“I got these three ladies on my neck.”
Ruben could only make out smudges on the side and back of Chino’s neck as Chino turned in the seat. He realized that Chino had not registered much with him, that he had been a presence and nothing more: a thought in the back of his mind. He took out his cell phone and dialed his wife. Chino was still talking, but stopped when he saw the phone pressed to Ruben’s face. It rang again and again, and finally Ruben left a voicemail saying, “James was beat up pretty bad. You should see him.”
“You know, you might want to hear this shit.” Chino choked his own throat, a caress. “I like these ones the best. The one on this side, she’s my gangsta bitch. She’s that bitch that backs you up no matter what, fool. And the one back here, she’s my little hoodrat. She’s that lady that’s down for whatever you want, whenever you want it. She gives you that love and she don’t ask questions. And on this side, the side above my heart, that’s my decent woman. She don’t ever mess up on you, and you always come home to her. She’s the one you love and that loves you. When I meet a lady, I know right away which one she’s gonna be. I never met one that’s all three.”
“Yeah. Well.” Ruben grinned across the shiny leather cab. “Things aren’t that easy.”
“Hell yeah they are.” Chino turned to face him. He silenced the radio. “I know what I’m up against. Serio, homes, you fooling yourself more than any other.”
“I just mean that bad and good aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“What the fuck you mean mutually exclusive? Talk real to me.”
“Forget it.”
“I see, homes.” Chino waited for Ruben to look into his eyes. “You thought you had one kind, but you got another.”
A flash of blue and red flew through the rear window and bathed everything inside the vehicle. A siren chirped and buzzed and Ruben saw a piece of a police car in the rearview mirror, his rosary dangling from it; twisting and untwisting itself, swaying into and out of the headlights flooding.
Ruben pulled over and the vehicle stopped behind him. In the side-view mirror he saw the chrome buckle and blue legs of the approaching cop. He rolled down the window.
“License and registration, please.”
Ruben handed the cop his papers from the glove box and pulled his wallet from his pocket. He made sure that his university ID showed along with his driver’s license when he handed the wallet over.
“Do you know that your vehicle is in violation, sir? It’s too low, and the brake lights don’t work.”
The cop brought his mustached face down to the level of the open window. He examined Chino at length. Chino shifted nervously in his seat and he looked side to side and behind the way he always had, the way a boxer does. Ruben thought of the gun at Chino’s waist, the gun at his own. He thought of James, of his reaction when he finds out his father had been arrested. Ruben feared there would be no one left to take care of him. He began to sweat, and conscious of this, became conscious that he had never felt this nervousness before. Not because he had never been in a similar situation, he had been in much worse, but instead because he had never thought about consequences. “I’m sorry, Officer. See, we were at a university down south. There’s a car club for the under-privileged. I’m the sponsoring professor, and his car broke down. I offered him a ride. I don’t normally drive this one. I guess I was just excited to show it off.”
The cop handed everything back through the window. “It’s not too smart for you to be driving a car like this through this city.” The cop looked at Ruben’s dress shirt and undone tie, and across at Chino’s white t-shirt and tattooed neck. “There’s a lot of trash around here.” He stood up straight and spit down onto the street, scraped the foamy spot over with his boot, and walked back to the car. When he drove past Chino reached to the radio and tuned it to an oldies station. He turned the volume as high as it would go. Ruben snapped it off and they glared at each other until Ruben shook his head and drove on in silence, Chino still staring, fuzzy in the periphery like Ruben’s memories.
“Turn left.” Chino snapped his fingers along with his order, smirking. “It’s the house on the right.” He jutted his chin at a crooked house shoved between a liquor store and an apartment complex. The fence-poles stood but the chain-links sagged over the yard like a safety net. A child’s Big Wheel lay overturned in the patchy grass, black belly turned to the stars. The driveway was not like Ruben had imagined it would be; it was clean. In his mind’s eye he saw Toro taking a water hose to his son’s blood, washing it down into the gutter with oil and dirt.
“Fuck him.” Ruben parked the car and threw the door open.
“He’s probably waiting for you.” Chino grabbed Ruben’s arm.
“To him no one else exists.” Ruben reached down to his waist and Chino put his arm out to stop him.
“I bet he has a lot of vatos with him. They probably don’t know you exist, neither.”
“They’ll know soon.”
“They could kill you.”
“I could kill them.” Ruben stood out of the car and walked down the long driveway, past the front door covered in weathered plywood. A brand new door packaged in bubble-wrap leaned against the wall beside it. Around back a dim light shone down through a broken pane of glass in the back kitchen window. Ruben took the concrete steps in twos and Chino shuffled up sideways and jumped in front of him.
“Maybe you’d better check on your son first. Just call.”
Ruben paused but he knew that if he stopped his forward momentum now he would never get it back. He knocked on the door and Chino pushed him down off the stairs. “Stop, puto. Just get out of here.”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Movement in the house. A ghost-white face appeared in the window and disappeared. The same face appeared in the doorway as the door creaked open: a young woman. Her delicate brown hand rested on the door and her white made-up face disconnected her from her body. “Who’s this?” She looked at Ruben gently and that frightened him, her calm resting beneath high and thin brows and beneath still higher feathered hair, stiff like a cheap wig. She moved with otherworldly calculation.
“Where’s Toro?” Ruben heard heavy footsteps inside. He said it louder, “Where’s Toro?”
She tilted her head sideways. “Why would he be here?”
“Go on, fool,” Chino pushed Ruben’s shoulder. “Get outta here.”
“Are you that boy’s father?” She stepped down one foot, pointing a long maroon fingernail at Ruben. She looked at Chino. “Is he that boy’s father?” Chino reached his hand out for Ruben’s shoulder and Ruben snapped his head toward him and back at the woman.
“Let him see.” Chino lowered his arm. The woman stepped aside.
Ruben stepped up into the darkness of a living room lit only by the television. It glowed on the floor in front of the fireplace and a naked toddler sat in front. A woman filled the expanse of a couch on the nearest wall; she looked him up and down and gave a bright grin before returning her stare to the television.
“Where is he?” Ruben turned a circle in the living room.
The fat woman looked up again. “¿Cómo?”
Ruben stepped back, bumping into the woman he came to realize was Chino’s girlfriend. He tripped out of the kitchen and down the concrete steps, grasping at the wooden rail. “What are you trying to pull, goddamnit?”
“I didn’t think you’d take this shit so far.” Chino made pistols with his fingers and pressed each temple. “I thought you’d puss out when I brought out the guns.”
“Where are we?”
“This is my hyna’s pad.” He pointed at the woman and child. “My baby’s mama. I tried to stall you out.”
“Why bother?”
“No sé, ese.” Chino pulled the gun out from under his shirt, where it had been resting next to a glinting, silver buckle the shape of a marijuana leaf. “I figure some of us just belong here, others don’t. Did yo
u expect me to sell Toro out, homes? That fool would kill me. For what? For some buster who can’t keep eye on his kid? Not even your own wife, vato.” He pointed the gun at Ruben. “You been gone too long.”
Ruben pulled his gun too and the girl in the doorway screamed. He looked up at her but she was not looking at him. She had pulled her wandering child back into the house and was crouched between the child and the guns, in the flickering TV light. “Put them away, guys. Please, the baby.”
“Yours ain’t loaded, cabrón,” Chino knocked the end of the pistol against his head. “Just go home.”
Ruben looked down his arm, down the blue dress shirt to the buttoned wrist, to the hand that didn’t seem his own. He opened it and he felt the gun slip. It clattered on the cement. He swept his eyes over Chino and the barrel in the air before him, over the girl standing in the doorway with the child wrapped in her arms, and back out onto the street where his car leaned its shadow forward under the streetlamps. He listened to Chino go inside, with the girl and child, and close the door, but he didn’t watch.
Ruben got in the car and put the keys in the ignition. He pulled out his cell phone and called his wife but there was no answer, so he called twice more. About to put his hand back on the key, he stopped and flipped down the visor instead. There was a picture there of his wife and his son with him when he’d graduated wearing that ridiculous wizard’s costume of a “doctor.” He took the picture down. Even then his wife’s eyes flared, haunted, summoned somewhere she felt lost.
He remembered that night when, screaming, crying, she’d kicked everyone out of their home. She disappeared for a week and returned looking strung out. She didn’t speak. She just ate all of the week-old chocolate cake he and James had been saving to eat together when she returned. Then she passed out on the couch.
He returned the picture to its place underneath the rubber band on the visor and put the visor up. The white-faced girl stood on the lawn beside his car. “I know about your son. I was there.” She looked back over her shoulder. “Toro lives ten blocks down. Behind the old church. You can’t miss it. There are always tons of people out front. He’s too stupid to think he’ll get caught. He’ll be there.”
Ruben started the car. “Thanks.”
“You’ve got a rosary.” She bent down to look at it hanging from the mirror. “It’s pretty.” She had a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on her chest and blue tears fell from the Virgin’s eyes down into the darkness inside her halter-top. “What do you believe?”
Ruben looked over her shoulder, scared he believed he’d be killed.
“Yeah.” She kissed two fingers and touched the half rolled down window. “I don’t know either. Be careful.”
He passed the church with its tall crucifix facing out over the street. Fat Tuesday had come and nearly gone, and in the morning the church would be full; everyone, even those that didn’t normally go to church would line up to confess sins, have ashes rubbed onto their forehead to mark the beginning of the fast. He doubted if wrongs could be righted so easily. He parked and walked around the corner.
Down the street, at the back of the old church, was a squat grey house with police cars out front. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk and yellow tape draped between the hydrant and the fence, then the fence and the orange caution cone, and then the cone and the hydrant. Ruben stepped closer, trying to see over the backs of bald heads and past the young cop telling everyone to back up, go home.
Ruben’s phone rang and he pulled it from his pocket.
“Is he okay?” It was Sandra, but there was too much noise to hear her clearly.
“Not sure. I had to leave the neighbor with him for now. Are you going to see him?”
“I can’t. Tell him I said I love him. I love you.”
“What are you doing? Why don’t you come home?”
The music in the background grew louder. “I can’t hear you.” A man shouted her name.
“I’ve gotta go.”
“Sandra—”
“I’ve gotta go now.”
He hung up and pushed past one man and then another. Ruben moved forward until, standing before the cop, his belly pushed against the tape. The feeling was so light but so exhausting. A broke-down car up the driveway leaked oil and some of it collected in pools within the taped off section. There were old stains on the cement but there also seemed to be different stains: lighter, the color of rust. In the back of one of the police cars sat a man about Ruben’s age but Ruben couldn’t see his face, it was disjointed by the metal grate dividing the criminal from the cops. Scrambled voices polluted the air, coming in bursts from police radios, and the police drove off. The crowd lost interest and dispersed. Only one child looked back, lips smeared by the clown makeup of chilied dried prunes.
Ruben stared at the driveway framed by the border of yellow tape, and reached. Though he was too far to touch any dirty cement, he squinted past his outstretched hand. He needed to know: Which stains oil? Which stains dirt? And which stains…not?
THE OTHER FOOT
Rob Hart
Bullets shred the front of the house, raining splinters on Nic’s shoulders. He presses himself against the scuffed floor, holds his hand on the back of Rita’s neck, pushing down hard to keep her from getting up. Her face is scrunched like she’s crying, but he can’t hear it over the sound of the bullets. Even if she is crying, he doesn’t know about what: the fusillade, or the way his hand is yanking her hair, or the way he’s pressing so hard his arm aches.
He resets his grip as the splinters of wood pile on his shoulders and in the crook of his neck, and then there’s a great silence, the air thick with smoke and debris. Truck headlights glare through the windows and shredded walls, lighting the front room of the house in a vicious white glow.
Nic expects them to say something, to make some kind of threat or warning, but nothing comes, just the hum of truck engines. He can’t remember the last time he heard engines. Weeks probably. Normally it’d provide a kind of comfort, like maybe the world was getting back to normal. Now the low rumble sounded like the threat of a wild animal.
“Stay quiet, sweetheart,” Nic says to Rita, keeping his voice low. “Just, please, stay quiet, okay?”
Rita sniffles. Tears cut clean streaks down her dirty face. He wonders how much she actually understands about all this. He hopes she doesn’t understand it. That one day she forgets this feeling, of being chased down by men who call themselves patriots, of having to push their way into a house that may offer salvation or may have its own hidden dangers.
Maybe it’s good she remembers, because that’ll mean she survived the night.
“Good girl,” Nic says, looking around the house for something—anything at all—and he notices a door in the hallway leading to the kitchen, and behind it, a set of eyes, glowing in the light of the trucks. He shifts to get a better look. A hand snakes out of the gap, beckons to him.
He doesn’t know what it means. Friend or foe. He just knows it looks like the door leads into the basement, and the basement is not outside.
“Okay sweetie, listen to me,” Nic says, turning Rita toward the hand. “Over there, okay? Crawl over there. Stay close to the floor.”
Rita starts, moving slowly. She raises herself off the floor and he presses down on her butt, on her unicorn stretch pants, to make sure she stays as low as possible, in case the bullets start again. They get most of the way to the basement door when there’s a crash behind them, then the thud of something landing to their left.
Nic thinks: grenade. He holds his breath, prepares to crawl over Rita’s body, and prays the person in the basement is even the slightest bit kind, that they’ll accept protection of a fatherless four-year-old girl, but in the corner of his eye he sees that what the men threw in was a human foot.
It’s old, the skin gray, a piece of dull bone sticking out the end. Now that he realizes what it is, he registers the stink. He shifts his body so Rita can’t see it.
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A voice rises up from outside, full of laughter and glee.
“Can’t get across no border with no feet, can ya?”
That’s met with a string of whoops and laughter. A fissure opens in Nic’s heart—how can people be like this?—as he pushes harder for the basement door, and as they get closer it opens wider and the hand reaches for Rita, pulling her into the dark.
Nic follows, sliding down the staircase, staying low even though the bullets shouldn’t be able to get him here. At the bottom of the stairs the shadows are gently shoved away by flickering candlelight, and he sees the source of the eyes and the hand.
It’s an older woman, dressed in boots and khakis and a T-shirt, her graying hair tied back in an efficient bun. Her face appears kind, a snap assessment Nic hopes is true.
Rita stands next to the woman, gripping her leg. Nic’s breath catches in his chest, and maybe it’s because for two days now he’s been giving nearly all his food and water to Rita, and delirium is buzzing around his head like a swarm of flies, but instead of the woman, he sees Maritza.
It’s the way Rita is holding the woman’s leg, which is how, before she learned to walk, she would pull herself to standing on Maritza’s leg, and Rita would stand there and laugh, like this knowledge of how to move vertically was her first step toward conquering the world. Over the smell of mold and gunpowder Nic detects a hint of the perfume Maritza would wear, and he wants to reach out to her, to fall into her so she can hold him up, like the way she always did.
But then the woman says, “Follow me.”
And her voice is wrong. Deeper, without the trace of Maritza’s accent, and Nic swallows and wishes he could go back to the moment before, even if it wasn’t true.
It was enough, though. It makes him remember the promise he made to Maritza.
He sets his back, tenses his shoulders, and follows after.
On the other end of the sparse basement is a room. The woman brings them inside, closes the heavy door, then she pulls a chain hanging from the ceiling and a small lightbulb warms to life. The room is stocked with supplies. There’s a cot, just the one. The supplies are neat and orderly and mostly untouched so she must not be living down here. Nic reaches over and pats the wall as the woman closes the door and spins the wheel on the door and there’s a heavy thunk.
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