Pray that her little kid is sleeping.
Stay in the car and hunker down. Keep the headphones on, 50 Cent low. Don’t get noticed, don’t let them see the Latino features, the thick nose, the full lips, the Technicolor guayabera, which is under a sweater and a leather jacket anyway, or smell the Jaguar 2999 cologne. Look cool. Just don’t get noticed. But if you get noticed, look cool. Scope for trouble. This is actually a good neighborhood, an up and comer, Southeast East East Williamsburg, brownstones filled with buppies. She’s moved on up, got a piece of the pie.
Ignore the fact that it’s your own ex.
Pray that the kid is sleeping.
Girl is threatening to go Jayhoving on the man who signed the contract on her, gotta show her Who’s The Boss like Tony Danza.
Watch her silhouette glide across the curtain.
Admire the picture they gave you. Her hair is natural now, not siliconed, flatironed, brushed, blown dry, sprayed, gelled, moussed, puttied, and relaxed into submission. It’s a wild topiary over her head, a crown, a corona. She’s filled out, but still walks like a goddess queen empress negrititita, a vision of confidence and artisanal cocoa pulchritude.
Listen to the cop laugh, expecting a little something something when he goes off work in the morning.
Take out the gun.
Sneak up the fire escape. Dark kitchen window. Pry it open slow, very slow—slower than the journey to Mordor. (Not even the eagles could save you now.)
Smell the inside of a brand-new kitchen. Is that takeout on the faux marble countertops? Looks Italian—Lights snap on!
What the fuck? she says. Oscar?! Is that you?
Oh shit.
So, yeah, there’s one thing I forgot to mention: Wear a mask.
What the fuck are you doing here? Coming through my window? You scared the shit out of me.
Think of something good to say, something that makes sense.
Surprise!
Are you trying to rob me?
I was in the neighborhood, playing like it’s all good, fun times, high school reunion. Girl Most Likely To Succeed. Boy Most Likely To Get Left Behind in His First Robbery Attempt, Get Trapped in Cycle of Violence, and Get Hired By Drug Dealers to Kill Peeps They Don’t Like.
Expect her to know the truth. It’ll be written on her face like Beyonce Bodoni Bold or J Lo Lucida Bright.
Expect a butcher knife.
Expect her not to put two and two that a bullet’s much faster than a butcher knife. No one puts that together until it’s too late.
I guess you kill a brown girl like anyone. Like blanquitas, Asians, the rest. Blood on the tiles, red in the grout.
Go to pick up the casings. Swipe some of that garlic bread.
Expect right then for the kid to come into the kitchen.
Spongebob Squarepajamas. Don’t expect praying to help. For him or for you.
After that’s done, get all the casings.
Go out the way you came in.
Get back to the car. Take the bag the sandwich came in, the water bottles, one empty, one filled with pee pee, and the gun, and toss them into the nearest garbage, hell, even at her stoop. Buppie neighborhood whatever. It’s still a black neighborhood. Ain’t no New York cops going to care that hard.
But—and this a big but—you should really take your time going down the fire escape or else you might wind up dropping the garlic bread, get your foot caught in the bars hanging down like a monga blinded by a flashlight and a cop’s irate white face in the night.
Which sucks.
Back to TOC
BLACK FRIDAY
“White meat or dark?”
Orlando said this looking at Marcie and her eyes popped open like kernels of popcorn. Plop! Plop! He would’ve busted out laughing but there was a knife in his hand.
Her dad (“That’s ‘Mr. Arens’”) in the wheelchair—dead from the waist down, depressed as hell, who wouldn’t be?—had silently allowed Orlando to do the carving. Mrs. Arens (“Call me ‘Mom’”), she was the one who actually handed Orlando the carving knife. Mr. Arens wouldn’t touch it.
Orlando was honored, after less than a year of being Marcie’s steady, to be responsible for carving the family’s turkey. Biggest, immensest turkey he had ever seen, browned to perfection, little paper socks on its turkey feet. And with every slice, shiny, greasy juice bubbled down its beautiful browned skin. This wasn’t some turkey baked in an oven bag, steamed to shreds, the way Orlando’s Mami made. Look at their mountain of stuffing—with actual chestnuts. Their clouds of marshmallows over the yams. Their red, glistening blob of real cranberries. This was professional, cable-TV-type cooking. Then again, he would expect their cook, Mrs. Sagawa, to be a total pro chef. She better be in this neighborhood.
Mr. Arens looked out the window as Orlando carved. On the left side of the table, Marcie’s sister Daphne sipped white wine, as did her husband, Roy, who was a vegan or vegetarian, one of those, so he didn’t want to do the carving on moral grounds, and their new baby, Rosemary, drooled in between them in a wooden high chair. On the right, next to Mom, who mimed the carving motions to instruct/coach/encourage Orlando, sat the other sister, Joanie, pale as pork fat, stringy haired, high on whatever they were giving her. She had been let out of some mental hospital just for Thanksgiving weekend. Nobody talked to her, nobody looked at her. The family had powerful genes—all cornflower blue eyes, strong jaws, cleft chins—inherited from both Mom and Mr. Arens.
As Orlando sawed away at the steamy meat, he could feel Marcie’s popcorn eyes on him. After what she had read, after what they had begun to talk about in the car ride from Princeton that morning, it was only natural.
During the meal, Mom tried to talk to Orlando—or at least about him. “I bet you’re a good dancer,” she said. “Is he a great dancer, Marcie? I bet he is.”
“I don’t know, Mom. We haven’t gone dancing yet.”
“Haven’t gone dancing? Your father and I used to go all the time,” Mom said, but then she seemed uncomfortable and asked everyone if they wanted more stuffing.
“How is school, you two?” Daphne said. “What are you studying, Orlando?”
“Computational mathematics.”
“That’s a foreign language to me.”
“To me, too, sometimes,” he said, and they all chuckled softly.
By the end of the meal, Orlando had eaten four servings. He noticed that Marcie just picked.
“Fuck yeah!” said Orlando, sated, stuffed, his body molded into the buttersoft leather recliner, shouting at the TV. He was the only one watching the football game. Mr. Arens had his chair turned toward the window, his face very Mt. Rushmore, Jeffersonian, and Roy was changing yet another full load from the baby. Daphne and Joanie were still in the kitchen, prepping a feast of a breakfast for tomorrow, since Mrs. Sagawa would have the day off.
Marcie had followed her mother upstairs, and they had been gone a while. He noticed because he needed a beer and wanted Marcie to get it. Not in a macho way, no, because he wasn’t that type, no. He was just too polite, too shy to go to the fridge himself and get it. So he sank deeper into the recliner, melding his molecules with it, wondering if one day the family would say to guests, “Don’t sit there. That’s Orlando’s chair.”
Roy stood in front of him, said, “Orlando, hey. Can you do me a favor? Can you hold the baby a sec? I got poop all over my shirt.”
“Wow, that’s an explosive baby. Maybe you better go light on the roughage you feed her.”
Ignoring him, Roy put the baby in his lap. “Be right back.”
Orlando tried to figure out what to do with the baby. He bounced it on his lap and it giggled. It had tender pink hands, a chubby pink face, gigantic cornflower blue eyes. The baby kept putting its fist in Orlando’s mouth and Orlando would go, “Yum yum yum yum yum yum yum,” and the baby would giggle. This went on for a while. “Yum yum yum yum yum.”
“The baby!”
&n
bsp; Mom at the stairs, looking popcorn-eyed herself, Marcie standing behind her. Mom walked-ran to Orlando and swiftly scooped up the baby.
“It’s okay,” Orlando said. “We were having fun.”
“She needs to be changed,” Mom said.
“Roy just changed her a minute ago.”
“Men don’t know about these things.”
Orlando felt he had been snubbed in some way and wondered: Did it have something to do with what he and Marcie had tried to talk about? Had she told Mom?
The parents wouldn’t allow Orlando to sleep in Marcie’s bedroom. “We’re not that modern,” Mom said, and Mr. Arens gave him a stabbing look.
They gave him the guest room. Creamy, dark wood paneling, thick, foamy rug, a king-sized bed. A king-sized bed in the guest room! They must have emperor-sized beds in the main bedrooms. The bed was inviting, but…
But in the middle of the night, following Marcie’s instructions, Orlando snuck out from his guest room down the hall to Marcie’s room. It was pink, girlie. Stuffed panda, duvet with a pattern of lilies. With pretensions befitting an English major. Bright bold posters of Van Gogh, Rothko. Shelves of books. Lindsay, Inge.
“Did my family freak you out, Boo?” she said. She was freshly showered, he could tell. Her strawberry blonde hair was ponytailed behind her. She wore full-body pajamas with tiny trussed turkeys on them.
“No. Not at all.”
“Sorry about the whole saying grace thing. I know it’s not your thing. But don’t be surprised if ‘Mom’ tries to convert you.”
“She’s okay. I don’t think your dad likes me very much.”
“That’s just him. Dad was a total jock for years. He had a big heart and was always open to people. Since the car accident, he’s just not the same anymore. Not that he ever would have liked you anyway.”
“You’re cold,” Orlando said, jumping on her. She giggled.
He loved the way Marcie smelled after a shower, her skin clean and fresh. He was too tired to have a conversation about what she had read, about what he had tried to talk to her about in the car. But he wasn’t too tired for some fun. He dropped his underwear and said, “You wanna?”
“I don’t feel like it, Boo,” she said.
“We won’t make any noise. No whooping, I promise. No screaming in foreign tongues.”
“No, no, no.”
“What’s the matter, baby?”
“I’m just so sad,” she said. “So sad for you.”
“Oh, baby.”
“I’ll hold you, Boo. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll hold you. Come here. I have to tell you something.”
He slid over to her, still naked.
She looked him dead in the eye and said, “I told Mom about you.”
“No!”
“It’s okay. She cares about you. She cares about anyone I care about, and it was important she know about your past.”
“Oh no.”
“Don’t worry. It’s a good thing. At least I think so.”
She held him close, squeezing him. She felt frail as a baby bird, but he knew she was strong. Soon they were kissing, and then she told him that she would make him better, she would heal him.
When he first nibbled on her nipples, she shrieked.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“Yes. Yes! Bite harder.”
In the morning, after an omelets-and-pancakes breakfast that would have stuffed a family of bears, everyone went off to different rooms. Orlando followed Marcie, but she told him to get lost because she was going to shop online for Christmas presents and didn’t want him peeking.
So he sat at the vast kitchen island, having coffee. Outside, rain came down steadily, pounding the trees and bushes on the lawn, pecking at the big picture window.
Joanie sat herself across the kitchen island from him. Still pale, still high looking. She looked just like her sisters, except for the stringy, ink black hair. She had made herself a bowl of chocolate milk and was slurping from it.
“How’s it going?” he said.
“All right,” she said, laughing to herself.
“Glad to be out, I bet?”
“What?” A snort.
“Glad to be home?”
“The food’s better here. Puts me off my diet though.” Again, a laugh to herself.
“Oh,” Orlando said. “Hey, do they, like, electrocute you and stuff? Just kidding, I know they don’t do that.”
“Actually, they do. It hurts like hell.”
“What? Sorry. I didn’t—”
“Hah!” Snort. “Nah, but they do give me drugs all the time.”
“Ha. Okay. Yeah.”
“So how long have you been dating my sister?” A snicker.
“About a year.”
“We were best friends growing up, you know,” she said. “Inseparable. Peas in a pod.”
“Are you still?”
“Still what?”
“Best friends?”
“I only see my family once a year,” she said, not laughing. “They don’t take me out for Christmas because they all go down to Aunt Margery’s farm and Aunt Margery doesn’t want me there. She’d think I’d devour a goat or something this time.”
“Wha—?”
Suddenly, Marcie was there, standing in the kitchen.
“Orlando. C’mon,” she said, ignoring her sister. “We have to go to the pharmacy. Dad’s pills are almost out.”
Marcie drove. The rain was done, and the roads glistened and seemed to tremble like jello. Orlando figured it was the perfect time to finally talk about everything. He couldn’t find the right way to start, but then she said, “I don’t want you to feel alone in the world. I’m here for you.”
“Aw, baby. That means a lot.”
“And you don’t have to talk to my sister, Boo. She’s very strange.”
“Aw, but she seems nice, a little funky though.”
“Huh. If you only knew. Years ago, when we were twelve, thirteen, we were on my aunt’s farm, and we found out that she killed and ate a rooster—raw.”
“Ewww.”
“I know. Isn’t that sick?”
Two car lengths ahead, a gray blue thing shot out in front of the car. Instead of turning to the right to avoid, the car sped up. They heard a thump and felt something roll under the wheels.
“What the hell was that?” Orlando said.
They jumped out of the car.
Her heard Marcie make a sound, what sounded like a giggle. On the road, the head of a rabbit and one of its arms protruded from the front left tire. The rest of it was smeared behind the back tire and twenty feet behind.
“Oh god,” Marcie said. “I-I couldn’t stop looking at it, so I…”
“That’s a big rabbit,” he said. “Was a big rabbit.”
“Oh god. I didn’t mean to. But I kept staring and focusing on it. I must have steered right toward it.”
“Don’t get upset. In ten seconds, you did what Elmer Fudd couldn’t do for decades.”
Her pale skin turning beet red, she cried, kept crying for twenty minutes, big, supersized sobs. Orlando held her. Was this the right time to finally talk, to confess? he thought. Maybe it wasn’t. But he did it anyway.
She listened, and then she said, “You don’t have to lie to me.”
“I’m not lying.”
She looked at him then as if she didn’t know him, as if he were an alien. She turned and got into the car.
At the house, he thought maybe they could make love and so make things better.
“I need to take a nap,” he said, as his way of hinting. “Want to join me?
“No. I need a walk.” Her eyes were sunken, her face hollow, as if starved.
“Want me to go with you?”
“No,” she said.
Orlando went to his room and threw himself on the duvet decorated with a field of cabbages and tried to sleep.
He had
met Marcie at a party and they’d slept together that night. He had been dating four other girls, but stopping dating two of them when he found out that Marcie lived in Sands Point, the most affluent town in the state. After that they were almost inseparable. She loved to ask him questions about his family and his past, but he refused to answer. Which made her even more insanely curious about him. His mathgeek friends told him she was asking questions, but they knew less than she did. He knew the next natural step for her to take was searching for stuff about him online.
When she was sleeping, he checked her browser history and, sure enough, there were hundreds of searches for his name. Years ago he had learned to hide himself online and within social media.
He came up with what he thought was a cute way to get back at her for her nosiness. He knew she was a Craiglist abuser, so he set up a Craigslist account advertising himself as a Marvin Aday, a private investigator who specialized in “digging into people’s pasts.” Then as Orlando he put a bug in her ear about how a philosophy professor on campus hired a private eye on Craigslist to spy on his wife.
Sure enough, a week later, Marcie bit. She emailed “Marvin” at the fake account saying she wanted to know all she could about Orlando. “Marvin” agreed to take the case, and a week later, the night before Thanksgiving, he sent her a news article he said was only available in print, so he had to retype it. It read:
Family Tragedy Devolves into Cannibalism
Camden, New Jersey—When their mother died, leaving them without money or food, three small children were forced to turn to cannibalism to survive.
The shocking details in this bizarre tragedy emerged today after police placed the children, ages five, three, and eight months, in the custody of child services.
The family was living in a motel in Camden after being evicted from their apartment early in December. The mother, unable to find work, resorted to begging, prostitution, and small arms dealing.
Last week, the hotel manager told the women she had to leave. “I was trying to be nice and let them stay a little longer. But I got bills to pay!!” said the manager, who preferred not to disclose his name. “I didn’t know they were starving. I never saw them leave the room. When I seen them, they looked healthy enough.”
Noiryorican Page 11