by Ed Kurtz
Aldo was pretty sure he was half-Spanish himself, though he didn’t know what kind, because Grandma never said anything about his or Josie’s dads. He asked Fernando about it one time, but he said Aldo had it twisted; no one in their family would fuck a spic, it’s just that Italians were dark like that sometimes.
After Aldo Bic-ed his head for the first time, none of that shit mattered anymore, because he knew who his brothers were. And one thing he knew about his skin for sure was that it felt so good next to Leticia’s. They fucked in her apartment in South Jamaica, Queens during the afternoons when her mom was out on her postal route and all the suckers were sitting in school.
Then Aldo got sent to up to the Tryon School for Boys for sixteen months over the beating he and his friends gave that guy in Tompkins. By the time he came back home, Leticia had gotten pregnant by some other boy. Josie was living with some guy on the Lower East Side. She had been drifting farther East since she left home, and now she was all the way over on Avenue D.
Grandma said Josie wasn’t allowed in the apartment, but Aldo knew she wouldn’t come by anyway as long as there was a chance of Fernando being there. Aldo knew that Fernando was a big part of why Josie had left in the first place and a big part of why Josie was as fucked up as she was. When Aldo thought about that, he filled with rage—more rage than he could handle, so he tried not to think about that.
Aldo met up with Josie a couple times that year after he got home. She was his sister. It was clear that she was shooting dope. They went to get breakfast at The Kharkov Diner on Avenue A one morning, and she nodded out right in her hash browns. He had to shake her awake, with the fat Ukrainian owner breathing down his neck, threatening to throw them out. She sat up, disoriented, with griddle grease and black eye shadow streaked all over her face. Aldo was disgusted. He knew bad things had happened to her, but she’d made her own decisions too. He threw a few bills on the table and walked out. He didn’t see Josie much after that.
Between her, his drunk pervert uncle, the guys he’d known upstate, the junkie punks left over from the seventies, the crackheads in the park, and every other weak motherfucker, it had become absolutely clear to Aldo that sobriety, restraint, and above all, discipline, were necessities for a soldier in this war called life. While the living dead were lifting pints, Aldo was lifting weights. When the shit went down, they’d see who was ready.
Aldo kept running with the old crew, but shit had gotten more serious. They weren’t just out for kicks anymore; they weren’t just beating fools down left and right, they were jacking cars every night, and selling them up in the Iron Triangle in Queens. Someone got stabbed over some bullshit, and cops were all over the place. Everything was narrowing in.
Aldo knew some guys up in Boston who could get him some work. He went up there for six months, but then he got a permanent warehouse job. After a while he was warehouse manager, then he got a deal on a place of his own out in Malden. He spent the next two years renovating the place. He worked on the house all weekend, and every evening after work. He liked being alone. He liked having work to do.
For the whole two years, he slept in his sleeping bag on the floor. The third year, he got himself some furniture. A table and a chair. A bed and, from a yard sale on the block, a bureau with a mirror. He looked in the mirror and saw he wasn’t a kid anymore. He worried about his sister sometimes, but life was war. The fact that he’d built himself a safe bunker didn’t change that. You couldn’t save everybody. Some of them, you had to leave on the battlefield.
He did hear from home from time to time, but nothing good. Half the guys from the old crew were dead or in jail; the other half were married with a bunch of brats in Yonkers or Jersey. Josie was in and out of rehab. Grandma was in and out of the hospital. Fernando went to jail for statutory. Josie moved back in with Grandma. Someone needed care, but Aldo was never clear who was taking care of who. Grandma died, but Aldo didn’t go down for the funeral. He talked to Josie on the phone the night before, and she said she didn’t blame him.
Aldo lit a second cigarette, smoked half of it, then ground it out on the cement. It was time to make the long trek up to the fifth floor. He shouldered his backpack and began the ascent.
A woman was coming down from the fifth floor. They got to the landing at the same time. There wasn’t enough room for two people to pass, so Aldo stood aside. They eyed each other. She was a pretty girl in her twenties, wearing a cheap peasant dress. No, it hung too perfectly. It was an expensive peasant dress.
“Are you moving in?” she asked. He nodded, then wondered why he nodded, because no, he wasn’t planning on moving into the apartment.
“Cool. That’ll be a welcome change. The woman who lived there was really trashy. She didn’t seem to have a job, and sometimes her apartment smelled bad. Sometimes she smelled bad.”
“What was her name?”
“I’m not sure. Flo. Tony. No. Jonie?”
“It was Josephine. But yeah, we called her Josie.” The woman gave him a confused look, then hurried on down the stairs.
Aldo walked down the long hall to his childhood apartment. He slid the key into the lock and pushed the door open. He felt the added weight of piled garbage behind the door. He pushed it just enough to squeeze through, then eased the door shut.
There was a rustle and then a crash from the middle room. Aldo was about to flip on the lights, expecting a rat to scatter, but caution stopped him. He stood still and listened. Someone was in the other room. Aldo searched by the door until he found the baseball bat; he knew his sister, and he knew there would always be a wooden bat by the door. He crept into the middle room, moving as quietly as a person can in steel-toed boots.
He needn’t have bothered. The figure that stood in the corner of the dark room, rifling through a chest of drawers, was oblivious to Aldo’s approach. An electric lantern glowed on top of the chest. Probably the electric bill hadn’t been paid; it wouldn’t have mattered if Aldo had flipped the switch in the kitchen. Aldo studied the man in the dim glow of the Coleman. Aldo didn’t need the light, though—he had seen this silhouette creeping around this apartment in the dark enough times to recognize it. It was his Uncle Fernando.
“Fern.” Aldo said.
“What the fuck?” Fernando shot up and almost turned an entire circle before his eyes settled on Aldo. “Aldie? Aldie? Is that you? What the hell are you doing here?”
“My sister died. I’m her closest living relative. I came to take care of her things.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah, man. I’m glad you came. I didn’t think you would. So I was coming to help out.”
Aldo unclipped the LED flashlight from his backpack, and pointed it towards Fernando. He shined it in his uncle’s eyes until Fernando had to raise his hand to block the beam. Then he shined it on the top of the chest, by the lantern’s base. “Seems like the only things you managed to take care of were a bunch of pills and an EBT card.”
“Well, hey man, look, it’s no use to her no more. And I didn’t know you’d be coming back.”
Aldo turned off the flashlight. He clipped it back onto his bag, then took off the bag and placed it on the floor. He didn’t want the straps encumbering him when he did what he had to do next. “I think you took enough from Josie when she was alive, Fernando.”
Aldo raised the baseball bat. He swung it around as he stepped towards his uncle. The first blow just caught Fernando in the shoulder. The second one got him right in the skull. Aldo didn’t know if that blow killed him, but it shut him up, and it knocked him to the floor.
Aldo got in one more headshot, then threw the bat down and went to work with his boots. It had been a dozen years since Aldo stomped someone, but it came right back to him. Like riding a bike. Or so Aldo heard, since no one had ever taught him to ride a bike.
He felt his uncle’s ribs give away. He felt his uncle’s cheekbones shatter. He felt his uncle’s nose drive back into his brain. Aldo knew no one would hear the beating. After all, no one had seeme
d to hear any of the other hundred beatings that had occurred in this apartment over the years. Aldo knew the building had changed, that it had gentrified. But he didn’t think anything could change so much that people would care what happened to him and his family in this apartment.
When Aldo had done what he needed to do, he went through the apartment. It was as disgusting as Billy had said. The sink and table were covered in rancid food. Roaches were everywhere. There were more pills that Fernando hadn’t found, and some dope in a baggie. There was an expired hack license belonging to someone named Singh, and a tattoo machine in a plastic bag. Aldo cursed and made sure not to touch the needles.
Half the bedroom was filled with piles of clothes. Some were filthy, but others were brand new, with tags still on them. One of Josie’s junkie friends must have stolen them off the rack to sell.
Aldo found a suit that was close to fitting his uncle, just a little big, and dressed him in it. He laid his uncle out on a sheet on the floor. He wiped the blood off his uncle’s face as best he could with a tee-shirt, and combed his uncle’s hair. He found a box of prayer cards—no doubt leftover from when his grandmother lived here—and found a St. Sebastian card to lay on his uncle’s chest.
Aldo didn’t regret killing his uncle. Fernando deserved it. Aldo didn’t really mind that his sister was dead either. She hadn’t been happy being alive. He wished that he could go back in time sixty years, and burn the building down before his grandparents had moved in. Better yet, he wished he could go back one hundred or two hundred years, back to the old country or whatever, and slaughter all his ancestors, so no one in his family would ever have been born.
Our Lady of Mercy
by Edward Hagelstein
I first knew Ms. Vagabond when we were both living under an interstate highway in Florida. I don't remember much from that time, but my memory of her is pretty clear. The next time I saw her was seven years later under another overpass in another city. It happens more than you'd think. There's a guy named Pepe that I run into once a decade or so, always in a different city, sometimes in a different state, usually in a jail.
I'm trying to change. You reach a certain age and getting locked up for a few days here and there loses its appeal. You get tired stepping in festering piles of problems, one after the other, and finally decide to step over a few, and eventually walk around them.
Which was why, when I saw her, I should have kept driving.
I'd been clean for a couple of years by then and was driving to work at the gym on a Sunday morning. She was panhandling at the bottom of the exit ramp, holding a wrinkled cardboard sign. A mousy-looking guy hunkered down under the overpass, leaning on a backpack, out of sight in the shadows. They knew the drill: a woman appearing to be alone was going to get sympathy bills that a couple wouldn't. I recognized her by her long, black, and severely curly hair that hung in tight ringlets past her shoulder blades. She'd put on some weight, but filled out a grubby pink tank top admirably. It looked like she'd been off the street for a while at some recent point. Long enough to pork up a bit anyway. But hard times have fallen all over, and they tend to revisit the same territory, so here she was again.
As the light changed, she punched the pedestrian walkway button to stop the cars coming her way a little sooner. That was Ms. Vagabond, always looking for an opportunity to turn the tide her way, usually at someone else's expense.
I was wondering what her sign said, what kind of scam she was pulling. I imagined child-like block-letter pleas: Out of Work–Please Help. She had never worked a day in her life that I knew of. Maybe a heart-wrenching message appended with an insincere God Bless, even if she had claimed to have no belief in religion when I knew her. Or Homeless, Hungry—which was probably actually true.
Just as my light went green she turned to take a dollar that a man in a pick-up held out of his window (to get a better look at her tits, I was sure). I was able to read the sign. SMILE was all it said, in graceful flowing script. I'll be damned; I thought as I drove on, Ms. Vagabond has learned the art of subtlety.
I lived in a decrepit trailer park at the time, drove a junker of a Korean compact, and survived. I had found out that you could make it, barely, and even save a little cash, if you didn't spend it all on illicit recreational substances. It took a few years for that lesson to settle in, but it finally did. So I didn't stop when I saw her standing there with her cardboard SMILE for two reasons:
One—I had to open the gym on time or the regulars would get cranky and one or two might go off on a 'roid rant.
Two—I didn't want to know if she'd gotten cleaned up and settled into something approaching normalcy for a while, only to relapse and end up back on the street because she just couldn't handle normal. I didn't want to know because I was still in the cleaning myself up but not totally sure if it was going to work phase. If I was wasting my time, I didn't want to know.
I did my shift at the gym, got in an arm workout, and pilfered a protein drink from the cooler, all without thinking about the past. But I did slow down under the overpass on the way home. Ms. Vagabond wasn't there. I figured she and the mousy guy were holed up in some woods for the night or were two exits up the highway. But when I stopped for gas, there they were, lurking off to the side of the convenience store smoking cigarettes too close to the pumps and looking like potential trouble.
She started to walk over to panhandle me while I was pumping gas and from the corner of my eye, I saw her stop. When I looked up she was staring at me.
"Carl?" she said.
I called her Ms. Vagabond back when I didn't know her real name and didn't know if she was ever married, or was still married for that matter. I eventually learned her name one morning when we were rousted by the cops and had to I.D. ourselves, but the name Ms. Vagabond had stuck by then so I never called her anything else but that or Ms. V for short. She didn't seem to mind.
I nodded and smiled, like I'd seen her last week.
She walked closer, eyeing me up and down.
"You been working out?" she said.
I don't get appraising glances as often as I used to before hard living took it's toll, so it was nice of her to notice—even if she was buttering me up for a handout. I looked at her chest.
"I was going to ask you the same thing."
She laughed and waved over the guy, who had half-hidden himself behind a dumpster. That was one thing about Ms. Vagabond; I could usually make her laugh.
This is where is I disclose that Ms. Vagabond and I have a little more history than I've let on. We had a thing going on back under I-95 in Miami. Ms. Vagabond shared my hard-won Frigidaire box, which I had to drag at least a mile the night I lucked onto it in an alley, until it finally collapsed a couple of weeks later from accumulated moisture. She then moved on to a guy with a plywood shack—it even had a shingle roof—which I'd suspected she had an eye on while planning for the eventuality of my abode's demise. When she left I felt like the first little pig, half-expecting her to find a guy who had built a brick house under the overpass next. Soon after that that I packed everything I owned that didn't smell like mold or piss, abandoned the rest to the scavengers, and started walking north.
The mousy guy shuffled over, like he was expecting to get pummeled by an invisible bully.
"This is Jeremy," she said.
I didn't offer my hand. He nodded weakly.
"You look like you're doing well," she said, glancing at my crummy car.
"All in all," I said, keeping it vague. "You been back on the street for long?"
"Not long," she said, equally vague. "We're on our way up to Chattanooga. Jeremy's got people there."
I remembered that about Ms. Vagabond—she had an answer for everything, even if it was the wrong one.
Jeremy stared at the ground, as if trying to remember if he actually had people in Chattanooga, or anywhere else. Up close he had the weathered stringy look of the long-term homeless junkie, and appeared to suffer from at least some of the health iss
ues that status suggested. He had a suspect sore on his lip that looked painful.
"I had an apartment and a live-in for a while," she said. "At least until he got locked up for a year."
She looked like she might have had a couple of kids since I last saw her, but I wasn't going to ask.
"What's he in for?" I asked. A touchy question, but I figured we had known each other well enough at one time to get a little personal. Besides, I'm one of those people that read the entire crime section of the paper, with interest. Usually with the phrase "but for the grace of God there goes Carl" in the back of my mind.
"Bad checks or something," she said, and looked away.
I wondered what the something was, and how deeply she was involved. She used to be pretty good at eye contact, even when—especially when—lying to your face. Maybe guilt is cumulative, at least in some of us.
There are people that never allow the concept of personal responsibility to attach itself to them, like they're covered with guilt-repellent Teflon. Then there are those that slough off guilt in sheets as it builds up incrementally, never letting it weigh them all the way down. Another group just soaks it up until they can't function. Those are usually the hopeless drunks and suicides. I always took Ms. Vagabond for one of the Teflon people, but maybe her shield was wearing thin.
"And then Jeremy came along and swept you off your feet," I said.
She laughed again. Jeremy looked sick and uncomfortable. "Something like that," she said.
They both had a smell coming off of them that made me think that Ms. Vagabond had been on the street longer than she was letting on. We had run out of things to say, and they stood there looking at me. I eventually dug a ten out of my pocket and handed it over. I think we all expected that to be that, and goodbye but not necessarily thank you. But I stood there longer than I should have because the smell got to me. No matter how bad it had been under the highway, I don't think either of us ever smelled like that. Perhaps the memory of the two weeks of our keeping house in the box made me vulnerable. I knew of one thing that I could do for Ms. Vagabond that I thought wouldn't put me at risk of getting enmeshed with her again, or with her sickly pimp, or whatever he was. I made a quick decision.
