Burning Time

“I’ll watch you down the street.”

“Thanks.”

He always said that. He was missing most of his teeth and was hardly five feet tall. But he had been a marine and kept a baseball bat beside his chair. Emma had no doubt that he would use it if something happened. It was quiet now, though. No sirens, no homeless.

Emma stepped outside and greedily breathed the fresh salty air from the river. Her building was on the corner of Riverside Drive, two long blocks from Broadway where all the stores were. She began walking slowly, testing the muscles in her legs. The ache went very deep. It was hard to imagine people running in the marathon for twenty-six miles at a stretch.

She wondered how it felt as they were doing it, and if it felt anything like this afterwards? After running only three and a half miles, she had to admit she didn’t feel all that wonderful. As she walked, she glanced at the trees which were in full leaf now, noticed the few cars that passed. Riverside and West End Avenue were quiet streets. Broadway was where all the trouble was. She considered what she would buy. Something really bad, with a crusty French bread.

As she got to the corner of West End Avenue, she decided to open a bottle of wine. She passed the thick old tree that partially blocked the view to the intersection. A car was parked in the space in front of the fire hydrant. Emma watched the traffic light change to green, and had prepared to speed up to make it when an arm snaked around her from the back.

“Hi, Emma.”

“Wha—” She jerked back and the arm tightened, wrenching her shoulder.

“Don’t get upset. I’m not going to hurt you.” The voice was calm, very polite.

“Ow.” A hard object was shoved into her stomach, pushing the air out of her lungs.

She saw it. It was a gun.

“Ah—” Her knees buckled.

“Get in the car, Emma, or I will shoot you.”

Now she could see that the car door was open. Blue car. Her knees sagged. She couldn’t stand up. A scream gathered in her throat trying to take shape, but she had no breath. Her mouth wouldn’t move.

“Uh, ah—”

“Not a sound,” he said. “It’s gonna to be fine. It’s gonna be great. Don’t worry about a thing.”

He moved her into the car as if she were a sack of laundry, then hit her on the head with the butt of the gun, hit her maybe a little harder than he meant to. The thunk was quite loud and startled him. She slumped over in the front seat.

He checked her pulse to make sure she was still alive, then covered her with a pale blue blanket, tucking it in carefully so it wouldn’t fall off. Then he looked around quickly, closed the door, and walked around to the driver’s seat.

“Say good-bye, Emma,” he murmured, patting the blue blanket as he drove off.

42

Sometimes April was so busy she didn’t have time to think about Sanchez, and sometimes, like right now, she found herself listening to his voice. He was on the phone having some kind of conversation with his mother. He was speaking in his fish-in-water language, and said her name.

“Si, Mama.”

Sanchez had a special tone of voice when he talked to his mother. April had mixed feelings about it. Sanchez told April that when she talked to her mother, it always sounded like they were arguing, no matter what they were talking about. When he talked to his mother, it sounded like she was center of the earth to him.

Spanish people were not so different from Chinese, April thought. Both spoil their sons rotten, give them everything, and never get mad at them. Fix it so when they marry, their wives sound like scolding nags and can never make them as happy.

“Si, Mama,” he said again.

And then something something else about la casa and something something else she didn’t get at all. They were on the four-to-eleven shift that day. Maybe he was telling her when he was getting home.

By now April was beginning to pick up a few of the words. It wasn’t a hard language like Chinese, which had a lot of different dialects and words that changed their meaning just by the register and tone in which they were spoken. She had a lot of paperwork to do and tried not to listen. Soon she was thinking about it again.

It was a good thing that Sanchez had respect for his mama, but a bad thing that he hung on her every word. Pretty soon she was speculating about how Spanish women were lower than Chinese. Chinese kept their pride in their face. Men and women, same thing. Both had pride, both had face. All Chinese spent time on saving face, protecting face, building face. It was kind of like face was money in the bank, and you could accrue interest on it, or lose it all, if you didn’t watch and protect it every day, and invest it just right. Jimmy lost face when his girl dumped him and he had to go home on the subway.

Spanish had their pride in a different body part. They didn’t care about face. Spanish had their pride in their penises. So only men could have it. You could see by the way they walked and talked that was where the pride was. Women were lower, had no pride. They walked around with their clothes too tight and their big behinds bouncing up and down to get men’s attention. Lipstick too bright, eyes too dark. All so they could attract a man and get some pride from him. Pah. And then when they got one, if he was a true Spanish man, he’d have the red-eye disease, be crazy jealous over her big, jiggling bottom, afraid every minute some other man would take it away.

Still, Sanchez went home to take care of his mama after his marriage broke up and his father died. And he was not ashamed of it. That was like Chinese, but not like Caucasians, who ran away from their parents in a big stampede as soon as their hormones changed. Other people just did their sex business and went home, didn’t have to make a big deal about it.

April couldn’t help wondering about Sanchez. Why did his marriage break up? Why were all the women he knew named Maria? It was hard to tell if they were sisters, or aunts, or cousins, or girlfriends, or what. Even Sanchez’s ex-wife was called Maria. That was another difference between the two cultures. Each Chinese had his own name, not like anybody else’s name. Parents put together whatever words they wanted. Happy Face. Free of Sorrow. Jade Luck. Tomorrow’s Chance. Chinese named their children like round-eyes named racehorses.

April’s Chinese name was Happy Thinking, as a kind of counteractive against the way she wrinkled her nose just after birth, as if she came into the world with a bad smell in her nose and was thus fated to spend her whole life questioning everything. Her mother liked to tell how she called her daughter Happy Thinking to trick the Gods into changing April’s fate.

“Didn’t work,” Sai lamented. Her unlucky daughter was still sniffing out the worst in everybody. She also liked to say she was afraid her only child had too much un-tempered yin to get married, which April believed was a contradiction in terms.

“You can’t be too much woman to be woman,” April told her.

“Not woman like person,” Sai argued. “Woman like down thinking. Settle for less when you could have husband, babies. Not gun in hangbag.”

“Handbag.”

April’s phone rang just when she was wondering which Maria Sanchez was now having his sex business with before he went home to his mother.

“Detective Woo?”

“Yes, speaking,” April said. It was a voice she knew, but couldn’t place.

“This is Jason Frank.”

“Oh.” The doctor who didn’t call himself a doctor.

“I’m calling from San Diego.”

San Diego again? “What are you doing there?” she asked with surprise. It was nine o’clock at night. What