She sat on the bed, checking her feet for those stinging scrapes and cuts before slipping on her Jackie O’s. A deep heaviness. If she spent more time thinking about it, she would never leave that blue room. It still felt safe, even with the man in the kitchen preparing coffee—or maybe because of him. It was foolish, impractical, dangerous. She wished she was good at talking. (A voice that said, Tell him.) She picked up her purse and undid the latch on one of the detachable handles.
He had laid out coffee mugs, coffee pot, container of milk. Fresh toast. Cold cuts and cheese. There was a tall thin bottle of vodka. He was rolling a cigarette when she appeared in the doorway. She felt comfortable in his clothes.
“Looks good,” he said, tucking in the loose fibers at the end of the cigarette with a pen.
She sat in the chair beside him. “As soon as the dress gets dry.”
“Sure.” He lit the cigarette. “You want I should roll you one?”
“I only want a few puffs.”
Now came that feeling of hesitation again. His, hers. She clutched her purse. He seemed about to say something, but it was only cigarette smoke. She looked around the small, bare kitchen. A thousand words came to her and she refused to speak them. She was not going to play a role or do a dance this time. She would not be guided by voices. She was bad luck, the kiss of death. Besides, she couldn’t even attempt to tell the story. She began fiddling with her purse.
“Hey,” she said, “do you have any tape? Something thick, like maybe masking tape?”
He looked at her. Cigarette smoke formed rings. “What’s your name,” he said.
The ticking cat-eyes of the clock did not distract her. His eyes were searching her for facts. The strange thought hit her that he was somehow being generous. That he knew, and wasn’t saying anything about fire escapes and open windows and women who slip into bed with total strangers.
“My name is Ava,” she said. “Ava as in Gardner, not Gabor.”
The cigarette was between his lips. A glimmer of amusement in his eyes or a show of welcome.
“I’m Alex,” he said, extending his hand. The touch was familiar, no surprise to skin. He passed her the cigarette. She took her first puff but it only added wooziness, blurriness, a flat taste. “You need tape?”
“The strap on my purse is broken,” she said, sort of holding it up.
“There’s some gaffer’s under the sink.”
She crouched down, opening the metal door to the undersink. Movement was better than just sitting there looking at each other, just sitting there talking, and he wasn’t moving. He was working those cups.
“Milk?”
“Oh yes, please.”
“Sugar?”
She put the gaffer’s tape on the edge of the table, noticing that he had dipped his spoon into a box of sugar cubes. There was something really funny about that. She laughed.
“Yes. Four cubes, please.”
Plop, plop, plop.
“So, about last night …” he said, just about to drop in that fourth cube.
That’s when she pulled the gun from her purse and hit him with it.
11.
and not always right you could be not always right and somehow still function still pull it off every day because it’s a job NOT an adventure way of life or belief system
pads and memos and files to look up files to shift from PERPETRATOR to VICTIM. Another name gone another piece of past obliterated stamped out no memory no trail as if this person never walked those streets
this is how I will always remember the South Bronx that preen and whore-proud strut to the corner where she tempts the truckers. Short memory so she’s never hurt long enough to do something about it. Spread sand over blood newly paved over streets. Make it look new make it smell clean. “It never happened here.” Some people never remember what some people work so hard to forget. Make failure sound like success. Put fake petunias in the windows. Celebrate and go parade. Every June fools. A sometimes Puerto Rican tendency to forget. To shrug and say well
what can you do
swallowed Jonah whale peoples. Live your life SPELLED BACKWARDS is dog. Seats taken, better stand. A long way home and that train is a local. Why burn books that have never been read? He doesn’t know about Puerto Ricans. He mentions Castro like he wants to speak my lingo but I don’t give a damn about Castro and still think Gloria Estefan is a Cuban torture device. To distinguish between LATINOs. When differences like that don’t make a difference anymore then it’s time to book a flight buy a house find a seashore far from. Good guys bad guys “when differences like that don’t make a difference anymore,” but no matter how you slice that shit it always comes down to the basic fact that Shakira was much better before she started to sing in English.
“What I know about Puerto Ricans couldn’t fill a postage stamp,” Myers said. The city blurred through rainy windows. Cranky squawk of windshield wipers wiping. The two of us in search of Spook. “They’re U.S. citizens. They love coffee and cigarettes. They play good baseball, like that guy THE A-ROD. They wave around a flag that can’t be found in an atlas. I got that from a Puerto Rican guy at the academy. I’m not surprised he washed out.”
The two of us, in search of Spook.
“You forgot salsa,” I said, drowsy with listening with not, with driving with blotting out canceling all like-terms.
“Salsa music,” he said. “Now you’re trying to trick me. That’s Cuban, right?”
The cigarette thing was a definite problem. Outside of those cheap opportunistic bonding moments with others, there was that stink on the fingers I hated so much that I was constantly washing my hands. My wife made me a special tea. She is sympathetic, having quit two years ago. She never banished me from a room or avoided my stink. On that recent sleepless night, she was there. Getting up from sheets to sit beside me in the dark living room. There while I finished the last two cigarettes, thinking
she’s in on it. All of it. This plan, that old plan. She was there when I tried to forget. Names that sometimes fade into files, but I have this thing with faces. Streets retain the memory of them. Sometimes they are caught in the flash of my headlights. They peer at me from fire escapes and stoops. Any cluster of kids in hooded jackets could be them. I developed a brief drinking thing with Lieutenant Jack. Was just learning how to forget when Dirty Harry came. After that came the nether float of an iso-tank. Big words and phrases shrank to a hand-hold, to the slow stroke of her fingers across my face when nighttime black. I was no nation of millions. I was a nation of two. Together we searched the atlas for a country with a flag. A place where houses are sold to foreigners on very favorable terms. Beach. Sun. Spanish. One good down payment
and the rest was gravy. No more South Bronx do-not-pass-go. No more South Bronx do-not-collect-$200. No more South Bronx go-directly-to-jail. Just no more South Bronx
not as culture not as place not as barrier not as wall not as language not as space as condition as sickness as way of life. Not as reason for living not as big as you think—
not as patria
but as springboard. Jettison speed. The ticket in, the ticket out. The one sure place to hit THE LOTTO. It was lightning hitting that power station to bring the blackout we had all been praying for, only this was more than a looted TV set carried through shattered glass streets. I had the images already collected like film strips: the squealing of a stuck pig. A gold shield on the captain’s desk. Beach. Sun. Spanish. “The check’s in the mail.”
“That’s tough about the death threats,” Myers said. My car moved slow motion through dark rain slick. “If the department gave half a damn, they would’ve rigged your phone up to a DSP-4000 with ripper autotrace functions and digital remote. Could show up at the bastard’s house two minutes after he makes the call.”
“I told you, they tried some of that stuff.”
“They didn’t try hard enough.”
Establishing shot. Giving Myers those preliminary drives through turf. “Here’s the
church. This is the steeple.” A game of fingers. The rain kept people indoors or clustered in doorways on stoops.
“I don’t even want to know anymore,” I said. To me it was a collective rejection a bad rating a sort of pink slip. I couldn’t talk about it while driving strange. I kept pulling to the left. The wheel wanted to go right.
“But the department should want to know, especially in a case where it’s obvious the callers are going to be police officers. Police officers making death threats? Why wouldn’t they want to look at that? Who is better equipped to carry out a death threat than a police officer? Who has the better resources, better access? How easy is it for people to accept that a cop did it?”
The theme seemed to be shifting, from death threats to cops who try to get away with murder.
“Damn.” Myers searched an empty cigarette pack. “I wouldn’t mind at all, nabbing a police officer who thought he was going to get away with something.”
The sound of that crumpled pack reminded me. I reached into a pocket. The gas pedal was a squirmy fat mouse and I was going to squash it. I passed him a cigarette and lit mine. He could light his own—I passed him the lighter.
“I did that once,” I said, more smoke than words. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
We sped down Avenue St. John, the street that always sounded like a playground.
“Say, hey, what’s the rush?”
“You said we don’t have a lot of time.” I ran a red light. Screechy right turn onto 149th Street. A bus honked long and hard. I could imagine cop cars in pursuit, blinking lights crazy zig-zags. Pedestrians jumping out of the way.
Myers laughed. “Man, that’s the ultimate treachery.”
“The ultimate treachery?”
“It’s just that you can never trust words. You’re a detective, you know that. Humans have a failing that they only believe what they feel sounds right. Nothing as outlandish as the truth. That Kennedy thing, they’re still arguing about that! They could’ve shot that man with a bazooka and have it all on film and people would still swear it was lone-gun Oswald pumping away on an antiquated slingshot. Words? What’s the point? I don’t go that way. I go by gestures, body movements. That’s the ultimate treachery.”
There was a jolting buzz from his words. I enjoyed the car splashing through puddles, a slick almost slip-slide feel to the handling that made me go faster.
“Those little things. Fear, guilt, anxiety. All these have their unique physical manifestations. The way fingers grip a steering wheel. The beads of sweat on a man’s upper lip. The way he starts accelerating the car wildly at certain points in the conversation.”
I flinched from a bump. It was the car fighting me, the car. Red light. I went through. A batch of honks and one frenzied car squeal.
“Not my favorite conversation,” I said.
“It’s completely understandable. I don’t know if I would take it so well. After twenty years on the force. A gold shield. And still, cops walking around calling you a traitor.”
The car growled, the rain slapped the windshield all blur. The car wanted to speed. The car wanted to scream.
“I wonder what you would do,” he said, “with ten million dollars.”
It was not the first time I had heard that question. Did Myers somehow know that, the way his eyes were all searchlight strength?
“You tell me first,” I said.
The storm raged over. Rain like a million baby fists pounding the car. I slowed down, pulled into a blank space. The seething engine, through with tantrums. The dashboard felt hot. I pulled the lighter out click. Put it pressed sizzle and lit cigarette number two.
Myers laughed. “Great,” he said, saying nothing. And me saying nothing back. And whoever says nothing best, wins.
Which brings me to David Lynch.
A few nights before I met Myers, my wife bought the entire first season of Twin Peaks for a weekend marathon. I was hooked to Lynch’s hypnotic story-telling style and his characters, especially a certain Agent Cooper (played in the series by Kyle MacLachlan). I couldn’t help feeling this was who Myers wanted to be. Young, smart, inquisitive, spiritually gifted with the ability to locate answers in symbols and dreams. Cooper was a city-slicker who found himself in a small town, and loved it—unlike Myers, who seemed hardly interested in his surroundings. His empty face could go innocent or malicious, his eyes briny with sincerity or closed like a door. He tended to laugh when facing opposition, to joke when he didn’t know an answer. Facts figures case scenarios like a long-winded lecturer like a loathsome FULL OF HIMSELF bore who needed to show there was no point in trying to stop him. Facts passed for cockiness and strut. I got the feeling he invented his own job, made it up on the spot, convinced others they couldn’t do without him. Sold himself to some big hat with a problem. He was all job, jumping from place to place on the map. He was in service to some amorphous national entity that gave him no real connection to people, turf, community. He was being real or he was being fake. All faces fit perfectly. Yet with me on the street, he was different. I saw timidity, bits of humble and moments of fumble where he showed it was not his turf. He was NOT mister everyman. He did not BELONG everyplace. This time, he was the scrub.
Those first few days he was on me like glued. Took interest in every word every picture every nick and crook. Every scribble on the edge of my desk, every doodle on the side of the page. That my car was a 1998 Caprice somehow unsettled him. On the street, he stuck close. No major scenes, no fleet of cop cars, no flood of blue. Just Myers and me, knocking on doors, talking to people. (Sometimes the “Myers team,” all two of them, put in an appearance as bookends.) Sitting in the Caprice and just watching. Who comes, who goes. “Stuck to me like glued.” Coffee, cigarettes. The surreal aspect of me on South Bronx streets, involved in a case of national security. Hand-picked by some Washington yoohoo. I suppose I should have felt proud, elevated despite that MARK OF CAIN. “Still part of the team.” But all I felt was
suckered
more like I’d been set up. My pockets filling up with cigarettes. Death threats? It was pretty funny how they always started to come in right around the time I had almost forgotten.
I had a hard time forgetting.
What happens when you fight to get in?
What happens when you get in?
What happens when you want out?
After three days, we still hadn’t found Spook. No David either.
I should have gone to him first, Myers or no Myers. A costly mistake. I felt I led it all right to them. I had opened a door. It was me. I let something in, something ugly.
The South Bronx has always been a self-contained world to me. Take the 6 train, rolling down from green lawns of Pelham. Coasting through Westchester Avenue on elevated tracks. A turn and steep plummet into Hunts Point station. To speed under Southern Boulevard streets. Longwood Avenue, 149th Street, 143rd Street. Scraping against the Bruckner Expressway to Cypress Avenue, then Brook. The South Bronx ended right at 138th Street and Third Avenue, the last stop before going under the East River into Manhattan. That’s where the planet mostly stopped. The world can go to shit south of that station, but up here—the same timeless timbales rhythms, the same girls dipping bare feet in cool streams of rushing hydrant water. It was the end and the beginning, that fucking 6 train. It was the Bronx troubadour spreading its snake length from south to south, bringing South Bronx to Park Place and back again. Could hear it pulsating in Willie Colón, in Eddie Palmieri, clatter boom bang and hiss of sliding doors. Could hear it on any salsa album from the late ’60s or early ’70s, though YOU CAN’T HEAR IT AT ALL on the Jennifer Lopez album named after the chugging Bronx local. 149th Street has its own sound like that roaring 6 train, that blast of steam pouring out of a crusty old radiator. As much small town as any city can be. The world and its events lay outside, distant. The South Bronx was any town in any spaghetti western, sleeping calm when the men in black pull up to the saloon. Bad guys make it easy in western
s: They wear black. They blow into town, and everyone knows. Ripples go through streets like stones skimming pond face. Good guys bad guys is a Hollywood formula. In the South Bronx right here right NOW, you cannot tell who is playing second base or outfield without a scorecard.
Myers needed that roster, the list of stats. He sucked out my intuition, the human side to the files the disks. He did not need my help with computer facts with cell phone data. He had the latest technology the fastest tricks. The electronic toys that read mail, hear phone calls, trace cell phones down to restroom cubicles in crowded malls. He had the machines. He had to show it off, as if starting the game with a display of force: It was a fucking bread truck. The old kind, big and boxy. Picture on both sides, huge Jewish kid face snacking on a slice of rye. Levi’s Bread. Inside, knobs and screens with graphs that snaked and lines that swerved and a map in color and rows of blinking lights. His “team,” those two always, those same two and never anyone else that I saw, working switches and knobs, earphones attached to faces as waxy as Ken, as inflexible as Barbie. A bread truck parked on the fucking Grand Concourse. What did he have to go and do that for? To tell me there were no FCC regulators hurling court orders at his ass, to remind me that his “team” was in that fucking bread truck meticulously working through the night.
You don’t know what they’re looking for, but you know they’re looking.
I was no longer flattering myself that he sought me out for my expertise. In fact, I was striking out. Spook used a tried and true system of security. It wasn’t hard for me to locate his squads, but this time he evidently went under with no security, no one with him. I told Myers that Spook was going solo, and this proved it. I knew his ways pretty well. I had my list of entrances and exits, particularly helpful during the Dirty Harry time. Chasing after Spook can be a real Tom and Jerry, but he would turn helpful if I was after someone else. Spook was just that kind of guy, ready-set to whittle down the competition. I guess he figured he’d take some dumb-cluck foreigner for the dough and invite him to come and get it. He could imagine some bunch of foreigners bumbling around every cuchifritería, searching that ghetto maze for a man with his own well-armed troop to protect him. The South Bronx is a complicated system of tunnels and trap doors, so maybe it wasn’t so crazy for him to think he could get away with it. He just hadn’t banked on the feds. I hadn’t really either: Just what was with them? If Spook ripped off a pack of foreign terrorists bent on doing evil, the feds should be rolling with mirth that they got robbed! They should pin a medal on him, get him to work with them to set up the ringleaders, all U.S. Americans together fighting evil! Didn’t they recruit the Mafia to fight Mussolini? Didn’t they recruit the Mafia to assassinate Castro? What was so fucking outlandish about recruiting a spick dealer to fight for “his” country in a war on terror?
South by South Bronx Page 7