Still, he’s not without some degree of sympathy for these women. They’re animals of commerce and at the very least he can understand the rules that drive their lives. There’s an obscene order to their motivations and actions, a primal, logical capitalism played out in a carnal market. And the fact is they never had the benefit of a Sister Bernadette, Speer’s first-grade teacher, with her rosary beads cloaked inside the flowing black habit and transformed in an unseen instant into a flailing whip, a blessed lash that could beat the commandments forever into a still-forming skull.
He leans forward and pops the glove box and for a second he stops and stares at his hand lit in the dim green glow that emits from the band selector of the dash radio. His skin looks gray and then almost translucent, as if, if he continued to stare, he’d see through the skin to the muscle and bone below. He blinks his eyes and pulls from the box a pint of Four Roses and a warm can of Jolt. He pops open the soda and takes a long drink, wedges it in his crotch, twists off the top of the bourbon, and throws down a shooter’s swallow.
The radio is tuned between stations, and the car is filled with a low, consistent hiss of static. Speer has no idea what time it is. On the drive to Goulden Ave, on impulse, he pulled up next to a sewer grating, unstrapped his Bulova — the one Margie gave him, inscribed All My Love Always—and dropped it down through the slot into a pool beneath the street. He’s not sure why he did this. He could argue with himself that it was a symbolic attempt to begin to move on, to eliminate reminders of his wife, of the woman he long ago invested his soul with. But the truth is he has no desire to forget Margie. To stop writing the letters. To abandon his plans for reconstructing their life together.
There’s a small silver crucifix dangling from the rearview mirror in the center of the windshield. Speer lifts his hand to it, recoils his index finger, then tweaks the cross lightly. It begins to sway back and forth through his line of vision like a pendulum, and with each arc Speer shifts his field of focus from the dying Christ to the clan of whores jabbering a hundred yards away. The process makes his head ache worse, but he keeps it up for a time, and then, without really thinking, he begins to recite a Bible verse drilled into him long ago by Sister Bernadette, words pushed down into the densest meat of his brain, where they could never evaporate.
Do not defile yourself by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am casting out before you defiled themselves; and the land became defiled, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants …
The words trail off, but he continues to move his lips for a while, a silent babble, an inaudible glossolalia, as if a mute tongue of purging fire had visited this Ford sedan parked at the side of Goulden Ave. When he finally brings his lips together, he restarts the car’s engine and begins to roll toward the Penumbra.
Steam is rising from the sewer gratings along Goulden and it combines with a low layer of damp fog to give the whole street. a different look, as if the block had been lifted out of Quinsigamond and transported to Berlin in 1931, all shadow and harsh electrical light against red brick and iron beams and whining, distant police sirens chronically sounding in the distance.
Mina is the first to approach Speer’s car. She’s small and a little wiry, dressed in a red vinyl miniskirt, sheer black stockings with a polka-dot design woven in, a shiny, royal-blue halter top under a ratty imitation-fur shoulder wrap. Her hair is a weird retro shag cut with the last traces of a burnt-red dye job growing out. She moves across the sidewalk at a slow pace, a true saunter, to the accompaniment of accented calls from her colleagues. Speer picks up a mention of señorito blanquito. He slides the passenger window down all the way and as Mina leans down on the door and smiles, he toasts her with his pint and says, “The kingdom of heaven approaches.”
“Your lucky night,” Mina says. “This kingdom has the discount for un policía.”
Speer doesn’t even try to protest.
“I’m off duty and very lonely,” he says in a low and awkward voice, feeling a run of sweat slide down the middle of his back.
“Let’s see how lonely,” she says, rubbing her thumb and forefinger together in the classic cash sign and looking backward over her shoulder at the sisters who continue to hoot and laugh and sing.
Speer slides a wad of bills up slightly from his breast pocket and Mina says, “You have a date for the prom, policía,” and climbs in the car next to him.
They enter the basement apartment and Speer flips on a light, then goes to the folding table and turns on the radio. As the sound of static plays from the speaker, he moves back to the door, locks the bolt, and secures the slide chain. Mina tosses her throw over the stool, walks to the tiny rectangular window in the far corner of the room, up near the ceiling, and says, “You get water in here?”
Speer ignores her, takes off his suitcoat, and throws it on the wicker rocking chair. He goes to the single kitchen cabinet, pulls down an unlabeled bottle, and begins pouring what looks like bourbon into a white coffee mug that says One Day at a Time. Mina walks over to the radio and begins to spin the tuner, looking for some music.
Speer wheels around immediately and says, “Don’t touch the radio,” in a flat, slow voice that makes Mina squint at him. He walks to the table and readjusts the tuner until the room is filled with static again.
“What are you doing?” Mina says. “This gives me the headache.”
Speer cups her chin in his hands, tries to smile, and says, “Five minutes, you won’t notice it.”
As if this is some sort of cue, Mina steps into him, brings her mouth up to his neck, and begins to unbuckle his belt. Speer jerks away, but Mina’s persistent, following the flow of his body, trying to unlatch the belt as she says, “It’s okay, papacito. Mina take good care of you.”
Speer gets his hands on her shoulders and holds her still, but he’s breathing heavy and he stammers as he says, “Now, you slow down. You slow down and we’ll do this right.”
He takes a long breath, then moves over to the bed, gets down on one knee, reaches underneath, and pulls out a worn and crumpled brown paper shopping bag. He reaches into the bag and for some reason the crinkling, rustling noise that his hand makes bothers Mina, tenses up her stomach like a sign of the flu coming on. Speer pulls from the bag a medium-length blond wig, done in sort of a bland style with a limp curl at the ends. He holds the wig out from his body with one hand and awkwardly tries to straighten the hair with the other.
He carries the wig across the dim room as if it were a chalice, kind of reverent, maybe a little bit scared, Mina thinks. He holds it out to her as if he were giving her a gift, an engagement ring that cost a year’s salary.
“You want me to wear it?” Mina says.
Speer nods.
“You know, you could’ve just bought a blonde, saved us both the trouble.”
But she takes it from him, fits it on her head, tucking her own hair underneath. Speer puts a hand on her shoulder and steers her toward the cloudy mirror hanging over his bureau. Mina adjusts and tucks a bit, rolling her eyes the whole time, but smiling as if this could be a fun game, or at least a good story for the girls when she gets back to Goulden Ave.
Speer stands behind her the whole time, hands lightly on her shoulder, looking at her reflection with devoted attention, adjusting his stance a bit, seeming to be looking for something he hasn’t named. When Mina gets the wig as attractive as she thinks is possible, she holds her hands out at her sides for inspection. Speer nods back at her in the mirror, then turns her around, steps back, and begins to look her up and down, feet to wig and back to feet again.