Sarah Cortez - Houston Noir

Aldine

Sergeant Dan Correal opened the door and heard the delicious hush, the whir of the air-conditioning, and the dog snoring gently on the couch. He locked up his holster in the safe, put in the Glock 22, which he’d secretly named Lady Lisa, after his wife. Just taking off the holster made his shoulders and neck ache as if he’d lifted weights for hours, like he used to, but he had hardly moved much from the seat of his cruiser for his entire shift.

At the end of his shift, he’d had to make a domestic disturbance call on Bissonnet, and he already felt old and grizzled as he climbed the apartment steps to the third floor. His radio and its perpetual buzz, the sun’s hot-white glare still strong in the fall, gave him a headache that pulsed into his ears.

He’d knocked on the apartment door, which pushed it open. A young woman, Charlie, stood in a transparent black shift dress. She was a regular, both sad and disturbingly attractive to Dan with her shifty, bottomless gaze, full lips, dark eyes. “He’s already gone,” she said, pushing back her hair into a sleepy pile, a mound of soft cleavage peeking through the V in her dress. Dan shifted his eyes quickly to the window, the spoons, the collection of flip-flops and heels that had been kicked off by the door. A pair of brown work boots, the laces undone in long snakes.

She’d met his gaze, made a small, teasing smile. “Oh, he left those, I guess.” She’d sighed and walked to the kitchen. He did his check, his to-do, and left.

Now, without the weight of the pistol and its responsibility, he let himself think about the black lace trimming Charlie’s breasts. She looked just like his daughter’s friend Chickie, and this thought both plagued and haunted Dan every time he saw her on his calls. Chickie’s little doppelgänger, he’d thought as he saw her striding toward him in a spaghetti-strap dress, the weight of her breasts, the curve of her ass.

Dan closed the bathroom door behind him. He hadn’t changed out of his uniform, wanted to feel the cold dangle of his handcuffs a little. Chickie, in Charlie’s black dress, pulling up the thin hem, pulling down her panties. He remembered the massage parlor, as he did during these moments — that hole-in-the-wall where his father took him for his first time. Those red lips, the mix of humiliation and the sheer pleasure of an orgasm with a live girl, the warm flesh beneath his hands, its softness and its salty taste. Chickie and her wet lips.

“Dad, what the fuck?” The door pushed against him abruptly, the knob jamming into his back as he climaxed.

He looked in the mirror and saw his daughter and Chickie, covering her face. “Oh my god.”

He turned quickly, realizing they’d seen enough in the mirror. He shut the door, locked it, pushed his back against it, holding up his pants. Maybe they’d seen only a bit, he reasoned, zipping up and clearing his throat. He heard them rush down the hall to his daughter’s room.

She was old enough to understand her father was a man, he figured. He looked in the mirror and washed his hands. They felt dirty and he washed them a second time, scrubbing under his nails the way his mom had taught him. He stayed in the bathroom until he heard the girls leave. He wasn’t sure what he did during that time, waiting, except stare at his hands. What broke through his shock was the hard sound his wife made coming home, the thud of her purse on the kitchen counter, all the hurried noise she made after entering the front door. Only then did he dry his hands and go to change his clothes.

The sky was about to crack open and release everything held in its dark clouds, but Chickie Rodriguez didn’t care. She kept swimming, ignoring the shade creeping from the clouds, cooling off the water. She’d paid her two dollars — money she’d saved by skipping lunch — and wasn’t going to waste it.

She sank again into the water, held her breath, let it blow a big balloon in her chest, beneath her breasts. A hot-air pump, made of anger.

At home, her mother waited to be fed, bathed, comforted like a child. But Chickie would no longer be the one to do it now. Thinking of her mother’s stench, Chickie held her breath as she spun upside down, feeling her hair cast wet fingers from her head, floating her legs into a perfect V. She held it as long as she could, picturing her mother’s crooked smile that was no longer a smile.

It’s not so bad , she thought as she left the pool in her worn bikini bottom and the anti-drug campaign T-shirt she’d had since second grade. For instance, she could be that lady in the studded bathing suit with her little brats, clearly trapped in a life of watching them grow and shit and scream. Diamond ring glinting as she moved to grab one child or another, to keep them from scratching or biting each other. Golden handcuffs, lady.

Chickie never cried. She didn’t cry at her father’s funeral, and she didn’t cry when the two police officers showed up at their filthy apartment, full of empty vodka bottles and pills, to take her mother away.

One of the officers was a woman who acted overly compassionate and warm, and to Chickie, it seemed feigned and slightly arrogant. This disgusted her. For some reason, it mixed in her mind with the disgust of finding Renee’s dad in the bathroom pleasuring himself the day before.

“It’s going to be okay,” the officer said, patting her shoulder. The condescension made bile gather in Chickie’s throat. The fuck it is.

Chickie walked to the room she shared with her mother and packed up her clothes: a cotton shirt with the logo of a Mexican restaurant they’d loved, a pair of faded, too-loose jeans, a busted bra, an extra pair of underwear that used to be gray. She looked at her mother’s things, especially the ceramic elephant sitting on the windowsill. Chickie had always admired the figurine, which was probably a gift from one of her mother’s boyfriends. It symbolized the precious, hateful, and painfully loving relationship she had with her mother. She would run her fingers over its lines and indentations after putting her mother to sleep beside her. We’ll be okay , she would say to herself during those times. But she didn’t mean it the way the police said it.

They were waiting. She left the elephant on the sill and left the room for the last time.

Farah Peña is always that other woman. She imagines that, on some other planet, she walks around in a nightgown, fresh from a bath, living the life she should’ve lived. That other Farah leans against the brick of her house, exhaling sweet breath, holding a wineglass to her mouth, tasting something foreign and glistening. Her mouth is not a horrid thing — just a mouth. Her breasts and torso held lightly in a gown for sleeping, and just that — a body. She listens to the crickets’ and frogs’ music. She goes back into her own house, disappears behind a thick layer of curtains fat with dreams, with hours and hours stitched inside them. Oh, how that other Farah sleeps.

She hasn’t heard the sound of frogs and crickets in years. It’s annoying and sad — the wrong background noise for a concrete lot with pitiful fists of grass and weeds growing from split cracks. Farah stubs out her cigarette on the bottom of one of the black stilettos — the ones that don’t slide against the spa floor, that give off a solid crunch when she walks in them, like she might be safe in them. She likes the gritty sound they make when she walks, the way they’re too big for her feet and not two or three sizes too small. She took them from Mary’s feet while she slept off the fresh bruises one of the johns had left. It was a repeat guy, a soccer-dad type who spooned his wife at night — the worst kind. Farah’s prepared for the same john now, her little stash lined up neatly at least an hour before he’s expected to show up: the plastic card with the Pizza Hut logo propped against her can of spray lubricant.