by Aura Xilonen
The truck keeps moving. Yes, now I remember, I’m thinking as she talks. But that chickadee didn’t at all resemble the one who’s now in the driver’s seat and turning at the intersection. That one had fire swarming up her legs like ants. While this one seems to have been crushed by a nutcracker.
“I don’t remember,” I say finally. She looks at me and, without saying anything, turns the music back up till it overflows the truck cab.
We roll on, climbing through the hills to the first exit and then leaving the highway. We go a couple of miles farther, and she starts to slow down. We pass through a checkpoint with a chip that’s attached to the truck. The place leaves me agape, iridescent: I’ve never seen anything like it except in the magazines I used to leaf through in the bookstore.
* * *
[There were a few magazines that Jefe bought reluctantly.
“Listen, you indigestible prick, that Reader’s Digest you’re flipping through is going to destroy the few brain cells you’ve got.”
“So why do you order them, Jefe?”
“To destroy the brain cells of the rich ladies who come through here,” he said, and laughed mockingly with that alebrije inside him.]
The houses up in the hills have yards lit by lanterns. Some of them have lounge chairs outside and little fountains; others have children’s toys and teak bum-resters. If those decorative doodads were in my town on the other side, I think to myself, they’d have been nicked already and sold on the street.
We get to a house with flagstone paving and surrounded by a few tarred trees. There’s a lantern illuminating a little path up to the entrance of an elegant stucco house. The lady parks the truck and shuts off the engine. The music stops blaring and the screen automatically retracts.
“We’re here, man.” I don’t even try to open the little door. “Oh, I forgot!” the lady exclaims, spotting my gloves again. “You’re a jackass, and those hooves of yours are no use for human things.” She cackles into the windshield. “I’ll open it for you, young sir.” She reaches over me, jabbing her elbow into my stomach, and yanks on the door handle with her other hand. “Sorry if I crushed your pecker,” she says. “I just wanted to feel it again.”
“Qué!”
“Relax, kiddo, you’re not my type, but I still had to investigate a little to make sure what I felt back there was true.” She laughs even louder and dives to the ground.
I leap out onto the grass.
“This way.” She leads me to the little path. She flits from subject to subject as we cross the yard. “Sometimes I’d like to have more time to take care of my plants—look at them, they’re wilting with embarrassment. A plant is like a woman: it needs love. I could have made an amazing lesbian because I know what a woman needs too, but no, I always liked dick.” She laughs dyslexically, like she’s got the hiccups.
She opens the front door and turns on the lights in an enormous foyer; then she lights up a larger room. She’s got tons of paintings on the wall, lots more than Jefe has at his house, and lots more than at the chickadee’s house. I figure people hang up paintings so as not to impoverish their vistas with bare walls.
“This place looks like a museum!” I say.
“That’s exactly what I told my ex-husband. So to get even with me for taking his house, that asshole left me all his crap. Even the cockroaches!”
“There are cockroaches here?”
The lady looks at me and smiles. “It’s just a manner of speaking, kid. Sometimes you seem older than you are, with those weird words you use, but other times you’re so naive.”
She turns on all the lights. The house is a museum. It’s huge but crowded with things: display cabinets here, paintings there; it has some side tables that look really old, made of carved wood. Toward the rear of the house there’s a vast dining room with twelve chairs; off to one side is a large living room with four armchairs as big as beds. To the right of the grand piano is a display cabinet set with gilt-framed mirrors that contains glass figurines and, on a lower shelf, a sculpture of a fish-woman.
On the other side of the house is one of those massive kitchens with a stove in the center—well, that stove part is just an expression, because all you can see is a black glass panel with several circles painted on it and a bell-like thing up above it. Hanging nearby are frying pans, pots, ladles. To the left is a bar with two stools, and in the rear, behind some sheer, gauzy curtains, is another lit-up yard and what looks like a swimming pool.
The lady goes over to a drawer in the kitchen. “You’d better entrust your soul to the Lord now, sassbucket—you’re about to learn all about Him.” She waves a chef’s knife and walks toward me, her eyes cold. Then she shrieks wildly, “Don’t run away, it’s a joke, sassbucket! I’m going to cut those gloves off you.”
I don’t know, I hesitate at the front door, trying vainly to grasp the goddamn knob. I keep hesitating even as my legs tell me to take off running. A person must always hesitate, I’ve always said. But there’s no way, my hands are fast asleep at this point. They must be black and blue inside the boxing gloves. I slowly approach her and extend my hands. “I’m in God’s hands,” I think.
The lady looks at me.
“You’re right to run, but there’s no need for it today.”
She puts the point of the blade between the glove’s laces and tugs hard. The laces give way and bloom open. She puts the knife on a side table and removes my gloves. It’s true, my fingers are shaking.
“Where did that bruise come from?” she asks, examining one of my hands.
“Nothing, just another fight.”
She squeezes my swollen, crampic phalanges. I feel her warmth enveloping my fingers; the ache is gradually disappearing.
“You’re a funny kid,” she says half seriously. “It’s like no one’s ever touched your hands before.”
I don’t know where to look, so I stare at the floor, turning into a cockroach. She keeps stroking my hands till they come back to life.
“Come on,” she says subjacently, and takes me by the hand; she leads me into a wide hallway and opens a door.
The light comes on automatically. It’s an enormous bathroom. A mirror across an entire wall makes it seem even larger. The sink is on a wide, glass-doored vanity, and you can see white towels on the shelves inside it. There are two chrome-plated brackets with glass shelves that contain a few decorative objects. The crapper’s covered with seashells, and the seat is made of wood. The shower is off to the left, enclosed in glass; on the other side of the room is a painting of some little fish in high relief. In the middle of it all is a round white bathtub with blue trim that could fit three cows, three donkeys, and maybe, if you really crammed them in there, three laying hens. Above it, hanging on the wall, is a flat-screen television as long as I am tall.
“The only peace I find is in the Jacuzzi,” she says absently. “In there, the world just disappears and the only thing that exists is me.”
She walks over to some switches at the base of the tub; she flips them and the tub starts to fill. After a few seconds, steam and hot water start pouring out of a number of holes.
“You go ahead and get undressed while I go look for some clothes for you. Those clothes you’ve got on are well past their prime. Absolutely foul.”
She leaves the room, and I don’t know what to do.
The water bubbles and the drops crash into one another; they’re like icebergs of steam. I look at my hands, which are macerated from all that time they spent inside the gloves. They smell like ass, a bouquet of vinyl and leather. I don’t know, maybe they smell like mules, those animals swaybacked under the weight of the knowledge that they’ll never have a family.
“Didn’t you strip, squirt?” she says, coming into the bathroom with a bundle of clothes. She puts it on the counter. “Come on, you’re like a little kid!” she says.
Where can I run
to? I’m shivering. Maybe if I dive into that ocean of bubbles I can fuck off down the drain, or leap in every drop till I’m torn to bits. The lady puts her hands on my waist and removes my belt; slowly, she unbuttons my bookstore shirt, which is filthy with blood, sweat, and dirt. She pulls it off my shoulders and lets it fall to the floor.
“You’re a funny one, kid. Stop shaking, nothing’s going to happen to you.” But she runs her hands over my marimbic ribs, touches them; my skin shivers even more. I get goose bumps. “I thought you’d have a tattoo of some Latin gang, from one of those urban tribes or whatever—maybe even from the MS-13. But no, you’re barer than my damn head. All you’ve got are these scars that look like sunburns.”
* * *
[It was true. I’d never wanted to etch anything on my body, only the scars of the desert. I felt different from everybody else in the evenings, thinking about strange things—like leaping up into the leaves and swinging off through the branches.
“That’s homo shit,” a paisa once told me dismissively when I was still back in Mexico, under the bridges, exiled from my godmother, stabbing the air with the alleycat breathing of my homeland.
“Say that again and I’ll put you on pain meds for life,” I said.
“You look like a fag thinking that fag shit,” the guy repeated, and uncautiously I laid into him, cursing a blue streak.
“Cocksucking motherfucker.”
And he takes out his knife—a big one, with a torsion spring, the kind you’d use to flay hogs, and me all unfazed, surrounded by guys who are eager to see blood.
“Fight!” they howled.
“Either put that away and we’ll throw down right, or I’m not responsible for what happens,” I said.
And he doesn’t put it away, because he’s already had his snout all battered in by my fists before.
And he charges at me, trying to gore me with the blade, and balls, I fend him off with my right hand, and nuts, I smash him in the legs so he spins in the air like a pinwheel, and boom, the moron lets go of the icepick and it flies up into the air and falls on top of him.
I saw him land facedown, denutted. I flipped him over and he still had eyes to see me, but just barely, life was leaking out of him through the hole in his gut. And me all bloody trying to stop the flood. Because he was my compadre out on the street, but sometimes your compadres get stupid. After that he didn’t see anything; his powered-down mouth starched up, full of lost tattoos.
“Scram, cabrón,” the other guys in the gang told me.
“Get out of here or they’ll nab you.”
And so I ran till my feet ached, under the streetlights and bridges, my hands puddled with blood.]
Suddenly a tremor runs through me, from all my cardinal points to all the astral points of my epidermis, yanking me out of my memories. The lady pulls my belt from my jeans and tosses it next to my shirt.
“Take off your boots so we can get your pants off.”
I teeter but manage to get out of them. Her hands rest on my hips and lower my pants down to the floor. I stand before her, naked, root-bare.
“Madre mía!” She lets out a little shriek. “That firehose of yours is terrifying,” the lady laughs. “You’re quite a find, papito.”
Right then my gut starts screeching. I haven’t eaten anything all day. Just the potato chips yesterday and the water. The noise of my bowels jolts her out of the place she’d gone in her thoughts, and I see her blush suddenly; she falters and immediately stands up.
“All right, papi,” she says acrobatically, “into the water, duckling.”
She pinches my butt and pushes me toward the bathtub. I plunge in. I hold my breath under the water.
I don’t want to come up. Yes, the sea, I’ve never seen it, I’ve never been—I don’t know what it’s like. I’ve seen it through books: blue, full of noises like murmurs full of sunshine, and the waves, succumbing to the gulls that tangle in their sandy fringes.
What does the sea in books smell like?
When I finally emerge from the water, the lady’s not there anymore. She’s dissolved into a sudden absence. I see only that the water’s starting to foam and there’s a loofah and a scrub brush on a shelf by the tub. I sit up in the aquatic seat and perch there still as the grave, like flowers after their petals have fallen and the wind blows across them, like that, contrite as the bubbles cling to my body.
I lean back, resting my head on the edge of the tub, and see a transparent skylight in the ceiling overhead.
There are no stars visible out there, just a bluish glow, but I know they’re there, indomitable, forming constellations, tumultuous, with their planets hitched to their suns. Yes, the universe could well be a wonder, I don’t know—a marvel in all its caspiricious nooks and crannies, where the light becomes a cradle for every nestling dewdrop or whatever. Why was that pockmarked writer who came into the bookstore always looking for things outside of Earth when everything may be right here?
My guts start groaning again. I press on my belly and manage to get them under control.
I’d better get out of the tub before my fingers get even more wrinkly. I pick up the scrub brush and start scrubbing myself as if I were a dog. I scrub hard, angrily, until my calluses are polished off and my hands no longer scratch like sandpaper. I scrub everywhere, especially to get rid of the filth inside me, sloughing it off my soul in little clumps.
I finish scrubbing, take one last dip, and then spring out of the tub to wring myself dry with the towel. I pick up a pair of sweatpants that’s in the heap of clothing and a T-shirt that says I HEART NY. I pick up the belt and wrap it around my waist, because my belt is part of me, it’s like my life jacket even when I don’t have anything stashed in its secret hiding place; I’ve got the mollusk’s eighty dollars in there, the card with the address of the gym, the pastor’s medicine, and, at the bottom, my mother’s locket, which they say she was wearing around her neck when she died.
I wad up my jeans and the bookstore shirt and stuff them under my arm; I pick up my boots and leave the bathroom with my belongings.
I don’t see the lady. The lights are still on. I walk down the hallway and into the museum. She isn’t in the living room or the dining room; I don’t see her in the kitchen. I don’t see her anywhere. Maybe she’s squeezing out her madness in the swimming pool like they do in shoddy novels, smoking a cigarette, or kneeling down and staring into the water, or having a drink and spilling nostalgia into her glass by the jugful.
I go outside, but she’s not there. The pool is carpeted with fallen leaves. The grass is overgrown, higher than my pubes. “Fuck.” I go back to the front door and open it. Her truck is still there. I return to the middle of the living room and decide to shout:
“Ma’am! Ma’am!”
I hear a peal of laughter like a lunatic goat from somewhere in the house.
“Come here!” she says.
“Where?”
“Here, you nincompoop.”
I retrace my steps toward the hall where the bathroom is; I walk past it and on the far side spot a hallway bending off next to a planter. I turn down it and discover an entrance with double doors that open onto another enormous, dimly lit room with a bed in the middle that would fit the same three cows, three donkeys, and three hens all at once with room to spare.
Across from the bed are two large floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on the backyard and the pool. The lady is glued to a laptop on a desk that’s covered with piles of papers. She turns in her chair and looks at me.
On the rear wall is a bulletin board with lots of pinned-up business cards, Post-It notes, slips of paper, photos, and I don’t know what else.
Next to it is a vanity and several wigs.
“What were you doing out in the yard?” she asks. I don’t answer. She half closes her eyes and studies me. “I see my ex-husband’s clothes fit you perf
ectly.”
I walk over to the wigs, which are perched on round stands. I look at them in alarm.
“What are these for?”
“Sometimes I need them for work. But I can tell you’re not listening.” She smiles. “Everyone calls me Double-U. None of this ‘ma’am’ crap—that’s not necessary, right, squirt? I can’t be more than fifteen years older than you.”
She notices I’ve got my clothing under my arm and my boots in my hand.
“Oh, no, not in here.” She snatches them away from me and hurries out of the room. “We should really burn these, toss them in the fireplace and douse them in formaldehyde to kill off all the creepy-crawlies you’ve got, but I’m just going to wash them in case you need them later, because here . . .”
Her voice fades off into the distance.
The room is the color of marble. It’s quite large. There are two fans on the ceiling, and at the far end of the room hangs another television much larger than the one in the bathroom. The floor is made of wood but there are thick rugs laid out on it. I walk along the wall to a door; I open it and find it leads to a dressing room. I close it again. I walk to the windows. From there you can see part of the city. We’re perched up on a hill. The lights of the city twinkle like stars, yellow and white. You can see the skyscrapers crowned with their pulsing red beacons. Closer in are dark areas of night; they must be the trees of the small, unlit forest that spreads over the hills, and over there, tiny, you can see the headlights of the cars moving along what seems to be the highway.
“Do you like it?” I hear the lady’s voice behind me.
“What?” I ask without looking at her.
“The view of the valley—do you like it?”
I shrug; I don’t say anything. Sometimes we’re so blind that all we see is shadows.
“Do you believe in God?” I ask without thinking.
She is quiet a moment; I watch her shadow reflected in the glass. I see her turn and go back to her seat in front of the computer. I keep looking out the window. The light from an airplane goes by in the distance like a bird carrying a firefly caged between its wheels; it must be heading toward the airport. I’ve never been on a plane. I once tried to imagine what the Earth looked like from the clouds when I read a book about a journey in a hot-air balloon, but all my imagination could conjure up was rooftops bedecked with water tanks and clotheslines filling with soot and rain.
