The Red Shirt
Maribel
“I want my own jeans.”
Mateo looks up from the coffee. It’s morning. The bike across the street is gone the way it always is by morning, and I’ve been standing at this bar in Beth’s jeans rolled at the ankle for long enough.
“Beth’s are fine.”
“Beth’s are Beth’s.” I put the envelope on the bar. There’s still money in it. “I want something that’s mine. Jeans. A shirt with a color. Underwear I picked.”
“Underwear.”
“You heard me.”
He looks at the envelope. He looks at the door. I know what he’s doing, because I’ve watched him do it for days, counting the bikes he can’t see. Then he drinks the rest of the coffee and stands up.
“Truck,” he says. “I’ll tell Torque.”
He doesn’t talk on the drive. He keeps checking the rearview mirror, enough times that I start checking it too.
A gray car stays two lengths behind us across the causeway. Mateo passes the turn for the store.
“You missed it.”
“No.”
He takes the next right, then another, circling us back toward the strip. The gray car makes both turns.
At the next red light, he takes out his phone, types the plate number, and sends it.
“Torque?”
“Yeah.”
“Are we going back?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Too many people. They won’t make a grab in front of a hundred civilians.”
“Then why follow us?”
He glances at me. “They want me to know they’re watching.”
He parks facing the road with the lot in the mirror, and he sits there a minute looking at every car in it before he lets me open my door. I let him have that. It costs me nothing.
The gray car rolls past us and parks at the far edge of the lot beside the taco truck. The windows are dark. Nobody gets out.
Mateo watches it in the mirror.
“Stay close to me.”
“I was planning to.”
It’s an ordinary store. A big one on the strip past the causeway, with carts, fluorescent lights, and a woman on the speaker calling somebody to the front.
Mateo walks in with me and doesn’t know where to stand.
He stands too close to the racks. A girl in a vest asks if he needs help and he says no so fast she backs up.
I take my time because I want to. I pull jeans off the shelf and hold them up against me and put them back.
I hold up two shirts and make him choose.
He says the left one. I put the left one back to see what he does.
He doesn’t do anything. He’s learning. I find a shirt that’s red, really red, and I hold it up to him.
“Yes,” he says.
“You didn’t look.”
“I looked.”
“You looked at me.”
“Yeah.”
I buy the red one. I buy jeans that fit me at the waist and not at the ankle. I’m short and all the jeans are long. I stand in the underwear aisle for a while and pick things out. I make him hold the basket while I do it.
He holds it, looks at the ceiling, and turns a color I’ve never seen on him. I’m enjoying myself. I’m enjoying him. I pay with my envelope and the girl at the register asks if I found everything. I say yes, and I mean it.
We come out into the sun with the bag. There’s a taco truck at the edge of the lot, and I’m about to say I want one.
Then I see the logo.
A cut, on a man leaning on that gray car by the taco truck.
Skull on the back. Jaw hanging open. I don’t see the man.
I see the skull. My knees go. The bag hits the asphalt before I know I’ve let go of it.
I can’t get air. The parking lot is very bright and very far away.
All I can feel is a room with a window I couldn’t open.
Mateo has me. His arm’s around my waist, and I’m on my feet because of it. He’s looking where I’m looking.
The man turns around.
I know his face. I know it the way I know the ceiling in that room.
He’s the younger one, the one who kept his hands clean while he came in and out of the house with his brother’s keys and looked at me on the floor and went on with his day.
He brought the plates. He knew what was behind that door because he opened it.
He never touched me. He never had to. He just kept me there.
“Cristo.” It comes out of me with no voice in it.
Mateo hears it anyway. I feel it go through him. He knows the name from Torque’s office. Now he knows it from me. Those are two different things.
Cristo Vega looks at Mateo the way you look at a dog you’ve heard about. Then his eyes come off Mateo and land on me. They stay there. He takes his time.
“Mu?eca,” he says.
That’s all. The name Santo gave me, in the voice that used to say it through a door. He doesn’t have to say anything else. He’s standing in a parking lot on an ordinary afternoon.
He knows my face and I know his. He wants me to know that nothing I’ve done since the truck has put any distance between us at all.
“He talks about you,” Cristo says. “I’ll tell him you look well.”
Mateo hasn’t moved. That’s the thing I can’t stop feeling, standing inside his arm. He hasn’t moved, and every part of him wants to. I watched him fight. I loved it. That was a man doing a job in a cage with a bell.
This is a man standing in a parking lot with a bag of my underwear at his feet, looking at one of the men who kept me in a room. There’s no bell and no cage. The only thing between him and Cristo Vega is Torque’s rules.
Mateo lets go of me. He takes one step.
I know it’s one step because I count it. One. He stops there. His hands are open at his sides, and I can hear him breathing.
Cristo smiles. He wants the second step. He’s been waiting for the second step since he leaned on that car.
I’m shaking so hard my teeth hurt. I make the decision anyway. It’s not for Mateo. I’m not managing anybody. It’s that this man has had enough of me. He had days of me in that house. He’s had my name and my face and my afternoon. He doesn’t get another minute.
“Mateo.”
He doesn’t look at me.
I put my hand in his. It’s a fist. I hold it anyway.
“I want to go.”
That gets him. He looks at me. There’s a war on his face and I don’t look away from it. After a second, he bends and picks up the bag with his other hand.
“Call her Mu?eca again,” Mateo says quietly, “and you’ll never say another fucking word.”
Cristo smiles. “Santo said you were touchy.”
After we start walking, I don’t look back. Mateo does, once, at the truck. Then we’re in with the doors shut, and he’s got both hands on the wheel.
“He was in the house,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“He knew. He was there and he knew.”
“Yeah.”
I look at my hands in my lap. They’re still trembling. I let them. I’m not going to pretend for him.
“I was scared.”
“I know.”
“I’m still scared.”
“I know.” He turns his head, finally, and looks at me. “You told me you wanted to go. You, not him.”
“I did.”
“That’s why we went.”
He starts the truck. His hands are still wrong on the wheel, too tight, and they stay that way all the way back over the causeway.
He doesn’t talk. I don’t make him. I hold the bag in my lap with the red shirt on top, and I think about a man saying my name in a house.
Then I think about the one step Mateo took and the one he didn’t.
At the lot, before he gets out, I put my hand over his on the wheel.
“I’m wearing the red one tomorrow,” I tell him.
He looks at my hand on his. Something in his shoulders lets go, not all of it, but some.
“Yeah,” he says. “You will.”
“You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
He almost laughs. It’s the first thing that’s come out of him since the parking lot, and I’ll take it.