Drown (10 page)

I had my eyes closed and the television was on and when the hallway door crashed open, he jumped up and I nearly cut my dick off struggling with my shorts. It’s just the neighbor, he said, laughing. He was laughing, but I was saying, Fuck this, and getting my clothes on.

I believe I see him in his father’s bottomed-out Cadillac, heading towards the turnpike, but I can’t be sure. He’s probably back in school already. I deal close to home, trooping up and down the same dead-end street where the kids drink and smoke. These punks joke with me, pat me down for taps, sometimes too hard. Now that strip malls line Route 9, a lot of folks have part-time jobs; the kids stand around smoking in their aprons, name tags dangling heavily from pockets.

When I get home, my sneakers are filthy so I take an old toothbrush to their soles, scraping the crap into the tub. My mother has thrown open the windows and propped open the door. It’s cool enough, she explains. She has prepared dinner—rice and beans, fried cheese, tostones. Look what I bought, she says, showing me two blue t-shirts. They were two for one so I bought you one. Try it on.

It fits tight but I don’t mind. She cranks up the television. A movie dubbed into Spanish, a classic, one that everyone knows. The actors throw themselves around, passionate, but their words are plain and deliberate. It’s hard to imagine anybody going through life this way. I pull out the plug of bills from my pockets. She takes it from me, her fingers soothing the creases. A man who treats his plata like this doesn’t deserve to spend it, she says.

We watch the movie and the two hours together makes us friendly. She puts her hand on mine. Near the end of the film, just as our heroes are about to fall apart under a hail of bullets, she takes off her glasses and kneads her temples, the light of the television flickering across her face. She watches another minute and then her chin lists to her chest. Almost immediately her eyelashes begin to tremble, a quiet semaphore. She is dreaming, dreaming of Boca Raton, of strolling under the jacarandas with my father. You can’t be anywhere forever, was what Beto used to say, what he said to me the day I went to see him off. He handed me a gift, a book, and after he was gone I threw it away, didn’t even bother to open it and read what he’d written.

I let her sleep until the end of the movie and when I wake her she shakes her head, grimacing. You better check those windows, she says. I promise her I will.

BOYFRIEND

I should have been
careful with the weed. Most people it just fucks up. Me, it makes me sleepwalk. And wouldn’t you know, I woke up in the hallway of our building, feeling like I’d been stepped on by my high school marching band. My ass would have been there all night if the folks in the apartment below hadn’t been having themselves a big old fight at three in the morning. I was too fried to move, at least right away. Boyfriend was trying to snake Girlfriend, saying he needed space, and she was like, Motherfucker, I’ll give you all the space you need. I knew Boyfriend a little. I saw him at the bars and saw some of the girls he used to bring home while she was away. He just needed more space to cheat. Fine, he said, but every time he went for the door she got to crying and would be like, Why are you doing this? They sounded a lot like me and my old girlfriend Loretta, but I swore to myself that I would stop thinking about her ass, even though every Cleopatra-looking Latina in the city made me stop and wish she would come back to me. By the time Boyfriend got himself into the hallway I was already in my apartment. Girlfriend would not stop crying. Twice she stopped, she must have heard me moving around right above her and both times I held my breath until she started up again. I followed her into the bathroom, the two of us separated by a floor, wires and some pipes. She kept saying, Ese fucking pepetón, and washed her face over and over again. It would have broken my heart if it hadn’t been so damn familiar. I guess I’d gotten numb to that sort of thing. I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber.

The next day I told my boy Harold what happened and he said too bad for her.

I guess so.

If I didn’t have my own women problems I’d say let’s go comfort the widow.

She ain’t our type.

The hell she ain’t.

Homegirl was too beautiful, too high-class for a couple of knuckleheads like us. Never saw her in a t-shirt or without jewelry. And her boyfriend, olvídate. That nigger could have been a model; hell, they both could have been models, which was what they probably were, considering that I never heard word one pass between them about a job or a fucking boss. People like these were untouchables to me, raised on some other planet and then transplanted into my general vicinity to remind me how bad I was living. What was worse was how much Spanish they shared. None of my girlfriends ever spoke Spanish, even Loretta of the Puerto Rican attitudes. The closest thing for me was this black chick who spent three years in Italy. She liked to talk that shit in bed, and said she’d gone with me because I reminded her of some of the Sicilian men she’d known, which was why I never called her again.

Boyfriend came around a couple of times that week for his things and, I guess, to finish the job. He was a confident prick. He listened to what she had to say, arguments that had taken her hours to put together, and then he would sigh and say it didn’t matter, he needed his space, punto. She let him fuck her every time, maybe hoping that it would make him stay but you know, once somebody gets a little escape velocity going, ain’t no play in the world that will keep them from leaving. I would listen to them going at it and I would be like, Damn, ain’t nothing more shabby than those farewell fucks. I know. Me and Loretta had enough of those to go around. Difference was, we never talked the way these two would. About our days. Not even when we were cool together. We’d lay there and listen to the world outside, to the loud boys, the cars, the pigeons. Back then I didn’t have a clue what she was thinking but now I know what to pencil into all those empty thought bubbles. Escape. Escape.

These two had a thing about the bathroom. Each one of his visits ended up there. Which was fine by me, it was where I could hear them best. I don’t know why I started following her life, but it seemed like a good thing to do. Most of the time I thought people, even at their worst, were pretty fucking boring. I guess I wasn’t busy with anything else. Especially not women. I was taking time off, waiting for the last of my Loretta wreckage to drift out of sight.

The bathroom. Girlfriend talked a mile a minute about her day, how she saw a fistfight on the C train, how somebody liked her necklace, and Boyfriend, with his smooth Barry White voice, just kept going, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They’d shower together and if she wasn’t talking she was going down on him. All you would hear down there was the water smacking the bottom of the tub and him going, Yeah. Yeah. He wasn’t sticking around, though. That was obvious. He was one of those dark-skinned smooth-faced brothers that women kill for, and I knew for a fact, having seen his ass in action at the local spots, that he liked to get over on the white-girls. She didn’t know nothing about his little Rico Suave routine. It would have wrecked her. I used to think those were the barrio rules, Latinos and blacks in, whites out—a place we down cats weren’t supposed to go. But love teaches you. Clears your head of any rules. Loretta’s new boy was Italian, worked on Wall Street. When she told me about him we were still going out. We were on the Promenade and she said to me, I like him. He’s a hard worker.

No amount of heart-leather could stop something like that from hurting.

After one of their showers, Boyfriend never came back. No phone calls, no nothing. She called a lot of her friends, ones she hadn’t spoken to in the longest. I survived through my boys; I didn’t have to call out for help. It was easy for them to say, Forget her sellout ass. That’s not the sort of woman you need. Look how light you are—no doubt she was already shopping for the lightest.

Girlfriend spent her time crying, either in the bathroom or in front of the TV. I spent my time listening and calling around for a job. Or smoking or drinking. A bottle of rum and two sixes of Presidente a week.

One night I got the cojones to ask her up for café, which was mighty manipulative of me. She hadn’t had much human contact the whole month, except with the delivery guy from the Japanese restaurant, a Colombian dude I always said hi to, so what the hell was she going to say? No? She seemed glad to hear my name and when she threw open the door I was surprised to see her looking smart and watchful. She said she’d be right up and when she sat down across from me at the kitchen table she had on makeup and a rose-gold necklace.

You have a lot more light in your apartment than I do, she said.

Which was a nice call. About all I had in the apartment was light.

I played Andrés Jiménez for her—you know,
Yo quiero que mi Borinquén sea libre y soberana—
and then we drank a pot of café. El Pico, I told her. Nothing but the best. We didn’t have much to talk about. She was depressed and tired and I had the worst gas of my life. Twice I had to excuse myself. Twice in an hour. She must have thought that bizarre as hell but both times I came out of the bathroom she was staring deeply into her café, the way the fortune-tellers will do back on the Island. Crying all the time had made her more beautiful. Grief will do that sometimes. Not for me. Loretta had left months ago and I still looked like hell. Having Girlfriend in the apartment only made me feel shabbier. She picked up a cheeb seed from a crack in the table and smiled.

Do you smoke? I asked.

It makes me break out, she said.

Makes me sleepwalk.

Honey will stop that. It’s an old Caribbean cure. I had a tío who would sleepwalk. One teaspoon a night took it out of him.

Wow, I said.

That night, she put on a free-style tape, Noël maybe, and I could hear her moving around her apartment. I wouldn’t have put it past her to have been a dancer.

I never tried the honey and she never came back. Whenever I saw her on the stairs we would trade hi’s but she never slowed down to talk, never gave a smile or any other kind of encouragement. I took that as a hint. At the end of the month she got her hair cut short. No more straighteners, no more science fiction combs.

I like that, I told her. I was coming back from the liquor store and she was on her way out with a woman friend.

Makes you look fierce.

She smiled. That’s exactly what I wanted.

EDISON, NEW JERSEY

The first time
we try to deliver the Gold Crown the lights are on in the house but no one lets us in. I bang on the front door and Wayne hits the back and I can hear our double drum shaking the windows. Right then I have this feeling that someone is inside, laughing at us.

This guy better have a good excuse, Wayne says, lumbering around the newly planted rosebushes. This is bullshit.

You’re telling me, I say but Wayne’s the one who takes this job too seriously. He pounds some more on the door, his face jiggling. A couple of times he raps on the windows, tries squinting through the curtains. I take a more philosophical approach; I walk over to the ditch that has been cut next to the road, a drainage pipe half filled with water, and sit down. I smoke and watch a mama duck and her three ducklings scavenge the grassy bank and then float downstream like they’re on the same string. Beautiful, I say but Wayne doesn’t hear. He’s banging on the door with the staple gun.

At nine Wayne picks me up at the showroom and by then I have our route planned out. The order forms tell me everything I need to know about the customers we’ll be dealing with that day. If someone is just getting a fifty-two-inch card table delivered then you know they aren’t going to give you too much of a hassle but they also aren’t going to tip. Those are your Spotswood, Sayreville and Perth Amboy deliveries. The pool tables go north to the rich suburbs—Livingston, Ridgewood, Bedminster.

You should see our customers. Doctors, diplomats, surgeons, presidents of universities, ladies in slacks and silk tops who sport thin watches you could trade in for a car, who wear comfortable leather shoes. Most of them prepare for us by laying down a path of yesterday’s
Washington Post
from the front door to the game room. I make them pick it all up. I say: Carajo, what if we slip? Do you know what two hundred pounds of slate could do to a floor? The threat of property damage puts the chop-chop in their step. The best customers leave us alone until the bill has to be signed. Every now and then we’ll be given water in paper cups. Few have offered us more, though a dentist from Ghana once gave us a six-pack of Heineken while we worked.

Sometimes the customer has to jet to the store for cat food or a newspaper while we’re in the middle of a job. I’m sure you’ll be all right, they say. They never sound too sure. Of course, I say. Just show us where the silver’s at. The customers ha-ha and we ha-ha and then they agonize over leaving, linger by the front door, trying to memorize everything they own, as if they don’t know where to find us, who we work for.

Once they’re gone, I don’t have to worry about anyone bothering me. I put down the ratchet, crack my knuckles and explore, usually while Wayne is smoothing out the felt and doesn’t need help. I take cookies from the kitchen, razors from the bathroom cabinets. Some of these houses have twenty, thirty rooms. On the ride back I figure out how much loot it would take to fill up all that space. I’ve been caught roaming around plenty of times but you’d be surprised how quickly someone believes you’re looking for the bathroom if you don’t jump when you’re discovered, if you just say, Hi.

After the paperwork’s been signed, I have a decision to make. If the customer has been good and tipped well, we call it even and leave. If the customer has been an ass—maybe they yelled, maybe they let their kids throw golf balls at us—I ask for the bathroom. Wayne will pretend that he hasn’t seen this before; he’ll count the drill bits while the customer (or their maid) guides the vacuum over the floor. Excuse me, I say. I let them show me the way to the bathroom (usually I already know) and once the door is shut I cram bubble bath drops into my pockets and throw fist-sized wads of toilet paper into the toilet. I take a dump if I can and leave that for them.