Songs of Innocence

“What are you doing?” I said. “Jesus, Di, Julie’s fine. She’s in the hospital, but she’s okay. And—” I carefully lifted my glasses off my face, held them out at arm’s length. “Where’s the bathroom in this place? I’ve got to wash this stuff off.”

I saw her bend and lunge for a corner of the room. She had to be going for the canister. I quickly wiped the lenses of my glasses against my shirt and put them on again. “Di, stop it. I don’t know what you think I’m going to do to you, but I’m not, I promise.”

“You son of a bitch,” she said. Through the smears on my lenses I could see she had her arm up again. She came toward me and I circled around, trying to keep her a few steps away. “You motherfucking son of a bitch, where are they? Where’s Joey?”

“Who’s Joey?”

“My fucking boyfriend! You know who he is!”

“No I don’t.”

“I told her,” she said, and there were tears in her voice, “I told her not to go, I told her you’d pull some shit, but she said, ‘What’s the worst he can do to me in a public place?’ Like that makes a difference.”

“Di—”

“He called me. I told him to follow her, keep an eye on her, make sure she was okay, make sure you didn’t do anything to her, and he called me afterwards, said you grabbed her, dragged her into some tunnel, and when he followed you, you hit him with a fucking two-by- four, left him lying in the fucking dirt...”

My gut seized up as she spoke.

“Joey,” I said, “is that short for something?”

“Jorge!” she shouted.

Jorge.

I pictured Jorge Ramos as I’d first seen him, eating on the grass across from Buell Hall, looking in our direction from time to time. Then, when we moved, picking up his stuff and following, doing his conspicuous stretches. Then pulling his gun. But when? When had he pulled it? I remembered my conversation with Julie growing heated. She’d shouted at me; she’d slapped my hand away and said “Don’t touch me.” And I’d shouted at her. From yards away, could it have looked like I was threatening her? Especially to someone who’d been told I might?

And then he’d pulled his gun, and I’d grabbed Julie and run. She’d struggled, she’d screamed— Let go of me! Get your fucking hands off me!—and what had I done? I’d dragged her into a building and down a flight of stairs and into a tunnel underground.

What else was the man supposed to think was going on?

And now—

And now, thanks to me, he lay in my bed, the wound in his throat gaping. His last sight had been his blood geysering toward the ceiling of my room.

“Di, stop,” I said. I let my hands drop. Something in my voice must have gotten through to her, since she stopped circling, stopped making little lunges at me with the canister.

“Julie’s okay. She’s actually the one who hit... Joey. We thought he was trying to kill her—trying to kill both of us.”

“You thought he was trying to kill her? He was trying to protect her!”

“He had a gun,” I said. “He pulled it and came after us. We thought Ardo had sent him.”

“He brought the...I didn’t tell him to bring the gun!”

“Well, he brought it. And we thought what you’d have thought if you saw a man come after you with a gun.”

She shook her head. “Fuck.”

“But I promise you, he was okay when we left him,” I said. “Unconscious, but breathing. I took Julie to St. Vincent’s—she needed more surgery on her hand. That’s where she is now.”

“So where’s Joey?” she said. “He called me at work, but when I got home, he wasn’t there. He won’t answer his cell, I can’t find him anywhere.”

No, I thought, he won’t answer his cell. But you can find him somewhere. Right now, that would be the police morgue.

“Di, I’ll tell you what happened, but you’ve got to promise not to spray me—”

“Just talk.”

“Promise.”

She hesitated, then slammed the canister down on a shelf, walked five steps away from it. “Tell me what happened.”

I told her.

Samantha wasn’t working tonight, but another woman was, a tiny Latina with little teacup breasts and enormous eyes. This was Rodeo, only she corrected my pronunciation when I said it—“No, no, man, Ro-DAY-oh, like the drive, you know?” I said I knew. She got me a cold compress, which I used to mop my face. I washed my glasses twice, using Palmolive from the kitchenette, but they didn’t get completely clean. I wondered if they ever would.

Di had been crying, but Rodeo had gotten a compress for her, too, and now her face was set in stern lines, her eyes focused a thousand miles away. She was thinking about her daughter, I imagined, thinking about her job, about her life. Thinking about her dead boyfriend. I wondered if he’d been her daughter’s father. None of my business. Just that much worse if he had.

I’d told her Miklos and Ardo had killed him after tying me up in the church basement. I hadn’t told her of my role in the whole thing, about how I’d tossed Jorge Ramos to the wolves—to the lion—in order to keep him from devouring me. But I’d told her the rest, including how I’d found his body and how the police had found it minutes later, how the newspapers would be full of it tomorrow.

“Shit, man,” Rodeo said, “ ‘Spanic man found dead on Bedford Street, no paper’s gonna be full of that, ’cept maybe El Diario.”

“Even if he’s found in a white man’s apartment?”

“In the Village?” Rodeo said. “They’ll just think it’s a gay thing.”

They might. I hated myself for it, but silently I was hoping she was right, that the city’s persistent racism would work in my favor, would keep the story buried on page 39 or 56 or nowhere at all.

“I’ll kill them both,” Di said in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice. She’d been saying things like this on and off for the past hour. She didn’t look at either of us as she said it. We might as well not have been there.

Then the phone rang, and since Di was very obviously in no condition to answer it, Rodeo ran to get it. When she returned she said, “It’s Willie. Little Willie. He’s here.” She put her hand on Di’s shoulder, snapped her fingers twice. Di turned her head, slowly, then stood and walked to the back room without saying anything.

Rodeo turned to me. “You stayin’ or goin’, man? You can’t be out here.”

“I’d like to ask you some questions. About Dorrie—Cassie, I mean. You going to be long?”

“With Little Willie?” She laughed. “Twenty minutes, tops. Man can’t last worth a damn.”

“Okay. I’ll be in the back. With Di.”

The buzzer buzzed then, and I went to the back room, closed the door behind me. Through the wall I heard the elevator chains dragging and clanking, then the elevator door sliding open and, moments later, Little Willie’s knock. I sat down in the folding chair next to Di’s, at a round plastic table scarred with cigarette burns all along its edge.

“Little Willie, huh?” I said.

“He’s a small man,” Di said. “With a large penis. John, why’d they do it? Why’d they have to kill Joey? He’d never done anything to them. Never. Nothing.”

I didn’t know what to tell her. Sometimes you lie through your teeth, to protect people, or yourself. Sometimes you just can’t. I didn’t have the energy to lie, so I took the coward’s way out and kept my mouth shut.

“And you...you say they had you tied up? How did you manage to get away?” There was more than a hint of