American Orphan

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  The motor and tires hum until the guard scoffs, “Reason no one’s here to greet you, they all dead from drugs, doing time or deported.”

  “Punk-ass,” Chuy retorts.

  The fat, white guard chuckles, reaches for a donut in the box on the passenger seat.

  Chuy asks, “What’s Watergate, ese?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Gary?”

  “Republicans got busted burglarizing Democratic offices. Sentenced to Sanford across the street. . . .”

  “. . . Playground for the rich,” Sickle breaks in. “Talk about sermons. Mom wanted me to follow ’em, gave ’em donations to get me Christian. Guy called Colson scammed all them believes with a faith-based hustle to rake in the bucks. Took my mama’s money.”

  “People’ll do anything to believe God is on their side,” I say.

  “Evangelicals,” Gary snorts. “Swill more charity money than hogs at a trough from people who still think America should only be run by whites. That means you, Sickle.”

  “Hell, yeah,” he laughs. “Master race, mother.”

  “What about that chick you writing?” Chuy asks. “You goin’ with her?”

  “Never turn down a chance,” Sickle grins.

  “I don’t know, probably work for my brother first, make some money,” I say.

  “Whatcha got on freedom?” I ask Gary, who can rap.

  My request brings a big smile to his face. “Tell you something about freedom, my brother. I spit some dark shit out: Pray Satan to appear wielding a fiery trident commanding legions of armed angels to descend and destroy all these urbanheathens, seething to avenge my maimed heart on all unlucky to be present when I blow. . .”

  “Oh hell. . .” Sickle says. “Shit ya. . .”

  From the dark roadside a dog dashes out, we all hear a yelp, bone and body thuds turning over under the van. We’re all disgusted by the meanness of it and swell with anger.

  Dogs are sacred: you fart and it don’t bother them. No matter what, they’re always happy to see you. We stare out the chilled windows as our hands tighten into fists, violent images of hurting the guard whirl in our imaginations.

  “Not what Martin Luther King would preach,” Gary says.

  “Or César Chávez,” Chuy adds.

  “But nice,” Sickle growls.

  Gary recites more: “Business as usual in America, happening every morning where youth holding facilities support the town’s economy; refugees like us, American kids, broken into criminalized brutes, who waited a long time for the hour to fall to purge our rage for the unjust torture inflicted on us.”

  “¡Simón, vato!” Chuy exclaims.

  “Where’d you get that from? That’s good, bro,” I say.

  “Photographic memory,” Gary replies. “While you guys were busy declaring war on every kid that looked at you sideways, I was reading.”

  “I got a photo-whatever power too,” Chuy says. “Naked ladies in my head, I’m making love to all of them.”

  “. . . purge our rage. . .” Sickle repeats.

  “We ain’t no rehabilitated knights on a medieval quest for the Holy Grail,” Gary says.

  Gary laughs, mimics Barry White with a baritone chuckle. “We America’s children, criminalized into thieves, addicts and dealers.”

  “Now you got it,” I say.

  Sickle’s reflection gleams in the frosted window, his tremor voice utters in a trance, “And I’m going to blow, I’m gonna blow, baby!”

  His breath mists the pane and his index finger traces the word RAGE on the glass. Four years from this morning, he’ll be high on meth. I’ll hear on the TV news that Sickle went into a school in Alexandria, Louisiana, with a semi-automatic rifle and killed four people: two kids, two adults.

  Eventually we glide under the neon-lit, corrugated airport terminal and the guard announces, “Here’s where daddy leaves his girls.” He swings to the curb and opens the doors. We get out, he locks the van doors and off he goes, pulling out as quickly as possible, leaving us stranded like plucked ducks at a busy intersection.

  Told what to do for so long, we wait for an order on which way to walk. I watch as the last vestige of DYA drives away, returning to that massive earth-ship of iron and concrete, that hulking empire of the doomed, moving into the dark horizon without me, collecting debris of more broken lives.

  I am a product of institutions. Without somebody guarding me, telling me what to do, I get scared. I want to yell, “Stop! Hey! You can’t leave me!”

  A sickening feeling of dread sours my stomach as I stand there remembering the night long ago when the State official dropped my brother and me off at the orphanage. Four nuns in dark, hooded cassocks stood on the steps to receive us. I’d never seen a nun, especially none dressed in cowls and robes. They looked like alien, like dark angels about to take me into hell. I was terrified.

  When the official took us to the orphanage, I turned and yelled, “Don’t leave me, please!” The nuns grabbed my arms and dragged me into the building. I screamed, “I want my mom, my father! Please don’t take me, please come back!” I watched the official’s car leave just like I watch the van leave.

  “A drink ’fore I slap you suckers,” Gary says.

  Sickle follows Chuy, I take up the rear. We go into the lounge. I sit down on an end stool at the counter, in case shit breaks out. I order a ginger ale, Sickle, a Jack and Coke, Chuy a tequila and Gary vodka.

  The bartender gives us a once over. “Just got out, eh? See it all over your faces . . . and also that you’re not old enough to drink. But from what I hear about DYA, you deserve one.”

  We stare in the mirror, and Chuy says, “We with each other for years and released at the same time. Will I ever shake yous?” He grins with a hint of camaraderie as he downs his drink and shoots two fingers at the bartender.

  “Unusual punishment.” Sickle cocks his head, slugs his whiskey. “Here-here!” He pushes his shotglass down the counter. “Deuce it.”

  “Been a long time.” Gary licks the last grain of salt off his glass rim, smacks his lips and gazes in the mirror, pleased with the feeling the vodka gives him. He motions for another. “I’ll take it how they give it: seconds, minutes, hours, days or years. All the freedom they wanna give, daddy mac’s here to take.”

  “Had a million reasons to mess you up, but out here . . . can’t scratch up one,” Sickle says.

  We stare at our reflections in the mirror, turn from our own eyes. I know what they’re thinking, what we’re all thinking: TIME has broken us, taken so much from us, so much life has slipped past already. We’re damaged goods, the wreckage irreversible. None of us know when or how it happened, but we feel it in our souls.

  Rather than stew in our misery as failures, we each opt for the lie that DYA life is the real life, that hitting the streets is like Spring Break with a serrated edge. Get jacked, party, do all kinds of insane shit, commit crimes, take drugs in any amount, chase the moment’s pleasure, screw until you can’t and then back to the real world, real life of DYA . . . eventually prison.

  As if Sickle can hear my thoughts, he says, “Detention doesn’t scare anyone. It messes your head up though . . . pretty fucking good.”

  Chuy says, “It give me a kind of honor, part of la vida loca.”

  “Never saw it as a deterrent, I’ll tell you that,” Gary says. “It was something to look forward to.”

  We sound like soldiers coming back from war. We had our innocence taken by force, we suffered a lot of injustices. Our faces mirror that back to us as if confirming the loss. Our eyes measure the incalculable damage years in Gladiator School inflicted, not one of us able or willing to say aloud or wanting to notice what could have been and never was. Our response to the gnawing pain that numbed our hearts is to order more liquor.

  The airport intercom announces my flight. Chuy hugs me. “If you ever draw the short straw, carnal, here, take this rabbit foot.”

  I wrote their information on a napkin: a pool hall in Dallas, a v
ideo arcade in Detroit, a laundromat in Portland. Riding the escalator up to my boarding gate, a passenger, hurrying to the baggage claim tosses a paperback in the trash. I reach in, clean it off and put it in my pocket. Books are my best friends, I’m not leaving this one behind.

  That’s who I was. Freedom, books, friends but definitely not a love king, despite all those letters attesting to my amorous mastery. I don’t remember exactly what happened in the cabin that night, I blocked it out, all I know is, you don’t mess with a thirty-two-year-old woman. I thought I was on top of my game, she showed me I was just a kid with a horny cock, big mouth, big fantasies, a very lively but distorted notion of who women were. Most importantly, I had been deprived of any relationship with a woman, ever. I knew nothing about what I was telling her to do.

  She showed me what I was made of: fear, shame, hypocrisy. I mean, I told her I wanted to do all those sexual things in letters, but when she called me on it, I freaked. There was something deeper at work there, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. I hardly ever had recoiled like that, in any situation. I was always able to regain my composure or limit my shock, but not that night. Not with her. It was like something had come out of the sky, slammed me unconscious, leveled me, trampled me to the ground and buried me a thousand feet down in some weird trap-hole I couldn’t claw myself up out of.

  It wasn’t the first time my boldface bravado had caught me up in shit. Ever since I was a kid I was like that, always jumping to prove I was one of the boys. Later when the consequence came down, I’d shake like a frightened rabbit. In the end, I always failed and was ashamed. I lived with the guilt that I would never be as good as any other kid, that I was a coward and there was no redemption. I felt that something was wrong with me that could never be fixed.

  The threat of any kind of punishment always held the specter of the world ending, that if I got caught, everything would fall apart, I would die a torturous death. I’d be lost again in the dark, be nothing, turn into nothing and disappear.

  I guess I was trying to overcome this posing in me with Lila, when I thought I was stronger but wasn’t. Instead of wrecking everything, commanding me to leave and never return, she was kind enough to trust me and forgive me.

  No one has ever shown that understanding to me. She accepted my lies, embraced my fragility and insecurity. She accepted my bullshit without coming back with acrimony and revenge. She taught me a lifetime lesson: When it comes to saying something on paper, you better mean it.

  As I mentioned, to be honest, I don’t remember much of that night, as far as what happened afterward. I think I took the whips down to the bullfrog pond and threw them in, and I must have taken off in the night, running for my life, probably thinking the whole world had gone mad and the end was near. That’s how crazy the whip thing affected me; turning over her ass, me slapping it, sucking her nipples, licking her thighs, whipping harder, seeing the stinging pain in her pinched features and smiling for more.

  All I know is I found myself sitting down at the lake shore. My heart thundered, my soul screamed. I wanted out of there, to pretend it never happened. I wanted God to save me from myself, from what I promised her, from my lies; what I said I could do, as if I was really a badass and experienced and shit.

  I wasn’t.

  Shortly after that night, it came back to me in a nightmare. I dropped the whips, flew from the room and sprinted down the hill in the moonlit dark until I reached the lake. I sat down in the lakeshore grass and hugged my knees to my chest, too scared to even cry. I felt a lifetime of rejection all at once, because I had once again thought more of myself than what was really there. I had nothing again. I was no one again.

  I plunged my hand in the water and doused my face, hair, neck. It cooled the burning inside. I lay down, listened to the night’s heartbeat in the mountain silence. A few inches from my cheek, a black snake slithered through the grass and into the water. Frogs croaked. I watched crickets, grasshoppers, water spiders. Rings rippled from puckering fish.

  Freedom was too crazy, it messed me up.

  If I would have known my reentry was going to be like this, I would have stayed in. I would have done something to get more time. I wanted to go back to a time when I didn’t have words. They are dangerous and can screw you up. Life is more than words in a letter, a lot more.

  It’s a warm day in late August. I stand before Lila’s library reading the book spines. I pull a Graham Greene novel and a Walt Whitman book of poems, carry them in one hand, balancing my coffee in the other. I walk into the bedroom, set my coffee on the side table, lie down and read. I resolve to escape into the safety of books. Later I go fishing, hike, take long walks in the forest. Then I read more.

  The August days slowly lose their humidity and heat. Soon it’s early September and the weather turns cool. Geese migrate, deer appear in the fields nibbling at sparse grass.

  One morning I’m in bed reading, after a while I move to the kitchen table, compare same-theme poems by William Carlos Williams and Seamus Heaney and scribble a few lines of my own on the same theme. It’s just some notes, mess around with the lines of a poem I feel forming in my mind. I pause, look around the room listening to the sound of engines. By their sound, I count several vehicles pulling into the yard. There’s a knock at the screen door. I holler, “Come in!”

  He doesn’t introduce himself, from the descriptions in Lila’s letter I know it’s Frog King, the southern Dixie mafia Godfather himself. He smells outdoorsy, root- and greensmelling, a tobacco field breeze that blows into my living room and looms before me. All six-foot-seven inches, four hundred pounds of him—along with two of his strong-arm guys. Frog King, around fifty or so, wears weathered denim overalls, a cocked baseball cap with a feed store emblem, a plaid cotton shirt, massive lace-up boots warped from hard use. Their leather tongues lolling out on the side.

  He bellows, “How the hell are ya?” and, without waiting for an answer, tosses a brown paper lunch bag on the table and roars, “There’s a goddamn truck with a camper in the yard with the keys in it. I want you to get the hell out. Take it, it’s yours.”

  I peek into the paper bag at a neat stack of hundred-dollar bills tied with a rubber band.

  “There’s five thousand. Don’t come back.”

  I lob the sack back. “If I leave, no one’s telling me when.”

  The moment requires every bit of character I can conjure. I feel I’m about to fall to the floor and faint. Another instance of someone commanding me to do something—court-figure, judge-in-robes, shit—I’m not going to obey, even though every single nerve in my body burns hot with fear.

  Memories of me at the orphanage spring up; there I am, waiting at the gate for my mother every Sunday. She never comes. I wait every Sunday for a year, watching car after car pull up, praying with every last vestige of hope in me that it’s her. I sneak up to the Blue Room, the visiting room, and watch other boys visit with their grandmas and aunts, thinking one might invite me to sit in on his visit, pretend for a minute she is my grandma or aunt too.

  I run away to go find my mom. I’m ordered to stop, spanked harder each time I’m caught. A dozen times I’m brought back. Under the paddle, my flesh goes numb for disobeying their rules, but some heart sickness in me takes over, and the beatings don’t matter. With every whack on my bare buttocks, I turn my head down and brood. I will not listen to a single threat or word they scream at me. Something in me braces, tightens to steel. I am not going to obey, no matter the punishment.

  This is the same thing. I am not going to do anything someone says to me in an authoritarian way.

  What I say to Frog King makes him convulse. I swear, I’ve never heard anyone laugh so hard as he does. His whole body shakes, an avalanche of flesh, moving with such earthquake force that the velocity and depth of his laughter makes the floorboards tremor. Even the table rattles.

  “I’ll be goddamned, boy! Sonofabitch!”

  He laughs again, an apple-wood cracking laugh
ter, his facial features crumpling in on themselves, flesh folding over flesh, his shoulders shaking until finally the earthquake subsides into a mean hound’s glare

  He growls, “I ever see another bruise on her, you hurt her in any way, I’ll kill you.”

  I say, “I won’t . . . never with love . . . people get hurt sometimes. That’s what love is. . . .” I don’t know what else to say, feeling ashamed I did something really bad like it was my fault. I have a hard time admitting it.

  Again it comes, this bouldering, crackle-lightning, raucous, laughing thunder that takes all the oxygen out of a tenmile radius. Then he turns, and leaves with the two guys. I understand why they call him Frog King: that down-home laughter borne of cayenne gumbo, cinnamon-sprinkled sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, bacon grease. If the moon could howl, it would sound like Frog King; if it could eat, it would devour a bowl of Frog King gumbo.

  I don’t know much about him, except what Lila hinted at in her letters and told me the other night. To my mind, he seems like a country hoodlum redneck. A southern hog bum-farmer on the government’s welfare roster or a plain and simple roadkill scavenger. Without his family’s fortune, he’d be a hyena-like vagrant. I don’t waste a second on his threat. I’ve lived my whole life with bullies; my strategy is always to stay out of their way. When that’s not possible, I always overreact, pick up the nearest weapon—a rock, a board, dirt, wire—out of fear, I defend myself. If nothing is available, I let them hit me, I show no reaction to the blows. Crazy attracts crazy.

  As September leaves turn golden, mornings become so cold the wall heater bellows burning through propane. I sit at the big table in the main room by the large window, study the frost-covered fields and forest, try to come up with a plan to get my life started.

  Should I sign up for school? A GED program? How do I do that? Who do I talk to? Where do I go? These half-hearted ruminations always end in anxiety. To alleviate the stress of boredom, just do something, I jog down the long blacktop road bordered on each side by tall, fat tobacco plants. I run hard, feel free for about an hour or two until I get back to face my empty life again.