Bloodline

by Joe Jiménez

  It all makes little sense as your feet begin, slowly, earnestly, to move. So you clutch the softness of the deer blanket from Mexico to your mouth, as if a blanket or a deer might shield you as you push your body upward, against the old headboard, against the wall, away from your father.

  Silly dream? There’s no way . . . Your mouth full of cotton. Awful, crooked shamble of bad sleep and want? Your dead father? The father whom you never really met.

  “Boy, listen to me,” the man that would be your father urges. “My hour dwindles. And I have so much still to say. If you ever loved your father, boy, then do right by him. Do not follow me. So much still to tell you.”

  And with that, the dimness in the room is unsheathed—light bleeds in through the curtains. The headboard feels cold against your spine, and the whole room falls back into itself. As much as you wanted to find credibility in this speech from this man with the neat black suit and fat brown cigar, your throat is locked tight, impeding speech, impeding breath and thought. Sweating, you shutter yourself in the room for the remainder of the afternoon, convincing yourself none of this occurred, that you dreamed it or hallucinated it or worse, that you willed it falsely, out of loneliness or desperation, acute sadness, the kind that makes boys see things that aren’t there, can’t be there, not today, not ever. This happens. Perhaps it is happening to you.

  And so later, when you can smell the pot of beans and the cumin from the rice, when your grandmother knocks her small hand on the door, you feign sleep.

  You mumble, “No, not now—not hungry” after she says dinner is ready.

  “¿Estás bien?” she asks. You okay? Then waits for your voice.

  “I’ll save you a plate,” she mutters in Spanish tenderly, after waiting too long.

  You hear her footsteps walk away. It is a soft sound, like a bird pulling its wings close to itself. And soundlessly, you look around the room, making sure he’s not there, that your father, in fact, hasn’t come back.

  All afternoon and into the night, you lay in bed, half listening to the pecan by your window scrape its long, burdensome limbs against the roof. You listen to your heart and listen to the sewing machine making humming sounds in the other room.

  Soon your uncle returns. The house walls tremble and the glass in the old windows shakes from the force with which he enters. Heavily, he steps down the hall and bangs on your door, though you hear your grandmother tell him you are sleeping, to leave you be.

  When you do not stir, he enters the room, his footsteps heavy.

  At the foot of your bed, he sits down near the edge and puts a hand on your ankle. He shakes it.

  “Abramito, wake up.”

  But again you feign sleep.

  “I need to talk to you. It’s big, Papo. I think we got something.”

  But firmly, committedly, you continue faking it.

  “Not right now—I gotta sleep,” you slur.

  He’s quiet. As if contemplating.

  He tries again to wake you. Shakes your leg and taps your hand repeatedly.

  And again you mumble something unintelligible, turn over and give him your back.

  And then he leaves, the door shutting unmistakably. Not long after that, your grandmother returns to the room with her voice like warm tea, soothing the walls and the difficulties of the bed and the tree that aches for itself and scratches at the old house: “Ven. Come with us. Claudio is taking me to the H-E-B. I need help getting the turkey. Will you come?”

  And for this, because it comes from her, because this is what you do when there is love you feel for someone you know has done ten million good things for you, someone who has saved your life more than once and kept you alive, you say, “Yes. Let me get up, grandmother. Just let me get dressed.” The suit, the cigar, the perfect black shoes, the visit—decidedly, you agree with the tree that you will say nothing about your father.

  After grocery shopping, at the table, eating tortas with your family, a little girl dances with a red balloon near the table beside you, a waitress laughs loudly, her fire engine laugh, her earrings that shine brightly like headlights, and you ask for it straight: “Tell me about my dad.”

  The question from which so many other questions are born.

  It crushes the air.

  Your grandmother bobbles her spoon, which falls into her broth and splatters, and her teeth grit down.

  Meanwhile, your uncle’s face has gone to God.

  You hold your hands in front of you, keeping them still, allowing that stillness to not break your voice.

  “My father,” you say. “What was he like? I want to know.”

  “Abram!” your grandmother grunts. Slate faced, your uncle shakes his head at you, pushes off the table and gets up.

  “You serious? You fucking serious?” he repeats. He knocks over his chair. The salt bottle spills white granules across the table.

  The restaurant stutters and halts.

  His knuckles gleam outrage and alarm, and his jaw broadens, clamps down on itself like a car that has been flattened in a junkyard. For a moment you stare at the vein that throbs in his neck, and for another, you see his eyes, which behold you with enmity and undoing.

  Hold your hands, you say to yourself.

  Do not look away, you force yourself.

  Your grandmother has risen from her chair, her arms stretched toward your uncle, attempting to calm him down.

  Near you, the little girl has stopped dancing. The waitress isn’t laughing. People stare. Everyone in the restaurant stares at your family.

  When your uncle exits, he leaves behind a trail of fuck yous. You watch as he yells at the darkness in the sky and starts the car. You watch as he speeds off, the engine roaring, and leaves you and your grandmother and your meal behind.

  In the restaurant, there is a pall.

  Except for the accordion emerging from the walls, everything is trying to restart itself.

  The little girl drops her balloon string. The balloon rises. The red heart floats up toward the ceiling, its long white string like an intestine, until it tangles in a slow, spinning ceiling fan.

  “Finish your food, Abram. Eat.”

  You watch the balloon. The little girl has stopped dancing. She watches you. Then, as if frightened or unsure, she moves toward her mother, who takes her in her arms.

  “How are we getting home?” you ask.

  “Eat your food,” your grandmother says.

  She shoves her hand inside her purse, grabs for her phone. She trembles.

  “Just eat,” she repeats. “Eat.”

  So you eat. Pushing your fork around the plate, through the stale rice and the puddle of beans, across the white lettuce of the torta. While your grandmother busies herself punching buttons on her phone, you pretend to eat, not all of your food but enough to comply with the demand. And soon, soon enough, Becky walks through the restaurant door and comes to your table, still covered with the food-filled plates. Conjunto music is playing on the jukebox by the wall. There’s a Spanish show featuring laughing bears on the old television suspended on a wall.

  Becky sits down by your grandmother and rights the salt bottle. She picks up a napkin and sweeps the grains of salt into a neat mound and pushes your uncle’s plate to the edge of the table to catch the grains while you sit and stare at your plate. The Mexican sandwich, lifeless and severe. Tortas, you think.

  “You okay, Abram?”

  You force a half smile for Becky and nod. She pats your shoulder.

  You sigh and sip water, and the balloon that once was a full red heart winds tightly around the fan motor, tighter and tighter, while outside now, Becky holds your grandmother, her arms wrapping tightly around her as your grandmother weeps.

  12

  The past is uninhabitable.

  You know this. You’ve been told.

  In the morning, your uncle is nowhere to be found. You’re fine with this, though your grandmother is worried. Worry or sadness. Perhaps both. But anger, you conclude, for sure she i
s angry at her one still-living son, at herself, maybe at you.

  In your bedroom, you clear the nightstand and throw down a towel. You do push-ups and crunches and more push-ups and lunges, as you’ve done for the weeks since your uncle first took you to work out. It’s a routine that suits you well. Every morning, some nights, sometimes in the middle of the day, when it feels better to smash your muscles than to sit alone with the crags that are your thoughts.

  At the table, there is oatmeal and toast. Becky has left for work after spending the night, which she rarely does, and your grandmother sips her coffee.

  You eat toast, and the crumbs fall on the plastic yellow tablecloth like sober reminders that not everything keeps itself intact, that things will gradually, in time, fall apart.

  You tell her you only asked because you wanted to know. Doesn’t everyone have the right to know where he comes from?

  Meanwhile, the sun is trying to understand its loneliness.

  Meanwhile, the pecan rasps its voice against the roof.

  Meanwhile, the house has swollen with your grandmother’s sadness.

  Meanwhile, Ophelia is vibrating your phone, and you say, “Good-bye, grandmother.” You kiss her forehead, and she shakes her head.

  “Have a good day,” she says. Solemnly. Occupied with voices you cannot hear.

  Her hair is gray and not taut in her braid.

  “I’m going to Ophelia’s. I love you, Grandma.”

  The sky, however, is not gray.

  Nor is it heavy. The sky is bright, full of light.

  “Go to the park with me. I made us a lunch,” Ophelia tells you. You stand on her aunt’s porch and marvel at her. “It feels good having the week of Thanksgiving off.”

  In the trees, which are bare for the season, there are birds. And there is light. Raucous chirps and cackling, flapping wings, and you wonder why there are so many of them. A flock in one tall tower of a tree.

  “Hawks. They’re migrating. It is almost winter,” Ophelia contends.

  And she’s right. These birds, like people, seek someplace warmer, more comforting, less difficult to endure.

  At the mission park you sit by the river and listen to the water. You munch the tomato and cheese sandwiches she packed. The bolillo dough fills your mouth, and you think of saving some, a few ends of the bread, to feed to the ducks, that maybe Ophelia would like this.

  “Every year they congregate down here,” Ophelia says, pointing to the dark birds perched on the tree limbs.

  How does she know this? you wonder.

  “Do you like birds?” you ask.

  “I do.”

  “Why do you like them?”

  “Because they can fly. And because they have hollow bones.”

  “Hollow? I guess that’s what lets them fly? Because of their bones?” you ask.

  Her hand is a small egg. It rubs her cheek; the pinkish hue mixes with her almond skin. And there’s Ophelia’s magnificent red hair. You love it. It speaks to you of simple, tepid songs and humble operas.

  She bites her sandwich and asks you midchew, “Any animal in the world . . . if you could be one, what would you be?”

  Above her, the sun is furious. The sky is white. It is early in the morning, and the entire day stands before you like a field.

  “Any animal?”

  “Any animal.”

  You think. You want to say bird, because maybe that will please her, so you say, “Bird. An eagle.”

  “That’s what you think I want to hear,” she snaps. “What would you really want to be? Anything.”

  You know pleasing her isn’t what she wants. She wants to know you, what’s churning inside you like a beetle caught in a well, dipping and possibly sinking but surfacing again, fighting, striving and struggling, urgency bubbling inside of it, for sunlight, for air, for anything solid.

  “Tasmanian tiger,” you say, finally.

  “Tasmanian tiger?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Now you are walking alongside the river. The sidewalk is cracked.

  You hold her hand, because her eyes are on you, her mouth opened by breaches in words, and you hold her hand so the wide, deep crack in the ground won’t trip her, so she won’t fall, so nothing bad will ever befall her.

  “Isn’t that extinct?”

  You nod. “Madagascar.” You remember reading about this when you were nine.

  “Humans suck. Nice one,” she says. “Never would have guessed.”

  Her lips curl nicely, and her breath is peppermint, which reminds you of the candies you pick up that are hard white coins eddied with red, the ones your grandmother keeps in the medicine drawer.

  “I’d be an iguana.”

  An iguana, you think. Ophelia seems nothing at all like a lizard.

  Scales and long tongued, black beans for eyes, legs like broken matchsticks, but thick-skinned and robust, and so maybe, perhaps . . .

  “Why?”

  “There doesn’t always have to be an explanation, does there?”

  In front of the little waterfall by the mission, you decide not to spoil the occasion. You can be happy with this. Just a walk. Holding her warmth in your hand, listening to her stories, the new things she teaches you about birds. The park and the sound of water and the auspicious thing she just taught you about those black birds migrating and landing in San Antonio trees—it’s enough.

  But it’s in you, you know. This want, that desire to press your mouth into hers and feel sweetness and joy and comfort and safety.

  And perhaps it’s inside Ophelia, too.

  “We should head back,” Ophelia says, finally, when you stop beneath a great oak and because perhaps she can see it in you, too, or feel it, how it bounces off your bones and through your muscles, or maybe it’s coming from her, the warmth, the desire to be held and to hold and to tell and to listen—perhaps it emerges both ways.

  “Sure,” you agree. “We should get back,” and her voice follows you, shining with dark eyes and a combustion known only by the farthest stars.

  13

  Quickly the week off from school goes by, and by Wednesday, Becky has stepped in and replaced the turkey left in the car when your uncle drove off, the one your grandmother will cook. As Becky and your grandmother engage in the night-before preparations, your uncle returns.

  Dusk has fallen around you, yellow heaps of old light and the pinkish underbelly of the sky exposed for the trees and the leaves to witness, the sidewalk and the roofs to clutch at. You’re sitting on the porch after a run when your uncle drives up.

  “Get in,” he tells you, pushing open the passenger door. With a hand like a pulley, he makes the door move.

  Hesitantly, you approach. The music booms, and his mouth vexes you.

  You don’t know why exactly you get in. There’s that place inside you that has always hungered for facts about your father, for an anecdote or a tidbit of a story, maybe just a thread, like he used to enjoy carnivals or his favorite food was hamburgers with refried beans smeared inside the bun from this place over on Blanco Street. You blame this. That hunger for information, anything.

  “I should tell grandma.”

  But he smirks and says, “No worries, Papo.”

  He drives you to the West Side of the city. Across two freeways, over an old gray bridge that flies above train tracks and a queue of dirty boxcars. The city is lit up. Behind you, the Tower stands obediently, vigilant and formidable, above the downtown buildings, like a sentinel. Watching over you, the Tower reminds you of where you come from.

  “We going to the gym?”

  As the car speeds through a neighborhood with dogs running in the middle of the street and hollering children playing soccer between parked cars, your heart begins to race.

  “Something like that.”

  When you arrive, the building appears worn. Broken bricks and grass pushing through the dented concrete. Glass has shattered and speckles the asphalt like crushed stars. With uncertainty, you exit the car, your
feet heavy with hesitation, a bowling ball for a heart. You follow your uncle to a dilapidated building, the walls coming apart. You noticed a few bricks toppled over from the gym’s corner edge, scattered chunks of rock. Over the door, the sign reads ALFONSO BOXING GYM.

  Underneath your uncle’s grip, the building’s door moans and hisses. Easily, he pulls it open, but when you tug on it, the metal is heavier than any other entry you have ever gone through. The whole world inside this gym is dim. In the center of the place there is a ring, the canvas dark and stained. A single lamp bulb rains lights down from above the ring, sparse ropes of light that somehow join, somehow constitute a single beam. Arms unfurl and fling toward bags and pads, and everything appears taped up or near falling apart. It seems less than a gym, less than a place where “champs are made,” as the long, sloping banner drooping from the wall whispers. Men grunt, and the sound of punching is everywhere. Your neck muscles clench.

  “Compadre,” your uncle addresses someone, his hand waving. “This here is my nephew.”

  A man in a little blue suit hunches over the ropes. He spits into a bucket and turns to look at you. He wears a dark dress shirt and a little black tie. His arms rest on the ring’s tired ropes.

  Your uncle propels you forward. Pushes you with a resolute shove that implies you know what to do, though you don’t. In fact, you don’t know at all what you’re supposed to be doing here, but you figure it out. Rapidly. Glancing at the others, the bag taking a repeated beating, the jumping rope that circles a boy’s body in a steady rhythm, the guy bent over in a dark corner, huffing and praying and hugging his body alongside the flat sympathy of the brick wall—you figure that your job is to jump in, show what you bring.

  Promptly, the man at the ropes chitchats with your uncle and then leads you into a little office at the side of the building, which is dust heavy and even more poorly lit than the canvas ring. Nerves wreaking havoc inside your heart, you follow.