Never in her life had Julia seen anyone draw or write them, yet every square inch of wall space in the downstairs hall where the plaster had not crumbled and fallen away, was covered with an intricate maze of graffiti: political, racial, but mostly sexual. As far back as 1969, some boy or man who wanted his cock sucked named the place, the date, and the time. This, beside the stick-body drawing by a child of a child with the mouth-balloon message: “Mary’s a fat pig’s ass,” together with the jagged news that the building contained a bomb ready to explode and that everyone should vacate immediately. And here the scrawled Jew-bastards joined hands with the black mother-fuckers and the shit-eating Spick cunt-lickers, and all lived together in multi-colored fluorescent peace.
Julia had at one time or another read every message, funny, sick, lusty, or sad, and with critical care regarded every crude scrawl and drawing; she was prepared to examine any new one that might appear, but it was all by now so unchanging and familiar it seemed like the design on ancient, faded wallpaper, and as she passed through the hall up the lopsided, broken stairs, she barely noticed.
As often happened, she had to step over “a body” on one landing where, this time, the acrid odor of fresh urine in the closeted space was so strong it hit the nerves in her head as sharply as a close whiff of ammonia. It was a man, apparently—dead, drunk, or high, the upper half of his body wrapped like a mummy in a winter coat despite the intense heat. His crotch was wet and a long deeply yellow stream that wound to the edge of the stairs was just now beginning to sink into the rotting floorboards.
Julia paused by her door, staring at the three locks, two of them useless and unworking, and the lip of the jamb that long ago had been scarred with an assortment of crowbars and knives, gathering courage to face the inevitable storm. After a lingering bite on a knuckle, she extricated a key pinned to the inside of one dungaree pocket and noiselessly let herself in.
Julia’s father (Aurelio by name) lies on a couch in the darkened living room dressed in soiled white oversize boxer shorts watching a small-screen TV placed on a chair nearby. Close to him on the floor, circulating the stagnant air, is a small electric fan that hums softly, surrounded by half a dozen empty beer cans and the cellophane from two bags of potato chips. He is a wiry, thick-haired, brown little man in his late forties. His left arm, at the elbow, is encased in a dirty, thread-fringed plaster cast because of a joint fracture he’s received in a street fight.
As Julia enters, he glances up momentarily but in no way acknowledges that she’s there or that he’s seen her, his vacant eyes returning immediately to the TV.
And Julia doesn’t greet her father either. She merely stands still, watching him, and then stares at the video screen where a screeching pterodactyl is battling a giant lizard. The vertical hold on the set is awry so that the frames reel slowly upward without pause or stop. The motion doesn’t seem to bother her father or interfere with whatever pleasure is his from watching, but in minutes it has annoyed Julia enough to move to the set and adjust the picture. At the far end of the dark room, Gabriel sits motionless, still looking down into the street. At his feet, almost hidden against a wall, lies her baby brother Danilio, sucking on the mouth of an empty Coke bottle.
It is a railroad apartment, and the next windowless, doorless room is where her parents sleep. It contains only a battered bureau with a cracked mirror and a large double-size mattress and boxspring on the floor. Beyond this is the kitchen, and then, at the back of the building, is the children’s (all seven) room where two windows overlook a fire escape that leads down into an alley and a large open backyard area stacked with trash cans and littered with debris, all once surrounded by a fence of seven-foot chicken wire, now rusted and fallen. The bathroom, for multiple-tenant use, is in the hall.
Seated at the kitchen table, their heads bent noisily over lukewarm, thinned-out stew, are Bruno and Teresa, and the twins, Delores and Raphael—all younger than Julia—while near the stove, her back turned, stands the thin, sharp-eyed, sharper-tongued mother of the brood, Elina Gabriela Rivera Ortiz, to whom life has meted out so few pleasures and so much pain, it has made of a lovely mouth a mere line across a face, and filled once-beautiful eyes with fear, rebuke, and melancholy.
Julia’s appearance is too sudden, too instant for anger to assert itself adequately; an expression of rage, like that of love, requires time to bloom; so Elina, turning, soup ladle in hand, merely stares at her daughter until the adrenalin begins to race through her blood and color rises in a dark-red flush to her brown cheeks.
In the next instant the ladle strikes quick and hard while the shrill voice lashes out in a mixture of Spanish and English.
“So! There you are! You’re here, are you!—creeping in like a thief. After three days!—and I’ve been waiting three days to give it to you! How do you like that—eh? And that! Where does it hurt most?—let me give it to you there! . . . ”
The girl dodges instinctively, hands coming up to protect her head.
“. . . And there! On the bare arms—eh? That’s where you like it! And the pretty, stupid little face! . . .”
Gabriel stands in the doorway watching, his handsome young face trying to hide its pleasure, but then, seeing his mother’s growing possession, the vicious, mindless intent of the blows, giving way to concern.
“Mama—don’t!”
Breathless, startled, Elina drops her arm momentarily, but continues her half-convulsed speech, now entirely in Spanish.
“Where were you?—gone three days, and every night besides. Six kids on my hands—the little one sick—eating plaster from the wall!—that’s what the clinic said! And that man in there?—who is he?—pretending to be sick; he’s been ten years sick, but he can sleep all day and watch movies all night! What good is he?—to me, to anyone? I wish he were dead! If he doesn’t die soon, I’m going to kill him! Yes! And maybe you too. All of you!”
She pounds hysterically on the table, startling the small children who begin to cower in their chairs.
“Do you think mothers don’t kill their children? Is that what you think? Well, maybe you’re wrong—eh? We’ll see. Where were you? Where? Where? . . . ”
The question is repeated in a savage litany, accompanying new, stronger blows from the ladle until Gabriel again interferes.
“Mama—stop!”—seizing her; “that’s metal!” And Elina—“Metal—eh? Good. She deserves it.” Twisting herself free—“A few bruises are what we need! Where were you? Where? Where? . . .”
Again and again, until Gabriel, unable to control the flailing arm, explodes, “Shit! tell her f’Christ’s sake, or she’ll never stop!” And Julia, screaming—“Nowhere! Out! By the River! In the Park! At the museum!”—frantic, still dodging the blows, one of which has caught her in the cheekbone, stunning her, shattering the light—“Mama—you stop!”—and in Spanish, “or I’ll hit back: I swear . . . I’ll kill you! I mean it!”
Elina stops instantly, not because of the threat though there is something genuinely dangerous in the girl’s manner, but because she looks so strange: the teeth bared, the eyes shining and for the briefest unbelieved second flashing a greenish-gold, seemingly cowering but actually crouched, poised, the hands clawed, ready to spring!
The rage Elina has nurtured for three days drains from her body. She turns away, depleted, afraid that her anger has driven her too far. Nevertheless, after a quick glance back, challenged, entertained, the black eyes snapping: “Kill me—eh? Is that it.” A laugh. “Kill me.” A pause. “Suppose I didn’t mind—eh? What then? What if I considered it a favor to be dead? Anything—” a gesture around “—has got to be better than this.”
She throws the ladle into the sink and dries her forehead. Without looking at Julia—“Sit down. Calm yourself. You’ll eat something. The stew isn’t bad. We have bread. And some margarine. If there’s any left. Later, you’ll take a shower. You’re filthy.” She turns slowly back, lifts her eyes, glittering with tears. She looks long and wonderingly at her
daughter.
“How can anyone get so dirty?—doing what? Are you turning into an animal?” Appalled: “Ah God, look at you !”
It is more like a litter than a bedroom with sleeping children: seven of them, on three mattresses on the floor, the little ones naked, in a virtual heap of intertwined limbs pointing in directions as diverse as those on a compass.
The heat is so intense, the humidity so unrelieved, that every inch of exposed skin is beaded and gleaming with sweat. The breathing is a soft, sighing chorus, with an occasional cough or mutter or groan as one or more of them toss or anguish in restless sleep.
At the back of the room, the two windows overlooking the fire escape, opened to their widest, are faintly lighted by the alley’s brick wall reflection of a street lamp, while through the kitchen from the living room where Aurelio at three in the morning still lies on the couch, comes the faint blinking blue-white glare of the TV screen and the murmur of TV voices.
Only Julia is awake, so wet she might have stepped from a river, the thin white shirt she wears sticking in wrinkled folds to her body. She lies on the bare floor because it is coolest, and next to her on a mattress all his own, is Gabriel, with a sleeping sound in his open throat like the purr of a cat, his dark skin melting into the surrounding darkness, his jockey shorts almost a bright white blur down below. Beyond him, by the windows, are the rest of the children, naked and piled, like the picture she had once seen of slaughtered refugees in a ditch.
Night and time have been passing like a great black tide on which she floats and is adrift, wide-eyed, seeing nothing, hearing and having heard everything. . . .
—A bottle tossed from an upper window smashing on the pavement below . . .
—Two men arguing in muted tones, then violently; a scuffle and running footsteps, one clearly in pursuit of the other, shouting hoarsely “You better run, you white mother-fucker. . . .”
—The occasional rumble of a predawn truck, literally shaking the building, and twice, faintly, the pulsing wail of a police siren . . .
—A woman screaming, then bursts of a monologue filled with grief and terror . . .
—A radio or phonograph, the loud crash of rock and roll before the machine is quieted . . .
Gabriel groans and changes position; his arm rises and flops over Julia like a great fish, his hand coming to rest on her lower abdomen. She stares at it, and his sleeping face, then lifts his arm and folds it across his chest, moving away, slightly closer to Delores and Raphael who are now also on the floor, having spilled from their mattress.
—The woman again, this time with sobs and moans, so rife with pain, Julia must, for a time, cover her ears to shut out the sound . . .
—Under it all, the murmur of the TV voices, the curious fake quality of movie doors being slammed or movie gunshots fired beside the ultrareal rattle of mucus caught in her father’s throat, his occasional cough and spitting . . .
—From her mattress only yards away, Elina, dreaming, weeps with such pathos one imagines her heart will break; half-waking, she curses softly in Spanish, then calls plaintively for Aurelio, gently speaking his name. . . .
The hair prickles on Julia’s neck.
If he goes to her, if I have to hear them, one more time . . .
It is too much. It is unendurable. And tears brim Julia’s eyes as she withdraws, trying to squeeze the something that is herself, whoever, whatever she is, into small, small, ever smaller space, so small finally, she will not see, hear, feel anything at all, so small she couldn’t possibly exist; never having been born, never made, never being. . . .
But the opposite occurs. It is like the shatter of water and sunlight mixed when a fish leaps from the sea; for suddenly, the ghost-image of the forest shimmers before her eyes and then moves against her and into her with a flood of moonlight and rushing wind; wet leaves, shreds of fog twisting on the paths; above all, the dazzling dance of her feet down below . . . running . . . running . . . running . . . breathless, wild . . . never to be caught. . . .
A wave of darkness crashes over her.
It is Gabriel, bringing her back. He has moaned and moved again, this time a leg coming up and crossing over her thighs. He is sexually aroused in his sleep; she can feel a smooth, rounded hardness against her. The movement wakes him slightly; he lifts his head and stares at Julia with heat-drugged, sleep-drugged eyes; then he smiles, feeling a dark seeking ecstasy in his body, and his caressing hand runs lightly across her stomach before he is unconscious and still again, heavy against her.
Pinned down, her heart thumping, feeling the weight, the silken smoothness of Gabriel’s young body, Julia lifts her head, staring at him, her mouth dry, as if for a moment considering whether or not to sexualize with her brother. But with a slight shudder she moves from under him. This time she stands, dizzied, looking down at the sea of twisted limbs and glistening bodies in disbelief, then with careful step, moves beyond them and out on the fire escape, pushing back the strands of wet hair that cling to her forehead.
The space is small, crowded with two paper bags of trash and a few potted plants that died long ago. The air seems a few degrees cooler, and with her back to the window jamb, Julia breathes deeply while she looks about: at the brick wall opposite, part of it now almost white with a shaft of slanted moonlight, at the eyes of the windows, inky black, at the rubble in the alley and yard below, the heaps of broken brick, glass, bottles, cans, wire, wood, paper. . . .
It is now close to dawn and the street almost quiet. Very quiet. Until—
—A few tiny rattles; tinny, scuttling noises below.
Julia moves quietly to the edge of the fire escape, looking down over the rail, surprised that her vision seems incredibly keen, far better than in the day. She sees everything in the sharpest detail, particularly the few dark bodies darting zigzag about the garbage cans in the yard. One can is lying on its side, and the rats keep nuzzling the rim, seeking to remove it and make their way in.
Bewildered by her own sharp interest, surrendered to it, Julia leans over the rail, moving accidentally as she does so, one of the flowerpots. The slight scraping noise attracts the largest of the rats. He pauses in his frenzied zigzags to peer intently up, his pink eyes glistening and sparkling in the shadows.
And Julia peers down, meeting the rodent’s impudent stare with an insolence all her own, their gaze locking while the girl’s hair seems to bristle and her breath stops short. When she breathes again, it is in quick, soft pants, while the gooseflesh crawls from her neck, across her shoulders, down the length of her damp, tensed body. She is astonished because she is feeling half herself, half “other”—compelled in her attraction to and for the creature below, with a clear sensation of their affinity, yet also with the eerie conviction that not only has she been “recognized” but “challenged.”
That being so, and so it is, she must creep stealthily to the fire escape stairs, make her way down. The metal ladder at the bottom long ago rusted through partway down, so she need drop only eight feet or so, landing with a faint thud on hands and feet.
The rats are a good fifty feet away, but the sound scatters them instantly. On her haunches, breathless, Julia hears nothing, sees nothing move.
She rises, and as she walks with quick, sure step through the rubble, the touch of the damp shirt clinging to her body is unbearable; she loosens it at the neck, slips it over her shoulders, and lets it drop to her feet, stepping out and over it, leaving it there.
Seconds later, secure in the deep shadows, naked, squatting, her back against the ruined wall of the empty, decayed building at the rear of the yard, ten, perhaps twelve feet away from the cans where the rats had scuttled and squeeked and the biggest of them had dared her with insolent eyes, Julia patiently waits.
It is a long wait, the rats cautious and timid, smelling, sensing, knowing her exact position though she has made no sound, not even her breath, and except for her restless eyes, not a single move, not even the smallest muscle.
Encour
aged, or stupid, an old mangy half-tailed rat with one bloody opaque eye rotting away in a pus-rimmed pocket is the first to make an appearance. He must turn his head at a peculiar angle in order to see her, then he backs away, his yellow teeth bared.
Two young rats, lean and muscular, range into view, keenly aware that she’s there but also aware of the comfortable distance between them. Ravenous, so psychotic with hunger they must dizzy themselves running in small mindless circles and crazed angles before they begin again to torture the rim of the overturned can, they pay Julia no heed until, angered, strangely confused by their behavior, she unknowingly shifts her weight, leaning slightly toward them. A bone in a knuckle cracks, and in the instant it cracks, the rats are gone.
But she has only moments to wait: because he comes back, His Lordship . . . King Shit she thinks with the part of her that still thinks, much bigger than most, fattened and muscled on God knows what, scarred and skin-bare in patches where the fur has been torn away in battle, with eyes as empty as the Devil’s . . . rubies faded to pink, glittering and glassy, with more time behind him than man, and probably more of a future, dreaming he’ll live to gnaw on the last man’s bones.
Julia rivets his attention because she has growled; yes, from deep in her chest comes an unmistakable rumble of warning, an answer to his challenge.
He is instantly fixed, poised, bristling with agitation, the tail up, the fur seeming to crackle with electricity, the tiny wet holes of his nose dilated to suck in the air, the long stained teeth bared and chattering with anticipation, the eyes twin pits of fire. Such pomp and splendor! Julia is not at all unimpressed, but it is clear she has some splendor of her own as the blood drains from her face, leaving it pale and luminous, more ectoplasmic in appearance than flesh, while darkness pools into the sockets of her eyes and the eyes themselves match the flashing fire of the rat’s with glints of green and gold.
Dracula's Children Page 5
