“I just turn around and she’s already fucking my best friend.”
“She was no good for you.”
“Nor for you.”
“I’m glad she’s dead.” Joey picks up the knife and holds it against her groin. “Don’t look.” He slides the knife quickly. A lip of muscle opens. A thick tongue of blood oozes out.
Don staggers. He leans against the wall.
Joey runs to him and holds him in his arms. “Go away. I’ll take care of it.”
“Do something about her eyes. Her eyes are open.”
“No they’re not.”
“They’re still kind of open, for heaven’s sake.”
“Okay. Am I really your best friend?”
“What?”
“You said I was your best friend.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Hey, you know something?”
“What?”
“It’s my birthday.”
“No kidding? Wow, pare. Happy birthday.” He gives Joey a hug. “Do something.”
As soon as he’s gone, Joey notices that he’s left drops of shower water on the floor, like little beads of glass. He stares at them for a while, wondering if he could pick them up. Maybe, if he was careful enough, he could even hold them up to the light.
7. Fade to black
Don sleeps all the next day. He takes a shower, puts clean clothes on, and walks out. It must have rained nonstop. He has to inch his way along the sidewalk as passing jeepneys swell the floodwater and stir up muddy waves. Vendors along the sidewalk are pulling down plastic tarps, drenching passersby with torrents of water.
He’s in a bar down the block from his apartment. It’s happy hour. He’s sitting by the window, looking out. The place is packed and noisy, full of people who have walked in to find a dry spot.
A man sitting at another table has been staring at him, his porcine face glowing with sweat, his coffee untouched and cold. Don stares back. The man doesn’t blink, and finally speaks up.
“Hands and legs.”
“Beg pardon?”
“They found a woman’s hands and legs.” He passes Don his copy of the Manila Times.
“It’s the projects,” Don tells him. “Folks there get butchered all the time.”
“Hindot! Good thing we live in Santa Cruz.”
“It could be anyone.”
“Some people are real sloppy, puta.” The man sucks on a cigarette and blows the smoke out, exhaling loudly, with exasperation. “You really fucked up. I told you to make sure that sissy Florante would go back.”
“He was too drunk to go back.”
“You and your friend better think of a story fast.” He gets up to leave.
“Aniano,” Don says, “I’m getting out of here. I’ve had enough.”
“Not till you finish the job.”
“Joey will take care of it.”
“Joey’s going to crack the minute you leave.” Aniano stubs the cigarette out on the table with a slight hiss. “If he does, you know what to do.”
“He won’t say a thing.”
“How do you know?” He leaves.
Don waits a few minutes, then goes to the cashier to ask if he can use the phone. He calls a number. He doesn’t have much to say. “Meet me at the bar. Right now.”
He hangs up, pays the cashier ten centavos, and walks out.
He stretches his arms. The sky is still overcast. He should have brought a jacket. He walks a few blocks toward Avenida Rizal, stops to purchase a ball-peen hammer from a sidewalk vendor, who wraps it in a thick roll of newspaper. Don continues walking down the avenue, then makes a sharp turn into an alley, pulls a key out of his pocket, and lets himself inside a building through the back door.
He’s inside Lucila’s House of Beauty. He bolts up the stairs to Joey’s room. There’s no one there either. He looks out the window into the street below. A vendor is passing by, balancing a bamboo pole with two baskets of duck eggs steaming on each end. As soon as the vendor is out of sight, Don drops the hammer onto the ledge. Then he walks out, heading back in the direction of the bar.
A block away he can already see Joey under the lamppost outside the bar. Joey’s face is crunched, his hands shoved in his pocket. He looks like he’s in tears. But when he sees Don his eyes suddenly beam. Maybe it’s the light from the lamppost, a cataract of amber streaming down his face.
Norma from Norman
by Jonas Vitman
Chinatown
She doesn’t have to travel very far to see her fortune-teller. This is the chief advantage of living in the Chinese section of Manila known as Binondo. From her apartment on Espeleta, it’s three quick blocks then up two flights of creaky wood stairs. On the third-floor landing, to announce her presence, she will call up to the woman who could be anywhere from forty to eighty and who, using the Fukienese word for grandmother, goes by the name Ah-ma.
Ah-ma is the trade secret of the girls in Charmaine’s group.
Charmaine doesn’t know why the Chinese make the best fortune-tellers. She has tried everyone else. There are the Catholic matrons, who are of two types: well-preserved socialites fallen on hard times; and the provincial transplants with their reedy bodies and brown-brown faces who consult in the front rooms of the overpopulated shacks they call home. A deck of playing cards is common to this type. There are also the baklas or homos she meets at the clubs — dabblers in trades from cosmetology to cosmology, whose instrument is the tarot. There are of course palm readers, tea readers, face readers, witch doctors who specialize in potions, spells, and counterspells, and two Americans who do extensive readings based on your horoscope — though Charmaine had inevitably run into the dilemma of not having the exact time of her birth, a very important detail to these specialists.
Ah-ma is the only Chinese fortune-teller Charmaine has ever been to, but according to the girls in Charmaine’s group, she is typical of the Chinese fortune-tellers in Manila, and by typical, it is understood that she is superior to all other non-Chinese practitioners.
Of course, these Chinese fortune-tellers are Buddhists and they conduct sessions in the halls and storefronts of their faith, places accoutred with wood and ceramic statues, depicting a celestial range from martial saints of protection with their slightly demonic faces and clutched weaponry to the hermaphroditic and peaceful face of Kwan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. Ah-ma’s place of business, which is a floor below where she lives with her only remaining relative, a grandson of eight, has plenty of these statues, and needless to say, Charmaine’s favorites are the various Kwan Yins, resting on the floor, by a couple of windowsills, and among the pantheon arrayed in a tiered central altar that also includes the commemorative black-and-whites in gold frames of the deceased relations of Ah-ma’s various disciples and clients — a funerary memorial.
Charmaine also loves the smell of incense perpetually suffusing the air in Ah-ma’s establishment. There is no Catholic equivalent in the churches she used to attend as a young believer — the burning candles had no fragrance to speak of, the incense was acrid like metal smoke, and the holy water no more than regular water that the priest was supposed to have transformed by passing his hand over it.
On the ground floor of Ah-ma’s building is a hardware store called Happy Fortune Supply, and this too has convinced Charmaine of Ah-ma’s superiority to all other seers, to Ah-ma’s aptness in Charmaine’s life.
The tubby eight-year-old grandson runs around the large altar as Charmaine and Ah-ma are consulting. He is like a miniature Buddha. Fatness must run in the family: his grandmother is also a large person, and among the reasons Charmaine has difficulty discerning the woman’s age is because the fat around her neck and on her face has stretched smooth any wrinkles, and because, encased in loose clothes, her body is voluminously formless.