voices crying in excitement, running in and out of the water while their fathers and mothers kept an eye on them. A summer evening in a poor neighborhood. Dolores talked with Ruita, one of her friends, and kept Maria bouncing on her knee. The men, still drinking and boxing and weaving a little for fun, tapping each other with light punches, were onto a new topic now, complained loudly about what assholes their bosses were and how they made them work too hard, and that became which women they would like to fuck, which movie or television stars looked particularly hot, maybe that girl on “The Cosby Show,” Lisa Bonet, Mickey Rourke did it to her in that movie and the scene, it was so hot they had to cut it out, just give it to her hard, man, and they all smiled sagely at the many ways of fucking women—you know, man, like they want it, and the talk went on like this, with the fathers among them casting an occasional, domesticated glance up the street to see if their wives were watching their children. And Hector, no doubt, enjoyed the talk, the way it set him apart from his family—even though he loved his wife and kids—and the way his head felt light from the second big bottle of beer. With the future uncertain, with not enough money, the pleasure of a summer evening was redemptive. Dolores finally went inside to put the children to sleep and called several times for Hector to come inside. But he yelled up to the apartment window that he was going to go out with the boys.

  “And this pissed me off, because it’s hot as hell and
of course I’m doing all the work with the baby just like always and Hector is just going to fuck around. I mean, I understood that he had to get it out of his system, what happened with the cops and all, but I was like, is this my life? Is this the rest of my life? Maybe I was thinking about that all along. I can’t remember every little thing. It was three years ago almost. We had this little apartment up on the third floor. It looked out over the courtyard. I was tired of that too, you had to walk up every time and there was always a lotta noise from the street that came in the window, kids smoking and messing around.”

  Maria was a heavy sleeper now that she was eating solid foods, and she dropped off quickly. The crib was in the living room because there was no other place for it. Maria would sleep through the night easily and be soaked in the morning.

  But little Hector was another matter. A poor sleeper, nervous and angry at his new sibling. Dolores sat in his small room, next to theirs, and sang to him. Finally he dropped off. It was not until much later that Hector came home, smelling of beer. She was tired of sitting in their sweltering apartment. The air conditioner didn’t work, she’d opened all the windows. Hector rolled a little as he walked, and she was angry at him, hated him for his freedom, which depended upon her labor with the baby, his domination of her. And she wondered if he’d cheated on her that night. He seemed mysteriously pleased with himself and she knew about the puta trash that hung out at the bar on Forty-eighth Street. With the music playing all the time. Some of the girls, the crackheads, would troll through the bar, cadging drinks and looking for men who wanted sex. They were not quite whores, not exactly. Some even had regular jobs. She knew how men could be flattered. She asked him where he’d been.

  “Out with Louie and Petito.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Just talk and shit, Dolores.”

  She didn’t believe it. Both men were single and would lie to cover Hector’s story. Both men were no good, as far as she could see.

  “You go to that bar down on Forty-eighth Street?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What’d you do there?”

  “Well, first I took all our money out of the bank and I bought everybody fifty drinks each, Dolores, and then I fucked each one of the waitresses until they, like, started to have, like, some kind of religious experience, Dolores, and then—”

  So she and Hector got into it from there, Hector alternating between righteousness and conceit inspired by his wife’s jealousy. Teasing her. Little Hector woke up and cried. He was old enough to get out of bed and run around the apartment in his blue cotton pajamas. But now yelling scared him.

  “Get back to bed,” Hector told him.

  “Don’t yell at him.”

  “I want some juicee,” the boy asked.

  “Let’s get in bed,” Dolores said.

  “I need some juicee.”

  “Get back to bed!” Hector roared. And the boy crawled back, snuffling. Dolores shut his door.

  “Maybe I did,” Hector said when she accused him again. “Maybe I need something I don’t get here.”

  She didn’t know if this was a taunt or a confession. She knew how frustrated he was, trying to make money, and she knew that a few beers at the bar generally relaxed him and that he may have only considered fucking one of the bar putas, that accounting for his guilty behavior. Or maybe he really did do that. She was hot and angry. There was only one way to tell, she knew.

  “Yes or no, did you do it?”

  Hector said no.

  “Then prove it. Prove it now.”

  “I don’t need to prove it, bitch. I can walk out that door and prove it to somebody who wants it.”

  “Prove it.”

  Staring with hateful lust at each other, they stripped. She was testing him. If he was quickly erect, anxious to get in, with quickening, tight breath, she would know he hadn’t just had sex. If he was slower to get an erection or labored in his effort to ejaculate, she would know. And it wouldn’t be the beer. Hector never had any trouble with beer. She would know. She was his wife, she had been fucked by him a thousand times. He couldn’t fool her.

  So, still angry, they fell into bed, tearing at each other, pushing, making it a little rough, then actually rough, with her hitting him as hard as she could, and him holding her down after she made his nose leak blood. Dimelo mami, dimelo, he said, give it to me. Más, más, oh fuck me mas . . . They didn’t care what kind of noise they made, screaming, cursing, and then when it was clear to Dolores that he hadn’t been with another woman, her anger metamorphosed to a purer lust, for she had won him from the bar putas, with their crotch tricks (she’d heard some of them could pick up coins off a table edge with their cunts, that they yanked up their bikini bottoms and bent over to show the little puckered mouth of their assholes pursing and winking, teasingly even slipped the first inch of beer bottles up into themselves) and she was who he wanted and he was hard as stone in her fingers and mouth and insides, irrefutable proof of his fidelity, and she did not care that he was still angry with her, fucking her with backbreaking vengeance, making a lamp go over, making little Hector scream from his bed, and the upstairs neighbors pound the ceiling above her. A fragment from the Bible in English: “O Lord God, You have begun to show Your servant Your greatness and Your mighty hand . . .” It was not so much lust for her husband but for how he made her feel. Who cares what they think, little Hector’ll fall sleep soon, fuck the people upstairs, I’m gonna forget everything . . . The minutes passed and she rocked in Hector’s anger, knowing that he was not fucking her but at the world through her, at the motherfuckers who had the money and at people who had rendered him so inconsequential. At the asshole racist cops. So be it, dimelo, that was where the power was in Hector. She loved that power, yes, she did, truly. Her head and neck hung off the bed, her arms limp over her head, Hector pounding her, pounding her, muttering viciously at her, the bones of his pelvis hitting her, the end of his penis jamming in hard, making a little pain, the fine gold chain of her crucifix fallen across her lips, her tongue tasting the small links, her mind a blurring hallucination of church spires and the heavy sweet face of her father and a faceless black man she had seen on the subway months ago, a man with shoulders the size of Georgia cantaloupes, and the lifting of the gulls from the garbage near the supermercado, pounding her, pounding her, the gray gulls that flew into the city from the ocean, from the Narrows, near where all the old-timer Italians lived, lifting at once, a thousand of them, wheeling across a brooding low sky, over and under the elevated F train, higher, the dark shapes of the ferries plowing through the river, and far across the water New Jersey, a wedge of salmon sky to the west, and the old dreams of the millions of new Americans, the sadness of it, the Chinese women working themselves to the bone along Eighth Avenue in Brooklyn’s garment sweatshops, occasionally having their fingers skewered by the thick stitching needle of the industrial sewing machines, and the young men like Hector pounding their youth into the hard cement streets, and the old Hasid in the park throwing the ball briskly to his son and the four dead black boys in front of the nightclub, yards of sidewalk slick with blood, she’d seen that once, and the lost, cataclysmic pain of the birth of her son, his birth had been much harder, and the smooth face of the priest when he saw her once on the street, his eyebrow lifted in recognition of her, and oh, más, más, más, in the small hot apartment in the vast choked Brooklyn night, she wrested pleasure and oblivion . . .

  And then there was the silence, their hearts heaving in the sweaty pallor of exhaustion, her insides stewed, stinging, juiced, her lips mashed by Hector’s face, her skin charred from his beard. Then came the pounding on the door, voices insistent with emergency. Her son. Her son? She leapt from the damp sheets and rushed naked to his small room next to theirs. He was not there. How could that be? And she heard the voices on the street below, coming through the window. And she knew before looking that little Hector had been so terrorized by his parents’ brutal lust that he had sought escape onto
the ledge of chipped brownstone by his window, where, while she always kept a watchful eye, he often played in the sun. But how far was three stories? Now Hector yanked on some underwear and was out the apartment door, flying down the stairs. She peered over the ledge to see the teenagers circled around the small figure of her son—she recognized the blue of his pajamas—and then she saw her husband push through them and fall to the ground; gathering the limp form into his arms, Hector peered upward, and by the streetlight she could see the wet torment in his face. Dios mio. Dios mio.

  Dolores pressed her fingers hard against her forehead, as if her face was made of soft clay that she could remodel into one less furrowed by grief. Then, through the bars of her fingers, she looked at Maria playing quietly in the sandbox on the other side of the yard and called, “Mi’ja, go get my purse.”

  The child obediently ran inside the house and a moment later came out, holding the purse with both hands.