Mrs. Baez

		Mrs. Báez Serves Coffee on the Third Floor It hunches with a brittle black spine where they poured gasoline on the stairs and the bannister and burnt it. The fire went running down the steps, a naked lunatic, calling the names of the neighbors, cackling in the hall. The immigrants ate terror with their hands and prayed to Catholic statues as the fire company pumped a million gallons in and burst the roof, as an old man on the top floor with no name known to authorities strangled on the smoke and stopped breathing. Some of the people left. There's a room on the third floor: high-heeled shoes kicked off, a broken dresser, the saint's portrait hanging where it looked on shrugging shoulders for years, soot, trash, burnt tile, a perfect black light bulb to remember everything. And some stayed. The old men barechested, squatting on the milk crates to play dominoes in the front-stoop sun; the younger ones, the tigres, watching the block with unemployed faces bitter as bad liquor; Mrs. Báez, who serves coffee on the third floor from tiny porcelain cups, insisting that we stay; the children who live between narrow kitchens and charred metal doors and laugh anyway; the skinny man, the one just arrived from Santo Domingo, who cannot read or write, with no hot water for six weeks, telling us in the hallway that the landlord set the fire and everyone knows it, the building's worth more empty. The street organizer said it: burn the building out, blacken an old Dominicano's lungs and sell so that the money-people can renovate and live here where an old Dominicano died, over the objections of his choking spirit. But some have stayed. Stayed for the malicious winter, stayed frightened of the white man who comes to collect rent and borrowing from cousins to pay it, stayed waiting for the next fire, and the siren, hysterical and late. Someone poured gasoline on the steps outside her door, but Mrs. Báez still serves coffee in porcelain cups to strangers, coffee the color of a young girl's skin in Santo Domingo. from The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero