Houston Noir

by Gwendolyn Zepeda

  She had gotten as far as Antoine and Frick Road, near the middle school, before Justin caught up to her in his Chevrolet, as if he knew exactly where she’d end up. Without a word, she got into his car. What else could she have done? She had swallowed that no, and that no was now her life.

  She’s over that now. She comes and goes like a ghost, the same way she did in her house with her parents before she ever met Justin. Now she sees the new girls come in with hope in their eyes and takes any opportunity to show them how stupid they are, were. Welcome home.

  Farah waits for the other girls to finish making their food at the small stove littered with old pots caked with sauces and sticky noodles, surrounded by takeout containers. None of them care to clean, despite the roaches that scurry behind the stove. When Farah first got here, she cleaned all the pots she could, sometimes during her assigned nap times. She’d throw away the containers and scrub the counters hard with a dingy sponge, barely moving the grime and grease. She did this until she learned, truly, where she was. Not just in physical space, but where she was stuck, inside.

  Farah imagines herself as the other woman, living the life she was meant to live. At fifteen, Farah is sure she’s already fucked that woman’s husband. She’ll be happy to tell her so, if they ever meet.

  * * *

  Chickie woke up in a strange room. Across from her, a strange girl sighed in her sleep. This could be anywhere, and that girl could be any of the ones Chickie had met—other versions of herself: runaways, caretakers of drunk or high parents, abandoned or otherwise without a family.

  Sleep was the only thing that gave Chickie relief. It kept her from hearing the other foster children, the twin toddlers screaming in their cribs. It was the only way to escape the television playing its gaudy reality shows throughout the night, the disembodied voices and music, the sickeningly sweet jingles that frightened her. There were too many sounds, colors, facial expressions, and products to keep track of in that perfect square. It made her believe the world was too overpowering, too complicated, and that she should just give up.

  She realized her face was wet, her dark hair damp and matted. She’d dreamed of the past: Farah warming an eyeliner with a match and letting Chickie rim her eyes with the melted black. Riding in Justin’s backseat, sipping whiskey, then watching porn while his parents sat outside the room eating dinner. She’d dreamed of her mother, standing in the kitchen in a white dress, chopping nothing, then crawling toward her with the knife, like a baby.

  Chickie lay in bed remembering the days before she’d been taken away, and thinking of all the days since. All the foster homes she’d been shuffled to, and the one she was in currently.

  Now that she was awake, she felt greedy for that sleep that had come so easily the night before. The way she’d collapsed into her bed like it was a lake and she was sinking to the very bottom. To stop these thoughts, she threw the cover off her body and sat up. She had to leave. She wasn’t sure where she’d go or what would change, but she had to stop living this way.

  She found Justin—and Farah—on the same road where he’d found Farah months before, right next to Shotwell. It was as if he’d planned this all—had seen this coming from the day the girls were born.

  * * *

  Sergeant Correal kicked open the door to the parlor’s back room. It was dark and smoky, but he could see a hall with a row of showers at one end, closed doors at the other. Men were lined up in the shower stalls, looking at the opened door with frantic faces. It was the typical setup Correal had seen in these salons. The men chose a girl and then showered, a sign of the owner’s “protecting” the girls from disease, since the johns refused to wear condoms. Steam from the showers pushed through the crowded entrance, carrying the smell of blood and sex and something putrid, like flood rot and bayou.

  Past the stalls was a small kitchen with covered-up windows and a filthy counter stacked with pots, knives, and open food containers. As Correal’s eyes adjusted to the light, the other officers moved in beside him, and he realized there were two girls immediately to his right. They stood behind glass—a display window that revealed their faces and the upper halves of their torsos, one in garden-pink lingerie and the other in a skimpy black slip. Waiting to be chosen.

  He thought of buying lunch for his daughters at a fast-food drive-thru a few days before. The window was the same height, with young women standing behind it. He saw his daughters’ faces in their place: his seven-year-old in leggings and a tank top with cartoon characters, his sixteen-year-old in faded jeans and an Astros T-shirt.

  Correal looked at the two girls here, both backed against the wall. They didn’t seem afraid. Instead, their faces, masked by long fake lashes that fanned out when they blinked, glittery charcoal eyeliner, dark lipstick, were held frozen in an expression that seemed prepared for the worst. A sort of going-away glaze over their eyes. Correal was familiar with this look.

  Later, when they’d been removed from display, one of the girls asked him, “How did you know I was here?”

  He’d been about to say something like, Girls, you’re okay now. We’re here to help, or some other nonsense that shrunk beneath the weight of this place and its horror, its revolting smell. Then his gaze rested on her face and he recognized her as the girl who had disappeared from his neighborhood last year. His daughter’s friend. He searched his memory, past images of other such busts—black lace panties, a skirt lifted, flesh on his hands—and found her name: Chickie.

  Her broad cheekbones were cut up, one side bruised purple. The lips made full with red lipstick turned hot pink in the neon light from the signs that said, Massage Alegría. The same kind of sign had glowed over him thirty years before, in this same kind of place, where his father took him for this eighteenth birthday. With a deep sinking feeling in his chest, as if some bottom had dropped beneath him, he wondered for the first time how old that woman—that sweet, delicious woman—had been. He looked at Chickie. She couldn’t have been a girl, could she? He shook his head until he realized what he was doing and stopped.

  He answered her question with, “I would’ve come sooner if I did.” He knew better than to reach out or move close.

  “How long will I be in jail?” the other girl asked. Her eyes were like ponds: no trace of fear or surprise—just a glassy sort of dreaminess, her dilated pupils reflecting the neon. Despite himself, Correal imagined being a customer to this child, taking her into one of the small rooms, and what would happen, however gentle or violent, and how those pond-like eyes would stay the same throughout. I’m a bastard for even thinking about this.

  He remembered, now, the last time he saw Chickie. She’d been sitting with his daughter on her bed, laughing, when he opened the bedroom door to tell them to go to sleep. After he’d walked away, he heard them whisper, howl with laughter, and continue murmuring throughout the night. In the morning, he’d watched them from the living room window, looking over the backyard where they jumped on the trampoline. The way they flung themselves into the air had made him ache in his chest, his throat. Their unfiltered joy as their limbs kicked toward the wide sky, their faces in full sun. When will this end for them? he’d thought. Two years? Three? “Take a look at these girls,” he’d said to his wife. He’d watched for several minutes, making sure they didn’t fall.

  “We’re here to help you,” he said to these girls now. “Not send you to jail.”

  This was Farah, he now recalled, another girl from his daughter’s school. She looked bored and uninterested, with a sly pinch in her upper lip.

  Correal stepped aside as the outreach group and social workers approached the girls. Farah bent awkwardly to take off five-inch black heels, then stood barefoot, barely five feet tall. She looked like a girl playing dress-up. The sliver of sarcasm that aroused and terrified him had disappeared.

  * * *

  Chickie was shaking. She turned to one of the social workers who had led them out the back door. “I’m so sorry. Tell Mama I’m sorry.”


  Chickie’s mother was dead. She’d been dead for months now, as Justin had informed her when he’d started working here. Chickie made that knowledge available to herself only sometimes. For the most part, her mother existed as a being with whom she couldn’t communicate, who couldn’t hear her. She was there now, walking beside them. Chickie was still caught up in the heroin high and needed this woman to give her mother the message.

  But the woman misunderstood. “I’ll help you find her. Come with me.”

  Chickie and her dead mother followed the woman to the car, through the loud noises of the men being arrested and shouted at, feet moving quickly, police, and sirens.

  For Chickie and Farah, the sounds were muted. The things still alive within them were kept hidden—almost completely covered.

  In the backseat of the car, the girls lay their hands next to each other, not touching.

  MILES’S BLUES

  by Wanjiku Wa Ngugi

  Montrose

  It happened one night in Montrose, in the Fielding Café on Fairview Street. There, love found Jennifer—in the form of Miles, named after Davis himself.

  Fielding Café was actually a bar that featured new psychedelic rock and blues bands. Jennifer burst through its doors because Lola’s, her usual dive bar, was closed for renovation. Struck by the youthful clientele, she sat on the barstool nearest the band, the only one left. She could have joined the table with an empty seat, but she had never been the social type. With a tequila firmly in hand, she studied her surroundings. In front of her was a small stage with black curtains and a framed pencil drawing of Obama plastered above. That’s what this place was like: amateurish drawings and pictures and paintings. Artists clamoring for walls on which to express themselves. Take, for instance, the silhouette of the woman standing over a grave in a dark forest; or the man standing in front of a burned-down house with the rainbow flag blowing in the wind; or the children standing in front of an old police truck with fists raised high; or the woman, her blond hair cascading in the air, her arms outstretched in front of her. Pent-up emotions splattered on the wall.

  As the band did their sound check, Jennifer paid for another drink. The bartender handed her the whiskey sour, and she spotted, above the bar, a picture of Lance Armstrong holding a little girl. Probably his daughter. She remembered sitting on her father’s shoulders during season games. She had often wished, even as a child, that she was someone else. Or that her father would one day show up at her school to watch her perform poetry at the talent shows, even though she never won. Or that her mother would, like her friend’s mother, take her to the park for a picnic. Or that the popular boy in school would spend his time with her instead of making fun of her looks. Wasted youth, she thought. It was one of the reasons she had gone into teaching—to be close to the youth she had missed.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the drums. And that’s when she saw Miles. She held onto her chair and took a sip of her drink, captivated by his long arms and the way they hit the drums as if they had done him wrong. She could tell he was letting go of something. She watched his face as he hit the red drums, how, in those precise moments, something revealed itself.

  This love came as a surprise, like most things in Jennifer’s life. Their relationship developed fast that first night. Right there on the corner of Fairview and Grant, in the early hours of the morning, Miles reawakened in her a longing as covetous as the one she first felt at age five, in her family’s two-bedroom bungalow on Crocker Street. This bungalow was a couple of miles from Dunlavy Park, long before it was named for Eyran Chew. Before the bulldozers entered Montrose, eliminating bungalows and cottages with wide porches in order to conform to standards Jennifer’s family and the other residents had no say about, and displacing them.

  Her father was a short man with a penchant for politics and cigarettes; he spent most of his free time exchanging opinions at West Alabama Ice House. So much so that, when he came home, he demanded silence to organize his thoughts for the next day. It had been like this since Jennifer was born, so she’d learned from an early age to temper her tantrums so they only emerged when he wasn’t home. One day her father staggered home a couple of hours earlier than usual and caught them by surprise. No one was in their expected positions. Most times, Jennifer’s mother would be preparing his food and Jennifer would be in her bed, practicing her nursery rhymes. This was good because when her father came home, her eardrums were acclimated to her voice and not his. His was always a few notches louder than necessary, so it bounced off the walls, creating a raucous sound.

  On this day, however, Jennifer and her six-month-old baby brother sat on their mother’s lap. It was a small house, so his breath that reeked of ethanol and yeast filled all the rooms as he pounced around the space her mother occupied, pointing out her insufficiency. When he pushed her chair backward, Jennifer’s mother had to make a choice. She chose to hold onto the baby because, as she later explained to Jennifer, his skull was not yet fully formed.

  Fortunately, except for the bruises in her heart and the shock on her body, Jennifer escaped unhurt. But from then on, she preferred to sit in her room. In that room, she developed the longing, only she did not know what it was she longed for. She carried this yearning everywhere she went. She only ventured outdoors to try to figure it out.

  Once, as a child, she walked two miles in her sleep. Then, as a teenager, she walked ten miles away from Montrose in the daytime. Then she traveled twenty-six miles to attend Clear Lake College. Over time, she had come upon three truths about herself. One was that she had developed a distrust for adults. The second was that she harbored undying love for a youth that had passed her by. The third was a realization that the yearning was a part of her.

  So she returned and set up house down the street from the Montrose Remembrance Garden on Converse Street, an homage to the neighborhood’s violent past. She often sat outside her one-bedroom apartment surrounded by antique stores, redbrick luxury apartments, and townhomes and watched pub crawlers prowl through. She knew how lucky she was to have secured a place she could afford on her meager teacher’s salary. The longing, however, remained buried inside her, under the membranes of her skin, until the night she saw Miles play his drums.

  After the first set, he asked if she wanted a drink, and she declined. He asked if she wanted to buy him one, and she declined. She wanted to walk away, but he kept talking, saying things about her face and her hair and her body. His shirt clung to his torso and his boyish smile lingered. A wisp of hair fell on his forehead, and she had the urge to push it back. He hung onto her every word. When she indicated she wanted to go home, he would not accept it and asked her to stay for their second set.

  She asked why they played so late into the night and he asked why not, tilting his head back and laughing. He said it wasn’t like he had a curfew or anything. She laughed uneasily. He told her he liked it when she laughed. He touched her hand as he ordered another shot, and the touch stirred something inside her. His hands were soft, and when his eyes danced on hers, she knew he saw only her. She decided to wait until the band was done.

  Later, outside, he put his hand on her waist. She started to protest, but then surprised herself by kissing him.

  On that first night together, she sat nervously on the edge of her bed while he sat beside her, his breathing audible, holding her hand. She stood and went to the kitchen for shots. While there, she decided to take a pill. Then, everything fell into place.

  After, he played with her braids, which rested on her shoulders and chest and on the bed. He asked her how her face was the same color as her braids and wondered how she kept that much hair in Houston’s heat. He marveled at how she kept her body so youthful. He spoke to her about his dreams. He spoke to her about rules and how he disliked them.

  It was uncanny, their meeting. Moments before she saw him at Fielding Café, she had stood still in this house, imagining standing on a wooden chair. Her head tethered closer to the ceiling, contemplating what it wou
ld feel like if her feet were suddenly suspended from the chair.

  What a difference time makes, she thought. As she lay on her bed, she thought only of Miles—not of her father, not of her students, and not of all the collective moments prior to Miles.

  * * *

  This continued for days and weeks after. Sometimes she stood at the entrance to the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, where she taught ethics and history, watching the kids trickle in, and thought of how good fortune had escaped her most of her life. But now, like a lottery, she had won it back.

  She and Miles saw each other during the daytime, but couldn’t let others know about their relationship. Although Miles belonged to her, he lived with another woman. They were cautious. Any attention might delay their plans.

  The hours she spent with Miles and the love they had brewed so quickly played and replayed in her head. They relieved the repetitive memories of her father, knocking living and nonliving things out of his way. There were also more recent memories of days spent in Montrose streets and parks, peddling wares.

  These memories were stubborn. They sneaked in and transported her to the time before Miles. Sometimes they appeared real in her mind, just as when they’d happened. There was the night she’d sat on her bed, counting her good fortunes, and heard a knock. She slipped on her robe and the knock got louder. A shadowy, tall figure stood at the door. He was not familiar, but his words were clear. A warning. From higher up the supply chain that oversaw the distribution of the pharmaceutical capsules she was given to sell. She tried to close the door. He blocked it with his foot, then pushed it wide open, but made sure to lock it behind him. She ran toward the bed and he followed. He jumped over the bed, narrowly missing her as she made a dash for it. She stumbled, then picked herself up. In the kitchen, she opened the drawer and drew a knife, but he lunged and wrestled it away from her. There was pain. Then the knife plunged too close to her heart, and she became numb as darkness filled the room.