Bronx Noir

“My father is an asshole,” Jasmine said.

Yolanda didn’t have an answer for that and gave up on the subject.

“School’s started already, baby girl,” she announced a few days later.

“I can’t go to school,” Jasmine answered. Of course, she was right. What were her experiences compared to those of her potential classmates? How could she make a friend? How could she answer, What did you do last summer?

Yolanda dropped the subject. She wouldn’t know how to enroll the child in a school without being the legal guardian anyway, though she figured that couldn’t be too hard.

The next day, Yolanda went out for groceries. When she came back, there was no Jasmine.

“Shit,” she said. It was afternoon. She wouldn’t know where to find the girl until night had fallen.

Yolanda sat for a moment. She was tired. She tried to calculate the chances that Jasmine had already scored and was shooting up or snorting or smoking something. Chances were good.

It was near midnight before Yolanda found Jasmine coming out of a parked car right where Farragut Street met Hunts Point Avenue. She was high and giggling, and she didn’t know how many men she’d been with.

Back in Yolanda’s place, Jasmine fell asleep, and Yolanda made a phone call. When Jasmine woke the next morning, Yolanda was out, and Ray Morales was sitting in an armchair, smoking a cigarette, and reading the Daily News comics. She was frightened and it took a few moments for her to figure out where she was.

“Who you?” she asked without getting up from the sofa.

“Ray,” the man said. He flicked his cigarette into an ashtray and turned the page on the comics. Ray was a small man—five-foot-two and maybe 110 pounds. Wiry. He wore shades though there wasn’t much sunlight coming in through any of the windows. His hair was dark and wavy, slicked back. He might have been forty years old like Yolanda, but if he was they had been forty hard years.

“You know Yolanda?”

The man looked up and smiled. “No, I just broke in for a cigarette and the comics” He laughed at his own joke. Jasmine wasn’t sure she got it, but she laughed too.

Ray just sat and read while Jasmine went about her morning business. She took a piece of toast for her breakfast—her hunger was for other things—then headed for the door.

“Nope,” Ray said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean no. You’re not going out. Yolanda wants you here when she gets back.”

“I’m just going to the store to get something.”

“No.”

“I really need to go.”

“No.”

“But—”

“No infinity. Sit your ass down.”

Ray looked mad when he said this. He hadn’t taken off the shades and he held his cigarette between index and middle fingers jabbing at Jasmine as he said his nos.

Jasmine did as she was told, but thought of some ways around this man. Her best option, she thought as she chewed her nails, was to make a dash past him to the door. If he caught up with her, she’d start kicking and screaming rape. With all her bruises, it didn’t seem like it would be that hard to get people to believe her. She was making up her mind to try this, trying to avoid Ray’s shaded eyes, when Yolanda returned.

“Who’s that?” Jasmine jumped to shout, a finger pointed at Ray.

“That’s Ray,” Yolanda said. “He’s my husband.”

Ray smiled again and went back to his comics.

Ray and Yolanda had married when they were teenagers and divorced a couple of years later when Ray was sentenced to eighteen years in a federal penitentiary for his part in a liquor store robbery that went really, really bad. He hadn’t pulled the trigger, but that didn’t matter as much as he thought it should have. He did every bit of his time and collected bottles and cans and did odd jobs for his living now. He lived in an SRO on Bruckner, paying his room rent weekly. Yolanda explained all of this while making sandwiches for the three of them. Jasmine listened, wiping sweat from her brow and scratching at her arms and face.

“Where’s he going to sleep?” she asked.

“In my bed,” Yolanda said.

“I don’t like this. I don’t want him here. No offense,” Jasmine said, turning to Ray. He shrugged and moved on to the sports pages.

Jasmine’s reaction to coming down off whatever she had taken the night before was mild, but she was twitchy and everyone including her knew that if she had the chance, she’d go out and get high again.

That night in bed, Ray and Yolanda talked in voices low enough to hear the creaking of the floorboards if Jasmine got any bright ideas.

“She’s not Rosita,” Ray said.

“I know that.”