Gordo had the beers in hand, pints in frosted glasses. Despite the day’s fiasco, he felt pretty good. It was a temporary setback. Before leaving the scene today, Gordo had gone upstairs and snatched some unopened mail he found laying around the apartment. There was good stuff in that pile of envelopes, he knew there was.
When Gordo arrived at the table, Jonah was slouched on his stool, ignoring Foerster’s mail. Instead, he held a wet cloth napkin packed with ice against his forehead. He said he had gotten hit with a bottle, and he had an evil lump to prove it. The lump had cracked open and was oozing a sort of liquidy pus. Maybe there was some glass in there, Gordo didn’t know and didn’t care. He had bigger things to think about. For one, Jonah had shown him something today. That leap across the fire escapes, that took the door prize for guts. That was probably why Gordo felt so good, just knowing he had a partner with the stones to do that.
For a moment he saw the Jonah others saw. Light-skinned black man, son of a black mother and a white father. He had softer features than a lot of black guys – a leaner nose, thinner lips. Jonah was a solid, handsome dude, like an actor or maybe a pro baseball player out and about in street clothes.
It was rare for Gordo to look at him this way. Most of the time, Gordo still thought of his partner as he was when they first met and became friends in junior high school – a skinny kid with a crazy head of curly hair and basketball shorts hanging down past his knees. They had known each other a long time now – just about twenty years.
Gordo placed the beers on the table and slid onto his stool.
‘You want some acetaminophen?’ he said. ‘I got some out in the car. Generic store brand, but it works real good.’
Jonah shook his head. ‘The stuff is poison, man. It kills the liver.’
Gordo saw right away that Jonah was in a mood. Well, then it was up to Gordo to lighten the place up a little. ‘Listen, it was poor planning,’ he told Jonah. ‘The fucking guy out-thunk me, that’s all.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Jonah said.
‘We learned something today, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Planning is the key, all right? We just gotta look at all the angles. Cover all possible exits, no matter how crazy they seem.’
Jonah grimaced in response and stared down at the table. ‘That’s a long way to go to learn something.’
Gordo sipped his beer.
He was thirty-two years old, stood a shade under six feet tall, and weighed almost two hundred and fifty pounds. He thought he carried it pretty well, more like a strong, heavy thickness than fat. His massive belly was as hard as an iron skillet. His legs were like the trunks of California redwoods. His arms were like the big bass pipes on a giant church organ. And the nickname? He loved it. El Gordo. It reminded him of a superhero, or maybe a monster from the old Jap Godzilla movies. He had loved the girl down in Santo Domingo who thought it up, too. She was dark black with dyed-blonde hair and a killer body. Chocolata, she called herself, though God knew her real name was probably something a little more conventional like Rosa, or Maria. In any case, Gordo did her good, in ten different ways and in the morning he gave her an extra tip for the nickname idea.
He had been around.
He sold cocaine for a while when he was coming up. He had a little route that took him all over the metro area three days a week. It turned him off pretty quick. He grew tired of listening to screaming babies in the back bedrooms of tiny houses while Mom and Dad had a taste in the kitchen before buying. How often had he seen that? Once or twice, but it seemed like every week. He also didn’t like that paranoid, up-all-night feeling after too many lines, hours of time to think about the cops knocking down the door and coming through the walls one day soon. He got out before that could happen.
Later, he spent some time repossessing cars. It was back when the collapse started happening, the first phase. People had bought all kinds of junk on credit, and now they were out of money. Gas prices going through the roof, house values tanking, people losing jobs left and right – suddenly, paying the note on that Hummer or that Land Rover didn’t seem so smart anymore. Those were good times and Gordo made good money. It seemed like he could always make money, up or down, it didn’t matter.
But the banks themselves started going belly up. There was a glut of consumer shit out there – cars, boats, jet skis – and nobody was paying on any of it, but the companies didn’t want it back anymore, either. It cost more to collect the stuff than the money they could get reselling it or unloading it at auction. Then the gasoline dried up, and no middle-class worker bee would take a powerboat or a jet ski if you tried to give them one. You might as well try to give them bubonic plague. It was a good lesson to learn – toys that had once cost ten thousand, twenty thousand, even thirty thousand dollars or more could become worth zero, or less than zero, practically overnight.
When that happened, Gordo drifted for a while. The occasional repo popped up from time to time, but it wasn’t enough. During a brief period, maybe six months, he lost his confidence a little bit. He began to think that maybe he was going to go down with ship, that he wasn’t going to be able to turn this thing around.
Then he stumbled on an idea while watching television one night. They did a short piece on some fluff news show about guys who went around serving lawsuit papers and summonses to people who didn’t want to be served said papers. The show said the guys worked for themselves, on their own, taking jobs from the courts and from law firms that operated around the court buildings. It could be a rough and tumble type job, according to the announcer, good for snoops who weren’t afraid when people got out of line. The news piece was over in about five minutes. Afterward, Gordo sat on his couch and drank a beer, staring at whatever came on the television next. But what he was looking at was an image in his mind’s eye, an image of the Bronx County Courthouse.
For as long as he could remember, Gordo had known about the Courthouse. It was that huge off-white ten- story Art Deco monster looming in the distance beyond the white bunting and the bleachers at the old Yankee Stadium. It sat high above the elevated subway line and all the shops and fast food restaurants wedged together along the wide boulevard of 161st Street. It ate up a whole city block. It always caught his eye, and he would gaze at it between innings, but he never imagined himself going up the hill and walking inside. Then one day he found himself there, as if he had floated there in a dream. He passed through the security checkpoint without incident. He asked some faceless person for directions, waded through the crowds, and stood in line at a window. He took a course, complete with a workbook and pencils and a buttoned-down instructor who told the twenty people gathered in the dusty classroom how it was all going to go down. Two weeks later Gordo was serving paper.
He liked it and was good at it. He could find people, even the people who didn’t want to be found – especially those people. And once he found them, there was no mystery to serving them. His first test came early on.
One day, he had to serve a mechanic who was delinquent in his child support payments. It was a typical set-up. As the economy went from bad to worse, a lot of women were chasing down a lot of deadbeat dads who claimed they had no money. And an auto mechanic would be a good candidate for deadbeat dadhood – cars were dropping off the road like houseflies had once dropped in the first chill of October.
It was 6:30 in the evening, and Gordo tracked his prey to a nudie bar a block away from the auto body shop. The bar had a steeple in front as though it were once a church. The guy Gordo wanted was in there drinking dinner with two of his buddies, watching some blonde-haired Bavarian sow in a lime green thong gyrate to loud disco music back behind the bar. She liked the night life, she liked to boogie. Her huge pink nipples hung down almost to her waist. The thong carved into her love handles. The bartender, a creaky old Slav, looked so bored he was about to expire from the tedium.
Gordo had a copy of the mechanic’s photo from a driver’s license, so he knew what the guy looked like. He walked up to the three of them at their table and sat down. The guy he needed to serve was the one in the middle, still wearing his grimy and oil-caked work coveralls. He had slicked-back hair, a pock-marked face, and oversized hands. His two friends were a small round Mexican in a baseball cap and a skinny, dark West Indian. Gordo envied them their openness – here in the Bronx, the various cultures mostly steered clear of one another.
The three men eyed Gordo.
‘Eddie?’ Gordo said. ‘Eddie Valence?’ Gordo thought that somewhere in the past the family had Americanized its name from Valenzuela.
‘Who wants to know?’
Gordo gave them all an apologetic grin. ‘Hey, I hate to bother you man, but I got a problem with my car outside. I think it’s the carburetor. A guy told me to look in here for you, said you might be willing to make some extra money. It’ll probably take somebody like you five minutes to fix it. Me, I don’t know anything about cars.’
He paused, Valence looking at him, the other men staring past him now, eyes glued to the girl on stage. At the end of a long day, and after a few drinks, even a specimen like that could get a man going. Gordo knew how
