Virgin Heat (6 page)

Michael put his beer down, reached out with a cool damp hand and clutched his new friend's wrist. "Of course you have to, dear," he said. "Of course you do."

Typically, Uncle Louie was the last to hear of Angelina's disappearance.

Her mother and father, after a night bereft of both sleep and conversation, had set about contacting the people they looked to for help and solace, and Louie was on neither of their lists. Paul spoke to his other brothers, Joe and Al, grilled them as to whether they'd been party to anything that might end in a vendetta. He spoke with Funzie Gallo, he spoke with whatever members of his ragtag
brugad
he could roust from their slovenly beds. As for Maria, she called Angelina's girlfriends, she called her own relations; when there was no one else to call, she called her sisters-in-law. No one thought to call Louie, stuck in his plumbing supply store in East Harlem, armed with a claw-pole to grab toilet floats from upper shelves, as cut off from importance as a jellyfish cast out above the tide line.

It was not till dinnertime the next evening that he heard a word about it.

His wife Rose was frying pork chops. She was a lousy cook, all she did was salt the pan, put the flame on high, slap the chops in straight from the supermarket plastic so that they sizzled dryly like souls in hell. Fibers of meat always stuck to the pan, when she flipped the chops there were tears in them, pale places like still-knitting scars. Cooking, she smoked a cigarette and sipped a Manhattan with a cherry in the bottom of the glass.

"Your niece Angelina," she said, as she stabbed the pork and tiny fat globules dotted the stove, "she flew the coop."

"What?" said Louie. He was looking out the window. They lived in a big tall building in the Bronx, near the Westchester line but still the wrong side of it, and what he saw out the window were other big tall buildings in the Bronx.

Rose said, "She didn't come home last night, didn't call. Maria's panicked."

Louie scratched his head. His head was still peeling from vacation, shreds of weightless skin rolled up beneath his fingernails. Angelina was his favorite, he wanted all good things for her. "Maybe she eloped," he said.

His wife sucked her cigarette, gave a short malicious laugh that ended in a cough. "Eloped with who? Who's she gonna 'lope with?" She sipped her cocktail, poked absently at the hissing meat. "Maybe she got picked up in a bar. That'd be a start at least."

Louie kept looking out the window. There wasn't much to see, but the familiar geometry was soothing, there was a kind of peace in the shifting patterns of lights turned off and lights turned on, shades pulled up and shades pulled down. "Paulie's worried?"

"How should I know, Paulie's worried? I talked to Maria. Maria's worried. Y'ask me, I don't see what the big worry is. Y'ask me, Angelina, for once that oddball kid is acting normal for her age."

*

"How many bars in this town?" Michael said. "How many would you guess?"

"I don't know," said Angelina. "Hundreds."

"At least they're close together," Michael said, as they ducked into another one, their fourth or fifth that evening.

It was in a courtyard off Duval Street. A mostly outdoor place, Caribbean. Cockeyed tables, their legs sunk in white and dusty stones, leaned against the trunks of scabby palms. Speckled crotons sprouted up from shallow soil and scratched at the backs of chairs. The bar itself was basically a shed—a seamed and ripply metal roof to siphon off the downpours of the tropics, a set of flaccid shutters for locking up the booze during the brief nondrinking hours between four and eight a.m. Vines clung to the overhang; a smudged mirror stood behind the ranks of bottles.

The place felt familiar, and Angelina wracked her brain to remember the details of Uncle Louie's video. But remembering was difficult. The bar where Sal Martucci worked—before the camera had zoomed in on the longed-for hands, how long had it been on the screen? Three seconds? Four? And, until she'd seen the hands, she'd had no reason to pay particular attention. She thought she remembered vines. She recalled a mirror, a warmly polished slab of wood in a place that was not quite indoors, not quite out.

But in Key West there were lots of places that looked like that, and with a tiny heartbreak Angelina saw that the hands that made their gimlets were long and regular and slender, not the hands she dreamed about. Discouraged and mirthlessly looped, she led her escort to a table under a palm whose deadly coconuts had been snipped away like the testes of some gigantic wild beast.

"Cheers," she said morosely, as they clinked their streaming glasses. Then she added, "This whole thing is crazy, isn't it?"

Michael beamed. "Absolutely."

"I mean," said Angelina, "who knows what he looks like anymore? Who knows what his name is?"

"That's what makes it so romantic," Michael said. "You've got to find him with your heart, there's no one that can help."

"You're helping," Angelina said.

Michael modestly blinked, toyed with his stud earrings.

They sipped their drinks, looked up at the sky. Lumpy clouds were massing, their pillowy bottoms reflected the red of city lights, their tall tops fell away in darkening shades of purple and charcoal and inkiest black.

"And it's really not fair," Angelina went on, "my taking up your time like this. You came here looking for excitement, passion."

"And I found it," Michael said.

Angelina scanned his face, refrained from saying, yes, but what he'd found was someone else's passion, not his own. As that thought rolled through her mind, however, it trailed behind it a hunch about Michael that surprised her. She heard herself saying, "You're really kind of bashful, aren't you?"

He looked away, and she wasn't sure she should have said it. But after a moment he answered. "Meeting people. It's really not so easy."

Angelina dabbed her lips.

"A lot of straights," he said, "they have these wild notions, they think it's all disco dancing and meet me in stall three. But if you're talking about really finding someone . . ."

He broke off, drank, glanced up at the wet, black, spongy clouds.

"Little secret, Angelina?" he went on. "Men talk big. Straight men do. Gay men do. There's a little bit of wishful bullshit in all of us. Or a lot . . . But when you're out there, looking, there's all this insecurity, all this doubt. I'll tell you—you can take a guy with a fabulous body squeezed into six-hundred bucks worth of perfect leather, and inside he's just like a kid at a high school dance."

They drank Faint orange lightning was pulsing deep inside purple clouds, the glow came through like a candle on an egg. Angelina felt it was only fair that she answer confidence with confidence. "That dating stuff," she said. "I've spared myself a lot of that." She ran a finger over the rim of her glass. "You know—by being strange."

Michael looked at her briefly, then his eyes slid off her face.

"It's okay," she said. "I know I'm strange. I don't feel bad about it."

It started raining. It wasn't gradual; from the first instant it was a hammering downpour, the way it happens in the tropics. Angelina sat there in the rain, her pouffed hair flattening as she waited for Michael's eyes to lift back to her own. "Hey," she said, "it's really okay. You're queer, I'm strange. You don't know I know I'm strange?"

*

"'S'raining," slurred a tourist at the bar where Ziggy worked, as drops the size of grapes slammed through yielding foliage and clattered like BB shots on metal roofs.

Brilliant deduction, asshole, thought the bartender, as he threw the man a small tight smile.

The evening had been even steamier than usual, the air was like some fat guy's underpants. The weather, and on top of it the endless parade of jerks, made Ziggy feel even grumpier than normal. He let off some private huff the safest way he knew: he stood there amid the clamor of the teeming rain and he thought about quitting. A job, a love affair, sometimes life itself—a big part of what made them bearable was knowing you could quit, reminding yourself. When you stopped believing that, that was when you got a bellyache.

This job, thought Ziggy—could he afford to blow it off? He made okay money with Salazar. But who knew how long Salazar would keep him on? Then too, it was a good idea to have a legitimate source of income, something to point to in case people got curious as to how you paid the rent. Besides, tending bar at Raul's wasn't all bad; like a savvy trout behind its rock, he could linger behind his arc of varnished teak, and the endless current of the tavern brought him sporadic amusement and sometimes business opportunities.

But then again, always, in unending supply, there were the assholes.

Like the guy coming in right now, motioning for a drink before he'd even got his butt up on the barstool. He was soaking wet from the rain, and plastered to his chest was a shirt that said
i'm shy— but i've got a big dick.

Wrong on both counts, douche bag, Ziggy thought. What kind of fucking idiot would wear something like that? He was so disgusted that he barely looked at the guy as he took his order for a Virgin Heat.

Which was exactly how the man in the unspeakable shirt, whose name was Keith McCullough, wanted it. When you were working undercover, your goal was to distract your quarry, cause him to look away or to notice nonessentials, to focus on anything except your face.

"Maria, this is Louie."

"You want Paul? He's in the shower."

"No, Maria. I wanna talk to you. About Angelina. Have you heard anything? Is she back?"

It was around eight the next morning. Maria, in a quilted robe, was making coffee, telling herself her movements around the kitchen were purposeful, productive, not just aimless pacing. She hesitated a second before she answered Louie's question. She was surprised that her shriveled heart warmed a little toward her husband's youngest brother.

"No Louie, she isn't back, I haven't heard a thing."

"I hardly slept last night," said Angelina's uncle.

For this there was no answer, so Maria nestled the phone against her ear and resumed her shuffling across the cold tiles of the kitchen floor.

"She didn't say anything?" Louie went on. "She seemed okay?"

"She seemed," her mother began, "she seemed like Angelina. It was right after the evening we were all together, Louie. You saw her same as me. How'd she seem to you?"

"To me?" he murmured. But he could not put into words how Angelina seemed to him. "I guess she seemed fine."

There was a helpless pause.

"Look," he resumed, "if she comes home, if you hear from her, will you call me, please, Maria? I really wanna know."

She said fine, she would. They hung up. Louie poured himself a few more sips of coffee, stared out his Bronx window at the next building's mystic pattern of shades pulled up and shades pulled down. He went to the bedroom, looked in on his sleeping wife. A lousy cook, a grouchy and critical companion, he yet doted on her, when she let him; he stole a moment of a lover's secret joy, seeing her head half off the pillow, faded lipstick still visible beyond the natural outline of her slightly parted lips. Then he went downstairs, started his car, got on the highway and headed for the plumbing store in East Harlem.

He turned the radio on, but he could not get Angelina off his mind.

How did she
seem
? She seemed like a dear sweet kid with something missing, or maybe she was just still waiting for her life to begin, her youth leaking away as she moonily listened for the starter's gun that everybody else had heard a long time before. She seemed like one of those polite untested children who stayed too long in the nest, getting softer, odder, nerve eroding day by day until the normal fright of flying off became an overwhelming terror.

Except that now she
had
flown off, thought Louie. Either that, or something unthinkable had happened.

Why had she flown off? he wondered. Why now? Where to? He drove; he thought; he was oblivious to the people who cut around him and gave him dirty looks for going slow.

He tried to recollect the other evening at his brother Paul's. In all, it had been for him a painful evening, but for the sake of his niece he tried to reconstruct it. They'd had drinks; they'd eaten. Thanks to Angelina's quiet intercession with her father, he'd gotten to show his video. He recalled the faces of his relatives—uninterested, impatient, condescending. Among them, one wide-eyed and attentive face, one person who asked questions, who seemed to share his fascination with this place that was different and loose and new.

A horn honked; Louie slid over a lane.

Then there was the weird intensity of the way she'd said goodbye.
Thank you, Uncle Louie, thank you.
She'd said it twice, her eyes a little glassy, her voice a little breathless, like he'd given her some wildly extravagant and unexpected gift. When she hugged him, it was not a normal good-night hug, it was the kind of hug you give someone at a wedding or a funeral, a hug that marks, and eases someone through, a passage.