Bronx Noir Read online

  The short man lay there gasping, twitching. The tall one turned and looked at the woman lying on the ground. She had bobbed stringy hair, her shirt filthy, too big for her, hanging down off her shoulder. Her neck so thin like a sick bird or child. The tall one reached down and began pulling at the legs of her pants and then she was bare.

  He knew he should step in, but he did not. No one did.

  When the tall man finished—it did not take long—he stood and pulled his pants up, turned and saw the other man still lying on the ground. He spit on the short man, and then moved through the crowd to the other end of the hold, where he disappeared inside a wall of faces. When the short one came to and saw his wife, he gathered her into a corner where he held her and wept.

  A world unto itself: no ruler, no rules.

  In the morning they found the woman by the kitchen area. She had used the lid of a rusty can to carve open her wrists. Her bottom still naked, she sat with her eyes open against the wall in a wide dark puddle. The short man was dead too, no signs of trauma beyond what he had suffered during the fight. He had just stopped living. No one knew if he or his wife had died first.

  They were still far enough out at sea to dump the bodies, so he was picked to prepare the woman and her husband on the deck to make sure they sank and stayed sunk. He tied them together with rope, stuffed their clothes with any random refuse or wood or metal he could find. Then he rolled them overboard and thought at least they had finished their voyage together.

  When he got back to the apartment he found his neighbor knocking on his door, an old woman with white hair and leathery wrinkled skin. A few times she had offered him food—yellow rice with beans and some salty shredded meat—that he gladly accepted.

  Now she spoke very fast, kept poking up the corners of her own eyes, then flashing two fingers, then pointing at the floor. She did this over and over again. Finally he took her wrists in his hands and smiled at her and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Sank you.” She took a breath and shrugged, then went back to her own apartment.

  He could still smell the perfume of the whore on his skin, so he took another shower. Then he turned on the television and sat on the mattress. He knew what the old woman had been trying to tell him: Two men with slanted eyes had come looking for him. This was not a shock or surprise. Since his first steps here, in this new place, this new world, he had known that they would find him, that someone would.

  Here the dreams were always the same: the taste of the water, the bubble of salt and surf, smoke and gas and oil in his nose and mouth, leaking down his throat. Knowing that his eyes were open in the water and yet all he could see was black; the floating, the flash and flail of his limbs. Was he watching his own death? He did not know then, but it was what he felt now. He woke in the middle of the night and drank a glass of water. Then he sat in the chair he never sat in, sat by the window smoking and watching the sunrise over the highway.

  He thought about home, the person he used to be. How he had grown up in a fishing village in Fujian province, learning to farm as well, to make a living with his hands and back. How his family had no money to send him to school; and how he had come to realize around the age of thirteen that he had no talent for the life that his family and ancestors had paved for him. When his parents died (he was twenty by then), he left.

  It took him days to get to Fuzhou, walking and stealing rides with strangers. Finally a truck filled with workers took him into the heat of the big buildings, the lights, the colors, the taste and smell of so many people, so many machines. He was afraid he would be swallowed by it all, that everyone around him would know he was a country boy. He found work in a hotel restaurant cleaning dishes and taking out garbage. He worked as many hours as they would let him, slept little, saved all of his money, but still he did not feel like a rich man.

  Then one day in the hotel he was relaxing after his shift. The bar and lounge were half-crowded. A man sat down next to him wearing a dark suit and collared shirt with no tie. The man’s watch shined in the lights around the bar. They began talking, and then the man said, “Have you ever thought about going to America?” His face appeared to be young but his eyes made him look old. They stared at each other.

  “No,” he said, “never thought about it.”

  The man gave him a card. “Call me if you want to stop wasting your life.”

  The man paid his bill and walked out. He looked at the man’s card and called him two days later. He said he did not want to go to America, but wanted to stop wasting his life.

  His job was to recruit, to work the city for potential clients. He was trained to spot who and what they were looking for.

  “Dressed shabby, looking a little lost. You know, country folk.”

  “Is that why you came up to me in the bar?”

  The man stared at him and told him to pay attention.

  “The police are paid off. So are the officials we need. But don’t be cocky. If you show off they will make an example of you.”

  He learned to spot them in crowds, in markets, on the street. He had his pitch, all the facts that anyone in the beginning would need to know: thirty-thousand U.S. total, at least five to ten up front, the rest when you get there. “How?” they would sometimes ask, and he would tell them by boat or by plane. It cost more if you wanted passports and special work papers.

  “We know your relatives, we know where you live. We are watching you on both sides. We are taking big risks to give you the chance of a lifetime. Don’t disrespect us. Don’t make us or your family lose face.”

  He knew when clients were satisfied. People would find him to thank him, tell him how well their sons and husbands and fathers were doing over there, the riches they were making, the opulent lives they would all someday lead. “He’ll be a citizen in a few years, then he can bring us all over,” one wife told him. “He sends me beautiful clothes and jewelry,” said another. “We’re going to live in a big house with big cars.” He would smile and nod and later more people from the same family, the same clan, would come to him to make the journey. They borrowed money from relatives, from friends, from anyone who could afford to give just a little to send them away to find their dreams. No one talked about the ones who did not make it, who were caught and shipped back, held by police and beaten; then sent back to their villages to pay a huge fine, only to begin planning when they would try again.

  He worked Fuzhou for two years, then his boss asked him to help with operations in Hong Kong. He practiced his Cantonese, learned the new landscape of police and officials, who knew what, what areas were safe to work. Now he helped to coordinate and find secure holding areas while the boats and ships and passports and payoffs were taken care of. He learned the routes that spanned the world—from Hong Kong or Fuzhou or ports out of Malaysia or Thailand, across the ocean and into South America or Europe. Groups as small as two or three, sometimes as big as twenty, thirty, fifty, more. They might wait in a holding area in a strange country for months, kept by enforcers in a house or warehouse or apartment, until it was safe to move again.

  Because they did not want to wind up in the Netherlands or Peru or even Canada. America was where they wanted to go, and even though he was no longer pitching and recruiting the dream, it was still the backdrop of his thoughts—places like New York, San Francisco, cities within cities filled with Chinese; piles of money waiting to be made, the fine clothes and food that would adorn their lives, teachers and schools that would educate their children and make them citizens, so they would never have to suffer.

  He had talked so much about it that even he began to believe. But he did not have thirty thousand dollars, and he wondered if he was still wasting his life.

  Then he was told about the next big plan: a new shipping route, from Thailand to Kenya, then around the tip of Africa, then on to the U.S. Almost three hundred passengers, they would need extras to work the crew.

  “Are you interested?” his boss asked him. “Think of it this way: You get to see the
world, spend a few days in New York when it’s over.”

  He did not see any way to disagree.

  That afternoon he went to the school to deliver the professor’s meal. The professor handed him two brochures, one in Chinese.

  “For classes,” he said. “The school is close to Penn Station, easy to get to.”

  He looked at the brochure written in Chinese, on the front a picture of a young Chinese woman, smiling, a book splayed open in front of her. Learn English—live life!

  The professor said, “It’s cheaper than taking classes here, which you might not be ready for anyway. This would prepare you.”

  He kept staring at the brochures, did not know what to say, what to do.

  The professor said, “Let me know if you have any questions, if you need help filling out the forms.” The professor reached out his hand. He looked at the gold band around the professor’s left ring finger, then shook his hand without thanking him.

  The rest of the day, as he made his deliveries he wondered about the professor’s life, compared it to his own. On days off he sometimes took the bus to the movie theater in the shopping plaza, and like the baseball games, he could surmise what was happening by the the tone of voice and look on an actor’s face. Afterward he would browse through shops in the plaza, sometimes buying socks or undershirts or small things that he did not necessarily need. Other times he went to the open market and bought vegetables and meat and went home and tried to cook, but always seemed to burn his food. Then he would go to a restaurant where he would be surrounded by brown and black people—no whites, definitely no Chinese. He would look at the menu and point, a kind of guessing game, and he knew that no matter what they brought him he would eat it.

  No one bothered him in these places, and was this so different from what an American might call life? He did not feel he was much better or worse off than anyone else around him. Except for when he was lonely, when he would argue with himself as to whether or not to go to the whore.

  The professor, he thought, did not need to visit a whore. Nor did he wile away his time watching movies or burning food or hording money and constantly looking over his shoulder. The professor had a wife and children, he imagined; a big house somewhere in a neighborhood of identical houses, did not live within the rows of blocky brick buildings with rusted fire escapes draped top to bottom that surrounded the school. He pictured the professor’s home decorated with classical Chinese paintings and calligraphy, a shiny new car parked in the driveway, next to a green lawn where his children could safely play. He was sure he had more in that suitcase than the professor had in any bank, but the thought did not make him feel any better. What good was it if he could not spend it?

  Maybe that was the problem. He could buy a small restaurant, but he knew nothing about the business except how to bus tables and make deliveries. Or he could open a store here in the Bronx that sold groceries and goods for Chinese people; but that would be silly because there were not enough Chinese. In the end he knew there was no way he could do any of these things without spending money and drawing attention to himself; and this was not like Chinatown where he knew he would feel less lonely, feel as if he were part of something again.

  He remembered going just a few days after he had arrived, taking a car from the hotel into the city, all arranged by the desk clerk. (Americans, he thought, were no different than Chinese: You give them enough money and they will do anything for you.) The car dropped him off and the white driver got out and leaned on the hood, smoking and reading the paper, and he began walking toward the crowd of Chinese faces, felt relief hearing his own dialect and Cantonese and Mandarin street to street. The stores selling big crates full of herbs and spices, vegetables, fresh fish, roasted ducks, and barbecued meat hanging in the greasy windows. They sold clothes, shoes, perfume, watches, toys. He had been to a thousand markets like these in Fuzhou and Hong Kong, but here the feel of the air, the smell of the streets, even the ground beneath him felt different.

  He walked below an overpass and past plain storefronts with Chinese signs advertising for workers. Here there were no blacks or whites or browns, only others like him. “You want to work? You—you want to work?” They were calling out in Fukienese, Cantonese. He ignored them, kept walking, felt his heart and stomach go slithery inside. He knew this was what everyone on the ship had come for—the chance to work nonstop every day to repay the debt that was their lives.

  He went to a small restaurant on a side street and ordered a bowl of beef noodle soup and small dragon buns. When the food came he did his best to eat slowly, the taste of the broth and beef slivers and noodles soaking into his mouth, his first real meal in months.

  He picked up a Chinese newspaper from the table next to him and read about the ship, the Golden Venture, stranded just off the shore of Long Island, filled with illegal Chinese: two-hundred and eighty-six captured, ten drowned, six escaped. He stared at the pictures of them all on the beach, wrapped in blankets, herded like animals. He tried to recognize the faces but could not.

  Six escaped.

  He lit a cigarette and the waitress came over and said, “No smoking.”

  He finished his meal and left. As he walked back to the car he felt the eyes of the city pressing in on him—the people, the buildings, the cars, the birds, the cracks in the concrete walls and streets surrounding. Maybe someone had spotted him and was already following, because this was America, a fast and wild and frightening place. Here, even among his own, he could feel how they were outsiders, transplanted.

  On his way back to the hotel he stared out the window, remembered how he had heard the captain and the crew leader talking, how they had not received communication from shore, did not know if and when the boats would meet them out at sea as planned or if they were supposed to press on and dock.

  He knew from all the muttering and murmuring that the situation was not good. They had been at sea now for three months. It had been bad from the beginning—those who grew sick and delirious right away, puking and shitting on themselves as if indigent and mad; then the fighting each day, passenger versus passenger, enforcer versus passenger; all of them hungry; breathing the air heavy with the smell of saltwater and sea-soaked metal and piss and shit and bodies festering and congealed. He dreaded his rounds below deck, could not imagine what it was like to be down there every minute of every day, as the passengers were not allowed above deck lest they be spotted from the air.

  The things he had done, the horrors he had seen: the short man and the short man’s wife, letting them both die, then rolling them into the sea; swinging a club and cracking a man’s skull for stealing the crew’s water and food; a woman held down and fucked until she bled, and by the time he was inside her, her eyes were still open but she no longer screamed.

  He had always thought of himself as a good and simple man, but now he knew this was not true.

  He was in one of the sleeping cabins when he felt the crunch of the boat, heard the thunk and grind, thought that they had smashed their way onto shore. He was up on his feet, gliding toward the deck, heard the screaming, the footsteps and pounding, scrambling in the hold below, heard the thwack of the helicopter above, being chased by a swirling beam of light. Then he saw the flood of bodies coming up through the doors and hatches, spewing like a fountain, spreading across the deck like ants. More lights attacking, the helicopter circling, electric voices in English, boats closing in, engines ripping the water.

  In the distance he could see the shore, big spotlights and smaller yellow dots maybe three hundred meters away. He looked around for his crewmates, for an escape boat or plan, but the frenzy was too much, people pushing, shoving, the twist and shriek of the fray. He heard the splashing first, then turned and saw them going over one by one near the bow, in groups over the side. He ran for the side and jumped out as far as he could, feet first into the water, flesh locking, the freeze crushing against him. He told himself that he was the son of a fisherman and that he would not die in the wat
er. His arms and legs began to move even though he could not feel them.

  Waves crashing over his head, he went under for as long as he could, kept kicking, thrashing, just trying to pull away; opening his eyes, trying to see, thinking of the boats and the helicopter and what they would do to him if he was caught. He came up for air and went under again, and when he came back up he was further away from the ship and there were more boats now closing in, but he was behind it all, off to the side.

  He knew he would not make it like this, his arms and legs like lead, trying to take in as much air as he could, water in his mouth, bloating his stomach, seeping through his lungs. Then he heard a voice, saw his crew leader’s head bobbing up and down. He was holding onto something, using it like a flotation device, saw the crew leader paddling in his direction in the hard and heavy surf. They swam toward each other, and when he was close enough he saw his own arm swing up out of the water and then down, his fist landing with a crack against the crew leader’s nose, then he was wrestling the small case away into his own arms as the other man’s head disappeared. He held onto the case and kicked, kept his head on a swivel as he swam for the dark water and stretch of lights.

  When he finally felt the sand in his toes it was so quiet he thought he was dead already. He saw houses with big wooden decks lining the shore. He could not stop his teeth from chattering, could feel all his bones and flesh shaking, his stomach and head filled with fire, and this told him he was not dead. He hugged the suitcase close to his chest even as he crawled onto the beach, spitting and coughing, his innards burning like oil and acid in his blood. When he looked back he saw the lights still shining, the freighter locked down. He had swam more than three hundred meters to get to shore, felt like a kind of superman, alone, freezing, but uncaptured and alive. His father, he thought, would be proud.