American Orphan

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  As far back as I can remember, I long to be in Nature. I find myself learning a new dialect, uttered by the wild blackberry bush: new green consonants, bush-bud vowels, mimicking the alliterative chattering of birds in magnolia leaves. The plumage of birds endows me with an ancestral sense of flight. I am privy to the mystery of first-species speech, part of a linguistic habitat babbling all around me: frogs, bass, herons, hummingbirds and mules. The flora and fauna around me form a language in their appearance I understand, and when I am out, I say good morning to them.

  I read Lila’s mythology books, gain a vague sense of my heritage: Aztec, Mayan . . . Quetzalcoatl, the flying serpent in Aztec mythology, is my God. Quetzalcoatl, heralded as the God of Dawn or Light, the Plumed Serpent is prophesied to return one day from the East. I believe this: every morning I jog, repeat a prayer to Quetzalcoatl. I don’t know why, but I feel Queztalcoatl’s presence in the woods, his eyes on me, protecting me from harm. I pray to Him with every mile.

  Toward the end of September, the bone-crunching cold on the wind numbs my cheeks, sharpens my smell as I inhale distant wood stove smoke. The ground is hard and crusty. From nowhere a darkness falls over the land. Lila suffers a peculiar melancholy with such intensity and rancor it turns her complexion pasty, shrouds the house in a malevolent energy. I don’t know what it is. At first, I think I did something wrong, that she’s mad at me. I worry even though she tells me it’s nothing. She has these recurring fits of depression, they come and go, she says, ignore her if she starts yelling or cursing bad things at me.

  I don’t understand what she means, but I don’t consider her mood swings to be critical. I mean, we all go through stages of sadness and happiness. After the third day, though, it comes to be much more, what I later learn from her sisters is a bipolar episode. I just think she is going crazy—it scares me. She looks at me with murder in her eyes. I sense a spiritual repellent emanating from her. At night I lay in bed feeling its malevolent presence on the floor or creeping up the walls, winding along the ceiling. Heavy stuff.

  One night when I go in to sleep, I see a snake on the window screen, crawling up. Another time I find the biggest pack of Japanese hornets I’ve ever seen under the porch light, each one big as my thumb. I feel sure that, if one stings me, I’ll die. Evil things surround me.

  The days creep by like crawdads, an emotional chill blows us in opposite directions. Our distance grows. I read a book on the couch, Lila in a chair next to me. I wonder what I‘m doing here with this stranger. Once the intensity of our sexual ardor has expired, there isn’t really much between us. She hasn’t said a single word to me besides cursing under her breath. Her brooding spirals into bizarre looks in my direction. Her angry features reflect an interior conflict. She wrestles with a dark inner force. I wake up at night to find her pacing outside. She’s quit reading, won’t work on her columns. There’s no translating, she won’t bathe or shower. She chain-smokes joint after joint, goes through a half carton of Benson & Hedges in three days, locks our bedroom door, isolating herself, stretching on the floor, twisting up, groaning as if in anguish, trying to get something out.

  One afternoon, her daddy comes over, talks about these spells, warns me with his stone-gray eyes.

  “It’ll pass, don’t meddle none.”

  “I’m worried,” I say.

  “They come in no particular way or time. They sort of take over a bit, then the spell lifts and she’s fine. This one was due.”

  I feel the same stomach sickness I felt at the cabin that night. Something is happening out of our control, a malevolent power beyond us, with menacing intentions.

  “Oh, she goes crazier than a three-legged hen doing the two-penny jig with a swamp-step frog. You’ve just sampled the honey . . . the vinegar’s a-comin’ now.”

  I see us in the cabin, her tied down on the bed and me whipping her. I feel like some devil was rising around us, taking over our souls. I say nothing.

  I think we have love, but it isn’t love, not back at the cabin or now. There are stronger, meaner forces at work here, appearing in her eye, in all the crumpled pieces of paper scattered over her office floor, in the empty gin bottles, empty cigarette packs, in her late-night pacing. I sense a demon about. Sometimes she walks around naked as if I’m not even present, patches of skin raw from fresh scratching. The presence takes over everything, every inch of air, ground and flesh. . . .

  “Son, do what you’re doing. Keep feeling your freedom, and there’s plenty to feel, see and do, plenty to write about in that journal of yours. With the spell, use that growing you did in that facility—you’ll handle it by instinct. Don’t hurt her, she’s sweet on you and don’t mean no harm. It’s a chemical thing they say, and you just gotta wait it out. I imagine your patience has been tested more than once on that.”

  Her mood swings throw me back to DYA, where boys changed from one day to the next. Nice ones became predators, silent ones screamed in horror at night, cowards became gladiators, hard ones fell knees to the ground weeping for mercy and timid ones suddenly grabbed a fork in the kitchen and stabbed the boy seated next to them. The craziness had that bipolar thing in it, like a hair trigger on a pistol that fired unexpectedly, anytime anywhere. Some invisible finger pressed, called, and that bipolar bullet started taking kids out, making them do things you would have never imagined within the realm of possibilities.

  It scared me. I often found myself praying under my breath for an angel to watch over me, so I wouldn’t be taken too by that bad thing stalking the dorms at night. The whole place filled with a kind of paranoid silence, a yellow pollution from a distant fire that set over a city, threatening at any moment to spread and flare into a huge flame that turns and swallows you up.

  That’s how it is with Lila. She keeps her silence, and I’m on edge. Then one evening, days later, sunshine throws a blanket of warmth over the land. I come in from a long walk. She is in her bathrobe, smoking a joint. She isn’t wearing anything under her robe; it’s open but she doesn’t seem to notice. Or doesn’t care. She lingers at the window with her eyes on the fields that spread from the house to the forest line. She pours us wine, we sit down in the living room, on the sofa against the wall. Her look is sad. She pulls out a letter, reads about some guy’s love for his wife.

  I say, “That’s nice,” not knowing where this is going.

  She stares at me, then smirks, “You wrote it.”

  She points to the excerpts on the fridge and says, “You commit yourself to me for life, but it seems like another person had surfaced in the old person’s place, trying in attitude and tone to be genuine.” She gives me a long look that ends with: “You’re playing with me aren’t you?”

  I tell her what one writes in a cell is different from what one might write on the outside. My letters should be taken in context.

  Her glare is bladed with paranoia, drips with the blood of every one of my written promises. They are no longer alive in her heart, but lynched on the tree branches in her daddy’s yard.

  “You didn’t mean it, why’d you write it?”

  “I lost control. Any twenty-two-year-old kid would. I just start saying stuff. Nothing more thrilling than writing about sex . . . except doing it. Sorry I hurt you. I didn’t mean to. All I can say is I’m sorry.”

  “You go on about how much you love me, how much you promise to be with me forever, say nothing can change that. I changed my life based on your words, words you vowed were honorable, truthful. I even said goodbye to a man I loved, had been with for fifteen years. I told him I couldn’t love him anymore in a sexual way. I believed every word you wrote, Orlando, every . . . word.”

  “Didn’t mean to hurt you. I got caught up. My imagination got away from me, you know . . . language, writing, you new to me—the whole world changed when I started reading and. . .”

  “You used this . . . this correspondence . . . as a weapon!”

  “No . . . I didn’t,” I shoot back. “When you’ve been institutionalized, g
row up in the culture of violence, everything, anything is first thought of as a weapon. How can I use this to defend myself? That is the question to every single possession: toothbrush, shirt, shoes, cup, books. . . .”

  “And why not language? Fill it with lies until you kill love? Is that what you intended? Because that’s what it did.”

  “It was different. I meant what I wrote when I wrote it.”

  “Oh, you use your words to fend off predators, but it wasn’t your intention to use them against me, these letters to prey on my heart by exploiting me with words I wanted to hear. Yes, your words were a lethal weapon . . . to get inside, execute me with your promises: ‘We found each other finally, soul mates. . .’ all the other garbage you spewed out.”

  “If I could take them back . . . if I could go back and undo it all, I would. A lot of the kids write like that, you know. We need someone out here—”

  “You used that one already. And I quote, ‘to forge them on the anvil of my heart into a Samurai sword and turn it against myself.’ I was so gullible. I guess I needed you to say that, to say you loved me when I dreamed of a love like that.”

  She is crying.

  “I realize how you abused me.” She wipes tears from her cheeks. “All your words that sounded so sweet and colorful were unintentional lies.”

  “I didn’t mean to. . .”

  “Ahhh,” she mocks. “And you want me to believe that you thought we’d never quarrel over what you wrote or meant, that I’d be okay with us living together in blissful nirvana with never a cross word between us? After all the lies?”

  And then I say the stupidest thing ever. Hearing my words come out of my mouth, I am in disbelief even as I utter them: “To be honest, yes. It never entered my mind at the time that we would ever disagree on anything. There was no way I could imagine us not getting along. Once out, I thought living with you in the country would be paradise, there would never be a problem we couldn’t solve.”

  “Pathetic, Orlando . . . believing that I’d never be in a mad mood, never tired, always ready to pleasure you . . . just be accommodating and happy, cooking, doing laundry.”

  “Kinda. . .”

  “You really are only ten years old, emotionally,” she says.

  She is right, and right about me being a liar also. I feel helpless. I want to tell her that I am not that kind of person, but she doesn’t have any more patience for my good intentions. Her anger lands me smack dab in the middle of the real world, but I keep going, my long-practiced defense system up, ready to spar.

  “Listen, it’s not that I am not absolutely sincere in what I write you. It’s just impossible to anticipate what impact freedom will have. This is a whole new world, I have a new life, and given that newness, I over-reached in my promises. But it doesn’t mean I’m not here for you. It’s more complicated, not as simple as writing it.”

  “Words, Orlando. They mean something!”

  “The heart thinks bigger than reality is,” I say, “it’s going to have its way no matter what. I can’t explain it.”

  “You’re so full of shit. Did you learn that from Denise?”

  “What?”

  “Is there something going on between you and her?”

  “Just friendship.”

  “Oh, yeah, I bet! More lies.”

  “How?”

  “How? You’ve dishonored your words. Do our letters mean anything to you? Oh, forget it. . .”

  She gets up and sobs again. Before going into the bedroom slamming the door, she turns. “Orlando, it’s you, you’re not who you said you were. I want this to work so much. You are supposed to come out, go to school, try to be a writer, supposed to . . . you’re such a disappointment; you haven’t done anything you said you were going to, including love me.”

  The days drag on. Late September mist blankets the forest and fields. A snowstorm follows with a grizzly, ice-raid of sounds of trees cracking that make our misery more cumbersome. Lila deals with this iciness by consuming a lot of weed and gin.

  One morning as we sit at the table for the first time in a week, she notes my uneasiness, tells me not to worry about her moodiness, that nice weather is the best therapy. She chalks up her personality change to the evildoings of THE SPELL. We’ll work out our problems, she says, I’ll learn how to co-exist in a situation not altogether understood by me.

  I still can’t bring myself to trust her. The change is too sudden. At any moment I expect her to return to the hoary Netherlands in her mind, mining the occult mysteries, she staring at me like a hunted animal fearful of daylight, afraid of going outside.

  But no, a couple of days go by and our relationship is replenished. We’re friendly again.

  But I sink into a sullen space. Under so much recent emotional duress, I can’t read. I spend a lot of time outdoors and walk, walk, walk, stumbling in the forest’s knee-high snow, among the extraordinarily sculpted icefalls shimmering down in cascades from tree branches. I’m slipping, freezing and admiring the frozen landscape. I track wild turkeys by their prints, wonder, If I do find them, how can I catch one?

  One day, sitting next to a pond, I start a campfire. I sit there all bundled up, wanting to walk out into the middle of the pond to see if I can do so without falling in. I sit there munching on a tuna and rye sandwich, wondering what the hell is wrong with me.

  The guys in DYA would love this. We used to talk about what we’d do when we got out. Lots of them dreamed of being out in the mountains with nature. It was great, but we didn’t include life in our daydreams—that is, life with life’s problems—while trying to get our reentry going.

  Up and down, up and down. Last night another fight. Too many quarrels turn my penitential self-pity to anger, and I begin to feel there is redemption, because I haven’t done anything wrong. I am so used to being wrong about everything that a part of me now is trying to figure out how to correct what I don’t know I’ve done or am guilty of. Recently, it seems everything I do is wrong. A part of me is besieged by the feeling that nothing matters. I should just walk away, screw it all, none of it makes sense. Maybe I did intend to hurt her, I don’t know. I’m confused.

  One thing bothers me above all else: the phrase “You’re a disappointment.” I know of no words worse than these to mark my heart with a big black X. Say or do anything to me, it won’t hurt as much as these words. They seem to sum up my life, describe in the bitterest detail, most piercing pain my very being, the essence of my plagued existence in this world. Christ had the cross, Ceasar the blade; me, these three words.

  I have to prove to her I’m not worthless, that I am not a disappointment. She’ll see, I’ll do something to make her believe in me again.

  The first week in October brings dark skies, the quietness of coming winter. When you’re about to get sentenced to do time in the Youth Authority, you get this feeling that something deep inside you goes to sleep. You say goodbye to the awake part of yourself, adiós to another life you dream of living. It’s the same feeling I have now.

  I carry it for days. I don’t talk. Or can’t. I call her sisters; they drop by with fried chicken, insist that this moody spell will pass. They tell me to give Lila space, time. Her brother stops by on another morning, offers to take me for a drink after work, but I decline.

  Lila and I decode each other’s secret intentions by the little changes happening between us: my silences, her silences; me in the room turning away from her before she can hug me; her eyes questioning my cold apathy; then her going into her office, weeping on the floor in the dark.

  A tension builds in me as I start to formulate a plan for changing things. I am going to prove to her that I am somebody. As I keep thinking about how to implement the plan, I deflect the disgust that I feel for myself onto her.

  I find myself at night in the bed staring into the dark. She knows I am awake, but we don’t talk. She asks what is bothering me, and I snap at her. I am angry at myself for allowing myself to get into this mess where she makes all the r
ules because it’s her place, her car, her money.

  Several nights a week I grab the car keys and go for a drive. My disdainful demeanor dares her to object. I find myself trolling for a fight, ready to leap at any provocation to accuse, insult or demean her. To avoid arguments, I go on walks or sit on the front step or do something like change the oil, hose the car down, clean or vacuum the interior. Other times, I drive off, park under trees at the back of a field or in a clearing in the forest and listen to the radio, chain-smoke, slap the steering wheel, berate myself for being stupid for getting myself trapped in this affair.

  I often go to the pond behind BJ’s house, watch the water, listen to the wind in the leaves, marvel at how dragonflies and water spiders live. I count the fish pucker rings breaking the surface, and as I look at the moon, I see what I have to do.

  October 9th, 1980. Lila feels distraught over the news that John Lennon was shot. It confirms her suspicions that we live in the end of times. Therefore, she needs more weed. I have no feeling either way, since I know so little about the Beatles, except an old memory from back in the orphanage. The nuns took us to a dentist. After we got our teeth cleaned, the dentist gave us all Beatle wigs. I wore mine on the bus back to the orphanage, and people on the sidewalk pointed and smiled as we went by. I remember feeling odd wearing that Beatle wig, thinking it was weird that people liked black beetles, the kind I would pluck from the dirt and play with during recess.

  We drive down to Frog King’s.

  Lila says, “All his cabins have a pond with bullfrogs.” She lights another cigarette, exhales. “Why he’s called Frog King. He lives in a cinderblock bunker next to his aging, wheel-chair-bound mother, who rarely leaves her mansion. You listening?”

  “I’ve been having the weirdest feeling lately,” I say, looking across the fields. “A mild case of pointless paranoia . . . I don’t know. I feel it breathing next to me, just beyond arm’s reach, I feel it stronger now.”