FICTION: The Long Vietnam of My Soul, Part 12

A few notes left on the kitchen table saying she had gone out for awhile; a glass earring he attached to a broken rosary and a pair of yellow shorts on the line she had every intention of retrieving.

                                                  -o- 

June 25, 1988.

Nieves had not come home for three days by the time Basilio figured out that she’d been arrested.

He lied to Grandpop – something about the Spanish embassy in Washington, which would be true soon enough. He scoured the streets from Highlandtown to Bolton Hill and back, talking to people whose lives were worth less than a budding Ailanthus, walked in wider and wider circles until Elisabeth, twice as upset as Basilio, found him pacing near the Pulaski monument in Patterson Park.

She turned to cough into the crook of her bare arm, turned and, through tears said, “They took her to Central Booking.”

Which in Baltimore was the same as saying someone you loved was being ferried to Deep Space Nine in a rowboat. People got lost at the downtown warren of detainees for months, sometimes years.

The only reason Elisabeth knew where Nieves was – and could only guess at how sick she must be, never having crossed beyond anything stronger than a Cosmo - was because her husband had come home and gloated about it.

“I took care of your little foreigner,” he said and Elisabeth – who did not look up from a boiling pot of rigatoni on the stove - made up her mind to call a moving van when the dick preening before her left for work in the morning.

She’d been underground for two days when she found Basilio chatting up heroin dealers. He had a job on the other side of the park painting a large steamed crab – Halloween orange/callinectes correct - on the side of a refrigerated truck. Elisabeth walked with him.

“Did you go?”

“No,” she said.

“I have to see someone over on Port Street. Then I’ll go over.”

 “I can drop you off,” said E, knowing Basilio didn’t have a car, taking the risk of driving hers in the old neighborhood. “But I can’t stay.”

They passed the Pagoda, which sits on the highest hill in the park, a surreal stack of Oriental octagons in the middle of a wide, rolling lawn; a weird obelisk of Confucius bordered all around by narrow rowhouses of porous brick.

Trudging past the landmark - relieved that his cousin was alive and anxious that she might not be for long – Basilio let his hand brush against Elisabeth’s hip. She moved closer, never breaking stride, and locked her pinky finger in his.

For the past year, Basilio had stared at the back of this young mother’s house - from his third floor studio, from the gate where he took out the trash, from the roof when he went up to caulk the skylights – imagining a thousand scenarios in which they might touch without ever conjuring this one.