I couldn’t tell whether they were doing it doggie-style or any style. I only pictured in motion the Penthouse scenes Sergio had begun flashing before me like cue cards. I closed my eyes.
The heaves of Rogelio’s mother began closing in on each other. The groans of Rowdy got louder. I imagined Ms. Ramirez sweating, her mouth open, her tongue pushed against her upper teeth like the women in the magazines. I imagined her nude but for the red heels she often wore to work. And in my imagination her shoes glowed red, radiating as if with heat in the steam-filled room.
“Ohh,” Ms. Ramirez suddenly gasped. I opened my eyes.
“Let me see!” Sergio said. I didn’t respond. Sergio put his magazine on the dresser and sat next to me. He placed his ear close to mine at the end of the tube. On my right side, Jorge did the same, a triangle of eavesdroppers.
“All right,” Sergio said. “He’s about to climax.”
And then there was a quick trade of punches. Ms. Ramirez called out to God; Rowdy grunted; the rocking turned to a rumble, the scrapes to digs. Then there was a yell, and in that split second Rowdy’s voice was thick and heavy, the way it sounded out front when he called someone a punk-ass motherfucker and was about to prove it. Silence followed, then a soft thump. I held tight to the tube, listening for any aftermath. Sergio rose from the bed and bowed like a matador to the four corners of the tiny bedroom. Jorge whistled softly in applause.
“Man,” Sergio said as we walked to the corner of Eighteenth and Throop, our notebooks in hand, “they were all over today. Usually they’re just quiet.”
“Must’ve been horny,” I said. “She always yell for God like that?”
“All the time,” Sergio said. “She’s going to hell.” He blessed himself and laughed.
At the corner Jorge took a seat on Trebol’s stoop as Sergio and I looked up the block for Rogelio and Marcitos. Up and down Eighteenth Street, the morning delivery trucks worked their horns to announce their backing into docks. The early mist had not yet burned off the neighborhood. The smell of yesterday’s fried food, tacos, gorditas, chicharon, hung in the air. Soon the sun would burn the haze away and allow a fresh day’s worth of fried-food smell to settle over the neighborhood. Up the block, Rogelio and Marcitos came out of their buildings. Marcitos, carrying a single spiral notebook like the rest of us; Rogelio, carrying his books and Bible in a small brown briefcase. Marcitos crossed Throop and met Rogelio. They approached us.
Providence was marooned on the darkside, forgotten among abandoned factories, outmoded railroad lines, and dilapidated wood-frame houses. I’m sure those in the neighborhood who didn’t know Providence of God was back there — it was small, like any other three-flat — wondered every morning where all the kids were going, disappearing into the maze of decaying brick buildings, following the train tracks as if we were ghosts of a life that might once have existed there. We even felt like ghosts sometimes, in the winter, when the sound of our footsteps was muffled by snow, when even our breathing seemed swallowed by the thick air. In the spring, when it rained, we huddled beneath the train docks and examined the vast innards of the factories — the huge chutes that hung like descending missile silos, the conveyers that led off into distances we never had guts enough to explore. When the rain stopped, we crossed back over the railroad lines and became real again, our walks like transformations.
“Hey, bro,” Sergio said as Rogelio passed us, assuming his usual position at the head of the pack. “Your mom leave for work early this morning?”
I cringed.
“She goes to work early now,” Rogelio said, not turning around to look, his briefcase bouncing off his skinny leg. “I told you last week.” Behind us Jorge and Marcitos, who were the same age, settled into their morning discussion about the previous day’s episode of Spectreman. Marcitos still had a black-and-white TV and it was Jorge’s duty to update him on anything he might have missed.
His blood is blue, bro. Everyone knows that.
For real, damn, I thought I saw some orange coming through.
Sergio stroked his chin.
“She must like working, huh?” he asked. Sergio elbowed me in the arm. Rogelio didn’t answer.
We neared Saint Procopius, our school’s competing parish. Morning sunlight exploded through the church, casting the reds and blues of the stained-glass windows onto the sidewalk below. As Rogelio passed the front doors, he blessed himself, forming a cross with his thumb and forefinger and tracing miniature crucifixes on his forehead, mouth, and chest. He kissed his thumb to heaven. In imitation, we all did the same.
“Hey,” Sergio said. “How about if your mother was seeing some other guy?”
“She wouldn’t see another guy,” Rogelio said. “She’s got the Lord.” He raised a finger to heaven.
“I know, I know,” Sergio said. “Everyone’s got the Lord, but say you found out she was with some other guy. Maybe you came home and found her on the floor, maybe in bed—” Sergio was looking to the sky, imagining scenarios, sexual positions. He didn’t see Rogelio whirl around, his briefcase flaring out at his side.
“Don’t talk about my mother!” Rogelio said. He pointed a finger in Sergio’s face. “Don’t talk about things you don’t know about.” Rogelio was much shorter and skinnier than Sergio, but he held his finger right off the tip of Sergio’s nose. Sergio didn’t move. Rogelio turned and began walking again.
“Damn, cuz,” Sergio called out after Rogelio. “Don’t worry about me. I know what I’m talking about.” Rogelio simply continued walking.
Sergio laughed and brushed himself off. He blessed himself, held up a cross of forefingers, then marched forward.
We turned down Sangamon Street. Sets of railroad tracks, the dividing line between the darkside and the realside, ran down the center. More kids had begun filling in our side of the sidewalk, all of us waiting until we got to Eighteenth Place, the street our school was on, to cross over. Our school bully, Gustavo Rivera, a large kid with sweat glands that poured like waterfalls, walked on our side as well, torturing smaller kids with “the wedge,” what he called the Saturday-afternoon-wrestling move with which he crushed tiny first-grader heads between his chunky hands.
Across the tracks, only Pepe Ordoñez, Paco Martinez, and Jeremy Witek walked the darkside. We called them the Lost Boys. They had been walking the darkside for as long as anyone could remember, breaking factory windows, smoking, spray-painting unfamiliar gang signs on the crumbling railroad docks. Rumor had it they were orphans, that they lived among the ruins of the darkside like animals, like the Villa Lobos, who for some reason, maybe respect, never seemed to mind the Lost Boys on their territory. The Lost Boys were eighth-graders. They had been held back two years or more and were actually old enough to be in high school.
“I heard Paco and Pepe were in the Audy Home for stealing cars,” Marcitos said from behind us. “That they got butt-raped in there and that’s why they went crazy.”
“Who told you that?” Sergio asked.
“Mona Colón, downstairs,” Marcitos said. Mona was a high-school girl who lived beneath him, one whom we collectively lusted after because at her age she didn’t seem that far out of reach. Paco was said to have gone out with Mona. Some even said that he had had sex with her. And at the time this seemed to have something to do with his ability to walk the darkside. We figured Jeremy and Pepe had had sex with Mona as well, or with the other high-school girls who stood on the corners smoking cigarettes, wearing tight black pants and thick black eyeliner and purple lipstick. The older we got, the more we wanted to be with them, have them hanging off our shoulders the way girlfriends in our neighborhood did. We imagined French-kissing them among the collapsed rafters of the burned-out factories we had always been so afraid of.