Burn Baby Burn

by Meg Medina

  Mima has no idea who the Ramones are, of course, or even who Donna Summer is. Her understanding of American music pretty much ends at Lawrence Welk. But she smells trouble. She starts muttering in Spanish, not looking at either one of us. The subways are a death trap at that hour. Murders are the order of the day. Her mind is swirling in ugly waters. And maybe she’s right. The club is on Bleecker Street, in the Bowery. If the pimps and junkies don’t jump him, he’ll still have to ride the subway home at midnight. Then again, maybe it’s the other riders who should worry. I wonder if Mima has ever stopped to think that Hector isn’t exactly defenseless. Has she forgotten last summer? He bought nunchucks from who-knows-where and practiced on the sidewalk scaring kids until their parents complained to Manny. Mima had to throw his little toy down the dumbwaiter chute when he wasn’t looking. “Sometimes boys like to show off like they’re big men,” she whispered to me as it clattered down four stories. Really? I wondered. By threatening to bust little kids’ brains out?

  I try an evasive maneuver. “You have to be eighteen for that place.”

  “Idiot. It’s sixteen plus two IDs. Besides, Sergio knows the guy at the door.”

  I take a bite of my cheese and fall silent. Sergio lives in the basement apartment of the building behind ours. He’s technically Manny’s “assistant,” but that’s only because Sergio’s uncle owns the building. He’s always checking me out with his mole eyes and talking shit. A sleazeball through and through.

  “Sergio?” I ask. “Since when are you two buds?”

  Hector doesn’t answer. “Gimme the ten bucks,” he says, turning back to Mima.

  The flatness in his voice makes the hair on my arms bristle. We’re sliding into a hole, and I have to figure out how to hold on to the edges. It’s one of my few gifts: trouble radar, like one of those dogs that can sniff explosives before the big ka-boom.

  “Niño, I told you, I don’t have it.” Mima turns to me. “Talk some sense into him. Háblale.”

  But I don’t get the chance. Hector snaps like one of his lighters. His cheeks go blotchy, and he shoves past me into the entry hall, where Mima’s purse hangs in the coat closet. He grabs it and digs inside, tossing out her eyeglass case, her pens, her citizenship card, used tissues.

  “¡Pero hijo!” Mima stands helplessly at the doorway as he empties her purse. Soapy water drips from her hands onto the floor. “¡No lo tengo!”

  My stomach squeezes into a familiar knot as I try to figure out the puzzle, fast. I could give him the ten bucks to cool things off, or I could hide in our bedroom and let them combust. The neighbors will complain, though, and I’ll still have to deal with it all week. Last time we had a “family discussion,” people stared at me in the hall for days.

  I go on instinct.

  “Shhh!” I hiss at Mima. “Hector, what do you want her to do? She doesn’t have it.” My voice is even as I try to pull him back to calm.

  He gives me the finger and keeps searching.

  I’d love to slap him. Or better, I’d like to see Mima walk over to him for once, yank her purse back, show him who’s boss. She’s supposed to be in charge, isn’t she? But I know better. Mima’s never been able to stand up to him. Not when he bit the kids at the playground when he was four and not when he told his principal to fuck off in middle school. Not even when she had to take me out of school last year so I could translate with the security staff at Alexander’s department store. Hector had been picked up for shoplifting, of all things, cuff links. It was the start, the cops warned him, of his yellow sheet.

  I try again in an even softer voice. “Buy the album next week when she gets paid,” I offer. “It’s better, anyway. You can listen to them whenever you want.”

  But it’s too late. Hector has slipped into that strange place where he can’t hear anyone. Finally he yanks out her wallet and flips it open. There are only three singles inside. He stares at the bills, mute with rage. For a second, his expression reminds me of that Christmas when he was six and he found a pack of socks from Woolworth’s beneath our tree instead of the Matchbox track he really wanted.

  He hurls the wallet across the room. When it hits the wall, pennies explode into a supernova.

  “This is bullshit!” he shouts, the veins in his neck thick. The door slams, and his army boots echo down the stairs.

  Mima stands in the sudsy puddle that has formed around her feet. She looks about a hundred years old.

  I don’t meet her eye as we bend to pick up the coins. I dig out dimes from around the stove and force myself to think of the bright side, the glass half full and all that shit the MacInerneys and other happy people say.

  Nobody screamed loud enough to get Manny to call the cops. Mima still has her three bucks. We didn’t do the Chair Fandango, so the furniture is still in one piece.

  So, really, all things considered, it went pretty well.

  Sometimes after school, Hector balls up pages from the newspaper and lights them. He holds the edges until I’m sure the flames will catch his sleeves, and then he drops them out the window. The first time I caught him, I ran over, yelling at him to stop. All these years listening to Mr. Mac’s fire stories made me worried. But standing there next to him, I could see what he liked. The flame balls spun in the air like fiery birds being consumed. They turned to harmless ash before they ever hit anything below.

  I don’t know if Mima knows about Hector’s flame birds. Probably not. But would she mind? It’s hard to know. Mima is tough to read sometimes, but she says the same about us. She complains that she can’t understand what we say if we speak English too fast, and she can’t tell whether David Bowie is a man or a woman. Last year when she sat me down in the kitchen for what I thought was going to be the long-overdue sex talk, she told me that drug use would lead to a life of prostitution on Times Square. That very specific information might have been helpful to know, if I actually ever bothered to get high. It’s Hector who partakes, not me. I’m too cheap to waste money on weed.

  But how Mima sees Hector is what is strangest of all. She lives here, doesn’t she? She has eyes and ears. She deals with Hector’s foul mouth, his bratty fits, and yet she actually gushes to her friend Edna all the time about him. How clever he is, how handsome, how adventurous and unusual.

  ¡Mi madre! Okay, fine, he’s guapo — even with cystic zits — but she’s leaving out a few important things that might dampen the glowing review, if you ask me.

  Like his habit of treating her like crap.

  “Men are reckless, Nora,” she likes to tell me. “They’re born that way, impulsive, but eventually they find a good woman and outgrow it. You’ll see.”

  It’s a nice fantasy, I suppose, although why she’s so charitable to men I’ll never know. It’s not like Papi did her any favors. I was almost four the day Papi’s silver razor just went missing from the toothbrush rack and his big shoes weren’t crowding the door. I remember that night because Hector pitched an epic fit and tore the linoleum from the floor with his fingers. We still have the holes near the bathroom. Mima stayed in bed for a long time after that, too.

  It’s no use talking to her about real life, though. She just doesn’t participate in it. Take her stories about her life back in Cuba before el desgraciado Fidel. She says it was about familia, about freedoms, about beautiful palm trees and a simple life. I don’t argue, but I can’t help but notice that she never mentions that they nearly starved during the Depression, that her father shot himself in a field, that all they ate was corn-mush harina.

  That was perfection?

  I’m thinking all of this when I flip on the TV news, hoping Hector will come through the door on his own before Mima starts in on me, the way she always does when he’s roaming.

  A yearbook picture of a pretty brunette flashes before us. The news anchor fills us in:

  “The university coed was gunned down early this evening in Forest Hills . . . . She has been identified as nineteen-year-old Virginia Voskerichian, who was discovered near Da
rtmouth Street, her purse untouched. Witnesses report hearing screams . . .”

  I listen uneasily as the camera pans the crime scene, and it’s like déjà vu. This is only a couple of blocks from where the other girl got murdered in January. Cops are lingering around, smoking. A pair of boots sticks out from the bottom of a sheet on the ground.

  I look over my shoulder at Mima, who’s staring at the screen, trying to cobble the story together from across the room.

  “¡Señor ampáranos!” She crosses herself and starts to sweep again. “There are devils all over this city.” The bristles sound like someone sharpening knives. She’s been cleaning for hours, her favorite task when she’s nervous. So far, she’s cleaned the baseboards, wiped down the plastic slipcovers on the sofa, and scrubbed the bathroom. Our whole place stinks of Clorox. “Filth, not poverty, is the sign of low people,” she always says. As chilly as the apartment is getting, streaks of perspiration still run down her neck. Finally she leans the broom against the wall and peers out the window.

  “The whole city is going crazy! And your hermanito is out there.” Her jaw quivers. “Did he take a coat?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What if something has happened and he’s cold? What if he doesn’t have spare change to call home?”

  I ignore her.

  “And what is his fascination with this screaming music? Why are a bunch of grown men yelling and jumping like that, anyway?”

  Pass.

  I turn up the TV and pretend to concentrate as the news drones on. I can’t stop thinking about this girl’s rag-doll body, the police standing over her, the strange angle of those stylish boots. I’m thinking of the decoy cops who might be sitting down the block right now.

  Maybe I should be worried.

  Mima sits down. For a second I think she’s calming down, but just then a fire truck goes by. The spinning lights fill our kitchen as the siren wails. She crosses herself and crumbles again. Mima believes in omens, after all.

  “Ave Maria purisima, what if he’s dead? There’s a murderer out there!”

  I give up. She will not quit until he’s home. I flip off the TV, pull on a sweatshirt over my pajamas, and stick my bare feet into my sneakers. Does anybody care that I am going out to find my brother with said murderer on the prowl? No, señores, apparently not.

  “Try the roof first,” she says as I slip out the door.

  A hunter looks for tracks. Hector has left clues on the roof — old cigarette butts, an X-Men comic, beer cans — but nothing’s fresh and there’s no sign of him.

  Damn.

  I cross the rooftop and peer over the ledge to the street below. The moon is half full tonight, so I can see pretty well. Unfortunately, Hector is not walking home from either direction. At least the unmarked car is under the trestle again. The cops are nearby.

  I head back inside, dejected. This leaves only one logical place to look.

  Sergio’s Den of Darkness.

  I have to run all the way around to the back of our building and down a flight of concrete steps to reach it. It makes sense that Sergio lives underground like a rodent. He’s got the beady eyes, the yellow teeth.

  I knock and wait, hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm. Sergio’s car is parked right across the street, so I know he’s home. These days, he thinks he’s big shit driving that Monte Carlo, which I’m pretty sure he funds with his side business of selling nickel bags outside the Satin Lady Lounge. He’s always peeling out so people will turn around and ogle. I try my best to avoid him, but I still run into him on the block every once in a while when he’s lugging his toolbox to somebody’s apartment to make a repair. He always tries to chat me up. “Noooora! Can’t you say hello?”

  I knock again.

  That’s when I hear a whine. From down here, I can see only the legs of anyone who might walk by on the street above me. But there’s a dog sniffing at me from the sidewalk. It’s the wiry stray we all call Tripod, on account of his having only three legs. We all sort of feed him, but no one knows who owns him. When it’s bitter cold, he hangs near the dryer vents, which is how he survived the bitch of a winter we just had. But the rest of the time, he likes to wander.

  “Hey, buddy,” I tell him. “What’s the matter?”

  He perks his ears and looks off into the distance, growling. Then he hops off, spooked by something or other. Is somebody coming along the street? It suddenly occurs to me that I’m boxed in down here at the bottom of Sergio’s stairwell.

  “Excuse me, miss,” a stranger might say, and then — pow — my brains will be splattered all over this door.

  “Sergio!” I bang with my fists. “Open up!”

  The door finally flies open. Sergio is barefoot and in jeans. He’s got a pigeon chest and hairy nipples, I notice. Yuck. It takes a second for him to recognize me. Then he breaks into his oily grin.

  “Noooora!” He leans an arm on the doorframe. How can anyone have this much pit hair? I wonder. He lowers his voice and coos, “What brings you to me?”

  “Is my brother here?” I’m too shaken to be polite, especially since he’s also ogling my boobs. I wrap my arms around myself tighter. “It’s late, and my mother wants him home.”

  His grin doesn’t change as he puts an unfiltered Camel to his lips and lights up. “You always look so uptight, Nora, you know that? You never relax, but you’d be really pretty if you smiled.” He picks at his tongue absently and spits a thread of tobacco near my feet. “There’s stuff to help with that, if you want some.”

  I glare at him and call into the apartment. “Hector?” I have no plan B, of course. If Hector isn’t here, I’ll have to go back home empty-handed. Then what? Mima will end up in the loony bin once and for all, like she’s always threatening. “Hector!”

  “Take it easy, Nora.” Sergio motions for me to come inside. “He’s in my room.”

  The place smells like a bag of Fritos. A brown velour couch with a big burn mark on one cushion is pushed up against the wall. Sergio holds up his ringed fingers and points toward his bedroom in the back.

  For a second, I stay put. What if he’s lying?

  Luckily, the buildings on this block are all the same. The layout of this apartment is almost exactly like ours, except that the bathroom is on the opposite wall. I walk backward and keep my eye on him. When I reach the bedroom door, I push it open with my foot.

  “Hector?”

  There’s no answer, but I spot him. He’s lying right beside the unmade bed, headphones on, drumming with imaginary sticks against his knees. His eyes are closed. Relief floods through me, but honestly I don’t know whether to hug him or kick him in the gut. I stand over him and lift the ear pads to get his attention.

  “Time to go.”

  Hector blinks. His eyes are glassy. Shit; he’s stoned. His expression reminds me of the day I taught him how to float at Rockaway Beach. I held my arms under his back, promising that he wouldn’t sink if he put his head back and breathed. It took all afternoon for him to believe me, but finally he lay back and looked almost peaceful.

  I can feel Sergio watching us from the doorway. Hector isn’t budging, like maybe his pride is still pressing him to the floor. “Please,” I add quietly.

  He grins up at the magic word and tosses the headphones on the bed.

  “This song sucks, anyway.” He hops to his feet and grabs his jacket from the mess of sheets. “Later,” he says to Sergio as he heads out the door.

  I try to squeeze past Sergio, too, but he steps out. “Nooora,” he whispers, reaching for my hand. I pull it away, watching as my brother dashes up the steps.

  “Stay away from him,” I say.

  Sergio grins. “He came to visit me, remember?”

  “Leave him alone, Sergio.” Then I run to catch up to Hector.

  We don’t say a word as we step inside the lobby. I let Tripod in behind us, hoping Manny won’t kick him out of his hiding spot near the mailboxes until morning.

  Our place
is on the top floor, so it’s a steep climb with lots of time to think. There are a million things I could say to Hector as we go from landing to landing, our footsteps echoing against all those closed doors.

  That it’s dicey to get wasted with the likes of Sergio.

  That he shouldn’t treat Mima like shit.

  That a killer just shot a nineteen-year-old girl on her way home.

  That I’m sorry about not giving him the money for the Ramones.

  But neither one of us says a word.

  Instead, we step back inside our apartment. Mima is in the kitchen, frying an egg, although it’s past midnight. Hector doesn’t say a thing to her. He just pulls open the sparkling refrigerator and starts to root inside. Mima turns off the flame and slides a chipped plate onto the table.

  “Eat something. You’re still growing, hijo,” she says. And then, without a word to me, she heads off to bed.

  Kathleen grabs me at the bus stop the next morning. I’m barely awake. It took me a while to go to sleep after finding Hector. Every time I dozed, I kept seeing that girl’s rag-doll feet on the ground.

  Kathleen looks wide-awake, though. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she dipped into the Café Bustelo I taught her how to brew at exam time.

  “I almost called you last night, but it was late, and I thought your mother might freak,” she blurts out. “I can’t believe I’ve had to wait eight hours with this.”

  I stifle a yawn and try to focus. “With what?”

  “Dad called from work last night.”