Side Chick Nation

by Aya De León

  “Is it true that civilian Puerto Ricans from Chicago were able to get food and water to some populations faster than the US government?” Zavier asked.

  “Here’s a quote for you,” the sergeant offered. “The men and women of our military are working hard for the relief effort, despite the naysayers and critics like you. The people of Puerto Rico are lucky to have us here.”

  “Don’t you mean the US taxpayers of Puerto Rico?” Zavier said, but by then the jeep had begun to drive away.

  He walked back to Dulce. “What did he say?” she asked.

  “Nothing useful,” he said. “But I’ll keep digging to see if I can find a second source for the article.”

  He scanned the area a few more times through the binoculars, and called the van pool.

  “Can I ask you something?” Zavier asked as they waited for transport to visit the young widow.

  “Sure,” Dulce said.

  “What made you ask that question at the funeral home?” he asked. “About women and violence?”

  “Something I saw at the shelter,” she said. “Assholes taking advantage of the situation with the hurricane.”

  “Makes sense,” he said. “Any particular story we should be pursuing there?”

  “No? Yes?” she said. “I don’t know. Seems like women get their asses beat and get killed all the time and it’s not really a story. So why would it be news if it’s just extra in a hurricane, you know?”

  “It’s fucked up,” Zavier said. “Thanks for helping me keep it on my radar.”

  The van pulled up and they climbed in. An older guy was sitting in the back talking loudly on a cell phone.

  “Nick?” he growled into the phone. “I was on fucking hold for ages. They just got me from the airport, and it’s like I’m on some Supershuttle from hell. I wasn’t expecting a goddamn limo, but I expected the vehicle to be heading toward my hotel and not making a two-hour excursion in the other fucking direction.”

  Dulce and Zavier looked at each other.

  “Total asshole,” Zavier mouthed.

  Dulce nodded discreetly.

  “Remember, you begged me to come report in this fucking disaster zone. I didn’t win three Peabody awards and a goddamn Pulizer to be roughing it like some fucking cub reporter.”

  Eventually he talked himself out. Or Nick hung up. Either way, the van went quiet as they headed up to see the young widow. A half hour later, the guy was asleep.

  The widow’s house was outside San Juan, and it was slow going, even in the sport-utility vehicle. Parts of the road were in foot-deep water. Other parts were covered in branches, and they had to take the van carefully off-road to get around them. At one point, it looked like they were caught in the mud, but the driver engaged the four-wheel drive, and the vehicle leaped forward. Further down that same road was a spot where the concrete had been torn to pieces.

  It wasn’t really possible to find an address the traditional way, but the driver was able to put in the longitude and latitude of the address, and the driver’s GPS brought Dulce and Zavier to the right location.

  There were no street signs. Not even a real street. And the houses were in different states of destruction. None was still fully intact.

  The house they were visiting was half-destroyed.

  Dulce and Zavier brought a rescue pack from the van and knocked on the door.

  A young woman answered. Mrs. Martinez didn’t look much older than Dulce. So young to be a widow. She had her hair back in a disheveled braid and her arm was in a makeshift sling. Beside her was a toddler that had on a diaper so heavily soiled, it was hanging to his knees.

  “Let me carry this in for you,” Zavier said, and set it on the counter.

  “Bless you,” Mrs. Martinez said, looking into the box to find canned and packaged food, water bottles and diapers.

  She handed one of the bottles to Dulce with her good hand. “Would you mind?”

  “Not at all,” Dulce said, opening it for her. Mrs. Martinez took a drink, then gave some to her son. He finished the bottle.

  The mother picked up one of the diapers, and tried to get it open, but it was difficult to do with her injured arm.

  “Here,” Dulce said. “Let me help. I was always changing my nephew.”

  “You’re an angel,” Mrs. Martinez said as Dulce picked up the toddler and walked him over to a coffee table that was buckling from moisture.

  Mrs. Martinez leaned her head against the back of the couch. She didn’t cry audibly, but the tears just ran down her face.

  Dulce glanced at her and then back to the toddler. “Si, papito,” she cooed. “Tú vas a tener un panuelo limpio! Yay!” She lifted both his hands and shook them, as if the baby was cheering. “My nephew used to love that. Looks like you do, too.”

  The toddler giggled.

  In the silence that followed, Dulce changed his diaper. She wasn’t sure where to put the dirty one, so she just used the tabs to seal it up, and left it on the coffee table.

  Abruptly, Mrs. Martinez sat up on the couch. “We were planning to move to the mainland,” she said. “We’ve been trying to sell this house, but no one was buying. So my husband was working overtime to earn enough for us to fly out. We had tickets for next week. Next fucking week.”

  “How did your husband pass away, Mrs. Martinez?” Zavier asked gently.

  Dulce picked up the toddler in his clean diaper and carried him into the kitchen—or what was left of the kitchen.

  “He got hit by a car,” she said. “Because the traffic signals were out. Two neighbors carried him to the nearest emergency shelter, but by then it was too late. Maybe if it had been a real hospital they could have saved him, but maybe not.” She rubbed absently at her injured arm. “And then we had to bury him there. Because there was no way for the funeral home to get to us. Like it wasn’t bad enough that I had to watch him die, but I had to literally bury him myself or watch him rot? My husband, buried with no coffin in the dirt outside an elementary school?”

  Dulce looked at the woman through the kitchen door. Mrs. Martinez wiped her eyes with the back of her good arm.

  “I wanted to leave sooner for Florida, but he said no. Just let him work a few weeks more. He could get a bonus. We would need the money when we got to the States. He worked so fucking hard. All that work and nothing to show for it. Nothing. Not one fucking thing. When I got pregnant, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep the baby. The economy had gone to shit. I was like, it’s such bad timing for us to have a baby. But my husband is so Catholic, you know. He was like God has a plan.”

  She looked around at the house “Is this God’s plan?” she asked, her voice rising.

  Dulce began to bounce the baby on her hip as she walked toward the sodden back bedrooms of the house. His mother’s voice wasn’t quite so loud there.

  “Is this God’s fucking plan?” Mrs. Martinez asked, her voice even more shrill now. “To have our economy fucking crash and then all the water in the world land on our tiny island. Is God pissing on us?” she demanded. “Is He?”

  “It’s not God,” Dulce heard Zavier say gently. “The United States is pissing on Puerto Rico.”

  “I guess you’re right,” she said, her voice quieter now. “The United States is playing God with us. And I look at my son, and he’s so beautiful, and I’m glad I brought him into this world because he’s the only thing of my husband that I have left—” She choked off into a sob. When she spoke again, her voice was a strangled whisper. “But I’m also sorry I brought him into this world. A world where he’s gonna grow up without a father. A world where he’s not even two years old, and already treated like shit. Es una mierda!” she said.

  The child had stayed quiet through the first part of her tirade, but now he began to howl.

  “It’s okay, papito,” Dulce said. “It’s okay.” But the child kept crying, his little hands balled into fists, his face turning scarlet. Because even the toddler could tell that it wasn’t okay at all.

  * *
*

  On the way back down the hill, they were alone in the van with the driver, and all three of them smoked. Dulce and Zavier shared a single cigarette in the back seat.

  “When I was a kid, I always envied Puerto Ricans,” Dulce said in Spanish. “Technically, I’m Puerto Rican, because I was born here, but my mom and my brother and sister were born in the DR. I always figured if we had all been Puerto Rican, it would have been different. My mom would have had papers and wouldn’t have had to work under the table. My brother wouldn’t have gotten deported when they caught him selling drugs.” She took a long drag on the cigarette and blew it out the window. She handed the cigarette to Zavier.

  “But now, I don’t fucking know,” she said. “That woman was right. It’s all una mierda.”

  Zavier gave a bitter laugh. “Everybody’s jealous of somebody,” he said. “When I was growing up, I used to envy the kids who lived on the island,” He flicked the ash from the cigarette out the window. “They just seemed to know who they were. Nobody was calling them a spic and trying to beat them down on the way to school. They never had to fall on their ass in the snow. They lived in houses with yards and chickens running around. We lived in apartments with rusty fire escapes and roaches. But I always thought I’d get back here. Retire or maybe just live in the US long enough to . . . set myself up as a freelancer and then I could work from here or something. But now?” He trailed off and took a drag of the cigarette. “I don’t fucking know.”

  Dulce took an absent drag on the cigarette and it almost burned her finger. She threw it out of the van, and for a split second she panicked. She had forgotten where she was and worried about fire. It was a reflex. She sat forward suddenly, as if to chase the flaming ember out of the window. Only she could prevent forest fires. Then she sat back in a burst of clarity. Those ads didn’t apply to the Caribbean most months of the year, let alone during hurricane season, and especially not now.

  * * *

  After they got back into San Juan, Dulce looked out the window as they picked up a few other reporters around the city. The beauty of the orange and pink sky contrasting with the ruined urban landscape sank Dulce into a state of melancholy.

  Zavier’s phone rang, startling her.

  She still hadn’t gotten reaccustomed to the sounds of technology. Before the hurricane, she had just grown accustomed to their constant signals. Calls. Texts. Alerts. Her phone. Her friends’ phones. Boyfriend’s and clients’ phones. But for so may days, there had been no pings and jingles. So when they did happen, they were jarring. Like a nearby siren or a fire alarm.

  “Dígame,” Zavier said when he picked up.

  She realized she hadn’t checked her own phone since the morning.

  Dulce dug it out of her pocket, hoping that she had a signal and maybe Phillip had texted. By now he must have seen the news of the hurricane. She imagined a text where he said he was sorry. He had underestimated the danger. To make it up to her, he was sending her a ticket to Miami or New York or maybe an open ticket to anywhere in the world. She could go to Barcelona. Or even Brazil. Make good on her fake identity.

  Instead, when she powered up her phone, she started getting several texts from her family:

  From her mother:

  Luqui, we’re praying you’re okay.

  From her sister Yunisa:

  Luqui, I’m so sorry I was such a bitch when you called and wouldn’t help you. You better fucking get out of this okay, or I’ll never forgive you.

  She laughed out loud and tried calling, but didn’t have a strong enough signal. Instead, she texted back:

  I’m ok. I’ll call when I get a chance. have a friend who might be able to get me home with the press corps.

  She tried calling the landline and her family’s apartment. She dialed and put a finger in her ear to listen for the sound of ringing. But instead she got a message that her call could not be completed. She hung up.

  When she looked up, Zavier was grinning.

  “I have good news,” he said.

  “Great,” she said. “I really need a happy ending to this day.”

  “Delia Borbón’s coming,” he said.

  “Delia Borbón?” Dulce asked, unable to imagine the glamorous film star in this dystopic landscape.

  “She’s giving a press conference tomorrow in San Juan,” Zavier said. “And I got passes.”

  “Passes?” Dulce asked, eyes wide. “As in more than one?”

  “Dos,” he said. “One for me, one for my lovely assistant.”

  “I hope that would be me,” Dulce said.

  “No one lovelier,” he said.

  As they rode back to the hotel, Zavier went online to see what he could find about Delia Borbón’s visit. Next to him, Dulce closed her eyes, so she didn’t need to see any more of the broken trees, ravaged ground, and half-collapsed houses.

  Chapter 24

  Dulce was dazzled by standing so close to one of her idols. As Delia Borbón approached the podium, the questions began.

  “Ms. Borbón!” rang through the room like the buzzing of a hive of bees.

  Borbón took the microphone and raised her hand for silence.

  “I’ve come here to talk about my humanitarian efforts in Puerto Rico, because my island is facing the biggest ecological disaster of our time. And this is not about forces of nature, this is about where colonization intersects with climate change. This disaster is man-made on both counts, in particular, made by the US, the West, and corporate greed.”

  She looked down at the reporters. “I hope you all quoted me on that. Before I go on, I need to clarify something. I see reporters here from TMZ and The Enquirer and other tabloid press. I did not come here to Puerto Rico, in the middle of this disaster to answer questions about my sex life, about my marriage, or about my work history. So, if that’s what you flew in here to ask about, you can turn around and fly right back out. Because I’m giving every question about those subjects a big fucking ‘no comment’ right now, so we can focus on something that actually matters.”

  In the last twelve hours, Dulce had gotten caught up on Borbón’s big scandal. In her memoir From Red Light to Red Carpet, and in subsequent interviews, she had always maintained that her sex work had been limited to being a stripper. She had insisted, even when asked very direct and explicit questions about it.

  But the previous week, on Reddit, a man had posted a first-person account of getting oral sex from Borbón in the nineties. When asked why he came forward with the story after all this time, he said he wanted to take her down a peg after the comments she’d made about the president being a racist.

  In the days since the Reddit story had posted, no one had gotten a comment out of Borbón. She hadn’t even been willing to communicate with the media until this press conference in Puerto Rico.

  “But it doesn’t have to be one or the other!” a reporter yelled out.

  “Excuse me?” Borbón asked.

  The reporter was a young Latino man.

  “I also care about Puerto Rico,” the young man said. “I’m Dominican. My island could be next. Many of our readers probably do care more about your personal life than your mission here, but we could craft a story that incorporates both and raises awareness about Puerto Rico.”

  “Okay,” Borbón said. “Fine. Somebody wants to craft a narrative about this disaster that weaves in details of my personal life, then fine. After this press conference, about the hurricane, I’ll be glad to have a separate conversation with any of the journalists in this room who are interested. But—wait for it—” she said, and cocked her head to the side.

  The room full of journalists wasn’t even breathing as it waited for the catch, the caveat.

  “The journalists all need to be current or former sex workers,” Borbón said.

  The room gasped audibly.

  “Those are my terms,” Borbón said flatly.

  Dulce still couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t get air in or out. Borbón meant her? Delia Borbón wou
ld only talk to someone like her?

  “Just as I thought,” Borbón said. “None of you are qualified to talk to me about my sex life, my marriage or my work history. So back to the hurricane.”

  Dulce struggled to get her lungs to obey her instructions. She couldn’t seem to talk, so instead, she stood up suddenly.

  Before she could say anything, Zavier had leaped up next to her and was speaking. “Zavier Mendoza, New York Times. We have a freelancer colleague back in New York who is a former exotic dancer. Can we contact her to do a phone interview with you?”

  Borbón gave him a withering look. “You think I don’t know any sex worker journalists?” she asked. “If I wanted to tell my story to one of them in the States I could have.”

  Zavier sat down, and pulled Dulce down by the hand.

  “Don’t say anything here,” he said. “These reporters will be all over you.”

  Zavier had figured it out. He knew. Dulce could feel her face burning as the entire room looked at them. The reporters began to hiss with questions to each other.

  “Who is that?” she heard someone ask.

  “Is she with some indy press?”

  She was afraid to look Zavier in his face, to see what he might be thinking. But he was looking straight ahead at Borbón.

  “We shouldn’t approach her directly,” Zavier whispered. “We’ll go through her assistant.”

  “And one more thing,” the star was saying. “I don’t want any of you coming to me trying to pretend that the compromises you make in your journalism are the same as sex work.” She surveyed them like a school teacher with naughty children.

  “Now back to the matter at hand, the devastation of my homeland, an entire nation, and a people that have been colonized by the United States for over a hundred years. Our blood is on the hands of the US and the hands of the president—who threw paper towels at us? Paper goddamn towels? Are you fucking kidding me? And it’s not just this president, but every previous president who was willing to let the US keep sucking the blood of Puerto Rico . . .”