He’d really know me by then. He’d know who I was.
But Javi did come back on leave, once, a few months before that final deployment.
Ma closed the restaurant for the weekend. Rushed around the place making sure everything looked right—that his room was in order, that the cabinets were clean, redusting and revacuuming and all the shit we usually ignore. Jan told her to settle down, that it was Javi, not Jesus, but Ma told her to shut up. One of the only times she’s let my sister have it since the baby.
You take care of what’s yours, was all Ma said. They may leave but when they come back you take care of them.
He took a cab from the airport. Let himself in. Hugged Ma and she instantly started to cry. We did the handshake thing. He kissed Jan and he shook her husband’s hand and he snatched her baby up from the carpet so fast that everyone flinched a little bit.
Javi looked thicker. Darker. Not gruff or monosyllabic or any of that shit, but there was something there that wasn’t there the last time we’d seen him. Or maybe something that wasn’t there at all.
We made his favorite dinner, jerk shrimp with potatoes, and he tried to jump in the kitchen but Ma told him to stop playing.
For finally being home, it felt like the end of something.
After dinner, he stood up. Yawned. We’d have him the whole weekend, he said, but the flight had been long. He was tired. Ma told him to get to bed, quickly, we’d see him in the morning, and before too long I followed him upstairs, left Ma and Jan in the dark of the kitchen.
My room was his room. I knocked before I went in. Javi’d collapsed across the mattress, away from the door, and he smiled when I touched him, when I took the floor beside him.
Well, I said. I didn’t finish my sentence and he didn’t follow up. We sat next to each other, just being brothers.
After a while, he said I’d grown up. Gained some weight in my face.
I’m fat, I said, and he said no, just a little weight, which was what I’d needed, and the hand he put on my shoulder felt like brambles.
We sat there for a while.
I wrote you a letter, I said, like in those fucking movies.
I know, said Javi.
And then he shut up.
Okay, I said.
So how was it over there, I said.
He didn’t answer. And it was so long before he said something that I figured he’d forgotten me.
It was just another thing to do, he said, in a different place. It’s like I could’ve just stayed in East End.
But you see how other people live, he said. And you really can’t help them if they don’t want it.
That’s one thing I’ve learned, he said. That’s what I’ve gotten out of this.
And it looks like nonsense now, like Santa Claus when you’re older, but that’s when I told him I’d been sleeping with boys.
I told him about the one from the library. About the one from the coffee shop. I told him these things, how I’d tried it with Cristina and Maribel, with LaShon and her sister; and how it hadn’t worked, with any of them, even when they’d stared me down, arms crossed. I watched Javi’s face for something to click or contort or scrunch itself into oblivion but it did not. It didn’t happen.
He said nothing, and I was finished talking.
And I didn’t feel it when he slapped me.
I saw his palm coming, but didn’t know it until my shoulder hit the ground, until I looked up to see him staring.
And the thing that I remember about my brother, clearer than what he wore on the day he left, or the cracks he made about our uncle when he came to visit Ma, or the way that he laughed or the color of his eyes or his scent or his funeral, is the look on his face while I lay on the carpet.
When he didn’t get up, and I didn’t get up, I rolled myself over, made a pillow on the floor, and my brother, here and gone, fell asleep on my bed.
SOUTH CONGRESS
The pretty ones always came looking for pills. Blonde and dazzling. Fresh from the Roxy. Glittered dresses and caramel lip gloss, and Raúl couldn’t help but drool, just a little, as they slumped through the Corolla’s open passenger window, poking the length of his seat belt. In the passenger seat, Avery was suave, or whatever passed for that at forty—all Yes ma’am, and Wouldn’t you know, beautiful, and Of course I saved my good shit for you—but it was Raúl who blushed when they howled his name, days past drunk, Hoe-la Rah-hool, Did you miss us Rah-hool, Give me a kiss over here Rah-hool, until Avery finally waved them away, twenties folded under his palms, yelling at the kid to drive and keep his eyes on the fucking street.
Raúl could usually tell which drugs they were looking for just by the corner they chose. He’d gotten good at that. They’d park on Congress for however long it took, until the pickups cruised under the streetlamps on McKinney—or the bimmers by Rusk, the purple minivans near the community garden—and he’d lean into the backseat for the little black JanSport, sifting through baggies sealed with rubber bands and tape. Everything had a label. It was Avery’s call who got what bag. Because everyone, according to Avery, had a type, some nasty little vice.
Kush was all the bums could afford. Spice for the Arabs bussing tables on Gray. The doctors asked for coke and the valets asked for coke and the oil and gas crowd wanted whatever cost the most. E for the housewives, hash for the doormen, and pot for anyone who didn’t know what they were looking for until Avery asked respectfully, demurely, if a little cannabis would do. The girls from the Roxy asked for their usual, a pack of poppers, and Raúl unearthed the baggies from his jacket like a budget magician.
Raúl didn’t deal, in the beginning, or ever. He just drove. At first the roads made no sense but eventually he figured them out. Fannin hooked into Dallas. La Branch sat across from Austin. Streets ran in conjunction, a tangle of dirty shoelaces. It wasn’t long before Avery stopped quarterbacking from the passenger seat, and Raúl didn’t mind the silence, he actually sort of welcomed it, until he looked over to find him snoring, dead to the world.
Some nights they just cruised and cruised. Stopping and turning. Breaking before the expressway.
But mostly they had business. A drop here, a sure thing there. They’d wait until the cops packed it in, creeping around the same avenues. Then one evening, early on, Raúl blew through a light, and a siren wailed a lone note before the flash went off behind him. He nearly shit himself. Months and months of riding dirty all over Houston, and here he was: about to be deported for missing a red.
Except Avery woke up. He rolled down his window, called the cop by name—Jeremiah! They done switched you up!—and Officer Jeremiah Stewart blinked, stuttering, before he tightened his belt and cracked his knuckles and hunched over the passenger door like he’d been looking for something himself.
They jawed about football and cousins and brisket. Avery asked about the wife, their garden in the Ward. The cop said something about Avery’s son, and Avery blew right by that with a wave, said the kid was a man now, better off than the both of them. They talked and they talked, and Raúl pinched himself, a little drowsy, until the cop nodded his way, asking Avery who that was. And Avery smiled with all of his teeth before he said, My nephew, obviously.
He was still cheesing hours later. A rolling guffaw like an avalanche.
Everybody out here looking, he said. And don’t know when to open their eyes.
Uh-hunh, Raúl nodded. Uh-hunh, uh-hunh, uh-hunh.
* * *
• • •
Avery would pick him up after dark. They’d creep along roads Raúl’d stepped through earlier, static if not for the streetlights, the monorail. So late that no one was out walking unless they had to, and the silhouettes between alleys looked like something off the television.
Their supplier was a stocky Greek. Damian Dukakis. Damo to associates. Raúl didn’t know about Greece, couldn’t have found it on
a globe with his finger on the Aegean, but standing in Damo’s condo, you’d have thought they’d landed in Athens. Portraits weighed the walls. Butter clogged his nose, wafting in from the kitchen. Occasionally, a little girl flashed through the kitchen, corralled when an older woman sped around the corner, and Damo’d stop midsentence, snapping his pudgy fingers in Raúl’s face.
They’d leave with a week’s supply. Come back the next to distribute Damo’s cut. His yard sat under a bed of trees, an oasis right in the center of town, and Avery’d shake his head on their way out the door, saying Damo’s good people, to Raúl, who hadn’t asked.
Family man, said Avery. Got a daughter, an old lady. Been pushing for twenty-two years now and not one fuckup.
Or just one, he said. Small thing. Couple kids came sniffing around. Damo plugged their noses.
Man knows what time it is, said Avery. Most boys out here don’t.
All Raúl knew was that most boys looked nothing like them. Most boys slung dope in gas-station parking lots. Most boys slipped half their cut to whatever schmuck took them on. Headphones on their domes, always young and black and mean and smoking. He didn’t know what they saw when they scoped him and Avery, a dirty old man and a Guatemalan in a Corolla, but he knew what they couldn’t have guessed—that they were taking in more than a couple grand a night. And from all parties, too: white, brown, red, and yellow.
Desire don’t discriminate, said Avery. Desire’s gonna swallow every motherfucker out here.
So we don’t discriminate neither, said Avery. We’re equal opportunity pharmacists!
* * *
• • •
Raúl worked other jobs before this one, but his English was rough and the city wasn’t waiting on him. He’d ground meat for a Thai diner, strung hangers at a dry cleaner. Twenty-hour days, six days a week. Whatever cash they paid him, if they paid him at all, was just enough for bus fare and maybe a grubby taco. He’d considered whoring himself at one of the clubs set up off Elgin, but the other guys dissuaded him, bitching about the pay, and when Raúl glanced at the clientele, balding white dudes in graying suits, he decided he wasn’t quite desperate enough to let one of them inside of him.
This was after nearly a year of sitting around his aunt’s apartment, a dilapidated piss-yellow complex downtown. Pacing up Alabama, conjugating English verbs under his breath. The buildings always impressed him, so tall in the business district that he’d squint and shut his eyes as if maybe then he’d catch their peaks. The Nigerian vendors behind the complex had come to recognize him, and sometimes he’d slip into their stalls, hearing out their pitches for earrings and DVDs. Raúl never bought shit, but he always listened. Their accents were like potholes. The clicking of consonants dulled to a thud. He’d offer a thumbs-up, and they’d offer theirs back.
His mother’d sent him up from Villa Nueva, and his father was who knew where.
He lived with his aunt as a favor to her sister. The aunt worked in a hospital, bucketing piss and blood for years, but eventually the ladder presented itself and now she was some doctor’s secretary. She was grateful to her sister, who’d stayed behind for their parents, so that she could flee, but the years had passed and her brow had furrowed, and eventually she realized she didn’t have to hold on to that. She could admit that she hadn’t much liked her. And she didn’t much like Raúl either. He was too dark, always gurgling his words. He spoke too quietly. He never washed the dishes. And no matter how many times or what tone she used, he always left the seat up, like she was back on the old shift, like she wasn’t doing him and his whore mother a solid.
Eventually Raúl found himself on a day crew, after a Mexican with a wrench spotted him drifting up the block. They held eye contact for a few waxy seconds, and the man asked in impeccable English if he was employed. He told Raúl to come back tomorrow, crack of dawn, and Raúl told his aunt about the encounter that evening, his first strike of luck in weeks and weeks. She told him he must not have opened his mouth.
He showed the next morning. Dirty jeans, white shirt. The man did not. Raúl stood among the smoking workers for a while, looking for a conversation to fold himself into, and when it became clear that they either couldn’t or wouldn’t hear him, he asked, not impolitely, about the man he’d spoken to yesterday.
Accident, said another guy, not even looking up from his coffee. Faggot fell off a chimney.
So Raúl was the replacement. Lucky he’d shown up.
What they did was roof houses. Not in the neighborhoods that clearly needed roofing—the ones with more black people than he’d ever seen in his life—but the other ones. The quiet ones. The ones with trees bursting from lawn-lined sidewalks and children walking in groups, chaperoned by wide women in orange vests and hard hats. At lunch they’d sit and watch the convoy pass. Sometimes a kid waved, and the men would wave back, until the chaperone grabbed the child’s wrists, shooting the workers a look.
Raúl wasn’t great with a hammer, but he figured that if he eliminated a nail a day he’d at least look like an asset. Maybe. A handful of old hires swung by to check on him, and they’d see the nail, and they’d see Raúl. And they didn’t laugh or frown. They shrugged. Squeezed his shoulder.
He spent the rest of that day and a couple more hammering.
It was something to do.
But then one morning the next week, the job was over. He loafed around their meeting spot for a while, nodding at everyone else left off the worksheet memo for a new project. When it was clear that the ship had moved on, and that he wouldn’t be paid, he walked back home beside the steady belch of traffic.
* * *
• • •
They met on a lazy afternoon. Raúl had stepped outside the apartment for a cigarette, although really it wasn’t the smoke he needed so much as a break from so many different tongues and that crushed feeling he got whenever he shut his eyes. The AC in the apartment had taken the day off. The roaches under the carpet had overtaken the countertop. He was watching a Jehovah’s Witness work her way up the block when the little black Corolla slid into the lot behind her.
That lot belonged to a series of new lofts. Glossy and refurbished. Lawn chairs on the balconies. Raúl didn’t even look at those buildings, because they made his stomach pop. They made him think of murder. A whiteboy in joggers skipped out of the garage, glancing both ways before he leaned into the Corolla.
Raúl watched them talk. He watched the exchange of hands. And then the car peeled off, and the whiteboy skipped away, like he hadn’t just handed something like two grand to a stranger. The whole transaction took less than two minutes. The little Jehovah lady in the shawl hadn’t even crossed the road yet.
A few days later, but not too soon, Raúl found himself in the same spot, broad day, smoking. He didn’t have a plan.
Then the Corolla pulled into the lot. The driver’s window drooped, revealing a black man in shades. Grizzled, with a mustache as dark as any Raúl’d ever seen.
Can I he-elp you, he said, and Raúl just swallowed. He said he didn’t know.
The man looked at Raúl’s tattered flip-flops, his unwashed hair. He asked if he was looking for pot.
No, said Raúl.
The man asked if he was looking for blow, and Raúl told him he wasn’t. The man asked if he was looking for dust, and Raúl told him he wasn’t. The man asked if he was looking for X, and Raúl told him he wasn’t. The man asked and asked and asked and asked and Raúl shook his head, a little dizzier for the effort.
So, said the man. You just popped over to my spot to chat.
Raúl peeked into the car. He said he was looking for work.
The man asked if Raúl worked for Jacob, did he work for Screwtop, or Lacy, or Tom-Tom.
Raúl knew what he wanted to say, but he didn’t know how to say it in English.
No, he said.
Then what the fuck, said the man.
Downtown traffic had begun to wake up. Raúl could spot his aunt’s window from the concrete below. The Nigerians behind them yelled obscenities at passersby, waving purses and blankets and key chains from Beijing. A school of schlubby bankers in ties crossed the road, cell phones at their ears, gophers in motion.
The man just stared at Raúl through the car window.
Then he sighed. Shook his head. He slipped off his shades, unearthing a pair of tired eyes.
Avery extended his hand. He asked if Raúl had a name, or had he left that at home with his sense.
* * *
• • •
Avery knew all their buyers’ names, and eventually Raúl did, too.
They sold to the postman who never wore socks. They sold to the sturdy little woman in a flowing hijab. They sold to the cabbies, to the line cooks, and to a Pakistani gentleman in a long robe.
Occasionally they broke a little off for the homeless. Damo shook his head whenever they tried to justify it, but they overcharged the club kids, so he never gave them grief. They’d sit in his living room counting out the profit, and Damo only said he really hoped they were proud of themselves.
Avery told him he had no idea.
It baffled Raúl that the people who bought from him left their homes, left their couches and their kids and their fridges and their televisions. To come out here. These stinking, fucking streets. The filthy heft of Texas Avenue and the sewage clogged on Fannin and the twilight at the end of every godforsaken intersection.
But Raúl didn’t ask questions. He didn’t say shit about it.
Lot Page 9
