The Transmigration of Bodies Read online

  There were a few people out and about, but more like ephemeral grubs than lords of the land. A few in cars with the windows rolled up. In a park three blocks away, the man who used to predict the end of days, now alone, in silence, thrown off. A guy in a white robe crossing the street with quick steps. And pharmacies, two-bit pharmacies, open. The Redeemer stopped in one to buy facemasks and a bottle of water. The salesgirl served him from a disgusted distance and took his coins one by one through a handkerchief.

  This doesn’t seem so bad, the Redeemer thought, almost happy. Long as it doesn’t last. And suddenly he no longer hated Dolphin quite so much for having hauled him from the bed of Three Times Blonde, who’d said Who in hell would order you out on a day like this? and pointed to the street. And he’d said An asshole with exceptional timing, and as she watched him get dressed she’d said You are seriously nuts, and then added: We were having fun, you and me, and now I’ll have to lock the door when you come back knocking. The Redeemer had stopped buttoning his shirt a second to see if she meant it, and tho he could see that she did he’d kept doing up his buttons and said Don’t know about you, but I make my living off the places people can’t get out of.

  Just then he hadn’t wanted to get out of anything, particularly, yet his reflexes kicked in the second the phone rang and Dolphin said I need you to help me with a swap.

  For who?

  For me.

  What happened?

  Don’t know. Shit went down last night. Someone took my son.

  Romeo?

  Yeah.

  Of course he knew who had him, that was why he’d called. Not to locate the kid but to get him back. So who did Dolphin have? Who’d he want to exchange him for?

  Where’d this go down? he asked.

  Lover’s Lane, said Dolphin.

  The Bug eyed him with a distinct lack of urgency, as if to say You think I give a shit about epidemics? No car stares straight at you the way a Bug does, he thought. It was the most expressive thing on the block. The Redeemer got in and drove across the city to see what he could wheedle out of Óscar, a compadre of his who worked the bar at a cathouse. Lover’s Lane was home to eight brothels in total, and together they tended to the various sectors of the population. There was one had cachet for kingpins and thugs with serious bank—even served champagne, and was staffed by girls who, word was, had appeared on soap operas. Two for those who liked to think they were street but lived nowhere near it, and tho those joints didn’t splash out on pricey juice or fine females, at least they could keep the lights on. Four itty-bitty bordellos with classic red-light decor and cement floors for the roughnecks, who also had the right to kick back. And a big old tomcathouse for women who earned their own dough: disco ball on the ceiling, tiger-skin sofas, and strippers with huge muscles and tiny G-strings, ready to romp for the right price. Óscar worked at Metamorphosis, where the better-bred boys went once in a while to put hair on their chests. Next door was Incubus—the one for women—so Óscar always had hot tips on what was going down on Lover’s Lane.

  He found him standing at the entry, stroking his tash as he gazed down the empty street. The Redeemer was embarrassed to be wearing a mask and considered taking it off for a minute, but opted to leave it on.

  How goes it, Óscar, my man?

  It don’t, Counselor, as you can see for yourself.

  Óscar was one of the only people he could stand calling him that.

  The Redeemer pokerfaced: You know the whereabouts of Romeo Fonseca?

  Dolphin’s boy?

  Mhm.

  Óscar had looked into the Redeemer’s eyes and then stared down the street again, stroking his tash with a don’t-know-jack face: obviously the Redeemer was about to ask him something and he was going to tell but it had to be clear he was not one to simply offer stuff up.

  He was here last night, right?

  Óscar nodded almost imperceptibly, like it was the natural extension of his tash-tugging.

  He started off somewhere else—nodding now toward Incubus—then showed up here; after that I don’t know.

  The Redeemer let his true question ripen in the silence of the street.

  Didn’t see where but you saw who with.

  Óscar finally took his hand off his face and pointed to a spot on the sidewalk, as tho conjuring the scene with his fingers.

  Only thing I saw was him sprawled there. Couple kids came and put him in a van.

  Kids, what kids?

  The Castros.

  The Castros, the Redeemer thought. Motherfuck.

  How’d Dolphin find out?

  You still on that prick’s payroll? Óscar asked.

  In his line, people fell all over themselves to say thanks if he fixed their situations, nearly wept with joy when he kept their hands clean of certain matters, they sent small checks and big bottles in gratitude. After that, tho, they didn’t even want to say hey since it reminded them of what they’d been mixed up in. Maybe that was how he felt about Dolphin: just hearing the sound of that agonized wheeze reminded him of that one defining moment he tried to keep buried. But the Redeemer had never stopped repaying the man who’d stepped in to lend a hand at a rough time.

  Still on it.

  Mmm… well. Must’ve heard because his girl was here too.

  The Redeemer eyed him, alarmed.

  His daughter? The Unruly?

  In the flesh. Up to her eyeballs she was, coming out of Incubus, saw it all go down but didn’t say shit till after they took her sib, then screamed her head off, tho no one seemed to notice.

  The Redeemer nodded. He pulled out the masks he had in his pocket, held on to one and handed the rest to Óscar.

  These of any use to you?

  Everything’s of use to me here, he replied.

  He drove back to his side of town, which was also where the Fonsecas were, some six blocks up the hill from the Big House. On the way he saw a train go by. Trains almost never went by anymore since they’d been sold off years back. But here was a convoy of eight sealed cars advancing slowly along the tracks. Carrying out the healthy or the sick? he wondered.

  He parked in front of their big sheet-metal gate and slapped it ten times in a row so they’d hear him in the house, which stood beyond the slapdash patio that Dolphin had erected for parties. No one came. He beat on the gate ten more times and waited. Nada. He was about to start slapping again when he heard a bolt slide on the other side of the entryway.

  Who’s that? a girl’s voice banged out. Her.

  It’s me, he said.

  The Unruly said nothing, but the Redeemer could hear her breathing through the metal.

  Your pops called.

  The girl undid a second bolt and showed half an unfriendly face through the doorcrack—brow arched, nose wrinkled, mouth twisted. She said nothing. The Redeemer repeated Your pops called for me. Go ask him.

  Don’t you tell me what I can or can’t do, spat the Unruly. She stared at him and then closed the door. After five minutes, she returned. Come back later, she said. Not right now.

  The Redeemer snorted but didn’t move, nor did the Unruly close the door.

  Who’d you grab? he asked. Please not who he thought, please not who he thought.

  The Unruly narrowed her eyes and said Baby Girl.

  Shit. But that wasn’t what he said. What he said was Where you got her?

  The Unruly gave a sort of half-smile that said You must be kidding.

  Why bother calling if you give me nothing to go on, he persisted, I’m not going to do anything, but I need to get an angle on this.

  The Unruly pressed her face up to the half-open door. She smelled of brandy.

  Real close. In that big white house. Cross from the elementary school.

  Odd. The Redeemer prided himself on knowing about all the palmgreasing, hornswoggling, and machinating in the city, but this house had him stumped. Who owned Las Pericas? And why would Dolphin hide Baby Girl there?

  Okay, he said, I’ll be around, tell y
our pops to call me.

  The Unruly slammed the door, and he listened to her walk away.

  He got a text from the government assuring him that everything would be back to normal any minute now, that it was essential to exercise extreme caution but not to panic: a reassuring little pat on the head to say Any silence is purely coincidental, okay? Like when people are talking and everyone goes quiet, like when an angel passes, like that. But it came off more like Better to play down than stir up.

  Baby Girl. The Redeemer recalled the first time he’d met Baby Girl on a job he did for her dad: itty-bitty thing, quiet, long hair always carefully brushed, pretty face but eyes so sad. The kind of girl you wanted to love, really truly, but then the urge passed kind of fast. Even for her family. The Redeemer had seen it, at a big blowout after that job, seen the way they treated her like a piece of furniture from another era, one you hold onto even tho it’s uncomfortable. The Castros had been putting on airs for years and Baby Girl cramped their style. Now the Fonsecas, too, had struck it rich, but about style they couldn’t care less. So different and so the same, the Castros and the Fonsecas. Poor as dirt a couple decades ago, now too big for their boots, and neither had moved out of the barrio: they just added locks and doors and stories and a shit-ton of cement to their houses, one with more tile than the other. So different and so the same. If he thought about it, in all these years he’d never once seen them cross each other. Until now. Odd for them to butt heads right when there was finally enough room.

  But he’d seen this before, the way old grudges resurface. Even in this city, where people didn’t nose around, no matter what was done or who was doing it, sometimes it could almost seem like We’re all one. Don’t matter if your thing’s a burning bush, some lusty dove, a buried book, big bank, talk or cock, there’s room for us all. But no sir, he knew better, the real deal was: Don’t give a shit what you’re doing but you better not look at me, fucker. Every once in a while people did look; every once in a while they remembered what they’d seen. But man, for this all to go down now—just when everyone and their mother was cowering under the bed?

  He passed by the local park once more. The grass on the median looked overgrown tho it had only been ignored a couple of days. Inside the park, in a little fountain where a colony of frogs used to live, he saw none; the water was dead, bereft of ripples; for a second he considered bending down to drink from it because he’d only bought one bottle and finished it, but opted instead to walk another block to the pharmacy.

  The pharmacy was closed. On the metal shutter a piece of paper: Out of Masks.

  He’d been told, that time, to go get Baby Girl from some corner store in a barrio stuck on the side of the hill. A boyfriend had tried to abduct her, but at a traffic light she got out of the car and ran into the shop. The boyfriend followed but when he tried to drag her out, the owners chased him off and someone called one of Baby Girl’s brothers—yes, everyone knows fucking everyone. Before the brothers could head out to butcher the boyfriend, tho, their father stopped them, calling in the Redeemer to keep it from escalating into a major shitstorm. The boyfriend wasn’t on juice, or blow, or smack, he just couldn’t stand Baby Girl getting feisty and refusing to go with him when he’d made up his mind. The Redeemer got to the corner store, made sure Baby Girl was okay, and she was—pallor and little-lamb panting were as much a part of her as eye-color—then went to sweet-talk lover boy.

  Hey, hey, amigo, listen up a minute. I got no dog in this fight, okay, I just want to say one thing and I’ll be on my way. Cool? Listen, man, I’m with you, I know what it’s like—respect, that’s what it’s all about, and it’s your girl those lowlifes got socked away in there, not theirs, right? Thing is, tho, people don’t see you been disrespected if you don’t make a fuss. Times it’s better to let things slide and come off like a king, comprende? All I’m sayin, a badass ain’t the one to raise his voice but the one with no need to—just think on it. And the boyfriend not only thought on it but thanked him and heartily shook his hand before shouting into the store: But we ain’t through, Baby! And sure enough, two weeks later they were back together. That was no longer his problem. The Redeemer sweet-talked only as much as he had to. Let people get in all the tight spots they want; he’d be out of a job if he started passing judgment on their vices. That same night, when he took Baby Girl home, each time he asked her what the boyfriend had done, she said Nothing, señor, honest, I just didn’t want to go with him.

  He helped the man who let himself be helped. Often, people were really just waiting for someone to talk them down, offer a way out of the fight. That was why when he talked sweet he really worked his word. The word is ergonomic, he said. You just have to know how to shape it to each person. One time this little gaggle of teenage boys had gone to the neighbor’s on the other side of the street and stoned the windows and kicked the door for a full half-hour, shouting Come on out, motherfucker, we’ll crack your skull, and the pigs hadn’t deigned to appear; that was one of the first times the Redeemer had done his job. He went out, asked in surprise how it was they’d yet to bust down the door and added You want, I’ll bring you out a pickax right now, and that sure calmed them down; see, it’s one thing to front, to act like a big thing, but burning bridges, well that’s a whole ’nother thing. Soon as he saw what was what the Redeemer added: Tho, really, why even bother, right? Man’s in there shitting himself right now, and they all laughed and they all left. That was when the Redeemer learned that his talent lay not so much in being brutal as in knowing what kind of courage every fix requires. Being humble and letting others think the sweet words he spoke were in fact their own. It worked on others but not on him. He’d met politicians who could believe whatever came out of their mouths as long as others believed it too. He tried to learn how but could never forget lies. Especially his own.

  He trusted Dolphin—or trusted him as much as anyone who’d been a buzzman for twenty-five years can be trusted—but the Las Pericas thing was prickling his neckhairs. What was up with that? He decided to ask Gustavo, a sharp-witted lawyer who knew the ropes and had been untying the city’s secrets for decades. He called, but a woman’s voice said he wasn’t in and who knew when he’d be back.

  He needed someone to watch his back. He called the Neeyanderthal and climbed back in the Bug to go get him.

  The Neeyanderthal was an entrepreneur of sorts: it was all bidness for the Neeyanderthal. Everywhere you look, he liked to say, looks like wheels and deals. He bought old cell phones that he sold at new prices to credulous clients, organized office pools at places he didn’t work, and shuffled the cash flow to keep all his balls in the air: he smuggled shit in, sold intel, rented his house out as a place for petty crimes to go down. He never had any money. Instead his rackets seemed designed to prove he was cleverer than everyone else, to bring him doses of euphoria followed by stretches of contained rage. The Neeyanderthal was huge and hulking, a man who walked like he was forever on his way out of the ICU, moving each muscle with considerable care.

  Years ago the Neeyanderthal’s brother had died in his arms, on the way back from a nearby town: some kid had crossed the road in front of them, the Neeyanderthal jammed on the brakes, the brother flew through the windshield, the truck flipped and by the time the Neeyanderthal could get out from under it, his baby brother was dying on the white line and kept right on dying even as the Neeyanderthal held his face, sobbing into it saying Hold on, man, almost there little brother, as tho that could extend his life. It didn’t. Finally the ambulance came to pick up the body, by then so lulled and soothed it looked almost at peace.

  To the Redeemer it seemed the Neeyanderthal had been trying to off himself on blow for years. After the brother thing he launched into more honest attempts. Provoking police, street fighting. Then one time while he was truly looped he came right out and tried to shoot himself through the heart. Like it was no big deal, people were at his place getting trashed, and he got up, went to his room and fired a shot. His luck was so
bad one of the credit cards he kept in his pocket to cut coke deflected the bullet, which flew up, barely kissed the top of his heart and came out his back. They found him standing unsteadily with a lost look on his face. Guess this ain’t a boneyard kind of day, he said, and claimed he was smiling when he said it.

  The Redeemer had never contemplated suicide, not even the time Dolphin had pulled him out of that black hole. Whenever he heard about someone who’d decided to cut their own life short he was shocked, especially if it was someone who had the strength to defend themselves; it surprised him not because he thought it was wrong but because he suddenly saw that person like they belonged to an entirely different species, and was astonished they inhabited the same planet. People who could make decisions they weren’t prepared for. So you want to inhale ammonia? You fuckin sure? Dead silence.

  He got to the Neeyanderthal’s place, rang the bell and went back to the Bug to wait.

  He watched a junkman pull his cart up the middle of the street. The junkman looked at the Redeemer in his mask, smiled with superiority, began hacking dramatically, then shook his head side to side and kept on his way.

  The door opened.

  What’s up, Neeyan? asked the Redeemer.

  Damn, man, not a tail to chase or a soul in sight, said the Neeyanderthal, staring out the Bug’s window at the empty streets.

  The Redeemer crossed an avenue with two military trucks down it and turned in another direction.

  First time there’s no traffic and I still got to take the long way, he said.

  At the next avenue they caught sight of a very small funeral procession: one hearse with two cars following behind, three people in the first car, only one in the last.

  Oh, yeah, said the Neeyanderthal, looks like people are real choked up over this fuckin corpse.

  Passing the procession the Neeyanderthal stuck his head out and said aloud, as if addressing the body in the hearse, You’re fooling yourself, man, you’re fooling yourself.