That night, she ran. Rain-splattered, cars honking. Headlights blurred wetly. She crept along tenement brick, back alleys. Side streets. Avoiding cop cars.
A bodega man stepped out for a smoke. Offered her a cigarette as they stood under bodega awning. The rain dropped in mad, thin streams. He lit her with a long, thin flame. She sucked in that first nicotine hit. His eyes, looking at her. She couldn’t blink them off.
“There’s blood on your cheek,” he said.
She wiped at it with the palm of her cigarette hand. It was blood, it was her blood. She hoped it was her blood.
The cigarette taste flattened everything. She kept busy sucking in that smoke, contemplating that glowing tip like it was good company. The words the bodeguero spoke, drowned out by rain patter.
She left before the cigarette ran out. If it did, she would have had to ask for another and that much involvement she didn’t want.
There was no point in walking wet streets, rain slapping her up like that. She wouldn’t get anywhere in this town knocking on doors. There were those cop cars, flashing silent, like fireflies.
The way off the street, was to climb.
The building was a big gray job. It towered over this block of small shuttered stores. The fire escapes were easy to reach from the stoop after a hop and a pull. On that 4 a.m. street there was nobody to wonder about the crazy white girl climbing the access ladder. Barefoot, in a clingy wet minidress. A second skin, flowered print. Up there, respite from rain. Not blinking from wet, better to breathe. To think a moment and see the down below.
She slid past half-open windows, so close she could hear the calm slow sleep breath. Some radio chatter. The buzzy hum of an air conditioner.
(Climb, climb)
Through the open window on the third floor she spotted a couple, dancing. Luis Vargas playing soft on the stereo. The one candle flickered unreliably. The woman was in a red dress, fringe splashing her thighs like water. The guy was bare-chested. Black dress pants, like a matador. She watched them dance slow and close. Took a moment before she realized the guy was wearing an eye patch.
The candle went out. The rain pattered a drum beat against fire escape steel. Creak of springs like child giggles.
She kept climbing. To the very top.
The window she chose was wide open, as if the person living there wanted no impediments for whoever arrived. She sat on the edge of the window. The room slowly took shape, a charcoal sketch coming to life under a gray moon.
It was a corner room. The windows along the far wall showed sky and moon like paintings. There were no curtains, no clutter, no mass of things. No bureau or dresser, no big mirror. (It must not be a woman who lives here.) A cluster of milk crates. A chair with some clothes on it.
The bed was placed right in the center of the room. There was no headboard, no frame, no connection to the walls. It floated in the middle of the room like an island.
The man looked like he had fallen. Facedown on the bed. Legs and arms splayed as if he had taken a couple of shells in the back. The sheets did not hide his body from her.
She sat there by the window a long time, shivering from wet, from the pinpricks Alan had given her to make her tell the truth. The skies brightened. The rain stopped. The first hit of light added color with slow brush strokes. A blue room. Bare walls. A bottle of something lying on the bed, as if it had slipped from his hand and rolled a little.
She invaded slowly. Inhaled the room. Liquor, sweat, and sleep breath. Varnish, old socks, cigarettes. A bare foot protruding from the side of the bed. It was the softest foot she had ever seen on a man. No calluses no hard ridges or bumps. She almost touched it.
Peeled off, the wet sticky minidress. She was soaked, down to bra and G-string. It all came off, made a bundle on the slick floor. The guy must have worked on it himself to make it look so waxy fresh. A museum floor.
She rubbed herself dry with a shirt that was on the chair.
The slow, steady. Rise and fall of his breath.
On the very edge of the bed. She sat, slowly in. Set off no ripples of movement from him. She lay down in one quick move.
Waited. Nothing. No break in the rhythm.
She slipped under the sheet.
The trembling, deep shudders. Flashing lights. She was running down a long hallway. He murmured, he turned, he put his arm around her. So snagged, hitched, she waited for words but he slept on. The trembling would not stop. He was good to strain against, to hold onto. Clutching, arms and legs. Wasted into tiredness. The sense of falling down a dark shaft.
Those seagulls flew by with cries that couldn’t wake anybody.