Roachkiller and Other Stories
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Authors: R. Narvaez
Tags: #mystery, #detective, #noir, #hard-boiled, #Crime, #Brooklyn, #latino, #short stories
Roachkiller and Other Stories
R. Narvaez
Beyond the Page Books
are published by
Beyond the Page Publishing
Copyright © 2012 by R. Narvaez
Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs
ISBN: 978-1-937349-30-1
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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“In the Kitchen with Johnny Albino” was originally published in
Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery
(2004).
“Juracán” was originally published in
Indian Country Noir
(2009), and appears as an ebook single as “Hurricane” (2012).
“Roachkiller” was originally published in
Murdaland
(2004).
“GhostD” was originally published as “El Bohemio” in
Thrilling Detective
(2007).
“Santa’s Little Helper” was originally published as “The Helper” in
Storyglossia
(2008).
“Unsynchronicity” was originally published in
Mississippi Review
(2006).
“Ibarra Goes Down” was originally published in
Yellow Mama
(2010).
“Watching the Iguanas” was originally published in
Spinetingler
(2010).
“Rough Night in Toronto” was originally published in
Plots with Guns
(2006).
“Zinger” is published here for the first time.
N.B.: Many of these stories have been revised, heavily in some cases, since their first appearance.
For my parents
Contents
In the Kitchen with Johnny Albino
In the Kitchen with Johnny Albino
Iris woke up in the dark. She rubbed her belly where it hurt, then got up, put on her slippers, and waddled to the kitchen. She had dark hair, almost black, and a heart-shaped face that made the island boys cross their fingers during confession. She was petite as a bird, and she was six months pregnant—with a baby she knew was a boy because of the way her belly seemed to come to a point and because she just knew. She went straight for the kitchen and to the dream book.
She got the book out and put it on the table, facedown. She tried to remember the dream but couldn’t. She lit a cigarette and went to the kitchen window. She looked outside at the clotheslines radiating from the big elm in the backyard to each building. The windows of the apartment buildings on the other side of the yard were dark, like eyes on faces before they wake up. She stared at nothing in particular. She felt that if she kept staring she could somehow reach back to the dream.
The cigarette smoke twirled around her fingers. Tree. Outside.
Rio
—river. And there it was—the dream she had been having before the baby inside her kicked her awake. First it came in pieces then it played like a movie. A woman. Standing with her feet in a river. Drowning. Iris did not recognize the woman, but she knew the river. It was back in Puerto Rico, near her hometown, Guayama, and the water was shallow. The woman could walk across to save herself. Iris told her so, but then a wave came, dark and red as blood, decapitating the woman, just as Iris found a knife in her hand, and . . .
Then a pigeon flew into her field of vision and Iris was back in Brooklyn.
She went back to the table quickly. The dream book was mimeographed on cheap blue paper. The listings were crooked, on some pages clear, on others blurry. Iris had bought the book when she first came to New York City, in the ’60s, ten years ago. She folded the cover back—it showed a crazy gypsy lady with a crazy smile that spooked Iris every time she saw it.
In the book, dreams were listed alphabetically, with a three-digit number next to each—
ANIMAL, 369
AUNT, 261
AUTOMOBILE, 522
AUTOMOBILE CRASH, 673
If you dreamed about an animal one night, you were supposed to play 369 the next day and the next few days, because that number was going to hit. Iris searched the Ds and found “
DROWNING
, 419.” She wrote the number down in a little red notebook. She got up and turned on the radio, finding her favorite Spanish station. A song by Trio Los Panchos came on, one of Iris’s favorites. She began to sway to its tinny rhythm.
“Mami.”
Her four-year-old daughter, Nancy, stood in the doorway of the kitchen in her pajamas. The girl had her mother’s dark hair and her father’s doleful eyes. Every time Iris looked at her she was reminded of him.
“Go back to bed.”
“I’m awake.”
“It’s too early. Go back to bed.”
“I’m hungry.”
She put out her cigarette. “You want some eggs?”
Later, after she dropped Nancy at the pre-K school at St. Peter and Paul, Iris went to the bodega at the corner. Negron, an old man the size and shape of a boiler, was behind the counter, talking to his bright red and green parrot.
“Te pegate? Te pegate?”
the parrot said.
“Negron!”
Negron was missing an earlobe—which was why he kept the parrot in a cage.
“Ratoncito,”
Negron said. He called it a little rat because the bird repeated so much of what he said that it was like a snitch, and if the cops ever heard the parrot they’d know all about Negron’s business.
Iris told Negron to play her regular numbers, and then told him to play 419—for a dollar, straight.
“A dollar, straight?” Negron said. “Did you have a dream?”
“A lady drowning,” she said.
“Dios to vendiga,”
he said, “419, dollar, straight. You got it.”
Later in the day, she went back to the bodega to pick up milk and to see what number hit.
“Quien pego, Negron?”
“419—
te peges!”
The odds for
bolita
—the numbers game—were six hundred to one. Negron was from Guayama, too, and had known Iris since she’d moved to the Southside, so he didn’t take his normal bookie fee of fifteen percent. Iris had six hundred dollars, more money than she had ever had at one time in her life.
* * *
Iris had been laid off that summer. She considered going back to Puerto Rico—again. She’d already gone back and forth twelve times. She got food stamps and sometimes she cleaned houses for cash. Her friend Maribel was in the same situation and hadn’t worked in a year. They spent a lot of the day in Iris’s kitchen, drinking coffee and listening to the radio until it was time to pick up Nancy.
“That’s pretty nice money,” Maribel said.
“You telling me. That’s half a year’s rent.”
“Pretty nice money.”
“I have to go shopping first. Then pay the rent and the electricity. And I gotta put money away for the baby. Then I start saving to buy my own restaurant.”
Maribel laughed. “For that, you don’t got enough money. You have to dream a thousand dreams. That’s a lot of drowned ladies.”
Iris took a drag on her cigarette and rubbed her belly.
“You know what?” Maribel said.
“What?”
“You know what—you could start your own
bolita.
You make enough money, you never have to work again.”
“Run the numbers? Like a crook?”
“Everybody’s a crook. Look at the frikking president. It’s easy. Look at Negron. He makes easy money.”
Iris nodded her head to the side.
“You have to watch out though,” Maribel said.
“Why?”
“If someone doesn’t pay you, you gotta be tough. Business is business.”
“I’m tough,” Iris said. She looked at the window, remembering her dream.
Maribel laughed. “Little Iris the crook.”
“Maribel!”
“Maybe you’ll get as big as Benny, ha.”
Benny was the biggest numbers runner in the neighborhood. The rumor was that he knew people in the Mafia.
“That’ll be the day,” Iris said. Then she got up and took pork chops out of the freezer for dinner that night.
* * *
Iris picked up Nancy at school then decided to go to Negron’s to pick up milk. As soon as she opened the door, the parrot said,
“Te pegate? Te pegate?
Negron!”