Drown

by Junot Díaz

  Wait and after an hour go out to your corner. The neighborhood is full of traffic. Give one of your boys a shout and when he says, Are you still waiting on that bitch? say, Hell yeah.

  Get back inside. Call her house and when her father picks up ask if she’s there. He’ll ask, Who is this? Hang up. He sounds like a principal or a police chief, the sort of dude with a big neck, who never has to watch his back. Sit and wait. By the time your stomach’s ready to give out on you, a Honda or maybe a Jeep pulls in and out she comes.

  Hey, you’ll say.

  Look, she’ll say. My mom wants to meet you. She’s got herself all worried about nothing.

  Don’t panic. Say, Hey, no problem. Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa. She will look good. The white ones are the ones you want the most, aren’t they, but usually the out-of-towners are black, blackgirls who grew up with ballet and Girl Scouts, who have three cars in their driveways. If she’s a halfie don’t be surprised that her mother is white. Say, Hi. Her moms will say hi and you’ll see that you don’t scare her, not really. She will say that she needs easier directions to get out and even though she has the best directions in her lap give her new ones. Make her happy.

  You have choices. If the girl’s from around the way, take her to El Cibao for dinner. Order everything in your busted-up Spanish. Let her correct you if she’s Latina and amaze her if she’s black. If she’s not from around the way, Wendy’s will do. As you walk to the restaurant talk about school. A local girl won’t need stories about the neighborhood but the other ones might. Supply the story about the loco who’d been storing canisters of tear gas in his basement for years, how one day the canisters cracked and the whole neighborhood got a dose of the military-strength stuff. Don’t tell her that your moms knew right away what it was, that she recognized its smell from the year the United States invaded your island.

  Hope that you don’t run into your nemesis, Howie, the Puerto Rican kid with the two killer mutts. He walks them all over the neighborhood and every now and then the mutts corner themselves a cat and tear it to shreds, Howie laughing as the cat flips up in the air, its neck twisted around like an owl, red meat showing through the soft fur. If his dogs haven’t cornered a cat, he will walk behind you and ask, Hey, Yunior, is that your new fuckbuddy?

  Let him talk. Howie weighs about two hundred pounds and could eat you if he wanted. At the field he will turn away. He has new sneakers, and doesn’t want them muddy. If the girl’s an outsider she will hiss now and say, What a fucking asshole. A homegirl would have been yelling back at him the whole time, unless she was shy. Either way don’t feel bad that you didn’t do anything. Never lose a fight on a first date or that will be the end of it.

  Dinner will be tense. You are not good at talking to people you don’t know. A halfie will tell you that her parents met in the Movement, will say, Back then people thought it a radical thing to do. It will sound like something her parents made her memorize. Your brother once heard that one and said, Man, that sounds like a whole lot of Uncle Tomming to me. Don’t repeat this.

  Put down your hamburger and say, It must have been hard.

  She will appreciate your interest. She will tell you more. Black people, she will say, treat me real bad. That’s why I don’t like them. You’ll wonder how she feels about Dominicans. Don’t ask. Let her speak on it and when you’re both finished eating walk back into the neighborhood. The skies will be magnificent. Pollutants have made Jersey sunsets one of the wonders of the world. Point it out. Touch her shoulder and say, That’s nice, right?

  Get serious. Watch TV but stay alert. Sip some of the Bermúdez your father left in the cabinet, which nobody touches. A local girl may have hips and a thick ass but she won’t be quick about letting you touch. She has to live in the same neighborhood you do, has to deal with you being all up in her business. She might just chill with you and then go home. She might kiss you and then go, or she might, if she’s reckless, give it up, but that’s rare. Kissing will suffice. A whitegirl might just give it up right then. Don’t stop her. She’ll take her gum out of her mouth, stick it to the plastic sofa covers and then will move close to you. You have nice eyes, she might say.

  Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own.

  She’ll say, I like Spanish guys, and even though you’ve never been to Spain, say, I like you. You’ll sound smooth.

  You’ll be with her until about eight-thirty and then she will want to wash up. In the bathroom she will hum a song from the radio and her waist will keep the beat against the lip of the sink. Imagine her old lady coming to get her, what she would say if she knew her daughter had just lain under you and blown your name, pronounced with her eighth-grade Spanish, into your ear. While she’s in the bathroom call one of your boys and say, Lo hice, loco. Or just sit back on the couch and smile.

  But usually it won’t work this way. Be prepared. She will not want to kiss you. Just cool it, she’ll say. The halfie might lean back, breaking away from you. She will cross her arms, say, I hate my tits. Stroke her hair but she will pull away. I don’t like anybody touching my hair, she will say. She will act like somebody you don’t know. In school she is known for her attention-grabbing laugh, as high and far-ranging as a gull, but here she will worry you. You will not know what to say.

  You’re the only kind of guy who asks me out, she will say. Your neighbors will start their hyena calls, now that the alcohol is in them. You and the blackboys.

  Say nothing. Let her button her shirt, let her comb her hair, the sound of it stretching like a sheet of fire between you. When her father pulls in and beeps, let her go without too much of a good-bye. She won’t want it. During the next hour the phone will ring. You will be tempted to pick it up. Don’t. Watch the shows you want to watch, without a family around to debate you. Don’t go downstairs. Don’t fall asleep. It won’t help. Put the government cheese back in its place before your moms kills you.

  NO FACE

  In the morning he pulls on his mask and grinds his fist into his palm. He goes to the guanábana tree and does his pull-ups, nearly fifty now, and then he picks up the café dehuller and holds it to his chest for a forty count. His arms, chest and neck bulge and the skin around his temple draws tight, about to split. But no! He’s unbeatable and drops the dehuller with a fat Yes. He knows that he should go but the morning fog covers everything and he listens to the roosters for a while. Then he hears his family stirring. Hurry up, he says to himself. He runs past his tío’s land and with a glance he knows how many beans of café his tío has growing red, black and green on his conucos. He runs past the water hose and the pasture, and then he says FLIGHT and jumps up and his shadow knifes over the tops of the trees and he can see his family’s fence and his mother washing his little brother, scrubbing his face and his feet.

  The storekeepers toss water on the road to keep the dust down; he sweeps past them. No Face! a few yell out but he has no time for them. First he goes to the bars, searches the nearby ground for dropped change. Drunks sometimes sleep in the alleys so he moves quietly. He steps over the piss-holes and the vomit, wrinkles his nose at the stink. Today he finds enough coins in the tall crackling weeds to buy a bottle of soda or a johnnycake. He holds the coins tightly in his hands and under his mask he smiles.

  At the hottest part of the day Lou lets him into the church with its bad roof and poor wiring and gives him café con leche and two hours of reading and writing. The books, the pen, the paper all come from the nearby school, donated by the teacher. Father Lou has small hands and bad eyes and twice he’s gone to Canada for operations. Lou teaches him the English he’ll need up north. I’m hungry. Where’s the bathroom? I come from the Dominican Republic. Don’t be scared.

  After his lessons he buys Chiclets and goes to the house across from the church. The house has a gate and orange trees and a cobblestone
path. A TV trills somewhere inside. He waits for the girl but she doesn’t come out. Normally she’d peek out and see him. She’d make a TV with her hands. They both speak with their hands.

  Do you want to watch?

  He’d shake his head, put his hands out in front of him. He never went into casas ajenas. No, I like being outside.

  I’d rather be inside where it’s cool.

  He’d stay until the cleaning woman, who also lived in the mountains, yelled from the kitchen, Stay away from here. Don’t you have any shame? Then he’d grip the bars of the gate and pull them a bit apart, grunting, to show her who she was messing with.

  Each week Padre Lou lets him buy a comic book. The priest takes him to the bookseller and stands in the street, guarding him, while he peruses the shelves.

  Today he buys Kaliman, who takes no shit and wears a turban. If his face were covered he’d be perfect.

  He watches for opportunities from corners, away from people. He has his power of INVISIBILITY and no one can touch him. Even his tío, the one who guards the dams, strolls past and says nothing. Dogs can smell him though and a couple nuzzle his feet. He pushes them away since they can betray his location to his enemies. So many wish him to fall. So many wish him gone.

  A viejo needs help pushing his cart. A cat needs to be brought across the street.

  Hey No Face! a motor driver yells. What the hell are you doing? You haven’t started eating cats, have you?

  He’ll be eating kids next, another joins in.

  Leave that cat alone, it’s not yours.

  He runs. It’s late in the day and the shops are closing and even the motorbikes at each corner have dispersed, leaving oil stains and ruts in the dirt.

  The ambush comes when he’s trying to figure out if he can buy another johnnycake. Four boys tackle him and the coins jump out of his hand like grasshoppers. The fat boy with the single eyebrow sits on his chest and his breath flies out of him. The others stand over him and he’s scared.

  We’re going to make you a girl, the fat one says and he can hear the words echoing through the meat of the fat boy’s body. He wants to breathe but his lungs are as tight as pockets.

  You ever been a girl before?

  I betcha he hasn’t. It ain’t a lot of fun.

  He says STRENGTH and the fat boy flies off him and he’s running down the street and the others are following. You better leave him alone, the owner of the beauty shop says but no one ever listens to her, not since her husband left her for a Haitian. He makes it back to the church and slips inside and hides. The boys throw rocks against the door of the church but then Eliseo, the groundskeeper says, Boys, prepare for hell, and runs his machete on the sidewalk. Everything outside goes quiet. He sits down under a pew and waits for nighttime, when he can go back home to the smokehouse to sleep. He rubs the blood on his shorts, spits on the cut to get the dirt out.

  Are you okay? Padre Lou asks.

  I’ve been running out of energy.

  Padre Lou sits down. He looks like one of those Cuban shopkeepers in his shorts and guayabera. He pats his hands together. I’ve been thinking about you up north. I’m trying to imagine you in the snow.

  Snow won’t bother me.

  Snow bothers everybody.

  Do they like wrestling?

  Padre Lou laughs. Almost as much as we do. Except nobody gets cut up, not anymore.

  He comes out from under the pew then and shows the priest his elbow. The priest sighs. Let’s go take care of that, OK?

  Just don’t use the red stuff.

  We don’t use the red stuff anymore. We have the white stuff now and it doesn’t hurt.

  I’ll believe that when I see it.

  No one has ever hidden it from him. They tell him the story over and over again, as though afraid that he might forget.

  On some nights he opens his eyes and the pig has come back. Always huge and pale. Its hooves peg his chest down and he can smell the curdled bananas on its breath. Blunt teeth rip a strip from under his eye and the muscle revealed is delicious, like lechosa. He turns his head to save one side of his face; in some dreams he saves his right side and in some his left but in the worst ones he cannot turn his head, its mouth is like a pothole and nothing can escape it. When he awakens he’s screaming and blood braids down his neck; he’s bitten his tongue and it swells and he cannot sleep again until he tells himself to be a man.

  Padre Lou borrows a Honda motorcycle and the two set out early in the morning. He leans into the turns and Lou says, Don’t do that too much. You’ll tip us.

  Nothing will happen to us! he yells.

  The road to Ocoa is empty and the fincas are dry and many of the farmsteads have been abandoned. On a bluff he sees a single black horse. It’s eating a shrub and a garza is perched on its back.

  The clinic is crowded with bleeding people but a nurse with bleached hair brings them through to the front.

  How are we today? the doctor says.

  I’m fine, he says. When are you sending me away?

  The doctor smiles and makes him remove his mask and then massages his face with his thumbs. The doctor has colorless food in his teeth. Have you had trouble swallowing?

  No.

  Breathing?

  No.

  Have you had any headaches? Does your throat ever hurt? Are you ever dizzy?

  Never.

  The doctor checks his eyes, his ears, and then listens to his breathing. Everything looks good, Lou.

  I’m glad to hear that. Do you have a ballpark figure?

  Well, the doctor says. We’ll get him there eventually.

  Padre Lou smiles and puts a hand on his shoulder. What do you think about that?

  He nods but doesn’t know what he should think. He’s scared of the operations and scared that nothing will change, that the Canadian doctors will fail like the santeras his mother hired, who called every spirit in the celestial directory for help. The room he’s in is hot and dim and dusty and he’s sweating and wishes he could lie under a table where no one can see. In the next room he met a boy whose skull plates had not closed all the way and a girl who didn’t have arms and a baby whose face was huge and swollen and whose eyes were dripping pus.

  You can see my brain, the boy said. All I have is this membrane thing and you can see right into it.

  In the morning he wakes up hurting. From the doctor, from a fight he had outside the church. He goes outside, dizzy, and leans against the guanabana tree. His little brother Pesao is awake, flicking beans at the chickens, his little body bowed and perfect and when he rubs the four-year-old’s head he feels the sores that have healed into yellow crusts. He aches to pick at them but the last time the blood had gushed and Pesao had screamed.

  Where have you been? Pesao asks.

  I’ve been fighting evil.

  I want to do that.

  You won’t like it, he says.

  Pesao looks at his face, giggles and flings another pebble at the hens, who scatter indignantly.

  He watches the sun burn the mists from the fields and despite the heat the beans are thick and green and flexible in the breeze. His mother sees him on the way back from the outhouse. She goes to fetch his mask.

  He’s tired and aching but he looks out over the valley, and the way the land curves away to hide itself reminds him of the way Lou hides his dominos when they play. Go, she says. Before your father comes out.

  He knows what happens when his father comes out. He pulls on his mask and feels the fleas stirring in the cloth. When she turns her back, he hides, blending into the weeds. He watches his mother hold Pesao’s head gently under the faucet and when the water finally urges out from the pipe Pesao yells as if he’s been given a present or a wish come true.

  He runs, down towards town, never slipping or stumbling. Nobody’s faster.

  NEGOCIOS

  My father, Ramón de las Casas, left Santo Domingo just before my fourth birthday. Papi had been planning to leave for months, hustling and borrowing fr
om his friends, from anyone he could put the bite on. In the end it was just plain luck that got his visa processed when it did. The last of his luck on the Island, considering that Mami had recently discovered he was keeping with an overweight puta he had met while breaking up a fight on her street in Los Millonitos. Mami learned this from a friend of hers, a nurse and a neighbor of the puta. The nurse couldn’t understand what Papi was doing loafing around her street when he was supposed to be on patrol.

  The initial fights, with Mami throwing our silverware into wild orbits, lasted a week. After a fork pierced him in the cheek, Papi decided to move out, just until things cooled down. He took a small bag of clothes and broke out early in the morning. On his second night away from the house, with the puta asleep at his side, Papi had a dream that the money Mami’s father had promised him was spiraling away in the wind like bright bright birds. The dream blew him out of bed like a gunshot. Are you OK? the puta asked and he shook his head. I think I have to go somewhere, he said. He borrowed a clean mustard-colored guayabera from a friend, put himself in a concho and paid our abuelo a visit.

  Abuelo had his rocking chair in his usual place, out on the sidewalk where he could see everyone and everything. He had fashioned that chair as a thirtieth-birthday present to himself and twice had to replace the wicker screens that his ass and shoulders had worn out. If you were to walk down to the Duarte you would see that type of chair for sale everywhere. It was November, the mangoes were thudding from the trees. Despite his dim eyesight, Abuelo saw Papi coming the moment he stepped onto Sumner Welles. Abuelo sighed, he’d had it up to his cojones with this spat. Papi hiked up his pants and squatted down next to the rocking chair.