Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer

by Jamie Figueroa

  Throughout the rest of the afternoon, Rafa had visitors. The Explorer, who said, “Women like your mother can break anyone they please. Are you going to cry about it?” He waited for Rafa to cry and when Rafa did, he said, “There it is. Oh, little boy, you start crying about women now, you’ll never stop for the whole of your godforsaken life. Leave her to me. I’m the kind of man who knows how to handle her.” Rufina, who said, “You’re a caca face,” feeding him apple slices and dates. She gave him another name, Carnicito, and asked him if he wanted to be her pet. She scratched him under his chin and on his belly. “Where you’ll have hair one day, you little beast,” she’d said, just like she’d heard the mother say. All of this while Rafa’s hands remained tied. No one was willing to interrupt Rosalinda’s punishment and risk her turning on them, too.

  It was dusk when the mother untied him. “Do you know how hard it is to survive?” she asked him. “If you knew, you wouldn’t do such a thing.” She carried him inside to her bed, where he lay in her arms. “Don’t you ever do such a thing again.” He clung to her. She clung to him. Their history together, as if hundreds of years old. All around them, the hills, mountains, and mesas bruising with the last light. The stars doing their best.

  “You can’t do that shit for money.” Rufina is standing over him. There’s nothing left of the crowd.

  “I did it for you,” Rafa says, his tongue fat in his mouth. He tries adjusting his vision. His right eye is swollen. He cannot locate the angel. “The money. Did you see the pile? You’re winning.”

  “There’s not a damn thing in the basket,” Rufina says. “Not even the crystal.”

  He twists into himself. His face pulped. The world rings in one fractured note. His nose is not broken, but close. The mother is nowhere near.

  Seven

  The teenage boy responsible for Rafa’s face is not wearing his own shoes, but his older cousin’s. He clomps down one street, and then another. His fist smoking. In his other hand the crystal. His chest a fantastic accordion. His eyeglasses are magnified and shaped like his favorite snack—moon pies. His joints are loose. Hidden like treasures beneath his flesh. Oversized clothes drape his soft body. His eyebrows tilt toward each other, his bottom lip droops. It’s a permanent expression of misunderstanding, a mask of it he wears. He’s hurrying as if he’ll be left behind. He is always left behind. On his head, Rafa’s hat. Under his right foot, snug in his shoe, the fold of bills.

  He is not a boy, not anymore. With what he stole, he could buy ink, just like his cousin. Down his neck, around his ears, down the outer seams of his arms and legs, around his wrists and ankles. Every prick of the needle will mean he exists. Has the right to exist.

  I’m here, Cousin.

  He imagines script fanning across his back. What does he have now? An X on the inside of his wrist, too small to see. A favor from the woman who marks his cousin. “Just getting you ready,” she’d said.

  Now he’s convinced himself he’s a man. Never mind how sloppy he is as he moves, as if each step lands in mud—no traction—and the effort walking takes causes onlookers to stare.

  They see me, Cousin! I’m here!

  A bandana wrapped tight around his head. The stems of his eyeglasses ride outside the material, pinching against the pattern of paisley. He wears navy scrub bottoms from the Goodwill. A gray oversized undershirt intended to show muscles, instead, tented over his body, revealing flaps of fat and skin. Look how hard he’s trying. Rafa’s hat, more shredded than it has ever been before.

  As he passes by a pot of geraniums, he stops. They are not plastic like the ones at the cemetery, but alive, and purple-rimmed, striped. Candy on stems. A smile hijacks his face, his first of the day. A feral mess of lips, gums, and teeth. As if he’s just gotten the joke. What does he know? Nothing. Which is what his cousin is always telling him.

  I’ll tell you what I know, Cousin.

  It’s his cousin he wanted to punch. Just this morning, in fact. After he skillfully scrambled the last of the eggs, his cousin swiped the plate from him as he was aiming his fork at the yellow sponge.

  Cousin!

  He heard the man at the microphone say, “Pathetic.” It doesn’t matter that the man was not talking to him, but to another teenage boy. “Pathetic, begging lump of a thing. I can’t even make out what you might be.” It doesn’t matter that in his own shadow there is a sage, sleeping. He lies on the ground of a fallow field, a snake piled atop his chest, all of this dwarfed by a blood-red moon.

  Squeeze. Aim. Strike. Release.

  That’s all he could manage. And as he was turning away, the money. All that cash. How the crystal ended up in his grasp, the hat on his head, he does not know. Never mind.

  Look at me now!

  Down Camino Agua Azul, then Doña Joya. He passes the tourists waiting in line at the corner restaurant. Then more geraniums. His smile at the sight of them. He stops at a two-story building of shops. Ducks under the exposed metal stairwell and steals a series of deep breaths. He removes his shoe, pulls out the fold. Counts each five-dollar bill, seven; each one-dollar bill, nine; each ten-dollar bill, three; each twenty-dollar bill, twelve. All his now. He counts them again. Organizing them from greatest to least value. Folds them. Goes to return them to his shoe, and then there is the angel.

  He slowly takes her in. Stares at her sideburns, the faint mustache, the chin hairs. He watches the rail of her body, the ladder-like quality of it. When finished, he says, “What are you supposed to be?” He has the faint memory of dreaming something like this once when he was a child sick with a fever. What’s more likely, a homeless guy in a costume wanting some change.

  “None of your business,” she says. “Kid Thief.”

  “That’s not my name,” he says. He wonders if he can pick her up. Without thinking, he reaches out. She backs up with her spindly legs. He can feel the scrubby wisps of hair on her forearms under his thumbs as he attempts to lift. She is heavier than she looks.

  An auntie with two children approaches the staircase they’re blocking and maneuvers around. On the second floor is the local brewery and shops selling dream catchers and kachina dolls, a nail salon, and a smoke shop. The auntie holds the children’s hands above their heads, steering them like puppets. Her cheeks crease as she smiles at the angel and the teenage boy. Lipstick marks her two front teeth. “Excuse us,” she says, which sounds like she’s making the noise of an oncoming train, a cartoon train. “Cooz. Zah.” Their progress upstairs is slow. The sound of their footsteps on metal stairs clinking as they rise.

  “That’s not your money,” the angel says.

  “Not yours, either.”

  “How much?”

  He’s already forgotten. Was it three hundred something, or four hundred something, or more?

  The angel knows how hungry the Kid Thief is. She can feel his mouth salivating at the thought of a bag full of fried chicken tacos. She knows he will eat his weight. Feels the warm grease running down his chin like breast milk. He’ll hold each one with his pinky up, stabbing the air as he takes each bite. He’s already forgotten the fantasy of the tattoos. This one needs to eat.

  “I can take it all,” the angel says.

  There’s no way he can get around her. Or can he? He looks to the store window behind her selling tablecloths, napkins, and picnic baskets. The display makes him wonder for a moment what the insides of the homes look like, covered in all of that. He’s not sure what a picnic basket is. A suitcase for rich people’s kitchens? He smiles at his own joke. Thinks he is smart. Again, feels his hunger twisting.

  Who said I wasn’t smart, Cousin!

  The auntie reappears, this time descending the stairs. Again, she steers one child in front of her and the other behind her. She has yet to let go of their hands. They each step down and then she steps. She will never let go of their hands. Which is to say, she is their guardian. Not their mother. Not their father. No actual blood relation. She is Auntie. The woman who stepped forward. The woman who c
ares. She is every woman in this place who cares, and they are all the children in this place. Know this—one day, in this place where they are all from, where they belong to someone, the children, grown, will take their turn leading her. After all, she is why they will never be discarded.

  “Give me half or I’m taking all of it,” the angel says, yawning. Her jaw pops. They both hear it. She wants to give him the chance to surrender the bills without force.

  Women have a kind of authority he has trouble questioning, especially this one with her face like a woman’s and at the same time a man’s. The unexpected density of her. He’s never sure what to trust. He squirms in his oversized shoes.

  A gap has formed between them from where the auntie passed through with the children. The Kid Thief licks his lips. He feels the wad in his right shoe. His left foot stomps the ground in preparation, as if faking on the basketball court. But he is not on a basketball court, nor has he ever been, nor will he ever be. Just in his imagination, on the couch watching TV.

  Watch this, Cousin!

  Notice how the mass of him running causes everyone to turn in his direction as he hauls west on Calle Chimayo. His fists cocked by his boobs. Before he makes it to Camino de Paz, he loses his right shoe, and the bills catch the afternoon air. They lift upward as if corn husk confetti. Through his thick lenses, he sees the angel three blocks down. She could be shaking her head. She could be flipping him off. Vision is a tricky thing. The bills continue lifting and whirling. People on the street, in the upstairs bar patio looking down on the world, think it’s a cloud of trash.

  The angel steps into an alley. Unseen, she calls the bills down to her pocket, as if they each had a name.

  Eight

  Rufina raps the wagon’s side with her cane. It pings. A sound Rafa cannot hear. Ping, ping, ping. It rolls toward her brother, stops against his back. As she stands over him, she longs for parents. She will always long for parents.

  Rafa makes out his sister’s shape. There is no angel. He’s able to see what is clearly in the sunlight. All shadows are hidden, quiet. Rafa knows it was the boy with the body of a man who grabbed it. He’s been beaten and robbed by a kid. The kind of kid he used to make fun of in his newly acquired French or Portuguese in the halls of junior high. This completes the insult.

  Officer Armijo plants himself between the brother and sister. The husband and wife are there, too, suddenly, donation in hand, red-faced and out of breath.

  “Go away,” Rufina says.

  “Nothing here for you to be an asshole about,” Rafa says.

  “Maybe it’s for the best,” Officer Armijo says. He shouldn’t smile so much. “There’s that problem with the permit. Not to mention someone could’ve gotten hurt.”

  “Right,” Rafa says, holding his face.

  “Apparently you don’t have the same gift your mother did.”

  “You want my gift?” Rafa says, wiping blood into his hair.

  “No, you keep it,” Armijo says, “I’d hate for you to be any more desperate.”

  The wife has her billfold open. She claws at its contents. Considering what’s happened, she’s compelled to give them more. Two hundred from the ATM, as if freshly manufactured. She flags it above Rafa as if it will revive him, get him to stand up.

  “They can’t accept that,” Lucio says, waving the wife away.

  “Why not?” Rufina screams. “What choice do we have?” Her voice startles them all. The husband and wife step slowly aside before they turn and head toward the safety of their hotel. Their suitcases are already packed and standing upright next to the door. The alarms on their phones are set to the shuttle’s pickup time. Once they have reached cruising altitude, the husband will press his hand on the wife’s as if to flatten any upsets during their stay. When they’re asked about their trip, they will both say it was the most fun they’d had in quite some time.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Lucio.”

  “Let me take you home,” Lucio says.

  It’s the pain in her hip that makes her agree. The pain that is now piercing not only her hip, but the front of her groin and entire expanse of her lower back. It’s affecting even her good leg, which thumps with an overwhelming ache.

  Rafa won’t look at either of them. He looks instead to the ground beside them. Shapes flush in their shadows, then disappear. Another wave of nausea. He uses Rufina’s good leg to grip while he pulls himself up. “I don’t want a ride in your circus car,” he says to Lucio. “With your fucking lights.” He grabs Rufina’s elbow, hanging on to her, attempting to steer her away, but he’s too weak. “He doesn’t need to be at the house,” he says in her ear. “I don’t want him that close. There’s no one there to rescue anymore.”

  All the windows in Lucio’s cruiser are down. In the front seat, there is a computer between them fixed to a black plastic shelf that swings out from the dashboard, its beeps intermittent.

  It’s different sitting inside. The car’s interior is gritty and smells of stale coffee, sweet grass, and fresh, unsmoked tobacco. The seat is worn beneath her. She’d gotten used to watching it pull up the drive with Rosalinda in the passenger seat. She remembers the start of last fall, when there was water in the river. The air had been alive with the sound of water pulsing. She remembers breathing it in from the open window above the kitchen sink. Remembers the curtain pinned back. Remembers cutting corn off the cob. Remembers how food gave her mother stomachaches. It didn’t matter that it was fresh. Everything gave her mother a stomachache. She was down to broths, a square of toast, a quarter of an avocado or sweet potato, mashed. “My body is eating me from the inside,” she would say to Rufina as she lit another cigarette. “Stop putting food in front of me.”

  Rufina remembers Baby in the rebozo sniffing the air, peering at Rufina’s mouth. Freeing a hand, the finger on Rufina’s cheek, the fast strike of nail against her skin. Its hands on her neck like two paws. They were in the kitchen, making lunch. Rufina cut away corn kernels while she sang a song, which was a combination of several songs she misremembered. Songs the Explorer sang to her.

  She stopped singing as she heard Lucio’s patrol car parking in the drive.

  “Not again,” she’d said, wiping her sticky hands against her thighs.

  “You’re as miserable as everyone else,” Rufina heard the mother shouting as she approached the front door. Rufina left the kitchen, headed down the hall. In her bedroom, she opened the trunk at the foot of her bed, tucked Baby inside.

  “You can’t pee in public,” Lucio said. “She can’t pee in public,” he repeated when Rufina appeared at the door. “Not anywhere she feels like it. Not in the plaza, not in front of the tourists.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

  “Again?” Rufina said.

  This had been a problem for some time. As a young woman who had managed crossing borders on her feet, sometimes on her hands and knees, escaping a country that wanted all of her kind dead, and this while pregnant—a journey no one is meant to survive—had caused internal and external damage. Some of the scars were visible, others hidden. She was used to her organs doing as they needed. Which is to say, if Rosalinda had to pee, she peed. It was as simple as squatting and making sure her skirt was out of the way. She did it whenever, wherever she had to. Why should it have been any different?

  “I had to go,” the mother said.

  “Why do you still do it?” Rufina said. “When you know you’re not allowed?”

  “I had to go.”

  “It has to stop,” Officer Armijo said. There were rules. There was order. There were public bathrooms.

  “It’s not like it was in someone’s house, on their floor,” the mother said. “It’s just on the dirt. The dirt doesn’t care.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Officer Armijo said. All the equipment suspended from his uniform lit up, his radio crackled.

  “Ma, no one wants to see you peeing on the street.”

  “I can’t have you doing it again,” Officer
Armijo said. “Rosalinda, I’m going to have to write you a ticket if you do it again.”

  “Write me a ticket? And then what? Put me in jail? Because I have to pee?”

  “Ma, you’re sick. You shouldn’t even be out like that, alone.”

  “Call your brother,” she told Rufina. “Call him right now.” Every single time, it was Rufina who had to dial Rafa’s number. The mother breaking down as soon as she heard his voice: “Conejito, mi amor, can you believe what they’re going to do to me? Put me in prison! Because I have to pee.”

  Rafa came immediately, he always did. On the next flight from Paris, from Marrakesh, from São Paulo to soothe her. To protect her from distress. But this time he did not return to his life translating and traveling. He stayed and watched the exodus that breath made from her body. Five months later, it was complete. She was wrapped and carried out by the Grandmothers to All.

  In the car, Rufina pulls her arms around her chest. She can’t think of what to say but silence feels too much like death. “How’s your litter?” she asks.

  “Doing great,” Armijo says. He adjusts his wedding band. Goes to trace his badge, stops himself. He sees his sons’ faces in his mind. Eleven, eight, five, four. They resemble their mother more than they ever have him. He drives unbearably slow through town. Lingers at all the stops. Rolls away as if in neutral, as if uncertain of which direction he’s heading, as if he hasn’t delivered Rosalinda countless times to her front door.

  “You sure you got enough of them?” Rafa says from the backseat. Spoken like a man who is not a father, who never will be. He’s tapping the bridge of his nose and beneath his eyes. He has yet to see himself, measure the swelling, the marks, the impressive discoloration. The pain keeps him subdued, a more tolerable version of himself than he would otherwise be, contained like this in the back of Lucio’s cop car.

  “Actually, we’re expecting,” Lucio says, taking the curve up into the canyon at a crawl.