Salsa Nocturna: A Bone Street Rumba Collection

by Daniel José Older

  I followed the noise through the shadows. I could now make it out definitively to be a melody; a lonely, minor key melody, beautiful like a girl with one eye standing outside a graveyard. I rounded a corner and then held perfectly still. Before me hovered all my friends, the muertos, with their backs turned to me. I tried to see past them but they were crowded together so densely it was impossible. Ever so quietly, I crept forward among them, their chilly undead shadows sending tiny earthquakes down my spine.

  The muertos were gathered around a doorway. I entered and found myself in this dank boiler room. At the far end, little Marcos sat calmly in a niche of dusty pipes and wiring. He held my carry-along in his lap. His eyes were closed and his fingers glided up and down the keys. Between myself and Marcos, about thirty muertecitos bobbed up and down, their undivided attention on the boy. You know, I never think much about those who die as children, what their wandering souls must deal with. Who watches over them, checks on those small, curly-bug lumps at night? The ghost children were transfixed; I could feel their love for this boy and his music as surely as I felt the pulse pounding in my head.

  And, to be quite honest with you, at first I too found myself lost in the swirling cascade of notes coming from my little keyboard. It is rare that I feel humbled, rarer still by a ten year old, but I'm not above admitting it. The song filled the heavy boiler room air, so familiar and so brand-new. It was a mambo, but laced with the saddest melody I've ever heard – some unholy union of Mozart, Coltrane and Perez Prado that seemed to speak of many drunken nights and whispered promises. It tore into me, devoured me and pieced me back together a brand new man.

  * * *

  But now the song has ended, breaking the quiet reverie we had all fallen into and ripping open a great painful vacancy where it once had been. I'm strong, and not the addictive type, so I shake my head and welcome myself back to the strange silence. But the muerte

  citos are not so quick to move on. A furious rustling ripples through their ranks, and the small, illuminated shadows nudge towards Marcos. The boy finally looks up and turns to me, eyes wide. He starts to play the song again, but he's afraid now. His heart's not in it and the ghostlings can tell. They continue their urgent sway, a tough crowd, and begin to edge closer to him.

  I carry a few saints with me and I find more often than not, they do their part. They tend to really come through when my more basic human instincts, like caution, fail. This is definitely one of those times. I surge (cat-like) through the crowd of wily young ghosts. Their cool tendrils cling to me like cobwebs but I keep moving. I scoop up little man and his living body feels so warm against me compared to all that death. He's still clutching the keyboard. Eyes squeezed shut. His little heart sends a pitter-patter pulse out like an SOS.

  I decide if I pause to consider the situation around me, I may come to my senses, which would definitely mean an icy, uncomfortable death for myself and Marcos. So I make like a running back – fake left, swerve right (slowly, achingly, but gracefully) and then just plow down the middle. They're more ready for me this time, and angrier. The air is thick with their anger; any minute the wrong molecule might collide and blow the whole place up. Also, I didn't gain quite the momentum I'd hoped to. I can feel all that stillness reach far inside me, penetrate my most sacred places, throw webs across my inner shrines, detain my saints. I realize I might not make it.

  But there is more music to write. I won't be around to see my legacy honored properly, but I have a few more compositions in me before I can sleep. Also, I enjoy my family and Saturday nights playing dominos with the band after rehearsal and my morning café con leche, bacon, eggs, papas fritas and sometimes sausage. Young Ernesto who's not so young and whatever crazy creation him and Janey will come up with in their late night house-rocking – there are still things I would like to see. Also, this little fellow in my arms seems like he may have a long, satisfying career ahead of him. A little lonely perhaps, but musical genius can be an all-consuming friend until you know how to tame her. I have room under my wing here, I realize as I plow through this wee succubus riot, and many things to tell young Marcos. Practical things – things they don't teach you about in books or grad school.

  Is trundle a word? It should be. I trundle through those creatures, tearing their sloppy ice tentacles from my body. The door comes up on me quicker than I thought it would, catches me a little off guard, and I'm so juiced-up thinking of all the beautiful and sad truths I will tell Marcos when we survive that I just knock it out of my way. I don't stop to see how the mama and papa muertos feel about the situation; I move through them quick.

  At the corner I glance back. An intervention of some kind seems to be taking place. The muertos have encircled their young. I can only suppose what must be happening, but I'd like to believe it's a solid scolding, an ass beating like the one I would've gotten from Papi (God rest his troubled soul) if I'd trapped one of my younger brothers in the basement and made like I was gonna end him.

  * * *

  When we reach the c'mon-get-happy lobby, I notice that dawn is edging out onto the streets. Marcos's song must've been longer than I realized. I put the boy down, mostly because I'm losing feeling in the lower half of my body and my shirt is caked in sweat. Wrap my fat hand around the banister and slowly, languidly, huff and puff up the stairs behind him. I pause on the landing, listen to the quick, echoing tak-tak-tak of his footfalls bound up the next three flights. He will be curled in his bed by the time I reach the second floor, asleep by sunrise. At six, the morning crew will come in, smiles first, and I will chuckle with them nonchalantly about the long, uneventful night.

  Tomorrow evening, as I show my new student a few tricks to keep his chops up, my friends will return. In their Sunday best, they will slither as always from the shadows of the fifth floor hallway. And this time, they will bring their young along with them.

  Date Night

  A phonecall breaks the spell; I’m equal parts shattered and relieved. The music swings along like a graceful monster—something from another world but something I’ve always somehow ached to hear—and Charlotte’s hand stays pressed against my thigh, but the whole room recedes some as I register which phone it is that’s ringing.

  “Reza?” Charlotte’s hoarse, hushed voice reaches me through the thunder of drums and horns.

  My face crinkles at the screen, a sudden bright beacon in the dim club. Sasha. There’s no reason for her to be calling my work number.

  “Sasha from the lighthouse? With the twins?” Charlotte unabashedly peering over my shoulder. I don’t mind; it’s brought her warm body even closer to mine. I nod. The music simmers than builds. “You’re not gonna—?”

  I pocket the phone, pull Charlotte closer to me then bring my face up to hers.

  It’s our third date, first kiss. First kiss with Charlotte; first kiss since Angie. This new Reza is slow. Once on the prowl, all sizzling fingertips and the raw mastery of timing, it took me almost sixty years to finally grow old and when it happened it happened overnight.

  Charlotte tastes like pineapple juice and spearmint gum and some musky body oil with the slightest hint of chronic from a joint she smoked earlier. No hint of the musty library she works in—she is fresh. I probably taste like this rum & Coke and mouthwash. At first, my wavering imagination circles the club, wondering which faces gawk, which corners of whose eyes catch us, who can’t be bothered. The saxophone brings me back. It’s that huge one, the baritone. The woman playing it unleashes a series of ferocious raspy blurts and the whole band stops and then falls back in around her as Charlotte’s lips become the whole world. I pull her closer. My hand slides down her cheek; wandering fingertips insinuate all the things I will one day do to her body; they chance a suggestion: maybe tonight, and then we both sit back and she glares at me with a slight smile and one eyebrow raised.

  “Well,” she says, sipping her juice.

  “Well indeed,” I mutter, the old Reza teasing at the edge of my skin, threatening to emerge
. We could leave now, reach my place within an hour and be naked by midnight. The sax hollers again; the band hums to a halt; silence descends between the guttural howls. I can almost taste her. My pocket vibrates.

  Sasha.

  “What?” Charlotte says when I roll my eyes.

  I shake my head as my face lights up again with that blue haze. It’s a text this time: 9119119119119111911911

  * * *

  “I’ll drive,” Charlotte says. It’s a warm Manhattan night. The streets glisten with a recent downpour and Soho bustles with well-dressed revelers.

  “The hell you will.” It comes out rougher than I mean it to. Immediately I want to swallow the words back up inside me. Who is this woman with regret and an uncertain step? Three dates and a kiss and already I’ve lost myself.

  But Charlotte just smiles and wiggles her eyebrows. “You been drinking.” She holds her hand out for the keys.

  “You can’t come,” I say, feeling like a stubborn child.

  “The hell I can’t.”

  “It’s probably going to be…” Words fail. Knowing Sasha, knowing me, it could be any flavor of horrific from ghost to gangster. Part of me is relieved: the familiar deep focus of urgency is like a deep sigh compared to this…this. But Charlotte is right: I’m in no condition to drive and there’s no time to take the damn late night train or wait for one of my guys to come get me. “I drive for a living.” A pathetic last ditch effort; she knows she’s won.

  “I’m sure that’s what you do.” She winks, taking the keys from me and sliding smoothly into the front seat of my Crown Vic. Slick.

  * * *

  “Just get here.” Sasha’s voice betrays no desperation, but that’s Sasha: impossibly poised and somehow deeply genuine. “The spot’s on Lorimer. Gonna text the address. Come in through the side entrance by the dumpsters. I’ll explain the rest in person. And Reza?”

  “Hm?”

  “Come heavy.”

  She hangs up.

  Heavy. The trunk has enough fire-power to take on an invading army. It lays concealed beneath several false layers of felt and plastic. Even on this relatively off-duty type night, a Mauser hugs tightly to my ankle and one of my Glocks hangs under my left arm. I’m always heavy, and Sasha knows this, which means come extra-heavy, which means some real bad shit is in the works. I grimace at the smudged lights of the Williamsburg Bridge as they dash past. Charlotte is making good time. I might be impressed.

  She turns down the salsa blaring on the radio. “You’re not just a driver.”

  She knows damn well I’m not. It’s been implicit and understood since we met, her voice guiding me along the Long Island backroads as Sasha and I headed out to stop a deranged half-dead guy holed up in an old lighthouse. Implicit and understood and unspoken. And that’s how I liked it.

  “You’re right,” I say, still watching the lights. “I’m a chauffeur.”

  She chuckles. “Okay, Reza, but the moment in which you’re going to have to explain more is rapidly approaching.”

  I grunt. She’s right.

  “Twelve minutes, according to my GPS.”

  “You’re gonna drop me off,” I say. “This isn’t safe, whatever it is.”

  “Reza.” My name a small song on her lips, a dusty blues, the clipped howl of that baritone sax. I shake my head, still a little tilted from that rum.

  “Doctor?”

  “I’ve had a good time tonight, so far.” Her eyes are on the road ahead. My eyes are on the dashboard, but all I see is her. “You give good date, even though you like to pretend it’s all whatever.”

  “I don’t—” I start, but she’s right and anyway she’s not done.

  “And I hope we do it again, as a matter of fact. And I haven’t said that after a date in a long time now. You’re a good kisser, Reza, and I can tell you give bomb head.”

  I won’t smile I won’t smile I won’t smile. I shrug.

  “But I don’t fuck with secrets and lies. Not when it comes to people I care about. And even though I barely know you, Miss Villalobos, there’s something about you. Something that tastes like tomorrow. And people I care about are the only people that have a shot at tasting this glory, which I happen to know you want a taste of.”

  My head wavers in a noncommital side-to-side samba, but my chest catches fire. Of course, I want it, my God. Dr. Charlotte Ann-Marie Robateau Tennessee moves through the world like a warm breeze through palms. She got that smile. Those hips and that ass been calling my name since I first saw ‘em shuffling around behind the research desk at the Harlem Public Library. I said her name over and over as I fell asleep that night, memorized it like a speech so I could say it back to her the next time we met, in full and with unfiltered flow. Dr. Charlotte Ann-Marie Robateau Tennessee. It even rhymes, goddamnit. Of course I want my tongue inside her.

  I must’ve let out a little grunt, because Charlotte laughs and shakes her head as we pull off the bridge and into the labyrinthine criss-cross of Williamsburg. “If you try to protect me from whatever it is your life is really about, it won’t even just backfire, it’ll explode. And I’ll be gone. So—”

  Because at this strange, dizzy moment, I am hers and I will do anything to stay hers, I blurt out three words I’ve simply never said before: “I’m a killer.”

  We slide along a steady flow of traffic under the rumbling J train. I close my eyes, let this new silence set in, resign to whatever will come.

  “Well that wasn’t so hard, was it,” Dr. Charlotte Ann-Marie Robateau Tennessee finally says, her voice almost a whisper.

  “You can’t even imagine,” I manage.

  A text comes in from Sasha: wherever you are, hurry.

  * * *

  Happy brown kids frolic on the painted storefront windows of the Braden-Belzer Center for Community Development. It sits between an all-night nail salon and a fruit stand on Lorimer. We follow a narrow alley towards the back, my duffle bag full of the requested heaviness bounces against my spine as I maneuver between the brick wall and rusted fence. Past the dumpsters, up a small flight of stairs, through a glass door, into a brightly lit rec room with more painted brown kids chasing rainbows and butterflies amidst melodramatic posters of grinning revolutionaries and generic colloquialisms. Sasha waits for us with her arms crossed over her chest, braids pulled back in a tight bun, face unreadable. Beside her, a very stressed out white guy scratches something on a notepad, and a woman who could be Sasha’s sister throws us a brief glance before glaring back at a door on the far side of the room. She’s got a metal baseball bat on one shoulder, poised to strike.

  “Everyone, this is Reza,” Sasha says. “She handles…stuff.”

  “Great!” the white guy sighs. He’s scrawny and wears a lumberjack shirt and jeans shorts. Only the thinning flap of blond hair suggests that he might be significantly older than fifteen. “That’s what Janey said about you, but here we are. Can she handle this stuff?”

  Sasha’s scowl is so tiny, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one to catch it. “Reza, this is Josh Tremont, and that’s my friend Janey by the door. They work here.”

  I nod at them. Josh is trying to project some ethereal white dude in control vibe but only managing to look exceptionally freaked out. Janey’s keeping it cool but that grim set of her jaw says she’s ready to make her first kill if need be. “This is my associate, Dr. Tennessee,” I tell them.

  “Oh good, a doctor,” Josh says, I think unironically. Charlotte’s degree is in library studies, but she just smiles and plays along. It takes physical effort not to swoon.

  I look at Sasha. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “Janey,” Sasha says.

  Janey opens her mouth but then the whole room shakes as something huge crashes into the door on the far wall. She takes a step back, readying the bat.

  “The hell is that?” Charlotte whispers.

  “Janey here still hasn’t fully told us,” Josh says, taking a few steps away from the door. “Some kind of class art p
roject, you said? Whatever it is, it’s big and pissed.”

  “It was a teambuilding exercise,” Janey growls. “Just went a little off the rails.”

  Josh rubs his hands through the blond strands trying to cover his forehead. “Whatever—at this point, we just need to get it handled. By protocol, as the supervisor on scene right now I’m supposed to call the co—”

  “No!” Janey, Sasha, and I yell at the same time. “No damn cops,” Sasha finished.

  He puts both hands up. “Okay! I get it! I wasn’t going to, I was just saying that’s what I’m supposed to do. Obviously, that’s not an option, fine, I’m willing to—”Another huge thud shakes the room. Josh shakes his head, eyes closed. “—I am willing to try to figure out another way. I don’t want the cops here either believe me, but look, we have to do something.”

  “You shouldn’t even be here, Josh,” Janey says. “If you hadn’t been working overtime without telling anybody your Cover-Your-Ass obsessed ass wouldn’t have to have known about any of this and you could’ve been sipping PBRs at your favorite fake dive bar in peace right now.”

  Josh frowns. “Well, that was unnecessary.”

  “It’s a monster of some kind,” Sasha says. “Made of clay and earth mostly.”

  “And it’s fucking huge,” Janey adds.

  “And it’s fucking huge,” Sasha agrees.

  “So I gathered,” Charlotte says. I raise an eyebrow her way but she shakes her head: she’s staying.

  “Can it be killed?” I ask.

  “That would be the million dollar question,” Josh says. Everyone stares at him. He cringes. “Sorry, that came out more sarcastic than I meant it to. I apologize.”