“There’s my girl,” John says and he rubs his hand through my hair and he tells me he is going away. He is going back home on a plane to see if he can find his wife and children. He has saved enough one-dollar bills in ten cigar boxes that he plunked down at the travel agent’s to pay for his ticket and his only regret is that he has not saved enough money to pay for new teeth and when he finds his wife she might only see an old man with a hole in his head.
“What about your children?” I say. “How will they know you?”
“They won’t,” he says.
Our mother is washed up and shiny, her face towel-rubbed and her elbows pumiced and her corns made smaller by single-edged razor blades she has sliced through the dead overgrown skin she has left in a pile on our floor where it gets stuck to feet bottoms and carried up at night under the covers of our beds.
She is going out. She doesn’t know the man. A friend of hers has set it up. The friend has picked the spot. A restaurant brightly lit with waiters leaning over like whispering friends giving advice on what not to order.
“Merde,” she says, she has smudged her eyeliner, the black under her eye now like a shadow of exhaustion. She licks her finger, tries to wipe it off, but the lower lid just becomes red and raised.
“I’m not going,” she says.
“Come on,” we say.
She has already read the subway map, figured out the number of stops she’ll have to sit before she comes to the one by the restaurant.
“You want to go,” we say and she says she does not and she throws the hairbrush at us and we hold up our hands to our faces and laugh so she throws more, whatever’s beside her. Twisted empty packs of her cigarettes, the eyelash curler, bottles of witch hazel and Jean Naté cologne. We tell her she’s beautiful and how great she looks and she says sure and don’t you have homework to do?
“We don’t have homework, but we do have work,” I say. There is still the hunt for our father. We will go back to the precinct for any more news. It is raining and we rip holes for our heads in empty garbage bags and wear them outside and my sisters and I say we are all Poncho somebody. Poncho Villa, Poncho de Leon, Poncho and Judy.
The cops now say they have no clue, he could be in Africa for all they know.
“Oh, no, not Africa,” we tell them, “the dingoes, the dirt, the flies carrying twelve different diseases, our father would never go there.”
The cops smile, sit back in their chairs, invite us to hang our garbage bags on hooks in their hallway.
“You girls,” they say, and shake their heads. When we leave we take our garbage bags off the hooks and they help us shimmy into them and make sure we know what bus to take home.
We dream of him and in the morning we tell each other our dreams where he is living with us again, fixing salads, whistling, standing in doorways. Our mother tells us there was a time before they thought to marry when he wrote her every day, long letters with a date and a time in the upper right corner, the hour always late and the pages sometimes stained purple by wine that had spilled as he lifted his glass and drank while he wrote.
“They were love letters of course,” our mother says and she rolls her eyes and says, “Whoop de doo.”
The letters are in boxes. Mice have nibbled the cardboard flaps and the corners of envelopes. Our mother says not to throw the letters out, they are all that’s left of the love she’ll never feel again.
“Boo hoo,” she says and takes a drink of her drink.
Ma Mère has tried to pour wine straight from the bottle down her mouth, but she’s missed, and there’s a big red stain on the shoulder of her leopard-spotted robe so she now looks like a leopard who’s been shot, poached, a dying breed finally finished off. We try to change her into a clean shirt, but what’s easier is to change her into a garbage bag poncho instead and we ask her if she minds and she says she doesn’t so we put one on her and call her Poncho Ma Mère.
Manolo comes over and kisses Poncho Ma Mère on the cheek and watches TV and takes a shower and we can hear him through our whole place singing. When he’s out of the shower he goes through our mother’s ashtrays looking for cigarette butts to smoke. He asks us how we all are and tells us that when he was a boy he worked in the olive fields and picked the olives in the high hot sun. He shows us his fingertips, still stained with oil.
“That’s stain from cigarettes,” Louisa says and Manolo reaches out and puts Louisa’s hair behind her ears and asks her if she’ll marry him.
“Of course,” she says, “and where shall we honeymoon? Shall we push your broken car to face the Palisades instead? Will my ring be a lead seal from a bottle of wine?”
“Give me that gun,” Manolo says, “that gun your brother had.” He finds the gun and puts the barrel in his mouth and talks around the barrel, asking Louisa if this is what she wants.
“I can’t understand you,” Louisa says.
“Is this what you want?” he says again.
“You don’t know how to use it? Is that what you’re saying? I’ll show you,” Louisa says and she takes the gun from him and puts it in her own mouth and our mother walks in the door. Our mother doesn’t scream, but runs so fast at Louisa that she knocks her over backward and grabs the gun from her. Then our mother throws the gun out the back window where we can’t hear it land. We only hear the rain, which is falling loudly.
Still in her coat, our mother goes to Louisa and slaps her face and says, “Don’t you ever do that again.” Louisa’s head doesn’t even move after the force of our mother’s slap. She just stares at our mother and then our mother slaps Manolo’s face and Manolo says, “Do it again, I deserve it,” and so our mother does. She slaps him again and then Jody and I back away from her, afraid she’ll slap us next.
There were no bullets in the gun, but that doesn’t matter to our mother, she says no mother should have to come home to find her daughter’s got a gun stuck in her mouth. Our mother pours herself a drink and lights a cigarette. She sits in her chair and rain from her coat drips to the floor. We turn on the TV for her, changing the channels, hoping for a war movie to calm her down.
The phone rings. Jody picks it up. “It’s Dad,” she says and we all look at the phone she holds out, as if we are to see his likeness in the earpiece, never wiped or washed, its shine dulled by our waxy ears, the buildup of our listening.
Our father explains to us the goddamn IRS, how they tried, the bastards, to get money from him he didn’t have. How they squeezed and squeezed him and came to his door.
“Big thugs of men packing guns behind shiny blazers, odd colors for clothes—iguana and smoke. Connected men,” he says, meant to scare him into paying his taxes.
“I left, cut out,” he says, “and finished the film in Florida and lived at the racetrack walking hots. I slept in haylofts next to illegals who yelled out Spanish in their sleep. That’s as close as I came to Spain,” he says.
“I would have called,” he says, “but the phone booth always had a line a mile long.”
Our mother wants to call our brother, tell him to come home, we have found our father, but we don’t have his number and it’s later in Spain than where we are now, hours ahead. The slut sleeping, dreaming of snow and her brothers and the pageantry of Christmas. Our brother with a girl in a car at the top of a hill where down below the sea can’t be seen through a milky-white mist. The condoms he’s used he ties into knots, sends them sailing out the window and over where he thinks they will land on the water, but they just collect on a ledge, along with others other men have worn while with their girls in the back seats of cars. The girl is correcting him while he is inside her again.
“Mierda,” she says and he says “mierda,” but it is not the same as hers, and she says it again for him and their breaths fog the windows and her sliding stockinged foot on the window glass leaves a streak they can see the rising sun through.
The slut wakes and goes down to the sea, bruising her bare feet on rocks. The snack stands are rolled shut, their
metal half doors down and flush with the countertops strewn with churros and chocolate sauce birds make a meal out of, flying off with the churros in their mouths like leafless branches from some kind of greasy holy tree. The slut starts to swim to an island. The island is just rock and when she gets there she cannot find footing to climb its slippery sides. She drags herself up, her knees turning bloody from small scrapes. She looks at the rest of Spain from her rock island. Small cars and mopeds are buzzing down the streets.
Then she sees Cal on shore, standing at a bar drinking coffee and reading the paper. She dives into the water and swims as fast as she can. She screams out Cal’s name and swallows salt water and now all she can do is cough.
Still in her bathing suit she runs across the street, but just as she does, Cal walks to his car and drives off, taking a road that leads up to the mountains.
As the morning sun grows so strong her bare feet burn on the street she goes to her hotel to get our brother who is now sleeping. She knocks on his door, but he doesn’t open it, so she opens it herself. She shakes his shoulder. She calls his name.
Our brother wakes up.
He can still smell the girl’s perfume on his fingers and what may be the smell of her crotch, or his, he’s not sure. He remembers the sunrise as a band of red seeping upward into the gray of the predawn and he remembers driving the girl home to her house in a alley where the sidewalk was rubble and the streetlights flickered off. His mother once said you should make a wish if you drive by and they turn on, but what do you do, he thought, when you drive by and they turn off and you are in Spain? Do you un-wish something?
The slut puts her hand on his arm, trying to pull him up, telling him she has found his father. Her fingers are still cool, like ivory on piano keys and they are that pale and he looks at her face, drawn and pale too, and he asks her what she’s been doing all day.
“Here we are in Spain,” he says, “by the water at the beach, and you look like you’ve been living in a cave. Where is your hairbrush?” he says. “Where are your clothes?”
There’s a dark circle around her on the bed where she sits, her wet bathing suit soaking the sheets.
Our brother says mierda and the slut asks him to think of all the blood she lost from the baby and she asks him to think about the days she has spent going from door to door to door asking black-scarved gnarled old women if they have seen Cal.
Our brother at the wheel, they drive up the road the slut saw her Cal take. They pass through towns where they have to stop to let herds of goats cross the road, the slut holding her arm out the window, showing the herder the pictures of Cal and the herder shaking his head and the goats coming round to the driver’s side, nibbling at our brother’s sleeve.
“Keep the other fuckers off my corner.” That’s the job John has for me while he’s away.
I lie on my back on the sidewalk’s corner, my arms and legs spread-eagled, asking John if this is the way he wants it done.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe they’ll just wheel their carts over this curb and on top of you and crush you,” he says. “Maybe there is no way.”
“Have you flown?” he asks. “I came by boat.”
“Never,” I say.
“I wonder,” he says, “if I’ll be cold. I was cold on the boat,” he says.
“I want to be an airborne Ranger, I want to fly the skies of danger,” our father sings, he is closing the shades, turning the lights down low in his new place so no one from the street can see in. We are eating his pickled herring on Rye King crackers. Louisa is drawing faces of boys on paper napkins and Jody is in the bathtub making bubbles with dish soap she has taken from the kitchen.
“In Spain?” our father says, and he starts to open a bottle of wine, “with your brother?”
“That’s right,” we tell him. He pours one glass of wine and drinks it down while still holding onto the bottle and then he pours himself another.
“What’s her number?” he asks and we say we don’t know and he says, “Mierda, isn’t that what they say in Spain?” We don’t answer. We lower our eyes, chewing our pickled herring on Rye King crackers.
“Isn’t it mierda?” he yells in our faces. We nod our heads. I cough on my cracker that went down the wrong way. Louisa and Jody start to laugh behind closed mouths, their own cracker crumbs spewing forth. Our father stares at us and as he does we see the blood rushing to his head, his skin now the purple of the wine. We cannot stop laughing so we all run into the bathroom and sit on the tub.
We bend over, rocking ourselves. Tears come running down our faces. He talks to us through the closed door.
“I’m tired,” he says. “Are you tired?” We don’t say anything. We can hear him turn around and slide his back down the door so he is sitting on the floor now. We can hear him gulping at his wine.
“Why don’t you go home,” he says to us. We call our mother before we leave to tell her we’re on our way.
“Don’t forget money,” she tells us. And so at the door, before we leave, we hold out our hands to our father and he laughs and in our hands he places lint from his pockets instead of money. “Jesus, Dad,” we say, and let the lint sail back behind us.
“Tell your mother maybe next month. Tell your mother she’ll just have to wait,” our father says.
When we get home we tell our mother there is no money. She nods her head and takes a drink of her drink and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
She turns on the news to calm down and I see there’s a bombing overseas and I swear I think I see John walking in circles in the middle of a road with his hands blown off. I imagine him back on the corner, his hands now hooks shaped like tongs custom-made to seize floating hot dogs from their bins.
“Let’s go,” Louisa says to me and Jody and so we leave and we’re out on the street and it’s a warmer night than we’ve had in a long time. We go to the park. Sit on the edge of the fountain, dangle our bare feet in the dark water. I can hear the clomp of hooves, my stallion patrolling the paths behind me. We look for change and find only pennies. We go to the pier, where Manolo’s car sits parked, only it’s rocking side to side and he’s in it and the windows are steamy and there’s the sound of the chassis squeaking as he moves inside with what must be one of the whores. We sit on the edge of the pier, saying we’re thankful our feet don’t reach the water from where we are, the river so dark who knows what would come swimming by and bite us. We go back home and play with the Ouija board but instead of moving across the printed letters, the pointer jumps to our laps, goes up our legs, our arms and breasts. All because we asked it who stole Louisa’s bicycle from our hallway.
“This is a pervert spirit,” Louisa says and she gets up from the game and goes to sit in her chair in front of the television, and the pointer jumps out from under our fingertips and moves across the floor towards her. We stand on our chairs and scream and the dog comes over and barks at the pointer and smashes down on it with her paw and then takes it in her mouth and thrashes her head back and forth. We throw the Ouija pointer and its board out the back window after the dog’s chewed the plastic.
Our mother can’t believe we threw the Ouija game out back. She says it’ll lure spirits up from anywhere and everywhere, every Tom, Dick, and Harry spirit from other people’s homes or passing by the avenue will now be drawn to where we live.
Our father is baking. We are at the oven window looking in, seeing through grease on the glass what our father calls his key lime pie. He bends close to us to look too and his smell comes at us strong. The oven’s baking more than pie. The cotton of his striped shirt, his rolled back cuffs, the hairs at his arms, the patches of dried brown skin on his hands are cooking too. They smell of things between things—the legs spread wide, the spaces between travel-weary toes, the crease below our mother’s breast that meets her rib, that is what our father smells like.
“Hotsy totsy newborn Nazi,” our father says, admiring the loftiness of his meringue, its beaded sweating ho
llows and its curled tips.
We are at our mother’s neck touching the wobbly moles, swearing there are more there than the last time we looked and also a hump there we haven’t seen, a muscle, she says, so big and hard it could be the Hope Diamond. We poke and press it, telling her we want to know what it feels like. We tell her we want to know if we can see it sparkle through her skin and she bats her hands behind her head at ours and yells at us to stop.
It is her birthday and all she wants is P & Q and we ask her instead to name something we can wrap with paper and ribbon. We snip our scissors in the air and twirl our tape rolls on our fingers, holstered and ready for the duel. She drinks more on her birthday and smokes more and our place is red in the night with the exit light on in the hallway, the electric off again. We huddle by its glow singing her her birthday song in shorts, our legs crossed and red on the cool dusty wooden hallway floor.
“Oh, the dog, fuck,” we say, we have forgotten to feed her because there is nothing to feed her. We call her over, our mother lets her lick her fingers from where she has dunked them in her drink. While our dog stands sideways to us we press our heads against her fur, roll ourselves against her ribs, hold her legs, listen to the workings of her hungry gut. We hang off her neck, admire her black wavy gumline, its ridges cupping foamy drool. Our mother cries and we lower our heads and Louisa says isn’t it funny how little you can see in red light.
“Is that so?” the slut says, shielding midday sun with her hand looking at foothills our brother says is where the gypsies live in caves so shallow they must curl in their toes in the rains to keep them dry. The slut puts her hands on her hips, drums her fingers on her skirt embroidered with “Energy.”
Here They Come Page 14
