Naomi Hirahara - Santa Cruz Noir

“ My family?” He chuckled. “You don’t want to do that.”

“Do what? Meet them? Of course I do. If it’s your family.” Then she stopped herself. They had only been dating a few months. Maybe he wasn’t ready for that step. “All right,” she finally said. “No pressure.”

Before getting too far, they pulled over at a roadside fruit stand and she picked up a basket of strawberries. “I know these are your favorite,” she said. She took a strawberry out of the basket and went to put it in his mouth.

“What makes you say that?” he asked, backing away.

“Uh, if it’s not your favorite fruit, why do you have a tattoo of one on your back?”

The first time they had hooked up, she noticed a tattoo of a strawberry near the base of his neck. It was so delicate that she almost laughed. It was sweet, and so like him too, like a stamp on his taut skin.

He chuckled. “Oh, yeah, that’s right. I forgot.”

She laughed too, and attempted again to place the strawberry in his mouth. “Open up,” she said.

“Perhaps it’d be wise to wash those first,” he said.

She had already eaten half the basket. “Whatever, live a little.”

A few weeks later, out with her girlfriends, they got on the topic of things they found odd or gross about their lovers. When it was Marcela’s turn, her friends joked that they should just skip her because Vicente was clearly a gift from God. She wanted to share something so she told them about his strawberry tattoo. “Isn’t that weird?” she said.

Her friends laughed politely and said it was “adorable,” but one of them asked, “Isn’t he from Watsonville?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I mean, I think that’s a gang thing. In Watsonville it’s the strawberry, in Salinas it’s a freaking lettuce head. Somewhere else it’s an artichoke. My students, I swear, they teach me the randomest shit.”

Marcela tried to laugh it off. The idea that Vicente’s tattoo was gang-affiliated seemed so ridiculous that she didn’t intend to give it any further thought. But later that same night, she went home, poured herself another drink, and googled variations of “beautiful thugs” and “hot gangsters.” She found the results entertaining if nothing else.

It was her own romantic history that caused her worry. It was lined with two kinds of men: machistas who infuriated her, and one harmless white guy whom she eventually grew bored of. She had married the latter, but had suffered the torture of plenty of the former. Vicente, she thought, was a departure for her. Finally she had learned from her mistakes. She wasn’t doomed to repeat herself. Didn’t she deserve someone beautiful and kind with an air of mystery?

Marcela heard a loud pounding at the hotel door followed by, “Police department, open up!” She looked over at Vicente, who hadn’t stirred in an hour. The towels of ice remained covering his face. The pounding on the door resumed and she rushed to answer. Two officers filled the doorway.

“We’re looking for Vicente Cuellar.”

“Yes, he’s here,” she said. “But he’s sleeping.”

“I’m Officer Fernandez. This is Officer Halston. If you don’t mind, we’d like to ask him a few questions about the incident in the downstairs bar. If we can just wake him up, we won’t be long.”

Marcela hesitated in the doorway. The officers couldn’t see the bed from where they were standing. Were they really asking her permission?

“Let them in. I’m up,” Vicente called from inside the room.

Marcela stood aside and the officers walked in. As soon as they saw Vicente’s face, they looked at each other, then pulled out their pocket notepads and began writing.

“Well, he sure got you good,” Officer Fernandez said.

“You should’ve seen the other guy,” Vicente quipped.

The officer looked up from his notepad. “Uh, we did. He’s in handcuffs right now. And he’s fine.”

Vicente chuckled. “It was a joke. Look, officers, let the guy go. It was just a misunderstanding. We were drinking. Tempers flared. I said some things I shouldn’t have—”

“And what did you say, exactly?” Officer Fernandez cut in. “The other guy just said, ‘Stuff.’”

“It doesn’t really matter. All I can say is that I’m over it. We got it out of our systems. I’m sober, he’s sober. No need to make it a bigger deal than it is.”

“Well, you see, we’re staring at your face and it looks like a pretty big deal. If a man is capable of doing what he did to you, then he might be capable of doing that to someone else. It makes us feel like we’re not doing our jobs.”

“I appreciate what you’re saying, sir, but see, the issue is—” Vicente stopped. “I thought I recognized you, Fernandez.”

The officer looked up from his notepad. “What was that?”

“It’s me, Cuellar. You used to be a guard in juvie, right?”

The officer looked closer. His face brightened. “Holy shit. It’s you! I thought that name sounded familiar! What the hell, man! It’s been years.”

“I know, I know,” Vicente said. “You gave up on the little homies or what? After the real bad guys now?”

“That was just my first job. Jesus, I was barely a kid in there myself.”

Fernandez’s demeanor had relaxed completely. He shook his head in amazement and turned to his partner. “This kid ruled the hall. You would’ve thought he was Tony Montana.” He turned back to Vicente. “So you teach college now? That’s what they were saying downstairs in the lobby. I couldn’t believe the other guy was a teacher. Looked like a thug to me. And now you, I can’t believe it — they letting every banger go to college now? But that’s good, Cuellar. I’m proud of you.”

Vicente nodded his head. “Look, that guy downstairs. Me and him are cool. We both got pasts, and today they caught up with us. We both spent too many years working to get where we are right now. I wouldn’t want to mess that up for him over a little skirmish.”

Officer Fernandez smiled. “ Skirmish . Listen to you. Same old Cuellar. You could always talk your way out of everything. Nothing stuck to you.” He looked over at Marcela. “Ain’t this guy about the smoothest talker you ever heard?”

Marcela was too stunned to answer. She had leaned against the wall and was digging her fingernails into the textured ridges of the wallpaper, afraid she was going to lose her grip.

The officers left. After a long silence, Vicente turned to Marcela. “You okay?” he asked.

She still hadn’t moved from the wall.

“Come here,” he said. “Let’s sleep this off.”

She couldn’t even look at him. “I don’t know who you are,” she said. “We’ve been together six months and I feel like I don’t know you any better than when we first met. That cop called you Tony Montana. All this time, I think you’re a sensitive, thoughtful teacher and now suddenly you’re Scarface?”

Vicente sighed. “What do you want to know?” His voice was tender, apologetic.

“Why’d you do that down there?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to fight.”

“But that’s the thing. I saw you. You didn’t fight at all. You didn’t even try to defend yourself.”

Vicente shrugged his shoulders. “Sometimes it feels good to get hit.”

“That’s not an answer that makes any sense. You know that, right?”

“Marcela, I’ve been through some shit.”

“You need serious help.”

He leaned his head back down on the pillow. “Perhaps,” he said.

Next morning Vicente woke her up, gently shaking her shoulder. There was a coffee maker in the bathroom and he had made a pot. He served her some in a Styrofoam cup and placed it on her nightstand. The coffee was weak, but it helped her headache. She pulled aside the curtain and saw it was dawn.