“Carlos, Carlos, what happened?”
Three schoolkids stood on the corner staring at her and Carlos as they staggered up the block.
“I’m hit. Damn, he shot me,” Carlos moaned.
“What was that?” Rosa was crying. “Why do you have a gun? Why were you shooting at that man?”
“Because he was going to shoot me, Rosa. This here is Bushwick, not Bay Ridge.”
“Why would he shoot you over a website?”
Carlos laughed as a clot of blood spilled out of his mouth, “Website. Oh, baby, I don’t do websites. I deal. You know, drugs. Perico and chiva, like that. It pays for college.”
“You deal coke and heroin?”
“I do. And now ain’t the time to judge me. Do that later. I got to get to Mama’s. Get me there. Help me.”
“Carlos, you’re shot! We got to get you to an emergency room.”
“Shut up and take me to Mama’s.”
* * *
How could she not have seen it coming? Everyone was giving him cash. He was always getting calls on his cellphone and having to grab cabs to take care of business. How could she be so stupid? Who needs a website at 2:30 in the morning?
As Rosa turned onto Harmon Street—Mama’s house was now 200 feet away—she realized she had believed Carlos because she wanted to. She wanted to believe he wanted out of the ghetto even though he kept going back to it.
“Hold on, Rosa. We’re almost there.”
Rosa reached the front stoop and rang Mama’s bell. Carlos’s eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. Mama opened the door and looked at her son.
“Díos mío! Mi hijo, mi bebe!”
“Mama, he got shot.”
“Inside. Avanza!”
Mama grabbed Carlos’s other arm and the women led him down the hallway.
“See, it was meant to be that we live on the ground floor,” Mama said as she kicked the door open and then yelled, “Papa! Carlos has a balazo. Put all the towels down on the couch. Cover it. Your hijo is hurt.”
Papa walked up the narrow hallway and ignored Mama and Rosa. He gave his son a sour look and grabbed a stack of towels from a hall cabinet and piled them on the couch in the front room. Mama and Rosa gently let Carlos down, and he slumped on the couch.
“Mal hijo!” Papa hissed as he looked at his son.
“Go! Get out!” Mama yelled at him.
Papa scowled at her and turned and walked quickly down the hallway. He slammed the door as he left.
“Papa’s flojo … You know, a weak man. Carlos takes after his mama. Strong. Fuerte. Like steel.”
“What do we do now?” Rosa asked.
Carlos moved and pulled out his gun from his pants and groaned, “Mama, Mama, get rid of this.”
Mama nudged Rosa and said, “Grab the pistola and bring it to the kitchen.”
Mama waddled down the hallway and Rosa followed her, holding the gun like it was a wild animal. Mama held out a plastic bag and Rosa dropped it in.
“Rosa, we have to stop the bleeding. Go and hold the towels to his wound till I get out there.”
“Mama, we need to get him to a hospital.”
“Hospital? That is where people go to die. My bebe no die. Not today. I know his death day. I saw it in a dream when he was two. He stays here and we take care of him. Stop the sangre. His blood has to clot. He’ll be fine. Be a good novia and help him.”
Rosa watched Mama place the gun in a drawer and then reach into one of the pockets of her red house dress and pull out two small strips of tinfoil.
“Rosa, go. Carlos has a herida de bala Stop the bleeding. Avanza.”
Rosa turned and ran down the hallway. In the living room she saw that Carlos was leaning back on the couch holding his stomach. She moved his hand and put a towel on the wound and pressed.
Carlos grimaced and turned his head. Rosa held the towel and then pulled it off when it became full of blood. She put it on the floor and picked up a clean one. She jumped when Mama silently touched her shoulder.
“Let me look.”
For a little old woman, Mama was strong. She gently moved Carlos forward and looked at his back.
“This might not be so bad. The bala went right through him. First we take away his pain. Here, Carlos, sniff.” Mama patted Carlos on the face as she held a line of white powder on her thumb.
“What’s that?” Rosa asked as Carlos took a long snort.
“Chiva … for the pain. Here, bebe, take another.”
“Heroin? You’re giving him heroin?”
“Rosa, you know what you read in your school books. Chiva is the best thing for pain and this chico is going to have pain when I clean this wound.”
Carlos leaned back on the couch and looked like he was sleeping. Mama took out some more white powder, lifted the towel, and poured it on Carlos’s stomach, inside the small hole where the bullet had entered.
“Now this, Rosa, is perico, which will freeze the nerves.”
Rosa watched with her mouth open.
“Now hold him by the shoulder.”
Rosa moved behind the couch and held onto Carlos.
“Tighter. Strong. He’s going to jump like a fish on a line.”
Rosa grabbed Carlos’s shoulder as Mama poured peroxide into the wound. Carlos’s body jolted and he screamed. He collapsed back on the couch.
“Just sit with him,” Mama said as she went into the kitchen. She came back in a moment stirring a glass of cloudy water.
“Now we use this dropper and put penicillin down his throat for infection. Hold his head back and open his mouth.”
Rosa tilted his head back, and Mama squirted the mixture from the dropper into his mouth.
“Now sit him up and hold the towel. The blood is slowing down. He’ll be fine and so will you.”
Rosa looked down at the wound and saw that the bleeding had slowed to a trickle. She sat down on the couch and gently held the towel as Mama went into the kitchen.
* * *
Rosa sat up on the couch, afraid. The room was dark. Had she slept? She blinked and saw Carlos leaning against her, breathing slowly. She heard a tapping on glass and saw the silhouette of a man trying to look into the window. The shadow moved, and then silence. She just sat there not moving—hardly breathing—when someone banged on the front door. In the hallway she could see Mama opening the door and say, “Sí?”
Then Mama flew back against the wall as a young Latino man stormed into the apartment, yelling, “Where’s that cobarde Carlos?”
The man looked down the hallway and came at her. She saw he had a gun, and Rosa closed her eyes. This is what Carlos has given me. A cheap, stupid death in a ghetto apartment. Rosa jumped as a shot rang out. She heard a moan, and then another shot. She opened her eyes and saw Mama standing over the body of the man. Mama held a black revolver in her hand.
“There, that’s for you! You come into my house to kill mi bebe You pendejo. Cheap-ass bandido …” Mama kicked the man, then smiled at Rosa. “How’s Carlos?”
“Is he dead?”
“Him, yeah. Come help me drag him into the bañera.”
“Why are you taking him to the bathtub?”
“Why you think? Think I want to clean him up? We got to get rid of this body. Come on.”
Mama grabbed the man’s feet and Rosa stood up. She stared at Mama. Mama dropped the feet and walked over and slapped Rosa in the face.
Mama yelled, “You do as I say! You hear me? You brought this here, and you will help me. Now!”
Rosa bent down robotically and took the man by his boots as Mama grabbed the arms. They dragged him down the hall, leaving a trail of blood on the linoleum. Rosa looked down into the dead face and saw he’d been no more than a boy—maybe eighteen. Why was he dead? What was she doing here?
“In here.” Mama motioned to the bathroom door. Rosa kicked it open, and with great effort she and Mama lifted the man into the tub and dropped him.
Mama smacked her hands and said,
“Got to get rid of this body.”
Rosa wanted to scream and run, but she just said, “No.”
“Go and get Papa. He’s down in the bodega playing dominos. Tell him we need to turn up the furnace all the way. We have something to burn.”
Rosa didn’t move and just stared at Mama.
“Rosa, go. Now! Avanza! And come back. Don’t think of going to the cops, because you touched the gun. Your finger-prints are all over that gun. You’re one of us now. I hope mi hijo picked a good one.”
Mama reached into a hall closet and smiled when she turned. “What, you want to watch?” She had a small axe in her hand. She motioned with the hatchet for Rosa to get going. Rosa dully nodded, put on her coat, and opened the door. She moved out of the apartment and floated down the hallway. She opened the lobby door and stepped out into the cold night air and stood on the stoop staring out at the Bushwick street. A gypsy cab cruised by and the driver stared at Rosa. She turned away and saw a shadow move in the alley across the street.
Rosa let out a long sigh and walked down the block, feeling like her body and soul were dying. She would never get out of this neighborhood.
LADIES’ MAN
BY CHRIS NILES
Brighton Beach
She was lush like an old-time movie star in black patent-leather shoes, fishnet stockings, and a fur coat. Her hair had been blonded, rolled, sprayed, and teased so that it stiffly circled her face like a halo on a medieval Madonna. She had Angelina Jolie lips and her heavy-lidded eyes were shaded aqua and rimmed with kohl. Crimsondipped nails grasped fake Louis Vuitton. She didn’t look anything like Ana, but that didn’t stop me staring.
The rhythm of the train tempted her to doze. Her head dipped. She woke, glanced around, trying not to look anxious, yet tightening her grip on her bag. Falling asleep on the subway. Not a good idea. It was late. The car was filled with a typical assortment of booze-and drug-fueled crazies, myself included. I’d spent the previous few hours with a couple a friends of the family—Eric Ambler and Comrade Stolichnaya.
Brighton Beach, end of the line. She got out. I did too. I stumbled down the steep steps, my eyes blurry from the booze, but my ears sharply focused on the clip-clip of her stilettos She walked west on Brighton Beach Avenue, long strides. It was cold, few people around. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, fingers searching for the Marlboro I knew was lurking somewhere. My head was fuzzy, the cold seemed to be making me drunker. I lit the cigarette and kept pace.
I liked Brighton Beach, it reminded me of my old life. I liked the stores selling canned fish, the babushkas hawking homemade trinkets on the sidewalk, the signs in Russian, the shabby exuberance. After years of exile, the extravagance of Manhattan made me feel ill. Out near the sea, where the choices seemed simpler, I could think again.
She turned left onto a side street lined with nondescript brick apartment buildings. Clip-clip. My cigarette was ashes and the promise of cancer by the time we reached the board-walk. I tossed the butt, dodged dogshit. It was spring, but a vindictive wind taunted my exposed skin. I turned up my collar and wondered what shape she was under that big fur coat, what her voice sounded like, what she whispered when having sex.
We passed the handball courts. For an instant my attention was diverted by an old guy in a t-shirt sprinting along the boardwalk. In as long as it took me to think, Don’t these people ever feel the cold? the woman had gone. I spun around, looking, listening. She was nowhere.
Shrugging, I headed to Ruby’s for a drink before my shift began.
* * *
People don’t tell you this about New York: The reason some never leave is because you can burn up on re-entry. It was almost that way with me. I had tried to make my fortune, or at least my name, as a foreign correspondent, and had failed. Eastern Europe worked for a while and then it didn’t, so I headed to Southeast Asia for some professional relaxation. I could have stayed, I suppose, lolling on a beach in Thailand, but there were too many reminders there of the kind of person that I would become—a fat, feckless ex-pat who couldn’t have survived a day in any city of consequence. Eventually there was no choice but to make things hard for myself again. So I came back to New York.
I hit the tail end of the 1990s and found it was a very, very different city from the one I had left almost a decade ago. It was as if real journalism had died and nobody had given it a decent funeral. CEOs were now celebrities and all celebrities were gods. The scary thing was, nobody seemed to have noticed. In some sort of crazy bait and switch, all the vicious, crazy, thrilling, real live New Yorkers had been replaced by a bunch of plastic people. The women were a discombobulating combination of perky and dull. The men talked about business school as the high point of their existence. All of them believed that every so-called obstacle in their trivial lives could be overcome if only they put in enough hours at the office and hired a personal trainer.
I did not fit. I missed real people. People who know that life’s often unfair. That sometimes, through no fault of your own, things just don’t work out. So I shunned Manhattan and my old life. I took a job copy-editing, overnights. The pay was crap and the hours were worse. I didn’t care.
* * *
“Why don’t you just fucking go back, man?” Paul Schneider, my companion in hell, asked as he assigned me yet another story about Donald Trump’s sex life. “So you hate it here, so leave.”
“Can’t.”
“Yes, you can. You buy a ticket. You get on a plane. Have a crappy meal, drink too much wine, and wake up in Budapest or Bucharest or wherever the fuck you’d rather be. People do it all the time. I’d lend you the money if I had any.” Paul was expecting a baby, or at least his wife was, and he was working double shifts so they could afford to move out of their 400-square-foot apartment.
“I’d steal it if you had any. But I can’t go back.”
The newsroom was quiet. We were both smoking. We’d stuffed a screwdriver in the smoke detectors and bribed Bart, the security guy. Smoking was the only thing that made this bullshit job even close to bearable.
“Why?”
I sighed, pretending to be annoyed at his persistence. “After the Berlin Wall fell, organized crime became the new growth industry in Eastern Europe. I made some trouble. Wrote some stories that made a few gangsters decide I deserved a whole new face.”
“So what? Aren’t journalists supposed to be fearless?”
“Very funny.”
“And what else?”
“Nothing else.” I reached for the cigarettes, Paul withdrew them.
“What else?” He held the packet up between two fingers just out of my reach, a practiced move. My lousy pay didn’t even come close to covering all my vices. Paul was used to me bumming off him.
“Fuck you.”
“Ah, a woman.” Paul handed the packet to me after taking one for himself, desperate for a story, anything that would distract him from the numbing hours that stretched before us. “Do tell.”
“Ana,” I sighed. “Her name was Ana.”
“And she broke your heart.”
“If you want to put it like that.” I struck a match, it snapped in two. I struck another one and the same thing happened. My hands were shaking. Ana could do that to me still, after all these years. Paul took the box from me and deftly lit the match. I started talking to smother my embarrassment. “She decided one day that she didn’t want to see me anymore I used to pick her up after work—she worked nights—and so I’d sit in this bar in Budapest and wait for her to finish and then walk her home.” I shook my head. “And one night she’d reassigned the job. That was it. No explanation, no nothing. I had no idea what I’d done wrong. Still don’t. She wouldn’t speak to me.”
“So no closure.”
“No.”
“Bummer,” Paul said.
“Yeah.” Maybe all those yuppies who paid 150 bucks an hour for a shrink were onto something. I hadn’t talked to anybody about Ana, I guess I’d been enjoying my own private hell a little too m
uch. But now I felt as if a small burden had lifted. “All the time I was in Hungary it was as if I had an evil cloud hanging over me. Because before Ana, there was Mike McIlvaney.”
“He broke up with you too?” Paul stubbed his cigarette out on his shoe and flicked the butt into the bag we used to remove evidence of our illegal habits from the office.
“In a manner of speaking.”
* * *
They called it the Highway of Death for a very good reason. A two-lane stretch of asphalt between Vienna and Budapest where bunches of flowers, crosses, and stuffed animals bore witness to its incapacity to deal with the enormous daily volume of traffic.
The problem was this: Food and wine were cheap in Budapest and the Viennese were fond of getting into their late-model German automobiles and making a bargain-shop-ping day of it. Racing the other way for a taste of the West were their less fortunate Eastern European cousins, shaking behind the wheels of their unreliable, two-stroke Trabbants. Most American lawnmowers have more power than the Trabbant, and there were no passing lanes on the Highway of Death. The Austrian drivers, spoiled by superior technology and frustrated at having to sit behind an aerodynamically challenged global-warming machine, took frequent, stupid risks. Trabbie drivers, too, pushed their impotent cars past what they were capable of.
Mike had a Fiat. He, like me, was freelancing, building a name for himself. He had dark hair, a rangy build, and although his parents were American, he’d been raised in Brisbane and had an Australian accent. We’d become friends.
It was a quiet week when we made our decision. The Hungarians had just elected a democratic government and the transition had been fairly smooth. There were rumblings of trouble between Romanians and ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania, and between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Pristina, but not enough for us to warrant a trip to either place just yet.
“Man cannot live by beer alone, mate,” Mike said one night, slightly drunk in a Pest bar. Food in Budapest was good but mostly limited to what the Hungarians could grow—peppers, cherries, tomatoes, meat, bread. “I feel like avocados. Can’t remember the last time I had an avocado. Let’s go to Vienna.”
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