Not My Name
Maribel
The room has a table, a chair, and a mattress on the floor. I know the mattress.
Santo sits in the chair. I stand, because he hasn’t told me to sit, and the last time I was in this room I learned what it cost to do anything he hadn’t told me to do. He hasn’t touched me. Instead, he’s looking at me the way he looked at me the first day, checking the delivery against the invoice.
“Mu?eca.”
“That’s not my name.”
“It is in here.” He says it mildly. He lights a cigarette. “You walked out, Cristo says. Bag on your shoulder. Nobody dragged you. So something happened over there that told you where you stand.”
I don’t answer. He doesn’t need me to.
“I’m going to tell you a thing. You’re going to hate me for it, and it’s still going to be true.
” He blows smoke at the ceiling. “The day my prospect brought you in, asking for Ortiz, I made a call. I’m a businessman, Mu?eca.
A Black Flag officer’s woman is worth something, if she’s his.
So I called him. I said, Ortiz, I’ve got a Cuban girl here, says her name’s Maribel, says she’s yours.
“ He looks at me. “You know what he said?”
I know he’s lying. I know it the way I know my own hands.
“He said he didn’t know any Maribel. He said if she was dumb enough to walk into my house looking for him, she was my problem now.
” Santo taps ash. “So I kept you. That’s all this ever was, Mu?eca.
He didn’t want you then, and he doesn’t want the trouble of you now.
They must have told you themselves. That’s why you walked. ”
It goes in. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t.
It finds the exact place Steel’s voice left in me, if she wasn’t here, and it sits down there and makes itself at home.
Nineteen years. He knew a girl called Pluma.
The girl he collected feathers for. I walked up to a strange man in a leather cut and said Maribel, and maybe Maribel wasn’t anybody to him.
Maybe I made him want me by standing in his building practically offering myself every day until he did.
Maybe my memories are betraying me.
Then I see his face on the road.
Not the face he had for Cristo. The face he had for me, running, when he was too far and knew it.
Nobody makes a man wear that face. He stopped in a parking lot because I said go.
He held a basket in an underwear aisle and looked at the ceiling.
He paid for a stupid shark until I couldn’t breathe.
He came for me down a sidewalk with his whole club behind him. I saw it. This man wasn’t there.
“Nobody’s coming for you, Mu?eca,” Santo says.
“Mateo is coming for me.”
He laughs. He starts to say something, his mouth’s open on it, and the world goes white.
I don’t hear the bang. I feel it, in my teeth and behind my eyes. Then there’s nothing in my ears but a high, thin sound and the room’s on its side. Santo’s chair is over. He’s on the floor with his hands over his face.
Somebody’s yelling out in the hall in a voice with no words in it. Under the ringing there’s a sound I’ve only heard in movies, over and over, fast. The wall beside the door grows holes.
Santo gets up before I do. His hand closes on my arm. They always come for the arm. I turn out through his thumb. He’s not expecting it, because the last time he had this arm I didn’t know anything. His hand closes on nothing.
He grabs again and gets my shirt. I go for his eyes with my fingers and get one. He screams and lets go.
Get free, Maribel. Steel never once said win.
So I don’t. I run instead, and not for the door. My bag is on the floor beside the mattress.
I get there before Santo understands where I’m going. I grab the strap and pull. It catches under the chair. Santo’s coming around the table with one hand over his eye.
I yank harder. The chair goes over. The bag comes free.
The tin is still inside, and that’s all I need.
I put the strap over my head and run for the open door. The hall past it is smoke and light and men going both ways. One of them goes down in front of me with his cut on fire and doesn’t move. I can’t tell whose cut it is.
Somebody’s shooting from the kitchen end. Somebody’s shooting back from the front. A man I don’t know runs past me and out the side door with his arm hanging wrong. The side door stays open behind him with the yard lit orange through it.
Then, through all of it, through the ringing and the shooting and the smoke, one word.
“PLUMA!”
Nobody in this house knows that name.
It’s the only thing in this building that’s mine.
“MATEO!” I don’t know if he can hear me. I say it again. I say it until my throat goes.
He comes through the smoke from the kitchen with a gun in his hand and Steel behind him. He sees me. His face does the thing from the road.
Cristo comes out of the room across the hall between us.
He’s got his nose taped and a pistol. He puts himself in the hall with his back to me and his gun coming up at Mateo, and he says, “Mu?eca—“
Mateo shoots him.
Twice, in the chest, before Cristo’s gun is level. Cristo goes down on his back in the hall with his eyes open and looks at the ceiling. Mateo steps over him without looking down, because Cristo Vega is not the job.
Behind me the side door bangs. I turn. Santo’s going through it, one hand over his eye, into the yard and the dark past the fence. Mateo sees him. I watch him see him. Santo’s back is right there in the open door. Mateo’s got a gun in his hand and a clear line.
“Mateo.”
He looks at me. He doesn’t look at the door again.
Once he gets to me, he puts his hand on my face, my neck, and then my arms, fast, checking. It’s the first time anyone’s touched me in this house and I’ve wanted it.
“You hurt?”
“Bruised. I can walk.”
“Then walk.” He’s already turning me toward the kitchen, his hand on the back of my neck, Steel ahead of us putting a man through a doorway. “Stay on my hip. Don’t stop for anything.”
“You came.”
“I told you it was you.” He doesn’t slow down. “Now move, Pluma.”
We go out through the kitchen where they came in. The yard is bikes on their sides, a man on the ground not moving, and Torque at the fence with Mess, still shooting at the front of the building. Torque sees us and yells one word. The shooting stops.
The truck’s across the street with the back open and Rook standing in it with his hands out. Mateo puts me up into it one-handed. Rook doesn’t say he’s sorry. He looks at me. Then he reaches into the cab and comes back with something blue and dirty with its face on wrong, and holds it out.
“Think this belongs to you.”
I take him. There’s road on him. I hold him against my chest with both arms.
“Sharknado,” I say. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s the first thing that’s been funny since the hall.
Rook looks at the shark. “He’s been through it.”
“Yeah. He has.”
Mateo’s bike is on the road with the engine running and the whole club behind it. Torque’s already up. Steel’s got blood on his sleeve that isn’t his and he looks at me once, all the way, and then looks away.
I don’t get in the truck.
I get off it. I walk across the street with Sharknado under my arm. I get on the back of Mateo’s bike, putting my arms around him with the shark between us. He puts his hand over both of mine on his stomach and holds them there.
Then we go, Torque in front and the rest of them around us. The sound of it is the same sound I heard outside a window for days.
Tonight, that sound belongs to me.