by Edie Meidav
Here in Miami the biggest story does happen to be green. As one promoter said right before I lost that crucial match and he dumped me, here football, baseball, and basketball matter more, plus Florida money is too white, boxers black: in New York they support Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, in California they support Mexicans, but here you have the American nightmare, the way it is, sorry, son, and too much sorry son can make a person start to feel foolish.
At lunchtime I go to a little hole of a place on Eighth Street where we have one riqueño joining us, the food islands of grease waiting for any drunkard to think it a good side dish for the all-you-can-eat bread and butter, but nothing matters since a long time ago I gave up the training, not eating fish-head soup and running three miles before six in the morning. Here the coffee makes me buzz as if I’m getting ready before a great fight, the bread like the calm of right after, the cigars making up our afterparty, my coworkers laughing too hard at their own jokes, snaggletoothed, but what else does a new American need?
When I was eight I helped my father haul bags of sugar cane, his unjoke being that he was good for the national company because West African traders chose his great-grandpa for strength. In his time, my father was The Ox, part of why he didn’t like my skinniness, the time when all kids called me Bones, before the system discovered me and I vaulted past him, reflexes my best part. Maybe Jimenez was right in calling me born to box, but tell me any greater camaraderie exists on this earth than eight day laborers in a sunny dive on Calle Ocho, smoking at one in the afternoon, most with at least one beer fizzing, television blaring nonstop videos of Latinas with the faces evangelists love to recruit, girls dancing half-naked with ribbons, our place with a name we’d know blind: The Miami Dream.
What happened during the fight I lost, people sometimes ask. I was fighting an Irishman from Chicago, the reigning champ, and so what if people later criticized me and said I was boring, like a spider in the web, I had my reasons. Come out of Cuba and you can’t help being a technical, inside boxer. Here, in the pros, they want you to push your weight out of your comfort zone. My trainer had me tracing parallelograms on the mat until round six when I went American and knocked the guy out. Even more American in how I strolled the ring with fists up before the last count was struck because when you act like triumph is inevitable, do as Americans do, beat your chest like a happy ape, you claim the match. But then the guy gets up in the last seconds. This throws me and he’s the one knocks me out. Did I make a mistake thinking I had a sure bet? And the contract the banker had with me was that if I lost even one fight, he could cut me, though if I’d started getting big, the banker would have had first option. So here I am, cut, past when any promoter would take me seriously, just laying tile and having coffee, my name Icaro on my American passport. Things could be worse.
There is a joke that people like to tell around here and it goes like this: The Cuban dog swims over and lands in Miami where the American dog greets him with a big lick. The Cuban dog complains to the American dog: I am so hungry.
The American dog says, Well, hombre, you got to get a job so you get money to eat.
The Cuban dog says, Fine, but I am too sick from all the bad water I drank coming over.
The American dog smiles. Here you got to pay the doctor, you got to get a job.
The Cuban doesn’t understand. But how can I if I’m sick?
The American dog gets fed up and says: Look, if you want to complain, why’d you bother leaving Cuba?
The Cuban: Because at least here I can bark.
And that much is true, at least I’m here, barking, Bones with dreams once so big on a map none of us have the guts to pinpoint them anymore.
KOI
A small girl stretches her hand over the splintering rail, throwing food pellets into the water in a peacock-tail burst. Her older friend, daughter of the college’s custodian, knows to savor. You can see her thinking: save up, throw one pellet at a time, wait before throwing the next.
To fish, only the eternity of appetite matters. Below the rickety platform, a ravenous will to power provides strategies to match. You leap over others’ backs to get to any pellet still floating above the mêlée. Small fish circle at the iris, sharp gold zigzags, while a larger fish stabs in, its mouth an O so stretched a smaller one accidentally enters.
That’s how Jonah got swallowed? the small one asks but the older one, Shanya, just shakes her head.
The food comes from a cracked twenty-five-cents-a-turn gumball dispenser placed on the platform, here behind the flower nursery, a whimsical convenience for those with time and pleasure-seeking on their hands, those driving past the college, the pick-your-own apple farm and raspberries and tannin stink of the winery to arrive at this rickety destination for those gratified by the craving of some hundred fish.
In a long-ago season, winter, the koi went torpid, sleeping under the black caul of ice, waiting to spring back once it thaws, a fact the older girl finds easy to believe, palming and warming her two quarters back into life.
After the koi expedition, led by Pint’s mother—Pint the younger girl’s nickname, granted by Shanya—they go to the goat-feeding place.
This semester, Pint lives in a faculty apartment near the supply office where Shanya’s father works. Sunday afternoons, Pint and her mother kept seeing the older girl on a stone wall, nothing in hand, smiling out as college students passed. In this way, the friendship in parallel pursuit of fun had begun, Pint’s mother saying: Let’s go over—she looks nice, doesn’t she?—bring a ball, ask if she wants to play.
Shanya is four years older than Pint, yet another carefully ignored difference; Shanya just eight, Pint four. Pint’s mother aims for bridging, though this question between children of who was born first stays pesky no matter the adult smoothing.
Only recently Pint had come with her parents to live on campus, parents latecomers to the act, surprised out of self-absorption by messy responsibility. Pint is also startled, in her four-year-old way, by the self-absorption of the college students who don’t notice her antics in the dining hall—hammy faces, eyebrows up, eyes sanpakku as Japanese warriors say, whites showing beneath pupils, cherub face turned into a tetragonal Halloween mask. Long ago a grandmother had cooed: She’ll go into theater, a regular Shirley Temple! The college students are too busy losing themselves in desperate restoration of childhood, prone to riding on swings and odd embraces, pulling some girl off her feet, shrieking eros, the pleasure of autoconsumption. Or else they walk about like gifted harbingers of apocalypse, lone cartographers of the poles, sullen with wires in ears connecting them to thanatos, fame, truer audiences. Sometimes Pint wants to imitate them. And sometimes Pint and her mother go through a cloud of smokers and Pint waves her hand in front of her face: It’s bad, Mommy, she reports solemnly, tell them they’ll live younger if they smoke!
After the koi, Shanya and Pint and her mother drive a half mile down to the place where you also slot in quarters in order to feed the goats.
But as the girls kneel there, prayerful, the goats refuse to come. Too jaded, knowing the girls lack pellets, the little dispenser holding just crumbs. Let’s call them? the mother suggests, the girls calling out random names: Nannygoat! Wizard! Kittycat! Billygoat! Cued by one, miraculously the beasts run toward them. Even the goats seem to find it funny. As if in celebration of a thing being called by its name, the big pregnant mama-goat butts her head against the chain link fence, her teeth pulling the zipper to open Shanya’s little pink purse which protects her cellphone, the connection to her father, before backing off.
The girls enterprise. Avoiding grass, handing clover over to the goats’ greedy nuzzles, which goes over big, Shanya especially gentle but forgetting to keep her hand flat. When she gets a little nip, Pint kisses her friend’s hand and says: If I had a gooder bandaid, I’d try fixing you for a million years.
Last stop in their Sunday, they go to the flea market, which, for this small rural town, amounts to an explosion of civic feeling
. Not much has happened all day, not much ever will and within the stillness Shanya moves with deliberation before the stalls, eyed by small-towners whose dormant question moves them with a torpid oily sexiness: Could Shanya be Lucy’s half sister? That telltale shade and hair—a mixed-race child of a different father? Whose loins linked with the mother of these girls? The flea-market sellers shoot looks between girls and the mother, delimiting borders of tribe and gene.
After great deliberation, from a bored lady with crimped bottle-blonde hair, Shanya chooses a rhinestone-studded black velvet purse—one dollar more than the $2 which Pint’s mother had suggested the girls find on cardboard price signs. Pint takes Shanya’s lead and chooses a cuddly bear, also for three dollars, because why see limits? Delaying, they are delaying the end of the day, Shanya trying to teach Pint how to balance a plastic water bottle on her head and whenever she starts a game, the mother cheers, feeling the friendship is no well-meaning, benighted enterprise in a landscape where they have sighted so few younger than first-year college students.
Why’s it easy for Shanya to balance the bottle? asks Pint, looking up at her friend’s hair oil-sheened flat to her head, zigzag-parted into a thick braid at the back, Pint’s lower lip heavy, meaning that in two seconds, she could cry and change the afternoon’s timbre.
I’m older, my head’s bigger, says Shanya. But you’re good at balancing balloons!
When they’re floppy? Before they’re blown up?
We could find a smaller waterbottle for your head, Shanya offers, her charity another staving off of the return to the college, the rite that includes Shanya’s nonchalant goodbye inside the car and the careful gleaning of any goods accrued on this outing, all that was painted, found, given. After, during the car drive away, mother and child back to their pair, Pint asks her mother for braids before her slow drift off to nap, head against the safety strap, global lullabies informing her background.
In Pint’s mother’s childhood, there’d been no safety belts. Hers a town that believed in free speech, busing, and multiculturalism so that early on she’d learned to hate her white face, gone to school with principals named Big Daddy, mastered the Black Panther handshake, been the only paleface in her classes, stayed as silent as she could, avoided as much as she could being beaten up in the halls or on the bus home as much as she avoided the glance of other whitelings, her face like Pint’s so obviously ready to cry. One day her friends Danette, Jocasta, and Tiawanna came over and met her fake-friendly grandmother visiting from Saint Louis. The mother thought the point was to keep trying. She believed in Rosa Parks and Claude Brown as testaments of faith, met and memorized Maya Angelou, learned the Robot, early breakdancing, socialized outside her melanin quotient, got the honor of performing in an African dance group. While nothing really changed the basic quotient: irreparable whiteness.
Now because of limited employment horizons, as someone at the top of the food chain put it, they’d moved to a town which enshrined whiteness. Mail-order catalogs which once seemed so foreign presumed this place, a snowy blanket of ignorance, a plaid neverland impossible to imagine in the town she had grown up in, where as she grew in height so did shame about melanin deprivation.
At the flea market, delaying their Sunday goodbye, by the side of the parking lot, the mother starts a game with rocks and sticks: a story about an enchanted forest, one Shanya likes, all of them using high squeaky voices in what is also Pint’s favorite game. We’re playing puppet! Pint tells her mother.
So lost in puppet they don’t notice him at first. A beef hock of a man come over, one of the oversize boys in their fifties you see riding 3K lawnmowers on tracts of land with new seams, farmland quilt being turned inside out to become lawn surrounding cookie-cutter gray colonials with large chandeliered master entrances, sheds, playrooms + dens, two-car garages and avant-garde washing machine–cum-dryer, all with room for a growing family!—the whole of it making Pint’s mother hunger for the pretend solidity. Schooled by old sympathies, she suppresses house-lust. She has heard the last of the old family farmers bemoaning the newcomers and loss of the old ways, the farm survivors turning themselves into pick-your-own places and quaint fruit-stands for the new consuming city crowd, purveying nostalgia to keep up income and a shred of family tradition.
Beefhock stands over them, casting a cow-size shadow over their game, and the mother squints up at the aurora behind him. Does she know him? Impossible.
Without preamble, he cuts in, slowly, measuring honey and spite: Who’s this cute brown girl? directing the question solely at the mother, tongue suggestive, flicked out over his lips before lolling again.
Spines stiffen. Girl. Even Pint knows to brace herself, water bottle falling out of her grasp and into the rutted mud next to the man. The crimped-blonde lady seller heaves herself out of her stall, slowly, in a state of permanent regret—loves unreceived, ungiven—to make a big show of handing the bottle back to Pint.
Perhaps the man’s voice gives them pause: a man used to making discomfort arrive on cue. The mother’s tongue also stiffens but trained in certain scripts manages to say: My daughter, placing her hand on Shanya’s shoulder. Why? she continues. You know her?
At which the man swishes saliva inside that big cavern of a mouth, choosing not to spit. He backs off, retreating to a private clannish tailgate party with someone who might as well be his twin, against a truck large as a baby dinosaur, spitting again but manacled by pride: he won’t try again. The eyes, however, are loud: slut. Easy to imagine his planning of intricate rapes, methodical, bringing lighter fluid, rope. But the moment has passed, they are practically safe; Pint managing to balance the waterbottle for one nanosecond before they get back inside the walls of their car.
Shanya knew more or may be just in the habit of questioning nothing. When she said goodbye, for the first time, goods clutched to her chest with one hand, she actually held Pint’s mother’s hand, the grasp warm and dropped just as quickly.
While once Shanya leaves, Pint asks, lower lip trembling, rejecting the idea of being replaced: Did her own mother claim Shanya as a daughter?
And if the mother were actually to answer the question, where to begin? Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Hagar, sons of Ham, Anansi stories, Ottoman power, traders, colonial economies, political decisions, cities, infrastructure, American variations on injustice and inequity? Instead with one hand she inserts the lullaby disk, hoping for the soporific of a drive through the farmland’s golden divine.
The next time they see each other, Shanya gives Pint a book she has written about a girl named Shanya who comes not to be afraid of the magic forest in which Pint and her mommy and daddy live, and all of them together discover the magic treasure and gold coins and become famous because only they discovered it!!! And though people used to be scared of the magic forest, now all people feel grateful to the five of them plus Papa Willie and they all stay famous famous and then magically become presidents of a college for both humans and fairies!
Each weekend Shanya descends to the school with her father, driving more than an hour for him to help the college, servicing entitled students who have lost keys and have urgent needs to heft boxes of technology or keep bikes locked on campus over the summer, kids spilling libido into careless late-night parties, all rim and periphery of the most memorable moments of their lives to be stroked forever in a future papered by alumni requests. They’ll belong to this place.
If Shanya’s father has a college degree, he’s mum. A bit old, possibly Shanya’s grandfather, though Shanya calls him Papa or sometimes Papa Willie; gray creeps through his beard. He’s seen his share. What he shows Pint’s mother is a rough regard, though, as part of his success at the college, friendly enough, he nonetheless gives away zilch. Willie will go so far as to ask how they’d been, or to say he was sorry that Shanya wasn’t around. This weekend she’s with family, he’d say, a scar traveling down one cheek with its own silencing seam, a credible working man with the stern unquestionable being his love f
or Shanya and how well she lives in its embrace.
After the flea market day, Pint’s mother returns to this: that Willie’s granddaughter had sat semi-attended for hours on the stone wall across from the janitorial office, doing nothing. The girl had no book or ball and seemed as if she could use a little diversion. Hours must have been spent as Pint and her mother drove off to pastimes before returning to this sweet-faced girl still watching students file past, earphones hooking them to the mothership, glances flickering significant nihilism.
Those early days, Shanya had been polite, thankful, eager to watch even their small-kid, positive-spin, we-all-get-along videos, sharing in the family’s odd Friday night customs, the candles and grape juice.
After Pint’s father got promoted, her mother found a more secure job at the college. Summer they left to see family and friends. In August, only the idea of Shanya helped lure Pint back on the plane east, leaving cousins and friends and delicate weather, heading back to August’s steam, the rural college and overheated town. Now they need her even more. On the way back to the college, Pint says: Shanya is my best friend.
