Bronx Noir

“I mean, say a john you did was really rich and you did him so good. You think he might fall in love and keep you?”

Angie’s round blank eyes flowed into the distance.

Iris closed her own eyes. Iris by candlelight, by midnight, in the mirror staring so. Waiting for the ugliness to come to her too. Bruises, welts, lines, sallow hollow-eyed streetsucked. Like so many of her friends. Like her mother. Like the street with its cracks and tears and chunks of gravel where the trucks hit. She couldn’t just sit and wait anymore.

She suited up. The minidress with the glittery pantyhose and high heels was just too putona. She wanted classier, something subtle gray, ladylike. She let her hair tumble loose. Not too much makeup, a more professional corporate look torn from a magazine ad. The buzz on the street all of a sudden was that Iris Robles was making her move. Mr. Romero at the meat market brought her the side of ham personally and walked her to the door, purely taken by how she looked this day.

“Now this,” he said, “is what I call a change for the better. You look so responsible, reliable, efficient, with just the right touch of feminine to keep you looking sexy but not slutty. A real fine lady is what I see. Yessir, a fine young lady. You tell your mother I threw in a little more ham for her. Will you be gone long into the real world?”

“I’ll be gone for a lifetime,” she said.

Her mother just thought she had a special date. Pacheco thought she was applying for a job, and gnawed a toothpick nervously. He was relieved when she sat on the stoop and thought he could maybe make a few calls, now that she was somehow looking so good. The way she pulled out a long thin cigarette and lit it reminded him of some ’40s movie, some Rita Hayworth, some Lauren Bacall. And he ran to get to his phone.

She had finished two cigarettes and just lit the third when she felt that vibrating rumble in the pit of her tummy. She could sense him already by instinct. The Jaguar crouched at the end of the block, headlights off. Iris stood up, walked to the curb. She stepped out onto the cobblestone street, face-to-face and staring back. The two of them not moving, the two of them still.

The first step was the deepest, with a crack of shard resounding forever slow-motion hip-move whirls of smoke on the outer edges of the frame and all that blue lighting. Every step closer took too long. At any moment she thought the roar would come, those headlights snapping on, all pounce. She spotted the flash of a match, the orange tip of his cigarette glow. The outline of those young, stern features. Closer, now closer, she standing golden in the glare of a parked UPS truck’s lights.

His eyes were not on her. They stared ahead, squinting through cigarette smoke, thin lips moving as if he were memorizing some poem. She put her hands on the door as if needing a handrail, felt the Jaguar throb tremor her insides. She leaned in to look. His cigarette hand was trembling something fierce. Her voice failed right then. She cleared her throat of cigarette, of car freshener, of some stale rubber smell.

“Hey, honey,” she said, troubled. “You need some company?” Her head tilted to one side, hair cascading down, her smile a little scared like a plea. He turned to look at her slow, machine-like, the muzzle mounted on a swiveling turret. Now she could finally see the eyes, how blank dark nothing they were.

“Get away from my car,” he snarled. The next instant his hand hit the stick shift. The car thundered and buckled. Iris had barely gotten her hands off the door before it lurched with tire shriek, racing off down the street without her.

PART III

ANOTHER SATURDAY NIGHT

EARLY FALL

BY STEVEN TORRES

Hunts Point

Yolanda Morales was on her knees on Farragut Street. There was the distant sound of strays. There was a cricket. There was no life on the street. Whoever worked in the area was long gone. The ladies of the night never worked so far from the main flow of traffic on Bruckner or Hunts Point Avenue. To her left was the fencing that kept people out of the transfer station where the borough of the Bronx separated out household garbage from recyclables. To her right was a warehouse loading area. In front of her stood a man with a gun. The muzzle was pressed to her forehead.

She smiled. It was a bloody-tooth-missing smile. One of her eyes had a cut running deep through the eyebrow above it. If she lived, it would swell shut.

If.

She raised her right hand—not to grab the gun, just to add emphasis to what she had to say if she could say it. The hand was ugly, but she didn’t feel the pain of it anymore—could not have told anyone without looking which fingers were broken, or that a splinter of bone from her ring finger had erupted through the skin. Those weren’t her only broken bones and that wasn’t her only broken skin.

“Listen, Mister Man. You do what you gotta do. I done my duty, and I’m ready to meet the Lord.”