“I walked to the end of the street where it turns and came back. Right away. I didn’t want to get in trouble. I reached the end of the street, the church bell sounded, and I took it as a sign to come back and take it like a man.”
“I came back three times.”
When he was five the boy had been on a white sand beach in Mexico with his parents, both parents. It had been a hot day. He remembered seeing a boy who sat under a palapa in a black bucket filled with water. His mother had known the other boy’s family—they were both from DF. He and the frail, sickly boy in the bucket spent hours staring at the bloated whale lying belly up just over the hump of the beach. The sad waves eased up to the fly-coated skin of the beast. A fishing boat appeared suddenly and a few men ran a smaller boat up onto the sand in front of the whale.
One of the men walked directly up the lower jaw, past the throat, to roughly the chest between the wilting caudal arms. The man wore shorts and a rounded machete. One of the hosts arrived in a Land Rover. He yelled at the fisherman as he was drawing his machete slowly down the belly of the whale. The deep purple skin of the whale parted like two waves receding from sunset pink sand.
The host kept yelling. The fisherman shrugged with the springy knife and walked back toward the head along the three inch deep cut. Each footstep on the whale made a sound like pants ripping. Until he reached the fins. One side of the flesh began to tear away, slowly lowering the fisherman to his knees on a pile of blubber and flies. Rotten muscle opened threadbare onto the whale’s flat ribs releasing gas in fits of flatulence and spray. But no blood.
When the animal’s side ripped open the guests returned to the house and pool. The boys reluctantly went with them.
Next morning he walked with his mother toward the beach. Along the path through the trees they could hear the screech of birds that echoed from the shore they couldn’t see nearly a half mile away. As they neared the beach he squeezed his mother’s hand. From behind the trees it sounded like they were surrounded by the birds on all sides. They could hear men yelling.
“What are we doing here, hijo?” his mother asked as they crested the lip of the woods and stepped into the grassy sand on the edge of the beach.
A wave crashed. For a moment it drowned out the cries of the birds. The wind swirled above the beach and the blood soaked birds swirled with it in invisible cylinders sometimes somersaulting midair with their legs spread wide and their dark eyes panicked.
The men who worked for the hosts were wading up to their calves in cherry black coagulation. The whale’s body had been dragged away from them by the surf and was turning over in the pink froth of the waves. The gulls were scratching through the dark blood on the sand. Some were floating in pools.
Two men scooped whale’s blood with the sickly boy’s black bucket and walked it half-full to the water where they emptied it into the trash-swallowing ocean.
Both parents had been alive and now neither was. He knew how his mother had died. Cancer of the throat. She hadn’t smoked a day in her life, but somehow she contracted a smoker’s cancer that had strangled her and cut chunks out of her beautiful, long neck and eventually spread to her spinal column where it took over the bone and turned it to mush. For the last months she had worn a neck brace with pins driven into the remaining solid bone structure and a shunt that allowed them to administer pain killer into her cancer hole. Every time he thought about her he could see her deterioration pass by like the time lapse life of a lily flower, deflating with the pesticides they poured into her cancer hole, the white petals withering, turning grey, then black and hanging deformed in death.
He could not picture his father’s death. It was a fact, not an event. Furthermore, it was a binary fact.
“Is your father alive or dead?”
“He is dead.”
“How did he die?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you live with your father?”
“I was mostly away at school.”
“Where did you go to school? In the States?”
“Yes. St. Parmenides in Chicago.”
“Oh, I see.”
“You don’t know it, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
“Do you miss your father?”
“That’s a strange question.”
--
“My father went to St Parm when he was a kid.”
“Oh, it must be a very good school.”
“It is.”
“What did your father do for a living?”
“He worked for the government.”
“In what capacity?”
“He worked for the Army before I was born.”
“He was in the Army.”
“No, he worked with them.”
“That’s putting a fine point on it for one who doesn’t know what he did.”
“He corrected me, too. What are you going to teach me?”
“What do you want to learn?”
“Can’t you give me a list of what you can teach and we can go from there?”
“Shorter list, eh?”
“Why say that?”
“It’s what is in your mind.”
“You don’t know what’s in my mind.”
“No, I guess not. Why don’t you help me?”
“Why don’t you help me?”
At one point he was in a humid sophomore fall semester in Chicago. At the next he was in the head of school’s office hearing the procedural litany of how he was going to Mexico to live with El Patroncito. With Don Arsenio Berardo de la Barca of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. Nearly all the way to the Guatemala border.
“Of course I want you to know that you can count on us for support. As a former student you will keep your—“ Mr. Arai had grey hair and sad, puffy eyes like used tea bags. He was probably no older than his father—“a heart attack waiting to happen,” his father used to say. He had slimmed down since his father had known him, and had been the water polo coach for the school’s upperclassmen. The puffy eyes had stayed with him.
“A former student?” the boy interrupted.
“Yes, I’m sorry. There’s been no proviso for your continuation at St. Parmenides.”
“I see,” said the boy as he gathered his things in his lap. A pencil. “Is there any way you can talk with them? They probably don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t think they do. I have tried every route I can think of. I wouldn’t present it to you as a fait accompli if I hadn’t. I wouldn’t. But that’s what it is, my friend.”
He was twelve when his mother died.
He had been in the little Mexican city for about two weeks.
A dead cat. A quickly receding flood. A bank robbery abandoned when the getaway car fled early. An ongoing strike of resort workers. Things that would have been swallowed up completely in Chicago. San Cristóbal was small enough to allow small events to rise to the surface. Small events happened in San Cristóbal.
He had three years to let his mother go. Her family too had been mostly gone.
“You’ve had quite an uphill charge,” said Mr. Arai to the boy. “And you’ve done a commendable job.”
“Now—” the boy stopped.
“Yes, now this,” the baggy eyes searched for the boy’s words.
“Now…” Adara trailed off. “It may be that the trunks never make it here.”
Together they had found a store that sold clothing that suited him. Adara knew the shopkeeper, an effeminate man with hair bleached to straw. He tried on some Chilean jeans and picked out a number of plain t-shirts. They would last until his bags arrived.
Adara’s soft, thin brown hand appeared over the swinging door to the small fitting room. She waved a package of grey Calvin Klein briefs. He took them and tore on the dotted line.
“The others are done niño, really,” she said as she walked away. “I’m up front. Let’s go, okay?”
Though he liked to have all new clothes washed before he wore them, he peeled off his white briefs and pulled on a pair of the grey ones. They he put on his old clothes over the top. The ones he’d worn on the plane.
“Don’t you like them, brother?” asked the man as the boy came to the front of the store.
“Of course. I’ll take them.”
“What about a hat to go with them? You’d look great in this,” the effeminate man handed him a denim cap that looked like an oversized pincushion with a short bill. The boy froze.
“Bruno, stop it,” said Adara.
“It’s a nice hat.”
“Stop.”
Adara paid the man with crisp green notes. The boy followed her outside into the heat. The man leaned on the glass counter as he watched them leave.
They ate a corn and chicken tamale at the big market on the way back to El Patroncito’s house. A melon agua fresca. A bottle of Coke.
“You look hungry,” his father said. “Aren’t they feeding you in Chicago?”
He hadn’t known what to say. “I don’t know.” He didn’t feel hungry.
“I don’t know,” his father mimicked to himself.
They sat silent in the evening rush to the city. Stopped on the Beltway, their faces were lit red from a thousand taillights. Their heads haloed by the cars behind. His father’s brake pedal squeaked each time his foot rose. The car moved ahead to fill the void.
They both could picture her face and her bald head. With each squeak of the brakes he saw his mother blink. Blink her makeup darkened eyelashes, the sockets smeared like a raccoon’s mask. It was her old style, his father said. He didn’t care what she did, he said. It took unwanted attention from her sutured skull cap.
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