Houston Noir

by Gwendolyn Zepeda

  That was a long time ago. Now she looked down at her sleeping son, his cheekbones like a model’s. The skin under his eyes deep purple.

  His phone pinged on the table again.

  Months before she knew, really knew, what this was—what had him—she’d picked up his ringing phone once, while he was in the bathroom.

  Before she could speak to the caller, Jamie flew from the bathroom, holding his pants closed with one hand. He snatched the phone, hurting her, crushing her fingers. He raged, screamed down at her. She edged around him, her hands held up, apologizing again and again. Fled upstairs to her room, shut the door and locked it.

  Told herself she wasn’t afraid of him. She slid down and sat with her back pressed against the eight-foot solid-wood door and tried to stop the shaking. Because she wasn’t afraid of her boy.

  Ping.

  His blond lashes rested on his cheeks. His cheeks were covered in red-gold hair. His huge hands lay open on his thighs, his whole body loose and easy and at peace. He was happy. This was happiness.

  The doctor told her, “He needs it like air. You’re trying to keep him from air. So be careful.”

  Ping.

  She picked up his phone.

  Jamie had an appointment.

  * * *

  When Kenneth moved out, he gave her a gun. He said the neighborhood was rough; he wanted her to be okay. He showed her how to load it and sent her a link to a video about how to use it. She stuffed it in a Tampax box, but also watched the video.

  Now, she went upstairs and got the gun. Put it in the zipper pocket of her purse. Then took it out of the pocket and put it in the loose bucket of the purse, with her loose change and loose bills and the lipstick she used every day and a package of Kleenex. She came downstairs with her purse and a quilt made of stitched-together biplanes. When Jamie was ten, she’d bought two of these quilts at the Neiman Marcus Last Call. For his bunk bed, back when he could fit into a bunk. Back when sleepovers happened every weekend. Now she laid the quilt over her son, drawing it up to his chin and tucking it around his feet.

  Here’s something she remembered—something she’d pull out every now and then: Her boy at two years old. She would put on a CD and turn up the volume, and they’d dance. Holding him on her hip, her left hand clasping his right. They’d spin and dip and twirl across the family room floor. He would throw back his head and that bright splash of golden hair would flare as they spun and he would laugh and laugh and laugh.

  She was careful with that memory. That memory could kill her—crack her open so everything inside would slide out, and she would not ever be able to keep things together again.

  * * *

  Once she knew what she was up against, she did her research. She called in sick to work, which God knows was the truth because the night before she’d stood frozen in Kroger, in the canned vegetable aisle, dialing his number over and over, crying without shame. Her hands shaking, praying, Please, God. Please, God. Please, God. Barely aware of the small woman next to her, patting her arm and murmuring consolation in Spanish. She’d walked away from the kind woman, walked away from her full cart. Drove home and poured a bourbon. Put in her earbuds and played Adele’s heartbreak as loud as the iPhone would go. She’d danced by herself, bourbon in hand.

  Philip Seymour Hoffman was a heroin addict. He overdosed, he died. His mom had twenty-three good years when he was sober. She would take that. Twenty-three years? Yes. She’d take that deal.

  There were people who’d gone down that road and found their way back, she learned. But if the numbers told the truth, she would bury Jamie. Jamie wouldn’t bury her. This was the truth. She did numbers for a living and believed in them. They hadn’t given her false hopes and, God knows, God had.

  * * *

  Months ago, they pulled into a gas station to fuel up, and Jamie said, “Mom! What the fuck? You can’t stop here!”

  She ignored him. She usually ignored what Jamie said by then because, like her husband, she wasn’t sure it was Jamie saying it.

  She slid her card through the slot and turned, and three men glommed onto her, touching her, pressing in. One needed bus fare. His mom was sick. If she could only . . . Ten dollars, lady. Ten dollars.

  Jamie’s face was turned away from her, stony. He’d told her. What the fuck.

  She pulled out of the station, stopped at the red, and a zombie peered in her window and said something she was sure she had misunderstood. She drove through the red. “Jamie, did that woman proposition you?”

  He smiled a smile that was a lot like Jamie’s. “She propositioned us, Mom.”

  * * *

  When her friends asked about Jamie, she lied. When they pressed, she dropped her friends. Ignored their calls. Stopped going to church. It was easier.

  * * *

  Here was a piece of good advice: she needed to go to Al-Anon. At least three meetings.

  She went to one and sat there for an hour and a half, listening to the terror and desperation of strangers. She didn’t go back.

  * * *

  The text said he had what Jamie wanted. Gooood shit. Truth. Meet the same place as last time.

  She scrolled through the text messages and found the last time.

  * * *

  A couple of months back, maybe three, she got a call from her bank. There was a young man. The signature—they weren’t sure.

  She heard herself say, “That’s not my signature.” Then she walked into her boss’s office, said she was sick and had to go home. She looked sick. He walked her to her car; she didn’t want him to.

  At home, she pulled up her account and did the math. Seven thousand dollars, give or take.

  She went to her grandmother’s dresser, opened the top drawer, and took out the navy velvet box where she stored her wedding ring and the pearls her father gave her on her wedding day. The ring had been her husband’s grandmother’s. She was saving it for Jamie’s bride. For when he got better.

  She didn’t shake the box. She carried it downstairs, poured a bourbon, and sat at the dining room table. Drank the bourbon. Waited until her heart was still. Opened the box.

  The ring was there.

  Covering her face with her hands, she wept with gratitude. It was such a gift, such generosity that Jamie hadn’t taken the ring. Oh, he did love her. He hadn’t taken the ring.

  He had taken the pearls. Could have been both, but it was just the pearls. And seven thousand dollars. Give or take.

  * * *

  She used the phone’s map app to find where to meet the man. When she saw how close it was, she pressed the walking-man icon and got directions.

  * * *

  Here are some of the lies she told herself . . .

  No. She was done telling herself lies.

  * * *

  She wiped Jamie’s face with a fresh cloth. Put a glass of ice water on the coffee table and pulled the table within his reach. Turned off the sound on his phone.

  She blew out the spruce-scented candle. Dimmed the lights. Turned the television on to the Pandora channel and let Zoe Keating pour comfort and healing on her child.

  She got on her knees and put her arms around his shoulders and held him close and breathed him in. He was still beautiful, you know? He was warm and bony and her Jamie, deep inside. She was sure.

  She didn’t want to be late. She dropped Jamie’s cigarettes into her purse, filled a paper cup with ice and bourbon, set the alarm, and locked the door behind her.

  * * *

  Oh, that cool air. The breeze lifted her hair at her temples. It felt good. See, that was something else she’d learned: to take her pleasures where she could. It felt good to click the wrought-iron gate behind her. To be walking these happy streets by herself at night and not feel afraid. Because she wasn’t afraid. She was doing something for Jamie.

  Her heels made a nice click click on the street. This block didn’t have sidewalks. She felt great. Healthy and strong, not too cold, not too warm, and the bourbon was good.
She’d poured just the right amount: not too much, not too little.

  Here was the house that had been on the market for three years—it went for seven hundred–plus and now there was a baby swing on the porch. Right next to it, Juan’s house. When she first moved to the Heights, she thought Juan was a slumlord. He had a four-unit garage apartment in back—she knew from the garbage cans out front on Thursday. He sat in a plastic chair in his front yard with a Chihuahua named Tiny on his lap. Neither Juan’s house nor his garage apartment had seen upkeep.

  She and Juan were friends now. Long ago, Juan was a professional baseball player in St. Louis. He’d brought his whole family over from the Dominican Republic. He wasn’t a slumlord—he was a family man.

  She passed under the massive oak tree some builder had the sense to save. The Heights had these lovely old oaks—more than a hundred years old and as big around as a rowboat. She walked up to the tree and pressed her cheek against the bark. See? She could enjoy this. This tree and the bark and the weather being good and her feet not hurting even though she hadn’t thought to change her shoes.

  There was a jumble of flotsam on the lawn ahead. A closer look showed it to be a pair of red sneakers, a plaid flannel shirt with tag still attached, a pair of black pants. Two feet from the clothes was a blue loose-leaf notebook—GET AN EXPERT PERSPECTIVE ON AN HIV TREATMENT printed on the cover. As if the occupant of those clothes had been raptured away right before she walked by.

  She loved neighborhood mysteries.

  Her friends from the suburbs thought she and Kenneth had lost their minds, moving to this ghetto corner of the Heights.

  The Rose Garden parking lot was full, and light and laughter streamed through the cracks in the blinds. Another night, she would go in and sit at the bar and nurse a Shiner Bock. Visit with Rose, who owned the Rose Garden but hadn’t named it or been named for it.

  See, her friends couldn’t get this—how cool it was, this old beer garden in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

  A block from the Rose Garden, the Tiki House was hosting a klatch of young men, some straddling bicycles, all with their heads shaved, all wearing white wifebeaters and baggy low-slung jeans. They were raucous as grackles, but went quiet when they saw her, leaving just the click click of her heels. She tapped one of Jamie’s cigarettes out of the package and walked over to them, smiling at the way they pulled themselves up and leaned back without giving way.

  She held out her cigarette. The boys exchanged unspoken words and then one stepped forward, eyes on hers. Took the cigarette, put it in his mouth, lit it, took a puff, and handed it back to her. She didn’t look away. She put the cigarette between her own lips, drew on it, and slowly blew out a stream. Sucked in, gave a puff. A perfect O of smoke drifted away.

  The boys exploded in laughter and applause. As she walked away, she added sway to her hips, listening to the catcalls her high school Spanish couldn’t translate.

  See, she wasn’t afraid, walking into the night. This felt good, and the cigarette . . . She inhaled deeply. Why had she ever given this up? This was all kinds of good—the taste, the feel, the nicotine rush, the rising feathered plumes of smoke.

  Okay, so now the shoes were hurting.

  A pit mix pressed his ugly face against the nearest fence. This part of the Heights, there were those who wouldn’t dream of leaving their dogs out all night, and there were those who had bought dogs to be left out all night. The pit watched until she reached his property line, then sighed gustily and returned to his porch.

  She should get a dog. A big one from the SPCA. A rescue dog, in case someone needed rescuing.

  There was a rescue injection. NPR did a story on it. You had to be the police or an EMT to get one—she’d checked. She couldn’t get this magic EpiPen that could draw your child back to life when he slipped into his dreams, deeply, deeply, and loosed his hold on the tether that bound him to the world, where you waited for him, sending out your love and your longing and your terror and your fury like hounds that could sniff him out and find him, find him and drag him back to your arms before he was . . .

  Jamie was very far away. She couldn’t find him anymore when she looked in his eyes.

  Or maybe he was still there. She couldn’t see him, but maybe he was still inside.

  She used to plan his funeral. Couldn’t stop her mind going there. All his friends would come. Walker and Taylor and Nick. They don’t come now, but they would come for the funeral and hug her, and the girls would cry and even some of the boys. They don’t come now, because he’s already dead, as good as.

  She turned the corner onto Airline Drive and the roar of the nearby freeway rose to greet her. Airline was lined with Houston’s produce suppliers. Avocados and onions and bananas and pecans. The sidewalk was littered with peels and the golden tissue of onion skin floating like shed skin cells. This superfluity of a wealthy, vulgar, living, striving city that could give you life or give you death, and it was all yours, you choose—this road or that one?

  Or maybe God chose. Maybe the city chose.

  Probably it wasn’t that simple.

  Oh, here’s something she loved: Before it got this bad, every Friday she would take off early and treat her boy to lunch at Liberty Kitchen. He would start with a dozen raw oysters. Gulf oysters, big as a baby’s fist. She taught him to pick up the shell and drink the sweet, salty brine. It was something she’d read about. She couldn’t eat raw oysters. She’d sit across from him and watch him eat, fill himself, anything he wanted. That was just . . . good.

  After, they’d go to Mam’s House of Snowballs and he’d get two or three flavors of syrup with a ball of vanilla ice cream under the ice.

  That was good.

  Off Airline, the freeway was a roar of blare and flare and it bothered her not at all. She was part of this night. She belonged, and she belonged here.

  The appointment was behind the Airline Service Station and Grocery. Where she’d stopped for gas that time they’d been propositioned. Tonight, she had a proposition.

  It was late. Grizzled and gaunt, a man slept open-mouthed as a baby on the sidewalk in front of the store, bathed in the light of a Texas Lottery sign promising that you, too, could be a winner. His life was nested in shopping bags around and under him, spilling out. He stank.

  She took a last draw on the cigarette and crushed it with the toe of her shoe. She didn’t pick it up.

  Behind the station was the man who was killing her son.

  No point in being mad at him. You don’t get mad at tornadoes or cancer or lightning strikes. It’s not personal—it’s business.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, pulled up her chin, balancing the sea in her eyes. This was good. And this was right. She stepped into the dark.

  Her heeled pumps with their black glove leather were no protection on the closely mown stubble and concrete rubble and shed condoms and Pepsi bottles and dog shit and fire ants. But she didn’t turn back. She made her way to Jamie’s appointment under the watery light of the twenty-foot neon sign.

  The man had his back to her. He was small and his head moved rhythmically.

  She said, “Hey.”

  The man spun around, popping black earbuds out of his ears.

  He was a boy. Black-haired, black-eyed in the dark. Not fifteen. Maybe fifteen, but not older.

  He said, “Fuck.” He looked past her like he was expecting someone else.

  His cheeks were smooth. That boy’s mother put her hand against that cheek when he was sick. If he had a mother. Probably he didn’t, if he was out here so late.

  This wasn’t the man who was killing Jamie. This was a boy, and he looked hungry. He needed someone to sit across from him and put good food in front of him. Cold milk. Good bread with soft butter. Some soup.

  She smiled at the boy like he was a shy woodland creature and she wanted to show him he didn’t need to be afraid. She reached into her purse for some money to give him for food and milk. She dropped her purse and fives and te
ns and twenties spilled out. Her gun spilled out. It was a mean thing, small and threatening. She looked up to reassure the boy.

  He wasn’t looking for reassurance. Fear bloomed in his face.

  His arm, loose and jointless, swung to the back of his oversized jeans. It snapped back, now rigid and straight, with a black-and-silver gun that was bigger than her own.

  The air went dead—there wasn’t enough to breathe. She couldn’t hear the traffic. Couldn’t hear her own voice. She held up her hand, unfolded her fingers to say stop. Wait. I won’t hurt you. I was going to, but that was when I thought you were someone else. When I thought I was someone else. Before I knew you.

  He didn’t hear any of those things her raised hand was trying to tell him. He did what his big brother taught him to do in such situations. He aimed at her chest and shot her.

  He’d never shot anyone before. It was dark and he was scared, so the shot was low. His arm circled back and tucked the gun into the waistband of his jeans. He pivoted like a dancer and ran.

  The blow knocked her against the back wall of the service station convenience store. She stepped back and out of one fine leather high heel, her foot landing on the gravel and the loam of garbage. She clasped her belly as the fiery pain and the warm rush spilled down her legs. The pain and the blood a surprise all over again. She sank down to the damp weeds and plastic bags and pooling blood, back against the brick wall, knees splayed.