An Uninterrupted View of the Sky

by Melanie Crowder

  “Papá!”

  I run down the stairs and push through the hall, and I hear the sound of their boots in his stomach and their punches landing on his face. “Papá!”

  When I get to the circle, it’s already breaking up. Red Tito is standing in the corner of the courtyard, watching everything. Men scatter, but my fists are ready, and I’m screaming, screaming at the cowards who did this to face me.

  I feel a hand on my ankle, and I drop down to the ground.

  “Papá.”

  He rolls over, slowly, onto his stomach and spits blood onto the ground.

  “Papá.” My voice breaks.

  He grabs my hand, and I gently lift him up. I drape his arm over my shoulder, and we stand together. I don’t know where to hold on—if they got his kidneys or his ribs. I’m afraid to even wrap my arm around him to help him to the stairs.

  “How did this happen, Papá? I don’t understand—you paid up, right? We should be protected.”

  He coughs, and more blood spills from his lips. His voice is raspy. “Some of the men in here are outside the council’s control.”

  My mind is racing. “Why you? Why, all of a sudden, are those guys after you?”

  His steps are so slow. He weighs almost nothing. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters, Papá!” If he wasn’t so badly hurt, I would take him by the shoulders and shake him.

  My father looks up into my face. “They wanted you to bring drugs into the prison for them. Just once, they said. The guards would never know, they said.”

  His words are like ice on my skin. “They did this to you because of me?” And the other fight he got into—was that because of me too?

  “No, my son.” He pauses to catch his breath. “They did this because they are desperate. They did this because they are cruel men. Don’t worry about me. It’s over. They’ve exacted their price for my refusal.”

  “You don’t know that. You don’t know they won’t try again.”

  “Well, they can’t have my son.” He puts one foot in front of the other and groans as we carefully climb the stairs. “What are they going to do to me? Take my freedom? Too late. Take my dignity? Too late. Take my life?” His head ticks to the side. “That may be a blessing for you and your sister in the end.”

  We stop in front of our cell door. “Don’t say that, Papá. Don’t even think it.”

  “Too late,” he whispers.

  November 9

  Soledad doesn’t wait for us in the morning. I thought it was just a little fight between us. I didn’t think she would cut me out for good. I take Pilar’s hand as we leave the prison and pull her to a side street.

  Pilar held it together last night when I brought Papá into the cell. And she tried to smile when he saw us off to school this morning. But now that he’s not here to see, tears drip down her face like melted wax.

  I see Soledad in class, but it’s like before, when I was a stranger to her. I watch her when she isn’t looking. I wish I could tell what she’s thinking. But she doesn’t even look at me. Not once.

  • • •

  Pilar and I go to the plaza after school. I try to focus on the paper in front of me; the entrance exams are only five days away. The wind is halfheartedly tossing around the tops of the palm trees over our heads. The serrated shadows cover the list of vocabulary words in front of me and pull away again. Shadows, then light, and then shadows again.

  Pilar sits up suddenly and peers across the plaza, shading the sun from her eyes. I follow where she’s looking.

  “It’s not her.”

  I tell Pilar this has nothing to do with her, that Soledad loves her like a sister, and it’s me who ruined everything. But one thing about all this time in prison—I know my sister now. When she chews on the side of her lip like that, she’s thinking about Mamá.

  And it’s happened all over again for her—without a word, without any explanation, she’s been tossed aside.

  Pilar slumps back against the bench and drops her chin to her chest. She shreds a leaf between her fingers, pulling the veins out one by one.

  “Hey, don’t you want to keep that? It would look nice on the shelf by the others.”

  Pilar shakes her head. Her chin doesn’t lift from her chest. “What’s the point?”

  She’s not supposed to give up. Not Pilar. I flip over the vocab list in time to catch the words as they untangle themselves in my mind. I usually turn away so no one will see me write, but I don’t know what my sister and I have to hide from each other anymore.

  I think those eyes see more

  than they let on.

  She’s just a kid

  a nine-year-old girl.

  What scares me

  is she sees it all.

  Her mind is swimming with things

  finned and full of teeth

  slithering, slinking from dark hole

  to darker hole.

  Those things,

  they worm their way inside a person

  and I’m not sure

  you can ever coax them out again.

  It feels better, to get it down. My mind is quieter, like when I’m on the fútbol field and the game wipes my head clean. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing, becoming more like Papá, if putting words to the page can do that for me now, too.

  Later that night, I’m studying, Pilar is scraping the floor with a rock, and Papá is lying on the mattress, staring at the wall.

  Suddenly there’s this crash outside, and then a loud, long wail. We throw open our cell door and crowd onto the balcony. Down in the courtyard, a boy a little younger than Pilar is lying on the ground, screaming. His mother bends over him, her hands fluttering above the boy’s blistering skin. A crowd packs around him like ice on a wound.

  As the boy is lifted by a dozen hands and carried to the gate, still screaming, murmurs pass along the balcony.

  “The whole thing crashed down on him.”

  “He was just playing.”

  “He shouldn’t have been running near a pot of boiling water.”

  “Where else are the kids supposed to play?”

  There’s shouting and arguments at the guard station as the prisoners push against the gate and the guards push back. Finally, the kid is passed through and the mother follows, sobbing into her hands. The father is left on this side of the gate, gripping the bars and calling after his son.

  Papá pulls Pilar and me back into our cell and locks the door. But he can’t shut out the sounds of the grieving father down in the courtyard, shouting until there’s nothing of his voice left to carry the pain.

  November 10

  The prison is quiet in the morning. Even the guards seem somber as they open the gate and usher the pack of kids out. That could have been any of us last night. It could have been me. It could have been Pilar.

  My sister holds my hand even tighter than normal. We stay with the group all the way to school. I wish Soledad was here with us, not just for me—because everything seems a little better when she’s close—but for Pilar, because she needs her, too.

  • • •

  The worst thing is seeing Soledad at school—the flick of her braids as she turns the corner. Or the way the air changes when she’s near me. I can feel her there, but I can’t even look at her.

  In writing class, she sits two chairs back and to the left. In algebra, she’s directly behind me. In history, I’m all the way at the front, and she’s all the way at the back. But the distance doesn’t make it better. It’s worse, somehow.

  I thought maybe after a few days, she’d quit being mad. I thought she’d come back to us. I thought after all we’ve been through, I meant something to her.

  I stay late after school, and Profesor Perez quizzes me on the study guide I took home. I get only thirty minutes to work with him each day before I have t
o sprint to pick up Pilar.

  For thirty minutes straight, I try to block it all out—the little boy from last night, and Soledad, and Papá. I try to focus.

  If I don’t pass this test, I don’t know how I’ll be able to live with myself. I need this to work for Papá, and for me and Pilar, too.

  I exchange the old test prep book for a new one and zip my backpack closed, ready to run to make it to Pilar’s school in time. Well, not in time. I’m late enough that her teachers watch me come and go with withering looks, but not so late that she’s just left outside all alone.

  Maybe it’s better, all this rushing from place to place. All this stress, all this studying. It’s something to do besides miss her.

  November 11

  I’ve been getting up early to study in the mornings, and the lack of sleep makes my eyes burn, but I’m getting better at this stuff, I can tell.

  When I’ve had enough, I chuck the study guide onto the floor and roll over. Pilar is sitting at the bottom of the blankets, her slight shoulders hunched over. I crawl to the edge of the mattress and stretch the soreness out of my neck.

  Papá is still sleeping. He hasn’t been back to the wood shop since he was jumped the other night, so I’ve been helping Pilar get ready for school and cooking all our meals, and Pilar is the one now trying to bring Papá back to us.

  She stretches out her palm toward me, and there’s this brown thing cupped inside.

  “What’s that?” I ask my sister through a yawn.

  “It’s for you.”

  I pluck it out of her hands. “Thanks, Pilar. It’s really nice.”

  “No—look at it.”

  Okay. It’s a brown lump, like maybe a shell or a nut or something, only it’s split in half. I turn it over and it rocks a little in my palm. The inside is nothing like the outside. It’s not rough or bumpy or coarse. It’s smooth as sandstone, all soft curves and hollow spaces.

  “Look at it, Francisco.”

  I am. What does she want from me?

  Pilar traces her finger around the outline of the smooth inner space. “See?” she says. “It’s a heart.”

  I squint to see what she sees. I don’t get it. And then, suddenly, I do. I was looking at it all wrong. The empty space where the seeds used to be splits into two symmetrical curves at the top that narrow to a point below.

  “You’d never know it was in there,” Pilar says, “if you only ever saw the outside.”

  I tuck the shell inside my pocket, drape an arm over my sister’s shoulder, and plant a kiss in her hair. Prison has taken so much from her, from me, from all of us, but it’s given me this, too.

  November 12

  I don’t know who writes these study manuals—nobody who wants kids to actually like learning. Nobody who wants kids to think the decision to go to university is a good one.

  But I’m like a fox who has decided the only way out of the steel jaws holding him down is to chew off his own leg. No matter how much I hate it, I don’t stop. I study like there is no other thing I could possibly be doing. I study like my life depends on it.

  Because even if it doesn’t, I think Papá’s might.

  So it’s a Friday night, and I’m making outlines, underlining words and looking them up, and filling in a thousand notecards. Papá watches me. He doesn’t ask what all this sudden studying is about, and I don’t explain. I can’t imagine anything worse than telling him my plan and then not being accepted into San Simón.

  Papá and me, we’re the same now. We’re both trapped. Doing what we have to just to make it through the day. To not joggle loose the memory of what it felt like to walk in a world that rolled over to share the soft curves and hollow spaces with us.

  November 13

  I don’t dream anymore about Mamá, or fútbol. Or even Soledad. But still, I miss her.

  I can’t talk to Papá, not about this. I open my notebook and turn to a fresh page.

  In seventh grade,

  we took a trip to the salt flats:

  a mirror laid over the high plains

  reflecting the sky

  reflecting the ground

  reflecting the sky.

  Droves of pink birds swarmed

  the alpine lakes.

  In the middle of all that nothing—

  flamingoes.

  Thousands of them.

  They mate for life, you know.

  They fly, always, in the same flock.

  They nest, always, by the same lake.

  But what happens if one day,

  one of them veers away?

  What happens to the one left behind?

  Does he still build a nest every summer

  for eggs that will never be laid?

  Does he still call out for her

  all those years later?

  It’s the day before the exam and I’ve been studying all day. I don’t think anything is even sinking in anymore. I think best when I’m moving.

  I jump up. “I’m going out.”

  The pickup game is in a dirt field on the other side of town from where I used to play, so I don’t know anyone, and no one knows me. The goals are fence posts, with a rope for a crossbar. In the game, I can push and cuss and tackle, and nobody calls me out for it. We’re all fighting out there, battling something besides one another.

  Shirts and skins. Pretty soon, my team is losing, so I throw a couple extra elbows. They slide off of sweat-soaked ribs while my mark yanks me back with a sharp tug on my shirt. ¡Pucha! I should have picked skins.

  I take a hard tackle and roll in the dust. My mark has me beat, and it’s just him and the goal now. He rips one past our keeper and opens his arms to the sky like the Cristo rising over the city. Just for a second, though. There’s no net, so he quickly drops the act and jogs off to fetch the ball. It’s the rule. You shoot it, you chase it.

  The rest of us go for water. I’m still spitting out the grit of the field when a hand clamps down on my shoulder.

  “Picked the wrong team again, eh, Francisco?”

  I whirl around. “Reynaldo!” It’s good to see him. I take a step to close the space between us, but something stops me. “Your má let you come back home yet?”

  “Ha!—I wouldn’t go back if she did. I’m living like a king.” Reynaldo circles behind me and comes up on the other side. I lean against the bench and stretch my hamstrings. I’m out of practice, and every single one of my muscles is letting me know it.

  “Profesor Perez asked about you again last week.”

  “You think I care about school?”

  Yeah, well, he never did. Neither did I, before.

  “You know, Francisco, this is crazy good money. I’ve got my own place now—I don’t even have to share with anybody. You could stay with me. Bring Pilar if you have to.”

  I reach out to steady myself on the bench. A bed, off the floor. Food to eat, whenever we’re hungry. A life here, in the city, where we could visit Papá every day. A normal life. The roof of my mouth is tacky. I can’t seem to swallow.

  I’ve been killing myself trying to find a way through all this, and the answer just falls into my lap. So easy. But all the questions have changed.

  I straighten, stretching my arm over my head and rolling out my ankles. “And we’ll be doing what, Reynaldo? Selling drugs?” I try to make my tone light, but I hear an edge creep into it. I just wanted some time to myself. I just needed a minute.

  “Yeah. What else?”

  I drop my arms and look my friend full in the face. “If being in prison doesn’t kill my father, then me selling drugs, and ending up there too—only actually deserving it—that would do it for sure.”

  “We won’t get caught, Francisco. Don’t be such a cobarde.”

  The tension that has been fizzing inside me all day goes flat. This isn’t the fight I want.
“Look, thanks for the offer. I mean it. I just can’t.”

  “You can’t.” He throws his hands up in the air. “And what about our shop? I was doing this for us, you know.”

  It’s over, and I know it. Whoever I was before, whatever mattered to me before—I can’t be that guy anymore. Everything I’m trying to hold together—it’s too much. It’s bigger than just me.

  I shake my head. “I can’t open the shop with you, Rey. Not now.”

  “So what—you’re too good for me now?” He closes the distance between us. “You’d rather live in prison? You’d rather be poor as shit than be like me? Is that it?”

  Reynaldo plants both hands on my chest and shoves. He follows, step for step, as I stumble backward. He shoves again. His lip is curled up and sticking to his gums, and I don’t see even one hint of my friend in that face. I don’t know this guy. And I don’t want to.

  He comes at me again, and this time, he doesn’t shove, he punches. Three quick fists in the ribs. The breath coughs out of me, and my arms close over my stomach. For the first time, ever, I don’t hit back. Instead, I sidle out of reach. “I’ll see you around.” And I walk away.

  Under his breath, in a voice my friend Reynaldo never had, he says, “You better hope you don’t.”

  November 14

  The college entrance exams are held on the Sunday before the last week of school.

  I leave my backpack by the cell door and tell Papá I’m heading out for a bit.

  He just nods, but Pilar stands and squeezes my waist in a quick hug.

  “You can do it,” she whispers.

  I step out onto the balcony and close the door behind me. Soledad’s gone—not that she would be talking to me if she weren’t. Still, my steps slow as I pass her door, listening for any sound of her inside.