Seems I could have spared the bother of getting rid of my other outfit. One-eyed white guys in full preppy mode make an impact all their own. But, bottom line, I’m too freakish just now to be anything other than a junkie. And this guy knows what to do with a junkie.
—The fuck out.
I don’t get the fuck out.
He takes his hand from under the counter, shows me the can of pepper spray it’s holding and points at the door.
—Don’t make me come out there and spray you, blanco.
I point at my one eye.
—Better have some sharpshooter fucking aim you want that shit to do any good.
He thinks about that.
While he’s thinking, I drop a twenty in the tray that cuts under the shield.
—Just give me a couple packs of Luckys and some matches.
Cash changes everything, even in the hands of a guy clearly wearing someone else’s polo shirt.
He drops two packs in the tray.
I look at them.
—No, no, not that shit. Give me the real ones, the filterless.
He looks at the display of smokes behind him.
—I got the filters or I got the filter lights. Don’t got filterless.
I toss another twenty on the tray and point.
—Give me that pair of scissors hanging there.
He rings up the scissors while I open both packs of smokes. I knock the bottom of one pack until just the filters stick out, open the scissors, and slice them off. I repeat with the second pack and leave the trash in the tray with the change from my purchases.
The guy points at the mess as I make for the door.
—Not your garbageman, motherfucker.
I hold up one of my modified smokes.
—Buddy, you’re lucky I didn’t burn this fucking place to the ground.
So much for keeping a low profile in the Bronx.
Then again, so much for the Bronx.
Rounding onto Rockwood I run my hand along the bars of the fence that separates the little playground on the corner from the rest of the world. My fingers snag one by one on the bars. Kids play here during the day. I know because I can hear them when I use my bolt-hole next door. This time of year they mostly run in and out of the spray from a little fountain, returning again and again to push the silver button on a red post, triggering the water when it times out.
Not a bad sound, those kids.
Sentimental. Romantic.
Predo knows shit. Just likes to throw words like that at me. Figures they’ll get my goat. Figures I got some problem with being who I am. What I am. Figures he can worm under my skin and make me jumpy.
I ever bothered time on who I am, I might get worked up about it. But why fret on something you can’t change.
I come even with tonight’s cave, one of a half dozen or so that I like to rotate between. A crumbling garage surrounded by ruined cars at the back of a mechanic’s asphalt lot. The business itself is a block over on One Seventy-two. This place here the guy uses as dead storage.
I scale the chain-link, drop inside and edge between a wall and an old red van. Back of the van are a couple steps down to a door held shut by rusty hinges. A stone ram’s head worn smooth by rain is wedged into a notch over the door. The walls are crumbling stone and brick. A limestone foundation visible at the foot of the wall.
It’s fucking old.
I push the door and it grinds open about eighteen inches before jamming on an engine block just inside. I work myself through the gap. Inside, I push the door closed. I could have gotten a lock for the door, but it was open when I found it. Figure the sudden appearance of a lock might attract someone’s interest. Some places are so forlorn, figure they’re safer if they look like anyone could come in and lie down to die anytime they please.
I reach inside one of the empty cylinder chambers on the big V-8 block and find my flashlight and flick it on. If the windows weren’t all boarded, enough light would filter in for my eye to work with, but that’s not the case. Pitch isn’t so black.
The light shows me the piled heaps of twisted rust and grease. It looks like someone bought the scrapped wreckage of a hundred demolition derbies and dumped it all in here until it could be made use of.
How lucky for me to find such cozy lodgings.
I skirt the piles, working my way to my burrow at the base of the north wall under the buckled hood of a ’49 Ford. Behind the mix-and-match seats I’ve wedged together for a cot, I find a filthy nylon laundry bag.
Worldly goods.
A couple plain black Ts mean I can scrap the pastel thing I’m wearing. Rarely felt better about getting rid of an article of clothing. Spare boots means I can get my feet unpinched and out of the sneakers. No backup pants just now so I’m stuck with the khakis, but they’re getting nice and greasy now, so that’s not so bad. Spare works. I open the kit and make sure it’s all there: hose, needles, blood bags.
No spare gun or switchblade or Zippo.
But lots of paperbacks. Moving from place to place these days, a DVD player is a bit of an encumbrance. And an expense. I find the copy of Shogun that I couldn’t get through, unsnap the rubber band that holds it closed, open it, and take the brass knuckles and straight razor from the hollowed pages inside.
A faucet scabbed with peeling lead paint juts from a wall at the back. I take my jacket, the Le Tigre shirt, and a small box of detergent from a Laundromat vending machine, and go squat by it. I get the shirt damp and sprinkle some soap powder on it and start to work at the blood on the jacket.
Not the first time I’ve done this.
Back outside, I pull the door closed and look at the City of Light Christian Center across the street. Is it ironic, me crashing across from a church? No, it is not fucking ironic. What it is is fucking business as usual in the Bronx. Churches are like hair salons up here. Can’t go two blocks without passing at least one.
Pentecostal Church of Jerusalem II. Cherubim and Seraphim Church. Congregation of Hope Israel. Healing of the Heart Worship Center. Concillio de Iglesia Pentecostal Vision Para Hoy Inc.
Danger isn’t that you’ll burst into flames should you accidentally rub against one, danger is that all those fucking places are breeding grounds for superstition. Not just the usual shit about the virgin giving birth and her son growing up to get crucified and come back to life. These people, they believe in all kinds of crap.
Not least of all, some of them believe in vampires.
The fact they believe in the kind that can be chased off with garlic and by invoking the name of the Lord is beside the point. Simple fact is, they believe.
I hit the corner of Rockwood and the Concourse at the big apartment building that looks like Charles Addams was a big inspiration in its design, and cross the Boulevard.
Believers are a problem.
Believers keep me moving from shithole to shithole up here. Mean, you slap a reputation for nocturnal habits on top of the white skin, and some of these churchy types get even more nosy than usual.
But the Bronx isn’t the only place where believers make trouble.
That scene cooking over the river. That isn’t about believers facing off for a dustup, I don’t know what it is. Everyone putting their back in a corner, going into a big stare-down, waiting for someone to twitch and turn their eyes away. That happens, someone blinks, and the rest will be on their throat. Whittle themselves down till there’s two left, circle, sniff and hit the floor with their teeth buried deep in each other’s flesh.
Smells like a lot of dying getting ready to happen.
I think about Predo’s little presentation on the Horde girl and everyone’s reaction to her plans. Trying to pry the truth from the cracks between all his lies isn’t worth the time. I’ve tried, and never come away with more than bloody fingertips.
Only way to get to the heart of what Predo’s up to is to pick up a knife and start digging under the skin till you hit a gusher.
One could ask, Why bother?
>
Why jump when the little prick comes calling with a setup that could be straight and narrow, but that just as clearly won’t leave room to squeeze out at the end? Things so bad up here? So miserable just eking it out? Life lack some kind of meaning when it’s lived this close to the bone? Willing to put your neck on the block just for a chance to live back in Manhattan? Mean to say, Joe, it’s a great city and all, but the rents are out of fucking control!
And I could answer back, Mind your own fucking business.
Man have to have a reason to do something stupid?
Man got to be more than just bored and sick and tired of what he’s got right now to decide to risk a pile of worthless crap on a crooked wheel?
So.
Figure I got a reason. Figure I got a couple reasons. Figure there’s some people over there important to me. Figure there’s two of them.
Figure one of them I got to kill.
The other. Well, figure that’s a little more complicated. Figure the other is a girl. That’s always more complicated.
Figure a chance to get across the river with a little time to work with is all I’ve been breathing for. Get picky about who comes offering everything you’ve been dreaming about for over a year, and it’ll slip away, never to be seen.
So it’s a crooked deal. So I’m angling to get myself real fucking dead. So what?
I play this right, I may get to see my girl again. Fact that if she’s alive, it could mean she’s just waiting for a chance to kill me doesn’t enter into the situation.
I like her anyway.
Besides, you got something better to die for?
Past the Morris Hair Salon and Spa, the svelte figure of a yellow neon woman standing in for the i in Morris, Bonner dead-ends in a cul-de-sac of weeded gardens. One yellow-brick tenement, a three-story town house of rotted wood shingle, a gray aluminum-sided row house with a rooster weathervane bolted above the porch, and another fucking Pentecostal church.
Juan 3:16 on a green sign.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Funny thing. Live in this life, do the things we do to stay alive. Know that if you do it enough you could go on living for a very long time, sometimes you think funny things.
Like that line about drinking His blood and eating His body.
Guy like me hears that and he could get ideas about what was really going on at the last supper. Not that I’m saying anything. Just that I like to give myself a good laugh every now and then.
Back of the church, behind chain-link, is a yard of high green weeds and low-hanging branches that screen the rear of a dingy white row house seated off the cul-de-sac. I go over the fence, through the brush and scratch at the red backdoor of the place.
Nothing happens. I scratch again. More nothing. So I knock. Same result. I pull my hand back to give the door a good banging and smell the gun oil on the barrel of the shotgun before it tickles my neck.
—You wake my neighbors and I’m gonna be mad as hell.
I raise my hands.
—You use that thing and they’ll wake the hell up all right.
—They will. But they’ll be too scared to look out their windows.
—Good point.
She takes the gun away.
—The hell you doing here, Joe?
I turn and show Esperanza my new scar.
—Hoped you’d have a pair of sunglasses I could borrow.
—Thought you had a quiet night planned.
I settle into the ladder-back chair in the corner of her basement room.
—So did I. Ran into a guy named Lament had other ideas.
She puts the .20 gauge on the floor next to her old army cot.
—Lament.
—Got in a tangle with some of his kids.
She pulls a drawer open on an old bureau.
—You hurt any of them?
I point at my face.
—I look like I hurt any of them? Want to see where that crazy fucker bit my toe off?
She digs in the drawer.
—No, I do not.
—Didn’t think so. Between that, losing an eye, and my bad knee, I’m gonna be roadkill any night now.
She looks up from her search.
—Kind of doubt that.
I light a smoke and drop the spent match in one of those ashtrays with a plaid beanbag base.
—Doubt all you like, but I’d have to contract dire leprosy to start losing parts any faster.
She takes a green and gold sweatband from the drawer and stretches it between her fingers.
—How’d you get away?
—Cut a deal.
She drops the sweatband back in the drawer and looks over.
—Cutting deals isn’t Lament’s style.
—What can I tell you, I cut a deal.
She scratches her upper thigh just under the hem of the flannel boxer shorts she wore outside to threaten me. I’m assuming she was wearing them already and didn’t put them on special for the occasion.
—Guess it’s not unheard of.
She’s washed her usually slicked hair and it hangs black and glossy to her jawline.
—I cut a deal with him once.
There’s an old Ewing poster above the cot, corners ripped by thumbtacks.
I stretch my leg, feel the gravel in my knee grind.
—Don’t say. Didn’t know you know the guy. Truth is, before tonight, I didn’t know he existed.
She twists a hank of hair.
—Like I said before, you don’t look to get involved in the neighborhood, you can’t expect to know what goes on.
—True. True. So you one of his kids?
She tucks the hair behind her ear.
—Yeah. I started over there.
She cocks a hip, rests a hand on it and leans against the bureau, flashes some attitude.
—But I didn’t like the way he ran things.
—So you cut a deal.
She works a cigarette from her pack on the bureau top and puts it between her lips.
—I cut a deal.
I watch her look for a match, and take mine out of my pocket.
—Having seen his operation, that sounds like it was a wise move.
I flip her the matchbook.
—What kind of deal did you cut?
She lights a match and puts the flame to her smoke.
—I cut the kind of deal where I dragged him out of the sun when the Mungiki would have let him burn.
She crosses and drops the match in the ashtray.
—Deal was, he was too fucked up at that point to do anything but whine while I kicked him in the face before I left.
She drives her bare heel into the floor a couple times.
—I was smarter, I would have left him in the sun.
—What stopped you?
The tip of her tongue appears between her lips, slips back inside.
—I was afraid. Stupid. Afraid he’d be able to do something if I killed him.
She knocks some ash.
—He has a talent for that.
She takes a drag and smoke rides her words.
—A real gift for making kids afraid.
The tips of our cigarettes flare a few times.
I stub mine out.
—Never too late to make up for past mistakes.
She nods.
—Yeah, I’ve thought about it. Every time I hear another kid went missing up here, I think about going over and finishing that deal.
—Something holding you back?
She walks back to the bureau.
—Yeah.
She rests her smoke on the edge of the bureau and starts digging again.
—I’m still afraid of him. How funny is that?
I think about my parents, about urine running down my leg as they came at me.
I watch her, and try to read the dark tattoos on her dark skin in the dark room.
&nbs
p; —Nothing funny about that at all.
She takes a pair of big geriatric sunglasses and a compact from the drawer, crosses to me and slides them on my face.
She tilts her head and gives me a once-over.
—Just like you just went to the eye doctor.
She palms the compact open and holds it in front of my face.
I take a look at myself in the huge black goggles.
—Oh yeah, very inconspicuous.
She clicks the compact closed.
—Better than walking around with that hamburger showing.
She takes the glasses.
—It gonna grow back?
—No. But it’ll heal some. Part of the eyelid might grow back. Probably skin will just seal it up.
She sets the sunglasses and the compact on the top of her boom box next to the ashtray.
—Gonna be light in a few hours.
—Yeah.
—Just saying, you may as well stay here.
I shift in the chair.
—No, I gotta—
She holds up a hand.
—Don’t tell me what you gotta, Pitt. I didn’t ask. I don’t need to hear your excuse. And, for the record, I didn’t mean anything by the invitation.
She goes to the bureau for her smoke.
—You’ve made it plenty clear you’re not interested. I’ve made it plenty clear I am, and that there’s no strings attached. I don’t need to be turned down twice in one night. When I say, You may as well stay, I’m picturing me in my cot and you on the floor. Not that I’d suddenly play hard to get if you climbed under my blanket, but you’ve let me know that’s not the way it’s gonna be.
She crosses her arms over her cutoff WNBA tank.
—So you staying or going? Cuz I’m ready to get some sleep.
I look around her little bunker room. Knicks posters, the scratched bureau, boom box and a stack of hip-hop and reggaeton CDs, small collection of basketball shoes, microwave, few groceries stacked on milk crates, chem-toilet in the corner, pile of books in both English and Spanish, that little cot.
The chambers of the Queen of the South Bronx.
The idea of climbing off that floor and into her cot, well, a man would have to be flat-out dumb as mud to pass on a chance like that.
But two people would break that cot.
—I can’t stay.
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