“Luis. You’re back.”
“Mercedes.”
She was sitting at the table where he and Mama used to eat their meals, a shriveled, white-haired woman behind a sea of pill bottles. Wrapped up tightly in an ugly pink robe that was much too large for her. Propping herself up at the table by her elbows, her head balanced on both hands.
“Mercedes.”
He said her name again, more as a question than anything else. At first he could not believe it was her, this husk of a woman. Her cheeks sallow and caved in on themselves, the rest of her a pile of bones and papery flesh. But her eyes, her eyes were just the same as ever, large and dark and fierce.
“Yes, Luis, it’s me,” she said calmly, her voice hoarse but threaded with sarcasm. “How ever did you find me?”
He brought up the gun in his hand and moved across the kitchen toward her, shouting, “Never you mind!”
* * *
She had left the neighborhood right after the trial. Nobody from the building, nobody at all knew where she had gone, or what had happened to her. Prison had been just as bad as he thought it would be. Years had gone by in a fog, while he just tried to survive.
Then the computers had come in. He had signed up to learn them, volunteered for a job in online marketing. He had used his access to search for her everywhere, even in Mexico, but there was still nothing—less than nothing—as if she had never existed in the first place.
It was only a couple years before, long after he knew he should have stopped looking, that he had come up with his first trace of her. A credit card number in her real name. He could scarcely believe that it had been there all along and he had missed it. Soon after that, her whole history had opened up to him—everywhere she had been, the different names she had used; all the jobs she’d had over the past thirty years. He had read it like a paperback novel from the prison library. Following the jobs she had taken—waitressing, running a cash register, answering phones—but never once anything that he could find that included acting. Tracing the places she had lived, weaving across the country to Los Angeles, then down to Mexico City, Miami, the Island—then back home. To the very same address, the very same building where they had lived. Beyond that, even. To his own apartment.
He had thought that over for days, after he discovered it. Lying in his cell at night, thinking about her living there, wondering what it meant. He sat up and stared at the picture of her from her driver’s license, the one he had printed out surreptitiously when the supervisor had gone to take a leak. The color was blurry, but from what he could see she looked remarkably similar, as if she had barely aged at all. Her hair the same pitch-black color, her face grave and beautiful and nearly unlined, staring back out at the camera. So much as it was—
Yet when he got to look at the mirror in the Port Authority bathroom, he saw an old man before him. His hair not even gray but white, an old man’s mustache doing nothing to rejuvenate his face, his slouching jowls, and his unmistakable prison pallor. He had seen it on old men before, back in the neighborhood, wondering how long they had been away. Now he was one of them, his life gone. But he could at least do this.
He had picked up the .38 in the back of the bodega his cellmate had told him about. Strangely pleased when the man handed it to him wrapped in a paper bag, just as she had given him Roberto’s gun thirty years ago. He had rolled out the bullets, checked the firing mechanism in the back lot behind the store, then, satisfied, had paid the man and taken the 4 train on up to 161st Street. Where he had stood again on the platform, listening to the crowd in the stadium.
* * *
“Don’ be angry,” she said, unfazed by his charge across the room. Her voice a long wheeze that broke down into a cough.
“You’re sick,” he said, lowering the gun again and staring at the array of pills.
“Ah, amado, you always were obvious,” she sighed, and he straightened.
“You know what I came back for,” he said coldly, though even now he had to fight back the urge to help her somehow.
“I imagined you would,” she said, and he thought he heard a hint of triumph within that dim voice, something that infuriated him all over again.
“So that’s why you moved in here. Hoping to surprise me.”
She said nothing, but made a small, neutral gesture with one hand.
“Why did you do it?” he asked despite himself, hating the pleading sound in his voice. “Why did you do it? I thought you loved me.”
“I needed the money,” she wheezed. “And I didn’t need you.”
“What about all your big plans?” The anger growing in him again, baffled and enraged that she had so little to say for herself. When he had first glimpsed her, in her decrepit state, he had expected her to do the pleading. Now he was conscious that he could hear the sound of the ballgame through the windows, much louder than he remembered it—the rising beat of the organ, the noise of the crowd building in that steady, dangerous way.
“What about being an actress?” he tried to taunt her.
“Mierda. Well, I wasn’t an actress after all,” she told him, and gave a little cackle that trailed off into a cough. “I couldn’t do anything. But I tried. I left this place.”
“So—maybe you needed me after all,” he said, lowering the gun and trying to smirk at her. Desperately wanting to hear her say it, to hear her admit it, even this sick, dying remnant of the woman he had loved. “Maybe you wish you had stayed with me now.”
She fixed him with another look, a glint in her eye.
“Why would I ever need you? A man who is too afraid to take what he wants? A man who lets a woman plan for him—who is too afraid to stand up to another man on his own?” She gave a short, scornful laugh, and drew herself up as straight as she could at the table. “Why would I ever want such a man? What could he ever do for me?”
Luis walked forward again, knowing then that he was going to do what he came to do. Through the windows he could hear the sharp intake of the crowd’s breath, like that hiss of the waves out at Jones Beach. He took another step toward her, but at that moment she held up a hand, her tired, painfilled eyes staring into his, stopping him for a moment.
“Luis!” she said. “Don’t you remember? Wait for it…That’s it. Ah, cara mia, I knew you would do fine!”
The crowd noise came up then, the full-throated roar, just like the wave enveloping him along the beach, and he took one more step and pulled the trigger, just as he had done it—done it so well—that afternoon thirty years before. But only as he fired, in that very instant, with the noise rising within and around him, and the feeling that he was falling, falling into the wave, only then did he finally put it all together—how she looked, and all the pills on the table; how easy it had been to find her after so many years without a trace, the way his cellmate had suddenly remembered someone who could sell him a gun, the triumphant, knowing way she looked at him even as he took that last step and pulled the trigger; how she had made him wait until the crowd noise rose up from the stadium, and what she really meant when she said those words, now and thirty years before, down in the super’s basement kingdom, I knew you would do fine!—and confirm, once and for all, that she always had been too smart for him.
JAGUAR
BY ABRAHAM RODRIGUEZ, JR.
South Bronx
To Scott, with love
Iris operated right from the stoop. She lived upstairs with her mother. It was the kind of building where she didn’t have to be too obvious about it, because of the crack traffic. Sometimes fishnets on her long curvies, but for her it was enough to just sit there in jeans and tank top and that smile, the eyes dizzy like she’s seen it all and just had another hit. She might wave to passing cars, plant the lingering stare on the shy ones. Her brown eyes were deep murkies and made people look away. There was just something about her, as if something was about to happen. Her olive skin tanned easy dark. If her hair was up, so much curvy smooth neck, if not, it fell in curly clumps onto her shoul
ders. A different girl everytime. Some days makeup, some days no. Some days she was a loud brash sound. Other times quiet meek and she could only sit there on the stoop like a lost girl staring back.
Her pimp was Pacheco. He was very nice and didn’t beat her. He was like family because he used to be her mother’s pimp. He sometimes watched out for her on the street but usually just went up to be with her mother, something Iris resented because he was supposed to protect her. There was this guy running around right now, gutting hookers like fish. Three already on the slab and the cops didn’t seem to be doing anything about it. The papers hardly cared. On South Bronx streets life is worth maybe a subway token. Cops don’t take subways. If the hookers were white maybe it would be more of a story, more tragic TV reports. But South Bronx killing zone is an everyday thing, and so one more hooker body appearing near Hunts Point market is not really a crime, just seen like waste disposal. Like a man dumping his trash.
Her mother had the same brown eyes planted deep in a wider face, hair longer but crunchier and usually up out of the way. Body sagging some now, which was why she didn’t do tricks anymore. “My time came and went,” she said, always laughing, lying in bed where she always could be found, mumbling vague words about finding some kind of real work. (She would have to get out of the apartment for that, though.) Iris, junior high dropout, did everything in that steamy three-room. She cooked, she cleaned, payed the bills, did the shopping. Her mother went out sometimes, disappearing up Westchester Avenue to come back late, empty bottle in her hand. Eyes swimming like she was trying to knock the feeling out of them. Iris would put her to bed.
“I feel bad,” her mother would say a lot, especially on Sundays when the big church on Wales Avenue would toll its bell. “I’m nada, you hear? A waste. I shitted up my life. Shitted up your life. Gaw, I wanna die.”
“Shh.” Iris would massage her head softly until her eyes closed.
“Iris. Do you love me?”
Her mother seemed to be talking through a dream.
“Yeah. I love you, Ma.”
“Don’t call me Ma. Call me Angie. We partners, okay?”
* * *
Iris called her Angie all the time. The two of them would dress up in spandex, high heels, and big shirts. Pacheco would drive them around. Angie would always remember the days when she was a hooker, and men would stare breathlessly.
“Ahh, don’t cry, baby,” Pacheco would say, his wide sturdy face creased up as he drove. “Iris. Stop her from cryin’.”
Iris would pull her close.
“You don’t understand, Pacheco. You don’t, ’cause she’s not your daughter. I just wasn’t a good sample for her.”
Pacheco lost his cool pretty fast, times like that.
“Look, you took care of her. Everything you did in life was for her. She know that. We talked about it, right, muñeca? All she wants now is to pay you back an’ help you. Right?”
“Right.” Iris nodding to reassure. “Don’t worry about it, Angie. I’ll be fine. You an’ Pacheco take good care of me.”
And she would kiss and hug her like she was at an airport, then go off to meet her date for the night, Angie slithering up into the front seat as Iris went into the hotel. Iris was used to Angie coming all apart when she drank. It was a good thing she didn’t drink anymore. Now all she did was crack. She smoked in the morning and in the afternoon and at night. Pacheco would bring the stuff and Iris would help her prepare the pipe. Angie would light up and then her eyes would glass up.
“You really love me, muñequita?” Always asking in the whirl of crack steam.
* * *
“Yeah, I really love you,” Iris always replied with an involuntary flinch.
Iris had seen her mother fucking for money for as long as she could remember. Used to operate from a tiny apartment on Avenue St. John. Would bring the men in there while Iris sat on the living room watching Pooh videos and playing with blocks or Holly Hobbies. “It’s the way I make my money, honey,” Angie would singsong with so much color and life and maybe a little too much lipstick. To Iris it was just normal life. If she opened the bedroom door and caught her mother in action it didn’t mean anything because there was food on the table, money for clothes and toys, plus enough time to go shopping and jump all over the sofa and love seat chasing each other. There was time between assignments for Angie to do Iris’s nails and Iris’s hair, to buy her skirts and pantyhose and to play with her face in front of the bedroom mirror where there was always a liquor smell like medicine. “My baby is beautiful,” Angie would say after applying all the makeup to miniature carbon-copy Angie. Iris remembered being in the stroller, crowded Third Avenue, outside Alexander’s in the rush of Christmas shoppers, and Angie blocking traffic there by the entrance so she could stoop down on one knee and reapply the mascara to Iris’s little face. Iris soaked it up. It was attention, it was love. They were girlfriends. They fought over lipstick and pantyhose, and once when Iris swiped her red minidress to wear to school Angie beat the fuck out of her.
It was in school that things turned sour. The kids there knew about her mother. They made jokes. Sometimes guys would come over and say, Hey, yesterday night I had your mother. Made her get all butch—lots of fistfights. Cut her hair short, perfected the crotch-kick, three fights a week and lots of notes home until Angie put a stop to it. In junior high she was a girl again, long hair, but the talk went on. The South Bronx was still a small town, no matter how many tenements went how deep. The only kids she could hang out with were crackheads and other street creeps who couldn’t figure out why she even came to school. She started to cut classes and smoke reefer.
One day she was made to stay after school by a teacher. His name was Mr. Berlin, so white he pink, spit when he talked and had curly blond hair. She sat at her desk and he sat at his.
“I’ve heard talk about your mother,” he said slowly. “Is it true, Iris? Is it true what the other students are saying?”
Iris nodded, her face bloodless burning.
Mr. Berlin got up from his desk and walked over to hers.
“And you. What they say about you. Is that true?”
Iris nodded again, her face a mask. She felt like she knew what was coming. She had seen that face on men who honked their horns at her mother as they walked home some nights from tricks. He took his wallet out and laid a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “Is that enough?” he asked. Iris shook her head. He peeled off another twenty. “How about now?” His face looked moist. When there were sixty dollars on there, then she nodded, though she had been a little curious as to how much she would be worth. That girl who sat in the third desk first row now stood up, lowering shades, pulling down drawstrings. Her voice was now gravel, her eyes like she had won. Mr. Berlin watched the professional take over.
“Okay,” she said like she was in charge now. “What do you want? Blowjob? Handjob? Sixty-nine? Doggie-style? Ride ’um cowgirl? Missionary?” A grin so twisted menace.
“I don’t know if I can,” Mr. Berlin said, looking a little pale like he had lost control.
“Take the pants down,” she said.
* * *
After she went down on Mr. Berlin she could have her way with him, could walk in and out during class, he wouldn’t even raise a mumble. She never abused it—she liked his regular sixty dollars, and Mr. Berlin was her first regular. He was a married-with-three-kids kind of guy. Pulling money off him was easy. It was so easy, it made her want to get into the business. There was a sense of power that went with it that left her feeling almost high.
One night she was sitting with Pacheco and Angie on the bed. A trick had just left and they had changed the sheets, then lay there with their legs intertwined, eating chicken from a bucket. Pacheco had just started with a tale from his army days when Iris came right out with the story about Mr. Berlin.
“Are you serious?” Angie jumped off the bed, giving Pacheco a punch. “Did’ju hear that shit? I’ll kill that bastid!” She paced, arms windmilli
ng. “I’ll take the bastids to court, the whole fucken school! That dirty fuck!! Pacheco!! Why the fuck you just sittin’ there? She’s only fourteen!”
Pacheco and Iris exchanged glances. Iris went into her room and came back with a cigar box. She emptied it on the bed. Three hundred and ten dollars.
“I’ll sue the city!! Just look at that!! All that talk about morality!! Like I’m garbage, right? And lookit what they do!! All of them fulla shit, alla them!”
“You don’t have a case,” Pacheco said, riffling through the bills. “The daughter of a local hooker? Gimme a break. They’d laugh you outta court. All the nice decent hard-working white guy has to say is that she propositioned him. Who ain’t gonna believe him?”
Angie glared, eyes teeming wet. “But we gotta do something!”
Iris said, “Fuck school. I wanna go to work.”
Angie stood there staring at the two of them. Trembling a little, looking as if they had just presented her with the terms of surrender.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her lips quivered. She passed a hand through her hair, sat on the bed, reached for her crack pipe. She took it into the bathroom and shut the door.
“Did he sex you?” Pacheco asked while lighting a cigarette.
“Yeah.”
“You want I should set you up?”
Iris didn’t even hesitate. “Yeah,” she said.
* * *
She turned tricks every day, every night, even on weekends. She still managed to cook for her mother, who wasn’t doing much of anything, and paid for her crack habit. The career started like a party, and turned into chain gang.
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