Valley of Bones jp-2

by Michael Gruber

  Anyway, the usual pimpish workup of an amateur, nothing I hadn’t done before except for the ass-fucking, which was quite painful, and the shooting up with heroin, which made me sick as a dog but tended to dull the pain. I did not get addicted, strange to say, except physiologically, and that amounts to twenty-four hours of discomfort, nothing I couldn’t handle. I’m not an addictive personality, it turned out. I pretended to be, though. He got a deal of pleasure out of making me beg for my next shot. What gave me pleasure was thinking of how I would kill him.

  I say that now, but when I really try to recall how I felt, day to day, I draw a blank. Maybe I didn’t have any feelings at all. I know that I lived a good deal of the time outside my body, in a waking dream fed by books. Some sweating pig would be on me and I would be floating through an English garden chatting with elegant ladies and gentlemen, or landing with a roar of white fire on a new planet. There is a level of not caring what happens to you next that is difficult to describe to people whose lives are governed by expectations and entitlements. One good thing was that Jerrell put me in one of his whore apartments so I had an address and could get a library card.

  I was actually a very good whore. I never stole, either from the johns or from Jerrell. He had me in a two-bedroom hole on NW Thirty-fourth Street with two other girls, Marlys and Tammy, both lily teens like me, but genuine junkies. They stole all the time, stupidly, fruitlessly, and on an average of once a week he would whip both of them with wire coat hangers. Then he would whip me, if anything a little harder than he did them, because he couldn’t find my loot or my dope nor could his imagination expand to contain the notion of an honest whore, as if he had come across dry water. This was part of the plan, of course. Then he would usually fuck me in a particularly degrading fashion and then fall asleep. Part of the plan, as well.

  Jerrell had a rival pimp named T-bone Carter. T-bone prided himself on being a cut above the ordinary piece of street shit, and in fact he was somewhat more intelligent than Jerrell, although this was not an epic feat. He drove a Mercedes rather than the Cadillacs the other street dudes had, and he dressed English style, always a nice suit and tie and handmade shoes for T-bone, and he liked jazz rather than funk. I knew some of his girls, and they said he was okay for a scumbag, light on the torture and easy with gifts and dope. A prince.

  T-bone ran a poker game that Jerrell joined every Thursday, and of course he always lost, being a dumb shit, and blamed it on bad luck. Yet another aspect of my plan, but the core of it was Marlys, the stupider and prettier of my two roomies. I got Marlys scared of Jerrell, or more scared than she already was. I said he had killed girls just for fun. I said he told me he was pissed at her ripping him off all the time, that he was going to make an example of her for the other girls. I told her what he was going to do to her, and here my recent reading of crappy thriller fiction furnished the details. When I had got her sufficently petrified, I suggested that a way out might lie with T-bone Carter. Jerrell was scared of T-bone, I said, and T-bone would get a kick out of stealing one of Jerrell’s best earners.

  I happened to be in Jocko’s Tropical Lounge on Second Avenue, my usual hangout, and it was early, maybe four, and I was thinking about heading for my stroll, which was fishing the exits off 395 for squares going home to the burbs, when Jerrell came in fuming, having just heard the news. He slapped me around a couple just on general principle and to show the onlookers that he was still da Man. He had a drink and began whining about what he was going to do to T-bone, how he was nobody’s bitch, and I took this opportunity to tell him that maybe T-bone was treating him like a bitch because it wasn’t any different from ripping off his money at cards all these years, and how I had heard T-bone joking about it right here, and then I gave him some details of the way he’d been shafted, which I had cribbed from Gambling Scams by D. Ortiz, borrowed from the Miami Public Library. Jerrell got real quiet then and went out to his car and came right back and I knew just what he had gone out there for. He drank Courvoisier and 7UP, his favorite, for the next half hour, one after another, and then I had to go to work. It’s a pity I missed it, because I would’ve loved to have seen the look on his face when he pulled his Colt Commander out on T-bone and held it in that stupid sideways way they all do now and pulled the trigger a couple of times. T-bone never carried a weapon, claiming that packing a gat ruined the line of his suit, but he always had a sidekick with him, and on this particular evening his boy was carrying a TEC-9. I heard that Jerrell was still pulling the trigger of the Colt when T-bone’s boy shot him to pieces.

  I was on the street after a trick, rinsing my mouth with Lavoris, when one of the girls told me the news, and I spat it out high into the air, a victory fountain yellow-green under the anticrime lights and then dancing my devil dance down NE Seventh Street heart on fire with demonic glee yelling and screaming, not knowing then that it was the squealing of an animal in a trap. The people I passed stared at me, probably thinking what’s that ho so happy about. Shameful to me now, but if I have to speak the truth, the truth was that it was glorious to feel the strength of his evil hand in me.

  I grabbed a cab for Jerrell’s place. Of course I had made a copy of his house key too. During one of his after-torture snoozes I’d taken wax impressions in a little tin box I got from one of my regulars, a car thief, who made the house key and car keys up for me in return for a couple of free fucks. That’s how I got into Jerrell’s glove compartment, so I could pull the firing pin out of his Colt, as Ray Bob had taught me to do during one of his famous gun maintenance and safety sessions.

  But no cash did I find there. Either someone had beat me or he was carrying his whole roll or he’d lost it all at cards. There was a nice bag of blow, however, and some gold junk. I’m trying to think of what my plan was for after that. Get out of town was the first part of it, or at least away from the part of town where I was known. I had a fugitive warrant out on me, and it wouldn’t take the cops long to figure out that Jerrell getting shot had to be an inside job. Maybe T-bone would be unjustly accused of setting it up, with me as an accomplice. I got into another cab and told the guy to drive south. I was thinking the Keys eventually, but I needed a little time to get myself together, so I told the driver to take me to Coconut Grove because I had heard that kids hung out there and I wanted to be a kid again, even a homeless kid.

  As I recall, it was a Friday night a balmy evening and the streets were full. I got some strange looks, as I was wearing a silver threaded halter top and tiny pink shorts and white platforms. I went into a Gap and bought jeans, a couple of Tshirts, a shoulder bag, and tossed the whore garments in the trash. I washed the whore makeup off in a restaurant bathroom, dropping several years in the process. I was finished with whoring, or at least finished with it on the street level. I was not that gorgeous I knew, but I had technique and I was a good enough actress and I had a look some men liked. I did a couple of lines of coke in the Gap dressing room to improve my attitude and went out to see what I could turn up in the way of shelter.

  I went to the park they have there down by the water, and there were plenty of kids hanging out to the sound of Def Leppard from a boom box. There were a couple of bicycle cops too, but they didn’t give me a glance. I am a good fitter-in. I went over to the raggediest bunch of kids I could find, looking for the telltale bedrolls and bags, was asked for spare change, handed over a couple of bills, got to talking to a gangly Mohawked and tattooed white boy holding a string leash attached to a black and white mutt. Tommy and Bo. Tommy had a girlfriend, Carmen, brown skin, buckteeth, dreads, bracelet tats on the wrists, heavily pierced about the face and navel. Told some plausible lies, learned the ropes on how to be a homeless teenager in Miami. Right now they were staying in a squat set up in an old commercial building on Douglas off Grand. It was scheduled for demo, but there was some legal delay and really nobody owned it. There were some bad junkies hanging there and guys, you know, looking to score young girls. And boys. But you could avoid them. They usually spen
t the night there, in the Market, as they called it.

  I bought them both a meal at a fast-food place, and late that night we crawled through the chain-link and crossed the rubbled parking lot. It was a two-story concrete block building whose main distinguishing feature was a high square tower that held a water tank and had once displayed the logo of the defunct retailer. The main squat was a cavernous former drugstore. There were a couple of dozen people there sitting around candles, making it sort of like a cathedral, although one whose god had taken a hike. Tommy and Carmen were obviously well known. People petted Bo and talked quietly. There were smaller kids there, with parents and without. Carmen lent me one of her blankets and showed me how to make a pallet out of plastic bags and newspapers. Not the Hilton, but after all that had happened that day I found I was exhausted. I would have slept pretty well except I had shoved the bag with my gold jewelry down into my underpants, and every time I rolled over it woke me up.

  In the morning I got on the Metrorail and took it downtown, where I found a no-questions pawnshop and got rid of Jerrell for four hundred and change.

  Why these details? I am drifting, am I not? The tone is drifting too, isn’t it, the person I am now oozing back into the past, coloring the story with later experience. The voice problem again. Oh, Jesus, if you could just help me get out of my own way for two minutes at a time…!

  Okay, back to the park, hook up again with Tommy and Carmen. Smoked some mediocre dope. Was offered crack but declined. Got hit on by two guys in their twenties, offered money too, I guess it showed, I mean what I really was, but declined that too. It was the world of no-plans, we were like pigeons pecking at bits and pieces. Restful in a way, much easier than whoring. A week or two or three passed like this. Then one morning Carmen said it was her birthday, sixteen, and cried. It turned out she came from a family that did not believe in parties, some religious nut thing, and she had never had one. So I did the first fairly selfless thing I ever did in my life?hey I got some money, I’ll throw you a party tonight at the Market, and I did, cake and candles from the Winn-Dixie, KFC, beer on my fake ID. I don’t know where it came from, maybe the first feathery light touch of my saint.

  It was nice for her and for the kids I guess. I was pretty out of it because I started having bad cramps around four in the afternoon and they just got worse, and Motrin didn’t do anything for them. I was bleeding like crazy too, not like usual at all. I started to think seriously about my plumbing, writhing there on my pallet, and realized that my cycle had been screwy for months, although I laid that to my career choice at the time. I should also say that, weirdly enough, while I was having sex with hundreds of men a week the idea that it would have some effect on my body never once crossed my mind, I was that young.

  Anyway Carmen asked me what was wrong and I told her and she said I ought to go to the hospital and I said no way, for obvious reasons, and then Audrey, an older woman with two kids, said I ought to try the sister van, which was this nun who drove a white bread truck around where the homeless hung out and handed out medicine and did exams and never asked about anything. You’re on the run, right? she asked, and I admitted I was.

  Tommy and Carmen half carried me to a parking lot on Dixie Highway off Douglas where an old white-painted bread van stood under the orangey anticrime lights surrounded by a small group of homeless patients. I was dripping blood down my pants leg, so they let me through first. The van’s interior was brightly lit off the idling engine and held a gurney, a metal stool, shelves, and cabinets. The proprietress was about forty, smooth brown skin looking darker against a white head cloth with red piping across the brow and under the broad forehead black serious eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. Something wrong with her face, the right side drawn up in a funny way, so that it looked like a smirk but there was no smirking in the rest of it, the opposite really, deep serious. Gray dress, white apron like a restaurant cook, a chain with a heavy silver crucifix on it, a pin at her breast, another lighter chain around her neck with something small and brassy on it. She looked like she weighed ninety pounds wet, but her grip as she helped me on the gurney was like a jockey’s. She slammed the door on the interested crowd. Trinidad Salcedo, my very first Blood Sister.

  Off with the jeans and underpants, soaked red. Temperature taken, blood pressure. I was weeping with pain. She looked, probed gently and at length. A smell of antiseptic and a sting. More pain. I howled. She was between my thighs, busy. What’s wrong with me? Her head rose above my belly. How long have you been pregnant? Are you nuts? I’m not pregnant! You were, she said, you just had a miscarriage. More antiseptic, stick in the arm, a tiny cylinder filling with red. Wave of nausea. Take these. Pills. I swallowed, asked for another glass of water. I pulled up my bloody jeans.

  What’s your name? I gave her Emily, and she introduced herself. You in the life? No small talk from Sister Trinidad. A lie leaped nimbly to my lips but a sudden and unfamiliar impulse batted it away. Yeah, I said, but I quit. Good girl, she said, and it wasn’t until that very moment that I realized that it was true. She handed me a bottle. You have crab lice. This is insecticidal shampoo. She gave me a photocopied list of places where I could get a shower.

  There was a knocking on the van door. She opened it, and there was an old deteriorated piss bum with a gash on his forehead. She ushered him in and motioned me into a corner of the van. I sat on a padded chest and watched her work. She talked to him more than she had to me, she knew his name, apparently not the first visit. He stank, and I wondered how she could stand to touch him, and felt obscurely jealous and then felt angry with myself for giving a rat’s ass.

  Stitched and bandaged, he left. A couple of more customers then, mostly first aid, but one baby too, the mother a little older than me, speaking Spanish, frightened. The nurse seemed to have forgotten me. I may have dozed.

  Her hand on my shoulder, face close to mine. I have to move to my next stop, she said, and asked me if I had a place to stay? I said I did. I asked her if she was a nun. She said she was a sister, she explained that nuns are sisters who live in communities, which she and the others of her order did not, and told me the name of it, which meant nothing to me. I don’t think we had any sisters or nuns in Caluga County. She waited for me to go, but for some reason I was reluctant to leave her presence, no not for some reason, no this was the Holy Spirit making his first little chip at the ashes impacted around my heart. I said what do those letters mean, pointing at her badge. It was a gold cross on white enamel with a red bleeding heart in the center and on the arms of the cross U V I M and around the gold rim SNSBC FAM

  She said pointing this means Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ and Fidelis ad Mortem, and these letters stand forubi vadimus ibi manemur. I asked what it meant and she said it means faithful unto death and where we go there we stay. I must have looked blank because she explained that it meant that when they decided to go someplace and take care of people, they stuck with their patients even if it meant the sisters had to die. I asked whether any of them had ever died, and she said only about a hundred or so. In Miami? She let out a surprising guffaw then hid her face in her hands, a strange sort of oriental gesture, and begged my pardon. No, in other countries. We specialize in helping people hurt by wars, she said, and asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no and asked her why she was here there wasn’t any wars in Miami except dope wars and she said she was taking a break, this was like a vacation for her.

  I had a lot more questions, like what was that little brass angel she wore around her neck, but although she wasn’t looking impatient or anything I could feel her vibing me out of there. She handed me a package of thick sanitary pads. Take care of yourself, Emily, she said, and God bless you. She looked at me and I could feel that she could see through me just like I thought Ray Bob could that time, but instead of seeing all the bad she was just seeing the good. It surprised the hell out of me at the time since I didn’t think I had any in there. Then I was outside thinking that aside from
Percival Orne Foy she was the most interesting person I ever met.

  Twelve

  They put Paz on administrative leave while they investigated the shooting. He didn’t think it would be much of an investigation, because they had the guy’s gun, there was a civilian witness (Lorna Wise) backing up Paz’s story to the letter, and the victim was a well-known local scumbag named Amando Cortez, Dodo Cortez to his friends and the police, who knew him as a head breaker and enforcer for the dope people. He had a pair of murder arrests on his sheet, both of which he had beat at trial, and a thirty-six-month jolt for aggravated assault/attempted murder. He was also a whiteish Cuban and so could be shot by a cop of any color whatever without hysteria breaking out.

  Paz was spending his first day of administrative leave with Lorna Wise, who had also taken the day off, and had called him early and then turned off her phone. He was surprised to have been thus called, but he had driven over, and now they were sitting in her little terrace out back under a mango tree, drinking iced tea together like old friends, which they certainly were not, but there was something working there, under the surface.

  She asked whether he was in any trouble, and he explained that it was what they called a good shooting, and why.

  ” ‘A good shooting,’ ” she said. “What an expression!”

  “As opposed to a bad one, the old lady shot in the back because a cop was under the impression that she was a crazed felon with a shotgun about to attack.”

  “Does that happen?”

  “In Miami? More than it should. We got a bunch of detectives on trial now for running sort of a death squad, whacking bad guys they didn’t like. How are you feeling, by the way?” He had noticed a crinkling around her eyes, as if she were going to cry.