Hoodtown

by Christa Faust

  “Just taking a walk, officers,” I said through grinding teeth. “Don’t want any trouble.”

  “Well you can just turn your hooded ass around and walk right back to Hoodtown, because we don’t like sneaky Hoods like you prowling around this neighborhood.”

  I wanted to tell him my hood was on my head not my ass, but said nothing, teeth grinding audibly and fists clenched.

  “Yeah,” the skinny one corroborated. “This is a nice, safe neighborhood. Kids play on the street here. We like it that way.”

  It was nothing new but it still hurt and the dull, impotent rage never really goes away. I should have known better than to come down here. I found myself thinking of Dulce, of the hostile, sunny prejudice of Tres Piedras and how she must have felt, just wanting a chance for a straight life and getting treated like a cockroach at a cocktail party.

  As for me, nothing to do but turn my hooded ass around. What was I gonna say? “Just a minute officers, please, I only need a minute to scope out this Skin guy’s apartment so I can come back later and murder the fucker in his sleep.” Defeated, bone tired and totally out of choices, I walked away, letting the cops call after me with the usual slurs and the “don’t let us catch you around here again or else” routine. I was about to round the corner when a Skin nearly ran right into me. His hairy head was down and he was clutching a wooden toolbox. When he swerved to avoid me he looked up and we both grunted in surprised unison.

  It was the maintenance guy.

  Icy comprehension flooded through me and I knew right then that it was him. It was Black Eagle. I could see it in his stiff, swollen joints, in his meaty wrestler’s hands and the way he carried his shoulders like he still wore a glittery, flowing cape. His eyes were hot and hunted in his raw, naked face and I could see that he recognized me too.

  “Don’t make me take you downtown, Hood!” the cop called and the Skin flinched, just a little, tick clenching in the corner of one eye as a fierce lick of panic flooded his face.

  “Bitch, I’m talking to you!” The cops pulled up alongside the two of us. “Don’t worry, sir.” This to Black Eagle or should I say Davis Trent. “We’ve got this situation under control.”

  Trent’s face cooled, small smug twist in the corner of his mouth and he nodded, eyes never leaving mine.

  “Thank you, officers.”

  He turned and walked away without a backwards glance.

  I wondered how long it would take the fat cop to get out of the car and unholster his gun. He seemed like a lazy bastard who had never put a bullet in anything but paper. Maybe ten seconds, thirty if he got stuck fumbling with the snap. Surely it would be enough time to take that hijo de puta down and smash his traitorous naked head open on the nice clean cement.

  I didn’t of course. I just made like a good little Hood and hustled back to Hoodtown, where I belonged.

  36

  The walk home seemed twice as long. The cop car crawled along behind me for several blocks until I reached Broadway and headed north. My bad knee was playing an upbeat rumba that was getting harder and harder to ignore. All the bright consumer glitter around me hurt my eyes so I just kept on putting one foot in front of another like a sleepwalker, mind idling in a dead gray neutral. I didn’t want to think anymore. I wanted to crawl into bed and never get out again. So I solved the big mystery. So fucking what? What the fuck was I supposed to do with what I knew. They say knowledge is power, but no one ever told me how easy it was to get electrocuted.

  When I hit the raucous neon jumble of Fire Avenue I felt like dropping to my aching knees and kissing the pavement. I was so far beyond tired, so profoundly burnt out that I felt close to hallucinating as I made my slow and painful way back to the Chrysanthemum Arms.

  Later, I look back and try to tell myself I was just tired, that I had been through so much that I wasn’t careful. That my guard was down and that if I would have been on the ball I might have seen the Skin goons lurking in my hallway before they grabbed me, one on each arm, and hustled me into my room, keys left dangling in the door, jingling as my old pal with the broken arm, Oscar, Nezumi had called him, came through and slammed the door behind him.

  “Hello X,” he said and let me have it with his good hand, still hard as fuck and my broken nose singing a goddamn opera of pain inside the hollow amphitheater of my skull.

  I would have passed out or at least gone down to my knees if the two madrinos hadn’t been holding me up with hands like bear traps.

  “You again?” I shook my head. “Ese impo yaro! You need two guys to help you beat up a girl?”

  Oscar grinned and gave me a few in the gut for variety and then one more in the face that made everything go all red and woozy for what seemed like ages. There was more, punches like the distant bass thump of a radio in someone else’s apartment, but I lost track. Next thing I know I’ve got this hot, cigarette breath in my face and my buddy Oscar’s pink, sweating face inches from mine.

  “You have got a bad habit of showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time, Hood,” he said. “What is it with you? Reading too many comic books?”

  I tried to say something brilliant like “Fuck you,” but all that came out was a bloody slush of meaningless sound. I could feel several of my front teeth were loose in their sockets as I poked at them with my numb tongue.

  “Well regardless of your intentions,” Oscar said, caressing my masked cheek and then squeezing my face between his thumb and forefinger. “I have been asked to determine exactly what it is you know, or think you know, about the situation with Black Eagle, the late El Nezumi and my employer.”

  He pulled out a brand new straight razor and clicked it open with his thumb. It was nicer that the last one, with a pearl handle.

  Cold elevator plunge inside my chest and I closed my eyes. I may be tough, but torture seemed like a bit more than I was really up for right at that moment.

  I let my body go limp and fought to stay limp, brain desperate for some kind of plan, some brilliant escape. I felt his finger hook under the inner corner of my left eyehole and pull my head forward. My heart was pounding, veins screaming with adrenaline as I felt the cold dull back of the blade on the nape of my neck and then heard the sound of the razor sawing through nylon. The fucker was cutting my laces. I could feel my whole hood going slack on my head as the laces gave grommet by grommet. He hooked his other finger through my other eyehole and without warning, my body bypassed my brain’s command to play it cool and started to fight.

  I nearly knocked the two thugs clean off their feet as I flailed and kicked, no thought in my head but to stop that bastard from pulling off my máscara. I bit savagely into his wrist and he grunted and ground the heel of his other hand into my nose. I teetered on the edge of graying out, head lolling helplessly and vision filled with red spangles as I felt the safe, tight fabric of my hood peel away. I froze, rigid as a fox in a steel trap, feeling the air on my skin through the sheer silk of my flimsy underhood and inches from losing it completely.

  To this day I don’t know how I did it, but somehow, somewhere in the deepest part of me, I found a hidden reserve of cold fury. Scared or not, I was still the fucking Ice Queen and there was no way I was gonna lay back and let these Skin fuckers peel me without a fight. And no point knocking myself out flailing around uselessly like a frightened rape victim either. I let myself go slack again, as if unconscious, watching through barely open eyes as Oscar raised the blade to cut my underhood and my face beneath. Then, as he brought it down, I wrenched to the left with all my strength, yanking the thug beside me into the razor’s path. The blade bit deeply into the crook of his muscled arm, blinding Oscar with a hot spray of blood. The slashed goon released me with a reflexive howl and I let the other one have it with my newly freed fist. Twice in the neck and once in the temple and the guy went down like a blasted skyscraper. Oscar was pawing at his eyes and waving the razor blindly in a circle while the other goon slid slowly down the wall, naked face gone a cold, cheesy gray as the rhy
thmic spray of blood shooting between his desperate clenching fingers slowed to a sluggish trickle. I grabbed my bloody hood and my purse off the floor and ran out into the hall, yanking the mask over my head as I hit the staircase door with my shoulder, never looking back.

  37

  I don’t know how I made it to Orchidia’s. I have only the vaguest memory of the sparkles in the sidewalk outside her shop and then the feel of her fat arms around me, her smell like pennyroyal and beeswax and the sharp tang of Barbicide.

  I remember laying nearly fetal in Orchidia’s chair, shaking and close to tears while she dressed my cuts, sank more stitches and iced the worst of my various contusions. She had given me some kind of tea for the pain and it was making my head swim, filling me with a dark, drowning drowsiness as she clucked over the bloody sponge of my nose.

  “You ruin my best work,” she said.

  She had the top two quadrants of the headrest open and she pressed her meaty thumbs into the side of my nose, bullying the tortured bones back into place with a sudden wrench to the left that shot such a huge bolt of pain through my head that I blacked out for a good solid minute.

  When I came too she had replaced my bloody máscara with one of the spares she kept for me and was sliding a lace into the grommets.

  “Orchidia,” I said, my voice as slushy and thick as a wino’s.

  “What is it, honey?”

  “Can I stay with you for a few days?”

  I tried to sit up but the room had developed a jaunty lean and I collapsed back into the chair like puppet with cut strings.

  “X, honey,” she said and hauled me bodily to my feet. “You ain’t going nowhere.”

  She practically had to carry me like a baby to the back room where she kept beds for clients who required overnight treatment. I was out before my head hit the herb-stuffed pillow.

  The next couple of days were a blur of nightmares and cold sweat and Orchidia’s fat, gentle hands on my neck, on my wrists, checking my splint and pulling what seemed like a magician’s trick worth of bloody gauze from my nostrils. I dreamed of being back in the ring, crowd roar like the howl of monkeys as I lifted Blue Velvet and took her head down into the martinete, her plump little body shattering into a thousand pieces when it hit the canvas and all the little fragments jittered and twisted like roadkill snakes, humping towards me with jagged yawning mouths dripping venom. I dreamed of Malasuerte on the top of an impossibly tall fire escape, the gentle muted sound of his lonely trumpet trickling down over the city like night rain but as I tried to climb to reach him, the fire escape ripped loose and he fell, slow inevitable tumble past my reaching hands. I dreamed I woke to find all of Hoodtown a burnt out smoking ruin, no one left alive but me, alone and stumbling through the black husk of the Telco arena. I dreamed of bloody ears and razors and hands wrenching off my hood. Waking was no better. Pain like strangling vines around all my senses, making everything tiny, distant and incompressible, like the world viewed through a peephole in an apartment door. The smell of incense was oppressive and thick as my pain and there was lumpy charm around my neck, heavy against my solar plexus. I thought of the little green Santo charm rescued from Lace’s wrath, still there at the bottom of my pocketbook, but that seemed so disconnected, like some relic from an ancient civilization. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t hold on to anything as I sipped obediently at ghastly herbal potions held up to my lips. I watched Orchidia’s apprentices, identical in their red and white, candy-striped hoods coming and going on soft shoes, taking away my pisspot and changing my sweat-stinking sheets like somber nuns.

  Sometimes they would pull back the curtains and let a little weak city sun into the room and I would feel almost clear. Almost able to think, to remember. Was Malasuerte really dead? It seemed impossible, a typo in the script of my life and while I could feel the dull hurt twisting inside my heart just like it was supposed to, I still couldn’t get the stealthy thoughts of Jaguar out of my head. It was like the two had somehow gotten scrambled in my drugged, sluggish brain and it hurt to think, just like the sun hurt my gooey, slitted eyes so I made the apprentices close the curtains.

  Instead of thinking, I slept. I let Orchidia remove thick blue stitches from my scalp and pass her clumps of bitter, smoking herbs over my aching body, chasing away the evil spirits as days and nights turned inside out, passing without any sign of change but a kind of slow, lingering twilight as my pain dwindled away. Like it or not my body was healing.

  There were little victories, enough to keep my mind focused on the here and now. The apprentices helped me stand and shuffle to the toilet, sore body, but how wonderful to piss alone like a grown-up and flush the toilet after, washing my hands without looking in the mirror. No way was I ready for that just yet. A warm, peppery cup of sopa mariscos and a spoon in my hand, first real food in forever and I don’t think anything I’ve eaten in my life ever tasted that good. A shower, palm against the tile and the warm, healing spray drenching my ugly borrowed bathinghood. The honeythick smell of gardenia in the handmade soap and the towel soft and fresh off the clothesline.

  As my strength came back, Orchidia gave me little jobs to keep me busy. Nothing too taxing. Caring for the orchids in the solarium, misting their delicate green and pink faces with a curious brass sprayer and clipping away dead leaves. Wrapping lucky soaps in brightly colored wax paper and pouring scented oil into fancy bottles with a tiny gold funnel. I was moving on autopilot, not thinking beyond the task at hand.

  “You don’t need to worry, you just need to heal.” Orchidia would tell me, setting me off on some other childish task while her solemn apprentices whispered behind their hands.

  38

  I don’t even know how much time had passed, a few days, a week, but there came a day when I sat amidst the orchids and realized, I’m better. My body still hurt all over but my head was clear. I stood, feeling achy but alive as I stretched my tired bones and wandered out into the hall in search of something to eat.

  I found the kitchen by smell. Several of the apprentices were crowded around the radio, herbs unground and lucky powders unmixed while they stood with their hooded heads pressed together by the greasy speaker.

  There was a pot of soup, bubbling away, forgotten on the stove and I leaned over to help myself, ear catching the unmistakable tone of a newscaster over the radio.

  “...still no leads in the case of the Hoodtown Ripper. Jaguar de Juarez Senior, Chairman of Mayor Pinkwater’s specially appointed Hoodtown Council, has expressed outrage and concern. When pressed for comment on the remarkable savagery of this latest killing, Detective Michael Sullivan said the police have, quote, ‘several leads’ and are expecting to make an arrest soon. Will that arrest be soon enough to prevent a fifth victim from falling prey to this insane maniac prowling our streets?”

  Fifth victim?

  I pushed my way in between the girls around the radio.

  “Did he say fifth victim?” My throat felt too tight, my belly a lump of ice. “That’s wrong, there were only three.”

  The apprentices looked at me with bright fearful eyes and then one reached through to turn the knob to off. One by one they went back to their tasks like I wasn’t standing right there.

  “Has there been another murder?”

  No one would meet my gaze.

  “Answer me, dammit! Has there been another murder?”

  “X, calm down.”

  It was Orchidia, massive in the doorway.

  “Orchidia, what happened?”

  “Nothing you need to worry about,” she said. “Why don’t you go lay down.”

  “I don’t want to fucking lay down,” I slammed the cup of soup down on the counter and it sloshed over the rim. “Puta Madre, if that fucker killed another girl...”

  I couldn’t even make myself finish that sentence. All I could think of was the smug look on that bastard’s naked face as he turned and walked away.

  “Have they...” I sank into a brightly painted wooden chair. “Identified t
he body? Anyone missing?”

  “No,” Orchidia said, too quickly and I caught a quick flick of a glance from one of the apprentices.

  “Don’t...” I took a deep breath and stuffed down my anger, voice cold and smooth. “Don’t lie to me Orchidia.”

  “X, you can’t do nothing about it.” Orchidia came forward and tried to put her hand on my arm. I shook it off and stood. “That man came here, looking for you. The one with the broken arm. They’re gonna kill you, you know.”

  “They’re gonna kill me anyway, whether you tell me or not.”

  Orchidia put a hand over her eyes.

  “Don’t get all crazy, OK?”

  “Orchidia...”

  “People say it could be Gitcho’s other girl. The blonde.”

  “Rubia?”

  “But a thousand things could have happened to her. She could have left town. That bastard Diamond’s been after her, she might be hiding out to get away from him.”

  “Or she might be dead.”

  Orchidia closed her eyes, nodding.

  “She might be dead, butchered and hoodless because...” My voice cracked. “Because I let that fucker walk away.”

  “You are not Santo, X.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  We all stood, silent, not moving for a good minute. There was nothing to say. It was a fucked up hopeless situation but I had to try, I had to do something. I might not be able to stop Pinkwater and all the Skins like him from sucking our blood and keeping us at each other’s throats, but I was not gonna let his pet psycho continue to brutalize our women with diplomatic immunity.

  “Please, X listen to me.” Orchidia caressed the back of my head, adjusting my laces like I was a little girl. “I know you have to do what you feel is right. I can’t stop you. I never could. But be careful, you hear me.”

  I saw that there were tears in her eyes and I felt a cold numb ache in my chest. I nodded. So many people telling me to be careful. I wasn’t sure there really was any such thing.