We ran out of gas halfway. It was already after midnight. Some random nigga and a vato weren’t about to flag anyone down. So we slept in the bed of his brother’s pickup, drenched from the humidity, wondering if anyone in this whole shitty country could be as lucky as us.
* * *
• • •
I wasn’t especially proud of myself for stealing the chupacabra.
Mix’d fallen asleep. Channel 8 had called him back, left a message on my phone. The intern or whatever said they’d see us around ten.
I unwrapped the chupacabra and tucked it into Mix’s gym bag. It yawned a little, exposing some fang. It looked me in the eyes, squinting, and I tried to keep its gaze.
It frowned. I zipped the bag.
* * *
• • •
This time she answered on the second ring.
Wow, I said.
T, said Denise. It’s late.
I know. I wanted to show you something.
It couldn’t wait, she asked, and I saw the face she’d be making, with her palm on her chin and her lips tucked in.
I’ve got work tomorrow, T.
It’ll be quick, I said.
But you can’t just tell me now?
I’d rather not.
Why?
It’s a little weird.
T, she said.
You know how things are now, she said.
We’ve talked about this, she said, and that’s when I told her I knew that, that I was aware, that if she listened for two fucking minutes she’d see.
There was silence on the line.
I wanted to eat my tongue.
I’d never raised my voice at Denise. I didn’t know it was something I could do. But a part of me knew however she replied would determine the next decade of my life.
Well, she said. I’m up.
You know the code for the gate, she said.
And TeDarus, she said, don’t you ever in your life do that again.
* * *
• • •
Denise lived in one of those walk-ups that look like garbage from a distance, then you get a little closer and they don’t look any better.
I knocked once. Then once again. And then I knocked and I knocked. And then I rang the doorbell. I called her name through the door. I knew exactly what I looked like, but I kept going anyways. I just kept going.
I thought maybe I’d felt something shift in the bag.
When I unzipped it, the chupacabra winced, ducking into the fabric.
It occurred to me that, in this moment, I was probably the closest thing to family it had.
This is for both of us, I said, and then the door finally opened, and I stuffed that motherfucker out of the way. I did my best to smile.
T, he said.
He extended his hand.
I figured at least she’d found herself a handsome one.
It’s TeDarus, I said.
Dude was taller than me. Broad-shouldered. With dreads. Probably could’ve tossed me over the railing.
Bruh, he said, shuffling his feet.
Denise says to tell you she’s tired, he said.
Right, I said.
She says she’s sorry she had you come around, he said.
Right, I said.
There was sleep on his face. His pajama bottoms were a little saggy.
All of a sudden, I felt ridiculous. I felt like the people you read about in the papers.
You’re what she wants, I said, and he made a funny face.
Look, bruh, he said. Wasn’t my idea. I told her to come out here.
Whatever, I said. It’s fine. She’s the one having the baby.
What baby, he said.
I thought about that for a second.
You know how she gets, he said.
Fine, I said.
But it’s weird, he said. You know? What you’re doing. Coming out. She says you invited yourself.
Denise told me I could come.
Word, he said. And I get it. Pussy’s pussy. But, honestly, I don’t—
Hey, I said, and loud. Loud enough for her to hear me.
Thanks a lot for answering, I said. Thanks for having Tyrone do your dirty work!
Yo, said the guy. He shifted his feet.
Thanks, I shouted. You don’t know how much it means.
My dude.
Really, I said. Thank you for fucking all of it.
And I started to say something else, something profound, something game-changing, but that’s when his fist hit the bridge of my nose and whatever I had was gone.
* * *
• • •
Mix was outside in his flip-flops, holding himself under the awning. He had on this ratty bathrobe but his knees poked through the crease. The sky had dimmed into this murky blue, like all of the smog had finally congealed, and our end of the bayou peeked over the mud, slipping straight into the water sloshing beneath it, until the water turned into mud, and the mud congealed into dirt, and that dirt made the bedding for the glossy buildings behind it.
I knew he’d probably been waiting outside for a minute. The blood on my lips had hardened. The swelling’d dimmed to a steady thump. When he saw me with the gym bag, all I could do was smile.
His sandals slapped my way. He snatched the bag from my shoulders.
You shit, said Mix.
I started to tell him that I deserved it—that I’d really, really fucked up.
Then he hit me in the eye.
The pain exploded immediately.
You fuck, said Mix.
I grabbed the hook of his elbow, brought him down with me.
Fucking bitch, said Mix.
He ran his palm across my throat.
I kneed him in the balls.
They came and left, said Mix. They came and they fucking left.
He slipped his wrist under my armpit and I hooked my knee across his chin.
Everyone’s always fucking leaving, said Mix. Fucking fuck fuck fuck.
I flipped him. Couldn’t help it. He tried to catch himself, but I’m just too big.
I sat on his stomach.
Okay? I said. Okay?
No, said Mix.
God, said Mix. Fuck.
Some cars honked at us. Dogs barked. The air felt crisp on my back. Mix’s breathing slowed beneath me, and I loosened my hold on his arms, and the chupacabra poked its head from the bag sprawled open on the concrete.
It looked at the two of us.
It sighed.
* * *
• • •
Before his brother was locked up, but after he’d gotten kicked out of the house, Mix and I were cooling out in the Whataburger parking lot.
The dude had just beaten the shit out of Mix for like the fourth time in a month. Mix’d called me up that afternoon, but he’d left out the part about the beating. He only asked if I wanted to hang, and I knew from his tone that it needed to happen. So we were sitting in the parking lot, with whoever on the radio, and some sodas in the holders, and our mouths full of burger, when he leaned across his seat, straining against the belt, and put his mouth on mine.
His tongue swam between my cheeks, and I let it. Just for a minute.
He tasted like ketchup. And mayo. And potatoes.
He put his hand in my shorts.
I socked him in the ear.
Jesus shit, I said. I got out and slammed the door behind me.
I took some laps around the parking lot before I came back.
And there Mix was. Sniveling.
He looked like a mess. Like something disgusting. I watched him there crumpling with the paper bag in his lap.
And weirdly, suddenly, and don’t ask me how this happens, I saw myself.
&nb
sp; So I let him cry for a bit.
I got back in the car.
I put my hand on his shoulder, sort of squeezing around his neck. When that didn’t really do anything, I gave him a hug.
Eventually, he sort of fumbled his hands around my shoulders.
We stayed like that for what felt like an hour.
Then he started the car. He pulled us onto the feeder, and back into traffic, and out of the lot.
* * *
• • •
It could’ve been midnight but it was probably later. The parking lot had emptied. The only thing moving was the water in the bayou beneath us. Mix sat in his robe, cradling the chupacabra in his hands, and it’d nestled into his stomach, licking the crook of his arm. He’d burrowed his hands into its mane, and it chewed harder than it should’ve, but Mix didn’t seem to care. He kept scratching under its neck.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
Chingao, said Mix, after a while, and I agreed.
Then the chupacabra’s eyes opened completely. It slipped out of Mix’s lap, onto the asphalt, and it pranced in a circle. Sizing us up. When it’d made some silent decision, it settled down in front of my feet.
I touched its nose. The chupacabra made a face.
TeDarus, said Mix, and that’s when I looked up.
Everyone says this and it’s a fucking cliché, but I’d never seen anything like it.
The first few were standing in front of us. Another group stood behind them, waiting in the ranks. They were big and small and fat and tall. Their manes were glossy, with a shimmering sheen.
We were surrounded by chupacabras.
We watched them watching us.
I didn’t move. I motioned to Mix. But it was clear that he’d seen them all along.
He started to stand, then changed his mind.
The one we’d found gave us a long look. It twisted its head, between us and them. It arched its back. Popped its legs.
And then it walked toward the rest of them.
And it didn’t look back.
One by one, the others followed our chupacabra back toward the bayou.
Mix and I watched them go. We didn’t say a word. We watched them plod across the street. We watched them step over the rocks. We watched them walk through the water, past the stream, under the buildings with their smog and their grime, and then the shot-up laundromats, and the broke-down pharmacies, and the gas stations with the low-riders parked out front, and, after all that, they slipped into the forest, and then they were really gone.
LOT
1.
Javi said the only thing worse than a junkie father was a faggot son. This was near the beginning of the end, after one of my brother’s marathon binges; a week or two before he took the bus to Georgia for basic training. His friends carried him home from the bars off Commerce, had him slinking around Houston like a stray. Since Ma had taken to locking the door at night, it was on me to let him back in.
At first, she hit him. Asked was he trying to kill her. Was he trying to break her heart.
Later on she took to crying. Pleading.
Then came the clawing. The reaching for his eyes like a pair of stubborn life rafts.
But near the end Ma just stared at him. Wouldn’t say a word.
Javi sat on my bed when he told me this. Smelling fresh like he’d just been born.
I asked what he meant, and he looked at me, the first time I think he’d ever really looked at me before.
He told me it didn’t matter. It wasn’t important.
He told me to go back to sleep.
2.
Ma planned on leaving the restaurant to the three of us, but then Jan had her own thing going on, and she didn’t want shit to do with the business, and Javi deployed, and it all came down on me. So I stayed. I slice and I marinate and unsleeve the meat. Pack it in aluminum. Load the pit, light the fire. The pigs we gut have blue eyes. They start blinking when you do it, like they’re having flashbacks or something, but after nineteen years of practice one carcass just feels like the next.
Way back when, Ma made Jan responsible for that, for prepping the beef with paprika and pepper, for drowning the carp with the rest of our voodoo, but then my sister met her whiteboy, Tom—working construction in the Heights, way the fuck out of East End—and he stuffed enough of himself inside her to put her in bed with a kid. Which brought our staff to two. Just me and Javi.
Neither of us gave a shit about cooking, but we both cared about eating. Ma had us wrapping beef in pastries, silverware in napkins. Javi taught me how to dice a shrimp without getting nicked. He plucked bills from pockets, cheesing like his life depended on it, and, since he was already nineteen, I followed his lead until Ma finally caught me with the fifties in my sock.
For which Javi took the blame. Ma leered him down a solid ten minutes before she told him to leave, to pack his shit, to go, to never come back. And he did it.
He went.
Joined the service. Sent postcards from brighter venues.
Now it’s just me in the back. Packing aluminum in paper bags. Setting the ovens to just under a crisp. Ma pokes her head in when there’s time—the one thing we have too much of—just to ask me if I’ve got it. If everything’s under control.
And the answer’s always, always no.
But of course you can’t say that.
3.
Come morning I’m in the kitchen around eight. Ma’s counting bills, twisting rubber into bundles.
Good night? she asks, and I say, Yeah, same as always, Ma.
She’ll nod like she knows what the fuck I’m talking about. Ma learned about suspicion from my father, from lies he’d wooed her away from Aldine with, but then he left for a pack of cigarettes and she gave up snooping entirely.
We don’t talk about where I go most nights or how I get back, ever, so I head to the freezer to handle the prep.
Beef’s fairly quick. Fish too. Chicken takes the longest. We douse them for a week or so—just drown the carcasses in salt. Ma adds her own seasoning, all pepper and grain and kernel, coating every limb with it. Shit she pulled from her mother, and her mother’s mother before her, back when they picked berries in Hanover. Then we stuff it all in some buckets, let them sit for like a day.
It’s something our father would do. He’d pitched Ma the restaurant like a pimp, like a hustler.
Think Oaxaca!
Bun and patties, menudo on Saturdays.
The blacks eat chicken so we’ll have that, too.
And, sometimes, I like to think that she put up a fight back then, tried to think of another plan.
But a month later they’d already set up shop. Found a shotgun off the freeway, polished it up. Our father served quesadillas and wings and pinto beans, hiring any number of the neighborhood layabouts, his friends, whooping and yelping and eyeing Ma from their stations. Sometimes she’d swat at them, ask who the fuck were they working for. Mostly she let them carry on.
My parents smoked cigarettes on the porch at sunset. Waving at everyone like they had something to smile about.
But Ma couldn’t get down with his pails. How they stank up the place. She said we were living in a slaughterhouse, that her home smelled like death.
Her kids were another story: Javi and I dipped our toes in the buckets, until Jan saw us, and said to cool it, to cut it out. We kept doing it and she kept catching us.
One time she’d reprimanded us a little too slow. Javi grabbed her, and he dunked her, and he held her until his arm got tired.
Hush, he said, and then again, slower.
4.
Javi sent letters from out east. A photo of some dunes. Some birds. An old fort. White words on gray backgrounds, angled across the card. He’d say how he was doing (fine), bitch about the weather (worse than Houston), ask for more photos of Jan’s
kid.
Once, he wrote a letter just for Ma. She wouldn’t let anyone touch it.
Once, he wrote one just for me.
He asked how Ma was doing, really, and about the baby. And about my plans. Said something about sending me some money. About what he’d do when he got out. He told me to write him sometime, that he’d appreciate it.
So I did that. I wrote him a letter spelling everything out. I wrote about Ma, and the shop, and the school. I wrote about Jan and the baby. I wrote about the Latina girls from Chavez I’d been meeting and fucking, and how that wasn’t working out, or how it wasn’t what I’d thought it should be, or that there was something else out there maybe, but what that was I couldn’t tell him, until I saw him, until he came back home.
I actually wrote that down.
I tossed it in the postbox before I could think about it, before it really messed me up.
But then a letter came for Ma, and then another one after that for Jan. But nothing addressed to me. I never tried again.
5.
I spend most days just trying to keep the place from burning down.
Four stoves, two ovens, three sinks. They’re always running. It might actually scare the shit out of anyone who cared to check, but nobody does that with Ma up front, dropping smiles and tossing napkins and asking everyone how their food is.
We get our rush in the afternoon, when the neighborhood shakes itself awake. Same faces every day. Black and brown and tan and wrinkled. The viejos who’ve lived on Airline forever. The abuelitas who’ve lived here for two hundred years, and the construction workers from Calhoun looking for cheap eats. The girls from Eastwood my sister left behind. The hoods my brother used to run with downtown.
Occasionally we’ll pull in a yuppie. They’d find us on the internet, review us in the weeklies. You can tell from the clothes, the bags. Their shades. How they ask what’s on the menu, any specials. Ma would treat them all like God’s children.
It’s a major event in our week, this pandering. So they get all the stops. And they’ll promise to tell their friends, to come back next week, but they sit through their meals with their eyes on the tile and their elbows on their purses so we know they never will.
Lot Page 7
