Chapter 11 Luis
LUIS
HE WATCHES HER AT WORK as much as he can without getting caught.
A few times she’s tried to speak to him, but someone must have told her that he’s not like everyone else.
She’s awkward when she mimes things to him.
Points at her watch, then at the mop, her cheeks and neck going red.
He dunks the mop into the bucket. She smiles at him, and that’s when he remembers where he has seen her before.
He thinks of the man who used to come into the bakery in the mornings, his easy grin, the way Luis never had to wonder what he wanted: a single roll and a cup of coffee, nearly white with cream.
Luis and the owner of the bakery had gone to the churches—so many of those pictures were of men who came in for breakfast, lunch, coffee—and it was in one of those churches where he’d seen her, the girl with the man’s same eyes.
She leaned against another woman with dark hair, both of them in black, as they followed the coffin out of the church.
It was like seeing the man again, even as her eyes blurred with tears.
Now that he remembers, it hurts to look at her directly, and sometimes he even feels a jolt of anger when he sees her.
He doesn’t know what it is about this city, the way it swallows up anything kind and good.
He still remembers the dust that coated the bakery windows after the accident, thick enough to choke on.
HE THINKS of ways he might tell her, might show her without making her afraid.
He tried to come up with the combinations of words, but none of them could ever be enough to match what he feels.
Every day he went to school and got hurt, teased.
Boys stuffed him into the lockers, and once they locked him in the custodian’s closet and no one found him for hours.
When he was ten, his grandmother saw the bruises when he took a bath, and he never went back again.
He waited for someone to come look for him, his teacher or someone from the offices, to come to their door, insist that he had to go back.
He doesn’t know if his grandmother spoke to the school, or if no one bothered to find out where he had gone. But no one ever came.
That was the year his grandparents needed his help more than ever.
His grandfather’s limp had gotten worse; his foot started dragging along the floor.
His grandmother rubbed cream that made his nose tingle into his grandfather’s knees.
His grandfather kept a bullet in a tin box in his nightstand drawer, would hold it up to Luis, point to his knee.
Luis would hold the bullet as his grandfather unfurled the map.
Europe, with its small pastel shapes, most of them not even as long as his little finger.
Then, they would go through the photographs.
His grandfather in a green uniform, his helmet tucked under his arm.
His grandfather, face smooth and the hair on his head full and dark, doing exercises on the deck of one of the old hotels, a row of men missing limbs, the ocean in the background, large boats hulking darkly near the horizon.
Luis was never sure if the boats were bad or good.
If they meant protection and safety or if they were something else to fear.
His grandmother taught him practical things: how to clean an oven, bake a pie, rewire a lamp, mend his clothes.
He thinks of her when he goes to work now, the way she concentrated on these small tasks, in doing them well, her lips pursed until a pane of glass shone or a tear in a dress was mended.
He tries to think of her when he gets angry—at the people who leave their plastic cups all over the place, who frown at the cleaning women in the halls, as though everything at the casino should clean itself magically in the night.
As though the workers are the ones in the way.
He is glad that she can’t see the city now, how dark it has become, how unclean.
Glass spangled over the sidewalks, used condoms left in the streets.
During his next shift they have him cleaning all day long, changing light bulbs, climbing stepladders to dust the tops of shelves and light fixtures.
By the end of the day his hands ache from dusting and wiping and mopping everything until it shines, until the blonde girl nods at him to go home.
His fingertips are swollen and his back is sore, but he feels that old pride that his grandmother taught him.
He holds his head a little higher when he walks out the door.
He stops at a pizzeria for dinner on his way back to the boardinghouse, points to a slice dotted with circles of pepperoni, holds up two fingers.
As he waits, he picks up one of the matchbooks on the counter, turns it in his hands, slips it into his pocket.
He eyes the stretchy, gooey strings of cheese that hang off the end of each slice as the man behind the counter slides them on a paper plate.
He snows them with shaved cheese and red pepper, his hunger rising up, roaring now.
He’s standing outside, about to take his first bite, when he sees the dark car, the windows tinted black, the purple sticker with the silhouette of the busty woman on the back.
The men. He starts to walk away, thinking he can slide from their view, slip loose.
He feels them behind him but refuses to turn around.
He walks faster, feels footsteps slapping, sees their shadows on the ground, and then a hand claps him on the shoulder.
They circle him. The dark-haired one elbows Gold Tooth in the ribs, motions to Luis’s pizza, rubs his hands together.
He tries to step around them, but Gold Tooth grabs his shirt, pulls him back.
The paper plate wobbles in his grip. They make their eyes big, looking at the pizza, cartoonish and stupid and mocking, then the dark-haired man reaches for a slice, folds it, and takes a bite that makes a third of the slice disappear.
Gold Tooth laughs and does the same, each of them returning the slices to Luis’s plate, nodding at him in pretend thanks.
Just when he thinks he’s free, one of them trips him from behind.
His chin scrapes the sidewalk and there is pizza smashed into the front of his shirt.
He knows he’s done nothing wrong and still, he feels the shame, hot and bright, in his cheeks.
It’s the same as when he was a boy, at school.
When the other kids beat on him, but he was the one left feeling as though he had done something bad.
His shame expands when he feels the tears begin to well behind his eyes.
The men look down at him, and their smiles get bigger.
He wants to kick their shins, land punches to their guts, tear at them, rip those chains from their necks.
Finally, Gold Tooth pats him on the arm—the greatest insult of all—as though they are friends, they’re all in on the joke.
They part to let him through, and though he thinks of the way his grandmother showed him to take deep breaths, to count to ten on his fingers, and sometimes that still works, this time he leaves behind the mess of plate and half-eaten pizza and breaks into a run.
He doesn’t stop until his chest is heaving and he’s reached a barren part of town, where a single house stands in the shadow of the blue glass tower, the one built a few years ago that’s already empty and locked up.
He keeps picturing that gold tooth winking, the cruel gleam in their eyes.
His hunger has now been replaced with a desire for revenge.
A desire to make them sorry, to make them—the men, the cops, the city, everyone—hurt worse than they hurt him.