“Not for this job?”
“Do you go into a church without blessing yourself?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Let me put it this way. Never mind you. But do most people walk into a church without putting their fingers into the water and blessing themselves?”
“No, they bless themselves.”
“Then how can you come into a political office unless you first have seen Luis Jimenez?”
He decided to call Jimenez back, but this time with an awareness of the consequences of his language. If asked to work in a campaign, he would give a Jimenez answer: of course, I will work in this political campaign, for it is my duty as a citizen to do such a thing. Which candidate will I work for? Of course I will not work for any candidate until I have seen you. Maximo was angry with himself that he had not delivered this answer when he was asked the first time. Promise to see the guy. To see means many things, particularly, Maximo thought, I’ll see you, you sonofabtich.
When he called Luis Jimenez’ office, he was able to get only the secretary this time.
“He is very busy for you to bother him,” she said.
“Would you tell him that I’ve thought over what he told me the other day and I now agree with him?” Maximo said.
“Just a moment,” the secretary said.
Luis Jimenez came on the line. “You are the smartest young man in the whole Bronx!”
“If I learn from you long enough I might be,” Maximo said.
“Oh, no, you’re so much smarter. Someday you will be governor of this state. Bankers will hold you up as a hero.”
“I’d like to start at that job first,” Maximo said.
“Well, that cannot be done so quickly now. First, we must see what is what.”
“How do we do that?”
“We have this meeting on Friday night. All the citizens can come. The meeting is here. Why don’t you come and we will speak after it?”
Maximo, who had no lecture on Friday night, came home from the library, took a shower and changed clothes. He found he had three dollars in his pocket. He walked out of his bedroom and saw his mother’s purse on the dining room table. His mother had gone down the hall to visit another woman. Maximo stared hard at the purse and then went downstairs with the three dollars in his pocket and stepped into the bar.
“Aha!” Teenager called out. He was sitting in a booth with three men Maximo never had seen before. Skinny men with faces that reflected the dirthills that filled the insides of their heads.
“Can I see you?” Maximo said.
Teenager slid out of the booth.
“I need ten dollars. I can give it back to you the day I get paid from my job.”
“You will take a hundred,” Teenager said. “What is this job?”
“I said I wanted ten,” Maximo said.
Teenager smirked and tried to put the hundred into his hand. “Ten,” Maximo said.
Teenager withdrew the hundred and handed Maximo the ten. “Now what is this job?”
“I have to go see Luis Jimenez tonight. All the jobs I want are up to him.”
“Who is Jimenez?”
“You don’t know him? You were away too long. He runs the Bronx. At least as far as Hispanics are concerned.”
“Who runs the Bronx?” Teenager said.
“Jimenez.”
“I never heard of him. He has never met me. Who is he to say he runs the Bronx?”
“He doesn’t have to say it,” Maximo said.
“And you are going to see him now?”
“Yes.”
“Show me where he is.”
“He’s going to be at a meeting on Westchester Avenue.”
“To hell with these meetings.”
“That’s where he’ll be.”
“I’ll drive you there. I just want to see the face of this man, he says he runs the Bronx.”
Teenager walked out as if the three ugly men in the booth were not there. In the car on the way over, he listened to Maximo tell of how Luis Jimenez knocked him out of his job, at least temporarily, and the moment he finished speaking, Maximo knew he had made a mistake.
“He screws you, he screws me,” Teenager said.
“Forget it. I can straighten it out, I think,” Maximo said.
“He makes you beg,” Teenager said.
“Well.”
“Nobody begs,” Teenager said.
He double-parked in front of the Bronx All Services Center and Maximo tried to get away from him, but Teenager insisted on going upstairs with him.
“Then I’m not going,” Maximo said, standing on the sidewalk.
“Why is this?”
“Because you’ll blow everything on me.”
“I am the strongest man in the world,” Teenager said. “Do not be afraid.”
“This isn’t a fight.”
Teenager’s voice softened. “I just want to look at this fellow who is a boss. I will do nothing else.”
Maximo went upstairs with Teenager behind him and followed the cardboard sign to the weekly citizens meeting of the Bronx All Services Center. It was being held in a large room where men sat on folding chairs and smoked cigarettes. Luis Jimenez sat down at a table in the front of the room. A large black man in a blue shirt took a seat a few feet away. He folded his arms and his eyes, heavy with sleep, appeared to close. On the wall behind Jimenez, starting from one corner of the room and running to the other, was a set of framed sequence photos, a dozen in all, showing Luis Jimenez advancing across the floor at a political meeting and, arms out, embracing John F. Kennedy and his wife, who held one hand to her hair and the other against Luis Jimenez’ fat chest. Maximo, hands stuffed into the pockets of a blue zipper jacket, slipped in quietly. He felt Jimenez looking at him. Teenager stood for long moments, then scraped a chair across the floor. He remained standing, for all to see his upper torso wrapped in a skintight yellow shirt open to the chest. Only a couple of people seemed to know him, but those who did not seemed to sense immediately that Teenager did not have as his primary interest the field of public safety.
Luis Jimenez, befitting a man who had decided many years before this that his constituents were primarily scum, and thus unworthy of any reaction stronger than slight indignation, smiled tolerantly as Teenager finally took his seat. The man in the blue shirt, sitting near Jimenez in the front of the room, opened his eyes and pulled his chair closer to Jimenez. His eyes stared steadily at Teenager.
“We must discuss the festival that we are having at Randalls Island,” Jimenez said.
Before Maximo could put a hand out, Teenager was on his feet. “I want to speak of something else.”
“Tonight, we discuss the festival,” Jimenez said evenly.
“I want to discuss with you why people go to great colleges and learn many things and they come to you and you do not help them.”
“Are you a man who went to a great college?” Jimenez asked.
“I went to the greatest college where the greatest teachers are,” Teenager said. “I do not want your porqueria. But this man here, he went to Harvard. He is to be a lawyer to help all the Puerto Rican people. You do nothing for him.”
Maximo forced himself to stand up. “He is talking for me and he means well, but he does not understand,” he said.
Teenager became furious. “I understand that this man will not give you a job.”
Jimenez, his smile ready, held out his hands. “We have a legal committee that helps boost all Puerto Rican lawyers.” He nodded his head, causing a thin man with neat black hair and skin that was quite pale to arise. “This is Luis Ortiz, who is in charge of seeing that all Hispanics have the proper chance in law.”
“I take care of all problems,” Jimenez said.
“Why don’t you give Maximo a good job?” Teenager said.
Jimenez nodded to another part of the room and a short, fat man popped up. “I move that these people are talking too much during this meeting.”
Th
ree people, in different parts of the room, stood and called out to second the motion.
Luis Jimenez, his smile ready, said, “I am sorry. The business tonight must be the festival at Randalls Island.”
Teenager’s finger counted the heads in the room.
“Fifty,” he said in a low voice. Then he called out to Jimenez, “I want a vote.”
Jimenez smiled. “You see for yourself that this is a waste of time. Please do not bother us so much now. You have heard what the others have to say.”
“No, I want a vote on whether I should shut up or not,” Teenager said. “Here is how we will have this vote. I will hit you on the chin and break your fucking jaw. Then I will hit him on the chin and break his fucking jaw. Then I will hit this man over here and break his fucking jaw.” He swung around. “I will hit you and break your fucking jaw. I will break fifty fucking jaws in this room. Then we will have the mother-fucking vote and I will win by 1-0.”
The large man in the blue shirt next to Jimenez stirred. Teenager pointed at him. “I will break your fucking jaw, too. And I can see that you have a gun. You think you are the only one with a gun. Now I am going to show you something that you are not the only one.”
Teenager bent down, pulled a Walther PPK/S automatic out of his sock, held it over his head and fired into the ceiling. Maximo froze, but nearly everybody else in the room dove to the floor.
Teenager again bent over, pushed the safety down and put the gun back into his sock, and now stood up and surveyed the room. The people on the floor, the fear finally draining out of them, reassembled their bodies on chairs. The next to last man to show his head was Luis Jimenez’ bodyguard. The last man to appear, rising like a victim of a mine cave-in, was Luis Jimenez.
Teenager kicked the chair out of his way and stomped down the hall to the staircase. Maximo was in the hallway, slumped against the wall, listening to the carhorn blaring out on the street. He knew it was Teenager waiting for him. Maximo was in pain until the horn stopped blaring, signifying Teenager’s impatience had won and he had driven off into the night.
When Luis Jimenez stepped out of the meeting, Maximo said softly, “I couldn’t stop him from coming in here.”
“Oh, I know it is not your fault,” Jimenez said.
“Really. The guy just walked in. I told him not to.”
“Oh, I know this,” Luis Jimenez said. “You are a smart boy. You would never do such a thing. Come in with me. I want to talk to you about your career.”
Maximo was badly shaken by his having been on a bough in a forest fire. The naked power that had taken him through subway turnstiles as a schoolboy and had been exhilarating to watch, now caused him to be terrified. He had prepared himself for a complex life and here he could lose it at the very outset to common thuggery. Yet, as he followed Jimenez down the hall, he could feel that Jimenez, who lived closer to the ground, was reacting differently: these things happen, and were best served by compromise, his body motions indicated. Maximo thought of his father. His father would be pleased. This was Carlos Tapia’s way. Now Maximo smiled for a moment. He had just been on a ride he never again would take, but it was clear that it had left him where he wanted to go.
“Mister, are you the man I am to see?” The first client of his career, a thin Puerto Rican woman, clutching an old purse, stood in the doorway of Maximo’s cubicle at the Bronx Legal Services two weeks later.
“I guess I am,” Maximo said.
“You are an attorney?”
“I hope to be soon. But I am allowed to handle your matter now, however. Sit down. What can I do for you?”
“My husband leaves me.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I have nothing. No food at home. No rent. I walk here. I do not have even the bus fare.”
“Well, something has to be done about that,” Maximo said.
The woman’s hands dug into a purse.
“Look.”
She held out a large color picture of a woman with long dark hair covering bare shoulders. A great bosom pressed against a red strapless evening gown whose front was sprayed with sequins. The woman in the picture had her head back and was laughing with joy.
“This is the woman your husband ran away with?” Maximo said.
“No, this is my husband.”
11
FOR THE NEXT WEEK, Maximo looked for a furnished apartment, but the number of burned-out buildings made it difficult to find anything inhabitable. Dirt could be scrubbed. Rats could be contended with; he had grown up to the sound of their scratching inside the bedroom wall at night. But a half-empty building, with the threat of fire in the night starting in an empty apartment, was not for him. Then a man named Roy in the bodega said that he had a cousin named Chino on Pinto Avenue who had a furnished apartment and was giving it up.
“It’s a wonderful place for me,” Chino said the next day. He ruffled the coat of a large German shepherd. A couch and two chairs in the living room were covered with plastic. In the bedroom, the bed had a light-colored headboard and the tables alongside it were from a different set.
“I hate to do this thing, but I must give this place up for fifteen, sixteen months,” Chino said.
“Where are you going?” Maximo said.
“Wherever the judge sends me.”
The apartment was on the second floor of a three-story brick building that stood on a street that had been nearly razed by fire. Directly across the street was a sandwich shop that was opened in the daytime, but at night was covered with corrugated metal. Over it, in frontier loneliness, lived two families. The rent for Chino’s apartment was $212.50 a month and Chino said he wanted forty a month to cover the furniture.
“Fine,” Maximo said.
“Give it to my cousin in his bodega and he will keep it for me,” Chino said.
“Every month,” Maximo said.
“What about the dog, man?” Chino said. “You got to pay me ten dollars a month for my dog.”
“I don’t know whether I want the dog,” Maximo said.
“When you see him bite some guy’s ass tries to get in here, man, you’ll want the dog.”
“What’s his name?”
“Duque.”
The dog panted as he heard his name.
“He only speaks Spanish,” Chino said.
“Bajate!” Maximo said. The dog sat. “That’s good,” Maximo said.
“You just feed him and he’s yours,” Chino said. “Anybody else, he bites, man.”
Maximo moved into the apartment about a week later. On his first night there, he went downstairs to an outdoor phone booth and called the number that Nicki had given him for her girlfriend Angela. He gave Angela the number of the phone booth and hung up. A few long moments later, the phone rang.
“Where have you been?” Nicki said.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“I thought you didn’t call me because you weren’t going to take my advice. You did what I told you, didn’t you?”
“I haven’t seen him or said anything to him.”
“Ahead of all the schools you went to, that shows you’re smart. So now let’s forget that. We don’t need to talk about that anymore.”
“Right. Am I going to see you tomorrow?” Maximo said.
“I’ll be in the same place at five o’clock,” Nicki said.
Nicki was there fifteen minutes early this time. She took the same table in the back, by the doors leading to the kitchen. It was all right for her to maneuver Maximo to this table the first time, she told herself, but if she had allowed him to arrive first this time, and then again had to make him move to this back table, he would almost certainly realize what she was doing to him. He probably would start hollering “New Jessey” all over the place, she thought.
She wore a maroon velour shirt from Macy’s and blue Calvin Klein pants from Bloomingdale’s. Around her neck were two thin gold chains given to her by her father. She ordered a cappuccino, lit a cigarette and stared over the heads of
people at the door. When Maximo appeared in a gold knit shirt, smiling across the room at her, Nicki felt her face become warm. As she watched Maximo slide between tables, hips swaying to avoid people’s elbows, she thought of him as a jungle animal, a long black panther. Do they have panthers in Puerto Rico? It doesn’t matter, she thought, whatever it is, as long as it is something direct from the jungle.
“I got a job,” Maximo said.
“That’s nice,” Nicki said.
“And I got an apartment.”
“That’s nice,” Nicki said.
“I’m going to be working in a poverty law office in the Bronx. It will give me a great chance to work at some of the things I want to do. Housing. I can’t wait to try some class actions in housing.”
Nicki saw him on a wide screen, his eyes and beard commanding.
“Where the poor get screwed is on Section 235 housing funds. The city uses them for the white middle class. They’re supposed to be used for the poor. Did you ever hear of Section 235 housing rehabilitation?”
Nicki said nothing.
“Did you ever hear of it?”
“No,” Nicki said finally.
“I’ll explain it to you. When I was in law sch—”
“—Where did you go?”
“Law school? Harvard?”
“That’s in Boston, isn’t it?”
“Cambridge.”
“Cambridge, Boston, it’s all the same to me. You went to a sleepaway school?”
“Yes.”
“My father never would let me go to sleepaway school. We’re conservative at home. Sleepaway school is all right for liberals like you.”
“What’s a liberal got to do with it?”
“You’re Puerto Rican.”
“Of course I am.”
“Then you got to be a liberal. We’re not. We’re conservative and we don’t go to sleepaway colleges.”
They lapsed into silence for several moments. At first their eyes were moving from coffee cup to cigarette to ceiling lights and then, simultaneously, they locked on each other and remained there. Maximo saw a forbidden white orchid, and she saw a panther striding across a wide screen.
Forsaking All Others Page 15