by Ana Simo
On Christmas Eve, I was in the kitchen at daybreak, needing four hours to do what Petrona would have done in one. Now her terror again filled the kitchen. Something far more malevolent than la migra had chased her. Had the English-only vigilantes who roamed the backwoods at night threatened her? Had she or her shriveled man stolen from one of the Negro drug dealers who lately controlled the outer edges of Shangri-La? Had I seen the contours of the Aztlán eagle on her car’s putrid chassis? The side of venison wrapped in transparent plastic drove Petrona out of my mind.
The venison had spent the night in the Judge’s king-size Sub-Zero fridge. It now stretched on the heavy oak kitchen table as luxuriantly as Mrs. Crandall’s body on the library table. The color pattern was different, though: here pale red meat, pure and fatless, over light brown wood; there, sumptuous, creamy flesh overflowing a polished cherry slab. I had never butchered venison before. I followed an illustrated primer self-published by a Pennsylvania resettlement camp butcher that I found tucked inside a cookbook. It was much more difficult and time-consuming than he claimed. Separating the meat from the bones and the muscle tissue required considerable strength and precision. At one point I moved the venison to the floor, to get better leverage. Six hours later, the pieces of venison were neatly stacked in the refrigerator, ready for cooking. Cleaning the butchery required another three hours: the table and the surrounding floor were splattered with blood, bones, and scraps of discarded meat. Blood had dripped between the planks, where it coagulated. I discovered it while looking for the source of the stench that persisted even after I had washed all floors and surfaces, and dumped the securely bagged venison waste in the garbage can outside the kitchen. It took me another hour to scrape the blood out of the floor cracks with a rusty scalpel I found in the Judge’s toolbox, and to apply bleach onto each crack with an eye dropper, precisely, so as not to damage the polish on the wooden planks.
McCabe had loved meat. I thought about it in the past tense while butchering the venison. I could not bring myself to put it in the present, even when I imagined her at that very moment eating a bloody sirloin for lunch in Manhattan, or dining on Eisbein mit Erbspüree in Berlin, or breakfasting on kaorou in Beijing. Wherever she was, she would be either eating, digesting, or preparing to eat meat. Meat and birds, dead or alive, were her only bodily interests, but her expanding empire was her true passion. I had imagined McCabe bored with her art dealing, content with the money and power she already had, and eager to move on to something that fed her spirit. Wasn’t that why she had become a nurse, an ornithologist, my patient pupil? Wasn’t that why she so quickly dispatched the fresh load FedEx brought her every morning from Manhattan? I had mistaken her tactical brilliance for lassitude, my material poverty for wisdom. Butchering the venison, I searched for a quality in my person. I found none. McCabe’s immolation would become my only quality.
The bone structure of the deer is not unlike ours, though the backbone is thicker and wider because it must support a full belly. The muscles that prevent backbone and belly from collapsing from the pull of gravity are also twice as fibrous and numerous than those of the average Caucasian human male. The legs, however, are similar, except that there are four instead of two. The animal kingdom consists of pieces of walking, breathing, jumping, fornicating, dim-thinking meat, on two or four legs. I am referring to us, mammals. I once dreamt that I was a pig rooting for truffles on the banks of the Little Ohio. Another time I dreamt I was a prairie dog running in the snow in the last remnant of the Great Prairie, which almost touches Elmira County in the west. In the summer, you can see it swaying in the distance if you climb a tree in Shangri-La’s cemetery. The Great Prairie was my Sargasso Sea, my Caribbean, boiling or frigid, my Red Sea parting, my home within home. I sat in the tree with my father’s binoculars trained on the golden waves. There I saw Moses, Billy the Kid, and Captain Morgan, who had set fire to San Cristóbal de La Habana centuries ago according to my father. The binoculars warped the tips of the prairie grasses and the line of the horizon. I took this to be proof that the earth was flat, even when I knew it was round. The Judge, who hated opera, had slipped his binoculars to my father before his annual fall trip to New York with Mrs. Wilkerson, hoping to avoid yet another Forza del Destino at the wretched Met. It did not work. She forced him to go anyway, my father later told me.
By the time I finished cleaning up, the sun was a pale yellow smudge dropping behind the icy rosebushes. The saddest winter sight in Elmira is that pale yellow twilight that replaces the afternoon. It made my mother walk around the house with pursed lips and a glare in her eyes. My grandmother advised me to keep clear of her daughter on those days. “She has a malignant streak,” she told me, hesitating between regret and pride. “But,” she added (and I knew what would follow: an indictment of my father), “He provokes it in her; he’s no saint.” As usual, she clammed up when I asked her what exactly he did wrong. I couldn’t see it and was afraid that I, too, might be provocative and un-saintly. “You haven’t done anything,” my grandmother said, pulling me into her fat lap. This was the beginning and end of many of our conversations. To her mind, I could do no wrong. I nevertheless mimicked my father, scurrying around the house, eyes glued to the floor to avoid my mother’s incinerating gaze until the whistling in the kitchen signaled that all was back to normal. My mother couldn’t whistle a tune any more than she could sing, but it was the happiest sound in the world for the three inmates in her fearsome prison.
My mother’s choleric winters continued until the day she died. And one year, winter drove Ezequiel Cohen mad. The sixth-grade English teacher had explained the meaning of “the dead of winter,” which in Elmira fell in February. Despite our protestations, Rafael and I were paired to do a five-hundred-word essay on the subject. We fought whenever we tried to write together, so this time I wrote the text and he did the illustrations. One showed a boat trapped in the ice in the Little Ohio River. Another showed a woman and a boy at table while snowflakes swirled outside their window. On a couch, nearby, a man slept under a green tartan blanket. All three had curly black hair. The teacher asked who the man was. Rafael said it was the grandfather. I knew it was Ezequiel, who had been lying in exactly the same position under a green Army surplus blanket for almost a week. When Ezequiel first failed to get up from the couch to go to work, Genoveva ran in tears to my mother, as she always did. My mother and my father, separately and together, went to talk to Ezequiel, who didn’t answer them either. It was then decided to leave Ezequiel in peace until he ran out of sick days. We were to pretend he was not there. Water and food were left on the windowsill by his couch. They remained untouched during the day. In the morning, they were gone. I was sitting alone at his dining table, revising my “In the Dead of Winter” essay, when Ezequiel spoke from his couch, slowly and laboriously, in English, a language he officially could not speak. “He was uncircumcised in flesh, but not in heart,” he said. He looked like someone who had chewed on something bitter. Then he shut his eyes, exhausted by his first and only bout of eloquence in the alien tongue. I never told anyone. This happened on a Saturday. By Monday Ezequiel was back to mopping the school hallways, all smiles as usual.
At four o’clock, the roses had not yet arrived. I needed them to lift the winter shroud that was enveloping the house. The flower shop insisted, for the third time, that they were on the way. The Yellow Pages listed no other flower shops outside the state capital. Thirty years after I had left, a decrepit Elmira was still the only semi-civilized outpost in the heart of the heartland. I found a flower wholesaler about sixty miles west of Elmira, in an adjacent and otherwise unpopulated county, surrounded on all sides by the shreds of the Great Prairie. The owner agreed to sell me $200 worth of assorted Colombian roses that were sitting in his refrigerator. He was not sure how many there were, but it should be more than the four dozen I wanted. He said he was giving me the Colombian price without me having to go to Colombia and risk being kidnapped and having a finger chopped off, or an eye go
uged out and mailed to my family. This went on for a long time while I commiserated with him about Colombian florists, winter blizzards, the unfairness of military subsidies for unused grasslands but not for flower importation, the disrepair of county roads, the venality of soldiers and politicians at the local, state, and federal levels, and other matters.
The world has the wrong idea about the white rural inhabitants of this corner of the heartland. They are supposed to be wise, hardworking, honest, dignified, and silent, only a tad less taciturn than, say, Minnesotans of old. That is a big load of baloney. This contradiction is lost on them, but not on smart little spics like Rafael Cohen, who pointed it out to me during a sixth-grade visit to a nearby milk farm. The farmer was a chiseler, his wife a whore, their four children violent and moronic giants, the assorted adults hanging on (in-laws, farmhands, the inevitable junkie younger brother in a black Metallica tee shirt) were bloodsuckers, and the entire group a collection of degenerates of the Bible-thumping, sister-fucking, speed-and-sanctimony-addicted persuasion. Rafael did not say it like that. These were, and are, my own words. “Witness the decline of America!” was all Rafael whispered in my ear as we entered the milking barn. We both tittered.
I arrived at the flower wholesaler when the family was finishing dinner. The man and his two sons loaded the flower boxes into the Land Rover. He was pissed, but held his tongue when I insisted on checking the contents of each box before it was taken out of his warehouse. As I began to drive away, he told me to watch out for prairie dogs crossing the road. “We don’t want some dog guts splattered over your nice car now, do we, Miss?” he said, baring his yellowish canines.
I saw no living creature on my way back. The snowy flatlands on both sides of the road were perfectly white and empty under a sliver of moon. I wished I had taken McCabe to see the remnants of the Great Prairie before the snow covered them. She would never see them now. Regret twisted my stomach the rest of the drive. I may even have shed some tears. When I pulled into the Judge’s garage, the Elmira roses were there waiting for me. It was around eight o’clock. I spent the rest of the evening matching all one hundred and twenty roses to vases, bottles, tall glasses, and any suitable container I could find, and putting the finishing touches on the Christmas meal. I arranged the flowers in large bunches, which I spread around strategically so that the house did not look, or smell, like a funeral parlor. I put the prettiest vase with yellow roses in McCabe’s empty bedroom. For the dining table I created a muscular arrangement with red roses at the center, surrounded by concentric circles of white, pink, and, on the outer ring, yellow roses. McCabe’s proximity must have inspired me. I am not the artistic type. Putting flowers in vases is alien to my nature. When I went to bed, drunk on a 2002 Pouilly-Fuissé that I had been keeping for a special occasion, the venison was the only thing left to do. I had even set the table with the best the Judge and his wife had to offer (I had found the delicate white tablecloth in Mrs. Wilkerson’s armoire, still wrapped in tissue paper.) The table was set for three. I was going to lie through my teeth until the end.
From my bed, I could see the thin moon rising behind the rosebush. McCabe could not keep her hands off that bush. Every morning, hands in pockets, she scrutinized it, bending over to look at some microscopic detail or kneeling to peer at an inaccessible branch. After the inspection, which would sometimes take a good fifteen minutes, she would bring the shears out of the garden shed and nip here and there. I suggested that she save herself the extra trip by bringing the shears with her the first time around. “You can keep them at the entrance with the Judge’s walking sticks,” I said. She refused, saying that she did not always need the shears. “But you always use them,” I insisted. There may be a day when she wouldn’t use them, so she preferred not to prejudge, she replied (not in those words—she would not have said “prejudge” or even known the word, but that is what she meant). She reflected for a long time, then added: “I don’t want to prune the rosebush just because I have the shears in my hands.” With this, I fell asleep, content.
26
Navidad Blanca
Bincrósbi was wafting up from the kitchen clock radio.
“We’re all white on Christmas. That’s what my man says,” Ezequiel Cohen spat in La Esperanza Spanish, each word ending in an acid air clap. How sweet it was to wake up to Bincrósbi on Christmas morning. You floated upward on his foamy white spiral until you reached the surface of the sea of tranquility. That was how white people woke up all year long, except Trailer Trash down the road, who woke up to his dogs.
The howling of dogs was Shangri-La’s relentless soundtrack. Dawn of the Dogs, with mutts playing the walking cadavers; or a topographically incorrect I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Night and day they howled, so we would not forget our delicate geopolitical situation, a brown island on Bincrósbi’s foamy white prairie. Hundreds of bloodthirsty, big-fanged canines fighting for a length of tripe in the trailer park, ready to rip out your guts if you looked them in the eye. It wasn’t tripe they wanted, but to be let loose, so they could tear through Shangri-La, ripping off limbs, flattening our houses, which suddenly seemed so small and weak, and running off with bloody baby torsos in their jaws. Trailer Trash had the power to unleash his dogs. Every day he didn’t was a day we owed him. Yet I did not hate him.
“I’m as white as they are!” my grandmother bellowed, so they could hear her all the way in Elmira. She was dyspeptic at the lack of racial logic of the americanos (i.e., white Americans, black ones being negros americanos). With her fair skin, blue eyes, fourth-grade diploma, beautiful penmanship, and La Esperanza birth certificate, she knew that she was better than the americanos, and, through sheer luck, better than the inditos, the little Mexican Indians, across the road. My grandmother’s conviction of her superiority was so absolute and so rooted in chance that she could be generous and unassuming in her daily life. Thus, she became godmother to several generations of inditos. Noblesse oblige, Rafael once admiringly remarked. The lack of this quality in white Americans, so rich and lucky, is what she resented them for most. Even Bincrósbi she distrusted. Had this been her house, she would not have let him preside over our Christmases.
Bincrósbi was the only americano who ever entered our house. Rafael and I did not count. We were not americanos, just “born here.” That was how Shangri-La saw its American children. To compensate for withholding our souls, the neighborhood binged on blind loyalty and flag-waving patriotism any time there was a disturbance against our adopted country anywhere on the globe (except south of the border, lest we betray our own, offend a neighbor, or give satisfaction to the americanos, ever ready to tar all of us with the same brush). To further appease the giant, Shangri-La boys were offered to the army in sacrifice. Half came back with tattoos and some of the same bad habits picked up at the state penitentiaries by their more numerous jailbait peers (drug and steroid use and dealing, bitter depression, terminal ethno-racial confusion, and a fat chip on their testosterone-swollen shoulders). The other half came back in the proverbial body bag, allowing their mothers the coveted status of mujer sufrida, a martyr.
Had I set the kitchen clock radio last night? I was still too drunk to tell. I drifted into that zone of clarity between wakefulness and sleep where McCabe dwelled. A scene from two months ago uncoiled with serpentine dread. I was still confined to bed, with my feet raised and thickly bandaged. McCabe was sitting on a chair by the foot of the bed. “I didn’t know that you followed Washington politics,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I don’t,” she answered. When I remained silent, she added, “They don’t matter.” She looked at me with curiosity. My hands got clammy and shaky under the covers, but I pushed on: “Yet you ran out to tell me about the National Security Advisor and the bomb… .” It was now McCabe’s turn to be silent. “I thought that you’d want to know,” she finally said. “Why?” I asked. “Because you like to know everything,” she answered evenly. I tried to decipher the meaning of that terse statement but hit the glas
s wall that was McCabe’s open and candid face. Did I see a slight tremor of fondness at the corner of her mouth?
She had a strong mouth, generous but not fleshy, perfectly in proportion with her nose and chin, both equally well defined. The new McCabe could not be called pretty. Her ears were a little too large and separated from the head, her neck perhaps too long. I decided this was only noticeable because the rest of her features were so harmonious. Hers was what used to be called a handsome and noble face. There was something Byzantine about McCabe. Not Byzantine as in classical paintings, but as you can still see in the faces of Anatolian refugee women who have just arrived on the streets of Astoria, before Aracnidan cuteness infects them. McCabe’s body and head were slightly mismatched. Her body was too bony and elongated, more suitable for the narrower elfin faces so common in Prague. What allowed her face and head to sit gracefully on her body, in spite of the mismatch, were her shoulders, slightly wider than what her body required, but perfectly adapted to receive the neck and head. Breaking down McCabe into her architectural components was not something I did in our everyday life. It was only in that zone of light, cushioned by a hangover and Bincrósbi’s fecally sweet voice, that I began to pull her apart.
