Hoodtown

by Christa Faust

  All I could think of was that ear. I shuddered, imagining her laid out in a chilly drawer, slowly rotting and waiting for family that would never come. Then I had an awful realization.

  “Where’s...” I almost said Kitsune, but just couldn’t bear to say her name out loud. “...the second one?”

  Thinking of Kitsune here in this grim, awful place made me feel cold and more alone than ever.

  “Her people came for her. ‘Spect she’d be buried by now.”

  Must have been Rubia — the only family she had outside of Gitcho. Must have taken her and had her buried in the Hoodtown Cementerio under a carved headstone with her name and flowers and incense and all her favorite things. A small comfort in the hell of all this but a comfort none the less. Boy I sure hope there’s someone to claim me when it’s my turn to visit this lonely place.

  “What’ll happen to the first one?” I asked.

  “Well,” the old man paused and rubbed the back of his neck. “Six more days and then they bury her out in the city lot with all the other ones nobody wants.”

  I shook my head, a thousand wordless emotions sloshing around inside me.

  “I’ll tell you what.” Zopilote turned away from me and running a gnarled finger over the paper drawer label that read Jane Doe over a hastily scrawled number, 32330. “I never seen nothing like this. I been here 19 years and I ain’t never seen nothing like this.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Do you remember a wrestler named Black Eagle? Died a few years back. You remember what happened to him?”

  The old man’s eyes drew down into narrow silts.

  “Car bomb,” he said.

  “A car bomb.” I nodded. “He would have been pretty badly burned, huh.”

  “That’s right.” I could feel him shutting down on me.

  “Well then how could you be sure it was really him?”

  He turned away from me and started washing the implements in the sink.

  “I ain’t no cop or doctor.” Grating steel clash as he banged things together. “How should I know?”

  But he did. I could tell. He knew something he wasn’t telling me. Well I wasn’t about to beat up an old man so there really wasn’t anything else I could do.

  I had no desire to stick around and watch Zopilote prep Jasmine’s body so I left, running the facts over and over in my mind. I wondered who else might have more info on Black Eagle and his supposed death. Of course there was someone, someone who knew every single thing that ever happened in the lucha biz or anywhere in Hoodtown for that matter, but after everything that had gone down that day, I just didn’t feel up to that little emotional bee’s nest. I did the only thing I was capable of doing. I went home.

  18

  Back in my apartment, I lay on my futon with the red and purple light washing over me. Jaguar de Juarez. That son of a bitch just had to be a part of this. Why couldn’t he have picked some other hooker to rescue? The answer to that one came way too easy. Jasmine was a big girl, big legs and ass, and she was a tough bitch who probably knew just how to put little heroes in their places. In short, she was a lot like me.

  I suppose I owe you a bit more of an explanation here. I need to be honest, to tell it like it was, otherwise the rest of the story isn’t gonna make any sense.

  I met Jaguar nearly twenty-one years ago. He was eighteen, and teen-idol pretty, almond shaped eyes fringed with girlish lashes and a proud, Aztec profile beneath his great-great-grandfather’s golden, jaguar-spotted hood. Indio-dark skin and a lithe little body with the perfect muscular symmetry of an anatomy drawing. A rich técnico so from another planet, I would never have dreamed of being anything more than polite. But somehow, that’s not how it worked out.

  We were touring with A.C.L.L., me working top women’s and Jaguar still low on the ladder of the men’s division but unquestionably on his way to the top. The promoter had this great idea to work in a mixed tag match. Me and Axe, an unparalleled physical comedian and flamboyant coward whose elaborate shenanigans in the ring perfectly offset my own brutal, businesslike style, against Jaguar and my nemesis at the time, the saintly Rosa de Oro.

  We had an ongoing angle that involved Axe keeping Rosa tied up on the outside while I beat the tar out of Jaguar. Jaguar, being the young hero that he was, refused to hit a girl. The audience would be going nuts, out of their seats and screaming against this horrible injustice until finally, Rosa snapped, kicked Axe in the cojones and then jumped up into the ring and let me have it, saving her brave partner and eventually putting the finish on me.

  We had done it a few times when I started to notice the way Jaguar was looking at me. Worshipful, almost. The stiffer the chops, the deeper the heat in his eyes. Knowing what I know now, I would have smelled it a mile away, but I was young and dumb and it wasn’t until one night that I had him pinned with one hand around his throat and I felt his erection straining against my hip that it finally clicked. It was as if time slowed to a crawl and I was suddenly aware of every inch of his body against mine. Heat flushed my cheeks beneath my hood and my pussy beneath my tights. Our eyes locked and there was no question that he was mine.

  The ref had counted one and two and was lingering over the third, knowing Jaguar was supposed to kick out but he just lay there, passive beneath me and looking up at me like there was no one else in the arena. Just as the ref was going down for three, I pulled Jaguar’s shoulders up off the mat, holding a finger up to show the people I wasn’t done with him yet. They went into an ecstasy of boos and whistles and I flipped him onto his stomach, kicking him again and again in the back of his head and giving him plenty of time to will away his hard-on as best he could before I dragged him to his feet and into a belly-to-back suplex.

  The rest of the match went like clockwork, but there was this weird new awareness, this hot connection between us that refused to go away. I could smell him. His sweat was on my lips. The finish came and went and I practically ran from the ring, desperate to get away from all these confusing emotions speeding through my bloodstream.

  It was wrong from the start. For one thing it’s never a good idea to get emotionally involved with someone whose ass you have to kick on a daily basis. And on top of that, he was a técnico. Not just any old good guy, but Jaguar de fucking Juarez, the fifth incarnation of one of the most famous hoods in lucha history. I knew better, but I still found myself in his hotel room.

  God, I thought I killed all those memories years ago, but there’s something about that kind of young, headlong lovemaking that’s like dying and being born all at once. The whole world’s against you and you still can’t keep your hands off each other. All the stupid, cliché love shit that hits you below the belt and takes away every drop of sense you ever had. He did shit to me that I still don’t completely understand. He coaxed a kind of tenderness out of me that I never felt again. He made me feel so protective, as if my arms were enough to keep him safe forever. He made me feel clean.

  We stayed up all night locked into the kind of passionate talk that is only possible when you’ve opened all your gates, stripped away all your armor. He would tell me how much he hated his life, the endless pressure to be perfect, to be a hero, to live up to the Jaguar dynasty and the 24 karat god that was his father. I would tell him about my worthless mother, about growing up nameless, just another unwanted trickbaby in a world where family was everything. I spent hours exploring the limits of his beautiful body, pushing him further and further in search of the burning catharsis he craved, that crystalline moment where everything else melted away and he could be fully and completely himself. He used to say that he would do anything to please me. He knew he could never really please his father, but if he took what I dealt out and gave me what I demanded, then he could please me and pleasure me and I would hold him and tell him how good he was. That was like a ten course meal for that love-starved kid. And for a young ruda who had clawed her way up from the street and already felt old at twenty-two, it tasted pretty damn good too. Of course it coul
dn’t last.

  I found him crying one night in the dry showers of Arena Quetzales, pressed into the corner with his hands over his masked face.

  “What is it?” I took his wrists and uncovered his face.

  His mask was soaked around the eyeholes.

  “I am going to be married,” he said, in almost inaudible Spanish. I knew he was upset when his English escaped him.

  “What are you saying?”

  “My family announced the wedding this morning. Her name is Tiger Princess, daughter of Dragonkiller and Lady Tiger. I’m supposed to meet her tomorrow.”

  He slammed a fist into the tile. I held him, feeling anger and jealousy and a thousand other things warring inside me. I knew Tiger Princess, a hard working young babyface with a solid workrate and a pedigree a mile long. She was pretty too, petite and athletic with gentle brown eyes and a million dollar smile. In that moment, I could have easily killed her with my bare hands.

  I caressed the back of his hooded head, panicking on the inside, but on the outside, still as stone, Plans and ideas and crazy desperate fear all bounced off each other in my head and I wanted to say a million things but instead I said:

  “How much money do you have?”

  “What?” He looked up at me. “I don’t know, a couple hundred. Why?”

  “Meet me in my hotel room after the match tonight.” I told him. I was holding him too tight, but I couldn’t seem to help it. “Bring your money and anything else you want to take with us.”

  He pulled away.

  “Take with us where?”

  Voices echoed down through the locker room and in a minute there would be a flood of Hoods filling the shower.

  I turned away.

  “Just be there!”

  The match that night was probably one of the toughest I’ve ever had to endure. Ok maybe the second toughest. Anyway, just looking at him was killing me and he wouldn’t meet my gaze, even though his body still talked to me just like always. I waited for him to show up in my shitty hotel room for nearly an hour and when he arrived, he had nothing with him.

  “X,” he said, still not able to look me in the eyes. “I can’t do this. I can’t leave with you.”

  Somehow in my youthful arrogance, it had never even occurred to me that he might say no. I just stood there, stupid, while he piled on the hurt.

  “I mean…” He was looking everywhere in the room but at me. “I can’t just up and run away. I have a commitment to my family. To my máscara.”

  He must have sensed the fury that was building up inside me but he kept on.

  “I don’t love this girl. I don’t even know her. It’s just a family thing. You know you are the only one. Please, X, listen to me. Just because I have to get married doesn’t mean we have to stop seeing each other.”

  “Do us both a favor and stop talking,” I said, killing mad but still cool, still cool as ice.

  He finally looked up at me, tears in his eyes and I knew he was torn to shreds over this but I just couldn’t seem to see past my anger.

  “I don’t want to hear any more sorry-ass excuses. All I want to hear is whether you’re gonna be a man and come away with me tonight or whether you’re gonna be Daddy’s boy and spend the rest of your life as your family’s puppet.”

  Silence, tears pooling in the eyeholes of his golden hood and then he spoke up in a soft, broken voice.

  “I can’t, X. I just can’t.” He swallowed hard. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  I wouldn’t understand. Bastard trickbaby that I was, I just couldn’t possibly comprehend the importance of his sacred responsibly to his high and mighty fucking family.

  I hit him.

  I know it was wrong but the anger got away from me and I let him have it, hard, in the face. He staggered back and I could see in his eyes that he was afraid of me. That made me feel simultaneously proud and horrible.

  I wanted to tell him that I loved him so much that I would rather die than share him with another woman. I wanted to tell him that I was hurt and jealous and so horribly afraid of losing him that I wanted to kill him. Instead, I said nothing. I just slung my bag over my shoulder and walked out.

  I left A.C.L.L. without notice, left the tour, left everything behind. I spent a couple years working around in the smaller promotions, picking up extra money as hired muscle whenever the opportunity presented itself. I drank too much, fucked too much and fought too much and in the end, I found myself in a two-bit ring in some cowtown dump with a cute little midcard queen named Blue Velvet.

  Anyway, I never saw Jaguar in the flesh again. Sure, I saw his famous hood everywhere I went. There was no avoiding it. Banners and posters and painted boards nailed to the sides of old trucks. Jaguar de Juarez says don’t forget to take your vitamins so you can grow up big and strong like him. Jaguar de Juarez reminding us to respect our barrio and throw litter into the trash barrels where it belongs. Jaguar de Juarez with his sweet young wife and three perfect children, including little Jaguar 6 in short pants and his own tiny version of the famous family hood, wishing all of Hoodtown Feliz Dia del Santo. It hurt like hell at first, but after a while I just got numb to it. It was easier to ignore when I couldn’t smell him.

  And now he was back in my life, probably laying awake in that hotel room at the Kabuki just like I was right at that very moment. Waiting for me. It would be so easy to go back to him. Too easy. Santo, why did he have to be mixed up in this.

  Instead of going to the Kabuki, I went to the all-nite liquor store and bought a bottle of tequila and a six of Tinieblas Gold and took them over to Malasuerte’s.

  19

  Because it seemed like the logical place to start, I spent the next day hunting up Diamond, the pimp who Kitsune had claimed was missing some machi no chicas. I finally tracked him down at a Blue Street pool hall three blocks down from the Cobra Room.

  The place was up a flight of narrow stairs, strange, low-ceilinged space lit only by bulbs hung on raw wire above each scuffed and ancient table. There was a curious smell hanging in the air inside that place, something old and weirdly tomb-like under the usual beer and cigarette veneer.

  Diamond was easy to spot. He was a mini like El Jefe but bigger, nearly four feet tall. I watched him for a few minutes as he dragged a barstool from one side of his table to the other, lining up a tricky combination and nailing it like a pro. The dim yellow light glittered off the jewels on his thick, stubby fingers and the gaudy rhinestones encrusting his flashy gold hood as he high-fived his snickering minions.

  I waited till the game was finished, and as the sawed-off pimp was tucking his winnings into his tacky jacket, I approached him as casually as I could.

  “You’re Diamond, right?”

  He looked me up and down.

  “You’re a little old for my stable, sweetheart,” he said, biting the end off a cheap cigar and lighting up. “But maybe if you lose a few pounds...”

  “I’m not looking for a job, pendejo, I’m looking for a girl.” I squinted against the stinking smoke. “A dead girl.”

  “Hey I know you,” he said, teeth clenched around the huge cigar. “X, the Ice Queen. Sure, I saw you fight Rosa de Oro at the Telco.”

  “Yeah well, that was a long time ago.”

  “Shame what happened with Blue Velvet.”

  “Look, I’m not here to talk about ancient history.” I gripped the cue ball nearly hard enough to crush it and then let all my breath out and rolled it down to the far end of the table. “I understand you have two girls missing.”

  He looked at me like he was sizing me up, trying to figure out my motivations. I could see he was getting ready to clam up.

  “Kitsune told me,” I said.

  “Kitsune?” He cocked his head, thoughtful. “Heard Gitcho got popped.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “Assaulting an officer.”

  “Que lástima.” The pimp flicked a giant wad of ash onto the floor. “I wonder if that Rubia needs a shoulder to cry on. She’s a good littl
e piece. Sturdy. Hard worker. No drugs. I might need to pay her a visit, offer my condolences.”

  He dug in his pocket while I bit my tongue. To my surprise, he fished out a photo.

  “Dulce and Lace,” he said, handing over the photo. “They ran off together nearly three weeks ago.”

  The overexposed, black and white photo showed two naked Hood girls using huge dildos on each other. One had a pale satin hood trimmed with white velvet and the other dark, overlaid with silvery lace. They were similar enough to be sisters, both fleshy and solid with long, curvy legs and large round asses. Either one could have been the dead girl at Minnie’s. Either one or neither. It wasn’t much to go on but it was better than nothing.

  “You find those baitas you tell them they better stay gone,” Diamond said stabbing the cigar towards me. “You tell them not to be dragging their dirty snatches around the neighborhood or I swear they’ll wish they was done by that killer. You tell them that from me.”

  I nodded, pocketing the photo, and got the hell out of there.

  20

  Next stop, the Hoodtown library. Now, you thought the Hoodtown hospital was broke, I’ll tell you our library gets maybe five bucks a year. Mostly donations from guilty Skin organizations trying to help us benighted, backward Hoods to better ourselves. Every book in the place is older than dirt and read to rags. Lots of religious crap and outdated textbooks. I haven’t set foot in the place since I dropped out of school about a million years ago.

  That day it was hot and dull inside, stinking of foxed paper and neglect. All the windows were propped open with hardback books and a few crooked fans weakly stirred the thick, dusty air. It didn’t help.

  The tiny brown librarian was as old as her books and seemed almost a part of her huge, wooden desk. She pointed me through a shadowy doorway, past a sullen cluster of school kids, into the periodical graveyard.

  Inside Periodicals old papers were stored on wooden racks that reached the high cobwebby ceiling, organized halfheartedly by date. There was the Angel City Tribune and the Hoodtown Diario but I was looking for the lucha sheets. Not the glossy mark stuff, but the insider rags. Anything that might have more information on the supposed death of Black Eagle.