“A fourteen-year-old arrested for arson in connection with a Bronx fire that left two dead,” the anchorman, a blow-dried blond from Nebraska, said. “District Attorney Robert Garafola says that David Robles will be prosecuted as an adult and he said he expects the grand jury to return a homicide indictment, based on the evidence he intends to present.”
The scene shifted to a gutted frame building on Mackey Avenue, two blocks from Maximo’s bedroom. While a crowd of children waved at the camera, a television reporter with California asparagus tones clutched a microphone and explained that the suspect had broken into the basement and deliberately set the fire in revenge for some slight perpetrated by the inhabitants of the building.
“The suspect will appear tomorrow in Bronx Criminal Court where a hearing will be held to determine if he should become the youngest person in the history of Bronx County to be tried as an adult on a murder charge.”
Maximo took the dog down to the street, watched him race into the darkness, then walked him to the candy store on Southern Boulevard. The News was up. On page three was the story about David Robles being held for arraignment on homicide charges. He took the paper home, read it and then lay awake with his fingernails tapping his chest as he thought of what he could do. He decided that he had no idea, that all he was certain of was that he would be in court with Maria Robles in the morning.
The next day, at 7:15 A.M., Nicki walked out of the New Jersey bus terminal at Washington Heights and looked around the street, the stores silent, and then got into a yellow cab. As she slid in and saw the white driver, she became flustered.
“What are you going there for?” he asked her when she gave the address.
“I own a building there and I have to clean it,” she said.
“What’s in the building?”
“People.”
He held his hand on the flag. “You’re going over there to clean up after those people?”
“My mother told me I had to.”
He pushed the flag down. “I guess you know what you’re doing.” Wispy gray hair grew like weeds out of a wrinkled neck. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-six.”
“You got a lot of guts your age, going to Pinto Avenue.”
Nicki lit a cigarette and looked out both windows for a store. In the shopping bag with her she had the basis for all good cleaning, houserags, cut-up old winter pajamas with the buttons removed and strips of old bed sheets. In her mother’s pile of cleaning rags home in the basement there was cut-up old underwear, which of course Nicki left. Imagine if I’m standing there doing the kitchen sink with my mother’s underwear? Even the things Nicki had been raised to hate, Handi Wipes, would be better than that.
She saw a woman walking into a bodega on 163rd Street and she told the cab driver to pull over, “You’re not gettin’ nothin’ to eat in there?” he said.
“No just some cleaning stuff.”
The bodega had Spic ’n Span next to the bread. It was a dollar two a gallon and the idea of paying thirteen cents more than charged by the Gristedes in Swiftbrook irritated Nicki. She then bought clear ammonia, Clorox, Ajax, Kirkman’s yellow soap, Noxon and vinegar. She resented paying the higher ghetto prices, but consoled herself with the thought that she would clean like an animal. When she cleaned a house as furiously as she intended to today, it always gave her a sense of doing penance and at the end of the day her soul was scrubbed nearly as clean as the kitchen. She had to do this today, she knew, perhaps more than any other day in her times this far.
In front of Maximo’s house, the cab driver said, “You all right now?”
“Positive.”
“Broad daylight don’t mean nothing to these people.”
“I know.”
“I read a story in the Post where they raped a girl five to seven in the morning.”
“Don’t worry.”
“All right, then. But I told you.”
Upstairs, her knocking brought the dog first and then Maximo to the door. He stood in his underwear and reached for the shopping bag, which she held away from him as she stepped past him and headed directly for the kitchen.
“At least say hello,” Maximo said.
“Later.”
She draped her coat over a chair and began emptying her treasure on the kitchen table. Last out were her great prizes, the cleaning rags, which she laid out as if they were a weapons display. She selected the arm of her father’s former winter pajamas and decided to commit it against the major enemies she hated the most, two rust marks on the kitchen sink. One was a long vertical patch under the faucet, and the second was a large splotch on the sink bottom. The sight or thought of each mark had caused her to choke each time she had a glass of water in the house.
Maximo took a container of orange juice out of the refrigerator and took a long swallow.
“I’m not going to be here this morning,” he said.
“I’m not leaving here until this is finished,” Nicki said. “And I’m certainly not staying here alone. So whatever you’re going to do will have to wait.”
“It can’t. I have to go to court.”
“I’m sure that’s your business,” she said.
“I have to go for the kid across the street.”
“David? What happened to him? The mother’s always watching him.” As she was talking, she was mixing ammonia and Clorox in a bowl so she could do the rust marks in the sink. She once had read where this mixture was a chemical disaster and that in cleaning the rust off the sink it took all the enamel with it, leaving a surface that caused a glass of tea spilled into the sink to leave a wider mark than the one before. But she continued to mix the ammonia and Clorox because this was how she had been taught to clean by her mother and aunts, who too had been raised to clean this way and tolerated no deviation. She concentrated on her mixture because the moment she heard the word court, and that the little boy across the street was involved, she searched for a sound or a scene that would instruct her what to do and she could find none and she knew immediately that whatever it was that Maximo was talking about had to be kept out of her life on this day.
He left the kitchen for a moment and brought in the Daily News. He put it on the kitchen table with the paper open to the story on page three. As she glanced at the story, her insides cringed. “I don’t want to know anymore,” she said, pushing the paper aside.
“What do you mean?”
“Just that.”
Maximo shook his head. “I know, it’s horrible. I can’t even think about it. They have this little kid on a hom—”
“—You don’t understand me. I don’t care. Today I do the sink.”
When Maximo didn’t answer, Nicki said, “I go to court for myself. I don’t want to know about it if other people are involved.”
“I’m talking about a little kid from right across the street,” Maximo said.
“If he’s outside playing in the street, then I’ll be nice to him and play with him,” she said. “But if he’s in court, then he’s in court, and I don’t want to know about it. I stay here.”
“Stop the nonsense. You’re not that cold.”
She dropped the rag in the bowl of ammonia and Clorox, wrung it out, sprinkled Ajax on the rust marks and began to rub directly under the faucet.
“You get paid for today?” she said.
“How can I get paid?”
“They don’t have any relatives?”
“I don’t know what they have. What do I care? Her boy is in trouble.”
“She has no relatives she can ask for something?”
“For what?”
“They don’t have a car around?”
“You see how she lives.”
“I mean a relative might have a car. Let them sell the car.”
“Come on,” Maximo said.
He watched her rub furiously at the rust mark under the faucet, then went into his bedroom. One thing about living with my husband, Nicki thought as she rubbed, there
would be no rust marks anyplace in any house where he lived. She exhaled in despair. She rubbed at the rust spot with her father’s pajama arm wet and gritty from the ammonia and Ajax. She concentrated on this task. This one computer screen of her life.
She remembered being woken up on Thursdays by the squeaking of her mother’s rag on the bedroom window in East Harlem. The window looked out on an alley that appeared to be in a state of festival with washlines drooping with sheets and nightwear. When rain came, the empty washlines slapped against the chipped, uneven bricks of the old building walls. Yet Nicki’s bedroom window had to sparkle at all times, for this was the way the windows in her grandmother’s house were kept, and so would all the windows of all her mother’s houses, from the East Harlem apartment until the present, the big yellow brick house in Swiftbrook whose windows looked over a golf course. In whatever houses Nicki would live her life, each Thursday there would be vinegar and water on the windows, for this was what a woman was taught to do as a girl and was expected to do until her hands were stilled by death or arthritis.
As she rubbed the sink, she could feel her arm out in front of her as she slipped through the cornfield in Iowa. The leaves brushing off her arm, then coming back to brush off her body. If there was someplace, she thought, where she could build a life that was her own, and one that came from what she felt and saw and worked for, and not what she was told and taught and stumbled into. For a time, she reminded herself, it seemed like Maximo was building his life in a way that did not make him a Spic. Some chance of that. So here he was going out with some derelict kid—that’s just what he is, say the truth now, don’t start thinking he’s cute; he’s just another derelict on the streets—and Maximo was doing it under the most unforgivable of circumstances, without profit. Oh, no, baby. No, thank you. She bit her lower lip and tried to scrub through the face of the sink. She began to cry freely and did nothing to stop it.
Maximo came in dressed in his courtroom suit. She kept her head down. He took another swallow of the orange juice.
“Want some?” he asked.
“No, thank you.”
“Well, I have to leave.”
“You can’t wait until I finish this?”
“No, I told her I’d pick her up outside at eight o’clock.”
“All right. I’ll be right with you.”
“You’re not staying?”
“Not here.”
“Why don’t you come with me, then?” he said.
“Me? Go to a courthouse?”
“Well, you could wait in the delicatessen right across the street from court.”
“Not I, dear.”
She paused for a moment and looked at the rust. The spot directly under the faucet had grown smaller. It needed more time and it would be gone, she thought. She dropped the rag, stepped back, pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt down, looked directly at him, for the only time in her life not even caring if somebody could see tears, if any were left, and said, “My husband is coming home Tuesday and I won’t be seeing you anymore.”
She did not wait for a reaction. She took the container of orange juice out of his hand and poured some of it into one of the paper cups he kept stacked on the sink. She handed him the cup. “Here, at least take this downstairs with you while you go to your people.” She stepped past him, took her coat from the chair and walked out of the kitchen. As she passed the bathroom, she saw an orange towel on the floor. Wet, trampled on. Another towel was thrown over the side of the bathtub. To her eyes, it was too dirty to be a cleaning rag. He must wash the dog and dry him with the towel, she thought. She grabbed the towels, rolled them up and walked to the front door with the towels in her hand. The dog began yelping and leaping at the door.
“Keep your dog in,” she said.
“Give me a minute,” Maximo said.
“I’m going.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“You can talk downstairs. Now keep your dog back and don’t spill the juice all over yourself.”
“I’ll put it down.”
“No, I want you to have it.”
“What are you doing with the towels?”
“Just hold the dog back,” she said.
He held the juice in one hand and grabbed the dog with the other. She opened the door and tripped down the stairs. The door slammed and he caught up with her as she stepped onto the street.
David Robles’ mother, Maria Robles, stood in the morning sun wearing a raincoat over her white church dress and red shoes. She held her son’s birth certificate in her hands as if it were a note from a saint.
“Take care of her,” Nicki said.
“Wait a minute,” Maximo said.
“No, I’m going.” She glanced at the orange towels she was holding. “You’ll get these back. It’ll probably take a week to wash them clean. You’re so sloppy.”
“You’ll bring them back?” Maximo said.
“No. I’ll mail them. Take care of her.”
She turned her head and melancholy steps took her toward the corner.
Maria Robles handed Maximo the birth certificate. He took it, but his eyes were following Nicki as she went down the street.
“Is she going to be at the court?” Maria Robles said.
“No, she’s going home.”
“Oh, she will meet us there.”
“She won’t. She’s going home.”
Maria Robles seemed surprised. “I thought she would come with you today.”
“She just said I won’t see her anymore.
“Oh, no. Soon she will be back. She loves Maximo.”
“What is she leaving for then?”
“Soon she will be back. I can see that she loves you,” Maria said. “Now you will get my son for me?”
“We’re going to try,” Maximo said gloomily.
27
“LET’S GET THE BUS,” Maximo said to Maria Robles.
As they walked to the corner, he said to her, “Now, tell me what happened.”
“He is only a child.”
“And.”
Her eyes on the sidewalk as she walked, Maria Robles said that her boy David had been sleeping in the basement of the building at 998 Mackey Avenue.
“Why wasn’t he home?”
“I hit my boy because he hit his sister and he run away.”
“How do they say this fire started?”
“He hid in this building. Then he wanted to come home. It was dark and he lit a paper to see. Everybody does this in cellars. But he forgot. He drops the paper. He always forgets. He forget the paper was lit and he comes home.”
“Did you tell this to the police?”
“I tell them, and they only say my boy did this fire and he is in big trouble.”
The courthouse faced a street of abandoned apartment buildings, black from fire, the rows of windows, covered with tin, staring like unkempt graves. Streaming into the courthouse were the consumers of the Bronx criminal justice system: young blacks in sneakers, smoking cigarettes, who showed up because court is an event, as graduation is for others; Puerto Ricans in gold chains and flowered shirts protesting loudly—”It’s a bullshit case, man”—as the lawyers, young and Jewish, dressed in the clothes of old Protestants, vests and watchfobs, told them of the charges. Maximo led her inside this building, a monument that had been overrun and left as a barn. The banister was speckled with spent gum and gashed with the initials of those who, in the absence of a tree in a secret place, made permanent their love by carving out their oaths. Cigarette butts and candy wrappers covered the steps, one of which creaked so badly on first weight that Maximo helped Maria Robles to step over it.
Once, there had been transoms of stained glass over the courtroom doors and now there was cardboard. Maximo read the sheets tacked to the wall and found the right courtroom. As he held open the door for Maria Robles, a man’s voice in the front of the room called out, “Ready?”
It was a clerk sitting at a table under the judge’s bench. Stacks of
manila folders stuffed with white and yellow paper were shuffled by the clerk’s bored hands.
Immediately Maximo’s attention was taken by a court officer who stood on the left side of the courtroom.
“I guess so,” he said to the clerk.
“All right,” the clerk said.
The court officer pounded on the door. “Bring him out, Mike.”
Maximo and Maria Robles were sliding into seats, looking at the door where the court officer stood, and there could now be heard a clanking of locks and steel doors. Two court officers stepped into the room. Then, escorted by another pair of court officers, David Robles shuffled into the room. He acted as he had been taught to act in the principal’s office. He wore cheap sneakers, the ten-dollar pairs that a mother buys and are a sign that the wearer has not learned how to glide through a store and come back onto the street with real sneakers, great thick soles and wonderful sides with the name Nike or Puma printed on them.
“Go up to the bench,” one of the court officers said. David spun around. There was nothing that looked to him like a bench. The court officer pointed over to the defense table. He walked over to the defense table and stood facing the bench. A court officer tapped David on the shoulder.
“Take your hands out of your pockets,” the court officer said. David took his hands out of the pockets of his blue hooded sweatshirt and placed them on the defense table. The fingers tapped the table edge like a piano. David’s knee worked back and forth.
“Stop tapping the table,” the court officer said. David’s hands dropped to his side. The fingers now played with the cuffs of his sweatshirt.
“Can I take off my jacket?” David asked.
“Yes,” the court officer said.
David had the jacket halfway off when he changed his mind and yanked it back over his shoulders. He began pulling the zipper up and down.
“All right,” the judge, Rose Keogh, said. The clerks began digging into papers with both hands.
Rose Keogh was so slight and the bench about her so large, that she nearly became lost, a pencil mark on gray paper. Even her red hair seemed dulled by the surroundings. To Maximo, her expression suggested infected gums. She sat in a place whose dusty windows were covered with wire grill so that thieves couldn’t climb into the place at night. Her surroundings were prostitutes throwing up on the floor in front of her and young muggers bending over to show bloodied heads from a police beating. And now she looked down at this kid in front of her. She screwed her lips and ordered the clerk to start the proceedings.
Forsaking All Others Page 36
