Maya's Notebook: A Novel (25 page)

When they removed the kid’s IV and catheter, and he could eat solid food and stand up, we helped him to get dressed, took him to the elevator, mingling with all the people on the fifth floor during visiting hours, and from there at a snail’s pace to the front door of the hospital, where Joe Martin was waiting for us with the motor running. I could have sworn that Olympia Pettiford was in the corridor, but the saintly woman pretended not to have seen us.

A doctor who supplied Brandon Leeman with prescription drugs for the black market came to the apartment to see Freddy and taught me how to change the dressings on his hand, so it wouldn’t get infected. I thought of taking advantage of having the boy in my power to get him off the drugs, but I wasn’t strong enough to watch him suffer so horrendously. Freddy recovered quickly, to the surprise of the doctor, who’d expected him to be laid up for a couple of months, and was soon dancing like Michael Jackson with his arm in a sling, but there was still blood in his
urine.

Joe Martin and Chino took charge of revenge against the rival gang; they felt they couldn’t let an insult that serious go by unanswered.

The beating Freddy got in
the black neighborhood affected me very deeply. In Brandon Leeman’s fragmentary universe, people came and went without leaving any memories. Some left, others ended up in prison or dead, but Freddy wasn’t one of those anonymous shadows; he was my friend. Seeing him in the hospital breathing with difficulty, in great pain, unconscious at times, tears flooded my eyes. I suppose I was also crying for myself. I felt trapped, and I could no longer keep kidding myself about addiction; I depended on alcohol, pills, marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs to get through the day. When I woke up in the morning with a ferocious hangover from the previous night, I’d make a firm plan to clean myself up, but before half an hour had passed, I’d given in to the temptation of a drink. Just a shot of vodka to get rid of the headache, I promised myself. The headache persisted, and the bottle was within reach.

I couldn’t kid myself about being on vacation, marking time before going to college: I was among criminals. One careless mistake, and I could end up dead or, like Freddy, plugged into half a dozen tubes and machines in a hospital. I was very scared, although I refused to acknowledge my fear, that feline crouching in the pit of my stomach. An insistent voice kept reminding me of the danger. How
couldn’t I see it? Why didn’t I flee before it was too late? What was I waiting for to call my family? But another resentful voice answered that my fate didn’t matter to anyone; if my Popo were alive, he would have moved heaven and earth to find me, but my father couldn’t be bothered. “You didn’t call me because you still hadn’t suffered enough, Maya,” my Nini told me when we saw each other again.

The worst of the Nevada summer came with temperatures in the hundreds, but since I lived with air conditioning and only went out at night, I didn’t suffer too much. My habits did not vary, the work going on as ever. I was never alone; the gym was the only place where Brandon Leeman’s associates left me in peace, because although they didn’t come into the hotels and casinos, they waited for me outside, counting the minutes.

The boss had a persistent bronchial cough in those days, which he claimed was an allergy, and I noticed that he’d lost weight. In the short time I’d known him he had grown weaker. The skin hung off his arms like wrinkled cloth, and his tattoos had lost their original design; you could count his ribs and vertebrae; he was gaunt, haggard, and looked very tired. Joe Martin noticed before anyone else and started to put on airs and question Leeman’s orders, while the secretive Chino said nothing, but seconded his partner in dealing behind the boss’s back and fiddling the accounts. They did it so openly that Freddy and I commented on it. “Don’t open your mouth, Laura, because they’ll make you pay—those guys don’t forgive,” the kid warned me.

The gorillas were careless in front of Freddy, who they considered a harmless clown, a junkie with his brain al
ready fried; however, his brain worked better than either of theirs, no doubt about that. I tried to convince the kid that he could rehabilitate himself, go to school, do something with his future, but he answered me with the cliché that school had nothing to teach him, he was learning in the university of life. He repeated Leeman’s lapidary phrase: “It’s too late for me.”

At the beginning of October
Leeman flew to Utah and drove back in a brand-new blue Mustang convertible with a silver stripe and black interior. He informed me that he’d bought it for his brother, who for some complicated reason was unable to purchase it himself. Adam, who lived a twelve-hour drive away, would send someone to pick it up in a couple of days. A vehicle like that could not stay for a single minute on the streets of this neighborhood without disappearing or being disemboweled, so Leeman immediately put it away in one of the two garages of the building that had secure doors, the rest being caverns full of waste, hovels for passing addicts and spontaneous fornicators. Some destitute people lived for years in those caves, defending their square yard of space against other strays and the rats.

The next day Brandon Leeman sent his associates to pick up a package in Fort Ruby, one of Nevada’s six hundred ghost towns that he used as meeting points with his Mexican supplier, and after they’d left, he invited me to go for a drive in the Mustang. The powerful engine, the smell of
new leather, the wind in my hair, sun on my skin, the immense landscape sliced by the knife of the highway, the mountains against the pale cloudless sky, all contributed to getting me drunk with freedom. The feeling of freedom contrasted starkly with the fact that we passed near several federal prisons. It was a hot day, and although the worst of the summer was already past, the panorama soon turned incandescent and we had to put the top up and turn on the air conditioning.

“You know that Joe Martin and Chino are robbing me, don’t you?” he asked me.

I preferred to keep quiet. That was not a subject he’d bring up for no reason; denying it would imply I had my head in the clouds, and an affirmative reply would be admitting betrayal by not having told him.

“It had to happen sooner or later,” Brandon Leeman added. “I can’t count on anyone’s loyalty.”

“You can count on me,” I murmured, with the feeling of slipping on oil.

“I hope so. Joe and Chino are a couple of imbeciles. They won’t be better off with anyone else. I’ve been very generous with them.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Replace them, before they replace me.”

We were silent for several miles, but when I was starting to think the confidences had run out, he returned to the charge.

“One of the cops wants more money. If I give it to him, he’ll just want more. What do you think, Laura?”

“I don’t know anything about that. . . .”

We drove for another few miles without speaking. Brandon Leeman, who was starting to get anxious, left the road in search of a private spot, but we found ourselves in a patch of dry earth, rocks, spiny shrubs, and stunted grass. We got out of the car in plain view of the traffic and crouched down behind the open door, and I held the lighter while he heated up the mixture. In less than a second he shot up. Then we shared a pipe of weed to celebrate our daring; if we got pulled over by the highway patrol they’d find an unregistered illegal firearm, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, Demerol, and a few other pills loose in a bag. “Those pigs would find something else that we wouldn’t be able to explain away either,” Brandon Leeman added enigmatically, laughing his head off. He was so high that I had to drive, even though my experience behind the wheel was minimal and the bong had clouded my vision.

We drove into the town of Beatty, which appeared uninhabited at that hour of the day, and stopped for lunch at a Mexican place, its sign decorated with cowboys with hats and lariats, that inside turned out to be a smoky casino. In the restaurant Leeman ordered a couple of tequila slammers, two random dishes, and the most expensive bottle of red wine on the menu. I made an effort to eat, while he moved the contents of his plate around with his fork, drawing little tracks in his mashed potatoes.

“Do you know what I’ll do with Joe and Chino? Since I’ll have to give that cop what he wants anyway, I’m going to ask him to pay me back by doing me a little favor.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If he wants an increase in his commission, he’ll have to get rid of those two men without involving me in any way.”

I grasped his meaning and remembered the girls that Leeman had employed before me and had “gotten rid of.” I saw with terrifying clarity the abyss open at my feet and once more thought of fleeing, but was again paralyzed by the sensation of sinking in thick molasses, inert, with no will of my own. I can’t think, my brain feels like it’s full of sawdust, too many pills, too much weed, vodka, I don’t even know what I’ve taken today, I have to get clean, I muttered silently to myself, while I knocked back a second glass of wine, after finishing the tequila.

Brandon Leeman was leaning back in his chair, with his head on the backrest and his eyes closed. The light was hitting him from one side, accentuating his prominent cheekbones, hollow face, and the green circles under his eyes. He looked like his own skull. “Let’s go back,” I proposed with a spasm of nausea. “I’ve got something to do in this goddamn town first. Order me a coffee,” he replied.

As always, Leeman paid in
cash. We walked out of the air-conditioned restaurant into the merciless heat of Beatty, which according to him was a dump for radioactive waste and only existed because of tourism to Death Valley, ten minutes’ drive away. He drove in a zigzag to a place where they rented storage spaces, low cement structures with a string of turquoise-painted metal doors. He’d been there before; he walked straight up to one of the doors with no hesitation. He ordered me to stay in the car while he clumsily manipulated the heavy industrial combination locks,
swearing; he was having trouble focusing his eyes, and his hands had been trembling a lot for quite a while. When he opened the door, he motioned me to come over.

The sun lit up a small room in which there was nothing but two big wooden crates. From the trunk of the Mustang he took out a black plastic sports bag marked “El Paso TX,” and we went inside the deposit, which was boiling hot. I couldn’t help but think in terror that Leeman might leave me buried alive inside that storage locker. He grabbed my arm firmly and stared straight at me.

“Remember when I told you that we’d do great things together?”

“Yes . . .”

“The moment has arrived. I hope you won’t let me down.”

I nodded, frightened by his threatening tone and at finding myself alone with him in that oven without another living soul around. Leeman crouched down, opened the bag, and showed me the contents. It took me a moment to realize that those green packages were bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

“It’s not stolen money, and nobody’s looking for it,” he said. “This is just a sample, soon there’ll be a lot more. You realize I’m giving you a tremendous display of trust, no? You’re the only decent person I know, apart from my brother. Now you and I are associates.”

“What do I have to do?” I murmured.

“Nothing, for the moment, but if I give you the word or something happens to me, you should immediately call Adam and tell him where his El Paso TX bag is, got that? Repeat what I just told you.”

“I should call your brother and tell him where his bag is.”

“His El Paso TX bag, don’t forget that. Have you got any questions?”

“How will your brother open the locks?”

“That’s none of your fucking business!” barked Brandon Leeman with such violence that I shrank back, expecting a blow, but he calmed down, closed the bag, put it on top of one of the crates, and we left.

Events sped up from the
moment I went with Brandon Leeman to drop off the bag in the storage depot in Beatty, and afterward I couldn’t get them straight in my head; some of them happened simultaneously, and others I didn’t witness in person, but found out about later. Two days later, Brandon Leeman ordered me to follow him in a recently recycled Acura from the clandestine garage, while he drove the Mustang he’d bought in Utah for his brother. I followed him on Route 95, three-quarters of an hour in extreme heat through a landscape of shimmering mirages, as far as Boulder City, which was not on Brandon Leeman’s mental map, because it’s one of the only two cities in Nevada where gambling is illegal. We stopped at a gas station and settled down to wait out of reach of the sun’s rays.

Twenty minutes later a car pulled up with two men in it. Brandon Leeman handed them the keys to the Mustang, received a medium-size travel bag, and got into the Acura
beside me. The Mustang and the other car drove off toward the south, and we took the highway back the way we came. However, we didn’t go through Las Vegas, but directly to the storage depot in Beatty, where Brandon Leeman repeated the routine of opening the locks without letting me see the combination. He put the bag beside the other one and closed the door.

“Half a million dollars, Laura!” And he rubbed his hands together happily.

“I don’t like this . . . ,” I murmured, backing away.

“What is it you don’t like, bitch?”

He went pale and shook me by the arms, but I shoved him away, whimpering. That sick weakling, who I could crush under my heels, terrified me; he was capable of anything.

“Leave me alone!”

“Think about it, woman,” said Leeman, in a conciliating tone. “Do you want to carry on leading this fucked-up life? My brother and I have it all arranged. We’re leaving this damned country, and you’re coming with us.”

“Where to?”

“Brazil. In a couple of weeks we’ll be on a beach with coconut palms. Wouldn’t you like to have a yacht?”

“A yacht? What do you mean, a yacht? I just want to go back to California!”

“So the fucking slut wants to go back to California!” he mocked threateningly.

“Please, Brandon. I won’t tell anybody, I promise. You and your family can go to Brazil, no worries.”