Blue Eyes

by Jerome Charyn

  But Odile was already slapping at the brass knucks, dents in her palm from contact with the metal. “Sweeney, get her to stop. The Chinaman’s my problem.”

  “Not when he invades the premises,” Janice said. “Then he belongs to us.” She was having too much fun to heed Odile.

  “Sweeney, I’ll stay out of here for life. One more mark on his ear and that’s it.”

  “Don’t listen to the bitch,” Janice told her cousin. “She’ll come crawling.”

  Sweeney was terrorized of having to work The Dwarf without Odile. She raised the Chinaman to his feet. He hung like some rag doll with one raw ear and a high-climbing shoe, his neck under Sweeney’s elbow. Odile catapulted him out of The Dwarf, hooking onto his suspenders with both hands, convinced that such a feather couldn’t have survived one of Janice’s attacks. She was pleased with the Chinaman although she didn’t intend to show it. “Moron,” she said, “you can lean on me if you want.”

  “Don’t stretch the suspenders,” was all he cared to say. No man or woman had ever tattooed the side of his face with brass knucks; he heard howlings in his ear. He sucked bits of red mop to preserve his sanity around such noise. Odile began to wonder why he was wetting his wig.

  “Chino, I could carry you better without the boot.”

  But the Chinaman refused. He wasn’t going to leave his high shoe in the gutter no matter how deaf he became from the blasts inside his head. Odile brought him to her house. She soaked his ear in an iodine solution and dressed him in little cotton bandages. The howling stopped but the iodine sting caused him to bite into the wig. Odile undid his collar and washed the signs of blood off his neck. She saw the tension in his ribs. She insisted on taking his temperature. The Chinaman mumbled with Odile’s thermometer in his mouth. He was lying on her mattress, propped against scatter pillows. “I have to be in Mexico, Odette.”

  She put more pillows on his knees. Being a farsighted girl, she couldn’t read the thermometer (Odile didn’t own a pair of eyeglasses). So she faked a reading. “A hundred. A hundred and a half. Jan must have given you the flu.”

  The Chinaman forgot about his burning ear. He couldn’t afford to disappoint Zorro; he had promised to be Blue-eyes’ chaperon. He snatched the thermometer away and investigated the markings. He frowned through the glass. “Odette, its a rundown tube. The mercury’s gone.”

  “Liar,” she said.

  He snapped the thermometer over Odile; no mercury balls fell into her hand. The Chinaman smiled at his victory. Odile was miffed.

  “Chino, button your collar. I don’t like a naked man in my bed.”

  The Chinaman was less groggy; his ear had quieted down, and he didn’t intend to be bullied by a girl who worked for him but would take nothing more than his telephone calls, who sent him cash in perfumed envelopes from the customers he supplied but treated him with disregard. The Chinaman had his advantage now: he occupied a favorable position on her mattress. He didn’t claw. He didn’t ruffle her material. He used logic with the porno queen.

  “Anybody who goes down for Bummy shouldn’t be so choosy.” He huffed out his pigeon breast. “I’m better built than Bummy any day of the week.”

  Odile was tempted to take off his clothes. He had a delicious bump under his bodyshirt. But she didn’t care for his argument.

  “I never got down with Bummy Gilman,” she said. “He pays me to soap his hernia. A hundred—no, a hundred and a half for every single wash.”

  The Chinaman was relieved the bouncers hadn’t gone through his pockets; he drew a nest of fifties from his money clip. “I’ll pay. Call it a cash sale. What’s four hundred to me?”

  “Chino, I can’t accept gelt from you,” she said, making him drop the money clip into his pocket. “You’re too close to Zorro. He’ll kill me if he ever finds out.”

  She pitied the Chinaman’s glum face, the palpitations of his chestbone, his cottony ear, the bend in his trigger-finger, and she was charmed by the display of his money clip; no man had offered her four hundred dollars yet for her simple tricks. She soothed him, put her hand over the palpitations. His chestbone beat against her touch. “We’ll play,” she said. “Only pants and shirts have to stay on.”

  The Chinaman didn’t know how many embargoes Odile would place on him; he couldn’t bring her down to her garterbelt. He should have been more humiliated, but he wanted her hand on his chest. He kissed her, felt the rub of her teeth, and his head was smoking all over again.

  “Chino, are your feet cold? Why are you shivering?”

  “Caught a chill in my ear, Odette. It’s nothing.”

  And he had to restrict his hands, keep from brushing her skin too fast, or the pressure points behind his ears might swell and clog his adenoids; that’s how much Odile could bother him. The Chinaman was no crappy fetishist. He could have managed five more girls, cubanas and negritas with rounder bottoms and fatter thighs, or a Finnish beauty who needed Chino’s pistola against her navel to enjoy a proper climax. The Chinaman preferred Odette. It wasn’t a matter of height (the Chinaman would only allow himself to be ravished by a tall girl), or the loveliness of Odile’s long bony fingers, or the perfect span of her chest (he could have given up an hour following the line of Odile’s bosoms, the curve from nipple to nipple, the wrinkles produced by the tug of an armpit). Her haughtiness appealed to him, the tough protrusion of her underlip, the amounts of scorn she seemed to blow into a sentence. If he had his own way with her, he would shove Odile out of pornography. He would put Janice and Sweeney in a bottle, close The Dwarf to Odette, hold her at Jane Street, deny Bummy Gilman visiting rights. She wouldn’t have to wash that man’s balls for a living. But the girl belonged to Zorro, and not to him. And if he defied the Guzmanns, he would have to take off taxi cabs again, and dodge shotguns in a shopping bag. The Chinaman was depressed.

  Odile shucked off his mop, fondled the dark roots of his scalp, and the Chinaman wasn’t so morose with lovely fingers in his hair. He dove into the pillows, caught Odile by one leg, reached under the stirrup of her ski pants, worked an arm into the hollows at the back of her knee, climbed half a thigh, worshiping the gooseflesh and thighdown (not even the beautiful Finn had hairs quite so fine), felt her erect nipples with the nubs of skin on his forehead and the depressions of his cheek, and came against her other hip, his screams muffled by the proximity of her jersey to his mouth. Odile liked his knobby head in her bosoms. She wanted to maintain the exact location of their hug, but the wetness in his pants troubled the Chinaman. “Mexico,” he blurted, getting off her chest.

  “Chino, where are you going with that sick ear of yours?”

  He couldn’t remember having such a sticky groin since his lurchings at Mott Street movie shows during the eighth grade (the Chinaman was always a year behind at school). He covered the bad ear with some furls of the mop. He was too distracted to kiss Odile right now. “I’ll bring you charms from Mexcity,” he said. “Something Zorro won’t be able to identify.”

  She thought he was hallucinating. “Chino, get into bed.”

  He pulled the kinks out of his suspenders in the hall. Odile’s landlady passed him on the stairwell. She frowned at his bandage and the rumpled state of his bodyshirt. The Chinaman was immune to landladies. He found himself a cab at Abingdon Square. “Prince Street,” he shouted. “Make it quick.”

  The cabby Quagliozzo, an alert Queens man of forty-five with a billy club near his money box for take-off artists and unwelcome guests, wasn’t fooled by the red mop. He had a circular stuck to his dashboard advertising the taxi bandit Chino Reyes, with a reward of $1,000 from independent fleet owners for the Chinaman’s arrest. Quagliozzo (his friends called him Quag) recognized the cheekbones behind the manufactured hair, only there was nothing in the circular about a clubfoot. The cabby reasoned that no professional bandit could flee fast enough from a job in a high shoe. The garagemen, who had their own connections with petty crooks, informed him that the taxi bandit was masquerading as a pimp to throw off t
he Manhattan bulls. So Quagliozzo decided to test the Chinaman in his cab. He wouldn’t keep a glass plate between him and his customers like other security-crazy hacks (how could he chat through such a barrier?); accordingly he drove with a hand on the club.

  “Mister, I hate them lousy pimps. They take advantage of white girls. They shellac their hair. They sit in fucking Cadillacs. If I had a pimp in my car, I’d murder him.”

  Quagliozzo couldn’t get the Chinaman to raise a cheek. “Mister, what’s your opinion?”

  “Prince Street,” the Chinaman said, and he motioned for the cabby to pull over near a lot. “Wait for me.” He walked to a row of garbage cans inside the lot. Solomon Wong, his father’s old dishwasher, was sitting on the northernmost can.

  “Salomón, que tal?”

  Solomon gathered the many skirts of his coat (it had once belonged to Papa Reyes), and removed a cloth traveling bag from inside the can. The Chinaman changed shoes, putting Solomon in custody of the boot, and shoved the mop under Solomon’s coat; he wasn’t going to be stuck with red hair in Mexico City.

  Quagliozzo was restless when the Chinaman returned to the cab. “Mister, where should I go now?”

  “Drive,” the Chinaman said. “I’ll tell you later.”

  Quagliozzo had sufficient proof to sink the taxi bandit; without his mop and high shoe he was exactly the man in the circular. Smart, smart, Quagliozzo reckoned. He uses a garbage can for a drop. That’s where the cash goes after a steal. Quagliozzo had more respect for the Chinaman.

  “Mister, I gotta take a dump.”

  He stopped at a cafeteria on the Bowery, brought his money box inside to the shithouse at the end of the counter, then doubled back to the telephone on the wall. He dialed the police emergency number. He walked out chewing sticks of gum. The Chinaman wasn’t in the cab. Quagliozzo blamed himself. “I shoulda used the club on him.” He joined the three radio cars that responded to his call, steering them to Prince Street. They couldn’t find Solomon in the lot; they overturned every can, mucking through the garbage, but nobody came up with the Chinaman’s shoe.

  8 Because he could see himself getting raked on every side (by Pimloe, by Papa, by Vander, by Isaac perhaps), Coen mentioned his trip to no one. He would leave the country without notifying the First Deputy’s office or the Second Division. Pimloe would go berserk if he knew Coen was traveling with a Chinese taxi bandit. Homicide would nail him to the wall. The First Dep would pray for the return of Isaac. Coen still had Vander’s boodle, and he intended to blow the remains of it in Mexico, on Jerónimo, himself, and cousin Mordeckay. He would travel incognito, without badge or gun.

  Leaving for the airport he found a swollen paper bag outside his door. The aromas were unavoidable. Coen smelled Papa’s sweetmeats through the bag; black halvah, jellies, overripe chocolate, bitter sucking candy, light and dark caramels, for Jerónimo. César must have ordered one of his brothers to empty Papa’s store. Or did Papa himself learn Jerónimo’s whereabouts? Coen had no more time for crude speculations. He took the candy with him and met Chino outside the Aeronaves terminal. He said nothing about the black lumps on the Chinaman’s ear. They both walked under the bar of the metal-detecting machine. But first the Chinaman laid his money clip and his cigar case in one of the baskets. He seemed annoyed when Coen didn’t take a basket for himself. “Cop,” he said, “where’s the cap pistol? Where’s the badge?”

  “I left them home,” Coen said. “In a stocking under my bed.”

  “Imbécil,” Chino muttered. “We have to go against the punks without police toys? I never figured on that. Zorro told me you had a little water on the brain. A bull with a soft head. The badge is priceless, and you cuddle it in a stocking. Imbécil.” He rattled at Coen up to the departure gate and into the Aeronaves jet. Coen yawned. He would have to sit for hours side by side with a spitting Chinaman from Havana. So he thought of the menu. He figured they would serve him tostadas and refried beans on a Mexican plane. He clutched his safety belt until they were well off the ground. He had flown only twice before, on Army transport planes, in and out of Germany, thirteen years ago. Chino was the veteran rider, taking Caribbean holidays and flying for César. He had come from the barrio chino (Chinese quarter) of Havana, where his father owned a bakery and a restaurant until 1959. He was twenty-four years old and despised the fidelistas whose presence in Havana had frightened his father into selling the bakery and closing the Nuevo Chino Cafe. Away from Cuba his father’s bones shrank, and he coughed out his blood on Doyers Street. Chino taunted Coen for the politics of the Jews, which, he was convinced, had put the fidelistas into power. “Coen, your papa alive?”

  “Dead.”

  “Me too. He loved Stalin, your papa, no?”

  “He was Polish,” Coen said. “The Poles hate the Russians.”

  Chino allowed his elbow to settle nearer to Coen. He had never worked with a cop. “Coen, don’t worry about the badge. I know a tinsmith at the Lagunilla market. He’ll fix you up with beautiful badges.” Still, he had to punish this Jew when they got home. Too many people had talked about the cop who slapped Chino Reyes. Coen had to live without refried beans. They fed him deviled ham and potatoes au gratin, and a slab of lemon pie.

  Coen felt giddy in Mexican sunlight. He looked for exotic plants around the airport. Chino walked him through customs and then commandeered a taxi. He haggled with the driver, offering a fixed price with his fingers, and pushed Coen inside. They drove through a neighborhood of shacks and seedy condominiums, Coen staring at faces and holes in the sidewalks, and went up Insurgentes Sur into the Reforma, where they came upon a fairyland of monuments, glorietas (traffic circles), and high pink hotels. The Chinaman pointed out at the boulevards. “Like Paris, no? The Campos Elíseos.”

  “I haven’t been to Paris,” Coen said, intimidated by all the glorietas and the crisscross of traffic.

  “Me too,” the Chinaman said.

  They stopped at the Hotel Zagala across from the Alameda park, Chino paying the driver in U.S. coins and summoning a bellboy with the shout “Mozo, mozo.” Coen had his luggage swiped from his hands by a thin old man in a monkey cap who could hold six suitcases at a time. They were put on the third floor, in a narrow room that faced the wall of another hotel. Coen was ready to lie down but Chino wouldn’t tolerate the room. He screamed into the telephone, berating the manager, the manager’s wife, and the third-floor concierge. “You have to stick them in the head,” he assured Coen, “or you’ll rot behind a wall.” They were transferred to a narrower room on the eighth floor, with a huge porcelain bañadero (tub) that overlooked the park. He dismissed the mozo with a pat on the shoulder and three dimes. Then he grew kinder to the old man and gave him a hat and a scarf out of his suitcase. “Coen, don’t tip too hard. Otherwise they’ll know you for a sucker.”

  “Chino, you gave him a fifty-dollar hat.”

  “That’s nothing. I liked the size of his head. But no money.”

  Sitting inside the great bañadero, with a bar of hotel soap on his knee, the Chinaman taught Coen a formula for changing dollars into pesos. Coen stalked the bedroom trying to memorize this formula. He was getting fond of the Chinaman. “Chino, what’s your regular name?”

  “Herman,” the Chinaman said, without hesitation. “Only my father could call it to me. You call it, I’ll bite your face off. I promise you.”

  Coen was anxious to deliver Jerónimo’s candy but the Chinaman slept for an hour after his bath. He put on an embroidered shirt, tweaked his suspenders, tucked a fresh scarf into his pocket, and ordered strong tea in the lobby. Then they crossed the Alameda into an older part of town and went looking for Jerónimo. Chino passed up the taco stoves and the coconut vendors to buy Life Savers from an Indian woman in the street. He wouldn’t let Coen watch two boys stamp out tortillas at a sidewalk factory. “Hurry,” he said. Away from the boulevards Coen felt the temperatures of the street bazaars, the vendors, and the press of faces near the curbs. Resisting Chino he ate cucumb
er slices (dusted with chile powder) on the fly. He goggled at shop signs—Tom y Jerry; La Pequeña Lulu; Fabiola Falcon—and bakery windows. Chino frowned at the bag Coen was holding for Jeronimo. “Fish?”

  “Halvah. From Papa.”

  They passed pulquería after pulquería (sidewalk taverns) along San Juan de Letran, the men inside staring at the chino and the blondo walking together. Coen saw fewer and fewer women in the streets. The Chinaman turned up Belisario Dominquez and stopped at a house with a grubby balcony and an inner court. “The chuetas live here,” he said. “The porkeaters. The Christian Jews.”

  “Marranos?” Coen asked. “Is this a Marrano neighborhood?”

  “Chuetas,” the Chinaman sneered at him. He entered the court, his body sinking into grayness after five steps. Coen stayed under the balcony. Accustoming himself to the soupy light between the walls he detected two smallish boys in nightshirts playing pelota near a bend in the court. They played with closed mouths, the thunks of the pelota the only noise coming from the walls. Coen couldn’t make any sense to their game. They slapped at the ball like old men, prim in their nightshirts, stiff at the waist, with no energy to spare. He wondered whether all Marrano boys were born with tight knees. On Boston Road César and Alejandro kicked a pink ball with a fever, a twitch in their legs. Even Jorge, who couldn’t stoop because of the quarters he carried for Papa from ten on, and Jerónimo, whose mind was occupied with sweets and the dying pigment in his hair, had more animation than these two boys. Just when Coen began to feel his abandonment, the Chinaman emerged with cousin Mordeckay, a fatter Guzmann in a nightshirt, with Alejandro’s features and Jorge’s disjointed eyes. Coen was introduced to Mordeckay as the Polander, “el polonés.” Mordeckay seemed pleased with the name. Chino wanted the candy from Coen. Mordeckay thanked “el polonés.” Then he went back inside. “Come on,” Chino said.