145th Street Page 4

  “How are you doing?” Mrs. Flores asked when they met in the bodega. “I haven’t seen you at Mass for a while.”

  “I go to early Mass with my mother now,” Angela said.

  “I saw your mother the other day and she looks good.” Mrs. Flores had selected two cans of kidney beans and put them on the counter. “You must be taking good care of her.”

  “I try,” Angela said, pleased with the comment.

  “Have you had any more of your dreams?” Mrs. Flores asked.

  Mr. Rodriguez looked up from where he was sitting with Jorge Cruz, a dark scowl crossing his face.

  “Sometimes I dream,” Angela said.

  There were images in her mind. An image of Poli sitting in the park watching the children play basketball. An image of the funeral cars pulling away from the church, gliding away into the gently falling snowflakes.

  “Who do you dream about?” Mrs. Flores asked, pretending to examine the label on a can of soup as the dark looks of Mr. Rodriguez burned into her back.

  “My father, mostly,” Angela replied.

  “Angela came for eggs, not to talk about her dreams.” Mr. Rodriguez got up from the card table and put his arm around the slim girl.

  “Did you dream about me?” Mrs. Flores stepped to one side so that she could see Angela’s face.

  “No,” Angela said, “I dreamt about the black man who works in the restaurant near the post office. Him and my father.”

  It stopped them. Mrs. Flores, Mr. Rodriguez, and Jorge Cruz. Even the moment stopped for the space of a heartbeat.

  “She dreams about a place to eat,” Mr. Rodriguez said finally, and twisted his face into a silly grin. “That’s a good sign for a young girl, isn’t it?”

  Angela took the eggs and a package of sausages and paid for them. Jorge Cruz played idly with the cards as Mr. Rodriguez bagged Angela’s purchases. When Angela had left, Mr. Rodriguez slapped the flat of his hand hard against the countertop.

  “Why do you have to do this?” Mr. Rodriguez lifted his voice, a thing that was rare with him. “Why can’t you leave the girl alone? We have bad girls in this neighborhood and you don’t say a thing about them. This is a good girl, so why don’t you leave her alone?”

  “Lips speak lies, but the face speaks the heart,” Mrs. Flores said, shaking a finger toward Mr. Rodriguez. “Jorge, did you see Mr. Rodriguez’s face when the girl said that she dreamt of Eddie?”

  “Who is this Eddie?” Mr. Rodriguez asked.

  “You know, the black man who works in the little diner that the Greek used to have,” Jorge Cruz asked.

  “Yeah, I see him at the market.”

  “You won’t be seeing him at the market much longer,” Mrs. Flores said.

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “You’re making something of nothing.”

  “What do you think, Jorge?” Mrs. Flores asked. “She has her father’s eyes, no?”

  “I don’t know,” Jorge Cruz said. “Maybe she has a special vision.”

  “What vision?” Mr. Rodriguez threw his hands up. “This Eddie is still alive, isn’t he? If he dies it’s you who puts the mouth on him, not her.”

  Eddie Robinson was born in Athens, Georgia, on the same day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was first inaugurated. Eddie’s father would have named him Franklin if he hadn’t promised his cousin when the boy’s mother was first pregnant that he would name the child after him.

  So it was Eddie, and not Franklin, Robinson who was hit by a truck on Thanksgiving morning. Someone who saw it said that he had pulled up his coat collar and was leaning into the bitterly cold wind and never saw the truck coming. Others said that it didn’t matter, that all that mattered was that Angela had dreamt of him, and that he was dead.

  Surprisingly, it was Titi Sanchez and not Mrs. Flores who started the most trouble for Angela. This despite the fact that it was Mrs. Flores who spread it around the neighborhood that Angela had dreamt of Eddie Robinson. When Eddie died it was the same Mrs. Flores who went on with her did-you-hear’s and her I-told-you-so’s.

  But when Mr. Rodriguez gave a party for his friends and best customers on the Wednesday before Christmas, which he had been doing for the ten years he had been in business, it was Titi Sanchez who piled the biggest burden onto Angela.

  Perhaps it was the wine, or the heat from the kerosene burner used to supplement the cranky radiator, or perhaps an unlucky combination of the two. Titi was standing against the wall, beneath the plastic Malta Fresca sign, when she found herself looking into someone’s eyes. The someone, sitting at her mother’s side at the round table, was Angela Luz Colón.

  “Don’t look at me!” Titi screamed at her.

  Angela looked quickly away, shocked by Titi’s sudden outburst. Then, compelled to see what kind of creature would scream at her so, she looked again, searching in her eyes for reasons for this violation of her sensibilities.

  “Don’t look at me!” Titi screamed again and buried her head in her hands.

  All eyes turned away from Titi toward Angela, but as the girl looked back the heads turned away quickly.

  “What is wrong? What is wrong?” Angela’s mother’s voice was like the screeching of a gull. Her eyes darted first to her daughter, then to those around her. “What is wrong?”

  “Titi has had too much celebration.” Mr. Rodriguez separated himself from two old friends. “Here, open another bottle of wine and let’s relax and enjoy ourselves.”

  The party went on, but the musical lilt of voices, the cymbal lightness of laughter, did not. Angela’s name pulsed beneath the hushed conversations like a muted drum.

  When Titi was finally calmed by Sadie Jones and her cousin she apologized to Mr. Rodriguez through her tears.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t want to die.”

  Mr. Rodriguez didn’t answer her, just patted her lightly on the shoulder and told her, “It’s okay, Mami.”

  When Titi left the others began to leave, too. Soon it was just Mr. Rodriguez, Jorge Cruz, Angela, and her mother who remained behind in the gaily decorated bodega.

  “I hear what they say.” Angela’s mother had her arm around her daughter. “It’s a terrible thing to say. This is America, not some jungle. Why do they say things like that?”

  “Today they talk about Angela and tomorrow they’ll be talking about me,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “Half the people in this neighborhood don’t have jobs, all they have for entertainment is what they can make up.”

  But they did not stop talking about Angela. When Titi went around saying that she did not want Angela looking at her because then she might dream of her it brought a nodded agreement, if not an “amen” and a hastily made sign of the cross.

  There were images in Angela’s mind. When her father died she had lived with the terror of knowing that he had been killed in his taxi, and that they had found him slumped over the wheel, just as she had feared for so many nights, ever since he had started driving. When it had come she was asleep. Her mother woke her to give her the news and then left to go to the hospital. She had lain in the darkness of her room, her mind blank, her body numb. Had she fallen asleep? She must have. When she was sure of her surroundings she recalled an image of her father. Had it been real? Or was it, perhaps, only the echo of a thousand headlines that had already screamed their violence into the deepest corners of her soul? Later, as she leaned against the cracked porcelain sink, the tea already cold in her thin hands, her mother and aunt returned from the hospital, their tear-streaked faces bringing her the news that the images had indeed been real.

  That people began to shun her was the worse part. The eyes turning away were like a knife to the heart. She began to stay away from school, from the park, even from the bodega, wrapping the images that came to her around her waking moments as one wraps a cape around the shoulders on a cold day.

  There was the image of her father sitting at the table across from her, his body framed by the high kitchen window,
his cap on the back of the chair near his shoulder.

  “Dying is not the bad part,” he had said. “The bad part is when the death grows in us. When we know it’s coming. Then you mourn for yourself even before you go. It’s the knowing that is terrible. When I die I want to die by getting hit by a comet at Yankee Stadium during the World Series.”

  “Why Yankee Stadium?” her mother had asked.

  “I don’t want to die alone, either,” he had said, buttering his toast.

  Perhaps it would have ended with Angela and her mother pressing themselves like two funeral lilacs between the yellowed walls of their apartment, had not Mrs. Morales also told Consuela Ortiz that Angela had the power to see death coming. Consuela Ortiz was a woman of forty-seven who lived in the projects. She was older than her years and much given to ruminating about her health. Further, she had had a strange feeling in her right side ever since a man had pushed her into a railing as they scrambled for seats on the IRT line. The more she thought of it the more she thought that it might, after all, be a cancer. And so she asked Mrs. Morales if she would arrange a meeting between herself and the girl, Angela.

  Mr. Rodriguez wanted nothing to do with it when Mrs. Morales approached him, but Jorge Cruz said that it would be a good idea.

  “If she can’t do this thing,” Jorge Cruz said, gently tapping his curved and yellowed nails on the card table in Mr. Rodriguez’s bodega, “then we will know that the deaths just happened and everybody will feel better for it. If she can, then we will know that it is a miracle of God.”

  Mrs. Morales was not sure if the miracle would be of God or Satan, but she held her tongue while Mr. Rodriguez thought about it.

  “I’ll see what I can do about it,” Mr. Rodriguez said.

  The idea didn’t sit well with him, but neither did the notion that the girl was so sad now. So he spoke first to the mother, telling her just how he felt, and then, with her permission, he spoke to them both and convinced them of Jorge Cruz’s logic. Still, when they all found themselves in his bodega the following Saturday evening, they were not easy.

  Jamie Farrell, who sometimes delivered packages for Mr. Rodriguez, was there, as were Maria Pincay, Mrs. Morales, and a few of her choice friends to whom she owed favors.

  “My name is Consuela Ortiz.” The woman’s hands were shaking as she spoke. “I have a pain here.”

  She touched her side, somewhat embarrassed to be revealing herself before so many people. Then she paused, not knowing what to say next, or how to frame the question that she wanted answered.

  “I don’t know what to say to you,” Angela said. “I don’t know about your pain.”

  There were tears in Angela’s eyes and her mother took her hand.

  “Do you have dreams?” Mrs. Morales asked.

  “Dreams?” Angela looked up at Mrs. Morales.

  “I don’t mean about me,” Mrs. Morales said quickly, “I mean about her!”

  There were images in Angela’s mind. Images of a city, of people walking, working, some sitting in the sun on benches. Were they eating lunch?

  “I dreamt there was a noise, an explosion. It was on a nice day. . . .”

  There were images in her mind. A cloud that shaped itself into a funnel and a funnel that shaped itself into a tornado, and then a giant mushroom, and then a cloud that covered half the earth.

  “. . . Many people were hurt,” Angela said, trying to shut away what she had seen in her dreams.

  “Did you see me?” Consuela Ortiz took her other hand.

  Angela looked into the woman’s eyes and shook her head. No, she had not seen her.

  As Consuela Ortiz looked around the room many things happened. First there were the tears of relief that came to her eyes. Then the loud cry that crouched in Mrs. Morales throat, ready to spring when she heard the expected news, died where it lay. Then there were smiles on other faces and, lastly, Jorge Cruz brought his years and wisdom to the event.

  “Sometimes a child sees things,” he said, “which are large things to a child. But when the child gets older it sees more important things. Angela is dreaming about a war. That’s why so many people were killed.”

  “I bet my last dollar,” Mr. Rodriguez said, “that there will be another war. Probably something in the Middle East.”

  “By the time you get to your last dollar we’ll all be too old to think about war,” Maria Pincay said.

  Even though the bodega had not done well that month Mr. Rodriguez broke out the wine. It was not a time for celebration, but neither was it a time for despair.

  Angela started coming back to the bodega again after that and Maria Pincay got Titi Sanchez to apologize to her for what had happened at the party.

  When a proper amount of time had passed Mr. Rodriguez began speaking with Mrs. Colón. He spoke of loneliness, and how the sun, even in the barrio, seemed warmer when shared. The consequences of their conversations seemed scant but they both seemed pleased with the possibilities, which, in turn, pleased Angela.

  But Angela’s dreams did not leave her. Or, rather, the dream did not, for they were all the same now. There would be a city, people walking, working, sitting in the sun on benches. Were they eating lunch? And there was a terrible noise and a flame that turned itself into a funnel, and a funnel that turned itself into a tornado, and then a mushroom, and then a great cloud that covered nearly half the earth.

  She would be in the dream, sometimes with her father, sometimes not, running from house to house, unable to find an unshattered mirror to hold the fragments of her terror.

  But she did not speak of her dreams again and, after a while, neither did anyone else. It was a silent pact that she had made with the world: She would not speak of the dreams that caused such trembling in her bosom, and the world would not turn away from her. It was hard for her at first, but soon she learned to cry only in her bed and to muffle the sound with her pillow.

  “Sometimes,” Mr. Rodriguez said, cutting up chickens for his meat case, “things happen that hurt us deeply, and even though it’s something we think we should hold on to it’s usually better to let it go.”

  “You mean my dreams?” Angela asked.

  Mr. Rodriguez, having meant her grief over her father’s death, nodded all the same.

  Okay, so my name is Jamie, Jamie Farrell. Remember that, in case I get famous or something. My main man, my ace, the Jack who’s got my back, is Froggy Williams. Froggy is definitely for real. Only thing is that he doesn’t know scratch about ball.

  “So you missed a shot,” Froggy said. “Big deal.”

  “So we lost to Powell Academy,” I said. “We’re the only team uptown that has lost to Powell.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The game was down to fifteen seconds and we’re losing by a point,” I said. “Tommy Smalls steals the ball and they all jump up into his face. Me, I see Tommy cop the pill and I’m running down the court. My man is trying to double-team Tommy and so I’m free as I want to be and standing under the basket.”

  “Tommy didn’t see you?”

  “No, he sees me, jumps up, and gets me the ball with like two seconds to go.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Then I blow the layup,” I said.

  “Why you do that?” Froggy asked.

  “How do I know?” I said. “I was free, I didn’t rush it, I banked it soft off the backboard just like in practice, and it rolled around the rim and fell off!”

  “So you want to go by my crib and listen to some jams?” Froggy asked.

  “Man, the whole school is on my case for blowing the game to dumb old Powell Academy and you talking about listening to some jams,” I said. “What am I going to listen to, the Death March?”

  “Yo, just forget it ever happened,” Froggy said. “Life goes on.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “That was the first thing that happened today. Then I go into the locker room and all the guys are giving me the evil eye because I blew the game, right?”


  “Yeah?”

  “So I try to finesse it off and I’m sitting there drinking a bottle of WonderAde, okay?” I said, thinking maybe I shouldn’t even tell him.

  “WonderAde is cool,” Froggy said.

  “It was until I dropped the bottle, it broke on the floor, and everybody had to pussyfoot around the floor so they wouldn’t get cut by the broken glass,” I said.

  “Oh.” That’s what Froggy said.

  Okay, so I go on home and I’m feeling miserable. When I go to bed what fills up my dreams? Tommy throwing me the ball and me blowing the layup. Only in my dreams when the ball falls off the rim it breaks up on the floor and everybody on my team gets cut. When I get up in the morning I don’t even want to go to school, but I go. You know, do the right thing and all that.

  Froggy and I have biology together. All the way down the hall to class people were giving me dirty looks. We stopped to look at the posters for the junior dance and a girl gave me a bump in the back. I gave her a look and she gave me a look back.

  “How you blow that layup?” she said. “You taking bribes or something?”

  When she left I turned my attention back to the junior dance. “I’m thinking about asking Celia to the dance,” I told Froggy.

  “Celia Evora?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” Celia was from the Dominican Republic and the finest chick in the school.

  “Man, you are never in all your days going to pull that girl,” Froggy said. “You probably couldn’t even pull her in a dream.”