Chicago Noir

Destiny returns by Achy Obejas

26th & Kedvale

Destiny scratched the back of her neck with her left hand, the glistening pink nail on her index finger digging into the skin until it almost hurt. With the other hand she held a short, slim, and brown Romeo y Julieta to her thick, rubbery lips and breathed in. The tobacco indulged her, sweet and vaguely spicy, and she rocked for a moment, savoring her refuge from the freezing Chicago winds outside her window.

The tiny coffee maker, stout and metallic, hissed, cradled by fire on the stove. Destiny shot up from her kitchen table to extinguish the blue and orange flames before the crude sprayed all over. No one at the bodega where she’d bought it would ever consider it was anything other than Cuban, certainly not provident from the island but from Cuba nonetheless: diasporic, exiled, absolutely imaginary. Using an oven mitt to hold the hourglass-shaped coffee maker, she poured herself an exact thumbful in a wee cup that sported a raised pink and green floral pattern. Destiny lifted the cup to her lips and let the heat rise like a wet, gentle fog around her mouth. She stuck her tongue out, a marsupial peeking from its pouch, then tucked it back in a flash.

“Fuck Cuba,” she said aloud, in shamelessly accented English. She paused to regard the coffee’s approachability. Fuck fucking Cuba — and Mexico too.

Then in one cranelike swoop, she snatched up the demitasse, opened her wide mouth even wider, and tossed the scorching black bracer down her throat.

It had been twenty-five years since Destiny, a/k/a Dagoberto Fors Arias, a/k/a Dago Fors, had landed on American shores. He arrived in South Florida from Cuba on a blistering summer day in 1980 in a small yacht named San Dimas which carried a beneficent Catholic dissident to Key West and was piloted by the meanest-looking priest Dago had ever seen, a bulldog of a guy named Mariano Delgado. It had been a lifetime since that journey and Destiny was in no mood to look back. But the Mariel boat lift had been both historic and controversial and, on its twenty-fifth anniversary, she was one of its stranger success stories.

Now a newspaper reporter, a young Cuban-American dyke with misplaced nostalgia and a predisposition to all things Cuban, had tracked her down and wanted an interview. Destiny had tried to demur but the girl was insistent. She’d seen her on TV, an intense but pretty tomboy, disarming in a way but with the ferocity of those small dogs who clamp on and never let go. Somehow, she’d gotten Destiny to agree to the interview; somehow, she’d gotten Destiny to agree to meet her at the one place in all of Chicago Destiny had vowed never to return, La Caverna Club on 26th and Kedvale, so deep in the heart of the Mexican barrio that it seemed, but for the cruel cover of snow, that it wasn’t in a northern enclave at all but at the very center of some lawless border town.

Destiny sighed and ground out the Romeo y Julieta on an ashtray in the shape of the island, a long pink caiman, hollow inside.

Dago Fors had gotten out of Cuba because in 198 °Cuban authorities let open the island’s borders, causing a gush of refugees to force their way north on anything that would float. Almost immediately, hundreds of exiles had begun racing boats south to pick up their seafaring relatives. When the avalanche of refugees was so great that it embarrassed the socialist government, the Cubans emptied their jails and mental hospitals and forced the exiles to take along former inmates and other undesirables. It was their “lacra social,” their catch-all category. Indeed, the snarling priest who’d brought Dago to safety had been promised the release of the Catholic dissident, who was his brother-in-law, as it turned out, only if he agreed to take a bunch of fairies back with him on his roomy boat.

Dago Fors, café au lait, pouty-lipped, a catlike twenty-four-year-old drag queen, was doing his best to be one of them. When word got out about the goings on, he put on the trashiest orange blouse he could find, the tightest, most worn jeans (with nothing underneath, naturally), and immediately set himself to slapping his flip-flops up and down the Malecón in the hopes of getting arrested. Within twenty-four hours, he found himself with an itchy crust of salt from the sea spray on his skin but at last standing in an official line of so-called “social scum.”

By his own calculations, Dago knew it might be days, if he got out at all, unless the official system was interrupted in some way. A bribe was impossible for him, with a life’s fortune of less than forty pesos in his pocket. So Dago screeched, his back arching each time. And the more he began to loudly comment on this or that part of the guards’ anatomies, the more irritated they became, and the more anxious they were to get rid of him. When Mariano the priest pulled up, the guards figured they could exact a double price: rid the revolution of the insufferable fag and make him pay for his unrelentingly bad behavior by sticking him with somebody big and mean and morally imposing.

To their surprise, Mariano sternly shook his head and touched his clerical collar every time one of the Cubans signaled for him to let Dago on his boat, but the brother-in-law, already on the deck and perhaps delirious from his prison trials, beckoned otherwise with his hand. That’s about when Mariano threw open the throttle, sans scum aboard.

Immediately, the guards started swearing, shouting and waving frantically, the dissident brother-in-law began to scream at the taciturn priest, and in the confusion Dago Fors gritted his teeth and threw himself, or was pushed by one of the guards (it was hard to say), into the froth, his fingers urgently gripping one of the yacht’s dangling ropes. At that, the brother-in-law whooped with joy and began to reel him in, Mariano now gunning the yacht’s engines as it roared its way out of Cuban waters.

It had been a surprisingly quick trip north, Destiny reminisced so many years later. But it wasn’t Mariano, as the Cuban guards had hoped, but the brother-in-law who gave him a lesson in catechism, going out of his way to explain Saint Dimas, for whom the yacht had been named.

“He was the good thief,” he said, “died on a cross just like Jesus, on the same day, with him. Patron saint of criminals. Bet you didn’t know criminals had a patron saint, huh? Well, Saint Dimas repented at the last minute, surrendered, and so Jesus said he’d take him to Paradise. It’s what we Catholics call baptism by desire.”

Sitting in her kitchen now, Destiny remembered the helter skelter arrival in Key West and the resettlement unexpectedly negotiated for him by the gruff Mariano. In a matter of weeks, Dago Fors found himself sponsored through a church in Chicago’s trendy Lake View neighborhood, living in a spare room belonging to an elderly white gay man who practically licked his lips at the sight of him.

Mariano was assigned to a small but thriving parish in a South Side Mexican barrio. As soon as he left, the elderly white man immediately took Dago by the hand around the apartment, explaining exactly how he expected each room to be cleaned and with what products. He lingered lovingly over an antique bureau and demonstrated the gentle rubbing action to be employed with the special cloth and lemon oil. He also seemed to think that Dago’s penis should be grateful enough to stand on command and insert accordingly.

“He thinks he hit the lottery!” Dago complained to Mariano that night, whispering into the kitchen phone now that the elderly man was asleep. “Somebody to clean his toilet and fuck him too. This isn’t my idea of freedom!”

Mariano showed up the next day, accepting a cup of coffee from the elderly man, who nodded enthusiastically as he explained that these were difficult days of transition. The old man was aghast as Mariano delivered his sermon, with Dago prim and still across from the two of them at the kitchen table. The elderly man, his hand shaking, assured them both that his largesse had been lost in translation. On his way out, Mariano gave Dago a stern, annoyed look.

That night the elderly man made himself a scrumptious beef brisket, heaping mounds of creamy mashed potatoes doused in butter beside it. It was not by any stretch a gourmet meal, though it was a particularly hearty one. Dago watched him devour it, his mouth flooding, his own plate empty. When Dago reached for a roll, the elderly man slapped his hand, surprisingly hard, and suggested that if he wanted a roll, if he wanted anything at all, Dago could clean the mess in the kitchen, bloody cutting boards and green stems, peelings and greasy foil scattered all over the counters. Later, in the privacy of the spare room, a determined Dago took a shoelace from a boot he’d found in the hall closet and tied the tightest, most arduous knot he could in its very center. He did this over and over, until it was hard as a pebble.

“Saint Dimas,” he whispered in the dark, remembering the prayer that Mariano’s dissident brother-in-law had taught him on the yacht, “I will not undo this knot from around your balls until you return to me my way, my path, my fate.”

The reporter — her name was Zoe Pino, an understandable reduction, Destiny would find out later, from Zozima Castro Pino — already knew most of his arrival story. She’d drawn its outline in an email that made the jaunt across the waters seem considerably more adventurous, yet abbreviated it into one solid paragraph. Destiny knew that what Zoe wanted now was the story of how Dago Fors had transformed himself from a little nobody Cuban wetback to something of an international drag legend. But she didn’t just want a recitation of facts, of this-happened-then-this-happened. She already knew about all the pageants Destiny had won, she could list all her titles and claims to fame. She had Destiny’s lines memorized from her cameo appearances in The Garden at Midnight, a film based on a murder mystery that ended up getting much greater box office than anyone could have suspected. Destiny had turned that into a flurry of talk show appearances, in English and Spanish, and even set up a website that sold DVDs of her performances, a beauty booklet she’d penned, and assorted Destiny accessories, like T-shirts and lunch boxes.

Zoe had immersed herself so completely in the minutiae of something so incredibly niched that she’d said, as casually as if she were asking a waiter for a tall drink of water, “Destiny, I think you’re even bigger than David de Alba,” who was really the greatest of them all and who, like Destiny, was a Cuban who had gotten his professional start in Chicago. Of course, David had never been to La Caverna; David, who could pass as Judy Garland’s reflection, would have never in his life set foot in La Caverna.

Dago Fors had always been very, very good at one thing: being a drag queen. He wasn’t a cross-dresser, he wasn’t a female impersonator; he wasn’t confused. He was a marvelously talented performer, an impressive six feet tall, with style and imagination and just enough restraint to give off an air of enduring elegance. No bookkeeping or waiting tables for him, this was all he knew how to do, all that he’d ever done.

In Havana he’d gotten to practice his skills due to uncommon good luck. Sure, there were tons of underground drag shows, something pieced together at somebody’s apartment until an intolerant neighbor turned them in. But his real showcase had been a lunchtime show, performed completely under the auspices of the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. It was conveniently chaired by a friend’s aunt, whose husband was a high-ranking military officer blackmailed to okay the whole thing. It turned out that Dago’s friend’s aunt had found out her husband was having an affair with the wife of an even higher-ranking officer and was now using the info to get him to do pretty much whatever she wanted, including lending his official imprimatur to the lunchtime drag extravaganza. As a result, for two years Dago had been free to be himself — or whomever he wanted to be — for ninety minutes every Monday to Friday.

The show took place at a worker’s cafeteria across the street from the Presidential Palace, right in the middle of the city, accessible to anyone who had the time and inclination to come. There was no stage per se, just a space opened up by pushing the long lunchroom tables together. This discouraged complicated choreography but really put the premium on presence. Moreover, without stage lights, and with the light of day pouring in unfiltered, the queens really had to be extraordinary to make magic in so naked a place. For Dago, it was a grueling but exuberant apprenticeship. Nothing would ever be as hard again. Nothing would ever require so much of his psyche and heart.

In Havana back then, all the girls loved to do Celia Cruz, the exiled queen of salsa. It was not that Celia was particularly beautiful, because she wasn’t at all, but her music was saucy and her costumes, even then, interplanetary. Lots of queens also liked Garland, of course, and Barbra Streisand and Marilyn Monroe. But the girls of color tended to go for Celeste Mendoza, who wore towering African wraps on her head and rivaled Celia for sheer rhythmic audacity, or Juana Bacallao, who had a nice ghetto thing going and was a lot of fun.

For Dago there really was only one choice: Moraima Secada, also known as La Mora. A gorgeous mulatta, a little richer in color than Dago, she’d begun as a member of a famous quartet but went off on her own to record a style known in Cuba as filin, a kind of over-the-top ballad in which both lyric and melody worked from simple melancholia to unfettered tragedy in about three and a half minutes.

Her style was sui generis: She sang with a stern face, as if she were incandescent with rage. She would tilt her head up, press her lips together, and raise her arm, fist clenched. But as she brought up her trembling limb, her fingers would slowly open, almost against her will, as if all fortune could take flight. La Mora was so intense that after her husband was killed in the terrorist bombing of a Cuban airline on its way back from Panama, she still kept her nightclub engagement that night in Havana, the only crack in her otherwise militant façade a suppressed sob, like a hiccup.

Of course, in Chicago no one knew anything about La Mora. When Dago finally found himself covered by the honeyed lights of a real stage, there wasn’t a soul in the audience who had a clue about his inspiration. In the long run, it was just as good that way — Dago was able to inhabit her, to fold and tuck and invent without worry. After a while, he came to believe he’d conjured her whole, except for the aching sadness left by the turbulence of love suddenly and unexpectedly lost. That was real, real for both of them, real and terrifying too.

The phone rang. Destiny didn’t need to glance at the caller ID to know it was Zoe Pino. There was just enough of a yap to give her away.

“Destiny, babes,” the girl said into the answering machine, “I’m just calling to confirm our date tonight. You say the first show doesn’t start until 1 a.m., right? I was thinking then we could meet a little earlier, for a late dinner or drinks or whatever, you know, and just talk. I really wanna get as much of the background on this as possible. Call or text me, okay? See you later, corazon.”

Destiny knew what Zoe wanted from her: a story about the good queen, the queen that against all odds found the liberty and success that was the inspiration for so many Marielitos. But in her few informal talks with Zoe, Destiny had already experienced a certain discomfort: Was Zoe trying to get her to say her dreams had all come true? They hadn’t, but would admitting that be some sort of betrayal? Or would going along with the story of awe be what was treasonous? If she had been able to accomplish what she had, was she inadvertently passing judgment on those who’d had a hard time?

In fact, what Destiny feared was that Zoe might have a secret angle: that Dago Fors had come to town, learned the ropes at La Caverna, then forsaken his Latino brethren forever to become a huge hit uptown and around the world. After he’d crossed north of Fullerton Avenue, not once had Destiny ever set foot in a Mexican club, or anywhere near anything even vaguely Mexican, for that matter.

Initially, Dago had actually gone in search of La Caverna, although he didn’t know that then. The day after Mariano’s visit to the elderly gay man’s, Dago got up, borrowed a coat from the hall closet, and walked out. But as soon as he opened the door, he was stung by the bite of Chicago’s autumn and he hugged the coat closer to him as he headed east on Barry Street to Broadway. He had no idea then he had aimed for the very heart of Chicago’s gay male world.

He’d vaguely imagined he could sleep in a park if he had to but that had been before he’d tested the temperatures, which were to him the equivalent of a Havana winter. The sky was gray; the streets were shiny from a predawn shower.

He turned south on Broadway, unaware of direction, and peeked in the large window of a diner right on the corner. It was well lit and clean and no sooner had he slid into a booth, a slender Mexican man with cobalt hair and a caterpillar mustache was deftly and deferentially wiping clean his table. Dago surveyed the room. It took him all of a second to realize the busboys were Latinos, square-shouldered youth who walked with a slight side-to-side sway, their heads tilted forward whether they were carrying trays or wet towels or simply disappearing between the two rubber-mat doors that slapped into the kitchen.

Dago waited patiently, then focused on the boy who’d cleaned his table. He was a little shorter than the others, a little boxier and compact, with more of a macho strut perhaps, although — Dago knew instantly — gay as a goose. Dago also knew that it was only a matter of throwing him a slightly bewildered smile, a vaguely helpless sigh, and the boy would find a reason to come back.

Quique Lopez proved a better connection than Dago could have ever guessed. He was, as Dago had hoped, Guatemalan, but with fake papers that said he was Mexican, fluent in Spanish but also perfectly capable of communicating in English. And he’d been in Chicago long enough so that, once Dago explained his plight, Quique knew immediately what to do.

“La Caverna, that’s where you need to go,” he said, “but all I can do is take you. The people I know there, I don’t even know their real names, you understand? There are American places, a couple around here, some downtown. One on the South Side, I think, but that’s a black thing. Maybe you could pass but... without English, I just don’t know.”

After his shift, Quique took Dago to the red line on Belmont, paid for his fare, and, various line changes and nearly an hour later, led him off a bus from 26th and Ashland to a nondescript building a few blocks away. There, in a studio apartment with six mattresses, they napped platonically, ate a modest meal of carnitas and rice, and watched TV until about 10 o’clock, when Quique again led him to the bus stop, this ride straight west, until they were deposited just steps from La Caverna, a club so notorious it didn’t boast any kind of sign. Instead, it had a huge metal door with black lettering stenciled across it, unintelligible to Dago at the time, but warning customers not just about IDs but also about its ban on handguns.

There wasn’t much of a crowd inside at that hour. A gaggle of queens who doubled as waitresses stared as Dago and Quique strolled in, waved through by the cross-eyed bouncer. Dago was amazed: There was a man dressed in black, replete with black boots, black bolo, and black cowboy hat at the bar. A stern looking middle-aged Mexican man served drinks. Quique led Dago to a corner table where a tiny elderly woman with reading glasses was going through a ledger. A glass of lemonade accompanied her.

The woman — Virginia was her name — didn’t say much during the conversation. Dago was never sure if she ever believed that he was, in fact, one of Cuba’s most popular drag attractions, as he described himself. He talked nonstop for ten minutes. Then a man walked in, utterly dashing, maybe thirty years old, about 5‘9”, cinnamon-colored and princely, bearing a boyish grin. He wore denim pants with a huge buckle in the shape of what looked like Cuba if somebody had tried to take the hump out of it. Later, Dago would learn it was Sinaloa, a Mexican province notorious for its drug runners. The man whispered in Virginia’s ear. He looked at Dago only once, and only long enough to wink in his direction before disappearing again.

Dago had drinks on the house that night and watched the show, a parade of queens trying their best on Third World budgets to create First World fantasies. The next day at noon sharp, he was given a tour by Virginia of the storage closet that served as the queens’ dressing room (they shared the bathroom with the customers, male and female), and offered a look at the DJ’s collection to pick out his debut song. There was no La Mora. There was no Celeste Mendoza or Juana Bacallao, though plenty of Lola Beltran and Veronica Castro. Dago sent the resourceful Quique off with twenty dollars and a list of possibilities. He came back with Olga Guillot’s greatest hits in pristine condition.

That night, Dago was introduced to the overflow Saturday night crowd as La Mora, covered in a simple blue chiffon dress with black pumps, his naps under a towering black hive of a wig, his jewelry accidentally tasteful by virtue of its simplicity. After hours of rancheras and accordion-laced banda music, La Mora came out defiantly, her supple lips shaping the words to Guillot’s “La Mentira,” a slow-burning torch song that entrusts the lying lover to God’s judgement.

Dago faltered only once, and it was only for a split second: To her astonishment, there was Father Mariano, sitting expressionless next to the man with the Sinaloa buckle from the night before. By now Dago knew the man was Beto Chavez, Virginia’s straight, married, drug-dealing son, a rascal who flirted with every queen at La Caverna but had never been caught with his pants down except with natural born women. Quique didn’t know anyone but he certainly knew everything. Beto Chavez winked again and lifted a can of Tecate in Dago’s direction.

When a shaken La Mora finished, her eyes downcast, chest heaving, there was a silent pause, then Dago heard the applause like a rolling wave gathering force as it neared the shore, finally crashing in shouts of “bravo!” and “viva la mulata!” and general whistling. As she exited the floor, La Mora turned for an instant. Beto Chavez was clapping, but slowly, looking after her with a distant melancholia.

“Did you love Beto Chavez?” Zoe Pino asked, her leonine hair straying into her line of vision as she positioned her pen on a blank page of her reporter’s notebook. She shook her hair back with a shrug. They were two hours into dinner, well into a second bottle of wine, and had long put all of Zoe’s questions about Cuba-this and Cuba-that to rest.

“Did I... did I love Beto Chavez?” Destiny repeated, aghast. “What gives you the idea I... I mean, what are you getting at?”

“C’mon, Destiny... I know.”

“You know what?”

“About you and Beto.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Destiny began to gather her lighter and the pack of Romeo y Julietas she’d dropped on the table.

“Look, I’ll close my notebook.” Zoe flipped it shut. “Off the record, I swear. I’ll never use it. I certainly have no need to for these Mariel profiles. But please, I’ve heard so many rumors about you and Beto...”

“And you listen to rumors?”

“I’m a reporter, yeah...”

“They’re just rumors, that’s all.”

There was silence. Zoe reached across the table to Destiny’s hand. “It’s a great love story. One of the greatest, if it’s true.”

Destiny shook her head and turned away. There was no need for Zoe Pino to see her tears.

It was Beto Chavez who’d created the opportunity for her at La Caverna, immediately realizing the young queen talking to his mother had to be the same one he’d heard about earlier from Mariano. It was also Beto Chavez who named her Destiny. “It was fate,” he said to her after her first show. “Destiny, pure destiny.”

After the performance, Mariano and Dago stared, dumbfounded by the other’s appearance in this most unlikely of places. Mariano would learn Dago’s trajectory to La Caverna that very night but it would take Dago a bit longer, more than a year, to understand that Mariano was actually a defrocked priest, a pre — Vatican II follower, who offered Latin masses in a former Lutheran church, now converted and supported by Beto Chavez and an entire community of narco-traffickers.

It had been Beto’s boat, the San Dimas, that the priest had taken to Mariel to snatch up his brother-in-law, a boat normally used to ferry between Florida and the bleached islets of corrupt coral that served as hideouts for smugglers. Beto Chavez was a Dimas devotee, and he showed Dago the cross on the chain that hung around his neck.

“Not Christ, no. Look: no crown of thorns, no nails, just rope,” he explained, as Dago examined the little crucified man and breathed in Beto’s cologne. “Dimas, Dimas the good thief.”

Beto Chavez was beautiful: his eyes wet with sadness but his smile a beacon. Dago fingered the knot in the shoelace he’d tied before, the tight little vise he’d placed on the saint’s venerable testicles, now securely tucked into his handbag.

“Destiny...” Beto said, this time in a whisper, his lips grazing Dago’s ear.

It was not lightning between Destiny and Beto Chavez. That Beto flirted surprised no one. That he was chivalrous was the norm. At least that’s what Quique Lopez kept telling Destiny so she wouldn’t have any illusions.

But what few people realized at first — including his mother Virginia — was that, within weeks of her debut, Beto Chavez had set up Destiny with her own apartment above a barbershop in Pilsen, far enough from La Caverna that he could pretend no one knew of his visits, but only ten minutes southeast of his family’s home on Kedvale, around the corner from the club in La Villita that served to launder so much of his profits.

It is unlikely that anyone would have believed that Beto Chavez was not fucking Destiny by then. It was clear he was utterly bewitched by her, by the way she walked, by the smell and feel of her hair, by the silky arousal her hands on him provoked. But when Beto had explained that he had no intention of touching or being touched by Destiny’s manhood, he got quite the surprise.

“I’m no fag,” he said, grinning.

“All of me or none of me,” Destiny said in refusal, flatly turning down the handsome, powerful drug lord, the one whom the sorority back at La Caverna yearned for precisely because he’d never, ever been known to betray the slightest interest in a queen.

Beto tried once, and only once, to force himself on Destiny. But he was stunned to discover how strong and limber she was, how easily the much taller and felid Destiny flipped him over, tying his hands with his Sinaloa belt, her knee jabbing Saint Dimas into his neck. She swore that if he tried it again, she wouldn’t hesitate to kill him, no matter what happened to her afterwards.

“I have nothing,” she whispered fiercely, “so I have nothing to lose.”

“How’d you get so... so strong?” Beto asked, coughing, not afraid but even more in awe.

“Cutting cane, forced ‘volunteer’ work in my country,” Destiny said, massaging Beto’s neck and shoulders as he leaned back on her, both of them still on the floor. “You’d be amazed by what I can do with a machete. Or a knife.”

Six months later, six months of Beto pleading and threatening to cut her off or have her fired, six months of Destiny shouting back that she’d tell the whole neighborhood how she’d thrown him on the floor, six months of Beto getting used to recognizing the pulse of Destiny’s desire against his leg or belly, of kissing and feeling her everywhere but there, Beto Chavez showed up one rainy April dawn at the apartment and let himself in with his key. He lifted the blanket from Destiny’s sleeping body, lowered himself to his knees and put his hungry mouth to her triumph.

Zoe Pino stroked Destiny’s hand gently. “I know some things,” she said. “I know you were, in some ways, almost married for a few years...”

Destiny winced. “I wouldn’t ever say that. He was married, you know, really married, to a woman.”

Destiny had seen her only once and had been surprised. Beto’s wife was not a roly-poly demure woman, older than her years by virtue of the stress that Beto engendered with his lifestyle. Staring at her across Mariano’s church, Destiny found she was nothing like she’d expected: at least as tall as Beto, a pale skinned Mexican woman with reddish hair, strong and dignified. If Virginia hadn’t been right by her side, Destiny might have doubted it was her.

“A sort of second wife then...” Zoe said.

“You mean a mistress,” Destiny clarified.

“Was that it then? You were his mistress? You know, they say mistresses are often the big love of men’s lives...”

“Don’t patronize me, Zoe, please.”

Had she been Beto Chavez’s true love?

That apartment above the barbershop on 18th Street had been a cozy little nest for many years. After work, when Destiny got home as the skies cleared for morning, Beto would come over for breakfast and the sweet exhaustion of their play. They’d spoon together for what seemed hours but which Destiny knew must have been only a little while, until she was asleep. Then he’d tiptoe out, back to his world of mystery and violence.

It was not unusual for him to come home hurt, to have sprained an ankle running, to have his face torn apart in a fight, to take a bullet in the flesh of his arm. He’d always come to her first, he’d always come to be cured by her hands and to sleep off the doubt and fatigue in her bed.

He brought her the usual romantic offerings of chocolate and flowers but also books and records, including an import of Moraima Secada singing filin, which could always make her cry. Instead of cocaine, he brought her what seemed an interminable supply of hormones; these made her smoother and curvier, her muscles softer though she was no less formidable.

Sometimes, on her days off, he’d show up in the early evening and they’d watch a movie and make dinner together. Destiny realized she’d never seen him anywhere outside of the club or her apartment, a place she kept warm, ready, but barred to all other visitors out of respect for Beto. Except for that last time...

At some point, of course, Virginia knew, the other queens knew, everyone knew. But it was so startling that even as time passed and all the little clues accumulated to create a rather convincing circumstantial case, doubt nagged even the most vociferous gossips; insecurity, and perhaps fear too, because Beto Chavez wasn’t anyone to trifle with, dogged even the most convinced.

Could it be real?

If things hadn’t changed so dramatically, if everything hadn’t ended so abruptly, if her world hadn’t collapsed so utterly, Destiny wondered how long they could have gone on like that... Back then she would have said forever, she would have wanted forever, would have believed in it.

But now, even as she sometimes touched the loosened shoelace on her own homemade altar to Saint Dimas, she knew that everything Zoe Pino would write about her — the pageants, the titles, the movie, her sanctified role in the most prestigious drag show in all of Chicago, the ridiculously profitable website (Quique, now her manager, had come up with it), the sensation she caused on returning to Havana for a millennium appearance captured by CNN (for 2001, not 2000, because the Cubans did not agree with the rest of the world on the new century’s commencement) — none of it would have happened if she and Beto had continued their journey together.

Catastrophe happened on an early and placid Tuesday evening in late summer. Destiny’s windows were open and she heard Beto’s voice downstairs greeting the barber, who’d stepped outside to take in the wild palette of sunset descending west on 18th Street. She leaned out eagerly, imagining herself like Juliet for a moment, ready to hear promises from her Romeo, when she suddenly caught sight of a pickup truck inching its way down the street, a couple of black-garbed men, not cowboys but more like ninjas, leaning over the cab, the stout barrels of their automatics slowly taking aim.

Destiny’s mouth opened. In her head, she screamed, as loud and precise as a missile. But the only sound heard for blocks and blocks was the explosive rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire as Beto Chavez danced like a marionette on the cracked Pilsen sidewalk, his arms reaching out to the barber who fell beneath him. Within seconds, the pickup truck was an eastbound blur, a cloud of smoke and black powder slowly settling in its wake.

Destiny raced downstairs, her throat still incapable of noise. She pulled Beto off the barber, onto his bloodied back, only to find the bullets had made tripe of his chest and belly. Her hands went to keep him together, to keep him whole. The barber’s wife was now on the ground beside him, the light disappearing as people gathered, leaning in. Someone tried to pull Destiny off Beto but she cuffed him so hard he fell back and no one else dared get near her.

“Go...” Beto whispered. “Get out of here...”

She tried to protest but the words were still struggling to exit, impossible to form. She noticed his chain with the Saint Dimas cross on the ground and picked it up, letting the light glint off of it so he could see she’d saved it.

He licked his lips. “See you in paradise... okay?”

Zoe Pino cocked an eyebrow in Destiny’s direction. “C’mon, he didn’t really say that.”

“I swear.”

Destiny lit another Romeo y Julieta. She’d lost count. The bitch had gotten her to tell the whole damn story and now she didn’t believe her?

“‘I’ll see you in paradise’? I mean, that’s...”

“I know, I know,” Destiny interrupted. “How do you think it made me feel? And how do you think it makes me feel now to know I can never tell that story because nobody will ever fucking believe me?”

“No, no, I believe you,” Zoe insisted. “It’s just, well, unbelievable. I mean, it’s... Look... you know what I’m trying to say.”

Destiny nodded.

“So that’s when you left Pilsen?”

“I had to.”

“What do you mean you had to?”

“I had to! Before the ambulance had even arrived, another car drove up, this one full of Mexican cowboys with their pistols drawn. One guy, a little skinny guy, his eyes all mean, he looked right at me and pointed his gun at Beto and just shot him point blank. I felt like Jackie Kennedy, gathering bits of his brains into my lap. I was screaming — finally! — and crying, and he made this motion with the pistol for me to go, and I did. I just ran and ran, scattering pieces of Beto all the way to Quique’s apartment and stayed holed up there, terrified and traumatized, until the day of Beto’s funeral.”

When she and Quique finally made it back to her apartment, they found the place had been tossed. All of her records and books were on the floor, clothes torn from the bar in the closet, the mattress gutted. The refrigerator leaked a foul smell from a puddle underneath.

Destiny just sobbed and sobbed.

“My god... what did they want? Do you know what they wanted? Did Beto keep anything here?” Quique asked, his voice shaky.

She shook her head.

“Are you sure?”

Beto hadn’t even kept a change of socks there. Destiny realized all she had of him now and forever was the Saint Dimas cross from around his neck.

Later, at Mariano’s church before the family arrived for funeral services, the priest, his stone face wet, opened the casket so she could have a last look. Destiny, wearing a men’s suit for the first time in her life, looked down at her lover. Beto was in pieces, like Saint Dimas himself, with a forearm in Jerusalem and a tibula in Istanbul.

A noise from the front of the church revealed Beto’s family, a mournful Virginia leading the widow and a gaggle of children. Sternfaced men, no doubt armed, flanked them on both sides. Mariano immediately snapped shut the casket and Destiny stepped back, disappearing into the shadows.

The only other thing she remembered from that day was Mariano’s prayer: Saint Dimas, from great sinner and criminal, a moment of mercy turned you into a great Saint. Remember me, poor sinner like you, and maybe greater sinner than you...

Zoe parked her boxy Nissan in front of a Western-wear store on 26th Street with a garish yellow awning and snakeskin belts draping one of the windows. Across the street was La Caverna, as anonymous as ever.

“You ready?” she asked.

Destiny nodded and pulled the car door open. She could smell the carnitas from the corner.

“You’ve really never come back?”

“Never,” Destiny said.

“See, I just don’t get that, because you weren’t in danger. Unless, of course, somebody thought you knew something...?”

Destiny sprinted ahead, sick of Zoe’s baiting. Upon seeing Destiny, the same cross-eyed bouncer from years before grinned and called her by her old name: “La Mora! Doña Mora!” There was a flurry of activity then, with men stepping up to bow and kiss her hand and queens popping out of nowhere, screeching and jumping up and down. Zoe struggled to keep Destiny in sight, though she was easily the tallest person there, her head high and steady.

Inside La Caverna, Destiny saw the same Mexican man, now white-haired, serving drinks. But the place was different: cleaner, painted. There were color posters of all the new queens framed on the wall. She was stunned to see her own face staring back at her from above the bar, in the center of a sort of Wall of Fame of famous queens who’d started at La Caverna.

Destiny clutched her heart, unexpectedly moved. Then she saw that Virginia was still there too, sitting on a stool behind the bar, taking money. The woman, now an old crone, flinched when she saw Destiny. The crowd parted like the Red Sea.

A few feet behind, Zoe battled to keep up. “Con permiso, con permiso,” she repeated as the waters closed in on her. Then the crowd crushed around Destiny when she and Virginia hugged across the bar, the old woman shaking from so much emotion.

“Listen, I’m with Destiny, really!” Zoe yelled, reaching so that she caught Destiny’s arm with her fingers for a second. But no one could hear her. The shouting and whistling was thunderous. The DJ immediately injected a battery of percussion into the club, the clattering beginning of a salsa roundup they’d later learn he’d titled “Destiny’s Cuban Fiesta Mix.”

“Destiny! Destiny!”

Zoe was just about to give up hope of ever reaching her when suddenly a gunshot rang out. Then another and another. She leaped through the mob and yanked Destiny by the arm, pulling and pushing through the masses of sweaty human flesh until they were back outside, breathing the carnitas-infused air of 26th Street.

“You’ve gotta tell me the truth!” Zoe demanded, leaning up on her toes to get in Destiny’s face.

“The truth? What the fuck are you talking about?” Destiny asked as she jerked her arm away and straightened her dress. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“What the...? Just tell me, okay? What it is? What do you still have of Beto’s that made you run, huh? What is it — an address book? The last two digits of a Swiss bank account? The combination of a secret safe? C’mon! What do you have that would make somebody want to kill for it twenty-five years later?”

Destiny grabbed her by the shoulders. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Am I...? What? You didn’t hear those shots in there?” Zoe asked, indignantly shaking herself loose.

“Oh, for god’s sake, Zoe — it’s 4 o’clock in the morning and everybody in there has had three bottles of who-knows-what and they’re out of control. It’s a crazy, violent bar — that’s all!”

“That’s all? But you’ve never been back — that has to be for a reason!”

“Is this what you’ve really been getting at? Is that what all your interest has been about? This ridiculous telenovela scenario where I have some terrible secret that someone wants to avenge? Oh, Zoe, you’re so much more Cuban than I ever gave you credit for!”

Destiny started to laugh.

“But...”

A crowd was forming again.

“There’s got to be a reason...”

“There is,” she said, and she strolled back into La Caverna.

Hours later, Destiny found herself back home, inhaling another Romeo y Julieta, and sucking on a cup of Cuban coffee with Quique, who’d gone to La Villita to pick her up. The sun was starting to gain power outside her window.

“It was never about what you took from that place...” he said.

“But what I left behind,” said Destiny.

Destiny ground the thin cigar out on her pink caiman ashtray. She sighed.

“Got it back, though,” she said, and patted the place on her chest where her heart beat.