by Junot Díaz
I bet this isn’t something you’ve eaten lately, she’d say.
I’d shake my head and Yennifer, who was eighteen and bleached her hair, would say, Leave him alone, Mamá.
Tía also had a penchant for uttering cryptic one-liners about my father, usually after she’d downed a couple of shots of Brugal.
He took too much.
If only your mother could have noticed his true nature earlier.
He should see how he has left you.
The weeks couldn’t pass quickly enough. At night I went down by the water to be alone but that wasn’t possible. Not with the tourists making apes out of themselves, and with the tígueres waiting to rob them.
Las Tres Marías, I pointed out to myself in the sky. They were the only stars I knew.
But then one day I’d walk into the house from swimming and Mami and Rafa would be in the living room, holding glasses of sweet lemon-milk.
You’re back, I’d say, trying to hide the excitement in my voice.
I hope he behaved himself, Mami would be saying to Tía. Her hair would be cut, her nails painted; she’d have on the same red dress she wore on every one of her outings.
Rafa smiling, slapping me on the shoulder, darker than I’d last seen him. How ya doing, Yunior? You miss me or what?
I’d sit next to him and he’d put his arm around me and we’d listen to Tía telling Mami how well I behaved and all the different things I’d eaten.
3.
The year Papi came for us, the year I was nine, we expected nothing. There were no signs to speak of. Dominican chocolate was not especially in demand that season and the Puerto Rican owners laid off the majority of the employees for a couple of months. Good for the owners, un desastre for us. After that, Mami was around the house all the time. Unlike Rafa, who hid his shit well, I was always in trouble. From punching out Wilfredo to chasing somebody’s chickens until they passed out from exhaustion. Mami wasn’t a hitter; she preferred having me kneel on pebbles with my face against a wall. On the afternoon that the letter arrived, she caught me trying to stab our mango tree with Abuelo’s machete. Back to the corner. Abuelo was supposed to make sure I served my ten minutes but he was too busy whittling to bother. He let me up after three minutes and I hid in the bedroom until he said, OK, in a voice that Mami could hear. Then I went to the smokehouse, rubbing my knees, and Mami looked up from peeling platanos.
You better learn, muchacho, or you’ll be kneeling the rest of your life.
I watched the rain that had been falling all day. No, I won’t, I told her.
You talking back to me?
She whacked me on the nalgas and I ran outside to look for Wilfredo. I found him under the eaves of his house, the wind throwing pieces of rain onto his dark-dark face. We shook hands elaborately. I called him Muhammad Ali and he called me Sinbad; these were our Northamerican names. We were both in shorts; a disintegrating pair of sandals clung to his toes.
What you got? I asked him.
Boats, he said, holding up the paper wedges his father had folded for us. This one’s mine.
What does the winner get?
A gold trophy, about this big.
OK, cabrón, I’m in. Don’t let go before me.
OK, he said, stepping to the other side of the gutter. We had a clear run down to the street corner. No cars were parked on our side, except for a drowned Monarch and there was plenty of room between its tires and the curb for us to navigate through.
We completed five runs before I noticed that somebody had parked their battered motorcycle in front of my house.
Who’s that? Wilfredo asked me, dropping his soggy boat into the water again.
I don’t know, I said.
Go find out.
I was already on my way. The motorcycle driver came out before I could reach our front door. He mounted quickly and was gone in a cloud of exhaust.
Mami and Abuelo were on the back patio, conver-sating. Abuelo was angry and his cane-cutter’s hands were clenched. I hadn’t seen Abuelo bravo in a long time, not since his produce truck had been stolen by two of his old employees.
Go outside, Mami told me.
Who was that?
Did I tell you something?
Was that somebody we know?
Outside, Mami said, her voice a murder about to happen.
What’s wrong? Wilfredo asked me when I rejoined him. His nose was starting to run.
I don’t know, I said.
When Rafa showed himself an hour later, swaggering in from a game of pool, I’d already tried to speak to Mami and Abuelo like five times. The last time, Mami had landed a slap on my neck and Wilfredo told me that he could see the imprints of her fingers on my skin. I told it all to Rafa.
That doesn’t sound good. He threw out his guttering cigarette. You wait here. He went around the back and I heard his voice and then Mami’s. No yelling, no argument.
Come on, he said. She wants us to wait in our room.
Why?
That’s what she said. You want me to tell her no?
Not while she’s mad.
Exactly.
I slapped Wilfredo’s hand and walked in the front door with Rafa. What’s going on?
She got a letter from Papi.
Really? Is there money?
No.
What does it say?
How should I know?
He sat down on his side of the bed and produced a pack of cigarettes. I watched him go through the elaborate ritual of lighting up—the flip of the thin cigarrillo into his lips and then the spark, a single practiced snap of the thumb.
Where’d you get that lighter?
Mi novia gave it to me.
Tell her to give me one.
Here. He tossed it to me. You can have it if you shut up.
Yeah?
See. He reached to take it. You already lost it.
I shut my mouth and he settled back down on the bed.
Hey, Sinbad, Wilfredo said, his head appearing in our window. What’s going on?
My father wrote us a letter!
Rafa rapped me on the side of my head. This is a family affair, Yunior. Don’t blab it all over the place.
Wilfredo smiled. I ain’t going to tell anybody.
Of course you’re not, Rafa said. Because if you do I’ll chop your fucking head off.
I tried to wait it out. Our room was nothing more than a section of the house that Abuelo had partitioned off with planks of wood. In one corner Mami kept an altar with candles and a cigar in a stone mortar and a glass of water and two toy soldiers we could not touch ever and above the bed hung our mosquito netting, poised to drop on us like a net. I lay back and listened to the rain brushing back and forth across our zinc roof.
Mami served dinner, watched as we ate it, and then ordered us back into our room. I’d never seen her so blank-faced, so stiff, and when I tried to hug her she pushed me away. Back to bed, she said. Back to listening to the rain. I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up Rafa was looking at me pensively and it was dark outside and nobody else in the house was awake.
I read the letter, he told me quietly. He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, his ribs laddering his chest in shadows. Papi says he’s coming.
Really?
Don’t believe it.
Why?
It ain’t the first time he’s made that promise, Yunior.
Oh, I said.
Outside Señora Tejada started singing to herself, badly.
Rafa?
Yeah?
I didn’t know you could read.
I was nine and couldn’t even write my own name.
Yeah, he said quietly. Something I picked up. Now go to bed.
4.
Rafa was right. It wasn’t the first time. Two years after he left, Papi wrote her saying he was coming for us and like an innocent Mami believed him. After being alone for two years she was ready to believe anything. She showed everybody his letter and even spoke to him on the phone
. He wasn’t an easy man to reach but on this occasion she got through and he reassured her that yes, he was coming. His word was his bond. He even spoke to us, something that Rafa vaguely remembers, a lot of crap about how much he loved us and that we should take care of Mami.
She prepared a party, even lined up to have a goat there for the slaughtering. She bought me and Rafa new clothes and when he didn’t show she sent everybody home, sold the goat back to its owner and then almost lost her mind. I remember the heaviness of that month, thicker than almost anything. When Abuelo tried to reach our father at the phone numbers he’d left none of the men who’d lived with him knew anything about where he had gone.
It didn’t help matters that me and Rafa kept asking her when we were leaving for the States, when Papi was coming. I am told that I wanted to see his picture almost every day. It’s hard for me to imagine myself this way, crazy about Papi. When she refused to show me the photos I threw myself about like I was on fire. And I screamed. Even as a boy my voice carried farther than a man’s, turned heads on the street.
First Mami tried slapping me quiet but that did little. Then she locked me in my room where my brother told me to cool it but I shook my head and screamed louder. I was inconsolable. I learned to tear my clothes because this was the one thing I had whose destruction hurt my mother. She took all my shirts from my room, left me only with shorts which were hard to damage with bare fingers. I pulled a nail from our wall and punched a dozen holes in each pair, until Rafa cuffed me and said, Enough, you little puto.
Mami spent a lot of time out of the house, at work or down by the Malecón, where she could watch the waves shred themselves against the rocks, where men offered cigarettes that she smoked quietly. I don’t know how long this went on. Months, maybe three. Then, one morning in early spring, when the amapolas were flushed with their flame leaves, I woke up and found Abuelo alone in the house.
She’s gone, he said. So cry all you want, malcriado.
I learned later from Rafa that she was in Ocoa with our tíos.
Mami’s time away was never discussed, then or now. When she returned to us, five weeks later, she was thinner and darker and her hands were heavy with calluses. She looked younger, like the girl who had arrived in Santo Domingo fifteen years before, burning to be married. Her friends came and sat and talked and when Papi’s name was mentioned her eyes dimmed and when his name left, the darkness of her ojos returned and she would laugh, a small personal thunder that cleared the air.
She didn’t treat me badly on her return but we were no longer as close; she did not call me her Prieto or bring me chocolates from her work. That seemed to suit her fine. And I was young enough to grow out of her rejection. I still had baseball and my brother. I still had trees to climb and lizards to tear apart.
5.
The week after the letter came I watched her from my trees. She ironed cheese sandwiches in paper bags for our lunch, boiled platanos for our dinner. Our dirty clothes were pounded clean in the concrete trough on the side of the outhouse. Every time she thought I was scrabbling too high in the branches she called me back to the ground. You ain’t Spiderman, you know, she said, rapping the top of my head with her knuckles. On the afternoons that Wilfredo’s father came over to play dominos and talk politics, she sat with him and Abuelo and laughed at their campo stories. She seemed more normal to me but I was careful not to provoke her. There was still something volcanic about the way she held herself.
On Saturday a late hurricane passed close to the Capital and the next day folks were talking about how high the waves were down by the Malecón. Some children had been lost, swept out to sea and Abuelo shook his head when he heard the news. You’d think the sea would be sick of us by now, he said.
That Sunday Mami gathered us on the back patio. We’re taking a day off, she announced. A day for us as a family.
We don’t need a day off, I said and Rafa hit me harder than normal.
Shut up, OK?
I tried to hit him back but Abuelo grabbed us both by the arm. Don’t make me have to crack your heads open, he said.
She dressed and put her hair up and even paid for a concho instead of crowding us into an autobus. The driver actually wiped the seats down with a towel while we waited and I said to him, It don’t look dirty, and he said, Believe me, muchacho, it is. Mami looked beautiful and many of the men she passed wanted to know where she was heading. We couldn’t afford it but she paid for a movie anyway. The Five Deadly Venoms. Kung fu movies were the only ones the theaters played in those days. I sat between Mami and Abuelo. Rafa moved to the back, joining a group of boys who were smoking, and arguing with them about some baseball player on Licey.
After the show Mami bought us flavored ices and while we ate them we watched the salamanders crawling around on the searocks. The waves were tremendous and some parts of George Washington were flooded and cars were churning through the water slowly.
A man in a red guayabera stopped by us. He lit a cigarette and turned to my mother, his collar turned up by the wind. So where are you from?
Santiago, she answered.
Rafa snorted.
You must be visiting relatives then.
Yes, she said. My husband’s family.
He nodded. He was dark-skinned, with light-colored spots about his neck and hands. His fingers trembled slightly as he worked the cigarette to his lips. I hoped he’d drop his cigarette, just so I could see what the ocean would do to it. We had to wait almost a full minute before he said buenos días and walked away.
What a crazy, Abuelo said.
Rafa lifted up his fist. You should have given me the signal. I would have kung-fu-punched him in the head.
Your father came at me better than that, Mami said.
Abuelo stared down at the back of his hands, at the long white hairs that covered them. He looked embarrassed.
Your father asked me if I wanted a cigarette and then he gave me the whole pack to show me that he was a big man.
I held on to the rail. Here?
Oh no, she said. She turned around and looked out over the traffic. That part of the city isn’t here anymore.
6.
Rafa used to think that he’d come in the night, like Jesus, that one morning we’d find him at our breakfast table, unshaven and smiling. Too real to be believed. He’ll be taller, Rafa predicted. Northamerican food makes people that way. He’d surprise Mami on her way back from work, pick her up in a German car. Say nothing to the man walking her home. She would not know what to say and neither would he. They’d drive down to the Malecón and he’d take her to see a movie, because that’s how they met and that’s how he’d want to start it again.
I would see him coming from my trees. A man with swinging hands and eyes like mine. He’d have gold on his fingers, cologne on his neck, a silk shirt, good leather shoes. The whole barrio would come out to greet him. He’d kiss Mami and Rafa and shake Abuelo’s reluctant hand and then he’d see me behind everyone else. What’s wrong with that one? he’d ask and Mami would say, He doesn’t know you. Squatting down so that his pale yellow dress socks showed, he’d trace the scars on my arms and on my head. Yunior, he’d finally say, his stubbled face in front of mine, his thumb tracing a circle on my cheek.
DROWN
My mother tells me Beto’s home, waits for me to say something, but I keep watching the TV. Only when she’s in bed do I put on my jacket and swing through the neighborhood to see. He’s a pato now but two years ago we were friends and he would walk into the apartment without knocking, his heavy voice rousing my mother from the Spanish of her room and drawing me up from the basement, a voice that crackled and made you think of uncles or grandfathers.
We were raging then, crazy the way we stole, broke windows, the way we pissed on people’s steps and then challenged them to come out and stop us. Beto was leaving for college at the end of the summer and was delirious from the thought of it—he hated everything about the neighborhood, the break-apart buildings, th
e little strips of grass, the piles of garbage around the cans, and the dump, especially the dump.
I don’t know how you can do it, he said to me. I would just find me a job anywhere and go.
Yeah, I said. I wasn’t like him. I had another year to go in high school, no promises elsewhere.
Days we spent in the mall or out in the parking lot playing stickball, but nights were what we waited for. The heat in the apartments was like something heavy that had come inside to die. Families arranged on their porches, the glow from their TVs washing blue against the brick. From my family apartment you could smell the pear trees that had been planted years ago, four to a court, probably to save us all from asphyxiation. Nothing moved fast, even the daylight was slow to fade, but as soon as night settled Beto and I headed down to the community center and sprang the fence into the pool. We were never alone, every kid with legs was there. We lunged from the boards and swam out of the deep end, wrestling and farting around. At around midnight abuelas, with their night hair swirled around spiky rollers, shouted at us from their apartment windows. ¡Sinvergüenzas! Go home!
I pass his apartment but the windows are dark; I put my ear to the busted-up door and hear only the familiar hum of the air conditioner. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll talk to him. I can go back to my dinner and two years will become three.
Even from four blocks off I can hear the racket from the pool—radios too—and wonder if we were ever that loud. Little has changed, not the stink of chlorine, not the bottles exploding against the lifeguard station. I hook my fingers through the plastic-coated hurricane fence. Something tells me that he will be here; I hop the fence, feeling stupid when I sprawl on the dandelions and the grass.
Nice one, somebody calls out.
Fuck me, I say. I’m not the oldest motherfucker in the place, but it’s close. I take off my shirt and my shoes and then knife in. Many of the kids here are younger brothers of the people I used to go to school with. Two of them swim past, black and Latino, and they pause when they see me, recognizing the guy who sells them their shitty dope. The crackheads have their own man, Lucero, and some other guy who drives in from Paterson, the only full-time commuter in the area.
