Jerome Charyn - Bronx Noir

The soap operas put a lot of stupid ideas into Iris. She thought about the rest of her life, and how much she didn’t want to end up like her mother. It was starting to hit her, those nights when Angie sat there blind-eyed in float-daze, drool hanging drip — she was the only support her mother had. She was trapped. It was going to be tricks and tricks and tricks. The wear-and-tear was starting to show, those circles under her eyes, for starters, that rough feel to her skin that face creams and makeup would not hide.

“And in my old age,” she whispered to Pacheco while her mother slept, “I’ll have to have a daughter just to take care of me.” Tears tracked mascara down her cheeks. Pacheco could only add that he had no more cushy jobs for her. Those “ jaitones ” only want girls who look like virgins.

The week she went back to street duty, the first hooker body appeared strewn over empty fish crates behind the Hunts Point market.

“I want a boyfriend,” she told a Jose, a young trick she shared a joint with, after she heard about the second body, found seven blocks from her stoop. “Someone to take care of me.” She looked at Jose, but he wasn’t buying, just renting. There seemed nothing to hold her in her world, no handles no grips and no brakes to slow the speed.

“I’m saying I want all of you to keep your eyes peeled,” Pacheco told all the girls one Friday night, after the third hooker turned up barely three blocks away. “The guy is close. You stick together, an’ if you see anybody actin’ weird, you get me. Okay?”

The first time Iris saw the Jaguar, she told Pacheco, but he didn’t seem too interested. She noticed the Jaguar coming by at least two or three times a week. It would usually crawl over quietly, not far from her stoop. The windshield was tinted slightly. Iris could make out a young face behind the wheel, maybe a mustache. Not too sure if it was real or just soap opera. He would puff on a cigarette sitting like a sphinx behind the smoke. She could imagine those eyes, deep-set and pinned to her. The Jag was red slick and so heavy with mystical that she never dared go over to it.

“Maybe he’s that nut runnin’ around,” Pacheco told her when she spotted it again one night.

The Jaguar hummed just down the block, headlights off. Iris was glad he saw it too now, so maybe he wouldn’t think she was imagining it.

Pacheco grinned. “He’s lookin at’chu an’ thinkin how good you’ll look as pork chops!”

“Thass not funny,” Iris said, miffed at thinking of her mystery man as a murderer. Pacheco wasn’t the least bit entranced.

“He’s a cop or a nut,” he said on his way upstairs to dose her mother. “Stay away from him.”

Iris did. She was content to leave the dream alone. She loved the sensation of being watched. Many times she was the only thing on the stoop, only her, nobody else. One night she was hanging there with Yolanda, who had just dyed her hair red. Yolanda had no imagination, no sense of mystery. When Iris told her about the car as it sat up the block breathing soft, Yolanda walked right over to it, swinging her hips like a dare. Iris froze to the spot. She watched Yolanda lean down to the window, her yellowed birdlike face steaming as she turned and walked back to the stoop. The Jaguar growled and roared past.

“What did you do?” Iris asked, pissed off and worried that maybe the car would never return.

“I axed him if he wanted some company,” Yolanda said, shaking crunchy red from her face. “An’ you know what he say? He say, ‘Get away from my car.’ The bastid.”

For the next couple of days all Iris could do was worry about the Jaguar not coming back. If she heard a certain car roar she would run to check, sometimes doing rush jobs for fear of missing the car while she was with some trick. It was a relief when she spotted the Jaguar again, resting behind a group of parked cars. There was that mysterious dark shadow, the swirl of cigarette, or maybe she was imagining him behind dark glass. She would become aware of her every pore, every movement of her body like she was an actress on a stage working to always present her best side. There might be a radio playing — she would dance voluptuous teasing like a stripper in a cage. Whenever she heard that Jaguar growl its goodbye, something inside her would sink, as if her ride was leaving without her.

She could see his sharply featured face, the deep-set eyes, sweet long lips pursed around the cigarette. A trace of mustache, but baby face, never shaved. He was young, an ex — drug dealer tired of the daily kill. He had his money now. He didn’t need all this. He wanted to take just one thing with him on his ride out.

“I tell you, he’s a nut. Don’t think about it,” Pacheco scolded when he heard her wonder why the Jaguar hadn’t turned up for three days. “He gonna carve you up.”

Yolanda, sitting beside Iris, made an ugly grimace. “You such a fuckhead, Pacheco, man. You a pimp or what? Do ya job! Go out there an’ scare the fuck off.”

“Yeah, right,” Pacheco laughed. Iris puffed on her cigarette so shaky. “Like I’m gonna walk up to a Jaguar and scare the guy off. Like, that bastid could own this block an’ shit.”

“Drug dealer?” Iris pulled the pinky out of her mouth.

“Damn straight drug dealer. Or a psycho cop. An’ they both carry guns, right?” He laughed as he went upstairs.

“Jaguar” by Iris Robles

He made like he was a trick, when finally she went over to him. She liked his smell, something all spice and tree bark. She didn’t kiss tricks but she tasted his long smooth lips to kiss forever. Stayed in the motel for three days. “I don’t have to be anyplace,” he said, biting the crotch off her pantyhose. After that, she moved into his duplex on Long Island, where her mother would join them after she got through the detox program.

“Ma, you think tricks fall in love sometimes?”

They were watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Angie was in bed, pipe slipping from her hand. A misty white vapor floated.

“Uhhh,” she said, her eyes round as saucers.

“I mean, say a john you did was really rich and you did him so good. You think he might fall in love and keep you?”

Angie’s round blank eyes flowed into the distance.

Iris closed her own eyes. Iris by candlelight, by midnight, in the mirror staring so. Waiting for the ugliness to come to her too. Bruises, welts, lines, sallow hollow-eyed streetsucked. Like so many of her friends. Like her mother. Like the street with its cracks and tears and chunks of gravel where the trucks hit. She couldn’t just sit and wait anymore.

She suited up. The minidress with the glittery pantyhose and high heels was just too putona . She wanted classier, something subtle gray, ladylike. She let her hair tumble loose. Not too much makeup, a more professional corporate look torn from a magazine ad. The buzz on the street all of a sudden was that Iris Robles was making her move. Mr. Romero at the meat market brought her the side of ham personally and walked her to the door, purely taken by how she looked this day.

“Now this,” he said, “is what I call a change for the better. You look so responsible, reliable, efficient, with just the right touch of feminine to keep you looking sexy but not slutty. A real fine lady is what I see. Yessir, a fine young lady. You tell your mother I threw in a little more ham for her. Will you be gone long into the real world?”

“I’ll be gone for a lifetime,” she said.

Her mother just thought she had a special date. Pacheco thought she was applying for a job, and gnawed a toothpick nervously. He was relieved when she sat on the stoop and thought he could maybe make a few calls, now that she was somehow looking so good. The way she pulled out a long thin cigarette and lit it reminded him of some ’40s movie, some Rita Hayworth, some Lauren Bacall. And he ran to get to his phone.