Reckless Endangerment (13 page)

He drove south on the West Side Highway. He was a careful driver, keeping under the posted speed limits and driving in the right-hand lane. He was not in a hurry. Besides driving, his attainments included a fair fluency in English, from his years in Nogales, Arizona, and much watching of cross-border TV, and the ability to read in both Spanish and English. He had an infallible memory for faces and automobiles. He could also read a map and had a remarkable sense of direction.

It was somewhat after the noon hour and traffic was light. It took him a little over an hour to drive from Washington Heights to the bar on Court Street, Rudy’s. This was a small, dim place under the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, known by Connie and the brothers to be a hangout of the man he sought.

Inside, half a dozen men and the bartender were watching a Giants game playing on a color TV suspended over the bar. There was a brief silence when the kid walked in, a comment, a laugh, and conversation and TV watching resumed. El Chivato stood at the bar, and the bartender came over and stood there, waiting. He was a middle-aged Puerto Rican with a pocked face and thinning combed-back hair.

“I’m looking for Lucky,” El Chivato said.

“Who?”

“Lucky. A big man, with a big nose.”

“Oh, him. He ain’t been around. What can I get for you?”

“Nothing. Where is he?”

The bartender sighed and rolled his eyes. “Hey, cowboy, this is a bar, not the fuckin’ phone book. I
said
he ain’t been around. So order a drink or take a hike.”

El Chivato pulled the .357 out from under his coat and shot the TV. In Hermosillo he would have shot a dog, in the unlikely event that anyone in Hermosillo had spoken to him like that. A .357 makes an extremely loud sound when fired, and El Chivato now had the undivided attention of everyone in the place, especially that of the bartender, who was staring into the smoking muzzle of the pistol.

“Where is he?” El Chivato asked again. The bartender was shaking. Sweat pooled in the pits on his face.

“Honest to God I don’t know! Jesus, man, take it easy!” cried the man.

“You do know. He comes in here all the time, I hear,” said El Chivato. The pistol went off again, shattering several bottles and a beer-company mirror behind the bar. The flame of the blast scorched the side of the bartender’s face. He fell to his knees behind the bar, clinging to the edge of the bar with his fingers as if hanging from a cliff; he wet his pants.

He looked up and saw the gun pointed down at him. He said, “Only on the weekends, Jesus, please, he only comes in on the weekends here, man. Please, he’s a dealer, he hangs out at the Palm, other places, Jesus, man … that’s all I know, I swear on my mother, man …”

El Chivato questioned the bartender as to the location of the Palm and the other places where Lucky might be found. Then he turned his back on them like a matador who has stymied a bull and walked out.

He paused for a moment outside the bar and looked both ways, as a cautious old man does before crossing a busy street. There were no pedestrians approaching and little traffic. He turned on his heel, went back into the bar. The six customers and the bartender had not moved. They stared at him, like mice paralyzed under a snake’s jeweled gaze. El Chivato threw open his coat, unlimbered his shotgun with a smooth, practiced motion, and killed everyone in the place.

Fatyma’s plan was a simple one: a young, rich, handsome man would fall madly in love with her and take her to Hollywood, where she would become a famous movie star, admired and loved by millions. Given her limited experience in the world and the narrowness of her literary sources, this seemed a reasonable goal. Every one of the heroines of the romances she had been able to obtain achieved the former goal, and the biography of Marilyn Monroe indicated that no particular ability was necessary to achieve the latter. It might be better to go to Hollywood and become a star first, Fatyma thought, for it was clear that Marilyn had plenty of rich, handsome men to choose from, but she was not entirely clear about how distant Hollywood was or how she might get there. She had on hand $28.35, in coin and small bills, pilfered over months from the family till. This might be sufficient to make the journey. She would discover this at the airport.

She rode the subway to the last stop, in the Bronx, and then back again to Manhattan. She saw a sign that said TIMES SQUARE and on impulse sprang up and left the train, clutching her small suitcase. She had heard of Times Square, but vaguely, as being the center of something exciting. Like Hollywood, the location had a symbolic ring to it, connoting romance, America, the mysterious pursuits of American adults, the life in which she desired to immerse herself.

The reality at four in the morning was mildly disappointing. The lights were alluring, the people less so. They seemed not too different from those in Brooklyn, especially the people in the sections starting a few blocks from her home, where she was not allowed to go. A large proportion of them seemed to be black or Spanish, which surprised her. She had imagined that once out of Brooklyn she would be in America, the land of the movies and TV, where the vast majority of faces would be white.

She walked around the periphery of the square for some while, from Forty-first to Forty-fourth, up Seventh and down Broadway, looking in the shop windows. This was disappointing too; she was not interested in cameras, electronics, or souvenirs, and she was shocked at some of the magazines on display, and at the marquees of the movie houses and at the places where men went to watch women undress. In fact, Fatyma had no information whatever about sex. In an Arab village she would have been ensconced in a community of women whose gossip and shared wisdom about the stupidity and perfidy of men would have provided her by her current (marriageable) age with knowledge sufficient to produce another generation. As it was, she had only her mother, who had withdrawn into the morose silence of the deracinated immigrant, and Fatyma had been from too early an age denied the companionship of American peers. What she knew came from her reading and from snatches of movies seen in other people’s homes, and the songs and chatter of her radio.

It passed briefly through her mind that her father’s view of the world was correct, that outside the family and the narrow world of the Arab, there was nothing but what her father called fornication. And sin. Fatyma was not entirely sure what fornication was. She wished that she had been able to watch more television, since everything on television related in some way to fornication, according to her father, but this had not been possible. The Daouds had a TV, but the channel dial had been snapped off and it was exclusively devoted to service as a VCR monitor, playing tapes of Egyptian movies and sermons from Palestine and Syria. It had something to do with kissing, she had concluded, which you never saw them doing in the Egyptian movies. At any rate, she had gathered that a man and a woman were necessary, and that they couldn’t be married, since clearly married people (in her experience) did not even kiss. It was also related in some way to love and passion. In
Fountain of Desire
Brent and Melanie were always kissing with burning lips, their hearts pounding as one. Also their loins were afire, and Melanie’s breasts throbbed. Fatyma knew what breasts were, and as for loins, she could make a fair guess, although the book was short on the details of what occurred when you dissolved in a fiery embrace on the silken sheets. How this related to sleeping with men she could not decide. Marilyn, she knew, “slept with” a good number of men so that they would help her become a movie star and after she did become one, because she loved them. Fatyma thought that she could easily do this too: you went to bed and you awakened—what could be simpler?

The sky was now lightening above the eastward-facing urban canyons, and Fatyma found she was both tired and hungry. She had not slept at all the previous night, of course, and had dozed only fitfully during the subway ride. And she had hardly eaten anything since her father had told her about her forthcoming marriage to the old man. She went into an all-night place on Forty-third. It was harshly bright and steamy with the smell of bitter coffee, toast, and warm grease. She sat at the counter and ordered a double-hamburger basket, coffee, and a slice of apple pie. It was the first time she had ordered a meal for herself in a restaurant. It struck her suddenly that she would be eating like this forever after, in restaurants, although she expected that soon she would be eating in better places and that a man would be paying.

The meal came and it was huge, the pile of fries threatening to cascade from the oval plate. She ate greedily until she was full. The woman behind the counter filled the coffee cup without being asked, which for some reason made Fatyma feel particularly adult. Fatyma looked around the restaurant. Ten booths covered with beige leatherette, red plastic tabletops, a line of separate tables and chairs down the center aisle, a counter. A ragged man wearing many layers of clothing was sleeping in one of the booths. Another held four women wearing short pants and short fake-fur or suede jackets in unlikely colors. They were laughing and pointing out the window at some other women of the same type standing on the street. Another booth held a group of grimy-looking young people wearing black clothes. One of them had lime green hair, and another had his hair drawn into long spikes. Fatyma looked at these people carefully. The women she knew were whores, since they were wearing heavy makeup. What the other people were she could not tell. Perhaps they were insane or members of some sort of religion she had not heard of.

“Hey, are you going to finish those fries?”

The speaker was a young woman sitting next to Fatyma at the counter. She was thin, pale, and foxy-faced, and had thin, dirty white hair escaping from under a red acrylic cap emblazoned with the symbol of some professional team. She was dressed in a soiled denim jacket over a sweatshirt and blue jeans. Fatyma shook her head and pushed the plate a few inches toward the stranger, who brought it in front of her place, flooded the fries with catsup, and consumed them in thirty seconds.

Fatyma observed the woman closely. A whore, without a doubt, lipstick in a pale purplish shade, lavender eyeshadow, and powder above a neck that was not clean. When the woman had cleaned up the plate with the last fry, Fatyma pushed over her half-finished pie.

“Hey, thanks,” said the woman. Then with her mouth half-full, she indicated Fatyma’s suitcase. “You traveling somewhere?”

“Yes,” said Fatyma. “I am going to Hollywood, California.”

“Hollywood, huh?” She grinned and asked lightly, “What, you’re gonna be a movie star?”

“Yes,” Fatyma said matter-of-factly, and smiled.

The young woman looked at Fatyma to see if she had spoken sarcastically, but decided she had not. She asked, “When’re you going?”

“I think today. Do you know how much it costs?”

“Oh, I don’t know: a bus’ll probably run you one-fifty, maybe. Air, maybe four hundred bucks, cheaper if you can get a special deal.”

Fatyma looked shocked. “So much? I didn’t know it costed so much.”

“You don’t have it, huh?”

“No. I have only twenty-two dollars.”

“You could hitch,” said the woman. She pulled a crumpled pack of Winstons out of her jacket and lit one, offering the pack to Fatyma, who refused with a shy smile.

“Hitch?” Fatyma recalled the word from songs but was unsure of the precise meaning.

“Yeah, bum a ride, Of course, twenty bucks’ll hardly pay for your food, and they’ll probably ask you to kick in for gas and all.” She saw the effect this statement had on the girl and added, “Hey, it ain’t that bad, kid. There’s ways to make money.”

“A job, you mean?”

The woman made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, yeah, sure a job! Look, nobody’s gonna give you a job, you’re on the street. I mean, you got to have an address, a real address, not a shelter or a crash pad. You got to have clothes …” She tapped Fatyma’s little suitcase with her toe. “I mean more than you got. Also, there’s what can you do? And how old you are. How old are you anyway?”

“Sixteen.” Fatyma lied.

“Yeah, I’m eighteen and they won’t look at me. I mean, face it, they’re out to fuck you any way they can. I’m Cindy, by the way.”

“I’m Fat—I mean, Franny. So what do you do? I mean to make money.”

“Oh, a little of this, a little of that. Panhandle. Sell, stuff. Boost from stores. How come you split?” Blank look. “I mean left home. You from out of town?”

“Brooklyn.”

“Oh, yeah, Brooklyn. I’m from upstate. So … your folks give you a hard time, huh?”

“I am a whore, so my father was going to marry me to an old man.” She shrugged. “I escaped.”

“Wait a minute, you’re a
whore?
”

“Yes, like you.” She smiled.

Cindy’s face hardened up. “Hey. I’m not saying I ain’t done tricks, but I’m no whore, and I ain’t gonna
be
no whore, let’s get that straight.”

“You do tricks?”

Cindy blew out a cloud of smoke from both nostrils, like a dragon. Fatyma looked on with admiration and wondered if she should have accepted a cigarette. “Yeah, everybody does it once in a while, on the street. The men’re there. God, are they there! It’s no big deal. Why, you thinking of tricking yourself?”

“You mean men? You … trick men for money?”

“Oh course, men! Who the fuck else’s gonna pay for it?” Cindy cast an appraising eye over Fatyma. “You need to lose that coat, get you a little short jacket or something, a sweater. And boots.” Her brow wrinkled and she shook her head. “On the other hand, you look like you just got out of fucking junior high. You can use that. Get your hair in like braids, little red ribbons or something.”

Cindy went on, seeming glad to have a rapt audience for her fashion advice as well as her considerable street experience. Fatyma, while listening, was still running her mind over the novel notion of trickery. She recalled now something she had not thought about for years. She was in a kitchen, playing under the table while her mother spoke with two older Arab women, relatives perhaps, she could not recall exactly who. The conversation had to do with some man in the old country, a farmer, before the war, and some gold, and a cow. Fatyma couldn’t remember the details, but she recalled the point, which was although men claimed all the power and made a great show of it, women were more clever and could trick men anytime they desired, and get them to do whatever they wanted. There was another story of a trick, something to do with a wedding night and blood on the sheets, and Fatyma remembered that here the women lowered their voices and glanced around to make sure no one heard, and this in itself made Fatyma ask her mother about the trick with the blood. Her mother ignored the question, and found fault with something the child did, which is what she always did when that sort of question arose, so Fatyma stopped asking.