“Why?”
“Because that’s what she says.”
“My father likes him,” Maximo said.
“My mother told me, that’s all I can say,” Eddie said.
In July of 1970, Maximo’s mother went into the bedroom at about eight P.M. to see her husband and came running back with a hand to her mouth. She opened the door and wailed for neighbors. Maximo went into the bedroom, where his father was on his back with his mouth open and his eyes looking out like those of a mounted fish. The body was removed to the medical examiner’s office and the night was spent with Maximo’s mother weeping on a kitchen chair while women from the neighborhood made tea.
At one A.M., Maximo went downstairs to the bar, where Benny Velez was in an argument with three men.
“Where is Teenager?” Maximo called from the doorway.
“He isn’t here,” Benny called out, without turning his head.
“Where is he?” Maximo said.
“It is none of your business or my business,” Benny said.
“When will he be back?”
“When he comes back from going away with a female.”
Maximo walked to the projects, woke up Eddie Hernandez and sat talking to him for a half hour.
“I won’t leave you alone in this thing,” Eddie Hernandez told him.
The next morning, Maximo looked out his window and saw Eddie Hernandez and his sister sitting at a card table set up on the sidewalk in front of the newsstand. They were collecting money, dimes and quarters, to pay for the funeral of Maximo’s father. For two days Eddie and his sister, and a couple of kids from school and the basketball court, sat at the card table and asked people for money to pay for Rafael Escobar’s funeral.
They collected eighty-seven dollars, which meant that the bill for a Rivera Chapels funeral, one hundred and sixty dollars, could be paid. Maximo and Eddie Hernandez went to the Rivera funeral chapel, paid the bill, picked out a white plastic casket and had Rivera go to the morgue for the body. Back at Maximo’s building, a familiar voice came out of the apartment’s open doorway. Eddie Hernandez began to linger at the top of the staircase, but Maximo took him by the arm and forced him into the apartment. There, pacing back and forth in the living room, was Teenager, his hands moving, breath snorting.
“You should have called me,” he said to Maximo.
“Nobody knew where,” Maximo said.
“You should have called me.”
Teenager stopped and put his hands on his hips. “Now what is this funeral?”
“Eddie and I just came from Rivera’s. We paid him.”
“How much did you pay him?”
“One hundred and sixty.”
“That is a cup of coffee. That is no funeral for your father. I will see that your father has a funeral.”
“We already paid,” Eddie Hernandez said.
“You will get your money back now,” Teenager said. He pulled a thick packet of folded bills from his pocket.
Shaking his head, Eddie Hernandez backed away from Teenager and became lost in the general confusion of the room. Maximo did not see Eddie again until the funeral. Maximo’s father was laid out in a polished brown mahogany casket in Rivera’s big chapel. Maximo, sitting in front, happened to glance back and see Eddie Hernandez sitting in a row of children who sat in the heat and kicked their legs. The people went to church in three limousines. Teenager sat in the hearse and held a microphone into the air and allowed the sound of funeral music to blare through the streets.
Maximo did not see Eddie Hernandez for several weeks after that. When he finally went to Eddie’s house one night, Eddie stood in the doorway and did not ask him in.
“My sister and I collected money from the people, but you wanted your father buried with drug money,” Eddie said.
“I do not know what Teenager does,” Maximo said.
“My mother does,” Eddie said.
Maximo only saw Eddie now and then after this. He was with Eddie in the hospital waiting room the night Eddie’s first baby was born, but otherwise they were generally apart.
And now, on the sidewalk outside the bar, Maximo could remember the look on Eddie Hernandez’ face at the hospital that night. Maximo glanced at the newsstand and this suddenly caused him to remember something else: the afternoon two years ago when he was home from Harvard for the summer, standing here on this same patch of sidewalk, and Eddie Hernandez’ wife, Fela, began to walk past him, but then her curiosity overruled. Her generous mouth in a smile, her eyes bright atop high brown cheeks, Fela walked up to Maximo.
“I haven’t seen you in a long time,” Fela said.
“That’s because I haven’t been here,” Maximo said.
“Oh, this I know,” Fela said. She put her hands to the back of her neck and lifted the long black shining hair. “It is only June and it is as hot as it is in PR,” she said. Fela’s chunkiness strained a white sleeveless blouse. The rest of her, covered in black jeans, was ample enough to please her husband, who, as do most Puerto Rican men, regarded a little extra weight in a woman as a sign of health and something a bit more pleasant to hold onto at night than bones. Fela had not, however, gone over the line with her weight; she had stopped just short of that point where the amount of flesh causes the husband to go out looking for a woman right away.
“What is it like in that school you go to?” Fela asked.
“Pretty good.” As Maximo spoke cheerfully, his head nodded to others he knew who were passing by. The corner was daylight busy: Nemo, who started as dishwasher and saved his money and bought the Ramona Coffee Shop, the best in the Bronx; a soda-truck driver carrying cases into a bodega; Carney, overweight, her teeth stumps, the mother of the last white family on the street; Medina, twenty-eight now, his skin surfaces torn by a past of dope and street gangs and prisons, but able to walk with a looseness and a smile, the scars inside perhaps faded, as he headed for the playground he and his friends operated since the city abandoned it; women in twos and threes going into the subway for their jobs downtown and, standing for all the hopes and all that is right, Valentin Perez, walking proudly in the hot sun, his plaid shirt buttoned to the top, a blue tie pulled flush with the neckline, not a semi-inch of shirt fabric showing, letting the world understand that he was going to the subway to ride downtown, where he held the most important thing of all in the life of a person in the South Bronx, he held a yob.
And there were the slow-walking, their eyes soaked with resentment, who understood that the major event of their day could be what they were doing right now, walking the street with nothing to do.
“How’s Eddie?” Maximo asked Fela.
“He’s good. You know Eddie. He’s always dreaming. Now he says someday maybe he will own a store.”
“That would be great,” Maximo said.
“Then he could use you as a lawyer,” Fela said.
“I hope not,” Maximo said.
“Oh, you’ll be very good for Eddie,” Fela said.
“No, I want him to own a store long before I become a lawyer.”
Fela laughed. Unconsciously, she took a step backward and bumped against one of the people walking to nowhere. He was about twenty-five and he had on a black undershirt and orange tattoos on his biceps. His hair was long and tangled. He stopped walking, with Fela stacked against him for an instant, and his mouth became a leer. He put his left hand between Fela’s legs. Then he brought his hand up to his nose.
“That smells nice, man.”
She jumped away, and he stood grinning at Fela and Maximo. The grin showed pride in what he had done, and also a desire that it would lead to something else, a chance to hurt somebody. He was only slightly heavier than Maximo, maybe only ten pounds heavier, and he stood grinning and looking at Maximo and Maximo looked at him and did not move. Inside Maximo, natural fear was fed by memory and justified by time spent in another atmosphere. Where Maximo was now, on a sidewalk of the hopeless, a stare held too long, a careless elbow, a misheard phrase, could lead to anywher
e. “I only asked you for a dollar, man,” the young guy named Johnny Gomez had said to Ruiz at this same newsstand five years ago. “Go fuck yourself for your dollar,” Ruiz had said. “I ought to get a gun and shoot you,” Gomez had said. “Go ahead. You a maricon. You wouldn’t know what to do to me,” Ruiz had said. Gomez, eyes blazing, spun and ran away. He was back in ten minutes, his manhood and a shotgun in his hands, and he blew most of Ruiz’ head away while Ruiz was counting change. Gomez was twenty-two when he went to prison; he might be free as early as his thirty-seventh birthday. That Maximo was violence-shy had kept him from jumping at this guy who stood grinning at him. That he had pid. Producing stupid pressure. Maximo knew that he would have no way to overcome this memory until he could look at Eddie Hernandez and speak to him and somehow dissolve the past. Which had to include Teenager. But he had no way to do that now. Now he had to ride downtown and see a white woman.
When Nicki hung up the phone at her desk, she was surprised, as she pulled out a cigarette, to find that her fingers were so calm that they barely disturbed the cigarette box. In all of her life she could not conceive that she ever would say yes to a Puerto Rican about anything, and yet she just had, and here she was, lighting this cigarette as if she was passing through just another part of the afternoon.
She looked at the administrator’s terminal in front of her and tapped the display function. On the screen came the production sheet for Crowley, J. He had been working in the charge cards department for only two weeks, and he was placed at a terminal in the center of the great room, but Nicki despised him. She had smelled him once when he brushed past her out in the hallway in the morning and she had been unable to drink her coffee as a result. He must have chickens hidden under his jacket, she had decided. Anyone that sloppy about his personal cleanliness had to be careless about his work, she thought, or worse than careless. He was Irish; he must be a liar.
Her eyes went down the calls listed by Crowley and she stopped at account number 867132. The production sheet note after it said, “Called home, spoke to card member who promised immediate payment.” Nicki took the name and phone numbers of the card member, a man in Louisville, Kentucky, named Landau.
As it was before five, she called Landau at his business number.
“Who’s calling Mister Landau?” a voice said.
When Nicki identified herself and said she was from the bank’s credit card division, she immediately caught the hesitancy in the voice on the other end. After eighteen months of running the delinquent accounts, sixty-five to ninety-four days, department for the bank, she was familiar with even learned, through thousands of hours in other places, that there was more to being a man than the instant, the right to revenge had been traded for the protection of law, that it was insane to stake your life on a matter so stupid that sensible people would not remember it an hour later, assured him that his initial fear, while not a sign of heroism, could pass for the beginnings of maturity. Throw a punch at this guy and you might cast him in the only drama of his life, and he would produce a gun.
The guy’s grin became broader and his chin stuck out and Maximo, looking straight at him, still did not move. Then he took Fela by the arm and walked her quickly to the side door of the bar. Inside, there were only two old men and a woman serving them drinks. There was no Teenager; Teenager was in prison at the time. Fela looked around the bar and then her eyes returned to Maximo and prosecuted him in silence. Fela abruptly walked out the front door of the bar.
Fifteen minutes later, as Maximo stood in the shadows of the doorway, Eddie Hernandez came along. He walked with his head up and his face showing nothing and a baseball bat swinging easily in his right hand. He noticed Maximo, but acted as if he had not. Maximo watched Eddie walk down the street in the direction in which the guy with the tattoos had walked. Maximo still was in the doorway when Eddie Hernandez came back, from a search that had found nothing.
Maximo started to say something and Eddie Hernandez cut him off.
“That was my wife,” Eddie said.
“I’m trying to say something,” Maximo said.
“Say what? Say that you have to wait for your friend Teenager to come home so he can hit the guy for you?”
“I didn’t mean that,” Maximo said.
“Well, we know what you are,” Eddie said. “Now I have to go back to my wife and tell her I couldn’t find the guy. She’ll make me as bad as you.” He walked off in disdain and Maximo stepped back in the bar and knew he had to sit there until nobody was around and he could leave without somebody’s glare stripping him to his bones.
Now, remembering this, Maximo became irritated by the size of the stone that had caused him to stumble. Small, stu– the most trifling signs of weakness from people who owe money.
“Mr. Landau just stepped out,” the voice said.
“I’m calling because we have a problem with our computers,” Nicki said.
“Yes,” the man said. The smallest hopeful sign puts timbre into the voice.
“Because of the computer problem, which of course is our fault, I merely want to check out something with Mr. Landau.”
“You can check it with me,” the voice said.
“Well, I’d like to know first if someone from our bank had the courtesy to call Mr. Landau today and inform him of our computer malfunction.”
“I got no call from your bank today,” the voice said.
“Well, I’m calling you now in reference to an unpaid balance of $975.63 cents. This balance now has been outstanding for eighty-three days, our records show, and we would like to know what Mister Landau intends to do about it. If we don’t receive payment shortly, I’m afraid we will have to turn the matter over to our collection agency.”
The voice on the other end of a man screwed rose many decibels.
“Listen, you dirty fucking bas—”
“Mister Landau, I’m not a dirty fucking bastard.” She smiled as she heard a grenade go off in his mouth. She aimed her words carefully through his shouting. “Mister Landau, I am today turning your account over to our collections people for proper action. Good afternoon.”
Immensely satisfied, she hung up. It had taken her months to figure out that while she was not allowed to react to any personal abuse from delinquent credit card members, nowhere in the bank rules did it say that she could not deny a charge and do so in a way that would leave her, as always, the one holding all the tools of torture. Furthermore, on this call she also had nailed Crowley as the liar that he was. Nicki made a note on her pad. “Crowley lies re account 867132.” In the morning, she would again bring up the Crowley production sheet on the display function, show it to Mr. Means, the officer in charge of personnel for her department, and start Crowley towards dismissal. Let him buy soap with his unemployment.
She glanced over the hundred and twenty-five people at video terminals. She was immensely proud of having risen this far in the bank, and at the same time had trained herself to think as little as possible about any job beyond this. She was being paid twenty-six thousand five hundred dollars a year and gave the men over her the same feeling of reliability that they got from their cars. However, the next step up for Nicki someday would be an assistant vice-president of the bank, and she had been told repeatedly that it was a job for which she was unqualified because of her educational background. “You don’t have the pedigree,” the chief of personnel once had told her.
His use of a courthouse word such as this caused her to flinch. Nicki had only two years of high school. When she began in school, her father was a gangster of little substance, he was in prison, in fact, and Nicki was living with her brother, mother and an aunt named Cia Concerta on 105th Street in East Harlem. Her aunt, Cia Concetta, enrolled Nicki in Cathedral High School, but on the first day Nicki went to the school, she was greeted by a huge black nun standing in the doorway. Nicki backed away, turned and fled up the street. When Nicki told her of this, Cia Concetta said, “The school mustn’t be Catholic anymore.” She took N
icki all the way downtown, to St. Anthony Girls Commercial High School on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. It was a two-year school, with twenty-two girls in a classroom, and when Nicki graduated at age sixteen the nun in charge of placing girls in jobs sent her up to the bank, where she started as a file clerk, then moved to teller and now, at twenty-six, with eight years of diligence reflected in her file, she had gone as far as her drive, street sense and instant familiarity with figures could take her without the greatest of all assets, a pedigree.
At times she became incensed at the wimps who were placed in jobs over her merely because they had college backgrounds. This was in contradiction to her upbringing, which was one of being servile to men, but common sense overruled the past when she was confronted with a person like Dalton, who had come onto the floor as an assistant vice-president a year before. He scheduled so many productivity meetings that there was no production, for which his memos blamed her. At one such meeting, an interminable one in the morning, Nicki rose to go to the ladies’ room out of boredom.
“Ah, Miss Mariani,” Dalton said.
“Yes?”
“Could you please tell me where you’re going?”
The six other faces in the room were all watching Nicki, and for a moment she felt the embarrassment rise to her face, but she quickly overcame it and let her instincts show.
“Out to buy you a new head,” she said.
As an assistant vice-president, Dalton immediately took this matter to personnel and Nicki was called in and the chief of personnel said to her, “We understand that Mr. Dalton’s work has not been conducive to achieving the results we have come to expect from your department. But there is a management principle here, and we simply cannot pass off charges of insubordination. At the same time we know how valuable you are. Perhaps could this be settled privately, ah, with a discreet apology?”
The next morning, Nicki went into Dalton’s office, looked at his blue watery eyes and said in a dry tone, “I’d like to apologize personally for yesterday.”
Dalton grimaced and began running his hands together. He was about to start a lecture on his own importance that he undoubtedly had spent the night preparing when Nicki walked out of the office and went back to work. You did what you had to do, she assured herself.
Forsaking All Others Page 6
