Hard News

Christmas Day six years ago, when the prison cooks had laid out a really good spread). What he ate now was just Kentucky Fried and Whoppers and Big Macs. He missed Arthur Treacher’s Fish ‘N Chips and wondered if they were still in business anywhere. Anyway, he thought it wasn’t fair that all he was eating was these fucking tiny meals and he was still gaining weight.
    Nestor noticed two red-and-white-striped boxes in bed. The Colonel grinned at him. Nestor kicked the boxes onto the floor. They tumbled open and bones and coleslaw shreds scattered on the floor.
    The chameleon took off.
    “Ooops,” Nestor said.
    He pulled on his T-shirt and smoothed his hair back. He yawned and groped on the bedside table for a cigarette. The pack was empty but he found a used one, still an inch long, lit it and stacked the cheap pillows against the headboard. He sat back, yawned again, and coughed.
    Flashes of sun shot off speeding cars and burst against the wall. The room’s window, as advertised, did overlook the beach; that much was true. However, the view had to get across six lanes of highway, two access roads and the hotel parking lot before it eased through the streaked window of room 258. Nestor listened to the sticky rush of the traffic for a few minutes, then reached over and squeezed the butt of the young woman lying next to him.
    The third time, when he got a little rougher, she stirred.
    “No,” she mumbled with a thick Cuban accent.
    “Rise and shine,” Nestor said.
    She was in her mid-thirties, with a body that looked ten years younger and a face that went ten years the other way. Her eye shadow and mascara were smeared. The lipstick, too, was a mess and it looked as if her lips had slid to the side of her face. She opened her eyes briefly, rolled over on her back and pulled a thin sheet up to her navel.
    “No, not again.”
    “What?”
    “Not again. It hurt last night.”
    “You didn’t say nothing about it hurting.”
    “So? You wouldn’t have stopped.”
    That was true but he would at least have asked if she felt better before they went to sleep.
    “You all right now?”
    “I just don’t wanna.”
    Nestor didn’t want to either. What he wanted was breakfast—two Egg McMuffins and a large coffee. He crushed out the cigarette and bent down and kissed her breast.
    Mumbling, eyes closed, she said, “No, Jacky I don’t wanta. I have to go to the bathroom.”
    “Well, I gotta have either you or breakfast. So, what’s it gonna be?”
    After a moment: “What you want for breakfast?”
    He told her and five minutes later she was in her orange spandex miniskirt struggling along the glisteningly hot sidewalk to the McDonald’s up the street.
    Nestor took a shower, spending most of the time rubbing his stomach with this green-handled pad with bumps on it. Somebody’d told him that if you did that, it broke up the fat cells and flushed them away. He thought he noticed a difference already even though on the scale he hadn’t lost any weight yet. He kneaded the large glossy star-shaped scar six inches to the left of his navel, a memento of the time a hollow-point 7.62mm slug had made a journey through his abdomen. Nestor had never gotten used to the leathery feel of the flesh. He had a habit of squeezing and running his fingers over it.
    He rinsed off, stepped out of the shower and spent a lot of time shaving then getting his hair into shape. He dressed in a dark-green, short-sleeved knit shirt and the gray pants he always wore. Dungarees. He wondered why anybody would call pants anything that started in
“dung.” Shitarees, Craparees
. He pulled on thin black nylon socks, sheer like women’s stockings, then strapped on black sandals.
    He stepped out of the bathroom, which was filled with steam and hair spray mist, and smelled the food, resting on the TV. The woman was sitting at the chipped desk putting on her makeup. For a minute, looking at her buoyant breasts in the tight yellow sweater, Nestor’s hunger for food wavered, but then the McMuffins won and he sat on the bed to eat.
    He ate the first one quickly and then, with the edge off his appetite, lay back on the bed to read the paper and sip his coffee while he worked on the second one. He noticed she’d bought some insurance; a third McMuffin was also in the bag—to keep his appetites and his hands occupied. He laughed but she pretended she didn’t know he’d caught on.
    He’d gotten halfway through the front section of the
Miami