Re: AHS: Sam A & Cris M
The carnival grounds that rose up in clouds of barber-striped cotton candy, the washed up remains of a helical metaphor: blood and bandages, towered, a pitch and peak of tents, and Cris wondered what this place was. If there were superhero doors, Alice in Wonderland, all of that, then this was some fictional place made real too. He just didn't know what. But he wasn't exactly current with pop culture, unless it was intended for the under six crowd or had to do with the Yankees or Giants. So, you know, he didn't think too hard about it.—He was a man who picked up details, pieces and clues, and kept them close until he had enough to see something if he held them at arm's length.
And right now the only thing that made sense at arm's length was the little Jersey girl wreathed in the sweet stench of cloves, right in front of him, the sandy pink of Florida blossoming out from beneath her black skirt. The gap-toothed grin he recognized—not exactly, but the esencia of it, fucking barrio trouble spelled out with an extra space, framed in red. He smiled back, eyebrows twitching upward as she gravitated close and thrust him the matchbook.
Club Bali.
He pocketed the pulped cardboard, the tropical bleached green and yellow swallowed whole by black. Yeah, he had family in Florida, but he'd never been, Nueva York through and through, a fact stated as much by the cold-weather black of his suit. No white pants, no unbuttoned anything. Midcentury machinery, sleek industrialization, down to the straw hat on his head.
He took the kretek, her voice, the cramped camp of vowels, sounding like home, and he stole one single, solitary drag of the cigarette. The pungency of cloves rolled on his tongue as he exhaled, dropped the thing, and squashed it out beneath the gum of his shoe.
Through a miasma of smoke, he said: "Sí."
The concrete of reality didn't change much. The hotel had changed the way she looked, had curbed some of the hungriness he'd seen up close, but that was it, he realized. La mujer peligrosa. He tipped his chin up to look down at her.
"You just gotta tell me where to go, eh?" The Bronx came through the nose, the cadence all that sardine-can melody of the city. He smiled again.