The End of the Block
Maribel
The lot is bigger in the daytime. The gravel is the same gravel. I stop at the edge of it with my sandals on the line where it turns to road.
Mateo stops next to me. Not in front. Next to me, the way I told him. Rook is on the step behind us with his arms crossed, pretending he isn’t watching. The strip runs off in both directions with nothing on it but heat.
“You want to go,” Mateo says, “we go. You want to turn around, we turn around. You want to stand here, we stand here.”
“Those are the rules?”
“Those are the rules.”
“You made them up just now.”
“I made them up last night. I’ve been practicing. I wish I didn’t need rules for you.”
I look at the road. The last time I stood at the edge of a road, a truck stopped.
There’s no truck. There’s a man next to me who used to wait on the corner for me to catch up.
There’s a prospect on a step and a building behind me with my room in it.
There’s Beth and her clothes. There’s a warm shower.
I should be okay. But I’m not okay. Not yet.
I take a step. Then another one. The gravel ends, the sidewalk starts, and I’m outside Black Flag.
The end of the block is a gas station and a place with a window where a woman sells coffee through it. I can smell it from here. I keep walking until I’m standing at the window. Then I stand there and don’t say anything, because I haven’t ordered a thing for myself since Cuba.
“Take your time,” Mateo says.
I order in Spanish. The woman answers in Spanish. She calls me mami and asks if I want it sweet. I say yes, loud enough that Mateo looks at me.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He’s got his hands in his pockets. “You used to order like that for your grandmother. Bossy.”
“She was deaf in one ear.”
“She wasn’t deaf. She just didn’t listen to anybody but you.”
I take the little cup from the woman. It’s hot enough to hurt. I drink it standing there with the sun on my neck. It’s too sweet. It’s the best thing I’ve had in my mouth since I got here.
“How is she,” he says. “Your grandmother.”
“Dead.”
He doesn’t say he’s sorry. He looks at the road for a while.
“Before you left?”
“Before I left.” I finish the cup. “There was nobody else, after. So I left.”
“How did you get here?”
“Nicaragua first. Then buses. Trucks. Some of it walking. That’s how I learned to tape my feet.” I turn the empty cup between my hands. “At the border, I told them I was Cuban and asked for asylum. They took my fingerprints and gave me papers and a court date.”
“They paroled you in?”
“That’s what the papers say.”
“You still have them?”
“In my bag.”
“When’s the court date?”
“Four months.”
His jaw shifts. “I’ll get you a good immigration lawyer.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t ask what I was doing all the years before I left, or what happened between the border and his front step. He can see I’m not ready.
“Your father,” I say.
“Still working. Still mad at me.”
“Still calling you Mateo.”
“Only when I’ve done something.”
“What did you do?”
“Didn’t call him for a while.” He pays the woman for the coffee before I can ask how much. I watch him do it. I don’t like it, and he sees that.
“Next time I pay,” I tell him.
“With what?”
“Beth gave me an envelope.”
“You save that. I can pay for your coffees.”
We walk back slower than we came. He doesn’t ask if I want to go back. I decided that. He saw me decide it. He walks next to me with his hands in his pockets.
There’s a street to cross before the lot. A real one, with a light. We stop at the curb.
When I was seven he used to take my hand at every corner without looking at me. He’d do it in the middle of an argument with one of his boys, reach back, find my hand, and keep arguing. I never thought about it then. It was just his hand.
I look at his hand now. It’s hanging at his side. It’s enormous, and the ink runs all the way down the back of it to the knuckles.
I hook my little finger around his.
That’s all. One finger. He goes still all the way through. He keeps his eyes on the light and his hand open, and he lets me hold his finger like that until the light changes. We cross. I don’t let go on the other side.
His hand is warm. What a stupid thing to notice. I notice it anyway.
I let go at the edge of the lot, because Rook is watching, and because I want to be the one who lets go.
Mateo puts his hand back in his pocket like nothing happened. His face says nothing happened. I know that face. The boy had it too, when he was pretending a thing didn’t matter and it was the only thing in the world that did.
“Tomorrow,” I tell him. “Farther.”
“I’ll decide how far we can go safely,” he says. “You’re going to have to live with that.”
Inside, he goes down the back hall to whatever the club needs him for, and I stand in the bar and finish waking up from the outside. Then I go looking for the man from yesterday. The one by the padlocked door.
He’s in the little room with the heavy bag, wrapping his hands. He doesn’t stop when I come in, and he doesn’t ask what I want. His cut says STEEL, and I can believe it.
“I want you to teach me,” I say.
He keeps wrapping. “Teach you what.”
“How to get away from a man who has his hands on me.”
He finishes the wrap. He tucks the end in. Then he looks at me, all the way, the way the president did on the step, and I let him.
“Ortiz can do that.”
“I’m not asking Ortiz.”
He doesn’t ask why. I don’t know if it’s because he already knows, or because he doesn’t care about the why, only the what. Either one is fine with me.
“I don’t teach fighting,” he says. “You’d lose. Anybody your size would lose.”
“I don’t want to fight.”
“Then what.”
“I want to get free. I want to have options.”
He looks at me a while longer.
“Okay,” he says.
“Don’t tell him.”
“Wasn’t going to.”
Upstairs I lock my door and sit on the bed with the bag in my lap. I open it, running my fingers along the lining until I find the place where the stitching is different. I work the tin out through the gap the way I’ve done in every place I’ve carried it, and in one place I don’t think about.
I open the lid. They’re all there. Brittle, brown, a few of them broken now, the last one still on top where I put it that night on the step.
They’re so fragile. Still soft. Still beautiful in their own way.
I look at them for a while. I don’t cry. That’s new.
I put the lid back on, slide the tin into the lining, and go to sleep.
My feathers are safe for now and so am I.