After Delores (17 page)

“I was wondering when I'd hear from you again.”

She looked great. She was so beautiful. Just the way gay men look when they're on display walking down the street, cool and embraceable.

“You can come in, I guess.”

We sat around the kitchen table. I could smell an overripe mango fermenting in the heat, mixing with the warm garbage, the perfume of Charlotte's refuse. She was quite fashionable and proper that day. Almost pristine, like the librarian in the old commercials. Once she washes with Breck, she becomes a showgirl. She was wearing those trendy, nerdy horn-rimmed glasses on the edge of her nose, complemented by a shock of black hair hanging over her forehead. Her eyes were dancing black things.

“What do you say, Charlotte?”

“I say what the Maharishi said. ‘The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.' That's all.”

We sat there for a while in the quiet. I broke it.

“You know what I found out? I found out that you didn't kill Punkette after all.”

As soon as I said it, I wasn't so sure.

“Right?” “No, I didn't.”

Charlotte was my fantasy so I could make everything right.

“And you're not a dope fiend after all either. You just like a little taste now and again. Plus, you do so like me. You weren't just trying to intimidate or get information. That's right, isn't it?” “Right.”

“You're just a regular liar.”

“I lie all the time,” she said.

She took the mango in her right hand and bit into the skin. Then she pulled a strip off with her teeth. The whole world smelled of mango. It dripped on the table and when she wiped it up partway, she left sticky mango fingerprints for me to look at and admire.

“I'm always lying. If that's the truth, then what I just said is a lie in itself, which makes it even truer than any regular fact could ever be.”

“Thanks, Charlotte. I was scared to bring all that up but I had to clear the air. Now we can really be friends. Don't you think? Now that everything is out in the open.”

“Yeah.” She was slurping the mango and untangling the threads of fruit caught between her teeth and the huge, hairy pit.

“One more question.” I took a breath because my heart was pounding over this one. It was the hardest question of all.

“Charlotte, whose house is this really? Punkette said it was yours and you say it's yours but Beatriz says it's hers. I mean really, whose is it?”

“It's mine,” she said. “Beatriz has a place uptown.”

Then she laughed but it wasn't happy. It was unusually stifled. She looked down at her fingernails and for the first time I could see that she was uncomfortable. She didn't know what to do next. I didn't want that at all. I liked her on top. It made her radiate. It made her special. Some women you have to break through to get through to, but Charlotte was the kind to turn off if you got her number. It wouldn't be fun for her anymore. So I tried to put a stop to the bad feeling. I wanted to take it back so she could have fun again, but another way of thinking was rumbling and growing inside me. It was taking over before I had a chance to hold it back. I started to feel very angry. I don't know why but for the first time I really wanted to hurt her.

“So you're not a killer or a drug addict, you're just evil and a liar and I love you anyway.”

I wanted her to stop me. I wanted to be generous instead of vengeful. I wanted to say, “I care about you,” without trying to hurt her at the same time. I wanted to prove we were both better than Delores.

This is the place where the events passed very quickly. Time went so fast that even though there was a sequence, it was three-dimensional instead of chronological. Everything happened on top of each other at the same time. I'm not sure if it speeded up as I was speaking or right after I said, “I love you anyway.” But somewhere between the
way
of
anyway
and the period at the end of the sentence, Daniel came into the apartment and he was sweating. I had time to smell him before I actually noticed him, but I'm not sure precisely when. I do think that before he said, “You cunt,” I noticed that he was sweating and I noticed how much he looked like Beatriz.

“You cunt, you ripped me off.”

He was holding a gun in his right hand, but I didn't see it at first because I was looking at Charlotte.

“This isn't a game,” he said. “This is real.”

She didn't have a chance to say much, but she did open her mouth. That I'm sure of. I saw her open her mouth but everything happened so fast that I don't know if she opened it to answer me or to answer him. I wasn't sure what moment she was in. Later on, it did occur to me that she might not have been in my moment or Daniel's but maybe just in her own as usual. Maybe she was about to protest Daniel's accusation that she had dipped into his stash at the wrong time, or maybe she was turning away in shame when he said, “And what about that girl, Charlotte? Huh, what about that little girl?”

Maybe she was turning toward me to defend her, to tell Daniel it was a man who did it, the man on the phone machine. Or maybe it was to tell me to leave, or not to love her anymore. That it wasn't worth it. Maybe Charlotte only opened her mouth to stretch.

Daniel's bullet caught her in the process of opening her mouth. It grazed the side of her head, but that mouth stayed open and she looked both ways out of the two sides of her eyes, behind those brown eyeglasses. She made a classically comic gesture like I Love Lucy used to make when she was in trouble. The laugh track would go wild over that one. Then she put her face on the table next to the mango peels because she thought she had been shot in the head and her blood was on everything.

The most unusual element of my experience of this event was that I hadn't caught up with what had happened at all. So right then I didn't have time to feel anything about blood from Charlotte's face, the third blood of the summer, the second blood I'd seen that week. I was still feeling the little seed of anger from our conversation and a bit of surprise that the way I expressed it was by saying, “I love you anyway.” It was that emotion, I swear, that made me reach into my pocket and pull out Prisclla's gun. I'd held it, caressed it, and posed with it so many times that it felt natural, clasped between my fingers. Then I pointed it at Daniel's face. Of all the faces I had imagined at the other end of that gun, his was obviously the wrong one, but the turn of events had brought me to this place and there was no going back.

I felt a terrible explosion. Not huge, but compact and powerful. I tasted it in the air and then realized it hadn't come from me. It came from Beatriz, aiming at the sky. I knew I was able to kill someone, but only the right and most deserving person. I just had to figure out who that was.

Beatriz stepped through the bedroom doorway and slapped Daniel's hand, like he was seven. His gun fell to the floor, spinning, and we all watched it slide across the tiny room. My gun was still pointed at his face but Beatriz paid no attention. She held on to hers and picked his up off the floor. Then, with one in each hand, she fired them into the walls and ceiling until they couldn't be fired anymore and until the already cracked plaster fell off and you could see the rotting wood underneath that held the building together. Daniel was standing there surrounded by plaster. So was I. Charlotte was sitting, the collar of her shirt soaked through with blood. It was as though none of us could accept what had just happened, so we were all waiting for it to pass. But the room smelled bitter. It would never smell the same again.

I had begun the motions necessary to shooting Daniel in the face when, in the scheme of things, he wasn't clearly the most deserving. I had wanted to shoot him right in the middle of some thought that would have never been finished, had I been successful.

The face is everything. When you want to obliterate someone, you do it in the face. That's where all the lies come out. That's what you remember most about someone. No part of a person can be more cruel and stupid than their face.

Beatriz's face was stone with fury and had no room for surprise. Then she turned to Daniel and that all faded and transformed into the fear in every parent of burying their own children.

“I checked your arms for track marks every day,” she said.

“Kids don't hit up that much anymore, Beatriz,” I said. “They all smoke coke now.”

“And you,” she said, pointing to Charlotte, who was sitting in a pool of her own blood, unable to decide what she could possibly do about it. “You get out of my house and never come back.”

“Your house?” Charlotte said, suddenly, as though she had nothing better to do than be indignant. “This is my house.”

Oh God, they didn't know who lived there either.

27

IT WASN'T UNTIL
the sun rose that I realized I had been up all night walking around and then sitting down in different places. Sometime during all of that I got drunk and some other time it rained. That's what I remember best, the rain. First, it started to land on me softly like kisses, and then it started to sing in an even, settling sort of way. It gave me something to do, which was listen to it, and a place to hide, which was inside it. Then there were thousands of drops coming at the same time and they started to roar, but I didn't want to leave, because it defined both parts of me: the outside part confronting the rain and the inside part that stayed warm and safe. I waited in the rain because it let me know that inside me there was still something alive that hadn't been ruined.

“Where the hell have you been?” Dino said through his teeth when I walked into Herbie's Coffee Shop and stood behind the counter.

“Huh?”

“You're a mess. Get over here.”

He dragged me into the dishwashing section like I was a misbehaved schoolgirl and started running the water. “Shit, you got vomit all over your shirt. Where have you been? Never mind. Here.”

He stuck my head under some warm water running out of those huge industrial faucets, and shoved a white T-shirt into my hands.

“Now, change your clothes and comb your hair. Here, use this.” He handed me his red, green, and black Afro pick. “Jesus, now sit down and drink a cup of coffee.”

I threw my shirt into the garbage and sat down in Dino's large one, drinking the cup of black coffee he put in front of me. The lights were so bright, you could see everything wrong and nauseating about the place.

“Do you realize that you have not shown up for work for a few days and you lost your goddamn job? Or are you in better shape than I think?”

A new waitress came whizzing by just then. She was old and had hair dyed silver and sprayed so hard it wasn't hardly hair at all.

“That's the Snitch,” Dino said, chewing on a toothpick. “They hired her when you didn't show. She's always going over to Momma and saying, ‘Dino threw out the crackers,' when I only did it because the mice chewed through the cellophane. Now you wait here until I get off and then I'm taking you to a meeting with me.”

I sat in Herbie's for a couple of hours until Dino was ready. The Snitch kept coming by asking if I wanted anything, being snitty 'cause I was taking up a table. Every time I said no, she clucked.

“You just leave her alone,” Dino told her. “That girl is my responsibility.”

I watched Snitch all afternoon long. I never took my eyes off her. She was a terrible waitress because she was rude to everyone she worked with. When she'd pass the busboy, she'd never say, “Excuse me,” she'd only say, “Watch your back.” When the customers asked what kind of soup there was, she'd say, “Read the menu.” In between it all, she'd be clucking all the time and occasionally squealing to Momma.

Dino and I walked uptown from work. We had never been next to each other outside of Herbie's before and it was funny to see him out of uniform. In the sunlight I could tell that Dino got into looking like a cool, older black man. He wore soft green pants, tight around the ass, double knits with a little flair at the bottom over his two-toned shoes. He wore a tan V-neck sweater, a little tan cap, and lots of jewelry around his neck. He had a thin mustache that looked somewhat debonair, and a gold ring on his right hand.

“That drinking thing,” he was saying, “all has to do with the twelve steps. It has to do with accepting a higher power no matter how you interpret it.”

People looked at us once in a while as we walked. I guess we were an interracial coupe.

“I am over sixty years old,” he said. “I woke up one morning and I looked around and realized that America is the land of opportunity and a smart man like me should be able to make a good dollar. So first, I stopped doping and drinking. Since then I got a mobile home in North Carolina, satellite dish, everything. I got a woman there and my son. I got another son in Detroit and I take care of him too.”

He was smiling now, like he was on top of the world, like he knew the way and got joy just from telling me all about it.

“I do not take my worries home with me. I go to AA meetings, to AA dances, to the movies. But I make sure that when I hit that department store alone at night, I don't bring any troubles in there with me or else they sneak up behind you and take over.”