Hells Kitchen

“finding” his wallet. He thought: her eyes are remarkable. Pale, pale blue. Almost blending into the surrounding white.
    “Not exactly.” He explained that West of Eighth was an oral history.
    “I don’t like reporters.” A bit of brogue slipped into Carol’s voice and he had a clue to the feistiness inside her—a grit that the director of a place like this undoubtedly needed. A temper too. “All those damn stories on preteen addicts and gang rapes and child prostitutes. Makes it hard as hell to get money when the boards of foundations turn on Live at Five and see that the little girl you’re trying to rehabilitate is an illiterate hooker with HIV. But, of course, it’s exactly kids like that who’re the ones you need to rehabilitate.”
    “Hey, ma’am,” Pellam held up his hand. “I’m just a lowly oral historian here.”
    The hardness in Carol’s round face melted. “Sorry, sorry. My friends say I can’t pass a soapbox without climbing on top. You were saying, about Alex? You were interviewing him?”
    “I’ve been talking to people in the building that burned down. He lived there.”
    “Off and on,” Carol corrected. “With his chicken hawk.”
    Me and Ray.
    She continued, “You know Juan Torres?”
    Pellam nodded. “He’s in critical condition.”
    The son of the man who met Jose Canseco.
    Carol shook her head. “It just kills me to see something like that happen to the good ones. It’s such a damn waste.”
    “You don’t have any idea where Alex took off to?”
    “Ran in, ran out. Don’t have a clue.”
    “Where’s home?”
    “He claimed he was from Wisconsin somewhere. Probably is. . . . I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”
    “Pellam.”
    “First?”
    “John Pellam. Go by the last usually.”
    “You don’t like John?”
    “Let’s say I don’t lead a very Biblical life. Any chance he’ll come back?”
    “Impossible to say. The working boys—you know what I mean by ‘working’—only stay here when they’re sick or between hawks. If he’s scared about something he’ll go to ground and it could be six months before we see him again. If ever. You live in the city?”
    “I’m from the Coast. I’m renting in the East Village.”
    “The Village? Shit, Hell’s Kitchen sleaze beats their sleaze hands down. So, give me your number. And if our wandering waif comes home I’ll let you know.”
    Pellam wished he hadn’t thought of her as a peasant. He couldn’t dislodge the thought. Peasants were earthy, peasants were lusty. Especially red-haired peasants with freckles. He found himself calculating that the last time he’d slept with a woman they’d wakened in the middle of the night to the sound of winds pelting the side of his Winnebago with wet snow. Today the temperature had reached 99.
    He pushed those thoughts aside though they didn’t go as far away as he wanted them to.
    There was a dense pause. Pellam asked impulsively, “Listen, you want to get some coffee?”
    She reached for her nose, to adjust the glasses, thenchanged her mind and took them off. She gave an embarrassed laugh and readjusted the glasses again. Then she gave a tug at the hem of her sweatshirt. Pellam had seen the gesture before and sensed that a handful of insecurities—probably about her weight and clothes—was flooding into her thoughts.
    Something in him warned against saying, “You look fine,” and he chose something more innocuous. “Gotta warn you, though. I don’t do espresso.”
    She brushed her hair into place with thick fingers. Laughed.
    He continued, “None of that Starbucks, Yuppie, French-roast crap. It’s American or nothing.”
    “Isn’t it Colombian?”
    “Well, Latin American.”
    Carol joked, “You probably like it in unrecyclable Styrofoam too.”
    “I’d spray it out of an aerosol can if they made it that way.”
    “There’s a place up the street,” she said. “A little deli I go to.”
    “Let’s do it.”
    Carol called, “Be back in fifteen.”
    A response in Spanish, which Pellam couldn’t make out, came from the back room.
    He opened the door for her. She brushed against him on the way out. Had she done so on purpose?
    Eight months, Pellam found himself thinking. Then told himself to stop.
    *   *   *
    They sat on the curb near Ettie’s building. At their feet were two blue coffee cartons depicting dancing Greeks.Carol wiped her forehead with the souvenir Cambridge cotton and asked, “Who’s he?” Pellam turned and