Drown (7 page)

We lived south of the Cementerio Nacional in a wood-frame house with three rooms. We were poor. The only way we could have been poorer was to have lived in the campo or to have been Haitian immigrants, and Mami regularly offered these to us as brutal consolation.

At least you’re not in the campo. You’d eat rocks then.

We didn’t eat rocks but we didn’t eat meat or beans, either. Almost everything on our plates was boiled: boiled yuca, boiled platano, boiled guineo, maybe with a piece of cheese or a shred of bacalao. On the best days the cheese and the platanos were fried. When me and Rafa caught our annual case of worms it was only by skimping on our dinners that Mami could afford to purchase the Verminox. I can’t remember how many times I crouched over our latrine, my teeth clenched, watching long gray parasites slide out from between my legs.

At Mauricio Baez, our school, the kids didn’t bother us too much, even though we couldn’t afford the uniforms or proper mascotas. The uniforms Mami could do nothing about but with the mascotas she improvised, sewing together sheets of loose paper she had collected from her friends. We each had one pencil and if we lost that pencil, like I did once, we had to stay home from school until Mami could borrow another one for us. Our profesor had us share school books with some of the other kids and these kids wouldn’t look at us, tried to hold their breath when we were close to them.

Mami worked at Embajador Chocolate, putting in ten-, twelve-hour shifts for almost no money at all. She woke up every morning at seven and I got up with her because I could never sleep late, and while she drew the water out of our steel drum I brought the soap from the kitchen. There were always leaves and spiders in the water but Mami could draw a clean bucket better than anyone. She was a tiny woman and in the water closet she looked even smaller, her skin dark and her hair surprisingly straight and across her stomach and back the scars from the rocket attack she’d survived in 1965. None of the scars showed when she wore clothes, though if you embraced her you’d feel them hard under your wrist, against the soft part of your palm.

Abuelo was supposed to watch us while Mami was at work but usually he was visiting with his friends or out with his trap. A few years back, when the rat problem in the barrio had gotten out of hand (Those malditos were running off with kids, Abuelo told me), he had built himself a trap. A destroyer. He never charged anyone for using it, something Mami would have done; his only commission was that he be the one to arm the steel bar. I’ve seen this thing chop off fingers, he explained to the borrowers but in truth he just liked having something to do, a job of some kind. In our house alone Abuelo had killed a dozen rats and in one house on Tunti, forty of these motherfuckers were killed during a two-night massacre. He spent both nights with the Tunti people, resetting the trap and burning the blood and when he came back he was grinning and tired, his white hair everywhere, and my mother had said, You look like you’ve been out getting ass.

Without Abuelo around, me and Rafa did anything we wanted. Mostly Rafa hung out with his friends and I played with our neighbor Wilfredo. Sometimes I climbed trees. There wasn’t a tree in the barrio I couldn’t climb and on some days I spent entire afternoons in our trees, watching the barrio in motion and when Abuelo was around (and awake) he talked to me about the good old days, when a man could still make a living from his finca, when the United States wasn’t something folks planned on.

Mami came home after sunset, just when the day’s worth of drinking was starting to turn some of the neighbors wild. Our barrio was not the safest of places and Mami usually asked one of her co-workers to accompany her home. These men were young, and some of them were unmarried. Mami let them walk her but she never invited them into the house. She barred the door with her arm while she said good-bye, just to show them that nobody was getting in. Mami might have been skinny, a bad thing on the Island, but she was smart and funny and that’s hard to find anywhere. Men were drawn to her. From my perch I’d watched more than one of these Porfirio Rubirosas say, See you tomorrow, and then park his ass across the street just to see if she was playing hard to get. Mami never knew these men were there and after about fifteen minutes of staring expectantly at the front of our house even the loneliest of these fulanos put their hats on and went home.

We could never get Mami to do anything after work, even cook dinner, if she didn’t first sit awhile in her rocking chair. She didn’t want to hear nothing about our problems, the scratches we’d put into our knees, who said what. She’d sit on the back patio with her eyes closed and let the bugs bite mountains onto her arms and legs. Sometimes I climbed the guanábana tree and when she’d open her eyes and catch me smiling down on her, she’d close them again and I would drop twigs onto her until she laughed.

2.

When times were real flojo, when the last colored bill flew out Mami’s purse, she packed us off to our relatives. She’d use Wilfredo’s father’s phone and make the calls early in the morning. Lying next to Rafa, I’d listen to her soft unhurried requests and pray for the day that our relatives would tell her to vete pa’l carajo but that never happened in Santo Domingo.

Usually Rafa stayed with our tíos in Ocoa and I went to tía Miranda’s in Boca Chica. Sometimes we both went to Ocoa. Neither Boca Chica nor Ocoa were far but I never wanted to go and it normally took hours of cajoling before I agreed to climb on the autobus.

How long? I asked Mami truculently.

Not long, she promised me, examining the scabs on the back of my shaved head. A week. Two at the most.

How many days is that?

Ten, twenty.

You’ll be fine, Rafa told me, spitting into the gutter.

How do you know? You a brujo?

Yeah, he said, smiling, that’s me.

He didn’t mind going anywhere; he was at that age when all he wanted was to be away from the family, meeting people he had not grown up with.

Everybody needs a vacation, Abuelo explained happily. Enjoy yourself. You’ll be down by the water. And just think about all the food you’ll eat.

I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent. On the ride to Boca Chica I was always too depressed to notice the ocean, the young boys fishing and selling cocos by the side of the road, the surf exploding into the air like a cloud of shredded silver.

Tía Miranda had a nice block house, with a shingled roof and a tiled floor that her cats had trouble negotiating. She had a set of matching furniture and a television and faucets that worked. All her neighbors were administrators and hombres de negocios and you had to walk three blocks to find any sort of colmado. It was
that
sort of neighborhood. The ocean was never far away and most of the time I was down by the beach playing with the local kids, turning black in the sun.

Tía wasn’t really related to Mami; she was my madrina, which was why she took me and my brother in every now and then. No money, though. She never loaned money to anyone, even to her drunkard of an ex-husband, and Mami must have known because she never asked. Tía was about fifty and rail-thin and couldn’t put anything in her hair to make it forget itself; her perms never lasted more than a week before the enthusiasm of her kink returned. She had two kids of her own, Yennifer and Bienvenido, but she didn’t dote on them the way she doted on me. Her lips were always on me and during meals she watched me like she was waiting for the poison to take effect.

I bet this isn’t something you’ve eaten lately, she’d say.

I’d shake my head and Yennifer, who was eighteen and bleached her hair, would say, Leave him alone, Mamá.

Tía also had a penchant for uttering cryptic one-liners about my father, usually after she’d downed a couple of shots of Brugal.

He took too much.

If only your mother could have noticed his true nature earlier.

He should see how he has left you.

The weeks couldn’t pass quickly enough. At night I went down by the water to be alone but that wasn’t possible. Not with the tourists making apes out of themselves, and with the tígueres waiting to rob them.

Las Tres Marías, I pointed out to myself in the sky. They were the only stars I knew.

But then one day I’d walk into the house from swimming and Mami and Rafa would be in the living room, holding glasses of sweet lemon-milk.

You’re back, I’d say, trying to hide the excitement in my voice.

I hope he behaved himself, Mami would be saying to Tía. Her hair would be cut, her nails painted; she’d have on the same red dress she wore on every one of her outings.

Rafa smiling, slapping me on the shoulder, darker than I’d last seen him. How ya doing, Yunior? You miss me or what?

I’d sit next to him and he’d put his arm around me and we’d listen to Tía telling Mami how well I behaved and all the different things I’d eaten.

3.

The year Papi came for us, the year I was nine, we expected nothing. There were no signs to speak of. Dominican chocolate was not especially in demand that season and the Puerto Rican owners laid off the majority of the employees for a couple of months. Good for the owners, un desastre for us. After that, Mami was around the house all the time. Unlike Rafa, who hid his shit well, I was always in trouble. From punching out Wilfredo to chasing somebody’s chickens until they passed out from exhaustion. Mami wasn’t a hitter; she preferred having me kneel on pebbles with my face against a wall. On the afternoon that the letter arrived, she caught me trying to stab our mango tree with Abuelo’s machete. Back to the corner. Abuelo was supposed to make sure I served my ten minutes but he was too busy whittling to bother. He let me up after three minutes and I hid in the bedroom until he said, OK, in a voice that Mami could hear. Then I went to the smokehouse, rubbing my knees, and Mami looked up from peeling platanos.

You better learn, muchacho, or you’ll be kneeling the rest of your life.

I watched the rain that had been falling all day. No, I won’t, I told her.

You talking back to me?

She whacked me on the nalgas and I ran outside to look for Wilfredo. I found him under the eaves of his house, the wind throwing pieces of rain onto his dark-dark face. We shook hands elaborately. I called him Muhammad Ali and he called me Sinbad; these were our Northamerican names. We were both in shorts; a disintegrating pair of sandals clung to his toes.

What you got? I asked him.

Boats, he said, holding up the paper wedges his father had folded for us. This one’s mine.

What does the winner get?

A gold trophy, about this big.

OK, cabrón, I’m in. Don’t let go before me.

OK, he said, stepping to the other side of the gutter. We had a clear run down to the street corner. No cars were parked on our side, except for a drowned Monarch and there was plenty of room between its tires and the curb for us to navigate through.

We completed five runs before I noticed that somebody had parked their battered motorcycle in front of my house.

Who’s that? Wilfredo asked me, dropping his soggy boat into the water again.

I don’t know, I said.

Go find out.

I was already on my way. The motorcycle driver came out before I could reach our front door. He mounted quickly and was gone in a cloud of exhaust.

Mami and Abuelo were on the back patio, conver-sating. Abuelo was angry and his cane-cutter’s hands were clenched. I hadn’t seen Abuelo bravo in a long time, not since his produce truck had been stolen by two of his old employees.

Go outside, Mami told me.

Who was that?

Did I tell you something?

Was that somebody we know?

Outside, Mami said, her voice a murder about to happen.

What’s wrong? Wilfredo asked me when I rejoined him. His nose was starting to run.

I don’t know, I said.

When Rafa showed himself an hour later, swaggering in from a game of pool, I’d already tried to speak to Mami and Abuelo like five times. The last time, Mami had landed a slap on my neck and Wilfredo told me that he could see the imprints of her fingers on my skin. I told it all to Rafa.

That doesn’t sound good. He threw out his guttering cigarette. You wait here. He went around the back and I heard his voice and then Mami’s. No yelling, no argument.

Come on, he said. She wants us to wait in our room.

Why?

That’s what she said. You want me to tell her no?

Not while she’s mad.

Exactly.

I slapped Wilfredo’s hand and walked in the front door with Rafa. What’s going on?

She got a letter from Papi.

Really? Is there money?

No.

What does it say?

How should I know?

He sat down on his side of the bed and produced a pack of cigarettes. I watched him go through the elaborate ritual of lighting up—the flip of the thin cigarrillo into his lips and then the spark, a single practiced snap of the thumb.

Where’d you get that lighter?

Mi novia gave it to me.

Tell her to give me one.

Here. He tossed it to me. You can have it if you shut up.

Yeah?

See. He reached to take it. You already lost it.

I shut my mouth and he settled back down on the bed.

Hey, Sinbad, Wilfredo said, his head appearing in our window. What’s going on?

My father wrote us a letter!

Rafa rapped me on the side of my head. This is a
family
affair, Yunior. Don’t blab it all over the place.

Wilfredo smiled. I ain’t going to tell anybody.

Of course you’re not, Rafa said. Because if you do I’ll chop your fucking head off.

I tried to wait it out. Our room was nothing more than a section of the house that Abuelo had partitioned off with planks of wood. In one corner Mami kept an altar with candles and a cigar in a stone mortar and a glass of water and two toy soldiers we could not touch ever and above the bed hung our mosquito netting, poised to drop on us like a net. I lay back and listened to the rain brushing back and forth across our zinc roof.