“What’s the matter with you?” Teenager said.
Maximo tried to pull his arm back. This time he could not.
“I said I want to go.”
“You never see me and now you want to leave when I tell you to stay?”
“I’m all screwed up with some kid,” Maximo said.
“What kid?” Teenager said.
“A kid in Spofford. Let go of my arm.”
Teenager’s eyes narrowed. “What is this? First I don’t see you, then you come here and you tell me some kid and you try to go.”
“It’s a kid in trouble in Spofford,” Maximo said slowly.
“Spofford, everybody is in Spofford,” Teenager said.
“This kid is under age. He isn’t fourteen. And he’s in there getting raped by some big nigger.”
“They hit him in the ass,” Teenager said.
“Yes.” Maximo tried to tug his arm away.
“A little boy like that,” Teenager said. With his free hand, he took a long drag on his cigarette. Exhaling, he looked at Maximo with a sneer.
“Is this kid a very good kid?”
“Yes, he is.”
“Well, if he was so good, then he would get out and bang somebody in the ass himself instead of stay there and get fucked.”
“Somebody ought to do the same thing to you,” Maximo said.
“Do what?”
“Bang you in the ass.” Maximo did not move and he locked his eyes on Teenager’s.
Teenager threw his head back and laughed crazily and this made Maximo quiver with anger and he yanked his arm hard to free it and amid the laugh Teenager was off the bar stool and he hit Maximo as hard as he could on the left side of Maximo’s head.
Maximo pitched off the stool and landed on his side, on his arm and shoulder, and then his head banged the floor hard. It was many seconds, a minute perhaps, before Maximo saw where he was. One ear was clogged and ringing. When he moved, pain sprang from the center of his head.
At the bar, Teenager looked down at Maximo. “That’s why nobody rapes me,” he said. “You say that I should get raped? I should rape you. I should pull down your pants now and throw you on the pool table over there and we all could take turns sticking it up your ass. What would you do about it? What would you do if I bent over now and pulled down your pants?”
Maximo lay in pain and silence.
“Now the great genius has nothing to say,” Teenager said. He picked up a paper napkin from the bar. “This is how much backbone you have.” He crumpled the napkin in his fist. “This is what happens to you when you have to face the world like a man.”
Tatiro stood in his bloody sweatpants and began to laugh. “I come here because I owe you this money and I expect to get beaten and instead this punk walks in and takes the smack for me.”
Tatiro laughed and Teenager roared and Rivera’s rotten teeth showed and Luisa Maria served drinks and somebody said, do lines, and as Maximo got up, he saw Teenager bent over the bar like a dog sniffing droppings on the street. He walked to the door, veering to one side with this toothache pain in the center of his head, and he went out onto the cold cement and the pain caused the orange skins and flattened soda cans to be burned in his mind forever.
He tried to walk steadily, but missteps caused him to appear to be drunk. He made his way down the hill to the light in Eddie Hernandez’ store window.
“What happened to you?” Eddie said.
“Nothing,” Maximo mumbled.
“Here, you sit down,” Weinstein said, getting up from the chair by the window.
“I’m all right,” Maximo said.
“Of course you are,” Weinstein said. “Sit down anyway.”
Maximo sat down and Weinstein looked at his face. Eddie Hernandez stepped out from behind the counter, bent over Maximo, nodded and said, “A little cold water won’t hurt.” He walked into the back of the store and came out with a wet towel, which Maximo rolled into a cold ball and held against his left temple.
“You get mugged?” Weinstein said.
“No, somebody hit me,” Maximo said, looking directly at Eddie Hernandez, whose face had the power to issue redemption.
“Teenager,” Maximo said.
“What was that about?” Eddie said.
“I told him that somebody should stick it up his ass.”
“They should,” Eddie Hernandez said.
“It’s about time somebody told that gorilla,” Weinstein said.
“No matter what happened to you, you did the right thing,” Eddie Hernandez said. His tone was of equals addressing each other.
A few minutes later, Maximo got up.
“Where are you going?” Eddie said.
“I want to put your towel back and go home.”
“Give me the towel,” Eddie said.
“I’ll drive you to your door,” Weinstein said.
“As long as I’m out, I got one more thing to do,” Maximo said. He handed Eddie the towel and walked out into the cold night.
Francisca’s sister, still in a robe, answered the door. There was the sound of a man’s voice behind her somewhere. Francisca appeared behind her sister.
“Could I see you for a moment?” Maximo said.
Francisca stepped out into the hall. She had on a rose sweater and blue skirt and looked like she belonged with schoolbooks in her arms. Maximo took both of her hands and spoke softly to her, smiling, staring into her eyes.
“Would you get some clothes and come away with me?”
Her eyes widened. She thought for a moment, biting her lip, and then said, “I have to be here Monday.”
“Don’t worry about Monday,” Maximo said.
She went back into the apartment. She returned in a gray coat, carrying a small suitcase and with her sister’s moaning trailing after her. “You must help me with the baby,” the sister cried.
Francisca shut the door, slipped an arm through Maximo’s and proudly walked down the hall with him.
“Do we go to your apartment?” she said.
“No,” Maximo said.
At eight-fifteen that night, Maximo led Francisca into the basement meeting room of the New Bronx Housing Projects, a cluster of twenty-four-story brick buildings whose hallways screeched of pain going on behind closed doors. About ten women, seven blacks, three Hispanics, sat on gray folding chairs at a long picnic table in one corner of the room, which during the day served as a child-care center, evidence of which was the homemade posters on the walls and the stale smell of children.
He and Francisca took chairs and pulled them up behind Haydee who had the folder for the case and was answering questions.
A short woman with a missing front tooth held up her hand. “I axt you one thing?”
“Yes,” Haydee said.
“They fire me. You can do something about it?”
“When did they fire you?”
“Fire me Friday.”
“Who fired you?”
“The man Anders.”
“I told you earlier,” Haydee said, “we contacted him Friday and he agreed to stop all such activity. Do you see what happens when people stick together?”
They die together, Maximo said to himself. He touched Haydee’s arm. “Have they got any room for somebody to go to work?”
Haydee looked down the table. “Mrs. Earle, did you say you were leaving, right?”
“Sure did. I’ve had it up to here.”
Maximo said to Haydee, “Good. Can you get her in?” He indicated Francisca.
“Suppose so,” Haydee said. “The man is talking to us this week.”
“Perfect,” Maximo said. He leaned over to Francisca. “Now you can get paid for taking care of a baby.”
He looked down the table. “Has anybody here got a bed they want to rent to a nice young woman who’s going to work around here?”
Three hands went up.
“Take your pick,” Maximo said to Francisca. He kissed Haydee on the cheek and stood up. Haydee looke
d fully at him for the first time.
“What happened to your face?”
“It’s an allergy,” Maximo said.
“Are you leaving?” Francisca said.
“Yes,” Maximo said.
“Then I am coming with you.”
“No, you’re going to stay here, Unless you want to go back to your sister’s and go to jail.”
Maximo patted her on the head and waved his hand to the people at the table and left.
His sleep was troubled and when he woke up the next day he was disheartened by the pain that was still fresh in his head. He craved solace and wondered immediately where she would be. At home, certainly, perhaps still asleep; it was only nine o’clock. He dressed and went down to the phone booth and called Angela.
“Where is Nicki?”
Angela said, “I imagine she’s home.”
“Could you ask her to call me?”
Angela’s voice was skeptical. “Didn’t she talk to you?”
“Yesterday.”
“Are you sure you talked to her?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t she say anything to you?”
“About what?”
“Her husband coming home?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Then I shouldn’t be calling her for you anymore.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just ask her to call me.”
“Where are you?”
“She knows. The phone booth at my corner.”
“That’s the same booth. Right on your corner?”
“That’s right.”
“Why don’t you move your bed down on the sidewalk next to it? Just in case you get tired waiting for a call.”
He leaned against the phone booth and was still there when the dog, bored with sniffing the tires of parked cars, ambled back. And he was still there at twelve-thirty when the phone rang.
As he spoke, he heard the click of the cutoff.
Maximo attempted to pace away the anger, but the feeling of powerlessness caused him to ask questions of himself, the answers to which disturbed him even more. He had thought of himself as a proud, priestly person making individual decisions in a high, icy wind. He had to kick his foot out at that notion. The motion disturbed the dog, who had been asleep on the sidewalk. Maximo knew that he actually was standing at the intersection of different worlds, his feet slipping each time he tried to turn about. He had informed himself grandly that he was challenging established order on behalf of the populace. He had found that he was the only one who knew that he was doing so. For living in such an illusion, he had been thrown down with an admonition that was indirect, but as apparent as flame at night: life is dictated by rules of books that are to be followed with the same purpose that people attend sports events; the tenets are so rigid that a spectator feels there is perfect order to life. And for daring to feel that he had any special rights left in the world to which he had been born, on the streets on which he had grown, he had received a smack in the face.
It had been a short trip; what was it, six months now, or not even that, Maximo thought; but there had been nothing veiled, the conductor had called each stop and held the door open for all to see, and Maximo had stared out and seen only images of a dream. Now, however, he knew. It was not his line. He thought he knew the people sitting with him but they actually were strangers. When he followed them to the street, they prevented him from walking further. Go where you belong, everything told him.
And of course he had allowed his prick to lead him to the worst avenue of all, one where he surely could not get over the stones, and this was the part that tormented him. He could explain the justness of defeat and the wiseness of recognizing, at age twenty-three, that you must lose, and perhaps only accomplish harm to others, by forcing yourself into a kitchen run by devils. But he could not reason or suppress the sudden emptiness that Nicki had left inside him. Hija de puta! Daughter of a whore. Tell me you love me, then the next minute you walk out on me. It probably isn’t her fault, she’s so evil. She was born this way. She wasn’t a baby pulled out of a mother’s belly; she was a scheme that took a breath.
Later when he went for a walk, there was a family climbing the steps to the El. The mother carried one child and the father absently held out his hand for one of walking age, and the kid, rather than take the hand, leaned over the banister and looked down at the street and Maximo was about to say something when the father, on his own, reached out and yanked the kid off the banister and gripped the small hand and led the boy up the steps. There was a release inside Maximo. It was mingled with defeat, of course, but still there was the release, as if he had paid some sort of mortgage. Only Nicki made it unlivable. Music about a wounded heart came from the cuchifritos stand under the El, and it bothered Maximo.
28
IN NEW JERSEY AT that hour the music was softer, with Sinatra singing on tape throughout the house, but the subject of the song was the same, being alone at a bar and feeling love lost. Nicki’s husband, unsettled by all the people in Mariani’s house, sat alone with Nicki on the living room couch and stared at television, which was tuned to channel nine, a station that carries no news during the evening and thus is considered safe to have on.
“Don’t you want anything else to eat?” she said to her husband.
“Had too much.”
“Don’t you want to go talk to the men?”
“I feel like, you know, shy.”
“Of course,” she said.
He had arrived from the long ride down from prison just two hours ago. Nicki had not gone to pick him up, for she felt it was more important to help clean the house and fix her hair for this coming-home party. She lit a cigarette and sat back, stretching her legs so she could admire the hundred-and-fifty-dollar Italian imported high-heels she was wearing. In honor of her husband being home, she wore the three-carat engagement ring and a set of diamond earrings that her husband had given her as a wedding present. For nearly three years now, she had worn them only at important family functions. She looked at herself in the large mirror across the room, then swung her head slightly to make the earrings blaze in the light. She thought of standing on the number six train going to the Bronx with earrings like these flashing in the subway car. For the old gold earrings I used to wear to work, she thought, the savages would have pulled my ears off. If I got on the train wearing these, they would kill each other for the chance to cut off my head. She giggled to herself.
“What are you smiling at?” her husband asked her.
“The movie.”
On television, a doctor was looking through a microscope at a disease.
Her father walked into the corner with his arms held out. “What are you doing in a corner?” he said to Nicki’s husband. “Why aren’t you eating something?”
“I’m not so hungry,” her husband said.
“Fish salad,” Mariani said.
“Maybe later.”
“Fish salad,” Mariani said.
“You think I should eat some?”
“What do you mean, ‘think?’ ”
“Go get me some,” the husband said to Nicki.
“Yeah, get the guy something to eat,” Mariani said.
She rose to the sound of the order as women in the house had done for years. She began to walk to the kitchen in numb compliance, but this time, the manner in which she had been told to serve, a foot reaching out to clear debris, produced a feeling of squalor. Her mouth and eyes smiled obediently as she walked into the kitchen, but her ribs smarted.
Her father’s man, Corky, was walking in the front door. “Hey, you must be happy, good to see you,” he said to Nicki.
She smiled vacantly, gave him her hand and walked past him.
Corky went into the living room where his booming voice caused Nicki’s husband to jump.
“Look at what you do with your big mouth,” Mariani said.
“I’m happy to see the guy,” Corky said.
“I wish you’d come and
tell me something good soon,” Mariani said.
“Hey, we’re out there trying. You know how it is. Takes time.”
“I want that guy’s head on the table for dinner,” Mariani said.
“Louis, you know for yourself what it is. All Spics there. They could spot us coming along a hundred miles away.”
“Look at what this son of a bitch does to us,” Mariani said. “We got to do something back to them people to show that we’re alive. Who the hell listens to me, I let a thing like this go on? They kill Paulie. Then they kill Torres. I look like a fag.”
I’ll get something done for you if it takes all year,” Corky said.
“I don’t care who or what or where. I want something,” Mariani said.
“You’ll get something,” Corky said.
In the kitchen, her mother sat with a cigarette and coffee and two of her aunts, Aunt Rose Montano and Aunt Rose Tortice, ladled out food with fanaticism.
“Having a nice time, Nicki?” her mother said.
“Oh, it’s lovely.”
“Ronnie seems all right,” the mother said. “A little quiet, but you know that’s the way they all are on the first day.”
“It’ll take a little time,” Nicki said.
“He needs some time and some love,” the mother said. “Make sure that’s what he gets.”
“Certainly.”
“He don’t need aggravation,” the mother said.
“Ma, don’t say that. He’s my husband.”
“See that you remember that.”
Aunt Rose Montano looked up from a platter of spaghetti and broccoli she had just wrestled from the oven. “Nicki, when are you going to have a baby?”
“Never,” Nicki said. Both aunts laughed. But the word had come out of her without mirth, and before she realized that she had said it. Her mother, however, had caught the tone. “Well, he just got home,” Nicki said quickly. “I mean, please.”
Her mother’s eyes were bowls of suspicion. “The sooner you have a baby, the sooner this will be a happy house.”
Aunt Rose Tortice said, “They haven’t even been in bed yet and we want the girl to have a baby. First the bed, then the baby. Remember?”
The other aunt said, “Well, what’s she doing in the kitchen, then? No beds around this kitchen.”
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