Luciano Guerriero - Chicago Noir

Sometimes, on her days off, he’d show up in the early evening and they’d watch a movie and make dinner together. Destiny realized she’d never seen him anywhere outside of the club or her apartment, a place she kept warm, ready, but barred to all other visitors out of respect for Beto. Except for that last time...

At some point, of course, Virginia knew, the other queens knew, everyone knew. But it was so startling that even as time passed and all the little clues accumulated to create a rather convincing circumstantial case, doubt nagged even the most vociferous gossips; insecurity, and perhaps fear too, because Beto Chavez wasn’t anyone to trifle with, dogged even the most convinced.

Could it be real?

If things hadn’t changed so dramatically, if everything hadn’t ended so abruptly, if her world hadn’t collapsed so utterly, Destiny wondered how long they could have gone on like that... Back then she would have said forever, she would have wanted forever, would have believed in it.

But now, even as she sometimes touched the loosened shoelace on her own homemade altar to Saint Dimas, she knew that everything Zoe Pino would write about her — the pageants, the titles, the movie, her sanctified role in the most prestigious drag show in all of Chicago, the ridiculously profitable website (Quique, now her manager, had come up with it), the sensation she caused on returning to Havana for a millennium appearance captured by CNN (for 2001, not 2000, because the Cubans did not agree with the rest of the world on the new century’s commencement) — none of it would have happened if she and Beto had continued their journey together.

Catastrophe happened on an early and placid Tuesday evening in late summer. Destiny’s windows were open and she heard Beto’s voice downstairs greeting the barber, who’d stepped outside to take in the wild palette of sunset descending west on 18th Street. She leaned out eagerly, imagining herself like Juliet for a moment, ready to hear promises from her Romeo, when she suddenly caught sight of a pickup truck inching its way down the street, a couple of black-garbed men, not cowboys but more like ninjas, leaning over the cab, the stout barrels of their automatics slowly taking aim.

Destiny’s mouth opened. In her head, she screamed, as loud and precise as a missile. But the only sound heard for blocks and blocks was the explosive rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire as Beto Chavez danced like a marionette on the cracked Pilsen sidewalk, his arms reaching out to the barber who fell beneath him. Within seconds, the pickup truck was an eastbound blur, a cloud of smoke and black powder slowly settling in its wake.

Destiny raced downstairs, her throat still incapable of noise. She pulled Beto off the barber, onto his bloodied back, only to find the bullets had made tripe of his chest and belly. Her hands went to keep him together, to keep him whole. The barber’s wife was now on the ground beside him, the light disappearing as people gathered, leaning in. Someone tried to pull Destiny off Beto but she cuffed him so hard he fell back and no one else dared get near her.

“Go...” Beto whispered. “Get out of here...”

She tried to protest but the words were still struggling to exit, impossible to form. She noticed his chain with the Saint Dimas cross on the ground and picked it up, letting the light glint off of it so he could see she’d saved it.

He licked his lips. “See you in paradise... okay?”

Zoe Pino cocked an eyebrow in Destiny’s direction. “C’mon, he didn’t really say that.”

“I swear.”

Destiny lit another Romeo y Julieta. She’d lost count. The bitch had gotten her to tell the whole damn story and now she didn’t believe her?

“‘I’ll see you in paradise’? I mean, that’s...”

“I know, I know,” Destiny interrupted. “How do you think it made me feel? And how do you think it makes me feel now to know I can never tell that story because nobody will ever fucking believe me?”

“No, no, I believe you,” Zoe insisted. “It’s just, well, unbelievable. I mean, it’s... Look... you know what I’m trying to say.”

Destiny nodded.

“So that’s when you left Pilsen?”

“I had to.”

“What do you mean you had to?”

“I had to! Before the ambulance had even arrived, another car drove up, this one full of Mexican cowboys with their pistols drawn. One guy, a little skinny guy, his eyes all mean, he looked right at me and pointed his gun at Beto and just shot him point blank. I felt like Jackie Kennedy, gathering bits of his brains into my lap. I was screaming — finally! — and crying, and he made this motion with the pistol for me to go, and I did. I just ran and ran, scattering pieces of Beto all the way to Quique’s apartment and stayed holed up there, terrified and traumatized, until the day of Beto’s funeral.”

When she and Quique finally made it back to her apartment, they found the place had been tossed. All of her records and books were on the floor, clothes torn from the bar in the closet, the mattress gutted. The refrigerator leaked a foul smell from a puddle underneath.

Destiny just sobbed and sobbed.

“My god... what did they want? Do you know what they wanted? Did Beto keep anything here?” Quique asked, his voice shaky.

She shook her head.

“Are you sure?”

Beto hadn’t even kept a change of socks there. Destiny realized all she had of him now and forever was the Saint Dimas cross from around his neck.

Later, at Mariano’s church before the family arrived for funeral services, the priest, his stone face wet, opened the casket so she could have a last look. Destiny, wearing a men’s suit for the first time in her life, looked down at her lover. Beto was in pieces, like Saint Dimas himself, with a forearm in Jerusalem and a tibula in Istanbul.

A noise from the front of the church revealed Beto’s family, a mournful Virginia leading the widow and a gaggle of children. Sternfaced men, no doubt armed, flanked them on both sides. Mariano immediately snapped shut the casket and Destiny stepped back, disappearing into the shadows.

The only other thing she remembered from that day was Mariano’s prayer: Saint Dimas, from great sinner and criminal, a moment of mercy turned you into a great Saint. Remember me, poor sinner like you, and maybe greater sinner than you...

Zoe parked her boxy Nissan in front of a Western-wear store on 26th Street with a garish yellow awning and snakeskin belts draping one of the windows. Across the street was La Caverna, as anonymous as ever.

“You ready?” she asked.

Destiny nodded and pulled the car door open. She could smell the carnitas from the corner.

“You’ve really never come back?”

“Never,” Destiny said.

“See, I just don’t get that, because you weren’t in danger. Unless, of course, somebody thought you knew something...?”

Destiny sprinted ahead, sick of Zoe’s baiting. Upon seeing Destiny, the same cross-eyed bouncer from years before grinned and called her by her old name: “La Mora! Doña Mora!” There was a flurry of activity then, with men stepping up to bow and kiss her hand and queens popping out of nowhere, screeching and jumping up and down. Zoe struggled to keep Destiny in sight, though she was easily the tallest person there, her head high and steady.

Inside La Caverna, Destiny saw the same Mexican man, now white-haired, serving drinks. But the place was different: cleaner, painted. There were color posters of all the new queens framed on the wall. She was stunned to see her own face staring back at her from above the bar, in the center of a sort of Wall of Fame of famous queens who’d started at La Caverna.

Destiny clutched her heart, unexpectedly moved. Then she saw that Virginia was still there too, sitting on a stool behind the bar, taking money. The woman, now an old crone, flinched when she saw Destiny. The crowd parted like the Red Sea.