“The pollution must have gotten much worse since we left here,” Chris said, twisting to see Jose struggling to keep up amid a stream of walkers. “Everyone’s got a cough,” he said, pausing to puff on his cigar, “but I wonder if they’re coughing at us to warn us of something. Maybe they think we should wear a mask.”
Jose smacked Chris on the shoulder, partially to let him know they were no longer separated by waves of pedestrians and partially to slap him out of the bumbling hillbilly role he was starting to put on.
“You know you’re an idiot,” Jose said, and then he pointed down 8th Avenue. “Lets head this way. That traffic jam should help us get through the intersections.”
The pair skirted around the tail end of a bus sidestepped a honking taxi, avoiding the steadily oncoming pedestrians also weaving their way through traffic. For nearly a decade, the biggest city Chris had braved was Albuquerque, and even that was a rare event. But he could still tell his skills of a diehard New Yorker hadn’t faded, mostly because all the noise was. The roar of traffic, the multitude of voices — now talking to their cell phones instead of each other — and the omnipresent construction melded into a wall of dull sound. Rather than overwhelming, Chris used the sonic barrier to isolate himself from it all, letting it combine until it was white noise preventing all the noise from penetrating the sound of his own thoughts.
The lights, however, still had a way of penetrating. After walking more than a dozen blocks, the cowboys stepped into a neon garden. A dozen signs lining the street told, often in one word, that a completely separate world existed inside the buildings. Chris didn’t recognize anything on the signs. They had all changed in the years he had been gone. But he did know what they meant.
“Jose, how the hell could you let us walk the wrong direction all this time?” he shouted at his companion. Jose just threw his hands up in the air and started walking toward Broadway. Chris reminded himself to forget about using his urban instincts. He may be able to block out sounds, but his internal compass no longer worked when the city was vertical.
Times Square is one of those rare locations in New York where what isn’t there speaks almost as loudly as what is. In the theater district, the skyscrapers are constructed of LEDs, and the walls scream in blinking colors. There are tourists watching the lights, and tourists watching those tourists, and a few sadistic New Yorkers watching it all. Times Square is where everyone wants to be unless they’ve spent any time there. It’s not surreal for the way it is treated as a sanctuary, the Holy Grail of tourism, or because night makes it look as though all the flashing lights are floating without any help. It is surreal because Times Square makes itself feel simultaneously as the center of the world and the gates of Hell.
Chris walked up to a man who, like him, was wearing a cowboy hat and boots. Unlike Chris, he was wearing nothing else. This nearly naked cowboy made Chris realize just how naked he felt himself. He reached to scratch an itch on his back, where he usually kept his machete, and one on his hip that was normally covered with his revolver.
“How do they call this a jungle,” he asked, turning to Jose, “and not let you go armed?”
As tough as he felt his wilderness life had made him, Chris had to admit that a country mile didn’t have anything on a New York block, not in rush hour traffic. His feet were swollen, and his ankles were growing unsteady. There was a blister forming just behind his middle toe. More than anything, he wished for his horse, and the mounted police galloping past didn’t help his mood.
Because Chris showed no signs of doing it himself, Jose hailed a cab.
“Admit you’re not a local anymore and get in the damn car,” the Mexican said to the cowboy, who was looking torn between comfort and pride.
Chris convinced himself and got in, only to find that progress had somehow reached the cab companies too… sort of. He and Jose found themselves staring at a television screen mounted to the back of the front seat. Above the screen was a Plexiglas barrier. Chris wasn’t sure if it protected the driver from the passengers or vice versa, but it protected no one from the smell of bleached mold that had befallen this vehicle. He put a cigar in his mouth and lit it.
“Hey!” came a voice through the barrier. “Hey, you can’t smoke in here!”
Chris crushed the cigar on the bottom of his boot. “It’s not the worst thing you could breathe in here,” he said.
Chris’s sense of direction had taken a serious hit in the nine years he’d been away. As the taxi driver turned left and right and left to reach a destination that should have been a straight shot, Chris was incapable of determining if the driver was lengthening or shortening the drive. He felt completely lost when the cab stopped long before reaching the business district. Chris shot a raised-eyebrow look toward Jose.
“I have to make a quick stop,” the Mexican said. “I made a bit of a promise.”
The pair, still clad in leather and denim and flannel, stood out like Tourette’s at a funeral, finding themselves in a super-trendy New York gym. The mirrors lining the walls trembled in time to the bass-heavy techno beat and the clanking of steel weights coming back to earth, accompanied by the steady hum creeping in from the exercise bikes, treadmills and elliptical machines. More than their clothes, though, Chris and Jose were set apart by being the only men in what was clearly a female-only gym.
From behind him, Chris heard, “Can I help you?” but before he could respond, he found himself shoved forward by whoever owned the voice. He spun around to see a rainbow of fury, the left jab a product of many hard years in the ghetto and the right hook powered by the strength needed to escape to a better life. The uppercut, however, was personal. Chris was vaguely aware of hitting the floor and only slightly more conscious of the figure standing over him and saying, “Welcome back to New York, Chrissy.”
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Chris woke to find he couldn’t see. His limbs were heavy and his face was numb, and he couldn’t see a thing. Echoes of whispers crept into his ears. His body ached and shivered, and he saw nothing. Slowly, and with more than a small effort, Chris lifted his hands to his face to find an ice pack draped over his eyes. Gratefully, he tossed it aside and turned his attention toward making his eyes focus.
Above him, Chris saw two forms, the shapes of two people he knew he should be mad at, but he could only manage anger for one. From the floor, he took a half-hearted swing at the scrawnier of the two.
“You set me up, Jose,” he accused.
The shadow shrugged. He propped himself up on one elbow, rubbing his eyes with his hand and hoping that wouldn’t make him see double.
“Well, Asia,” he said to the other form, “I guess I finally owe you that explanation.”
A decade earlier, Asia Craft was standing in front of a mirror and introducing herself as Asia Billows. She was a bookworm, spending most of her time in doctoral anthropology classes or in the university library. It was only by pure chance that Chris met her. He was scouting a frat pledge doing a certain act in the library stacks that could have gotten them all in trouble. If not for Chris, Asia would have walked right into the middle of that act, and Chris parlayed his “rescue” of her into their first date.
The short story sees their relationship blossom into an engagement, but it never went any further. When Chris’s grandfather disappeared, they put the wedding on hold. When Chris disappeared a year later, the wedding was off. He had left a note. It said he loved her, but it didn’t mention New Mexico or why. She still had the note, and she had pulled it out and dripped tears on it the night before she went Mike Tyson on him.
Chris knew he had been away for a long time, but this was not the girl he remembered. Her muscles were sinewy. Her clothes were made for style, function and to show off the results of the work she did in the gym. Most telling, her hands and wrists were taped, as if she were about to put on boxing gloves or, from the way Chris felt, had just taken them off.
“Chris, I don’t want anything from you,” Asia said, looking off at something that wasn’t him. “I had just been holding that in for nine years and wanted to let it out. You can leave now. Thanks for the closure.”
Chris put the ice pack back on his face. “So you’ve been checking in on me since I left,” he asked, “just in case I came back to town?”
She stood up and smacked the table. “I didn’t check up on you, you ass!” she yelled. “Who do you think they got to translate that box of your grandfather’s? I read that and knew you’d be coming. God, you take off a little baby fat and men think you leave your brain in your gym locker! I’m not the one that threw my career and my education away to go play cowboy.”
Chris reached for her hand, but she pulled it away.
“Asia, I’m sorry,” he said. “Yeah, you’re sorry,” she quipped, “and you made him sorry,” she added, pointing a thumb at Jose, “ but I won’t be sorry for you again. I’m…”
She stopped short when she noticed that he had noticed her new curves. He hadn’t noticed her noticing him, though. She coughed, but she didn’t need to. This was a fake cough that said danger was coming, that he was in mortal peril, that he had better at least blink. It would be the last warning she would give him… ever… but he failed to pay heed.
Years of exercise and more years of leafing through heavy, heavy tomes had made her fingers strong, and she used all that strength to clamp down on Chris’s ear.
“My eyes are up here,” she said, finally getting his attention.
He made yet another mistake by thinking this was the time to joke. “Yeah, but baby got back!” She went South Central on him.
“Yes, baby got back, but guess what, baby also got new music. Did you think they’d stop making new music when you left town? Or did you listen to so much country music that you forgot that it’s not all the same song played over and over by new people.”
He started to defend himself — himself or country music, he couldn’t decide — but he couldn’t stop staring at those angry eyes that told him something bad could happen. Jose was watching Asia’s fist, which was saying something bad was already happening.
“So if all you wanted was the punching, we have to go,” Jose said, starting to push Chris toward the door. “Take care, Asia; it’s been educational.”
And with one final push, he got Chris out into the street, where any of the dozens of people walking by could be a pickpocket or mugger or drug dealer or meth addict, and they both felt safer.
“So when we see my dad,” Chris asked, “is anyone going to punch me in the face?”
Jose started walking downtown. “You’ll be lucky if that’s all they do,” he said.
All content and characters are the property of the author and may not be republished or recreated without prior written consent.
just gets better and better
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