Jerome Charyn - Bronx Noir

At the trial she was all tears and rages. Refusing to be consoled, pushing away the aunts who came to court with her, then folding into their arms. Proclaiming how much she loved Roberto from the stand, to the news crews outside. Dressed all in black, but with her hair uncovered and freshly cut, her picture on one tabloid or another for almost a week. Through it all, Luis had to admit that she was a fine actress, even if it was his life at stake.

And he had done fine, just as she had predicted. When the trial began, he was still weak from his long stay in the hospital, groggy from the painkillers. Learning to live with one kidney, with the knowledge that she could have done such a thing to him. All he had been able to do was make weak protests against the questions when it was his turn on the stand — admitting to the assistant district attorney that he loved her, claiming that he had never had anything against Roberto, claiming it was all in self-defense. Afraid to confess that they had planned anything together, knowing that it wouldn’t help him — knowing that they wouldn’t believe him anyway.

She had been all fire and ice on the stand, talking about how she had spurned his come-ons in the courtyard. A dozen other men from the building confirmed it, their pride unable to let them admit that anyone had succeeded where they had failed. She told the jury that she had never believed he would do such a thing, not a man like that — and they had believed her.

It hadn’t surprised him in the least when the thirty-year sentence came down, and he was transported on the prison bus for the long ride upstate. He had worried only about explaining it all to Mama, though he had no words for that, no words even to explain it to himself. What he regretted most of all was that he would never see Mercedes again.

Now he was moving steadily through the rooms of her apartment — his old apartment — everything both stranger and more familiar than ever. To his surprise, it all looked much as he remembered it, as if this were the only part of the building that hadn’t been refurbished. There was still the chipped, dingy, inch-thick paint on the doors, and the woodwork. The windows more streaked and dirty than ever, as if they had barely been cleaned at all in the whole time he had been away.

But stranger than any of that was how the rooms had been stripped bare. No clothes, no furniture, no TV in the living room, no curtains on the windows. Almost nothing at all, as if the apartment were still empty and no one lived here. He began to feel more and more apprehensive as he walked through the rooms of his former life — almost as shaky as he had been that day, going into the basement. He held the gun out in front of him, wondering when he was going to touch off the trap. Wondering — much worse — if she could have just moved. Then he turned into the kitchen, where the smell of corruption was worst, and there she was.

“Luis. You’re back.”

“Mercedes.”

She was sitting at the table where he and Mama used to eat their meals, a shriveled, white-haired woman behind a sea of pill bottles. Wrapped up tightly in an ugly pink robe that was much too large for her. Propping herself up at the table by her elbows, her head balanced on both hands.

“Mercedes.”

He said her name again, more as a question than anything else. At first he could not believe it was her, this husk of a woman. Her cheeks sallow and caved in on themselves, the rest of her a pile of bones and papery flesh. But her eyes, her eyes were just the same as ever, large and dark and fierce.

“Yes, Luis, it’s me,” she said calmly, her voice hoarse but threaded with sarcasm. “How ever did you find me?”

He brought up the gun in his hand and moved across the kitchen toward her, shouting, “Never you mind!”

She had left the neighborhood right after the trial. Nobody from the building, nobody at all knew where she had gone, or what had happened to her. Prison had been just as bad as he thought it would be. Years had gone by in a fog, while he just tried to survive.

Then the computers had come in. He had signed up to learn them, volunteered for a job in online marketing. He had used his access to search for her everywhere, even in Mexico, but there was still nothing — less than nothing — as if she had never existed in the first place.

It was only a couple years before, long after he knew he should have stopped looking, that he had come up with his first trace of her. A credit card number in her real name. He could scarcely believe that it had been there all along and he had missed it. Soon after that, her whole history had opened up to him — everywhere she had been, the different names she had used; all the jobs she’d had over the past thirty years. He had read it like a paperback novel from the prison library. Following the jobs she had taken — waitressing, running a cash register, answering phones — but never once anything that he could find that included acting. Tracing the places she had lived, weaving across the country to Los Angeles, then down to Mexico City, Miami, the Island — then back home. To the very same address, the very same building where they had lived. Beyond that, even. To his own apartment.

He had thought that over for days, after he discovered it. Lying in his cell at night, thinking about her living there, wondering what it meant. He sat up and stared at the picture of her from her driver’s license, the one he had printed out surreptitiously when the supervisor had gone to take a leak. The color was blurry, but from what he could see she looked remarkably similar, as if she had barely aged at all. Her hair the same pitch-black color, her face grave and beautiful and nearly unlined, staring back out at the camera. So much as it was—

Yet when he got to look at the mirror in the Port Authority bathroom, he saw an old man before him. His hair not even gray but white, an old man’s mustache doing nothing to rejuvenate his face, his slouching jowls, and his unmistakable prison pallor. He had seen it on old men before, back in the neighborhood, wondering how long they had been away. Now he was one of them, his life gone. But he could at least do this .

He had picked up the .38 in the back of the bodega his cellmate had told him about. Strangely pleased when the man handed it to him wrapped in a paper bag, just as she had given him Roberto’s gun thirty years ago. He had rolled out the bullets, checked the firing mechanism in the back lot behind the store, then, satisfied, had paid the man and taken the 4 train on up to 161st Street. Where he had stood again on the platform, listening to the crowd in the stadium.

“Don’ be angry,” she said, unfazed by his charge across the room. Her voice a long wheeze that broke down into a cough.

“You’re sick,” he said, lowering the gun again and staring at the array of pills.

“Ah, amado , you always were obvious,” she sighed, and he straightened.

“You know what I came back for,” he said coldly, though even now he had to fight back the urge to help her somehow.

“I imagined you would,” she said, and he thought he heard a hint of triumph within that dim voice, something that infuriated him all over again.

“So that’s why you moved in here. Hoping to surprise me.”

She said nothing, but made a small, neutral gesture with one hand.

“Why did you do it?” he asked despite himself, hating the pleading sound in his voice. “Why did you do it? I thought you loved me.”

“I needed the money,” she wheezed. “And I didn’t need you.”

“What about all your big plans?” The anger growing in him again, baffled and enraged that she had so little to say for herself. When he had first glimpsed her, in her decrepit state, he had expected her to do the pleading. Now he was conscious that he could hear the sound of the ballgame through the windows, much louder than he remembered it — the rising beat of the organ, the noise of the crowd building in that steady, dangerous way.