by Joe Jiménez
And you loathe that he uses the word “chick.” You hate that your blood is his, the sameness coursing through you like pinpricks of words entering the ear, becoming the air, the sigh, the wickedness of rage and ire and disgust for all the shit he’s done poised to become the whole body. His blood, your blood.
“No.” Firm, blocklike, your answer jars him. Your spine tightens. Your jaw clamps. Instead of joy that your uncle is here, you feel stuck and powerless to stop it. It has already happened, and now what will you do?
“But there’s that one girl, no?” your grandmother, sipping her coffee, interrupts. Her voice like a hand smoothing out a bedsheet. “What is her name? Ophelia.”
“Oh yeah? Tell me about her. This Ophelia. She fine?” As he speaks, he smacks, and the sound of saliva and tongue and tooth vexes you.
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
Why did your grandmother have to say this?
“Not yet,” your uncle breaks in, grunting his laughter.
You wish. You wish you could smack the smirk off his jaw.
All of this happening outside of you is happening inside, too. Insistently, the heat that has overwhelmed you in the past begins to churn, and you wish you could lift him up by his neck and hurl him out of this house. Hurl him so hard he would land in Saint Petersburg or Anchorage with the other wolves or in the middle of the ocean, on an iceberg, maybe, alone and far, far from you and your grandmother and Becky and Ophelia, far from this little kitchen with its soft, lame light, its imperfect table and its four stove flowerets.
But you can’t. And he rips off another piece of sweet bread and swigs from his mug. Crumbs spatter across the table, fall to the floor. He chews sloppily, and the table legs wobble.
“I’m gonna show you some things,” he asserts, chewing and chewing and smacking his stout lips. “Things are gonna change around here, little boy.” His mouth is as big as a continent.
“I asked him to come. Abram, he’s here to help,” your grandmother tells you when you are alone on the back porch.
“Here to help?” you ask. Disbelief peppers your mouth.
The planks beneath where you sit are weathered with a woe known only by wood. Sparse grasses and a few empty pots, the plants within them long dead, litter the ground by the drooping steps. Somewhere, a dog barks, and you wish you had one, a dog.
The idea of your uncle doing anything other than screwing things up confounds you. Stirs inside your brain like a long metal rod, the kind used for swirling cement in a bucket, the kind you watched Becky use when she stabilized this once-crooked porch by digging three deep holes in the ground, inserting posts to bolster up the porch planks, then filling the holes with poured cement. “Just watch. You might learn something today,” Becky told you, firmness and affection in her eyes.
“I don’t think he should be here. Becky says it, too,” you tell your grandmother on the now-steady back porch that overlooks pecan trees and neighboring roofs. But you pause as the words fall from your mouth, because you realize you only acquired this information by eavesdropping on their late-night talk, from listening to Becky and Chonch, and so you shouldn’t have known this or said it. “I mean, I bet if you asked her, Becky would say no. I know she would.”
Your grandmother strokes your hair. Her hands, two sad nets.
In the patches of grass and dirt, the pecan trees stand motionless. Their last leaves still clinging to limbs, rebelling or unable or even, maybe, eager but not exactly ready to fall. A squirrel scampers around the downed leaves, which crackle each time the creature hops. A plane somewhere in the sky takes hundreds of people to the next part of their lives. You look upward, but nothing. Only the sound.
“Give him a chance, Abram.”
An hour later, in front of the mirror that stands in the hallway, near the bath, near the closet with the old folded towels and the blankets for winter, near Saint Michael holding guard over the demon on the wall, you find yourself. In the mirror, you look twice your size. You take out bedsheets and a blanket for your grandmother to wash—these will be for your uncle—and behind you, as quiet as a moth, your grandmother sweeps.
You stare at your hands, two huge spoons attached to the long bones of the arms.
You are standing in front of a mirror, and your eyes flicker, a blinking that does not settle when you command it to. Your neck is a rod that holds up your head, its only job, its dutiful obedience to keep you looking ahead. And your jaw has widened, your body has thickened, your arms are much larger than you ever thought they’d grow. These days to come, the life you are making versus the one that has been made for you, for you, a man, excites you.
Your hair is the color of Saint Michael’s boots, the hilt of his sword, too.
Inside your shorts, your parts struggle to breathe.
Now, your grandmother has to tiptoe and reach high to put her thumbs on your scalp. The broom stands against the wall. In the middle of the hall a dust pile waits to be lifted. It wasn’t long ago that the two of you were the same height. It wasn’t long ago that you said, One day I’m going to be an astronaut and I’m going to walk on Mars. Now, you’re not so sure. Not of anything aside from the simple facts of your life: that you love your grandmother, that November is when the pecans fall to the ground, that Ophelia is smart and kind and beautiful, that you want a dog and somehow, maybe because you’ll be stronger, or maybe because you’ll read it in a book or watch a movie that will inspire you to do it or maybe because one day you’ll just wake up and everything will work itself out, somehow, somehow, you will leave your fists behind. A simple fact—determination and so much at stake—that you’re afraid of what you’ll become, that you don’t think your uncle belongs, that you will become just like him. The worries flank you. It might have been easier becoming an astronaut.
Vividly, you recall when you were smaller and, crossing a parking lot, your grandmother holding your hand, nights when she’d make popcorn and you’d chomp pickles, cheering on the Spurs, or those difficult nights after your mother left, when your grandmother sat by your bedside each night, the bed squeaky and imbalanced, and recited prayers, because this, she claimed—instructing you to brace your hands together in a small teepee—was the way to calm your spirit, the way to ask God to look after your mother, the way to help yourself summon sleep. Later, older, you wondered why your grandmother never guided you to pray for your mother to come back.
In the mirror, in the hallway, in the tiny wooden house in the middle of this incredible world, with Saint Michael wielding his blade as vigilant as an owl and your uncle in the other room, the television louder than it knew it could ever speak, with the pecan trees loving their last few days with their leaves, perhaps, indeed, you might wield the world in your hands, make the best of what you’ve been given. But this is a lifetime away, an uncertain span of variables and a trumpeting of disquiet, while your uncle, it seems, is here to stay.
“He’s going to make things better, Abram.” Your grandmother smiles.
In front of the closet, your grandmother holds your hand. You feel the sound of her heart, that heat, that solid rhythm, untangled, tangible somehow, threads and ribbons, fibers, veins, twine and vines. The idle trees through the little window in the kitchen grow dark, and you detect this through the glass. Then you wish for some wind and wonder if trees ever did the same.
“But he can’t help us, not if you don’t let him,” she adds.
That evening, your uncle sits in front of the TV and bounces his bull of a voice off the walls: “Grab your shit, Papo. I’m taking you to work out.”
It’s a dense voice, full of accidents.
You were cleaning your shoes, whitening them, and loathing saturates your bones when he calls you Papo. It’s not your name, not even close. And you’ll never know why he does it. A joke, perhaps, some other idiosyncratic tic.
In the car, on the long freeway, your Uncle Claudio tells you about free weights and how to put on size, become stronger—tuna and tortillas, dumbbell
s, chicken meat, 45s and milk—and you think, Damn, this guy might be wise after all. The real deal.
While he drives, he is calm, his knuckles gripping the wheel firmly. His own arms are built well, and so you listen, like listening to a dentist when you want better teeth. Meanwhile, the voice inside you continues to wish him gone, though you wonder if this is what he’s really like. Knowledgeable. Giving. So willing to share what he knows. Both hands on the wheel. His voice as thick as a log. Sturdy. Like maybe this part of him was lost and now that he’s found it, he is able, finally, to come home. But how do you know when you can believe someone’s words? You aren’t sure.
“We have to find something for you, Abraham. Something for you to be good at. Damn good at,” your uncle says, his chin stoic and stern, and you hope one day, for a moment, you hope that your face will grow this way, stout and full of itself and strong. He keeps nodding. You hope one day you will know shit, like he does, that people will sit beside you and listen with their ears wide open and the whole world flashing before them. The socks on his feet are white like bone. Around the steering wheel, his knuckles pop out as if someone has placed bolts underneath the skin of his hands. “Something that one day can make us some money.”
You listen. Us. You listen, and inside you a shred of belief has fattened itself up like a small, thick snail growing too wide for its shell. When did we become us?
Before you can reach the gym, before you can take this new plan for your life out of its box, take it for a test run, his phone rings, and he swings into a parking lot, because there is a more pressing matter for your uncle with both hands on the wheel and his socks as white as bone to deal with.
“Tomorrow,” he tells you, dropping you off in front of your grandmother’s house. “We’ll hit it tomorrow.” Something’s come up. His voice tails off like a kite.
5
It’s the second quarter, and the Cowboys are losing terribly. On the television a commentator laments the loss of an era, how a team can slide into mediocrity and what an organization might do to ascend from these depths. In the bald commentator’s hand, the microphone shimmers, waxy and undeterred, and the green turf behind the speaker is greener than any green you’ve seen spurting out of the ground. The man’s tie is red. He mouths his words like each one of them had the meaning of every true thing in the world.
In the living room, your feet tuck beneath you, sockless and cold, and outside, the wind bulges. Ordinarily this room seems small and comfortable and squat, but with your uncle around, it seems larger somehow, like the house has had to expand in order for him to fit. On the sofa beside you is your grandmother, her hands like two birds, small and patient, pressed together in her lap. Beside her is the small space heater with its orange heart flaring for everyone to see. She watches the Cowboys and dozes off, waking up from time to time as if bothered by sleep itself.
“Who’s winning?” your grandmother mumbles, the sleep on her like a coat.
In the recliner, his legs up, your uncle shutters his eyes, the remote perched on his chest.
Life, you think. This is what I have to look forward to. The commercial for beer, the pizza commercial, the new Toyota commercial, the commercials for shaving cream and deodorant for rugged men. Cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms and their white, white boots.
“Let’s do this!” your uncle proclaims suddenly, his voice a fiery cannonball slung across the room. The chair rocks from the force he produces getting up, and the remote flies across the floor.
“Do what?” you ask.
“What happened? What happened?” your grandmother slurs, trying haplessly to lift herself from her sleep.
“Grab your bag, Abramito. Your tennis shoes. Bring an extra shirt and shorts.”
He leaps toward the kitchen.
“For?”
“The gym. I’m taking you with me to the gym.”
“But the game’s not over.”
“Who’s Jim?” your grandmother, in her half slumber, asks, clutching her heart with two shivering hands.
That afternoon, your Uncle Claudio teaches you how to bench-press and explains how the muscles of the chest work and are complemented by the biceps and the triceps when you let the weight down and then have to extend your arms to propel it upward. With zeal, you listen, your eyes wide open.
“When you do this, press the weight upward, away from the body,” he tells you. “It’ll burn.”
He’s right, it does burn. The more repetitions you put in, the more times you push the resistance away, the more it burns. This is a good thing, because the muscles are tearing and soon, with good nourishment and sleep, they will rebuild, scarring themselves in layers, and this is how mass is built, how more difficult tasks are overcome.
“It’s how you get bigger,” he explains.
“Hey, don’t let your elbows break ninety degrees,” he instructs as you lower the bar with four fat plates just beneath your pecs. It is a slow descent. You think of math class, the drawings in your textbook of perfect right angles, and you obey.
“Now up.” He steadies the bar, his two fingers below it. A fulcrum.
“A one hundred and eighty-five pounds. Damn, Papo! First day at the gym. Tha’s what’s up, Daddy.”
He grins, and something inside you like a radio wave or a lantern cutting through darkness begins to beam, so you grin, too. It’s a harness, this light, this noise, and it loosens you up, your disbelief, your worry, your desire for him to go.
Next he demonstrates how to do diamond push-ups and how you can turn these into Spider-Mans by kicking up your knees toward your elbows each time, to extend the triceps.
“You’ll feel it. Here. And here,” he tells you, pointing to the back side of your arms and then to the middle of your chest.
This is difficult. Like mallets are taking their turns at the bones. Your muscles ache, but you know this is useful, imperative, you know it is what is required to build strength. You want that, strength, more of it, mass and ability and form. So you give it your all, and you can see something in front of you, a light, maybe a tree, maybe a bird, which you’ve never seen before.
Next, you do butterflies, which means you will sit with your spine upright and make Ls with your arms, which are outstretched near your ears, and you pull the weight in, extending the flat outside muscles that form the perimeter of your chest so that the inner muscles squeeze. You do three sets of these butterflies and then end with the incline. And this one is fourth on your regimented list of chest tasks. Because the seat is positioned at a slant, you call it incline, and it works the top of your pectorals, which are the chest muscles. If you work them right and regularly, a valley will develop between your two pecs.
“You want this,” your uncle says and points to his own swollen chest, which owns a deep-shaped slope between the two mounds of muscle. “You have to commit,” he says, tapping the peak of his chest and pointing, posing in the long mirror.
The announcement in the mirror, the dialogue between the lights and your two bodies and the electricity of courage is like fuel you feel within the thin, slim vessels of your long veins, each pulse a reminder of what could be.
Huffing, sloped over from the exhaustion, watching him shine in the glass, you say, “Yes. Yes. I can do this. I want to come again.”
In the car you tell him about fighting, because he asks, and he asks because your grandmother told him you’ve gotten in some trouble at school.
He says you should put this energy to good use.
He says good things are on their way. That good things come to those who don’t sit around and wait.
He asks what you want to do with your life. Tells you the world is an oyster. It’s yours. Crack it. Eat it up. And you know the rest.
That night, you want to thank him, to tell him everything about the rest of your life. But to take such a minute, to show that? Would he sit beside you, listen intently as you splayed your heart or yanked the true things inside your gut and displayed them like tripe? Woul
d he know this, recognize his own troubles in yours and say, I’ve been there, Papo. You can do this. Do it better than I did.
After your shower, after eating the two cans of tuna he bought you, after brushing your teeth minty fresh and deflating your gym bag, you sit on the couch and wait, because his car is not in the driveway, and you don’t know where he’s gone, though you want him to come back. Funny how that works, isn’t it? The television lights up the room with a soft fuzz. Already the muscles of your chest and arms have started their anguish. Not a scream, not yet. Not panic or yowling but soreness, enough of it to underscore that tomorrow is coming and there is more work to do.
November has fallen, and the world has gone gray and bold. The sun is falling out of the sky. After an hour, the Patriots are dominating the Bills, and you realize he’s gone, that your uncle probably won’t be back anytime soon, so you turn off the game and head to your room. The muscles in your chest sting. There is so much you want him to know.
The familiar vibration of your phone: Just wanted to say good night.
Ophelia, you whisper to yourself before you punch your head into the pillow and try not to fall asleep.
“Like what, Claudio?” your grandmother asks over chicken and rice the next day, after your uncle tells her he has a plan. She brings over the coffeepot and pours more, white steam rising over the mug rim.
Beside your uncle you sit and watch your grandmother’s eyes like two seeds beginning to break shell. Nervously, you wait for your uncle’s words to careen from his mouth. At the old table with its cloth the color of watermelon hearts, your grandmother stirs a lump of sugar into her red cup. You imagine the little granules like oddly shaped fish disappearing into a dark lake. Like a swan, steam flutters above the cup.
One day you will remember this swan. Its silences, its noise.
One day it will be how you remember everything.
