by Jon Pineda
Turning onto their street, he was surprised to see Elle’s car in the driveway. There was another car there. He didn’t know whose it was. It looked new. Maybe Marsha had gone and bought one with some of the money Elle suspected the old woman had squirreled away.
Closer to the house, he slowed his pace. Wendell lay on the ground in the front yard, the bicycle next to him. Exequiel didn’t hesitate. He dropped his bag. He yelled Wendell’s name.
The boy didn’t move.
Exequiel crouched down to check his breathing.
There was no movement.
Then, suddenly, the boy laughed, giggling. He sat up.
Wendell pointed at Exequiel’s chest and said, “I got you, Dad.”
“You got me,” Exequiel said.
“I got you good,” Wendell said.
“Yes, you did.”
“What’s wrong?”
Exequiel finally collapsed on the ground. Beholding the burnt orange sky above them. He let out a breath.
“Are you tired?” Wendell said.
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Oh.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“Inside talking.”
“With your grandmother?”
“No,” the boy said. “With some man.”
Wendell picked up his bicycle. “That was a good joke, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Exequiel said. “A good joke.”
He remembered his tools and went into the street to gather them. Wendell followed on his bicycle, wobbling as he rode past. Exequiel fought off the urge to say, “Watch out.”
The boy went a few houses down and then turned and raced back. Exequiel realized he had never been taught how to ride a bicycle himself. He laughed at the thought that Wendell might one day have to teach him.
“What?” Wendell said as he approached. He hit the brakes and skidded to a stop.
“I can’t do what it is you’re doing,” Exequiel said.
“Do what?” the boy said, smiling. “Ride a bike?”
Exequiel nodded.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Wow.”
“I know. You’re getting older.”
“If you want, I can show you how. It’s easy.” Wendell studied his face.
“Maybe later,” Exequiel said.
He looked at the house. He dragged his foot behind him.
He could hear them in the kitchen. Their silence as he rounded the corner. Elle looked out of breath herself. The rims of both eyes red as flares on a roadside.
Exequiel thought the puffiness of her lips, the faint pink smear on one side in particular, had been from some scuffle, but when he looked at the man standing across from her, the smirk on the man’s face, Exequiel knew. On the man’s mouth, the same coloring.
Among Exequiel’s tools was a thick, fourteen-inch flathead screwdriver that he had been taught that morning to use for testing the integrity of a telephone pole. It functioned more like a dagger. The instructor had shown him how to go around in a circle and stab at the base of the pole, deep into the wood, to see if any of the outer ring would flake off. He had to do this before he started his climb. If he failed to perform this step, he would be penalized.
“This is Joshua,” Elle said nervously.
Joshua wiped at his chin and grinned without saying a word.
Even so, Exequiel could still hear the man’s voice. He was talking to him on the phone again. Exequiel didn’t need for him to speak. He didn’t need to be insulted anymore.
He set his bag down and rummaged through the contents until he found the screwdriver. He grabbed at the metal end, holding it to his side like a hammer.
Joshua looked sheepish with his lips smeared pink. Exequiel could not put out of his head that these were the same lips that had formed the words spic motherfucker. Exequiel was glad that the voice on the other end of the line could hear him breathing and that now the body that had made the voice had come into his life in this way.
He did not pretend, as Joshua pretended, that everything was fine.
They could not just go back into their lives as if nothing had happened. Everything had already happened.
Outside the boy rode his bicycle.
Exequiel held his breath. His chest shuddered. He thought he could hear the boy racing past the house. The wheels whirring like the engines of a distant airplane. It was headed this way. Inside, the smoke jumpers waited to vanish into an inferno.
The phone number was written on a small slip of paper that had been left inside a book of poems. He found the book in the trunk of the car, under a box of tools. He had kept the same tools over the years, as he traveled from one small town to the next. The motel parking lot was a bleached field of random shoots, cracks spidering out in the pavement. He held the slip of paper and studied the phone number and remembered the boy and the smell of his hair. Elle’s way of standing in the kitchen. The warmth of her body as they shared coffee in the mornings before he left for work.
He went inside the motel room and pulled the dusty curtains to the side. Through the window, the sound of the highway threatened to become something else. He wondered if the boy, who had to be fifteen or sixteen by now, would even remember him. He dialed the sequence of numbers. He waited for someone to answer, but no one did.
Later that evening, he ate dinner at the small roadside restaurant near the motel and brought back to his room some coffee and a slice of lemon meringue pie, touted by the lone waitress as a specialty of the place. The pie filling was tart and the coffee was bitter, but he enjoyed them nonetheless. He opened the window and lay back on the bed and listened as the moths gathered on the screen. As far as he knew, he was the only guest.
He tried the numbers again.
This time, a woman answered.
“Who’s there?” she said, when he wouldn’t speak.
“I’m sorry,” he said, struggling. “I must have the wrong number.”
“Is that you?” she said.
There was a pause on her end.
He tried to take a breath quietly, so as not to be heard breathing.
“Exequiel?” she said. “Is that you?”
He answered her, and she laughed, saying she thought it was him. She asked where he was. How had he been? Just the other day she was talking on the phone to her brother Wallace. She couldn’t remember if he had ever met Exequiel. Then she made a joke about her ex and how his broken jaw remembered Exequiel, for sure. She laughed again. He didn’t know what to say exactly, and so he said, “I’m fine. I’m working in Georgia.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought you might be closer.”
“No,” he said.
There were more pauses in the way they spoke to one another. More moths left the darkness to brush the screen.
“How is Wendell?” he said finally.
“Wendell?”
“Yes, Wendell,” Exequiel said. “What is it?”
She whispered, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying, even when she spoke clearly and started telling him about the boy. He didn’t want to hear what he knew she would say, but as she spoke, he could already see the way it had happened. The boy growing up with fresh anger. Having joined with other boys in the neighborhood who shared the same way of looking at the world. Each night they would ride their bikes into the streets, keying cars or throwing bricks through windows. One day, the oldest of them was able to drive and took the boys to meet other boys nearby who were older. She said it had become too much in the house. These boys had begun to hang out at all hours, coming in when they wished.
They had tested Wendell to see what he would do.
At thirteen, he took a bandana and wrapped it around his face like an outlaw and walked into a convenience store and asked the man behind the counter for all of his money. When the man refused, Wendell pulled out a gun. The oldest of the boys had used the gun in similar robberies. Wendell took aim at the man, but the man fell, clutching at his chest. Wendell had
not pulled the trigger. It didn’t matter.
The paramedics brought the man to the hospital, and he gave a description of the car and the boy who had pointed the gun at him, who had foolishly thrown it down onto the floor and raced off with the others. It wasn’t long before the sheriff’s deputy came to the house and arrested Wendell.
“I’m sorry,” Exequiel said.
He could still hear the boy’s laughter, could see him walking slowly into the kitchen those mornings, rubbing his eyes as his hair stood up in back like the broken springs of a clock. Each time, it was the same ritual. The boy would step between Elle and him and pretend he wanted their coffee, just to hear them say, “No, no, you’re too young.” Then they would hold him.
Exequiel stopped listening to the story. He could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. Somehow they were connected by a thin strand of wire that left the room where he waited to hear her just once more and extended elsewhere, into an unfortunate oblivion.
five
It wasn’t long after their time together in Charlottesville that Rachel and Tom were engaged. Rachel had graduated with honors and had job offers from a number of firms in both the Richmond area and a few cities in Hampton Roads, most notably Norfolk. Her aspirations involved going to law school eventually, and she believed experience as a paralegal would help her application.
When they had first met, never in those early discussions about life had she mentioned such an interest. Perhaps he had inadvertently influenced her, describing too often the horror of the crime in his childhood, how his family had been left to make sense of something senseless?
Before the proposal, Tom had been meaning to break things off. The perfect opportunity for such a discussion, though, never seemed to surface. So he waited, but as he did, he grew angry with himself.
One day, he spoke up.
“Now you’re telling me this shit?” she said.
She threw a glass. It smashed against the wall near him.
Tom clutched his hand. There was blood. He carried the small shard over to the sink. He would not say anything as he ran water over his hand.
Rachel decided to tell him.
He looked up from the running water.
“Yeah, right,” he laughed. He thought she was making it up.
“In a month or so we’ll hear the heartbeat,” she said.
“You’re serious.”
He turned off the faucet.
His fingers bled slowly into the drain.
“I knew you’d be thrilled,” she said.
She wiped at her eyes, but then stared hard.
Tom felt she was looking through him.
“How long have you kept this secret?” he said.
“What does it matter?”
“How long?” he said. It was only now that he felt his fingers throbbing, going numb.
“You’re such a fuck,” she said.
That night, after they made love, Tom lay awake in bed. Rachel had fallen asleep, was snoring lightly. In the glow from the lamp on the stack of books they used as a nightstand, he read the shadows. They were spread in paragraphs along the warped ceiling. He tried to make sense of what he felt now. “Rachel?” he said, though he knew she was dreaming. He wanted to wake her just then, but instead, he let her sleep.
Teagan had helped her mother clean the kitchen, even getting down on her knees to scrub the floor like Cinderella. She had the picture book in her room. It was one of her favorite things.
“Sissy, get up,” her mother said, but Teagan would not relent. She wanted to be the one who was a prisoner. She wanted to clean and then be locked up in a room, and she wanted very much to put on a dress and go to a dance and have people look at her and think she was pretty.
“Tommy needs to see the floor,” Teagan said.
“He’ll see the floor,” her mother said.
“Dad said he wants me to clean it good. Wants to see our faces in the floor.”
“He was kidding.”
“I see my face.”
“Sissy, get up,” her mother said, but Teagan refused. She gazed down at her face and kept trying to wipe it away.
After they finished in the kitchen, she helped tidy up the living room and then Elinor started cleaning the main bathroom. Elinor wanted her daughter to take a nap, but there was too much excitement. There was no way Teagan would calm down enough to rest. She had made the mistake of telling her that Tommy and Rachel were coming over later. Manny would be home by then, too. Tommy supposedly had good news to share.
Elinor stood in the shower and sprayed down the tile and let it sit.
“Sissy, what are you doing now?” she called out.
Teagan didn’t answer.
“Where are you?” Elinor said.
She heard Teagan laughing quietly, talking.
Elinor went down the hall to Teagan’s bedroom.
She found her sitting in the middle of the floor. Teagan’s dolls were grouped by size, smallest to biggest, and facing her. They gave Teagan their full attention. She was reading to them. “Isn’t this exciting?” she said slowly, enunciating the word. She brushed the hair away from each of their faces.
“I’m the teacher, and you better be thankful,” she said to the biggest. “You could be locked up for doing that, you know?”
Elinor cupped her mouth and leaned forward in the doorway, but Teagan still hadn’t noticed her.
“What was that?” Teagan said to the smallest doll. “What did you say? You don’t want to go? Well, that’s too bad. Too bad, too bad!” She started repeating the words, even dropping the book to her side so she could use both fists to pound the air.
Elinor saw that Teagan had changed into a dress, but when Elinor looked closer now, she realized it wasn’t one of her daughter’s dresses, it was one of hers. Taken from the back of the closet, a dress from a long time ago. She wanted to ask her daughter why she had taken it without asking for permission. It had been wrapped up because the pale white cloth was delicate. It was old. Couldn’t she see that it was fragile? Why couldn’t she?
Tom and Rachel met on Tom’s lunch break from the sports equipment store where he had recently found employment. It was the kind of place where his father would love to work. Tom’s days were mostly spent replenishing the shelves. If he wasn’t helping customers, he was signing off on pallets. New shipments of uniforms. Rows of boxed, untouched soccer balls. Basketball shoes. Boxing gloves. The flow of inventory seemed endless.
Tom might have been consumed by the monotony if he hadn’t, only months before, heard the gurgling static of their child’s heart. Rachel had tried to keep from laughing. She cupped her mouth. The heartbeat had sounded oceanic to Tom, something immense. It wavered and cradled him. He didn’t want to stop hearing it.
Today, they were to meet in a different room. They had been called in because of some questionable test results. An ultrasound had been scheduled and would rule out concerns. Rachel had repeated these words more than once, even that very morning. Now, preparing for the technician’s arrival, she said them again under her breath. Tom could only stare at her.
Rachel laughed when the technician squirted a thick, warm dollop onto her stretched belly.
“Look familiar?” she said to Tom, trying to get him to laugh.
“Stop,” he said. He nudged her.
Had she forgotten about Teagan? Things could still go wrong.
On the screen, a smear of pixels revealed the shape of their child. He quickly tried to discern the image. He looked at the technician’s face, her small nose and smaller eyes. There were no signs of change in her expression. He studied the screen and listened as the woman told them everything looked good. She counted out the eyes and measured the distance between them with the computer program. She counted out the fingers and the toes for them. He could listen to this lesson all day long, counting and counting. In the middle of the screen, the heart announced itself in quick bursts of steady flashing.
“I couldn’t r
emember, did you want to know?” the technician said to Rachel.
“Know what?” Tom said.
“The sex,” Rachel said to him.
“What about the other thing?” he said.
“It’s fine,” the technician said, smiling. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Rachel leaned her head against his neck. He exhaled.
“So, do you want to know what you two are having?” the woman said.
six
When Exequiel was a boy, he lay not in the woods, for the surrounding area near his town was not referred to as such, but in the realm of trees nearest the ravine that he and his friends called el más allá. The beyond.
Where the others had run off to that day, he didn’t know. His older brother Paul was gone by then. Exequiel had been left to fill his days with his own wanderings, breaking sticks or batting away rocks, anything remotely spherical, launching it all into the flora.
His boredom exhausted him.
When he approached the river, he found a matted spot that allowed him both to lie down and rest and to still listen to the water rushing below. It moved like the blood inside his body, he imagined.
His life, no matter where he was to go, would always be tied to here, this juncture. From far off came the scent of rain. Maybe a light shower, but nothing like a storm to fear. He closed his eyes. He waited for his future to come for him on its own.
The oldest of the men who had taken him looked to be his father’s age. They were ancient. At nine years old, he was not the best judge of age. He was certain only that there were five of them. All were dressed in a similar way. Their uniforms were evidence of their poverty. Soiled khaki pants and old shirts with prominent logos of American companies. If they wanted to, they could easily drop their weapons and return to their towns, disappearing into lean-tos or other such dwellings.
