Bodega Dreams (28 page)

“I knew you were in here!” she yelled at me.

“Aw, Negra, what do you want?” I said, and returned to the living room and lay down on the sofa.

She stood over me. “Chino, Victor’s still okay.”

“Amazing,” I said, “the streets are crawling with cops and you break into my house. Amazing. New York’s Finest.” I sighed, thinking that my fire escape faced the street and yet no one spotted her. Or maybe nobody cared.

“I don’t give a fuck about what’s happened. I want Victor hurt.”

“I thought you took him back. Why you still want him hurt? Besides,” I said, lifting my head a bit to look at her, “how do you s’pose I’m going to do that now, when Bodega is dead?” Just saying his name out loud made me feel sad. It was somehow tied in with Blanca leaving
as well. There was too much absence in my life all at once. The events were compound words that could never be ripped apart.

“You know Sapo.”

“Yeah, but Sapo won’t do anything for you, Negra.”

“Yeah, but he’d do it for you. He must owe you. Ask him for a solid.”

“Negra, I’ve no time for this, all right? Do you know what just happened? Do you know?”

“Yeah, I know, so what. Bodega was killed by some guy from Loisaida.” She took out a cigarette. “He never did anything for me. The neighborhood talked about him like he was God, but he ain’t never did shit for me.”

The doorbell rang. I didn’t bother to get up.

“Go away!” I yelled, but nosy Negra went over to open the door.

It was Blanca.

I got up, whispered “Hi,” surprised and happy to see her.

“Don’t you kiss your wife, Chino? Dag,” Negra said, but I felt so useless and stupid that I didn’t want to disturb the universe or Blanca anymore. Maybe she would pull back and I would be very hurt. But Blanca walked over to me and placed her hands on my face.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said nonchalantly, as if I was Mr. Cool, because I didn’t want Blanca to feel bad for me.

“Your friend is dead,” she said, her voice sad. Sad for me because she hadn’t really known him. “I came by to see if you were all right.”

“He was never my friend,” I said to her, but quickly realized that I shouldn’t lie to Blanca anymore. “No,” I said, “he was a good friend. I think he would have built up the neighborhood. I don’t know if you can understand.”

“I do understand,” Blanca said. “For me, it was always about you thinking I wouldn’t understand.”

“Are you fine, the baby fine?”

“Yes, we’re both fine—”

“How long will you two torture me!” Negra pretended to gag. “Blanca, tell him what you came here to tell him.” Blanca let go of me. She sat on the couch and I sat next to her. She began.

“You told me that my aunt Veronica was in love with your friend.” She looked me in the eye.

“
Tía
Veronica?
Tía
Veronica?” Negra laughed and lit another cigarette. “
Tía
Veronica was in love with half of El Barrio. She was the biggest
puta
, my mother told us. They should have a plaque for her in the Boys Club at 112th and Second.”

That’s when it hit me. My blood ran cold just thinking about what had really happened. And as Negra kept talking, not letting Blanca say anything, it was all falling into place. Could it really be? It seemed too sad and cruel. So cruel you’d never think that people could do such a thing.

“
Esa mujer es como un carro rentao. Si tú tienes el dinero te da las llaves.
My God, Mami says that, growing up Veronica gave head to anyone with a credit card.”

“Shut up, Negra!” Blanca snapped, and Negra wrapped her lips tight around her cigarette. “My mother tells me that years ago her sister went out with a lot of guys, but that the guy she supposedly was in love with, Julio … his name wasn’t William Irizarry.” The worst had been confirmed. I closed my eyes in disbelief, leaning back against the couch. I didn’t want to hear it but Blanca told me anyway. “The guy she really loved, his name was Edwin Nazario. You, Julio,” she said, talking like her sister, “have been played.”

H
ER
mother didn’t know for sure when or where Nazario and Vera first met, but Bodega never knew about it. Now everything fell into place: Nazario and Vera had been planning this for some time. I figured that Bodega remained in the dark right up until Nazario reached for his gun to shoot him. His eyes must have bulged in pain, his mind must have spun in disbelief. In those few seconds, his heart must have broken. Again. I wasn’t there, but sometimes you just know.

Vera just wanted her husband dead. That’s why the day they arrived at my door, all silly and drunk, she asked Bodega to teach her how to fire a gun. She had planned on killing her husband with Bodega’s gun. She knew Bodega would do anything for her, even take the rap for killing her husband.

And Bodega would, too, confident that Nazario would get him acquitted or at least a light sentence. Bodega was more than ready to go to prison for Vera. Vera and Nazario knew Bodega could still run things from his cell. That’s why he had to be killed.

That day when I first met Bodega he had said, “Should something happen to me, people will take to the streets.” But it never happened. When he was killed, no cars were overturned. No fires were set. No cops were conked. Nothing. The people in Spanish Harlem had to go
to work. They had families to feed, night schools to attend, businesses to run, and other things to do to improve their lives and themselves. No, no one took to the streets.

The day of Bodega’s funeral, which came the day after Negra and Blanca visited me, I went looking for Sapo. He was easy to find. Not because of his big, shiny BMW but because of the sky. See, when something really bad happens, Sapo still likes to fly kites. So I woke up early that morning, left the house, and looked at the sky. I saw a kite flying nearby and tracked it. I took the dirty, pissed-up elevator to the fourteenth floor, then up the stairs to the roof, not worrying about the alarm because I knew it had been broken since we were kids. I stepped out onto the roof and circled around, looking for Sapo. Then I saw him looking at me, his kite string tied to a pole.

“I knew you’d come.”

“Negra call you?” I asked.

“Yeah, that bitch called me.”

“So you know, then.”

“I know.”

“So what should we do?”

“I can’t do shit. Man, I got my car someplace in the Bronx. Cuz right now, I got to lay low. I got to walk through the streets as if I’m a second-class citizen. I got to go out and get groceries and come right home. Right now, I can’t do shit.”

“And later?”

“Later, Chino, when this shit all dies down, I still can’t do shit. Cuz Bodega might be dead but his empire is out there for the takin’. And this time I plan on bein’ the Man. Maybe, later, I’ll go after that mothafuckah.”

Sapo untied the string and started to fly the kite again.

“Are you at least goin’ to the funeral?”

“Crazy? I got to lay low.”

“Good luck, bro.” I was about to leave him.

“Hey, Chino!
’Pera, no corra.
”

“Wha’ you want?”

“Why don’cha paint anymore, Chino? ’Membah back in school
when you painted a lot? Good pictures, too. You did a lot of cool R.I.P.s, and at school all the teachers would, like, ask you for somethin’.”

“I don’t know, it’s just one of those things that ends.”

“You evah gonna paint again?”

“Sure,” I said, but I knew I didn’t mean it.

“Thass good. You should do one last R.I.P.—for Bodega, you know?”

“Later, bro.” I started to walk away, wondering why Sapo wanted to know why I didn’t paint anymore.

“Whass your rush, bee? ’Membah when we would do Kid Comets up on this roof. ’Membah that?”

“Yeah. It was cruel, but fun.”

Kid Comets was catching a pigeon, spilling gasoline over it, then lighting the bird with a match, just as you let it go. The bird would fly for a few seconds and then turn into a fireball and come crashing down. We would do this at night. On the roof. We would see the bird fry extra-crispy in midair and laugh.

“They’re rats with wings, anyway. Plenty of them to go around,” Sapo said.

“I gotta go, man.” I knew he didn’t want me to go and I wanted to stick around remembering things and laughing with Sapo, but I had things to take care of.

“Chino,” he said when he saw me start to walk toward the roof’s door again. “I just wanted to know if you remembah, cuz you my only friend.” In his own way Sapo was telling me that his childhood memories were important to him. And a large part of them were made up of times with me.

“I remembah,” I said. I left him up there on the roof and walked back downstairs and took the elevator to the lobby.

Like many others, Sapo didn’t want to be seen at the funeral. Sapo was right, Bodega was gone and his dreams had dissolved like a wafer in water; his buildings would be reclaimed by the city, which would raise our rents. But his underground empire was still there for the taking. It was a game of chicken, and after the smoke cleared, all the cocks would fight for Bodega’s spoils. My money was on Sapo. Because Sapo was different.

I went back home and fixed myself some breakfast and read a little. I wasn’t going to go to work because I planned on attending Bodega’s funeral later on that day. What I dreaded was making that phone call. I was never one to rat on people. But the neighborhood had been betrayed. Knowing Nazario fairly well, I knew it was only a matter of time before Nazario would erase me from the picture. I mean, I was the only one who had been there, I knew the truth. I wasn’t afraid; I was angry. I just hated going to the cops. I wished it could be people from the neighborhood that would punish him and Vera. Hang them from a lamppost like old sneakers.

But I had no choice, so I called Ortiz and DeJesus, met them at the precinct, and afterward went to the funeral.

•

THE PEOPLE
from the neighborhood might not have taken to the streets like Bodega thought they would, but that didn’t mean they had forgotten him. At the funeral the entire barrio was there. It seemed as if everyone had set aside everything and had gone to pay Bodega their humble respects and show their appreciation. The service was held at the redbrick Methodist church on 111th Street and Lexington Avenue—the same church the Young Lords had stormed and taken over, and from which they had launched their great offensives: clothing drives, free breakfast, door-to-door clinics, free lunches; they even picked up the trash the Sanitation Department always neglected. The church was jam-packed and outside people crowded the streets as if for a parade.

After the service, Bodega’s sister had asked the managers of a minimarket on the corner of 109th and Madison to let the public view Bodega’s body there. The three Dominicans, a husband and wife and their business partner, agreed because Bodega had twice helped them make their rent. The place was cleared for the wake.

Everyone knew Bodega had loved that minimarket because it had once been the Gonzalez Funeral Home. It had been where the wake for the Young Lord Julio Roldan was held after the cops had arrested him, killed him, and then claimed he hanged himself in his cell. Bodega had attended that funeral, decades back, when he was a teenager and death was too far away to scare him. Back when his street
name was still Izzy. In those days he was a small-time thief whose heart was stolen by Veronica Saldivia. He thought Veronica was as madly in love with him as he was with her, and as ardent as he to advance the status of Puerto Ricans. Bodega had attended Roldan’s funeral with Veronica at his side, before Vera Vidal and Willie Bodega had been invented. The young Izzy had stood guard under the funeral home’s clock, which freely gave the time to Madison Avenue, alongside his fellow Lords with their berets and empty rifles. They were watching the neighborhood’s back. It was a time when hope for El Barrio seemed fertile, and love at last seemed attainable.

And so the wake was held at that spot. Puerto Ricans and Latinos from all five boroughs came to pay their respects. The line snaked across 109th to Fifth where it turned downtown, all the way past El Museo del Barrio, the International Center of Photography, the Jewish Museum, and the Cooper-Hewitt, and ended by the Guggenheim. For three days Fifth Avenue was colored like a parrot. The Rainbow Race, Latinos from the blackest of black to the bluest eyes and blondest hair, all splashing their multihued complexion at the edge of Central Park. The entire Latin continent was represented, including the thin waist of Central America and all the islands that decorated it like a string of pearls. Everyone was there like in some pageant for a dying monarch. And to pass the hours on line, Bodega tales began winding around the avenue. Almost everyone had one, and those that didn’t added to the tales by retelling them.