“Of course,” my mom said.
I was in the living room, eavesdropping, even though I was supposed to be doing my geometry homework.
“Well,” my mom went on, clearing her throat, “it will be nice to have another family in the building. They’ll be a good addition.”
Quisqueya took a quick look at me before turning back to my mom and hunching over her coffee mug. “Except …,” she said.
My mom leaned forward. “What?”
Quisqueya said, “The girl …” She looked at me again.
My mom peered over Quisqueya’s shoulder. “Mayor, are you listening to us?”
I tried to act surprised. “Huh? Me?”
My mom knew me too well, though. She shook her head at Quisqueya to signal that whatever Quisqueya was going to say, she’d better save it if she didn’t want me to hear it.
“Bueno, we don’t need to talk about it, then,” Quisqueya said. “You’ll see for yourself eventually, I’m sure.”
My mom narrowed her eyes, but instead of pressing, she sat back in her chair and said loudly, “Well.” And then, “More coffee?”
WE HEARD A LOT of things, but who knew how much of it was true? It didn’t take long before the details about the Riveras began to seem far-fetched. They had tried to come into the United States once before but had been turned back. They were only staying for a few weeks. They were working undercover for the Department of Homeland Security. They were personal friends with the governor. They were running a safe house for illegals. They had connections to a Mexican narco ring. They were loaded. They were poor. They were traveling with the circus.
I tuned it all out after a while. School had started two weeks earlier, and even though I had told myself that this would be the year the other kids stopped picking on me, the year that I actually fit in for once in my life, things already weren’t going exactly as planned. During the first week of school, I was in the locker room, changing into my gym shorts, when Julius Olsen tucked his hands into his armpits and started flapping his arms like wings. “Bwwaak!” he said, looking at me. I ignored him and cinched the drawstring on my shorts. Actually, they were my older brother Enrique’s shorts that had been handed down to me, but I wore them because I thought that maybe they would make me seem cooler than I was, like maybe some of Enrique’s popularity was trapped in the fibers and would rub off on me. He’d been a senior the year before, when I was a freshman, and every single person in the school had adored him. Soccer stud. Girlfriends by the dozen. Homecoming king. So opposite of me that when I tried to earn points with Shandie Lewis, who I would have given just about anything to hook up with, by telling her that I was Enrique Toro’s brother, she said that was a really stupid thing to lie about.
“Bwwaaaak!” Julius said louder, jutting his neck toward me.
I balled up my jeans and shoved them into my locker.
Garrett Miller, who had basically made picking on me last year his special project, pointed at me, laughed, and said, “Fucking chicken legs.” He flung his boot at my chest.
Julius snorted.
I took a deep breath and shut my locker. I was used to this kind of abuse. Last year, whenever Enrique caught wind of it, he’d tell me to stand up for myself. “I know you don’t want to fight,” he said once. “But at least have the balls to tell them to fuck off.” And in my head I did. In my head, I was Jason Bourne or Jack Bauer or James Bond or all three of them combined. But beyond my head, the most I ever did was ignore it and walk away.
“How do you say ‘chicken’ in Spanish?” Garrett asked.
“Pollo,” someone answered.
“Major Pollo,” Garrett said.
The kids at my school loved changing my first name to English and then tacking insults onto it. Major Pan (short for Panamanian). Major Pan in the Ass. Major Cocksucker.
Julius started cracking up, and he squawked at me again. A few of the other guys in the locker room snickered.
I started walking—I just wanted to get out of there—but when I did, I bumped Garrett’s boot, which was on the floor in front of me.
“Don’t touch my shoe, Pollo,” Garrett said.
“Kick it over here,” Julius said.
“Fuck you,” Garrett snapped. “Don’t tell him to kick my shoe.”
“Don’t worry,” Julius said. “He can’t kick for shit. Haven’t you seen him out there after school trying to play soccer? He’s a total fuckup.”
“Major fuckup,” Garrett said, stepping in front of me to block any hope I had of leaving.
Garrett was thin, but he was tall. He wore a green army coat every single day, no matter what the weather was, and had a tattoo of an eagle on his neck. The year before, he’d spent a few months in juvenile detention at Ferris because he beat up Angelo Puente so bad that by the end of it, Angelo had two broken arms and blood pouring out of his nose. There was no way I was going to mess with him.
But when the bell rang and the other kids started filing out into the gym, Garrett still didn’t budge. The locker room was in the school basement and it was so quiet right then that I could hear water coursing through the pipes. There wasn’t anywhere for me to go. Garrett took a step closer. I didn’t know what he was going to do. And then Mr. Samuels, the gym teacher, poked his head into the room.
“You boys are supposed to be out in the gym,” he said.
Garrett didn’t move. Neither did I.
“Now!” he barked.
So that was one thing. The other thing, as Julius had pointed out, was soccer. The only reason I’d gone out for the team in the first place was because my dad had forced me into it. For him, the logic went something like: I was Latino and male and not a cripple, therefore I should play soccer. Soccer was for Latinos, basketball for blacks, and the whites could keep their tennis and golf as far as he was concerned. He’d applied the same reasoning to my brother, too, except that in Enrique’s case, it had actually worked out. Enrique had been the first player in the history of our school to make varsity as a freshman, and when he got a full-ride soccer scholarship to Maryland, it was like my dad had been vindicated. “See?” he’d said, waving around the offer letter when it came in the mail. “You were meant to do this! The next Pelé! And this one,” he’d said, pointing at me, “the next Maradona!”
Enrique might have been the next Pelé, but I wasn’t even in the same galaxy as Maradona. Two weeks into practice, I had bruised shins, a scabby knee, and a scraped elbow. Coach even pulled me aside once to ask whether I was wearing the right size cleats. I told him they were size seven, which was my size, and he patted my shoulder and said, “Okay, then. Maybe you should just sit it out for a while,” and directed me to the sidelines.
In the past few days, a flock of girls had started coming to our practices, sitting in the empty stands and pointing at us while they texted and talked. Word got around that they were new freshmen. They didn’t look like any freshmen I knew, in their skimpy tank tops and lacy black bras they wore underneath, but what I did know was that our team got a hell of a lot better after those girls showed up. Everyone was running faster and kicking harder than before. I felt like a loser, hanging around the sidelines all the time. Whenever the girls broke out in laughter, I was sure they were laughing at me. One day, I asked Coach if I could go back in, even if just for a few drills. When he looked ambivalent, I lied and said, “I’ve been practicing with my dad at home. Even he thinks I’m getting better.” Coach worked his jaw from side to side like he was thinking about it. “Please?” I said. Finally he gave in. “Okay. Let’s see what you got.”
We set up a star drill where guys spread out into a circle and dribbled the ball a few paces into the middle before passing to a teammate who took the ball and repeated the sequence. Each time I ran through and got back in line, I looked up at the girls in the stands, who weren’t laughing anymore, just watching. Maybe I got overconfident. Maybe there was a divot in the grass. The next time I ran into the middle to get the ball, my ankle turned. Ethan W
eisberg was stepping toward me, waiting for me to pass to him. I was so eager to get the dribble going again that when I went for the ball with my other foot, I rolled my cleat up over it instead. The ball was still spinning, and I stumbled again just as Ethan, impatient and frustrated, finally came at me and tried to spear his foot in to swipe the ball out for himself. When he did, I fell. His leg caught under mine. And before either of us knew it, I had taken him down, both of us landing on top of each other in the middle of the field. “What the fuck, Mayor!” Ethan yelled. My hip throbbed. Coach blew his whistle and jogged in to untangle us. The girls erupted in laughter.
Rafael Toro
I was born in 1967 in a town called Los Santos in a little country by the name of Panamá. I was an only child. My father moved us to Panamá City when I was five because he had political ambitions. He read the newspaper every day to keep himself informed. He had a small transistor radio that he listened to in the morning while he was in the shower. My father used to walk around the house in his socks and make speeches about everything. He made speeches about the dishes stacked in the sink or about Gerald Ford or about the raspado vendor who’d gotten in his way. He had a temper, too. He broke our teacups and one time he broke the television set when he threw a vase through the screen. Well, it broke the vase, too, but I was ten and I only cared that he had broken the television set. I remember one time he got so furious that he picked up a ham my mother had prepared for dinner and heaved it into the front yard. My mother ran out to retrieve it and when she brought it back inside, she was crying and picking pebbles and dirt off the seared skin. My cousins were over that night and I remember them all laughing at her. I thought that was how a man behaved, so when I got upset, even as a young boy, I would throw things or kick the wall. I had a terrible temper. After my father died, when I was thirteen, it only got worse. Because then I really had something to be angry about. I missed him after he was gone. My mother must have felt the same way, because in the years following his death she often got sick. She went to doctors but they never knew what it was. She was depressed and tired. There were days she didn’t get out of bed. I don’t think she could function without my father. Then one morning I went to wake her and she didn’t move. I remember her arm was cold when I shook it.
I spent a long time after that feeling like I didn’t care about anything. The house went to the bank, and I lived with various friends for a few months at a time, sleeping on their couches or more often on the floor. I stopped going to school. I started drinking during the day. I got into fights at the bar or with guys on the street. I washed people’s cars to earn enough money to get by.
My wife, Celia, saved my life. Who knows what would have become of me if I hadn’t met her? I was playing a pickup baseball game with some friends on a beach by Casco Viejo. That beach is filthy now, but back then people used to go swimming there and sunbathe on the sand.
I was terrible at baseball. I was always trying to persuade the other guys to play soccer instead, but baseball was the big sport then, and one of the guys would bring cold beers in a cooler to the pickup games, so I used to go for that.
Celia was walking by with her girlfriends—they had on their bathing suits and the kind of platform sandals that were popular—and they stopped to watch the game for a few minutes, all of them laughing like nervous birds. I think one of them knew one of the guys. Celia didn’t stand out to me right away. But after the game, she was still there with one of her friends—everyone else had left by then—and I remember she touched my shoulder. I must have said something funny, but I don’t know what, and if you ask her, she’ll claim I’ve never said a funny thing in my life. But she laughed and laid her hand on my shoulder, and I thought to myself, Who is this girl?
I was eighteen then. We started spending time together. I was still sleeping at friends’ apartments with no place of my own, so Celia and I sat on park benches and drank bottles of beer or walked down Avenida Central or sat on the rocks by the bay, listening to the water slap below us. Her favorite was always that small Casco Viejo beach where we met. She could sit for hours with her toes in the sand, letting the sea foam come up to her ankles. I never saw her happier than when we would go there together.
She wasn’t very demanding, Celia. She didn’t care that I couldn’t give her a lot of things. But I cared. Eventually I got a job at a restaurant, just so I could have enough money to buy her gifts and take her out once in a while to a movie. That’s what the man is supposed to do. She was in university, studying to become a secretary, but I didn’t want us to have to rely on the money she would be making one day. I wanted to be able to take care of her myself. And, I guess, all of a sudden I wanted to be able to take care of me.
I got my life straight after that. Instead of spending my paychecks on rum and beer like before, I saved enough to buy Celia a gold ring from Reprosa, and I asked her to marry me.
We got married in Iglesia del Carmen in front of about twelve guests. Her sister, Gloria, her parents, a few of our friends. One year later, we had our son Enrique. Then Mayor.
Both Celia and I miss certain things about Panamá. It was our home for so many years. It’s hard to let go of that, even when you have a good reason for leaving. How can I describe what it was like during the invasion? We slept in a city bus one night because the bus was barricaded and when we and all the other passengers tried to get off, men from the Dignity Battalions were standing outside the door with guns pointed at us, telling us not to move. Celia was holding Enrique in her arms, pleading with them because we didn’t have any food for him. And in the morning, when they were gone, we walked home listening to gunfire in the distance. No one was outside except people who were fighting. Well, and a few people who were looting. But most of the stores were closed and the owners had pulled the metal gates down over the front windows and doors, padlocking them shut. We went three weeks without leaving the house. We were eating toothpaste by the end of it. There was static on the television. We didn’t know what was going to happen. Then one day we heard from a neighbor that Noriega was gone, and suddenly there were voices in the streets again. Everyone was wandering around, looking up at the sky, knocking on each other’s doors, sharing stories about what it had been like, how scared we had been, the parts of the city that had been destroyed. But the stories were nothing compared to what we saw when we went out. El Chorrillo. San Miguelito. I didn’t even know how to comprehend it. Burnt-out cars and the rubble of buildings. Broken glass and charred palm trees along the sides of the roads. It looked like a different place. It was just destruction and more destruction. I remember Celia burst into tears the first time she saw it all.
We tried to give it time, but three years later we made the decision to leave. We never felt safe there again. We felt as if our home had been stolen from us. And part of me felt embarrassed, I think, that my country hadn’t been strong enough to resist what had happened to it. Maybe the way to say it is that I felt betrayed.
We’re Americans now. I’m a line cook at a diner, and I make enough to provide for my family. Celia and I feel gratified when we see Enrique and Mayor doing well here. Maybe they wouldn’t have done so well in Panamá. Maybe they wouldn’t have had the same opportunities. So that makes coming here worth it. We’re citizens, and if someone asks me where my home is, I say los Estados Unidos. I say it proudly.
Of course, we still miss Panamá. Celia is desperate to go back and visit. But I worry what it would be like after all this time. We thought it was unrecognizable when we left, but I have a feeling it would be even more unrecognizable now. Sometimes I think I would rather just remember it in my head, all those streets and places I loved. The way it smelled of car exhaust and sweet fruit. The thickness of the heat. The sound of dogs barking in alleyways. That’s the Panamá I want to hold on to. Because a place can do many things against you, and if it’s your home or if it was your home at one time, you still love it. That’s how it works.
Alma
Arturo started w
ork a few days after we arrived. Before we came he had arranged a job at a mushroom farm, just over the state line in Pennsylvania. It was the only company near Maribel’s school that had been willing to sponsor our visas.
“How was it?” I asked, running to meet him at the door when he came home. He had dirt under his fingernails and smelled like rotten vegetables.
I pinched my nose. “Maybe you should take a shower before you tell me.”
But he didn’t laugh. He walked past me and sat on one of the chairs by the table. “How was it?” he said. “Well, I stood in a warehouse for ten hours and picked mushrooms out of the dirt.”
“So it was great.”
Arturo pushed his chin to one side, cracking his neck.
“Sorry,” I said, sitting across from him. He wanted to be serious, so I would be serious. “The mushrooms grow inside the building?”
He nodded. “In boxes. They’re stacked on top of each other with just enough space in between for us to fit our hands in. Everything is controlled. The ventilation, the humidity. And they keep it dark.”
“You work in the dark?”
“It doesn’t matter to the mushrooms whether there’s light.”
“But don’t you need to see what you’re doing?”
“I can feel when I’ve found one. Then I have to snap the stem, brush off the dirt, and toss it in the collection bin. Pero tan rápido. We have quotas to make.”
“But in the dark?” I asked again. I tried to imagine him standing in the dark all day. What kind of conditions were those?
“It’s mindless,” he said.
“Do they know about your experience? You could be a manager there.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Tell them that in México you owned a construction business.”
“They’re not going to care about that.”
“But you could do more than pull mushrooms in the dark.”
“We knew this was going to be the job, Alma.”
The Book of Unknown Americans Page 2
