by Laura Furman
Get an adjunct position at a junior college in southern Wisconsin, where you teach a class called the Sociology of Communities. You have seventy-six students and, unlike your previous overly polite ones, these have opinions. Several of them are from Chicago and recognize your accent for what it actually is—not Spanish, but Urban. Let this give you hope. Their questions about Miami are about the beach, or if you’d been there during a particular hurricane, or if you’ve ever been to the birthplace of a particular rapper. Smile and nod, answer them after class—keep them focused on the reading.
At home, listen to and delete the week’s messages from your mother. She is miserable because you have abandoned her, she says. You could have been raped and dismembered, your appendages strewn about Wisconsin and Illinois, and she would have no way of knowing.
—You would call if you’d been dismembered, right? the recording says.
It has only been eight days since you last spoke to her.
The last message you do not delete. She is vague and says she needs to tell you something important. She is crying. You call back, forgetting about the time difference—it is eleven-thirty in Hialeah.
Ask, What’s wrong?
—Can I tell her? she asks your father. He says, I don’t care.
—Tell me what?
Tuck your feet under you on your couch and rub your eyes with your free hand.
—Your cousin Barbarita, she says, Barbarita has a brain tumor.
Say, What, and then, Is this a fucking joke?
Take your hand away from your eyes and stick your thumbnail in your mouth. Gnaw on it. Barbarita is eleven years older than you. She taught you how to spit and how to roller-skate. You cannot remember the last time you talked to her, but that is normal—you live far away. Then it comes to you. Eight months ago, at Nochebuena, last time you were home.
—It’s really bad. They know it’s cancer. We didn’t want to tell you.
Sigh deeply, sincerely. You expected something about your centenarian great-grandmother going in her whiskey-induced sleep. You expected your father having to cut back to one pound of beef a day because of his tired heart.
Ask, Mom, you okay? Assume her silence is due to more crying. Say, Mom?
—She’s been sick since February, she says.
Now you are silent. It is late August. You did not go back for your birthday this year—you had to find a job, and the market is grueling. Your mother had said she understood. Also, you adopted a rabbit in April (you’ve been a little lonely in Wisconsin), and your mother knows you don’t like leaving the poor thing alone for too long. Push your at-the-ready excuses out of the way and say, Why didn’t you tell me before?
She does not answer your question. Instead she says, You have to come home.
Tell her you will see when you can cancel class. There is a fall break coming up, you might be able to find a rabbit-sitter and get away for a week.
—No, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t want you to worry. You couldn’t do anything from up there.
Wait until she stops crying into the phone. You feel terrible—your poor cousin. She needs to get out and see the world; she has never been farther north than Orlando. When she was a teenager, she’d bragged to you that one day, she’d move to New York City and never come back. You think (but know better than to say), Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. When you see her, you will ignore the staples keeping her scalp closed over her skull. You will pretend to recognize your cousin through the disease and the bloated, hospital-gown-clad monster it’s created. You will call her Barbarino like you used to, and make jokes when no one else can. Just before you leave—visiting hours end, and you are just a visitor—you’ll lean in close to her face, so close your nose brushes the tiny hairs still clinging to her sideburns, and say, Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’m busting you out of here.
Your mother says, She died this morning. She went fast. The service is the day after tomorrow. Everyone else will be there, please come.
You are beyond outrage—you feel your neck burning hot. You skip right past your dead cousin and think, I cannot believe these people. They have robbed me of my final hours with my cousin. They have robbed Barbarita of her escape.
You will think about your reaction later, on the plane, when you try but fail to rewrite a list about the windows of your parents’ house in the margins of an in-flight magazine. But right now, you are still angry at being left out. Promise your mother you’ll be back in Hialeah in time and say nothing else. Hang up, and book an eight-hundred-dollar flight home after e-mailing your students that class is canceled until further notice.
Brush your teeth, put on flannel pajamas (even after all these winters, you are still always cold), tuck yourself in to bed. Try to make yourself cry. Pull out the ladybug-adorned to-do-list pad from the milk crate you still use as a nightstand and write down everything you know about your now-dead cousin.
Here’s what you remember: Barbarita loved papaya and making jokes about papaya. One time, before she even knew what it meant, she called her sister a papayona in front of everyone at a family pig roast. Her mother slapped her hard enough to lay her out on the cement patio. She did not cry, but she stormed inside to her room and did not come out until she’d said the word papayona out loud and into her pillow two hundred times. Then she said it another hundred times in her head. She’d told you this story when your parents dragged you to visit Barbarita’s mom and her newly busted hip while you were home during one of your college breaks. Barbarita’s mother, from underneath several white blankets, said, I never understood why you even like that fruit. It tastes like a fart.
Barbarita moved back in with her parents for good after her mom fractured her hip. The family scandal became Barbarita’s special lady friend, with whom she’d been living the previous eight years. You remember the lady friend’s glittered fanny pack—it always seemed full of breath mints and rubber bands—how you’d guessed it did not come off even for a shower. Barbarita took you to Marlins games and let you drink stadium beer from the plastic bottle if you gave her the change in your pockets. She kept coins in a jar on her nightstand and called it her retirement fund. She made fun of you for opening a savings account when you turned sixteen and said you’d be better off stuffing the cash in a can and burying it in the backyard. She laughed and slapped her knee and said, No lie, I probably have ninety thousand dollars under my mom’s papaya tree.
Look at your list. It is too short. Whose fault is that? You want to say God’s; you want to say your parents’. You want to blame the ladybug imprinted on the paper. You are jealous of how she adorns yet can ignore everything you’ve put down. Write, My cousin is dead and I’m blaming a ladybug. Cross out My cousin and write Barbarita. Throw the pad back in the crate before you write, Am I really this selfish?
Decide not to sleep. The airport shuttle is picking you up at four a.m. anyway, and it’s already one. Get out of bed, set up the automatic food dispenser in your rabbit’s cage, then flat-iron your hair so that it looks nice for the funeral. Your father has cursed your frizzy head and blamed the bad genes on your mother’s side since you sprouted the first tuft. Wrap the crispy ends of your hair around Velcro rollers and microwave some water in that I-don’t-do-Mondays mug that you never use (the one you stole off the grad program coordinator’s desk right before shoving your keys in the drop box—you couldn’t help stealing it: you’re a spic). Stir in the Café Bustelo instant coffee your mother sent you a few weeks ago in a box that also contained credit card offers you’d been mailed at their address and three packs of Juicy Fruit. The spoon clinks against the mug and it sounds to you like the slightest, most insignificant noise in the world.
Sit at the window seat that convinced you to sign the lease to this place even though your closest neighbor is a six-minute drive away. Listen to the gutters around the window flood with rain. Remember the canal across from your parents’ house, how the rain threatened to flood it twice a week. There is a statue of San Láz
aro in their front yard and a mango tree in the back. Lázaro is wedged underneath an old bathtub your dad half buried vertically in the dirt, to protect the saint from rain. The mango tree takes care of itself. But your father made sure both the mango tree and San Lázaro were well guarded behind a five-foot-high chain-link fence. The house’s windows had bars—rejas—on them to protect the rest of his valuables, the ones living inside. You never noticed the rejas (every house around for blocks had them) until you left and came back. The last night of your first winter break in Hialeah, just before you went to sleep, you wasted four pages—front and back—in a notebook scribbling all the ways the rejas were a metaphor for your childhood: a caged bird, wings clipped, never to fly free; a zoo animal on display yet up for sale to the highest-bidding boyfriend; a rare painting trapped each night after the museum closes. Roll your eyes—these are the ones you remember now. You didn’t mean it, not even as you wrote them, but you wanted to mean it, because that made your leaving an escape and not a desertion. Strain to conjure up more of them—it’s got to be easier than reconciling the pilfered mug with your meager list about your cousin. But you can’t come up with anything else. All you remember is your father weeding the grass around the saint every other Saturday, even in a downpour.
Peek through the blinds and think, It will never stop raining. Pack light—you still have clothes that fit you in your Hialeah closet. Open the blinds all the way and watch the steam from your cup play against the reflected darkness, the flashes of rain. Watch lightning careen into the flat land surrounding your tiny house, your empty, saintless yard. Wait for the thunder. You know, from growing up where it rained every afternoon from three to five, that thunder’s timing tells you how far you are from the storm. You cannot remember which cousin taught you this—only that it wasn’t Barbarita. When it booms just a second later, know the lightning is too close. Lean your forehead against the windowpane and feel the glass rattle, feel the vibration pass into your skull, into your teeth. Keep your head down; see the dozens of tiny flies, capsized and drained, dead on the sill. Only the shells of their bodies are left, along with hundreds of broken legs that still manage to point at you. If you squint hard enough, the flies blend right into the dust padding their mass grave. And when your eyes water, even these dusty pillows blur into an easy, anonymous gray smear.
Your hands feel too heavy to open the window, then the storm glass, then the screen, to sweep their corpses away. You say out loud to no one, I’ll do it when I get back. But your words—your breath—rustle the burial ground, sending tiny swirls of dust toward your face. It tastes like chalk and dirt. Feel it scratch the roof of your mouth, but don’t cough—you don’t need to. Clear your throat if you want; it won’t make the taste go away any faster.
Don’t guess how long it will take for the clouds to clear up; you’re always wrong about weather. The lightning comes so close to your house you’re sure this time you’ll at least lose power. Close your eyes, cross your fingers behind your back. Swallow hard. The windowsill’s grit scrapes every cell in your throat on its way down. Let this itch convince you that the lightning won’t hit—it can’t, not this time—because for now, you’re keeping your promise. On the flight, distract yourself with window lists and SkyMall magazine all you want; no matter what you try, the plane will land. Despite the traffic you find worse than you remember, you’ll get to Hialeah in time for the burial—finally back, ready to mourn everything.
David Means
The Junction
As he heaves down through the weeds with a plate in his hand and a smear of jelly on his lips we watch him and stay silent, stay calm, and listen now to that high middle western bitterness in his voice as he talks about the pie cherries and the wonderfully flaky crust and the way he found it steaming on the sill, waiting for him as he’d expected. Our bellies are roaring. Not a full meal in days. Just a can of beans yesterday—while we wait out the next train, the Chicago–Detroit most likely, tomorrow around ten. He talks about how the man of the house was inside listening to a radio show, clearly visible through the front parlor window, with a shotgun at his side, the shadow of it poking up alongside his chair. Same son of a bitch who chased me out of there a while back, he explains. Then he pauses for a minute and we fear—I feel this in the way the other fellows hunch lower, bringing their heels up to the fire—he’ll circle all the way back to the beginning of his story again, starting with how he left this camp, a couple of years back, and hiked several miles to a street, lined with old maples, that on first impression seemed very much like the one he’d grown up on, although he wasn’t sure because years of drifting on the road had worn the details from his memory, so many miles behind him in the form of bad drink and that mind-numbing case of lockjaw he claims he had in Pittsburgh. (The antitoxin, he explained, had been administered just in time, saving him from the worst of it. A kind flophouse doctor named Williams had tended to his wound, cleaning it out and wrapping it nicely, giving him a bottle of muscle pills.) He hiked into town—that first time—to stumble upon a house that held a resemblance to whatever was left in his memory: a farmhouse with weatherworn clapboard. A side garden with rosebushes and, back beyond a fence, a vegetable patch with pole beans. Not just the same house—he explained—but the same sweet smell emanating from the garden, where far back beyond a few willow trees a brook ran, burbling and so on and so forth. He went on too long about the brook and one of the men (who, exactly, I can’t recall) said, I wish you still had that case of lockjaw. (That was the night he was christened “Lockjaw Kid.”) He had stood out in the road and absorbed the scene and felt an overwhelming sense that he was home; a sense so powerful it held him fast and—in his words—made him fearful that he’d find it too much to his liking if he went up to beg a meal. So he went back down to the camp with an empty belly and decided to leave well enough alone until, months later, coming through these parts again after a stint of work in Chicago (Lockjaw couched his life story in the idea of employment, using it as a tool to get his point across, whereas the rest of us had long ago given up talking of labor in any form, unless it was to say something along the lines of: Worked myself so hard I’ll never work again; or, I’d work if I could find a suitable form of employment that didn’t involve work), he decided to hike the six miles into town to take another look, not sure what he was searching for because by that time the initial visit—he said last time he told the story—had become only a vague memory, burned away by drink and travel; the aforesaid confession itself attesting to a hole in his story about having worked in Chicago and giving away the fact that he had, more likely, hung on and headed all the way out to the coast for the winter, whiling his time in the warmth, plucking the proverbial fruit directly from the trees and so on and so forth. We didn’t give a shit. That part of his story had simply given us a chance to give him a hard time, saying, You were out in California if you were anywhere, you dumb shit. Not anywhere near Chicago looking for work. You couldn’t handle Chicago winters. Only work you would’ve found in Chicago would’ve been meat work. You couldn’t handle meat work. You’re not strong enough to lug meat. Meat would do you in, and so on and so forth. Whatever the case, he said, shrugging us off, going on to explain how he hiked the six miles up to town again and came to the strangely familiar house: smell of the brook. (You smelled the brook the first time you went up poking around, you dumb moron, Lefty said. And he said, Let me qualify and say not just the smell but the exact way it came from—well, how shall I put this? The smell of clear, clean brook water—potable as all hell—filtered through wild myrtle and jimsonweed and the like came to me from a precise point in my past, some exact place, so to speak.) He stood outside the house again, gathering his courage for a knock at the back door, preparing a story for the lady who would appear, most likely in an apron, looking down with wary eyes at one more vagrant coming through to beg a meal. I had a whopper ready, he said, and then he paused to let us ponder our own boilerplate beg-tales of woe. Haven’t eaten in a week & wi
ll work for food was the basic boilerplate, with maybe the following flourish: I suffered cancer of the blood (bone, liver, stomach, take your pick) and survived and have been looking for orchard work (blueberry, apple) but it’s the off-season so I’m hungry, ma’am. That sort of thing. Of course his version included lockjaw. Hello, ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you but I’m looking for a meal & some work. (Again, always the meal & work formula. That was the covenant that had to be sealed because most surely the man of the house would show up, expecting as much.) He moved his mouth strangely and tightened his jaw. I suffered from a case of lockjaw back in Pittsburgh, he told the lady. I lost my mill job on account of it, he added. Then he drove home the particulars—he assured us—not only going into Pittsburgh itself (all that heavy industry), but also saying he had worked at Homestead, pouring hot steel, and then even deeper (maybe this was later, at the table with the entire family, he added quickly, sensing our disbelief) to explain that once a blast furnace was cooked up, it ran for months and you couldn’t stop to think because the work was so hard and relentless, pouring ladles and so on and so forth. Then he gave her one or two genuine tears, because if Lockjaw had one talent it was the ability to cry on command. (He would say: I’m going to cry for you, boys, and then, one at a time, thick tears would dangle on the edges of his eyelids, hang there, and roll slowly down his cheeks. Ofttimes he’d just come back to the fire, sit, rub his hands together, and start the tears. You’ll rust up tight, Lockjaw, one of the men would inevitably say.) In any case, the lady of the house—she was young, with a breadbasket face, all cheekbones and delicate eyes—looked down at him (he stayed two steps down; another technique: always look as short and stubby and nonthreatening as possible) and saw the tears and beckoned him with a gentle wave of her hand, bringing him into the kitchen, which was warm with the smell of baking bread. (Jesus, our stomachs twitched when he told this part. To think of it. The warmth of the stove and the smell of the baking! We were chewing stones! That’s how hungry we were. Bark & weeds.) So there he was in the kitchen, watching the lady as she opened the stove and leaned over to poke a toothpick into a cake, pulling it out and holding it up, looking at it the way you’d examine a gemstone while all the time keeping an eye on him, nodding softly as he described—again—the way it felt to lose what you thought of as permanent employment after learning all the ropes, becoming one of the best steel pourers—not sure what the lingo was, but making it up nicely—able to pour from a ladle to a dipper to a thimble. (He’d gotten those terms from his old man. They were called thimbles, much to the amusement of the outside world. His father had done mill work in Pittsburgh. Came home stinking of taconite. He spoke of his father the way we all spoke of our old men, casually, zeroing in as much as possible on particular faults—hard drinking, a heavy hand. The old man hit like a heavyweight, quick and hard, his fist out of the blue. The old man had one up on Dempsey. You’d turn around to a fist in your face. A big ham-fisted old brute bastard. Worked like a mule and came home to the bottle. That sort of thing.) In any case, he popped a few more tears for the lady and accepted her offer of a cup of tea. At this point, he stared at the campfire and licked his lips and said, I knew the place, you see. The kitchen had a familiar feel, what with the same rooster clock over the stove that I remembered as a boy. Then he tapered off into silence again and we knew he was digging for details. Any case, no matter, he said. At that point I was busy laying out my story, pleading my case. (We understood that if he had let up talking he might have opened up a place for speculation on the part of the home owner. The lady of the house might—if you stopped talking, or said something off the mark—turn away and begin thinking in a general way about hoboes: the scum of the world, leaving behind civility not because of some personal anguish but rather out of a desire—wanderlust would be the word that came to her mind—to let one minute simply vanish behind another. You had to spin out a yarn and keep spinning until the food was in your belly and you were out the door. The story had to be just right and had to begin at your point of origin, building honestly out of a few facts of your life, maybe not the place of birth exactly but somewhere you knew so well you could draw details in a persuasive, natural way. You drew not from your own down-and-out-of-luck story, because your own down-and-out-of-luck story would only sound sad-sack and tawdry, but rather from an amalgamation of other tales you’d heard: a girlfriend who’d gone sour, a bad turn of luck in the grain market, a gambling debt to a Chicago bootlegger. Then you had to weave your needs into your story carefully, placing them in the proper perspective to the bad luck so that it would seem frank & honest & clean-hearted. Too much of one thing—the desire to eat a certain dish, say, goulash, or a hankering for a specific vegetable, say, lima beans—and your words would sound tainted and you’d be reduced to what you really were: a man with no exact destination trying to dupe a woman into thinking you had some kind of forward vision. A man with no plans whatsoever trying as best he could—at that particular moment—to sound like a man who knew, at least to some degree, where he might be heading in relation to his point of origin. To speak with too much honesty would be to expose a frank, scary nakedness that would send the lady of the house off—using some lame excuse to leave the room—to phone the sheriff. To earn her trust, you sat there in the kitchen and went at it and struck the right balance, turning as a last resort to the facts of railroad life, naming a particular junction, the way an interlocking mechanism worked, or how to read semaphores, for example, before swinging back wide to the general nature of your suffering.) We knew all of the above and even knew, too, that when he described, a moment later, the strange all-knowing sensation he got sitting in that kitchen, he was telling us the truth, because each of us had at one point or another seen some resemblance of home in the structure of a house, or a water silo, or a water-pump handle, or the smell of juniper bushes in combination with brook water, or the way plaster flaked, up near the ceiling, from the lathe. Even men reared in orphanages had wandered upon a particular part of their past. All of us had stood on some lonely street—nothing but summer-afternoon chaff in the air, the crickets murmuring drily off in the brush—and stared at the windows of a house to see a little boy staring back, parting the curtain with his tiny fingers.
