Bronx Noir

by S. J. Rozan

  “Take the pants down,” she said.

  After she went down on Mr. Berlin she could have her way with him, could walk in and out during class, he wouldn’t even raise a mumble. She never abused it—she liked his regular sixty dollars, and Mr. Berlin was her first regular. He was a married-with-three-kids kind of guy. Pulling money off him was easy. It was so easy, it made her want to get into the business. There was a sense of power that went with it that left her feeling almost high.

  One night she was sitting with Pacheco and Angie on the bed. A trick had just left and they had changed the sheets, then lay there with their legs intertwined, eating chicken from a bucket. Pacheco had just started with a tale from his army days when Iris came right out with the story about Mr. Berlin.

  “Are you serious?” Angie jumped off the bed, giving Pacheco a punch. “Did’ju hear that shit? I’ll kill that bastid!” She paced, arms windmilling. “I’ll take the bastids to court, the whole fucken school! That dirty fuck!! Pacheco!! Why the fuck you just sittin’ there? She’s only fourteen!”

  Pacheco and Iris exchanged glances. Iris went into her room and came back with a cigar box. She emptied it on the bed. Three hundred and ten dollars.

  “I’ll sue the city!! Just look at that!! All that talk about morality!! Like I’m garbage, right? And lookit what they do!! All of them fulla shit, alla them!”

  “You don’t have a case,” Pacheco said, riffling through the bills. “The daughter of a local hooker? Gimme a break. They’d laugh you outta court. All the nice decent hard-working white guy has to say is that she propositioned him. Who ain’t gonna believe him?”

  Angie glared, eyes teeming wet. “But we gotta do something!”

  Iris said, “Fuck school. I wanna go to work.”

  Angie stood there staring at the two of them. Trembling a little, looking as if they had just presented her with the terms of surrender.

  “I don’t know,” she said. Her lips quivered. She passed a hand through her hair, sat on the bed, reached for her crack pipe. She took it into the bathroom and shut the door.

  “Did he sex you?” Pacheco asked while lighting a cigarette.

  “Yeah.”

  “You want I should set you up?”

  Iris didn’t even hesitate. “Yeah,” she said.

  She turned tricks every day, every night, even on weekends. She still managed to cook for her mother, who wasn’t doing much of anything, and paid for her crack habit. The career started like a party, and turned into chain gang.

  She used to feel in control. She’d get into a car with some guy and feel like she was holding the cards. She had what she wanted, and when it was over she still had it, while the guy was fifty bucks poorer. (Or forty or thirty or whatever it was that night that moment.) She liked seeing some guys over and over, a stable of “steadies” like her mom had, young dudes who cruised with booming hip-hop cars. They had flashy gold rings, gold chains, big gold watches with diamonds glittery, big belt buckles, and she so sparkling pantyhose girl, so high-heels clingy skirts, she looked so young, she looked so edible, and the business did not show on her. They’d take her to parties in the early days before gangs became posses. She would give them group rates so they wouldn’t have to fight over her. She liked them. In their arms she imagined being with a lover, and sometimes she might cum.

  A few months later, and things started to change. Posses became strict; she couldn’t go from this boy to that without some other boy getting mad. You can’t go from posse to posse and do business; a girl that fucked someone in TTG would not be touched by someone in FNB. Iris found she couldn’t stay with a posse either, as all of a sudden posse boys weren’t so interested in hookers. There was plenty of fresh girl meat out there eager to get “tagged” by a posse, to be owned and belong, and they refused to have Iris anywhere near them. Iris couldn’t be tagged; not only was it bad for business to confine herself to a select group, but no one would tag a puta anyway, so she had to hit the streets again and kiss the pretty boys with the fine rides goodbye.

  After six months she was tired. Sleepless eyes. The young guys who would fuck her were abusive, pounding into her like hammer-thrust speed is of the essence, the great twitching shudder coming so fast. She’d sit on the stoop and not even look at their cars anymore. There were fat old greasy types waving bills, men who stank of cologne and cigarettes. She’d give them hand jobs while they talked about their wives, slipping their palms up her thighs in the cuchifriteria where she went to get lunch. She’d overcharge them in hopes of discouraging them.

  “I have this weird dream,” she told Pacheco one night on the stoop. “I’m with this older trick, and we fuck an’ all. I’m sleepin’ with him in Ma’s bed, when she comes in an’ starts screamin’. ‘My Gaw, whachu doin’ in bed wit’cha father?’”

  Pacheco started sending her out on cushy assignments, dates where she’d end up at some hotel like The Penta, all spruced up like an office lady, to meet some flaky spick borough president or some shit like that. Those kind of people pay a lot for a fifteen-year-old. It meant not working so many tricks but the bastids did wear her out, all those pretzel shapes and that stripping shit they love. After one of those, she’d take the day off, sit around and watch TV. Row after row of soap operas, her mother lying on the bed behind her. Pizza delivery, and Pacheco’s visit to bring the crack. The hurried breath of Angie’s torch, the suck of cold white flame. A curl of freeze and then the glassy fishtank haze.

  The soap operas put a lot of stupid ideas into Iris. She thought about the rest of her life, and how much she didn’t want to end up like her mother. It was starting to hit her, those nights when Angie sat there blind-eyed in float-daze, drool hanging drip—she was the only support her mother had. She was trapped. It was going to be tricks and tricks and tricks. The wear-and-tear was starting to show, those circles under her eyes, for starters, that rough feel to her skin that face creams and makeup would not hide.

  “And in my old age,” she whispered to Pacheco while her mother slept, “I’ll have to have a daughter just to take care of me.” Tears tracked mascara down her cheeks. Pacheco could only add that he had no more cushy jobs for her. Those “jaitones” only want girls who look like virgins.

  The week she went back to street duty, the first hooker body appeared strewn over empty fish crates behind the Hunts Point market.

  “I want a boyfriend,” she told a Jose, a young trick she shared a joint with, after she heard about the second body, found seven blocks from her stoop. “Someone to take care of me.” She looked at Jose, but he wasn’t buying, just renting. There seemed nothing to hold her in her world, no handles no grips and no brakes to slow the speed.

  “I’m saying I want all of you to keep your eyes peeled,” Pacheco told all the girls one Friday night, after the third hooker turned up barely three blocks away. “The guy is close. You stick together, an’ if you see anybody actin’ weird, you get me. Okay?”

  The first time Iris saw the Jaguar, she told Pacheco, but he didn’t seem too interested. She noticed the Jaguar coming by at least two or three times a week. It would usually crawl over quietly, not far from her stoop. The windshield was tinted slightly. Iris could make out a young face behind the wheel, maybe a mustache. Not too sure if it was real or just soap opera. He would puff on a cigarette sitting like a sphinx behind the smoke. She could imagine those eyes, deep-set and pinned to her. The Jag was red slick and so heavy with mystical that she never dared go over to it.

  “Maybe he’s that nut runnin’ around,” Pacheco told her when she spotted it again one night.

  The Jaguar hummed just down the block, headlights off. Iris was glad he saw it too now, so maybe he wouldn’t think she was imagining it.

  Pacheco grinned. “He’s lookin at’chu an’ thinkin how good you’ll look as pork chops!”

  “Thass not funny,” Iris said, miffed at thinking of her mystery man as a murderer. Pacheco wasn’t the least bit entranced.

  “He’s a cop or a nut,
” he said on his way upstairs to dose her mother. “Stay away from him.”

  Iris did. She was content to leave the dream alone. She loved the sensation of being watched. Many times she was the only thing on the stoop, only her, nobody else. One night she was hanging there with Yolanda, who had just dyed her hair red. Yolanda had no imagination, no sense of mystery. When Iris told her about the car as it sat up the block breathing soft, Yolanda walked right over to it, swinging her hips like a dare. Iris froze to the spot. She watched Yolanda lean down to the window, her yellowed birdlike face steaming as she turned and walked back to the stoop. The Jaguar growled and roared past.

  “What did you do?” Iris asked, pissed off and worried that maybe the car would never return.

  “I axed him if he wanted some company,” Yolanda said, shaking crunchy red from her face. “An’ you know what he say? He say, ‘Get away from my car.’ The bastid.”

  For the next couple of days all Iris could do was worry about the Jaguar not coming back. If she heard a certain car roar she would run to check, sometimes doing rush jobs for fear of missing the car while she was with some trick. It was a relief when she spotted the Jaguar again, resting behind a group of parked cars. There was that mysterious dark shadow, the swirl of cigarette, or maybe she was imagining him behind dark glass. She would become aware of her every pore, every movement of her body like she was an actress on a stage working to always present her best side. There might be a radio playing—she would dance voluptuous teasing like a stripper in a cage. Whenever she heard that Jaguar growl its goodbye, something inside her would sink, as if her ride was leaving without her.

  She could see his sharply featured face, the deep-set eyes, sweet long lips pursed around the cigarette. A trace of mustache, but baby face, never shaved. He was young, an ex—drug dealer tired of the daily kill. He had his money now. He didn’t need all this. He wanted to take just one thing with him on his ride out.

  “I tell you, he’s a nut. Don’t think about it,” Pacheco scolded when he heard her wonder why the Jaguar hadn’t turned up for three days. “He gonna carve you up.”

  Yolanda, sitting beside Iris, made an ugly grimace. “You such a fuckhead, Pacheco, man. You a pimp or what? Do ya job! Go out there an’ scare the fuck off.”

  “Yeah, right,” Pacheco laughed. Iris puffed on her cigarette so shaky. “Like I’m gonna walk up to a Jaguar and scare the guy off. Like, that bastid could own this block an’ shit.”

  “Drug dealer?” Iris pulled the pinky out of her mouth.

  “Damn straight drug dealer. Or a psycho cop. An’ they both carry guns, right?” He laughed as he went upstairs.

  “Jaguar” by Iris Robles

  He made like he was a trick, when finally she went over to him. She liked his smell, something all spice and tree bark. She didn’t kiss tricks but she tasted his long smooth lips to kiss forever. Stayed in the motel for three days. “I don’t have to be anyplace,” he said, biting the crotch off her pantyhose. After that, she moved into his duplex on Long Island, where her mother would join them after she got through the detox program.

  “Ma, you think tricks fall in love sometimes?”

  They were watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Angie was in bed, pipe slipping from her hand. A misty white vapor floated.

  “Uhhh,” she said, her eyes round as saucers.

  “I mean, say a john you did was really rich and you did him so good. You think he might fall in love and keep you?”

  Angie’s round blank eyes flowed into the distance.

  Iris closed her own eyes. Iris by candlelight, by midnight, in the mirror staring so. Waiting for the ugliness to come to her too. Bruises, welts, lines, sallow hollow-eyed streetsucked. Like so many of her friends. Like her mother. Like the street with its cracks and tears and chunks of gravel where the trucks hit. She couldn’t just sit and wait anymore.

  She suited up. The minidress with the glittery pantyhose and high heels was just too putona. She wanted classier, something subtle gray, ladylike. She let her hair tumble loose. Not too much makeup, a more professional corporate look torn from a magazine ad. The buzz on the street all of a sudden was that Iris Robles was making her move. Mr. Romero at the meat market brought her the side of ham personally and walked her to the door, purely taken by how she looked this day.

  “Now this,” he said, “is what I call a change for the better. You look so responsible, reliable, efficient, with just the right touch of feminine to keep you looking sexy but not slutty. A real fine lady is what I see. Yessir, a fine young lady. You tell your mother I threw in a little more ham for her. Will you be gone long into the real world?”

  “I’ll be gone for a lifetime,” she said.

  Her mother just thought she had a special date. Pacheco thought she was applying for a job, and gnawed a toothpick nervously. He was relieved when she sat on the stoop and thought he could maybe make a few calls, now that she was somehow looking so good. The way she pulled out a long thin cigarette and lit it reminded him of some ’40s movie, some Rita Hayworth, some Lauren Bacall. And he ran to get to his phone.

  She had finished two cigarettes and just lit the third when she felt that vibrating rumble in the pit of her tummy. She could sense him already by instinct. The Jaguar crouched at the end of the block, headlights off. Iris stood up, walked to the curb. She stepped out onto the cobblestone street, face-to-face and staring back. The two of them not moving, the two of them still.

  The first step was the deepest, with a crack of shard resounding forever slow-motion hip-move whirls of smoke on the outer edges of the frame and all that blue lighting. Every step closer took too long. At any moment she thought the roar would come, those headlights snapping on, all pounce. She spotted the flash of a match, the orange tip of his cigarette glow. The outline of those young, stern features. Closer, now closer, she standing golden in the glare of a parked UPS truck’s lights.

  His eyes were not on her. They stared ahead, squinting through cigarette smoke, thin lips moving as if he were memorizing some poem. She put her hands on the door as if needing a handrail, felt the Jaguar throb tremor her insides. She leaned in to look. His cigarette hand was trembling something fierce. Her voice failed right then. She cleared her throat of cigarette, of car freshener, of some stale rubber smell.

  “Hey, honey,” she said, troubled. “You need some company?” Her head tilted to one side, hair cascading down, her smile a little scared like a plea. He turned to look at her slow, machine-like, the muzzle mounted on a swiveling turret. Now she could finally see the eyes, how blank dark nothing they were.

  “Get away from my car,” he snarled. The next instant his hand hit the stick shift. The car thundered and buckled. Iris had barely gotten her hands off the door before it lurched with tire shriek, racing off down the street without her.

  PART III

  ANOTHER SATURDAY NIGHT

  EARLY FALL

  BY STEVEN TORRES

  Hunts Point

  Yolanda Morales was on her knees on Farragut Street. There was the distant sound of strays. There was a cricket. There was no life on the street. Whoever worked in the area was long gone. The ladies of the night never worked so far from the main flow of traffic on Bruckner or Hunts Point Avenue. To her left was the fencing that kept people out of the transfer station where the borough of the Bronx separated out household garbage from recyclables. To her right was a warehouse loading area. In front of her stood a man with a gun. The muzzle was pressed to her forehead.

  She smiled. It was a bloody-tooth-missing smile. One of her eyes had a cut running deep through the eyebrow above it. If she lived, it would swell shut.

  If.

  She raised her right hand—not to grab the gun, just to add emphasis to what she had to say if she could say it. The hand was ugly, but she didn’t feel the pain of it anymore—could not have told anyone without looking which fingers were broken, or that a splinter of bone from her ring finger had erupted through the skin. Those weren’t
her only broken bones and that wasn’t her only broken skin.

  “Listen, Mister Man. You do what you gotta do. I done my duty, and I’m ready to meet the Lord.”

  The man she spoke to pressed the barrel of the gun harder against her forehead. She pressed back. If this were a battle of wills only, it would be a dead draw.

  Tucked between a Spanish food joint and what is sometimes a Spanish Pentecostal storefront church and sometimes just a storefront, boarded over, just off the Bruckner Expressway, there’s a nudie bar. Girls dance topless, bottomless too if you ask right, and all kinds of deals get made in back rooms or even in the front rooms. Once in a great while they’re raided. More often they’re ticketed, but the place is never shut down. Possibly some of the police in the area are on the take. Possibly no one cares enough to do anything permanent—arresting a couple dozen people just to hear “No hablo Ingles” all night is never high on any agenda. Besides, no one cares if the Puerto Ricans or the Dominicans or the Guatemalans or whatever the flavor this month, no one cares if they all open each others’ throats with razor blades. Half of them are here illegally. For the other half, their citizenship is the only legal thing about them.

  For a set of the regulars, one the favorite dancers in the summer of ’91 was a small girl named Jasmine. She had cinnamon skin and dark brown eyes, and a crooked smile that people thought she must have practiced to make her more seductive. Her breasts were tiny compared to all of the other girls, her hips and ass unpronounced, and when she was asked to show it all, she was hairless like a girl who hadn’t fully entered puberty yet. She hadn’t. There was no fake ID involved until the guy who owned the placed made one up for her. In real life, she was just thirteen. The look in her eyes, the drugs in her veins, the dying ember of her heart made her soul far older. She was paid in smack, a place to stay, and all she could eat and drink. Small as she was, drugged as she was, the food bill was negligible. The drugs were cheap; the managers even shot her up. The place to stay was a mattress, and when she was high, high as a kite or higher, men paid well to have her any way they wanted as long as there were no marks.