Half-Resurrection Blues (5 page)

T
he first time I met Kia I realized I could never hide anything from her. She was only fourteen, and by the way she worked the counter at Baba Eddie’s botánica, you’da thought she owned and operated the joint single-handedly. She bounced back and forth between customers, arguing about how much yerba buena to use in a spiritual cleansing and helping an old man who wanted to get his wife back from her new lesbian lover. When she saw me, there was a momentary freeze in her confident frenzy. Her big green eyes bored into mine, and I knew she could tell there was something not quite right. She raised one eyebrow and pursed her lips. I was startled. Most people have to touch my skin to realize I’m a little off and then they’re all freaked-out. So I was even more startled when she said, “I’ll be right with you,” and kept it moving.

Now she’s sixteen, and I’m pretty sure she handles most of the online business and advertising for Baba Eddie. And possibly runs the entire business as well. She’s perched on a stool, clackety-clacking away on the desktop computer, when I walk in. “Whaddup, Carlos?” she says without looking up.

“Kia.” I nod. “Taking over the world again?”

“Mm-hmm. One online customer at a time.”

“I hope Baba Eddie’s paying you well for all the good work you do for him.”

Kia scoffs. “You’re damn right he does. Well . . . let’s put it this way. I get paid.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“I do payroll. So . . . I get paid. And so does Baba Eddie. So everybody’s happy.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, Baba got Russell and his big corporate paycheck taking care of him, so it all works out.”

“You getting your schoolwork done in the midst of all this?”

Kia looks up at me for the first time and narrows her eyes. “How ’bout Carlos worries about Carlos and Kia worries about Kia, m’kay?” She turns back to the screen.

I just frown and say, “’Kay.” Kia looks up again, probably because I didn’t zing back with some slickness, and now regards me more carefully.

“Whatsamatta—lady trouble?”

Ugh. Omniscient teenagers are the worst. “No.”

“What’s her name?”

Now I wish Kia would go back to her computer and leave me alone. Sometimes I think she has the same third-eye vision that I do. I try not to imagine Sasha’s smiling face dancing around my head.

It doesn’t work.

“She a weirdo like you?”

She is! I want to yell it from the roof of this crummy little building, shatter the storefront windows with my raging joy to have found another weirdo like me. Instead I say: “How ’bout Carlos worries about Carlos and Kia shuts up and does her homework?”

Kia rolls her eyes and submerges back into whatever social networking site she’s ruling. “Okay, Carlos.”
Clackety- clackety-clack
. “Have a wack afternoon with your heart full of lead, dipshit.”
Clackety-clack.

“Thank you, Kia. Baba Eddie ’round?”

“The back.”
Clackety.
I make my way through the narrow aisles full of potions, soaps, and candles. “With a client.”

Fine. I drop into an old easy chair they have set up next to the bookshelf and liberate a Malagueña from its wrapper. Before I can light it, a commotion erupts from the back room and then a perfectly round woman in her late sixties bursts out of the curtain. “¡Coño!” I jump to my feet, hand clutching my cane-blade, and then remember where I am. A screaming Latin lady is really no kind of anomaly in Baba Eddie’s place. “Gracias, Baba! ¡Gracias! ¡Ay, coño . . . ! ¡María de los aguas infinitas! Se me va acabar mañana . . . ¡Mañana, carajo!”

Eddie’s voice drifts out from behind her, a gentle sussuring of affirmations.

The woman explodes through the store in a flurry of jangling jewelry and thick perfume. She blows kisses at Kia, waves dramatically at the three of us, and exits. The bells and wind chimes on the door jingle away as she rumbles off, still chatting ecstatically to no one in particular.

“Well, damn, Baba.”

“Don’t ever let them tell you Baba Eddie don’t know how to please a lady.” He’s a little guy with a big mustache. Also, he dresses more like a dorky suburban dad than a Brooklyn santero. Today he’s got on an old beige baseball cap and a plaid shirt that hangs from his ponchy potbelly over slightly stained khaki pants. “C’mon, Carlos, let’s go outside for a smoke.”

*   *   *

I don’t get cigarettes. It’s like all the worst parts of cigars—stank breath, yellow teeth, slow and horrible death—but none of that warm invigoration. Baba Eddie, on the other hand, adores his menthols with religious fervor. Smoking’s the last poison left for him since the retrovirals kamikazed his liver, and he relishes that shit like it’s the first drop of Mother Mary’s tit milk, each and every time. I gotta say, repellent as the habit is to me, I respect a man who can enjoy a simple, cancer-filled pleasure. So I wait while Baba Eddie ceremoniously produces a single smoke from the gold cigarette case that Russell gave him for their twentieth anniversary. He smells it, closing his eyes like a good little connoisseur, and then places it between his lips. I can see the excitement building in him. He actually enjoys teasing his body, triggering those little addiction demons that roam through his bloodstream. He brings the lighter up to his face, flicks it to life, and then holds it inches away from the tip of the menthol. I roll my eyes. This routine used to annoy the shit out of me until Riley and I got smashed and made fun of it for about fourteen hours straight. Since then, Baba Eddie’s cigarette appreciation ritual has only been comedy to me.

Finally, it’s lit, and the first luxurious drag has been released into the chilly afternoon air and the little priest looks up at me and smiles. “What’s troubling you, Carlos?”

“It’s not me. I mean, it’s not what’s troubling me that I’m here for. That’s not . . . It’s another. What I mean is . . .” I pause, but my thoughts still won’t collect into rational sentences. Baba Eddie puts on his patient face and enjoys his cigarette. “I mean nothing’s troubling me.”

“Mentira.”

“True. But that’s not why I’m here.”

“Fair enough.”

“I’m here because Riley, Dro, and I are dealing with an ngk on Mama Esther’s block.”

Baba Eddie’s eyes get big. “You saw it? A true ngk?” His pronunciation is exquisite, like he’s been saying “ngk” all his life. Must be part of the training to achieve Baba-status, which, from what I gather, must be pretty rigorous.

I nod.

“Shit.”

“You know how to deal with ’em, Baba?”

The santero shakes his head, still wide-eyed. “Carlos, this could be disastrous. Is Mama Esther okay?”

“She’s managing. It’s a few doors down from her.”

“But if it spreads . . .”

“I know.”

Neither of us wants to say the next part, so we just let it hang there unspoken. I borrow Eddie’s lighter and spark up my Malagueña. “Any idea what we can do?”

“I . . . I’ll have to check on some things.” I’ve really never seen him this flustered and I hope I never do again. Even when we don’t need spiritual advice, Baba Eddie’s is where we come just to hang. It’s nice to be around folks who get it, and Baba will keep his head on through any kind of fuckery and come out smiling.

“Thanks, Baba,” I say. He nods, and then we stand out in the cold, coveting each thick tug of smoke and not saying anything for a long
time.

I
’m almost six feet tall and Moishe the real estate guy still towers over me. When he smiles, it’s not the please- be-my-friend grin of a man trying to sell me something. Instead his mouth creases outward and opens slightly into a true, from-the-gut smile. When he asks me how I am, I believe he really wants to know. Moishe’s dressed in the standard all-black Hasidic trench coat and hat. He’s only twenty-five and his beard is still a little on the wispy side. He laughs energetically when he shows me pictures of his triplets—I have no idea how it even got to that so quickly, but there it is—and then we get down to business.

“There are many apartments for rent in this area, Mr. Delacruz. We have a wonderful selection, and very affordable.”

“I noticed. It’s more than usual, no?”

Moishe shrugs and drops the edges of his mouth into a pensive frown. “Eh, in some ways.” He’s Brooklyn born and raised, he proudly informed me earlier, and his speech is thick with Yiddish intonations. “But you know, real estate is a complicated type of business, hm? The market is a changing animal, very different from one day
to the next, you know? It’s never”—he searches for a longer word and fails—“the same . . . from day to day.”

“Okay.”

“But let’s start with this beautiful two-bedroom on the second floor.” He gestures to a brownstone three doors down from Mama Esther’s. “Very classy. All brand-new renovations. Eat-in kitchen. Well, come. I’ll show you.” He laughs again, I’m not sure at what, and leads me up the stoop steps and into the building.

It’s a little ragtag, but we’re still in a middle zone of gentrification, not quite here nor there, so I’m not surprised. We head up a dingy flight of stairs, all off-color carpets and slow-mo dust tornados, and then walk into a pristine, sun-drenched modern apartment.

“Well, damn,” I say almost involuntarily. The place is nice. It puts my cranky little loft of shadows to shame. Moishe nods and ushers me around, making little clucks and shrugs as he points out various appliances, views, closets. “Why’d the last residents move out?”

“Eh, people, they move.” He hunches those big shoulders and waves his hand back and forth. “These people, they moved.”

“I see.” Useless.

Then that horrible feeling rips through my body like an earthquake and I have to steady myself on Moishe so I don’t collapse. The towering Hasid looks at me like I’ve lost my damn mind. His mouth moves within that wispy beard. He’s speaking, I’m sure, but all I hear is that screeching: a thousand trains trying to brake, all at the same time, all too late.

Then it’s gone.

A moment of awkward silence passes as I catch my breath. “Mr. Delacruz?” I stand, spin, plant my cane hard
on the ground, and hold my balance, but only barely. “Mr. Delacruz? Are you okay?”

“No. Yes. Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”

“You sure? You don’t look . . . too good, you know?”

I never look too good, really, but I guess now I look worse. Something is gnawing at my subconscious, more and more fiercely as my balance returns. The ngk. It’s that feeling, but . . . more so.

There’s one in this building too.

*   *   *

“The basement.”

Moishe’s still trying to process my near-syncope, so it takes him a second to catch up. “What?”

“Can I see . . . the basement?”

“Um . . . yes. But are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” Bullshit, and he knows it, but I seem to be able to walk. The wretchedness has dimmed. I follow him down the stairwell to the first floor. The screech comes back while Moishe’s fumbling with his massive key chain. It’s worse this time, but I’m ready for it. Prickly waves of nausea radiate up and down my body. I plant my cane on the ground and lean hard on it, determined to wait out the anguish. Moishe toils away, oblivious, and then says something, might as well be in Yiddish for all I know, and pops open the basement door.

I’m relieved he doesn’t glance back, because I’m sure I look like even more shit than I did a few minutes ago. Still, I’ve steadied myself and manage to make it down the stairs without collapsing.

I want to find the thing, but my vision’s blurred and I’m having trouble walking a straight line. The basement is what you would expect: a long dank room, all cluttered
with dust-covered furniture. Two of the four overheads are busted and the two left are uncovered; sharp shadows clash with sudden fits of brightness. The ngk could be anywhere—all I can do is stumble toward wherever the horrible is more horrible. Hopefully, Moishe won’t decide I’m nuts and haul me out of there first. Also, hopefully, I won’t drop dead in the thick of it.

I make my way through a narrow aisle, squeeze my body between an old file cabinet and some wooden chairs, and then the screeching-nausea-death feeling stops altogether again. Which I suppose is good—my body is certainly grateful—but I don’t know how I’ll find the thing without my rapidly decomposing soul to use as a compass.

“Mr. Delacruz.” It sounds like he’s been saying it for a long time. He’s not pleased. I can almost hear his salesman’s need to be nice clash against his irritation that this particular customer is stumbling around the basement in a deathlike frenzy. “You may need medical attention. And, either way, we should really leave this basement, okay? Come.”

I would like to. I really would. I’ve just about had it with this wild-ngk chase, and I don’t like pushing Mr. Moishe’s kindness further than necessary. But I also have to see this thing. I need to confirm, with my own eyes, that there is in fact a second ngk here. I turn toward Moishe, and I’m about to spit out some bullshit explanation, when something, something that I was absolutely sure was just a piece of furniture, detaches itself from the shadows in front of me. I don’t have time to unsheathe my blade. I barely catch my breath before the thing bursts past me, rushing toward where Moishe stands on the stairwell with his mouth open.

He can see it. The thought flashes through my mind as
I watch the Hasid hurl his massive frame over the banister and clutter into the shadows. The thing moves too fast to make it out. It’s just a pale flash of something vaguely humanoid with long black hair, definitely upright but somehow hunched over, and then it’s up the stairs and gone. Moishe yells a barrage of what I have to assume are the vilest of Yiddish curse words. It’s enough to let me know he’s alive and relatively unhurt, so I make for the stairs. Maybe I can at least get a glimpse of the thing. I might’ve made it, too, if the damn ngk’s screeching didn’t start searing through me just as I was lunging toward the doorway. I’m caught off guard this time and collapse on the steps in a heap.

Things get dim. Those stupid Cheerio-shaped bubbles float across my view of the open door in front of me. For a second, I think I’m gonna make a comeback. The ngk’s screech still shreds from inside, but I’m strong. I’m trained for this.
I’m—