by Matt Burgess
“He can’t,” Alfredo says. “He can’t gamble. He’d violate his parole.”
“Oh please. What, are they staking out bodegas now? Junior can just go straight downstairs—”
“Tariq,” Alfredo says. “Not Junior. Tariq.” With his fists choking the handlebars, he shoves Jose out of the living room. The chair’s wheels jump the lip of the carpet and hit the smooth linoleum of the kitchen floor. Ordinarily, this tactile transition is Alfredo’s favorite part of the journey. He doesn’t know how to drive, but when he hits the linoleum Alfredo usually imagines that this is what it must be like to catch a string of green lights, or to punch the gas on a blacktopped highway. Tonight, however, Alfredo finds no satisfaction in the creamy smoothness of rubber wheels on a kitchen floor. “Even if Tariq could pick up your tickets, he wouldn’t. It’s against his new religion.”
Isabel stands at the range, her face hovering above a giant pot. The kitchen is as dark as pitch, save for a few purple fingers of fire. Alfredo doesn’t know if the fire comes from the stove or from Isabel herself, doesn’t know which one of them is illuminating and which one is the illuminated. She wears his old Our Lady of Fatima gym shorts. With her third-trimester belly swelling her tank top, she looks beautiful and monstrous and strange.
She turns to them but doesn’t say anything. Water sizzles, the refrigerator hums. Is she sleepwalking? Has she graduated from late-night Oreos and ice cream to some serious stovetop cooking? Alfredo doesn’t know what’s in the pot but he imagines it can be anything—a box of linguine, the head of a pig—and just as he’s about to ask, she brings her finger to her lips as if to say Shhhhhhhh. Fire crawls up the side of the pot. It occurs to Alfredo that he has possibly steered his father’s wheelchair into some kind of dream.
Someone—in the apartment above or below or around them—turns on a faucet, and the pipes in the Batistas’ walls begin to moan. A neighbor getting a late-night drink of water perhaps. Someone who has been asleep all night and will be able to go right back to bed. Alfredo wonders what the hell they’ve got to be so thirsty about.
“I just hope those numbers don’t hit,” Jose whispers. “That’d be just the thing.”
Alfredo pushes the wheelchair down the hall to an open door, his father’s bedroom. A queen-sized mattress dominates the room. Scattered across the bed lie a dozen pillows, each one autographed by Jose’s signature hair grease. Lizette visits the Laundromat as frequently as she visits church—the entire bedroom smells freshly laundered—but Jose’s grease stains are just that, stains, impossible to get out. Lizette keeps trying, however. She hasn’t lost faith in the redemptive powers of a good scrubbing. Her dresser and Jose’s dresser face each other on opposite walls, as if locked in an interminable staring contest. Alfredo parks his father at the foot of the bed and turns on the light.
Lizette doesn’t yank the sheets over her head or roll over or throw an arm across her eyes because Lizette sleeps next door in the boys’ old room. She made the move a few months ago, on the same night Isabel showed up at the front door with a duffel bag and a DVD player and with bruises on her neck. Lizette went into Alfredo’s room; Alfredo and his guest were deported to the living room sofa bed. It’s your father’s late hours, Lizette said. He’s always waking me up. Now where Tariq will sleep—with both bedrooms and the sofa bed occupied—is yet to be determined. Alfredo considers asking his father but it’s unlikely he’s got any idea. Papi’s not on the wire, not in this house, not anymore.
Alfredo depresses the wheel brakes and locks the chair in place. Both men share the same warped, nervous smile. Alfredo hooks his arms under his father’s damp armpits. With a grunt, he scoops him clean out of the chair. They stagger backward. He and his father are chest to chest, one body, and while Jose isn’t particularly heavy, it is all dead, helpless weight. His legs dangle. His hands scramble to touch each other behind Alfredo’s back. When his father starts slipping, Alfredo shoves his face into his neck, which feels smooth and smells of Aqua Velva. Together, father and son spin around, dancing dangerously, until the backs of Jose’s knees kiss the edge of the bed. Alfredo eases him onto the mattress. Both men breathe with their mouths open. They gorge themselves on great big gulps of air.
“Tomorrow night,” Jose says, “we’ll get Junior to help.” He unbuttons his pants slowly, his hands shaking. “Unless it’s against his religion.”
Alfredo pulls at the cuffs, wiggles the pants off his father. His legs are spidery, thin and awkward, and in the move from chair to bed, fresh capillaries have burst. Purple splotches speckle his thighs. Hugging his waist is a pair of underwear that’s as old as Alfredo. They are white cotton and damp in the middle.
“I guess I had an accident,” Jose says. He sits up on his elbows, to stare into Alfredo’s face. “Can you take them with you? The underwear? Can you hide them or throw them out or something? I don’t want your mother to know.”
With his head turned to the side, Alfredo pulls off the underwear. The smell of urine is released into the room. As is Jose’s penis, which is sizably serpentine, thick and substantial. Impressed, as he always is whenever he sees this penis, Alfredo is careful not to smile. He is also careful not to hold the underwear at arm’s length or daintily pinch the elastic waistband; instead, he lets the damp undies hang from his fingertips casually, so as to show Jose how little this bothers him, how pleased and honored he feels to be able to do this thing for his father.
“You gonna change the diapers for your son?” Jose asks.
Alfredo props pillows around his father’s legs. “You want the covers on you?”
“No,” Jose says. “I want your mother to come in here in the morning and catch me with a raging hard-on.”
“Good night, Papi.”
“We’ll play those same numbers tomorrow? In the Lotto? Or we can run with some new numbers. If you want. Maybe Isabel’s birthday?”
“Yeah,” Alfredo says. “I better get out there before she sets the kitchen on fire.”
“You see any license plates tonight?”
“A few.” Alfredo knows his father doesn’t want him to leave. “I saw an unmarked police car.”
“They stop you?”
“Plate number 3AT649.”
Jose asks him what’s all that multiplied together, three times six times four times nine, and Alfredo tells him instantly. Jose asks him what’s that number times four (Jose’s lucky number), and the answer takes Alfredo as long as it takes him to close his eyes and see the digits—green-and-purple-hued—fall against a black backdrop and lock into place: 2,592.
Jose lets loose a low whistle. “Good man, Dito. Good man.”
Now it’s Alfredo who doesn’t want to leave. He leans into the doorframe, lingers inside his father’s benediction. Above the bed’s headboard floats the ghost outline of a giant crucifix. When Lizette switched rooms she took only the alarm clock off her dresser and the cross off the wall. But it’s still there, sort of. Alfredo can see a T where the cross used to hang; the paint on that part of the wall seems fresher. He wants to know if this pseudocrucifix might still work, if it might still impart a sliver of divine protection for his father’s unbelieving soul. And if so, Alfredo wonders, might there be any juice left for a good man like me?
Isabel and Alfredo lie in bed, careful not to touch each other. Out on the street, below their open window, rubber-gloved men from Staten Island toss bags of garbage into the jagged maw of a sanitation truck. Pizza boxes, expired milk, cleaned-out cans, discarded magazines, uneaten rice, shredded bills—it all gets gnashed up and digested. With a release of hydraulic pressure, a noise somewhere between a belch and a sigh, the truck moves on to the next apartment building. Isabel and Alfredo listen to it beep-beep-beep away.
Alfredo laces his hands behind his head, so that his elbows jut out, twin antennae trying to pick up a signal. His armpits reek. Talk about garbage! He must feel guilty—he should feel guilty, Isabel thinks—otherwise his BO wouldn’t be so brolic. It’s as if somethi
ng inside of him has curdled. She can smell his pits even with her back to him. She lies on her side, faces the parrot with the clock embedded in its belly. It is 3:47 a.m. It is 3:48 a.m., and Isabel is a kiddie pool. Because he knows something is wrong, Christian Louis swims laps. He crashes into his mama’s uterine wall, turns, crashes into her bladder. He swims freestyle. He swims the butterfly and backstroke. He churns his fetal arms, kicks his fetal legs. Isabel wants to roll over and lie on her other side, but she can’t, because if she rolls over, she will have to face Alfredo, and if she faces Alfredo, she will have to claw out his eyeballs.
The Big Surprise did not go as well as she’d hoped.
Things had been going just fine. Just as they were supposed to go. When the water began to simmer, Isabel turned off the gas. Step two: she put on some oven mitts. She experienced a minor hiccup when she had to carry the pot into the bathroom. Not only was the pot heavy, but the floor felt tilted at an angle. And not only did the floor feel tilted, but her foot had fallen asleep. (Increased clumsiness, pins and needles in her extremities—add it to the list of things she forgot to ask the doctor.) On her way to the bathroom, Isabel banged into the kitchen table. Inside the pot, hot water swished.
Don’t spill that shit on your belly, Christian Louis said. When Isabel told him not to curse, he said, I’ve got Tourette’s! I’m autistic! I’ve got a rotten case of thalassemia!
Isabel set the pot down on a bath mat. She can’t be sure if she heard a sizzle. She was too busy running back into the kitchen, tossing off oven mitts. She was too busy reaching under the sofa bed, grabbing the box of Epsom salts she’d bought earlier in the day. The box rattled—maraca-like—as she ran with it into the bathroom. She dumped columns of salt into the pot. The water swirled gray with clouds.
“What are you doing?” Alfredo said. In his hand he held what looked like a pair of droopy tighty-whities, definitely not the pair of silk boxers she’d given him for Christmas. “Are you sleepwalking?” he said. “Is it dangerous to wake you?”
Isabel stood up, her back screaming. With a majestic sweep of her arm, she beckoned her boyfriend to the toilet seat. “Welcome,” she said, feeling suddenly silly, “to Spa de Batista.”
Because Alfredo walks all night from one end of Queens to the other, and because—for God knows what reason—he insists on wearing those heavy Timberland boots, his feet break out in calluses. His heels coarsen, his soles blister, his dogs get to barking. So Isabel—stunning girlfriend that she is—set up this foot massage with the idea that Alfredo would sit on his throne, kick off his boots, and plunge his maltreated feet into the salty water. He would feel like a sultan, fanned by the giant feathers of a mystical bird. Isabel put all this together so that later tonight in bed she could look for some indication in the outward signs of his sleep—some hint in his fluttering eyelids or twitching fingertips—that he was dreaming about her, a woman who loves him, who knows when his feet ache and who does something about it. A woman, in other words, worth fighting for.
“Baby,” Alfredo said. He pressed his palms to his forehead. “I’m tired.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“I’m not really in the mood.”
“I set this all up,” Isabel said.
“Okay, but I’m just trying to go to sleep. You know what I’m saying? I’m just trying to get to bed.”
“Exactly,” Isabel said. “This will relax you. Get rid of your aches and pains. See? It’s a foot massager.”
“You want me to stick my fucking foot in there?” Needless to say, in the movie version of her life Alfredo does not say this. “Don’t be stupid, baby. That’s a pot. That’s a pot my mama uses to cook rice.”
Isabel let him know that if they had more money then maybe she could afford a real foot massager, and maybe she could get some other things too, like a crib or an OB-GYN or a crisscross support sling for her back, or maybe even their very own apartment (!), where Isabel could take baths surrounded by candles. But you know, that’s if they had money, which is a ridiculous idea—like all her ideas, of course, since she’s so stupid, right?—because as we all know there ain’t no foot massager money and there ain’t no moving out money coming around here either.
Alfredo sat down on the toilet. He tossed the underwear into the tub. He untied his boots and neatly placed them to the side. From his pockets he removed a beeper Isabel had never seen before, and holding it with both hands he slid it into the open mouth of his boot. He took out his cell phone, dialed a number with his eyes closed, and when what sounded like a message clicked on, he hung up the phone. She didn’t ask. She watched him peel off his socks. From the bottom of one of those socks he pulled out a small wad of cash, no more than three or four bills, and threw it at Isabel’s bare feet. They stared at each other, Isabel and Alfredo did, with this pathetic sum of crumpled money on the floor between them—it was maybe thirty-five dollars, maybe less—and then Alfredo thrust his foot into the water.
His head snapped back, banged against the wall behind him. His foot came out of the water looking pinkish-white and soft.
“Is it too hot? Are you okay?”
“Are you kidding me, Isabel?”
“Please don’t yell.”
“Who’s yelling?”
She clamped her hands onto the sides of her belly, as if to cover Christian Louis’s underdeveloped ears. “What if you wake up your mother?” They both knew that’d be impossible. “Please,” Isabel said. “Please don’t yell.”
“Who, Isabel, is yelling?”
“I was just trying to do something nice. I was just trying to take care of you.”
“Everyone needs to stop trying to help me. Please.” Alfredo wrapped a towel around his foot. He lifted the pot and peeked underneath it. “You know the rug is completely burnt. Because you are retarded. Because you are a child. My mother’s bath mat now has a big black circle right in the middle of it.”
The water got dumped down the drain. Lizette’s scorched bath mat got balled up and stashed under the sofa bed, along with the Epsom salts and damp underwear. And now Isabel stares at the parrot clock. She’s halfway convinced it will take off and fly shrieking into her face.
The garbage truck turns the corner. It is 3:49 a.m. With the truck gone, Isabel and Alfredo listen to nothing. Soon the paper guys will come. The New York Times, the Daily News, the Post, Newsday, El Diario. No prepubescent boys in this neighborhood, pedaling down maple-shaded streets, tossing the morning edition over rose bushes and onto welcome mats. Here the papers get delivered by men, immigrants from Ecuador, Colombia, Pakistan, Korea. They drive cars through all of Queens, stopping at the buildings on their list and leaving the engine running while they run out and drop thick stacks of plastic-bagged newspapers onto stoops. They will be here soon, these men. And when they arrive, there will be no denying a new day has begun. The midnight transition from p.m. to a.m., the sunrise, the beeping garbage trucks, the morning papers—Isabel can fool herself no longer. Extra, extra! Saturday’s coming, whether she likes it or not. She and Alfredo lie in bed, waiting. The silence sits on their chests.
“You got any new songs?” he says.
She scoots closer to the edge of the bed.
“Not for me, of course,” he says. “Don’t sing for me. I don’t deserve to hear a new song. But the baby. It’s not fair the baby doesn’t get—”
“You were mean. I was just trying to do something nice. I made a mistake. I’m sorry. But you were mean.”
“I’m a bad person,” Alfredo says. He reaches toward her. He taps her recently outied belly button. “This is your microphone. This belly button right here. Sing into that. You want, I’ll close my ears. I’ll stick a pillow over my head.”
Isabel is a wealth of lullabies. Alfredo assumes she’s carried them with her from childhood. He assumes they were passed down from Isabel’s mother to her. But that’s not the case at all. Isabel grew up in a tuneless home and she’s had to work hard for her lullabies. Secretly, without any
one knowing but Christian Louis, she goes down to the public library, logs on to their computers, and searches the Web for cradlesongs. She writes down the lyrics, commits them to memory. Never having heard any of these songs, she needs to work out the proper beats and cadences—and so at night she practices. She rehearses.
Alfredo rests a hand on her stomach. “Little man’s had a rough day,” he says. “The hospital and shit. Listening to us fight. He only wants a little lullaby. Half a lullaby, even.”
She just learned a new one, too. It’s about three little bears who roll over in bed and fall crashing to the ground. Alfredo’s right—a song would be just the thing to get Christian Louis to chill out, to balm his thrashing legs—but there ain’t no way she’s singing. She’d rather suffer.
“Don’t make me break out some Nas,” Alfredo says.
“You think if you ignore something long enough it’ll just go away.”
“She speaks!”
“Where’s he gonna sleep? What happens the first time you leave me alone with him?” When he doesn’t answer, she says, “He’s going to try to kill you.”
“He’ll have to get in line. Right behind you, yeah?” Alfredo laughs and rattles her elbow. He tries to keep his voice bright, but she knows better. “I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do,” he says. “This’ll pick you up. You listening? It’s about tomorrow. Hey, you listening? First things first, we tell my mother I was smoking a giant cigar and I put it out on her bath mat. I’ll take the blame. No? Okay, then we’ll tell her I was taking a shit, drinking the world’s largest cup of coffee and I couldn’t find a big enough coaster. Or how about this? Hey, listen up. We run away. From the road we send her a check for a new bath mat.”
Isabel rolls over. With the living room dark, she sees only the outline of Alfredo’s face. “We run away?” she asks.
“You’d be cool with that? Packing up? Leaving here?” Alfredo kicks the sheets off of him, plants his feet on the ground. “Ask the baby. Find out what the baby says about leaving on up out of here.”