“He’s a cop or a nut,” he said on his way upstairs to dose her mother. “Stay away from him.”
Iris did. She was content to leave the dream alone. She loved the sensation of being watched. Many times she was the only thing on the stoop, only her, nobody else. One night she was hanging there with Yolanda, who had just dyed her hair red. Yolanda had no imagination, no sense of mystery. When Iris told her about the car as it sat up the block breathing soft, Yolanda walked right over to it, swinging her hips like a dare. Iris froze to the spot. She watched Yolanda lean down to the window, her yellowed birdlike face steaming as she turned and walked back to the stoop. The Jaguar growled and roared past.
“What did you do?” Iris asked, pissed off and worried that maybe the car would never return.
“I axed him if he wanted some company,” Yolanda said, shaking crunchy red from her face. “An’ you know what he say? He say, ‘Get away from my car.’ The bastid.”
For the next couple of days all Iris could do was worry about the Jaguar not coming back. If she heard a certain car roar she would run to check, sometimes doing rush jobs for fear of missing the car while she was with some trick. It was a relief when she spotted the Jaguar again, resting behind a group of parked cars. There was that mysterious dark shadow, the swirl of cigarette, or maybe she was imagining him behind dark glass. She would become aware of her every pore, every movement of her body like she was an actress on a stage working to always present her best side. There might be a radio playing — she would dance voluptuous teasing like a stripper in a cage. Whenever she heard that Jaguar growl its goodbye, something inside her would sink, as if her ride was leaving without her.
She could see his sharply featured face, the deep-set eyes, sweet long lips pursed around the cigarette. A trace of mustache, but baby face, never shaved. He was young, an ex — drug dealer tired of the daily kill. He had his money now. He didn’t need all this. He wanted to take just one thing with him on his ride out.
“I tell you, he’s a nut. Don’t think about it,” Pacheco scolded when he heard her wonder why the Jaguar hadn’t turned up for three days. “He gonna carve you up.”
Yolanda, sitting beside Iris, made an ugly grimace. “You such a fuckhead, Pacheco, man. You a pimp or what? Do ya job! Go out there an’ scare the fuck off.”
“Yeah, right,” Pacheco laughed. Iris puffed on her cigarette so shaky. “Like I’m gonna walk up to a Jaguar and scare the guy off. Like, that bastid could own this block an’ shit.”
“Drug dealer?” Iris pulled the pinky out of her mouth.
“Damn straight drug dealer. Or a psycho cop. An’ they both carry guns, right?” He laughed as he went upstairs.
“Jaguar” by Iris Robles
He made like he was a trick, when finally she went over to him. She liked his smell, something all spice and tree bark. She didn’t kiss tricks but she tasted his long smooth lips to kiss forever. Stayed in the motel for three days. “I don’t have to be anyplace,” he said, biting the crotch off her pantyhose. After that, she moved into his duplex on Long Island, where her mother would join them after she got through the detox program.
“Ma, you think tricks fall in love sometimes?”
They were watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Angie was in bed, pipe slipping from her hand. A misty white vapor floated.
“Uhhh,” she said, her eyes round as saucers.
“I mean, say a john you did was really rich and you did him so good. You think he might fall in love and keep you?”
Angie’s round blank eyes flowed into the distance.
Iris closed her own eyes. Iris by candlelight, by midnight, in the mirror staring so. Waiting for the ugliness to come to her too. Bruises, welts, lines, sallow hollow-eyed streetsucked. Like so many of her friends. Like her mother. Like the street with its cracks and tears and chunks of gravel where the trucks hit. She couldn’t just sit and wait anymore.
She suited up. The minidress with the glittery pantyhose and high heels was just too putona. She wanted classier, something subtle gray, ladylike. She let her hair tumble loose. Not too much makeup, a more professional corporate look torn from a magazine ad. The buzz on the street all of a sudden was that Iris Robles was making her move. Mr. Romero at the meat market brought her the side of ham personally and walked her to the door, purely taken by how she looked this day.
“Now this,” he said, “is what I call a change for the better. You look so responsible, reliable, efficient, with just the right touch of feminine to keep you looking sexy but not slutty. A real fine lady is what I see. Yessir, a fine young lady. You tell your mother I threw in a little more ham for her. Will you be gone long into the real world?”
“I’ll be gone for a lifetime,” she said.
Her mother just thought she had a special date. Pacheco thought she was applying for a job, and gnawed a toothpick nervously. He was relieved when she sat on the stoop and thought he could maybe make a few calls, now that she was somehow looking so good. The way she pulled out a long thin cigarette and lit it reminded him of some ’40s movie, some Rita Hayworth, some Lauren Bacall. And he ran to get to his phone.
She had finished two cigarettes and just lit the third when she felt that vibrating rumble in the pit of her tummy. She could sense him already by instinct. The Jaguar crouched at the end of the block, headlights off. Iris stood up, walked to the curb. She stepped out onto the cobblestone street, face-to-face and staring back. The two of them not moving, the two of them still.
The first step was the deepest, with a crack of shard resounding forever slow-motion hip-move whirls of smoke on the outer edges of the frame and all that blue lighting. Every step closer took too long. At any moment she thought the roar would come, those headlights snapping on, all pounce. She spotted the flash of a match, the orange tip of his cigarette glow. The outline of those young, stern features. Closer, now closer, she standing golden in the glare of a parked UPS truck’s lights.
His eyes were not on her. They stared ahead, squinting through cigarette smoke, thin lips moving as if he were memorizing some poem. She put her hands on the door as if needing a handrail, felt the Jaguar throb tremor her insides. She leaned in to look. His cigarette hand was trembling something fierce. Her voice failed right then. She cleared her throat of cigarette, of car freshener, of some stale rubber smell.
“Hey, honey,” she said, troubled. “You need some company?” Her head tilted to one side, hair cascading down, her smile a little scared like a plea. He turned to look at her slow, machine-like, the muzzle mounted on a swiveling turret. Now she could finally see the eyes, how blank dark nothing they were.
“Get away from my car,” he snarled. The next instant his hand hit the stick shift. The car thundered and buckled. Iris had barely gotten her hands off the door before it lurched with tire shriek, racing off down the street without her.
Part III
Another saturday night
Early fall
by Steven Torres
Hunts Point
Yolanda Morales was on her knees on Farragut Street. There was the distant sound of strays. There was a cricket. There was no life on the street. Whoever worked in the area was long gone. The ladies of the night never worked so far from the main flow of traffic on Bruckner or Hunts Point Avenue. To her left was the fencing that kept people out of the transfer station where the borough of the Bronx separated out household garbage from recyclables. To her right was a warehouse loading area. In front of her stood a man with a gun. The muzzle was pressed to her forehead.