Authors: Ian Vasquez
He remembered now: He and Herman had arrived around midday, hungry and sleepy. In a kitchen cabinet they found the canned foods that Tessa had brought on one of her cleaning trips. They left the white albacore chunks and Vienna sausages for later, opened the ravioli, got two spoons, and dug in, straight from the can. They washed lunch down with tap water.
Afterward, Herman fell asleep in the master bedroom in the back that was all clean and fresh-smelling, the bed spread with new linen that Tessa had bought. The other bedroom was jammed with trunks of her dead aunt’s stuff, broken furniture pushed against the walls, old appliances blocking access to the closet, windows with dusty curtains pulled tight, the room stuffy and haunted-like. Leo had stretched out on the living room sofa.
He forced himself up now and padded barefoot through the
house, peeked in on Herman. Still sleeping, mouth open. Leo toured the house, noting the latches on the double-slung windows, where all the doors led, and which ones had deadbolts, like the one that opened onto the front porch. They had entered through the side porch door; it seemed that the front door wasn’t used much. He tried the keys Tessa had given him. None worked on the front door.
He cranked open the glass louver windows in the living room, looked out at the grassy front yard. Three towering oaks laced with Spanish moss partially shaded the dirt driveway that snaked around from the gate of the wood-and-wire fence.
He went out into the yard, enjoying the coolness of the grass and dirt under his feet. Smoked a cigarette. Felt the sun on his shoulders, his hair. Said to himself: Listen up, Leo. Let’s get this plan straight. First, you’re going to make sure Herman drives away safely with his nephew. Then you’re going to that Wal-Mart you passed back there on State Road 674, phone Tessa, and give her the good news. Then you and she can start your new life. Then you’ll be free. Free to enjoy your life together and live happily ever after, no Patrick around, no more Lonesome Point talk to disturb the peace.
Tell yourself the truth, man. You think happily ever after’s going to happen? He sucked on the Marlboro and pitched it on the ground. Stepped on it with his bare feet. Damn right it’s gonna happen. It occurred to him, staring at the Spanish moss shifting in the breeze, the high grass by the fence bending, that settling down finally with someone, starting a family, was
his retreat from confusion. The confusion that was the Varela family.
Tessa, I love you. Baby whose name we don’t know yet but who will be gorgeous and bouncy, I love you, too. Because you’re giving me back my sanity and something to live for.
But would the guilt keep hanging on?
One day, he was going to tell Tessa everything. She probably knew by now that he was no poet. Shit, to publish a handful of things in little journals nobody reads was not the same as find-ing your calling. The only real calling he ever heard was the guilty whisper in the back of his mind, telling him, for years now, that he was just like his family. That deep down he was a coward all these years for knowing about the Rev, the Rev’s stolen car, and not telling a soul.
It was time to let all that go, though. Time to do the right thing. He couldn’t go on living like this. Raising a family, teaching your baby girl to do right, knowing you had the chance to do right yourself and never did—maybe Patrick could live that way. But he was not like Patrick, and he was proving it now.
He walked around the yard, occasionally swatting at sand fleas. He thought he could smell the earth from the fields they had passed down the road, where migrant workers were picking strawberries. The only other residence they’d seen on the road was a run-down trailer park, a gravel lot, no fence, signpost, or mailbox out front. You passed beat-up pickups and cars, rust-stained trailers, then not until a mile and a half later you came upon a wire fence covered in vines, this yard in the shade of oak
trees, and this farmhouse with two porches, set far back from the dirt driveway. He and Herman were isolated here, the rural underground. They were going to be safe, they were going to be safe, they were going to be safe… .
W
HERE?”
“Wimauma. I’ll spell it. W-i-m-a-u-m-a.”
“How did you find out?”
“I did what had to be done.”
“Where are you, Celina?”
“Well, I’m lying down on their bed. In their bedroom, which smells kinda doggy, if you ask me, and I’m thinking about you. About us.”
Patrick walked down the hall and into his office and sat down in front of the computer. “We’ll see right now if this is the right address. What’s Tessa’s last name again?”
“Woodson.”
Patrick scratched the name on a piece of paper. He said, “Wimauma, Wimauma …” Typing
Wimauma, Florida
into the Google search window. He hit Enter, and a list of sites popped up on the screen. “Hillsborough County,” he said. “You still there?”
“I’m here.”
“Bear with me,” he said and cleared the search window and typed in
Hillsborough County Property Appraiser
. Hit Enter. Once in the appraiser’s Web site, he clicked on Property Record Search and tapped out
Woodson Tessa
into a box and selected to sort results by name. “Got it.” He read the address to her.
“It’s a match.”
“Celina, I couldn’t ask for better than this.”
“I could. I’m lying here all alone in this empty room. Wouldn’t you want to do it in somebody else’s house? Ever had that fantasy?”
Patrick shifted around in his chair. “You’re a bad, bad girl.”
“Am I a bad girl? You want to punish me?”
“I want to give you a spanking.”
“I can help you with that. Listen. I’m raising my skirt now. Can you picture it?”
He pulled his nose away from the screen and sat back. “Keep talking naughty, see what happens to you.”
“You want me? I want to hear you say it.”
“I want you, bad girl.”
“I want you, too. I did this for us, I want you to know that. A woman’s got to do what she can to protect her family. Her man. You’re
my
man. It’s the least a bad woman can do for her man.”
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”
“Why don’t you show me, this afternoon?”
Patrick was getting excited, smiling, picturing his wife naked on the floor, right there by the desk, on her back, long black hair fanned out on the carpet.
B
ERNARD WAS SWEATING HARD in his bedroom. He’d knocked out one set of twenty reps of shrug-bar dead lifts at 380 pounds, banged out two punishing sets of one-arm dumbbell rows, eight reps of 120 pounds being all he wanted today, and now it was on to the main course: lifting the Blob.
The Blob was a sawed-off half of an old York cast-iron 100-pound dumbbell. Back in the seventies, a man named Richard Sorin was the first to lift it with a one-hand pinch grip. In fact, for inspiration, Bernard had a poster on his wall of Sorin lifting the Blob in a cluttered garage gym, hands all chalked up, wearing those short shorts from back in the day. Gripsters all over America worked toward this feat. Bernard was almost there. He’d succeeded a couple of times, sweating, forearm veins popping, getting that cast-iron sucker a few inches off the rubber mat, before his grip gave out and
bam
, he had to drop it.
The man in the apartment below had complained to the rental office, but Bernard didn’t give a fuck and continued his training. Then one day he met the man in the second-floor laundry room. He approached the guy, something telling Bernard to go with brain and not brawn, so he apologized to him for the noise, because he just didn’t realize sometimes when setting down his wife’s wheelchair how much of a racket he was making, but he was going to try his darn best from now on to be a little more
considerate of his neighbors, though it was hard, his wife needing all the help she could get since losing her leg to diabetes, you know?
Mr. Sanchez—“call me Luis”—never complained again.
Bernard dried his hands on a towel and powdered them with a handful of chalk from a bowl on the dresser. He clapped his hands and sent up a white puff. The only thing on the mat now was the Blob. That evil, grip-tearing, old-school iron bitch. Bernard said, “All right, brother,” and bent over and slapped a wide pinch grip around it. He squeezed hard, psyching himself up for the lift, when the phone on the nightstand rang. It kept ringing and ringing and annoying the fuck out of him and killing his concentration, until finally he hollered, “Mona!”
No answer for a few seconds. Then his wife shouted from the living room, “Who you screaming at?”
“Sorry.” His voice softened. “Get the phone for me, please?”
It stopped ringing. He heard Mona talking, then she said, “It’s for you.”
TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES later, Bernard had showered and shaved, both head and face, and was dressed in a blue Perry Ellis shirt, a ruby red tie, and black slacks, all of which Mona had ironed to help him make that daily transformation from Bernard to Big B.
He went into the living room to say good-bye to her. He could see just the top of her head over the back of the chair, where she sat in front of the TV ten hours a day. The box was on, Dr. Phil smugly talking down to some weepy white woman,
people in the audience nodding like bobble heads. Two baskets of laundry were on the sofa, a pile of clean folded clothes, a portable writing table with a checkbook, pen, bills, and a couple of pill bottles. Mona was diabetic but she still had both legs and would’ve been able to walk just fine if it wasn’t for her severely arthritic knees and the fact that she weighed 310 pounds—at least that’s what she told him, always talking about her weight but not wanting to do shit about it, always finding excuses. She rarely left the apartment and preferred to travel the rooms by wheelchair. Bernard was through trying to persuade her to go outside, walk around the parking lot for exercise. The woman’s problem was in her head. But, man, he loved him some Mona.
He kissed her on her clammy forehead. “I gone, boo.”
“Okay, luscious. I’m gonna roast that pork with some pinto beans and collards for later when you come home, hear?”
Bernard checked himself in the little mirror by the front door, tightened his tie knot. The thing he was most proud of in his adult life was sticking to his vows, until death do him part from his Mona. Despite the fact she was probably too big a woman, he’d never once strayed. How many men could boast like that? Self-discipline—that’s what made him feel justified every day to dress sharp in these expensive threads that Mr. Rocha made his people wear, that made the transformation from Bernard to Big B complete.
FREDDY LIVED on the fifth floor of an old apartment building on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. As run-down as the place was, it cost him plenty, but since Rocha had taken over from
Parra, the future looked about $300 a month rosier. So Freddy had decided to stick it out a little longer, the view of the Atlantic just sweet enough.
Right now, though, he wasn’t feeling too positive. From his balcony he watched Bernard walk across the street toward the building. He threw on his tie, hurried to the door.
Bernard came in saying, “Man, I busted like three red lights to get here. What’s this little situation?”
Freddy was halfway across the living room carpet to the bedroom, knotting his tie. “Goddamn if I didn’t overdose the bitch.”
Bernard said, “What?” and followed him through the double doors, and then the two of them were standing at the foot of the bed staring at a naked white woman prostrate on the rumpled sheets.
“The fuck happened here, Fred?”
“A wee bit of a problem,” Freddy said, taking a watch from a night-table drawer, “is what we have here.”
Bernard looked from Freddy to the woman and back.
“Tourist from Scotland,” Freddy said, grinning. “Man, I couldn’t resist. After that fiasco last night? Shit, a man got to have something to ease his worries.” He started tucking in his shirt. “Met this one this morning at that hotel down the beach, poolside. We got to talking over brunch. Got to drinking a little bit, Bloody Marys, you know how it is.” He rummaged through the drawer. “Man, where the fuck my cuff links?”
“So like”—Bernard lifted his shoulders and threw up his hands—“what happened? She all right, she gonna live? What’s she on?” He walked to the side of the bed, reached down and felt her neck for a pulse.
“Roofies, B, chill. That’s it. And maybe a little kush I been saving that we smoked, but aside from a couple Bloody Marys by the pool, it’s roofies got her like this.”
“I feel a pulse. Faint, though.”
“I need you to help me get her dressed. We walk her out to the back stairwell, carry her down. Or we could try the elevator, prop her up, but that’s too risky, that’s why I’m thinking the stairs, get me?”
Bernard checked his watch. “Not like we got much time. It’s like a three-hour drive to Wimauma, right?”
Freddy stopped fiddling with his cuff links. “You going to lecture me about time now, Bernard?”
“All I’m saying …” Bernard shrugged. “Forget it. What you want me do?”
Freddy plucked a red bikini bottom off the carpet and dropped it on the bed, followed by a bikini top, a wispy sarong, a white T-shirt. “Help me put on her clothes first.”
Lifting and tugging here, holding up an arm or leg there, they dressed her in rough fashion.
Perspiration beaded Bernard’s forehead. He had the woman propped up, sitting half slumped forward, and watched Freddy get his shoes from a walk-in closet, shoehorn them on. “Man, I thought after last time shit like this happened that was it, Fred.”
Freddy checked himself in a wall mirror. He said, “B?” catching Bernard’s glance in the mirror. “I don’t want to hear it, all right?”
They carried her down the musty, carpeted hallway to the stairwell and down the stairs, five fucking floors, Freddy thinking, Was this pussy worth it? Sweating up your nice Kenneth
Cole shirt like this? He had to laugh at himself. Getting a little taste the easy way was hard work. Although he’d have a good story to remember later, to jack off to.