Go for the Tail
Ortiz
Maribel picks the place right off a billboard on the causeway, a warehouse with a neon sign and the word ARCADE in letters taller than the truck.
She points at it with the hand that isn’t in my back pocket. “That one.”
“That’s for kids.”
“You said that about the last place.” She doesn’t take the hand out of my pocket. “You lost.”
I didn’t lose. I got kissed beside a domino park in Little Havana, and I’d call that winning. I don’t argue. I take the exit.
Inside it’s noise. Every machine in the building is yelling at once, lights going, some kid screaming at a racing game, the smell of pizza and floor cleaner. She stops in the door and takes all of it in with her mouth open, and then she looks at me the way she looked at the dominoes.
“Give me money.”
“Ask nicer.”
“Give me money, Mateo.”
I give her the money. She comes back with a cup of tokens the size of her head, takes my hand, and pulls me into it.
She’s terrible at the racing game. She drives the way she orders coffee, fast and bossy and straight into the wall. She blames the wheel, the seat, the kid next to her, and me.
She’s good at the basketball one, better than me, which she says out loud to everybody in the row. Then she finds the long wooden lanes where you roll a ball up into rings. It turns out she’s some kind of natural at it.
I stand there and watch a woman I’ve known since she had two braids drop ball after ball into the little hole in the middle without even looking at me.
“How.”
“Wrist.” She rolls another one. It goes in. “Steel says it’s all in the wrist.”
“Steel doesn’t play skee-ball.”
“Steel says a lot of things.”
I let that one go, because she’s smiling when she says it and the smile’s for me.
She beats me at air hockey by putting her mouth on mine when I’ve got the puck.
That’s cheating. I tell her it’s cheating.
She says the rules are for people who can’t kiss, and she scores while I’m still standing there.
She wins. She’s the worst winner I’ve ever seen.
She walks around the table with both arms up telling the room. I’d let her do it all day.
We eat pizza at a sticky table. She takes the pepperoni off my slice and puts it on hers without asking.
I let her. She knows I’m letting her. She sits on the same side of the booth as me instead of across.
Her leg is over my leg under the table. I’ve got my hand on the inside of her knee and she’s eating my pepperoni.
That’s when she sees it.
It’s in the claw machine by the door, on top of the pile. A stuffed shark. Bright blue, fat, with a stupid grin on it and the mouth sewn on crooked, so the whole face is off to one side.
She points with the pizza.
“That’s your shoulder.”
“It’s not my shoulder.”
“It’s your shoulder, Mateo. It’s got the same mouth.” She’s up already. “I want it.”
She wants it. She tries first. She’s bad at it. The claw’s got no grip in it. She gets the shark off the pile and drops it. She gets it again and drops it again. The last time, she smacks the glass and calls it a word her grandmother used to call the neighbor’s dog.
“Move,” I tell her.
“You can’t do it.”
“Move.”
I get the claw on it and it opens. I get the claw on it and it drops the shark on the way to the chute.
I feed the machine another token. I feed it another one.
She’s leaning on the glass beside me eating my crust. Somewhere in there she starts to laugh.
By the time I’ve fed it every token in the cup she’s laughing so hard she has to sit down on the floor.
“It costs less than that at a store.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?”
“The point is I’m going to beat this fucking thing.”
A kid comes over. He’s got a blue slushie and a look on his face I’ve seen on Torque. He watches me lose one more time. Then he says, “You gotta go for the tail, man. The head’s too heavy.”
I look at him. He looks at me. He isn’t scared of me at all. Maribel is dying on the floor.
I go for the tail.
The claw comes down and closes. The shark comes up crooked with its tail in the jaws and its grin hanging down. It swings over the chute and drops. Maribel screams. The kid nods once and goes back to his slushie. His work here is done.
I get down on one knee and pull the shark out of the flap and hold it out to her.
She doesn’t take it right away. She looks at me on the floor of an arcade holding a blue shark with its face on wrong, and she stops laughing.
She puts both hands on my face, kissing me in front of the kid and the claw machine and everybody.
Then she takes the shark and holds it against her chest with both arms.
“Mine,” she says.
“Yours.”
“You spent so much money.”
“Worth it.”
She carries it out under her arm. She won’t put it in the back. She rides home with it in her lap and her feet on the dash and her hand on my thigh. She talks the whole way about how bad I was at the claw machine.
I let her, because I found out something today that I didn’t know. I know how to stand in front of her. I’ve known that since the step. I didn’t know I could make her laugh so hard she had to sit down on a floor. Now I know. I want to know what else does it. I want the whole list.
The shark ends up on the pillow between us that night. I move it to the chair. When I come back from the bathroom it’s on the pillow again, and she’s on her side with her eyes shut and her face very innocent.
“It’s not sleeping here.”
“He,” she says. “And yes he is.”
He sleeps there.