Jerome Charyn - Bronx Noir

She had finished two cigarettes and just lit the third when she felt that vibrating rumble in the pit of her tummy. She could sense him already by instinct. The Jaguar crouched at the end of the block, headlights off. Iris stood up, walked to the curb. She stepped out onto the cobblestone street, face-to-face and staring back. The two of them not moving, the two of them still.

The first step was the deepest, with a crack of shard resounding forever slow-motion hip-move whirls of smoke on the outer edges of the frame and all that blue lighting. Every step closer took too long. At any moment she thought the roar would come, those headlights snapping on, all pounce. She spotted the flash of a match, the orange tip of his cigarette glow. The outline of those young, stern features. Closer, now closer, she standing golden in the glare of a parked UPS truck’s lights.

His eyes were not on her. They stared ahead, squinting through cigarette smoke, thin lips moving as if he were memorizing some poem. She put her hands on the door as if needing a handrail, felt the Jaguar throb tremor her insides. She leaned in to look. His cigarette hand was trembling something fierce. Her voice failed right then. She cleared her throat of cigarette, of car freshener, of some stale rubber smell.

“Hey, honey,” she said, troubled. “You need some company?” Her head tilted to one side, hair cascading down, her smile a little scared like a plea. He turned to look at her slow, machine-like, the muzzle mounted on a swiveling turret. Now she could finally see the eyes, how blank dark nothing they were.

“Get away from my car,” he snarled. The next instant his hand hit the stick shift. The car thundered and buckled. Iris had barely gotten her hands off the door before it lurched with tire shriek, racing off down the street without her.

Hunts Point

Yolanda Morales was on her knees on Farragut Street. There was the distant sound of strays. There was a cricket. There was no life on the street. Whoever worked in the area was long gone. The ladies of the night never worked so far from the main flow of traffic on Bruckner or Hunts Point Avenue. To her left was the fencing that kept people out of the transfer station where the borough of the Bronx separated out household garbage from recyclables. To her right was a warehouse loading area. In front of her stood a man with a gun. The muzzle was pressed to her forehead.

She smiled. It was a bloody-tooth-missing smile. One of her eyes had a cut running deep through the eyebrow above it. If she lived, it would swell shut.

If.

She raised her right hand — not to grab the gun, just to add emphasis to what she had to say if she could say it. The hand was ugly, but she didn’t feel the pain of it anymore — could not have told anyone without looking which fingers were broken, or that a splinter of bone from her ring finger had erupted through the skin. Those weren’t her only broken bones and that wasn’t her only broken skin.

“Listen, Mister Man. You do what you gotta do. I done my duty, and I’m ready to meet the Lord.”

The man she spoke to pressed the barrel of the gun harder against her forehead. She pressed back. If this were a battle of wills only, it would be a dead draw.

Tucked between a Spanish food joint and what is sometimes a Spanish Pentecostal storefront church and sometimes just a storefront, boarded over, just off the Bruckner Expressway, there’s a nudie bar. Girls dance topless, bottomless too if you ask right, and all kinds of deals get made in back rooms or even in the front rooms. Once in a great while they’re raided. More often they’re ticketed, but the place is never shut down. Possibly some of the police in the area are on the take. Possibly no one cares enough to do anything permanent — arresting a couple dozen people just to hear “ No hablo Ingles ” all night is never high on any agenda. Besides, no one cares if the Puerto Ricans or the Dominicans or the Guatemalans or whatever the flavor this month, no one cares if they all open each others’ throats with razor blades. Half of them are here illegally. For the other half, their citizenship is the only legal thing about them.

For a set of the regulars, one the favorite dancers in the summer of ’91 was a small girl named Jasmine. She had cinnamon skin and dark brown eyes, and a crooked smile that people thought she must have practiced to make her more seductive. Her breasts were tiny compared to all of the other girls, her hips and ass unpronounced, and when she was asked to show it all, she was hairless like a girl who hadn’t fully entered puberty yet. She hadn’t. There was no fake ID involved until the guy who owned the placed made one up for her. In real life, she was just thirteen. The look in her eyes, the drugs in her veins, the dying ember of her heart made her soul far older. She was paid in smack, a place to stay, and all she could eat and drink. Small as she was, drugged as she was, the food bill was negligible. The drugs were cheap; the managers even shot her up. The place to stay was a mattress, and when she was high, high as a kite or higher, men paid well to have her any way they wanted as long as there were no marks.

That was July. By August she was wasted, fresh girls came in, even a blond one, and Jasmine was out on the street.

The streets in the Hunts Point area were tough. The strip club was like a high school where they prepare you for the rigors of real life. The streets were the real life. Jasmine wandered over toward Spofford. Toward the juvie correctional facility, toward the water of the East River, and toward the transfer station. Hunts Point was famous for its meat market — truckloads of beef and pork were sold wholesale in the early morning hours to supermarkets and grocery stores and delis. The neighborhood was also famous for its other meat market, where girls showed themselves and sold themselves, little by little, until nothing was left and they died. A baseball jacket and G-string was the normal uniform here, with a pair of stilettos and a Yankees cap as accessories.

Jasmine wore sneakers, same ones she had left home in a half-dozen weeks earlier. She had on a Mets jacket and cutoff shorts, cut off so high there was really hardly any point to them at all. Her hair was in a ponytail, held by a rubberband. In one pocket she had a cigarette lighter for whatever she could get that needed lighting up, melting down, or smoking. In the other pocket she had a butterfly knife. Young but not entirely stupid.

One night, so late it was almost morning, Jasmine was negotiating with a gypsy cab driver. He was Indian or Pakistani or Arab or… well, she didn’t care what. He mentioned having drugs, and Jasmine was listening. Then the smile on his face dropped off like a rock sinks in water and he grabbed for her. He tried to pull her into the cab through the driver’s side window. He had her by the head and she had both hands on the door frame to keep from being pulled in. If she could reach for her knife, she’d stab him, she thought fleetingly. But if she let go for a second, he’d win. She’d be in the car with him, and she knew as a fact heartless and cold as a stone that she would never get out of that car alive. Suddenly, the man let go. He was shouting something. There was a funny sound and someone else was shouting too as Jasmine fell sitting onto the asphalt. It took her a minute to focus.

“You all right?”

There was a woman standing over her. Jasmine nodded. She couldn’t speak.

“Here. Have some.” The woman offered Jasmine a bottle and she grabbed it greedily. It was three gulps before Jasmine figured out the bottle had only water in it. She handed it back. They were silent together for a moment.