Gordo

by Jaime Cortez

* * *

  Adjusting to life away from El Salvador has been hard. Back at their sprawling home in the capital city of San Salvador, the maid would tell Tinman that he was the best-looking of the family. The reddish Mayan color, prominent hooked nose, and straight hair of his father bypassed him. Like his late mother, he has hazel eyes and thick eyelashes. Tinman’s skin is on the lighter end of the mestizo spectrum. A light brown that is not quite prized but also not disdained. Praise is rarely on offer back in the Pardo home, especially after they buried the mother, and Tinman has never forgotten that the maid had told him he was handsome, entitled to attention and company. Tinman keeps his eyes open for the just-right girl, not too pretty, not too ugly, not too confident. A girl who maybe has just one great thing, like a nice smile or big breasts. He tries repeatedly to connect with one girl, freckled and green-eyed, with whom he shares a history class.

  “Hi Sylvia.”

  “My name is Sylvie, not Sylvia.”

  “Oh darned. Sorry about that, Sylvie. Sooo. How are you doing, aye?”

  “I’m cool, thanks.”

  “Hey, can I walk with you to gym class?”

  “Sorry, but I’m in kind of a hurry. Mrs. Mitchell the Bitchell is my PE teacher, and if you’re late, she’ll make you run laps. See you later, okay?”

  “Okay. Later. Have a good PE, okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll see you around, okay, Sylvie.”

  “See you.”

  At night, on the mattress, on the floor, he waits for the soft snoring of Shy Boy at his side, turns his back, closes his eyes, conjures Sylvia, and quietly masturbates. It doesn’t take long. His breath catches and he cums in waves that ripple through him and leave him spent. He rises and washes his hand at the bathroom sink. Returning to bed, he immediately descends into sleep with his hand in his briefs, cradling his penis.

  * * *

  In all of Callaghan High School, only the cafeteria ladies are fond of Tinman, and Shy Boy. Lined up at the lunchroom steam tables in hairnets and aprons, the ladies are tough and practical but also ready to serve up a bit of salty-sweet surrogate mothering with each upturned scoop of food they drop into the compartments of the plastic lunch trays. Some of the ladies had raised sons of their own and were familiar with the blustery way of boys. They watch with dismay and disgust as the students of Callaghan High School daily discard vast amounts of half-eaten food. Some found this disposal an insult to their work in the kitchen. The Pardo boys were different from those wasteful kids. Even by teenager standards, the boys were prodigious eaters. Chicken a la king, sloppy joes, tacos, raisin-carrot salad, and even the spinach, boiled beyond recognition, are wolfed down with uniform gusto by the brothers. They eat in silence, heads bowed over their putty-colored trays, sporks held baby-style in their fists, which rise and fall mechanically. When they finish, the boys take the trays back to the cafeteria line. Their eyes are bright and urgent. Tinman smiles and asks, “Can we please have more, please?”

  “We only have corn left if that’s okay,” says one of the ladies.

  “Yeah, please, your corn’s really good.”

  The praise dignifies the ladies’ work, but more than that, a hungry mouth opens something up in them, a generosity. The ladies pile it on, filling each compartment of the trays with little pyramids of corn.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” By the time the Pardos have gotten seconds, many of their fellow students have cleared out, and the boys have the cafeteria mostly to themselves. They quietly hunch over their trays and disappear the food, wiping the buttery sauce with their last bits of bread.

  * * *

  After lunch, they sit on the gym steps, mostly watching the flow of students go by, sometimes sharpening their sporks into makeshift daggers by rubbing them against the sidewalk. A cheap cassette player between Tinman’s feet plays oldies they recorded off the radio. To the scratchy keening of Rosie and the Originals, they wait for the bell and the classes they may or may not attend according to their moods. Their grades are uniformly poor, but the Pardos don’t mind. They have accepted that school is not for them. Even in woodshop and auto maintenance, where many boys with academic allergies can experience success and satisfaction, the Pardos refuse to be inspired. Shy Boy can take apart, adjust, and then reassemble a carburetor, but he can’t pass the simplest yes/no auto shop quiz. So the brothers do their time in school and wait for something to happen. Expulsion. Flunking out. Dropping out. Something.

  * * *

  In class, Shy Boy sits in the back row and cultivates invisibility, hiding behind unread books covered in brown grocery bag paper. His spiral binder is illuminated with page upon page of ballpoint drawings. Delicate vine roses arch over long-necked peacocks. Sacred hearts crowned in thorns burn away. He draws his neighbors’ shoes, capturing the glint off the patent leather and texturing the shoelaces with feathery crosshatching. As he falls ever more behind in his classes, Shy Boy’s ballpoint technique blossoms. At times he shocks himself with the richness of his work. The roses grow ever more graceful. His horse threatens to gallop off the page. Anything is possible in Shy Boy’s notebook, except algebra.

  In his classes, Shy Boy is in particular trouble. He arrived in the United States and began learning English at a younger age than his older brothers, but his English is the most halting and cautious. He understands it, but when he tries to speak, the words scatter, hiding in burrows and mocking him. The teachers slow down and try to help. It is exquisitely embarrassing.

  “If you’re not sure of the answer, can you take a guess?”

  Silence.

  “What do you think the answer might be? Try, just try.”

  Silence.

  “It’s okay if you don’t get it right. We can learn from our mistakes. I make mistakes all the time.”

  “Sorry. I don’t know.”

  I’ll never belong here, he thinks.

  Shy Boy never stops yearning for his tropics. He never stops yearning for Profesora Hernandez and that starchy cotton solidarity of his uniformed schoolmates. Shy Boy’s distant memories of his mother are fragmented and painfully elusive. He was so young when she joined The Disappeared. Still, he remembers a kiss from her, on his forehead. The memory does not have her words in it, nor her face, but it conjures in Shy Boy a yearning as imperishably lustrous as a gold ingot.

  As the teacher’s lecture and explain, Shy Boy is distracted, writing and rewriting his name, his true name.

  “Mauricio” horizontally in cursive.

  “Mauricio” upside down.

  “Mauricio” in a spiral.

  “Mauricio” progressively fading to almost nothing between the first letter and the last.

  And finally, “Mauricio” standing tall in a jungle of palm trees. The “M” is sturdy, with sinewy roots clinging to the soil. The tips of the “M” reach above the palm trees and branch out like grasping fingers reaching for a clear, Salvadoran sky.

  The Problem of Style

  In the summer after sixth grade, as he crossed the creaking vine-and-slat suspension bridge toward the overgrown wilds of San Benito Junior High, Raymundo decided he was going to become art. Maybe not art exactly but more artistic. He grew his hair out longer and longer. In much of the United States, it was the seventies, but in San Benito County farm towns, home of farmworkers fresh from rural Mexico and sunburnt ranchers just a generation removed from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, it was simultaneously the fifties. The teacher’s room of the middle school was a temporal anomaly, where time seemed to have looped back on itself. The fifties, sixties, and seventies lay in perplexing proximity to each other, like the empty rum bottles, dead seagulls, tree branches, and Barbie doll heads that commingle on beaches after epic storms.

  San Benito Junior High’s veteran teachers like Mr. Tack-water watched the newly minted teachers with suspicion, daily gathering and cross-referencing intelligence. He noted it all: their loud frocks and unkempt serial-murderer sideburns, their tepid patrio
tism, their fussy firework proclamations about the importance of student autonomy and critical thinking, as if seventh graders knew shit from proverbial Shinola, as if immigrant children could become Americans without American guidance.

  He suspected the younger teachers secretly mocked him, saluting the flag like he meant it, dressing professionally with his chest and nuts roasting in the hotbox fire of his polyblend suits. He imagined they were colluding against him when he saw groups of those soft, shaggy not-quite-men and the tight little covens of sob sisters in their ponchos and culottes. The Baptist ramrod ladies he first taught with in the midfifties would have snapped these gals over their righteous knees. Thank God most of those early teachers had gone to their reward or were retired, so they didn’t have to see this generation of teachers flush all these poor kids down the toilet.

  On the first day of school, rows of boys sat cross-legged on the shiny gym floor. Mr. Tackwater paced and watched as the last of them trickled in and he noted the androgynous blemish that was Raymundo sandwiched in between two freshly crew cut boys. He caught the boy’s eye and called him over with his crooked finger. Raymundo rose with a look of concern and came to Mr. Tackwater.

  “Son, what is your name?”

  “Raymundo Sanchez.”

  “Well, Mr. Sanchez, I’m Mr. Tackwater, and I want to know what exactly you are planning with that hair.”

  “I don’t have plans, I think.”

  “Are you trying to be a hippie, Mr. Sanchez?”

  “I like it this way, sir. It’s not against the rules, is it?”

  “No, unfortunately it is not. You seem to be a bright kid. Polite. I wouldn’t want you to ruin all that with this hair of yours.”

  “I won’t, sir. It’s not anything bad. It’s just my style.”

  “That’s the point, son. Talk to your daddy. Ask him what people think about boys who run around worrying about their style. It could open your eyes. You might be surprised.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  Raymundo’s schoolmates, those boys he’d known since kindergarten, saw his changed appearance and suddenly knew him differently. Raymundo had left sixth grade a quiet boy who played tetherball at lunch, sometimes by himself. He was rarely hassled. Raymundo was a kid sighted out of the corner of one’s eye, moving through school with feral caution. During that transitional summer, he would brush out his hair and savor its growing weight in the shower. At night, he curled the waves of it around his fingers, spiraling into sleep where he imagined himself gestating in a silken black cocoon. By his first day of junior high, it was down past his shoulders. His transformation was complete, he had abandoned his previous mission of invisibility, and everyone who cared to see could see he had become something new.

  “Fag.”

  This was his name.

  “Fag.”

  His horsehair shirt.

  “Fag.”

  His vocation.

  Fag. Once assigned to Raymundo, the word cemented itself to him with a barnacle’s stubborn might. He was not ready for this designation, but taxonomy was destiny, and his faggotry now seemed to issue uncontrollably from his pores. It trailed after him: a shameful, florid perfume. In the school halls, it possessed his hips as he walked. In class, he would stare at the back of a boy’s neck and the sight would bind his free will and hijack his penis with sudden violence. On the basketball courts, the boys instinctively attacked that in Raymundo that threatened something mighty but fragile in them.

  “Hey, fag. How’s life in Fagville today?”

  He walked past in silence, grateful for the protection offered by his mirrored shades. His silence afforded no protection, and they persisted.

  “I said, HEY, FAGGOT. Can’t you hear me, puto?” Raymundo held his breath, patrolled his hips, and walked faster.

  “Whatsamatter? You late for a date with your boyfriend?”

  “Does he smack you when you’re late, Raygay?”

  Life got dangerous. Once and then twice, he came home with bruises and tears in his clothing. Both times the attacks paralyzed him. He had of course argued with his sister and with classmates in the past, but he had never fought before. Didn’t know how, didn’t see why. He tried to fight the second time it happened, but his fists felt as alien as wings. Hitting someone was as strange as flying. His mother, devastated by the severity of the beatdown, dialed to call the school, but he protested and lied, “No, Ma. It was me who started the fights. I’ll get busted.”

  “All right. But no more fights. Period.”

  School changed. Each long day, he feared the violence and humiliations that could rain down on him now that he was not invisible. He spent lunchtimes in the library, finding quiet corners within sight of the protective librarians. He feigned sickness whenever he could to escape the terrors of PE and avoided the bathrooms until he could no longer hold it in. Crossing from class to class became a precisely timed scramble across enemy lines. He checked the path to his locker, left and right. If he saw trouble, he backed into the classroom and waited for the danger to pass. He sprinted to his locker and tried to get the combination in one go before racing to his next period.

  Kids who had previously been friendly or at least neutral to Raymundo began to distance themselves, afraid of becoming collateral damage in an attack or being seen as a fellow traveler. His longtime homey Olga remained loyal.

  “Why don’t you leave him alone, ese?” asked Olga when Junior Barba harassed Raymundo.

  “Why should I?” replied Junior.

  “Because he didn’t do nothing to you, that’s why,” said Olga.

  “Pfft,” said Junior, turning to Raymundo. “You got a girl protecting you, Raygay? What a puto. Why don’t you stand up for yourself, ese?” Raymundo had no response.

  “C’mon, Ray,” she said. “We’re going. What you said, Junior, that is messed up.”

  “She’s tougher than you are, Raygay!” sneered Junior as they walked away.

  “Hey, Olga, thanks homey,” said Raymundo afterward.

  “What Junior Said was messed up, Ray. But I’m not afraid of that guy.”

  “Thanks for helping me, Olga, but you know what? You gotta stop defending me. It only makes me look worse.”

  “So I’m supposed to let them push you around?” asked Olga.

  “I don’t know, Olga, but I’ll figure it out, okay? Just let them say what they say. I can take it.”

  “Okay, homey, whatever you say,” said Olga. “Maybe you should go ahead and fight it out with one of them so they know they can’t push you around.”

  “I don’t know how to fight,” he said.

  “Then just fight however you can, loco,” said Olga. “Swing, kick, bite. Just to make them think twice.”

  “We’ll see,” he responded.

  * * *

  Raymundo took comfort in improbable peace-through-strength fantasies of beating his tormentors till they begged for a detente. He imagined running away to San Francisco, Santa Cruz, or anyplace with cafés. He imagined magically transferring to an upscale middle school with tame white children, leaving only an empty chrysalis of himself at San Benito Junior High.

  Raymundo’s life seemed broken to him, but his heart, eyes, and penis worked just fine. They all pointed toward beauty, which is to say toward Mateo Valenzuela. At the edge of the playground, Raymundo watched Mateo thread his way through players on the basketball court, laying up the ball so prettily that his opponents sucked their teeth and cocked their heads in admiration. And when the ball dropped in, he would smile. The mole on his cheek would rise, his teeth would flash, and he’d push his wet hair off his forehead. Raymundo watched discreetly, taking fitful glances and then pretending to focus on something else, anything else. His sneaker, the clouds, the gymnasium doors. He understood his place in the school’s caste system, understood that his gaze was a contamination and an affront to Mateo, a violation of honor that required retribution.

  The day that Raymundo finally felt the touch of Mateo was harrow
ing. School was letting out, and as Raymundo passed the portable classrooms, Mateo and his friend Joey Sandoval took him by the arms and pulled him into the walkway between the back of the portables and the cyclone fence that ringed the campus.

  “Don’t! Leave me alone!”

  They pulled him into the space between the gym and the fence. Raymundo twisted and struggled and protested. In response, Joey bent Raymundo’s arm behind his back. Mateo hovered over him.

  “Yo, Mateo, if you don’t mess up his face, there won’t be no evidence,” coached Joey.

  “How come you’ve been lookin’ at me, Raygay?” Raymundo had never seen Mateo this close before.

  “I’m not looking at you,” protested Raymundo. Mateo was terrible and beautiful, an avenging angel.

  “Don’t lie, faggot. I seen you looking. Don’t be lookin’ at me. You think I’m a faggot like you?”

  “It’s not true. I’m not that.”

  “Shit. You can’t even say it, but you’re a fuckin’ fag. Now say it.”

  “It’s not tru—”

  One blow connected with Raymundo’s belly. The other with his face. Raymundo froze.

  “Say it, puto.”

  Mateo’s knee snapped upward. Raymundo tried to evade by twisting to the side, but still caught some of the blow with his crotch. Raymundo bent down, sucked air, and fought back the tears.

  “Say it, bitch.”

  “If you say so,” said Raymundo, still facing the dirt. “That’s what I am.”

  “Louder, bitch. I can’t hear you.” Raymundo lifted his head and met Mateo’s eyes.

  “Fag. I’m a fag,” said Raymundo in a hoarse whisper.

  The uppercut to Raymundo’s chin was revelatory. He had grown up without brothers, without brawls, and had never been hit hard enough to actually see stars, but there he was, staggering to the ground like a regular boy. A great chrysanthemum of sparks erupted across his field of vision. He had always thought that only cartoon characters saw stars. This revelation seemed inexplicably comical, and he laughed.