Bronx Noir

The hard part was finding a place to be together. They would have gone to the movies, but there were no more movie houses in the neighborhood, they had all closed up years ago. Sometimes they went up to the roof and made love under the water tower, where they could hear the nighttime rustle of the pigeons in their nests. But you never knew who might be up on the roof—kids fooling around or firing guns; junkies shooting up. They couldn’t even go up at the same time, there was too much of a chance they might be seen.

Instead they went to the games. It was cheap enough to get in, only two-fifty to sit up high in the upper deck. They would climb up to the last row, where they were cloaked in the shadows and the eaves of the big park. From the leftfield line, Luis could just make out where they lived—staring out now from inside the gleaming white, electrified stadium that looked like a fallen moon from the roof of their building. From where they sat too, they could see the fires out beyond the stadium walls, more and more of them every night, until it looked as if the whole Bronx was burning down that summer.

“It’s all goin’,” Mercedes said one night, while he watched in amazement as apartment buildings he had passed his whole life—buildings that had seemed as large and eternal as mountain ranges—went up in flames. “We should go with it.”

“What about Roberto?” he had asked, but she just made a disdainful shrug, and turned back to her beer.

Roberto didn’t care where she went in the early evening. That was when he did his other business—dealing horse, coke, bennies, guns; whatever he could get his hands on, out of his basement kingdom. Even so, they always made sure to sit up in the last row, and they would touch each other only when something big was going on and the rest of the stadium had turned its full attention to the field. He would lose track of the game, but he was always attuned to the rise and fall of the cheers, breaking like the waves on Jones Beach.

“He’s a pig,” she told him. “He hurts me, you know. When I say somethin’ he don’ like, or just when he’s drunk.” She had leaned her back toward him, lifting her soft pink shirt to show him the bruises Roberto put on that exquisite skin. Luis felt as if he were on fire when he saw those marks on her, he wanted to go out of the stadium right then and there and find Roberto in his basement.

“Every night, I wanna die before I go back to that bruto,” she told him.

But she did go back. They both did. Nights when the Yankees were out of town were the worst. Then all he could do was stand by the kitchen window, looking to catch some glimpse of her going by on her walk through the courtyard, while his mama cooked dinner and asked him what was so fascinating down there. He would watch her moving through the trash to Roberto, the same as always—arms folded over her breasts, head down. Only now she would look up at Luis where he stood in the window, even though anyone might see her.

He walked slowly up the hill of 158^th Street with his cheap suit and his cheap suitcase and his little package in the brown paper bag. He turned onto Gerard Avenue and then he was there, in front of the old building. Like everything else, it was disconcerting in its familiarity. It seemed so much the same, only cleaner, the bricks scrubbed, most of the graffiti gone. Even the high red, locked iron gate that had surrounded the front entrance was gone, completely vanished. Easier and easier.

He lowered the suitcase to the ground and stood there for a moment. Feeling the package in his inside suit pocket. Looking up at the floor he knew she was on—his old floor. Mercedes—this close now. He picked up the suitcase and went up the front walk, grabbing the door as a pair of laughing kids came dashing out. He stepped in, marveling at how clean and new everything looked here too. The walls were painted a bright new color, the layers of grime scrubbed off the floor so that he could make out the original mosaic work in the marble again; the outlines of a big fish about to eat a little fish, who was about to eat a fish that was littler still.

He almost walked past the elevator, from the force of a habit suspended thirty years ago. But then he noticed how the door gleamed, all the original silver-and-gold art deco work shining brightly. He pulled tentatively on the door, got inside, and pushed a button. To his astonishment, the elevator started to rise.

He couldn’t stand to see her walking through the trash in the courtyard, a woman like that. Not that the stadium was much better. They had just spent two years rebuilding it, but it was an ugly place; the grime already ingrained in the rough concrete floors, old hot dog wrappers and mustard packets and peanut shells blowing up around their ankles, and spilled coke sticking to their sneakers. He wished he could take her someplace better, someplace worthy of her.