South by South Bronx (16 page)

“Hey, you hold on.”

I don't think Roman has ever grabbed a cop, not by the collar up close like that, right up to his flaming eye. It froze me. It froze him.

“I don't know about the money shit. I'm telling you, if you throw in with that girl expecting a payday, you're going to get ripped. But I still want a piece of the bastards that killed Spook. They took a piece of my life with them and somebody's gotta pay for that. After, I'll disappear. Just don't try to buy me.”

“I'm not.”

He released me gradual, a sense of shock. A slow coming to himself. The return of the stiff hard to his face.

“Just tell me.” Was that disgust curling his lip? “Just tell me you know this guy is the murderer.”

The spread of that hard burn from my face to the rest of my body like a heat lamp. I could phone Anderson, just to make sure Myers had been with him all this time, but what would that prove? The guy had a team. I had only ever seen two, but who knows how many more worked for him? Did people even know they were working for him?

“I know she thinks it's him.” Roman pacing his words like a prosecutor. “I even know she wants you to think it's him. What about you?”

“But he's after me, don't you see that?”

It was more than I had wanted to say but the only words I could press out. All of a sudden I couldn't stand it. The tenement windows all lined up like a jury. The thought I was being watched the whole time, my actions framed on video, my words on spools of tape, and this asshole pushing me around on these streets that I know like every deep wound

and those stupid young smirking bastards I pushed him I pushed him choke so sudden he falling in my grip and it was ME feeling like the one-eyed freak in the country of the blind and it never occured to me that I could be king that I could be running this town—the bad closing dialogue from a Clint Eastwood film—the typical American hero taking justice into his own hands. Roman's head made a wood sound every time it hit the wall hit the wall hit the wall. All he knew was the old script, the black-and-white scheme that kept life simple. Good guys bad guys. Some stupid shit too about standing up for what you believe in, and that's not always flag queen country. I pushed him up against chain-link.

“Listen, don't be grabbing me like that again, okay? Because out here I'm still a cop. You got that? You still walk two steps behind me!”

I hit him again, didn't I hit him? He slid down chain-link, a slow sidewalk crumple. I must have kicked him. Those boys on the street, “Wattup, yo?” They know I'm a cop, they come running they want bark like dogs they want pull guns like big-time hoods they don't do nothing just come to a skid and I look at them and I kick him again and this big curly head yells, “Hey, are you making an arrest? Are you making an arrest?” And tenement windows swirl the same like eyes the same smells the same dusky gray I remember from 1993. “I'm still a cop,” I say, some dignity, some straightening of the suit. Some looking down. I drag him up to his wobbly feet. And they still step back, but not so far back like they used to once.

I let go of him. Roman's eye dizzy blurred. He was trying to catch his breath after I winded him, gasping like a marathon runner. I walked away from him. I walked away and lit the next cigarette. How did so many find their way into my pockets? The pecking order of these streets and how I hate it. Better for Roman to be seen getting beat by a Dirty Harry than for them to think their boss was consorting with the enemy. The car door slam obliterates all sound. The tick ticking of no clock. The tweety chime of my cell phone.

“Where are you?”

The same buzzing insect in my ear that would not go away. A voice trapped inside of me. The part of me I created.

“I'm shooting some film at the grassy knoll,”

I said. “What do you see?”

“Three shooters,” I said.

You can wake from a dream and realize you are still trapped in someone else's dream.

PART
TWO

It is my bad luck and my supposed biggest happiness
to use things the way that I want to. How sad for the
painter who loves blond women but can't put them in
a painting because they don't match with the fruit
basket. In my pictures I use all the things I like.
How those things feel about it, I don't care.

—Pablo Picasso

18.

It had always been colors. It started on canvas, unrolling outwards by itself. Contours appear. Things would take shape with no heavy mental prodding. A vague feeling, that had been enough. Desire. A handful of brushes clattering in a tin can. He would work until the acrylic got thick and it felt like he was painting with gravel. It was raw instinct, all rhumba cha-cha voodoo. Back then, every time he splashed colors, something happened. He blamed Monk for bringing him interminable concepts, these sociological undercurrents. Dry days and blank canvases immediately followed, as if trying to be specific stifled the crazy wild that led to birth.

Now it was new, this throb this pulse, almost an old feeling except that this was no chance encounter with colors, no splash-and-see: It was specific, it was theme and concept. It first drove him to sketch with pencil and charcoal. Sometimes it was just the fine lines of her, sometimes shadowy contours. Sometimes sometimes. Page after page hour after hour no sense of day passing. Into night phones ringing answering machine squawking. A bed becomes an island. A shiny wood floor, the gleamy Caribbean. A whole sketchbook filling with his many variations on a theme. To set up the easel was one thing, stretch canvas, hammer and nail: To paint was another. Tinkering with empty cans and paint tubes. The picture windows darkened with night before he began.

Past 2 in the morning, Mink completely forgot to call Monk. Monk likewise did not call him. There would be no restless search for meaning as they killed the hours waiting for daylight.

The blond girl had started to appear on canvas. Blanket of beach. Sun. Sand. Heavy-lidded sleeping. Didn't know if she could wake—for starters, he hadn't seen the color of her eyes. He could always ask Alex. Would he even know, bother to notice, bother to care? It would be just like the guy to ditch a prize piece like that, especially now that Mink would probably need some sort of release form. He couldn't just steal her, sleeping like that. He would have to ask her. The fear came not from the idea of seeing her again but rather from the worry that Alex, in his instant-woman wisdom, had by this hour already dumped her. He was thinking about that when he noticed the skylight above beginning to glow with first sun.

LIGHT

light was strange coming through the stairwell windows. glazed honeycomb glitter. sunlight bright but no bite. air chilly from floor to floor and in the lobby a strong breeze that ruffled paper napkins chewing gum wrappers. a good moment to pause. the building had four separate stairwells and a huge lobby. monk's place was front left, third floor. alex was front right, at the top. what stairwell went where depended on what side you were facing and how drunk you were. which was how alex was most times he sought monk out for clarity.

this time alex was not drunk. he was not fighting off the effects of blackout. the moist dress was in his hand, swinging like hair.

alex only knocked twice. the door opened right away as if monk had been “right there.” his eyes were liquidy clear. the moment he spotted the dress, his face changed. he touched it, verified its realness. a smile, slow gradual like a stoner.

“Come inside,” Monk said.

TIME

it wasn't time that was the problem it was the distance. the distance from someplace else. the place you are meant to be. something tells you when you're there. it's a mixture of signals, a certain grace. there are no sudden close-ups. no violins rising to an emotional crescendo.

more like a sense of recognition. the way light shifted against those windows. signs leading back to a place. stored in memory cells. leaking from some past life. the place you had run from. a place to run back to.

this thought. made the shutters come right down. she wasn't into remembering.

she wasn't into astrology. she didn't generally believe in what she couldn't see, and didn't seek out tarot card readers, psychics, or seers. up until her experience with sarita, she had been skeptical. past lives? she only remembered one. a spoiled rich girl looking for kicks. gave her heart to a maverick agent. liked to see her perform. he was frameups, corporate scams. information gathering. formed his own team, made friends in hide places. flew off to texas for three weeks and came back a new man. talking about oil and national security and a new american century. gets work with cia to track money flowing into the country, money linked to terrorists. past lives? a succession of names, different faces. she makes like a doll she makes like a hooker a thief a liar. she makes like a lover she makes like a friend. time and time past, one job over she would do it again because she sort of hated him and liked him those long fuck nights when she could take what she could get, and he would get so wound up if she talked about quitting. “don't say that, don't ever say that.” a child about to smash all his toys. and maybe she liked sometimes feeling like a possession, though she prided herself on her independence, her fast land life “in the service of your country.” she was always morbidly fascinated by men who pimp off the women they love. it's the same even in the name of higher ideals. that last job—she expected a frame a setup the typical police raid at the end of the show, but when the curtain call came, four people were dead and she was through with it. she woke one day and didn't recognize herself in the mirror. that is, she did not see a person. she saw she could not place that current face with any she that she knew

that her name that her life was fake always a role, an empty pose a set of characteristics adapted not felt, not lived, not real. and if she always asked who she was when she looked in the mirror, she never got the answer like she did in the mirror of sarita's beauty salon when that young woman in the '30s cut looked back at her. almost black-and-white she was, shimmery soft focus. past lives? it was anne sexton she found one sunny afternoon, wandering the bowels of harvard's massive library

or was it wellesley, or was she thinking princeton? didn't matter which. she hadn't registered.

that skinny anne so slunk, so hiding from glare. beneath a stack of books like the last chicken in line, pecked bloody. a little battered but no less a firm spine, a hard cover, a crisp newness to every yellowed page. it was anne she chose that day while in search of something she couldn't identify. she opened a book and found, for the first time, words that would not go away. she could recall the page number remember the words recite as if burned into memory every letter every crinkle. she had known this closeness with numbers, but never before words. anne expressed her. she knew the words before she read them. they were not transformations, but confirmations. the discovery of her photographic memory came only through anne, through her poems, her letters, her life. like practice. rehearsals. training. “you can go far with a brain like that,” some voice said. she took retention tests. disorienting quizzes. a black room. slides that flashed in an eyewink. whole pages of information, absorbed. swallowed, spit back whole, line for line. better than xerox. no microfilm to hide, no tiny camera to be confiscated—no documents ripped from the lining of a handbag. and she could lock her face like a safe. “imagine, you wouldn't even need a camera.” that was trudy talking. “you've already got one in your head.” ava started to think about her head as a camera loaded with film, each frame a memory, a moment, a piece of past. what happens when you run out of film? every head has only a certain amount of frames. once this camera runs out of film, it simply puts a new image on top of the old. ava found herself rushing to anne so that every bad moment was replaced by a poem, a page, a segment of her life. it was almost an exchange. soon memories would become poems, anne words. anne life. she didn't want any more bad moments to blot out, no more dead bodies to feel somehow responsible for. that people were killed was never part of the deal. the night she told him, “I think it's better if I try it on my own,” something people used to say on THE LOVE CONNECTION when the date went wrong—he went ballistic. The first time he beat her. he was sorry, he cried like a baby. took trudy to talk her into joining the team in new york, they could just try, that's all, and if it didn't work out then they could still have new york

and that was what made her say yes, and this at a time when he was becoming more unbearable. not even dates anymore, and since the killings she didn't want him touching her. she couldn't see anyone else, he was too jealous too crazy—and she was in the room when he pulled the trigger pulled the trigger. “the realization that she's outlived her usefulness is one of the worst feelings a hooker can have,” he said. “you are so much luckier than that.” (the slap that resounded, and along with it, his laugh. him playing the star-spangled banner at every seventh inning stretch ruined being an american for her faster than fascism.)

but new york—she had been attracted since birth the skyline was so deeply embedded in her mind it seemed a mirage, maybe atlantis or some marvel comics city. the world trade center was the first place she came to see, to stare straight up at those towers reaching deep into sky. she skated in the pretty park down by the water, strolled the walkways that reminded her of minneapolis. shopped in the bustling underground mall that led to the world financial center. and she, walking amidst the hustle of suits and ties, decided this time she would not just play a role, pick up a life, and discard it at the end of the play. this time she would become a person.

she saw that person in the mirror of sarita's beauty parlor.

LIGHT

the light was strange coming through the bedroom window. prismatic color almost like stained glass. churchlike, serene. a choir should have been singing. no hassle for monk to pop a few more oranges in the juicer.

“That dress really looks familiar somehow,” Monk said. Feeling it again like braille, touching its intertwined rose petals.

“You on your way to work?”

“Yeah.” The juice was a cold, sweet splashing blast down his chest.

“You got time for a quick cup and a smoke?”

there was a strange energy in the apartment. something was going on and this made the walls nervous. the bomb shelter had now become a headquarters. the big typewriter sat on the kitchen table. stacks of paper, a box of blank white taking up a chair, typewritten sheets spilling across. no sound of typing but somehow still the echoes of that ratatat and it was on monk—his energy now flowing fast, not the laid back gradual like before. with their cups and their smokes, they sat in front of the bedroom window. it was quiet there and for a while there was no need of words. the bedspread behind them lit up rosy with sun. the two rocking chairs they sat in creaked gentle. it felt momentarily like sitting on a
balcón
in puerto rico. prospect avenue instead of palm trees. the wheeze of a bus instead of
coquí
.

“I had a strange night last night,” Alex began.

Monk lit his tobacco, stroked his stubble.

“I felt sure I imagined it.” He touched the dress absently, which he had hung over a shoulder. “But then there's the dress.”

Monk rocked faster, his bare toes gripping the sill.

“Does this have anything to do with that blonde I saw going up the fire escape last night?”

Alex felt the strange urge to jump out of his skin, to scream, to grab Monk and shake him. Something inside him wanted to get out, get born, get on with it.

“You saw her?”

The creaking of their chairs in rhythm.

“It was pissing rain,” he said. “Almost 4:00. I would've normally been with Mink, but he pissed me off so I came home. I was looking around for something, I don't know what. Restless window thing. I had just lit a bowl of fine
chiba
and was watching the rain come down. I leaned out the window to check on the stoop in case Mink was down there, but there was no Mink.”

Alex was imagining her climbing the fire escape in the dress, which he hadn't yet seen her wear. An odd thing, having seen her naked first. An odd thing, that the dress should be hanging from his shower curtain rod like something intimate.

“I could've swore I caught a glimpse of something down there. I craned my neck to look, and I swear I almost dropped my pipe. It was a blond woman, climbing up the fire escape, slow and stealthy. When I saw you holding that dress, I thought, fuck—I've seen that before. I couldn't see the color too good at night, but the pattern, something about it I could see. I could see she was barefoot too.”

Alex sipped his coffee, puffed on the cigarette. An even, steady calm. A solid rhythmic rocking. So safe it was almost cradle. Could sleep now. She had those strapless, bit of a heel clackies on. He knew from first sight that they were Manolo Blahniks. How funny, how she kept them in her purse.

“Bro, I craned my neck out so far I almost fell out.”

A ripple of laugh. A sense of relief. The feeling that all were present and accounted for.

“I saw her go up to the very top. I lost her up there, somewhere near where you are.”

Monk's eyes, wide and mystified, now turned all their curiosity on him. He was never one to hog the story, for he especially liked people telling their own stories.

Alex took up the thread, waking up with the blonde, dizzy uncomprehending. Met Mink, took him upstairs because why, because maybe Mink, being real, could confirm she was real. “I tried your door on the way down,” he said, “but you were typing.”

“That's what happened to me,” Monk said. “All this time I couldn't get to work, it was like something was in the way. Last night, that blowout with Mink … I just haven't been writing. I was looking out the window like I always do, like I'm looking for something. I think I found it. I stayed at the window for a while, thinking maybe I would see her again, or thinking I had gone nuts. Then I thought, yeah, right! She was climbing up to Alex. And then, this buzz. I went straight to the typewriter. Thirty-eight pages later, my back hurts, I have neck pain, my vision's blurry … it's glorious.” Monk's face creased up. “Hey, what about Mink? What did he say when he saw her?”