by Junot Díaz
Because I’m hungry, he says, taking a big bite out.
LUCERO
I would have named it after you, she said. She folded my shirt and put it on the kitchen counter. Nothing in the apartment, only us naked and some beer and half a pizza, cold and greasy. You’re named after a star.
This was before I knew about the kid. She kept going on like that and finally I said, What the fuck are you talking about?
She picked the shirt up and folded it again, patting it down like this had taken her some serious effort. I’m telling you something. Something about me. What you should be doing is listening.
I COULD SAVE YOU
I find her outside the Quick Check, hot with a fever. She wants to go to the Hacienda but not alone. Come on, she says, her palm on my shoulder.
Are you in trouble?
Fuck that. I just want company.
I know I should just go home. The cops bust the Hacienda about twice a year, like it’s a holiday. Today could be my lucky day. Today could be our lucky day.
You don’t have to come inside. Just hang with me a little.
If something inside of me is saying no, why do I say, Yeah, sure?
We walk up to Route 9 and wait for the other side to clear. Cars buzz past and a new Pontiac swerves towards us, a scare, streetlights flowing back over its top, but we’re too lifted to flinch. The driver’s blond and laughing and we give him the finger. We watch the cars and above us the sky has gone the color of pumpkins. I haven’t seen her in ten days, but she’s steady, her hair combed back straight, like she’s back in school or something. My mom’s getting married, she says.
To that radiator guy?
No, some other guy. Owns a car wash.
That’s real nice. She’s lucky for her age.
You want to come with me to the wedding?
I put my cigarette out. Why can’t I see us there? Her smoking in the bathroom and me dealing to the groom. I don’t know about that.
My mom sent me money to buy a dress.
You still got it?
Of course I got it. She looks and sounds hurt so I kiss her. Maybe next week I’ll go look at dresses. I want something that’ll make me look good. Something that’ll make my ass look good.
We head down a road for utility vehicles, where beer bottles grow out of the weeds like squashes. The Hacienda is past this road, a house with orange tiles on the roof and yellow stucco on the walls. The boards across the windows are as loose as old teeth, the bushes around the front big and mangy like Afros. When the cops nailed her here last year she told them she was looking for me, that we were supposed to be going to a movie together. I wasn’t within ten miles of the place. Those pigs must have laughed their asses off. A movie. Of course. When they asked her what movie she couldn’t even come up with one.
I want you to wait out here, she says.
That’s fine by me. The Hacienda’s not my territory.
Aurora rubs a finger over her chin. Don’t go nowhere.
Just hurry your ass up.
I will. She put her hands in her purple windbreaker.
Make it fast Aurora.
I just got to have a word with somebody, she says and I’m thinking how easy it would be for her to turn around and say, Hey, let’s go home. I’d put my arm around her and I wouldn’t let her go for like fifty years, maybe not ever. I know people who quit just like that, who wake up one day with bad breath and say, No more. I’ve had enough. She smiles at me and jogs around the corner, the ends of her hair falling up and down on her neck. I make myself a shadow against the bushes and listen for the Dodges and the Chevys that stop in the next parking lot, for the walkers that come rolling up with their hands in their pockets. I hear everything. A bike chain rattling. TVs snapping on in nearby apartments, squeezing ten voices into a room. After an hour the traffic on Route 9 has slowed and you can hear the cars roaring on from as far up as the Ernston light. Everybody knows about this house; people come from all over.
I’m sweating. I walk down to the utility road and come back. Come on, I say. An old fuck in a green sweat suit comes out of the Hacienda, his hair combed up into a salt-and-pepper torch. An abuelo type, the sort who yells at you for spitting on his sidewalk. He has this smile on his face—big, wide, shit-eating. I know all about the nonsense that goes on in these houses, the ass that gets sold, the beasting.
Hey, I say and when he sees me, short, dark, unhappy, he breaks. He throws himself against his car door. Come here, I say. I walk over to him slow, my hand out in front of me like I’m armed. I just want to ask you something. He slides down to the ground, his arms out, fingers spread, hands like starfishes. I step on his ankle but he doesn’t yell. He has his eyes closed, his nostrils wide. I grind down hard but he doesn’t make a sound.
WHILE YOU WERE GONE
She sent me three letters from juvie and none of them said much, three pages of bullshit. She talked about the food and how rough the sheets were, how she woke up ashy in the morning, like it was winter. Three months and I still haven’t had my period. The doctor here tells me it’s my nerves. Yeah, right. I’d tell you about the other girls (there’s a lot to tell) but they rip those letters up. I hope you doing good. Don’t think bad about me. And don’t let anybody sell my dogs either.
Her tía Fresa held on to the first letters for a couple of weeks before turning them over to me, unopened. Just tell me if she’s OK or not, Fresa said. That’s about as much as I want to know.
She sounds OK to me.
Good. Don’t tell me anything else.
You should at least write her.
She put her hands on my shoulders and leaned down to my ear. You write her.
I wrote but I can’t remember what I said to her, except that the cops had come after her neighbor for stealing somebody’s car and that the gulls were shitting on everything. After the second letter I didn’t write anymore and it didn’t feel wrong or bad. I had a lot to keep me busy.
She came home in September and by then we had the Pathfinder in the parking lot and a new Zenith in the living room. Stay away from her, Cut said. Luck like that don’t get better.
No sweat, I said. You know I got the iron will.
People like her got addictive personalities. You don’t want to be catching that.
We stayed apart a whole weekend but on Monday I was coming home from Pathmark with a gallon of milk when I heard, Hey macho. I turned around and there she was, out with her dogs. She was wearing a black sweater, black stirrup pants and old black sneakers. I thought she’d come out messed up but she was just thinner and couldn’t keep still, her hands and face restless, like kids you have to watch.
How are you? I kept asking and she said, Just put your hands on me. We started to walk and the more we talked the faster we went.
Do this, she said. I want to feel your fingers.
She had mouth-sized bruises on her neck. Don’t worry about them. They ain’t contagious.
I can feel your bones.
She laughed. I can feel them too.
If I had half a brain I would have done what Cut told me to do. Dump her sorry ass. When I told him we were in love he laughed. I’m the King of Bullshit, he said, and you just hit me with some, my friend.
We found an empty apartment out near the highway, left the dogs and the milk outside. You know how it is when you get back with somebody you’ve loved. It felt better than it ever was, better than it ever could be again. After, she drew on the walls with her lipstick and her nail polish, stick men and stick women boning.
What was it like in there? I asked. Me and Cut drove past one night and it didn’t look good. We honked the horn for a long time, you know, thought maybe you’d hear.
She sat up and looked at me. It was a cold-ass stare.
We were just hoping.
I hit a couple of girls, she said. Stupid girls. That was a big mistake. The staff put me in the Quiet Room. Eleven days the first time. Fourteen after that. That’s the sort of shit that you can�
��t get used to, no matter who you are. She looked at her drawings. I made up this whole new life in there. You should have seen it. The two of us had kids, a big blue house, hobbies, the whole fucking thing.
She ran her nails over my side. A week from then she would be asking me again, begging actually, telling me all the good things we’d do and after a while I hit her and made the blood come out of her ear like a worm but right then, in that apartment, we seemed like we were normal folks. Like maybe everything was fine.
AGUANTANDO
1.
I lived without a father for the first nine years of my life. He was in the States, working, and the only way I knew him was through the photographs my moms kept in a plastic sandwich bag under her bed. Since our zinc roof leaked, almost everything we owned was water-stained: our clothes, Mami’s Bible, her makeup, whatever food we had, Abuelo’s tools, our cheap wooden furniture. It was only because of that plastic bag that any pictures of my father survived.
When I thought of Papi I thought of one shot specifically. Taken days before the U.S. invasion: 1965. I wasn’t even alive then; Mami had been pregnant with my first never-born brother and Abuelo could still see well enough to hold a job. You know the sort of photograph I’m talking about. Scalloped edges, mostly brown in color. On the back my moms’s cramped handwriting—the date, his name, even the street, one over from our house. He was dressed in his Guardia uniform, his tan cap at an angle on his shaved head, an unlit Constitución squeezed between his lips. His dark unsmiling eyes were my own.
I did not think of him often. He had left for Nueva York when I was four but since I couldn’t remember a single moment with him I excused him from all nine years of my life. On the days I had to imagine him—not often, since Mami didn’t much speak of him anymore—he was the soldier in the photo. He was a cloud of cigar smoke, the traces of which could still be found on the uniforms he’d left behind. He was pieces of my friends’ fathers, of the domino players on the corner, pieces of Mami and Abuelo. I didn’t know him at all. I didn’t know that he’d abandoned us. That this waiting for him was all a sham.
We lived south of the Cementerio Nacional in a wood-frame house with three rooms. We were poor. The only way we could have been poorer was to have lived in the campo or to have been Haitian immigrants, and Mami regularly offered these to us as brutal consolation.
At least you’re not in the campo. You’d eat rocks then.
We didn’t eat rocks but we didn’t eat meat or beans, either. Almost everything on our plates was boiled: boiled yuca, boiled platano, boiled guineo, maybe with a piece of cheese or a shred of bacalao. On the best days the cheese and the platanos were fried. When me and Rafa caught our annual case of worms it was only by skimping on our dinners that Mami could afford to purchase the Verminox. I can’t remember how many times I crouched over our latrine, my teeth clenched, watching long gray parasites slide out from between my legs.
At Mauricio Baez, our school, the kids didn’t bother us too much, even though we couldn’t afford the uniforms or proper mascotas. The uniforms Mami could do nothing about but with the mascotas she improvised, sewing together sheets of loose paper she had collected from her friends. We each had one pencil and if we lost that pencil, like I did once, we had to stay home from school until Mami could borrow another one for us. Our profesor had us share school books with some of the other kids and these kids wouldn’t look at us, tried to hold their breath when we were close to them.
Mami worked at Embajador Chocolate, putting in ten-, twelve-hour shifts for almost no money at all. She woke up every morning at seven and I got up with her because I could never sleep late, and while she drew the water out of our steel drum I brought the soap from the kitchen. There were always leaves and spiders in the water but Mami could draw a clean bucket better than anyone. She was a tiny woman and in the water closet she looked even smaller, her skin dark and her hair surprisingly straight and across her stomach and back the scars from the rocket attack she’d survived in 1965. None of the scars showed when she wore clothes, though if you embraced her you’d feel them hard under your wrist, against the soft part of your palm.
Abuelo was supposed to watch us while Mami was at work but usually he was visiting with his friends or out with his trap. A few years back, when the rat problem in the barrio had gotten out of hand (Those malditos were running off with kids, Abuelo told me), he had built himself a trap. A destroyer. He never charged anyone for using it, something Mami would have done; his only commission was that he be the one to arm the steel bar. I’ve seen this thing chop off fingers, he explained to the borrowers but in truth he just liked having something to do, a job of some kind. In our house alone Abuelo had killed a dozen rats and in one house on Tunti, forty of these motherfuckers were killed during a two-night massacre. He spent both nights with the Tunti people, resetting the trap and burning the blood and when he came back he was grinning and tired, his white hair everywhere, and my mother had said, You look like you’ve been out getting ass.
Without Abuelo around, me and Rafa did anything we wanted. Mostly Rafa hung out with his friends and I played with our neighbor Wilfredo. Sometimes I climbed trees. There wasn’t a tree in the barrio I couldn’t climb and on some days I spent entire afternoons in our trees, watching the barrio in motion and when Abuelo was around (and awake) he talked to me about the good old days, when a man could still make a living from his finca, when the United States wasn’t something folks planned on.
Mami came home after sunset, just when the day’s worth of drinking was starting to turn some of the neighbors wild. Our barrio was not the safest of places and Mami usually asked one of her co-workers to accompany her home. These men were young, and some of them were unmarried. Mami let them walk her but she never invited them into the house. She barred the door with her arm while she said good-bye, just to show them that nobody was getting in. Mami might have been skinny, a bad thing on the Island, but she was smart and funny and that’s hard to find anywhere. Men were drawn to her. From my perch I’d watched more than one of these Porfirio Rubirosas say, See you tomorrow, and then park his ass across the street just to see if she was playing hard to get. Mami never knew these men were there and after about fifteen minutes of staring expectantly at the front of our house even the loneliest of these fulanos put their hats on and went home.
We could never get Mami to do anything after work, even cook dinner, if she didn’t first sit awhile in her rocking chair. She didn’t want to hear nothing about our problems, the scratches we’d put into our knees, who said what. She’d sit on the back patio with her eyes closed and let the bugs bite mountains onto her arms and legs. Sometimes I climbed the guanábana tree and when she’d open her eyes and catch me smiling down on her, she’d close them again and I would drop twigs onto her until she laughed.
2.
When times were real flojo, when the last colored bill flew out Mami’s purse, she packed us off to our relatives. She’d use Wilfredo’s father’s phone and make the calls early in the morning. Lying next to Rafa, I’d listen to her soft unhurried requests and pray for the day that our relatives would tell her to vete pa’l carajo but that never happened in Santo Domingo.
Usually Rafa stayed with our tíos in Ocoa and I went to tía Miranda’s in Boca Chica. Sometimes we both went to Ocoa. Neither Boca Chica nor Ocoa were far but I never wanted to go and it normally took hours of cajoling before I agreed to climb on the autobus.
How long? I asked Mami truculently.
Not long, she promised me, examining the scabs on the back of my shaved head. A week. Two at the most.
How many days is that?
Ten, twenty.
You’ll be fine, Rafa told me, spitting into the gutter.
How do you know? You a brujo?
Yeah, he said, smiling, that’s me.
He didn’t mind going anywhere; he was at that age when all he wanted was to be away from the family, meeting people he had not grown up with.
Everybod
y needs a vacation, Abuelo explained happily. Enjoy yourself. You’ll be down by the water. And just think about all the food you’ll eat.
I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent. On the ride to Boca Chica I was always too depressed to notice the ocean, the young boys fishing and selling cocos by the side of the road, the surf exploding into the air like a cloud of shredded silver.
Tía Miranda had a nice block house, with a shingled roof and a tiled floor that her cats had trouble negotiating. She had a set of matching furniture and a television and faucets that worked. All her neighbors were administrators and hombres de negocios and you had to walk three blocks to find any sort of colmado. It was that sort of neighborhood. The ocean was never far away and most of the time I was down by the beach playing with the local kids, turning black in the sun.
Tía wasn’t really related to Mami; she was my madrina, which was why she took me and my brother in every now and then. No money, though. She never loaned money to anyone, even to her drunkard of an ex-husband, and Mami must have known because she never asked. Tía was about fifty and rail-thin and couldn’t put anything in her hair to make it forget itself; her perms never lasted more than a week before the enthusiasm of her kink returned. She had two kids of her own, Yennifer and Bienvenido, but she didn’t dote on them the way she doted on me. Her lips were always on me and during meals she watched me like she was waiting for the poison to take effect.
