Old Ghosts, page 3
“That’s unacceptable,” he said. I opened my mouth out of habit, to mediate their argument before someone threw a chair, then snapped it shut.
“That’s life.” She handed the case and lighter to me. “We’ll meet in two to discuss final arrangements.”
I wiped my forehead. My hand shone in the sun, covered in sweat. The scent of burning insulation and pine trees smothered me. “I can’t do this. I need to go. I need to get out of the car.”
Chance laid a reassuring hand on my thigh while Delilah just cackled.
“No, really,” I said. “Stop and let me out.”
“You know, Beto, you keep saying that, yet you always follow me like a lost little duckling.”
“I need to get back to the job.”
Chance squeezed my leg. “Where did you think we were going?”
“I’d like to see it,” Delilah said. “Is it going to be ready in time?”
“That’s a great question.” He looked at me, smiling. “Will you be ready, Beto?”
I tucked my hands between my legs, trying to conceal their trembling. A woman pushed a baby stroller down the street, trailed by one child holding a baseball bat, another skipping rope. Looking out the window, I imagined Luz’s hair cascading from the fur-trimmed hood like a dark waterfall, her whistle on the woman’s tongue.
Breath on my neck. Delilah’s voice next to me. “Remember when I tied you up with that jump rope?”
“Yes,” I said. Arctic fingers compressed my spine and a warm, familiar sensation spread through my thighs. Anticipation. “Yes, the house will be ready.”
“Good,” he said. “Now where can we get a burger around here?”
“I thought we were going back to the job!”
Something hit me on the back of the head. An orange plastic bottle with a prescription label fell into my lap.
“Take a few. Jesus,” Del said. “You know, Beto, you used to be a lot more fun.”
Chance decided to bestow his mercy upon me and we pulled up to the site five minutes later. I hurried away from the car as quickly as I could while remaining inconspicuous, following the echo of Dwaine’s voice like a dolphin finding a safe cove. He stood beneath a light fixture in the kitchen, trying to explain how to rewire it to one of the workers.
“You’d think red, green, and yellow would translate worldwide.” He coughed, spit on the floor and covered it with his boot.
“Rojo, verde, and amarillo.”
“Huh?”
“That’s how you say red, green, and yellow in Spanish. You haven’t figured that out yet?”
He considered me with a long glare then invited me to give myself an enema with the nozzle beside the kitchen sink. “How was your coffee date?”
“It wasn’t a date.”
From down the hallway, I heard Delilah’s laugh. I debated whether to slink away to the basement and wait until they were gone or jump through the plate-glass back door and sprint home to Luz. Instead, I stood and waited. As if I would’ve done anything else.
“Mrs. Miller, nice to see you again.” Dwaine rushed forward and shook her hand, kissed her knuckles. “I was just about to walk through the plans with Beto here. Reckon you’d like to join us?”
“That would be positively lovely.” She wrapped her fingers between Chance’s and we followed them upstairs, Dwaine pointing out which doors to replace, which walls to knock down and which fixtures to keep. Picking out which wires to wrap around her neck until threads of veins filled her eyes. I floated in and out of the conversation.
In the last room upstairs, Dwaine and Chance were drawing theoretical blueprints in the air, their backs towards us. Delilah drifted around the room, cupping my crotch when she passed before me. I was less than pleased to realize I had a massive erection. What are you doing, Beto? Chance said something about for the kids.
“Yes, darling,” she said. “This would be the perfect room for the kids to play.” She stood behind him and gave a quick kiss on the neck. Dwaine blushed. I wanted to bite off her lips.
We made our way through the rest of the house, Chance and Dwaine breaking off to discuss some alterations, Delilah wrapping extension cords around her wrists on front of me, maybe a reminder, maybe a promise.
Twice I saw Chance smile and wondered if he was watching in the window reflection. She’d pull away just as Chance turned around and asked my opinion of Dwaine’s plans. I’d give the answer that Luz would approve of, invoking her presence as the single light in this lurid scene.
Eventually, they were called away for other business—to lead a bondage ceremony or roast children over a trashcan fire or file their taxes: each was just as likely as the next—and left the house to Dwaine and me. While he argued with a distributor on the phone, I worked upstairs, repeatedly sinking a twenty-pound sledge into a wall in the nursery, watching the asbestos and drywall burst in the air and drift down like cancerous snowflakes. Without closing my eyes, I could see cartoon jungle creatures parading around the chair-rail, the stuffed animal mobile hanging over a bamboo crib, the brightly colored blanket Luz’s grandmother wove for her as an infant lying over our child. I could smell baby oil, cotton diapers, the warm musk of innocent child. I could hear Luz’s whisper-singing a Zapotec song from her grandparents, tiny breathing.
I tore apart the last part of the wall, wiped the paste from my face, and headed home before Chance or Delilah could make a surprise return visit.
Assholedickwhore echoed in the bathroom as I walked through the front door of our apartment.
“Everything copacetic in there?”
“Out in a second.” She could be singing a Spanish lullaby or uttering something that would make Joe Pesci blush, yet her voice was always as soothing as an ocean breeze. I threw my shirt across the room and fell onto the bed, pressing against my eyelids until I saw circus shapes. They swirled and twisted and bled into an oblong splotch that resembled Del’s head after being hit with a hammer.
“Hey, you,” Luz said. My hair stood on end.
“Thank God.” I wrapped my arm around her neck and pulled her onto me. “You smell good.”
She nestled her face into my chest; her breath made my hair flutter. “You stink,” she whispered.
“What was all the commotion about?”
“Stupid toilet.” Her voice reverberated inside me. “You know how it wobbles when you sit, and I’ve been saying we’re going to end up in the middle of the apartment downstairs?”
“But you’re not downstairs.” That got me a pinched nipple.
“We will be soon. Stupid thing broke through part of the floor.”
“Shit.”
“I was.” She bit her lip at her own pun.
“You are one sick bird.”
I draped her hair over my face, inhaled and let her fill my lungs. Feeling her body rise and fall, I patterned my breathing after hers, like an ouroboros, unending. As the haze of sleep began to drift over us, she looked up, smoothed my eyebrows with her fingertips.
“¿Todo bien?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Her hand was a feather over my cheek, brushing the debris of the day, of Boston, down to the floor to be buried by dead skin and fiberglass dust.
“You don’t seem it.”
Chance and Delilah flashed on the back of my skull, mouths lurid and dripping. Come home, Beto.
“Long day.” I pressed my lips on her forehead. “I’m fine.”
Her pelvis pressed against my thigh, toes caressing my calves. She brushed hair from my forehead and put her lips next to my ear. “Today’s the day,” she said.
“What?”
She started to speak, caught her words, then blushed and whispered, “I’m ovulating.”
Before I could even get pissed off, I caught myself, realizing that it couldn’t have been any other way than this. Penance and retribution. All that Catholic nonsense Chance and Del’s parents used to go on about. The inevitability almost made me laugh.
“Luz, sweetheart, I—” but her finger on my lips, her thighs straddling my hips, quieted me. She leaned down, said just lay there and pulled her shirt over her head. Shadowed ribs. Her hips, brown seashells. Neck extended and begging to be kissed. I closed my eyes and dissolved into the warmth of her.
After she came, after she did her alternating-knee sperm-magnet routine, after she curled against my body and softly snored into my neck, I laid on my back and stared at the watermark cracks in the ceiling. Faces and scenes and whispered exchanges crashed inside my skull. I saw Chance and Delilah, holding hands inside the home they were going to use as a stash-house while Dwaine gave the grand tour. I saw the reverent look on the cashier’s face in Royal Farms that afternoon, the fear, the respect. I saw Luz’s smile, her black hair swimming among the debris of Boston, the shards of an abandoned life. I saw myself lying in an alley with ice picks stabbed through my eyes.
Chapter 4
The days passed, because that is what days do. Their ethereal genetic code is comprised of moments lost and savored and relived, but never held. Of instances and loss. Of kissing and cutting and shitting. The days buzzed past us like shrapnel-winged flies, slipping through our fingers as if covered with scales and casting us away, palms smeared with longing.
I used to fight against it. In Chance’s dank college apartment, before he began his ascent, I’d hold smoke in my lungs to the point of choking, absorbing and cataloging every detail: the nauseating weave of his carpet, the laminate grain of his desk, the gold-turning-green Orthodox cross he’d taken to wearing. As Delilah tried to consume my soul through my penis, her hands squeeze my flesh like a butcher, I’d focus on her hair tumbling like chunks of slate, on the creases and scrapes along her knuckles; anything to prolong the sensation of teetering along orgasm’s razor edge.
All of these scenes flashed on the back of my skull like some car-crash video I couldn’t scrape my eyes from, all while Luz breathed softly next to me on another of my sleepless mornings, her snores punctuating the rhythm like her subconscious was using Morse code, telling me to stay away from the light, don’t step into the light. Crawl into the present, it said. Nestle yourself in the moment and sleep.
Her breathing, her breathing.
Chance once broke up with an artist’s model because she refused to remove her shoes in his apartment. He pushed a fifteen-year-old Delilah down the steps for ironing a crease into his jeans. He also punched me in the face for adding too much milk to the macaroni and cheese: we were stoned, he had the munchies, I became unmoored somewhere inside my skull. Though the last seven years had tarnished his façade, his anal-retentive sense of design remained intact. As it stood, though, he was two reprimands from having his dental work ruined.
“This is all wrong. All wrong.” He flapped his hands like a flightless bird.
The crown-molding and floors upstairs were perfect, but the dining room walls were more canary, less mustard gas. I’d chosen the color because it reminded me of watching the back of my eyelids while lying beside Luz in Patterson Park on Sunday afternoons. At least he liked the kitchen. I worried Dwaine’s head might otherwise explode.
Later, we stood in the basement, scratching imaginary walls in the dirt, positioning chunks of concrete to stand in for ventilation ducts. I could feel the grit in the air between my teeth. My skin, damp.
“A dehumidifier would be more effective. You don’t need this many vents.”
“The speakers draw in air, and if there aren’t enough vents, I’ll suffocate. Haven’t you every installed one of these?”
“I have, but how many speakers do you plan to have down here?”
He smiled and licked his teeth. “A lot.”
“And this is the reason for all the locks?” I motioned at five separate points.
He stood in the corner, smoothing his mustache and measuring distances with a glance while ignoring my question. Dwaine, afraid to say anything, kicked away an empty bottle. It tinkled like a handful of dropped teeth from a dealer who had diluted Chance’s package to make some extra cash on the side. I still had a hard time using ball-peen hammers to this day.
“Okay.” Chance unbuttoned his sleeves and rolled them above his elbows. “This is all wrong. We need less space between the cellar walls and the drywall.”
“Seriously, I’m going to cut off your balls if you change—” Dwaine’s watch your goddamned mouth cough stopped me short. Chance’s hand silenced us both, the just let me explain motion he used so well.
“You know how to soundproof your room when you have drums?” he said. “As a teenager or whatever.”
I nodded in Dwaine’s direction. “We’re a legitimate company. We don’t need to use mattresses for insulation.”
“Dead air,” he said. His palm hit the wall with a damp smack. I could almost see ripples through the moisture. “Pre-sound-foam, post getting-beat-for-using-you-dad’s-mattress. Leave a foot of dead space between the walls.”
“Then you lose—” I looked around the room, trying to calculate some square-footage of space lost so that my answer would be authoritative, and he’d finally shut the fuck up, “—a bunch of space.”
“Then use some nouveau shit to make it look bigger.” He glanced at his watch.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“That art shit you’re into. All over Miami.”
“Art Deco?”
“Sure. The Jew art.”
“Doing Art Deco won’t change any…” I raised my hands, palms out. “Know what, never mind. I’ll make it work.”
Dwaine coughed; I jumped. I’d forgotten he was there.
“I need to be going,” Chance said. “See me out?”
I started to follow him up the steps and Dwaine grabbed my forearm. “The fuck is going on, Beto? You started with Mr. Miller this and Mr. Miller that and now yous sounding like a damn married couple.”
I shrugged, made some noncommittal grunt, twisted my arm from his. “Dunno. It’s weird.”
“Son, that ain’t good enough. I need to know if this is a problem.”
We stood for a breath, the air pregnant with wavering trust, the shimmering hope of confession, the tactile dampness of mold spores.
I coughed and spit on the concrete floor. “I don’t know what to tell you, Dwaine.”
He exhaled hard through his nose.
I said, “I gotta go.”
Two days later, I was hunched in the basement corner leveling fresh concrete when Dwaine bellowed down the stairwell.
“Mr. Miller asked you to go meet his wife for him. Said he’s caught up at work.”
“Now?” With my finger, I drew a heart in the grey mess.
“Twenty minutes ago.”
Mine and Luz’s initials. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“Not no more.”
Outside, Dwaine was trying to talk to one of the workers. All I could hear was pendejo and jefe, though I wasn’t sure of the relationship between them. I passed behind the truck, avoiding him, but he called my name before I could sneak away. He put his hands up, saying what the fuck? with a gesture. He quickened his pace and headed toward me, saying we need to talk, Beto. I lowered my head and kept walking.
Delilah kicked her heel against the brick wall of the café, cigarette dangling from her lips like a Marlboro ad. I opened the door and motioned for her to enter.
“Already ate.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry. You didn’t miss much.”
“Oh.”
We stood facing each other, the occasional passing car rattling the empty cans and takeout containers scattered over the street. I ran my tongue along the inside of my gums, rocked from heel to toe. In a parking lot next to us, a woman tossed chunks of bread to the gathering seagulls. Her coat looked to be little more than scraps of discarded carpet.
“We’re not on a first date, Beto.” She lit another cigarette, offered me one. My hand twitched and I shook my head.
“Never said we were.”
“Then don’t act like it.” She punched me in the bicep, the hunk of cut-glass on her ring dead-arming me. Chance had taught her where to hit. She nodded her head, indicating to walk.
We stopped in a Polish deli on Eastern because she wanted a pierogi. When I asked if she’d just eaten, she told me that she was an empowered female and she could eat and fuck whenever she wanted. The shrunken woman behind the counter coughed, her face the same color as the jar of pickled beets.
“Anyway, I told you the food wasn’t any good.”
The pierogi grease made her hands shimmer. The wind caught her hair and tossed it around, making it look more like a clutch of snakes. She cursed under her breath, tried to brush it away with the back of her wrist but only managed to smear oil on her face.
“Jesus, you’re hopeless.” I gathered her hair and held it for a second while she shoved the rest of the pierogi into her mouth. Touching her, my body swelled, too large for my skin. I imagined setting myself on fire. I pulled a napkin from her pocket and wiped her forehead clean.
“My hero,” she said.
“More like your hospice worker.”
She dead-armed me again, this time in the other arm.
Another block passed in silence. I stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk. Our feet clicked in opposite rhythms, my left and her right, my right and her left. This was how she used to fuck, inhaling when I exhaled. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Her orgasms would be so intense that the only way to keep her head from twisting away, she’d scream at me to bite her lip until I tasted blood. She called it circular fucking. Don’t confuse it with circle jerks, though. That’s Thursday night. I never knew if she was joking.
Her voice chirped, startled me. “Come back, Beto.”
“I didn’t go anywhere.”
She lit a cigarette to hide a smile. Offered me one again.
“I told you I don’t smoke.”
She only gave a shrug, as if she knew some secret and might tell me if I earned the privilege.
