Jerome Charyn - Bronx Noir

“It’s all goin’,” Mercedes said one night, while he watched in amazement as apartment buildings he had passed his whole life — buildings that had seemed as large and eternal as mountain ranges — went up in flames. “We should go with it.”

“What about Roberto?” he had asked, but she just made a disdainful shrug, and turned back to her beer.

Roberto didn’t care where she went in the early evening. That was when he did his other business — dealing horse, coke, bennies, guns; whatever he could get his hands on, out of his basement kingdom. Even so, they always made sure to sit up in the last row, and they would touch each other only when something big was going on and the rest of the stadium had turned its full attention to the field. He would lose track of the game, but he was always attuned to the rise and fall of the cheers, breaking like the waves on Jones Beach.

“He’s a pig,” she told him. “He hurts me, you know. When I say somethin’ he don’ like, or just when he’s drunk.” She had leaned her back toward him, lifting her soft pink shirt to show him the bruises Roberto put on that exquisite skin. Luis felt as if he were on fire when he saw those marks on her, he wanted to go out of the stadium right then and there and find Roberto in his basement.

“Every night, I wanna die before I go back to that bruto ,” she told him.

But she did go back. They both did. Nights when the Yankees were out of town were the worst. Then all he could do was stand by the kitchen window, looking to catch some glimpse of her going by on her walk through the courtyard, while his mama cooked dinner and asked him what was so fascinating down there. He would watch her moving through the trash to Roberto, the same as always — arms folded over her breasts, head down. Only now she would look up at Luis where he stood in the window, even though anyone might see her.

He walked slowly up the hill of 158 thStreet with his cheap suit and his cheap suitcase and his little package in the brown paper bag. He turned onto Gerard Avenue and then he was there, in front of the old building. Like everything else, it was disconcerting in its familiarity. It seemed so much the same, only cleaner, the bricks scrubbed, most of the graffiti gone. Even the high red, locked iron gate that had surrounded the front entrance was gone, completely vanished. Easier and easier .

He lowered the suitcase to the ground and stood there for a moment. Feeling the package in his inside suit pocket. Looking up at the floor he knew she was on — his old floor. Mercedes — this close now. He picked up the suitcase and went up the front walk, grabbing the door as a pair of laughing kids came dashing out. He stepped in, marveling at how clean and new everything looked here too. The walls were painted a bright new color, the layers of grime scrubbed off the floor so that he could make out the original mosaic work in the marble again; the outlines of a big fish about to eat a little fish, who was about to eat a fish that was littler still.

He almost walked past the elevator, from the force of a habit suspended thirty years ago. But then he noticed how the door gleamed, all the original silver-and-gold art deco work shining brightly. He pulled tentatively on the door, got inside, and pushed a button. To his astonishment, the elevator started to rise.

He couldn’t stand to see her walking through the trash in the courtyard, a woman like that. Not that the stadium was much better. They had just spent two years rebuilding it, but it was an ugly place; the grime already ingrained in the rough concrete floors, old hot dog wrappers and mustard packets and peanut shells blowing up around their ankles, and spilled coke sticking to their sneakers. He wished he could take her someplace better, someplace worthy of her.

“It’s no better anyplace aroun’ here ,” she told him. “No wonder they want to burn it down.”

As the season went on, he was more and more preoccupied with thinking about what she wanted, what they could do. He didn’t follow the games much, though the Yankees were supposed to have a great team. Instead, they behaved like a bunch of soap opera queens. The players fought with the manager, the manager fought with the owner. Everybody fought with everybody, it was in all the papers. A crazy season.

Then, as if they had finally decided to get serious, the team came back to the stadium in August and began to win game after game. The crowds grew bigger, the games quicker and more intense. Suddenly, it seemed as if everything had become much more urgent. Mercedes had started to talk about going away somewhere. She told him that she thought she could become an actress on television down in Mexico, even if she was Puerto Rican; maybe even go to Los Angeles and get on American TV.

She had never talked like this before, and Luis had the uneasy feeling that there might be layers of her that he had never previously suspected — that she might be much smarter than he would ever be, able to effortlessly conceal certain desires from him. But he didn’t really care. Sitting next to her there in the upper deck, just looking at her beautiful face, the gentle slope of her breasts, her bare legs. Touching her, absorbing her scent, sitting next to him game after game, he felt as if he were falling again, enveloped by the wave. There was nothing about her that didn’t surprise him, didn’t excite him down the whole length of his body.

“But how do we do that?” He had bit. “How do we go away?”

“We need money.”

“ Sí .”

“ He has money. We could take it.”

“He’d come after us for sure then.”

“Yes, he would,” she said, then looked him in the eye, her gaze as level and meaningful as that first evening he had touched her in the hall. “If he could.”

All that August, he pretended he didn’t get her meaning. The Yankees kept winning and the fires kept burning, more and more of them. But he knew she was right, that it was all going. Every week, he walked past another store closed on the Grand Concourse, even the bodegas boarded up. The streets were filling with broken glass and old tire treads that nobody bothered to clean up; the fire engines screaming past him, night and day. In the evening, after his job, he would climb the five flights of stairs past the same broken elevator. Making his way down the hallway with its same bags of garbage and its roaches; the dingy hospital-green paint peeling off the walls, a single bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. There was nothing more for them there.

But to kill him—

“You really wanna leave him alive, be lookin’ over our shoulders for him the rest of our life?” she asked him, straight out, in the last week of August, during a game where the Yankees were battering Minnesota.

“No.”

“All right then.”

“All right,” he said slowly, and when he said it he had that marvelous falling sensation again.

Yet he still agonized over how to do it. Sometimes late at night he could hear Roberto working down there, even up on the fifth floor. When he wasn’t dealing, he was always doing something vaguely sinister with his saws in a corner of the basement — cutting up something, making something; the shrill sound of metal cutting into metal echoing all the way up to Luis’s sweltering bedroom when he was trying to sleep. It kept the whole building up, but nobody dared to complain.

He knew it wasn’t just talk what they said about Roberto. Luis had seen him chase some junkie who had cheated him clear across the courtyard, tackling him and pummeling his face with his .38 until it was a bloody mess. The junkie had laid down there for half a day, before he was finally able to drag himself away, with nobody so much as daring to call the police.