Leapfrog

by Guillermo Rosales

  “Take a good look at them!” He said. “I want you to solemnly swear that this is the last time in your life that . . .”

  The patriots stared at him indignantly.

  “Swear!”

  The ball beat down on his back again.

  Fine.

  He wasn’t crying. The girls had passed and were now far away. He felt the drops of sweat running down his thighs like lizards. Then he heard Papa Lorenzo’s whistling. Papa Lorenzo’s unmistakable whistling coming from Hunchback Alley.

  “I’m dead meat,” Agar thought.

  He tried to run.

  “You can’t leave now, dude.” Bones said, blocking his way. “You’re paying your dues.”

  The West Side Boys had already made a circle around him. There was a circle for everything. For the spiders. To tell jokes. To take out their members and rub them madly waiting for a finale that never came. To smoke, to play, to piss, to fight.

  “Stay still, dude,” Bones said. Agar felt a swift kick and fell to the ground.

  Papa Lorenzo whistled again from the Alley while Agar cried on the ground, with a powerful knee on his chest and a tough hand around his neck.

  “Look at him crying!” Kiko Ribs said in a fag’s voice.

  “Leave him alone, dude . . . here comes his father!”

  Agar stood up, wiping his tears quickly away. Papa Lorenzo crossed the field of rosemary and went up to him.

  “Who hit you?” he wanted to know.

  “It was a game.”

  “Who was it?”

  Agar looked at Bones without answering. The kid bent over, pretending he had a pain in his ribs.

  “Hit him!” Papa Lorenzo ordered drily.

  “We were playing . . .”

  “Hit him!” Papa Lorenzo insisted. “I want you to fight him, you son of a bitch! Hit him!”

  So they started hitting each other. Lightly at first. Hard and silently afterwards. Agar felt the rain of blows fall on his face and clenched his jaw without saying a word. He swept blindly at Bones’ face, and sometimes felt that his blows managed to do damage. He cried silently. Without moving an inch of his face. When it was over, after insulting the West Side Boys, Papa Lorenzo grabbed him by the scruff of his neck.

  “Go to bed, you son of a bitch!” Papa Lorenzo said once they were inside their house.

  In his room, Agar heard Mama Pepita shuffling around the pots and pans in the kitchen, and from there came the unmistakable smell of chickpeas.

  At Ten, Start Again

  “ ‘We’re in the West, son,’ Old Jerome said. ‘And what you see here is none other than Tombstone: “The Two Who Refused to Die.” ’ ”

  “You’ll stay in your room,” Mama Pepita said. Then she closed the door and left him alone in there.

  Old Jerome started running to town. Agar turned over on the bed and thought that just about now, the West Side Boys would be running through Gómez Pass, hunting spiders or exploring the bushes.

  His eyes scanned the room and he started to play with the gaps in the walls. Because, with the gaps in the wall and a little imagination, time flew.

  The gap in the corner turned into Sergeant York, with his helmet and backpack. The peeling paint on the bathroom wall made up a legion of soldiers clearing the decks.

  He would have liked to go to war. He would have liked to prove himself against bullets. He felt that only by turning into a hero could he free himself of his past. So sometimes he was Sergeant York, and other times he was Splinter Weevil, The Meanest Man in the World, and other times, he reappeared in Veracruz killing Indians with a revolver that never ran out of bullets. But that afternoon he was in Tombstone, Arizona.

  He closed his eyes.

  He tied his horse at the town’s gate and spit on the dry earth. He would walk.

  He had waited for this moment for thirty years. He adjusted his guns and started walking slowly. Reverend Cunnings was the first to see him. He looked up at the heavens and rushed to shut the church doors. The church bells rang quickly and everyone in town ran to their windows.

  “It’s Lorenz’s son!” They yelled from the Saloon. He heard the poker tables moving around loudly and the pianola waltz languish. He remained there, with his legs spread wide, standing in the center of the main street. Time seemed to stop in Tombstone. Tumbleweeds rolled by on the empty street.

  They were scared. They were all scared. Only Parker the judge, leaning on his crutches, dared to look him in the eye.

  “Listen, Bronco . . . listen to the words of an old man and then do whatever you want. But . . . may the devil take me away if it wouldn’t be right for you to forgive!”

  “Where is he?” he said.

  “Pop Lorenz left here a thousand years ago. May the devil take me away if that’s not how it was. He might have gone to Yuma,” Old Parker said, looking nervously at his pistols.

  “Get back!” Bronco Joe said brusquely.

  “Listen to the words of an old man, son!” The judge exclaimed, feeling found out. “Forget about the past . . . I know you can do it!”

  “Forget . . . ,” Bronco Joe whispered. “It’s hard to forget!”

  “Leave it be, Parker!” He heard behind him. It was the unmistakable voice of Pop Lorenz.

  He turned around brusquely and saw him again for the first time in thirty years. Tears of indignation threatened to fall.

  “Leave it be!” Old Lorenz repeated. “God knows I don’t regret a thing!”

  He grabbed a fistful of dirt and threw it at Bronco Joe.

  “That’s what you are!” he yelled. “Dirt!”

  Bronco smiled wanly and said: “The same old Lorenz, right?” He rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. “I’m glad it’s like this,” he said then. “It resolves an old doubt I had.” And he let the words fall lightly: “Do I kill you . . . or not kill you?”

  “So what did you decide?” Pop Lorenz yelled. “Say it once and for all, for God’s sake!”

  Suddenly, Old Lorenz gestured to his pistols. Bronco let him go until he practically saw him touching his guns.

  “Now!” He said, drawing his own.

  Pop Lorenz’s revolvers flew through the air. With his wrists bathed in blood, he fell to the ground on his knees.

  “Finish it once and for all!” Old Lorenz yelled angrily.

  “No . . . ,” Bronco Joe said. “I’ve waited thirty years for this. To forgive you . . .”

  He slowly left the town, down the center of Main street.

  “He’s a man from the West!” Old Parker yelled, raising up his crutch. But Bronco Joe didn’t hear him. He was already riding his horse very far away en route to the sweet plains of glory.

  And so it happened in Tombstone, Arizona: “The town that refused to die.”

  At Eleven, Get In on the Action

  All of that had happened. He remembered it now alone. He closed his eyes and it was as if he were in the Buck Rogers’ Time Warp and landing on the planet of No Return. Where he could change the past at whim. He then remembered the stories piled under his bed. “Witch Tales,” “Frontier,” “El que la hace la paga,” “Superman,” “Walt Disney’s Stories.”

  He felt he was leaving Walt Disney behind. Before he had lived for him, and had dreamed of being Gladstone Gander, the lucky one who found diamonds wherever he was. Or Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck’s uncle, who was swimming in millions and ate hot dogs to save ten cents. He liked Scrooge McDuck. He would have liked to be like that.

  The owner of the house where he lived was a filthy rich Spaniard who was a lot like Scrooge McDuck. He walked around Santa Fe on Sundays with a cedar walking stick just like Scrooge McDuck’s.

  “I’m thorry, I’m thorry . . . I’m thrict about payments. Dear thir, pay me. Fine! I’ll wait until Monday.”

  “Mr. Castelón is a nice guy,” Agar commented that day.

  Mama Pepita shot him a hard look from the kitchen.

  “He’s a no-good son-of-a-bitch,” she said.

  Agar didn’t say any
thing else. He would have liked to have been Castelón’s nephew. Uncle Scrooge Castelón, the golden old man who swam in bills from the bank.

  He left aside the Disney stories.

  Mickey Mouse was still looking for diamonds on the Lost Island.

  Gladstone Gander was about to find Tutankhamen’s treasure.

  Elmer Fudd remained lost under an avalanche in the Himalayas.

  He now preferred “Witch’s Tales,” “The Spirit,” “Macabre Stories.” Although he knew that at night he would have insomnia and that things would reach for the bottoms of his feet.

  He opened the book:

  It was the story of Clay Putnam. The man who was hiding a secret. The unknown man who always walked with a box on his shoulder. What was Putnam hiding? The town asked itself. At church, the people would stop praying and turn their eyes on him. Who would pray without taking the box off of his shoulder?

  One winter afternoon, Clay Putnam went into Peter’s Café. He asked for a glass of gin.

  “I’m sorry, Putnam,” the barman said. “I won’t serve you until you get that damned box off your shoulder.”

  “Leave me alone!” Putnam yelled. “Leave me alone with my blasted box!”

  The men left their drinks and surrounded him.

  “What do you have in there, you devil?”

  “Show us what you have in that box, you damned warlock!”

  “What did you come to Finstown to do, Putnam? Did you maybe come to cast a spell on us?”

  Putnam backed away to the door and started running down the street with his box.

  “Go after him, get that warlock, even if he’s the devil himself!”

  Putnam fell to the ground. The men reached him, panting. Old Carson MacCullers raised his wooden stake and brought it down forcefully over his heart. The heart of Clay Horace Putnam, “The Man with the Mysterious Box.”

  “Open that box!” MacCullers ordered. “Let’s get to the bottom of this mystery.”

  Old Edward Albee leaned over the dead man. An air of expectation surrounded the men.

  “Here goes!” Albee yelled, lifting the lid.

  “Holy God in heaven above . . .”

  And the surprised eyes of the inhabitants of Finstown contemplated Putnam’s horrible secret: there was another head on his shoulder!

  That was Putnam’s mystery. “Finstown’s Bicephalous Man.”

  Agar shuddered. The drawing of the other head made quite an impression on him. He was now reading “Vampires in the Belfry” when he sensed the door creaking behind him.

  “What are you doing?” Mama Pepita asked roughly. “Why are you shaking? Get to the table!” She said, turning around. “I want you to finish that plate of chickpeas without a single complaint.”

  At Twelve, an Old Lady Snivels

  You went back to your room.

  You could also play “The Colors a Blind Man Sees.” You cover your eyes and press them tight with your fingers. That’s how the pain comes, but you’ll see a kaleidoscope of lights and unknown colors. And best of all, a red dot at the center through which you can escape and see yourself from the inside.

  Grandma Hazel would tell you that you’re going to go blind from so much squeezing, but deep down, the idea doesn’t bother you.

  To go blind. Marching with a red-tipped walking stick and being protected by everybody. Then Papa Lorenzo wouldn’t be able to raise his hand to me and I would eat whatever I wanted and on Sundays I could go to the theater to see this movie or that and . . . shit! How would a blind person go to the movies?

  So you preferred to stay as you were. Although you remembered the joke: “It was twelve at night and the sun was beating down on the rocks. Under a burnt-out lamp, a blind man read a newspaper without letters.”

  You started to laugh.

  You really were happy alone.

  “Ah!” you said. And you thought. And you thought about your penis. Although you didn’t take it out because Mama Pepita could come in whenever she wanted and the very thought of such a scene made you die of shame.

  Maybe she would say: You disgusting thing! Are these the filthy things you learn in school?

  And the word “school” reminded you that vacation would soon be over and you’d have to see the face of Agrispina Pérez Pérez again, the fifth-grade teacher. Do you remember? That day, she was teaching a class on Descriptive Anatomy.

  “This,” Agrispina said, “is the kidney. Here are the bladder and the liver. And this is the urinary tract.”

  And she tapped on the human map with her pinewood pointer.

  Henry moved behind you, excited.

  “Did you see that?” he whispered. “Agrispina pointed at the balls.”

  Agrispina continued singing to her class in a soprano voice and walked around the room looking up at the ceiling. On the beach at Santa Fe, they said she didn’t have a husband. Was it true? In any event, the West Side Boys said it was, while talking in a circle at recess.

  The Boys on one side and the teachers on the other. Both groups talking in low voices and looking at each other with reciprocal loathing.

  Sometimes, Agrispina called someone from the group and made him stand up before her. She then turned to the other teachers and said with contempt,

  “Look at this one!” And with that, she made a gesture, waving her hand. “You can leave now!”

  They hated her. The West Side Boys had even made up a song about her. You remembered it now that you were drawing a naked woman.

  Old Agrispina

  has never seen a wiener.

  Green grass, green grass,

  she has a smelly ass.

  “The human body is made up of 204 bones, as you all know,” she was saying, and then she brought the pointer down on Ulysses’ head, a hunched over and silent boy who spent the day drawing Martian spaceships. Then she turned to you and grabbed you tightly by the ear.

  “Give me that piece of paper, you little cretin,” Agrispina Pérez Pérez said. “Do you think I didn’t see the filth you drew?”

  You were livid. You stood up and quickly put the drawing in your mouth.

  “He swallowed it! He swallowed it!” The voices sang.

  “Spit it out!” Agrispina ordered. “Spit it out or I will keep your ear!”

  Paper is paper. And notebook paper won’t go down a dry throat. You could feel the cartilage in your windpipe.

  “Spit it out!”

  You let it go. The rolled up ball fell to the floor and she calmly leaned over to pick it up.

  “Ha!” She smiled with satisfaction. “How good is this?”

  “This time, you can say goodbye, Agar,” expectant voices whispered. “They’re going to throw you out. They’re going to throw you out.”

  Agrispina adjusted her wire-rim glasses and began to straighten out the saliva-ridden ball of paper on her desk.

  To you, it seemed like the Earth was opening up under your feet, and that you were falling, falling, falling into the void again.

  “Splendid!” Agrispina exclaimed. “So very illustrative, very illustrative, very . . .”

  And the bell rang. But you stayed inside. With Agrispina and the smell of the dead classroom.

  The difference now. Without the children’s sweat. Without the leather of their book bags. From the walls, the patriots again looked at you strictly.

  “Swear!” Papa Lorenzo said, suddenly emerging from your memory.

  “What’s up, Doc!” Bugs Bunny said, hopping around inside your head.

  Agrispina looked at you in silence. With the drawing of the naked woman in her hands.

  “I would like to know,” she said, “what do all of you have in your heads? Do you think that I don’t know what you do when you get together in your circle at recess? Make fun of me, that’s what you do! And say dirty things and write terrible things about me in the bathroom.”

  He looked at her, expressionless.

  “And now you draw this!”

  And she held up the drawing
of the woman.

  “Who told you that women are like this under their clothes? Tell me! Did your father tell you? Who? I’m waiting . . . come on!”

  This is the island of Cuba, discovered by Columbus. Rodrigo de Triana also came along. What did Columbus do when he first set foot on the island?

  “Place the other one behind it, dude. If he hadn’t, he would have lost his balance.”

  Laughter. Laughter. Laughter.

  “Names!”

  “Who?”

  “What’s up, Doc!” Bugs Bunny said.

  Hardy har har.

  We were in the West, son . . . in the West . . . in the W —

  You shook your head. You would have liked to turn into an ant. You would have liked to say, Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock.

  “Fuck the mouse!” You screamed in your head.

  Agrispina slumped down in her desk, overcome by defeat.

  “Come on . . . ,” she said, exhausted. “What do the kids say about me? What’s that thing they sing?”

  Come on . . .

  Tell me . . .

  Sing it . . .

  At Thirteen, a Midget Can Be Seen

  At noon, the guys from the Rotary club arrived. They came in a gray truck, with the words “Rotary Club International” inscribed on the door.

  Papa Lorenzo went out to meet them in shorts and a T-shirt, and Mama Pepita ran to the bathroom to quickly get herself ready.

  “One day they’ll take me for the maid,” she complained. “A rag is what I am, a rag!”

  Agar watched the Rotarians get out of the vehicle with Carnival whistles and shakers.

  “The terrible bunch!” Papa Lorenzo greeted them, trying on his best smile.

  So they got out: old Mutt Martinez, shortstop for the Santa Fe Club softball team. The very fat Jeff de la Vega, pitcher. Ambrosio Choraliza, owner of the “La Principal” ball field and supplementary member of the club’s board of consultants. Mingo, the barber, “the man who, on the whole beach, knew the most about the Big Leagues,” in Papa Lorenzo’s words. Ciriaco Sardinas, the Club’s Honorary President, who was carrying the Rotarians’ bell and banging on it with a hammer, requesting: “Keep this party orderly.”

  “So what says the old man?” Ambrosio Choraliza greeted him, giving Papa Lorenzo a big hug.