Franzáló and the Jackal (Part one) The northwestern fringe of the city is defined by its vacancies between rotting brick tenements where one may find mundane treasures or, more commonly, corpses. It is a neighborhood rife with ungracious dowagers fanning their dyspeptic gasses in the shadows of sunset. Produce-men cry their trade in the courtyards and seller’s alleys. They boast of mangoes, announce the succulence of melons, and invite housewives to fondle and squeeze their avocados. Fruit flies stagger in spastic, drunken arabesques above clumps of fermenting apples; the fruits rot in gutters, kicked by children making games of the browning, soggy mess. Cats meander between pedicab tires with dead mice drooping from their furry jaws. Everyone watches the cats, and reward them for the mice they kill. Violence rides on the edge of a knife (a fish-gutter’s knife, or the knife of a butcher, any knife, really, as long as its blade is true) and finds its way into the meat between ribs. Dead bodies migrate into the weed-choked spaces between tenements, where laundry and bedding hang from balcony rails and rope lines, stealing what freshness they can from the stagnant air. They drip water, scented with the remnants of cheap detergents and the weeds (below balconies and clotheslines) are fuzzy with the rime of dead, powdery soap. Carrion flies cloud the sky. Buzzing. Their infants wriggle in occasional white, undulating carpets, feeding on rot, on stink, on flesh gone mottled and nacreous in shallow, criminal graves. Police look for maggots in their endless searches for the missing. On Gallows Street, Franzáló Azoré watches a girl making her way from somewhere to somewhere. She carries a bright, red bucket with anchovies swimming in tea-colored water. She wears skin in the color of walnuts and cream stirred into caramel, skin hot in the warmth of summer, and dirty with rough scales of sweat-compacted grime. Her nose is bent and knotted in a shape that speaks of Arazi blood. She is stout and robust, muscles like river-washed stones shifting beneath her skin. Arazi, at least by half, she is like the Holy Martyr Virgin, like the singers along Jailer Street, and like Franzáló himself. He has never seen her smile. The girl with the red bucket. The girl with the anchovies. No one knows her name, though Franzáló recognizes her, as anyone might. The Jackal is a name common in the neighborhood; it is all anyone knows to call the girl. He has seen strong men cross busy streets, protecting themselves lest her shadow touch them. The witches (as common as the singers on Jailer Street,) avoid her as well, though it is they, Franzáló thinks, who have given her The Jackal’s name. It is they, Franzáló, thinks, who know of the curse she carries, or the blessing. No one speaks to her. Ever. Boys avoid her gaze, throwing the signs of the Mirror at her back as she steps ahead of them. “Medusa,” Péó says, drawing Franzáló’s thoughts from the girl with the bucket. He sips vermouth from a cloudy, blue glass, fluted like a trumpet’s lip. He is darker than Franzáló, leaner. “Medusa,” he says, eyes closed, as if reading some inner vision scrawled on the backs of his eyelids. Medusa, la bella. Medusa, la sfortunata.” He nods toward the girl, vanishing—now—around a corner. “What?” “Something I read, a long time ago. Poetry.” “Poems,” Franzáló shrugs. “Not my thing.” “Medusa,” Péó says. “She’s a modern girl with matted, dingy dreads. She lives here and walks around with her pet anchovies in a red bucket. Only she’s not what she seems. The lines I quoted: Medusa the beautiful, Medusa the unfortunate. Poets aren’t afraid of monsters. They understand what monsters are, and why we make them.” “You think The Jackal’s a snake lady?” “I think you need to talk to her, before it’s too late.” “Yeah? And what should I say, huh? Hey, girl…I like your fish?” Where Franzáló wears skin in the colors of caramel and toast, Péó is like a pecan’s woody husk, blushing with cinnamon and a tinge of honey. He clasps his fluted, blue glass in long, piano-player’s fingers and considers what remains of his drink. A fly buzzes near his head and he fans it away, muttering something under his breath. There is no breeze. It is hot, even beneath the green and violet umbrellas of the Café du Thé, and the late-day crowds are lethargic and sullen. It is a poet’s kind of place, but only when it gets dark. Now—an hour into sunset— those with rougher hands sit, chattering and joking and picking at calluses. This is where Péó comes to decompress, to sit with glass after glass of dry, fragrant vermouth…where Franzáló comes, to sit with him, to watch him, and—when no one is looking—to reach forward, clasp his fingers, and to suck one, or both of Péó’s neatly-manicured thumbs. It happens in advance of other, nightly things, salty with sweat and naughty with whispered entreaties, provocations, and rolling sighs of startled, ticklish laughter. “How’s your papi? Any better?” “Worse. Sleeping most of the time. Breathing shallow, you know, like his other lung has started go.” Though he helps with his father’s care, it is his sister who tends to him most conscientiously. She is with him now, as Franzáló sits with Péó, sliding his feet back and forth, in and out of his sandals, idly entranced by the manner in which each skin-softened thong strokes between his toes. “No improvement?” A shake of the head, a sip of his warming beer. “No,” Franzáló says. “One week, and he’s gone.” Péó nods, as if expecting the news. “Then you should talk to The Jackal quickly. See what she can do.” “The doctors can’t do anything, so what’s a crazy girl with fish going to accomplish?” “More than you think,” Péó says. “Or less. But you’ll never know unless you talk to her, ask what she can do, and maybe haggle with her for an hour over the appropriate price.” “Nobody talks to The Jackal.” “You believe that? You believe that if you piss her off, she’ll turn you into one of the anchovies she’s always carrying around?” Péó’s words wear cloaks of laughter. Franzáló flinches, toes clawing at the inside soles of his sandals. He hears their joints pop like old-lady knuckles and flinches again. “She’s not like that,” “How do you know?” “Because I just know, is all…I know her in a way; not like you see her, not like anyone else knows her. She can help you; I can introduce you to her. Tonight, if you want.” * “It isn’t far,” Péó says. It has taken him an hour to convince Franzáló to see The Jackal, to talk to her. Now, Franzáló walks beside him quietly, sandals lisping on cracked and sun-grayed asphalt. Little more than an evening’s span of hours lie between his first meeting with Péó at the Café du Thé and this moment, heavy with the sound of blood pounding in his ears. Péó has gone with him, to check on Vérónia and Papi, and to leave green squash and bean curd and strips of cured boar for the night’s dinner preparations, and to take a sack of soiled, shredded bedding to the incinerator. It is quiet in The Jackal’s neighborhood. Tenements are sparser here, spaced in the irregular patchwork of weed-choked, gravel beds. Fires burn in oil-drum trash cans; stoop-shouldered silhouettes cluster around the flames, the gleam of a bottle passing between them. There were houses, once: mansions for the rich, but most of those are gone or in ruin: home to rats and vermin or indigent kids chewing côká with black-rimmed teeth. The crunch of glass marks a transition from winter-ruined asphalt to winter-ruined concrete. Fronds of weed-growth tickle the outside fringe of Franzáló right foot. “So it’s okay,” Franzáló begins, “to drop in on her, unannounced?” A shrug from Péó, a shuffle of the feet as he kicks at something: a lump of gravel sent skittering—thudding—lisping into weed growth and shattered glass. “She expects visitors, especially at night.” “Visitors like us?” “Especially like us.” Péó knows more about her than he has ever said, and Franzáló is chilled by that sudden and subtle revelation. It has been three years since their first amatory night: shy and halting, at first behind a dumpster thick with the smell of cooking oil and cardboard, and later (that same night) drunk on the smell of sweat and spermicidal latex. He’d made promises on that night. Franzáló did too. But now, with Péó walking beside him, an offering to The Jackal in hand, he wonders at the depths of knowledge Péó possesses and withholds. Franzáló knows the common things about him, and things relevant to the bed on quiet and secretive nights, but there are gaps, he realizes, like the empty spaces between city tenements. In the distance, sirens wail. Something pops. Twice. Three times. Four. Cops and robbers, Franzáló thinks, but cannot determine if it is the good guy or the bad guy who fired first. Gunshots are a constant in the city, always in the east, where the 47th Street River bleeds into The Sump. “Here,” Péó says as they reach the edge of another vacant lot. The area is nearly devoid of buildings. One stands, forlorn, within a perimeter of wrought-iron fence and a perimeter of vines. Light bleeds from curtained windows. Half the streetlights are dark. Electricity on the western edge of the city is an uncertain proposition, Franzáló realizes, and that—he imagines—is why there are so many fires in oil-drum trashcans. It is easier, he thinks, to watch a fire than a television here. “She lives on the second floor,” Péó says. Paths cut through the vacant lot beside The Jackal’s building, and Péó leads Franzáló along the straightest of them and on a slant between front walk and alley. In the distance, music booms from speakers mounted in some tenement window—with chipping paint, Franzáló thinks, and torn fly-screens. Shadows loom and shift in the distance—human shapes: moving. Franzáló thinks of gangs and roving neighborhood vigilantes: he can find no sign of knives or shotguns, but a prickle of fear rolls (like a bead of sweat) down the shallow curve of his spine; though the softest possible breeze plays strands of hair across his brow, it is the shorter hairs on his neck that seem to stand at attention. Something scuttles away from his advancing footsteps; it is a small thing. The air—as stagnant as ever—lacks the subtle bouquet of rot: proof, Franzáló thinks, that The Jackal lives in a neighborhood safer than his own. The scent changes as Péó leads him into a vestibule and up a creaking flight of stairs. Floor tiles (like black and white squares on a chessboard) attest to the building’s age, and dark carpet (a runner on dark, dark, wooden stairs) recalls the passage of Russian grandmothers: the Old Country remains as a ghost: dusty, tattered, and sagging. Food-scents stick to the roof of Franzáló’s nostrils, announcing the presence of heat, of grease, and of chicken-fat in yellow, oblong clumps, splattering in skillets. “Who?” The demand comes after Péó’s second knock. There is silence behind the question, but music from another apartment. Old people, Franzáló thinks, listening to old music. Franzáló’s toes claw at the insides of his sandals. “Ezrabel?” Péó asks, as if he hasn’t heard the demand for an answer. “Who?” “C’mon. It’s Péó.” There is a rattle. The dark, oaken door opens as wide as a security chain will allow. Péó smiles, faintly. “Ezrabel.” “Esús is gone. Thought that’s what stopped you from coming around.” “Work,” Péó says. “Bigger projects. Screw Esús. That’s what you always said, right?” “This your friend?” There is suspicion in the husky, contralto voice, and an accent not unlike Franzáló’s own. “Your new friend?” “Yeah,” from Péó. “Franzáló Azoré. Good guy. I thought, maybe, you could help him out.” Péó touches him on the shoulder, demonstrating something Franzáló can’t quite catch. “His pápí,” Péó says, as if those words explain everything. Franzáló is skewered by the dark, unblinking gaze above a hook-nose. He bobs his head in polite, acknowledgement. He doesn’t know whether to smile or not, so he keeps his expression on the friendly side of neutral. “So, you gonna make us stand here in the hall?” Péó asks. “Or you gonna let us in?” * “No vermouth,” Ezrabel had said, nodding Franzáló and Péó toward a plush sofa, like champagne for its color. “I’ve got soda. I’ve got orange juice. I’ve got tea.” They’d settled for cola. Dark and fizzy: it carried the vaguely bitter finish of some high-end diet line. Off of emotional balance, Franzáló sits beside Péó, wondering at his relationship with this woman, and how long they’d known each other. He’d heard—once or twice—of Esús, but never imagined a sister, a relative of any sort. Esús, as Franzáló assumed, is a disconnected phantom and little more. Ezrabel lives in a one-bedroom expanse of polished hardwood floors and expensive rugs as thick as Russian tapestries. The apartment, as Franzáló judges, is sleek, modern, and expensive. The scent of incense is heavy in the air. Sandalwood, maybe, or ambergris. “So,” Ezrabel says, at work on some arcane project. “You need my help?” Péó nods. “If it’s available.” “Who?” “Franzáló’s papi.” “He has the lung,” Franzáló says, tentatively stealing the conversational lead. “Advanced?” Ezrabel asks, squeezing a tube of children’s glue into a porcelain cup. She follows the gesture with incense ashes, dumped into the glue. She stirs, until gray muck colors the inside of the cup. Suddenly aware of Franzáló’s attention, she smiles. “It looks like grime,” she says, nodding to the goop in the cup. “When I paint it on my ankles and wrists, I look positively dirty…and I am, to a degree, until I get home and wash it all off.” “Advanced,” Franzáló says, shocked by the secrets he has discovered tonight. “Your anchovies in the bucket. Where—?” His question is interrupted by her nod in the direction of a closed door. “In there,” she says. “With the rest of my costume.” It is easy to go with the flow of tonight’s conversation. The Jackal and Ezrabel are the same woman. Perhaps here, it makes sense: perfectly. But Franzáló knows that those two identities will clash. Later. Out there. A half-homeless madwoman cannot possibly share so much with the elegant woman stirring ashes and children’s glue in a delicate, china cup. “You know, as well as I do, that immigration from the city is illegal. I help people get out. But only those who are no longer living. No one pays attention to a mad woman with grime on her skin, and hair like a matted nest of lice. The wig’s in there”—she nods toward the closed door—“with the anchovies in their bucket.” “Péó says you can help him, mi papi. “He’s close to death?” A nod. A lump in his throat forestalls speech. He nods again. Péó shrugs. “In a week,” he says. It is a mercy, Franzáló thinks, that Péó answers her question. “He wants to go home,” Franzáló says. “He was not born here.” A silent question flashes from the strange, composite woman’s eyes and Franzáló feels her curiosity. “Nuevo Baja,” he says. “He was born there, back in ’88.” “Just down the river,” Ezrabel says. No, Franzáló thinks…he cannot call her The Jackal. Not now. Not when she’s clean. Not when she’s pretty. “Easy,” she says. “I can do it.” Péó leans forward, elbows on his knees. “I’ll pay the cost,” he says. “No,” Ezrabel says. “Not this time.” “Ezi…” “No. If you want to pay something, then tell me—later—why you disappeared when you broke up with Esús. You were a good friend and I missed you. Was it him that drove you away, or was it me…? Whatever it was, whatever it is, I’d like to know. Not now. Not tonight. But tell me, eventually. That’s the price you’ll pay. Fair?” “Fair.” Franzáló is chilled when Ezrabel skewers him with hard, unblinking scrutiny. “Better than Esús,” she says. “I’ll give you that much.” She smiles, and dumps more ashes into the glue. She stirs briskly, popping slurping noises erupting from the thin, blue-glazed porcelain. “You love him, eh? He’s loco. Muy loco, she spirals a finger around her ear in the universal marker of insanity. “But he’s good, eh…if he makes you crazy for him, that’s even better. Her eyes gleam with an impish light. Franzáló nods. “I love him,” he says, and the words are easy. “He makes me crazy.” “Good. Esús is my brother, but he’s a prick…” she shrugs as if she’s just explained every intimate and complicated aspect of her friendship with Péó. It seems, Franzáló thinks, that she has just accepted him. He cannot fathom why. * * * * …to be continued… * I had no clue that I was going to write this. It simply erupted and wouldn’t stop flowing until I’d finished the very last line. I’d memorized the opening lines as they decompressed in my head, and scrambled back to Corey’s apartment to write them down. The rest of the story (including tomorrow’s conclusion to the tale) followed. As always, thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this little dip into a world that isn’t exactly this one, but far less alien than the sort of place I normally explore.