The Stairs
Ortiz
I leave her asleep and go downstairs to be a useful person. I don’t make it past the bar.
Mess is doing inventory with a clipboard. He doesn’t look up. “Morning.”
“Morning.”
He counts a shelf of bottles. He writes a number down. Then he says, still not looking up, “You want to wipe that off your face before Hendrix gets down here, or you want to let him have it.”
“There’s nothing on my face.”
“Brother.” He turns the page. “You’re grinning at a bottle of well gin.”
Hendrix comes down the stairs one step at a time with his hand on the rail and stops halfway. He looks at me. He looks at Mess. Mess shrugs. Hendrix comes the rest of the way down grinning so wide it has to hurt his leg.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“I didn’t say a word.”
“You’re about to.”
“I’m going to make eggs.” He goes past me to the kitchen. “For everybody. It’s a big morning. Somebody in this building’s got an appetite.”
I sit on a stool and drink my coffee and take it. There’s nothing to say back and no point. These men have watched me for years. They’ve watched me since she showed up, sitting on the floor outside her door, walking wide around her in the hall, staring at the coffee pot.
Of course they know. The whole building knows. I don’t care. She put her hand on me last night and looked me in the eye while she did it. I’d stand here and let Hendrix make jokes until the sign burned out.
Steel comes in from the lot. He looks at me. I look at him. I’m still thinking about pinkies.
“Whatever it is,” Steel says, “no.” He goes down the back hall.
“What was that,” Mess says.
“Nothing.”
“Sure.”
I spend the day being a Black Flag officer instead of a man with a woman asleep upstairs.
Rook needs the front tire on his bike looked at and doesn’t know it yet, so I show him.
Mess needs a hand with the beer delivery because the driver’s new and scared of the building.
Torque wants the alley door hinge checked, so I check it.
Ordinary. I’m grateful for it. Around noon she comes down in Beth’s jeans and a shirt of mine that goes to her thighs. She pours her own coffee, sits on a stool at the end of the bar, and looks at me over the cup.
Hendrix drops a spatula.
I keep working on Rook’s tire. I’ve got my back to her and every inch of it knows where she is.
The day passes in an ordinary way I could get used to. Until they come at closing.
I hear it before Rook does, because I’ve been listening for it since the night the one bike sat on our gravel. This isn’t one bike. This is the whole pack coming down the strip in a column with their lights on and nobody hurrying, a sound you feel in your back teeth.
Torque’s already at the door. Steel’s at the window. Mess has his hand behind his back.
They don’t turn in. They roll past the lot at a walk. Every cut says LOS MUERTOS. Every man looks at the building on the way by, the way you’d look at a house you’d already bought.
The rider in front is the one who sat on our gravel and said my name. When he’s level with the door he lifts two fingers off the bar at me, easy, and keeps going.
They go down the strip until the sound fades. Then one bike comes back.
It parks across the street, facing us. Lights off. Engine off. The man on it puts his helmet on the tank and folds his arms and sits.
“He’s not coming in,” Torque says.
“No.”
“He’s telling me he can sit on my street as long as he wants. Costs him one man and a tank of gas.” Torque doesn’t take his eyes off the bike. “Costs us every night she looks out that window.”
He knows what the bike is for. So do I. I’ve got her upstairs in my shirt, and across the street is a man Santo sent to sit outside her window because that’s the sound she knows best. He wants her to hear it. He wants her to remember.
I’m going across the street. I know it before my hand’s on the door. It’s one man on a bike, and I’ve handled worse than one man with nothing but what I was born with. One trip across, and Santo gets his man back in pieces. I don’t have to stand here while she listens to that engine.
Torque puts his hand on the door above mine.
“I know,” he says.
“Then let me.”
“That’s exactly what he wants. One of mine crosses the street, and he’s got a reason.
He’s sitting there because he’s hoping it’s you.
” He looks at me, finally. “Rook. Get the plate. Log every bike that sits on this street from now on, time in and time out. Mess, the alley door’s locked from now until I say.
Steel, you’ve got the window tonight.” He takes his hand off the door. “Ortiz. You’re on the stairs.”
“The stairs.”
“Nobody gets up them that isn’t ours. That’s yours to hold.” He says it quiet. “You wanted to protect her with your own hands. There’s the stairs.”
I stand there with the door under my palm. Across the street the man on the bike hasn’t moved. He’s watching us not come out.
I take my hand off the door, and go to the stairs.
Torque catches me before I make it halfway up. “Office.”
I follow him in.
He shuts the door. “I need to know what she is to you.”
I look at him but don’t say anything.
“Don’t give me that shit. I’ve got Los Muertos sitting across the street from my building because she’s upstairs. I’ve got you ready to cross four lanes of traffic after one man because he’s sitting on a bike. I need to know.”
“She’s Maribel.”
“I know her fucking name.”
I sit back against the wall.
There’s probably a version of this where I tell him we grew up together. That she followed me everywhere. That I fed her when nobody else remembered. That I left her sitting on a step with a feather in her hand and spent nineteen years still picking them up thinking I’d never see her again.
None of that is what he’s asking.
“She’s mine.”
Torque’s face doesn’t change.
“Not like that,” I say. “She doesn’t belong to me. But she’s my person. She was before I knew what that meant.”
“And now?”
I think about her in my bed. Her hand on me because she wanted it there. Her asleep upstairs right now because she chose to stay.
“Now I know what it means.”
Torque watches me.
My spine stiffens. “Santo could bring every Los Muertos cut in Florida to that street. I’m not giving her back.”
“Nobody asked you to.”
“I’m telling you anyway.”
“Good.” He leans back in his chair. “Then hear me. I put her under the flag before I knew who she was to you. That doesn’t change because Santo brought friends.”
Something in my chest lets go.
“But,” he says, “if she’s your person, you need to stop acting like that makes her yours to protect alone. If she belongs to you, she belongs to us.”
There it is.
“I gave you the stairs, Ortiz. Hold the fucking stairs.”
I nod.
“And if I tell you not to cross the street?”
“I don’t cross the street.”
He looks at me like he knows exactly how much that answer cost.
“Good. Get out.”
I don’t sleep. I sit on the bottom step with my back against the wall and my hands open on my knees, because I want that man across the street and Torque’s not letting me have him.
Not tonight. I tell myself that a lot. Not tonight.
A door opens up top a while after the bar goes quiet. She comes down in my shirt with her feet bare and sits on the step above me, and she doesn’t ask why I’m here. She puts her hand in my hair. Then she looks past me, at the window, at the shape across the street with its arms folded.
“I know that sound,” she says. “That’s the sound a bike makes when it isn’t leaving.”
“Yeah.”
“How long is he going to sit there?”
I don’t know. I don’t tell her that. I put my hand over her foot on the step and hold it. We sit there, the two of us, and listen to the man across the street start his engine. He lets it idle so she can hear it.
Then he turns it off again.