Here They Come

by Yannick Murphy

  “First the racetrack,” he says and he comes home later that day saying he saw parts of our father. Another man with the same bald head. Another man with the same hunched back. A woman with his eyes. A lot of people with his shoes. Some with his smell, or it was just the popcorn machines. Some with his thumb, curled around programs, wide enough to cover strings of printed words and complicated racing terms. Some who he will someday be, trundling their IVs alongside them, heading for a cheap seat, stopping along the way, turning thrown tickets with their toes on the ground, hoping to find winners another man missed.

  He goes back the next day, thinking he will now find the whole of our father. The sounds of the calls of the races like blood in his ears. He admires the board, its fast blinking lights and ever-changing odds. He finds himself cheering. A horse, who would have thought, leading by lengths, bringing it on home. He favors underdogs every time.

  He uses the men’s room. In the mirror, at the rows of yellow-stained enamel sink bowls, he sees another man alongside him, his hands already lathered in liquid soap, trying to turn the sink handle that won’t budge, going from one sink to the next that way, finding out none of them work and saying, “Shit like this always happens to me. Every time I get to a traffic light it turns red.” He thinks, this man is like our father, and he goes into a stall and pulls out the roll of paper and unwinds some for the man and offers it to him, to wipe the soap off his hands. The man grabs the paper without saying a word and wipes his hands and when he’s finished he throws the mass of paper on the floor, steps over it and walks out the door.

  He tries the backside, sneaking past guards to shed rows in the morning when hotwalked horses are hosed down. He pulls aside blankets on beams hanging from barns, spooking horses that hit their chests against their chain webbings. A horse with one eye is the closest he has come to finding his father. The hollow socket somehow familiar, perhaps like his father’s throat, the skin thin there at the base, where the pulse beats between bone.

  A Puerto Rican girl at school gets pregnant. She comes to school in her father’s button-down shirts and undoes a few buttons and shows us her navel which she says has popped out as far as the bulging eyes of one of those little mop dogs. I know the kind she means, the kind like Ma Mère’s. A little Bambi dog eye, just one, the Cyclops of her belly.

  “Comes everything with seed,” Mr. Lenin says. We are building wooden birdhouses.

  “Rats come,” says the pregnant Puerto Rican girl. She has seen them shimmy up the brick of buildings, so many you’d think it was ivy, but it’s just what the realtors call Lower East Side charm, crawling rats instead of climbing ivy. She is afraid for her not-yet-born child’s cheeks. The rats might think they’re chunks of cheese and bite them.

  “I’d like to build a wooden trap instead, if it’s all right with you,” she says to Mr. Lenin. Others of us do too, with guillotine doors that slide down when the rats step on a dowel to get to the seeds. When she is nearly due the class gives her a shower and she receives our wooden rat-traps in the shapes of birdhouses tied with yellow and pink ribbons. We all sign a card. “May your baby’s cheeks never be chewed.” She cries and hugs us and lets us feel her kicking baby. “If everything comes for seed,” she says to me, “then maybe a little seed could bring your father home.” I shake my head. “A trap then?” she says. She turns to Mr. Lenin. “What would it take to build one big enough for a man?”

  “More wood,” Mr. Lenin says, while he stands at the mirror hung in the closet of the classroom cutting his long black nose hairs with a tiny saw blade.

  The next day Mr. Lenin opens the door to the supply room.

  He points at me. “Come, I show you,” he says. I point at myself. “Me?” I say.

  “Yes, come,” he says.

  I walk into the supply room. There’s metal shelves stacked with different lengths of wood. A lot of wood.

  “When you are ready. I help you build trap. The one for a man,” he says. “I know how to do it. But don’t tell principal.” He takes down a huge piece of wood from a top shelf. “We start with this,” he says. He takes my hand and places it over the wood. I glide it back and forth, feeling sawdust, the powder of the wood.

  “I once wanted to build same trap when I was your age,” he says.

  Finally, I get a phone call. Someone saw my sign.

  “I found your dog,” a man says.

  “My sign is for a man. My dog’s right here,” I say. It’s true, our dog is sleeping in the corner with one of the cats sleeping curled up between her legs.

  “What’s my reward?” the man says.

  “The reward is you get to keep the dog,” I say.

  “That’s fucked up,” the man says. “I should report you to the humane society.”

  One night we all wake up because Ma Mère’s standing at the window, pointing at a bum wandering on the street. She is calling for our mother, asking out loud in French if she remembers her father and our mother answers of course she remembers her father, and Ma Mère draws our mother near and puts a hand on our mother’s shoulder and says in French, “Vois tu? There he is, wave to him,” she says. Our mother waves to him and puts her arm around Ma Mère’s waist and the two of them watch the bum, reeling, drunk, trying to make his way up the street.

  In the morning the bum is at our breakfast table.

  His name is Manolo and he is not our mother’s father.

  “But he is hungry and we should help him,” our mother says and Ma Mère, from her chair in the living room, says, “Oui, he is hungry,” so we have to let him stay and our mother finds some of my brother’s shorts that he never wears and she gives them to Manolo.

  “Call him Uncle,” our mother says a few days later.

  “Uncle?” we all cry out.

  “He could be yours, he looks so much like my father,” she says and she makes him special meals cooked with saffron that stains our wooden spoons yellow.

  “That’s what it does to your insides too,” Louisa says, holding up the yellowed spoons, showing us how we are yellow-bellied.

  Manolo sleeps in an old car parked on the street, saying he doesn’t mind it there, especially since the weather’s warming up. The car doesn’t run and every other day Manolo puts it in neutral and we help push it to the other side of the street so it won’t be towed.

  After a while, we do call him Uncle. He likes to tell us stories about Chile. Long, long stories that are mostly about women he loved and women he wished loved him back. Their eyes are all black as night and their hair soft as breezes. When he tells us the stories he outlines their figures in the air for us, dozens of big breasts and narrow waists and curved hips shaped by his hands and left standing invisible and silent all over our house.

  I go to see John and he gives me a broken hot dog to eat and then he tells me to be careful, that Uncle Manolo may be a creep.

  “How disgusting,” I say and John nods his head but I’m talking about the hot dog he just gave me.

  “Fuck, is this some kind of tail?” I ask him and I show him where I bit into the hot dog, how a string or a tail of some sort is processed into the thing. “Rat tail, must be, or big mouse,” I say.

  “It’s just what happens sometimes to hot dogs when they’re made,” John says. “Eat and keep quiet. You want someone to hear you?”

  John takes off his fast food hat and throws it in the garbage.

  “It’s falling apart,” he says. He wipes his hand through his hair which shows his balding head beneath it. Sweat glistens on the rolled wrinkled skin by his neck. I’ve never seen him looking so hairless.

  “Creeps like your new uncle make me want to go back to my country and be with my wife and kids,” John says.

  John says come here and he sits down and I sit on his lap and he slides his fingers up to my tits and after a minute I stand up. I think a minute’s long enough for a hot dog, especially a broken one and all with a rodent tail inside.

  “Go home. I’m busy,” he says. But there are n
o customers and he’s not busy, he just looks down, putting his hands around the handles on his hot dog cart, as if he’s mustering energy, as if any moment he’s going to run breakneck with the cart in front of him through the street, ready to crash into some bus or truck and do himself in. I don’t want to leave him this way, so I tell him what my brother said, that if you’re going to kill yourself you better be careful you do it the entire way, and not just half-assed so that you’re stuck in a wheelchair your whole life collecting your shit in some plastic baggie. And then I go home.

  “The heat has come for us,” our mother says. She wears wet turban towels on her head, she once heard some swami swear that it cools the body down.

  “Don’t talk,” she says, “there’s no need for it.”

  Powdered, we stand akimbo, holding ourselves out from ourselves in front of dusty-bladed metal fans, the powder blowing back behind us, whitening the dog, the cats, and Ma Mère.

  There’s a run for ice. Louisa and I stay close to buildings, protected by their ledges, providing shade in narrow inches to the deli. The ice is all out. What remains at the bottom of the deli’s glass case is just a few chips we pick up and slide down the fronts of our shirts. We search for the deli’s air-conditioning vent, stand directly under it and hold our hair up from our necks, patting and waving away at our sweat.

  “Can I help you ladies?” the deli man wants to know.

  “We’re just looking,” Louisa says.

  “Leave some cool air for us,” he says and he shows us the door.

  * * *

  The bang and brattle we hear is Manolo dragging an air conditioner through the house. Where he got it, our mother doesn’t want to know. They lift it to the window and turn it on and it shakes and thrums and loosens paint chips on the ledge. The dog barks and the cats arch their backs and hiss. Our mother bends down on her knees and prays, but still the cool air doesn’t come. Instead there is smoke and sparks we can see through the slitted vents.

  “Merde,” our mother says, and she pulls the plug and opens the window and tips the air conditioner over so that it falls out the window, hitting the ground in the shrubby skinny treed lot with a loud smash.

  Manolo swims in the dirty river, jumping off pylons in front of whores who are calling out Olympic scores for his leaps and dives and pointing out hazardous floating debris like a cooler and a two-by-four.

  Our mother joins the whores.

  “Nine-Six. Watch out for the floating can,” she yells.

  Later the whores get up and head back to their places on the avenue, remembering as they go to hike up their skirts, peel back their necklines, let their breasts rise to the surface.

  “There were men,” our mother says, “who wanted anything I left behind. One even collected my nail trimmings.”

  “That’s too strange,” Louisa says. “Did you call the cops?”

  Our mother laughs, “The cops? Yes, and a cop too. I dated one. He kept a photo of me up under his hat.”

  “So it was everyone then? They all wanted you,” Louisa says. “The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. You must have been lonely, you must have had no other girlfriends, just these men following you everywhere you went.”

  Jody and Louise and I decide to ask the Ouija game where our father is. We ask if it our father’s in the country, and the Ouija spells out “r-a-i-n.” We ask it if we’ll see him again and it spells out “f-e-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-t.”

  “Whatever happened to ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” Louisa says and while our fingertips are still resting on the pointer, it moves, landing on the word “goodbye.”

  At the E & B, I take a package of hamburger meat for our dinner and slide it into my coat. It feels cold on my chest and I think maybe it’s a good thing to have it there, what if I walk outside and there’s a shoot-out on the street and I accidentally get shot, then the hamburger meat may stop the bullet or slow it down and I’ll live and the E & B won’t press charges for my thievery because they’ll be honored to say it was their pack of hamburger meat that saved the girl’s life. When I get home I see the blood from the package has leaked and stained my shirt red. Our mother runs to me, looking to see where I’m cut.

  “It’s cow blood, fuck, leave me alone,” I say and push her away and run to the shower but I’ve got to wait because Uncle Manolo’s already in there, singing a Chilean love song and using up all the hot water.

  She married our father in a restaurant, not even a church. She wore a silver skirt and jacket and pillbox hat to match. After the ceremony, she was called to the phone, an old boyfriend wanting to know if it was too late. It was. My father took a picture of her on the phone, the wedding ring shining on her finger. She remembers being in love, but only how it made her feel and not what she felt for him. She has stored the ring in a crack in the wood in the wall, so she can pull it out with something thin and sharp if she wants to, a knife blade perhaps. He photographed just her legs, upright against the bathroom’s tiled wall while she lay in the tub. Her legs slick with soapy water grew cold from posing so long. Her back began to ache. She never asked him to hurry, but just closed her eyes in the tub and imagined her legs were not really hers, and tried to stay still for him. She says she tried to stay still for too many years, that’s how she always felt, as if he were making her hold a pose and it ached. She slapped herself in the face with both hands for being so stupid, the slaps leaving red welts from her wedding ring. That’s when she took it off and put it into the crack in the wood in the wall.

  I’m alone with Ma Mère and I ask her what my father was like when I was small. Was he bald then too? I can’t imagine him with hair. But she doesn’t answer my question, instead she says, “When you were a baby, we went to the beach. He held you high above the waves because you were scared of them. The ocean was rough. I thought the both of you would be knocked down. But when he brought you back to shore there wasn’t a drop of water on you.”

  John doesn’t look like he’s trying to muster up energy anymore. He’s sitting on the curb, wiping his forehead with his apron. When he sees me he invites me to sit on his lap, but I shake my head. I’m hungry. I’ve come for some Hershey and ask for it.

  “I’m all out, kid,” he says.

  Manolo won’t get out of his car. He is drunk and unable to move. There are green and amber liquor bottles all over the floor, wedged under the gas and brake pedals, crammed into the glove box that now can’t be closed. Tickets pile up under the car’s wipers.

  “We’ve got to move him,” our mother says and we try, we put it in neutral and push, our mother steers, but by the time we get to the other side of the street where the parking is legal, the spaces are already taken. We keep pushing him down the avenue. The dog jumps on the hood, splaying her paws, trying to dig in with her toenails. We go crosstown.

  “Let’s keep going,” our mother says, thinking it best to park the car right in front of the river where there are no signs restricting the parking.

  “Wake up, we’ve given you a view of the river,” our mother says through the window to Manolo. Manolo sits up, runs his hand through his hair and then looks at himself in the rearview mirror, smiling. He gets out of the car and admires his view, saying he doesn’t know why he didn’t think of parking here himself. He takes our mother and dances with her and the skirt of her dress flies up when he spins her on the rotting wooden pier. The heel of her shoe gets caught and she falls and she laughs and the sun is setting now and she points to it and shakes her head and looks over at us standing on the street. While she still sits where she fell, she waves and points again to the sunset, wanting us to see what she sees.

  On our walk back home I count the hot dog men. There are more out there than you think. Somehow they are strategically placed on every third street corner like pieces of a chess game.

  “I’m tired, let’s take the bus,” our mother says. But we don’t have enough money for everyone to take the bus so our mother takes it alone. We jump alongside when we can, holding on the w
indows with our fingertips, looking in at her, smiling while she covers her mouth and tries not to laugh, and waves us back down to the ground, afraid one of us will get caught up under the wheels and be dragged crosstown.

  At home we are swearing that even the poreless parts of us are sweating—eyeballs and nails and navels and tongues. We’re afraid for Ma Mère, who isn’t hearing, who won’t answer our questions, but simply sleeps all day. At night, though, she says she doesn’t sleep, saying she’s too hot. When we walk by her on our way to the bathroom she says “hello” to us and sometimes lifts her fingertips in a wave. One night I stop and I sit on the floor by her chair. I don’t say anything. She just starts to talk.

  “That day we went to the beach, he fell asleep with you under the crook of his arm on the towel. The plan was to head back home before dinner. But we stayed. We couldn’t bring ourselves to wake you. He slept with a smile on his face the whole time.”

  “How can you remember all of this and I don’t remember any of it?” I say.

  “It’s not so much to remember,” she says.

  Our father’s slut sits in the window seat at her dead parents’ house, watching her brothers out back, raking leaves, throwing a ball for a dog who won’t bring it back.

  She sleeps in her parents’ room, puts on her father’s silk pajamas stored in plastic. A pattern of rulers’ heads on coins. She touches a bedspread she cannot remember ever having seen before, and the curtains, she can’t remember having ever seen those either. Patterns are small buds when she always thought they were full blooms. She lies on the bed. Her hands behind her head, she marvels, this is not the same ceiling. She wakes her brothers knocking on their doors, “Come look,” she says, “The ceiling, who replaced it? Who painted it and changed the tiles?”