Читать книгу Give It To Me - Ana Castillo - Страница 7

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Mucho traffic and a stampede of plebes down below. Above all, Mulch. Mulch was what Palma Piedras called the wide and astonishingly ordinary middle class at the start of the twenty-first century. Horns blasting, cops’ whistles blowing, and an ambulance stuck and siren ignored. She watched them hurry against changing traffic lights in their khaki shorts, flip-flops or sports shoes, and T-shirts or cheap polos. Big, fat men dressed like five-year-olds in baseball caps. Americans were the worst dressers in the world. She was in her hometown.

A year in Colombia.

A letter from Pepito brought her back to Chicago. He was out of prison by the time she got the letter that said he was getting out and could she meet him? A decade locked up. Ten years, nineteen days, he wrote. Before he did what he did to get himself locked up about five minutes after he did it—the gun was still warm—she hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. During all that time she had stayed in Buenos Aires, Madrid, El De Efe, and Medellín, Colombia briefly—her ex’s native tierra, her brief husband. The woman, who’d readily admit she did life better on her own, was attracted to places where Spanish was spoken because it was her other strong language. (In Italy she understood everyone but couldn’t put a sentence together.)

Palma changed out of shorts she’d slipped into on that humid day and tried on a summer dress from the mall back in New Mexico. She was broke but didn’t want to look broke so she hooked on her best gold hoop earrings and a gold bangle. Accessorizing her mall dress made her look more broke. She changed twice before she was back in the plaid Bermudas purchased at the Sam’s Club where Palma was buying a twenty-pound bag of dog food for her forty-pound mutt back home. Home was now Albuquerque. She had returned to Chicago, among other reasons, to meet Pepito.

Pepito was her lil cous’, raised by their grandmother. (Little was an expression.) She and him, together. Abuela told her way long ago that Palma’s mother, the grandmother’s daughter, had been born under a bad star. That bad star led her to follow a worse guy. Not Palma’s father, the old woman assured her, although she never said who he might have been. One day Palma came to the conclusion that her grandmother hadn’t withheld her father’s true identity out of spite for her mother who dumped the girl on her after she was born, but that her abuela truly had not known who he was.

Abuela preferred her own one and only son and treated him like a baby, still cutting meat for him at the table, useless piece of shit that he was, and that never changed even after one day while in the seventh grade Palma came home from school and there was a toddler. A duffle bag the girl didn’t recognize was by the door. Pepito is going to stay with us a while, Palma, Abuela said. He’s taking your room. My room? The girl said. Where am I going to sleep? With me in my bed, Abuela said. Palma loved Abuela but she found the idea of sleeping with a woman who left her teeth in a glass by the side of the bed a very unattractive proposition.

Then again, her lame uncle Jim-bo (or Jim-Boy or Jimmy or Yimmy, depending on who was talking about him or to him) had started making stops at the bedroom doorway with no door late at night when he’d come home smelling like a tavern urinal. The girl had sensed the soused louse lingering and then move on. Even at twelve, and during the unenlightened days in the country’s health education history when such things like sex were not considered appropriate to discuss with kids, she knew about sexish things.

One day Giovanni, handsome as the devil’s own and dumb as dental floss, and she were in the coat closet while the other kids were at recess. He had his fingers way up there like tiny miners lost in the catacombs when they realized the teacher had stayed at her desk during recess. They peeked out and saw her trying to readjust her tights, one leg had been noticeably twisted around the ankle. The teacher had two rods for ankles but football-player calves. Mrs. Preston had taken the hose off at her chair and was now pulling them up straight, the dress up near the bra line. It made Palma and Giovanni hot, and when he stuck his fingers up the girl again she thought he busted her hymen since he’d gone up like an electric screw gun.

Giovanni had been held back because first he was from Italy and didn’t speak English very well, and second, because, in any case, it wasn’t a language problem why he did so badly in school. By the time they reached eighth grade Giovanni was turning sixteen that summer, and he dropped out. He went to work at his family’s deli business on Harlem Avenue. Palma often thought of Giovanni during those long dry spells when she had to rely on her own fingers. She’d recall Giovanni reaching up there and them both thinking of Mrs. Preston’s pillow ass with stretch marks and flesh dark as a roasted chestnut with no panties as she gave her tights a clever snap around the flap-over waist.

Now, getting ready for Palma’s reunion with Pepito, she slipped on Michael Kors loafers that matched the bag (near-Alta-Mulch-level birthday gifts from a woman left behind) and the bi (buy?) everything woman expelled herself from the hotel room. She didn’t know what it was about hotel rooms, but they had the genuine power to suck you in and make you want to stay in them until you died. You became an instant porn addict, threw cochon to the wind and ordered room service late for an overpriced burger that you’d never have ordered except that you suddenly felt like committing suicide and therefore, it was not a problem (another thought you didn’t have until you were stuck in that room with a Gideons Bible and nothing to do). You masturbated like a fourteen-year-old boy with a bad case of acne and no social life or later hit the minibar, got loaded, and started texting people who didn’t want to hear from you.

The one thing you wouldn’t do was pick anyone up. You’d seen enough Dateline mysteries. (There was that pretty Russian blond who got into a hotel elevator with a big dude. Cyclops huge. It was caught on camera. Later, you saw him casually leaving the building pulling a large suitcase on wheels. The victim was in that suitcase folded up like a rag doll. Incredibly, she survived.) As for God’s hand in the matters of Palma’s life, she was dealt the revengeful, wrathful Lord of the Old Testament. If he even ever bothered with a gentile, he had no reason to be any more compassionate with her religion-free existence than he was to Job, Adam, or Moses, who he was constantly testing and they were his favorites.

Palma Piedras had survived thus far. She’d survived Abuela’s house and tío Jim-Bo and Pepito’s whininess during his childhood (spoiled from her grandmother’s preferring anything with a penis. That’s why he got Palma’s room). Pepito was a terrible two when he came to their household. The kid got into everything, drank toilet water with the cat. The tomcat, good for killing rats, taught the new household member a few survival tricks of his own. It was as ugly as a boil on your ass, but Pepito was all the opposite. Whose looks he had inherited she didn’t know because Palma never met his mother. She suspected he was Jim-Bo’s kid and that one of the skanks he went out with on Saturday nights brought Pepito over to Abuela’s, once the baby could walk and had stopped sucking titty. He didn’t look like Jim-Bo; he looked like the Angel Gabriel.

When he was seventeen Pepito got a girl in the neighborhood pregnant or so the girl claimed when she came over with her mother and father to force Pepito to do the right thing. Now you see what you did? Abuela said, probably imagining the horrors of having the girl move in, drop a kid, and then leave it there for her to raise at eighty-something. She slapped Pepito. He was taller than the shrunken grandma, of course. Taller than Jim-Bo. A boxer, in fact. Only Abuela could touch him and get away with it. Pepito decided the right thing was to leave home.

Palma was done with her first marriage and, by then, living on her own. It took her eight years to get her bachelor’s degree. During the day she worked as a docent at the Art Institute. Tour guides normally had their degrees in fine arts. Palma Piedras, lone satellite orbiting in space, had her ways.

Now Pepito was out and they decided to meet after all those years. She concluded he wouldn’t care that she was forty-plus (to his thirty-two) because he was like a brother to her. Palma had sent him money now and then. Who else thought of him? A pining ex-girlfriend looking up old boyfriends when finalizing a divorce or drunk with her girls when one would say, Whatever happened to that melt-in-your-mouth caramel, what was his name? Pepito, she’d say. It came right to her lips as if he were waiting for the return of his tongue. She looked him up or asked around and got his address. They’d started writing and she’d send money. Palma figured there were ex-girlfriends because there was one true fact, besides his nature, the Mexican killer instinct, and that was his being a lover. Or so she imagined.

One time when she was living on her own, and Pepito was all of fourteen, he cut school and had the nerve to go to her flat. She was home with a cold that day, studying in bed. He bought a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and a small jar of Vicks VapoRub. She thought he was el Niño Fidencio with a buzz cut. Palma felt like the loneliest woman in the world when she was sick like that. He left them on the kitchen table and followed her to the broom-closet-size bedroom where the sick woman climbed back into bed. He looked at her hard, smiling. Fourteen and already cocky. A man with secrets. Fucking, no doubt, not jacking off like a choir boy.

She was all snot and puffy eyed. Her long hair was pulled up in a bun with stray hairs stuck to her sweaty neck. His big cousin stared back at him. Are you in a gang? She asked him. What? Me? Naw, man. I ain’t stupid. She wanted him to fuck her but all she said was, That’s good. You’re a good kid. Abuela would kill you, if you did join a gang. Jim-Bo . . . Aw, he said, waving a hand, meaning he didn’t give a flying fig about their uncle. He called him tío, like she did, when he was little, but as soon as he passed Jim-Bo in height he referred to him by name—if he felt like being polite. He was right. If he had been Jim-Bo’s son, as the primitos were both led to believe while Abuela never came out and said it, why hadn’t Jim-Bo stepped up to the plate? Too late by the time Pepito was in her micro-pad, three stories up in the big apartment building she lived in then. Palma remembered Giovanni and his Magic Flute fingers and looked at her little cousin’s. They were nothing like the boy’s in the classroom coatroom. Pepito’s were powerful. He was already boxing. Maybe he did it to keep himself out of a gang. Maybe he was lying to her and had already gotten into one.

Well, I best be going, prima, he said. Grin. Secrets. My girl’s waiting downstairs for me, he said, hand on the front doorknob. You have a girl? Palma asked. Yeah, of course, I got a girl, man, he said. It was about twenty-two degrees out that day. She wrapped a blanket over her shoulders, went to the window, and watched him exit downstairs. A waif in a heavy coat, mittens, ski cap, and long, black hair waited out there. He took her hand and they trudged off in the snow. The girl slipped on a patch of ice and he quickly grabbed hold and steadied her.

Palma didn’t see Pepito for a long time after he left Abuela’s. Or at least, she couldn’t remember. Abuela caught her up on him. He was living for a while with a girl a little older than himself who had two little kids. She came over one time and complained that he had not come home all night. Another time, she came by, crying because he had left her. What do you want me to do to him? Abuela said to the girlfriend each time. He’s a grown man, now. He don’t listen to nobody, anyway. The third time the girlfriend came by, before she could state her complaint Abuela stopped her, didn’t even invite her in. You want to be with a man like that then be woman enough to accept how he treats you, she said. But I love him, the girlfriend said. Abuela closed the door in her face. Pero, lo quiero, Abuela mimicked in Spanish. Bah, Abuela said.

Palma Piedras never went to her grandmother with complaints about the men in her life. She never went to the viejita during the good times, either. The granddaughter knew well enough that the old woman would cast her pessimist spell on her new love and kill it. Abuela didn’t trust men. She loved only Jim-Bo. She didn’t trust women, either. When Palma was fifteen, her equivalent of the quinceañera, the fifteen-year-old princess party given to most girls, was a short speech. Remember, if you get yourself pregnant and have to drop out of school, you’d better not come to me. I’m not raising any more hüerquillos. (Punks. She and Pepito.) A few months after Palma’s fifteenth birthday, when she got pregnant that winter, her best friend’s mother took her on three bus rides out of the city to a private doctor’s office in Lincolnwood. They worried that public-funded clinics might require her guardian’s consent. The lady fronted the three hundred smackaroos the private doctor charged, a fortune for the girl.

She stayed in bed for a few days complaining of the cramps, which often had her bedridden back then, so her abuela may have not suspected anything. If she did, she didn’t say. After that Palma’s boyfriend and she had anal sex, their idea of contraception. Her boyfriend dropped out of school, joined the Army, and she soon forgot him and his pulsating dick that sought every orifice of her body. It was easy to forget him because she soon heard he had another girlfriend all that time and she was pregnant with his kid. The dick was killed when home on furlough before the baby was born. A drive-by, they said.

With all due respect, he wouldn’t have kept her attention long; by then, what she wanted was to be the next Picasso. Since the girl learned to hold a crayon, she made art. On the white, bloodied butcher paper Abuela discarded, brown carton flaps, and backsides of junk mail. Whatever the girl found to color on became her media. Abuela wasn’t big on buying supplies for Palma’s “fooling around.” In college, svelte and with a passion for dressing up—with or without much of a wardrobe—she designed clothes. They stayed mostly on paper. Art was an expensive enterprise. Somewhere along the line Palma took a turn and instead became an admirer of fine arts and fashion, a coveting aficionado as a tour guide and translator.

She also (and maybe for reasons unrelated to the progenitor of her eliminated embryo) began to see herself as the heroine of the tragedy that was her life. Palma pretended they’d had a great love and that he died a war hero. She never told this story to anyone, just to herself until she started believing it. Palma never took drugs and couldn’t hold her liquor. It was all a good thing because the girl’s rich imagination had her deluded enough. She liked watercolors, and painted a picture of the dog the Army boyfriend gave her for Christmas as a puppy. Then one day the dog disappeared and she framed the painting and hung it in the living room as an homage. The girl liked her dog well enough but she loved him when he was gone. At least that was the impression she gave anyone who’d ask about the picture, Whose dog was that? (Or, What’s that?) Palma would say, It’s Snowball. It doesn’t look like Snowball, the person would say. Not long after that Palma quit painting.

It was hard to believe, but when Palma painted Snowball, Pepito was six years old. His first grade teacher was in love with him. His “big cousin” had taught him to read at four, and the teacher thought he was a prodigy. Palma wanted Abuela to put him in a good school or at least try to get him in a gifted class. Abuela la Evangélica spent a lot of time in her church. She didn’t have patience for such nonsense. Anyway, Pepito was not a genius except at seduction. He fooled his teachers but he never fooled his prima. He could get passed on to the next grade if the teacher was a female. And one year, a male teacher. Usually male teachers and he did not get along. It was a mental macho standoff to the end of the school year. Palma was long gone out of Abuela’s home when all that was going on. The old woman kept her up on things.

Another chance encounter came to mind. It was the summer before Pepito went to prison. She was coming up the steps to Abuela’s and he was rushing out. Hey! He said, and gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Hey, she said. He made her nervous. Palma already sensed danger in him, the danger that perhaps came with a sociopath in the making. His body was solid. If she were a porn star she would have picked him to co-star with her without hesitation. That one with the shaved chest and the thick indio hair. Take off your clothes. Let’s see what you got. Oh yeah. He’ll do. Palma Piedras wasn’t a porn star, and this was long before porn, considered the epitome of seedy, became a household word, before poles were set up in bedrooms to spark up Mulch marriages and Mulch fiancées were allowing strippers to give them lap dances at the request of future husbands to turn them on with girl-on-girl power.

She was going on thirty, single, and overall not feeling that eye-catching on her grandmother’s front porch that day, except as the proud bearer of a Bachelor’s degree. She was going to show it to Abuela that day. (Abuela was not impressed, given the fact that Palma had no job, and what good was education, much less education for a woman, if not to help her provide for her family.)

Hey, she said again to Pepito and held out the envelope mailed to her with the degree. I just finished college. A Bachelor’s in Fine Arts. Even as she said it she knew it didn’t mean jack shit to him. He didn’t give a damn about finishing high school but he flashed his Pepsodent smile, Oh yeah? Congratulations, Prima, he said, and took off. She watched him cross the street to his vehicle. It was new. How had he managed to get a brand new Land Rover? He turned and saw her staring. Palma’s face went red. He threw his gym bag in the back seat and waved before getting into his ride. The man with secrets. He knew she had been watching his ass.

Pepito’s prima was outside now, teeming with Mulch as the streets were throughout Chicago’s summers, wondering if he had ever watched her ass. There wasn’t much of one to watch. She was still the thin-bone woman much like the one he saw on the porch that day over a decade earlier. Now Palma had the finest of crow’s feet. Her boobs were not as well positioned as they had been then. She’d had a hysterectomy the year before. Instead of standing on the corner where they agreed to meet, she went across the street. Palma wanted the first-glimpse advantage.

She didn’t even see Pepito until his arms were around her and his mouth on her own. She was holding a Starbucks cup to keep her skinny bod steady, and it nearly went flying when he grabbed hold of her. Palma felt nothing from the kiss that was meant to sweep her off her feet and part with all her sense and money, she was sure. You knew from a kiss and Palma suspected he had the same reaction but more than anything, he acted nervous about seeing her.

They walked along the avenue holding hands. Actually, he gripped hers, like Palma might run off, which in fact did cross her mind. She was embarrassed to be walking with a thug. He could have been in an orange jumpsuit wearing his prison numbers, she felt it was that obvious. The strut. The posturing. Want a piece of this? each step spoke. And she, in her plaid, synthetic Bermudas from Sam’s and puny arms swinging in the early summer air, like a pet on a leash. Once upon a time she wanted to be an artist. Short of that, a fashion designer, except that it was all about connections. Either way, she never would have pictured herself walking along the Magnificent Mile of Michigan Avenue when she was past forty in sweatshop clothes with a not-so-much-too-cool but too-old-for-school former gangbanger.

A street musician playing sax (two bucks in his open case on the sidewalk to give passersby a clue) hit the first notes of “Let’s Get It On” when they sat on a bench nearby. Are you kidding me? Palma gestured to the guy. He stopped, nodded, dried off the mouthpiece, and switched to Aretha. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” Pepito and she each wanted the other and each didn’t want to be wanted. That day Pepito was taking her down. She was taking him down, too. He looked out of breath. It’s too much, he said. What? She asked. Seeing you, again. Being here. Pepito vulnerable? That could work for me, Palma thought. (Women stuck on stupid had those thoughts all the time, didn’t they? Maybe he’ll see how much he needs me, they told themselves.)

Pepito got hold of himself, stood up, and took her hand. Dead woman walking, Palma thought, as she saw they were headed in the direction of her hotel. Hey, how ‘bout we get something to eat? She asked. He wasn’t hungry, he said, although by the size of the man he could obviously pack it in. Their inevitable getting together, when it finally came down to it, frightened the living scampi out of her. They stopped at a place with tables outside. All he ordered was coffee. Sign of a cheap man. And not so bright, since she was treating. She ordered an egg and toast. Palma hated eggs. (Who came up with the idea of eating an animal’s preborn?)

You could always order a bloody mary or a mimosa at nine a.m. and not sound off the AA alarm, but right out of the gate she asked for a double shot of tequila. The egg was a ruse. Pepito ate up everything on the plate, so no waste there. Palma swigged down the tequila like it was her last wish. She didn’t want Pepito to know she was seeing dos of him so she put her Tom Ford shades back on. Let’s go to your hotel, he said again. After Palma paid the bill they got up, and he gave his older cousin a French kiss. She bit his bottom lip hard. He ran an index finger over it. Okay, he said. I can bite, too. Her Day-of-the-Dead skeleton body let him take her hand and lead Palma rattling in the direction of the hotel. She wanted banter. Smooches. A prayer. They marched in silence.

In the elevator he predictably came toward her. The mirrors and unpardonable lighting in the elevator . . . Color me freaked out, she thought, seeing her two dots for eyes in the reflection as they hit fourteen. (Really thirteen but hotels skipped that number for the sake of the superstitious.) She took his baseball-mitt hand, and led him to room 1413.

Palma left her room more or less made up and crime safe by putting away her jewelry just in case she didn’t come back alone. (What did she know about Pepito anymore?) They ended up not fucking. He came out of the bathroom fully dressed and her, now in leopard-print Victoria’s Secret crap.

I know somebody who owes me forty grand, he said. (But of course, he did.) Maybe you can contact him for me. (Wait for it . . . ) I’ll give you half. He laughed to himself a little, Okay, not half. But I’ll give you ten. Ten what? Ten knocks upside her head? Get the fuck out of here, all of which Palma did not say, but thought. She was getting the Bermudas back on. Forget it. I’ll find him, he said, obviously aware of his error in judgment. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you, anyway, prima, he said, meaning a share out of the fantasy $40K. Yeah, don’t do me no favors, she said, and pointed with her chin to the door. He could hardly get a word out when Palma let it close in his face.