A plastic smile, poured and now cooling, sets on Schreck's face. Eyes open-not missing a thing-teeth bared, he slaps Nathan on the shoulder. "Nothing, buddy boy. No reason at all. just happy to see you."
Again the dancers cease mid-writhe and kneel for their heap of belongings and rotate, the one farthest over stepping into her slippers and down and zipping across the floor along the bar. A new girl surfaces out of the beaded curtain. The off-duty dancer stops in front of Nathan. Her eyes are red-rimmed. She lifts a knuckle to her nose and sniffs, and staring walleyed at Schreck, withdraws from her purse a packet wrapped in butcher's paper the size of a pound of swiss cheese and slides it into the pocket of Nathan's jacket. She doesn't look, Nathan says nothing, and she turns abruptly for the back as though she's forgotten something there, as though the phone in back has rung.
Schreck slaps the bar. "Stay there, be right back," he says, patting his pocket for keys. "I have something to show you."
He runs out, but his presence lingers, like an offensive smell.
Nathan probes the package in his pocket. He pats his jacket for the shape of the envelope. In the mirror he sees Isabel on the boardwalk turning a sloppy pirouette, much too drunk. Her mouth open, so beautifully, in laughter, or a scream-
Schreck returns, steering before him a young girl wearing dayglo lipstick and a little black dress. "This is what I mean," he says, winking, his voice sliding to a whisper. "Consuela wants a green card. What was I telling you?"
The girl eyes Nathan's scotch. Nathan hands it over and she drinks it down thirstily. "Where the hell were you keeping her, leashed up outside?"
Schreck smiles. "Mr. Philanthropist all of a sudden. She was in the car. Don't worry so much. What am I, an animal? The engine was running. But, look, Nathan, can't you see it now? A line of Dominican peasants around the block with hundred-dollar bills in their hands?"
Nathan looks at the girl with alarm.
"No English," Schreck says. "No habla inglgs, hey?" He grins an even row of white caps at the girl, and the girl grins broadly back, her teeth ragged and gray. "We hire some law students for eight bucks an hour for the shit work," he says out of the corner of his mouth, "get some of Isabel's cousins to watch the door." He leans forward, squinting with sincerity. "Ten percent of the gross, Nathan"-chopping the air-"clean cut off the top. Overhead's my problem. Fair or what? In or out?"
Behind them the music starts again. Consuela, fingers meshed around the empty glass, steps softly to the beat.
"You feeding her, Oliver?"
"Okay. Fifteen. I'll make it fifteen. Fifteen percent, Nathan. Trouble-free dollars. You and your father's name. My work. I couldn't be more fair."
"Just get her a drink." Nathan slips away.
In the men's room, clutching his side, he reaches out and lands on the condom dispenser. He locks the stall door behind him. He has a fever, he feels it on his face like the sun. His own wavy reflection stares back from the toilet water. Crushing his thumbs in the palms of his hands, he looks about the graffitied stall. Limericks, phone numbers. Ten-inch cocks.
The pain is numbing. Laughter, anonymous, fills his head then is sucked out. He leans his ear against the wall to hear within. A vent overhead hums with cold air. His knees draw up sharply and he goes down, the porcelain sweating cold in his hands. Kicks, kicks him again. He holds himself tightly around the waist while the muscles beneath collide and wrench loose the debris down below, his mouth falling open as though he's been punched in the groin, the air rushing both ends, all of him working to expunge what? Again the dry retches burn the roof of his mouth. Then his reflection shatters, the water darkens, the drool reaches the floor. He pats his pockets and brings out the vials. Two labels made out to him, two to Maria. Shaking, he struggles with the childproof caps, finally bringing the vials up over his shoulder and down one at a time against the toilet bowl rim. Pink blue yellow ricocheting like hailstones over the floor, into the water, twirling like confetti in the loose mud. "Fuck it, fuck it." He sweeps together what he can off the sandy floor. Off the urine-stained rim into his trembling palm, picking out one of each. His eyes blurry with tears and pain he spits at the little mound of pills in his hand, spits again and overturns them into the toilet with the rest. "Fuck-you," he says.
Panting against the steel partition, his hair matted to his forehead, the trembling of his lips stills as he digs into his pocket, fingering the paper. The package gives with a squeeze. Cornerless.
No money. Fuck. Fucking cold cuts I'll kill him, I'll have him killed. Johnny owes me, I'll just have him bumped off, kill two birds with one stone, clean off both accounts.
Working the corner he inserts his pinky and brings it up frosted, like a vanilla-topped creamsicle.
What am I? What-? He thinks for a split moment, like a flash of a bad dream, an old recollection, of all the people he owes. He thinks, briefly, of the Citibank mail sorter in her bunker in Sioux Falls distributing Visa stubs and checks and hate notes into plastic pneumatic tubes, opening a package containing a half-kilo of cocaine, unfolding the note: To Whom It May Concern: Please accept enclosed in lieu of my debit of eight thousand fifty-four dollars and seventy-eight cents. Keep the change.
The outside door opens. The tinny music washes in, then chokes off. Footsteps stop outside his stall. An eye peers through the crack of the door. "You all right in there?"
The footsteps retreat. The door bangs softly.
His cell-phone rings beneath his clothes and a choked bleat of sound escapes his throat. The phone rings, then rings again, then stops. It begins once more but is cut before the first ring is done. Then his belt chirps. He peels aside his jacket, hands trembling, thumbing the illumination button. His chest lights up like a flare:
Cabron. Bastardo. It is 9 o'clock. I rain dead roses on your bed.
9 P.M.
Santos rehangs the pay phone and cinches his coat tight at the waist. His heels pace off the minutes, echoing past the house of detention, a highrise of crosshatched windows ringed by a skirt of razor wire. Past a row of alternating pawn shops, bail shops. Past black and padlocked storefronts. Across the river the Manhattan Municipal Building with its spires and grand arches and engraved cornice naming the old quadrants of the old city when all was wilderness. Years ago, Santos arrived there dressed in white and pinned a two-dollar flower to his young wife-to-be and an old black man with a beaten box camera took their wedding portrait against the scuffed marble.
The sky to the west shivers with lightning. Streaks of frozen rain race the snow. He turns in at a doorway and finds Barbados at a table by a window. "He's coming down," Santos says.
"That's awfully sweet of him."
"He said he's eager to help," Santos says.
"How likely is that?"
Santos edges past a dark pinball machine toward the sound of dull chopping and the beating of eggs. At the counter he grips the menu in both hands and studies it. The waitress appears tapping her pencil against her pad. "After all these years you still need to look at that?"
"No. I'm sorry. Coffee, please. A grilled cheese." He looks back at the booth but Barbados is staring out the window. "That's all."
The waitress tears off the ticket and turns to go, then stops. "You okay?"
He sightlessly watches her through her thin blue uniform: as she heads back to the grill; as she stands on one hip in a cloud of steam; as she comes back with the coffee. She sets down the cup with a click and the liquid tilts and slips over the rim and fills the saucer. She covers her mouth and contemplates the mess. Not a pretty face, but eyes that see and lips that form words and kiss a baby's moist head.
"Thank you," Santos says.
In a minute she comes back with the sandwich. Saturated with sweet butter, the filling orange and gummy, crammed with hope. Santos holds a wedge of it to his nose, closes his eyes and chews slowly, but it goes down like a wad of cotton and fills him with nothing he wants or can even imagine and his body registers nothing of it at all.