It was steamy hot in Dolly’s apartment, it always was. Nita was eating in a highchair getting to be too small for her, finishing coconut instant pudding and putting most of it into her mouth by now.
“Ahora comes como una santa!” Connie hovered over her grandniece. “She eats real neat now. She’s such a good girl. Give me a smile, Nita? Hazme los ojitos! Yes? Quй preciosa!”
Dolly’s face was swollen with tears and she rolled up the ruffled sleeve of her blouse to show a bruise.
“Some john did this to you?”
“Geraldo did it!”
“Why do you put up with him? He’s bad to the core.”
Dolly sighed and rolled a joint in the licorice‑flavored paper she liked. “You know how when I got back from San Juan you told me I was carrying?”
Connie nodded, accepting the joint. As she let the smoke seep out she said, “You knew it already. You wanted a baby real bad.”
“I still do! I went, I got one of those tests? I haven’t had my time since then.”
“What did the test say?”
Dolly patted her belly. “I told Geraldo yesterday. He starts yelling at me, that it’s by some john. He starts hitting on me!”
“He makes me so sick. He makes you go with men and then he puts you down for it. It’s his kid. You came back from Puerto Rico with that baby.” She had known as soon as she saw Dolly.
Dolly drew herself up. “The johns are a business thing. Don’t put it down, I make good money. I don’t bring the johns here–I do them in hotels or at Geraldo’s. Listen, every woman sells it. Jackie O. sells it. So?”
“So how do you like it with them?”
“It’s a job.” Dolly sucked in the smoke, glowering. The minutes thickened between them. Finally she sniffled. “You hate yourself, you hate the trick. I never met one woman yet who didn’t hate every stupid trick.”
“Leave him, carita, leave him. Never mind him. He’s not worth your little fingernail.”
“He’s smart, Connie, his mind works like that.” She snapped her fingers. “He has style. The other whores all standon their heads to catch his eye when he comes around … . I thought, why not have a baby with him? Then Ican quit. It’ll be like it was before, only better. A man respects you more if you have his baby. Why not?”
“So you didn’t take your pills in Puerto Rico?”
“I left them here. I didn’t even put them in my purse. I thought too it might be lucky, a baby made on the island. I want to have this baby, Connie!”
“Why not? One child is lonely. Why not have another? You’re a good mother. You quit this whoring and have the baby.”
“He won’t let me! He says I got to have an abortion!”
“No.” Connie banged her fist on the table. A strange gesture for her. Dolly stared. “You have it! Tell him to o.d. and sell his body to the city for rat bait. You come live with me. I’ll help you with the children. I’d love that, you know it’s the truth–”
The phone rang. It was a john. Dolly ran off to the bathroom to fix her face and get herself together. Connie kissed her, fussed over Nita for a couple of minutes, and then reluctantly picked her way down the stairwell. In the street a damp, jagged wind off the East River scraped her face. She pulled her old green coat closer. The lining was gone. She felt high and loose with the grass, too stoned to endure the subway just yet. She decided to walk all the way over to the Spring Street stop on the IRT and take the local uptown, even though it was ten blocks of walking.
In a playground on Elizabeth, some little girls were playing red light, green light. She hunched against the wind, not deciding to walk closer, to stop and stare, but finding herself pressed suddenly into the fence. Brown‑skinned mostly, about the right age. Angie would be one of the lighter, one of the shorter girls. Eddie, her father, had been light and short. She could be that lean quick one with the black hair and creamy skin and big love‑me grin. Getting caught and making a big show of kicking herself. Yes, the girl who kicks herself would be mine!
Two men wheeling a cart on the sidewalk looked at her, and one spoke laughing to the other. Tears were rolling down her face. Rotten dope making her sentimental. Crazy Connie. She started to walk while the street bellied out before her. With the sleeve of her coat she tried to rub her face. The tears ran from her sore eyes, faucets that would not be shut off. Warm and wet over her cheeks. She turned onto Prince and sat down in a doorway, on a cement step recessed into the entrance to a loft building, the door big as a barn door behind. She spread the newspaper for her butt. Nobody around. She blew her nose hard in a wad of toilet paper. Anybody would think she had loved her daughter.
A shadow across her. She began to get up but that hand was extended again. “What’s wrong? You’re weeping. Connie, did I frighten you?”
Shorter than in her dream, just a few inches taller than she would be, standing, he bent toward her, moon face, black turtle bean eyes, that gentle smile.
“I’m going crazy! But it could be the dope. Really powerful–”
“I’m here.I’ve been trying to reach you. But you get frightened, Connie.” Luciente grinned. Really, he was girlish. Mariquita?
“What do you want from me?” Childhood scary tales of brujos, spells, demons. A lot of garbage, but how could this boy creep into her dreams?
“Just to talk. For you to relax and talk with me.”
“Ha! Nobody ever wants to talk to me. Not even my caseworker, Mrs. Polcari. I depress her.” Connie rose stiffly, brushing off the seat of her old coat, and folding her paper, she slipped past him. Her arm grazed his. He was real enough, his arm muscular through the leather jacket. Her belly hardened with fear. El Muro and the way he would wait for her. Then she had been young and succulent as a roasting chicken. Now she was what Geraldo always called her, a bag–a bag full of pain and trouble. She wanted a cigarette bad but she was scared to open her purse in front of him; so easy for him to snatch. She had the plastic pocketbook tucked along with the newspaper between her elbow and her body on the side away from him as he walked beside her with a casual springy step. No, he didn’t walk in a swishy manner. He had a surefooted catlike grace. He moved with grace but also with authority. In her purse were seventeen dollars, some pennies and two subway tokens, also her welfare ID and the keys to her apartment. Where would she replace the seventeen dollars? He could steal her little TV set to pawn. She had two weeks to wait till her next check, if she got it on time.
He wasn’t dressed like a bum. Although nothing was new or flashy, his clothing was substantial and well made. Big heavy boots like the kids wore, black pants cut something like jeans, a red shirt she could glimpse at the throat, a worn but handsome leather jacket with no insignia of gang or social club but instead a pattern in beads and shells in the sleeves. He was without gloves and his hands she remembered. She would have liked to take the hand toward her and lift it to her nostrils. The skin was stained but not with nicotine. What kind of work would stain hands purple? Like the dye used to stamp grades on meat.
She made her voice harsh. “How long you planning to follow me?”
“I’d rather talk to you at home, if you’ll let me.” Luciente recoiled as an ordinary truck roared by. He covered his nose.
“No. Why should I? Who are you?”
“You know my name, Connie. Luciente.”
“Bright boy. What do you want with me?”
His eyes watering, he took a large bright intricately dyed handkerchief out of his pocket to dab at them. “You’re an unusual person. Your mind is unusual. You’re what we call a catcher, a receptive.”
“You like old women?” She’d heard of that but never really believed in it. She was scared but slightly, slightly intrigued.
“Old?” Luciente laughed. “Sure, only women over seventy. I’ll have to wait on you. Tell me, am I so scary? I’m not a catcher myself; I’m what we call a sender.” He kept staring past her at cars, at the buildings right and left, up and down like a jнboro just off the plane; like her own grandmother, who would pass into the street in downtown El Paso by crossing herself, refusing to look at the cars, and stepping straight off the curb as if plunging into deep water.