Half-Resurrection Blues_ A Bone Street Rumba Novel - Daniel Jose Older Page 0,13

advertising for Baba Eddie. And possibly runs the entire business as well. She’s perched on a stool, clackety-clacking away on the desktop computer, when I walk in. “Whaddup, Carlos?” she says without looking up.

“Kia.” I nod. “Taking over the world again?”

“Mm-hmm. One online customer at a time.”

“I hope Baba Eddie’s paying you well for all the good work you do for him.”

Kia scoffs. “You’re damn right he does. Well . . . let’s put it this way. I get paid.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“I do payroll. So . . . I get paid. And so does Baba Eddie. So everybody’s happy.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, Baba got Russell and his big corporate paycheck taking care of him, so it all works out.”

“You getting your schoolwork done in the midst of all this?”

Kia looks up at me for the first time and narrows her eyes. “How ’bout Carlos worries about Carlos and Kia worries about Kia, m’kay?” She turns back to the screen.

I just frown and say, “’Kay.” Kia looks up again, probably because I didn’t zing back with some slickness, and now regards me more carefully.

“Whatsamatta—lady trouble?”

Ugh. Omniscient teenagers are the worst. “No.”

“What’s her name?”

Now I wish Kia would go back to her computer and leave me alone. Sometimes I think she has the same third-eye vision that I do. I try not to imagine Sasha’s smiling face dancing around my head.

It doesn’t work.

“She a weirdo like you?”

She is! I want to yell it from the roof of this crummy little building, shatter the storefront windows with my raging joy to have found another weirdo like me. Instead I say: “How ’bout Carlos worries about Carlos and Kia shuts up and does her homework?”

Kia rolls her eyes and submerges back into whatever social networking site she’s ruling. “Okay, Carlos.” Clackety- clackety-clack. “Have a wack afternoon with your heart full of lead, dipshit.” Clackety-clack.

“Thank you, Kia. Baba Eddie ’round?”

“The back.” Clackety. I make my way through the narrow aisles full of potions, soaps, and candles. “With a client.”

Fine. I drop into an old easy chair they have set up next to the bookshelf and liberate a Malagueña from its wrapper. Before I can light it, a commotion erupts from the back room and then a perfectly round woman in her late sixties bursts out of the curtain. “¡Coño!” I jump to my feet, hand clutching my cane-blade, and then remember where I am. A screaming Latin lady is really no kind of anomaly in Baba Eddie’s place. “Gracias, Baba! ¡Gracias! ¡Ay, coño . . . ! ¡María de los aguas infinitas! Se me va acabar mañana . . . ¡Mañana, carajo!”

Eddie’s voice drifts out from behind her, a gentle sussuring of affirmations.

The woman explodes through the store in a flurry of jangling jewelry and thick perfume. She blows kisses at Kia, waves dramatically at the three of us, and exits. The bells and wind chimes on the door jingle away as she rumbles off, still chatting ecstatically to no one in particular.

“Well, damn, Baba.”

“Don’t ever let them tell you Baba Eddie don’t know how to please a lady.” He’s a little guy with a big mustache. Also, he dresses more like a dorky suburban dad than a Brooklyn santero. Today he’s got on an old beige baseball cap and a plaid shirt that hangs from his ponchy potbelly over slightly stained khaki pants. “C’mon, Carlos, let’s go outside for a smoke.”

* * *

I don’t get cigarettes. It’s like all the worst parts of cigars—stank breath, yellow teeth, slow and horrible death—but none of that warm invigoration. Baba Eddie, on the other hand, adores his menthols with religious fervor. Smoking’s the last poison left for him since the retrovirals kamikazed his liver, and he relishes that shit like it’s the first drop of Mother Mary’s tit milk, each and every time. I gotta say, repellent as the habit is to me, I respect a man who can enjoy a simple, cancer-filled pleasure. So I wait while Baba Eddie ceremoniously produces a single smoke from the gold cigarette case that Russell gave him for their twentieth anniversary. He smells it, closing his eyes like a good little connoisseur, and then places it between his lips. I can see the excitement building in him. He actually enjoys teasing his body, triggering those little addiction demons that roam through his bloodstream. He brings the lighter up to his face, flicks it to life, and then holds it inches away from the tip of the menthol. I roll my eyes.