Flaco turned his attention back to his beer. “One voice inside me says, ‘Flaco, stay with your woman and take care of her during her months.’ But another says, ‘Earn the money you will need to care for her forever.’ How often do such opportunities come for men in the trades?”
“There are other trades,” Clotario said casually. Flaco gave him a dead look, and he shrugged. “Then, if you wish, I can look after Serafina while you are gone.”
Flaco stared at him through the gauze of alcohol. Saw the easy smile on his lips; heard the smooth assurance in his voice. Before he was quite aware that he was doing so, Flaco had sunk his fist in the pit of his friend’s stomach.
Clotario fell gasping for breath. Flaco found himself suddenly in the center of an open space, as the others in the bar made room. Ysidro reached under the bar and said, “Flaco, you and ’Tario take it outside.” He made no other moves. Everyone stood very still. Flaco bent over the gasping Clotario.
“You do not touch my wife while I am gone.”
Clotario lay with his knees tucked up, clenching his belly. “Flaco. I didn’t… mean…”
“You will not allow anyone else to touch my wife when I am gone. If anyone does, I will kill him. I give my word on that. Do you understand?” Clotario nodded dumbly and Flaco bent lower, putting himself in the man’s face. “I do not give my word lightly. I have done so only twice. Once when Diego died in my arms, and once when Serafina and I stood together before God. And you, Clotario, know how well I kept my word on that first occasion.”
The voice whispered to him from the alleyway on Dyckman. “Flaco,” it said. “Hey. Flaco.”
It was the street talking to him, he thought. When he turned, he saw a woman standing there, looking tired, feigning interest. “Long time, Flaco,” she said.
Flaco made to pass by. She stepped out, took him by the sleeve, and pulled him into the alley. Flaco staggered after her, too woozy to resist. The alley was rank. The ancient bricks of the buildings were sweaty with runoff from the clogged rainspouts on their roofs. “What do you want, bomba?” he asked. But it was a stupid question, because he knew what she wanted. Her fingers told him.
“I need you, Flaco,” she whispered in his ear. Her tongue licked him there, sending a thrill down his spine. “They tell me you were good. Fast and clever. You can help me.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him, but the notion gradually soaked through the alcoholic mist that it was all a ruse so she could whisper to him.
“Jaime, he beats me alia time if I don’ make enough tricks.”
“Leave him,” Flaco said shortly, and she laughed.
“Then who gives me powder? You could do that. You’d be nice to me. Nicer’n Jaime.” She was drunk, too, Flaco realized, or high. He could have her here and in the morning she wouldn’t even remember, and that would be like it never happened.
“I can be nice,” he admitted.
“Jaime, he’s getting a load tonight, from downtown. I know where he’s gonna be. You’re smart, they always said. You could nine Jaime and sell the shit and then you ’n me, we’d be fat.”
“How much shit?” he asked, because his tongue, awakened by alcohol, was living its own, dangerous life.
“Ten keys, at least,” she told him. “Mexican pearls.”
Flaco pursed his lips. He didn’t know street for pearls these days, but five years ago ten keys would mean thirty kilobucks, as much as a six-month tour on LEO.
Thirty kilobucks of Mexican pearl could also get you nined, but death was on the station, too. A nasty, lonely death, either way. And if all he wanted was a place for Serafina and himself, here was a way that was faster and only a little riskier. He could use this woman—he didn’t know her name, though she obviously remembered him. He could use this woman to take “Jaime”—a nobody, but somebody enough to cast pearls—and then cut her or keep her, as seemed best.
Serafina was in bed when Flaco finally returned home. She pretended to be asleep, but Flaco knew it was pretense from the stillness with which she lay. He stood in the bedroom doorway, bracing himself with one arm on the jamb against the swaying of the floor. The August night was too hot for sheets, too hot for nightgowns. Serafina lay beautifully uncovered, wearing only her white lace underwear. Flaco’s breath came shorter.
He could take her. She probably wanted him to take her; or else why was she lying just so? He had never forced himself upon her. But he had never struck and threatened his pana before tonight. And if tonight was the time to rediscover the old Flaco, the Flaco of the careless streets, then perhaps it should be the whole man that was found.
But he turned away without disturbing her. The old Flaco was best left buried. He closed the bedroom door gently and found his way to the couch in the outer room, where he lay down carefully. A two-room, walk-up flat in upper Manhattan. It was little enough, but it was theirs. Their names were on the lease. But how he dreamed of escaping! A house, with trees, and a yard where Memo could run and play and grow tall and strong.
Sleep would not come. After a time, he rose from the sofa and walked softly to the open window He sat on the sill, looking down at the nighttime. The crackling neon signs of the twenty-four-hour cafes; the blinking traffic lights at the corner; the furtive men and women conducting their business in shadowed doorways, in parked cars, among the children’s playthings in the little park where the streets all came together. A black car rolled up Fort Washington Avenue, slowed at the intersection and turned right. No one paid it any mind. Not the hustlers; not the hookers. Not the couple standing in the doorway to the transient hotel, whose rhythmic movements never missed a beat. Not the whiskered old man with the strap still around his arm, staring where the stars ought to have been, pulse thumping to a rhythm no one else could hear.
He wondered if the woman had been setting him up; if this Jaime was someone who had reason to remember old scores. Most likely, she had been tempting each man as he came and would continue to do so until either Jaime heard of it and nined her or someone took her up and got both of them killed. By turning her down, Flaco had undoubtedly condemned the next man along the street to a nasty death.
And yet, every man thought he had the cojones and the brains to carry off such a play.
Flaco turned away from the window. It was not Serafina he had to save. It was not Serafina he had to pull away from these streets. As long as he could hear their siren call, the old Flaco would never stay entirely dead.
Saturday was strained, and he and Serafina spent their time not in love-making, but in making arrangements to sublet the apartment. It made no sense for her to stay there alone all those months. She would move back with her mamita; he would put his things into storage. Flaco’s parents would take care of the lease and keep an eye on things. When Flaco spoke to his father over the phone, papita gave no hint whether he thought Flaco wise or foolish, but that had been papa’s way, as far back as Flaco could remember.
After that—after he had helped Serafina move back to her mother’s place in Spanish Harlem—it made no sense to wait for Sunday evening. So, after one last night in their apartment, he turned the keys over to papita and caught an early-morning flight back to Phoenix. For the first Sunday in the five long years since Diego went down, he missed Mass.