The Importance of a Piece of Paper

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  At around one in the afternoon, the four of them, feeling woozy, went out into the heat and headed down the winding cobblestone streets for the arena. The editor talked about how they had met, sharing that he had hired his lover to photograph the matadors. He looked at his companion and gave him a peck on the cheek, saying, “We are the perfect match!”

  Lynn and Franklin lost the two men in the hordes of Mexicans streaming into the coliseum to watch the bullfights. They sat in the first rows, the ones closest to the pit, leaning their elbows on the railing wall so they could see the eyes and expressions of the bulls and matadors up close.

  After all the time they had been together, Franklin knew how Lynn’s eyes were sometimes the color of green summer sage but changed color depending on what kind of day it was or what clothes she was wearing. On rainy days they were dark green, on windy dry days they became the palest light blue, but on the day he first saw her they were the bluest blue he’d ever seen in his life. It was as if he were looking into the purest coastal waters surrounding an undiscovered island. On the day of the bullfights, they were red as the matador’s cape.

  Lynn was crying and getting angrier every time a new bull, heralded by the cries of spectators, proudly broke into the arena and the poised matador bravely faced the bull, lining up his sword under his cape in preparation for battle. After the bull had been stabbed, speared, and ignominiously dragged away, Lynn would rise and scream that it was wrong, that the bull didn’t even have a chance. Her hysterics amused the Mexican crowd, who not only found her amusing but, judging by all the flirtatious stares, quite alluring.

  Lynn changed her tune with the last bull. They had saved the bravest bull for the final fight, and a hushed awe rose from the spectators as the announcer stated that the bull was unrivaled, the most valiant. Trumpets blared. The bull charged and immediately gored the matador in his thigh. With the matador pulled off to the side so assistants could wrap his wound, the bull snorted around the arena, daring anyone to challenge him. He trotted around as if he were immortal, galloping wildly, swinging his horns, and taunting the crowd to deliver him another victim. The crowd loudly booed and ridiculed the matador, who now had to save face and reappear for the showdown.

  Lynn was the loudest, even the cruelest, standing and shouting for the bull to avenge the deaths of the other bulls. But then the crowd grew quiet as the matador walked over to where Franklin and Lynn sat, unleashed his sword from its scabbard, pointed it at Lynn, and bowed. The crowd went berserk again, tossing sombreros into the air, toasting their pulque cups and tequila bottles, while others bowed and waved. Souvenir-selling kids rushed over and gave Lynn free roses, a mariachi trio serenaded her with a song, and one young gentleman gave her a beautiful Mexican cowboy hat, which she put on. One of the Mexicans seated a few seats to Lynn’s left leaned over and told Lynn, “He will kill the bull in your honor! Because you are so beautiful! He’s paying homage to your beauty!” Lynn couldn’t hear what he said because of the noise from the crowd, nor could she understand what this generous outpouring of affection meant, but as she and Franklin looked around waving back in gratitude, thousands of spectators smiled at them.

  The crowd reeled in ecstatic hysteria as huge gates opened up on the far side of the arena and men in uniforms brocaded with glittering jewels came out on horseback with long spears and gradually formed a circle around the bull, surrounding him. The crowd fell deathly silent. Other novice matadors appeared with capes and smaller daggers. The circle tightened around the bull as the creature lunged with false starts in one direction and then another, trying to roll its massive eyes everywhere at once. Confused and alarmed, it charged at matadors wherever it saw them.

  Although it could do nothing as daggers and swords plunged into its back and heart and chest, still it did not fall; it refused to go down. Blood drooling from its nose, gushing from its wounds, dribbling in red rivulets down its shimmering black hide, it charged again and again, only to be knifed and speared until the blood literally dripped in a curtain from its wounds and the bull turned red in the lowering sunlight. When it stood in one place, huffing, trying to breathe, pools of blood gathered under its belly. When it moved, scores of daggers planted deep in its muscles jiggled with its movements.

  Crying and drinking more tequila, Lynn was yelling her heart out at the cowards when two men dressed in suits descended the bleachers. They escorted Franklin and Lynn up the concrete steps of the arena and around the top of it to the back, and then down into the area where the bulls were dragged after they were killed.

  Franklin and Lynn felt disoriented as the two men positioned them under a rough-looking, open-air shed made of four telephone poles and a corrugated roof. Dizzied by too much tequila, the heat, and the roaring crowd, they held hands and waited. They remained as they were, until they heard the crowd give a concerted groan followed by a gasp, then a triumphant howl erupting in deafening celebration.

  Seconds later, the big wooden arena doors swung open and a chariot of four horses, breathing foam from their nostrils, charged through dragging the dead bull behind them. Four other men— naked except for ragged and soiled shorts—appeared and unchained the bull that now rested on the ground under the shed.

  The bull had not entirely expired and was still snorting out its last heaving breaths, when a giant of a man, wielding a medieval ax, and his cohort, a fierce ash-smudged midget with a sicklelike machete, grabbed Lynn and Franklin and stood them close to the bull.

  Lying on its back, its big oval black-and-white eyes glaring and blood streaming from its nostrils and mouth, the bull bellowed mournful grunts as the midget bent down and ripped open the animal’s torso from neck to groin. The giant next to him yanked the rib cage apart, and then the midget sank his hand into the bull’s chest, held a cup next to a heart artery, and filled it with blood.

  He withdrew his hand, turned, and, all spattered and smeared with blood and guts, handed the cup to Lynn, motioning for her to drink. Lynn looked at Franklin, who nodded, and she drank half of it, handing him the other half, which he drained. All the while, just beyond the shed, a mob of Mexicans, Americans, and Asians were shouting and waving fistfuls of money high above their heads, hollering for the testicles, horns, tongue, and penis. The midget stepped toward the crowd, swung his machete in an arc, and yelled that they better keep their distance. He then cut off a portion of the still warm and beating heart and handed it to Lynn. She bit off a part and chewed and swallowed it. Franklin did the same. They both understood there was no turning back; they had now committed to love and trust each other for life.

  Runaway

  The orphanage was to be doomed for demolition as soon as the nuns could arrange for suitable institutions or group homes to accept its more than four hundred boys. However, the children’s relocation was not going as well as they had hoped, so the closure was still on hold—it would happen when it happened. Motorists passing along I-40 and pedestrians hurrying down Indian School Road would continue to see masses of boys rushing down from the second-story classrooms, shoving and jostling one another out the push-handle double doors of the ground floor. The boys would stream past the communal washrooms to the right, roughhouse their way west across the stony lot to the open-air big shed, and spread like a trembling earthquake over the playground. Massive telephone beams held up the corrugated roof of the big shed, which covered sixty or so picnic benches and tables. There the nuns shuffled cards and laid out hands of solitaire, and boys lounged on tabletops, talking, sleeping, or playing checkers and dominoes.

  Ten years ago, when Runaway was first brought to the home at the age of six, he was out under the big shed on a summer morning when he saw a boy go into an epileptic attack. The boy squirmed and contorted on the concrete as nuns tried to pull his tongue out of his throat, and Runaway thought the school did that to kids—tortured them and forced them into madness. Runaway sat on a table under the big shed and cried and cried for days. Nobody could remember any boy who cried that long with such
passionate effort. He used to believe that if he cried hard enough his parents might come and get him. No one ever told him his parents had been shot in an armed robbery and died from wounds later in the hospital. His aunt delivered him to the orphanage in the middle of the night, telling him that his mom and dad were off working far away and they’d come and get him when they were finished with their job. The nuns still remembered how Runaway sobbed from dawn to dusk for weeks and how he didn’t stop until his grandma came to visit him. She was the only person in the world who loved him, and because he believed that, Runaway ran away so many times to be with her that his original name, Juanito, was used less and less by the nuns and the boys, and was eventually replaced with the name everyone knew him by—Runaway.

  Every time after he ran away and was returned to the home, he would sit on a picnic table under the big shed with all his buddies surrounding him, and start his epic tale of adventure. “You should have seen her. My grandma’s blind, but she’s one bad old lady. If she could see, she would kick the shit out of those cops. She loves me. I’m in her trailer, a small little thing, hardly enough room for two, when we hear the cops outside. My grandma goes out, I’m holding her hand, and when we get outside, the cops say they’re there to bring me back. She starts swinging her walking cane all around to keep the cops from getting me. I’m behind her while she’s doing this, but they rush her, grab me, and I’m carried away fighting these two goons, kicking and yelling, ‘I’ll be back. Grandma, I’ll be back.’”

  Sometimes he went on with his beautiful lies until the church bell rang, signaling that afternoon playtime had ended. The boys would stream in from all directions on the field and playground to wash up before supper. After their evening meal, they would do their chores and watch TV for an hour in the playroom reserved for toddlers during the day. Around 7 p.m. they’d all be marched in twos to their respective dorms, where they’d put on their pajamas and then head for the bathroom. In front of a row of mirrors and sinks, the boys brushed their teeth, slicked their hair with daubs of greasy pomade, and preened themselves as if they were going out on dates.

  One night, above the clamor, a kid masturbating in one of the toilet stalls groaned, “Ahh... ahhh.”

  “You squeezing your turkey, turkey...” a second kid’s voice poked fun from another toilet stall.

  “Ahhh... ahhh... ahhh.”

  “How many times you coming!”

  “Ahhh...”

  “Nobody comes that much!”

  Despite the noisy turmoil, the sweetest rap floated angelically from a corner of the urinals: Runaway smacked a stick against the cast-iron lip of the urinal and harmonized with Kimo, a big Tongan boy, who slapped his stomach, shoulders, and buttocks, contributing some tribal conga sounds to the song, as Tesco and Osca, two Jamaican brothers, rapped.

  “Stop this procrastination and get to bed!” scolded Sister Dolores, the dormitory nun. There was a sudden hush at the sinks and most of the boys scrambled out. Even the kid masturbating in the toilet stalls rushed out. But Sister Dolores’s presence was lost on Runaway and his crew—the acoustics in the newly quiet washroom were great and they kept rapping.

  Sister Dolores angrily rounded the wall separating the urinal from the sinks and stood there glaring.

  “You,” she said, her eyes drilling Runaway, “always the trouble!”

  “We were just kicking it around before bed,” Runaway said, out of breath and sweating, suffused with happiness from singing.

  “You kick it,” she hissed, “tomorrow morning, an hour before the others rise, to clean the side altars.”

  “Why? I haven’t done anything,” Runaway protested.

  “You know the rules, it’s bedtime, not rap time.”

  “It’s always rap time,” Tesco said.

  “Got that,” his brother Osca chimed in.

  Sister Dolores frowned at them, then extended her arm toward the cots in the other room and commanded, “Bed!”

  The next morning Runaway knelt at the communion railing, fervently praying at a small side altar to a wooden statue of the brown Virgen de Guadalupe, patron saint of the Chicanos.

  “Help my grandma, she’s alone, and needs you to do a miracle. Can you hear me?” He studied her brown lacquered eyes flickering with candle flames. The glimmering flames from the votive candles softened her expression and her gaze. “She’s going blind, you know, and she can’t hardly walk anymore.”

  The priest, Father O’Neil, startled Runaway. “You haven’t started cleaning?”

  Father O’Neil was a no-nonsense English priest with a weathered face, a red bulbous nose from too much Mass wine, and a sour disposition. Most of the boys knew about Father O’Neil’s transgressive behavior with some of the kids, but it wasn’t worth it to reproach him; the nuns would never believe it, and the unlucky kid who accused him would get a terrible beating. All they could do was warn newcomers to keep on their toes.

  “I was about to—” Runaway started to say.

  “Step on it.”

  Runaway picked up the feather duster and began dusting La Virgen again as Father recrossed the main altar toward his quarters.

  “Do they listen?” Runaway called out to Father O’Neil.

  Father O’Neil turned. “Who?”

  Runaway pointed to the saints at the side altars.

  “Start obeying the rules and they might.”

  He watched Father leave and then made a few disheartened swipes at La Virgen. He realized suddenly that she might not be able to hear him. He set down the feather duster and took her off the altar ledge. Emboldened by his act, he carried her to the pew and lay down with her. He unbuttoned his shirt and placed her next to his heart.

  “Maybe,” he whispered, “you couldn’t hear my prayers. Now you can. They’re even stronger in my heart.”

  He fell asleep praying, clutching her close against his naked chest. The last images he saw as he dozed off were the faces of other saints on the altars gazing at him lovingly.

  The chapel darkened as the sun moved west across the sky. Bells sounded. Pigeons came in from the fields and landed on the ledge outside the stained glass window above the main altar. Nuns came and went without even noticing Runaway sleeping on the pew; they knelt at the communion railing, lit votive candles, and left. Then Father O’Neil entered with two altar boys.

  “The choir will be singing Gregorian chants, and when they come to the verse—” He paused, noticing the feather duster on the floor. He picked it up and looked around. He found Runaway sleeping and when he saw the saint against the boy’s bare chest, he slapped Runaway hard across the face, roaring, “How dare you! You heinous fiend!”

  With his face burning and La Virgen violently yanked from his grasp, Runaway leaped up and dashed out of the chapel, confused about what was happening and what he had done to make Father so enraged.

  He flew up the flight of stairs from the second floor to the third and crawled through the small door leading into the bell tower. A storm of pigeon feathers exploded in the air when he entered. The birds madly squeezed through the slats, cooing frantically. Runaway hugged his knees to his chest in a corner on the floor caked with feathers and bird droppings, shaking so badly that he welcomed the sudden deafening gong of the bells, which distanced him from his own fright and made the birds go even more crazy. After hours spent hiding in the bell tower, he finally came out and turned himself over to Sister Anna Louise.

  She was the enforcer, a tall, broad-shouldered, grim-lipped German woman. She reminded Runaway of the picture in his history book of Napoleon. Often she’d surprise the kids with practice fire drills—when the alarm went off, all the kids would dive under their school desks. It was called the Sister Anna Louise drill, not because of the drill itself but because whenever she appeared on the playground, in hallways, or anywhere on the grounds, everyone dived for cover.

  The next day she pulled Runaway out of class and escorted him to his dormitory. She had him pull down his pants and spanked him
so many times that he lost count at thirty-eight, his butt so numb he couldn’t feel the sting of the board anymore.

  Dozens of boys played under the hot sun on the playground. Sitting on the sides of the sandbox, the older, rougher boys yelled, “Come try your luck! Hit ’em and win ’em. Try your luck!”

  Boys crowded in and knelt at a line scratched in the dirt to shoot at the pyramids of marbles against the sandbox ten feet away. On all four sides, shooters jostled one another and marbles flew down the swept-dirt gallery, missing and banging hard against the metal. Other boys collecting the marbles got their knuckles smacked hard as their hands scurried in and out of the line of fire.

  At the monkey bars, the risk takers did suicidal somersaults, some still with casts on their arms from breaking their limbs the last time. Unfazed, they threw crazy flips and crashed down onto the dirt on necks, backs, and knees. Younger boys were at the slides and teeter-totters, and near them, another group of boys played piquete, a Mexican top game. One player would throw his top into a circle drawn into the dirt, and the other players would try to crack his top in half with their tops before it stopped spinning. If the first player’s top survived the bombing, then another player had to throw his top in and let the other boys try to bust that one. The dirt circle was always littered with splintered corpses.

  Other kids sat along the ditch that ran around the playground, smoking cigarettes made of dried elm leaves and comic book paper; some walked the weed and dirt field, others raced go-carts on the asphalt court. The go-carts were made of pieces of rotting wood and baling wire, with rusty bicycle-rim steering wheels and wobbly, rubberless wagon wheels. Some played basketball on the other half of the court, a black square marked with a coal rock indicating where the backboard, rim, and net used to be.

  Runaway and his crew stood in the right field, rapping and harmonizing while waiting for Marcello, the midget coach, to hit them a pop-up. Runaway told them the next ball would be his—he was going to catch it. Meanwhile he sang backup lyrics, Kimo slapped his body with his glove, and Tesco and Osca ricocheted rap lyrics.