Bronx Noir

When he got off the train he could already hear the stadium, the noise of the big crowd breaking like the waves out on Jones Beach, from when he was a kid. First there was the low preliminary hiss of anticipation, then letting out with a long, full-throated rush. The wave breaking over him, knocking him off his feet in the water. He put the cheap suitcase down on the platform and stood there with his eyes closed, remembering. Remembering how they had waited for that second rush, down in the basement of Mercedes’s husband—waiting to kill a man.

He opened his eyes and wiped a sleeve across his forehead, the seams of the ancient suit he wore nearly tearing out at the shoulder. The jacket was too small for him now, stretched nearly to the breaking point where his torso bulged from so many years of prison iron and prison food. He worried about the suit. The last thing he wanted was to look ridiculous in front of her, but he couldn’t wait. He had come up as soon as he got off the prison bus, after the endless jolting ride from upstate; making only a quick stop to pick up something he needed, in the back of a bodega that his last cellmate had told him about. Taking the 4 train from there, until it poured up out of the tunnel to the 161st Street stop, past the vast blue-and-white monolith that was the stadium.

Now he was finally here, after so many years of thinking about it, and everything was…off-balance, as if he were a little dizzy. All the same, but different. From the train platform, he could look into the open half-shell of the stadium’s upper deck and see the big crowd there, the people laughing and enjoying themselves, drinking their beers. That was us. That whole loco summer, when everything had seemed unreal then too. Thirty years ago. The two of them sitting night after night up in the last rows of the upper deck, sipping slowly at the stale stadium beer, trying to make it last—trying to make the whole night last. Hoping for one more rally by the Yankees, anybody, so he could stay a little while longer with Mercedes, touching her smooth brown knee beside him, kissing her mouth.

He had heard the games all his life, growing up in one of the pale-brick apartment buildings along Gerard Avenue. He could follow them by the ebb and swell of the crowd noise alone; the collective, disappointed sighs; the cheers, the boos—the vast, hissing intake of breath when something good was in the offing. The wave roaring in after that, a feral, vicious noise, fifty thousand voices sensing the kill. Everyone in the building would lean out their windows on a sweltering summer’s night and listen to it. The old folks smoking and chatting quietly with each other in Spanish; the younger people bored and silent, staring down into the concrete courtyard.

That was where Luis had first seen her, walking her path through the courtyard to the basement. Making her way like a nun across all the trash that he didn’t bother to clean up even for his woman. Head down, arms crossed over her chest, moving quickly through the smashed brown beer bottles, and the cans, and all the other junk in her open shoes. That was where he had seen her, and decided he had to talk to her, even though she kept her head down all the time, never looking up at the men who laughed and called to her from their windows.

Now he was finally back, and about to see her again. He headed on down through the cage of iron bars that encased the 161st Street station. Latecomers scurried down the steps in front of him, kids skipping and prancing about in shirts bearing the names of players he had never heard of. He kept his distance from them, still walking in the careful prison shuffle that was second nature to him now, carrying the cheap suitcase easily in one hand. All it held were his remaining clothes from the old days, a few mottled snapshots, the Bible he had been given on his confirmation, and a deportment medal from grammar school. Everything that his mama had left for him near the end, when she knew that she was dying. They were all that remained of his previous life, the only possessions he had in the world—save for the item he had just acquired in the back of that bodega down on East 124^th Street, wrapped carefully in a paper bag and secured in his inside jacket pocket. Any con would see it coming a mile away, he knew, but he didn’t expect that to matter.