Party Girl

by Lynne Ewing

  “Hey, Kata,” Pocho said.

  “You made it.”

  “Yeah, I run faster than bullets,” he said, and smiled. “I got nowhere to sleep tonight.”

  “Come in, then,” I said.

  He swung his leg over the sill and pulled himself up and into the room. I closed the window and turned on the lamp on my nightstand.

  Pocho sat on the edge of my bed, the springs sagging under his weight. His eyes looked blank and sad. He took off his shoes and let them drop on the floor. I lay on the bed and pulled the covers over me.

  “You knew Raul wasn’t the one who shot Ana,” I said.

  He nodded and took off his Pendleton and T-shirt. Tattoos covered the hard muscles on his back and arms.

  “You took me to kill the wrong guy,” I said.

  “No,” Pocho said. “I took you to the right one. I loved Ana. I did. You know? She never let me touch her, and then she goes off with some vato from another neighborhood. Raul’s the one I wanted dead as soon as I heard.”

  “You should have blasted him yourself, then. It was wrong to send me.”

  “No, I couldn’t. If you blasted him, people would think he killed Ana. If I did him, they’d believe the story and think Ana loved him and I was jealous. I wanted the secret to die with him.”

  “Who told you, anyway?”

  “Amelia.”

  “The little bitch. Don’t you mess with her.”

  “She caught Ana with Raul,” Pocho said. “She knew about it but didn’t tell me until after the funeral. Said she’d tell me about Ana if I let her in. She said you were keeping her out.”

  “She doesn’t know what’s up.”

  “Maybe I’ll recruit her.” He said it like a challenge.

  “Don’t mess with her,” I repeated. “Out of respect for Ana. She didn’t want Amelia in the life.”

  Pocho took off his jeans and fell back on the bed. He lifted one leg onto the mattress, then the other. I turned off the lamp. The light from passing cars and the glow from the neon sign of a taco stand on the corner lit the room, giving it a strange red cast.

  After a while Pocho whispered, “Kata?”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt the puppy.” His words struggled from his throat. “What makes me do what I do?”

  I shook my head against the pillow. “Why do any of us do what we do? We don’t have many choices here.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Pocho said, and stared at the ceiling. He was silent for a long time, and I thought he had fallen asleep, but then he spoke softly, his words filling the room with sadness. “I wonder if this is the way guys feel in war,” he said. “I don’t want to die.”

  “I know,” I whispered. “I don’t want to die either.”

  He took in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Why didn’t she love me?”

  I covered Pocho and put my arms around him. His skin felt cold, and he was shivering. I didn’t think I could ever warm his body. Then I realized he wasn’t shivering. He was crying like he had when we were little kids alone in the dark in my room. His sorrow scratched against his lungs and chest, sounding like a small bird trying to escape his body and soar to another world.

  Knowing each other’s hurts made us close but also drove us apart. It’s hard to pretend you’re strong around someone who’s seen you at your weakest. Usually we needed to feel strong more than we needed each other.

  Pocho pulled away from me. The movement was so sudden I thought he had changed his mind and decided to leave.

  “I feel like someday I’m going to run past the edge into the darkness, and I won’t come back,” he said.

  “You’ll come back,” I said. “You’ll always come back.”

  He slipped his hands behind his head and stared at the passing car lights brushing the darkness across the ceiling.

  “I can feel it waiting for me,” he said. “Something black and ugly. It makes me jealous of that puppy.”

  “How can you be jealous of a dog?”

  “’Cause I’ve been thinking about death, you know, ’cause of Ana, and I keep thinking about hell and what’s going to happen to me when I die. That little puppy just dies. I mean, it’s just gone and it doesn’t feel no more when it dies, but me, I got to go to hell and spend eternity in flame.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said. “It’s not your fault you live here. God knows that.”

  He paused and took in a deep breath, his chest rising high under the covers. “Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I go back in my mind to when I was three or four and I start living my life forward, thinking how different I’d do everything. Do you think I could have made anything different?”

  “Things happen for a reason,” I said. “Maybe we don’t figure that part out until after.”

  “When we’re with God.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You know,” he said, “I try to think of death like a phone call. Like I’ve just hung up with Ana. She’s still there. I just can’t talk to her because the connection is gone.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling that dull pain in my chest again.

  His shoulders shuddered, and he made a strange sound, a hiccup like he was trying to swallow back a sob. “But I don’t want an invisible Ana,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  We lay in the dark a long time, not saying anything, watching lights and shadows change as cars passed outside my window.

  Finally he spoke. “Kata, would you scratch my back?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Remember when we were niños?” Pocho said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You was so mean to me,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was mean to you.”

  “You taught me how to fight good,” he said.

  “It was the only way you were going to survive in our neighborhood,” I said.

  He was silent for a long time. “My mama was a lot like Ana. Do you remember her?”

  “No,” I lied, not wanting to remember the only time I’d met her.

  I scratched his back until he fell asleep. Then I got up and looked out the window. The wind had scattered the fog, and the few remaining clouds looked white against an indigo sky. Shadows hovered close to the apple and avocado trees.

  I had a strange feeling that something really bad was going to happen—worse than Ana’s dying. I didn’t know why I should feel so afraid. Nothing could be worse than losing Ana, but my hands started trembling and a lump I couldn’t swallow grew in my throat. Nando said you can’t miss something you never had, so there must have been a time when I felt safe.

  I crawled back into bed, and when I glanced back out the window, I had the unshakable feeling that someone had been standing there, watching me. A small mark smudged the outside of the window like an angel’s fingerprint.

  My curandero grandfather had told me that in ancient times spirits and angels traveled in our world, but when people stopped believing in the spirit world, the door between the worlds closed. Now spirits and angels could only make the passage into our world by twisting through the keyhole and screwing their beauty into scary shapes: werewolves, vampires, and ghouls. Geists, my grandmother called these spirits that invaded our world.

  My grandfather told me this when I was afraid of the invisible creatures I sensed lurking in the darkness around my bed. He protected me then, but now his power had faded into the black-and-white photographs that hung above my bed, and I didn’t know who could protect me.

  “Jesucristo, Redentor mío, ¿por qué me has desamparado?” I muttered, praying to God. “Why have you abandoned me?” But I didn’t expect an answer. He couldn’t hear me. I was lost to Him.

  The next day I woke up alone. Ana was still dead. Pocho had left sometime during the night.

  Sunshine turned the morning fog metallic and dusted the leaves with gold. Then the gold glare lifted and the fog disappeared the same way it had come, from nowhere and in silence like some myst
erious force. It made me sad when the fog disappeared because I no longer had an excuse to stay in bed.

  I got up and went to the kitchen, my bare feet cold on the linoleum floor, to make a cup of coffee for Mom. The faint smell of peanut butter and coffee lingered over the dirty dishes Pocho had left on the counter. Water dripped from the faucet onto a knife in the sink. I rinsed the dishes and left them on the drainboard, then boiled water and made a cup of coffee. I shook a vitamin from each of the jars and took the pills and coffee to my mother’s room.

  I pressed against the door. The room smelled sour, of stale love and beer and broken promises. The blinds were drawn against the sun. I crept inside to where Mom lay, tangled in her blankets.

  Mom was awake and staring at nothing, her face pressed into her pillow. When I was a girl and she did that, I would run to her and shake her, afraid she was dead. Now some days I prayed for her to die because it was so hard to care for her, but then I would hate myself and pull back the prayer as if it were a kite sent out in a too violent wind.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. I could feel the warmth and comfort of her body through the blankets. I wanted to crawl in bed with her and cry, but I was too afraid she might push me away.

  The puppy was under the covers with her, its head bobbing, lifting the sheet as it shook the pouch I had stolen from the botánica.

  “I’m sorry about the check,” she said finally. “Krandel scares me.”

  I shrugged. “He scares me, too. He’s a kuntur,” I said. That made Mom smile. I think kuntur means “bad-assed dude” in Quechua.

  “You remember that Christmas you wanted the doll with the clown face and I wouldn’t get it for you because I didn’t like it?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I gave you a Barbie,” she said.

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “I wish I had bought that clown doll for you,” she said, and looked away.

  The puppy shook the pouch and the sweet smell of licorice and thyme filled the air.

  “I’m sorry about a lot,” she said.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “I thought I heard someone in the house last night.”

  “Probably the puppy,” I said. “I brought you some coffee.”

  “Coffee?” She sat up in bed and placed the pillows behind her like a child on her birthday, playing princess.

  She took the mug in her thin hands and sipped, steam rising to her face and circling around her eyes in a way that reminded me of the morning fog. Her face looked less swollen this morning, but her eyes still had a yellow cast.

  “I hoped maybe Pocho had come home,” she said.

  “Take your vitamins.” My words came out like jealous boots kicking dry cement. She looked at me curiously.

  “Just try to swallow them,” I said, my tone more gentle. “If you can’t, you can spit them out.”

  “In my coffee?”

  I gave her the pills. One had stained the palm of my hand red. “If you can’t swallow them, you can spit them back in my hand.”

  She put the vitamins in her mouth and swallowed them with the hot coffee, then looked up at me with a big smile. She had a beautiful smile but never seemed to use it, as if she had decided to put it away with the opals and save it for good.

  “When you were born,” she started, and looked away. Tears ran silently down her cheeks. When she saw me looking, she said, “My eyes are watering. It must be the hot coffee.” I knew she was only trying to save me the embarrassment of her tears.

  “What were you going to say about when I was born?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Just a thought. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I’d like to hear.”

  She stared off, and I followed her gaze, hoping to get a glimpse of what she saw the night I was born.

  “I had different dreams of what our lives could be, but I lost them in the bottle. Then you came home all covered with blood and it felt like the night you were born. Like you could be reborn, and we could start again. I never meant to hurt you, Kata. Now I’m so weak I can’t do much for you. When I drink, I don’t feel. Now I feel and I know I’m dying.”

  “Maybe the doctors can give you a new liver,” I said.

  “I’m no movie star.” She laughed. “Sometimes I get a feeling that Nando’s old Santería gods must have gotten so upset with me that they crossed the ocean from Africa and put a curse on me when I wouldn’t marry him. That’s when things turned from bad to worse, wasn’t it? Sometimes I think I can hear those old gods dancing to the batá drums.”

  “Nando said the powers of the orishas can never be used to harm others,” I said.

  “I know what he said, but things weren’t this bad then, were they? Even before Nando, it wasn’t this bad.”

  “Things are fine,” I lied. “Now that you’ve stopped drinking, you’ll start feeling better.”

  She sipped her coffee and spoke into the cup like a child afraid of her mother. “I’m not supposed to have coffee either, am I?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied.

  She shrugged. “It’ll be better for you when I go,” she said.

  “No, it won’t,” I said. “It won’t.”

  “I’m going to an AA meeting,” she said. “They got them at the church.”

  I had heard her say that before.

  “Nando’s taking me,” she said as if that would give her words the force of truth.

  “Nando?”

  “I called him last night.” She set the cup of coffee on the nightstand.

  “What about that bruja he lives with?”

  “She didn’t answer, so I didn’t hang up.”

  “She doesn’t care if Nando sees you?”

  “I didn’t ask. He’s going to take me out to County General, too. Let the doctor check my liver again.”

  “Good,” I said, but we both knew it was too late even if she did stop drinking now.

  She smiled, closed her eyes, and started to fall asleep. I took her hand and held it against my cheek. It felt cold and smelled of rose-scented lotion. I kissed the tip of each finger, then tucked the hand under the covers next to the puppy.

  I dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a Pendleton and went outside. I knew the guys from last night would still be looking for me. The streets near my home wouldn’t be safe, so I walked over to Kikicho’s house. His house was at the dead end of a street near the graffiti-covered wall surrounding the old cemetery. I stared at the desperate rows of gray and white granite markers. Square gray buildings in the projects on the other side of the cemetery gave the illusion that the cemetery continued forever.

  Kikicho was sitting on his porch reading a book. A line of half-empty Coors bottles, drowned cigarette butts in each, caught the morning sun and shot amber lights across the porch. The smells of onions, jalapeños, tomatoes, and hot oils came from the kitchen.

  “I heard what happened,” he said. “Pocho came by. He said those guys in the Monte Carlo have been out scoping the neighborhood, looking for you.”

  Kikicho had washed his blue-black hair, and it curled around his ears, still wet, dripping onto his white T-shirt.

  I didn’t know until I was sitting next to him staring at the graves that I had decided to let him own me.

  “Get me pregnant,” I whispered. “So I can face out and get my welfare.”

  He kissed me, then ran the tip of his tongue along my lip, his mouth tasting of toothpaste.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked, kissing him hard.

  He pulled me onto his lap, and his canes clanked to the porch floor with a hollow sound. “Because you always told me that’s what you were running away from,” he said. “That’s the life your mom had, and you wanted something more.”

  “I changed my mind,” I said. “I’d be better than her … At least she’s alive …”

  He let his hand touch the back of my neck, and then he tugged my hair, wrapping his fingers in it. I didn’t want him to eve
r stop. He lifted my hair and kissed the side of my neck, then my ear.

  He was silent for a long time.

  “You got bigger plans than even you can see right now. And someday, no matter how much you love me, you’ll have to leave me here,” he said, his voice as soft and quiet as angel wings. “I used to want to ask you to take me with you, but I know I don’t belong there, wherever it is. I belong here.”

  I wondered what he saw in me that made him think I could ever get out of here.

  “The place I’m going, you don’t want to go to,” I said. “I wouldn’t be a friend to take you along.”

  He looked at me funny. “Where’s that?”

  “Wherever God puts his fallen angels,” I said.

  “Listen, Kata,” he said. “I’m getting out. They got a special program for people like me. I’m going to be one of those gang-intervention guys. Homies don’t listen to anybody but homies, so maybe they’ll listen to me.”

  I nodded, but I felt wounded inside. “You’re going to desert me, too,” I said in a voice so soft I wasn’t sure I had spoken the words aloud.

  “Let me do it with you.”

  He looked at me, his eyes serious, and I knew he was saying good-bye.

  “Maggie is going to do it with me,” he said.

  “What? Maggie? You and her?” I said, feeling a new hurt fill the wound in my chest. I got up from his lap and started pacing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “And I came here like a fool chavala asking you to get me pregnant. How did it happen?” I asked.

  “We just started talking after you left me at the field.”

  I remembered how badly I had disgraced him by not going back when he called my name.

  “Maggie’s good,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you don’t need me. You’re going to do something big with your dancing. That’s your future. You should stop doing it for nothing.”

  “No. I can’t dance anymore. I picked some bad music,” I said, remembering what Ana had said.

  “Pues, change the music,” he said.

  “Too late,” I said.

  “Kata, dancing … it does something for you I can never do. I seen you onstage. You go someplace.”