Coyote (14 page)

“You hungry?” I asked.

“If the girl isn't home, there's nothing in the house. She's supposed to go to the store, get rice, food. But she stays at the school, don't do nothing.”

“I could make you some tea. Some coffee?”

“Coffee would be nice,” she admitted.

There was enough instant in a small jar in a grime-smeared cupboard to make one decent cup or two weak ones. I made Marta's strong, the way she likes it, and filled my cup with water from the tap. I probably won't die from Cambridge water.

“So maybe you said something about me at work,” I ventured when I came back balancing the two cups. That wouldn't account for the business card I'd seen my Manuela tuck away in her handbag.

I'd placed two sugar cubes on the saucer. Marta put a cube in her mouth, between her teeth, and sipped the coffee through it. My mom used to drink it that way.

“Yeah,” she said. “I don't remember, but we talk to pass the time.”

Shout is what they'd have to do over the din of that machinery.

“Tell me about the factory,” I said. “Tell me how you got the job.”

“You gonna tell the Welfare I'm working?”

“Oh, yeah, Marta, you know me. I'm a blabbermouth, tell everything I know to the government.”

That won a grudging smile. One sugar cube was completely melted away. She toyed with the other one on the saucer. “Lilia,” she said. “Lilia tells me about it. They ask no questions.”

“What do you mean, no questions?”

“You work, you get paid. Cash money. You don't gotta fill in no forms. And 'cause of Lilia, 'cause she works regular, they let me work sometimes when I feel okay.”

“Like today?” It was pretty damn obvious she didn't feel all right.

“Or when I need money,” she said, staring down at the cracked tile.

“When you need money, I can help you out.”

She flared up. “I don't mind work.”

“It's just that the factory didn't look like the easiest place to work in,” I said soothingly.

“Is noisy,
sí
. Always the machinery. You wouldn't think to lift a lot of feathers would be so heavy. Hurt my back some. Is no so bad. If my fingers are better, like before this damn arthritis, I could sew the pillows. Is more easy.”

“They pay okay?”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

“What does ‘okay' mean in dollars and cents?”

“Two ninety-five the hour.”

“Christ, Marta,” I protested. “That's way below minimum wage.”

“They gotta give some of the money to the government.”

“Sure,” I said, “especially if you don't fill in any forms.”

“Money for bribes,” she said through closed teeth, as if she were exasperated at having to repeat the facts of life for the fifth time to a slow adolescent. “They don't ask questions. They pay cash money.”

“You're being treated like shit. You ought to see yourself coming out of that place, blinded, deafened, dazed. You ought to resent it. You ought to turn the bastards in. There are laws to protect you from …” I started on a soapbox speech but ran down like an unwound clock. My grandmother worked in a New York City sweatshop when she came to this country. Eighteen-hour days chained to a sewing machine in an unventilated hole with boarded-up windows. Once she fainted from lack of air, and the foreman shoved her aside so the machine wouldn't be idle. My grandmother joined the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, went out on strike. Once, walking a picket line, she hit a scab over the head with a protest sign. She wound up in a Bowery jail.

Other kids got fairy tales. I got union stories.

Protest!
I wanted to scream at Marta. Those women should organize and protest like my grandmother did. But then, cops hadn't threatened to send Grandma back where she came from.

“Okay,” I said, “I can see why you work there, but why Lilia?”

“I told you, they don't want no papers from
La Migra
.”

“Lilia's been here for years. You told me she was going to file for amnesty.”

“She change her mind. She no apply. I tell her what you say, but she figure it's a way to trick her, to send her back, maybe take the children away.”

I shook my head. I must have been shaking it for a while, but I suddenly realized I was shaking it—grimly, sadly. Asking to be taken advantage of, asking for it, that's what these women did. So frightened, so passive, and still not safe. “How many work there?” I asked.

“Why you wanna know?”

“How many?”

“
Treinta
, maybe.
No sé
.”

We were getting more Spanish. Pretty soon Marta's English would dry up altogether.

“I saw the front door, the hallway, the little office where the three women work. Are there a lot of other rooms?”

“
No sé
.”

“Do you all work in one big room? Come on, Marta, I need to know this.”

“You gonna make trouble, tell your cop friends?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“You tell them, I'm gonna be the one in trouble.”

“How?”

“My own cousin, she gonna lose her work. Lilia can't work no place else. The law change. Now you have to have the papers to get a job, or the boss, he's in trouble. It cost him lots of money, maybe jail, I don't know. Lilia can't go no place else. And the women find out, they tear out my hair. Please. We need money, work.”

I thought about the foul air and the noise and the pay. And Manuela.

“A woman who worked there died.”

“Maybe she work there. I don't know.”

“The police don't know anything about the woman. How can they find her killer if I don't tell them what I know?”

“You don't know nothing. And I tell you, if a woman is dead, it's because she got a man angry with her. You live a nice life, you don't know, maybe. Nobody kills this woman because she works stuffing feathers into pillows. It's because of something with a man. She sleeps with him, she doesn't sleep with him. Who knows? But you got no reason to make trouble for Lilia and me and all those women at the factory. You make trouble there, I can't stay here, pay the rent. I go somewhere else. With Paolina. You
comprende
?”

If I talked about the factory, she'd take my little sister away. I got the message, and I didn't like it.

“Promise me you no tell about the factory.”

“Marta—”

“I mean it. You talk, I take Paolina away.”

“Where would you—”

She stopped me with another rush of words. “It won't do you no good tell the police anyway. The police, they know.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice, rubbed her thumb and forefingers together in the universal symbol for under-the-table graft. “The boss, he pays them money to forget. A place like that doesn't last unless money changes hands. That's what the women say.”

“Who's the boss?” I asked. “Mr. Hunneman? A big guy with reddish-blond hair, well dressed?”

“I don't know. He don't come out and greet me personal when I come to work.”

“The men who work there, tell me about them. Maybe one of them was sleeping with Manuela.”

“The guard. The shift supervisors. The boss man I never see.”

I described the big-bellied Coors T-shirt man.

“The guard,” Marta said tersely. “None of the women sleeps with that son of a dog.”

“What do they need a guard for?” I asked.

She shrugged. “If there's trouble, I suppose.”

“Have they had trouble before?”

“Once I heard some girls make trouble about the pay, say it's not enough. Say the machinery is too noisy, the lunch break too short, and the women should stop working.”

“And what happened?”

Marta shrugged again. “Those girls don't work there anymore. They bring in new ones. Always new ones.” She took a final gulp of her coffee and held out the empty cup. “You make me another cup, no?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “That's all there is.”

Her lips pressed together, whitened. “And the lazy girl is still not home. No coffee, no nothing. The girl is old enough to work, a girl so big as that. But no, she's too good to work. Like her father, she is, a liar like her father. She told you where I work, didn't she? I tell her it's a secret, but she tells you, no? Because she thinks you'd be better for a mother to her, an Anglo lady gives charity. If I lose my work, it's gonna be because she—”

“Wait a minute, Marta,” I said firmly. “Paolina didn't tell me. I asked her, but she wouldn't. She listened to you.”

But Marta wasn't listening to me. She went on, rapping her empty coffee cup on the chair arm by way of punctuation. “Just like her father, that girl. You can't trust her for nothing. She's never here, she's out doing God knows what with boys maybe, with strangers, while her mother sits without a cup of coffee, without a piece of bread to offer a guest.”

My hand itched to slap her, to make the words stop, but they kept coming, angry words about Paolina's father, about Paolina. She was so loud, I didn't hear the footsteps on the stairs. I just heard the steps running away from the door and knew whose they must be.

By the time I got to the door and unbolted it, she was gone. I could hear the echo of the downstairs door slamming. I ran over to the window. I heard steps, but I couldn't see her running away.

“Shut up,” I said to Marta.

I should have said it sooner.

20

I looked under the front stoop on the way out, even though I knew it was wasted motion. It used to be Paolina's refuge when tragedy struck. Tragedy was anything from bad grades to lost boots, but she hasn't hidden there in years.

The rotted side board had been replaced. Even if it were loose, there wouldn't have been room for Paolina to squeeze through.

I was glad of that. I remembered the scurry of rats down there. I'd never seen one, but I remembered the noise.

Maybe she'd spotted my car. Maybe I'd yank open the front door and find her sitting there. Not so easy. She couldn't be in the car, since I'd locked all the doors, and the Cambridge public schools don't teach ten-year-olds to boost cars yet, although sometimes I wonder. But maybe she'd be standing nearby.

She wasn't.

So, I told myself, she went to Lilia's or a friend's house. I decided I'd call Marta in an hour or two and find out which.

I still circled the block and made a series of passes through the project, keeping my eyes on the sidewalk, looking for her. A new Chinese take-out had opened on the corner. Two young boys with shaved heads and cropped T-shirts wrestled near a fire hydrant. I felt like I was a cop again. After a couple of months in a radio unit you stop thinking about driving and concentrate on the street. Your eyes pick out anything off, as if it were a color image smack in the middle of a black-and-white photograph.

I hadn't heard Marta mention her long-missing husband twice in three years. Why the burst of anger today? Had she heard from him? Was he in town? Was that the reason for Paolina's bizarre behavior, her shaky school attendance?

I shook off the thought. I'd ask Paolina flat out the next time we spoke. If Dad had turned up to make trouble, we'd deal with it. I'd deal with it.

I gave up and headed home. For now my job was to find out more about the pillow factory, if possible without shutting the place down. Poor Lilia. With citizenship so close, her fear had scared her off, and now she'd be working at Hunneman's Pillows with its foul air and machine-gun racket for all eternity, afraid to ask for a raise or a day off, expendable for life.

I wondered about Marta's conviction that cops were paid off to ignore Hunneman's. Marta couldn't be discounted on statements like that. She had an uncanny sense of what was going on, the kind of intuition men label “woman's” and scoff at.

My mom used to say that intuition was what slaves had and bosses never bothered to acquire. It grew from the need to please without calling attention to yourself. The slave learned to catch hidden signals, subtle signs of approval and disapproval, learned to anticipate events, to soothe tempers, to make nice.

Who took bribes? The cops, the INS, city code inspectors? All of the damned above?

By the time I reached home I'd decided. If cops were taking bribes, Mooney wasn't one of them. It's not his district, and it's not his style. So I phoned him, and of course he was out. I didn't try him at home because his mother answers the phone. Cop's widow, cop's mother, traditional Irish Catholic to the core, she disapproves of me. And she always provokes me into giving her more reasons to disapprove.

Stymied, I wandered into the kitchen and came upon Roz. What the hell she was wearing, I don't know. To tell the truth, it looked like rags. A consignment-shop special or a designer original. Probably the former. It was black, like almost everything she wears besides the T-shirts—short, tight, and, at least from the rear, definitely eye-catching, due to a highly slit skirt and a few scattered sequins. Her hair was brassy blond, which it has been before, but not yesterday. It disoriented me. I wasn't entirely sure who she was.

The smell of turpentine was reassuring. Who else would be painting in my kitchen? More to the point, who else would be painting a still life of a giant-sized can of Ajax, a moldy potato, and, yes, a rubber glove, stuffed so it looked like it was reaching for something?

I rarely comment on Roz's art. I used to, but then she'd explain the symbolism of each painting in great detail.

“Hi,” I said when her paintbrush was away from canvas. Far be it from me to mess up a painting of a rubber glove fondling our Ajax.

“Yo,” she said, “give me a minute to wind this up, okay?” She didn't turn around. Her attention was riveted on the label of the Ajax can.