Bronx Noir

He made his way down to the street, and it all came back to him in a rush. He missed his step and staggered off the curb, stunned momentarily by the sheer, overwhelming familiarity of it all. His eyes blinking rapidly, trying to accustom themselves to the dappled, pigeon-streaked world beneath the elevated that he had run through so many times as a boy. There was the same newsstand on the corner; the same seedy row of souvenir booths; a bowling alley. The smell of pretzels and hot dogs cooking over charcoal in the vendors’ carts. All the same, somehow. Back when he was still her Luis, her amado, and his hair was still thick and black, his stomach flat and hard as an ironing board from packing meat on the trucks all day.

She had loved him then. He knew it. Why else would she have been there, up on his floor that day? Why would she be there now?

Despite his vow to meet her, to talk to her, he hadn’t had any idea how to do it. She belonged to Roberto, the super, walking every evening like a novitiate to his fiery kingdom in the basement.

Roberto was not a man to go up against—everybody in the building said that. He was short but built like a bull, with a mat of hair on his chest. Stripped to the waist, summer and winter, always strutting about, flinging open the furnace door and digging vigorously at the grate ash with a fire iron. People in the neighborhood whispered that it was there he burned the bodies of all the men he had killed. He kept a .38 jammed into the front of his jeans, where everyone could see the handle. He wore a pair of wraparound aviator glasses, so that with his pointed beard and his perpetual leer, Luis thought he looked like some kind of demonic insect down in the fiery half-light of the basement.

When Luis came down to pay the rent for Mama, Roberto would bully him. Forcing Luis to wait while he told him his stories about all the things he had done, the women he had taken, the men he had killed. He bullied everyone who came down to plead in vain for him to fix something, or to give them a couple extra days on the rent. Sure that he could keep them all in line.

“I don’ even need the gun. I give them a taste of this, and that’s all!” he would laugh, waving the iron poker just underneath Luis’s chin, and Luis would have to stand there, not daring to leave; trying desperately not to flinch, though the iron was so close he could smell the heat coming off it. Keeping that beautiful, beautiful girl, with those beautiful, large brown eyes, all to himself. But Luis had seen a dozen other beautiful girls who belonged to men cruising down the Grand Concourse in big cars. Laughing loudly, showing off the gold around their necks and on their fingers, always ready to reach for the piece under their shirts and show that off too. Men like Luis looked at her beautiful eyes and looked away, going about their business.

Then one day she was there, in his hallway. Appearing like a vision amidst all the trash there, like the faces of the saints people were always seeing in a pizza somewhere out in New Jersey. Where they lived used to be a nice building, for nice people, with marble floors and mosaics, and art deco metalwork on the doors. Now the people were not so nice, they left their garbage out in the hall, where the paint peeled off the walls in long strips, and the roaches and the waterbugs swarmed around rotting paper bags full of old fish, rotted fruit, and discarded coffee grounds. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen, suddenly appearing there before him, just as he got home from work in the early summer evening, with his muscles aching from loading the trucks all day, and the climb past five flights of busted elevator.

Yet he hadn’t even thought about what she was doing there—at least not until much, much later, after it was too late to do any good. He hadn’t thought about anything much at all, he had simply reached out and touched her hip—the boldest thing he had ever done in his life—as she tried to move past him in the hall.

And to his surprise she didn’t try to pull away but stayed there, stopped by his hand, those great brown eyes looking right back at him. The first thought that occurred to him was how tall she was with those long legs, her gaze nearly level to his. The second was how bad he knew he must smell, his shirt and jeans soaked through with sweat, and smeared with blood, the way they always were after another day filling the bellies of the trucks.

Yet he could not let go of her, could not stop looking at her there. He moved his other hand to her hip and pulled her slowly to him. Then he touched her all over, petting her long, pitch-black hair; caressing her smooth brown flesh through the open back of her blouse. Still resting his other hand on her hip, as if she might try to move away. But she didn’t.