Bodega Dreams (21 page)

A little later, downstairs in the lobby, which looked like some purgatorial setting, Nazario had assembled most of the tenants. He spoke eloquently about Latin pride, about a sense of community and trust. He compared the fire to a tragedy like the ones that occurred in the Mother Island or our other Latin countries, where the most important form of help you got was from your neighbor, not the government.

“You have to tough it out. Help each other. We’re Boricuas, we’re Latinos! Where are you from?” he asked, pointing to one of the residents.

“Mayaguez,” the woman answered.

“I have an aunt in Mayaguez. She raised me,” Nazario continued. “We were
pobre, pobre.
All I had to play with was a cat named Guayo. A tough cat named Guayo, who would dive into a lake like a bear and emerge with a fish in his mouth.” The people laughed a little. “He hated to go in that lake but he had to eat.” The people understood. “You have to tough it out! We are one people, one island, one Latin continent.” Then he raised his index finger in the air. “One people! One month! Tough it out for one month!” The tenants all began to murmur in agreement. “Remember it was Willie Bodega who sheltered you.”

At this, Blanca glanced my way, with the look of a student who wants
to ask a professor a question but knows the class is almost over and her question won’t be appreciated by her peers, who are dying to go home.

Nazario continued, “And it will be Willie Bodega who will shelter you again. Any man or woman who believes in community and pride will be included in his love for this neighborhood. Stay with your mother, your brother, your sister, your friend, your priest, anybody for a month. Give Willie Bodega a month and he will shelter you.” Then Nazario looked at Blanca, telling the tenants in Spanish that this woman was pregnant and couldn’t wait a month. He asked Blanca if I, standing behind her, was her husband. Blanca said yes, almost in a whisper. I played along and held her shoulders. Blanca knew this was a farce. She already knew, I could see, that anything connected with Bodega was trouble. She was still not completely sold on my claims of ignorance about that reporter’s death, and as soon as she heard Nazario mention Bodega I sensed she was sure he was one of Bodega’s pawns. But right now was no time to ask questions. Now there were more important things at hand. The questions would come later, and I knew I would have to have some fucking great answers.

Right then there was the whole tragedy of the fire staring us in the face. Nazario announced that Bodega would take care of pregnant women and one-parent families first, and that Blanca and I would be rehoused the very next day. No one seemed to have a problem with this. The other tenants even said Blanca and I deserved it because we were good kids. But I knew Bodega couldn’t have Vera’s niece homeless, even temporarily.

Nazario then continued to circulate, moving like a panther from one place to another, making sure all the tenants had seen him, while he looked for an opportunity to speak to me alone. The moment came when most of the tenants, Pentecostal, Catholic, or whatever, got together to pray in the lobby. No one noticed me not joining in. Maybe Blanca did, but she knew where I stood on that.

“Fischman?” I asked Nazario as we stood in the flooded apartment of someone who was probably out praying with the rest of the tenants.

“I have something to ask of you,” Nazario said.

“Name it.” I wanted a piece of Fischman myself. This fuck could have killed my wife, who had nothing to do with him or Bodega. He
had pushed me to the point where I could either break completely away from the situation or dive in completely. I was in.

“I want you to come with me tomorrow to Queens.”

“What’s in Queens?”

“We have to speak with someone. And should something happen to me, I want this person we are going to see to be familiar with your face for future reference. Understand?” I didn’t, but I nodded anyway.

All I understood was that Bodega was in trouble. Not with the fire department, which would know right away it was arson and dismiss it as another case of pyromania in a neighborhood crawling with firebugs. Nor with the media, who needed sensation and since no deaths had occurred would give it only passing mention, like a footnote in a thousand-page book. The Harry Goldstein Management Agency would receive little attention, making it the only good thing, besides no one dying, that Bodega had on his side. What Bodega had to worry about was this Fish of Loisiada making tidal waves.

“Where’s Bodega?” I asked Nazario.

“Vera” was all he said.

I was about to ask something else when we heard the tenants say Amen in a chorus of hope and then begin to disperse.

“I’ll send for you tomorrow, after you’ve moved,” Nazario said, and left.

That night Blanca and I slept at Blanca’s mother’s. Blanca was too tired to ask questions and went straight to sleep, knowing we would need rest because tomorrow we would be moving again.

B
LANCA
and I missed work so we could move. Bodega sent someone over with a lease. Maybe it was the immediacy of the situation or maybe she was just too tired, but Blanca asked no questions. We signed the lease, then got friends and family to help us pack up and move into a two-bedroom apartment, two buildings down on the same block as the burned-out building. Bodega had had a beautiful row of five newly renovated tenements and now the middle one looked like a missing tooth in a pretty woman’s smile.

As I made a trip to the U-Haul van to remove a rug and take it upstairs, I heard a familiar voice.

“Yo, homeless guy! I hope you ran into the flames and rescued my shit.” It was Sapo in his familiar black BMW, going around and collecting money from Bodega’s crack houses and numbers joints.

“Where you been, bro? With all the peace around here I thought you was dead.” I was happy to see him. No matter what, Sapo had never done anything to hurt me. If anything, Sapo had always been around when I needed someone to watch my back.

“Get in.” He opened the door for me, smiling his Sapo smile.

“Can’t. I’m in the middle of moving, bro.”

“Too bad, Nazario sent fo’ yah.”

“I can’t just leave. I got stuff ta move, bro,” I said. Sapo reached for the car phone. I waited. Sapo dialed, and after a few uh-huhs and yeahs he hung up the phone.

“You have two minutes to give an excuse to your alleluia wife and her alleluia friends cuz you comin’ with me,” he said.

“I can’t go wi’choo, bro. I got things to finish.”

“You’s comin, Chino. Now, I’ve done a lot of things in my days but I ain’t never kidnapped nobody. But I will if I have to cuz that was Nazario on the phone.”

I had to go. So I told one of Blanca’s church friends, Wilfredo Reyes, that I had forgotten something important uptown and had to retrieve it. He just smiled and said not to worry, but I felt really bad because I wasn’t lending a hand when it was my stuff they were breaking their backs carrying. Still, I had to go, so I jumped in with Sapo and we took off.

“Where we going?”

“Pa’ viejo.”

“Yo, that ain’t original. You should never repeat yourself.”

“I hear that. So this’s the deal. You and Nazario are goin’ to talk with some wops in Queens.”

“ ’Bout what?”

“Wha’, I look like Walter Mercado to you? I don’t fucken know ’bout wha’.” We drove.

“Yo, Sapo,” I said in a low tone. “Did you kill Salazar? Did you kill that reporter?”

“Nope.”

“Get the fuck. Why you lie to me, bro?”

“All right, I’ll tell you. I ain’t kill the sonofabitch.”

“Yeah, so how come he had a chunk missing from his shoulder?”

“I didn’t say I ain’t bit the nigga. I bite ’em but ain’t kill ’em.”

“Yeah, then who did?”

“You see whiskers on me? You see a tail? You see me likin’ cheese or somethin’?”

“All right. But you were there, bro, that’s guilt by association. They can get you for that.”

“They ain’t gettin’ no one,” he said, slamming the brakes suddenly, and my body jerked forward. I knew Sapo didn’t like me asking him about any of this. He was telling me to back off. I didn’t.

“Yo, I asked Bodega himself. He said you killed Salazar.”

“Bodega wasn’t there, how he’d know?” He shifted really hard and gritted his teeth.

“But he sent you, right?”

“Nazario did. But Bodega okayed it. Still, I didn’t kill the fuck.”

“Then where you been, bro?”

“You know, Chino, I never thought of it but like you sittin’ on a bunch of info. Thass not a good chair to be sittin’ on, know what I’m sayin’,
papi?
If I was you I’d move my ass and sit somewhere else.” Now I knew he was really serious, and I backed off.

We had reached 116th and First. Sapo double-parked.

“Come with me, bro. This will only take a minute.” Sapo and I got out of the car and entered a city-owned abandoned building. Such buildings made perfect places for crack houses and numbers joints. The electricity was easily siphoned from a lamppost socket or the nearest building (via the roof). The windows facing the street were covered with plywood and only the first floor was renovated so it looked as if the fire that emptied the building hadn’t affected that floor. A phony business was set up, be it a candy store, a comic-book shop, or a florist. By the time the cops busted the place Bodega had made a killing and couldn’t be traced because he never owned the building, the City of New York did. Anybody arrested who worked for Bodega had Nazario and his suits taking care of their backs in court.

This numbers joint fronted as a candy store. It had a few comic books, some lollipops, gum, jars filled with hard candy, and a Pac-Man machine. When Sapo walked in the guy sitting behind the counter quickly rose to attention, like he was in the army or something. Then he relaxed when Sapo slapped him five and they laughed at each other. They went to the back and left me there with two other guys who were playing Pac-Man and talking about some guy from the old days.

One of them hit the machine as if it was its fault he had lost his turn. “That fucken red ghost got me! Frankie, it’s your go.” He made way so Frankie could have a try at the joystick. The music of little dots being
eaten up and ghosts following the smiling yellow cartoon was the only sound in the candy store. No children went there to buy candy, they knew better. And the numbers for the day had come out already, so betting time was over. It was an ugly, desolate store, with posters of Marvel superheroes taped to the wall, where all you heard were stories of things that might have happened.

“So, Angel, what happened to the nigga?” Frankie asked as he played.

“Dead,” Angel said.

“How he die?”

“That shit was a shame.”

But before I could learn the details of Angel’s fate, Sapo returned with a paper bag in his hand and we left. Inside his car, he drew out a knapsack he had hidden under the seat. He stuffed the bag inside the knapsack, which was filled with other wrinkled-looking brown bags. We took off.

“I thought you was takin’ me to Nazario, whass this about collectin’?”

“That was the last one, don’t freak on me.” He turned on First Avenue and we headed uptown.

“So like you know I was with this white girl las’ night and they like good in bed but like they say stupid shit. You know, like, Spanish girls, they moan to you, ‘Ayy
papi
, ayy
papi.
’ See, I like that. But white girls, white girls say shit like, ‘Oh, God, oh God’ or shit like ‘Oh yes, oh yes.’ I’d rather be called
papi
in bed than God.”

“Spoken like a true existentialist,” I said.

“All right, nigga, use them big-ass college words on me, call me a fucken extraterrestrial, but I know you understand. I mean, I know you like white girls. You always liked white girls. You hate to admit it, but I always knew you did.”

“Blanca’s Latin, bro.”

“Yeah, thass right, but they call her Blanca. Why? Cuz even though she might be Spanish, she’s a white Spanish—”

“So what you tryin’ to say, Sapo, that I don’t like our girls?”

“Nah, I’m telling you, you don’t like our girls. If the shoe fits, wear it, mothafucka.”

“Why you want to go on and say that to me for, bee? You got somethin’ against my skin preference?”

“All I’m sayin’ is, if Blanca weren’t white you woulda nevah married her.”

“Yo, you been stayin’ up all night figurin’ this out? Or like Bodega, you’ve been watching fucken psychology shows on TV. What the fuck.”

“Face it, Chino, you got plexes. You got plexes with your kind in bed.”

“Please. I ain’t got no complex about Latin girls.”

“Hey, man, I ain’t like tryin’ to get you angry or somethin’. You know whass your problem, Chino, you’re like a Schick razor, you’re ultrasensitive. But you my
pana
, I mean we go way back.” Sapo stopped talking when we reached 125th. He pulled over opposite a black Mercedes.

“See that car?” Sapo pointed. “Nazario’s in it. I’ll see you when I see you. And I want my shit. You still have my shit, right?”

“Yeah, I got it.” I stepped out of Sapo’s car. “I’m happy to see you, bro.”

“Yeah, yeah, you just better have my shit,” he said, and sped out.

I walked toward the Mercedes and the driver opened the door for me. I climbed inside. The air conditioner was on full blast and the car was freezing. It was only spring and the day was cool. There was no reason for the air-conditioning. Nazario had some notes on his lap and a suit hanging beside him.

“Good to see you.” He shook my hand. His was warm, how I didn’t know. He handed me the suit. “Go inside that building,” he said, pointing. “Knock on 1B. An old woman named Doña Flores will open the door. She will let you take a bath and change into these clothes. And don’t forget to shave. Please, Julio, don’t take too long,” he said nicely.

“Five minutes,” I said, and did as I was told.

•

CROSSING THE
Triborough Bridge to Queens, Nazario kept silent and just studied a ledger, at times making little notes in it. I didn’t speak and didn’t let him know that I was cold. I just looked out of the window.