WHEN SIDNEY CAME out of the taqueria and headed down the alley, he saw Glorette Picard on her knees, her back to a shopping cart parked near the fence, her face held up toward the shadows made by two wild tobacco trees that grew along the chainlink. Sidney flattened himself against the wall, holding the bag of tacos like a school lunch, and waited for the sound of a man’s voice.
She must be on her knees waiting. The man would be against the fence, getting his money. Or the drugs. Glorette had been sprung for years, living here on the Westside, moving from apartment to apartment just ahead of the rent. She and her friend Sisia worked regular rounds near the Launderland because that’s where one crew sold rock from a dryer.
But he didn’t hear anything except the back of his shirt rubbing against the stucco, loosening a few rough grains. Glorette’s eyes were open. She was about twenty feet away. Her face was upturned, her lips parted like she was having trouble breathing, and her neck curved long and golden.
Her neck. That made his nature rise. How the hell was he hearing his father? Boy, when your nature rise, you gotta watch who you with.
Sidney had never been with Glorette. Why was it always her neck he’d wanted, when they were young? Who kissed her neck now? None of the men along Palm Avenue who stopped in cars and trucks or brought her back here to the alley cared about her neck. Throat was inside the neck. Sidney had danced with her once in high school and let his lips brush down along the side of her neck as if it were an accident when he shifted, and she’d shivered.
But she was with Chess then. After that, she met a musician from Detroit, an older guy named Sere Dakar, and when he disappeared, she was seventeen and pregnant.
Sidney stepped away from the wall, but she didn’t turn her head. She was focused on the shadows. She didn’t see him. Or she did, and she didn’t care. Hey—Sidney Chabert. Remember?
The alley lit up like heat lightning flashed, but it was August. It wouldn’t rain for months in Rio Seco. The silver flashes were from a huge SUV coming down the other part of the alley, behind the Launderland. The glare turned her into a small crouched figure behind the cart. Sidney slid around the corner of the taqueria. Those boys. The ones who sold the rock. They had a brand new Navigator, the sound system pounding so hard the drum shock collected in his sternum.
Spongy marrow inside. Sidney walked quickly around to the front doorway of the taqueria. Now his heart beat hard behind the sternum. Surgeons cracked open the sternum to get to the heart. Back when he worked at the hospital, he listened to the doctors in the hallways and the cafeteria. The neck and the throat—the first time he’d thought of the difference, he was nineteen, a brand new custodian, and the words floated all around his cart. Inflamed throat. Broken neck.
His father-in-law had gotten him the job. Jinelle’s daddy had been in maintenance at County General for twenty years, since he arrived from Shreveport. Jinelle was already working at her mother’s beauty salon. She was good. But she’d never touched Glorette’s hair, not even in high school when all the girls cornrowed and braided during lunch. No one looked like Glorette. Long neck, perfect eyebrows, her waist-length black hair in a crown on top of her head. No one ever saw it down, and that was part of her beauty. They would pay for her hair. Jinelle always said angrily, “Hair is dead. Just keratin, okay? I can make every woman’s hair look the same. Just a lotta product.”
Had Glorette’s hair been down, just now?
The Navigator paused. The boys must have seen her. But then the car turned down the small cross street, away from the avenue.
The man would be in a hurry, with the interruption. Sidney didn’t want to see that shadow move toward Glorette, where she waited patiently because she felt she had no choice.
Because she didn’t choose me.
The taqueria’s glass door was covered with hand-painted phrases. Tacos de lengua. Tacos de cabeza.
Tongue and brain. He didn’t want to see the man, but he wanted to wait for her. He pushed open the door.
Glorette was from Sarrat. It wasn’t even a neighborhood, like the Westside. It was another world—one long dirt road that led to a small bridge over the Rio Seco canal, and then a narrow gravel road wound through tunnels of orange trees to one white house and ten smaller wooden bungalows. Sidney had been there twice, when his father worked on a refrigerator for Mrs. Antoine.
The groves and houses all belonged to Enrique Antoine and Gustave Picard. Sidney’s father was from New Orleans—Treme—but those men were from out in Louisiana cane country past Baton Rouge, he told Sidney that day in the truck, bringing back a new coil for the refrigerator. Sidney’s father had come to California after he got out of the war, and in 1958 he’d met five beautiful girls at a church dance. The girls had just come from Louisiana, some place out in the fields called Sarrat. A rich white man was hunting them, some old woman told his father, and they were sent to live with her.
His father said, “Few years after that, here come Enrique Antoine. I heard he killed that white man and headed out. He brought his brother—Gustave. He stay right there.” His father pointed to a small porch across the street from the yard where they’d pulled out the refrigerator, and Sidney saw Glorette on the steps, drying her hair.
Sidney sat at the table he’d just vacated. His plastic container of hot sauce was still there. A straw. He’d forgotten to leave her a straw that night, five years ago. He’d found her in the ER when he wheeled his cart past, collecting predawn trash. Glorette peered at him from the bank of plastic chairs. “Ain’t you—?” Her huge purple-brown eyes shimmered with fever, and she coughed so deep in her chest it sounded like cellophane crackled behind her ribs.
Lungs black from crack smoke and torn from coughing, Sidney thought. He’d frozen there while she stared at him. Lungs didn’t weigh much, when the surgeon cut one out and left it in the medical waste bag. The red bag.
She’d said, “Sidney, right? You graduated, huh? I missed the last three months. Learned all I needed to learn by then.” She coughed again, then grinned up at him. Even with all the smoking and the streets, her teeth were still white as mints, her neck marked with only one creased line like faint jewelry. “Learned when a brotha say he got protection, that don’t mean he know how to use it.”
Sidney had looked away, at the old man in the wheelchair by the door, his foot hugely swollen and bare. At a Mexican woman’s braid hanging over the back of her chair, almost to the floor.
“You want to marry me?” Glorette had whispered then.
Sidney felt his forehead crease, tight and dry from the heat of the hospital basement and the incinerators. He was ashamed at what he carried in his cart. What he had to burn for extra money, down there in the basement with Raoul Moreno.
“What?”
“That’s what all y’all used to say in school. You Westside fools. Just marry me, baby,” she murmured, and coughed again until her eyes watered. She raised her face to him and said, “But you wanted to put me in your crib and then trip, like do I think about you all day while you at work, or am I studyin some fool. Right? Ain’t you asked me back then?”
Brothers had all asked her something—marry me, baby; come on over here by the lockers with me, baby; help me out with this pain I got, baby; take down that hair and let me see it on your back, baby. Gimme some a that, I swear I give you every dollar I got in the world.
But nobody had any dollars back then, because they were all teenagers. In the ER now, he and Glorette were thirty years old. “I ain’t never asked you that,” Sidney told her, bending nearer so the intake nurses wouldn’t hear. They were staring at him since he wasn’t moving along.
Glorette had never even looked at him, except sometimes in math class when she and her friends teased him about his name.
She coughed again, so hard her body bent like a question mark over her cupped palms, the admissions form sliding to the floor. When she raised her head, she said, “No. You asked Jinelle. You still married?”
Sidney shook his head, and she stood up unsteadily, her hand slapped to the wall. “I always said, Hell no. Any a you fools be the same. Want to lock me in some house. Tie up my time. Always talkin bout Wrap that pretty hair around me, baby, I want to see how it feel. Shit. Any woman same as me when y’all eyes shut.”
Then she’d fallen to the dirty linoleum floor, and Sidney didn’t even think before he squatted down and picked her up. Regulations. Call an orderly. No. She was longer and heavier than his daughter, but not dead weight like a sleeping child. The creases at the backs of her knees hot over his right wrist. The shoulderblades sharp from her halter top, digging into his own shoulder. Her hair fell out of the loose bun and draped over his arm. No, it didn’t. This wasn’t a damn movie. The intake nurses started yelling at him from the Triage window. “What the hell are you doing? You’re Chabert, right? Put her down!”
He pushed through the double doors and went down the gray tunnel of hallway through their voices until he saw an empty gurney. White and clean. He lay Glorette on her side and her eyelids trembled violently as if boiling water were underneath.
AT THE TABLE closest to the register, three Mexican guys had beer and tacos. Their t-shirts and jeans were covered with slivers of palm frond. Guys working off the street. They looked up, then dismissed him. Must think I went outside to check my car.
He usually saw Glorette and Sisia from a distance, because Excellent Video was four blocks up on Palm. But he hadn’t had a car for a week now. The brakes had gone out on his old Cavalier and he thought that rather than spend a few hundred on new ones, he’d send the money to Jinelle in Shreveport. His daughter Sarena was twelve now, and she needed braces. Orthodontia, the doctors had called it when Sidney worked at County General.
At the video store, he had three-to-eleven shift. All this week he’d taken his break at nine so he could watch anime in the back room while opening boxes of new DVDs. He needed a break from the trailers blaring all night on the TV above him. Tonight he’d helped Mr. Jae close up, then picked out two new anime videos and walked to the taqueria. His apartment building was only six blocks from here anyway, and he figured he’d be fine walking until fall, since all he did was go to work, then go home and watch movies.
Behind the counter, the mop bucket propped open the back door to the alley. The taqueria closed at midnight. Sidney got up and walked toward the register, listening to the slice of darkness past the door. No Navigator. No voices.
The woman who worked in the taqueria came back to the counter and nodded warily at Sidney. He couldn’t think in here for free. But the man would leave. A car would start up. Sidney could go back to the alley and offer Glorette tamales. He’d heard she loved the taqueria. Someone at Sundown Liquor had joked that she would do you for shrimp tacos and a Coke, if she was hungry enough.
The woman frowned at him. He said, “Got hungry again. Two tamales. Por favor. Pollo.” Her eyes were shadowed with light blue. Eyelids like two baby oceans, but when she looked down to write, Sidney saw creases where the makeup had heated into crescents. Frosty second brows.
Before he could stop it, the vision came. Eyebrows and eyelashes on fire when the woman looked down at the order pad. The leg hairs burning, glistening purple-gold. Red fingernails when she handed him the can of Coke. Pure varnish. Nails would flare up intense in the incinerator. Flames shooting blue-hot from the fingers, like the hands belonged to some cartoon.
She paused and tore the sheet from the pad, and then said something in Spanish to the men at the table.
Sidney leaned against the wall, staring at the back door. It had been so hard not to look at Jinelle like that, when he came home from the hospital and saw her cheeks with downy hair on them, her neck where the hair grew into a point at the nape. When he saw their daughter Sarena’s boneless-looking body in the crib, legs bowed and soft. Because that one time when he carried a red bag of medical waste from the cart to the incinerator, a finger had fallen to the floor from the tangled bundle of surgical bandages and needles. He saw hair between the knuckles. Raoul Moreno, his supervisor in the basement, had laughed and said, “Come on, carnal, you knew they lost some shit in there now and then!”
Sidney stared at the poster on the taqueria wall. Aztec gods. But they looked like the two gargoyles carved above the front entrance of County General. The hospital was so damn old the walls were stone.
“Quit playin. We ain’t got time.” The rough voice carried through the back door.
Sidney moved down the short hallway, closer to the rectangle of dark. He heard the smudge of dragged heels in the gravel, someone walking toward Glorette. “Stop trippin, Glorette. Jazen and them looking for us.” Sidney glanced outside, feeling like a fool. Like a child, listening to something he wasn’t supposed to hear. Sisia stalked down the dirt, wobbling in her heels, her extensions swaying, like a drunk model on a bad Tyra Banks special.
Sisia and Glorette had been sprung together all these years. Sisia was tall and built, opposite of Glorette. “Brick house,” brothers used to laugh, “and somebody done shut the window on her face.” Sisia’s cheeks were round and full and pitted like dark oranges. Her hair was jheri-curled back then, with those stray ends waving up in unfortunate ways, like horns, no matter how she tamped them down. Now she always had braids, even if her shoes were taped together. “Percy and Harry and Sidney,” Sisia had sneered at Sidney in math class. “All them old-time names. Like a old man.”
“Name after Sidney Poitier,” he had answered, cocking his head like Chess and Lafayette and the cool brothers did.
Sisia laughed loud. “Who in the hell gon watch some Sidney Poitier but my country-ass uncles? Give me some Blair Underwood. Some Denzel.”
Now Sidney smelled bleach from the mop bucket. Behind him the woman from the counter said, “No. No baño!” He turned. She looked up at him, her eyes black as licorice in the dim light, and he saw that the three men in the taqueria were standing now, watching him intently.
He held up his hands in surrender and said, “No, no baño. I got it.” They think I’m fixin to rob this place, he realized.
Outside, Sisia said, “Oh, shit, Glorette. Why you had to pick the one I wanted? Why you always gotta be the queen?” It sounded like Sisia was crying. Sidney closed his eyes. She said, “I wouldna left your ass. Why you had to talk yang?”
The woman from behind the counter went past him, breathing hard, and closed the door. She said, “Two tamales.”
Sidney walked slowly back to the counter, the men still standing, their mouths wide and long and clamped shut. Not chewing. The plastic plate held two tamales bundled up in cornhusks, like kids in sleeping bags. Sidney sat at the table again, his tacos making translucent clouds of grease on the paper bag. The tamales. The Coke so cold that when he pushed in the tab, fog seemed to rise from the darkness underneath his finger.
Sisia wouldn’t talk long.
The imprint of husk on the corn dough—lines like fingerprints. Was each cornhusk different? On Law & Order SVU, they were always resurrecting prints—from dead fingers, from beer bottles and walls, and even buried under electrical tape.
Who burned all the body parts they were always weighing on that show? Who disposed of their medical waste? The hearts they liked to hold up, the severed digits?
Sidney looked out at Palm Avenue, past the backward Spanish words. The men were speaking softly now. They were waiting to see what he would do. Whether he was a thief. Muslims cut off the right hand of a thief. What the hell they do with all them hands? In the paper you saw them standing around in a courtyard, all the sentenced men. Who chopped off the hands, in a row?
Chess always said to him, “You seen Archuleta’s leg and you ain’t figured it out? Damn, Sidney, you that stupid? You sure as hell looked lost when your picture was in the paper right in front of the furnace.”
Sidney looked over at the men. They had finished eating. They were merely watching him now. Chess and them didn’t know. The cops had brought all that marijuana to burn in the incinerator. The smoke was heavy and sweet as magic fog in some slasher movie. No one knew the leg was in there until the bag fell away and they saw the thickness of the thigh. The round eye of bone.
He checked his watch. Eleven-thirty. Too early for Glorette and Sisia to quit Palm Avenue. When he had started working at Excellent Video a few years ago, after the hospital closed, he’d seen that all the women were as predictable as the older white security guards stationed in front of the drugstore. Strolling and patrolling were mindlessly the same. Guarding something inside, or looking for customers, they paced in patterns every night. Like the zoo. He’d thought he would see Glorette close up. Maybe she’d come into the video store. Twice or three times she passed by the front window—her back, her elbow when she kept walking. She carried a bag of what looked like paperbacks.
He didn’t want to get with her. He just wanted to see her, talk to her long enough to know whether she remembered that night in the ER. If she remembered him. If she’d ever done that to anyone else. Ever.
But why would she come to the video store? Chess said she didn’t even have a TV.
WHEN CHESS CAME in for videos, he acted like Glorette was still his girlfriend. Not like she’d ignored him after she met Dakar. Not like he’d had a daughter with some other girl. He’d come up to the counter and say, “Man, she stay at Jacaranda Gardens now, them gray apartments. Her and her boy. Ain’t a damn thing in there but a futon and a glass-top table. Her and Sisa let them sprung fools party up in there all the time, and they walk off with everything. Her son’s seventeen, and he can’t even keep a CD player or no shoes.”
“What you doin up there?” Sidney said, putting the videos in a bag. Mindless shit like Xtreme and Fast and Furious. Chess didn’t even know what anime was.
Chess lifted his chin so Sidney saw his neck, where a thin green wash of Magic Shave remained near his ears. He still wore a fade. “I hang up there sometimes with her. Talk about the old days. Gold days.” Chess looked out at his car, a Bronco with the hood crazed by the sun. He leaned over the counter and said, “So you miss County General? They closed that shit down. After what y’all did.”
Chess laughed and lifted his chin again, and Sidney slammed the cash register closed. “Wasn’t just me workin in the basement, okay? Was two or three other dudes.” Really it had just been him and Moreno. They were the only ones whose names made the newspaper.
“Least I don’t take advantage of somebody like Glorette,” he said.
Chess shrugged. “When I leave, homegirl’s fine.”
FRIDAY NIGHT—CHESS and the Antoine brothers were probably hanging out under the huge pepper tree in the parking lot of Sundown Liquor, three blocks up Palm. The Antoine brothers were Enrique’s sons, big guys who played football in junior college. They drove in from the groves to buy beer and play dominoes. Card table, some folding chairs, and too much talking shit, under the tree. Sidney never hung out. He stayed away unless Archuleta’s customized van wasn’t in the parking lot. He hated seeing the leg, in his mind, whenever he saw the handpainted sunset on the van doors.
Sidney picked up the tamales and Coke and walked slowly out the door. Don’t wanna alarm nobody. He turned the corner. Crickets were loud in the weeds along the sidewalk, but with each step he took they all stopped singing but one—suddenly it wasn’t music but a single scraping. Fingernail on a plastic comb. His father used to joke, “Even that bug gotta get him a woman.”
Sidney felt himself hard. Nature rising. He’d always hated how country his father sounded. Even from New Orleans, he sounded as country as the Sarrat people. After he’d finished the refrigerator, he’d installed a window swamp cooler for Mrs. Antoine. He’d said in the truck, “Man, they got they own church out there. They own cemetery. They own chickens. Don’t need nobody or nothin.”
Sidney pushed his palm hard against the stucco wall to distract himself with the rough grains. No voices in the alley. No shopping cart wheels. The crickets began again.
That night in the ER, he’d come back. The intake nurses were distracted by the old man screaming about his inflamed foot. Sidney carried two cartons of chocolate milk on his cart. Glorette was in one of the curtained-off exam rooms. He said the words quickly. “Why you waste yourself like this? Look how sick you are.”
She’d opened her eyes. “Waste?” she’d said, drawing out the word, her lips darkened from the way she kept licking them. He put the chocolate milk on the silver tray. “How I’m a waste?” she whispered. “All y’all want is to look at my face while you gettin off. Leave me lone.”
“How you feel?” he said, bending closer, and he saw her amber eyes, one fleck of brown like a piece of leaf floating in the left eye.
She said, “You got a shirt under that one?”
“No.”
She pulled at Sidney’s shoulder, then said, “Undo them buttons.” She said, “Help me up. Why you so hot?” She stood before him, small and perfect, even after years of walking the streets. Her hair was pushed up at the back where she’d been lying down, but it looked purposeful. What did Jinelle call it? Teased. Bouffant. Like Audrey Hepburn.
Don’t think of Jinelle.
Glorette pushed his shirt aside and leaned close to his chest. He felt something brush against his nipples. Not her lips. Soft and tickling. Eyelashes. She moved them slowly, again and again, her breath heating his skin.
She said, “You smell like smoke and somethin else.”
Outside in the hallway someone called, “Why’s that medical waste cart here? We just had a pickup.”
Sidney jumped away from Glorette and buttoned his shirt. He batted at himself, in his pants, and she said, “What they said about you? Somethin about the basement. Lord, that’s you. When they talk about Archuleta’s leg.”
“You okay?” he whispered.
“I’m fine,” she said, distant, as if she were in a tower. A turret. The princess bride. “Just fine.”
Fine as wine and just my kind, they all said every time they saw her. Every brother on the Westside had fallen in love with Glorette, and even though she’d been on the street for ten years, as far as he knew, no one had ever fallen out.
WHAT HE WANTED to ask her was whether she’d ever done that to anyone else. How had she known to do it? Nothing Jinelle did to him had ever made him feel that way. Not sex. Not even hot. But shaking and trembling inside, just under the layer of his skin.
What if that was just an experiment? What if he was the only one she’d ever touched with her lashes?
In all these years he’d driven up Palm to work and thought he’d seen her—the red sandals she always wore, the high crown of her hair—he couldn’t stop. It wasn’t something you could lean out the open window and ask. Not when she was used to men asking how much?
What you did to me—you did that before?
No one spoke. He went around the corner, no slipping and sliding, and walked down the alley. The shopping cart had moved closer to the wild tobacco trees. Curled inside was a shape.
Glorette was sleeping. Homeless people never slept inside a cart. Even if it was their hooptie, the only transportation they had, no one fit inside a cart. But Glorette was small. He moved closer, along the chainlink, and in the light from the single yellow streetlamp he saw something glittering at her bare toe.
She must be damn tired to sleep like that, take a nap slumped with one arm across her chest and her feet up awkwardly.
He couldn’t see her face yet. Her long black hair fell through the slats at the back of the cart and lay in the dirt. He felt the shock inside his jeans. All that hair.
The Navigator. The drums. Sidney flattened himself against the fence. The plastic slats through the diamonds of chainlink danced and shimmered with the vibration. The world leapt with the drums. The yellow flowers, like macaroni, dangled from the wild tobacco tree hiding him. They shook until the car turned away.
Glorette didn’t stir. Her hair poured from the cart like black ferns, cascading from a cave wall. The cave where the hero hid out while he rested, got himself together, and made his plans. “Hair is dead,” Jinelle used to say in annoyance whenever the brothers brought it up, at a house party or barbecue. She’d been working at the beauty salon years then. “Glorette should get her a style and stop wearin that old bun like a grandma.” But Chess would say, “She don’t have to get a style. Get anybody she want the way she is.”
Now Sidney didn’t want to wake her. She wouldn’t remember him if she was this high, and that would kill him on a night like tonight. Nothing to do but tacos and anime.
Damn. He’d left the videos on the table, next to the hot sauce.
What was in the plastic bag at the back wheels? It was tied shut. Looked like that same stack of books. Sidney crouched down and flattened the plastic. Maruchan Ramen. Ten for a dollar. That must be what her son ate, because she was always carrying it.
The wind moved the palm fronds suddenly, the sweet whispering, and a rat shot across the phone line above him. The rat scrabbled for a moment on the taqueria roof and disappeared. The night was warm and dry, but rats would be working. Sidney couldn’t leave the tamales, like he’d left the chocolate milk. Glorette hadn’t moved; her arm curved around her waist. She was small, but rounded breasts and perfect behind. The foolish sprung wardrobe of yoga pants, exercise bra, and red high heels. Sidney came closer. The left heel pushed out from the cart like a stick. The toe ring was a sparkly flower of red jewels. He could pick her up and move her to—no, she couldn’t sleep in Launderland, or the bushes, or the taqueria.
He reached into the cart and moved her hair from her face. Her eyes were open. She wasn’t sleeping. Her neck was bent too far to the left, and two small half-moons filled with blood marked her collarbone.
SIDNEY THREW UP against the fence. He steadied himself, fingers in the wire. Red chunks of tomato, white flags of tortilla chip. The tamales were on the ground. His fingerprints were everywhere on the plastic. His body fluids were here. He smeared his foot over the tomatoes, crushed the sour smell into the soft dirt by the fence, pushed the mess into the weeds.
He could hear the conversation he’d have with the cops when they came.
“I was walkin cause the brakes are out on my car.”
“I got off work at Excellent Video at eleven. Bought some tacos and headed home.”
“It ain’t in the shop cause I sent my paycheck to my ex-wife for my daughter’s teeth. Yeah, all the rest of her body, too. Bite expanders. Teeth are too big for her jaw. Like mine.”
“Four years. That’s how long I been divorced.”
“Yeah, I know her, but from when we were kids. Long time ago. No, I ain’t seen her for years. Well, yeah, everybody sees her on the street, but I haven’t seen her close up. Yeah, she’s close up right now.”
“No, I ain’t paid her nothin. I ain’t touched her. No, I ain’t remarried. Come on. No. Yeah, I walked over here to see if it was her.”
“Glorette Picard.”
HE COULDN’T CALL the cops. Not a brother walking through the alley near midnight, a loser with no car, no woman, only a couple of anime videos. Shit. Which were in the restaurant. Which meant everyone had seen him looking all nervous and jumpy. Buying two meals.
Can’t leave her here. Not with the rats, and the Navigator, and the crickets. Cops would come eventually, in the morning, and find everything. Including his vomit. What did they always say on SVU? Something’s always left behind—the dead tell us the truth. The story.
Mexican music came from the taqueria when someone opened the door. Sidney was tired. He backed into the trees again, and water was flung across the alley, a white plume of water that hit the fence and washed his tomatoes back into the dirt.
Hell, no. Wasn’t no SVU: Rio Seco. The city had closed County General years ago and built a new medical center out in the wilds, but the morgue was an ancient brick building downtown, covered with ivy; you could smell it sometimes from the street, it was so inefficient. The city wanted to build a new morgue by the medical center, but there was no budget. And the cops wouldn’t be women with tight sweaters and boots and long hair. They’d be Rio Seco PD. He’d be the brother with no car—what a loser—who just found the body. Uh-huh.
“No, it didn’t bother me to pick her up. I’ve seen bodies before. I worked at County General.”
“I picked her up because I thought she was sleeping.”
“I don’t know CPR. I was a custodian at the hospital.”
“I wanted to help her.”
“She didn’t love anybody but her son, from what I heard.” “No, she didn’t tell me.”
Nobody would drop liquids into revolving machines or find stray red needles from a bottlebrush plant or take a fallen eyelash from her shoulder and extract the DNA.
Nobody would care about Glorette. No cops or technicians. They’d laugh about her clothes, find multiple kinds of semen inside her, make fun of her apartment, pull Ramen from the cupboard, scare the shit out of her son. Well, hell, someone killed a crack addict. Top priority. What did they used to call it? No Human Involved.
The left leg of her pants had been dragged up when she’d been put in the cart, and her knee was pressed so awkwardly that her skin pushed through the metal mesh. Five squares of flesh.
The scratch marks were from small fingernails. Not Sisia’s, because she had hands like a man, and long square fake nails. He picked up Glorette’s hands. No blood. No nails. They’d been bitten into soft invisible edges.
Glorette had been kneeling by the cart. Sisia had to have put her inside, or she climbed in herself. And died? Her neck wasn’t bruised. Heart attack, from smoking too much rock?
Sidney had come into his father’s yard one day to find him sitting straight up in an old recliner—a washing machine dismantled beside him—and dead. Heart stopped, mouth closed. Fists on his legs.
Now he unbuttoned his shirt. Come here. He draped it over her body and picked her up. She was not stiff. She was not soft. A layer of something was forming under her skin. A river spreading over banks and then leaving silt and mud just below the surface. Her head fell back over his wrist and her hair fell across his thighs.
No. No. He couldn’t carry her down the alley like this, couldn’t carry her anywhere. Save a dead body? Nobody died of solitude. You can’t save her. The wind prickled on his bare back, and a door slammed behind the fence. A lighter scratched, push tab snapped, and smoke drifted into the alley.
Sidney paused in the trees. He could hear the man sucking the smoke into his lungs. Hear his shoes moving on the concrete. Patio. His wife made him smoke outside. Not weed. Strong cigarette like a Camel. “Jesús, mira, you better not stay out there all night,” she called, and the sliding glass door slammed shut.
I can hear him, he might hear me. Yes, officer. Black male. About thirty-five. Carrying a woman.
One car was parked on the side street. An ancient Nissan Sentra. Mexican flag in the back window. The taqueria woman, or the men.
The smoke released from the man’s lungs and lifted in a dancing skein over the alley fence, like a bad detective movie. Fake fog. Blue. Glorette’s body was no heavier than his daughter Sarena’s. He had called her last week. She talked for five minutes, and then her cell phone went off. Her ringtone was loud. Some dude sang, “My body, your body, my body, your body.” Who the hell is that? Sidney said. Pretty Ricky, she said. I have to go, Dad. That’s my friend. Mom’s at work.
“She told me you carried her one night at the hospital,” Jinelle said, furious. “I ran into her at Rite Aid and she said you rescued her and shit. You some kinda knight? You got feelings for her? Why she couldn’t walk? What you mean I didn’t need savin? I ain’t never needed savin. You did. And I ain’t the one now. No. Go get her. Her royal highness. I’m gone.”
The beer can landed in a pile near the fence. The sliding glass door clanked shut. Sidney looked down at Glorette’s face in the streetlight. Her eyes amber, frozen. Helen of Troy. Her lips were etched sharply into her face without makeup. He curved her body onto its side, in the workshirt, and lay her in the cart again. He pushed it through the soft sand and gravel and onto the sidewalk. He wouldn’t look down the narrow side streets. The Antoine brothers would be at Sundown Liquor. They had to be there.
He didn’t care who heard the wheels grinding on the asphalt when he crossed the streets and headed down the next alley. The light was dimmer here, behind the shoe repair shop and the Botanica San Salvador. More smoke came from the open back door of the botanica—candles and marijuana. When the cops had brought all the black plastic bags of weed to the basement, Moreno had crowed like a bird. “Contact high, carnal!” he said, and the cops shook their heads. But they were smiling. Ten bags. Homegrown sinsemillia.
“Authorized to dispose,” one cop said, peering into the incinerator. “Damn, this place is old.”
Moreno sailed two bags into the glowing door while plastic hissed and the smoke filled the basement with a sweet-burnt blackness. In the dim basement Moreno said, “The government checks the smoke, man, you know. For emissions or whatever. It can’t be too thick or black out there, in the air. So burn some bags off that last cart, Sidney.”
“Damn, this one’s heavy,” the cop said, helping him lift two red waste bags from the cart. When they threw it in, the plastic disappeared, and Archuleta’s leg lay in the burning bright branches of sinsemillia.
“What the hell are you guys doing?” the older cop yelled. “You’re not supposed to burn body parts!”
“I didn’t know it was there!” Sidney remembered his eyes burning, tearing. But Moreno didn’t care. “Man, them surgeons throw all kinda stuff in the bags. We can’t check em all. Lotta wombs in there. You know? I’m glad the doctors don’t decide guys don’t need our equipment no more.”
The young cop stared inside the flames, and Moreno closed the door.
In the newspaper, after they interviewed surgeons and cops and administrators, they came to the basement and Moreno told them everything. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about emissions and airborne viruses and gangrene. The photographer thought Moreno was hilarious, with his huge mustache, and Sidney didn’t notice the flash until it was too late.
Behind Sundown Liquor were empty boxes in a pile. He wasn’t going to talk to Glorette. He wasn’t an idiot. He left her there and went around to the parking lot.
Four men were under the pepper tree. Two red embers floating in the darkness, one set of white teeth laughing when he walked forward under the bright light from Sundown. Archuleta’s van, with wheelchair lifts at the back, with gaudy desert sunsets glowing on the doors, parked near the door. Sidney didn’t care. Chess hollered, “Hey, brotha, you lose your shirt?” Some other fool he didn’t even recognize said, “He still hot years after workin that basement.” Lafayette and Reynaldo Antoine wore plaster-spattered black Dickies; they didn’t move anything except their eyes. They never had to say much. Lafayette slammed down a three-six and said, “Fitteen.”
Chess opened his mouth and Sidney said, “Back up off me tonight, man, I ain’t in the mood. Just walk away. I gotta talk to Lafayette.”
“What the fuck wrong with you?” Chess said. “You never come to Sundown cause you don’t want to make chit-chat with—”
Sidney said, “I see Archuleta in there behind the counter, okay? I know—I burned up his leg. Now get in your Bronco with this fool and go. We got business.” Lafayette stood up and Sidney remembered his father speaking French to Enrique Antoine out in Sarrat, carrying the swamp cooler. Sidney said to Lafayette, “Li cousine. Mouri. Pas moi.” He shrugged to say he didn’t know who’d killed her.
Chess said, “You just babblin.”
“Lousana brothers crazy and shit,” the other man said, but he followed Chess to the Bronco. Sidney waited until it started up. Not the alley. Down Palm. Uh-huh.
Sidney took the Antoine brothers to the alley. “Glorette,” he said. “I saw her in the alley when I came out the taco place. Then I heard her friend Sisia talkin to her.”
“They fightin?” Lafayette said.
“No, like—sad.” Sidney nodded. “Sisia had to been who put her in the cart. But I don’t know how she died. Maybe a heart attack. All that rock.”
“Why you bring her here?” Reynaldo said, toothpick like a catfish barb at the side of his mouth. He looked like he didn’t believe Sidney hadn’t been the one, maybe, to kill her.
Sidney folded his arms over his chest. The air brushed his collarbone. “What the cops gon do but laugh? What the morgue gon do but cut her up? Don’t y’all want her back in Sarrat? You got that cemetery.” He paused. “I heard her father wish she was home.”
Lafayette nodded. “He keep her son sometime. Feed him.” He stared at Sidney, his eyes that strange green, like he was making up his mind. Lafayette loved to fight. He’d broken jaws and noses in high school. Sidney kept his eyes hard. He didn’t blink until Lafayette moved his hand to Reynaldo. “Get the truck.”
The truck rumbled up the alley, and Lafayette said quickly, “Qui sais?” Who knows?
Sidney said, “Only me. And Sisia. If she did it, she won’t say nothin. All she want is rock or money.” He looked down at Glorette’s hair, the wild strands he’d smoothed when he put her inside his shirt. “I never saw a purse or keys or nothin. Just this bag.”
He handed Lafayette the bag of ramen and Lafayette said, “Glorette live on air. But she try to feed that boy.”
They glanced around the alley and then lifted her into the truckbed, among the plastering tools and tarps. Lafayette covered her with a thick tarp, and when her face was gone Sidney leapt up into the truckbed beside her. “What you gon do?” Reynaldo said.
“Cops see us, tell the truth. They don’t, tell her dad when we get out to your place.” And hope I don’t see your pops, he thought. Cause my pops made him sound like a stone cold killer—the way he did that white man.
The truck swayed around the corner and headed down Palm. Sidney rested his head against the cab window. He didn’t want to see Sisia, or the Navigator, so he closed his eyes until he felt the dirt road that led to Sarrat. Then he reached down slowly, so Reynaldo wouldn’t see the movement, and uncovered her left foot.
Marry me. He felt her toe cold and smooth as plastic.
Her toenails had no polish. Her heels were cracked and dirty, like someone had drawn designs there with black pen. Puckered scar—as if from a cigarette burn—near her ankle, pink as gum.
They crossed the canal bridge, the water sliding metallic beneath, and then in the tunnel of orange trees he slipped the toe ring into his pocket and breathed in the scent of white blossoms on the dark branches.