Young and Violent (9 page)

Anita smiles, “?-how do you do. Ah —
como está usted?”

“Buenos días,”
Mrs. Gonzalves says.
“Mucho gusto.”

“Hallo!” Mr. Gonzalves says. “Take the chair, no?”

“Haga el favor de sentarse?”
Mrs. Gonzalves says.

“I’m afraid my one year of Spanish isn’t going to help much, Gober.”

“She says, sit down please.”

“Si.”
Mr. Gonzalves nods. “Take the chair.”

Anita walks to the large brown stuffed chair with the claw feet, sits forward in it, and pats her hair in place lightly with her fingers. Gober puts their damp coats on a wooden chair near the door, then goes across to the hassock beside Anita, and straddles it.

“Everybody’s so dressed up around here. Think we were having a party.” He snickers self-consciously. His mother does not understand him, but she smiles and says,
“Si!”

“Rain, rain!” his father says. “It no stop all day.” “We really needed it, though,” Anita comments. “Huh?” Mr. Gonzalves leans forward. “The rain. We really needed it.”

“I don’t,” he tells her. “No like. No work in rain. No like.”

“Oh, of course. I never thought of that.”

“Papa hates rain,” Gober says. “I can’t remember it raining much back home. I don’t know. Probably it did but I can’t remember it ever raining much.”

“No work in rain.” Mr. Gonzalves says. “Rain, rain. No good.”

They sit in silence for a while, Mrs. Gonzalves smiling at Anita, looking down at her hands, folded limply in her lap, then up again at Anita, smiling, then back at her hands. Her husband pulls at the gold fringe edging the pillow between his wife and him. He crosses and re-crosses his legs.

Gober says to Anita, “You want a coke?”

“No. No, thanks, Gober.”

“I get cokes, Riggie.” His father rises. “You stay. Talk. I get cokes.”

“Do you want one, Nita?” “Sure, I guess so.”

“Okay, Papa,” Gober says, as his father disappears into the small closet kitchen. “Not warm ones, Papa. I put some on ice last night.”

Gober’s mother reaches next to her on the end table for a small glass bowl filled with a combination of peanuts, raisins, and Rice Krispies.

“Desea usted — ”
She bends across, offering them to Anita.

“No. I — don’t think so.”

“Desea usted
— ” Mrs. Gonzalves repeats, continuing to hold the glass bowl out, grinning and nodding her head.

“No, mama, no!” Gober says.

“Muy bueno,”
she persists.

Gober snaps at her, “Mama,
demasiado!
No!”

Mrs. Gonzalves withdraws her hand with a hurt look on her countenance. She stares down at the mixture, picks some up in her hand, raises it to her mouth, and then, suddenly, changes her mind. She drops what is in her hand back into the bowl, and replaces it on the end table. As she was doing this, Anita had mumbled, “But,
gracias,
anyway,” but Gober’s mother chose not to hear. Her feelings are hurt.

“That’s Mama’s trouble,” Gober tells Anita, while his mother sulks on the couch. “She’s touchy. She takes everything personal. She offers you something and you don’t want it, you don’t want her. That’s the way she thinks.”

“If I’d known that, I would have taken some. I’m stupid!”

“Why should you have! You didn’t want any.” “But I could have — ”

“Naw. What’s the point? Mama’s got to grow up someday!”

Mrs. Gonzalves is humming now; very quietly sitting and humming to herself. She traces the word Mom in the pillow and does not look across at her son and the girl. When Gober’s father returns, holding three cold coke bottles by the neck, handing one to Gober, one to Anita Manzi, and keeping one for himself, Mrs. Gonzalves stares at him. Her eyes are at first peeved, then offended, then bitter.

“Qué pasa?”
she demands. With her thumb she hits his bottle of coke.

“You forgot Mama, Papa. Here, Mama, take mine.” Gober gets up and walks over to give it to her.”

“No,” she says, and in Spanish she complains, “I want mine. Not yours. Where’s mine?”

“There were only three on ice,” her husband tells her.

“And you three are the three? And I can go fly away. Because you three are the three. And all I do is cook around here and clean up. I am a maid, and you three are the family. You three are the three. Ah? You three!”

Gober says, “Look, Mama, look. I didn’t know Papa would be home for sure. I didn’t know last night it would rain today. I put three on. One for me. One for Nita. One for you.”

“Ah, so! We are the three,” she complains, “and your papa don’t count! Is that it!”

“You just want a fight,” her husband says.

“Yah, you got a fight coming too!” she shouts back.

Anita Manzi sits gripping and ungripping her bottle of coke, trying vainly to pretend preoccupation as Gober’s mother and father quarrel.

“Mama, Papa,” Gober pleads in Spanish. “We have a guest.”

“Entertain her,” his mother says. “You asked her here. You want to marry her, you might as well know to entertain her by yourself. You don’t need your mother and father for that, Riggie. Go on, then!”

“Mama, I’m not marrying her. I’m only asking you to meet her.”

“She’s skinny and she would not cook you things I would, but go on and entertain. Have a good time. You’ll never do it any younger, Riggie. Just forget all about your papa and me.”

“Your mama wants a fight with me,” Mr. Gonzalves says, “so she can make up in bed.”

Gober sighs, and looks helplessly at Anita. “Why do they pick today to get their tempers going?” he says. “I’m sorry, Nita.”

“The rain maybe did it, Gober.” “I don’t know.”

“You see the empty bed you have tonight!” Mrs. Gonzalves threatens her husband.

“What’s it about, Gober? Is it me?”

“It’s about nothing at all. It never is. It’s exercise for them.”

“Good! Then I have room to move for a change!” Mr. Gonzalves taunts. “You can sleep in the hall.”

Anita raises the bottle and drinks some of the coke. Gober does not touch his. The arguing continues. Anita whispers, “Should I go, Gober? I think I should go.”

“We’re not here two minutes.”

“I feel uncomfortable, as though I shouldn’t be here, Gober. I could come back another time.”

Mrs. Gonzalves is yelling, “Riggie come home and bring a girl friend, all ready you got someone to cook for you and pick up after your dirtiness and you tell me I should sleep in the hall, and you live off your daughter-in-law, is that your big game? You play some big games. Yah! Yah!”

“Tonight you be begging me turn over!” his father yells. “You fight so you can love better. You love better when you make up, ah?”

“Yah, yah, you cheese! You’re an old man. You are too old for me!”

Anita rises. “Really, Gober. I think I’d rather go. I’ll come back again.” “I’ll go with you.”

“All right. I — don’t have to work until six.” “I’ll go with you.”

Gober takes her hand as they walk across to the chair where their coats lie. He is holding her coat for her when he hears his mother say, “Riggie!”

“Mama?” he answers glumly.

“What happens here? Hah? You bring your girl friend home and you don’t stay five minutes. Where you going?”

“Come back,” his father says. “I got some card tricks to show your girl.”

“Riggie, does she dislike us for some reason?”

“No, Mama,” he says, “She likes you. She just can’t stay long.”

“Tell her to come back, Riggie. I’ll show her my recipes. She can’t make
rulino,
I bet you.”

Anita smiles at the Gonzalveses, who stand before the sofa now looking as bewildered and as expectant as they did when she arrived with their son.

“Gracias,”
she says.
“Gracias.”

“Igualmente,”
Mrs. Ganzalves answers, bowing a little, and smiling benignly,
“Igualmente.”

“Okay,” Mr. Gonzalves waves. “No get wet in rain!”

“Buenos dias!” Anita says.

“Buenos dias!”

“Buenos dias!”

Behind them, Gober and Anita shut the door. Without talking, they go down the stairs, through the corridor, and into the entranceway. It is still pouring out. The rain whips the streets.

Gober sighs. “I guess we better wait for a while,” he says in a sour tone.

“Don’t feel bad, Gober.”

“Mama and Papa are funny. They fight but in a way they are making up to each other all through it.”

“I like them, Gober.”

“I like them too. They are so kiddish, though. Sometimes I feel like the parents of them instead of the other way around.”

“Gober? I have something to ask
you
now. Can you come to meet my brother Bob?”

“Sure.”

“Friday night?”

“Friday! Why that night?”

“It’s Bob’s night off.”

“I got something planned.”

“Bob and his fiancée want us to come over to Bob’s.” “Not Friday, Nita.”

“Gober — I — I’d sort of told him we would.”

“No,” Gober answers adamantly. “It’ll have to be another time. Friday is out!”

“Has it something to do with your gang, Gober?”

“I said it’s out!”

“Then it has!”

“Friday night is out and that’s that!”

“Gober, if your gang’s so important — ”

“What do you want from me!” Gober shouts at her. “I said I had something on Friday. You want me to change my whole life around for you! Move out of here! Quit the gang! Just change everything for someone I haven’t even laid!” The last word slipped out. Gober gets red. He looks at her and in her eyes sees the word’s hurt like a slap. Tears start stinging her eyes.

“You haven’t even kissed me either, Gober,” she says, “or do I get laid
before
I get kissed?”

“Either way you want it,” Gober answers gruffly, and then, trembling, he takes her in his arms for the first time.

• • •

Outside the doctor’s office, the rain lashes the window panes. The thin young girl clutches a plastic pocketbook and sits tensely in the chair, beside the doctor’s desk.

“What more do you want me to say?” the doctor asks.

“I don’t know. Isn’t there something — ”

“An abortion? No. As far as I’m concerned, anyway.”

“But you know of someone? Some other doctor?”

The doctor shakes his head. “You probably couldn’t afford it if I did. No, my dear, your best bet is to tell the man with whom you were intimate. You say you love him. Tell him. Marry him.”

“No, no, no. Can’t. You don’t understand.”

“I understand one thing. You’re ten weeks pregnant. I don’t know why some women think they’re particularly noble or heroic not to mention their pregnancy to a man. Even today, a married woman was in, three months pregnant and in shaky condition. Doesn’t want her husband to know. It beats me!” The doctor stands. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I can’t do anything more, except perhaps to caution you. Abortions cost anywhere from four hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on the doctor — if it
is
a doctor. And you can’t be sure of that.
Under
that price, you take an even greater chance. Either way you endanger your health, if not your life, and you’re committing a criminal act. I’m sorry to be so stern, but don’t do anything foolish.”

“Before I go, could I use your phone?”

“Surely.”

The thin young girl walks to the window sill where the telephone directories are stacked. She pulls out the city directory and pushes the pages past Q to R. Then she runs a finger down the long column to Roan, Danl. 322W122.

Ar E
L
P
ALACIO
, Tea buys a ticket.

“Hay un asiento reservado para esta noche?”
he asks the girl in the box office of the dumpy little movie house.

“A reserved seat, ah?” she says back to him in Spanish. “Go sit in the back. I have to see. What’s your name?”

“Tell her Perrez,” he answers.”

“Sit in the back. If there is a reserved seat an usher will let you know.”

“There better be one.”

“You can’t predict about that,” the girl tells him.

The theater is crowded because of the rain. The picture has been shown for two weeks, a Spanish-speaking romance; almost everyone there has seen it once, twice, three times before. It is great sport. Tea walks through the shabby lobby to the inside. There is a bad smell, made up of a hundred awful odors; and noise — laughter and catcalling, shushing, and hissing, and myriad conversations. A white-haired old man shuffles up to Tea as he stands in the back. The old man wears a ragged black suit, a striped T-shirt, and a band around his arm with “Acomodador” written across it. In his hand he carries a flashlight.

“Asiento?”
he asks Tea.

Tea says,
“Asiento reservado!”

“Ah,
si?”
The old man shrugs. He points to the last seat in the last row and tells Tea, “Sit there until we know.”

Beside Tea in the row, a child sleeps. Next to her a young girl necks with a sailor. His hand is moving under her blouse. She moans and giggles and moans and giggles. It makes him bolder. His fingers slide to her skirt. The fat woman beside them chomps popcorn and watches them. They are better than the movie. On the screen a man in a mambo band winks at a lady in a tight-fitting evening dress. She raises her eyebrow. Someone in the audience bellows,
“Cuidado!”
Tea holds his arm up to see the time on his watch. Ten o’clock. Tomorrow is Thursday. Cold turkey day. His arm knocks the child’s shoulder and she wakes, pulls at the girl’s blouse next to her. “Mama?”

“Go back to sleep,” the girl says. She grabs the sailor’s cap from his lap and puts it on the child’s head. “See, you are a sailor, sleeping on a big boat!” The child does not buy this. She wants to go home. “Shut up or I’ll call a policeman,” her mother warns. The sailor bites the mother’s ear.

“Asiento reservado?”
the old usher’s voice whispers in Tea’s ear.
“Si!”

“Follow me,” he says to Tea.

They go up a worn staircase, into a small room behind the balcony. There are two or three chairs there, and a closed door leading into another room.

“Wait here,” the usher commands. “She will see you pronto.”

“Si, gracias,”
Tea tells him; and the usher closes the door behind him, leaving Tea alone in the room. He does not have to wait long. The door to the second room opens and a plump woman in her mid-thirties greets Tea.

“Hello, Perrez. Long time no see,” she laughs. Her height is below medium; her legs are fat and wide. She wears a beige kimono. Her hair is badly hennaed, and the part in the middle is black.

“Hello, Hazel,” Tea says, following her into the second room. A convertible bed is pulled down, unmade. There are playing cards spread on it, a couple of crumpled Kleenexes, a nail buffer, a half-eaten candy bar. Beside the bed on a glass table is a bottle of gin, and a plate filled with pickles and sandwich crusts. A phonograph whines out a scratchy blues song.

Hazel flops on the bed. Tea sits in the chair next to it.

“Business good?” he asks.

“Can’t complain.”

Hazel has some nice rackets. She runs El Palacio for a smart money man who knows some other uses for a movie house besides showing movies. People who ask for reserved seats can arrange for a game, play a number, score, buy a girl who’s game, or some “sneak” for one who’s not, read the latest news, or report it — depending on their fancies — and accomplish sundry other illicit tasks. Besides these, Hazel occasionally makes the scene as “the unknown blonde woman” found in the husband’s hotel room when the wife and the private detective walk in. For this service, Hazel charges New York’s incompatibly married couples fifty dollars, which is cheap enough in a state where divorce is dependent upon one-half of the couple being caught in a compromising situation.

“I need to score, Hazel,” Tea says. “I’m all hung up.”

“It’s true what they say about Latin lovers, Perrez,” she answers, reaching over to put the phonograph needle back at the start of the record. “They’re smooth. They walk into a lady’s bedroom, and they know just the right words of passion to turn on.” She stretches her feet out on the bed, kicks off a pair of soiled white mules. Her body bulges under the kimono.

“I’m not much of a cat on the flesh kick,” he says. “I live to boot!”

“You’re a tough little man, aren’t you, sonny?” She smiles at him, pats the bed with a pudgy hand. “Come on. Sit over here. I like tough little men. Like to see their eyes when they get sugared-up.”

Tea goes over and sits on the bed. “Something happened to Ace,” he says. “Know anything about it?”

She reaches back for the gin bottle, swigs, brushes off some that runs down her chin, and sets it back. “Oooh, sonny, you’re such a serious little Latin. Look at your eyes.” Her own eyes slide up and down Tea’s lithe body, and her mouth makes a lopsided grin.

“How’d you ever get the name Hot Hazel, anyway?” Tea says in mock dismay.

She reaches forward and pinches his chin. Her kimono falls open and Tea sees her breasts heaving like melons, the nipples awake. She watches his face and laughs.

“It’s hot,” she says. “Why do you wear your jacket?”

“I look good in it.”

“It’s hot for a leather jacket like that, King Perrez.” She runs a finger along his name on the jacket. It slips down to his thigh. She says, “If it’d stopped raining, I would have gone out tonight, down to the soda fountain where all the little tough boys make the lights go on and the bells ring in the pinballs. But it didn’t stop. So Hazel had to stay in. No little tough boys. No pretty lights.”

Tea knows what she means.

He never would have come to El Palacio if it were not the only place left him. Everywhere else he has tried. Hazel is why the usher at El Palacio is as old as Moses. But even a younger man is safer than a boy. Hazel’s kick is kids.

Tea tries earnestly, “I’ve got to score, Hazel. I’ve got one cap home between me and a cold turkey, and half a dozen hopheads eating their knuckles right now waiting for me.”

“I think that leather jacket’s what makes you so tough. Using all those tough expressions. You’re just a little boy, aren’t you?”

She places her hand on him.

“Hazel, I’m in
trouble!
Don’t you see!”

She lets her kimono fall all the way open. The whole soft round fatness of her churns. “So am I,” she croons. “Don’t
you
see?”

• • •

Beppo Ventura pounds his stomach until a belch roars up out of him. Dinner is over in the de Jarro flat.

In the kitchen, the occupants sit around listening to the rain. The Ricos occupy the army cot, upon which they have spread crumpled dollar bills and silver, and they count it out. It is rent night. They owe Mrs. de Jarro $50 a week, room and board.

Jesus Ventura squats on the floor by the potbelly stove, drinking and watching his youngest niece as she clears the table and stacks the dishes in the sink. Her sister, Jo, primps before a cracked mirror hanging on the back of the door, and Mrs. de Jarro, Carlos Ventura and Eyes sit around the table. In the back room, eating her meal slowly on the mattress, is Grandmother Ventura.

“You going out, Dom?” Dolores asks Eyes as she passes by him.

“Yeah, I got to see Flash. He’s lending me a clean shirt for tomorrow night.” Eyes emphasizes the
clean shirt
and glares at his mother.

She says, “I don’t wash shirts for dirty pigs to put on!”

“You be back early, Dom?”

“It’s late now, Lorry.”

“You’re outa luck tonight, Dolores,” Uncle Jesus laughs.

Mrs. de Jarro says, “Tonight I’m going to take a walk over to the police station. I’m just going to go by that way. See what they say about someone on probation start out at ten o’clock for a night. That’s what I’m going to do tonight.”

“Go ahead,” Eyes says. “Get your head soaked!”

“I shoulda drowned you the day you came outa me! No wonder your father took to his heels. Nick took one look at your ugly puss and it was too much for him!”

Eyes gets up. “I’m blowing. I ain’t got the rest of my life to sit and hear you sound off because you jiggled when you was drunk one night fifteen years back!”

Jesus Ventura says, “Is that that noise I hear coming from the back bedroom nights, ah? Jigglin’?”

“What you saying, Jes?” Carlos Ventura asks.

“Nothing.”

“I catch them at it, I kill them!”

Dolores Ventura’s face is crimson. She turns her back on the room, and runs the water in the sink, full force.

“Kill him!” Mrs. de Jarro points a finger at her son. “He’s the one with the ideas. He’s the smart one, he is! When I take my walk by the police station tonight, we’ll see how smart he is.”

Carlos Ventura repeats, “I’ll kill them! I swear to that! If I ever hear that!”

Jo Ventura, his older daughter, struts across the room to him. She is his favorite; a shapely, long-legged, black-haired girl in her late teens. She runs her hand through her father’s hair. “You make a fuss when there’s nothing to fuss over, Pa. You listen to Uncle Jes, you believe next the stars fall in the ocean.”

Carlos laughs and pulls her down to his lap. “Ah! Ah! Ah!” he says, “You’re the one like your mother. A beauty who could charm vipers. You’re the honey-tongued one.”

In the background, the Ricos count, “… quince, diez y seis, diez y siete, diez y …”

• • •

Later, while Eyes is in the bedroom stuffing cardboard into the soles of his worn-down everyday shoes, preparing to go out, Dolores comes in and sits on the mattress. Grandmother Ventura leans against the wall still chewing her food, swallowing it, raising the fork again, and staring ahead of her blankly. She understands no English.

“Dom?”

“Yeah, honey?”

“I wish I could go with you.”

“It’s raining, f’Chrissake. And it’s ten-thirty. Since when?” He looks at her with a puzzled expression. “Uncle Jesus bugging you, is that it? Talking that way.”

“I’m just so sick of it all. This place. This kind of life. This talk. It’s like everyone here hates everyone else, and just stays together to see how much worse they can make it for the others. I don’t know. I’m just sick, Dom.”

“You’re really bugged, aren’t you, baby? It’s the rain.”

“Remember how you felt when you found out that song business was a racket the other day?”

“Sure. It hit me below the waist. But I don’t let it get me, Lorry.”

“I feel that way about everything — everything — today.”

Eyes stands up and pushes his feet into the shoes, squeezing them around, forcing the cardboard to fit. “I don’t let it get me,” he says, “for the simple reason it don’t do no good. I don’t let it get me, and I don’t give up. Like, tomorrow night I go to that musical, I maybe learn the angles I need to know. You don’t know.”

“You’re really looking forward to it, aren’t you, Dom?”

“Sure. I wish you was going. Flash is lending me the works. Suit, shirt, tie — the works!”

Eyes takes his King jacket from the soot-covered, rain-splashed window sill. He says very seriously, “Lorry?”

“Yes?”

“You remember that part in my song went like this — ” He stands stiffly in the posture he always assumes when he sings:

“Remember, Lorry?” he says. “Yes, Dom.”

“Well — Dan tells me he thinks the words are too vague. I mean, he says people aren’t gonna know what it means to get wasted. You know?”

“Yes, Dom. You told me about it.”

“Yeah. So, I says to Dan,” Eyes grins at Lorry, who smiles back faintly, “I says, who knows what ko-ko-mo means. You know? Ko-ko-mo I love you so. You know how Perry Como’s always coming on with that. I says, who’s going to know what that means?”

Grandmother Ventura bangs her spoon on the plate. “Take it away!” she cries in Spanish.

“All right, Nannie, for heaven’s sake. You just this second finished.”

“Dan had to admit I had a point,” Eyes says.

“Come home before midnight, Dom? Hmmm?”

“Lorry, Lorry — you’re the only one that really wants me around, aren’t you?” Eyes touches his fingers to her cheek gently.

“Take it away!” Grandma Ventura squeals again.

“Whenever it rains in here,” Babe Limon says, “the whole place stinks of oilcloth!”

She and Marie Lorenzi sit in the striped canvas deck chairs in the Limon flat, chewing on popcorn and watching television, but they are growing restless now and bored. They began their viewing at 7:30; they have swallowed down three bottles apiece of No-Cal, and four bags of popcorn. The ashtrays overflow with butts, and they have both given their finger and toe nails four coats of red polish.

“I think I seen your old lady twice in my life,” Marie says to Babe.

“Staying home gives her ants in her pants. Mom’s a chick’s gotta be on the go.”

“Where’s she go?”

“Works all day. Then goes downstairs to the bar, over to my aunt’s, around. My aunt and her’s real close. Born one right after the other.”

“Twins?”

“Naw. Just one right after the other. That’s why my dad cut out. He was mad the way she never stayed home. Always over to my aunt’s. He says to Mom, ‘So why didn’t you marry Flora, you spend so much time there!’ “

“You get along with her?”

“Mom? Sure. I do what I want. Last Christmas she gets this set for the place. She can’t stand TV herself. Can’t sit still without getting up and running around unless she’s gossiping. That’s why she likes my aunt. They never run out of gossip. They can’t think of any that happened recent, they gossip about things happened ten years back. This set wasn’t a used set, either.”