“You don’t know, hombre?”
The way Emil saw it, if his neighbor didn’t own his dump next door he’d be out on the street. He growled, “Go sleep it off, man.”
“What? You want to shoot me?” Franco called. “Pale-blooded blanco; go ahead, shoot me with your shiny pistola! If you have los cojones, amigo.” He broke out in a raucous laugh, repeating, “Los cojones.” In the morning he would have little recollection of his beer-soaked words.
Emil lingered after Franco finally retreated to his cave of a house. His mind wandered back to Adam and Eve and their short-lived joy. So what was it, one blissful go next to the silvery stream, the peaceable animals hearing Eve cry out in earthly delight? The thought of them prior to the hissing, whispering snake, a sexless, childlike pair wandering through a flawless setting for all eternity—whose idea of perfection was that?
His garden had a flaw: the bald patch Franco alluded to that once flourished with peppers and nasturtium. He hated peppers. He’d told Elena and asked her not to grow them. She laughed, said, “Peppers speak to passion.” Then the seeds stopped growing, lay barren, to use Franco’s word.
The other day Franco called to Emil. He was walking home with a bag of groceries. Franco was seated, aimless as usual, on his front steps in the afternoon warmth. Emil stopped on the sidewalk, shifted the load of groceries. “What’s it this time, Franco? Someone took your parking space again?”
“But you told me the streets are free, any car can park where it wants!”
Franco would place traffic cones, stolen from construction sites, in front of his house to reserve his space on alternate parking days. Emil told him it was illegal and Franco finally gave up the practice, but only after receiving twenty summonses.
“Good to know you’re obeying the law,” Emil said. He turned to go.
“Amigo, wait,” Franco yelled so anyone within five miles could hear. “Come see what I have.” He leaned out, looked up the street. Lowering his voice, he said, “Now that is hot chili.”
Emil turned to see where Franco pointed. Mrs. Noily’s tenant—Lorraine, no, Lori, or was it Lorene?—slowly descended her front steps. The men watched as she walked, heading in the direction of the subway, her hips swaying to a private rhythm. She was tall with long hair falling below her neck, in jeans, a size too small white T-shirt, and a red patent-leather purse slung over her shoulder. She carried a large portfolio under her left arm. The air held still until she turned the corner.
“Phew! Poca flaca but mine if she wants me,” Franco said, nodding approval. “That could be the devil with the red dress, like the song, no?”
“What is it you want, Franco?”
“No, that dress is blue; devil with the blue dress.” He looked toward a cloudless sky, nodded. “Blue, sí, mi amigo—”
“All right, I’m gone—”
“Amigo, no, come see my peppers. Venga.”
Emil went with him because he thought he’d bring up the topic of painting Franco’s scarred south wall and was surprised to see a thriving pepper patch tucked along the fence outside the kitchen door. Yellow, red, and orange nasturtium trailed alongside three robust pepper plants. The buds hung like ornaments, the leaves polished green. Emil stared dumbly at the plants, an exact replica of Elena’s.
Franco laughed, slapped him heavily on the back, and challenged, “My very own, hah? Su esposa linda, mi amigo—a very generous lady.” Grinning, he handed Emil a few seeds from his pocket and told him to try again. Back in his kitchen, Emil tossed the pepper seeds into the trash.
The garden was abundant everywhere else, a profusion of color, mingling scents and buzzing bees; dizzying on hot summer afternoons. Mornings, he’d be out early with fresh anticipation: what flowers had opened in the first pale light as he slept; the great mystery of how a flower chooses the exact moment to open. Time slipped gently by as he deadheaded roses, pulled stray weeds, and hand-squashed fat green aphids that would suck the life out of the blooms. Only the pepper patch was a sore that wouldn’t heal. He blamed himself. Elena had pickled them each autumn for condiments over the winter, relishes and spreads and spicy yellow chutney. There were still rows of neglected jars in the cellar. He’d managed to avoid the patch, to slink past it because Elena was dead and seeing the empty dirt made him know her death all over again, and the paralyzing ache of loss.
Franco’s backyard was something else he tried to ignore. Once a garden had grown but now junk littered the place. Dolls’ heads, forgotten kitchen utensils, a rotting toilet seat, a pile of bricks from some abandoned project; Franco’s sloth. The south side abutted a black cinder-block wall that was splattered with illegible graffiti. The only readable word, sprayed an angry sulfurous yellow, was “heel.” Through his bedroom window the heel greeted Emil each morning, rain or shine, winter through autumn, the shrill, indecipherable message. Whose heel? A dog? A person? He wanted to paint the blocks white, plant a vine to soften the surface. He’d tell Franco his idea and offer to pay for the paint, but would his neighbor ever sober up long enough?
Emil the cop knew Franco had every right to live as he liked; there was nothing criminal about a generally disorganized lazy man. Elena hadn’t shared Emil’s resistance, and much as he might object to it in himself, he’d been bothered that she wasn’t bothered by Franco, that she overlooked his bouts of loutish drunkenness. There had been that slip of her that eluded him, that part of her that answered to no one. She was so contained he sometimes felt he was only a complication at the edge of her world. And there was too the inevitable cop’s distrust—reasonable or not—that all was on the up-and-up between his neighbor and his wife.
Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that
the Lord had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any
tree of the garden’?”
B ook of Genesis
Monday morning, June 19th, Emil’s eyes, menaced from the night, appeared darkly circled. The early light made him seem older than he was. He’d seemed older in some ways since childhood. There had been a sunless room under the roof rafters in the house in the old country. As a boy Emil hid up there and listened to the sounds of his family below, and to the coo of mourning doves under the eaves. From his mother too much talking, from his father too little, his sister recalibrating the balance between them, as if that were the purpose of her life. His memory of the old country was of darkness. Not the place itself—so full of mountain light—but something else, vague and under lit.
He’d sat in the garden too late, Franco’s taunting words circling like angry flies. He told himself, “I should shoot him with my pistola.” He finally went to bed and had a vivid dream.
In the dream he lay trapped on the bed as malignant black crows flew through the open window. They had blood-red eyes and carried Elena’s jewelry out in their beaks. Beside him a very young Elena lifted herself off the bed. She moved toward the window, her silhouette obvious through a sheer nightgown, nipples two sharp points pushing through the fabric. At her bureau she pulled out lingerie, tossed shimmering panties and dark satin bras into the opened crow beaks. Able to move again, Emil ran to the window. The garden shifted to his mother’s from the old country. Elena leaned against a wall. The crows were now clumps of black grapes hanging low above her head. Franco sat on a stone bench looking at her, his gritty laughter carrying up to Emil in the window, looking down.
Dreams disturbed him with their irrationality. Elena said they were only the unconscious puffing smoke. “Or maybe something’s hidden in there. Why not analyze the dreams?” she’d say, tapping his forehead.
But