“Mom. It’s me, Vernon.”
“Yes I know Vernon, I jus’ said your name. I have a name too, you know, you don’t nee’ to call me ‘Mom,’ nobody else calls me that.”
No one else called her ‘Mom’ because Vernon was her only child, obviously, but he knew better than to deploy reason.
“Well Mom, I’m out in two days. And I need somewhere to stay - “
“Well you’re not coming down here, you can stay in New York.”
He breathed deeply and closed his eyes. This was the cresting tide of an inevitable headache. It felt appropriate to have his nostrils burning with whatever pungent dust or debris was coming off this worn phone. Piece of shit phone looked like it’d been ransacked off the streets of New York, some Coney Island nostalgia piece.
“Where am I supposed to go, then.”
“I said - dee apartment. Whee still got dee apartment, in Queens.”
“Mom, I told you before. You are going to lose that apartment. It has to be your primary residence. It’s NYCHA rules, they look into that.”
“VER-NON” – the way she said it, you’d think he was a spoiled college boy begging his mommy for a bigger allowance – “don’t talk on the phone about this shit, stoopid. It’s under control. Just shut up, the Machatos next door got the key, go speak to them. It’s good you’re out, you watch the apartment.
“You probably don’t got much time there, so I won’t keep you on dee phone no longer. I see you. I’m glad you can stay in dee apartment. Call me once you get in and sit-choo-ated.”
What had he expected? That she’d invite him down to Puerto Rico? Maybe. But what would that have done? In some hazy, indistinct rendering of his imagined future, his mother invited him down to Puerto Rico to begin anew, where he never brought up Cruz. And, since she didn’t know anything about Cruz, she never brought Cruz up, either.
And in this reverie he’d continue on with his life, and there was no pain or doubt, and in time the brief tenure of Cruz’s life required concentrated thought to remember, it being so distant and remote, to the point where he’d sometimes doubt whether Cruz ever even existed. For there was an unwritten rule that the life of a child must be avenged, but he’d like to check the exceptions to that rule. He intuited that enforcement of that societal norm was contingent upon some kind of bond with the child. How many men did he know who didn’t give two shits about their child, who ducked child support and were somehow so nonchalant about the whole thing: offering at most presents, never presence. You bring up the ease which with these dudes abandon their kid, and they get mad at you, run through the whole gamut of excuses with you, tales of crazy ‘baby mammas’ to just boilerplate dismissals, just a ‘c’mon son,’ as if you should just know not to bring the issue up. Yet, if anyone ever hurt their kid, well, “nah nigga, now shit’s on, nigga, that’s my fam, nigga”: all of a sudden these deadbeat dads become fuckin’ fathers of the year, eager Cliff Huxtables.
He was at least being consistent, he figured.
>< >< ><
When Vernon was seventeen and believed in something like love, he and this girl promised they’d be faithful to each other. She was going to college upstate at Albany, a good school, and they made all the plans and commitments they should have; bus-this, Amtrak-that, and all was well and good, and then soon enough it was her day to move. He helped her pack up any last things — made sure the blue bulldog he won for her on Coney Island was next to her in the backseat — and they hugged really tight and she made that half-smile scrunchy face that showed off her high cheek bones. Then she and her family drove off and she was gone, and all those finely-wrought emotions were for nothing. Those promises they made to each other were the product of some liminal haze, and, with her gone, he had unknowingly but decisively entered a new period. A period where she wasn’t around and wasn’t going to be around, some chapter of his life that ended and was stowed away. That had been that.
That’s what he felt when he was out of jail. All he did was walk out — escorted, of course — and, presto, all that prison bullshit was behind him. He was given a card that had a detective’s name on it, presumably the same detective investigating his son’s murder. Then he got in Mr. Machato’s black beat-up Ford and off they went, back downstate to Queens. Mr. Machato didn’t even say much — you’d think he was just picking Vernon up from a 7-11. Good old saintly Mr. Machato, with his wizened, stoic face, his crusty wife, and their two fully-grown, dependent children who were rarely ever mentioned.
They rode in stony silence. Mr. Machato didn’t ask about prison life because he didn’t care. Inmates seemed too wiry and frenetic and rambunctious, plotting, scheming, hustling; quiet Mr. Machato seemed like he was from another planet, like he’d be shocked to learn people like those prisoners even existed.
He barely even talked when they stopped at the roadside diner. Basically, he spoke just enough to tell the waitress his order, to let Vernon know that he thought his father had been a good man and that he’d been sorry to hear of his passing, and to explain how Vernon’s mother was able to keep her apartment:
“She sends us the check each month, written out in her name, and we drop it off with the Super. That’s it. They don’t even know she’s not around. Your mom came back to New York to re-certify her income for the apartment last month, so she may not be back for a while. I got no idea if your apartment needs repairs, but be careful about that, I guess.”
And with that Mr. Machato shrugged. Vernon knew it’d be unbecoming to probe the arrangement set up between Mr. Machato and his mother, but he damn well wanted to make sure that his mother was compensating Mr. Machato for basically allowing her to keep two residences. But Vernon said nothing, just nodded.
The ride from the prison to “home” was another liminal state, a feeling of unreality, that mercilessly ended when Vernon glimpsed the Triborough Bridge. He could have thought about the symbolism — driving through the deprivation endemic to the South Bronx, across a bridge providing two options, west to East Harlem, his old haunt, or east back to Queens — but instead he defenestrated his pretensions, shut his eyes, tucked his neck in disgrace and just wished to be doing something else, anywhere else. He kept his eyes closed until the moment Mr. Machato pushed him gently, apparently figuring he must be asleep. They had arrived and were parked about a block away from the Woodside Houses.
Mr. Machato had a letter in his hand.
“We’re home, Vernon. Welcome back.” Vernon nodded and they both left the car. Mr. Machato popped the trunk, Vernon got his stuff, and they walked the block in silence.
At the front door, Mr. Machato again reminded Vernon that he’d already given him the keys, and then handed him the letter he’d been carrying. “This was left under my door yesterday, it’s addressed to you. A friend, perhaps?” Even Mr. Machato, unhip as he was, blanched at the naïveté inherent in his question, and took that faux pas as an opportunity to expedite his departure. He forced Vernon to take $300, wished him well, reminded Vernon to knock if he needed anything to get adjusted, idled himself by checking his mail (it was a Sunday), and disappeared into the complex.
Vernon was tumbling the letter in his hand the whole time he pantomimed the unreality of being back in his childhood home. He imagined what it’d be like if he were being captured on camera for an unsuspecting audience. All they’d see was him, back in this apartment, checking to see if the lights worked, checking the apartment for dust, carrying a letter, carrying out the same list of listless activities as anyone else. They’d have no idea what this letter was capable of, how just looking at it induced some strong psychological reactions, made his stomach bottom-out, made him feel like he was walking on slanted ground through a perpendicular maze of askew, vicious angles.
Yes, here he was, the same two-bedroom apartment — the “2 BR,” as he knew it from all those income forms — that he’d lived in all his life. And now he went into his bedr
oom and turned on the light, which flared hot for a brief second until it burnt out with an audible pop.
He unfurled the letter, and the strain of the dark made the back of his eyes ache and feel pregnant, as if this letter was actively evil and able to harm him just by being read.
We Will Be Contacting You Soon. We Want To Speak To You. You Want To Speak To Us.
He unpacked and slept without eating, without shaving, without shitting, without doing anything. He felt it immoral to find sleep in circumstances like this, but when he did, he thought of Kim-ly’s big full lips, which were most prominent whenever she looked confused. Which was often.
>< >< ><
On the subway the next day, he thought of his dead child mainly because thoughts of his dead child weren’t coming to him instinctively. That is to say he proactively conjured up images of what his child might have been like because he felt bad that, without his own guilt-stricken prodding, all the little bouncing babies and school-aged children on the train would have passed him by without causing him grief.
He just didn’t care, really, and how on Earth could that be true?
He should go to the police, call that number he’d been given. Shouldn’t the police be contacting me? He could show them the letters, maybe get some police protection … but no, he wouldn’t do that, he couldn’t do that, he had to see this through, perhaps out of the same impulse that introduced ersatz images of a chipper light-skinned half-Vietnamese school-aged boy as the screensaver of his subconscious.
He’d walked through El Barrio for less than thirty minutes until he decided to go home to Queens. While on the 6 train from 59th street to 96th Street, he thought the same jokes he had always thought. At 96th street: please, all white people, please get off the train. Then, at 96th street, a whole lot of professional and posh looking types disembarked. Then, up at 103rd street — no, seriously rich white people, if you are still on this train, get the fuck off this train. As if privy to his imagination, almost everyone in the subway car had emptied out at 96th street, leaving just some single mommas with kids in tow and a smattering of the physically or economically disabled.
He got off at East 110th Street, ducked some young dark-skinned kid asking/insisting “Yo, lemme get a swipe for the subway,” ignored some angry black man giving everyone a mean-mug, and ambled somberly behind the hobbled, elderly Puerto Ricans who traversed these East Harlem subway steps since time immemorial. He walked east on East 110th street toward Third Avenue and, even though there were some atypical condos or bakeries here and there, it was just all the same bullshit. He didn’t even make it to Third Avenue, as the combination of bummy-looking loiterers outside the public library and the truth-in-advertising banner of the Hellgate Post Office was enough to get him to hightail it back downtown and then across the East River to Queens.
He spoke to no one and was fine with it. If only it’d always been like that.
>< >< ><
“Hello good sir, do you know your way around this area?”
Vernon squinted his eyes and creased his forehead. He was back in Woodside and had been walking, head down, oblivious, when this stranger brought him back to Earth:
“Did you hear me, good sir? You do speak English, correct? It would be a sad state of affairs, if I, a Dutchman, could speak English, but you, Mr. Mexican-in-America, could not.”
Vernon’s forehead was still terse, eyes of squints, as if in rictus.
“Fuck you say, son? Bitch do I look five-three and brown? Who the fuck you be, saying shit like that to people, son. Nigga better get the fuck outta here before I beat your ass, son.”
“Mijn hemel, there you go. Ghetto talk. That Ghee-toh talk goes straight to your head, ja?” He spoke English crisply, just the trace of an accent around the hard consonants and the strange lilt of certain words, like “ya.”
Vernon kept squinting at this man. Vernon didn’t know shit about this guy or what he was talking about. The man was well over six feet tall, muscular, bald and dome-headed, broad-shouldered in brown pleats and a tight brown T-shirt that looked basic but which Vernon knew was of some material or of some brand that made it expensive and chic. Vernon wasn’t used to being intimidated by white people — by this he didn’t just mean of European descent, like this guy was — but white people, you know, that ineffable middle-class whiteness that bleached out the aggression and volatility of generations past. This man was imposing, no doubt, but he was composed, too, and Vernon couldn’t picture him lashing out unexpectedly, as if this man was contained behind some invisible frame.
“Nigga you fucking retarded, get the fuck outta here. You know where you are, nigga, you right by the projects.” Vernon pointed one under-handed finger in the direction of the western house of the Woodside projects, only a block away. “Stupid fuck.”
“I know where I am. And I’m not a nigga or a nigg-er. I’m white, obvious. Like you, you are white, too, ja?
“And is it wrong to call you good sir, Vernon? Are you not a good sir, Vernon?” He had no accent when he said Vernon, and that was unsettling.
The man said nothing for a few moments.
“So, I’m Dutch, from the Netherlands. What do you think of that?”
Vernon shook his head, like, can you believe this guy? But he didn’t know how to extricate himself. “I don’t think anything of it. You have something to say to me, then say it.”
“Trying to keep composed are you? If you impress me with some knowledge of the Netherlands, I won’t beat the ever-living shit out of you right now.”
Vernon glared at him, which was the wrong move. The man sidled up closer to Vernon, so Vernon could literally feel the shadow casting over him from the man’s height, get a close-up of the granular muscular detail of the man’s forearm, get up-close-and-personal with that shaved thick dinosaur dome-of-a-head.
“Amsterdam, party town. Hookers and drugs. Maybe you should go back home to Amsterdam, cool off a little.” He was playing the game and avoiding eye contact. His body language communicated his weakness.
“Not Amsterdam. Utrecht. More to the Netherlands than just Holland. Uh oh, looks like you are failing the test. It’s not fun feeling weak, is it?
“I’m here to give you a message. I don’t know why you’ve been selected, so to speak, but you have been. We know you won’t do eh-nee-thing stupid. This just involves you, your child, and us. No reason to bring other people in it. If you do, we will kill them. Everyone, anyone.
“We are going to meet you tomorrow, southeast corner … are you listening? … we are going to meet joo, tomorrow, noon, southeast corner of 63rd Drive and Queens Boulevard, in Rego Park. M or R train, you know where, ja?
“No police, no friends, no any of that. We know you won’t, we know you. We are not dumb, obviously, and, while it not as obvious, you are not dumb, either. If you want justice, you can get it. Tomorrow, ja?”
Vernon could see how muscular this man was; he half-expected the man to show off the ripples of muscles in his abs, proud of them like a family seal.
“But first, of my own interest, I must ask: Is it true? Are you a rapist? I mean, I know it is true, it must be. But I just want to make sure, to hear it from you.”
>< >< ><
It never felt like rape. Whether some asshole could look at it after the fact and tell him technically this or technically that happened, and the occurrence or non-occurrence of this or that made something technically rape … that was beside the point. It didn’t feel like rape.
She had said “no,” that was true. They had been alone in her apartment for the first time, unpacking her groceries, and he cupped the back of her neck with his hands and kissed her. She said nothing because his face smothered hers. When his face was off of hers but still close by, she looked askance and, if his hands hadn’t been clamped around her neck, she would have been shaking her head.
He’d pressed forward. H
e thought cupping her neck was romantic and dramatic, and when that wasn’t enough to woo her, he decided he’d take her on the kitchen table. That display of bombast would be enough to impress her. Then she whispered “no” when his weight was down on her, and “please, Vernon, please, no,” in her stereotypical sexy fuck-me Vietnamese accent.
She hadn’t struggled, or maybe she had, but not struggled by pushing him off her, but maybe by holding onto his shoulders and restraining him. No, not restraining him, more like enervating him, so he took her weakly, like the way she was weak, saying ‘no,’ and ‘please.’ Even her resistance was submissive, and when he entered her, there’d been a look of consternation on her face that didn’t parse with the pleasant image of her humble face with those big fat beautiful dick-sucking lips. She always looked so sphinx-like and confused, as if she didn’t know that being a pretty Asian woman with big lips gave her exploitable advantages.
But that inscrutability was broken through and she was in pain. But she took his thrusts — held him to lessen their impact, but she took them — while he whispered in her ear, “please, please, I need this,” and she whispered back “please,” too, and their words had different origins but that was lost somewhere and the words came out the same. But he wasn’t dumb and he knew they meant different things except he was inside her and that’s what mattered, and he pictured her pussy as warm and all-encompassing like those big lips, and only he was smart enough to somehow know that and take the initiative.
>< >< ><
The Dutchman’s nose hair looked like crushed ant legs, Vernon thought, inexplicably, as the man darted forward and socked him hard in the jaw. The force of that punch knocked Vernon out of himself; he was on another plane of existence, a whirling top. He’d never been hit that hard, and he could never hit someone that hard, and all his tough-guy bravado bullshit spun right out of him. Still dazed, a solid punch to his gut brought him back down, down, down to earth, and this wasn’t just a fight, it was something horrendous, it was getting hit by a car or struck by a terrible explosive or something. This, too, was unreality.
With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer Page 25
