Hell's Kitchen

TWENTY-FOUR

“You missin’ a tooth, man. Don’t you know how to fight?”

“It was three to one,” Pellam told Hector Ramirez.

“So?”

Noon, the next day, Ramirez was sitting on the doorstep of the Cubano Lords’ kickback, smoking.

“It’s hot,” Pellam said. “You got any beer?”

“Man, do I got beer. What kind you want?”

“Any kind. Long as it’s cold.”

Ramirez rose, motioned him toward the front door of their apartment. He nodded at his bruised face. “Who did it?”

“Some of Corcoran’s boys. They heard about us the other night? With McCray? And drew straws to see who it’d be more fun to beat the crap out of, you or me. I won.”

“Hey, I ice somebody for you, you want. Or do some kneecaps? I do that for you, man. I got no problem doing that.”

“That’s okay,” Pellam said.

“It no problem.”

“Maybe next time.”

Ramirez shrugged as if Pellam were crazy. He pushed through the doorway. Pellam noticed a young Latino man standing in the shadows of the alcove, a gun in his belt.

He spoke in Spanish to Ramirez, who barked a phrase back. He looked at Pellam’s face and laughed. Pellam wanted to believe it was in admiration.

Ramirez knocked on the door to a ground floor apartment and, when there was no answer, unlocked and pushed it open. He let Pellam precede him.

The apartment was large and comfortable, filled with new furniture. A couch was still in its plastic wrapping. In the kitchen were stacks of cases of food and bags of rice. One bedroom was filled with five sheet-covered mattresses. The other bedroom was packed with cartons of liquor and cigarettes. Pellam didn’t bother to ask where the merchandise had come from.

“So, you want a Dos, Tecate?”

“Dos.”

Ramirez took two beers from the fridge. Rested them against the counter, cracked the tops off with a single blow from his palm. Passed one to Pellam, who drank down nearly half.

The room was sweltering. There were two air conditioners in the front and back windows but they weren’t running. Through the shaded windows blew hot, dusty air and the heat was like a liquid.

Ramirez found a shoe box sitting on a table in the kitchen. He took out a pair of athletic shoes and began lacing them up. They were similar to the pair he’d given to Ismail the other day. “Hey, man. Take one.”

“What’s the penalty for receiving stolen?” Pellam asked.

“Fuck, I found ’em.” He bounced, looking down with approval.

“I’m not the running-shoe type.”

“No, you the cowboy-boot type. Man, why you wear those fucking boots? They no hurt you feet? So, what you doing here, Pellam? Why you come visit me?”

“I’m leaving town,” Pellam said. “Came to get my gun.”

“I hear, that moyeta, she say she do it. Man, she your friend. That gotta be tough for you. But nobody oughta burn the old places here. That no good.”

Ramirez was getting the shoelaces even, the tautness just right. He stood slowly, savoring the feel of the shoes. He bounced on his toes again then came down on his heels. He feinted right then left then leapt into a layup, his fingers knocking flakes of white paint off the ceiling.

Pellam noticed a hand-lettered sign on the wall next to a poster advertising a Corvette, on which a bikini-clad model reclined.

Your standing in the Crib of the Cubano Lords.

Either you be a Friend or you be fucked.

Ramirez followed his eyes. He said, “Yeah, yeah. You gonna say we spelled ‘you’re’ wrong.”

“No, I’m gonna say that’s a hell of a poster.”

“You play basketball?” Ramirez asked.

“A little.”

Pellam’s last games had been one-on-one against a man in a wheelchair and Pellam lost six, won two. It was a shame he wasn’t going to have a chance to play with Ismail; he probably could’ve beaten the boy.

“I go down to the Village today, play half-court. Some big moyetos down there. Man, those niggers, they can play… You come with me.”

“Thanks but I’m out of here,” Pellam said.

“For good, you mean?”

Nodding. “Picking up my truck and heading back to the Coast. Need some work. Got some people I owe money to gonna be knocking on my door in about sixty days.”

“You want me to talk to ’em? I can-”

Pellam wagged a finger. “Uh-uh.”

Ramirez shrugged, lifted the corner of the linoleum in the kitchen and pulled up a floorboard. He lifted out Pellam’s Colt and tossed it to him. “Man, you crazy, carry that old thing. I’ll get you a nice Taurus. That a sweet piece. You like that. Bam, bam, bam. A man need a fifteen-shot clip nowadays.”

“I don’t have as much of a call for one as you do.”

As he replaced the flooring Ramirez said, “I no watch TV much but I turn on you movie, Pellam, when it come on. When that gonna be?”

“I’ll let you know,” Pellam muttered.

The door pushed open and a young Latino man stepped inside, gazing suspiciously at Pellam. He walked over to Ramirez and whispered in his ear. The man nodded and his young associate left.

Pellam started toward the door. Ramirez said, “Hey, maybe you don’t wanna go so fast. He got some news for you.”

“Who is he?”

“My brother.” He nodded after the young man who’d just left.

“News?”

“Yeah. You wanna know who broke into you apartment?”

“I know who broke in. The pyro. The kid who got burnt up. I figured I must’ve got him on tape when I was shooting the building the day after the fire.”

Ramirez bounced again on his pristine shoes and shook his head. “You wrong man. You dead wrong.”

“Yo, cuz.”

“Hey, Ismail.”

Pellam stood in front of the Youth Outreach Center. The air was hot, dusty, filled with a glaring shaft of sunlight reflected off a nearby building.

“Wassup, homes?”

“Not much,” Pellam answered. “Wassup with you?”

“Hangin’, you know how it is. Whatchu got there?”

“A present.”

“All right, cuz.” The boy stared at the large shopping bag with huge eyes. Pellam handed it to him. The boy opened it up and pulled out the basketball. “Yo, you all right, Pellam! This be fine! Yo, homes, lookit!”

Two other young boys, a little older, came over and admired the ball. They passed it back and forth.

“How is it here?” Pellam nodded at the YOC storefront.

“Ain’t so bad. They don’t dis you so much. But what it is they make you sit an’ listen to these hatters, like priests and counselors, don’t know shit. They tell you stuff. Talking at you, wearing yo’ ear off, axing you things they don’t know ’bout.” He offered an adult shrug. “But, fuck, that life, ain’t it?”

Pellam couldn’t argue with that.

“An’, man, that Carol bitch,” he whispered, looking around. “Don’t go messing with her. She ax me why I be comin’ in at three this morning. Give me all kindsa shit. I tell that bitch what she can do.”

“Did you now?”

“Hell’s yeah… Well, I tried. But there ain’t no talking to that woman, cuz.”

“Why were you out at three a.m.?”

“I was-”

“Just hangin’.”

“That straight, Pellam.” He said to his homies, “Let’s get a game up.” They disappeared toward an alley, happy as ten-year-old boys the world over.

Pellam pushed through the squeaking door.

Carol looked up at him from the desk. Her wan smile faded as soon as she saw his expression.

“Hi,” she said.

“Howdy.”

“Sorry I’ve been so hard to get a hold of,” she said. “We’ve been busy as hell here.” The words were leaden.

Silence. Motes of dust floated between them. Amoeba, caught in the brutal light.

“All right,” she said at last. “I didn’t call because I got scared. It’s been a long time since I got involved with somebody. And my history with men hasn’t been so great.”

Pellam crossed his arms. He looked down at what Carol was working on, a stack of papers. Government forms. They seemed overwhelmingly dense and complicated.

Carol sat back in her chair. “This isn’t about that, is it?”

“No.”

“So?”

“I just heard a few things I was curious about.”

“Such as?”

“The day of the fire you were asking about me.”

The Word. On the street.

“Hey, cute guy, wearing cowboy boots. Sure, I was asking.” She laughed but she couldn’t bring the levity off. Her hands rose to her pearl necklace then continued up to her glasses and compulsively kneaded the taped joint on the frame.

Pellam said, “You found out where I lived. And you broke into my apartment the morning I stayed over. While I was asleep in your bed.”

Carol was nodding. Not to agree or protest or to convey any message at all. It was a reflex. She looked around. Set her pen down. Her face was a grim mask as she considered something. “Can we go upstairs? It’s more private.”

They walked to the elevator. Inside, Carol leaned against the car wall, looking somber. She glanced down and brushed absently at some dust that marred the stalwart Latin word for truth on her sweatshirt.

Carol avoided Pellam’s eyes as she made meaningless conversation. She told him in a breezy voice that an elevator company was going to donate a new car to the YOC. It would have a big “compliments of ” plaque inside. As if the kids would run out and buy elevators of their own. “Crazy what people’ll do for publicity.” He gave no response and she fell silent.

The doors opened and Carol led them down a deserted corridor oppressive with dirty tiles and murky in the weak fluorescent light. “Here.” Carol pushed the door open and Pellam stepped in – before he realized that it wasn’t a lunch room or office, as he’d expected, but a dim storeroom.

Carol closed the door. She had purpose in her movements and her eyes had grown chill. In the back of the room she moved aside boxes. Bent down and rummaged for something.

“I’m so sorry, Pellam.”

She paused. Took a deep breath. He couldn’t see what she held in her hand.

His thoughts strayed to the Colt in his back waistband. Ridiculous to think that she’d hurt him. But this was the Kitchen.

You’re walking past a little garden at noon in front of a tenement, thinking, Hey, those’re pretty flowers, and the next thing you know you’re on the ground and there’s a bullet in your leg or an ice pick in your back.

And her eyes… her cold, pale eyes.

“Oh, what a fucking mess.” Carol’s mouth tightened. Then suddenly she turned, her hand rising, holding something dark. Pellam reached back for his gun. But in her pudgy fingers were only the two videocassettes she’d stolen from his apartment.

“For the past week, I’ve actually thought about running away. Going someplace else and starting a new life. Not saying a word, just vanishing.”

“Tell me.”

“That man who mentioned me. About saving his son?”

Pellam nodded. He remembered about the young man nearly dying inside a building about to be torn down, how she’d rescued him.

She said, “I was afraid you might have me on tape. I can’t afford any publicity.”

He remembered her distrust of reporters.

“Why?”

“I’m not who you think I am.”

A recurring motif in Hell’s Kitchen.

“And who are you?” Pellam snapped.

Carol hung her arm around the riser of a shelf and lowered her head onto her biceps. “A few years ago I was released from prison after serving time for dealing. In Massachusetts. I was also convicted…” Her voice faltered. “… convicted of endangering the welfare of a minor. I sold to some fifteen-year-olds. One of them overdosed and nearly died. What can I tell you, Pellam? What happened to me was so boring, so TV-movie… I dropped out of school, I met the wrong men. Street dealing, basing, smack, fucking for dollars… Oh, brother, I did it all.”

“What’s this got to do with the tapes?” he asked in a cold voice.

She compulsively ordered a stack of thin towels. “I knew you were making that movie about the Kitchen. And when I heard that man had mentioned me I thought you’d include me in the story. I thought somebody in Boston might hear about it and word would get back to the Outreach Center board. I couldn’t risk any publicity. Look, Pellam, I’ve ruined my life… I’m so messed up from abortions I can’t have kids… I’m a felon.”

Carol laughed bitterly. “You know what I heard the other day? This bank robber was released from Attica and was having trouble getting work. He was furious that somebody referred to him as an ex-con. He said he was ‘societally challenged.’ ”

Pellam wasn’t smiling.

“Well, that’s me. ‘Societally challenged.’ There’s no way I can get a job with a government social agency. No day care center in the world would give me the time of day. But the Youth Outreach Center board was so desperate for help they didn’t have much of a screening process. I showed them my social work license and a massaged resume. And they hired me. If they find out who I am they’ll fire me in a second.”

“For the good of the children… Why’d you lie to me?”

“I didn’t trust you. I didn’t know who you were. All I know about reporters is that they look for the dirt. That’s all they fucking care about.”

“Well, we’ll never know what I would’ve done, will we? You never gave me the chance.”

“Please don’t be angry, Pellam. What I do here is so important to me. It’s the only thing I have in my life. I can’t lose it. I lied when I met you, yes. I wanted you to go away but I also wanted you to stay.”

Pellam glanced down at the cassettes. “I’m not interested in today’s Kitchen. It’s an oral history of the old days. I wasn’t even going to mention the YOC. If you’d asked I would have told you.”

“No, don’t leave like this. Give me a chance…”

But Pellam pushed open the door. Slowly, undramatic. He walked down the stairs then continued through the lobby of the YOC and stepped outside into a midtown filled with a searing sun and the cacophony of engines and horns and shouting voices. He thought Carol’s might have been one of them but then decided he didn’t care.

Walking east, toward the Fashion District on the way to the subway.

Crazy name for a neighborhood, Pellam was thinking. The least fashionable of any neighborhood in the city. Trucks double- and triple-parked. Tall, grimy buildings, dirty windows. Feisty workers in kidney belts and sleeveless T-shirts, pushing racks of next spring’s clothing.

A woman stood at a phone kiosk, hanging up the receiver then tearing a slip of paper into a dozen shreds. Now there’s a story, Pellam thought. Then he forgot the incident immediately.

He paused at a construction site on Thirty-ninth Street to let a dump truck back out, its urgent beep-beep-beep reverse warning jarring his nerves.

“… Thirty-ninth Street – that was Battle Row, the headquarters of the Gophers. The worst place in the city. Grandpa Ledbetter said the police wouldn’t even come west of Eighth a lot of the time. They wouldn’t have any part of it over here. He had a boot with a streak across the toe where he got hit by a bullet from this shoot-out on Battle Row when he was a boy. That’s what he said to us children. I never quite believed him. But maybe it was true – he kept that old boot till he died.”

Two shrill whistles rose from the pit of the construction site. The sound brought more spectators to the viewing holes crudely cut in the plywood fence lining the sidewalk. He paused and looked through one. A huge explosion. The ground leapt under Pellam’s boots and the mesh dynamite blanket shifted as the explosive shattered another fifty tons of rock into gravel.

Ettie’s words wouldn’t leave his mind, they looped endlessly.

“There was always construction going on here. Papa had an interesting job for a while. He called himself a building undertaker. He was in one of the crews that’d take the old demolished tenements out to Doorknob Grounds in Brooklyn. They dumped hundreds of old buildings in the water. Build up a shoal with the junk, and the fish’d love it there. He always came back with bluefish or halibut to last for days. I can’t look at fish now for any money.”

Three loud whistles. Apparently the all clear from the demolition crew. Hard-hatted workers appeared and a bulldozer moved forward. Pellam started back up the sidewalk. Something caught his eye and he glanced at yet another developer’s billboard.

He stopped, feeling the shock thud within him like a replay of the explosion a moment before. He read the sign carefully, just to make sure. Then he started off at a slow walk but, despite the overwhelming August heat, by the time he was at the corner he was sprinting.