If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (8 page)

Georgie took my hand and kissed it. “Promise you’ll come visit,” he whispered. “Me and my pretty new apartment in the city.”

“It’s expensive, now,” I said. “Dig it, Cha-Cha was saying apartments in the city are three times what they cost in Elephant Beach for half the space. He said you could rent a whole bungalow on Comanche Street for the price of a one-bedroom apartment in the city.”

Georgie struggled to sit up. “‘Don’t rain on my parade,’” he sang. “‘I got my band out . . .’” His voice wobbled, and he slumped back against the pillows, moaning.

“Georgie,” I said. I rang the nurse’s buzzer again. Georgie’s mouth twisted, the way it did that time Duncan Cray called from the corner, “Hey, Georgina, your slip is showing.”

“Promise you’ll come,” he whispered weakly.

“Yes,” I said, pressing the buzzer harder, so it sounded angry.

“Promise,” he said again.

“I promise,” I said, abandoning the buzzer and going out in the hall to find someone who would come and make the bump stop growing, make it go away.

running with ramone

W
e’re just driving, Bennie, Voodoo, me and Nanny, in Bennie’s white Pontiac that smells so bad we have the windows rolled down even though it’s one of those nights that’s totally dark, no stars in the sky, dead air outside the windows, and as much as you love summer in your mind, you start thinking that maybe it’s time for it to be over. We’re driving from one end of Elephant Beach to the other, just to get away from Comanche Street for a couple of hours. It’s a Wednesday night and the uptown streets are empty. We’re just waiting for the weekend, even though we do pretty much the same thing every night.

“Scumbag!” Bennie yells suddenly out the open window. “Lady, you’re a scumbag and you suck!”

“Great,” Nanny says. “That’s great, man. Can’t we go anywhere with you guys without worrying about sirens chasing us all over the place?”

“Did you perchance not see what just happened?” Bennie asked. “Did you not see the close call I cleverly avoided by swerving away from that bitch’s car that was encroaching my lane?”

“You been reading the dictionary again or what?” Voodoo asked. He had his eyes closed and was playing air guitar, even though the radio in Bennie’s car didn’t work.

“Trouble with this fucking one-horse town, nothing to do but get into car accidents,” Bennie grumbled.

“Yeah, you must miss the panoramic view of those alleys on a Hundred Thirty-third Street.” Voodoo laughed.

Everyone was in an itchy mood. Nanny was still doing it with Voodoo because she didn’t know how to stop. They did it in his bedroom underneath the Jimi Hendrix poster, the one where Jimi was on his knees, burning his guitar. Nanny said the way the flames came up his thighs, it looked like he was burning his own dick. She felt like they were in bed with Jimi Hendrix and his burning penis. It was making her angry. She was also angry at Voodoo for being in love with her and for not being Tony Fury. Bennie and Voodoo were grumpy because there was a drought; there had been a huge bust in Lefferton, the next town over, and all the dealers were diving for cover until the heat lifted. I was antsy because it was almost the middle of July and nothing had happened with Luke yet. Here’s what I’d heard: that before leaving for Nam, he’d had a girl in the city who no one knew and he’d come home to find she was shacked up with someone else and he was in a heartbroken rage over it. I didn’t believe this story, because I couldn’t imagine such a thing. If this know-nothing girl was too stupid to realize how lucky she was—no, I couldn’t imagine it. Then I heard that Luke was strung out, that in the jungle he’d developed a heroin habit because the dope there was so pure, so fine, that it took less than a bag to get off, and back here, it took much more to feel even the slightest glimmer. But Conor, Luke’s brother, said that was horseshit, man, there were no bent spoons, bloody needles, any of that shit lying around, and, if anything, Luke was speedier than he used to be, pacing back and forth in his room at night, chain-smoking, too jittery to finish a full meal. He rarely slept, and even though he was around, he kept his distance, getting up earlier to surf when it was barely light out, heading to the beach late in the day, when everyone else was leaving. I ached with love for Luke, but sometimes it felt like loving a ghost.

Now we were stopped at a green light at Buoy and Crescent when Bennie pulled a sudden U-turn and the Pontiac began choking toward the abandoned mall across the street from the train station.

“What the fuck?” Voodoo yelled.

“Really, will you not be happy until we’re finally arrested?” Nanny said. Bennie turned sideways and smiled his lopsided smile.

“Lips in a Hole,” he said triumphantly.

“Lips in a Hole!” Voodoo shouted, and they hooked their thumbs in the “right on, brother” handclasp, happy as if they’d won the lottery.

“Oh, shit,” Nanny groaned.

“Really,” I agreed.

“‘Please pass me the peace weed, and take some heed,’” Voodoo sang, beating the air.

Nanny snagged my eyes with her own. “Drop us back at Eddy’s, then you can go do what you want,” she said, but Bennie was already looking for a parking space.

Voodoo stopped playing the air and turned around. He looked into Nanny’s eyes, long and level. “You want to cop the breeze, go ahead,” he said. “Because for a born and bred city chick, you sure don’t act like one.”

Nanny’s eyes were startled; she wasn’t used to Voodoo talking to her like that. She mumbled something, then turned and stared out the window.

Lips in a Hole was run out of the abandoned mall behind the housing projects, across the way from the railroad tracks. Word on the street was that no matter how dry the terrain, you could always purchase your drug of choice from Lips in a Hole, which was really just a voice behind a small slot carved into the back wall of a half-finished Pancake Heaven. It wasn’t the safest place on earth for white people, but it opened only after dark to attract less attention. Sometimes a line would form and straggle outward until it touched the burglar bars on the public houses that ran parallel to the railroad tracks. None of the tenants complained, because they didn’t want trouble. If anyone spotted a cruiser, they’d
whistle once, sharply, and the line would disperse, shadows creeping swiftly through the darkness. The cops had to have been pretty stupid not to know about Lips in a Hole, but whoever was behind that door must have been very crafty because so far, no one had been caught.

“Wassamatta for you, man, just park already,” Voodoo grumbled.

“Easy for you to say, man,” Bennie said, driving cautiously through one of the parking islands in the middle of Buoy Boulevard. “This is a dangerous part of town. Don’t want my wheels getting stolen.”

We all laughed hysterically. “What are you, fucking kidding me?” Voodoo said, holding his sides. “Who would steal this piece of shit?”

“Niggers,” Bennie replied. “Niggers’ll steal anything. Steal your eyeballs, you ain’t looking.” He pulled into a space and insisted we lock the doors even though one of the windows was broken and couldn’t roll all the way up.

It was a murky, humid night, no breeze anywhere. The air smelled like a moldy sheet left in the hamper too long. We crossed Buoy Boulevard, landing on the side of the street where Buster’s Florsheim Shoes used to be. The Krackoff Bakery had been next to it, where you could buy the best raisin coffee-cake rings in the world. My mother would send me there to get a coffee ring for her mah-jongg game and on the way home I’d pick all the raisins out. Then I’d have to turn back and buy another one out of my own money so she wouldn’t go nuts. That’s how good those coffee rings were. But now Krackoff’s was gone, along with Elephant Beach Dry Goods, where we bought all our corduroys and flannel shirts and desert boots. All the stores had been kicked off the block, bought out to make way for the shiny new mall that was supposed to lift Elephant Beach from the skids and bring prosperity back to its center. We heard the builder had gone belly-up because the economy was so bad, but the other rumor was that he’d pulled out because of the black men from the housing projects staggering around drunk at ten o’clock in the morning. We heard he’d known about the projects, but didn’t think the people who lived there would be so visible.

“Belly-up, my ass,” Desi said. “Were they blind or what that they didn’t know this from the get-go? It’s not like anyone was hiding, they’re all out in plain sight, at least when I drive over the bridge from Queens.”

We crossed the street. Nanny was scared, I could tell. She was leaning all over Voodoo, and he had his arm draped protectively around her. I wasn’t scared, because I’d lived in Elephant Beach all my life and I hadn’t gone to Catholic school like Nanny and Liz and practically everyone else because my father said the nuns were a bunch of bitter old biddies taking their frustrations out on children and he wanted his kids to know there were other people in the world besides Catholics. “They’ll have to get used to it sooner or later,” he told my mother when they argued. It was another of the ways I was different; I had gone to Central District Elementary, on the other side of the train station, and I knew these streets as well as I now knew the Trunk. I knew about the staggering drunk black men and the junkies who hung out in the playground at Central District after dark, sitting on the swings, shivering, pumping themselves high in the air to keep warm until their connection showed. I knew all this, but it hadn’t always been this way, and because it was familiar I never felt that anything really bad would ever happen to me.

Sure enough, the line for Lips in a Hole snaked down the alley, but it moved quickly, since nobody wanted to linger too long. Bennie, Voodoo and Nanny moved ahead, trying to find the end of the line. I wished I hadn’t come, that I was back at the lounge at The Starlight Hotel, watching Luke. He’d be there by now, huddled in a corner with Mitch, or maybe smoking a joint with Cha-Cha and Raven out on the piazza. I didn’t love drugs as much as everyone else did; I was always too afraid I’d be the one who put the baby in the oven instead of the turkey, like the Thanksgiving babysitter did while she was tripping. I was on the verge of walking over to the station to catch a bus back down to Comanche Street when I heard behind me “Katharine?” I paid only half attention because nobody called me Katharine, not even my grandmother, and I was named for her. But then I saw someone coming into the alley from
the side panels of the Pancake Heaven. He began walking toward me. “Katharine, is that you?”

I only recognized him by his eyes, huge and dark and liquid, like they’d been poured into his face. I walked toward him and said, “Ramone?” When he leaned forward to kiss my cheek, I was surprised. We hadn’t spoken in years. When he hugged me, I caught a whiff of something sly and humid.

“Been a long time, man.”

“For sure,” I said, looking down at his feet. In summer, a lot of people went barefoot in Elephant Beach, but not in the center of town, where the pavement was tar-stained and dirty and littered with glass. Ramone’s feet were filthy, the toenails yellow, cracked. They looked like the feet of an old man, even though he was only eighteen years old, the same age as me. His once thick, curly black hair was now lank and stringy, tied back from his face with a blue bandanna.

His shirtsleeves were floppy at the wrists. Nobody wore long sleeves in summer, unless they were trying to hide something.

“How’s Ophelia?” I asked.

Ramone nodded, smiling. “Fat,” he said. “
Gordita.
Third kid on the way.” Then he asked, “What you waiting on?”

“My friends,” I said.

He laughed. “That’s what they all say.”

“No, really, I—” And then it came to me. Ramone walking out of those side panels, into the alley. I whispered, “So you—you’re the—”

“I work for my brother now,” he said. “You remember Eddie?”

“Sure, I remember Eddie,” I said. Eddie Lopez had at one time been the town track star. So good-looking, everyone was in love with him. My babysitter, Susie Rickman, showed me her yearbook one night when she let me stay up late to watch
Saturday Night at the Movies
. I was around eleven at the time and she was sixteen. She showed me the pages where people were voted Most Congenial, Best Dressed. Then she pointed to the Most Athletic couple and sighed. “That’s Eddie Lopez,” she said.
“He’s the first Puerto Rican to ever be voted in for anything. Isn’t he gorgeous?”

I stared at the picture. “That’s Ophelia’s cousin,” I said. “He drives us to the kickball games in her uncle Manuel’s truck.” Sometimes Uncle Manuel drove us to the games at other elementary schools, but on the days that Eddie drove us, everyone was quiet while he sang along to the radio. When he helped us down from the back of the truck, we demurely murmured, “Thank you,” afraid to look at him. He always smiled that famous Lopez smile, riddled with dimples. “Break a leg,” he’d call as we walked toward the playing field. Then he’d honk the horn as he backed out of the parking lot and yell, “Only kidding!
Buena suerte, chicas!
Good luck!” before driving off to his gardening job.

Susie nodded. “He was going out with Stephanie Clayborn, they were so cute together. She told her parents he was Italian, you know, he’s so light-skinned, she thought they could get away with it, but then they heard him speaking Spanish one day and flipped out. They told her if she didn’t stop seeing him, they wouldn’t pay for college. What was she gonna do? Then he was supposed to get a scholarship to one of the state schools, Cortland, I think, that’s where all the jocks go, but something messed up and he didn’t get it.” She closed the yearbook and began rooting around in her purse for her cigarettes.

“What messed up?” I asked.

Susie shrugged, fitting a Herbert Tareyton between her lips. “Could have been anything,” she said. “That’s just how it is with the spics. It’s not like you can expect things to work out for them.”

“How’s Eddie doing?” I asked Ramone now.

Ramone jerked his head toward the slot in the door. “Ask him,” he said. I recognized Hutchy Michaels, a boy from the Dunes, hunched over the slot, earnestly placing an order. I knew Ramone wasn’t talking about Hutchy.

“So Eddie is—”

Ramone shrugged. “We take turns,” he said.

“A Lopez family franchise,” I said, and then I was sorry. That’s the trouble with hanging out with the people I hang out with, everyone’s a smart-ass and you get into the habit. Ramone only shrugged, but his smile was uncertain, and for a minute I wondered if he knew what a franchise was. I remembered he had either dropped out of high school or gone to BOCES, the vocational program, somewhere out on the Island. Behind him, I heard a slight scraping noise, and Ramone’s eyes darted quickly to the loose panel in the wall. “Just a minute,” he said, and he walked back through the panel and then he was gone.

“Katie.” Nanny and Voodoo were suddenly beside me. Behind them were hundreds of eyes in the night, and the glowing embers of what seemed like a thousand cigarettes. I could see Bennie farther down the line, craning his neck to look at me. I was flattered that he could take his mind off copping drugs for even two seconds.