Between Heaven and Here Read online

  He didn’t want to get with her. He just wanted to see her, talk to her long enough to know whether she remembered that night in the ER. If she remembered him. If she’d ever done that to anyone else. Ever.

  But why would she come to the video store? Chess said she didn’t even have a TV.

  WHEN CHESS CAME in for videos, he acted like Glorette was still his girlfriend. Not like she’d ignored him after she met Dakar. Not like he’d had a daughter with some other girl. He’d come up to the counter and say, “Man, she stay at Jacaranda Gardens now, them gray apartments. Her and her boy. Ain’t a damn thing in there but a futon and a glass-top table. Her and Sisa let them sprung fools party up in there all the time, and they walk off with everything. Her son’s seventeen, and he can’t even keep a CD player or no shoes.”

  “What you doin up there?” Sidney said, putting the videos in a bag. Mindless shit like Xtreme and Fast and Furious. Chess didn’t even know what anime was.

  Chess lifted his chin so Sidney saw his neck, where a thin green wash of Magic Shave remained near his ears. He still wore a fade. “I hang up there sometimes with her. Talk about the old days. Gold days.” Chess looked out at his car, a Bronco with the hood crazed by the sun. He leaned over the counter and said, “So you miss County General? They closed that shit down. After what y’all did.”

  Chess laughed and lifted his chin again, and Sidney slammed the cash register closed. “Wasn’t just me workin in the basement, okay? Was two or three other dudes.” Really it had just been him and Moreno. They were the only ones whose names made the newspaper.

  “Least I don’t take advantage of somebody like Glorette,” he said.

  Chess shrugged. “When I leave, homegirl’s fine.”

  FRIDAY NIGHT—CHESS and the Antoine brothers were probably hanging out under the huge pepper tree in the parking lot of Sundown Liquor, three blocks up Palm. The Antoine brothers were Enrique’s sons, big guys who played football in junior college. They drove in from the groves to buy beer and play dominoes. Card table, some folding chairs, and too much talking shit, under the tree. Sidney never hung out. He stayed away unless Archuleta’s customized van wasn’t in the parking lot. He hated seeing the leg, in his mind, whenever he saw the handpainted sunset on the van doors.

  Sidney picked up the tamales and Coke and walked slowly out the door. Don’t wanna alarm nobody. He turned the corner. Crickets were loud in the weeds along the sidewalk, but with each step he took they all stopped singing but one—suddenly it wasn’t music but a single scraping. Fingernail on a plastic comb. His father used to joke, “Even that bug gotta get him a woman.”

  Sidney felt himself hard. Nature rising. He’d always hated how country his father sounded. Even from New Orleans, he sounded as country as the Sarrat people. After he’d finished the refrigerator, he’d installed a window swamp cooler for Mrs. Antoine. He’d said in the truck, “Man, they got they own church out there. They own cemetery. They own chickens. Don’t need nobody or nothin.”

  Sidney pushed his palm hard against the stucco wall to distract himself with the rough grains. No voices in the alley. No shopping cart wheels. The crickets began again.

  That night in the ER, he’d come back. The intake nurses were distracted by the old man screaming about his inflamed foot. Sidney carried two cartons of chocolate milk on his cart. Glorette was in one of the curtained-off exam rooms. He said the words quickly. “Why you waste yourself like this? Look how sick you are.”

  She’d opened her eyes. “Waste?” she’d said, drawing out the word, her lips darkened from the way she kept licking them. He put the chocolate milk on the silver tray. “How I’m a waste?” she whispered. “All y’all want is to look at my face while you gettin off. Leave me lone.”

  “How you feel?” he said, bending closer, and he saw her amber eyes, one fleck of brown like a piece of leaf floating in the left eye.

  She said, “You got a shirt under that one?”

  “No.”

  She pulled at Sidney’s shoulder, then said, “Undo them buttons.” She said, “Help me up. Why you so hot?” She stood before him, small and perfect, even after years of walking the streets. Her hair was pushed up at the back where she’d been lying down, but it looked purposeful. What did Jinelle call it? Teased. Bouffant. Like Audrey Hepburn.

  Don’t think of Jinelle.

  Glorette pushed his shirt aside and leaned close to his chest. He felt something brush against his nipples. Not her lips. Soft and tickling. Eyelashes. She moved them slowly, again and again, her breath heating his skin.

  She said, “You smell like smoke and somethin else.”

  Outside in the hallway someone called, “Why’s that medical waste cart here? We just had a pickup.”

  Sidney jumped away from Glorette and buttoned his shirt. He batted at himself, in his pants, and she said, “What they said about you? Somethin about the basement. Lord, that’s you. When they talk about Archuleta’s leg.”

  “You okay?” he whispered.

  “I’m fine,” she said, distant, as if she were in a tower. A turret. The princess bride. “Just fine.”

  Fine as wine and just my kind, they all said every time they saw her. Every brother on the Westside had fallen in love with Glorette, and even though she’d been on the street for ten years, as far as he knew, no one had ever fallen out.

  WHAT HE WANTED to ask her was whether she’d ever done that to anyone else. How had she known to do it? Nothing Jinelle did to him had ever made him feel that way. Not sex. Not even hot. But shaking and trembling inside, just under the layer of his skin.

  What if that was just an experiment? What if he was the only one she’d ever touched with her lashes?

  In all these years he’d driven up Palm to work and thought he’d seen her—the red sandals she always wore, the high crown of her hair—he couldn’t stop. It wasn’t something you could lean out the open window and ask. Not when she was used to men asking how much?

  What you did to me—you did that before?

  No one spoke. He went around the corner, no slipping and sliding, and walked down the alley. The shopping cart had moved closer to the wild tobacco trees. Curled inside was a shape.

  Glorette was sleeping. Homeless people never slept inside a cart. Even if it was their hooptie, the only transportation they had, no one fit inside a cart. But Glorette was small. He moved closer, along the chainlink, and in the light from the single yellow streetlamp he saw something glittering at her bare toe.

  She must be damn tired to sleep like that, take a nap slumped with one arm across her chest and her feet up awkwardly.

  He couldn’t see her face yet. Her long black hair fell through the slats at the back of the cart and lay in the dirt. He felt the shock inside his jeans. All that hair.

  The Navigator. The drums. Sidney flattened himself against the fence. The plastic slats through the diamonds of chainlink danced and shimmered with the vibration. The world leapt with the drums. The yellow flowers, like macaroni, dangled from the wild tobacco tree hiding him. They shook until the car turned away.

  Glorette didn’t stir. Her hair poured from the cart like black ferns, cascading from a cave wall. The cave where the hero hid out while he rested, got himself together, and made his plans. “Hair is dead,” Jinelle used to say in annoyance whenever the brothers brought it up, at a house party or barbecue. She’d been working at the beauty salon years then. “Glorette should get her a style and stop wearin that old bun like a grandma.” But Chess would say, “She don’t have to get a style. Get anybody she want the way she is.”

  Now Sidney didn’t want to wake her. She wouldn’t remember him if she was this high, and that would kill him on a night like tonight. Nothing to do but tacos and anime.

  Damn. He’d left the videos on the table, next to the hot sauce.

  What was in the plastic bag at the back wheels? It was tied shut. Looked like that same stack of books. Sidney crouched down and flattened the plastic. Maruchan Ramen. Ten for a dol
lar. That must be what her son ate, because she was always carrying it.

  The wind moved the palm fronds suddenly, the sweet whispering, and a rat shot across the phone line above him. The rat scrabbled for a moment on the taqueria roof and disappeared. The night was warm and dry, but rats would be working. Sidney couldn’t leave the tamales, like he’d left the chocolate milk. Glorette hadn’t moved; her arm curved around her waist. She was small, but rounded breasts and perfect behind. The foolish sprung wardrobe of yoga pants, exercise bra, and red high heels. Sidney came closer. The left heel pushed out from the cart like a stick. The toe ring was a sparkly flower of red jewels. He could pick her up and move her to—no, she couldn’t sleep in Launderland, or the bushes, or the taqueria.

  He reached into the cart and moved her hair from her face. Her eyes were open. She wasn’t sleeping. Her neck was bent too far to the left, and two small half-moons filled with blood marked her collarbone.

  SIDNEY THREW UP against the fence. He steadied himself, fingers in the wire. Red chunks of tomato, white flags of tortilla chip. The tamales were on the ground. His fingerprints were everywhere on the plastic. His body fluids were here. He smeared his foot over the tomatoes, crushed the sour smell into the soft dirt by the fence, pushed the mess into the weeds.

  He could hear the conversation he’d have with the cops when they came.

  “I was walkin cause the brakes are out on my car.”

  “I got off work at Excellent Video at eleven. Bought some tacos and headed home.”

  “It ain’t in the shop cause I sent my paycheck to my ex-wife for my daughter’s teeth. Yeah, all the rest of her body, too. Bite expanders. Teeth are too big for her jaw. Like mine.”

  “Four years. That’s how long I been divorced.”

  “Yeah, I know her, but from when we were kids. Long time ago. No, I ain’t seen her for years. Well, yeah, everybody sees her on the street, but I haven’t seen her close up. Yeah, she’s close up right now.”

  “No, I ain’t paid her nothin. I ain’t touched her. No, I ain’t remarried. Come on. No. Yeah, I walked over here to see if it was her.”

  “Glorette Picard.”

  HE COULDN’T CALL the cops. Not a brother walking through the alley near midnight, a loser with no car, no woman, only a couple of anime videos. Shit. Which were in the restaurant. Which meant everyone had seen him looking all nervous and jumpy. Buying two meals.

  Can’t leave her here. Not with the rats, and the Navigator, and the crickets. Cops would come eventually, in the morning, and find everything. Including his vomit. What did they always say on SVU? Something’s always left behind—the dead tell us the truth. The story.

  Mexican music came from the taqueria when someone opened the door. Sidney was tired. He backed into the trees again, and water was flung across the alley, a white plume of water that hit the fence and washed his tomatoes back into the dirt.

  Hell, no. Wasn’t no SVU: Rio Seco. The city had closed County General years ago and built a new medical center out in the wilds, but the morgue was an ancient brick building downtown, covered with ivy; you could smell it sometimes from the street, it was so inefficient. The city wanted to build a new morgue by the medical center, but there was no budget. And the cops wouldn’t be women with tight sweaters and boots and long hair. They’d be Rio Seco PD. He’d be the brother with no car—what a loser—who just found the body. Uh-huh.

  “No, it didn’t bother me to pick her up. I’ve seen bodies before. I worked at County General.”

  “I picked her up because I thought she was sleeping.”

  “I don’t know CPR. I was a custodian at the hospital.”

  “I wanted to help her.”

  “She didn’t love anybody but her son, from what I heard.” “No, she didn’t tell me.”

  Nobody would drop liquids into revolving machines or find stray red needles from a bottlebrush plant or take a fallen eyelash from her shoulder and extract the DNA.

  Nobody would care about Glorette. No cops or technicians. They’d laugh about her clothes, find multiple kinds of semen inside her, make fun of her apartment, pull Ramen from the cupboard, scare the shit out of her son. Well, hell, someone killed a crack addict. Top priority. What did they used to call it? No Human Involved.

  The left leg of her pants had been dragged up when she’d been put in the cart, and her knee was pressed so awkwardly that her skin pushed through the metal mesh. Five squares of flesh.

  The scratch marks were from small fingernails. Not Sisia’s, because she had hands like a man, and long square fake nails. He picked up Glorette’s hands. No blood. No nails. They’d been bitten into soft invisible edges.

  Glorette had been kneeling by the cart. Sisia had to have put her inside, or she climbed in herself. And died? Her neck wasn’t bruised. Heart attack, from smoking too much rock?

  Sidney had come into his father’s yard one day to find him sitting straight up in an old recliner—a washing machine dismantled beside him—and dead. Heart stopped, mouth closed. Fists on his legs.

  Now he unbuttoned his shirt. Come here. He draped it over her body and picked her up. She was not stiff. She was not soft. A layer of something was forming under her skin. A river spreading over banks and then leaving silt and mud just below the surface. Her head fell back over his wrist and her hair fell across his thighs.

  No. No. He couldn’t carry her down the alley like this, couldn’t carry her anywhere. Save a dead body? Nobody died of solitude. You can’t save her. The wind prickled on his bare back, and a door slammed behind the fence. A lighter scratched, push tab snapped, and smoke drifted into the alley.

  Sidney paused in the trees. He could hear the man sucking the smoke into his lungs. Hear his shoes moving on the concrete. Patio. His wife made him smoke outside. Not weed. Strong cigarette like a Camel. “Jesús, mira, you better not stay out there all night,” she called, and the sliding glass door slammed shut.

  I can hear him, he might hear me. Yes, officer. Black male. About thirty-five. Carrying a woman.

  One car was parked on the side street. An ancient Nissan Sentra. Mexican flag in the back window. The taqueria woman, or the men.

  The smoke released from the man’s lungs and lifted in a dancing skein over the alley fence, like a bad detective movie. Fake fog. Blue. Glorette’s body was no heavier than his daughter Sarena’s. He had called her last week. She talked for five minutes, and then her cell phone went off. Her ringtone was loud. Some dude sang, “My body, your body, my body, your body.” Who the hell is that? Sidney said. Pretty Ricky, she said. I have to go, Dad. That’s my friend. Mom’s at work.

  “She told me you carried her one night at the hospital,” Jinelle said, furious. “I ran into her at Rite Aid and she said you rescued her and shit. You some kinda knight? You got feelings for her? Why she couldn’t walk? What you mean I didn’t need savin? I ain’t never needed savin. You did. And I ain’t the one now. No. Go get her. Her royal highness. I’m gone.”

  The beer can landed in a pile near the fence. The sliding glass door clanked shut. Sidney looked down at Glorette’s face in the streetlight. Her eyes amber, frozen. Helen of Troy. Her lips were etched sharply into her face without makeup. He curved her body onto its side, in the workshirt, and lay her in the cart again. He pushed it through the soft sand and gravel and onto the sidewalk. He wouldn’t look down the narrow side streets. The Antoine brothers would be at Sundown Liquor. They had to be there.

  He didn’t care who heard the wheels grinding on the asphalt when he crossed the streets and headed down the next alley. The light was dimmer here, behind the shoe repair shop and the Botanica San Salvador. More smoke came from the open back door of the botanica—candles and marijuana. When the cops had brought all the black plastic bags of weed to the basement, Moreno had crowed like a bird. “Contact high, carnal!” he said, and the cops shook their heads. But they were smiling. Ten bags. Homegrown sinsemillia.

  “Authorized to dispose,” one cop said, peering into the
incinerator. “Damn, this place is old.”

  Moreno sailed two bags into the glowing door while plastic hissed and the smoke filled the basement with a sweet-burnt blackness. In the dim basement Moreno said, “The government checks the smoke, man, you know. For emissions or whatever. It can’t be too thick or black out there, in the air. So burn some bags off that last cart, Sidney.”

  “Damn, this one’s heavy,” the cop said, helping him lift two red waste bags from the cart. When they threw it in, the plastic disappeared, and Archuleta’s leg lay in the burning bright branches of sinsemillia.

  “What the hell are you guys doing?” the older cop yelled. “You’re not supposed to burn body parts!”

  “I didn’t know it was there!” Sidney remembered his eyes burning, tearing. But Moreno didn’t care. “Man, them surgeons throw all kinda stuff in the bags. We can’t check em all. Lotta wombs in there. You know? I’m glad the doctors don’t decide guys don’t need our equipment no more.”

  The young cop stared inside the flames, and Moreno closed the door.

  In the newspaper, after they interviewed surgeons and cops and administrators, they came to the basement and Moreno told them everything. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about emissions and airborne viruses and gangrene. The photographer thought Moreno was hilarious, with his huge mustache, and Sidney didn’t notice the flash until it was too late.

  Behind Sundown Liquor were empty boxes in a pile. He wasn’t going to talk to Glorette. He wasn’t an idiot. He left her there and went around to the parking lot.

  Four men were under the pepper tree. Two red embers floating in the darkness, one set of white teeth laughing when he walked forward under the bright light from Sundown. Archuleta’s van, with wheelchair lifts at the back, with gaudy desert sunsets glowing on the doors, parked near the door. Sidney didn’t care. Chess hollered, “Hey, brotha, you lose your shirt?” Some other fool he didn’t even recognize said, “He still hot years after workin that basement.” Lafayette and Reynaldo Antoine wore plaster-spattered black Dickies; they didn’t move anything except their eyes. They never had to say much. Lafayette slammed down a three-six and said, “Fitteen.”