Skin in the Game (2 page)

I play with the walkie before I press any buttons. Long enough for the word to spread among los vivos. Long enough for the zombies to hide inside the hollowed-out, trashed couches along the rail bed. Long enough, even, for the ghosts to gather their lives into grocery bags and vacate.

I dally long enough to cost me my badge if someone important were watching.

But that's the thing: what survives here, good and bad, does so because nobody is watching. Not the council people nor state legislators whose districts overlap in Zombie City; not church do-gooders; not police nor social workers nor public health officials.

Just me.

*   *   *

Fronts

El Centro de Rehabilitación Corazón Fuerte has a nice façade, but get past the door and its heart is rotten.

The first room we go into has so much trash strewn about it's impossible to tell whether there's hardwood or carpet beneath our feet. It was once grand, that I can see from the crumbling plaster detail on the ceiling and the decaying moldings.

There's no one in the room. Nor in any of the rooms we check on the bottom floor. Nasey says he searched the database as soon as I called, and this rehab is officially listed as serving some twenty-five residents. Whatever money they make from drug sales is frosting on the rip-off-human-services cake.

I find the body on the third floor. Sprawled out, face down, hair dark and wet from some cold sweat she went into before keeling over. It's not the boy from the missing persons report, but a viva. As we move closer, I see tiny bits of foil kick up and dance in the light streaming through the busted-out window. Addiction's telltales.

“Another OD,” Nasey says.

I squat down, push the girl's shoulder to turn her over. Not an OD—her chest is cracked open. It is a disturbingly tidy cavity, without a single organ or even much blood left to pool under it.

“Jesus,” Nasey says. “You ever seen this kind of thing before?”

I shake my head.

Nasey takes a step back, burps, reholsters his gun. “Special Units is going to want a piece of this. Better for us. Except for the part where we have to wait for them to show up.”

Then he burps again. Grimaces. The color climbs up those pale cheeks and I swear it even tints his hair as he fumbles with the radio. “Too much coffee,” he says. His eyes stay on mine longer than they should. Maybe he knows.

Non-Latino folk have magic too. I sense it when I go to the Ukrainian neighborhood to buy pierogies, or when I pick up an order in Chinatown. Sometimes I even feel it reaching out to me from my father's people if I get roped into working the St. Patrick's Day parade which, thankfully, isn't often.

People who talk about code switching don't know the half of it.

“They're on their way,” Nasey says. I hear his footsteps as he leaves the room, but my gaze lingers on the dead girl. Her skin is still good, which means she was new to this. I use my thumbs to drag the lids down over her eyes, then shove both thumbs in my mouth.

The taste of her fear-driven flop sweat, her death, washes over my tongue, takes the edge off the hunger that's always nested inside me. Taste prompts image. I see the girl, face upturned as she waits for her fix, then something striking fast at her chest. Not a knife, but a mouth with scimitar teeth that pop out like double switchblades. I'd like to say I focus on the face of the assailant in the vision, like a good cop would, but I don't. Just the blood. So much blood. My gut clenches with a sympathetic convulsion.

I take my thumbs out of my mouth and scramble to my feet to find Nasey. He's leaning against a rickety-looking banister, shooting the shit with two other dudes from the precinct. As soon as he sees me come through the doorway, he steps up to meet me.

“I've got to go,” I say. “You'll have to deal with the paperwork.”

His eyes narrow. “Whadya have?”

“Nothing. A rumor to check out.”

As I start to brush by him, he gags, then swallows hard several times and grabs my arm. “If the rumor looks good, you'll call me in, right?”

“Sure.”

“I mean it, Villagrán.”

He pronounces my surname perfectly. Nasey may play the part, but he's not truly a redneck. He's something else I haven't been able to decipher yet, hurt and bitter and confident all rolled together.

Because there are so many cops on the fake rehab center call, the streets of el barrio are nearly deserted as I make my way back to the entrance of Zombie City/La Boca. Once more through the packed mud lip, the stone teeth, and down its gullet to the tripas, the innards, of forgotten Philly.

“Tell me about the new ghosts haunting this place,” I say when I find Yoli.

She hands out the ten or so meal boxes in her final garbage bag before she turns to me.

“Not ghosts,” she says. “Monsters.”

*   *   *

Me, Myself, and Mine

So the thing about monsters is that it is easy to confuse us for human. If we want to we can look the same, smell the same, behave the same.

Some purport we can be identified by our teeth, but they are unreliable indicators at best. A number of us have fangs that fold back and are completely hidden, hinging out only when we get within striking distance of our prey. Others have hollow, venom-stemmed teeth that pivot sideways in their socket joints. These last don't even have to open their mouths to strike, they wear their concealing smiles the whole time.

But even monsters with fixed rows of fully visible needle teeth don't need to worry these days. Human kids have started to file their teeth sharp in a bid to be considered edgy and fashionable, and the visual confusion works to the monsters' advantage.

In any case, nobody has ever been able to see me for what I really am. Not even my mother, who must have started looking for the monstrous telltales the minute I slipped out of her on a slick of vernix and blood. She knew as well—no, better—than any of her foremothers which herbs to use to rid herself of the product of rape, but she didn't.

So I try to do justice to her faith in me.

I hunt my own. My monstrous kin. And when I take them down, the last thing I see in their eyes is the sting of my treachery.

But I ask, what deserves my loyalty?

Not the hunger. Never the hunger.

*   *   *

Another Kind of Ghost

I don't know what Yoli reads on my face—self-loathing, stubbornness, what—but her jaw sets. “Tell me whatever it is you're not saying,” she demands.

She's not using magic, but for the first time since we've known each other, the need to let her under the surface of my story hits as hard and fulminating as any other desire I've ever experienced. Even the one called up by blood and soft organ meats.

It takes me a while. I don't want to lose her friendship, and even her understanding that we don't pick our magic—or our parents—won't be enough to prepare her.

“The victim,” I say. “The thing that took her out … I know it. I know its taste. It tastes like me.”

“You?”

“It has my same DNA.”

I climb into the passenger side of her car without her asking me to get in, and when she slides in the driver's side she focuses on fitting the key into the ignition. Her hand shakes a little.

“I guess it's time we talk to your mother,” she says.

*   *   *

Las Girlfriends

My mother lives on a block of South Philly I've come to call Witch Central, because the neighbors whose houses flank hers have her same proclivities. They're all old; single or singled; women who keep too many animals for their small living spaces: Sonia keeps birds, Nilda turtles, and my mother cats. They dress alike—as if big flower prints had never gone out of style—and talk alike, with accents that have slipped from Chiapas, Tabasco, and Guatemala to generic Spanish. They've even started a business together, though they can't decide how serious they are about the actual selling side, so it's more sideline than subsistence.

When Yoli and I pull up, my mother's place is dark but light dances out of Sonia's windows. She opens almost immediately after we knock. A wave of warmth pulses through the door because she, like my mother, keeps her thermostat at a near-tropical setting.

“Eh, Mena, entra,” Sonia says, stepping aside to let me in. Then she bellows, “Oye, Rosa Marta, llegó tu hija.”

Not only my mother, but Nilda and about a dozen little finches perching free of their cages, look over at the summons.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt your party,” I say, “I just need to talk to my mother.”

“Ay, chula, it's no party and no interruption,” Sonia answers as she moves away and lets my mother take her place.

“So, he's found you,” my mother says as soon as she takes a look at my face.

“How? And why?” I ask, following her from the entryway to the big room that is Sonia's living room, dining room, and kitchen all rolled into one. I hear Yoli close the front door and come up behind me.

“He's your father, mija,” Nilda says. “That says it all, no?” She's the oldest and largest of las girlfriends, and at the moment she has her massive arms sunk elbow-deep in the bowl of masa she's mixing on Sonia's kitchen table.

“You think monsters don't pay attention to rumor?” my mother says to me. “Or that they don't know you're protecting humans at their expense? The surprise is they've taken this long to try to rid themselves of a turncoat.”

“You knew.” My words come hard, pushing against the years of disguise and subterfuge.

“I'm your mother. Of course I knew.” She wipes her hands on the apron that half covers her wide skirt and comes behind me to guide me into one of the kitchen chairs. “Sit,” she says, pushing on my shoulders. She nods to Yoli to grab the remaining seat.

Yoli clears her throat. “Are you saying the body Blanca found was left there as a message for her?”

My mother scrunches her face at the unfamiliar nickname. She rummages through the jars of ground herbs gathered on the table and hands one to Sonia before she nods.

“There are probably other kills like it that haven't been found yet,” my mother says to Yoli. “Vivos, zombies, ghosts—anyone under Mena's protection.”

“In order to force a confrontation with her?” Yoli's voice turns skeptical. “Doesn't that—”

“No, mija,” Nilda interrupts, “not confrontation. Mena's father wants to reclaim her. ¿Entiendes?” She spreads the masa on a banana leaf she hands to Sonia, who sprinkles the ground herbs onto it, folds the leaf, and gives it to my mother to tie and place in the tamalera. Their hands work independent of their minds, because they're all watching Yoli and me with their too bright, too dark eyes.

“The hunger is always inside me,” I say, but tentatively, because it's the first time I've lent breath to these thoughts. “Like a huge hole that wants to be filled with blood. Blood, or the taste of human fear.

“I hold it back with tricks of restraint. With hope of redemption. But just barely,” I say. “My father must know that. He knows who I really am, because he made me.”

Yoli stays quiet for a long time, then gives me one of her looks—the one with which she compels good—even though she knows it won't work on me. Even now that she knows why.

“But your father isn't the only one who made you,” she says finally.

“¡Eso!” I hear the old women say.
That!

And with it, they acknowledge Yoli worthy to add something to the collective magic they're cooking up: they hand her an apron. For a few minutes—finches flying free in circles around us and the women I love making their tamales—I let myself believe that nurture can win over nature.

Either way, I've got skin in the game.

*   *   *

Hunger

Las girlfriends make hundreds of tamales with special protections steamed into them. Tamágicos is what they've called them since they first started making them a few years ago. The little steamed packets—wrapped variously in plantain leaf or corn husk—bring love and luck and winning judgments after just a few bites. They'd be a hit even without the magic—Sonia, Nilda, and my mother have never once in their lives made a bad, or even mediocre, tamal.

They drive their battered vehicle around the older barrio streets not so very different from their own South Philly ones, handing out free samples as they ask people to nominate them for Best Food Truck on
Philly Magazine
's annual list. Sonia's daughter Pat comes up with the ruse.

Unfortunately, not only does it point out the city's cultural gulf (no barrio store carries the Anglo magazine, so las girlfriends have to write out the internet address on scraps of paper) but also, it doesn't have enough reach. Even with Yoli handing out more tamágicos to the ghosts, and me sharing them with the domino players and bodegueros, too many are left unfed.

The next week, Nasey and I crash three more fraudulent drug rehabs and stumble onto four more bodies. Johnny the Fox brings me word that the Biblicals are down to two—Ezequiel has met an end that left him looking like a lobster after its innards have been scooped out by a famished diner.

And at the tents, two of the ghost children have gone missing. Yoli and I find one shell of a body spraddled across a ditch at the far end of the rail bed, and another small one folded into a box that once held a microwave.

With every body found, the spasms twist my gut, urgent and increasingly undeniable. I'm running out of time.

*   *   *

On the Rails

I'm crunching across the familiar landscape of needles. A hundred feet behind me, the zombies' girder table is empty.

In just seventy-two hours everything has changed.

The tents are gone and so are most of the ghosts. After the gruesome deaths of the two homeless children leaked to the public, the District Attorney swept in with most of the 26th precinct at his back and social services covering his flanks, to tear down the makeshift homes, haul the adults in for criminal checks, and portion out the children to the city's youth shelters.