Hoodtown

by Christa Faust

  “I will,” I said, wondering if I would ever see her again.

  39

  First things first, I needed some decent clothes. I couldn’t walk around on the street in the ridiculously tight apprentice Barber uniform Orchidia had leant me and there was no way I was gonna chance going back to the Chrysanthemum Arms so I ducked into a little shop across the street from Orchidia’s that sold workman’s duds. Feeling engulfed in this huge strange sense of unreality, I picked out a decent pair of sturdy black trousers and a plain black shirt with a pair of grommets above the left breast where I could attach a factory ID. There was something so twisted about doing a thing as basic and normal as shopping when people wanted you dead and you were planning a cold-blooded murder. Worrying about clean socks and choosing good, solid workboots and the fact that they didn’t have any underwear for women. I tried to put all the crazy shit out of my mind and focus on the task at hand.

  I figured I could do without panties but with tits like mine you need a little crowd control. Plus the underhood Orchidia had leant me was a weird fit and was starting to chafe the back of my neck. I didn’t have the leisure to shop around so I went with what I could find, a nearby trashy boutique full of clothing for an entirely different workforce.

  The underhoods they had were all utterly preposterous, frilly little confections of lace and ribbon and trampy fishnet. I searched out the plainest one, a sheer black nylon with matching bra and panties. The gum cracking salesgirl tried to get me to buy the garter belt, stockings and gloves that completed the set but I was nearly out of money already and filled with a kind of jittery hilarity that kept me looking over my shoulder like an escaped con. I had to stop her from wrapping the stuff up in pink tissue and ribbon and when I told her I wanted to wear them home and she grinned, giving me an elaborate wink.

  “Hot date?”

  I shivered. Yeah I had a hot date all right. A date with a murderer.

  I ducked into the dressing room and shucked off the uniform, wriggling into the sheer panties and sliding my arms through the bra straps. I checked the lock on the pink wooden door and then undid my masklaces. Máscara off, I slipped out of the ill-fitting underhood and into the new one in one quick fluid motion.

  I stood before the full-length mirror, feeling cold and foolish. I didn’t look like an avenging angel fixing to dish out vigilante justice. I looked like an aging housewife trying to spice up her marriage. My boobs spilled over the flimsy cups of the bra and my big ass stretched the sheer panties to their utmost limit. Only the underhood looked halfway sexy, as smoky-sheer and tight as a silk stocking over the curves of my smooth-shaven head. As long as I didn’t turn sideways you could almost ignore the still-swollen mess of my broken nose.

  I slipped my new clothes on and stuffed the uniform and my old shoes into a pink shopping bag with the store’s logo — a sort of sexy invisible woman filling up stockings, bra, panties, gloves and a glittery underhood. I was standing outside with my silly bag, scanning the street for Oscar and his goons, wondering where I might be able to get my hands on a pistola, when I noticed a familiar car in front of Orchidia’s. It took a few seconds for my brain to register the sporty little two-seater but by then it was obvious because there he was, Jaguar de Juarez, spitting image of his famous father and every inch the hero in his neat pressed suit and immaculate golden hood.

  My heart stopped as his eyes caught mine and I had this absurd urge to turn and run. Then he was getting in his car, pulling up to where I stood.

  “X,” he said, leaning across the seat to unlock the passenger door. “Get in.”

  No words, just this jagged anxiety ripping at my guts as I looked up and down the street again, crystal bright paranoia making my teeth grind and my heart leap inside my chest.

  “That’s not such a hot idea,” I was finally able to say.

  “Just do it,” he said opening the car door. “You’re not safe out here on the street.”

  I had no idea what “safe” meant anymore than “careful” but I was weak and I could smell him, seductively familiar scent. I knew it was wrong, but I got in anyway.

  40

  The hallways of the Kabuki were the same, same dusty flower smell and same blue carpet with the gold stripes and 1101 down at the end of the hall, as familiar as the inside of my hood.

  Jaguar had pulled his car over in the alley behind the hotel and pressed the room key into my hand.

  “Go. I’ll meet you inside.”

  Another chance to leave, but did I? How could I when the old game, the old rush of sneaking around, of secret rendezvous, felt as delicious as I remembered. I cursed myself as a horny old fool a thousand times, but I was helpless against the brainless gravity of desire and the stealthy, cowardly whisper – He wants to help, why not let him take care of this? He’s the hero after all, right?

  I paused with my hand on the knob of room 1101, key halfway in the lock. I knew I shouldn’t open that door, that doing so would open a can of worms, but the key slid in so easy, door open and me inside like stepping into a time machine.

  This room, the same room, every detail just like I remembered. Thick bedspread with that strange modern pattern like chunky, geometric snakes twisting through a sea of blue and silver. Minimalist cherry wood furniture and remember the time I knocked over a candle there, on the bedside table and we had to try and scrape the wax off with our fingernails. Still a pale stain there by the phone and I just didn’t think I could do this but it was too late because there was that soft knock on the door.

  I stood for a moment, eye pressed against the peephole. He looked anxious out in the hallway, eyes darting from side to side and I slipped the chain and let him in.

  At first more awkward silence, me standing with my back to the door, ready to bolt and him facing the bed, looking down at his own hands. Then I took a step towards him, unable to take my eyes off the exquisitely vulnerable strip of soft brown skin between the hem of his máscara and the collar of his jacket. Remembering just how that spot tasted, how it felt against my lips and he was turning to face me, looking up at me with the same voracious brown eyes that had sucked me in that first night in the ring.

  I was all ready with this explanation of why I couldn’t do this, no way, but instead this painful carcrash kiss and whatever else I was going to say dissolved in the terrifying heat between us. Everything that held me back, from mundane worry about my cellulite and how much I’d aged to the deeper, more complex fear of dragging his golden perfection through the bleak, dark filth of my own personal nightmare, all of it seemed like things briefly glimpsed through the window of speeding car, suddenly meaningless in the brutal velocity of desire and memory.

  From there it was like the first time, inevitable, as I wrenched impatiently at his jacket and shirt, yanking down my trousers and silly new panties and there was no time for formality, no time for anything but the quick, fierce battle to free his stiff, weeping verga from the tangle of his shorts and then I had him on his back in seconds and deep inside me. We fucked like a drunken fistfight, like the end of the world, only half out of our clothes and nearly falling off the edge of the bed but not caring, not caring about anything but the brutal thrusting that was so bad, so wrong and yet so impossibly good. The worst possible idea, as luscious and destructive as heroin and just as impossible to resist. I came so fast with him close on my heels crying out my name and dissolving into hot, wrenching sobs in my arms.

  After, in a strange tense calm like the eye of a storm, I held him with his head on my breasts and listened as he spoke with his lips against my skin.

  “Orchidia told me what happened.” He looked up at me, máscara still wet with tears and saliva. “Why didn’t you tell me? Let me help you? I’m a part of this too, you know.”

  Why didn’t I? How could I possible explain the mess of feelings tangled up inside me.

  “Black Eagle has to be stopped. You’ve known it since the beginning. Skin cops won’t help us but we can’t just sit back and let h
im kill our women.” He paused. “We have to kill this hijo de puta. For Jasmine, for all the Hood girls. He needs to be put down like a mad dog.” He sat up, straightened his crooked shirt and twisted tie. “X, you know it’s the only way.” He was so fucking beautiful, with his righteous anger and the heroic tilt of his famous hood. He looked just like his great great grandfather on the silver screen, ready to do battle with some troublesome zombies or a villainous mad scientist and I suddenly felt this crushing love for him like an anvil on my chest. It would be so good not to be alone. To have someone to watch my back. Like my reasons not to fuck him in the first place, all those years ago, my reasons for keeping him out of this seemed suddenly impossible to remember.

  “You still keep a gat in your glovebox?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “OK then, we go to his apartment just before dawn, break in and put a bullet in that psycho fucker’s naked head. Finish this once and for all.”

  His eyes glittered.

  “Yes.” He was hard again, pulling me to him. “It’s the only way.”

  In lieu of agreement, I gripped his masklaces and pulled his head down to my still-dripping omé. I hid from my whirling thoughts in the pleasure of his knowledgeable tongue, working it just like I taught him and I came and came again, letting the cacophony of orgasm drown out the doubt, the sure and growing knowledge that this was wrong, more so now than ever.

  But his body felt so good. Thicker now and scars I didn’t recognize but that smell. Santo, that smell that made me crazy, made me forget myself and it hadn’t changed at all. If anything it was stronger, deeper and more potent as the sweat poured off him, fucking me, giving me everything and when he came again, he didn’t stop, segueing directly into a third caida without a breather and I just couldn’t get enough. I could feel my pussy wringing him like a washrag, pulling him in deeper as I clawed at his muscular back, egging him on, whispering all the things I knew he loved to hear. Making love with him again so like wrestling with an old, trusted opponent, knowing each other’s every move and working together without words, elegant as ballroom dancers, effortless and perfect. Each move, each bump clean and sharp as math, drawing you inevitably towards the flawless, spectacular finish.

  Then quiet, hearts slowing and sweat cooling and again it was Jaguar who broke the silence.

  “I didn’t love her,” he said.

  “What?” My spine tensing as my stroking hand froze on the back of his hooded head.

  “Jasmine.” He turned his head away towards the wall. “I cared about her and I can’t believe she’s gone, but I never loved her. Not like I love you, X.”

  What could I say to that? Nothing. I just caressed the back of his head and let him continue.

  “Letting you go was the worst mistake I’ve ever made. My life is nothing but a dry pointless soap opera without you. My wife and I... we barely speak. She has her life and I have mine. I guess she loves me in her own way but... I don’t know

  “There have always been other women, women like Jasmine.” Emotion constricted his voice. “They were never you.”

  He looked up at me.

  “You were right, X.” His eyes were fierce in the gold teardrop frames of his eyeholes. “I am just Daddy’s boy. I am nothing without you. I never will be. I’m not a real hero, I’m just the meat filling up a comic book fantasy for little kids. The only time I was ever real was when I was with you. All I ever did after you left was follow the script, be Jaguar de Juarez.” He looked away, fingers trailing over the black velvet spots on the curve of his forehead. “There’s nothing inside the prison of this famous fucking máscara. Nothing but loneliness and regret. Not a day goes by when I don’t wish I had gone with you. Taken a chance to be something real, to be myself instead of just some cold dead action figure, advertising soap powder. And now...”

  He trailed off. I could always read him like a book and I could see as clear as day that Jaguar was riding high on this wonderful, heroic fantasy of getting the bad guy and getting the girl too. Of undoing the years of regret and trading in his stale, boring middle-aged life for a wild adventure full of danger and romance. He was so naive, and so beautiful in that naiveté. I knew then without a doubt that I loved him, that I always would, just like I knew involving him had been a terrible mistake.

  Still as the night wore on, I let myself luxuriate in that impossible dream. I should have left right then but what can I say? I wanted to feel something good, even if it was for the last time. I needed that to give me the strength for what I knew I had to do. So I let him tell me how sorry he was for hurting me, how much he loved me. I even let him think that we would run away together, once this horrible injustice had been righted.

  Of course he brought the cuffs. Had he been so sure I would come here? I handcuffed him to the bed the way I always used to and let him tell me he was mine, that he was and always will belong only to me as I fucked him slow, so painfully slow until he begged to be allowed to come again. I let him come, let him believe. In the heat and sweat and raw, open love I felt for him in that moment, I almost believed it too.

  When it was over, I held him close with his verga softening inside me and his tears sweet on my lips. Pulling back and away from him was one of the hardest things I have ever done. Far harder than the first time.

  “Jaguar,” I told him. “I can’t let you do this.”

  He tried to sit up but his handcuffed hands would not let him.

  “X, what...”

  “Don’t talk, just listen.” I turned away from his huge, hurt eyes and steeled myself to do what had to be done. “I was wrong to ask you to leave your family twenty years ago and I would be even more wrong now.”

  “No. X please, listen...”

  I turned back to him. How could I explain the enormity of the love I felt for him. Mi alma, my beautiful shining hero. He was wrong to say he was not a real hero. Every day little kids in this shithole city find a way to see beyond their cheap hoods and their empty bellies and their fucked up barrio because they look up and they see Jaguar de Juarez, telling them to stay in school, to work hard, to grow up big and strong. And his own boy, little Jaguar 6, he needed his father to help him become a hero too. I knew what would happen to that little boy if his father ran off with an excommunicated ruda like me. If he was arrested for murder. Or killed. I just couldn’t live with that.

  Me, I’m nobody. Nobody will care what happens to an old washed up luchadora with no family and no future. I’m expendable. I knew in my heart that I had to do this alone.

  I’d known it from the start and fought it all along, throwing bodies in the way and hiding from that brutal truth but in the end there just wasn’t any other way. As much as I wanted the luscious sunset-colored fantasy of happily-ever-after with my one true love, I knew it could never be. I had to protect him, not just from scandal but from the brutal ugliness of what I was about to do. He was a good man in the way that only the pure and naive can ever really be. The world was full of stonehearted cynics but real good guys were rare as rubies. I loved him too much to let him become like me. The only way to show him how much I really loved him was to break his heart all over again. It was the only way.

  “I’ll leave the key here on the dresser.” I said, unable to look at him. “The maid can let you up in the morning.”

  “Please, X, don’t do this!” He thrashed against his bonds.

  “Do something for me, willya?”

  He went still, suspicious.

  “What?”

  “The last victim,” I said. “Her name is Rubia Peligrosa. If something happens to me, make sure she gets a hood and a decent burial.”

  “I can do that, I’ll do anything for you, you know that, but please, don’t go alone, it’s too dangerous.”

  “And if it comes down to that,” I paused, feeling a sick, chilly lick of fear and clenching my teeth against it. “Don’t let them take me to the morgue. Take me to Orchidia. Promise me.”

  “Don’t talk like that, X
. Santo, this is crazy.”

  “Just promise.”

  “I promise, X, just let me up. You can’t go alone. Please, X.”

  I nodded, silent, and turned to go, pulling Dulce’s little green Santo charm from my pocketbook and putting it around my neck.

  “Don’t leave me again. Please.” He was crying now, thrashing madly, and I felt this vast aching hole inside me. “X, I need you. Please, I love you. I love you.”

  I love you, too. I thought. More than you know.

  I left.

  41

  In the predawn hush, I found myself on 53rd street again, wary as a stray cat in the dog pound, eyes wide, watching for cops as I slipped into the alley behind Davis Trent’s nice clean building. I had no idea what I was going to do, how I was going to get in or what I was going to do once I was inside, but I had Jaguar’s pistola in the small of my back and I had the kind of crazy headlong gravity of a suicide who’s already jumped, already pulled the trigger, pulling me up the solid green fire escape and into the dim hallway of the fifth floor.

  No one there. No one in the hall or the stairwell, all the happy little Skins snug in their beds as I slipped down to the end. 505 was the apartment number and what if I’m wrong? Doubt coiling in my guts and this creeping fear draining away my crazy momentum as I stood blankly staring at this unremarkable door, just one in a row of unremarkable doors. Each one with a little fisheye peephole and tin numbers painted a dark evergreen against the pale mint of the doors. But what if I’m right? It did all make an awful kind of sense. A skinned Hood taking his own twisted self-loathing out on Hood hookers, destroying their identities like he had destroyed his own. I had no other choice but to keep moving, stop second guessing myself and take care of this once and for all.