I was at the underground poker games with my girls one night, and I felt his delicate eyes on me as soon as we entered the room. I looked good that night too. I was wearing my favorite peep-toe pink snakeskin heels. I also worked out regularly and knew I had a beautiful body. He was the pretty new money maker in the game. Coke dealers weren't really my type, but this man was so different from so many I'd met. A delicate man, body hard as steel under perfectly tailored Egyptian cotton shirts. He held a fine cigar in his manicured hand, his mouth gleaming a sexual sheen. He licked his lips. My body felt it from across the room.
My relationship with Rigo began just like that, one glance, one well placed stare and my body was on fire. Before I knew it we were having dinner at some Puerto Rican restaurant at the end of a shabby shopping center I had never noticed before. He fed me fried bananas dipped in honey, his aggressive fingers brushing against my tongue with every morsel.
The sex with him had become my vice. His voice in the dark was commanding, smooth and sanguine. He spoke a completely different kind of Spanish than the one I'd grown up hearing, it was faster and had so many more intervals of sound. It was a whole other language to me. Rigo's body was tight, a dark cinnamon color, and once as he held onto my hips and ground into me, he came so hard we both cried.
We usually saw each other in secret, on weeknights mostly; when he could get away from the endless barrage of phone calls and other women I knew he dined with. I never asked. We spent endless hours sitting in that tiny table by the window that faced the alley in the dimly lit back room of that restaurant. As soon as he'd start rubbing the edge of his glass with his thumb and ran his index finger down my muscular thigh he would always then immediately suggest that we leave.
Remembering the sex with Rigo must have flushed my face immediately, and as I returned from my visions my eyes settled on the drink being served in front of me.
"I take it I don't have to ask," he said.
"I... I don't know what you're talking about."
He watched me for awhile, seemingly amused.
"You look beautiful when you lie, darling."
I could feel his anger quickly mounting. He hated Rigo, and had mentioned it to me many times before. The truth was I knew exactly who he was as soon as I saw him, because he had already been described to me in detail.
"I really thought more of you, dear. He must be fucking you in the daytime, cause he's been spending some long nights with a couple of strippers I know...some white girls with legs up to their necks...lucky bastard."
My face bristled in anger.
"Gymnastsm" he purred.
"Fuck you." I softly said, into my drink.
"No...no, you don't, actually. You don't fuck me. I really thought it was because you had some self-respect, but now I know I'm just not your type."
He was right. He was a large man, angry-looking. I have always preferred thin, wiry dreamers. His words dripped with sarcasm and self-loathing.
"So, you and pretty boy, huh?" He took an angry gulp of his whiskey.
I didn't know what to say.
"You really have no fucking idea what's going on, do you? I suggest you stay away from him, and that you take this as my formal warning. He's been pissing off the bosses lately, and less and less people like him these days."
The waiter brought by our entrees. I stared at my stuffed crab, at its garish pink color.
He was mean, that's for sure. He could get real mean on me. He had before. I braced myself as he continued, but where his anger took him that night left a bloody mess of my insides, a red trail that led to the rope that hung us both.
"Have I ever told you about the spider hole?" he asked, menacingly, his eyes darting back and forth making sure no one was in earshot.
"No."
He let the sentence linger for awhile, and he savored his drink and watched me lasciviously for awhile before he continued. "In Juárez, there's a string of very high end restaurants. We've dined there several times. There's tunnels underneath." he said, as he greedily drank the last of his scotch. It was replaced with a new one immediately.
"In the very, very busy kitchen of the very busiest one, if you move the stove just a few inches to the right you'll see it. They call it the spider hole."
I was used to his stories, but there was something different about this one. He was angry, and drunk. He wanted to hurt me, I knew, and I wondered where he was going with it.
"You know the very best way to get rid of somebody? You put them right underneath everyone's noses. Humans are arrogant creatures by nature, and always want to believe evil is far, far away, in some unnamed place. But what would you do if you found out evil is all around you, darling? Undulating underneath you? Perhaps even inside of you?"
I sat, silent. I had been having unprotected sex with Rigo, and suddenly felt as if he knew that, too.
He continued.
"When they really want to get rid of somebody, they put them in the Spider hole. It's a basement meat locker directly underneath the kitchen, with steel hooks hanging from the ceiling. The strangers, the who gives a fucks, they get killed like dogs, the good hits they get the desert burial...But the real traitors to the game end up there. It's like a family secret. It's where they hang the most unfortunate souls until they die...slowly. The irony of it all is the rich motherfuckers and their fat-assed families above the ground, ordering till their hearts content. The unfortunate souls can hear it all, see nothing, but they smell the food, they hear the laughter, the music, the bustling in the kitchen. They get to hear life at its fullest every second until they die. The excitement of a fancy night out; the endless crab soufflés and crepas de cajeta."The silence pierced the air like nails.
"Even pretty motherfuckers end up there."
Tears burned my eyes, and spilled down my face.
"Fuck you," I said.
But it was too late, and the image of Rigo hanging there was sliced into my memory, the crucifix tattoo on his chest that I loved to kiss turned into a sick mockery. I saw Rigo hanging there slowly dying, his sad eyes looking up at the spider hole, thinking about his life, about his mama.
My eyes searched for my phone, desperately hoping for a blinking red light.
"Don't bother baby, I happen to know he's busy right now. Mmmm...those white girls have sweet pussies, too. One of them lets me get a little taste of her once in a while."
I was paralyzed by jealousy at the thought of Rigo wrapped in between those two naked girls at that very moment, their pink tongues wagging, the sounds of giggling and hard sex in his bedroom, and their laughing mouths spilling fantasies into his ears. I imagined them trying hard to outdo each other for his attentions, the way only sad women can do. Fucking him good the way sometimes only wounded women can fuck.
We left the restaurant and drove back to El Paso in complete silence.
By the time I got back to work the next morning not even the hot sun could burn off my disappointment. I had been assigned playground duty that week, and I walked out the double doors by my classroom holding a hot coffee, grimacing the whole time.
I watched the kids shrieking and running outside on the playground, a baseball game in full swing out on the fields. A third-grader ran around me so fast, her long braids whipped my arm. I remembered my own long trenzas that my mother would tie fancy Mexican bows to every morning. She would make me promise not to rip them out as soon as she left me at the schoolyard. I always did.
I decided to stop calling Rigo for awhile. But men like him; they only contact you when they know that you've waited just...long...enough. When you're at the edge of your mind and start believing they were only a bad dream, the telephone rings.
I met him that night for dinner.
