by Matt Burgess
Pierre lifts the strawberry milk to his mouth, seemingly intending to drain it as payment for his services, when the shadow of a large black bowling ball crosses his face and the glass shatters in his hand. He drops down to his knees. Both hands cover his mouth, as if stifling a terrible secret. Blood seeps through the fingers.
The bowling ball dangles from Tariq’s hand. A small cut has opened up underneath his eye, where a shard of glass must have ricocheted and caught him in the face. The red blood trembles. Tariq drops the bowling ball—it crushes the straw Baka flicked away earlier—and dabs at his cut with the tip of his pinky.
Pierre’s cries are muffled, unintelligible. It’s possible his lips have come loose from his face. Alfredo turns away, looks instead at the air vent on the ball return machine. He passes his hand over the slats. The air feels nice, but he wishes it was cooler.
“What are you gonna do now?” Baka says. He sounds as exhausted as his mother must have sounded when she came home from a double shift and found her house a mess, the vases broken, rugs trampled, her only son covered in infield mud. Still sitting in his big leather booth, he hasn’t even made a move to help Pierre. “Where you think you gonna hide?”
Tariq pushes his face close to Baka, and the big man flinches. The Cushing’s may have damaged his fight-or-flight response, but apparently his body can still react instinctively when faced with a more dangerous predator. Tariq’s mouth hangs open. His eyes are gleaming. He waits for Baka to say something else—but for once, he stays quiet. With a disappointed hitch in his shoulders, Tariq walks away.
Alfredo chases after him, just as, it seems, he’s always chased after him. They pass lanes full of people. They pass the shoe rental guy, who has no problem making eye contact now. With a phone pressed to his ear, he glares at them, as if memorizing their eye color, their heights, their distinguishing characteristics. Alfredo glares back. He doesn’t care about this guy—it’s only the waitress he wants to avoid. He’d hate for her to regret her kindness toward him.
As soon as they get outside, Alfredo realizes he left his Timberlands behind. In these red and tan bowling shoes, he feels pounds and pounds lighter. He feels faster. And a good thing, too. Tariq dashes through the parking lot, his prison-built chest hardly heaving, and Alfredo struggles to keep up. While he runs, he peers into the windows of parked cars. He doesn’t know what Mike Shifrin looks like, but he imagines an older version of Vladimir, a pale white face, a round head, a bottle of expensive vodka in the passenger seat.
“Hurry up,” Tariq says.
When they reach the sidewalk, Alfredo feels as if he’s burst through a forest, through dark trees and into a clearing. The lights are brighter. Tariq raises his arm, and the air all around him feels charged, pregnant with the threat of rain. Across the street, a squirrel runs by with half a hot dog bun in its mouth.
“Come on,” Tariq says. A gypsy cab has pulled over to the curb and it sits palsied at Tariq’s feet like a giant nervous panther. “Let’s go. Get in.”
“What are we gonna do?” Alfredo whispers.
“I don’t know,” Tariq says. He slaps Alfredo hard between the shoulder blades. “But I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”
The brothers slide into the backseat. Over a dashboard-mounted walkie-talkie, a faraway dispatcher barks orders in a crackly, unintelligible Spanish. Or at least it sounds like Spanish, which is odd considering the driver has a turban wrapped around his head. Scented cardboard Christmas trees—each of them arctic blue—hang from the rearview mirror. They’ve all got the plastic wrappers still on them, some of these wrappers barely opened, others dangling from midtier branches, as if the scented trees were exotic women in various states of undress.
“Where to?” the driver says.
Alfredo wonders if this guy is the father of the two little Indian girls in the park yesterday, the ones who walked with a swagger and had Mister Softee’s schedule memorized. Alfredo tells the driver Jackson Heights, looking for some thrill of homecoming in the man’s eyes. The cab takes off into the street.
“You thought Baka was setting us up?” Alfredo says.
“I don’t know. But if he didn’t want to fuck you up before, he’ll want to fuck you up now.”
“Oh great. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Tariq says. He reaches over and picks off the beer-label bits stuck to Alfredo’s shirt. “It’s important to know who your enemies are, Dito. If this Shifrin dude’s big-time, you’ll want him to act soon, while he’s still mad enough to come solo. And now you know Baka will bring him to you.”
“He doesn’t know where we live,” Alfredo says.
“But he knows where you’ll be tonight, yeah?”
The cab lurches down the Whitestone Expressway. With the Mets game long over, traffic is only half bad. Up ahead a smattering of bleary red brake lights are glowing. The driver speeds up, cuts off a rival yellow cab, and both men lean into their horns.
Alfredo puts the E-beeper in his brother’s hands. He tells Tariq that when you slide off the top, rows of pills suddenly materialize. Welcome home, Alfredo says without actually saying it. Welcome home. This is my present to you.
“How much does this sell for?” Tariq says.
Alfredo rounds up: “Fifteen hundo.”
“That ain’t enough,” Tariq says and shoves the beeper into his pocket.
Alfredo doesn’t know what he expected, but, well—he thought he might feel relief to relinquish an object that’s brought him only bad luck. Or he thought he might take a gift giver’s satisfaction in bestowing a present. At the very least, he looked forward to demonstrating the beeper’s ingenuity, and by extension his own ingenuity in figuring it out. With all these pleasures denied to him, Alfredo stares out his window. There are two stickers stuck to the glass, one with the name of the cab company, Mexicana, and the other with a warning: For Your Own Safety You Are Being Videotaped. Alfredo cracks the window open, lets the air outside toughen his face.
The Department of Worry crams his pneumatic tubes with questions. Fifteen hundred dollars ain’t enough for what? If Alfredo is killed, will the mere sight of his dry-bristled toothbrush in the bathroom send Isabel into hysterics? Who will get rid of the tighty-whities under the sofa? The department comes up with many possible afterlives, but the one most frequently imagined is a small room without windows or doors, a black box where darkness fills your mouth like sand. Or maybe he gets to stay on as a ghost. He wonders if, years from now, he’ll be hovering in the corner of a dorm room on the night Christian Louis gets too wasted and confesses to his roommates that all he has of his father are a couple of stories his mother told him and a few cheap Happy Meal toys he collected.
Alfredo turns to his brother, to ask him about the Muslim conception of the afterlife, but Tariq’s eyes are closed. His breathing has deepened. Air whistles out his nose. Alfredo doesn’t even know how this is possible. Less than five minutes ago, Tariq smashed a milk glass into Pierre’s face, officially turning Baka against Alfredo. And now? Now his head sags into his chest. While Alfredo panics, while his stomach acid gurgles, Tariq catches up on some Z’s.
“You’re asleep?” When his brother doesn’t answer, Alfredo says, “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
He wants to go home. He wants to fall into Isabel’s arms and catch up on some Z’s himself, sleep till all the world’s vendettas are forgotten, till the ozone layer disappears and the earth explodes. Of course, at some point during that snooze, Izzy’s water will break and Christian Louis will insist on his debut. But until then … Alfredo asks the driver if he can maybe go a little faster. I’m in a bit of a rush, Alfredo explains. The driver grips the wheel with both hands. He leans forward, his eyes framed in the rearview mirror. Alfredo isn’t sure if he’s somehow offended the man, or maybe he hasn’t been heard. He’s about to repeat himself when the car’s sudden, extra acceleration throws him against the back of his seat. Wind howls into the cab, over the top of Alfredo’s cracked-open
window. With the exception of the ghetto car, Alfredo’s never driven in his life, never had to worry about staying in his lane or keeping his eye on the road, and so, when in a car passing other cars, he is free to stare out his window at all the people in all those other cars, who always seem to be moving backward, getting sucked into the past. He likes to catch them in some sealed-off moment of privacy—picking their noses, bobbing their heads to songs he can’t hear. But when Alfredo looks out his window now, he can’t see anyone clearly. Just a few blurry figures stooped behind a few blurry wheels. The cab is moving way too fast. With yet one more pleasure denied to him, Alfredo turns to his brother, who’s still sleeping. A snore ripples out from the bottom of his throat. What a bunch of bullshit, Alfredo thinks. He picks at the stickers stuck to his window. Videotaped? For my safety? It doesn’t even make sense, and Alfredo is starting to get a little tired, a little skeptical, of all these people claiming they got his best interests in mind.
By busting up Pierre, Tariq turned potential allies into definite enemies. You’re welcome, he said. It’s important to know who your enemies are. He provoked Baka so that he’ll crash the dogfight and bring Mike Shifrin with him. Here, tie this bull’s-eye round your neck. Now you’ll know for sure which way the bullets will be zinging.
Alfredo realizes he’s working with two possibilities here. Either his brother is a fool with a poorly conceived plan, or his brother is both smarter and more dangerous than he anticipated. Alfredo wishes he could come up with some rival explanations. Maybe if he were sitting someplace dark and quiet and isolated, where headaches aren’t invited, he’d be able to think of something else, but right now this is all he’s got: Tariq’s plan only makes sense if its intent is not to protect Alfredo, but to nudge him into the crosshairs.
Alfredo—who constantly fights back exhaustion, whose job keeps him up nights, whose filing cabinet keeps him up past that, who gets three or four hours before the sun shoots through the blinds, before Isabel wakes him up for a prenatal appointment, before his father wakes him up for a favor, before his mother wakes him up with a grievance, before Winston wakes him up with a request to meet him at the park—watches Tariq sleep the sleep of the wicked. His eyes remain shut and his lips parted. With his head tucked into his chest, a small indent is made visible at the base of his neck. A little recess, deep enough for a thimbleful of water. A soft and familiar pocket. If given one thousand photographs of the backs of one thousand necks, Alfredo would be able to pick out his brother’s every single time. The skin around the indent seems to swell with pride. Red tiny bumps—presumably from the teeth of a barber’s razor—encircle it, encroaching upon it dangerously.
“You know,” Alfredo says out loud, “I’m not so sure you’re as dumb as you seem.”
Tariq’s eyes snap open. Without emotion, as if reading lines off a cue card, he says, “We ain’t never backed down from thugs and bitches. And you ain’t gonna start now.”
“Right,” Alfredo says.
Contrary to street gossip, Alfredo never dropped a dime on the Virgil’s robbers. Why would he have? To get rid of his brother? To get closer to Isabel? Come on! Before Tariq went upstate, Alfredo hardly even knew Isabel. He’d seen her around, of course, poised on the brick incline of the handball courts like some kind of talent scout, buying movie magazines at Max’s candy store, gently stripping away the aluminum foil on a gyro as she waited for the traffic light to turn green, standing behind the blue police barricade at the Sunnyside Puerto Rican parade—but these moments only became charged by hindsight, reassembled after they’d fallen in love. Prior to Tariq’s incarceration, Alfredo and Isabel had never even spoken, other than half-muttered hellos when they passed each other in the street. She was his brother’s girlfriend. What could they possibly have to talk about? Besides, her physical appearance elicited a feeling previously unfamiliar to Alfredo: she made him feel shy.
And then, late one night, a month into Tariq’s Fishkill sentence, she appeared, trudging through snow toward the candy store, toward Winston and Alfredo. She wore boots and mittens and a bubble jacket zipped up to her chin. A scarf completely covered the lower half of her face, and it seemed to Alfredo that this wasn’t only protection from the cold, but a kind of disguise, as if she preferred to wander the streets incognito. But who could she fool? The eyes above that scarf could only be Isabel’s. Her hair, exposed and dark, glittered with snowflakes.
Winston and Alfredo stood together under Max’s red and gold awning. According to procedure, Winston should’ve been across the street, guarding the stash, but it was too cold a night to be all alone in the Alleyway, too cold to be outside at all, selling drugs or buying them. And yet there they were, in matching wool knit caps that Alfredo had bought for them. They stomped their feet and breathed out smoke and watched Isabel come toward them through the snow.
She said something—it sounded like hzgnoe—and both Winston and Alfredo leaned forward and asked her to repeat herself. With obvious reluctance she pulled the scarf away from her mouth. What she had said, she explained, was hello.
“Oh,” Alfredo said. “Hello.”
“Hello,” she said again. “I don’t think we’ve met,” she told Winston, as she extended her hand toward him. “I’m Isabel.”
“Oh, I know that,” he said. He grabbed her hand, not shaking it, just holding it, and while Alfredo looked on, frantically flipping through his conversational Rolodex, Winston continued to hold on to her hand, obviously reluctant to give it back. Tremendously stoned, he dropped his voice to a Casanova bass and said, “Let’s stay like this forever.”
“Sure is cold!” Alfredo said. It was the best he could do.
“It is,” she said, pulling her hand free. “It is unbelievably cold.”
“Freezing!” Alfredo said.
Winston tapped the bridge of his nose. “When it gets cold like this?” he said. “Oh my God, my nose hairs go buck wild. I can feel like each little hair up there. It’s like they’ve gone stiff. Like they’ve turned into icicles. It weirds me out, but at the same time I kinda like it. This ever happen to you?”
“So,” Isabel said, turning to Alfredo. “You talk to your brother lately?”
Ah. The reason for her visit. Alfredo had been worried she’d heard the neighborhood rumors and had come down here to jab her finger into his chest, to accuse him of doing her man dirty for financial gain. And so when it became clear that she only wanted to pump Alfredo for some Jose-related info, he felt relieved, although it was a relief tinged with disappointment. In the subsequent years, he’s tried to pinpoint the source of that disappointment, and the safest explanation he can come up with is who the hell would want to talk to a beautiful woman about some other man? But that’s what he did. He told Isabel that his mother had gone up to Fishkill, took the train and everything, but Jose asked her never to come back. Alfredo didn’t describe Lizette’s reaction to this, that when she got home she locked herself in the bathroom, nor did he share with Isabel his own reaction, that he thought it selfish, not to mention cruel, but that he was, as always, trying to extend to Jose the benefit of the doubt, that maybe his brother was embarrassed and didn’t want their mother seeing him behind Plexiglas, in those orange jumpsuits or whatever they’ve got on up there.
“Have you heard from him?” he asked her, although her presence here made it obvious that she had not.
“My mother the puta did something to our phone,” she said. “It can’t get collect calls or something.”
“That sucks,” Alfredo said.
“Yeah, right? It won’t even give you the option of accepting collect calls. So like if he’s trying to get ahold of me, I wouldn’t even know.”
“Was he trying to call you before your mother fucked with the phone?” When she didn’t answer, Alfredo knew he should probably stay quiet, but he’s always had trouble keeping his mouth shut, just as he’s always had trouble resisting the urge to press his fingertips against walls with wet paint signs. “He’s sent you
some letters though, right?”
Her face darkened. “Jose didn’t talk about you much,” she said. “The only thing I remember him telling me is a story about how your father took you two on the subway for a funeral scam. And you started crying real bad.”
“Oh yeah, you didn’t know? I’m a real wuss.”
“Getting colder out here,” Winston said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the candy store. “I think I’m going to go inside. Where it’s warmer? And, you know—”
“Less awkward?” Isabel said.
“Exactly.”
Before the door closed shut behind him, a little heat from inside the store trickled out onto the sidewalk. A sign—ATM Available Inside—hung off the awning, and Alfredo slapped at it to give his hand something to do.
“I should probably get going,” she said.
“I’ll walk you home.”
“And disappoint all your customers?” she said, laughing. “No, that’s okay. I live right up the block.”
“My father tells me that like fifty percent of your body heat comes off the top of your head. I don’t know if it’s true or not. But you know. That’s what I’ve been told,” and he handed her his wool knit cap. Maybe 50 percent was an overestimate, a typical Jose Sr. exaggeration, but man: without his hat, Alfredo felt his body heat plummet. And he wasn’t going to get any warmer either. Isabel looked at the cap in her hands as if it embarrassed her, and Alfredo’s ears turned red, thinking he’d done something else he shouldn’t have done. Later, he’d find out that she simply didn’t have much experience receiving small kindnesses. “You don’t have to take it,” he said. “If you don’t want to.”