Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (6 page)

The newspapers started calling almost immediately after I was released from the hospital. How did they know I was home? I watched my parents as they
struggled to answer everyone’s hungry questions.
No, they couldn’t speak to me, yes, it was outrageous, no, the family had no comment, please, please, no, no, describe how you feel. Describe how you feel
?

I didn’t like that my mother and father hovered over me as if I was a bird born with a broken wing.

I noticed how my mother would flinch every time the phone rang. A reporter from one of the TV stations showed up at our front door, cameraman in tow, and smiled sympathetically at my mother as she stood at the door. “We’d like to feature you,” she said. “Would you mind saying something, just a short interview? Actually, would the boy like to say something?”

“His name is Nick,” my mother said stiffly. “And he’s a man,
not
a boy.” She shut the door. I studied the look on her face. I thought she was going to cry—but she didn’t and I was glad she didn’t because I didn’t know how to calm her. I could see her lips trembling and I knew it was because of me. When the reporter began taping her segment using our house as a background, I stood in quiet awe of my sister Angela who stormed out into the yard, grabbed the reporter’s microphone, looked into the camera and yelled: “Someone used my brother’s back like a goddamned chalkboard. You want to know what they wrote on his back? Is that what you want? You want to know how we feel? We fucking feel like dancing.” She tossed the microphone into the neighbor’s yard and stared at them until they drove away.

I watched her from the doorway. I wondered how it was that she came to be the owner of that rage. I wanted it for myself but there was nothing in me. I was a tree who had lost its leaves in the middle of spring. When Angela came back into the house, she was shaking. I put my hand on her back and felt the sobs washing through her body. I wanted to beg her to give me her tears.

A magazine from Chicago called. Would it be possible to interview me
over the phone. “No,” my mother said. The reporter pushed, wanting to know how I was doing. Would I be permanently scarred? Was I returning to college in the fall? Did I hate the boys who’d done this? What did I think about the Hispanic community’s reaction? Did I support the student demonstrators? My mother listened patiently to all her questions—then hung up the phone.

The phone calls became routine—calls from friends, from acquaintances, from people we didn’t know, most of them offering sympathy. I asked myself if sympathy was a good word or a bad word. But there were other phone calls too, calls that were not related to the word sympathy.
Wasn’t it true that the boy had done something to those other boys? He must have provoked them, goaded them into attacking him. Surely the boys must have had a reason. Couldn’t it be true that the boy wanted to start some kind of race war? Did the boy have papers? What was an illegal doing at a public university
?

I looked up the word
illegal
.

An anonymous caller said that I was lucky. “They didn’t exactly lynch him, did they?”

My father had our phone number changed.

But even after that, when the phone rang, my parents gave each other tentative glances before they answered it.

Everything felt like it was happening to someone else. The newspaper people and the journalists, they didn’t want to speak to me. They wanted to speak to a Nick who no longer existed. The dead couldn’t speak. Didn’t they know that? The thought occurred to me that the living were exhausted from the weight of the words they were forced to carry with them everywhere they went.

I at least felt free of the weight of words.
Why don’t you talk, Nick
?

If I lay still in my bed, maybe I would dissolve like dry ice in a glass of water. To melt, to turn into a gas, to float away. To disappear.

But my mother’s food—and the smell of it—reminded me that having a body wasn’t always a bad thing. The odor of her
sopas
and
caldillos
and
guisados
. The garlic, the onion, the cumin, the cilantro, the roasted chiles. Sometimes, the odors that came out of my mother’s kitchen made me want to live.

Taste lies on the tongue but it is beyond the reach of language.
That’s what I wrote down on a piece of paper. I stared at what I had written. I ripped up the piece of paper until all the words were indecipherable.

My mother came into my room one night. She sat on my bed. “I thought you’d be reading,” she said.

“I don’t want to read anymore.”

“You told me you couldn’t live without books. You said you wanted to learn all the meanings of every word that existed in the world.”

“I don’t remember saying that. It must have been a long time ago.”

“No, Nick, it wasn’t long ago at all.”

“I don’t feel that way anymore.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“What?”

She kissed my forehead. “When I walked in the room, Nick, you were thinking about something.”

“My scars.” I didn’t know why I said that.

“They’re not just places of hurt, Nick. They’re places of healing.” My mother and I disagreed about how to translate the words on my back.

I felt the soundless tears running down my face.

I let her rock me to sleep.

I woke to the sound of thunder. I’d been having the same dream, the white sun beating down on me, the blood on my back as purple as Lenten vestments. But the morning storm was stronger than the dream. I opened my eyes, heard the drops pounding the house, smelled the pungent odor of the thirsty creosote.

I ran my hands under my T-shirt, feeling my own smooth chest. I caught myself reaching for the scars on my back, the tough, raised skin. I rose from my bed and stared out the window. I watched as my father’s peach trees swayed to the rhythm of the wind and the water.

Days, weeks, months of nothing but sun.

The learning to live without water.

The parched land.

The waiting.

And then the rain.

When I was a child, the whole world stopped at the sound of the thunder. I had a memory of people stepping out of their houses. The people would watch and listen closely as if each drop that fell to the ground was a whisper of a loved one come back from the dead.

I tried to picture my brothers and sisters playing outside, their laughter distant and lost amid the thunder, their bodies glowing in the bolts of lightning. I saw myself running toward them. Together, me, my brothers and sisters, all of us laughing, happy, together.

The storm stopped as suddenly as it began. The image of my brothers and sisters disappeared. I looked up at the immaculate, clearing sky.

I moved away from the window, then sat on my bed. I decided to go for a
run. I was sick of feeling the presence of three white boys that had occupied my body. Their hate sat inside me like a bird who was nesting—waiting for her eggs to hatch. I decided I could get used to hating, could even learn to love it in the same way that I’d learned to love the desert.

You could learn to love anything.

I yawned, stretched my arms upwards and left them reaching towards the sky until they hurt. I looked in the closet for my running shoes and found that all of my shoes were neatly arranged. My mother must have unpacked and organized everything. She was good at turning chaos into order.

I grabbed my running shoes, opened a drawer and found a pair of socks. I changed into my running clothes, then walked into the kitchen. My mother and father were drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. They looked up at me carefully—as if they were afraid I might break if they said the wrong thing. A part of me wanted to laugh, but the other part had forgotten how to laugh.

“Hi,” I said.

I thought I saw something in my mother’s eyes. She was either happy or sad—I couldn’t decide.

“I’m going running,” I said.

“Be careful,” my mother said. “You’re still a little weak.”

“Just a short run, Mom.”

“You want breakfast when you come back?”

“Sounds nice.” I looked at my father. “You were right, Dad.”

“About what?”

“You said I should have stayed home and gone to college here. You were right.”

He didn’t say anything. He ran his fingers through his thick, graying hair. “It doesn’t matter. You’re going to be okay. You’re home now.”

I nodded and kissed my father on the top of his head as I walked out the door. I wondered why I had done that but it seemed like the right thing to do. The old Nick would have done that.
You’re home now.
Home. I thought that word was just a dream.

I half expected the ground to give, open up and swallow me whole. But every time I took a step, nothing happened. I found myself heading toward the desert, but as I reached it, I stopped as if I had reached a line I was not allowed to cross. I looked toward the houses behind me, all in neat rows, all with numbers and mailboxes and sidewalks. I wondered why people had such a need to make the desert into something tame. Green lawns and flowers. It was all so futile—and such a waste of water. I sat down and looked at the well-trimmed hedges, the flowers struggling to survive.

I walked past all the homes and stood at the edge of the desert. I looked out at the mesquites and chamizos and the cacti. They always caught me there in the dream, caught me in the desert. They lived there, those boys, the three of them, the white boys who had hurt me. They lived in all the deserts of the earth. Death. That was the new word for desert. So that’s where they lived now, in every desert, in every dream I would ever have. I knew they would find me someday, catch me, cut me up again. I turned my back on the desert I once loved and ran home.

Breakfast was waiting for me when I walked into the house. “I’m out of shape.” I smiled at my mother. “Smells good.”

“
Huevos con chorizo
.”

I washed my hands at the sink.

My mother pushed the plate in front of me. “You’re too thin.”

I nodded, began eating, then looked around the room. “When did you paint the kitchen?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Guess I haven’t been much help around here.”

“You’re looking better,
mi’jo
.
Y no se te quita lo bonito
.”

“Mom, I’m plain as a row of cotton.”

“A row of cotton is anything but plain.”

“You want me to argue with you, Mom?”

“It would make me feel better if you did.”

I shrugged, took a tortilla and scooped my eggs up into my mouth. “Good,” I said. “This is really good.”

My mom looked almost happy. “What are you going to do now, Nick?”

I forced a smile as I looked into my father’s dark eyes. I thought they looked like a winter night. “Now? Today?”

“Yes. Now.”

“Now?”

“Now that you’re alive again.”

“Oh,” I said. “So that’s it. I’m alive?” I rolled my eyes.

“See, you always did that before—” She took a drink from her cup of coffee. “You always used to do that. You’re home now, Nick. You’re home.”

I looked up the old words in the dictionary, words I’d once known the meanings of:
home, desert, death, knife, skin, blood, knife, hate.

Waiting tables is not what I had dreamed of doing. Not that I minded the job. Café Central. My oldest brother knew the owner. It was the nicest restaurant in the city. The food was as good as it was expensive. And the money was even better than the food. Not that I gave a damn. What was I going to do with the money?

I liked my new routine. Running in the morning, going to work in the evening. It almost didn’t matter that nothing happened in between.

Sometimes, I wanted to go out after work. Going out sounded like something normal. I wanted normal, but something about normal scared me. Walking down streets at night. Something bad would happen. But there was this bar that all the waiters talked about, some dive called the Regal Beagle. I wanted to go. Normal.

One Saturday, I made up my mind. The bar was walking distance from the restaurant—but I decided to drive. I parked half a block away. I walked into the bar and smiled nervously as I looked around. I sat on a stool and ordered a drink. I polished off my bourbon in three gulps. I ordered another. As I finished my second drink, I thought about having a third—but already I felt lightheaded.

I didn’t notice her sitting next to me—until she spoke. “What’s your name?” Her voice was deep and raspy as if she had a cold. I stared at her cigarette, the smoke coming out of her mouth. “I’m Sylvia.”

I nodded.

“Quiet, huh?”

“Not much to say.”

“So what’s your name?” She smiled. She was pretty when she smiled. I guessed she was in her thirties—maybe older. It was hard to tell in the dim light of the bar.

“Nicholas,” I said. “My name is Nicholas.” I tried to pretend it was normal for me to be sitting in a dark bar having a couple of drinks and talking to a woman. Men did it all the time. Normal.

“You look nervous.” She offered me a cigarette.

“I don’t smoke.”