“They make him the Pope,” Martin said.
“How many of them are in the crowd?” Myles said.
“What does it matter?” Martin said. “I knew we were through the first time I saw Jackie Robinson. You ever seen him play? Well I did. First World Series he was in. Nineteen forty-seven against the Yankees. He gets on base and he starts jigging around. Jigging and jigging. Here’s poor Yogi Berra catching. First time Berra ever caught in the big leagues. He starts trying to pick Robinson off first. Ping! Throw to first. Ping! Pitchout, throw to first. Sure enough here goes the next throw into right field. Robinson runs to third like a bastard. To third. I said to myself, next thing you know they’ll be living with us. Wow, was I right.”
Martin stood up and stretched. “So, what’s doing with you?”
“Nothing.”
It was morning before the police were through questioning the four girls concerning the killings in the Mojujuo Bar. Clarissa Martinez was angry because they all had been kept so long. Luisa Maria looked for a cab, saw none, noticed the bodega up the street and decided that her mouth was smoke-parched. She asked the others if they wanted gum. No, they said. Luisa Maria started for the bodega. A man was walking toward her from the bodega. The man turned around and went back.
The bodega man had gum and candy on the counter as you walk in. Luisa Maria was reaching for a pack of gum when she was yanked the length of the store by this wide-shouldered bearded man who held a finger to his lips. Luisa Maria knew enough to keep quiet.
He took her out the back door, through an alley and to a Mercedes 300 that was parked by a fire hydrant.
Luisa Maria was frightened and tried to pull away. It was impossible to get out of the man’s grasp.
“That’s all right,” Teenager said as he put her into the Mercedes.
“I like your name, Teenager, that is a good name,” Luisa Maria said in the motel.
They were long past any questions and answers. In the car, Luisa Maria had taken one long look at Teenager and then told him immediately why his friend Pete Boogaloo had been killed: “I just happen to be in the club looking for a job and I hear this Italian guy Paulie tell Torres that he has to shoot Octavio Turin and Boogaloo right away. Paulie said, go ahead, you better do it tonight. Gigi and Victor said, yes, they would do it tonight.”
Over brandy in the motel bar, Luisa Maria told Teenager every daily habit of the four, Paulie, Victor, Gigi and Torres, that she could remember. And now in bed with Teenager, Luisa Maria ran a fingernail across his chest and said, “Next time I think they want to shoot you.”
“Who said that?” Teenager asked.
“I just think so,” Luisa Maria said. She kept running her fingernails on the chest. “Teenager, I like that name.”
“I will give you my name someday because you are so beautiful,” Teenager said. “I will make you my wife.”
“I have a husband,” Luisa Maria said.
“Maybe I will make your husband go away,” Teenager said.
“Oh, I like that,” Luisa Maria said.
Eighteen months before this, in the first job she had in this country, as a floor girl in a factory where old clothes were cut into rags, the foreman one day asked her if she wanted to have sex. She said she had a husband. The foreman said, “Then go home and ask your husband if you can do it with me.”
That night, she mentioned this to her husband and he said, “If he gives you money, then it is all right for you to have sex with this man.” In bed with Teenager, Luisa Maria said to herself, fuck this husband I have.
“He should go away forever,” Luisa Maria said to Teenager.
She looked into Teenager’s eyes as she said this. Then Luisa Maria slid her hand between Teenager’s legs and caused his great body to shiver.
In the morning, Teenager took Luisa Maria to Ana’s Bar and told the old barmaid who wore her hat over a kerchief that he did not want her any longer.
“Do you know how to tend bar?” Teenager said to Luisa Maria.
She stepped onto the duckboards and picked up a rum bottle from the bottom shelf. She blew the dust off it.
“You keep this place dirty,” she said.
“Here,” Teenager said. He held up a dollar.
She bounced down the duckboard floor. “¿Sí?”
“You play the juke box for me.”
She came out from behind the bar, punched the tunes and came back. As the first record came on, Teenager said, “Make the music loud.” Behind the bar, Luisa Maria turned a key and the tune, “Toro Mata,” with Celia Cruz singing, blared into the small barroom. Luisa Maria began to sing with the juke box.
Toro mata ahí
Toro mata ahí
Rumbanchero toro mata
Toro viejo se murió
Mañana comemos carne
Toro mata
Toro torito toro mata
Teenager wriggled his shoulders to the tune. Toro mata. The bull kills. The song said the bull kills, the old bull died and tomorrow we eat meat. Halfway through the lyrics the second time, with trumpets loud and high, Teenager let out a growl that came from the bottom of his belly.
9
IN THE MIDDLE OF the hot afternoon, the shoemaker stood in front of the small electric fan and let it blow on his wet face. Outside his window, the Brooklyn sidewalk was crowded with Italians and Puerto Ricans who walked slowly and street-shopped at the outdoor displays of fruit and summer-wear and fish that the shopkeepers had set up. A Puerto Rican with large, menacing shoulders covered by a powder-blue knit polo shirt stood with his back to the shoemaker’s window. The Puerto Rican turned and came into the shop. The shoemaker placed a hand to his mouth and spit the shoenails into his hand. He was proud of the shoenails; he was sure that he was the only shoemaker left in Brooklyn who still hammered nails to put new soles onto his shoes.
“Can I help you?” he said to the Puerto Rican.
Teenager did not answer. He opened a paper shopping bag and took out a white boat-captain’s hat, which he jammed down over his eyes.
Teenager walked up two doors and then stopped at the outdoor counter of the Cafe Del Golfo. Around him, the narrow strips of sidewalk going past the outdoor stands were clogged with shoppers. In the windows of the five-story walkups, old women rested their arms on pillows and stared down at the street. A kid in a bathing suit sat atop an open hydrant and directed the water at passing cars by clamping his bare legs against the opening, sealing it, then suddenly opening his legs and directing a stream of water at the windows of the cars and delivery trucks. The air was filled with the sounds of a changing neighborhood, Puerto Ricans calling in Spanish and Italian merchants shouting out in rough English. A cockeyed kid in a white apron came to the open window of the cafe.
“Lemon ice,” Teenager said. He glanced at his watch. One fifty-nine. He had a full minute.
The cockeyed kid went to the refrigerator and Teenager stared into the Cafe Del Golfo. The cockeyed kid was the only one behind the long counter. A squat orange espresso machine sat like a tabernacle on the middle of the counter. The far end of the counter was open. There were phone booths, and then a space in a partition leading into the back room where the Italians sat and played cards. Teenager watched the amount of smoke hanging in the air over the partition.
When the cockeyed kid brought him the lemon ice, Teenager fumbled in his pocket for change. He took a step back and grimaced.
“I have a whole pocket of change someplace here,” he said.
The cockeyed kid stared out the open window and said nothing.
Inside the cafe, one of the phones rang.
“Now I have the change,” Teenager said. He stepped up to the counter. Inside the cafe, the phone kept ringing. Finally, a bald man in a short-sleeved shirt came out of the card room and answered it. The bald man dropped the phone and walked back into the card room.
“Paulie,” he called out.
Teenager grabbed the cockeyed kid by the T-shirt and yanked him so that th
e kid’s chest and head were through the window. The first Italian in my life I ever touch and it is an idiot, Teenager said to himself. His right hand went under the powder-blue polo shirt and brought the black Browning .9 millimeter into the kid’s face.
“Sit down on the floor or you are dead,” Teenager said.
He let go of the kid. Terrified, the cockeyed kid dropped to the floor behind the counter. Now Teenager gripped the Browning with both hands and aimed down the counter, past the espresso machine, at the phone booths. Paulie came out of the card room to answer the phone, walking with his lips wide apart so everybody could admire his newly capped teeth. Teenager didn’t know if Paulie saw him or not. Teenager had his eyes riveted on Paulie’s chest, a yellow shirt under a brown lounge suit. It took a fraction over a second for the Browning to fire nine shots at the chest. It sounded at first, on the crowded street, as if a truck had backfired. Then in people’s minds came the realization that the truck had a trigger. Women began to shriek. Teenager was in the shoe repair shop by now. He stuffed the pistol into his trousers and threw the captain’s hat behind the counter. The shoemaker, afraid it was a bomb, jumped into his show window, which was filled with shoes and posters for a soccer match.
Teenager ripped off the blue polo shirt, dropped it and walked outside in a white undershirt. The screaming of many voices came from the cafe. People on the street were running toward the cafe to see what had happened. Teenager walked away from the shoe repair shop, went past a fruit stand and then mixed in with a group of Puerto Ricans who stood at the corner.
One of them, bare-topped, held a quart bottle of Miller’s beer. “The Guineas shoot each other,” he said.
Teenager took the bottle from his hand. “I’ll buy you a dozen bottles,” he said. He took a long swig of the beer, the sun blazing against the clear glass. As he drank, he had his eyes on the entrance to the Cafe Del Golfo. Guineas kept running out, stopping, looking up and down the sidewalk, seeing the flock of Puerto Rican faces, and then running on to their cars. Flying out of the doorway came the cockeyed kid. A hand from the doorway held the cockeyed kid’s black hair. A foot came out and kicked the cockeyed kid out onto the sidewalk where he rolled in pain.
“Come with me,” Teenager said to the bare top. They walked several yards up the sidestreet and into a bodega.
“Three quarts of beer for my friend,” Teenager said. He put a five-dollar bill on the counter and then walked out into the hot street and ambled up to a 1965 red Falcon. Benny Velez pretended to doze at the wheel, but his hands shook slightly. Teenager opened the door and stood in the sun and stretched. He watched a police car come the wrong way on the one-way street, siren sounding, roof light spinning, the bare-armed cops inside it motioning furiously for the crowd of Puerto Ricans in the street to get out of the way.
Teenager got in the car, slammed the door shut and put a hand on Benny’s thigh to keep Benny from trying to reach ninety by the middle of the block.
“Just drive slow,” Teenager said.
They went up the narrow, littered street, past stoops crowded with women who held babies and craned to see what was happening at the corner.
“Right,” Teenager said at the end of the block.
Benny turned right and the car now was on the street with several old cars driven by Puerto Ricans. They drove for blocks until they no longer could hear the police sirens.
“Let’s go home,” Teenager said.
When Teenager walked into Ana’s Bar, Luisa Maria slid off the barstool and looked at him. Teenager licked his lips and smiled. Luisa Maria put her hand on the juke box key. Suddenly, the music roared into the room.
Toro mata ahí
Toro mata …
“Aha!” Teenager shouted. His shoulders wiggled to the music.
“Call somebody on the phone,” he said to Luisa Maria. “You are good at making phone calls.”
Luisa Maria shrieked and clapped her hands.
Two days later, Gigi and Victor were having one of the best times in months. At 6:00 A.M., they were at the Myruggia Bar in Hunts Point, a desert by day and swamp by night, separated from the South Bronx mainland by an expressway and a slimy canal with an old drawbridge going over it. Hunts Point has a huge market area, fenced and closed at night; a high white building holding Spofford House, the detention house for kids arrested under sixteen, a few low apartment houses and empty lots around weary factories. Fire reduced Hunts Point to about a third of what it once was; the Myruggia Bar sat in the center of this like a truck stop in the middle of Nebraska. There were no sidewalks, and the bar had no other buildings near it. A lone streetlamp bathed the front of the building in a weak light. The Myruggia was a long one-story building with a steam table in front for factory workers’ lunches during the day, along with several pool tables, and the rest of the place taken up by a rectangular bar that could fit two hundred. On a platform behind the bar nearly naked young women, women not as young as the trade called for, danced to Latin music. The women were listless and sad-fleshed, but this was no matter to Gigi; he sat with his friend Victor and they carefully braided five-dollar bills into paper airplanes. The way Gigi did it, he made the point as sharp as possible, and then he kept twisting the point until it seemed as firm as metal. When Gigi and Victor had many of these five-dollar planes, Gigi picked up one, squinted and aimed it at the dancer’s bare right breast.
A smile came on the dancer’s face and her body began to swing more. Big lesbian hips swung out, causing her chest to shake, a chest with contours suggesting more of fat than of beauty. She looked at the ceiling, smiling, knowing what was coming, but pretending she did not, so that she could give a greater kick to Gigi.
Gigi threw his airplane dart. The kneaded nose seemed to be going right for the nipple, but it landed lower.
The dancer gave a jerk, as if in pain.
Gigi exploded. “Yaaaaahhh!” he roared. The dancer smiled at him, and gave him a reproving look. Hips still moving, she bent down, picked up the five and tucked it into the little patch of cloth covering her pubic hair. Her gaze went to the ceiling again, so that she could be taken by surprise by another of Gigi’s darts.
Gigi aimed carefully. She glanced down and caught him in the midst of this and Gigi giggled and covered his face and hid the dart behind his glass of vodka. Then the big hip-swinging lesbian looked up at the ceiling again and Gigi threw. She swung her body to the right and the dart, fading, landed just at the right hip. She gave a little start that made Gigi smile slightly. Then as he took aim again, she scooped up the five-dollar dart and tucked it safely against her brown sugary hair. She straightened up to dance and now, at once, Gigi and Victor Buenes aimed and threw, Victor for the left tit, Gigi for the right. Victor’s fell harmlessly to the floor, but Gigi’s hit well, about two inches from the nipple. The big lesbo dancer bucked forward as if badly stung. She began to swing her body as if in great pain. Gigi loved it. As the lesbo danced, she indicated with a finger the bills that had just been thrown. The barmaid picked them off the floor and stuffed them down the dancer’s front.
“That’s all right,” Teenager said. He was standing behind Gigi and Victor, pushing up against Gigi so that Gigi would feel the pistol in the small of his back.
“You’re coming with me,” Teenager said to Gigi.
“I am here,” Gigi said.
“That’s all right,” Teenager said.
“I don’t see you when you are home from jail and now you come to me like this?” Gigi said.
“That’s all right,” Teenager said.
Chita Gonzalez, in red blouse opened to the waist, was at the opposite side of the bar. She looked up from her drink and saw Teenager and immediately began to push her way through people to get to him.
“I make money with him,” she said.
As she came around the bar, Teenager was pushing Gigi and Victor toward the door.
“You don’t remember me?” Chita Gonzalez called to him.
Teenager glanced at he
r, then marched Gigi and Victor out of the bar. They stood outside the rear door in the early morning.
“You have been in jail too long,” Gigi said. He saw that point reached Teenager. “Come on,” Gigi said, “would I be out in a bar such as this if I had done anything to you? I would be on the other side of the world.”
Teenager slapped Gigi on the shoulder. “I don’t know who tells me anything. I am so mixed up from prison. You are right.”
“Where do you have to go?” Gigi asked.
“To the Cross Bronx Expressway service road,” Teenager said.
Gigi knew where this was. It is a short, deserted street with no sidewalk that serves as a launch site for cars going out onto the expressway and, more prominently, a meeting place for Puerto Rican drug peddlers and Mariani’s Italian suppliers who came off the expressway from the North Bronx, did business through car windows with these greasy Spics, then took the money and rushed off to their homes.
Teenager slid into the back seat and Gigi and Victor sat in front of Gigi’s tan Mark IV Lincoln. The drive took less than ten minutes. Gigi pulled his car alongside a fence of a public schoolyard, whose asphalt sounded with the footsteps of the first basketball game of the day.
“You are just nervous from jail,” Gigi said. “When I first come home from jail I cannot listen to a bus going by, I am so nervous.”
Teenager shot Gigi in the back of the head with the gun in his left hand and Victor in the back of the head with the gun in his right hand. He fired once more into each head. He stuffed the guns into his belt and dove out of the Lincoln on the street side, so schoolyard kids would not see him. Benny drove up in his Mercedes. As the car pulled away, Teenager could see Gigi and Victor with their heads against the seatbacks. Teenager began to think of a place to get rid of the guns. Then, like a bored cat, he began to lick the blood from his hands.
At 7:45 A.M., the sector car lurched up to Gigi’s Lincoln and saw what was inside. The patrolman called for a supervisor. When the sergeant arrived, detectives were called. Detective Lieutenant Robert Martin, his face red, but not from sunshine, drove up in a weary brown Plymouth Fury. Behind him was a blue Plymouth with two detectives and in the third Plymouth, black, were Hansen and Myles.
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