by John Rechy
“Lyle has no problems, sir. What are yours?”
With that, she left.
Lyle, seeing her outside through the classroom window, walked out to join her. She welcomed him beside her. My God, when had he grown so tall, become so mature?
As they passed a music shop, Lyle paused to look at a guitar in the window, displayed alone, like something special.
A car that had been parked a short distance away drove alongside them, slowly. Sylvia stared at the driver’s side. Lyle followed her look. But the sun’s glare on the windshield did not allow him to see what had turned Sylvia’s face livid.
She grabbed Lyle’s hand and hurried him away.
10
Lyle’s education is taken over by a firm authority.
That evening, when Lyle was not present, Sylvia told Clarita about the encounter with the assistant principal.
“Ha! Lyle’s too smart to listen to the tripe they teach him at that Protestant school,” Clarita said. She refused to correct her reference although Sylvia had told her he was not going to a “Protestant school,” that she misheard “public school.”
“I couldn’t be more certain of it myself.” Sylvia held up her sip of liquor to toast their conclusion.
“I will be his teacher,” Clarita toasted back. “I have a diploma, I am a graduate.”
11
Clarita upholds em-pa-thy for the down-trotten.
When they began his lessons, Clarita would frequently remind Lyle about her cherished diploma earned years ago. She had kept her grammar textbook and dictionary from that time and used it to guide Lyle. “I could have been a teacher,” she often said wistfully, “but—” She would stop there, with a long sigh. Lyle suspected that something in the past had interfered with her goal. Often she would follow her sigh with a wistful: “Ah, such is life!”
She would write out his lessons in careful phrases, sauntering inconspicuously every now and again to her dictionary and casually flipping through the pages to find an exact word. If Lyle caught her—and at times he would pretend not to, at other times he would playfully let her know he’d seen her—she would claim she had been “dusting this large book.” During those times, and often making her discoveries at random—or searching through until she found a word that touched her—she added impressive words to her vocabulary. “Empathy” became her favorite. She would always separate its syllables, to cherish it a bit longer. “Em-pa-thy.” “You must always have em-pa-thy for the down-trotten,” she said to Lyle after two visits to the dictionary, locating herself against a window so that her raised chin, in profile, would indicate the nobility of her feelings.
He knew she wanted him to ask. “What is em-pa-thy?”
“Why, everyone knows that. I’m surprised by your question,” she pretended to scold. “Em-path-y is when you know what people feel when they’re hurt, try to feel like them, and that’s how you know why they do what they do. You understand?”
“Yes,” Lyle said. “Yes, I really do.” Would that allow him to know what hurt Sylvia so deeply? he wondered.
12
Lyle’s extended education.
In temporary agreement that soon would become permanent, Clarita remained at home, taking care of the house while Sylvia continued to work at the perfume counter.
Clarita allotted at least one hour a day to teach Lyle about matters that were far beyond the stupid grasp of his classes at school.
He listened attentively.
About science: “Everybody knows the earth is round, but nobody knows why.”
“Do you?”
“Of course.”
“Why?”
“That’s your first assignment. … In life there are always two sides, the good side and the bad side—on the bad side are the cabrones—”
“Cabrones,” Lyle added a word to his vocabulary. “The sons of bitches, like my father?”
“Yes.” Why should she adjust what had already been established?
She taught him about Pancho Villa, Porfirio Diaz, and about all the confusion at a place called the Alamo: “There were cabrones on both sides, and no one won.”
“That’s not what—” Lyle started.
“I know that’s not what they teach you, and that’s why I’m your teacher.” She added sagely, “What happened is what you think happened—and what needs to happen, that’s all.”
Lyle nestled his head against her shoulder, enjoying the sweet scent she sprayed herself with after each day’s bath.
She resumed her lessons: “Rivers always flow into the ocean because that’s what they flowed out of in the first place, and everything always returns.”
“Even to Rio Escondido?”
“No. That will always be hidden. Mystery should remain, it’s a part of la vida.” She hardly paused before she jumped to another lesson: “And don’t ever, ever talk to strangers.” She had introduced her admonition about strangers years ago, but now that Lyle was the handsomest fourteen-year-old she had ever seen, she emphasized it often.
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Oh.”
13
Time passes, obscuring Clarita’s warning.
“Hey, kid!”
Lyle had, again, wandered away from school, just stood up during arithmetic and walked out as if someone was calling to him. The stringy teacher’s mouth flew open and stayed open, her sentence chopped right at the point where she had begun to explain that if you kept multiplying and multiplying you’d never, never reach the end and if you kept going back and back you’d never reach the beginning. A dark-haired girl—beautiful, beautiful, Lyle thought every time he saw her, which was often since he would prop his chin on his elbows and stare at her—stood up as if to leave with him—he would encourage her with a sideways nod of his head; but, by then recovered from Lyle’s easy walking out, the teacher snapped her fingers as if to bring the girl out of what must have been a contagious trance. The girl sat back down, watching wistfully as Lyle disappeared.
Lyle sat in a vacant lot, where wild desert flowers grew, puffy buds that crumbled when you touched them but that survived the wind. A short building that had once stood there had been torn down to make room for something else that never went up. There remained only the props of what it would have been, blocks of concrete, wire twisting out of them like veins, boards, some cans with hardened white paint, one left there with a stiffened brush.
“Kid! Hey, kid!”
Lyle turned to see a man standing there.
The man was dark-complected, in his thirties, good-looking, not tall, with gleaming white teeth. He was dressed in casual clothes, with a jacket.
“How old are you, kid?”
“Fifteen.”
The man squatted beside him, not too close. “Fifteen, huh?” He mumbled to himself, “I was hoping you were younger.” He was about to sit down next to Lyle, against the unfinished wall, but, brushing the seat of his pants as if he had already sat down and regretted it, he remained squatting, looking around fretfully.
“Are you a Catholic, kid?” the man asked.
Lyle wasn’t anything, although sometimes his mother took him to the pretty Catholic church, where he sat with her while she stared wistfully at the saints around her. He supposed they went there because Clarita was always insisting that he, and his mother, should become “real Catholics.” Now he answered, “I’m not sure.”
“You go to church?”
“Sometimes.”
“You think the saints are pretty, the women saints, I mean?”
“Yeah—they look like movie stars.”
“Oh, my God!” the man said, and slapped his forehead. He said abruptly, “You sure are fair under that tan, aren’t you?”
“It’s not a tan, that’s my color.”
“No.” The man shook his head. “What color are your eyes?”
Lyle opened them, wide.
“Damn! You got brown eyes, I was hopin’ for blue. How old you say?”
“Pretty big for a kid fifteen, huh? I got a daughter, about that age. But it’s not the same—a girl, ya know? You mind standing up?”
Lyle did. Although the questions were very odd, they seemed terribly important to the man, who was so nervous about them.
“You’re tall, too, already taller than me!” The man measured himself against Lyle. “Gee, kid, you’re sure good-lookin’. Like me. Hmmm. … Your mamma—she’s got brown eyes, your color?”
“No—they’re green. … Why are ya askin’ me all those questions?” Lyle took a firm posture, boots apart. He wasn’t about to hear this man talking about his mother even if she didn’t want him to call her that.
“Just asking,” the man said, moving away hurriedly. He turned back. “Don’t tell anybody about me talking to you, okay?”
14
A startling revelation.
“Armando!” Clarita said. “It was that cabrón Armando trying to determine if you’re his son.”
Laughing as he recalled the questions, Lyle had just told Clarita that a very inquisitive man had asked him a lot of odd questions. “Am I?” Lyle wanted to catch up on what he was feeling, confusion, conflicts, sadness, exhilaration.
“Absolutely not,” Clarita said. “You are the cowboy’s son, and everything about you verifies that.” She glanced up and down at the tall, handsome boy with dark hair and the boots he cherished. Cherished because Sylvia had first bought them for him? Very likely. Now that he replaced them himself when necessary, did he cherish them because they asserted a connection to the missing cowboy? “Everything, including—” She peered into his eyes. “—Sylvia’s brown eyes.”
“Sylvia has beautiful green eyes,” Lyle corrected her, “with yellow dots.”
Of course, and she knew it, had forgotten it, conveniently, only for that strange moment. Lyle the First had brown eyes. No, Sylvia had doted on his blue eyes. Clarita adjusted nervously, “I believe Sylvia’s green eyes are tinged with brown, not yellow. That’s where you got the color of yours.” Lord, did that cabrón Armando have brown eyes?
CHAPTER FOUR
1
Why Lyle Clemens did not become a “geek.”
By certain cruel definitions of his peers, Lyle would have been a “geek”—an outcast, the odd one, the one who didn’t go out for sports, who didn’t “hang out,” and was considered “weird.” At times he would simply start running after school and disappear, or so it seemed, in a second.
“Where’d he go?” someone might ask.
Shrugs were the only answer.
He would have been a “geek” except for this powerful factor: He was so handsome and sexy that girls giggled and nudged each other when he appeared, looking back at him, smiling flirtatiously; some ran away squealing as if in grave danger of succumbing to him. Their boyfriends could not easily taunt him, because of his appearance, leanly muscular, tall, agile.
He did not court popularity, did not care what anyone said about him. Still, he was “popular” in a unique way. Boys his age, the ones who were not popular and were, themselves, considered “geeks,” lingered about him because they saw in him a hero, their king, someone like them who was not exposed to the harassing they were objects of. Even some of the more popular boys seemed at times to be courting his friendship, although cautiously and perhaps mainly because their girlfriends were infatuated with him and some of his aura might transfer to them—and also because he had the nerve to walk out on classes at school, the way they might want to but didn’t.
Only giggles resulted now from his sudden exits as if he was invisible, always with a smile, as if someone was calling to him from the vacated field he went to in order to think and figure out life. Still, the beautiful girl who indicated intending to follow him had not done so, even though he paused next to her on the way out recently and would have bent to kiss her—the urge was so powerful it seemed to come beyond his volition. He would have kissed her, except that at that moment he stumbled, taking a step forward to recover, and so resuming that direction out.
Often in his field, he recalled the strange man Clarita had identified as “Armando.” He had kept the matter from his mother, just as Clarita had instructed, because, she had said, “Telling her about that other son of a bitch will only make her sadder, and she’s sad enough already.”
Why? Why was Sylvia sadder each day? When she was drinking, she’d turn giggly for sporadic moments, as if long-withheld happiness was bubbling over, and then instantly she turned moody, angry, sullen when her moods were challenged.
“You can’t understand, Lyle,” she told him when she caught him staring at her during one of her dark moods. In a whisper he barely heard, she said, “Don’t even hope.”
Don’t even hope? Had she meant that he shouldn’t ever hope to understand her? Or had her sadness reached the point where she was telling him that she had stopped hoping?
Increasingly, he came to feel that it was within his capacity—if he could only know how—to change Sylvia’s life, to edge it away from her sadness.
2
The unique nature of amoebas, according to Miss Stowe.
A young teacher arrived as a substitute to teach the high school students biology. Miss Stowe wore a tomato-red sweater-dress that hugged her assertive breasts and curvy hips. That made Lyle keep blinking, to focus more closely on them. She had introduced the racy subject of procreation, beginning with something called amoebas that reproduced by simply splitting apart.
“They don’t have no father?” a freckled boy asked forlornly.
“Naw,” said another, a burly boy who would be fat in less than a year, perhaps by next week, and whose girlfriend had earlier given him some gum, which he chewed relentlessly between words, “that’s—chew—why they—chew, chew—call them bastards.”
“Now—” Miss Stowe attempted to steer back to amoebas.
The burly boy forged ahead. “That makes Lyle an amoeba—”
Lyle shook his head, to brush away words that had intruded on his concentration on the substitute teacher’s tight-fitting sweater—the dark-haired girl was not in that class to draw his attention. At the same time—and he could do this, easily—he had been listening attentively and learning all about amoebas.
“—’cause he doesn’t have a father, either.”
Lyle stood up, smiling. “I do have a father, and he’s a goddamned son of a bitch.”
Titters, laughter.
“Just that,” said Miss Stowe, “would make a lot of children bastards, including—” She was about to point to the burly boy, but she caught herself. “Let’s restore order to the class,” she admonished, “so that we may—”
Not satisfied because Lyle had brushed away his insult and that his girlfriend with braces was now moonily eyeing Lyle, the burly boy pointed to a girl who was usually alone, a sad girl about to burst into tears at any moment. “She’s a bastard, too, an amoeba, because she doesn’t have a father, either, like Lyle.”
The girl ran out of the room crying.
The bell ending the period sounded, and the students scrambled away. The burly boy lingered in the hall, chuckling at his own cleverness, looking around to see whether any of his new fans had stayed to cheer him on.
That was when Lyle would begin to think that his hands and his legs had a mind of their own. In the hall, while he remained smiling, his legs took two strides toward the burly boy. His hands grabbed him by the shoulders and, still smiling as if he was about to introduce himself, he shook him and shook him and shook him, and then with a shove, sent the boy reeling against his locker. The burly boy remained there, scrunched, shocked, looking at Lyle, who was still smiling as if they had just become friends, except that his hands prepared to grab the boy again.
“Lyle! Don’t you dare!” Miss Stowe was there.
Lyle welcomed the opportunity to be closer to her, at least to glimpse more closely the curves the sweater was hugging.
The burly boy preten
ded to swagger away—“Damn!” he muttered when he tripped and fell; he didn’t bother to brush his clothes, streaked with chalk that had fallen to the floor at one time or another and that other students had crushed into white powder.
“I’m not going to report this,” Miss Stowe said, sounding stern, “and I think he’s too humiliated to report it himself.” Her lips puckered, and she closed her eyes.
Was this happening? It sure was. Responding the way his hands had earlier, his head bent down on its own volition and his lips moved toward her. Before he knew it, his mouth was pressed against Miss Stowe’s in a quick kiss; maybe the one he had intended sharing with the beautiful dark-haired girl had stayed there waiting.
When the kiss ended, Miss Stowe’s head remained tilted as if in expectation of another kiss, which Lyle eagerly supplied.
3
A discovery in the vacant lot.
In his lot—he had begun to think of it as his own—Lyle found a guitar someone had abandoned there. He plucked a string, a sweet twang. When he had it adjusted at a musical shop in Rio Escondido, he would write a song and sing it to himself, in his lot.
The man at the shop said the guitar wasn’t in bad shape at all. “Won’t take much to fix it. Then you’ll be able to play it again.”
“I don’t know how to play it,” Lyle said.
“This’ll help you,” the man said, and sold Lyle a booklet: “Learning How to Play the Guitar on Your Own.” Lyle was glad to pay with his own money—he made a big show of taking it out of his wallet to emphasize that fact, now that he had a job after school in the warehouse of a stationery store.
After he picked up the adjusted guitar—“I made the notes nicer for ya,” the man said, “specialty of mine, sweet notes”—Lyle took it with him to his lot, along with the booklet he had bought. He learned easily. He began to compose his first song:
