Here They Come

by Yannick Murphy

  “He never gave me one,” Ma Mère says.

  “What’s that, ma cherie?” our mother says.

  “Oh, you know, you know,” Ma Mère says, “One of those. I never had one with him. He never gave me one,” she says.

  “Mami, the children are here,” our mother says.

  “I know, but they are such old children now. They stink, you know, the older ones, the smell of onion coming out from underneath their fat arms,” Ma Mère says.

  “Enough,” our mother says.

  “Your father would sew their mouths shut, if he saw them, so they could not eat. You realize that, don’t you?” Ma Mère says to our mother.

  “Papa would have done a lot of things I don’t do,” our mother says. “He might have cut your leg off, to keep you from the pain,” our mother adds.

  Ma Mère nods her head. “Oh, yes, the bastard would have done that without a moment’s hesitation. Oh, ma cherie,” Ma Mère says to our mother, “I’m better off to keep the leg, I’d like to be buried in my silk saffron-colored pants. Do you know the ones I mean?” Our mother says she does. We all remember the silk saffron-colored pants. She called them her pants to land planes, they were so bright. She’s had them for years and wore them once when we all tumbled out of the car at some frozen lake upstate and tried lacing broken-laced ice skates onto our feet, feeding knotted worn laces through paint-chipped eyelets, while we sweated underneath our raspy nylon coats.

  She was on the ice before any of us, gliding in her pants, singing songs in French and still smoking her cigarette. We could hear how well she skated before we even saw, the blades clean and slicing through snow-covered ice, more like the sound of knives being sharpened. Her tapered legs awhirl in spin. Chips of ice like stars shooting up around her while she went, clinging to the bottoms of the saffron-colored silk. We clapped when she was done, the snow falling from our mittens in flakes with the dull claps echoing against walls of the stone bridge we stood under.

  “Bring me that,” she says and we drag over the suitcase she brought when she first came to stay with us. Some of Bambi’s black and white hairs are still matted on the plaid. She pulls the silk saffron-colored pants out and they smell of cigarette smoke and she hands them to me and tells me to wear them until she dies, she wants the pants to go places she can’t go.

  “To school?” I say.

  “Sure, comme non?” she says, and then she says, “But make special efforts, wear them to other places too, elegant parties, uptown galleries and overseas.”

  “Overseas?” I say.

  “Be careful on the tarmac, though,” she says. “You may land a plane.”

  John sees me in the pants and turns me around, looking for the knob so he can turn their brightness down. He is trying to take out a tooth, sticking his fingers in the back of his mouth. He is losing another one and he says he’d rather take it out than wait for it to fall out just as he swallows a meal. No one buys a hot dog from him. “John, stop,” I say.

  “I can’t,” he says.

  “Really,” I say.

  “Those pants have done a swell number on you,” he says. “Where’s the girl I went fishing with? Where’s the girl in blue jeans?” he says and as he does his tooth comes loose and he pulls it out along with a sticky string of red saliva.

  “You’ll lose your corner,” I say. “You’ll have to fold up your umbrella, let the others have a try, maybe they won’t be pulling their teeth out in front of customers.”

  “Go away from me,” John says. “Go on,” he says and takes the mustard server, a metal lid with a metal rod attached that he dips into a cylinder filled with mustard, and with his outstretched arm he lunges towards me, the end of it dripping yellow mustard and he starts to splash it at me, the blobby drops falling to the sidewalk. I have to jump back, cover what I can of my pants so they don’t stain, but John keeps coming at me and so I have to turn and run away from him.

  We call the police station, just to see if there’s been any news, but we can’t get through to anyone who knows about our father’s case.

  A woman answers and Louisa tells her who we are and the woman asks, “Are you the kids who were in that basement fire?”

  “No,” Louisa says.

  “I know,” she says, “you’re the ones who blew up the dumpster.”

  “No,” Louisa says. “We’re the kids with the missing father.”

  “Oh,” she says and then she puts Louisa on hold and never picks up again.

  Rena says the pants would get me pregnant in PR.

  “Too tight, baby,” she says. She says the way to be attractive is to do it so that no one else knows it but yourself. For instance, she says, wear a long skirt, but don’t wear underwear.

  “I’m not wearing any now,” she says.

  “You’re not?” I say. I can’t imagine walking down the city street, the grit from what my heels kick floating up between my legs, settling in crevices I’d later have to wipe, seeing the speckles of the city on my toilet tissue.

  I take my box home from Metal and show it to my mother and she sees her wedding ring welded into it and she smiles.

  “What a gift,” she says, because she likes that she’ll never again be able to slide the ring over her finger. She leaves it open on the table by her chair, dropping cigarette ashes into it when she thinks I’m not looking.

  Bonnie’s Hells Angel has been gone and now he flies in from Latvia. There his mother tried wiping off his tattoos in his sleep with a mixture of lye, lemons, and black dirt. She made him wear his father’s pants, tied around his waist with a rope taken from the donkey’s neck. The leather pants he arrived in she cut and made into drawstring purses for the ladies she met with at four every day. The donkey they now kicked to go forward instead of pulling it by the rope.

  “Oh, what my mother could do with those pants,” the Hells Angel says when he sees me in mine.

  His swollen tattooed arm, he says, can go no higher than this, and he raises it to Bonnie’s breast and holds it there.

  “Thank God that’s all she did to you,” Bonnie says.

  “No, that’s not everything,” the Hells Angel says and he shows us his underwear, pulling it out from his pants so we can read his name sewed there, Viktor. He says it wasn’t just her, either, it was all those other four o’clock women too who sat in a circle, pitched in and sewed alongside his mother.

  “Viktor? That’s awful, that’s really your name?” Bonnie says.

  “Yes, Viktor,” the Hells Angel says and Bonnie says that’s the worst thing his mother could have done, letting her know his real name.

  “Oh, baby,” the Hells Angel says, “it’s not so bad.”

  “Yes, it is. It really is,” Bonnie says. “I need to be alone now,” she says. The Hells Angel leaves, leaving his rope belt behind him which Bonnie holds up like a rat tail by one end and puts in the garbage.

  The letters from Rena’s father stop and when she writes to him, the letters come returned, the addressee unknown.

  “Don’t worry,” I say, “after my brother finds our father, we’ll send him to PR to find yours.”

  But it’s Rena’s father who finds her. In the middle of the night there’s a knock at the door. Muy Hombre barks and it’s Rena’s father standing there with his suitcase in his hand and a bag made of fishnet holding oranges he said he picked himself, fighting rats who wanted to eat them first. The stems and leaves from the oranges poke out through the bag as if he had carried back from PR the whole tree and not just the fruit. Bonnie looks him over and she can’t believe she once made love to the man.

  “It wasn’t just once,” he reminds her, “it was countless times and you screamed with pleasure like this,” and then in the doorway he imitates for us the way Bonnie screamed while they made love and Bonnie grabs his arm and brings him into her place and tells him to be quiet, he’ll wake the building.

  He sleeps on the couch and then eventually he is sleeping every night with Bonnie and Rena says, “Listen,
she is screaming again,” and she is and Muy Hombre scratches at the door, wanting out, whining, the screams too loud for him. In the morning Rena’s father cooks them breakfast and squeezes fresh orange juice, hanging the green leaves over the side of the glass and wedges on the side of the plates. Then he takes Bonnie’s purse and finds her pills and flushes them down the toilet and when they float back up, he has to pull Bonnie out of the bathroom, her arm so far down the bowl her bathrobe sleeves are wet to the shoulder.

  He tells Rena men in PR know when a woman does or does not wear underwear and men know the kind of women who do not wear it and he buys Rena packages of cotton underwear with flower buds all over them and tells her to wear them and Rena tells him they are not in PR. Rena’s father wrestles Rena to the floor and pulls on the underwear over her legs. He tells her to wear them or he will glue them to her culo next time and Rena tells me I am lucky that my father is far away.

  Rena’s father tells me he knows I wear underwear, it’s the pants that he’s worried about. If I were his daughter he would hold me in a pickle barrel. “Let the brine fade the pants to something more pale, something more Sunday,” he says.

  Our brother writes the slut thinks she is getting bigger and she says it’s high time she did something about it. In evening sunsets, she looks at her rounded silhouette against walls. They are looking for a doctor on a street in need of repair, in need of front doors on buildings, in need of beads on its curtains in its doorways, in need of lights beyond the beaded curtains, in need of inner voices, instead of the trickle of water from faucets, the creak of timber on a stair. The slut puts her ear to the wall, says she hears the sound of metal instruments placed on porcelain trays.

  They find the entrance of the place and it looks like all the others, strings where the curtain beads once were threaded sway in the breeze as if just parted, as if someone had just come through or just gone out. The slut enters first, her shoe heels loud on the broken tiled floor.

  “Hola! Hola!” she says. No one comes. Our brother sits in a folding chair, one of many, by the door.

  “That’s where the men wait,” she says when she sees him sitting in the chair.

  Our brother gets out of the chair and walks to the stairwell. “Hola,” he says. A man comes down eating a peach. The man’s hands are all wet with the juices.

  “Are you the doctor?” the slut asks him in Spanish.

  The man looks to the left of him and then to the right of him and then he says, “Yes, I am the doctor.” The doctor leaves the peach on the desk and wipes his hand on a handkerchief.

  “Where should I change?” the slut asks and the doctor points up to the ceiling. “Up the stairs?” the slut asks and the doctor nods. Our brother waits in one of the chairs where the men wait. When the doctor comes back down he reaches outside the doorway and rolls a metal gate down.

  “Siesta,” the doctor says. When the slut comes down the stairs she is holding her belly and trying to work the back of her shoe onto her heel.

  “There was nothing there,” the doctor says to our brother.

  “Excuse me?” our brother says.

  “No baby,” the doctor says.

  “I didn’t think so,” our brother says. The doctor nods his head. There is the bill, anyway, written out on lined paper from a small pad with pictures of fluffy cats on the cover which the doctor doesn’t bother to rip off the page, but simply holds up the pad to show our brother the amount. To leave the place, the doctor lifts up the gate halfway, and the slut and our brother have to bend over and walk under it.

  “I’m bleeding,” the slut says as they walk down the street.

  Our brother nods his head.

  “Maybe the doctor lies,” she says.

  “What for?” our brother asks.

  “To save the girls from guilt,” the slut says.

  There is a lead. A man in a bar has seen a man who might be our father.

  “A man who looks Americano because of the shirts he wears,” the man says.

  Our brother and the slut sit at the bar every night. It is in a town by the sea and they hear the waves and feel a wind off the water while they sit on their stools. On the bar’s patio, the wind cools them and blows through their hair and they order many drinks.

  There are a lot of Americanos who come to the bar, and the slut sometimes says, “I almost thought that was him,” and she’ll point and our brother will see a man who he thinks must be from Texas by his boots and his hat and he’ll say, “Him?” to the slut and she’ll say, “His jaw, just his jaw.”

  They walk to their hotel late at night on the slick cobblestone streets, past castle ruins with glassless windows framing mountains and the moon. The slut holds her belly.

  “That doctor left some inside me,” she says. “Maybe an arm or a leg. A heel,” she says. At the door to their rooms our brother wishes her goodnight and she takes his hand and puts it on her.

  “Feel the kicks?” she says and our brother shakes his head and goes into his room.

  When he thinks she’s fallen asleep, he goes out again to a dance club, a place he doesn’t expect to find our father, and watches all the Spanish girls in their short skirts and midriff tops moving in the flashing black lights and tries to catch their eyes.

  At times he has told the slut he has given up hope for their father ever being in all of Spain and that he had better fly home. But the slut has grabbed onto his arm with her thin fingers cool through the madras shirt he has taken to wearing instead of the silk robe on days of record-breaking heat, and she begs him to stay, she can see her Cal on so many streets here, at so many bars, she is sure on days he is also swimming in the sea, breaststroking under the cloudless sky, his back red in the sun as he rises for his breaths, the water sliding off him leaving only the gleam of his burning skin.

  Our mother shuts the window but the rickety frame is old, and large triangles of yellowed glass break loose from fractures in the pane and fall on her shoulders and clatter to the floor sounding like dinner plates come crashing down from shelves.

  “Oh, Mom,” we say. We tell her to come away from the window and she picks up glass shards and sails them out over our lot and the fat neighbor walks in and says, “That is exactly how they threw them at me.” She means the Chinese stars the gang boys threw at her on the subway trains. Our mother walks to the garbage pile, sitting in one of the broken-legged chairs whose wicker seat is propped by a full plastic bag. Our mother sinks down. The fat neighbor stands sweaty under our hot skylight. The dog in the corner growls a low, constant growl at her. Our mother fluffs the garbage bags around her like pillows.

  The fat neighbor says, “May I?” and takes a seat too on the pile of garbage where it really sinks down and compresses. The old greasy bags burst at the seams as she sits and garbage falls out—balled tin foil that once lined broiling pans, butter wrappers, and moth-ravaged sweaters.

  The fat neighbor lifts our garbage up and tries to tuck it back into the bags, apologizing, and our mother nods her head. Then the fat neighbor asks for a glass of water and drinks it quickly and then goes to the wall and holds the glass up, listening to what she can hear on the other side, her loft. She says she swears he is having an affair. She has seen the other woman leaving their downstairs front door, and she has passed her in the hallway and has smelled him on the woman’s long hair, has even seen, she says, red hair, the same as his, tangled in the woman’s black.

  “So?” our mother says and our mother snaps her fingers at us and we bring her a cigarette and she lights it and smokes.

  The fat neighbor lowers her head and big tears fall down her face and would hit the floor, except that she’s so fat and the tears hit her belly instead.

  “Maybe I didn’t mean ‘so,’” our mother says. “Maybe I meant ‘big deal,’” she says. “Or not ‘big deal,’ but ‘merde.’ Maybe I simply meant ‘merde.’” Our mother keeps her cigarette between her lips and holds out her hands so that we lift her up and she can go to our fat neighbor a
nd pat our fat neighbor on the back. Then our mother takes the glass from the fat neighbor’s hand and she holds it up against the wall herself and listens. Our mother starts to laugh.

  “What?” our fat neighbor says.

  Our mother says it sounds like two men. Our mother asks if our fat neighbor is sure it isn’t two men over there on the other side of the wall. Our fat neighbor shakes her head. Our mother says it sounds like two old men to boot. Our mother laughs louder.

  “Two old men huffing and wheezing and who can’t figure out in which hole to put it,” she says.

  The neighbor starts out our door. We can still hear her crying.

  “Merde,” our mother says and wipes her eyes of her own tears from laughing. “Drop by any time,” our mother yells to our neighbor who we can now hear walking in the hall, the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling shaking from the weight of her footsteps hitting the floor.

  Our father is with us everywhere in the house. He stands in front of us like Manolo’s outlined women. He is in front of Jody, I’m sure, in an orchard picking apples, giving her the reddest ones. He is in front of Louisa, too, the morning after a night of heavy rain, pointing to a grassy field covered in mushrooms. He is in front of our mother, or on our mother in the dark bed, the sweat on his head sparkling in street light coming in from a window, the phosphorescence of the bald.

  He is in front of me, not drunk, not stumbling, but sitting in a chair, clearing his throat as if he will talk, ready to call my name, but he never does. Perhaps he brushes shoulders with Manolo’s curvy women, or even Jochen’s paint-stained fingers press upon his arm, steering him through the length of our house.

  The silk saffron-colored pants have a hole in the seat. A small hole, but still, one that I worry will split wide open in Metal or English or Spanish. I stop wearing the pants and Ma Mère tells me it’s about time, their bright color was starting to make her sick.

  I sit across the street from John on the curb in the park. He waves me over and asks me where I’ve been. He shows me three Hersheys held fanned out like a poker hand and asks me to pick the one that I want. Nuts and no nuts and dark. I take all three with one hand, and stick them in the back of my jeans pocket.