Listen Ruben Fontanez (7 page)

I hurry past his room and out the side exit. My briefcase is heavy. The cowboys are not in sight. I breathe deeply. It has grown cold again and I button my coat to the top. I smell wine. I think back and wonder if there had been any time when one of the cowboys could have had access to my briefcase. I walk away from the Yeshiva, toward Marcy Avenue and the subway, trying to tell myself that nothing has happened, to clear my head, to shrug off what I have seen. But I cannot. I do not fool myself. At each corner, each tree, I expect to be attacked. I am shivering. The streets are empty.

I see Jackson's puzzled black face and I think of little Gil, in the snow. The sight is a peaceful one. My heart slows. A woman yells in Spanish from a window overhead.
“¡Espéreme, batardo! ¡Ahora! ¡Espéreme!”
I try to recall the events of the day, one by one. Nobody, I am certain, could have touched my briefcase. I am on Broadway now and under the el pillars there is life. At the corners, groups of monkeys plan their evenings. Above me, a train roars through the night. The cold air has made my nose drip. I stop and look up, expecting to see the entrance to the subway, but I am at the wrong corner. Harry, Harry, it happens sooner than you think. I turn and walk back along Broadway. When I stop this time I am at Have-meyer Street. It is no use. If Jackson's brother is near, let him have me. I will not fight. I would never learn to sleep on my back anyway. My briefcase grows heavier and I switch hands. Danny, I suppose, will mourn for me.

There are no lights on in the store windows. The street corners are deserted. I hear no trains. The sidewalks are slippery from the ice. I hear giggling. Around the el pillars, cats move. When I am gone, I wonder if they will leave my story on the bulletin board. It is all right, Simon. It is all right. I am cold. I hear giggling again and glance to the right, squinting through my glasses. In the doorway of the Aponte Travel Agency two forms are locked together. A neon sign flickers on and off, in red. I move closer. The giggling is that of a girl. A boy presses her against the window, his hands, I see now, working furiously under her sweater. The girl stares at me, over the boy's shoulder, and she chews gum. I cannot take my eyes from her. The boy is shorter than she is, coming to her chin only, and she seems, despite the paint on her face, to be no more than thirteen years old. There is a mole on her left cheek, and hairs grow from it. Still, she is lovely. I know her face, I realize. I step forward. In the doorway it is warmer. A poster advertises cut-rate family trips back to Puerto Rico. The girl chews and giggles. She has seen me. The boy's hands stop moving. He turns around.

It is my monkey. “Ruben!” I exclaim and rush forward. The girl slips away. Light dances from my monkey's eyes. He tries to escape but the doorway is too narrow. I corner him and press him against the window, my right hand at his throat.

“What you want?”

“You will come with me—” I say. He struggles. “You will come with me,” I repeat. He kicks, but his foot hits the briefcase. “There are laws, Ruben,” I say. “I have seen you also.”

He squirms and his eyes do not look into mine. “I got to be home for supper,” he says.

“I will buy you your supper.” The words are out before I know it. Ruben's body goes limp. He eyes me, his head to one side. He smiles slowly.

“You mean it?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. I have no choice, after all. I know it at once. He touches my hand and I relax my grip. He does not try to run away. I think of the doll and I look closely at Ruben's face. His eyes look back at me now, and, in truth, they seem calm and innocent. “Yes,” I say again.

We walk along Broadway and he stays a step behind me. Over a faded red flannel shirt, he wears only a thin denim jacket. He talks freely. He tells me about his younger brothers and sisters, his grandmother, his mother who is sick with a coughing sickness, the welfare man who is always checking on them. He says nothing about school. I feel pressure on the sides of my head, at the temples. The first restaurant we come to is a Chinese one and we enter and take a booth at the back. He blows into his cupped hands to warm them. I hang up my overcoat, but I leave my briefcase under the table, next to my feet. Ruben tells me about the way his mother beats him when he is bad.

“But she getting pretty weak now,” he says. My eyes tear from the cold.” She make these funny noises from her chest. She real sick, Mister Meyers. It worse now, with the winter.” He seems very much at ease. His face is open. “She keep trying to get us in a project where you get more heat, but you got to have a husband to get into the project. That's the rules of the welfare.” The waiter comes and I order for us. Ruben is laughing now, pleased with himself. “I make one of the dolls of the man from the welfare!” He shakes his head. “It don't help. They say to call when things go bad but you live on the welfare, you not allowed to have a phone.”

I nod.

“She a real sick woman,” Ruben says, and briefly, I see his eyes flash. “Real sick.” I remember what Rafael said about the doll of his mother. Our soup comes and Ruben begins drinking it, carefully at first, then with increasing abandon. He looks up at me and smiles. “It's warm,” he says. I watch him as I sip mine and I feel myself relax. I too am warm inside. “This soup real crazy,” he says. I smile and I say to myself: after all, Harry, he is only a boy.

“Is this your first time in such a restaurant?” I ask. He nods, his mouth full. “Is it all right for you to be here?” I say. “Perhaps your mother will worry that you are not at home.”

“She don't care,” he says. “I only make trouble for her, she says. It easier when we not all around.”

When the main dish comes, he hardly looks at me and that is all right also. I watch him devour his food and I eat from my own plate, pausing now and then to sip tea. I am feeling somewhat better. My nose has stopped running and my eyes are dry. I feel very tired, though. It has been a long day. It would not be so terrible if Harry Meyers could trade in some of his parts, I think. My toes are numb. I remember the dinner with Danny. My muscles tighten. I look down and think of the wrinkles Ruben has drawn on the bulbous head. While he eats I open the briefcase. He talks about his friend Manuel Alvarez who came on the boat with him from Puerto Rico. I am not interested. I take the doll from the briefcase and I keep it under the table, on my lap. My chest hurts and I realize I have been eating too fast. I drink some cold water.

“I seen you,” Ruben says. “Me and Manuel.”

I do not respond to his statement. It is time, you see. My right hand moves. I thrust the doll in front of my monkey's face. “Did you do this—?” I ask.

He nods. “You know I did. I real sorry, Mister Meyers,” he says. “I no mean nothing. That the truth. You a pretty good teacher.”

He goes back to his food. I slap his fork away and it clinks to the floor. “What about the pins?” I ask. It is difficult to whisper, to keep my voice low. “The pins, Ruben—”

He bends away from me and picks his fork up from the floor. He wipes it on a napkin. I look around the corner of our booth. The restaurant is almost empty. At a corner table a Chinese family eats quietly, a large brown fish on a platter in the middle of their table. The waiters sit near them, eating their own supper, their rice bowls raised to their mouths. “The pins, Ruben. The pins—” He shrugs. “I no mean nothing,” he repeats. “I telling you the truth. That just to have some fun. I do it of everybody—”

I lay the doll down and reach across the table, grabbing my monkey's wrist. My heart pounds unevenly. “Before,” I say. “I took the pins out. Who put them back in—?”

He shrugs again. “I told you I no mean nothing,” he says, and twists his wrist loose. “That the truth.” His eyelids drop. “After you catch me in the room I get out of that school real quick and go down to the river to see the boats break up the ice.”

He looks at me and his eyes are soft and puzzled. They are a true monkey's eyes. The doll is between us, next to the pot of tea. There is nothing else to say, I realize. I breathe in. The doll seems very small. I place it next to me, on the plastic cushion. I drink some tea to calm myself. “This food real crazy,” Ruben says again. “I got to come back here.” I touch the doll and unclasp its hands. Harry, Harry, you are playing the fool. Enough. I put the doll back in the briefcase. Ruben smiles at me. I wonder about Danny's questions concerning next year. “You talk to him sometime and you see.” Ruben is speaking.

“I will see what?” I ask.

“That Manuel not so C.R.M.D. like people think.” Brown sauce drips down my monkey's chin. “I tell you something—he know the lifetime batting averages of every Spanish ballplayer.” I relax somewhat. “We see you lots, me and Manuel, where we work.”

“You see me?” I gather my last bit of fried rice together with a fork.

“Where you live—” His eyes dance. “It surprise you, what we do to make money.” He puts his chin close to his plate and sweeps the last bit of food into his mouth. “You can get a lot of things if you got money.”

We are quiet. In the half-yellow light of the restaurant his forehead does not seem ugly. I taste garlic and think of Nydia and Carlos. I picture her eyes, downcast, as she passes along the staircase. Ruben asks me why I am in Williamsburg at such a late hour. I picture Nydia when I saw her the first time, the day she returned from the hospital, smiling shyly, asking if I wanted to look at the baby. I tell Ruben that I am a teacher of cowboys. At the word cowboys he laughs. The baby was wrapped in a soft blue blanket. Carlos' grandmother was there also. I explain to my monkey that I teach them Spanish and he laughs even more. I lean forward and tell him that I do it for the money. Harry Meyers will never be obligated to anybody's welfare. Ruben sets his jaw and nods. On Friday nights, he says, he and Manuel and Manuel's sister listen outside the windows of the Yeshiva. He speaks with passion of the way the cowboys dance and sing, and of how Manuel tries to imitate them. He cannot wait to tell Manuel what I have named them.

Our dessert comes. I wonder also: what will I do next year. Ruben uses the word cowboy and I laugh with him. I tell him about Morris's fears. Ruben does not laugh. “They got magic, Mister Meyers,” he says. “I seen them.” I remember the story Morris and I laughed at when we were boys: about the Rebbe who was such a cowboy that, although he had ten children, he did not know his wife had a wooden stump for a leg until her funeral. Ruben's eyes are bright. The cowboys are harmless, I assure him. I think of Rabbi Akiba, who set out from home when he was already forty years old, to learn to read and write. Later his wife was plagued by his disciples, who demanded details of his behavior during intercourse. Ruben is talking about Manuel's sister. Her name is Mara Alvarez and she is in a special school for Catholic girls.

“Ah, Ruben, Ruben,” I say, looking at him across from me. “Tell me something, Ruben Fontanez. What will you be doing in ten years?”

“I be making it—”

“No, Ruben,” I say. “Listen to me. What will you be
doing?”
He shrugs and eats from his plate of ice cream. I know what it is I have been waiting for, you see, what I want to say to him. “Ruben, listen to me,” I say again. “Put down your spoon and listen.” He does as I ask, and his eyes tell me that it is true, that I can reach him, that he will hear me. I think of Rabbi Akiba and though I know such a thought is silly, I proceed. I lean toward him and whisper. “Listen, Ruben Fontanez. You must get an education. Do you understand? You must get out of Williamsburg. Harry Meyers is telling you something. Do you hear me?” His eyes do not blink. He wipes his lip with a finger. “Listen to me, Ruben Fontanez. If you do not get an education and get out, do you know what you will be? In ten years, in twenty years, in thirty years—? It will be the same forever, Ruben. Until your body dries up. You will be a filthy monkey with filthy children all around you. You will all be hungry. Do you hear me?” The door of the restaurant opens. The Chinese family is leaving. The cold air from the outside reaches us and I shiver. “In ten years, Ruben, your life will be at an end. You will be drunk half the time. Your children will cry in your ears. Your friends will be in jail. You will be loving somebody else's wife and yours will be grabbing the plumber. You will be making fifty dollars a week and your nights will be endless.” I am not sure I have meant to say all these things, but it is all right. Sarah is pleased. I feel pressure on my eyes. My feet are cold. “Do you hear me?” His face is serious. He nods and blinks his eyes, then nods again, slowly. “You are still a boy—enjoy life, have fun,” I continue. “But get out, Ruben!” The words come with a rush of air. “Do you hear me?” I breathe out, exhausted.

“I listening to you,” he says. “I listening, Mister Meyers.” Then he smiles at me, and, my heart full, I reach across the table and take his hand, pressing it.

He finishes his ice cream and we do not talk again until we are outside. I walk alongside him and he asks if I would like to see where he lives. I nod, and we walk on, under the el pillars, my briefcase at my side. It is cold, but I do not mind. Ruben is talking about Manuel's sister again and he wants to know if I have ever seen her. I say that I have not. He tells me that she is very beautiful. We turn a corner and walk down a dark street. “That girl you catch me with,” Ruben says, embarrassed, “that not Manuel's sister. I want you to know.” He would like to tell me more, but I do not encourage him. It is his business.

“It pretty bad in the winter, when you got no place warm to go to. Sometimes you sneak into the movies, but that not so good.” I smell garlic again, and the odors of frying fish. Ahead of us, I see lights. I hear the sounds of electric guitars and tambourines. In the front doors of buildings, people chatter in Spanish. A bottle crashes to the sidewalk behind us. A baritone voice rises above the sound of electric guitars, of portable radios.