She clapped her hands over her face again. Through the fingers she could see Teenager put the barrel of the gun to Angel’s head. Teenager waited until the trumpets of “Toro Mata” were at their highest and then he roared out, “Toro torito …”
The juke box almost completely drowned out the sound of the gun as it went off against Angel’s head.
Luisa Maria, peering through her hands, screeched.
At the bar, Benny went into his shirt pocket and brought out his cocaine.
22
THE NUMBER FIVE IRT subway train came out of the tunnel and onto the iron bridge crossing the Harlem River. Standing between the third and fourth cars, the wind blowing his hair, Maximo watched the lights of a tugboat glancing across the top of the black water.
“Fixtures are chattels so affixed to land or buildings as to lose their identity as chattels and become part of the land or buildings,” he recited to himself, like an incantation.
It wandered into his mind like a thought about drinking water or eating dinner. For weeks, Maximo had been going by subway to and from the Statler Hilton in Manhattan, sitting in the faded ballroom with four hundred other students, mostly in blue jeans, and he had just finished the last evening in which the professor would inflict on them his three-hour monotone on the most important subjects to know for the New York State Bar exam, which was to start the next morning. The ballroom was full on this last night because the professor, who had a reputation of being able to predict most of the questions to appear on the bar exam, was, like a horse tout at post time, giving his final selections, the last-minute specials that had earned him fame. Tonight’s last words had centered on real property.
“Timing is all important with regard to trade fixtures,” the professor had said. “If fixtures are not removed in time, they become the property of the landlord.”
To prepare Maximo to assist the South Bronx, the professor with the sure-shot questions had droned, “A bathroom cabinet attached to the surface of a wall does not evidence the same intent as does one installed flush against the wall.” The words remained in Maximo’s ears as he rode the train.
The train pulled into the first station in the Bronx. “No riding between cars,” a cop standing in the station shouted to Maximo. Maximo went into the car. The cop came into the same car. A kid of high school age, toothpick hanging from the corner of his mouth, turned on the portable cassette player he had on his lap. Salsa music blared.
“Turn that thing off,” the cop said. The young man pushed up the lever on the side of the cassette player. The volume doubled.
“I said to turn that thing off,” the cop said.
With a simple motion, he scooped up the cassette player and threw it out the window over the schoolboy’s head. The schoolboy started to rise from the seat to take on the cop. The cop’s right hand banged into the kid’s left ear. Not enough punch to stun and harm and cause people throughout the car to erupt, but enough for the kid to get the message.
Five stops later, Maximo stepped off the train and went through the turnstile and down the stairs leading from the elevated station to the street. He walked along Southern Boulevard and turned into Pinto Avenue. Through the truck fumes, through the smell of fish frying in stands whose glass was too smeared for vision, and all through the tar heat of the street, Maximo could smell her neck. If he could be with her for just a few minutes, make it an hour, an hour would be lovely, and feel her body against his, perhaps he could get the ownership of bathroom fixtures out of his mind for the night.
At the corner on Pinto, four men were sitting on milk crates, playing dominoes on a piece of plywood propped on a cardboard box. One of them swiveled and called across the street. David Robles’ mother looked out the window. “Espero!” Maximo stopped. Her head disappeared from the window, and in a few moments the street door flew open and David came running into the street. He handed Maximo a folded sheet of paper. Then David went into his shirt pocket and took out a dollar bill. “For doing my job,” he said proudly. He ran back to his door. Maximo climbed the stairs, pushed the dog aside when he opened the door and leaned against the living room wall and read the note under the ceiling light.
M—
I am going to Novena tonight so you will pass your exam. I will prove how sure I am of you. The Novena is not to St. Jude. It is to St. Ann. I am not worried about your passing. I am going to Novena so that you will get the highest mark and be the richest lawyer in New York.
You are nice. N.
Maximo read the note several times. While he was proud that she understood both the importance of the exams and the extent of his smartness, the line that he kept rereading was the one where she said he was nice. When he took the dog out for his nightly run, Maximo kept thinking of the line. It was the close of a short note and he saw it as great poetry.
The wolf whistle was the overt act that caused her to think differently of her life with her husband for the first time since the night she had sat on the park bench and looked at the East River and agreed to go out with no other man. The wolf whistle came from this stupid moron who was leaning on a rake inside the prison’s outer fence, a high storm fence. Nicki and her husband were in the conjugal visit trailer parked on the grass outside the storm fence. At four o’clock that afternoon, Nicki and her husband looked out and waved at the guard at the main gate, who nodded and then wrote on his clipboard that prisoner Schiavone, housed for this day in the fuck truck, was present at the afternoon head count. At first, Nicki and her husband were smiling as they waved at the guard, but then as this stupid moron behind the fence kept whistling, Nicki’s husband broke into a giggle. He hopped from the trailer and stood out on the grass and began pounding his chest like an ape. The moron behind the storm fence shook with laughter. Nicki’s husband now made ape sounds. The guy behind the fence fell on the grass, his legs kicking in the air. The guard with the clipboard yelled something and the moron rolled onto his feet and walked off with the rake. But now from an upper floor in the main building there came more wolf whistles and shouts from men pressed against barred windows.
“Eat your hearts out,” Nicki’s husband yelled.
Nicki quickly ducked inside the trailer, for she knew what the retorts from the window would be. The sounds of voices calling from the prison caused her to cringe. The trailer was neat, and the bed was covered with her own sheets and pillowcases and blankets, but she now imagined the place smelled faintly of a place where dogs had lain. Each day of the month, different bodies were on this bed, black nigger bodies mostly, thick lips smacking, big long cow tongues lapping, the bodies rolling around on the mattress, probably with some used sheet on it, not even tucked in, the heels finally kicking the sheet onto the floor and making everything the way they were used to it, bareass on dirty mattresses. Because some schedule in a guard’s office said it now was the turn of #327C19 Schiavone, into this fuck truck she came, seamy with semen, a place that made a motel whorehouse seem as fresh as new grass. Here was her husband validating her feeling as he hooted back at the men behind the bars. Above all, he knew that she liked sex in the dark, where she could surrender her privacy with murmurs. Now he was taking her privacy and spilling it across the floor of a cellblock.
When her husband stepped into the trailer, he walked up behind her and locked his arm under her chin. He made an animal sound.
“Please, I need a minute,” Nicki said. The arm released and she walked to the kitchenette and began washing plates that were already clean. The next time I have to come here, I will have my period, she told herself.
Later, they decided to finish the last bottle of red wine before leaving the trailer.
“So it looks good,” her husband said.
“What looks good?” Nicki said.
“Me getting out of here,” he said. “I told you.”
“When?”
“I just told you before.”
“Oh, well, you’ve been telling me all day.”
“They said when I mee
t the board in February, I got a shot.”
“That’s good,” she said.
“Good? It’s my whole life.”
“When could you get out?”
“If they give me a date in February, I could be in a halfway house by March.”
“Uh huh.”
“We’d be back where we were.” He drained the wine, stood up and bent down to kiss her. She responded, but then when he began to press his body on hers, she held up a hand.
“Too late,” she said. “We have to be out of here.”
She felt better when he stepped back.
Driving home in her father’s car, Nicki wondered about the rules of her life. If she was breaking them already by seeing Maximo now and then, perhaps someday she would break nearly all the rest of the rules and live according to her desires, and not by some ancient code that her people followed. In the beginning, nothing mattered except to be with her husband. When he worked construction the first year that they were married, she went to a job on Lexington Avenue, a twenty-five-story apartment building, and she waited by the cement trucks for two hours, and then he finally came down and they kissed in the hot sun and then he turned around and went right back up, and she would have waited far longer, for the thought of him made time and comfort meaningless. Prison was something else. There had been a forlornness to her life that she tried not to think about, but now this wolf whistle from this stupid moron had brought it all to the surface: her husband had been away too long and she no longer could handle it.
She stopped for coffee at a Hot Shoppe on the Thruway, took a piece of paper from the cashier and wrote the note to Maximo. She gave it to David Robles on Pinto Avenue and then drove to New Jersey in time to go to novena with her mother and aunts. This she had to do; one of the few things you could not lie about was making a novena for a person. If you said you were going, you had to go.
She prayed by rote, using her white rosary beads, thinking of what Maximo looked like when he read a book to her. When she thought of the wolf whistle, she closed her eyes and said the rosary louder to rid herself of the scene in the trailer. At home, the mother and aunts sat in the kitchen. Aunt Philomena brought out the Polaroid shots of her nephew, who was in Lewisburg.
“You got your pictures?” the aunt said to Nicki.
“Somewhere,” Nicki said.
“Let me see. I want to see what he looks like these days.”
“I’ll look around for them,” Nicki said.
She went down into the playroom and put Donna Sommer on the stereo. She flicked one switch, the one that turned on only the ceiling lights, miniature spotlights that were imbedded in the ceiling. She stood in one beam of light and swayed to the music. She thought of the trailer and the wolf whistle again—why does this freaking thing bother me now?—and wondered what other things time had done to her husband. He knew what she was like, yet he had pranced in front of the trailer and proclaimed that she was some hot bitch to be dog-jumped in the sunlight, with the whole village watching. Maximo, she had never spent a crude moment with that one. He allowed her lust to spill from her when she wanted it. Maximo had a quality that she never before had experienced, understatement. He knew that the lights were to be out, that her feelings for what she was doing were to be protected.
When she was around him, she felt a confidence in herself that was unique. She did not realize how she felt at the time, but at several odd moments, at the desk in the office, on the bus on the way home, she remembered the night in the hotel with the judges. It wasn’t the kind of life she ever would feel comfortable around, she felt, but for the one night, even though she didn’t realize it until much later, there was an excitement to her life that centered on something that was considered out of her class. Maximo. Oh, he is so courteous. You could see he went to a high-class school.
When the song “Bad Girl” came on the stereo, Nicki picked up a stirrer from a glass on the bar, held it to her lips like a microphone, and began to hum along with Donna Sommer. Nicki started to sing softly, then louder, and she danced under the spotlights. Her head rocked and she sang “Bad Girl” into the stirrer and she swept her hand out, as if shaking the microphone wire from about her feet, and she danced and sang on, at first pretending to be in a Las Vegas nightclub, in a top lounge, and then she no longer was pretending; singing as high and loud as possible, wailing really, head back, body swaying, she sang into the microphone in her hand in this nightclub. She saw Maximo by himself at a table by the wall.
The next day, she felt that somewhere inside her a feeling that she thought had been anchored began to move. She knew this in the morning, when the exhaust from the bus clung to the pine tree branches like paste and yet she noticed only the color of the pine. She stood on line at the bus stop and thought of Maximo brushing his hair to start his morning.
On the bus to Manhattan, she stared out the window and saw Maximo taking his exams. At work, she saw for the first time that there was perhaps more to her computer terminal than words and figures that swam under the glass surface like baitfish. Suddenly the computer terminal, once a machine with a strange tongue, now became a wise, familiar voice. The computer dealt with only one universe at a time, and then only at those moments for which it had been programmed. Sitting at the computer, she suddenly knew that it was important for her to deal with one subject in one place and in one solitary time frame. Just as her computer worked only with the information given to it, so would she call up her life one screen at a time. Her heritage was to control every moment of her life; in dealing with another person, the only consideration was the amount of good the other person could accomplish for you before reaching the point where he had to be betrayed. True affection was reserved for possessions. Until today, she loved most the diamond trinket hanging on a gold chain about her neck. The trinket had diamonds set tastefully and richly. It was not a glaring diamond, but it was her most costly piece of jewelry and it made her feel superior, which to her was all-important.
She came from a body of people who believed, whether indeed it ever had happened or not, that their family names called for brother to kill brother if one was found to be treasonous. Control of emotions and relationships was everything. And now, of this morning, from the moment she looked at the leaves on the bus stop, she understood that her usual staying hand was not quick enough, the palm spread not wide enough, to suppress what was happening. Therefore, she said to herself at her computer, if she was falling in love with Maximo Escobar—falling? Say the truth: you want to scream—then she would make sure to contain the romance on one screen of her life. When she wanted to deal with Maximo, it would be only at those times when she was actually with him or had to think of him. Otherwise, she would log him off. When it was time for her to deal with her husband in jail, she would either be visiting him or on the phone with him or standing at the stove and wrapping tinfoil about food for him. She would keep everything on separate screens.
In a reaction to her emotions wandering, Nicki’s eyes became mean whips as they went across those names she called up on her “ST” file, or skip-tracing. She became personally infuriated with each name. Who were these people not to be paying their bills, and not paying them to her? For an hour, Nicki studied the work productivity sheets on skip-tracing and then settled on one screen that showed a man named Carpenter had lived in Cleveland, moved to Akron without notifying the credit-card company and had run up bills of $1,753.27. At midmorning, Nicki indicated on the computer that the administrator was checking on the case. She went to the Akron cross-directory—a phone book listed by streets—and found a family with a phone who lived next door to Carpenter. She called the neighbor and said she was from the Akron Edison Company and because of a misunderstanding the power to Carpenter’s house would have to be shut off by five o’clock, unless Carpenter called and cleared up the misunderstanding. Nicki left her 800 number.
At three o’clock that afternoon, Nicki’s phone rang.
“This is Mrs. Carpenter,” an annoyed
voice said. “We paid you.”
“You didn’t pay me,” Nicki said.
“We did so. We paid our deposit to Akron Edison.”
“But you didn’t pay me. You didn’t pay your credit card.”
“What’s that got to do with the electric lights?”
“It’s got to do with your husband’s credit-card bill.”
“You’re not from the electric company?”
“No, I’m worse. I’m the place your husband owes one thousand seven hundred fifty-three dollars and twenty-seven cents.”
“Oh, I don’t know anything about that.”
“You don’t know he has a credit card, Mrs. Carpenter?”
“I know he has it, but that’s his business.”
“You mean your husband doesn’t tell you about the things he charges and never pays for?” Nicki said. Her eyes ran over the list of places and amounts on the computer screen. “You mean your husband didn’t tell you that on March 4, he rented a room at the Jade East Motel at Cleveland Airport and that the charge for the room was thirty-two dollars? That was the night rate. Did he tell you that on March 16, he rented another room at the Jade East Motel and the charge for the room was eighteen dollars? That sounds like the rate for one of those afternoon quickies. That’s that airport element.”
“Where are you getting this from?” the woman on the phone said.
“Right from your husband’s signed receipts. I have them right on the screen in front of me. Your husband’s life is on a computer, Mrs. Carpenter.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not. Your husband used all these motels and he doesn’t want to pay for them.”
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know anything about this.”
“Oh, you weren’t in the motels with him?”
Forsaking All Others Page 30