Bodega Dreams

by Ernesto B. Quinonez

  Afterward, Blanca stocked up on the religious cards, booklets, and leaflets she hands out every Saturday morning. Then she kissed half the women in the congregation goodbye, making small talk along the way. I waited patiently because it meant a lot to her. Finally, after more goodbyes and gushing about how great a speaker God’s anointed was, Blanca and I were out the door and walking home.

  “So that’s Roberto Vega. Impressive. I thought he was very convincing.”

  “You should see, sometimes brothers come from as far away as New Jersey to hear him talk.”

  “Blanca,” I said, “if you know Claudia is in love with Roberto, why did you invite him to dinner? He’s only seventeen and Claudia looks at least thirty.”

  “She’s twenty-seven.”

  “For a Latina that’s not married, twenty-seven is ancient. Nobody is going to want to marry her.” Okay, I could have phrased that better. I waited for Blanca’s wrath. I had just patched things up with her and now here I was, starting something new. But Blanca didn’t get mad, in fact she agreed.

  “Yes, isn’t that terrible, Julio?” I was surprised at her reaction. “That’s not one of our finest qualities.” I wasn’t sure if Blanca meant Latinos or her church. “It’s a terrible thing that we feel a single woman at twenty-five is over the hill. You should listen to some of the sisters in the congregation bug her. ‘So when are you getting married, Claudia? So when are you going to have children, Claudia? You’re not that young anymore, Claudia, te vas a quedar jamona.’ So much pressure on that poor girl. Meanwhile all the single brothers, young or old, want nineteen-year-old virgins. It’s amazing.”

  I started laughing; I liked it when she trashed them.

  “Don’t laugh, Julio. Roberto Vega is different. True, he is still young, but he is as mature as a man in his thirties. And Claudia is the most spiritual girl in the congregation. Once he sees that, he might marry her.”

  I laughed even harder. “So you think, Blanca, that Roberto Vega is going to give up his celebrity status in your religion to help this girl from Colombia? Blanca, you can be so dumb.” She knew I was half kidding.

  “So? It could happen. It could happen. If it’s God’s will it will happen,” she insisted, laughing in spite of herself.

  “Of course it’s God’s will. I know God. We go way back,” I said.

  Blanca just rolled her eyes at me, punched me softly in the stomach, and said, “Stupid.”

  Then she said, firmly, “Well, if Christ wants it to happen, then it will happen.” She knew that part of Roberto’s appeal was not just that he was young and anointed, but single, too. If he got married at eighteen he’d be ruining all that. But she had hopes.

  I gave her a quick kiss on the forehead. I was glad I had gone to church, because it had made her happy. That night, walking home with Blanca near me, the streets seemed cleaner, the neighborhood quieter and gentler. We saw a little kid kicking a garbage can bigger than him, yelling that he was the Master of the Universe. What was he doing out so late? If he had been a little girl, I bet his parents would’ve been more concerned. When he kicked the can over and all the garbage spilled on the street, his mother yelled at him from a window above. “Mira, Junito, get your ass up here, o te meto una pela.” We burst out laughing, then began talking about the baby. About names again and about education. We talked in a cute and silly private language of our own. But all that was broken when we reached 109th and Third, three blocks from our home.

  “Chino! Chino! Blanca!” A man we knew came running over toward us. It was Georgie Vato. We called him that because his name was George and he was Mexican. When we were kids the play Zoot Suit was very popular, and the characters in it kept calling one another vato. The name stuck. Plus, he was a fat little kid and we would tease him, jeering, “Georgie Vato ate all his tacos and then his gato.” He would protest, “Yo, I ain’t got a cat!” which was the dumbest thing to say because then we could answer, “Thass right, cuz you ate him.”

  But that night, his face was serious.

  “Chino! Blanca! Your house is on fire!” he called out urgently. “The trucks are still there.”

  Blanca and I looked at each other. In El Barrio you always think that the fire engines are headed to someone else’s house. You never think it will be your own home that’s on fire, but when it is, all the toughness, the calloused nonchalance of watching fires and hearing sirens falls away. It takes away your immunity, makes you knock on wood and count your blessings the next time you hear a siren at night.

  We ran home. From a block away, it looked as if they were filming a movie. Red lights were flashing. The red-orange blaze engulfing the building looked surreal. The people looked like extras on a set, watching in a tight group from across the street. Every time the fire consumed a new window, the wind creating fireballs that would fly out into the air and dissolve in mid flight, the people who didn’t live in the building would yell, “Olé! Olé!” I saw a woman run down the fire escape with a bucket of water. When she reached the floor where the fire was she threw the contents through the window. Everyone laughed. “Oh, that’ll help.” Someone said the fireman that was escorting her down the fire escape let her do it, because she wouldn’t go with him otherwise. When we reached our side of the street, Blanca drew herself toward me and, shaking, buried her face in my arms. When she pulled away from me a bit, she saw one of our neighbors.

  “Are you all right?” Blanca asked.

  “I’m fine, everyone got out. And we didn’t have much,” she answered, half in tears as her kids clung to her legs. It might not have been much, I thought, but it was hers. Blanca nervously placed her hand on her stomach. I knew she was thanking the Lord that the fire had happened while she, the baby, and I were at church.

  “Cristo salva, gracias al Señor. It’s not the end of the world.”

  As we watched the fire grow more stubborn, fighting the firemen and their hoses, our faces were blank. I knew Blanca felt what all of us who lived in that building were feeling. Displaced. Disoriented. No insurance, no new place, everything lost.

  Then something happened.

  Someone appeared. Someone who looked like he came out of the fire itself. Slowly, like a mirage from a desert sandstorm, a figure emerged walking toward the people. A tall, elegant man came into focus with his arms outstretched and a face of pure empathy. It was Nazario. When the people saw him, they rushed him. They all wanted to touch him as if his touch could make the blind see, the deaf hear, and the mute speak. Blanca and I just stayed where we were.

  “Who’s that?” Blanca asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said automatically, because when our eyes locked, even from a few feet away, Nazario’s eyes told me all I needed to know.

  Fischman had done it. The fire was in retaliation for Salazar. The war was in full bloom.

  ROUND 6

  After the Fire

  AFTER the fire was put out, we tenants were let back inside to retrieve what remained of our belongings. The building had been completely drenched with water and the stairs had become little waterfalls. Glass, pieces of Sheetrock, broken furniture, cups, nail polish, pans, hair brushes, mirrors, bottles, plates, rugs, clothes—almost everything imaginable floated in streams of water from apartments that looked like flooded basements. The elevator didn’t work and all the windows were broken. The firemen had axed their way through what seemed to be every wall and every door, leaving the place looking like a bomb had gone off. The fire had left the ugly smell of smoke stamped and sealed on every piece of clothing that had survived the flames.

  Soon word spread around the building that someone had spilled gasoline down the trash chute. A match had been dropped in and the fire had shot straight up to the roof. Between the fire and the water damage, no apartment was habitable. No one in their right mind could have spent the night in that building.

  Blanca and I tried to salvage what we could. We needed Vera’s ring more than ever. And I also needed to find the Apple Jacks box containing Sap
o’s stuff.

  Meanwhile Nazario played his part beautifully. His face led you to believe his place was among the ruins. Nazario was moving from apartment to apartment, reassuring the tenants that they’d have a place to stay within a month. I believed him; I knew Bodega had three buildings on 119th and Lexington that were almost ready to house people.

  I always knock the people in Blanca’s church, but a lot of them were right there that night helping us move our things, everyone splashing around ankle-deep in water. If we hadn’t had Blanca’s spiritual brothers and sisters we would have been moving things out all night.

  I had left the ring on top of the bureau, but it wasn’t there. No doubt it had been knocked down like everything else. I bent down low, looking for a reflection of light in the water, and then I saw it glittering like a goldfish. I reached through the water, snatched it up, and put it in my pocket. The Apple Jacks box was a problem, and I started to get a bit scared when at first I couldn’t find it, but then I saw it floating, the paper box dissolving like a wafer. I took Sapo’s stuff out and hid it under my shirt.

  A little later, downstairs in the lobby, which looked like some purgatorial setting, Nazario had assembled most of the tenants. He spoke eloquently about Latin pride, about a sense of community and trust. He compared the fire to a tragedy like the ones that occurred in the Mother Island or our other Latin countries, where the most important form of help you got was from your neighbor, not the government.

  “You have to tough it out. Help each other. We’re Boricuas, we’re Latinos! Where are you from?” he asked, pointing to one of the residents.

  “Mayaguez,” the woman answered.

  “I have an aunt in Mayaguez. She raised me,” Nazario continued. “We were pobre, pobre. All I had to play with was a cat named Guayo. A tough cat named Guayo, who would dive into a lake like a bear and emerge with a fish in his mouth.” The people laughed a little. “He hated to go in that lake but he had to eat.” The people understood. “You have to tough it out! We are one people, one island, one Latin continent.” Then he raised his index finger in the air. “One people! One month! Tough it out for one month!” The tenants all began to murmur in agreement. “Remember it was Willie Bodega who sheltered you.”

  At this, Blanca glanced my way, with the look of a student who wants to ask a professor a question but knows the class is almost over and her question won’t be appreciated by her peers, who are dying to go home.

  Nazario continued, “And it will be Willie Bodega who will shelter you again. Any man or woman who believes in community and pride will be included in his love for this neighborhood. Stay with your mother, your brother, your sister, your friend, your priest, anybody for a month. Give Willie Bodega a month and he will shelter you.” Then Nazario looked at Blanca, telling the tenants in Spanish that this woman was pregnant and couldn’t wait a month. He asked Blanca if I, standing behind her, was her husband. Blanca said yes, almost in a whisper. I played along and held her shoulders. Blanca knew this was a farce. She already knew, I could see, that anything connected with Bodega was trouble. She was still not completely sold on my claims of ignorance about that reporter’s death, and as soon as she heard Nazario mention Bodega I sensed she was sure he was one of Bodega’s pawns. But right now was no time to ask questions. Now there were more important things at hand. The questions would come later, and I knew I would have to have some fucking great answers.

  Right then there was the whole tragedy of the fire staring us in the face. Nazario announced that Bodega would take care of pregnant women and one-parent families first, and that Blanca and I would be rehoused the very next day. No one seemed to have a problem with this. The other tenants even said Blanca and I deserved it because we were good kids. But I knew Bodega couldn’t have Vera’s niece homeless, even temporarily.

  Nazario then continued to circulate, moving like a panther from one place to another, making sure all the tenants had seen him, while he looked for an opportunity to speak to me alone. The moment came when most of the tenants, Pentecostal, Catholic, or whatever, got together to pray in the lobby. No one noticed me not joining in. Maybe Blanca did, but she knew where I stood on that.

  “Fischman?” I asked Nazario as we stood in the flooded apartment of someone who was probably out praying with the rest of the tenants.

  “I have something to ask of you,” Nazario said.

  “Name it.” I wanted a piece of Fischman myself. This fuck could have killed my wife, who had nothing to do with him or Bodega. He had pushed me to the point where I could either break completely away from the situation or dive in completely. I was in.

  “I want you to come with me tomorrow to Queens.”

  “What’s in Queens?”

  “We have to speak with someone. And should something happen to me, I want this person we are going to see to be familiar with your face for future reference. Understand?” I didn’t, but I nodded anyway.

  All I understood was that Bodega was in trouble. Not with the fire department, which would know right away it was arson and dismiss it as another case of pyromania in a neighborhood crawling with firebugs. Nor with the media, who needed sensation and since no deaths had occurred would give it only passing mention, like a footnote in a thousand-page book. The Harry Goldstein Management Agency would receive little attention, making it the only good thing, besides no one dying, that Bodega had on his side. What Bodega had to worry about was this Fish of Loisiada making tidal waves.

  “Where’s Bodega?” I asked Nazario.

  “Vera” was all he said.

  I was about to ask something else when we heard the tenants say Amen in a chorus of hope and then begin to disperse.

  “I’ll send for you tomorrow, after you’ve moved,” Nazario said, and left.

  That night Blanca and I slept at Blanca’s mother’s. Blanca was too tired to ask questions and went straight to sleep, knowing we would need rest because tomorrow we would be moving again.

  ROUND 7

  Watering His Peach Tree

  BLANCA and I missed work so we could move. Bodega sent someone over with a lease. Maybe it was the immediacy of the situation or maybe she was just too tired, but Blanca asked no questions. We signed the lease, then got friends and family to help us pack up and move into a two-bedroom apartment, two buildings down on the same block as the burned-out building. Bodega had had a beautiful row of five newly renovated tenements and now the middle one looked like a missing tooth in a pretty woman’s smile.

  As I made a trip to the U-Haul van to remove a rug and take it upstairs, I heard a familiar voice.

  “Yo, homeless guy! I hope you ran into the flames and rescued my shit.” It was Sapo in his familiar black BMW, going around and collecting money from Bodega’s crack houses and numbers joints.

  “Where you been, bro? With all the peace around here I thought you was dead.” I was happy to see him. No matter what, Sapo had never done anything to hurt me. If anything, Sapo had always been around when I needed someone to watch my back.

  “Get in.” He opened the door for me, smiling his Sapo smile.

  “Can’t. I’m in the middle of moving, bro.”

  “Too bad, Nazario sent fo’ yah.”

  “I can’t just leave. I got stuff ta move, bro,” I said. Sapo reached for the car phone. I waited. Sapo dialed, and after a few uh-huhs and yeahs he hung up the phone.

  “You have two minutes to give an excuse to your alleluia wife and her alleluia friends cuz you comin’ with me,” he said.

  “I can’t go wi’choo, bro. I got things to finish.”

  “You’s comin, Chino. Now, I’ve done a lot of things in my days but I ain’t never kidnapped nobody. But I will if I have to cuz that was Nazario on the phone.”

  I had to go. So I told one of Blanca’s church friends, Wilfredo Reyes, that I had forgotten something important uptown and had to retrieve it. He just smiled and said not to worry, but I felt really bad because I wasn’t lending a hand when it was my stuff th
ey were breaking their backs carrying. Still, I had to go, so I jumped in with Sapo and we took off.

  “Where we going?”

  “Pa’ viejo.”

  “Yo, that ain’t original. You should never repeat yourself.”

  “I hear that. So this’s the deal. You and Nazario are goin’ to talk with some wops in Queens.”

  “ ’Bout what?”

  “Wha’, I look like Walter Mercado to you? I don’t fucken know ’bout wha’.” We drove.

  “Yo, Sapo,” I said in a low tone. “Did you kill Salazar? Did you kill that reporter?”

  “Nope.”

  “Get the fuck. Why you lie to me, bro?”

  “All right, I’ll tell you. I ain’t kill the sonofabitch.”

  “Yeah, so how come he had a chunk missing from his shoulder?”

  “I didn’t say I ain’t bit the nigga. I bite ’em but ain’t kill ’em.”

  “Yeah, then who did?”

  “You see whiskers on me? You see a tail? You see me likin’ cheese or somethin’?”

  “All right. But you were there, bro, that’s guilt by association. They can get you for that.”

  “They ain’t gettin’ no one,” he said, slamming the brakes suddenly, and my body jerked forward. I knew Sapo didn’t like me asking him about any of this. He was telling me to back off. I didn’t.

  “Yo, I asked Bodega himself. He said you killed Salazar.”

  “Bodega wasn’t there, how he’d know?” He shifted really hard and gritted his teeth.

  “But he sent you, right?”

  “Nazario did. But Bodega okayed it. Still, I didn’t kill the fuck.”

  “Then where you been, bro?”

  “You know, Chino, I never thought of it but like you sittin’ on a bunch of info. Thass not a good chair to be sittin’ on, know what I’m sayin’, papi? If I was you I’d move my ass and sit somewhere else.” Now I knew he was really serious, and I backed off.

  We had reached 116th and First. Sapo double-parked.