The Shaft (15 page)

    He lifted the last two boxes of this run, mostly goodies purloined from Rapid O'Graphics, and headed back for the Garrison Street entrance. Half in jest, he thought to himself that that guy Cruz looked sort of like his idea of a dope dealer.

    

    

    Mario Velasquez heard the bad man coming back, and hid.

    The biggest event so far in Mario's short life of two years had been his recent promotion from toddler phase to a new frighteningly exhilarating mode of locomotion. Not yet potty trained or articulate beyond urgently loud monosyllables and parroted commands from Mama, Mario tarried in Kenilworth's third-floor corridor, packed into didies, a food-stained T-shirt and miniature track shoes with reflectorized insets on the heels. He was pretty grimy but it was not his mother's fault. Not old enough to read his second hand shirt, which proclaimed I'M A LITTLE STINKER, he nonetheless tried to live by this maxim.

    When he heard the tread of boots and voices on the stairs, he made a bubbly whine and retreated to the open door of 314. He never resisted peeking. There was a crack in the doorjamb, so peek he did.

    His Papa had called the bad man a chingon but Mario did not retain the word. He saw snow-crusted boots and black clothing. The bad man scanned the hallway in both directions before digging out a set of keys. Mario heard the keys and instantly coveted them more than anything in the world. Safe in his hiding place, he duplicated the motions the bad man made with the keys. So shiny, so gloriously noisy. The lightweight masonite door opening into the hallway made a hollow noise as the bad man bumped around it. As it closed a skinny black cat darted through just in time to keep its tail from getting truncated. The door thunked shut. The cat glanced quickly rearward, hit full stop, and sat to lick itself in case anybody was watching.

    Mario immediately forgot the keyring existed and visions of the gato negro consumed the grabbiest portion of his mind.

    Usually, when Mario decided a thing should be his and his alone, and he encountered resistance, he gave vent to a shriek that could gasify brain cells. Then charge: Hands in the air, barrel forward, scream until all breath is gone. His signature gallop made the third floor sound as if it housed the largest and most clamorous rats in Oakwood. Whenever Mario was conscious, he ran, and whenever he ran he squealed.

    His mother, frustrated at her first son's wanton demolition of the few good family hand-me-downs within reach in their tiny apartment, had finally let Mario run around in the hallway. She admonished him to never go near the stairs, as if he could understand the consequences. The elevator was no danger, ft never worked, and the third floor doors seemed permanently shut. Letting Mario loose was a compromise. He was quiet in general but now she had to monitor him every minute or so to ensure that the reason for his silence was not the brand of infant death she now spent most of her waking hours fearing. Apart from Mario there was Eloisa, and after Eloisa… well, she and her husband had not decided on a name, yet.

    Mario knew that Mama was occupied with kitchen duties, the steam industry of bubbling pots and hot skillets. A late meal for Papa, who was soon due home. The meal was not yet ready for Mario to gleefully fling it in all directions. Mama's head poked around the kitchen alcove, saw Mario near the front door where he was supposed to be, and withdrew. Mario watched her. Right on time. Only Mama could perceive the invisible barriers inside of which Mario had been remanded.

    All Mario could see or care about was that cat.

    He crept beyond the door, into the animal's sightline now. He saw it, he wanted it, so he squealed. It was an uncertain interrogative, not yet pitched to shatter plexiglas. Almost a coo. The cat crouched, unsure of whether a chase was about to commence, unwilling to move if there was no attack. The creature in diapers was not that large, but it emitted weird screechings, and the cat had long ago learned to dodge the questing paws of children.

    Mario determined that if the cat of his desire could not be nabbed before Mama did her next forty-five second surveillance, the prize would be lost. The cat would run.

    Mario unleashed his forward-ho scream and blasted off, thud-thud-thud.

    The cat did not dally. It accelerated claws to carpet, puffs of rotten fiber flying in its wake. Its sleek speed easily aced Mario's clodhopping gait. It zipped around the hallway's western corner.

    
Gone!

    Mario tried to hang a speed turn, but his top-heavy momentum tipped him over and the pursuit cut short with a clonk of impact as he fell, palms slapping the floor, forehead bouncing off the nap. His big brown eyes welled with easy tears. He sucked in a breath destined to be expelled as a shriek of historic volume. Mario fall down.

    He hesitated.

    One of the icebox doors in the next corridor hung ajar. Generally they were nailed shut, drowned in paint. Mario was used to seeing them closed. He forgot his abraded knees and disposable pain. His plotted caterwaul leaked forth as an upward-curving peal of fiendish delight. He scrabbled to his feet and thundered over to the target. The gato had to be holed up in there. Foolish gato.

    'Mario! Mario, donde esta?'

    
Poop.
His cover had already been blown. Mama had no way of knowing that he was just around the next corner. Her next step would be the usual maternal freakout. The next cry of Mario's name was strident.

    The gato would be lost in seconds if Mario did not drag it out of its lair. He knew from experience that the tail part was the best when it came to gato dragging. It was sort of like a furry suitcase handle, almost unbreakable. Almost.

    His next screech was victorious. He jerked open the bottom-most icebox door. Oho, gotcha furball now you're gonna eat some torment, for running. The gato was not hiding inside.

    Marisole Velasquez knew that one of the calculated gambles of motherhood was leaving one child unobserved so that another might be rescued. Baby Eloisa was swaddled on the couch, busily trying to plug a pacifier all the way into her mouth and waving her legs like fat antennae. She would not roll off onto the floor in the few moments it took to collect the wayward Mario. Probably. If she did, the whole building would share the event in a hurry, but in the meantime Mario had once again pulled his jailbreak routine and needed rounding up. Marisole could track her first son like a bloodhound, correctly picking his most likely trajectory, her motherly seventh sense guiding her. She continued calling his name. Her tone would suggest that for mounting a sortie alone he would get his cachetes whacked.

    She rushed into the corridor, trailing fulsome cooking smells. Once she was gone little Eloisa made a face and filled her cloth diaper with essence of infant, a double scoop. Eloisa smiled toothlessly at the abrupt burst of warmth. She was happy to keep her mother so busy.

    The swell of Marisole's third pregnancy was sufficient to list her weight as she heeled around the west corner. She had to clutch the wall for support. Already she was breathing hard, panting. A voice behind the door of 320 shouted a general order to shut the fuck up out there. Such imperatives rarely came with backup. To Marisole it was the same as street noise, something to be ignored. If construction workers whistled and hooted at you, you paid them no mind. Marisole had not been whistled at in quite a while.

    Sweat, mostly from the kitchen, speckled her neck and forehead. She called again, but only the first two syllables of her errant son's name made it into the air before she spotted the single, Mario-sized track shoe. It was lying on its side near one of the disused, flush-mounted icebox doors. The laces were still tied.

    Eloisa, back in 314, would begin crying any second now.

    Marisole ran to the shoe as best her pendulous belly would permit, and petrified when she saw the blood staining the floor. A wide, wet slide trail had mixed with floor dirt to make thin mud. It began next to the abandoned shoe and swept straight into the icebox door, which hung wide open and was supposed to lead no damned place at all except into a one-by-one cubbyhole lined with sheet metal.

    Which it did, Marisole saw.

    More blood was pooled on the floor of the tiny box. So much more blood than Mario's birthing had brought.

    From the corner, a black cat watched, not very interested, licking itself methodically. Mario was nowhere to be seen. Worse, he was no longer making any noise.

    Marisole heard Eloisa begin screaming back in the apartment; hitching, gulping baby bleats that might signal colic. By then, Marisole was pounding on the door to 320 for help and screaming herself.

    Mario's tiny foot was still inside the shoe.

    

    

    Jonathan felt dead below the ankles, his gym shoes slushed, his socks saturated and freezing, his toes like cocktail icecubes. Okay, okay, Bash was right, Capra was right; he'd buy some boots. The winter was not going to recede in time to spare his footgear. Okay. I give. Chicago wins this round.

    And some paranoias never rinse clear. He decided to lock Bash's box of stuff in the cabin, despite the fact that it was late at night and no passing thief with any sense would be tempted by the boxes of books and junk awaiting the offload. It was snowing, for godsake. The only other person he'd seen for hours had been Cruz, his neighbor to the north.

    He did two flights of narrow, angled stairs with his last load of this trip, feet squishing along. This box had the towels. He could use a basin of hot water or the steam heater to thaw out.

    Several other boxes were stacked next to the outside door of207. One at a time they would have to be lifted through and placed to the left of the door in a pile. Then he could shut the hallway door, open the other door to 207, and repeat. U-Haul aerobics. Technically, the tiny airlock's other door, the one to his back now, was 205. His neighbor, who had not yet manifested, also had a key to the outside door. It seemed a needless and labyrinthine complication until Jonathan figured out how the older apartment had been subdivided.

    His hair was damp. He should've worn the parka hood. He chided himself that he was new to this climate and could make his body sick fast by being too casual. He'd gotten ill enough Texas summers by walking from century-mark heat into a refrigerated supermarket.

    The parka had been his father's, long in the closet. This was its first opportunity for practical use. Jonathan wiped his face, shucked the heavy coat, and searched up towels from the box circus.

    The bathroom light was a naked bulb on a pullchain, spattered with thick slops of white paint from the apartment's recent and indifferent makeover. The el cheapo latex lay thick as barnacles on the switchplates and had blocked up some of the electrical outlets, not that plugs were in abundance to start with. This building's circuitry would probably scare the ass hair right off any sober electrician.

    Jonathan set a dish drainer loaded with kitchen implements into the bathtub. It was a freestanding clawfoot tub with one of those circular shower curtains. He twisted the hot tap on the two-faucet sink and noticed the sink had also been painted, probably to make it look more like porcelain. He snapped up a blade on his Swiss army knife and gouged down until he got rust. Judging by the paint strata, the sink's factory surface had last been exposed to air sometime around the Great Depression. The paintjob in toto clogged the air with its stuffy industrial fumes. Jonathan had done time in enough low budget residences to accept an indifferent paint job as a norm, but who was this half-assed cosmetology supposed to fool?

    The whole move stank of the depressing and inevitable. He felt suitably cast away by Bash, who was full up with his own problem. Jonathan already knew what her name was. Bash had promised, awkwardly, that the whole rancid romance would be old news within weeks. Two months at the outside. The prognosis was not happy-making.

    Meanwhile, life at Rapid O'Graphics had to move on. Bash's homefront situation was now stressed to the point that Jonathan was required to telephone prior to returning the truck, even at this hour of the night. Camela would not lift the receiver, he knew. Bash would wait out front and taxi Jonathan back to Garrison Street. That way, Jonathan and Camela would not have to trade any more tight silences. Bash would apologize again. Jonathan hated that part most.

    Dead of night. Amanda would be sleeping by now. He wondered bitterly if she was sleeping alone.

    Movement caught his eye from the bathroom. He dropped a moldy Rubbermaid plug into the sink drain as soon as the water ran hot.

    
Oww…
his feet were beginning to tingle.

    The passage to the bathroom from the studio's central room was formed by a dead space across from a doorless closet. He traced fingers along the wall as he looked out. The hair on his arms scared up and he felt immediately that he was not alone in the apartment.

    Some paranoias…

    He saw a curl of blackness wisp around an encylopedia box and vanish.

    In Texas one summer night, Jonathan had been washing dishes, wearing swim trunks and thongs. Those were the days before he or Amanda could afford an air conditioner to knock back the temperature. They sweltered, invented shade, and compensated. Were things really happier when people were broke? Every so often Jonathan would wipe his face with a rinsewater-wet hand. The sensation of air evaporation moisture was a noble, simple pleasure. Puff, Amanda's wretched cat, was aprowl and Jonathan could feel its tail brushing the backs of his bare calves. Several times he kicked without looking to shoo the damned beast. The ticklish intrusions did not curtail. He finally stopped what he was doing to boot the monster well and soundly… and discovered a tarantula as large as his hand making the slow climb from knee to thigh on the back of his right leg. Jonathan reinvented the St Vitus Dance in the next few seconds. His taste in clothing refocused toward long pants.