Tampa Bay Noir

by Colette Bancroft

  “I don’t think I’ll ever live in one of them,” I said, pointing behind me.

  “Sure you will,” Jake said. “Anyone that comes to this country gets the same chance.”

  The air smelled like the older people who moved here wanted to be burned alive. Nicole had slathered on an oily lotion that smelled of coconut. She lay on her back with a towel covering her face, not saying much. Jake asked me a few questions about my family, like where in Colombia we were from and why we’d come to the States and how we’d ended up in Largo. There was so much I could have told him about those candlelit nights that came after the men who’d killed my uncle started directing their threats my dad’s way, so his usual clients wouldn’t do business with him anymore for fear of ending up like my uncle. I could have talked about the block parties the neighbors threw at Christmastime, about getting up at four in the morning to take the bus to the metro so I could be on campus in time for my six o’clock English class, and how sometimes I didn’t have money for the fare and couldn’t go. There was so much I wanted to tell him, so much that got stuck somewhere between my brain and my tongue, so I just said the things I knew how to say.

  “Oh, Medellín!” Jake said. “Pablo Escobar, right?”

  I smiled and nodded, holding in a sigh. He took a sip of his light beer and readjusted his black baseball hat. His brown eyes glinted in the inescapable sunlight. His face was covered in wheat-colored scraggly hairs that didn’t do much to protect him from the sun. I hadn’t seen him put on any sunscreen.

  “I’ve read all about that guy,” he said.

  “He was a bad guy,” I said.

  “Oh, no doubt, but I’ve read all these articles online about all the money he stashed in all these places that people still haven’t found. I mean, it’s been like six years since he died, and no one has found it. That’s awesome! But that shoot-out where he died was crazy, right?” He slapped his thigh. “The photo of all the soldiers posing with his corpse on that rooftop—that’s hard core. I’m pretty sure I have it somewhere at home if you want to take a look at it.”

  I’d seen the picture, of course, and I didn’t feel I ever needed to again, but I nodded. I knew he meant well. He was just trying to connect with me in a way his daughter didn’t feel the need to. I remembered my mom’s tearful gratitude upon coming home and finding the apartment full of things that made it look like a place where real people lived, and the note she had me write for Nicole’s dad in my best English. He’d been kind to me, and it felt easy to be nice to him.

  That’s how I found myself at Nicole’s house that evening, standing in the room where her dad kept all his memorabilia. As Jake went through drawers and piles of paper, Nicole plopped down on a reclining chair in front of the TV. Her skin still glistened with the stuff she’d put on at the beach, and her cheeks and the bridge of her round nose had turned pink as cotton candy. She was still wearing sunglasses, even though no natural light entered the room through the black curtains over the window. The walls were covered in posters for what he explained were cult horror movies—movies with titles like Blood and Lace and Brain Damage and Kill, Baby, Kill! There were also posters for movies I did know, like Fight Club and Pulp Fiction, and framed newspaper clippings of bizarre stories of living dolls and people being swallowed by sinkholes. Enormous speakers accompanied the enormous TV, and in a corner stood a small desk strewn with papers and action figures and guitar picks and DVD cases. The word that came to me while standing in the middle of the room as Jake frantically looked for the Pablo photograph was reblujo, which is what my mom called the small room where we used to keep junk back in Medellín. Here, even the carpet served as a resting place for guitars and exercise weights and junk food packages and soda cans.

  “Can you hurry the fuck up?” Nicole said. “I want to get this gunk off of me before dinner.”

  “I swear I have that photo in here somewhere. Your mom must have hid it.”

  “Why would she do that? She doesn’t set foot in this pigsty. You see how clean the rest of the house is, don’t you, Vicky? That’s because Mom cleans it.”

  I said nothing, but it was true. The rest of the house was spotless. It was all beige walls and pictures of palm trees and ocean sunsets and shiny glass surfaces and spotless white tile. The living room had a beige sofa, but I could tell it was real leather, and not an ant in sight.

  “You know what? Fuck it,” Jake said, throwing papers on the carpet and pointing a slender finger at me. “You stay for dinner. Call your mom. Change into some of Nicole’s clothes. I’ll drive you home later. I’ll look for the photo in the meantime.”

  We left him rummaging through the junk in his room, huffing and throwing things on the carpet.

  Nicole’s mom found me and her daughter on the beige sofa, going through the family album. It contained picture after picture of a small, chubby Nicole holding kittens and blowing out the candles of her birthday cakes and standing next to Mickey Mouse. My parents had only brought a handful of family photos with them, of my grandparents and uncles and aunts, as well as one picture of their wedding and one of my first communion.

  Nicole’s mom, who introduced herself as Carmen, appeared in a few pictures in their album, wearing shoulder pads and hairspray, her lips fuchsia, just like my mom looked when I was a child. Now, as she sat across from us, she wore green scrubs and black chunky shoes, and her dark hair was up in a high, curly bun. Nicole was her spitting image, down to the only dimple that formed on the right side of her face when she smiled. As Carmen examined me, her shoulders slackened and a wide grin filled her cheeks. Nicole had lent me a pair of denim shorts that didn’t quite hug my hips, and a large white T-shirt with the word NASCAR in big block letters.

  “You girls having a sleepover?” Carmen asked. Her voice sounded salty to me, like the roar of the waves on the sea.

  “Oh no,” I said. “No, just dinner.”

  “We ordered pizza,” Nicole said. “Jake’s on one of his rants about a stupid photo. He just really needs her to see it.”

  “Oh, it’s okay,” I said.

  “I know,” Nicole said.

  “We know,” Carmen said. “Don’t worry, honey. We’ll eat dinner, and I’ll drive you straight home. Sorry he’s holding you hostage. Did you call your parents?”

  I nodded. I didn’t understand the word hostage, but I memorized the sound of it so I could look it up in my dictionary at home.

  Carmen got up slowly and sighed while undoing her hair tie. The curls flopped down in one clump. She dug around in her purse and left a bill on the coffee table.

  “I’m going to get changed before dinner,” she said. “You be on the lookout for the pizza.”

  What followed was an hour-long screaming match behind the closed door of Jake’s memorabilia room, during which the sausage pizza Nicole had ordered got colder and colder. I couldn’t hear most of what they said after Nicole turned on the TV to a music video channel that people called to request their favorite video. I could hear pointed accusations like, “What is wrong with you?” but most of it was muffled or drowned out by the volume of the television and Nicole calling the number that scrolled at the bottom of the screen to request “You Make Me Sick” by P!nk over and over, using what she proudly announced was her dad’s credit card number. Even though I couldn’t hear most of the row, it reminded me of the last few months at home, when my parents argued over money they didn’t have for bills they couldn’t pay.

  When Nicole’s parents came out, Carmen was still wearing the scrubs and her hair was still tangled, but now her cheeks were flushed and her blue eyes glinted with a giddiness I hadn’t seen before. Jake looked as collected as ever and, during our cold-pizza-and-orange-soda dinner, didn’t mention a single word about the Pablo photograph. When he apologized for making me come over, I stopped bracing myself for another fight. Both were now in full couple mode, asking questions about my dad’s health and my mom’s two jobs, and because I didn’t know the word housekeeping yet, I mentioned
the things my mom cleaned instead: floors, windows, toilets.

  * * *

  My mom didn’t work her second job on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, so one late-October Saturday we went to see the Virgin on the window. My mom’s boss had written directions on a piece of paper, and I read them to her from the passenger seat of the Cordoba, while my dad’s long legs cramped in the back. My parents wanted to go pay a promise they’d made to the Virgin of Chiquinquirá on behalf of our safe passage and transition to a new country. They still hoped to make it back to Medellín to pay the promise for real, but now that my dad could move around more or less normally again, this would do.

  I would never tell my parents this, because their response would have been that God manifests in many forms, but I found the shrine unimpressive. The building where the Virgin had appeared was by the side of a highway, unceremoniously next to a Toyota dealership. The image of the Virgin itself looked like an oil slick that had spread over a couple of large mirrored windowpanes of what we were told used to be an office building. It was an outline of what could be the Virgin but also almost anything else, or nothing at all. In front of the window, someone had installed a life-size wooden crucifixion, in front of which was a church kneeler. Before the statue were countless votive candles and rosaries. People stood around or sat in white plastic chairs and prayed in the choking heat of fall.

  A man who introduced himself as Guadalupe told us the image had appeared four years earlier, just before Christmas, and that was why so many people believed it was a miracle. He was short and wore brown slacks and a navy button-up, and he said he came to pray every Saturday. On seeing the slickness of his forehead, which he wiped with a white handkerchief, I wondered if he dressed the same way every time he came to spend a scorching afternoon with the Virgin. He offered my dad a chair close to the Jesus statue after my dad told him the story of his work accident.

  “I should be dead,” my dad said. “When that machine was grinding me, I felt like my organs were just going to burst out of my body. All I could think was that I’d brought my family all the way here just to abandon them.”

  “But here you are, standing after all of that,” Guadalupe said.

  “Yes, and I can walk and move. It hurts, but I can do it.”

  “That’s a miracle,” my mom said.

  They sat together and prayed a rosary while I stayed silent, wondering what would have happened to my mom and me if my dad had died. Would we have stayed, alone in a new country where we were afraid to answer the phone for fear the caller would speak only English? Would we have gone back home and begged one of our relatives to take us in while we figured out what the rest of our lives would become without him? And what would our lives become now?

  * * *

  When we opened the door of our apartment, it was evening and the phone was ringing, but we didn’t answer it. It rang and rang, until I got a look from my mom that had started to become familiar in this new life, which begged me to speak on their behalf to whomever they couldn’t understand and couldn’t understand them.

  I recognized Nicole’s voice through the receiver, but not what she said. She was yelling rapidly, and the words sounded like they were reaching me from the other side of an ocean.

  “What happened?” I asked a couple of times, but it was useless.

  She yelled and cried, and the only word I understood was “Help!”

  We drove to her house. The car still smelled of the remnants of our McDonald’s dinner, which we had shared with Guadalupe. My parents didn’t like the food, but it was cheap, and the air-conditioning inside offered relief from the heat. I loved it and had gleefully eaten my oily apple pie on the ride home. Now the smell made my stomach turn when I thought of Nicole’s ragged voice. I wasn’t even sure I could point my mom to her house without getting lost.

  When we arrived at her street, the car got flooded with waves of blue and red light. We parked by the corner, where police cruisers and vans didn’t obstruct the way, but as I ran toward her house, my parents yelling after me, cops standing around chatting to each other and looking at their watches and lazily shooing away the small crowd that was starting to gather behind the yellow tape that cordoned off Nicole’s house, I felt as if I were the only one with any sense of urgency. That was until I saw Nicole, and she saw me and started running to me, her face a mask made of garish red and blue light, yelling, “He killed her! He killed her! He killed her!” and in that moment I remembered that earlier at McDonald’s we’d seen a very old man making his slow way to the counter with the aid of a walker, and that having picked up his food, he couldn’t maneuver his way to a table, and that my dad had said to me to go give him a hand, and having felt shy, I’d said no, so he’d gotten up himself and helped the old man in his own slow way. I thought of this as Nicole extended her arms to me, and I understood she had no one else, and that was why she’d called me, and she didn’t have to tell me the whole story for me to now understand what she had said on the phone, which was that her dad had killed her mom and now she was all alone. I understood that when Jake had said that I’d be there for Nicole someday, that his help to us had been purely selfish; he’d meant it not in the way of self-deprecation, but in the way of a payback he expected me to give someday. Well, that day had come, and as the steam of Nicole’s breath gathered on the skin of my neck when I took her in my embrace, I knew it was time to pay back the things America had given us.

  WINGS BEATING

  by Eliot Schrefer

  Safety Harbor

  I guess I should have figured a Florida vacation would have lots of cars in it. This trip has been red arrows, four-way stops, ogling the rare pedestrian, hailing a car on this app or that, or waiting for a crusty cab with a crustier driver. How much of a life around here is spent wallowing in seats, hands at ten and two or a pinkie at six, waiting for a light to tell you when it’s time to act?

  I’m driving around all the time in Maryland too, don’t get me wrong. On Darren weeks I’m chauffeuring him plenty. Violin lessons or swim practice or trips to the mall food court with his girlfriends. Darren’s a busy kid—the only thirteen-year-old I know who uses his calendar app—but driving with him back home means not having to talk. Now we’re on vacation so we’re pressed in the back of these hired cars, not me in front and him on his phone, but right next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, like we’re sweethearts on a date. Like we’re me and his mom, back before the split.

  We’re done with the sightseeing part of the vacation and onto the spa stay, the whole point of this trip. I’m no spa guy, but I was the third-place-out-of-three winner of an episode of Guess It Now, and this spa trip was my prize. I thought Darren and I could bond a little. Maybe we can laugh about it.

  That’s why we’re in the back of a car whose upholstery smells like nightclub cologne, driving down the main street of this town called Safety Harbor, even though there’s no ships here. Pretty safe though!

  “Nearly there, kid,” I say. “The glamorous resort and spa.”

  Darren puts his phone away—he’s pretty good about that stuff, not an addict like most of them—and casts his liquid staring attention toward the spa. I guess it’s the same place as the cutaway graphic on the game show: curved brick drive, blue rectangle of a pool behind the front windows, a restaurant that looks like the conservatory from Clue. There’s something a little seedy about all of it too, which I definitely didn’t expect. Hard to put my finger on. There’s probably microscopic grime between all the tiles.

  Valet boys in polo shirts lounge in front. One says, “Good afternoon, sir,” when I pass. It’s in this put-out way, though, like his mom just made him say it.

  The other boys look at Darren, with his skinny jeans and gay or at least rainbow-spectrum-y designer eyeglasses, and I can feel the smirks they’re all hiding, each and every one.

  I don’t know, maybe I thought the game show would have called ahead, said, Hey, a prize winner’s coming in to stay for a while, give him a congra
ts when he gets there, and Darren could have had a moment of being proud of his dad, but I guess we’re just like any other guests, because the lady behind the counter says, Enjoy your two nights with us, as she gestures me and Darren toward our room.

  The hallway’s covered in aggressively ugly carpet, a blue-green run through by ship’s wheels and nautical rope. It saps the sound from our feet and our luggage wheels.

  The room is perfectly clean. It’s also perfectly stale, like a mock-up that was never meant to be lived in. While we slot our clothes into drawers the window air-conditioning unit rattles and chugs, goes quiet, rattles and chugs, goes quiet. I open the blinds, see the license plates of the cars parked right in front, the gas station on the far side, and close the blinds again.

  It’s a third-place-winner sort of joint, I guess.

  Darren’s messaging on his phone for a while. When the air conditioner’s off, I can actually hear the sound of his thumbs on glass. I wonder, not for the first time, if he’s cruising nearby guys. A little young, sure, but I’d have taken up any chance to have sex at his age, though willing girls are harder to find and I didn’t have apps or anything.

  It’s not like he’s come out to me, but I’m operating on the assumption that my son is gay until proven otherwise. I work with three gay dudes—maybe four, actually—and I find it hard to keep up with their fast and mocking conversations, but they’re good guys. My son has their same armoring wit, the same tendency to check his hair, the same examined life.

  Darren looks up from his phone and asks if I want to go for a walk. My son has made a request that involves spending time with me. I try to play it cool—but yes, I would like to go for a walk!

  We haven’t said much during our days working on our sunburns on Clearwater Beach. We don’t ever talk much, to be honest, but I think that’s what we both want. At least I know it’s what I want, or at least it’s the only way I know how to be. Darren, though—when he’s with his mother he can’t shut up. The number of TV shows they manage to watch and then discuss, it makes me wonder if he’s ever sleeping when he’s in his bedroom with the door closed.