Hot Sur (44 page)

All that would be later, though, all that was the dream I was building up high as the moon while living down below in the rubble. For the moment I had to give time its due, without becoming desperate or depressed, keeping my priorities in order, surviving as best as I could in the ruins of that apartment, and focusing all my energies on the upcoming trial that was getting closer each day. That’s where my head was that night I returned home late, put the dog on the floor, and began looking for a candle, when I tripped on the mattress, the one I had brought up from the basement and that on top of everything smelled of urine. I tripped on it and asked myself what it was doing out there. I had left it in the bedroom and not where it was now, crossways at the entrance. Very strange, and my first instinct was to grab Hero and get the hell out of there. I should have done it, Mr. Rose, I should have. But I didn’t, just one of those times when I didn’t listen to my instincts. Analyzing it, I can’t quite figure out why I didn’t take off right away, when it was very obvious something was wrong. I guess in the end I didn’t do it because everything seemed so wrong during those days, one more thing seeming wrong just didn’t register; I was immune to things that seemed wrong. I must have thought that the stray cats had broken in looking for food and moved things around. But Hero was also startled and growled. It couldn’t be clearer if a hundred roosters were singing, or more to the point, one dog growling, but I refused to listen to the message. In the end, I think I didn’t run away because I didn’t have anywhere to run to. Better just to stay there and deal with whatever I had to deal with. I kicked the mattress aside, grabbed a candle, and went searching in the darkness for matches to light it, when someone grabbed my arm and pulled me back. Hard. Ugly. A big hand covered my mouth. Someone breathing on the back of my neck, and pressed against my butt, a . . . a man’s thing. Horrible? Disgusting? Terrifying? Of course, it was a horrifying experience, well, at first a very horrifying and then not so much, not so much and not at all, because soon I recognized that hand, that smell, that breath, that other thing.

Have you guessed? If you bet on Sleepy Joe, then ding-ding, you win. Apparently, he had been there, waiting for me in the dark, crouching quietly in a corner. I don’t know how long he had been there. It’s possible that he came often, and stayed the night once in a while. So I arrived that night, and he jumped me. I almost had a heart attack at first. You have to understand, Mr. Rose, my thing with Sleepy Joe had been a torrid love, and you can’t simply delete those things. You can shove them completely out of sight or bury them under a mountain of forgetfulness, but when you least expect it, they come back full force. That’s just how it happened here, my old flame jumps me from behind, and before I knew it, we were back to the same old thing, embarrassing as it is to admit it. I’m not saying I still loved him or anything like that, the opposite, in fact. I knew better than anybody what an absolute bastard he could be. A do-nothing, an asshole of the worst kind, but he hadn’t done anything to his brother. Sleepy Joe adored his brother, Mr. Rose, and I was sure he hadn’t lifted a finger against Greg. Sleepy Joe was not the murderer. And he was still a hot little papacito, no use denying that, so with all those repressed desires built up from Manninpox, that long dry spell, that abstinence that made me want to explode, starving and with my man right there, like a pie cooling on a windowsill. But not as you may imagine it, because there was a lot to talk about first. It was obvious he only wanted one thing, a little toss in the sheets to get things going, but I needed to talk. I needed to know what had really happened to Greg, what Sleepy Joe knew about the murder and this mess I was in up to my chin. What role had Sleepy Joe played? How deeply was he implicated? Did he know about the arms trafficking? Who had killed his brother? Why the fuck did he not come to visit me in prison? How is it possible that he abandoned me at the lowest point of my existence? What was that whole muddled history of the knife, the one I had wrapped as a present like an idiot? A whole rush of questions brimming with rancor, mistrust, and suspicion . . . and hatred. Because deep down, I felt a physical hatred for him, a primal hatred thickened with regrets. You would think that even the most feverish lust would cool under these circumstances. You would think. But Sleepy Joe wasn’t your run-of-the-mill character. He wanted me on the bed, or on that filthy mattress, and that’s it. But that’s not what I wanted. Well, maybe a little bit, because Sleepy Joe was no good to the core, but damn, he was fine. “Come here, my little hot ass, don’t waste this present I’ve unwrapped for you,” that’s what he said, the damn flirt, and I could easily confirm that he wasn’t kidding. He goes at me with kisses all over my neck, and I slowly get lost in his smells, a little bit saying no and a little bit saying yes. And right in the middle of all that he blurts out a very strange question, well, strange for someone in the throes of this kind of passion.

“You have that hundred and fifty thousand, right? Tell me you do, my love, tell me you have it.”

“What hundred and fifty thousand?” I said, pushing him away. “Don’t fuck with me, Joe. They almost fucking killed me for that, some hundred and fifty thousand I didn’t know shit about. So you tell me. What hundred and fifty thousand?”

“Whatever you want, my little hot ass.” He backpedaled, trying to calm me down to get back to business, “Take it easy, my love, don’t get all flustered, let’s just stay with this and we’ll talk later.”

I needed to think. Hit pause to take in everything that was happening, bring down the temperature to avoid making a huge mistake. We were still inside in the dark and it was cold, so I was able to convince him to go out in the hallway for a moment to plug in the extension cord. But he kept on coming at me when he came back, determined not to let me interrupt things, so the fever had risen instead of dropping. Although maybe not, maybe that’s not how it happened. I think I’m lying, Mr. Rose. Maybe writing is not a good medium to tell about these intimate things, or maybe I just shouldn’t be telling you in such detail. In any case, I think I’m not being clear. The confusing thing about the feelings we carry inside is that they never are what they seem, always something different. Here I am confessing to you that what I felt for Joe was physical desire, and yes, that’s partly true, but it’s also not true, because in those days what I really wanted was something or someone to return to after a long voyage, and the familiar and once-loved body of Sleepy Joe could very well have been felt as a home, a place where you are received with a hug. I don’t want to get entangled in my psychological ramblings, Mr. Rose. So be that as it may, the scene was sexual. Now another confession, this one a bit stupider. It has to do with female insecurity. The truth was that I was self-conscious about being so thin. The last time we had made love I had been some forty-four pounds heavier, and Sleepy Joe wasn’t at all attracted to the sylph type, and had always said he liked my body because it gave him something to hang on to. Now I’d come back looking like a scarecrow, all bones, and I didn’t want him to see it, to realize that the thing he liked about me was no longer there. I had an idea. I’m not sure if right at that moment or a bit later, but I had an idea. Maybe not such a great idea. “Wait here,” I said to him in a very seductive voice, “I’ll be right back.” Sleepy Joe stayed in the living room while I went into the bedroom and took off my clothes, all my clothes. The mirror in my vanity was broken. They had destroyed it with everything else when they had burst in, but for one jagged piece that still hung there. I caught a glimpse of myself there. Where before there had been a full and delightful body, as someone had once described it, now it was just a skinny thing, too skinny. And that wasn’t the worst of it. When I looked closely, I realized how evident the suffering was on me. Maybe that’s what I should keep Sleepy Joe from seeing, I thought. What I need to hide from him is not so much this thinness, but the pain and weariness I’m carrying inside. That person in the mirror looked like a piece of cow cud or something that had been put through a grinder. Everything that had happened to me had turned my soul into jelly. Something told me that I needed to keep that from Sleepy Joe. I’m not sure why. It just seemed like an anti-aphrodisiac. Who’d want to hook up with someone so beaten down? I didn’t feel very seductive, let’s just say, but at least with my clothes on it wasn’t so noticeable.

Now that I’m recounting all this, Mr. Rose, I realize there may have been different reasons. I didn’t want Sleepy Joe to guess the true state of my ruins, because it would prove costly, I was sure. He would be merciless, taking advantage of it to hurt me further. Getting naked in front of him would be like taking off my armor and exposing myself. But that’s what I think now, like I’m telling you, that night my head was somewhere else, so the next step was to let my hair loose and lower my head to brush it all forward, all of it, and then in one gesture, throw it all back so it fell down my back thick and frizzy. Do you see where I was going? Then I put on the mink that Socorro had given me, finally finding some use for that coat, throwing it over my skin and bones, bare naked under it. An old female trick, à la Marilyn Monroe, fill a man with wonder by appearing naked under a fur, also very useful to hide physical defects, in this case, my hyper thinness, so Sleepy Joe wouldn’t realize I was bony as a stray cat. Not to mention the hemorrhaging, so that he wouldn’t notice that especially. God forbid he thought I had my period, because then the whole seduction ruse would be fucked. There was nothing that terrified him more than menstrual blood. Like I’ve said, no one could outdo this man when it came to weird ticks and prejudices. I stripped down, threw on the fur, and went out to try my luck. My Greg, with his obsession with Christmas carols, had a video in which Eartha Kitt sang “Santa Baby.” Kitt is naked under her white mink in the video, or so it seems, and my poor Greg used to imitate her using a towel, clowning around, showing his bare shoulders as he sang along karaoke-like about seducing St. Nick to get a blue convertible for Christmas: “I’ll wait up for you, dear Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight.” You can imagine. But first, let’s shoo Greg from my memory, Mr. Rose, so I can go on with my story. It’s hard to explain how much Greg’s memory weighs on me, all that time I had cheated on him. That was not right, my poor old man. Poor me too, left without love or company. But let’s move on. I went back to Sleepy Joe in my tattered mink, all seductive and stuff, cue the sexy music, a sexy little kitten moving in stealthily step-by-step through the hallway, humming “Santa Baby” and letting the fur slide ever so slowly down my shoulder. And the Neanderthal of Sleepy Joe, instead of focusing me, all of a sudden could see nothing else but the fact that I had a mink coat. Think about it, Mr. Rose, he realized I had a mink coat. He went nuts.

“You liar,” he screamed. “You do have the money! You took the hundred and fifty thousand. How else would you have such a coat? You bought it with that money, you fucking liar, admit it.”

Unbelievably, for Sleepy Joe that coat was proof that I had the money and was spending it on luxuries. That made him start to get violent. He grabbed me hard and demanded I tell him where the money was, with his big open mouth close to my face. “Where’s the money, you bitch? Did you spend it all already? You didn’t save even a little bit for me?” And liar and bitch, and liar and bitch. “Not even a little bit for your papacito? Huh, you bitch? Not even a little bit?” He had me by the hair and was tugging it so hard it hurt. This can’t be, I thought to myself, is life just a repeating reel? Before this it had been Birdie, now Sleepy Joe, both assaulting me for the same reason—the only difference that Sleepy Joe wasn’t smacking my face. He shoved me around but did not strike me. I just want to be clear on that detail, Mr. Rose: Sleepy Joe, the thug, the scrounger, did not smack me, while the FBI, who supposedly stood for law and order, had beaten me senseless. But the two scenes also had their similarities, and to think that so much fuss was about some money that I had never seen in my life, one hundred and fifty thousand blessed dollars. Son of a bitch, if I would have had that kind of money, none of these losers would have seen me or my shadow again. I would have taken off for Seville, Seville in the spring with the flowers blooming, that city I had never visited but dreamed about, fled to Seville where these animals couldn’t put a hand on me. I tried to think about that and only that, Seville and its blooming gardens, while Joe manhandled me and screamed, sticking his chest out and getting all machito on me, till I was in tears because of that deep and violent voice. All that show of manhood so I would throw myself at his feet and shrink like a worm. What did this asshole want? For me to apologize. Fine, I’d apologize, I’d suck him off if that’s what it took for him not to smash my face in, and was just about to beg forgiveness on my knees. But for what? I hadn’t even seen that money, much less had my hands on it. So beg for forgiveness out of sheer exhaustion, to save my neck, so this animal would think he had won, that the battle was his, that I was not even worth hitting anymore. Beg for forgiveness so Mr. Macho Man would stop his assault. But something in me didn’t want to go there, bend over, humiliate myself. I just didn’t feel like it. Hadn’t I just survived hell itself, where I had to learn to defend myself against real monsters? I wasn’t going to let this shitty little asshole bring me down now. I could give him a Swiss kiss that would rip the lips off his face. See if he stopped screaming then? I had never actually done the Swiss kiss to anyone while in Manninpox but I knew about it through the grapevine. Better to try a more proven method. So I head-butted him smack in the middle of the nose with such a brutal force that I heard something crack, like a branch breaking off, and when I saw the concern with which the moron took his hands to his blood-soaked face, I said to myself, now, María Paz, now or never! And I was off, without a hitch, as they say. Bone thin and naked as I was, I untangled myself from him, slipping out of the coat like a serpent from its old skin. He held on to the moth-eaten mink with one hand, more surprised than anything, his face covered in blood. He tossed the coat aside and tried to chase after me, but his feet got caught up in the extension cord and he came crashing down with a loud thud, like an armoire tumbling over, leaving the apartment in darkness again. I wish you could have seen that idiot, Mr. Rose. The way he came down as if struck again, in the end—it was comical. Too bad I didn’t have a video camera. The howling when for the second time that night that nose got smashed in was unforgettable. That gave me time to run into the bedroom and hide behind the stinky mattress leaning up against the wall, leaving a little space where I was just able to fit. There I waited, protected by the darkness, like I hoped brave Hero was, somewhere else, and listening to Sleepy Joe grope around in the darkness and bellow, looking for me. The night could not last forever, and soon light began to seep in through the window. A pale mist began to fill the room, and since it was so thin at first it didn’t quite reach my hiding place, but soon enough it spread and brightened the whole room, leaving me exposed. All Sleepy Joe had to do was stick his head in the room and he’d see me hiding there behind the mattress like a terrified, sorry-ass little mouse. That’s not how it was going to be, I decided. Instead of panicking, I grew very peaceful. If there was nothing to do, there was nothing to lose, I said to myself. If Joe was going to find me, he might as well find me ready to defend myself. So I came out from the hiding place, went to the closet, and grabbed a baseball bat that had been Greg’s since he was a kid, gripped it tight with both hands, and waited strategically behind the door, taking a good stance to be able to unleash the bat across Sleepy Joe’s head as soon as he crossed the threshold. Then I heard the tap of his yellow boots. Heard him coming. If he was out to hurt me, he had best be ready to be hurt twice as bad. Greg had made me watch his favorite video a thousand times: “The Twenty Greatest Home Runs,” which among others included highlights of Kirk Gibson’s glorious high fly-ball doozie in Dodger Stadium, Bill Mazeroski’s World Series slam, and the best one of all, the one that I had seen so often that I had memorized it, October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants battling the Brooklyn Dodgers for the National League pennant takes a pitch from Ralph Branca, and with all the soul and cojones he had in him line-drived the fuck out of that ball for the most memorable home run of all times. And that’s the exact position I was in behind that door, with a strong grip on the bat and ready to send this retard Sleepy Joe flying out the window so his head plunged into the asphalt and he became what he truly was, a little splatter of shit, a piece of garbage that everyone would simply step over like all the other garbage in this neighborhood.