“Don’t think we’re going up there,” our brother says.
“Yes, come on,” she says and then they are off on foot, their sandaled feet slipping on the foothills’ rubble, their tongues licking dry lips, their shirts stuck to the smalls of their backs with their sweat. By the time they reach a cave her skirt is dusted up, his ankle is sore from a twist along the rocky way, and the sun is beginning to slip down over the mountain’s back. In the cave there is the smell of goat or sheep or ram or man, they do not know. Our brother wonders what’s on the walls. He runs his palms over bumps and some kind of slime. Beneath their feet are green wine bottles, their labels gone.
“I’m going to be sick,” she says and falls and our brother catches her and helps her to the floor of the cave where she closes her eyes and then falls asleep. Our brother looks out of the cave, out over the ocean, a blue the same blue as the sky. The slut stirs. Our brother looks back at her and thinks he can leave her. He will go back down to the car and drive north where he has heard the green hills are dotted with cows. He walks out of the cave but she hears him.
“You leave,” she says, “and I will find you. I will certainly find you.” He turns to her and smiles.
“I’m my father’s son,” he says, “and you can’t find him.” She brushes off her skirt as she stands and then she holds her hand out to him as if the cave were deeper and she could take him with her through dark passages. Our brother pats his shirt pocket.
“Have you got a cigarette?” he asks her. She shakes her head and he nods and then he walks toward her and takes her hand and then they are both down on the floor of the cave, their lovemaking sending the green bottles spinning and shoring up against the walls.
They find cigarettes at a bar at a blind curve in the road. They sit and drink beer and smoke and watch a skinny dog trot across the road and almost get hit by a car. The slut sees some of her brothers in our brother. The slitted nostrils and small ears, she says. Our brother calls to the dog and whistles, but it will not come and cars slam on their brakes and their tires screech and the burnt rubber smell fills the air. The cigarettes are French and stubby and the tobacco loosely packed and spilling from the ends and the slut asks if there is tobacco stuck to her lips. Our brother shakes his head but does not look at her.
“You should eat,” our brother says and he orders her a small sandwich, mostly bread with a thin slice of ham and butter. Our brother thinks again about the North and the cows dotting the green hills. The slut says she’s cold, the sun is going down and they should go inside or get back in the car. The skinny dog is inside the bar now, circling stools where men with hats low on their heads sit and sip beer and drop shells from peanuts.
“I should go up north. The fish, I hear, is out of this world,” our brother says. The slut shivers and rubs her upper arms.
“All right, then, we’ll go north,” she says. Our brother says he was thinking about going alone, how maybe she’s right, that his father is still down south and she is sure to find him if she stays.
“Did I tell you about your father, how after every time he did it he thought he was having a heart attack?” she says and how at the hospital they listened to his heart and said it was gas, just gas and they gave him antacid. Our brother laughs, he can see our father afraid, his hand at his heart. The slut laughs too. “Yes, it was funny,” she says.
Our brother leaves the slut while she’s sleeping on the beach oiled in sun gel the color of carrots. The gel melting at her temples, magnifying the lines by her eyes. He goes for a coffee and drinks it while the waiter wipes his hands on his apron and sucks through his teeth, sounds for the pretty women walking by. Our brother, alone in the café, tries making the sounds himself, imagines himself with hair in the style of the waiter’s hair, imagines the waiter after work on a motorbike riding high roads without railings overlooking the sea. The slut wakens to the man calling out, “Co-co-rico.” He slices the coconuts on a splintered board he lays on the sand, the knife is curved as if for cutting cane. She wants the man to come to her. She waves hard, like a castaway who’s just sighted a plane, her arm sweeping wide arcs in the air.
Our brother calls to tell us that he’s fine. We can hear the rolling waves, we tell him, and he says it’s just the roar of motorbikes. We can hear the slut’s voice in the phone booth, we say, and he says it’s passing Spanish girls. Our father’s here, we tell him, come on home. We can hear him shaking his head, his hair now long rubbing against the earpiece, a faint sweeping noise.
“Well?” we say.
“All that time,” he says, “and where was he?”
“You know,” we say, “the IRS, the horses,” we say. Can we hear our brother nod? He understands.
“Your gun is lost,” Louisa says. “Come on home.”
“Not yet,” our brother says and he hangs up the phone. He walks back to the slut. The cocorico man is holding with two hands his knife like a scythe, bringing it down for a blow on the coconut that sends white shards flying up behind the slut’s head as if it were her head the cocorico man had sliced open and the shards white matter from her brain.
“Señora, Señora,” the cocorico man says, holding out the coconut sliced on the splintered board for her to take, a fanned display of its white meat held by the man’s brown hand.
“There is the start of something here,” she says, and reaches out and holds our brother’s arm, puts it on her belly. And he feels it, he does, a small kick, a gentle jab, a pushing up from inside her. He lays his head on her, prepared to listen for it, aslosh in watery cradle.
After a moment he gets up and goes to the car. He drives alone, heading north, the call of co-co-rico fading, and green hills and the rolling haunch of cattle coming into view.
John is back.
“I never went,” he says.
“You did, I saw you on the news,” I say. “I swear.”
“I took the bus,” he says. “The bus stays on the ground. I passed marshlands. I saw them long-necked birds. I played some poker. I slept on the beach. You’ve never seen such washed-up crap. Those things, those pink plastic things women stick up them when they bleed. Those were all around me when I woke up. They looked like arms from plastic dolls. I lost my money. I was never lucky. Women touched me at the bar. I gave them chips so they wouldn’t. Except one with gold on her lids. I gave her chips so she would.”
“Your hand was cut off, I turned to every channel and you were there bleeding,” I say.
“Oh, no, that wasn’t me,” he says. “I did get some fever from a sunburn, though. The woman with the gold above her eyes took care of me. She said she knew some shit about the sun.” John loosens his white apron, lets the strings fly out behind him, the apron like a stingray swimming up from a sandy ocean bottom.
* * *
Ma Mère is hitting my leg, showing me where she has her pain.
“That hurts,” I say.
“It really hurts more than that,” she says. She bites her bottom lip. She rocks back and forth, her arms around her in a hug.
The phone rings.
It’s our father down and out and jailed and using up his one-time call from Mobile, Alabama.
“Possession,” he says.
“Pot?” Louisa says.
“Marygeewanna is what they call it here,” he says. We have to bail him out and wire him two hundred dollars. He says he’ll pay us back. We have to ask our mother for the cash.
“Let him rot in there,” our mother says, “let them show him Southern hospitality. They’ll feed him grits in the clinker, he’ll be all right,” she says. We cry. We break open Jody’s piggy bank she keeps on the shelf by her mouse cage, and nothing’s in there but some pennies and cedar shavings. Our mother hits herself, slaps her face. “I must be an idiot,” she says and she signs over the paycheck she’s just received so we can cash it at the E & B and set our father free.
There is no more Metal. We are scheduled with free time. Periods where we walk the streets, sit in the par
k, decorate the margins of our pages with clumpy ink from ballpoint pens and write our names on the sides of rubber soles. Rena sits on her boyfriend’s lap, facing him, kissing him, braiding his long hair, holding the end above her lip. She turns to me so I can see her mustache and in her deepest voice calls out my name and says, “This is your father talking.”
Later, after her boyfriend leaves, I say to Rena, “Fuck, Rena, all these boys. It’s a little disgusting.”
“Disgusting? Maybe what’s disgusting is no boys. Who do you like, baby? Is it that hot dog man? Is he your lover?”
“Fuck, no,” I say.
“Mr. Lenin, then?” she asks.
“Gross, no,” I say.
“Then who, baby, who?” she asks.
I shake my head. All I can think of to tell her I like is some cop’s horse. Some stallion. I don’t even know his name. But I don’t tell her anything. I don’t have to. I know she knows there’s no one. I wish there was. I wish there was some Ramón or Realidad.
Then Rena hugs me. I smell grape in her hair. Some shampoo or conditioner she used in the morning. It is a smell I think I can fall into. Fuck, why can’t I be Rena? Boys and a father and grape in my hair? Rena stops hugging me.
“I know what you need, baby,” she says. From her jeans pocket she pulls out a small box and lifts the lid. There are blue pills and black and pink.
“Take a blue. I had one earlier,” she says.
“Christ, Rena,” I say.
“Well, then try a black beauty, Bonnie always takes a black beauty,” she says.
“You’re going to end up like your mother,” I tell Rena.
“We all end up like our mothers,” Rena says. “Baby, don’t you know anything?”
I walk back to school.
Sharks are sliced and their innards cut and lifted and placed on slate tables in the labs. The halls smell like the ocean gone bad—rotten fish and stinking seaweed. I look in classroom door windows at teachers who once were mine. They wear the same sweaters, the same scuffed shoes I once made fun of. I miss those teachers, how they lowered their heads over my pages, tried to read my scrawl. I’d like to open a door, take the seat that once was mine, feel their heads close to me, the not so unpleasant smell of their just-finished lunch on their lips, a yeasty whiff of packaged bread coming from their mouths when they speak, their voices low and calm, the others at a problem in their books, the pages filled with the beauty of geometry. My pencil sharp, my circles perfect. The teacher ready with an answer.
I get home and sit next to Ma Mère and she starts to tell me again about our father. “When you were a baby he would walk you around the room for hours…” she begins, but then she stops. “You’ve heard this before,” she says.
I nod my head.
“I’ve told you all I know,” she says. “Your father, I’ve been thinking, maybe he wasn’t such a good father after all.”
I nod my head again.
“Your mother was right to leave him,” she says.
Then I laugh, and Ma Mère laughs too, enjoying her own joke. Her eyes turning into slits, her cheek bones lifting high and wrinkles forming on her forehead like steps.
“You are getting older, aren’t you?” she says after we’ve quieted down, after our laughter has stopped and the steps on her forehead have disappeared and all that’s left are lines. She holds onto my chin and looks at my eyes.
“When you paint them you must try to make them look bigger,” she says.
“Will I see more?” I say.
“You will always see less as you grow older,” she says. “Otherwise you would not want to go on.” She tells me to get one of my mother’s makeup pencils and she licks the point and with a shaky hand she draws lines underneath my eyes.
“There,” she says. I look in the mirror.
“I look surprised,” I say, “a doe in the headlights.”
“Men like that,” she says.
“Are there deer in France?” I say.
“Oui,” she says, “all over the streets.”
Our brother is back. He has gifts for us from Spain, miniature bullfighters’ capes we clip to our shoulders and fans carved from sandalwood he teaches us how to whip open and hold to our faces, fanning furiously in the way we believe señoras and señoritas do as they stand in the stands under a hot Spanish sun. Our brother looks different, his dark hair a little wavy, a little Spanish, we say. He wears gummy-soled shoes. When he walks through the house we cannot hear his footsteps and we startle when he comes upon us. We ask where he has put his blue silk fire-breathing dragon robe and he says he wore the robe so much the cloth at the shoulders became bare and his skin stuck out like epaulets on a uniform for no army known to man.
Maybe years later the slut has the look of a woman who has lived somewhere before. She now knows the words for certain things, is familiar with three-day winds, the roads of Morocco, the strongholds of the British, the uses of kohl, the laying and folding styles of napkins for all sorts of tables, has heard music from instruments deep-bellied and two-stringed, cries that were songs, waves washing on rock, coral, and sand. She has pens filled with ink and some that are plumed. Slippers sewn with gold thread and pointed toes. Gum smelling of leaves. Oil in wax-sealed jars. Says “no” as a question after her sentences. Pedals backward to brake on a bike that only brakes by hand. Eats steak with a knife like it was a fork. Looks skyward for the grace of God. Digs in a garden with shards of broken bowl. Calls dogs with the clap of her hands. Trims her nail with a blade. Twists her hair and burns the broken, frayed ends. Rubs her teeth with hollow grass blades in the morning and night. Wears skirts that are scarves knotted at the hip. Writes in a leather-bound book. Totes a cat on her shoulder. She has seen the torturous wonders of the Middle Age, has swung the creaky wooden door of the iron maiden, felt the pointed bloodstained tip of the anal pyramid, turned the rack’s wheel that stretched the victims’ limbs. Joins children at games on the street, throwing off her shoes and hiking up her dress, letting the girls try her perfume kept in a vial, applied with a stick to the small beating veins at their necks. She gives them names they have never heard before and tells them they are the words for tree, sky and lake in a country where the girls never bathe but are licked clean by cows.
She writes to a daughter she thinks she had. The letters never get mailed and even if she did know where to send them, she doesn’t know she would. The daughter is perhaps where she left her, under the Damas sign on a door in a restaurant in Spain. That is how she sees her now, a cutout shape of a girl in a dress on the door to the toilets. The letters are statements, rushes of visions come to her while seated on buses, on plush movie-house chairs, benches spilled with pigeon crap.
“Yearning sounds like what it means,” she writes. “Above it all is the underbelly of something else.” “I can die.” “Who has seen me ever juggle. Did you know I can?” The pen point scratching fast on onion paper, the plume dipping and rising like a grounded bird beating wings in attempted flight.
“Cut all vegetables by hand. The cook is in the pudding. Let the guests taste you. Oh, and about your menses. Get the moon to phase with you. The tide to lap at your door. Call it Rose or Aunty, but never what it is. If caught wearing white and you stain, stand and spread out your skirt, let the boys read into it shapes like blots of ink. Imagine the abdominal pain is forty times less painful than having a baby, no, imagine sixty times. Deliver blows with your fist and then curse, you are really bleeding now and nowhere near knowing. Shhh, listen to your hair getting longer, the turns it takes when growing in a curl.”
Sometimes she twists the pages of the letters together and lights the ends on the oven’s small pilot flame and throws the letters in the sink, watching them burn and then smoke when she douses them with water from the faucet. She likes to think the daughter eats sardines and sausage made with blood. The daughter was born bleeding, the midwife called it “primero sangre.” The midwife called her Señora and the baby La Niña and the midwife was c
alled Vieja, and so she said “Vieja, take her.” She did not hold La Niña to her breast and she tried to put her in Vieja’s arms but Vieja shook her head and gathered up her bag and the cord she had already asked to keep for drying and grinding into powder for strength and she said, “No, no, no, señora,” and backed out through the beaded curtain in the door while still shaking her head. Sore and still bleeding, she walked to the restaurant next door, carrying the baby who did not cry in her arms, and she walked up to beautifully dressed women eating, wanting to place the baby in their arms, wanting them to put down their forks, hold up their pretty hands and take her daughter from her. They did not even look at her as she walked through and she realized she must look like a gypsy come to beg, the baby’s blanket falling and dragging to the floor, and her own hair matted to her forehead with the sweat of the labor. She left the baby in front of the door to the toilets where its arm came undone from the swaddling blanket and its hand waved in the air.
“Select milk from the back rows of cases, never the front, for that is what will spoil first. Learn to chop onion with your eyes closed. Brush your teeth in the shower. I think we were meant to. Watermelons once had seeds. The sun is not a star.” She tears the letters into bits and lets them snow on heads of children who play below in the street. Cal still calls. He is drunk. He is asking for money, for fifty dollars, for anything she can spare because he has not eaten in a week. She is growing lumps behind her ears that move between her fingers and she finds herself feeling the lumps when she’s in line at the grocery or when she’s on the phone or trying to fall asleep at night. She has caught herself in the mirror while feeling these lumps and she looks like an old woman who cannot hear well and is cupping her ears, hoping to capture words that would otherwise float past.
I go to John and I sit on the curb by his cart. He sits down next to me and touches my hair, moving it away from my eyes so I can see and then he points, showing me two pigeons fighting in the gutter over a broken hot dog he has thrown them. He claps his hands together and laughs because the fight is a good one, the pigeons’ beaks stuck together.
Here They Come Page 15
