Yuri Herrera: The Transmigration of Bodies

Your pops called.

The girl undid a second bolt and showed half an unfriendly face through the doorcrack — brow arched, nose wrinkled, mouth twisted. She said nothing. The Redeemer repeated Your pops called for me. Go ask him.

Don’t you tell me what I can or can’t do, spat the Unruly. She stared at him and then closed the door. After five minutes, she returned. Come back later, she said. Not right now.

The Redeemer snorted but didn’t move, nor did the Unruly close the door.

Who’d you grab? he asked. Please not who he thought, please not who he thought.

The Unruly narrowed her eyes and said Baby Girl.

Shit. But that wasn’t what he said. What he said was Where you got her?

The Unruly gave a sort of half-smile that said You must be kidding.

Why bother calling if you give me nothing to go on, he persisted, I’m not going to do anything, but I need to get an angle on this.

The Unruly pressed her face up to the half-open door. She smelled of brandy.

Real close. In that big white house. Cross from the elementary school.

Odd. The Redeemer prided himself on knowing about all the palmgreasing, hornswoggling, and machinating in the city, but this house had him stumped. Who owned Las Pericas? And why would Dolphin hide Baby Girl there?

Okay, he said, I’ll be around, tell your pops to call me.

The Unruly slammed the door, and he listened to her walk away.

He got a text from the government assuring him that everything would be back to normal any minute now, that it was essential to exercise extreme caution but not to panic: a reassuring little pat on the head to say Any silence is purely coincidental, okay? Like when people are talking and everyone goes quiet, like when an angel passes, like that. But it came off more like Better to play down than stir up.

Baby Girl. The Redeemer recalled the first time he’d met Baby Girl on a job he did for her dad: itty-bitty thing, quiet, long hair always carefully brushed, pretty face but eyes so sad. The kind of girl you wanted to love, really truly, but then the urge passed kind of fast. Even for her family. The Redeemer had seen it, at a big blowout after that job, seen the way they treated her like a piece of furniture from another era, one you hold onto even tho it’s uncomfortable. The Castros had been putting on airs for years and Baby Girl cramped their style. Now the Fonsecas, too, had struck it rich, but about style they couldn’t care less. So different and so the same, the Castros and the Fonsecas. Poor as dirt a couple decades ago, now too big for their boots, and neither had moved out of the barrio: they just added locks and doors and stories and a shit-ton of cement to their houses, one with more tile than the other. So different and so the same. If he thought about it, in all these years he’d never once seen them cross each other. Until now. Odd for them to butt heads right when there was finally enough room.

But he’d seen this before, the way old grudges resurface. Even in this city, where people didn’t nose around, no matter what was done or who was doing it, sometimes it could almost seem like We’re all one. Don’t matter if your thing’s a burning bush, some lusty dove, a buried book, big bank, talk or cock, there’s room for us all. But no sir, he knew better, the real deal was: Don’t give a shit what you’re doing but you better not look at me, fucker. Every once in a while people did look; every once in a while they remembered what they’d seen. But man, for this all to go down now — just when everyone and their mother was cowering under the bed?

He passed by the local park once more. The grass on the median looked overgrown tho it had only been ignored a couple of days. Inside the park, in a little fountain where a colony of frogs used to live, he saw none; the water was dead, bereft of ripples; for a second he considered bending down to drink from it because he’d only bought one bottle and finished it, but opted instead to walk another block to the pharmacy.

The pharmacy was closed. On the metal shutter a piece of paper: Out of Masks .

He’d been told, that time, to go get Baby Girl from some corner store in a barrio stuck on the side of the hill. A boyfriend had tried to abduct her, but at a traffic light she got out of the car and ran into the shop. The boyfriend followed but when he tried to drag her out, the owners chased him off and someone called one of Baby Girl’s brothers — yes, everyone knows fucking everyone. Before the brothers could head out to butcher the boyfriend, tho, their father stopped them, calling in the Redeemer to keep it from escalating into a major shitstorm. The boyfriend wasn’t on juice, or blow, or smack, he just couldn’t stand Baby Girl getting feisty and refusing to go with him when he’d made up his mind. The Redeemer got to the corner store, made sure Baby Girl was okay, and she was — pallor and little-lamb panting were as much a part of her as eye-color — then went to sweet-talk lover boy.

Hey, hey, amigo, listen up a minute. I got no dog in this fight, okay, I just want to say one thing and I’ll be on my way. Cool? Listen, man, I’m with you, I know what it’s like — respect, that’s what it’s all about, and it’s your girl those lowlifes got socked away in there, not theirs, right? Thing is, tho, people don’t see you been disrespected if you don’t make a fuss. Times it’s better to let things slide and come off like a king, comprende? All I’m sayin, a badass ain’t the one to raise his voice but the one with no need to — just think on it. And the boyfriend not only thought on it but thanked him and heartily shook his hand before shouting into the store: But we ain’t through, Baby! And sure enough, two weeks later they were back together. That was no longer his problem. The Redeemer sweet-talked only as much as he had to. Let people get in all the tight spots they want; he’d be out of a job if he started passing judgment on their vices. That same night, when he took Baby Girl home, each time he asked her what the boyfriend had done, she said Nothing, señor, honest, I just didn’t want to go with him.

He helped the man who let himself be helped. Often, people were really just waiting for someone to talk them down, offer a way out of the fight. That was why when he talked sweet he really worked his word. The word is ergonomic, he said. You just have to know how to shape it to each person. One time this little gaggle of teenage boys had gone to the neighbor’s on the other side of the street and stoned the windows and kicked the door for a full half-hour, shouting Come on out, motherfucker, we’ll crack your skull, and the pigs hadn’t deigned to appear; that was one of the first times the Redeemer had done his job. He went out, asked in surprise how it was they’d yet to bust down the door and added You want, I’ll bring you out a pickax right now, and that sure calmed them down; see, it’s one thing to front, to act like a big thing, but burning bridges, well that’s a whole ’nother thing. Soon as he saw what was what the Redeemer added: Tho, really, why even bother, right? Man’s in there shitting himself right now, and they all laughed and they all left. That was when the Redeemer learned that his talent lay not so much in being brutal as in knowing what kind of courage every fix requires. Being humble and letting others think the sweet words he spoke were in fact their own. It worked on others but not on him. He’d met politicians who could believe whatever came out of their mouths as long as others believed it too. He tried to learn how but could never forget lies. Especially his own.

He trusted Dolphin — or trusted him as much as anyone who’d been a buzzman for twenty-five years can be trusted — but the Las Pericas thing was prickling his neckhairs. What was up with that? He decided to ask Gustavo, a sharp-witted lawyer who knew the ropes and had been untying the city’s secrets for decades. He called, but a woman’s voice said he wasn’t in and who knew when he’d be back.