“You’ll get in trouble for speaking like this,” Mrs. Carpenter said.
“Does this mean, Mrs. Carpenter, that you don’t know that your husband spent the weekend of April first and second at the Holiday Inn at New Trier? Or—”
“—Dorothy!”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Carpenter?”
“He was in New Trier?”
“For two nights in the Holiday Inn, plus restaurant and bar, your husband ran up a bill of two-hundred and seventy-six dollars and forty-eight cents at the Holiday Inn at New Tri—”
“—He was with Dorothy!”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Carpenter?”
“He was with Dorothy in New Trier,” the woman moaned. “That bastard!”
Nicki spoke forcefully, to raise her voice over the woman’s shrieking. “Mrs. Carpenter, I don’t care who he was in the motel with. But you just tell your husband that if he wants to run around with women, do it on his own money. Don’t expect this bank to pay for his sex. Just tell him, you pay to play in this league, darling. Good afternoon, Mrs. Carpenter.”
She went into the kitchen with one of the sheets wrapped around her, sipped from a can of Coke and then stood in the bedroom door and examined her legs.
“I almost have Irish legs,” she said.
“What are they?” Maximo asked from the bed.
“You don’t know Irish legs? Burned at the knees and the feet. I’m out in the sun one day and I almost got Irish legs. That’s not me, you know. I’m Italian. I tan.”
“You like being tan?” Maximo said.
“Oh, I love it. Wait’ll you see me once I start going to the beach. I’m Sicilian. I get so dark. I make you look like skimmed milk.”
“You know what Puerto Ricans use for suntan lotion?” Maximo said.
“What?”
“The shade.”
“They don’t like sun?” Nicki said.
“Nobody wants to get any darker than he is,” Maximo said.
“But they live in the sun, near the beach and everything.”
“And they stay in doorways.”
She held out a leg and examined it. “That’s all from doing my father’s car. I had on shorts. I did my father’s car four hours today. Took me hours. When I do something, I don’t pass it off. I do the trunk, the floors, the works. Vacuum the floor, shine all the leather. I was working so long my brother felt sorry for me and he came out and washed the tires. Look what I got from being out in the sun all those hours. Look at the knees. Look at my feet. How do you like them? Irish legs.”
She slipped into bed and Maximo nuzzled his face into the crook of her neck.
“What made you stay home and not go to work today?” he said.
“Because you had me so freaked up thinking of this test you took that I could go to work yesterday, but then when I got up this morning I couldn’t do it. Whoever heard of a test taking two days?”
“You were worried about me?” Maximo said.
“Not worried that you wouldn’t pass or anything. But you’ve made such a big thing of this, it got to me.”
“That’s nice,” he said. He kissed her.
“Besides, I thought I’d make my father feel good by doing the car for him. That way he won’t be asking any questions about me not coming home tonight. I keep him thinking all good things about me.” She turned her face and kissed him on the forehead.
“This is the best thing that could have happened,” Maximo said.
“Is it?”
“The minute everybody finished the test, they wanted to run out and party. ‘Let’s go here, let’s go there. Let’s get really wrecked.’ I said, no, I’m too tired. I just want to go home.”
“You were tired, all right. You attacked me like it was a war.”
“I ran twenty blocks, and the only reason I didn’t run another two hundred was that I knew I had to meet you, so I jumped on the subway.”
“I would’ve waited for you,” she said. “I would’ve had coffee for hours waiting for you to pick me up.”
“Why should I waste time running when I could be with you? I wanted to walk out of the test in the middle of it and call you up just to speak to you.”
“That would’ve been silly.”
“Never,” he said. He kissed her neck. “I love you.”
He said it first, Nicki told herself. No matter how crazy I get, maybe now I never have to say anything. He said it first.
“I love you,” he said again.
She kissed him. “That’s nice.”
“Do you love me?” he asked.
“How do you say ‘I love you’ in Puerto Rican?” she asked.
“Te quiero.”
“Oh.”
“Say it,” Maximo said.
“Say what?”
“Tell me, ‘Te quiero.’ ”
“Oh, I just wanted to know how you say it in Spanish. So now you told me.”
“I want you to say it.”
She tried to divert him with a small kiss, but he collected her to him and said fiercely, “I want you to say ‘te quiero’ to me and then I want you to come and live with me and marry me. I love you.”
Wide eyes looked up at Maximo from his chest. “Are you crazy?”
“No, I love you.”
“Don’t you think about your life?”
“Yes, I do. I think my life out. I know what I want out of my work. And I am going to get it. I am going to do exactly what I want to do in my life. I think it out. Then I do it. I’m smart. And I know what I want with you. I want to love you and live with you. Because I love you.”
“I have to tell you the same thing I’ve been telling you all along.”
“Just tell me you love me. Say, ‘Te quiero.’ ”
“I’ll tell you that if my father ever found out that you so much as touched me, you’d be a dead man.”
“Stop talking nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense. It would happen.”
“That’s your stupid Guinea movies,” Maximo said.
“No, it’s my Guinea guns.”
“I said I love you and I want you to say that you love me.”
“Maximo, I’m married.”
“To whom? To a number in jail? You’re not married. You’re here with me.”
“My husband might be coming home.”
“When?”
“In a few months.”
“What difference does it make?”
“A lot to me, darling.”
“You’ve got nothing left with this guy.”
“Who told you?”
“All I have to do is look. You’re with me.”
“This is only a little disgrace to my life. When he comes home, I’ll still be his wife.”
“You have nothing with him right now. What do you think you’ll have in a few months from now?”
“A husband.”
“Yes, you will have a husband. I’ll be your husband.”
She looked at him and ran a hand through his hair and down his face. She traced the ridge of his nose and then brought her fingers down to his lips. Maximo began kissing them.
“A movie star,” she said.
“I’m more than that,” he said.
“To me, you’re a movie star,” she said.
They kissed and Maximo pressed full against her and he was mad at himself that his breath came so quickly and his words sounded desperate.
“Tell me.”
“Please, don’t talk. Just love me,” Nicki said.
“Tell me.”
“I don’t want to make speeches. Just make love.”
“Tell me.”
Physically, she was moving, stretching, caressing, feeling. Then everything inside her began to slide, a ship tilting suddenly and things falling off the table, and here she was trying to catch them, but her hands were too slow, her fingers too short. She thought she said something to Maximo and she became alarmed. Then she realized that it was only a moan and that the words had remained inside he
r. But now nothing inside her would stop and she arranged her body against this man who was causing her to fall into something of which she knew nothing and then she remembered exactly what to do. Her computer screen. Call up one thing at a time and in one time frame.
“I love you today,” she said to Maximo.
Who then whispered, “Te quiero,” and Nicki drew from his body a sunburst.
23
TEENAGER LIVED WITH AN oil fire inside him after he killed Angel, and he prowled the streets looking for the others who were with Angel in the raid on Indio’s apartment. In the midst of this anger, however, he had to conduct business, including the sale of one kilo of brown heroin to a man named Hector the Buzzard for forty thousand dollars. Hector drove down from Holyoke, Massachusetts, with his ten-year-old son along to throw off any police. Hector arrived at Ana’s Bar with twenty thousand dollars and the knowledge that the balance was to be paid within twelve selling days or mayhem would flourish. Teenager took the money, kept in cake boxes tied with red and white bakery string, to the room upstairs from the bar and stood behind the two-way mirror and counted it. He then came down to the bar and called Junior Mendez, who had the heroin stored in his apartment, the voiceless Dobermans pacing back and forth around the plastic bags of heroin.
“Where is your baby?” Teenager said.
“With me in the house,” Junior said.
“It is too nice a day for that,” Teenager said. “Take your baby out walking. Take him for a big walk.”
A half hour later, Teenager got into his Mercedes and had Hector the Buzzard follow. He drove to the Aguaserra, a cuchifritos stand with window lights shining on greasy pans in the front window. Next door to it was a bar with music screeching out the open door and into the crowded night. As Teenager stepped out of his car, he waved an arm in the air. Across the street, in a first floor apartment, a man named Pancha picked up a phone. Either Pancha or his wife always were on duty at the window, as if at the periscope of a submarine. Pancha dialed the Aguaserra. The pay phone on the wall was picked up by a waitress. Then there was the sound of an extension being picked up. The extension was in the basement.
On the extension, Junior Mendez’ voice said to the waitress on the pay phone, “Cuelga.” The waitress hung up. Pancha told Junior that it was all right to open the trap door, that Teenager and people were coming. Junior Mendez crept up a flight of iron stairs and pulled back the heavy bolt that prevented anyone upstairs from pulling the trap door up and coming down unannounced. Teenager’s rule was that no one could unlock the trapdoor unless Pancha first had inspected the people from his window and called in.
Teenager walked Hector the Buzzard into the front of the cuchifritos stand and then stopped. Hector went alone to the rear, picked up the trap door and went down the iron stairs to the basement where Junior Mendez sat with a kilo of brown heroin. By the time Hector came back up into the cuchifritos stand, his ten-year-old son was chewing on cuchifritos, pork skin deep-fried in fat, and Teenager was driving away in his car.
At Ana’s Bar that night, Teenager counted out twelve hundred dollars and placed it on the bar.
“Do you know my special tailor?” he said to Luisa Maria.
“I do not know this guy.”
“Mel Sharf, the name of this guy is. Go see him tomorrow morning and give him this money and tell him that I am going to a wedding on Saturday and Benny is going to this wedding too and we need suits for this wedding. Mel Sharf has the measurements. Just tell him to work all the time and make the suits by Saturday.”
The next morning, Luisa Maria began to think hard of the money in her purse. She stopped for coffee at the stand across from Eddie Hernandez’ clothing shop, and she drank her coffee slowly and watched Eddie Hernandez wash his show windows. She thought of the money in her purse some more.
“I need two wedding suits, one with very big shoulders,” she explained to Eddie Hernandez a few minutes later.
“How big?” Eddie said
“Teenager.”
“Then it must be very big.”
“And one for Benny.”
“Teenager and Benny are going to a wedding?” Eddie Hernandez said.
“They go to one Saturday,” Luisa Maria said.
“The suits I can get for you will cost two hundred each,” Eddie said.
“That is very good,” Luisa Maria said.
She gave Eddie Hernandez the four hundred and walked out of the store cooing to the eight hundred dollars left in her purse.
On Saturday morning, Teenager and Benny were so concerned with drinking brandy in preparation for the wedding that they took little notice of the clothes Luisa Maria delivered to them. There were blue velvet jackets, the brand-new name ripped out as neatly as Luisa Maria could do it, and black pants; there was no way that Eddie Hernandez could put together a suit that would cover Teenager’s fifty-two-inch shoulders and thirty-inch waist.
At four that afternoon, at Diego’s ballroom on Westchester Avenue, Gumersindo Torres, known as NeNe, swallowed rum at the bar and, smiling, proud of the big carnation in his lapel, he decided to promenade. He immediately bumped into another wedding guest, who pressed a gun into his stomach.
“Let’s go to the men’s room together,” Teenager said.
He directed NeNe down a passageway that went past the men’s room and through a door to the parking lot, where Benny Velez sat in the car with a nickel-plated .357 Magnum.
“You sit and keep Benny company,” Teenager said to NeNe.
Inside, Pedro Torres was dancing with a girl when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“I am dancing,” Torres said.
“I want to dance too.”
“So get a girl and dance.”
“No, I want to dance with you.” Teenager leaned into Torres, and when Torres felt the gun his knees became weak.
“We will go outside for dancing,” Teenager said.
NeNe and Torres, handcuffed and staring at the nickel-plated .357 Magnum in Benny’s hand, sat in the back seat of the Mercedes with Benny while Teenager, a cigar in his mouth, drove along Southern Boulevard, thinking, staring at factory buildings and then, happening to glance to his right, seeing the Mayaguez Express Company. Teenager made a sudden turn, causing his passengers to rock forward. He pulled up at the warehouse, where a man dozed in the sun in a chair that was covered with plastic and had labels on it saying it was to be sent to Calle Marie 7, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. On the ground next to the chair was a large statue of a black Virgin Mary.
“What if it break?” the man in the chair asked a warehouse attendant.
“We wrap everything carefully.”
“I work my whole life to get this for my mother,” the man in the chair said. “If the chair breaks, the Virgin Mary breaks, my whole life breaks.”
Inside, Teenager had to wait until a woman with an electric can opener spoke to the warehouse manager.
“Is this all you’re sending?” he said.
She nodded.
“It’ll cost you forty dollars just to ship this one thing to Santo Domingo,” the manager said. “Why don’t you wait till you get a lot of other stuff together and then ship it? Or find somebody sending a whole package. Why pay for the one thing?”
The woman shrugged. “For my sister,” she said.
“Does your sister ever have any cans to open?” the man said.
“Sometimes she has.”
“Let me ask you another thing. Does your sister have electricity?”
“Sometimes she does.”
Teenager decided he didn’t want to wait any longer. He walked over to a stack of Mayaguez boxes, brown cartons that can hold as much as one hundred and fifty pounds of clothes and are known as Puerto Rican moving vans.
Teenager took three of the boxes. “I am just going to load them up,” he said to the manager.
“Who are you going to put in there, the bride?” the manager said, looking at Teenager’s wedding clothes.
“T
hey both go on the honeymoon this way,” Teenager said, laughing.
He put the boxes in the car trunk and then drove up to the corner, where a pusher named Nesterline was standing in the afternoon shade in front of the bar. Nesterline was dressed in a powder-blue suit and a yellow flowered shirt and red tie.
“Come with us, Nesterline,” Teenager called out the car window. “We are going to a baptism.”
“To the baptism?” Nesterline said, looking at their wedding clothes.
“Yes, the baptism is now,” Teenager said. “First the wedding and now the baptism. The bride had her baby at the wedding party.”
He pulled the car around the corner and parked it facing the wrong way. Benny opened the rear door and pushed NeNe and Torres out onto the sidewalk and down the basement stairs.
“Carry the boxes, Nesterline,” Teenager said.
He opened the trunk for Nesterline and then went down the basement stairs.
Nesterline carried the Mayaguez boxes down the steps and along a damp cement hallway and into a room with sweating pipes running across a low ceiling. A single light bulb hung on a long cord. A Ping-Pong table sat under the light. Benny stood on the far side of the Ping-Pong table. He had a power chain saw in his hands. NeNe tried to step backward. Teenager pushed NeNe against the table. Torres began to tremble. Benny’s eyes gleamed.
“This is a baptism?” Nesterline said.
“Yes,” Teenager said.
At midday, a woman leaned out the third-floor window of her building on Whittier Street to hang out wash. Immediately, a smell reached her that caused her to close the window. She waited for an hour, opened the window again, recoiled, shut the window and went out to the phone on the street. Some time later a patrolman, hand clamped to his mouth, trudged through the garbage in the lot and stopped several yards away from three Mayaguez boxes that baked in the sun. The policeman went back out to the street, for he felt that this was a matter for a supervisor. By late afternoon Myles, working the four-to-midnight shift, appeared on the lot, covered his face with a handkerchief and waited for the emergency service squad. When they arrived, a red-headed man in baseball cap and coveralls came up, sniffed and said to Myles, “You caught the case.”
“Looks like it.”
“Good luck.”
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