by Matt Burgess
“Which one of you beautiful angels is Janice Singh?”
“That’s me,” said the bazooka-loading prostitute. “Where we going?” For the first time in what felt like a month, Janice, the real Janice, laughed. A uniformed officer opened the cell at the detective’s request. A black guy, with cute-nerdy glasses and a soft face of almost movie-star symmetry—Jesus Christ, what had this cheesy magnate done to her?—the detective introduced himself as Geo Hamilton of the Queens Division Warrants Squad. When he saw the enlarged plum on her elbow, he cuffed her from the front, a tactical no-no. She tucked a few stray strands of hair behind her ear, as if to give Pauly across the corridor a better view of her face. Which she most certainly did not want to do. She didn’t know why she did it. She worried he’d read too much into the gesture, as she herself was reading too much into it, and she continued to worry about it—of all the things to worry about!—as Detective Hamilton brought her to the cage where she reclaimed her possessions, and then to the book where she was signed into his custody. Together they went through the heavy wooden doors of the 115 Precinct. Down on the corner a beat-up Buick was waiting for her.
“Hi,” Tevis said, leaning out the driver’s-side window. He wore a black tracksuit made out of some bizarre, heretofore-unknown material: an alien fabric that seemed to turn liquid when he drummed his hand against the door. “Hurry up,” he said. Then, when she came closer: “What the heck they do to your face?”
“My face?” she said.
Stooped in front of his side-view mirror, she saw ink streaks along her chin and forehead and everywhere else she’d been scratching. She also saw that Tevis was wearing not a tracksuit, but a garbage bag with holes cut out for his arms and neck. Why not? Drained, confused, feeling increasingly shriveled every moment, half afraid that if tonight’s luck continued along its current trajectory she’d slip through the grates of a street gutter and land in an underworld lorded over by sewer gators, she began to totter toward the passenger’s-side door, but Detective Hamilton called her back. She was walking away with his handcuffs.
“You don’t want to ever get used to wearing these things,” he said as he unlocked her.
She collapsed into the passenger seat, rubbing her wrists. She’d never been in Tevis’s personal car before and was surprised to see a plastic container of half-eaten takeout salad festering in the footwell. Through the open window he and Hamilton debated whether Hamilton still owed him a favor, or if now Tevis owed him the favor, or if instead all their competing favors had nullified one another, the whole thing seeming less like an actual argument than two boys not knowing how to say good-bye. They settled on a fist bump. As Hamilton was walking back to the precinct house, Tevis reached under the seat, not for a bottle of coconut rum as she’d hoped, but—even better—the baby Glock 9mm that Cataroni must’ve given him. When she had it back in her hands, she started to cry.
“Aw, criminy,” he said, clearly as embarrassed by her crying as she was. He gripped his mangy leopard-print steering-wheel cover, afraid to even look over at her. “Don’t … don’t do that, Itwaru. It’s okay. A little hard time’s good for the soul.”
She wiped away the tears as fast as they came, smearing more ink across her cheeks. She was a mess. To see exactly how much of a mess, she flipped down the sun visor to check its mirror, but there was no mirror, just a bunch of papers that fell into her lap. All the pages were yellow, ripped out of legal pads, notes of some kind that Tevis had written to himself. She didn’t read them. She didn’t want to read them. She wanted only to stop crying. He took all the pages from her, crumpling them up, and tossed them into the backseat without caring where they landed. For whatever reason, he was apologizing to her. She didn’t understand why. She didn’t understand anything. Four separate winter coats lay across the backseat. She sucked snot back up into her nose and asked him why he was wearing a garbage bag over his body.
“To lose a little weight,” he explained. “Walk a few miles in one of these bad boys and you’re gonna start sweating out the pounds, let me tell you.”
“I’m not sure that’s too healthy,” she said.
“I’m not sure you’re much of an expert on what’s healthy,” he said, smiling. He turned over the ignition and the car filled with light and R&B and cranky beeps insisting they buckle their seat belts. “So where we going?” he asked. “I can take you home, or, if you want, I can get you drunk at a bar and then take you home. Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.”
“My car’s back at the rumpus,” she said.
“Forget it. Whatever we end up doing, I’m driving you home. And I’ll just pick you up tomorrow before work, okay? Or if you got errands to run or whatever, I’ll come by first thing in the morning, whatever you want, just let me know.”
“Are we partners again, Tevis?” she asked.
“No, but we’re still friends, right?” He flicked on the turn indicator. “So where are we going?”
Worried she might start crying again, she felt the heat crawl up her face. Friends but not partners: how mature, how completely ridiculous. When she kept her own grudge books, she wrote every name in permanent marker. Maybe that was her problem. She didn’t let go. The radio played a song she didn’t recognize, but like all R&B it was about a heart-scorched whiner who’s finally had enough. She turned the dial through static before giving up and hitting the power button. “Home,” she told him.
“Not a bar first?”
“Just home, please,” she said. “But thank you. Seriously. For everything.”
The car’s headlights eased out of the parking spot and caused the dark street up ahead to tremble. “Hey,” he told her. “Put on your seat belt.”
They stopped before they’d ever really gotten started, at a 24/7 gas station a few blocks away. She was reminded of a quickly aborted Itwaru-girls-only road trip to Jones Beach, back when Brother filled the garage with his “hobby cars” and Vita had to always find parking on the street. The day of the trip Vita pulled out of a too-good-to-be-true spot in front of the house, only to immediately reverse right back into it. Change of plans: they took buses out to Rockaway, Janice and Judith eating their salami sandwiches and runny peaches between transfers. Tevis, though, just needed some gas. And maybe some provisions. So as not to freak out the potentially armed gas-station attendant, he peeled off his garbage bag. White piping climbed up the legs of his pajama pants. Sweat sopped his lucky shirt, the one with the Looney Tunes characters in gangsta poses. He wanted to know if she needed anything. Coffee? One of those celebrity magazines? She needed nothing, she told him, but he apparently didn’t believe her. He came out of the gas station with two Marino Italian ices, the kind with the little wooden-oar spoons pressed flat to their tops.
“Cherry or watermelon?” he asked.
“Cherry.”
“You sure?”
“Watermelon.”
“Oh, good.” he said. “Because cherry’s sorta my favorite.”
Back on the road to Richmond Hill, he turned the heat all the way up and asked her to hold his Italian ice against the vents. It was around one thirty in the morning. Only a few gloomy taillights ruddled the parkway, but he still drove as cautiously as he always did: both hands on the wheel at four and eight o’clock, like a bus driver, so that in the event of an accident the airbag wouldn’t break his thumbs. Before changing lanes, he turned on his blinker, checked his rearview, his side-view, and his blind spot, which was unnecessary because as far as she could tell he didn’t have any blind spots.
“Give it back,” he said, reaching for his Italian ice. “You don’t want to melt it too much. You’re really just sorta trying to thaw it around the edges a little. I mean, you can attack right away, but if I’m gonna spoil my diet, I’m gonna want to do it correct, yeah? So what you want to do … look at this guy. Hey, buddy, nice signal there.… So what you want to do is, well, take the lid off obviously. Give that a good lick. But here’s where the real innovation comes in. Because we g
ot the edges nice and soft, we use the spoon to like flip the ice over in its cup, so we can start at the bottom with all the sugar crystals and thick syrupy goodness, but you gotta be real careful when you’re … oh, son of a biscuit.”
The ice, in the process of being flipped over, capsized out of its paper cup and slid down the front of his T-shirt.
“Frick my frickin’ life,” he said. “That’s gonna stain. That is just totally gonna stain.”
“You want mine?” she asked. She had no intention of eating it, had only been pressing it against her elbow. “Watermelon? Your second favorite?”
“I’d probably spill it,” he moaned. Real quick he took his eyes off the road to scowl at the streak of red down his shirt. Even Bugs and Taz looked annoyed, but the gangsta versions of Bugs and Taz always looked annoyed. “What do you think?” he asked. “Is it gonna stain?”
Her household chores included vacuuming, corralling water glasses, doing the dishes, which amounted to putting dirty dishes in the dishwasher, occasionally inserting that sticky blue pod thing along the inside of the toilet bowl, and double-checking the locks and gas burners before bed every night, but stains? She knew nothing about stains. But you know who did?
Vita ran down the back porch steps toward the Buick. It was past two in the morning, an hour when she should’ve been sleeping naked in bed, and yet here she was, wide-eyed in blue scrubs with the pink drawstring knotted at her waist. She’d probably kicked off the sheets at midnight. Stared out the window for an hour. Eventually getting dressed in the expectation of having to answer the never-used front door for a pair of uniformed cops who’d avoid eye contact and mumble hollow condolences and split open the earth beneath her bunion-plagued feet.
“I’m fine,” Janice said, already out of the car and rushing toward her. “Everything’s fine.”
“I kept calling!”
“My phone broke.”
“Then borrow somebody’s!” Vita said. She cupped her hands around Janice’s cheeks. “What happened to your face? Where’s your car?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I love long stories,” Tevis said as he stepped, smiling, out of the car. “Savita, I’m telling you, this whole thing is one hundred percent my fault. I took her out to this classified operation where—”
“Don’t,” Janice said, because she’d lie to anyone on this planet except her mother. “I’m sorry,” she told her. “I should’ve found a way to call.” Not that Vita would have ever held him responsible anyway. Normally a gigantic black guy lumbering down a dark alleyway would’ve dried the spit from Vita’s mouth—actually, full disclosure, despite or perhaps because of her marriage to Brother Itwaru, normally a black guy period would’ve dried the spit from her mouth—but ever since she’d met Tevis over a year ago, she had rightly or wrongly credited him with the daily miracle of her daughter returning home alive every night. For him Vita only ever had hugs, cheek kisses, flirty ballbusting, and leftovers. She walked over and pressed a hand over his heart.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“It’s Italian ice,” Janice said.
Tevis tugged on the hem of his shirt, gently, to avoid stretching out the neck or accentuating his man-boobs. “You think it’ll stain?” he asked Vita. “I’d hate to have to get rid of it.”
“Fancy shirt like that, I don’t blame you,” she said. “Come on, I’m sure I can scrub it out.” Without waiting for his false protests, she climbed back up the porch steps, her round tush pendulous in the blue scrubs. “You better park that piece-of-shit car of yours in the garage, though,” she told him. “If you leave it blocking that alley, my lunatic neighbors will slash all your tires.”
He did as he was told. Then—without having to be told—he walked backward into the kitchen, to freeze any ghosts who might’ve attempted to follow him inside. An unnecessary precaution. Any potential ghosts would’ve been too busy trying on the new boots Vita had picked up from Goodwill. Still, though, the gesture brightened her face and more than justified the plate of leftover fried chicken she’d already put in the microwave for him.
“You like curry green beans?” she asked.
“I love curry green beans.”
Asked to fetch some rubbing alcohol for his cherry stain, Janice trudged up to the second-floor bathroom, where she sat on the edge of the tub with her head between her knees in the emergency crash-landing position. When she closed her eyes she saw Terraza’s front door. So she tried not to close her eyes. She stared up at the ceiling fan vents, as if waiting for the bat from her nightmare to come flying out. In the dream she’d thwacked it with the wooden end of a plunger, both her and the bat naked, silent, fighting for their lives. Blood had risen to its fuzzy back slowly, like a developing Polaroid. Its dream back. Its dream blood. With an exfoliating bar of organic chamomile soap—thank you, Judith—she washed the ink smudges off her hands and face. She filled a tumbler with New York City tap water and drank it all down before the billowy clouds could turn transparent. She couldn’t believe how thirsty she was. She couldn’t believe how badly she wanted to share her bed with someone tonight, with Puffy or Cataroni or old Jimmy Gellar or Detective Hamilton, a lightly snoring body to fortify the edge of the mattress between herself and the door. Pathetic? With her tongue having almost been cut out of her mouth, she granted herself full permission to be as pathetic as she wanted for the next twenty-four hours. She found the rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet, next to a prescription bottle of her mother’s antianxieties, which Janice felt tempted to take but couldn’t because the Big Bosses randomly drug-tested her. She wanted a drink, a real drink, but there wasn’t any booze in the house.
On her way back down the stairs, she half hoped, half dreaded that she would catch her mother making out with Tevis, but instead found them on entirely opposite ends of the kitchen. Like a veteran bachelor, he stood shirtless over the garbage can eating a leg of fried chicken. Dark hair coiled his belly. His eyes brimmed with the manic glee of a diet-breaker who knew he’d be back here again tomorrow, probably right on time for breakfast. Maybe then he’d get his curry green beans, which apparently her mother had forgotten to serve him. She’d forgotten to wait for the rubbing alcohol, too. Marooned on the other side of the kitchen island, she poured hot water from the electric kettle into the sink, where his shirt lay taut and rubber-banded across a salad bowl. Her face was disappearing behind a veil of thick steam.
The next day, after Tevis brought Janice to work, but before she actually walked out into the rumpus, Richie the Receptionist told her two things. One: he had taken her advice and invited both his girlfriend and her lesbian roommate over for dinner tomorrow night at his place, where he intended to cook penne alla vodka with a whole lotta vodka. Janice wasn’t so sure that was her advice exactly, but okay, good luck. The second thing Richie told her was that, excluding present company of course, Narcotics seemed almost exclusively to hire small-minded, mean-spirited buffoons who loved nothing better than when their victims got riled, and so it was probably in her best interest if she went with the flow, rolled with the punches, and just sorta tried to play along.
“Play along with what?” she said.
A present lay waiting for her on her desk. At least it looked like a present: a white cardboard box wrapped up in green ribbon. On the drive over here, she had told Tevis that she was dreading having to explain the eggplant on her elbow, but obviously the story had already circulated, no doubt exaggerated, too, its details juiced up on the performance-enhancing devices of cell phone and Nextel. The entire rumpus seemed to stare at her as she came in, everyone except for Puffy, who was over at One Police Plaza finally getting sworn in as a detective. Fiorella sat with one leg crossed over the other and her foot bobbing nervously. Under her desk, where only Janice could see, she tamped down the air with her hands, as if to say, Be cool, take it easy. Poker-faced, Janice untied the green ribbon. Inside the box, atop tissue paper, a note—written i
n a surprisingly elegant, seemingly feminine hand—said For the girl who has everything, except everything had been crossed out, replaced by blown her cover. That she had in fact maintained her cover seemed like a technicality not worth arguing. Beneath the tissue paper, she found a long black burka, headscarf included.