“There’s the good and there’s the bad,” he said.
My father told me about home altars. How many of the jíbaros did not have easy access to churches in the mountainous region. How getting down from that mountain would have taken too long and so many of them created small altars in their house. The altars would be decorated with rosaries, pictures of saints, family members, flowers, maybe even Milagros – metal religious folk charms used for healing. And of course there were the Santos, wooden hand carved statues of saints. I thought of that small wooden statue my father had gifted me so many years ago. About patron saints and protection. I asked him, too, why Saint James, and he asked me what had taken me so long to ask.
We came to a crossroads and my father told me to go left, continuing upward, farther up into the mountain. He asked me if I remembered now why I had not been to any more Puerto Rican Day Parades, or why we didn’t own a Puerto Rican flag, and why I had never been to the island before now. I nodded my head slowly and silently
“Do you still have the vejigante mask?” He asked and I smiled.
“It’s above my bed.”
“Good. That’s a safe place to keep it.”
“The statue is on my dresser still, too,” I said.
“And that is where they both should always be, watching over you.”
We drove slowly, along a narrow mountain road, pockmarked with potholes, and my father suddenly asked me to stop the car. He got out of the car and stood facing the jungle. As I looked closely I could see a small wooden house deep within the brush that had long ago been consumed by the mountain.
“This is where I grew up,” he said. “This is my home, and it’s time.”
I told him I was not ready, so we stood there for a long time, him telling me about my grandfather who would sit at the porch and wave at cars that went by. My father told me ghost stories about the mountain, how at night he heard the whispers of his ancestors, the Tainos—natives of the island of Borinquen later renamed Puerto Rico by the Spanish conquistadors who came to our island home. He told me through tears how they came to kill and then to conquer. He told me how 300 years passed under Spanish rule and how our island was then handed to the United States and wrapped in an American flag. Our ancestors, he told me, had endured more than we could ever imagine, but still, they endured countless horrors, the theft of their homes, land, their language, their religion, their identity —but that those who survived did so that I could stand here right now. Words nor hate could hurt me, my father reminded me.
When it was time, my father walked into the house that was no longer a house, but now a part of that great mountain. As the cool wind blew I heard the rustle of banana leaves, or was that the fluttering of flags?
I then drove to the small cemetery there in Adjuntas and sat at my father’s grave.
My father had been struck and killed by a car on the parade route so many years before, when he chased after me. After my father was killed, my mother knew he would want to be buried here, his homeland.
I knew, in all of those moments of sorrow and pain, of feeling as though I did not belong—that I really did. That I belonged here and there. That I was both. That I straddled lands, identities and beliefs, and that my father had sent me blessings of saints and devils to remind me that I would be okay, that I would be safe.
In my car, when I pulled on my seatbelt and adjusted the rearview mirror, I saw in it that satin, billowing fabric and that demon mask. El vejigante waved to me as I drove away, but I knew it was not goodbye. I knew that he would continue to serve as my guardian, reminding me that if my ancestors could persevere and if my father could, that I would, too.
FAT TUESDAY
Christopher David Rosales
Ruben opened the front door to see his son hanging from the arms of two other boys on the porch. His son’s friends, their hair messy-long on top and the sides as bald as their peeled eyes, suspended James between them so that James’ calves, ending in Converse, collected below. His head sagged between his shoulders, hung so that Ruben could see the bruises on one side of his face. Ruben took his son in his arms and brought him inside. He kicked the stacks of graded papers off the couch and laid his son down. “Oh my god, what happened? Mijo, you’ll be all right.”
He called the policía first, then he called his wife, but she didn’t answer. With one hand he smoothed James’ black hair back and felt the Tres Flores, blood, and dirt stick to his palm, rubbed the shiny tips of his fingers together. His other hand floated above James’ forehead as if he were about to take his temperature. Instead, for no reason he could imagine to himself, he smelled the scent of his son’s hair on his fingers.
He went back to the porch, where the boys told Ruben how they had been to Toro’s house, north, across the border. In L fucking A, near the San Gabriel river. James had wanted to see about some firme chick who turned out to be Toro’s niece. Toro didn’t like James for that. Toro had said something about who Ruben had been before he became un Profesor del culo. James had been pissed and called Toro a puto, so Toro had pulled a nina and beat him with it, right there in the driveway in front of everybody, said he’d kill him if he ever came back. “And tell your pops. . . I know he ain’t got no payback.”
“Who’s Toro? Does he go to your school?”
“He don’t go to school,” answered the one on the left. “He old. Like you.”
Ruben clenched his other hand into a fist at his hip before hiding it in his slacks’ pocket. “What’s he, some dumbass gangbanger?”
“Yeah. But he’s been banging a long time. Since you was young, even.”
The sirens approached now in the faint radar way noise is heard in the poorer parts of the city, where whispers downpour from distant alleys, the police sirens shriek and the whoop whoop of birds overhead is a species of helicopter. The boys flinched at the sounds, and it was a moment before the one on the right nodded to the other that it was time to go.
Ruben reached for their wrists. “You have to stay and talk to the police.”
They backed off with their hands up, as if to say don’t shoot the messenger. “I think you know him, Mr. Flores.”
“Who? Toro?”
They walked faster now, heading toward the low-walled stucco apartments across the street. “Mike G. Didn’t he used to bang with you when you was kids? Before you got into all that University T.J. shit?”
The two of them vaulted up and over the brick wall, their baggy shirts and jeans billowing. Ruben heard them crash into trashcans on the other side. Standing in the doorway between the darkening city outside and the cramped and sweaty safety of his home, he hated this man, Toro; but he also hated himself for not guarding James as he should have. He watched his son’s chest rise and fall, and he listened to the ghettobird’s whoops overhead, and the approaching sirens, until the police arrived. He rolled the sleeves of his shirt down to hide his tattoos, and he buttoned each cuff, before waving his arms. The police and EMTs tried to squeeze past his large frame before finally asking him to move. When he did move he stepped to the window facing the street and stood there with his arms crossed over his chest, staring down the street, pretending to see through every building and wall to his past’s role in now.
After the reports, the questions and the hours spent in Hospital Ángeles, a grey-lidded doctor told Ruben that he’d need to admit James for the night. Maybe two. But the boy would sleep for now. Ruben went into the room—the beeping machines, the hiss of the oxygen mask deafening after the silence of the hall outside. He kissed his son on the cheek. It was too loud a smack and he regretted the sound instantly. He knew that while he’d been on campus his son had been moving through a different kind of world; Ruben had been distracted by work—a way to avoid thinking about his wife—but now saw the recent changes in his son as clear as the stitches that ran up and down the boy’s face. He realized that the two worlds could not exist as one; that, like life and death, you could only pass from one to
the other. Ruben didn’t whisper apologies to James from the door, just told him he’d be back soon.
The old Mercury traveled Avenida de los Heroes surrounded by pick-up trucks with filigreed paint above the wheel wells, motorcycles shiny and motorcycles old, and the occasional decrepit Ford with rotten wooden fencing along its bed—appliances, or alfalfa, or corn inside. Dang, man, nothing felt right. Rosary beads hung from the rearview mirror and Ruben thanked the Virgin that his son was safe. The car roared around the corner and he parked in front of his old neighbor’s house, the kind of neighbor who was there when he was thirteen and would still be there at thirty-two, and Ruben walked across the dry grass to the black steel door.
He pushed the button, and Yasmín answered before the brass doorbell ceased to ring. She wore a tacky kimono of cherry blossoms and looked as if she’d practiced every facial expression she tried. She smiled. “I thought you might not come.” She propped her right arm high in the doorway so that Ruben could see inside if he lowered his eyes.
“We had an emergency. I need you to stay with James at the hospital.”
“I don’t guess you called his mother?” She tugged the kimono down over her thighs, then up over her breasts, and crossed her arms.
“As soon as it happened.” He turned his head away and pretended to track a stray dog up the street but its receding hips were blurry to him even though he stared. “He got mixed up with the wrong people, I guess.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, really?”
“Call me if anything changes.” He handed her the doctor’s card on which he’d scribbled the boy’s room number.
“And if she does actually show up?” She pointed nowhere relevant. “If she finds me there?”
“Don’t sound so hopeful.” He was already walking away. “You’ll be disappointed.”
Along the highway, the Merc rode smooth, round and black like a bomb it was called in his old L.A. neighborhood. From inside, the view of his old city was like the view from a tank, more horizontal than vertical, and low along the ground. That close, riding over the textured asphalt was like crawling over a rug in the dark, searching for its end. Instead of the street stable beneath the moving car, it pulled beneath by a hand unseen.
On either side of Alondra Boulevard were trees with white trunks, and these gave way to smaller and darker trees, and these gave way to none—just telephone poles and jaundiced streetlamps. When he got to the square shop on the corner, the one with the enormous donut on top, he turned left on Atlantic. A yellow-haired woman in low-cut scarecrow rags stood on the corner and called out her price. He watched her in the side-view mirror flipping him off.
Down a side street and still another, he stopped before a small house guarded by a low, chain-link fence. There was dirt where grass should have been, and a white pit bull roaming out front. Ruben opened the car door and stepped out, but the dog charged the fence and Ruben ducked back inside. The dog snarled, leapt, and its head snapped back for the chain attached to its collar. It flipped backward. It wasted no time whimpering but growled and barked while its head jerked back and forth so quickly it seemed to have many.
From behind the metal screen door of the house a voice called out, “Who’s there?”
Ruben shut the car door softly, holding the latch but keeping the keys in his hand. “It’s me.”
“Who the fuck is me?”
Ruben moved forward and the man inside opened the screen and pushed his face into the porchlight. There was the same horseshoe mustache running up over his lip, the same squinting eyes that seemed closed while he looked Ruben over. The dog kept barking and the old friend called Chino turned the porchlight off. It was as dark as the night can be in the city; radiant with the artificial light that fills the sky and fills the eyes with the falseness of what one attempts to see in the dark below. Chino cursed at the dog to shut up, but it didn’t.
Ruben stepped toward the fence and the pit bull dove. Again, the chain snapped the dog back, but not before Ruben was hit with spit and the dog’s sour breath condensed fog in the air.
“Watch out, pendejo. You’re gonna hurt my dog. Stay back so she don’t fight the chain.” Chino walked off of the porch and led the dog back and out of sight. He returned, waddling, holding either pant leg at the thigh to keep his baggy jeans up out of the dirt. “She’s worth a grip of cash.” His white t-shirt hung from his skeletal frame as it would from a hanger. “She fights for me, so I’m protective.”
“She looks like she needs protection.” Ruben raised a hand to offer a shake. “It’s been a while.”
Chino slapped Ruben’s hand away. “Shit, Profesor.” They hugged and slapped backs. “Get the fuck in the house, homie. It’s been about a minute.”
When they entered they stepped on ragged, vomit-toned carpet. The walls inside bore sparse patches of 70s wallpaper in orange and yellow crescents, and a big-screen television occupied most of one wall. It wasn’t a small wall.
On either side of the TV were enormous speakers, like columns beneath the low ceiling. Children’s toys littered the floor, and a pile of weed centered the glass coffee table. Ruben focused on a Tonka truck near an end-table leg. An oversized black-leather couch filled the room and, when Chino sat, it huffed, the protective plastic crackling the death-rattle of a dying rhino. Chino cleaned the weed, squinting his eyes at the green tufts between his fingers. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, ese. I thought you’d moved on. You know, bigger and better things.”
“You haven’t.” Ruben stood in the center of the room, in front of the TV. “Seen me, I mean.”
“Sure, I get it. Beef with the police? What’d you do, Profesor?” He looked up with a crooked smile on his face. “Forget to return your library books?” He laughed and the dog barked in the backyard and Chino laughed louder still, and then barked too. Ruben did not laugh and Chino’s face went blank. “Serio homes, you? You didn’t do anything, did you?”
“Where’s Toro?”
Chino plucked seeds from the shake on the coffee table. “Chingón.”
“Where?”
“Stay the fuck away.” He pinched some seeds into his mouth and rolled them along his inner lip. “Whatever it is, ain’t worth it. You shouldn’t be messing around, Profesor. Ain’t you got rich white kids in Mex-i-co to teach?”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m just being real here. You ain’t seen me in years and now—”
“Toro beat my son. My son.”
Chino set his elbows on his knees and leaned forward as if to see Ruben’s face better in the dim light. He sighed in the stillness. “What do you want from me, ese?”
Ruben said, “Go for a ride with me.”
“I don’t go for rides no more. ‘Specially not with people like you. If you got too much to lose you bound to lose it, hermano. Every time.”
“No one changes much.”
“Yeah, well I ain’t gonna stick around to see you prove it.”
“I did enough—back when. Where were you to kill those doubts, then?” Ruben dropped his arms to his sides. His fingers opened and closed. “You don’t have to come now, but I’ve done worse for you. Just tell me where to find him.”
“Fine.” Chino lowered his head and shook it. “I’ll get the guns. You ain’t going alone.”
“No guns.”
“Fuck you, no guns. You think I’m going for moral support? You want that shit you take your wife.”
Ruben grunted.
Chino stepped off into a short dark hallway. Ruben watched him stand before a dresser. Chino took a gun from beneath his shirt and another from a drawer and set one on the dresser. He began to load them with a jeweler’s finesse.
Ruben stepped outside, smelled smoke, and looked down the street past the yards that grew narrow as the road curved away from the concrete riverbed. The 710 crossed over the thin river far below and in the dark space beneath the overpass a trashcan fire burned. The firelight painte
d the men surrounding the can. They shared outbursts of laughter. Above them were blurry yellow and red light-trails of movement on the freeway and, behind, palm trees glowed in the streetlights. Ruben thought about what he wanted for his son, for himself, and knew that searching for it day and night wouldn’t matter if he used the wrong map.
The metal door behind him screeched open. Chino pushed past him and pressed a towel into his stomach. “Take it, homes.”
Ruben unwrapped the towel and a gun rested within: not cold and dead, as he’d expected, but warm and full of potential. God, he was losing it with the sentimentality already. He placed the gun inside the waist of his slacks and let the towel drop to his loafers. The two of them walked down the steps of the porch and out of the yard. The car rumbled to a start and they drove away from the freeway, turned left onto Compton Boulevard. Once, they had tried to change the street’s name to Somerset. And on the safe side of town, they’d succeeded.
Deeper and deeper into the city the buildings were smaller but more colorful. It was depressing for Ruben to see his old neighborhood so dark and empty of any ornamentation, like the “Welcome To…” signs missing proper city names or stolen and replaced by graffiti.
“Do you still have your tattoos?” Chino thrummed his fingers on the dash. Turned music up. Turned it down.
Ruben looked at his arms and imagined the tattoos that covered his skin beneath the blue fabric of his collared dress shirt. Even now, on his mission, he hid the tattoos he once wore to show that he had kept company with other men who sought the very same things that he did now. “I thought about having them removed. Do you have any new ones?”
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