(By Richard Tenorio)

On a cloudy spring afternoon, just after the bell rang ending lunchtime, Mrs. Shoemaker, the sixth grade school teacher at a tiny, Christian, private school in a small, rural, Southern town buckled deep within the Bible Belt, paced back and forth in front of her class with lips pursed and eyes staring blankly ahead.

She was deep in thought and full of reservations about the visitor who was to come and speak before her class in just a few moments. The children had been told to sit quietly and read their library books from which their next book reports would be written while they all waited for the day’s speaker to arrive. Aside from the occasional whisper or giggle from one student at another clowning, the only sound to be heard in the room was Mrs. Shoemaker’s tiny, low-heeled shoes clapping against the floor in a kind of staccato, military march from one side of the room to the other.

Mrs. Shoemaker’s stride had been mocked by sixth graders for years, one class passing the torch of mockery to the other, and the most famous of these legendary taunts was Mrs. Shoemaker’s “Big Bird Walk” as they called it. It was as if they thought that because her legs were short and her stride too long and wide for such limbs, she was surrounded by a huge, yellow feathered belly, carefully having to plot her course in three-toed footies attached to plushy legs of orange and red rings.

But Andrew, the strange little boy with new crooked teeth who sat on the third row, one desk away from the window, always thought that it was not only mean of the other kids to tease her, but actually inaccurate, for he had watched Big Bird on Sesame Street carefully and honestly never saw the resemblance between the two’s paces. If there was anyone Mrs. Shoemaker could be compared to, it was a reserved, absent-minded, elderly, drill sergeant, in his opinion.

Of course, Andrew, the unusually thin little boy covered with freckles that matched his reddish blonde hair, never really understood childish mockery and pranks. He was never amused when a classmate would cup his hand up under his underarm and begin cranking the other like a chicken wing in order to produce some sort of farting noise that would leave the class in stitches. And Andrew never thought it funny when another would take scissors and cut the hair of the fat girl seated in the seat in front of her without the girl ever knowing, only to get a hearty laugh from all that sat behind her. And it certainly wasn’t humorous when they would tie someone’s shoelaces together or hide someone’s glasses or whisper, laugh, and point at someone, only to create some sense of amusement for themselves by alienating him or her. Yes, Andrew was different than all of them, and he knew it, and in a way, it caused him great despair.

However, at that moment, no one was engaged in any kind of fun-poking, and the students seemed consumed by their library books while listening to Mrs. Shoemaker’s percussion melody. Andrew, on the other hand, was hardly reading, perhaps a word or two now and then, for he had become more curious about this mystery guest that seemed to leave Mrs. Shoemaker tied in knots and thoroughly distracted. The other children didn’t seem to notice that there was a difference in her manner and demeanor, but he did, and he was sure that what was about to occur was something that would make things different. It had already changed Mrs. Shoemaker.

The knock on the door caused Mrs. Shoemaker to gasp, and she pulled her hands to her cardigan, fastening the top button. As she walked towards the door, she peered over her glasses towards the classroom. “Our visitor is here. Now I want everyone to be on your best behavior,” she said somewhat nervously, and then seemed to brace herself before opening the door. In walked a petite woman, much younger than Mrs. Shoemaker, with her blonde hair pulled tightly into a ponytail. She flashed the class a virginal white grin and shook Mrs. Shoemaker’s hand. Before she could utter a greeting, Mrs. Shoemaker abruptly pushed her towards a chair she had arranged at the front of the class, nonverbally declaring that this was still her classroom, and they were still going by her rules; therefore, she should not speak until Mrs. Shoemaker allowed her to do so.

“Students, this is Miss Singleton. According to our state’s Education Department, all sixth graders must be led in a discussion of sex education.” The class erupted in giggles and laughter. The word “sex” began flying around the room in breathless, adolescent pants, and the kids looked to one another in amazement and hilarity. Andrew, however, looked shocked; his face went flush, his heart pattered, and although he knew he was unusual, he wasn’t sure why his reaction was in such contrast.

“Silence! We will have none of that,” said Mrs. Shoemaker, demanding order. “As sixth graders preparing to enter junior high school next year, I expect you to be mature about this subject, a subject that I am certain your parents have already taken the opportunity to discuss with you.”

As if prompted, all of the children began looking at one another to see if they could determine who had had that talk with their parents and who hadn’t. Mrs. Shoemaker continued, “Nevertheless, because we are required to meet state regulations, we have invited Miss Singleton here from our county’s health department to speak with you this afternoon about this matter.”

“About sex?” laughed Jim as he nudged Brandon, who sat next to him.

Mrs. Shoemaker clearly looked flustered, and now her character seemed completely changed from the always-in-control matron she normally embodied. “Yes, regarding the way babies are conceived after you are married,” she said, turning a glare upon Miss Singleton, “which I would imagine would be some time from now.”

Again the class broke into laughter, this time a more nervous kind, and Mrs. Shoemaker stomped her foot. “Now I have said that we will have none of that! You are expected to be mature!”

Mrs. Shoemaker looked around the room sternly. The class became quiet. Then she proceeded, “Now, we thought it would be best to separate the boys and girls during this talk. One group will wait on the playground while the other has their talk. The girls will have their discussion first, then the boys afterwards. So, get up boys, and follow me. And no talking, girls, until I return.”

“Which group does Andrew go in?” a voice mumbled from the back for only Andrew to hear. Andrew closed his eyes. Was this the reason the visitor was here, to uncover exactly what it was that made him so different from everyone else? Suddenly, filled with his own apprehensions, Andrew felt more alone than he ever had before.

Once outside and on the playground, which was just north of the kickball fields, the boys were ordered to sit on the perimeter of the sandbox crafted of railroad crossties and filled full of pebbles instead of sand. Clouds hung low over them and a cool, fragrant, spring breeze was forcing dandelions to let loose their seeds in flurries of white puffs while also whipping its way around and through the swing sets, pushing invisible children back and forth. Andrew was grateful for the clouds. When the sun was hidden away, he felt more comfortable in his skin, as if the shadowy gray could conceal all the imperfections that tormented him. The sandbox was deep, and one could hide his entire foot underneath the pebbles or drown her hand within its rocky puddle. The boys all sat with their feet stretched out into the box. Some looked annoyed and seemed to be moping that they were to miss the girls’ talk and miss hearing all the secrets of their female bodies.

Mrs. Shoemaker looked at them crossly, “Now please behave. There is no one available to watch you, so I’m trusting you. Just sit right here, don’t move, and I’ll be back to get you in about ten minutes. And I’m warning you, if I hear of any of you fooling around, I will immediately be calling your parents.” With that she marched back to the schoolhouse, looking back once with a very forbidding warning before entering the school door.

Andrew was uncomfortable sitting here with all of the boys in his sixth grade class. True, he called some of them his friends, and they had, on the occasion, asked him over to spend the night. But since his best friend, John, moved away a couple of years back, he had yet to find that friend with whom he was paired and could truly be himself. Andrew watched the boys watching each other as they waited for someone to lead them, and he dipped his hand into the rocks and then watched them fall between his open fingers as he raised it. He listened intently to their tapings as they fell to the sandbox below, giving his attention to anything but the group that sat around him. He was nervous, and for an unknown reason, afraid, so Andrew prayed for the ten minutes to pass quickly.

It was Guy who first shattered the silence of little boys knowing not what to do under the strict provisions of their teacher to remain within the box. “So, Andrew,” he said smirking, taking the lead, bringing to light the game that they would play, “Why are you out here? Shouldn’t you be inside with the girls?”

He laughed and prodded Scott, who sat to his right and who immediately broke into laughter as well, “Yeah, Andrew, why are you out here with us boys?” Andrew looked around the circle hoping that one of the boys might be showing some sense of apprehension about the direction in which Guy’s teasing was moving. Maybe Jason would speak up for him. Yet he was discouraged to see all the boys with slight knowing grins or giggles at the thought of it.

He could have said something at that point. He could have protested, saying with mustered conviction, “Duh, I’m a boy. Of course I’m not supposed to be inside with the girls;” however, for some reason, Andrew felt there was something almost true in Guy’s question, unlike the wrongness of the comparison of Mrs. Shoemaker to Big Bird, and it left him paralyzed in silence under the attack.

No one but God knew of the confusion that had always reigned in Andrew’s head about himself and his belonging. For so many years, every night, after Mommy had pulled the sheets over his body, kissed his cheek with a “sweet dreams,” and turned out the light over his head, Andrew had prayed and begged God to show him what made him so different from all others.

Yes, he knew he was completely abnormal, he felt it in every interaction, yet he couldn’t quite understand why. He was flesh and blood, had the same shape, the same sound, the same smell, but something was altogether different on his inside. And so his pleadings with God to show him the reason why seemed to finally be answered. Yet now, in this instance, he was frightened of the clarity that he had long been seeking suddenly coming into view.

“Andrew! Why are you out here with the boys? Didn’t you hear me?” Guy asked. He took a small pebble from the sandbox and chunked it at Andrew to get his attention. The stone hit Andrew on the chest and then fell into his lap, and Andrew looked at it, the tan little oval folded into his blue denim. He tried to mutter a laugh, perhaps trying to “laugh with them” as his dad had suggested that he do any time he was being laughed at, but Andrew could barely break a smile as he swam in deep thoughts that probed his heart over why this was happening, and it was then that the wondering as to why he was so different began to find a resolution.

All of the moments of questioning his belonging began reemerging. His memory began succinctly lining up all the episodes within his short life when the question had truly plagued him, causing him to take the look back that he had never been prompted to take before.

Like the slideshows he watched in children’s church showing right from wrong, pictures flashed within his mind. Like the time when he was four, and Santa Claus at Goldsmith’s Department Store pulled him upon his lap and asked, “So what should Santa bring this pretty little girl for Christmas?” and Andrew had to say he was a boy. The time when Andrew was six and received a severe spanking with the belt after telling Daddy he wanted their friends’ blonde-haired, tan skinned, blue-eyed son to be his ‘boyfriend,’ a very wrong request for a boy. The time when Andrew was eight, and Mommy slapped his hand down from its seeming natural limp-wrist position, which was not a proper mannerism for a boy. The time when he was nine, when the little boy next door befriended him and even after two days of playing with Andrew finally asked, “Are you a boy or a girl?” to which Andrew cried in reply, “A boy!” For the first time, those pictures, plus others, played the story that Andrew had suppressed into confusion, and now Andrew understood why he wasn’t like anyone else.

The lack of expression on Andrew’s face enraged Guy, and he tossed another pebble at him, hoping that Andrew would do something, anything, to feed this entertainment that everyone seemed to be watching with great intensity. But Andrew could do nothing, remorseful over an answer that he had found and an understanding that there was reason for Guy’s scorn. So Andrew sat with his head bowed and was hopeful that they would become bored of his target and move on to someone else less deserving.

“My dad calls him ‘squirrelly,’” Jim said, picking up a pebble from the sandbox and launching it towards Andrew. It hit his left shoulder.

“He’s a girly girl,” Jason said, tossing his own pebble at Andrew, hitting his forehead, leaving him stunned.

“Aren’t you going to do anything, you sissy?” Guy screamed, grabbing a handful of rocks. “Aren’t you at least going to say something?” He pulled back his arm and held the rocks steady there, waiting, wondering, angered that Andrew was so strange and removed that he would not even put up a fight.

“He’ll say something,” Scott said, in alliance with the leader, also grabbing a handful of pebbles, pulling them back in a threat against Andrew.

“If he knows what’s good for him,” Brandon said, gathering his ammunition, joining with the others.

Following suit, as most sixth graders do when faced with the option of rebelling against or conforming to their peers, each boy grabbed a handful of rocks and pulled them into striking positions, waiting for Andrew. What would his reaction be?

Guy laughed as Andrew lowered his hand into the pebbles and picked one up, rubbing it, feeling its texture within his fingers. All he would have to do to show that he was the same as them was fight back, even with just one pebble; pelt one laughing boy between the eyes, and perhaps it would be done. Perhaps they would laugh and say, “See, he is a boy; he’s just like us.” Or maybe they would even become scared, retreat, and worry, oh no, crazy Andrew has decided to fight, and we don’t know how far he will go. But Andrew wasn’t angry; just sadder, and he gripped the pebble within his fist tightly, trying to figure out what to do.

Another image flashed from his memory, a more recent time when he was 11 sitting on a pew in the First Baptist Church sanctuary one Sunday morning, absently listening as the preacher breathed fire from his lungs. Andrew had imagined himself flying by way of white feathered wings high up near the church’s arched ceiling, from stained glass window to stained glass window, in colored, filtered sunlight, around the heavy chandeliers, up and over the entire congregants’ heads, sprinkling everyone with love dust. This recollection inspired him, and he found a solace in this different kind of answer as to where he might belong: Simply, he did not belong on this earth at all. Instead, he was some sort of divine angel caught in between two worlds, sent here to earth only to help people with his gift of being both girl and boy. He was a Godsend.

This image and answer seduced him, and with the rock held within his grip, a familiar voice began calling inside him, giving rise to his white feathered wings, setting alight his halo, beckoning, “Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, and forgive them, for they know not what they do.” So Andrew obeyed and dropped the pebble to the ground next to the others, hearing the single tap before the stoning began.

At first, the pebbles hitting his 11-year-old frame felt like the hail that he had run through a few years back when he was entranced by the unusual precipitation falling on his grandmother’s farm on a cold twilight. Their second handfuls seemed to hurt a little, pelting his head, stinging his face, ricocheting off his chest. The dust mixed with the stones dried his eyes to red, causing water to run down his dirty cheeks. But what really drove the stake through Andrew’s throat, what really dropped his heart into burning oil, was the feeling and knowing that by not belonging at all, he was left completely and utterly alone in the world, forever destined to live emotionally homeless, to have no one that would or could understand, and to once again be back to lonely in the empty wilderness starving for belonging. That was what brought Andrew’s true tears, and suddenly, he was deaf to their chantings, calling him a baby, a mama’s boy, a sissy, and he was oblivious to the rain of stones. Alone, Andrew cried.

It was at that moment when he completely lost consciousness of them, that a single hole in the low clouds broke open, and a ray of golden sunlight streamed from the heavens upon the sandbox. The other boys, grabbing more pebbles, laughing and continuing to lay waste to Andrew, didn’t seem to notice the sudden change in the atmosphere, but Andrew noticed. No one but Andrew felt the warmth of the sun on his head and his face, a soothing calm within the fury, and he turned to look upwards; white tracks from his eyes, down his cheeks, glistening upon his dusty face. In a kind of majesty, of feeling heard, of no longer being alone, of belonging to something, he spread his arms wide, and accepted the ecstasy of the comfort in the single ray of promise which broke through the clouds to save him. He stayed like that for some time. He didn’t know how long he was there held in the sun’s embrace.

When Andrew finally opened his eyes and came into awareness, he found himself surrounded by his girl classmates sitting in a circle around the sandbox. Things had changed.

“Are you not going in with the boys?” Shelia asked Andrew.

Andrew stood, dusted himself off, and replied, “No. I don’t belong.” And he took off across the kick-ball fields towards a hole in the bushes, which led away from girls and boys.

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Chad

Carolyn’s husband, Richard, was home alone when the telephone rang. He tried to manipulate his electric wheelchair close to the wall-mounted phone, but by the time he got there the caller had been transferred to the answering machine.                

“I won’t be home tonight,” he heard Curtis, his live-in attendant, shout through the speaker. “I’m in the Alameda County Jail. The police picked me up for dope. But it wasn’t me, it was the dude in the seat next to me. Tell Carolyn her car is on the corner of Peralta and 17th. She should go down there and pick it up. Won’t be tires on it in the morning if she don’t go now. I’ll be out by tomorrow, Richard. Sorry ‘bout this. I gotta go.”

Richard called Carolyn’s office. Using his lips, he lifted his mouthstick, an eight inch, lightweight, thin metal tube with a plastic tip on one end, from its stand on his wheelchair tray. He gripped it between his teeth in order to tap the oversized numbers on his specialized telephone. He reached her voicemail, but he didn’t leave a message. He looked at the clock on the wall above his television set. She had probably already left work and was on her way to the 16th Street BART station.

When she arrived home he was waiting for her in their living room, which also served as their dining room and Richard’s office, bathroom and bedroom. Before she could put down her bags or say hello he was shouting.

“Curtis is in big trouble,” he said in a rush. “He’s in jail. You’ve got to go get your car, it’s in West Oakland. That stupid son of a bitch. We should let him rot there!”

Carolyn took a deep breath and looked at Richard. His steely blue eyes stared back at her. The mouth and lips that she had once found so warm and sensuous were turned down in a permanent scowl. On the television screen behind him, Jerry Seinfeld cracked jokes and the audience sound track laughed. She felt panic rise in her throat.              

“Fuck,” she whispered as she dropped her bags on the couch and wrestled off her coat. Then she took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said in a controlled voice. “Let’s not get upset. I’ll put you to bed and in the morning I’ll call a lawyer.”

Richard turned his wheelchair around by pushing, with his chin, a joystick mounted in front of his face. He gazed blankly at the TV. What could he do? Like almost everything else since his accident, jails, and dope were a new experience for them. Carolyn didn’t even know how to look up the county jail in the telephone book. She called information. Then she dialed the jail.

“May I please speak to Curtis Washington?” she asked the woman on the other end of the line.

“Who’s Curtis Washington?” the woman answered, sounding annoyed.

“I believe he is being booked or has been booked this evening.”

The woman let out an audible sigh. “What did you say his name was?”

“Curtis Washington.”

After a moment she came back on the line and said, “Yeah, he’s here. But you can’t talk to him. He’s in a cell.”

“Can I come in and see him now?”  Carolyn asked politely.

“No, you can’t see him. I told you, he’s in his cell. You can’t see him ‘til the weekend.”

“But how do I get in touch with him?” Carolyn asked.

“Lady, you can’t,” the woman answered with impatience. “If he decides to call you he can. He gets arraigned tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry,” said Carolyn, “but what exactly does that mean?”

“It means he could be in here for a long time, or he could be out by noon tomorrow. It means his arraignment could get postponed and he won’t be out ‘til Friday. If he’s charged, he could go to Santa Rita as early as tomorrow. It means he’s in trouble.”

There was a pause and Carolyn thought the woman had hung up, but then she continued to speak. “You can’t do anything for him right now. Call the D.A.’s office at noon tomorrow. They should be able to give you some answers.”

“Oh, I see,” Carolyn stammered. But she didn’t really understand what was going on. She thought of another question. “Can you tell me what he’s been charged with?”

Carolyn heard the woman sigh again. “Hold on,” she said. After a moment she came back and barked, “Sellin’ crack cocaine. Bail is set at $20,000. Like I said, if he wants to call you he can. But you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to talk to the D.A.”

“Thank you,” Carolyn whispered. She was out of breath.
      

Carolyn found an Oakland map in a drawer and searched for 17th and Peralta. It wasn’t far away. She briefly considered asking a friend to drive her, but it was late. Calling someone for help in the past had often resulted in disappointment. She dreaded the hesitation, real or imagined, that she heard when she waited for their response. She had learned not to contact anyone unless it was an absolute crisis. Carolyn’s definition of emergency had changed radically within the past year. These days emergency meant life or death, not Curtis in the clink, or no one available to help her with Richard’s care, or a car abandoned in a potentially unpleasant neighborhood.              

She looked inside her wallet to see if she had enough money for a taxi. It contained $2.85 and a partially used BART ticket. It would cost at least $5 to get to West Oakland. She knew that Richard didn’t have any money. His wallet contained only his official California ID, his HMO card and a wrinkled photograph from years ago of himself and Carolyn on a backpacking trip in Yosemite. Of course, he could only look at the photo when Carolyn pulled it out for him and put it in front of his face. He hadn’t seen it in months.

“I’ll ride my bike down there and get the car,” she told him. “Seventeenth and Peralta isn’t near a BART station and I don’t have any idea how long it will take me to get there by bus, or if a bus even goes there. When I get back I’ll give you dinner and then I’ll put you to bed.”  Richard was a C-4 quadriplegic. He’d been in a bicycling accident the previous year. He was paralyzed below the shoulders, the result of whacking his neck on the pavement after flying over the handlebars of his Italian racing bike. He had been muscular, handsome, independent, but now he needed help with everything: eating, washing, voiding. Without Curtis, Carolyn would have to do it all herself: make dinner and spoon it into Richard’s mouth, pull him out of his wheelchair, slide him into bed, take off his clothes, detach his leg bag and empty its contents, brush his teeth, clean his ears, turn off the television and the lights before falling into her bed upstairs, alone.
            
“Be careful riding your bike in the dark,” Richard told her when she said she was ready to leave. His eyes never left the screen as he watched George, Elaine and Kramer in Jerry’s apartment. Carolyn wanted him to tell her not to go, that it was too dangerous in that part of Oakland and that it could wait until the morning. She wanted him to get out of his wheelchair and go with her. She needed him to be in control like he used to be, before the accident, when he was strong and healthy, when he’d worked as a financial analyst in the city and had been in charge of almost everything in their lives. She had been content to be his lover and companion. She had never planned on being his nurse.

She went into the garage and pulled her old mountain bike out of the dusty clutter of unused skis, climbing gear and rollerblades. She squeezed the knobby tires. They were soft from disuse but she thought they’d make it as far as West Oakland. She found her bike helmet hanging from a nail between ski poles and lifejackets. She brushed aside the cobwebs and put it on. As she snapped the straps together under her chin she thought about Richard’s cracked and dented helmet and the bloody clothes that the ER orderlies had cut off of him. They were in a paper bag, hidden away in a nearby corner. She didn’t dare look in that direction, but she knew they were there. The helmet had saved Richard’s brain, but not his body.

She rolled the bike down the driveway toward the quiet street. The night air was cool and she could smell the sticky, sweet scent of jasmine. She noticed for the first time in months that the vine Richard had planted many years ago, when he had been an enthusiastic and passionate gardener, was overgrown. It covered the entire south side of the house. She’d have to get out the clippers and trim it soon before it covered the windows and took over their home entirely.

She mounted the bicycle seat and pedaled over to 53rd Street, crossed Martin Luther King and continued onto West. The thoroughfare was wide and well-lit. There was no traffic. She was surprised by how good it felt to be on a bike again. Her legs felt strong, but she had no time to relax. She looked straight ahead, afraid to make eye contact with the young men hanging out on the corners. As she pedaled westward, the streetlights thinned, and the avenue became dark. Large, shadowy warehouses stood back from the street interspersed with small wooden houses, a few lit, some with people sitting on the front porches. She caught the red glow of cigarettes and heard the faint murmur of conversations. She knew from the evening news that this was an area known for crime, for drug traffic, and drive-by shootings. She shouldn’t be here by herself, at night.

Within 15 minutes she found the Subaru. It was parked crooked in the middle of a quiet block, the front tires against the curb, the back end partially out onto the street, as if someone had pulled over and gotten out in a rush. The windows were open and Carolyn could see that the passenger seat was set in full recline position. Whoever had sat in the seat must have been very tired. Or maybe they hadn’t wanted to be seen.                              
She hopped off her bike and looked around to see if she was alone. She popped open the trunk. Things were in disarray. The carpeting that covered the spare tire was pulled up and had not been replaced. It looked as if someone had rifled through it, searching for something. It gave her chills.

She wrestled her bike apart, opened both back doors and pushed from one end, then pulled from the other in order to cram it into the backseat. Carolyn threw the front and rear tires into the trunk and closed it. She slid into the driver’s seat, took off her helmet and tossed it onto the backseat. The glove compartment was open, its contents strewn across the floor. She slammed it shut, adjusted the rearview mirror and turned the key. A blast of loud rap music frightened her. She slapped at the OFF button, locked the doors, closed the windows and pulled out onto 17th Street. The neighborhoods remained eerily quiet as she drove through them, but her car felt occupied by more than just herself.

Curtis did not call again that night and this worried her. She wasn’t happy that her car had been involved in an apparent drug raid, but Richard’s welfare was her main concern. What would she do if Curtis didn’t come home soon? She couldn’t take care of Richard by herself. She would have to get someone else to help her. She knew how difficult it was to find anyone willing to do this kind of work, to bathe and feed her husband, lift him in and out his wheelchair, empty the contents of his bladder and his bowels. It was an ongoing challenge that Curtis, although not perfect, had been willing to fulfill with laid-back reliability in exchange for a small wage, a roof over his head, a well-stocked refrigerator and the occasional use of her car.

In the morning she phoned a lawyer friend, who gave her the name of an attorney who specialized in criminal law. She called him and told him what she knew.

“Mrs. Carson,” he said. “How long have you known this guy?”

“Since my husband’s accident almost a year ago. He’s been living with us since December. He helps me with my husband’s care. I depend on him.”

“Do you know if he’s got a previous record?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Do you know what it’s for?”

She remembered the words Curtis had thrown around casually when he was telling her stories about his old life, the days when he used to “own” Fillmore Street in San Francisco. “Pimping, pandering, prostitution,” she said, trying to make her voice sound casual. “But that was over twenty-five years ago, when he was practically a kid.”

There was a pause. Then the lawyer said, “Listen, I know you want to help this guy, but don’t bother. I see this kind of stuff all the time. You don’t have the money for bail, do you?”

“No.”

“Get a new attendant for your husband. He could be in jail for a long time. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, but that’s just the way it is. You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly as she hung up the phone and tried to quell her anger at his arrogance. He may see this stuff all the time, she thought, but he doesn’t have to live with it.

At noon she telephoned the D.A.’s office. “Could you give me the status of Curtis L. Washington?” she asked.

“Just a moment,” said a voice. Then a second later, “He’s not being charged. He’ll be out around 1 p.m.”

Relieved, Carolyn called the jail. “Could you tell me when I can pick up Mr. Curtis Washington, please?”

“What?” asked the man on the other end.

“I’ve just gotten off the telephone with the D.A.’s office,” Carolyn explained. “They told me Curtis Washington will be out by 1 p.m.”

“Lady, the guys at the D.A.’s office don’t work here.”  He sounded angry. “We ain’t heard nothin’ from them yet. If he gets out and he wants you to come and get him he’ll call you. You’ll have to wait.”

So she waited. She knew that Curtis would telephone her when he was out. There was no way in hell he’d walk home. Curtis didn’t walk anywhere if he could help it. And he knew that she would come and get him as soon as he called.      
            
Carolyn spotted Curtis sitting alone on a bench in front of the county jail, a huge gray complex that took up two city blocks. It was not far from Carolyn and Richard’s home, but she had never noticed it before. She pulled over to the curb and he got up off the bench and slowly walked toward the Subaru. He had a way of swinging his broad shoulders and rolling his slim hips that made her half believe his stories about Fillmore Street.

“See what you get for bein’ a nice guy?” he asked her as he folded his length into the passenger seat and adjusted it to a semi-upright position. He looked straight ahead and pulled down the overhead visor. “How was I to know that dude had dope on him and $3,000?  I was jus’ tryin’ to do the dude a favor. Goddamn, you can’t trust nobody no more.”

Carolyn said nothing as she glanced in the rearview mirror before pulling back onto the street. Her blonde hair hung limp and uncombed. The wrinkles around her hazel eyes seemed to have multiplied overnight. Long ago, after she had found empty Saint Ides’ bottles rolling around in the backseat of the Subaru and Curtis had feigned ignorance as to how they could have spontaneously appeared, she had restricted him, like a teenager, to only using the car during daylight hours. But Curtis always pushed the limits of her middle-class sensibility and it seemed the car was no longer hers, except when the gas tank needed to be filled.

“You know, that dude asked me to drive him somewhere and wait for him,” Curtis continued. “So I did. How was I to know that the police were watchin’ that house?  That there be a shitload of coke and money in there and that kid was hidin’ it under his balls and stuffin’ money in his pockets. I was just tryin’ to help him out, that’s all. Next thing you know, blue lights come up behind us and there be The Man. I told him I ain’t got no money and no dope. I shouldn’t of even been taken in. He knew I hadn’t done nothin’. Dude told him I ain’t done nothin’, but still I got hauled in with him. Goddamn!”

Carolyn glanced at Curtis. His eyes were puffy and red. Stubby, day-old beard growth, some of it gray, covered his chin. His black jeans and white t-shirt were wrinkled and dirty.                                  
“Where did you sleep?” she asked at the first stoplight.

“On a hard seat,” he answered. He tracked a young woman with his eyes as she crossed the street in front of them. “It was like a shelf,” he continued. No pillow, no blanket, no nothin’.” He didn’t look at Carolyn but he nodded to let her know the light had changed.

“Were you alone?” she asked as she pressed down on the accelerator.

“Shit, no. There was four or five other dudes in there. All drunk or high on somethin’. No, I wasn’t alone, that’s for damn sure. Wish I’d been alone.”

“I tried to call you.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t call nobody in jail, baby. I was afraid of that. Afraid you’d be worried. I can take care of myself though, you don’t have to worry ‘bout me.”

“Did you eat anything?”

“Yeah, you know I did. And it wasn’t half bad either. Better than I remember it bein’. But I’m tired now. Goddamn, I’m tired.”  

She glanced at him again. His eyes were closed. She gripped the steering wheel harder to prevent herself from pulling over to the curb. She wanted to stop the car and carefully trace the deep lines on his cheeks with her fingers, rub her hands through his soft black hair and press his face against whatever was still left of her heart.

“I’m tired too,” she whispered through clenched teeth to no one as she drove the sleeping man who could take care of himself home to her house.

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In The Fray Contributor

Hands. White hands. They wipe my face, pulling my eyes like tears, reaching, clawing, gripping my skin, fingerprints sapping my breath. I am thrown down, thrown back, over thrown, hair splayed, marking the ground with sweat and salt. I want to whimper and laugh and explode. I am pressed down, held like a ball underwater, struggling, pushing up and out like a flower about to burst, spilling bloody petals on the ground. I turn my head. There is my apron and coat, my underwear, torn now amid the ashes, petals and faded paper dolls. All my pieces scattered. I am raveling and undone, dying a little more with every breath, nerves surging, tingling, numb and dead, and then alive. So this is what it feels like to bleed.

1 a.m.

That sign — “Welcome to Tony’s! Please wait to be seated!” — stands like a barrier between two selves. Inside, apron covered in the conglomerate filth of bleach water, finger smears, and clumsy spills, you are the waitress, the server, the sweet smiling slave. You are “Sugar,” “Peaches,” “Hon,” “Miss,” “Sweet Thing,” “Girl,” and “Little Lady.” You nod. You say, “Excuse me, sir,” and “Will there be anything else, sir?” Manners all aglow.

A snide remark about a glass of water — why can’t you seem to find one? Meanwhile, you are remembering that table 22 and 24 both need refills, the little girl at 5 wants color crayons, no mushrooms in the omelette to 32, and could you please get the change for 25’s $20 bill? Simple glass of water? You’re waiting 13 tables, remembering the details of 28 food orders and carrying seven plates in your two hands. But you want a lemon wedge with your water. “I’m sorry, sir, it will be just a moment.” Smile. Your happiness is my only concern.

A snap of the fingers, the bang of a coffee cup, tight tug at the strings of your apron. Passed around like a million sirs’ play thing. “Excuse me, miss. Excuse me, miss.”And you smile, nod, acquiesce. It’s what you have to do for that fifty cent tip that means you can still make this month’s rent.

The slap on the ass (“Damn, ain’t you still just a spring chicken”), the leering, the propositions (“And how much for a side of you after my meal, Sugar?), and you laugh coyly, feign a stolen naivety, pretend to be flattered. You’re their sweet-assed, long-legged, firm-breasted meat for eight hours a day.

Behind the line you’ll cringe at the crap-covered napkins that wiped their grease and snot and spit. You’ll whisper all the curses and smart-assed comebacks that would get you fired out on the floor. You’ll hate that unctuous bastard, pray for salmonella in his eggs, imagine burning his ass the next time he touches yours.

But right now, you smile and nod and acquiesce, because you have to. For these few moments, this is who you are. Under skin and smile and nod, you’re their chosen play toy for a penny — their bartender, cook, their mother, maid and whore.

3 a.m.

The room inside Tony’s diner was a world unto itself at three in the morning. The yellowed lights and cigarette smoke hovered stagnant, blending the bacon grease and coffee smells into a solitary haze. Reflections bounced off the windows, hollow shadows echoing between the walls.

I watched a lazy taxi pull away, hoisting off the last of the drunks. No doubt he was already regretting his omelette and French toast as he stumbled, nauseous, into the seat. Somewhere out there, in that void beyond those two double doors (“Welcome to Tony’s!”) his wife had long given up on waiting for him, sighed, and rolled over, cradled in the sheets. He waved luxuriously at the glass, trying to peer past the maze of reflections. From out there, his hopeful fingers could not reach through to bang his coffee cup with an obnoxious grunt and graze my ass as I walk by him. I flinched. Even now, restaurant empty except for the lingering coffee drinkers, I could still feel those sloppy blue eyes and white fingertips scratching at the windows and cracks under the door. They were always trying to get in.

“C’mere, brown shu-gar,” smile curved up too far. “Can’t drink ’n em’ty cup ya know.”

4 a.m.

It was her fifth hour here and her 18th cup of coffee. She’d come in dragging her stack of notebooks, pencils and charcoal, and plopped down at the counter. Her loose jeans barely clung to her hip bones, two inches above that waistline — damn — a worn Lakers t-shirt, tight to her chest, nipples sneaking through. Auburn curls splayed out and traced the nape of her neck — guilty. Behind my bronze the color rose to my cheeks.

Art student, definitely. With that carefree funk and darting eyes, cigarette smoking itself in the ashtray, small fingers handling the pencil roughly then caressing, teasing the paper. She sat amid the smoke in a world of curly cues and shadows. Her eyes were heavy on me, pinning me down, drawing me out. She looked up smiling warmer than the streaming caffeine, inviting me into her eyes of shape, form, and shadow. I swallowed slowly, even though I knew her white smile was not a request but a demand. Stare, desire, worship. I gasped, turned away, dripping errant drops on the table.

Eavesdropping (the waitress’s curse), I subtly browsed her portrait with every refill, assembling the details like a puzzle pieced together with graphite lines. It was a pixie or some other angelic fairy creature, skin shaded so darkly it shamed the black coffee she’d been drinking. The pixie splayed her limbs placidly on an altar, wings hanging limply, bare breasts only small mounds at this angle. Her face was twisted coyly as if on fire, either from fear or anticipation. I blushed as I caught myself staring a little too long at the eyes mirrored back. Pupils like the dying petals scattered loosely on the ground.

“Coffee?” I whispered. She jumped shyly at the shimmer in the quiet, hand instinctively covering the perfect V between the pixie’s thighs.

5:55 a.m.

And then she was gone. She must have slipped out the door as I clocked out in the back. She’d left a pile of change to cover her tab, but it didn’t matter. I’d bought her meal hours ago under that enchanting gaze. With a tinge of regret that I couldn’t explain, I cleared the crumpled napkins and discarded sketches, flipping through the chaotic scribbles and pencil shavings.

I moved to throw these away and stopped, stared at the fiery black altar, limp wings and disheveled petals. I felt my face grow warm at the tiny points and curves — the petal eyes, the coy face on fire, the thighs’ V were all my own, reflected back. I shivered at this charcoal mirror, skin tingling, breath short. I shuddered as if naked, tensed my hands into fists and then breathing in, grasped for calm. I stood for a moment, stilling the tremors and then folded the page and hid it in the pocket of my apron.

6 a.m.

Outside, I light a cigarette, roll my apron into a tight bundle and set off into the murky fog of dawn. Not enough tips to call a taxi today. Inside Tony’s, the fingers scratched and pounded at the glass — angry men trapped inside. Powerless. I’m not their whore anymore. I’m me out here — the strong, beautiful, capable young woman my dad always told me I’d be. I laughed. Now, who the fuck is that?

I hear a car slow behind me. My breath catches; I hug my coat around me tighter, and do not turn my head. Please go on. Go away. Please leave me alone. My apron is off. I’m not your waitress, not your friend, not your lover. Please, sir, you cannot see me here — not past that sign, not through those windows. You cannot touch me here — there are people all around, sure to hear me scream. There are cars driving all along this road. They’re sure to stop and help.

Sir, I told you. Don’t. Don’t slow your car and lower your window. I’m off the clock. I’m not yours any more. I won’t be your whore. (“How much for a side of you after my meal?“) You cannot see me. I’m not a woman, not a body at all. I have no legs, no ass, no breasts, no curves — see — look — I’m invisible, a shadow. You cannot touch me. I will slip through your fingers with my non-body. I will disappear unharmed, and you won’t be able to find me. Go away, sir, please. I am nobody. I am no body. I am no woman. I am… not.
  
I still couldn’t say why I got in that car. Maybe it’s because I could not escape into a shadow, could not lose this form, divorce this body and slip through their fingers. I am a body; I bleed. Deep in deep I am woman — it’s written all over my skin, curves and softness and moist salty petals. I am a woman. I do what I have to do. I nod. I smile. I acquiesce. And sometimes I have it my way.

Maybe I was crazy — too much smoke and coffee — and suddenly looking into the car I saw the most beautifully distorted creature God ever made. Maybe I wanted to be delirious for that face. Maybe God never made any of us. Maybe this seemed safer, easier, purer than all the others. Maybe this would feel okay. Maybe this would comfort. Maybe I could forget to breathe for just a moment.

Or maybe this was me, this was my life, this was my choice and lack of it. This was my body, my meat, my blood. And so this was my beauty, my chance, my lust. Maybe.

She rolled down the window and peering in cautiously, I hardly hesitated a moment — opened the door without a word, and sat breathless as she drove away with her white hands on the wheel, auburn curls screening her eyes.

“You left this.”

She smiled. I fell, breaking shadows into pieces, looking down in horror at all those parts of me laid bare. I wept silently, staring down in frightened disbelief, no hope of piecing this back together — not with all this shattered glass and ashes — my own urn, filled with the little blisters I never let them see. The pencil stubs and ash trays, the faded paper dolls and bloody petals, torn underwear and white face I couldn’t see.

She pulled into the driveway. I followed her inside and tossing my apron and coat to the floor, felt the strength of her hand wiping my face, pulling my eyes like tears. I wanted to whimper and laugh and explode. She smiled. And it all fell away there, poured like blood down an altar, or scattered like little pixie petals on the ground.

In The Fray Contributor

Hassan left the municipal hospital early. It was a Friday afternoon, the heat pouring through the windows, making the patients moan in pain and thirst and reducing rolls of medical tape to soft, useless masses of glue. He took his leave without a word to anyone, as was his custom, threading his way through the emergency room crowds, the hands reaching for him, touching him, grasping for his attention. There was no other way to enter or exit the hospital. Bodies bloody and dismembered came through these doors —sometimes on a stretcher, more often on foot — ragged clothes hanging at odd angles, fresh pieces of gauze distributed by earnest young women who helped soothe the patients as they waited and waited and sometimes died in the heat and stench of the ward.

Hassan held his breath as he passed, too many open mouths breathing death here, their inner rot expelled with every uttered word. Please, please doctor, please. He felt the hands tug at his clothes, too weak to bother brushing off, a single hand wrapped strongly round his wrist. He jerked around, could not tell which body owned the hand, pulled away.

“Ass,” he hissed as he walked on. He made a mental note to wash that wrist particularly well that evening. And inwardly he cursed his fate, a doctor once tapping on the chests of newborns to clear their lungs, now sewing fingers to their hands and staunching blood from leaky bodies. The hours spent in residency under clean hygienic lights, sterile tools, separately sealed, a life of schedules and temperance, of smiling into the faces of beautiful rotund women, their bellies huge with child, optimistic and self-absorbed, and reassuring them of things he knew that nature would take care of even in his absence. But doctoring was no longer a profession, not now, not here. Here, now, he was simply a surgeon, a mechanic on the assembly line working among hulls that should have been scrapped long before he ever saw them in consultation. Wretched dirty animals, he called them. And this thought ran through his mind as he rounded the corner and viewed the ward once more before he left the hospital:  all these wretched dirty animals. Should have left when we had the chance, he thought, would have been better than this.

He walked slowly up the dusty street that led to his home, laboring under the weight of the afternoon sun, his briefcase in hand, its leather handles frayed and splintered from years of use. He scrambled from one patch of shade to the next, the heat blistering his feet through the flimsy soles of his shoes. A rotting goat carcass sat in the ditch, its smell of offal and sweet-sickly death perfuming the afternoon. The breeze scooped up a handful of sand to toss in his eyes as he scurried from shadow to shadow. Down the street he went, blowing the dust from his lungs to keep from screaming at the heat of the road under his feet, pausing before the chemist’s shop to see if Alifa, the neighborhood gossip, spied him from her window above, but there was no trace of her hand holding the curtain aside to watch the comings and goings of the street below.

“Doctor!” called Said, the chemist. “Good to see you!” The chemist’s shop displayed only a handful of sun-baked vials of expired tablets on dusty shelves. A bottle of aspirin brought from France sat alone in the window, the lettering faded.

“Good afternoon, Said,” Hassan said, tipping an imaginary hat to the old man. Old rituals for old men, for a time when he walked the streets with dignity, his shoulders not nearly as crooked as they were now. There goes the doctor. The obstetrician. The best obstetrician. Once that was the chant that whispered after him. Now he worked alongside the other drones, the surgeons, his arms covered to the elbow in gore, nurses holding his lunch above a patient’s inert body as he took a bite, no time to sit in the cafeteria, no time to linger over a cup of tea, only time to salvage the wounded who were badly losing on a battlefield as wide and broad as the city itself. So many enemies, so difficult to tell; how luxurious, Hassan thought, to live in a world of only good and evil. He lowered his eyes and continued walking home.

He slowed before the tea shop, dropped his bag, wondered if he had enough time to sit and drink a single cup. He stood in the blinding sun and watched a pair of businessmen in their suits, the sole pair of patrons sitting outside at one of the outdoor tables, their heads erect despite the heat, their faces dimpled with sweat, sipping tea. They shared a newspaper, wet moons of newsprint where their sweaty palms had held a page. Nostalgia swept across him with the ruffling of the breeze, a single breath of hot air that raced down the street and disappeared. He longed to join them, saw himself approach, sit down, the table shined to a high silver gleam, the dust turned to cool tiles, the unrinsed glasses turned to china. He must go at once, he thought. And, in his mind, he heard Dima’s shrill recriminations. It was true:  being late might mean being dead. And she was expecting his arrival. He picked up his bag to continue his walk home.

“Mr. Al-Awad?” Hassan turned slowly to face the businessmen.

“Doctor Al-Awad,” he said.

“Oh, yes, yes, excuse me. Excuse me.”

One of the businessmen got up from the table and walked towards Hassan, his stomach bulging from the waistband of his pants, his shirt colored a darker blue where his sweat had collected. He extended a hand to Hassan. “Doctor Al-Awad. It is a pleasure.” Hassan bowed slightly in acknowledgement; the man frowning slightly as he withdrew his hand.

“Yes?”

“I am Mohammed al-Wadi.”

Hassan nodded.

“I am your neighbor — your new neighbor.”  

“I didn’t realize anyone new was moving to the neighborhood.”

“Oh, you know, it’s true, not very good circumstances. But the house is lovely!”  

“Which house?” Hassan asked.

“Number 28.”

“Number 28. Oh yes.”

Hassan examined the man, tried to imagine how he could have leapt ahead of the others on the waiting list, tried to assess his allegiance, which wartime philosophy, if any, the man subscribed to. And Hassan recalled the long days of patience he and Dima had endured at the hands of his in-laws before they could move into their own home, children piling up in their room amid the clothes and coffeemaker and medical texts. Someone’s cousin, he thought, or someone’s lackey. Someone’s favorite — but whose, he wondered, for the house had been vacant only a month.

“Yes, we’ve just gotten married — I understand you’ve a wife and children, no? We should have dinner, perhaps, if your schedule permits.”

Hassan said nothing, let the man shift his bulk uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “A pleasure meeting you,” Hassan offered, “but I really must go.”  

“Of course!  Of course!” the man said. “A pleasure!  It was a pleasure indeed!”  

Hassan felt a bubble of fury rise in his throat as he continued his walk home, the sweaty gleam of the man reminding him of the indignities of his life, a life of ease stolen from his family by the whimsy of a king, now deposed, living comfortably in the Fifth Arrondissement. And the image of his childhood teas floated before his mind’s eye, homemade scones still hot sitting on a colorful plate, his nanny spreading the tablecloth while the black tea steeped in its pot, a linen napkin pressed carefully across his lap. Now, he thought, he had to squabble with the likes of that businessman over a chair at a dirt-floored café for a tea served in a cup washed with cold water and the pressure of a thumb. More wretched dirty animals. He ground his teeth and bowed his head and walked home.

No, Kamal thought, no reason for them to know, no reason to tell. Nothing had happened. They had watched from a distance. A hundred other witnesses. A thousand even. And what had they seen?  A cart, a donkey, a dark green sedan, a knot of men, a flash of bills held high in the air, copper coins raining on their heads as they ran away.

“Where have you been?” his mother Dima asked. She was short and plump and youthful, a shine of perspiration coloring her face, making her eyeliner run by late afternoon. She stood in the kitchen chopping okra and eggplant, Kamal’s silent sisters, Yasmin and Kalifa, humbly slicing cucumbers into strips no wider than a hair.

“Out,” he said.

“Out where?”

“Just out.”  

He struggled for a quick lie. “Faisal and I went for a walk.”  He imagined the lie as a great cotton sheet snapped fresh from the laundry, billowing upwards and slowly wafting down to cover the half-eaten bones and bloody mess of his afternoon.

“In this heat?” She looked skeptical.

“Yes.” She eyed him cautiously, still believing that, as in her own time, a meaningful stare would beckon the truth from her fourteen-year-old son.

“Go take a bath,” she said, “you stink like that carcass in the ditch.”  

Kamal gratefully left, the scolding twitterings of his sisters following him down the hallway, two crows gossiping, their straight black hair falling across their faces like a pair of glossy black wings.

He stood before the mirror, peeling his clothes from his skin, rings of dirt encircling his neck and wrists, giant smudges of oil wiped along his belly, a thin line of blood running down his side, already crusting over, a single bruise, in the shape of a thumbprint, blackening his collarbone. A light rap on the door; the heated water was ready; his sisters silently left him two buckets on the ground before the bathroom door, the steam noticeable only in the dank coolness of the bathroom. He filled the porcelain tub and climbed in, stretching out in the semi-darkness of the bathtub while he watched the steam rise and, in return, the moldy stalactites drip their guano into his bath. He lay completely still, his eyes closed, tried to slow the rabbit’s heart that fluttered within his chest, tried to find solace in the voices of his sisters and mother, the frying pan clattering against the stovetop, the slam of the door and the footstep of his father.

“Kamal!” called Dima. “Get out already!  Your father’s home — it’s time to eat!”

“They’ve taken Suhayl,” Hassan said quietly. Suhayl was a colleague of Hassan’s, another doctor at the hospital. His words interrupted the silence of their dinner, the scraping of plates and swallowing of food.

“What?” Dima asked.

“He was easy,” he continued, his voice low. Suhayl the Perfect, Hassan thought, Suhayl whose arms were soaked in gore to his armpits, who cooed to the filthy near-dead, the animals Hassan was only too glad to shake off at the end of the day, with the affection of a mother.

Dima shook her head, worried for the ears of her children.

“No,” he said, “they should know.”  

He glanced awkwardly around the table, briefly examining his daughters and son. “What’s not to know these days?”

He chewed before he spoke again. “Suhayl — you remember him, don’t you?”  He waited for a nod of acknowledgement. “Suhayl’s been taken. Sometime last night. Probably early this morning. Could have been earlier — he had a couple of days off and left early his last shift. No one can be certain, of course, because he lived alone. No wife keeping tabs. But he didn’t show today and when we sent ‘round the jobber, he wasn’t there and his house was a shambles.”

“Ransacked?” asked his mother.

“What do you think?”

She turned her eyes to her lap.

Hassan paused. “But he’ll be fine!” he said brightly, world-weary sarcasm edging his voice. “He’s too useful to kill. I mean, all of them need surgeons — who the hell knows who took him?  Too many bloody sides to keep count. The Volunteers?  The Rebels?  Everyone needs help these days — why not kidnap one of ours? Fat lot of good he’s doing them back at the hospital. Why not borrow him?  Why not recruit him?  I’m sure he volunteered,” he said. “What the hell do they need anyone for anyway?  It’s hardly as if we’re winning this war. Haven’t they killed all of us already?  I mean, hell, the number of filthy wretches I see each day … ”  

“Hassan,” Dima hissed, frowning.

And Hassan stopped, closed his eyes, cradled his head in his hands, and gazed at his plate, remembering Suhayl. He was not the image of a doctor:  plump, a second chin already developing, his arms grown flabby like a woman’s and his character equally as soft and round and gentle. But it had been his hands, the enormous delicacy of his hands, the smooth, slenderness of his fingers and perfect fleshiness of his palms — it was Suhayl’s hands that made him a surgeon devoutly followed by the crippled, the maimed, and the ugly. And the war had created many of them. Hassan recalled Suhayl sewing toes to a woman’s hand, a desperate choice, singing quietly to his woozy patient, her drugged laughter rising above the din of screams and wails that filled the ward. So perfect, so perfect, so good, thought Hassan, so bloody fucking good in all he did, the surgeries, of course, but the petty attentions to the patients, too, even the dying, the near-death, the shouldn’t-waste-your-time-or-our-resources.

The family sat at the table in silence as they watched Hassan, his hands digging at the roots of his hair, its curls twisting oddly between his fingers, uncovering its grayness. He grew still, his hands squeezing his head tightly, a small moan escaping his body, long and low, sustained; a wail of frustration and sorrow and fury. The pang of sorrow could not quite contain the pang of guilt Hassan felt trickle into his grief: A shiver of perverse delight crept over him as he realized that the zookeeper of the wretched dirty animals was gone.

Kamal sat at the table, felt his heart lighten, its rabbitty flutter begin again, and pushed the tines of his fork into the palm of his hand to keep himself still. The image of his afternoon swelled before him:  money changing hands, held high in the air, as the man’s head was forced low, shoved into the back of the sedan. This is how it’s done, Faisal had said. How war is waged and populated, how we live and die. The man, a stranger, but like all men with shaded eyes and little beard and arms folded back like a pigeon’s wings, scrambled in his captors’ hands. Two calls to his family, hissed forlornly as he stumbled to the car, but when they did not answer, he straightened his back, regaining his dignity despite the ashy dust graying his hair. And the man’s family wept and counted bills as Kamal and Faisal watched him disappear in a cloud of red silty earth churned free by the tires of the car and when the family realized their shame had been witnessed by two boys, they pelted them with coins, the traders’ laughter only increasing the family’s zeal.

“Open up!”

“Open up!” called the voice again. Hassan rolled over and looked at his alarm clock:  three a.m. It was a man’s voice, serious and loud, a fist pounding steadily on the wooden door, the iron knocker dancing in response.

“Bloody fucking hell,” Hassan said.

And Kamal heard his mother whimper to his father in the next room, please, please, please, don’t go down there, ignore them. He heard his father stir, the floorboards creak beneath his feet, and gripped his coverlet fiercely, even in the sweltering nighttime heat.

“Open up!” yelled the voice again. Neighboring shutters could be heard opening on unoiled hinges.

“No!”  Dima said. “Let it be.”

“They won’t be going away,” Hassan said.

The shutter fell open. “What do you want?” Hassan called. And, “Would you please be quiet?”  

His words hung in electric air, silent yet living, every ear pressed to its door, every hand to its shutter, a collective breath waiting to be expelled. Even the cicadas had grown silent.

“How many are there?” Dima whispered.

“Two — no, three, maybe,” Hassan said quietly.

“We’ve got a sick child here!” the voice below called.

“Tell them to go to the hospital,” Dima hissed.

“There’s a hospital nearby,” Hassan offered out the window.

“Full up,” the voice said.

Kamal felt a hot trickle of pee run down his leg and sink into the mattress, his heartbeat churning in his ears. Don’t tell, the trader had said, his hand tucked under Kamal’s chin, don’t tell now, will you? The things that happen when people tell, they’re very bad, worse than this. Faisal had cleared the fence, his form fading into the shimmering heat of the junkyard, only Kamal was left behind, his throat held by the trader’s hand.

“No,” Dima hissed again. “Tell them to go away.”  

“I’m afraid I can’t help,” Hassan said. “Did you try the chemist’s down the street?”

A shutter thumped open elsewhere on the street, a sweaty hand no longer able to grip the slippery iron strut.

“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” the voice chided. “We need an examination, not a pill or powder.”  

“Tell them to go away and find another hospital!” Dima said.

“What the bloody hell do you think I’m doing?”

“Tell them again!  Tell them to go away!”

“Open up!  Open up!” the voice called from below, angrier, the gate being rattled, the broken pin that once held the wrought iron in place scraping against the crumbling concrete step. And then a human cry rose from the dusty street, a single wailing note that echoed in the night.

“Shit,” Hassan said.

Kamal heard two sets of footsteps careening down the stairs, his father and mother, his mother’s voice calling after his father, telling him no, no, no, it is a ruse, a trick, let them call all night but don’t let them in!

Two men and a boy stood in the dim light of the entryway.

“What do you want?” Hassan asked. Dima stood in the shadows of the stairwell, watching the men, her hand fiercely clutching the wall.

“We’ve come for some help,” the first man said, gesturing towards the boy. The man was tall and thin, with large hands and feet, wearing glasses, a sliver of a callus running down his forehead, skin worn away from much devotional prayer. “May we come in?”

Hassan bent to examine the boy and stood up. “I don’t see anything wrong with him.”  

“What kind of doctor are you?”  

Hassan paused before answering. “Not a very good one.”  He ground his teeth as he spoke:  it was a denial of all he was, his schooling and his work, his pedigree and his profession.

“Really?  That’s not what we’ve heard.”  The man paused. “He’s got a fever, maybe more. Feel his forehead!”  

The second man stepped from the shadows, his face red from sun and heat, a handkerchief clasped in his hand. “We heard you’re very good, sir — one of the best. The best. Please.”  

Hassan paused before answering. The best? His pride flickered at the mention. “It’s not true.”  

Hassan felt a tooth crack, bits of it float in his mouth. We should have left, he thought, we should have left years ago, gone to Brussels or Stockholm or Frankfurt and suffered the indignities of immigrants: the disapproving frowns as we tried to move our tongues around their awkward language, the rustle of passengers changing seats, clearing out, when we board a tram, the air sniffed around us as if an animal lived down the hall. It would have been better than this, he thought. But he had ignored the war, pretended it happened elsewhere, had gone on his rounds as if the wounds he treated were commonplace everywhere, that the wretched dirty animals were typical patients, that countries like France and Australia had whole teams of doctors dedicated to limb reattachments and shrapnel removal.

“I cannot help,” he said. “I really can’t. This boy has no broken bones, no missing digits.”

“Ah … you’re a surgeon then, are you?” the first man said.

“Yes.” By default, he thought. The tooth gave way again; he felt it tilt wildly in his jaw.

The man nodded. “We heard you were the obstetrician, the best one here. Surely you know something about pediatrics, too — you can help this boy.”  

Hassan said nothing, felt a twinge of pride. The disdainful smirk of the grocery boy, the children’s tears from schoolyard taunts, it would have been worth it, Hassan thought, better than this.

Gravel crunched beneath tires outside, doors opening and slamming closed, gasps and sighs punctuated the night silence, sounds of a scuffle, the loser in pain, and the front door burst open with a rush of air. Suhayl stumbled forward, his arms held high behind his back, two men accompanying him, his lip blubbering red with blood, his forehead blown open above the eye, his left eye swollen shut, the blood already dried and crusty on his neck and chin.

“Oh God, please,” Suhayl said.

So this is how it’s done, Hassan thought. Shit.

And the man holding Suhayl’s arms pulled them aloft, Suhayl shrinking in pain. “Join them,” he croaked. His arms were pulled higher still. “Us!  Us!  Join us!”  His arms were released and he collapsed onto the dusty tiles of the entryway.

“We need doctors, surgeons,” the man explained. “And this one — so clever — did a nasty thing.”  Hassan bent to inspect Suhayl, his breathing shallow, his face drooped against his chest.

“Suhayl,” Hassan said.

“Join them anyway,” Suhayl whispered.

“What?”

And then Hassan noticed Suhayl’s hands, bloody and limp, fingers wobbly and swollen, splayed at erratic angles, broken. Hassan felt his bowels move, fully realized what had happened, why they had come.

“He sabotaged himself. Broke his own bloody hands to spite us.”  

Hassan stared at Suhayl, his body limp on the floor, the dusty tiles turning blue and yellow from the drool spilling from his mouth. He had been such a good surgeon, Hassan thought. And he saw Suhayl and the woman trading toes for fingers, her breath stinking of something vaguely tubercular, her eyes glassy and red-rimmed with untreatable disease, Suhayl stroking her head as he finished his song and his stitching. So good to them, he thought.

“But he told us you were available,” the man said. Hassan felt his hands grow cold and rubbery as he considered this statement. He stared at Suhayl’s heaving form lying on the dirty tiles. Fury flickered through Hassan’s body and he suppressed a desire to kick Suhayl, squarely, in the ribs; suppressed the imagined satisfaction he would feel to hear the crack of a single rib beneath his foot. So this is how it’s done, Hassan thought. He had lived with his head down, believing that he could avoid the war if he failed to seek it out, but it found him, had come seeking him out.

“Mr. Al-Wadi said you have a wife, three children?” the man asked.

The businessman. The neighbor. The snitch. Ah, Hassan thought. He paused before answering. “Yes.”

“We can arrange for five thousand for them.”  

Suffering round a lousy heater in the midst of winter; cheap flimsy housing in a ghetto; a job far beneath him, as a technician cleaning beakers, emptying trash in a hospital, it would have been worth it, he thought, better than this. He paused. Would it? Five thousand, he thought, enough for them to get out, not enough to live on. And he pictured Dima tailoring clothes, pushing a pramful of children, not her own, for extra cash; cleaning bathrooms and kitchens in an elegant home that would have been theirs if only they had left sooner, before this, before the war.

“Will you volunteer?” the man asked, offering the bills, folded into a wad, to Hassan.

He bowed his head and closed his eyes. Yes, Hassan thought, as if there were a choice. But yes, he thought, it will be okay, better than this: no busboy job, no shit-hole apartment, no humiliation while he stood on a corner, his hand waving wildly to hail a taxi in a cold winter rain; no anxious mothers herding their children away from his family’s approach, their funny clothes, their peculiar talk. No longer working for the state, his eyes averted as if the war did not rage around him. He would work for the winning side, the ones who killed and managed to avoid death themselves. He imagined himself the Volunteers’ best surgeon, called upon to perform miraculous repairs, kept like a king, their special envoy, a magician serving their corporals, their generals, their elite. He would drink a cup of tea each afternoon, starched linens dressing the table, the cups fragile, hand-painted, imported from a civilized place. It will be okay, he told himself, better than this.

“Yes,” he said.

Dima appeared from the stairwell, wailing, striking Hassan while she cursed him, his body absorbing her blows.

“No!” she screamed. “How could you?  How could you? How could you do this?”  

“It’s for the best,” Hassan said. He looked at his wife and felt a pang of remorse:  her eyes rimmed with tears, her lips trembling with fear and love. It looked nobler than it was, he realized, as he kissed Dima’s forehead again and again, to volunteer, leaving her to scratch out an existence on a cold continent with their children in tow. How difficult to be Dima, he thought, facing all that hostility in a foreign land alone. It will be okay, he told himself, better than this.

Kamal scrambled to his bedroom window, unlatched the shutters and watched his father’s figure disappear, his head forced low, shoved into the back of the waiting sedan, heard his mother’s wails echo down the silent street, saw, in moonlit silhouette, her upstretched hand, bills clasped firmly in her angry fist, watched as the car pulled away, his mother standing in the street as she fingered the bills one by one, her sobs filling the night sky. He sat on his bed and realized there was no longer any reason to quiet his heart with its rabbitty flutter.

Understatement

Under the state
meant beneath notice,

Alien,
invader of this inner sanctum
bordered by ocean, river, mountain.

“Geography is destiny.”

The earth plotted, planned on paper,
fettered in lines penned by hand.

We come from brush languages we can barely speak.

Perhaps that is why
we commune so well with each other.

We live in understatement,
where meaning lives in a glance.

In The Fray Contributor

this poem has been removed at the author’s request.

In The Fray Contributor

“Boy Rock” by dC

Rev your engines, boy
Clear the road
Rub the sky from your eyes, boy
Take it slow
This ride around the galaxy
makes two stops
one at you one at me
it slingshots
with the gravity
of the sun we hide behind
In the shadow of our love
the earth grows cold
The mines lose weight
The train tracks crystallize
Empty freight
cars glide
toward the twisted crags
of hunchback mountaintops
and break up close to space
close to the summit of Boy Rock

There’s no destiny but we
sheathed in western states of being these
borders are too narrow to make love
so break them up
and watch them crumble from above
Disintegrate your fear each season
Make commitment
Speak of treason
Publish it, and name
your citizenship with a kiss
This
is
revolution time
There’s no more hate and no more crime
so state your rank and fuck this rhyme
The war will come in lines
The spoils will divine
if we hold true and set our minds
on territory yet unclaimed
unsung anthems left unnamed
Step in place and drag your fate
across the amber waves of grain
and sing a spiritual
Chained to the face of Boy Rock

If poetry comes out of me in waves
you catch them on your tongue
but if you dare to utter one
the sound reverberates
and heard around the world
it’s all it takes to lift the curtain
from the jaded generation
and deionize their oxidated dreams
Love is never what it seems
Blood doesn’t pump
it speaks in streams
and we decrypt the crippled scripts
of loose-leaf social movements
mostly in the hips
We know that history bends at the waist
know that weather starts with storm chasers
dare the sky to touch us
and know it can’t stand the heat
Critical is what the masses
can never stand to be
The least that we can give is a position
loud enough to make them whisper
so kiss me
Rip the rope from my neck
Pull the bullet from your chest
and if we want to be the best
we have to climb
Claw over hammer
hoe over heel
mind over matter
breath over steel
hard casings of our lungs
caving in with the bass
from invisible drums
on the floor of a club
that beats in our skull
We have to fight for breath
climb high to be the best
Hand over hand
over hand over
hand
over the buckled knees and arched back
of the diamond-tipped glass-slick
cracks in the seamless body
blasted out of Boy Rock,
boy, rock

A mythical place engraved in our dreams
the frequency of our kisses
the pitch of our screams
the sinew that holds you together
the glue that burns your skin
the power that keeps you running
the light you won’t let in
the hope we all aspire to
the finish wearing thin
the insurmountable odds of you
mounted atop me
atop a mountain
across the sea
Boy Rock
no rock
soars higher
breaks bones
burns brighter
fuels fire
makes my eyes water at the sight
of you climbing
tearing muscle from stone
crying out inside a silent plea
for dignity
among the igneous fragments
summit crumbling to ashes
these last lines scattered
at our feet
statues standing watch for we
make our monument from the single stone
of Boy Rock,
boy
rock

In The Fray Contributor

If everyone wore their crosses
like Christians
boasting
this is  my purpose
this is sacrifice

The man at the bodega would wear a dog collar
chained to a security camera
cash register
tobacco field
And when you asked him the time
he would howl
twelve years!
twelve years!
that’s what time it is

The alcoholic on your stoop
would have a dick
colored like a Michelob bottle
permanently shoved up her ass
And every bad word you’ve thought
as you stepped around
averting your eyes
tattooed on her cheeks
in the shape of handprints

The lesbian daughter you disowned
would grow a cunt on her forehead
Every time she kissed her lover
her bellybutton would rip open
She would cry placenta
and we would have to smack her to shut her up

That depraved artist you petitioned against
would have brushes instead of hands
Every time he tried to say something insincere
shit would come out of his mouth
and he would never be invited
to another SOHO gallery art opening again

The pregnant teenager
would carry asign made of condoms reading
“Jesus was a bastard”
But you would still call her a whore
so her tits would be metal spikes
like Madonna
They would rip through her shirt
unable to cover them
And when she nursed her baby
gums would bleed

The beaten wife
would have purple stars for eyes
mops for feet
and her children’s  shrunken heads grown around her neck
like something from a Viet Nam veterans’ prized collection

The raped woman
Would have a tombstone in her vagina
You’d have to put down flowers before you could fuck her
She would have a video screen in her chest
And every time she was afraid
the “incident” would play
in full color
loud and bright
and you couldn’t look away
No
you couldn’t look away
this time

The screaming insolent child
would have flesh made of cellophane
insides of sand
and you and you’d have to think about it
before you smacked him

The romantic
would grow thousands of tentacles
blue and silver and all things spacey
reaching out for miles
caressing the unseen
When they got chopped off
he would scream
and no one would know why
They would think he was singing
unaware of  how it hurt
But he can grow them back
don’t worry
He can grow them back
so many times

The quiet dissenter
would have mirrors for skin
microphones for ears
and an affinity for fundamentalists

If everyone wore their crosses —
like Christians
boasting
this is my purpose
this is my sacrifice
Maybe those two little sticks
wouldn’t act so damned righteous
anymore

In The Fray Contributor

(stock.xchg)

On the Big Yard
Art is everywhere
Etched into the skins
Of former foster care kids
Turned convict

One man walks the yard alone
He wears a shirt that he cannot take off
The ink of a thousand ballpoint pens
Pushed under his skin by the tips of old guitar strings and sewing needles
In group home midnights
Or D Block lockdowns

Across his shoulders; the letters “S O C A L”
And below this
A pictorial history of Los Angeles
The Pachuco Riots, the movie industry, and surf culture
Underneath the left arm
A lifelike rendering of Adolph Hitler
Underneath the right arm
A shamrock with the numbers “666” in the center
Four teardrops from his left eye
A Sistine chapel of convict art
And down the back of two gigantic biceps are the words:
    P
G      R
A      I
Y      D
    E
He is called “Silent”
Because he speaks to no one
And no one speaks to him
No one even speaks of him
Except for an old man who once said in chow line
“There go Ol’ Silent … He don’t talk to nobody …”

I wanted to speak to him
And when he ran past the Woodpile
Where the peckerwoods sat
I said “Good Morning …”

Silent kept running
But the Woods, playing Pinochle with their White Pride tattoos,
Had heard what I said
And one of them said to me: “Don’t fuck with Silent …”

I decided this was good advice
But when we lined up to be searched after our day on the Yard
Silent stood next to me
He knew that I was the one who had spoken to him

You could see it on his arms!
How lonely he was …
I spoke to him, again
“You’ve got some really amazing tattoos, man …”

The room had been a maelstrom of convict clatter and clanging doors
Now it was quiet, as Silent regarded me with a blank stare
too late now
I looked back at him
Silent reached up and lowered the elastic band of his orange convict pants
No one could look away
We saw his tattoos
Black flames reaching down the shaft of an erect penis
A small “happy face” at the very tip

The guard turned
He addressed Silent by his real name
“Miller! What the fuck is you doin’?”
“Man, git yo’ hands up against that wall!”

Silent covered himself slowly
He put his hands on the wall
They shook him down for weapons and other contraband
Then we moved back into the cellblocks
When they called for “Yard” at 11 AM the next day
I stayed in my cell

I left Old Silent
On the Big Yard
But I thought you should know
He was there

Gay Pride, motherfucker ….

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
(Order from Powells.com and a portion of each sale goes to InTheFray)

Books by prison poet Jimmy Santago Baca
URL: http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?kw=jimmy+santiago+baca

PEOPLE >

Prison Poet, Dramatist, Jean Genet
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/books/author/genet/index.shtml

Prison Poet Etheridge Knight
URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/knight/knight.htm

The Prison Poet by S.H. Wintle
URL: http://dreamsis29.tripod.com/PrisonPoet.htm

In The Fray Contributor

None of the guys drinking in the alley behind Panson’s Beer and Wine knew El Jefe’s real name. In ephemeral fraternities, behind liquor stores or do-it-yourself car washes, names are hardly required. They all drink, laugh, cry, and pass out at all hours of the day. A rotating cast of characters, day laborers, bums, dropouts, and the occasional nine-to-fiver chat, earn nicknames, exchange philosophies and whistle at passing girls regardless of their age.

Tonight was El Jefe’s third night as celebrity of the week in the alley behind Panson’s, one of East L.A.’s most frequented liquor stores. Panson’s was a classic spot along Whittier Boulevard, a strip famous in the late 70s for its heavy cruising. That nightlife was long gone but Panson’s remained a crucial stopover. Crowds of cholos, Chicano yuppies, immigrant day laborers, aproned housewives, and rowdy junior high students kept the place alive from a.m. to a.m. The new owner was a pompous and polished pocho named Juan Martin, who the guys in the alley called Juan Martin del Mar Malvado, or Juan Martin of the Wicked Sea. That night he could be heard slobbering over his elected girl behind the huge blue dumpster. The girl giggled and moaned.

The alley guys, two mechanics, a butcher, a veterano on crutches, and El Jefe swigged at their paper bagged forties as they playfully threw pebbles at the ankles of Juan’s girl from under the dumpster.

“Pinche perros!” the girl squealed.  

“I’m sorry purdy perrita!” El Jefe retorted.

The alley guys collapsed hysterically. El Jefe held up his beer to the applause. Since coming from Tijuana, he had been continuing his career in taco trucks. Cooking was his talent, eating was his downfall. He had always been the fat sidekick for the men and the chubby confidante to the ladies. Even his family glossed over his billowing unattractiveness by nicknaming him El Jefe, or “the chief,” to compensate for the hurtful nickname Panson, or “fatso,” that had begun to circulate in their neighborhood.

El Jefe had never had a girlfriend nor kissed a girl that wasn’t just too drunk to understand the mistake she was making. He swore to himself that coming north to Los Angeles would not only guarantee him better pay but better luck with the ladies — a deception so outdated only a charismatic fat man could seem lucky enough to pull it off.  

“Buenas noches cabrones!” Juan’s butterfly collar was smeared with lipstick. He emerged from behind the dumpster, zipping his fly. His good looks were merely a blend of grooming, accessories, and attitude.

“You be crazy every night, compa!” said El Jefe, who had developed an admiration for Juan’s smoothness with the neighborhood girls.

Juan’s girl of the night shuffled out from behind the dumpster shielding her face and clasping her ripped blouse.

“Hey that ain’t your Flaca!”

The girl stopped in her tracks, “I’m better than La Flaca you fuckin’ wino!”

She gave them the finger and then took off running.

“Who’s La Flaca?” El Jefe asked, offering Juan a drink of his beer.

Juan downed it entirely, “Some puta …”

El Jefe chuckled, “Okay, three putas sit at a bar. One puta says, ‘Yeah I so loose, I stick my cup in my twat.’ The other puta says, ‘I so loose I stick the pitcher in my twat.’ The last puta says, ‘I so loose’ — and she slides into the stool.”

More phlegmy laughter and applause. The cackling butcher downed his beer and hurled his bottle against a brick wall. El Jefe sucked at the remaining foam.

“You’ve been making these fuckers laugh all week,” Juan zeroed in on El Jefe.  

“You don’t have nothing better to do?”

“Not really. They call me El Jefe, but I never in charge of nothing. Maybe you gimme work here at your hotel.”

“Sure, I need a new guy.”

The alley guys were now laughing nervously. They knew what would happen next. Juan would offer El Jefe a decent wage but bury him in work. After all, Juan only wanted him as a mascot; Panson himself would now be working at Panson’s Beer and Wine. Every one of the alley guys felt an urge to warn El Jefe not to accept Juan’s job offer. Instead they finished their beer. Drunks, for better or worse, always seem to let nature take its course.

El Jefe arrived at his new job a little before 10 p.m. with a little paper bag in hand.

Juan looked at it and cackled, “You mojados — always waiting for lunch time. Don’t worry, you’ll work just a little past midnight. First I want you to make sure all those bottles in the back get stocked. Then sweep and mop. If I need anything else, I’ll holler.”

For the most part, El Jefe was a stocker and janitor. Panson’s was larger than most liquor stores in the area. In addition to carrying the most varied collection of spirits, tobacco, soda, and snacks, Juan had expanded into dairy products, canned goods, piñatas, diapers, and an assortment of imported Mexican goods. There were round surveillance mirrors in every corner, and the walls were lined with autographed pictures of all the stars that had chanced to stop by for a bottle, people from Oscar de la Hoya to Maria Conchita Alonso. In such a popular store, El Jefe saw that Juan needed a second clerk. Juan was always managing to get himself entangled in drunk talk with the cholitas that thought they could score a pint of vodka if they flaunted nipple. El Jefe assured Juan that he had experience handling dollars in Tijuana. So, on the third night of his new job, El Jefe — burly and moustached — found himself behind the checkout counter, his belly peaking from below his t-shirt, earning a dollar more as clerk.

El Jefe quickly realized the irony of working at Panson’s. It didn’t help that Juan had invested in a sound loop that would blare through speakers every 15 minutes the California Lottery catch phrase “Pegale al Gordo!” (Strike the Fat One). Customer after customer would reach across the counter to playfully sock El Jefe in hopes of striking it rich with their Scratchers or Lotto tickets.

On his fourth night as clerk, El Jefe thought nothing could surprise of him anymore. But that night, Irma Molacha walked into Panson’s, sashaying in bear claw slippers. El Jefe saw her and figured she had been drunk since noon. Irma managed to trip over a stack of newspapers that was not in her way. She was a Panson’s regular who always wore heavy eye makeup and rouge, even on her waddle. She always donned a zebra print coat of dirty plush. Her drunken craving for Now and Laters and Cracker Jacks made her teeth rot and earned her the name Molacha (Toothless).

She had never really been pretty, not even 20 years ago when she first started showing up at Panson’s, dressed for a disco to see who might treat her to a forty. Back then, the guys would bet each other to see who could stand kissing such an ugly girl the longest. The pinnacle of their fun was driving Irma to a faraway neighborhood and pushing her out of the car. She would giggle and look around to see who might be watching like an embarrassed celebrity, then hitchhike back to the liquor store.

She thrived on her imaginary fame and confused the blow jobs she performed for every former owner of Panson’s with real intimacy. Juan Martin del Mar Malvado was the only owner of Panson’s that would never play her game. She swore he was gay. How could someone find her undesirable?

Irma stumbled throughout the store. Taking advantage of the commotion created by a crowd of teenage girls at the checkout counter, she stuffed her pockets with chocolate bars and single-dose aspirin packets. When she finally approached the register for El Jefe to ring up her single can of Tecate, she licked her finger tips and brushed them across her eyebrows to sadly flirt for a discount.

“Finally, a strong panson here at Panson’s. I knew the original panson very well if you know what I mean,” her laugh allowed a view of her ruined teeth. “This place used to be a lot classier back then. Look at all these hootchies. Except La Flaca of course, she’s got my blessing. Have you seen my flaquita tonight?”

El Jefe shook his head.

She darted a sudden look of concern, more like a gossip than someone who cares.

“You know what? I think they don’t know where she is. She’s always following guys to whereever they want. I’ve always told her don’t let them take you into no garage, but she’s so crazy and real purty, huh?”

Irma Molacha paid for her beer, making too great an effort to conceal her secret. She shouted for Juan’s attention, showering him with “goodbyes” and “take cares.”
He had been tickling bellies and licking earlobes. Juan let her stumble out before he called over to El Jefe. “Next time, try shaking out all the candy she shoved down her panties.”

The crowd of girls giggled, and Juan put his arms around the two prettiest ones. He escorted them to his car for a few favors.

Bruno Urquidi walked into the store gawking at every exiting female ass. He came almost nightly at this hour. The boulevard’s most unsuccessful realtor was always preceded by his bloodshot eyes. Bruno’s firm was known for the collage of Polaroids covering the front window of the office, offering to pedestrians images of the worst investments they could make from City of Commerce to Bell Gardens. His handful of associates waited back at the office, drinking the Coronas and smoking the cheap cigars that Bruno offered as a stipend for remaining in his fruitless firm.

Bruno, dark and leathery faced was even more pompous than Juan. He massaged his moustache as he pondered the vital liquor decision.

“Gimme the tallest Presidente,” Bruno was not coordinated enough to handle money and talk at the same time. He counted and recounted his bills. “And hey, if you see La Flaca tonight, let her know Bruno is looking for her.”

Bruno didn’t hesitate to open the bottle and take the first swig of its genie.
“It’s gonna be a cold night at the office. Pinche Flaca, never around when you need her.”

He staggered out, coughing and commenting to himself.

Chano rolled into the store on his low rider bicycle and carefully set it to lean against a counter topped with jars of beef jerky and pickled pigs feet. Everything about this junior high dropout suggested a street hardened cholo, his posture and strut, the tattoos of the Raiders and Dodgers logos, and a voluptuous naked woman in the company of Our Lady. But his baby face and cracking voice betrayed him.

He was the only son of a reputable cholo who had been shot and killed well before Chano wet his first diaper. Juan knew all the veteranos and had great respect for the memory of Chano’s father. Knowing this, Chano felt free to hang out in the aisles of the store as if it were his turf. He got away with buying liquor and cigarettes in exchange for nickel sacks of pot.

Chano brought a six-pack and a bag of Doritos to the checkout counter. El Jefe was ready to ask for ID when Juan returned from the rendezvous in his back seat. He erupted in glee at seeing Chano and took over the register.

“Hey, you know where I can find my Flaquita tonight?” Juan whispered as he gave the boy a good discount.

Chano gasped, giggled then coughed — a stoner could be astonished by any statement. “Nah man, supposably she was gonna stay home. I dunno.”

He got on his bike, swung the bag over his shoulder, and rolled out of Panson’s without looking back.

El Jefe, ever the good worker, grabbed the push broom. Seeing that there were no customers, he casually asked, “So, who the hell is La Flaca, everyone asking for?”

Juan chuckled and pondered the question before he answered. “La Flaca is the prettiest little lost soul along the alley. I don’t even know her real name. Nobody cares what her real name is anyway.”

El Jefe listened to Juan as he slowly made his way throughout the store sweeping and arranging merchandise. Juan described La Flaca with half interest as he focused on the entrance in anticipation of the next batch of hootchies.

La Flaca lived with her grandmother in a dilapidated little bungalow behind a vacant storefront, but she preferred saying she was just from the alley. She barely managed to finish high school. When she did, she had no clue what to do next. She had no real guidance and no true friends. The girls her age envied her slender figure and cringed at her penchant for tube tops and caked-on mascara. The school teachers had never looked passed her slutty behavior during nutrition and lunch time. Boys and their fathers kept her phone number in secret drawers. She was not a prostitute that you pay with money, Juan noted. Only if she happened to mention that she wants something really bad was it customary for a man to give her a few dollars. La Flaca quite simply loved the company of men and boys. There were no positions she wouldn’t explore. The more adventurous the man, the better the sex. The higher they exalted her looks, the longer she stayed. No guy knows what she really thinks of him. And when she talks, nobody knows what she really means. She was quite animated when she talked about things that interested her, she motioned with her press-on nails, and looked up at the sky to search for her words, but nobody ever really listened to what she was describing. Her neck was covered by a chain of hickeys that she seemed totally unaware of, perhaps placed there while she was still talking. It wasn’t unlike her to be missing like this — she liked to deprive the public of her presence every once in a while — it seemed a reasonable way to maintain the equilibrium of her legend.

The phone rang near closing time. “Hey Juan, it’s Bruno, where the fuck’s La Flaca tonight?”

“I haven’t seen the skank. I guess you should just send ‘em home early tonight.”
Juan slammed the phone.  

El Jefe made his way into the huge refrigerator to stock the beer and soda. The cold made him shiver for a quick second. He could hear Juan behind the register whistling at a couple of cholas as an intro to his suave routine. Assured that Juan was distracted, El Jefe grabbed a Mickey’s and muffled the twist of the cap with his shirt.  He tried to gulp it down in one swig but coughed it out suddenly when he caught sight of vapors coming from someone breathing hoarsely behind a stack of boxes.

Juan shouted from the front of the store, “You awright, compa?”

“Is okay, is Okay!”

El Jefe set the half drunken beer aside. He could have tipped off Juan that there was a thief hiding in the refrigerator, but he figured it would earn him more points if he caught this guy himself. El Jefe’s huge arms embraced three boxes and set them on the floor. His blood chilled further when he revealed a slender girl picking dirt from under her nails, leaning without effect against the freezing aluminum siding.

La Flaca brought a finger to her mouth, pleading him to remain silent. Her lips were matted with a thin frost. “Don’t say nothing.”

He brought his own finger to his mouth in agreement with the seductress. Although she stood a few feet away, it was as if her words were spoken directly into his ears in the manner of lovers and hallucinations. In the short time he’d been in this country, he had never heard a voice utter such a simple phrase with that lusciousness of the Mexican silver screen. Her alabaster skin and opaque curls made him think Maria Felix herself might be keeping him captive in Panson’s refrigerator. She brought her body closer to warm herself against El Jefe’s massive belly.

“They’re looking for me . . .”

He nodded.

“I decide who finds me now. Don’t tell anybody where I am. I like you. I can tell you’ll take care of me.”

She pressed her freezing hands under his shirt, gliding her palms over the carpet of hair that stood upright at her touch. She was tiny and fragile standing next to El Jefe, who had not felt the hair of a woman near his lips in a long time. La Flaca looked up at him and brought her mouth to kiss his lower lip. She kept her eyes open at this delicate moment. El Jefe’s puckered lips sucked like a boy staggering through his first kiss.

As she withdrew, her chilled lip clung to his and ripped a thin layer of flesh. Her mannequin-like gaze pressed against his face weightlessly. El Jefe took a step away from her and let his head hang, thinking he had lost his mind. To convince him of the truth, La Flaca brought his hands to her chest, guided them along her contours and down to rest on her ass. She invited his tongue into her mouth with the tip of her own. El Jefe unleashed the desire he had been harboring since he left Tijuana, delivering his entire tongue for her.

In the front of the store, Juan had been busy pouring shots of tequila for the cholas in hopes of taking one home for the night.

“All right, I’ve been a good host. Now, how ‘bout I show you how hot it can get in my car?”

The girls recoiled and threw their cups.

“Nah-uh, I ain’t La Flaca!”

“Fuck that — my shit ain’t that cheap!”

Juan didn’t hesitate to shove the drunk girls out the door

“Awright, closing time!” He drew the front grate with frustration.

El Jefe and La Flaca retrieved their faces from one another’s with eyes closed, the way shipwrecked sailors bring their heads out from a stream they chance to come across. She brought her finger back to her hushing mouth and gently pushed him away, repeating that nobody should know of their encounter.

The cash was counted. All the doors were shut, and every light turned off except for Panson’s pulsing neon signs. Juan believed it was bad luck to keep a business completely dark after hours. As he opened the door of his car to give El Jefe a ride home, he continued with his sensible lunacies.

“No business, no relationship, no matter is ever really closed. I love my store. I’ll be thinking about it all the way home. I’ll probably dream about it . . . What the fuck happened to your lip?”

xxxxx

El Jefe returned to Panson’s exhausted from that afternoon’s labor in a Chinese family’s yard. It wasn’t the lure of money that revived him for his night job, but the sweetness that lingered on his lips from La Flaca’s mouth. He headed straight to the refrigerator with half a hard-on but found no sign of his pretty girl. He looked in ridiculous places for his lover, between magazine racks and stacks of boxes, to no avail. As there was no stocking to be done in the storage spaces, where an encounter with her seemed most likely, El Jefe reluctantly took his post behind the counter. Juan had already managed to ensnare a group of underage girls in flirtatious chit-chat. El Jefe instantly had his hands full ringing up customers and bagging their purchases.

A wrinkled wino with the rosiest of cheeks, lips, and irises approached the counter with a bottle of the cheapest beer. A curious smile arrived on the wino’s dirty face in slow motion as he noticed the drops of sweat pouring from El Jefe’s forehead and collecting at the tip of his nose.

“A dollar seven, El Jefe said, struggling with the simple task of bagging a can.

There was an awkward pause before the pink drunk placed the money on the counter. El Jefe panicked at the thought this drunk might know his secret. It was as if the roles were reversed and El Jefe was the one suspected of shoplifting. He watched as the filthy man puckered his lips and seemed to kiss the bottle that delivered its genie. He suddenly coughed the beer through his nose and scudded out the door.

El Jefe finally exhaled and wiped his forehead with a paper bag. His eyes fogged over as he remembered La Flaca’s pretty face. To celebrate the survival of his secret, he glided his tongue over the tiny gash of tender flesh left on his lower lip as a scar from her kiss.

“Wake up, panson!” Juan smacked the thick skin bulging from the back of
El Jefe’s neck.

“Don’t touch me!” El Jefe kept from lunging at him.

“I run this store my way, panson.”

“I not one of your putas!” El Jefe shot the first genuine frown of his life. His blood suddenly boiled with the memory of Juan’s nasty description of La Flaca.

Juan froze in shock at El Jefe’s balls. He pealed a sinister half smile.

“Let’s talk about this after closing, Jefe. You have a customer.”

Irma Molacha’s wrecked mouth awaited El Jefe’s service on the other side of the counter. Her drunk tongue, drunk eyes, and drunk nose all declared their independence and swayed, curled and flared about. Irma’s left eye seemed flirtatious, and the right one stared dire like an accuser. Her right nostril struggled to breathe. Her left cheek sagged, and her tongue flickered like a lizard’s. As usual, she placed a single can of beer on the counter and sifted through her purse for a while, expecting for Juan to intercede and give her a discount.

“You know what?” she grinned like a witch casting a spell, “I don’t think they know where La Flaca is.”

Irma searched her pockets for her crumbled bills, bypassing the stolen Chiclets and little packs of Saladitos. El Jefe continued to sweat with every mention of his Flaca, a girl Irma described with such precision that one might think she was a figment of her own imagination.

“She’s purty, huh? But you know drunks. They always do the things they would never do if they were sober. She does the things Panson makes her do,” she cackled and quickly returned with a serious look. “They don’t even know where she is, huh?”

Although his light English was enough for him to understand Irma’s words, El Jefe could not bear another person knowing his secret, and he pretended he had no idea what she had just said.

“Si, si, si, is OK, is OK.”

Irma brought out her index finger and extended it to his lips like La Flaca had when her majesty shushed him. But Irma’s fingernails were like rocks with dull red house paint spilled over them. She didn’t bring the shushing finger to her own lips the way the mermaid had, but pointed it at him like the Chimoltrufia to Botijas.

“Don’t purten to be my fren, awright? Don’t tell me to leave, awright? I’ll go when I want, okay?”

“Irma! Irma, mi amor!” Juan shouted as he emerged from the crowd of giggling girls with his hands outstretched like the pope.

Her eyes peeled back. Her lips drew back like curtains, revealing a set of lower teeth that rotted in a perfect semi-circle and bicuspids worn to reveal their graying marrow. Juan’s attention transformed her into a hyena as if by magic. She burst into song.

“Juan del Mar, Juan de mi Corazon, Juan del mar panson.”

“What’s that in your pocket, Irma?” he retorted as he frisked her.

Irma giggled nervously. Juan’s groupies, with their blouses knotted at the belly, laughed and applauded, glancing back and forth like twins confirming that they are in sync with one another.

Irma seemed to realize that she was being used as a prop in Juan’s show. She started slapping at him in hopes of getting his face. He grabbed her by the wrists. She growled and shook violently.

El Jefe had been watching the commotion from his post at the register when he heard a faint chirping. Perhaps a pigeon had become trapped in the store. His eyes darted to investigate the refrigerators at the back of the store. The chirping quickly became a squeaking.

As Juan brought out all the stolen goods from Irma Molacha’s pockets, El Jefe looked in the space beneath the counter to search for the bat making that noise. Tucked like a stowaway in the tight space beneath the cash register that harbors a little wastebasket and extra receipt rolls, La Flaca sat with her skeletal hands clasped around her folded legs. She might have been wearing a mini skirt and halter top, but her body was huddled so tight that El Jefe was convinced her majesty had returned in the nude. He took the deepest breath of his life and it made him feel suddenly drunk. If this sight of La Flaca — cherry nipples, skin without pores, hair like finely sliced vinyl — meant that he had inexplicably lost his mind, this sudden madness could not be considered a punishment. She stroked at his pant leg and tongued his calves.  When she finally made eye contact, her sultry look was flushed by a sweet smile. A creaking was heard from her throat but no voice was issued this time. She licked her lips over and over to replace the gloss that seemed to be absorbed by the flesh that insisted on remaining matted.

Irma Molacha howled and scratched at Juan like a humiliated tiger. She grabbed a whole rack of Fritos and scudded out the door. Juan retrieved a pen from his shirt pocket and held it up like a dagger as he chased after her. The novice sluts panicked that their man was getting away and they dashed out the door too.

Unaware of the commotion, Bruno Urquidi came stomping into Panson’s. His hair was a mess, his breath stunk of liquor, and his unbuttoned shirt revealed his damp fur. This time, a massive bruise had been added to the features of his wasted face. Bruno clung to the counter with one hand and massaged his bruise with the other.

El Jefe saw this but could not utter a word, as La Flaca threatened to spring out of her cave beneath the register at any moment. El Jefe stupidly offered his hand to Bruno and stuttered nervous hellos.

“Where the fuck is Juan?”

Drops of Bruno’s saliva fell across El Jefe’s face as La Flaca taunted him from below. Her hands ran up and down his inner thigh until she felt his flaccid bulge.
She massaged his balls and taunted him with slight slaps that sent shocks up to his vocal chords as he responded to Bruno with a prepubescent screech.

“I dunno, I dunno where he is.”

Somehow Bruno’s wife had been tipped off about his cheating. She had stormed into his office amid the stench of cigar smoke and the raucous of crooked realtors being blown by their coked-out receptionist and struck Bruno in the face with his own bottle of beer. Bruno had come to the only place he could imagine his wife had heard the truth. He pounded his fist against the counter.

“Somebody told my wife a lot of shit! Fucking Juan better know who he’s dealing with!”

La Flaca dared to reach for El Jefe’s fly. He gasped and dropped his elbows onto the counter. Bruno mumbled unintelligible curses. Shivers shot throughout El Jefe when he felt La Flaca’s hand searching through his trousers for his cock. Registering her touch, bucketsful of blood came rushing into it. He shivered as she pulled back his foreskin and flicked her chilled tongue against him.  

Bruno boiled at El Jefe’s disregard for his emergency. “Who the fuck called my wife?”

He grabbed the life size cardboard Budweiser girl and ripped her head off.

“If it was that fuckin’ Flaca, tell her that there’s five of us that need to settle shit with that cunt.”

El Jefe was far from conversation. La Flaca’s mouth engulfed his shaft and laved its girth with an undulating motion. He could see Bruno stamping, puffing, and tossing TV Guides, but El Jefe was deaf to his wails.

“Gimme that tall Jose Cuervo you fucker!”

La Flaca’s jaw locked on El Jefe as if her very pulse relied on this connection. She shifted her posture so that she was on her bare knees reaching with her arms to embrace his legs, enabling her to impale her head more firmly on his mass.

“Gimme my fuckin’ bottle, pinche wetback!”

Vertigo set in for both. Bruno felt the spirits of Presidente dancing in his throat as if he’d vomit. El Jefe heaved and hissed as his own spirit neared a beheading by La Flaca.

Chano strutted through the entrance with a nervous coolness. His hands were buried in a bulky windbreaker with its collar raised to conceal half of his face. It could not have been a cold enough night to require such attire nor warrant that pale face that surveyed emotionlessly the comedy in the store. El Jefe’s eyes rolled back into his sockets. His laugh regressed to its adolescent discovery of naughty acts, as La Flaca pumped on him with choking urgency.

Chano took a rigid stance before the register as he nervously drew a gun from his pocket.

Bruno darted his arms to the air.

“No mijo, you’re making a big mistake!”

But the boy was determined to become a criminal, perhaps driven to this poor beginning by a boring night. Chano was a sucker for being called mijo and with a shake of the head advised that Bruno quickly leave the store.

“Don’t do anything crazy, Chano!”

“Awright, gimme all the money panson.”

El Jefe already felt cornered by the throes channeled from La Flaca’s mouth. And just as his heart could not beat any faster, it leapt again when Chano pointed his gun straight at him. It was too late for him to pull out from La Flaca without blasting a shot of his own.

“La Flaca! La Flaca!” Juan came running into the store, his pants and shirt undone, his face a white sheet. He had been working on a young girl in the alley near the dumpsters when an uncanny smell led him to find La Flaca’s corpse rotting among the trash.

El Jefe could not retain any longer, and as if shot by Chano’s weapon and Juan’s declaration of the name he loved, he fell back into the shelves behind him, his spurts of cum arching through the air as the most expensive bottles of Absolut came crashing over him. Chano dropped the toy gun and ran out.

“She’s right here,” El Jefe moaned as he wiped the blood from a gash on his brow and licked it from his fingers. He pointed at the empty space beneath the counter. “She’s right there!””

In The Fray Contributor