“The girls,” I say, “can do things with their hands no other girls can.”
“You’re crazy,” my brother says and finishes his coffee in one gulp and then puts it down on the table next to his bed. I pick up the gun that’s leaning against the wall in his room and I turn the gun and point it at my brother.
“What things with their hands?” my brother says and he stands up while tying his robe tighter around his waist. He goes to his window and stands looking out at the Charlie Bar across the way. I stand next to him. I point the gun at the windows of the Charlie Bar. There’s no one I can see through the windows. The Charlie Bar is closed.
My brother turns and looks at me. “That’s not how to do it,” he says. He raises the gun up so it fits in my shoulder. He straightens out my arm and with his foot he kicks at my foot so I spread my legs a little and stand the way a shooter is supposed to stand. When I talk, it’s into the wood of the gun, into the swirls of cherry grain.
“Please go,” I say.
My brother shakes his head and says, “Only thing in that Charlie Bar is a bad smell from the night before. I know,” he adds, “because I was sitting there last night so loaded I was barfing into a basket of peanuts on the bar.” Then he says, “I’ll go. All right, I’ll go.”
Manolo is teaching our brother to say things.
“Dónde están los lavabos?” Manolo says.
“They all piss on the street there, teach him something useful instead,” our mother says.
“Dos cervezas, por favor,” Manolo says
“No,” our brother tells Manolo. “Teach me right. Teach me how to say ‘consulate,’ how to say ‘missing person,’ how to say ‘I’d like to file a report.’”
Manolo tells him and our brother writes the phrases down on bits of paper he safety-pins inside the lapel of his robe. Sometimes he reads them, flapping back his robe’s lapel like some watch-seller on the street corner flashing us his goods.
When he’s just about to leave for the plane, he picks up his bag and he can’t figure out why it’s so heavy until he unzips it and sees the gleam of the gun. Louisa put it in. “You never know when you might want to do yourself off,” she says.
“It’s do yourself in,” he says and he takes out the gun and chest-passes it to her and she catches it with both hands and he says, “Is there anything else in this bag I should know about?” He leaves and Louisa aims the gun at him in our hallway and then he goes down in the elevator and from the street he waves goodbye to us at our window, Louisa still aiming the gun, telling us she has a good shot, a really good shot.
“Maybe you should have taught him how to say ‘You fucking son of a bitch,’ maybe you should have taught him that,” our mother says to Manolo, “because that’s all I’d want to learn to say if I were going over there to find him and I found him.”
“‘Let’s dance,’ ‘Let’s drink,’ that’s what you’d want to learn,” Manolo says. “That’s what you should learn. You hardly know it in English. Do you know it in English?” he asks our mother.
“Let’s dance, let’s drink,” our mother says.
“No, that’s not it, that’s not right. Say it like you mean it,” Manolo says.
“Merde,” our mother says, “and now you will teach me English?”
“It could be too late. Languages are best learned young, when there’s the chance you’ll mean what you say later in life,” he says.
Our mother is jiggling. Her leg sending the hanging light fixtures shaking. Her drink slightly sloshing, playing up the glass’s lip. We are adjusting our eyes. The evening through our skylights comes in gray. The news is war-ridden, shots never sounding as loud or as close as what we see in a movie, but childish, a popgun sound. We don’t know what we see, men or boys running holding guns, women hiding in doorways, making themselves thin, as if waiting out the rain.
Ma Mère is back in the hospital on a gurney in the hallway, getting brushed by people passing in thick-armed coats, scarf ends tossed in her face, packages set down beside her by people tired of carrying them who don’t know she’s there. Ma Mère tries to sit up, she wants to see where she is, but her robe’s back slit has now moved to the front, exposing her pantiless and scant-haired and folds so wrinkled and crumpled it is hard to imagine there is an opening between them, a place where this old woman was once young. And now others notice her and widen their circle around her, not touching her now as they walk past her, giving her room, looking at what she is between her legs and then looking away, hoping staff will wheel her back behind closed doors.
“Lie down,” our mother says and our mother takes her big black pocketbook and puts it over Ma Mère so no one can see her exposed and she pushes down on Ma Mère’s shoulders.
“Are you in pain?” the doctors ask her when they finally have a room where they can see her.
“Oui, here,” she says, she points to our mother’s heavy pocketbook still lying on top of her. The doctors hand our mother back her pocketbook.
“That’s much better. These are really good doctors,” Ma Mère says to our mother.
“And now do you feel pain?” the doctors ask her.
“Of course I feel pain, I am human,” Ma Mère answers.
“No, this very moment,” the doctors say.
“Well, my eyes, it’s this light, you poor doctors, to have to work in this light. It’s too bright. If I ran this hospital I would do something, I would turn down the lights,” Ma Mère says.
“Yes, that would be nice,” the doctors say.
“This is hurting me,” Ma Mère says to our mother, and grabs our mother’s arm so that she stands closer to her.
“What’s hurting, ma cherie?” our mother says.
“My leg, of course, what else?” Ma Mère says.
The doctors have done more tests, they still can’t operate they say, it’s her blood, it’s her brain, it’s her heart, it’s nothing to do with her leg. They say they are waiting for better conditions.
“You’re not going sailing out on a stormy ocean, you’re operating,” our mother says. “Can’t you just do it, this woman is in pain. She sleeps in a chair.”
Ma Mère nods her head. “That’s right, I sleep in a chair. My dreams are all straight-backed. Put your raincoats on, your rubber boots, men, let’s operate,” she says and she lays back and closes her eyes.
“No, no, no,” the doctors say and we go home, wheeling Ma Mère out the main door and stealing the wheelchair. We go down the avenue and Ma Mère tries to grab the bumper of a bus. “Why keep pushing me?” she wants to know. “I’ll just hold on.”
John is disappearing. He is so thin now that his neck looks more like an arm poking up through his collar. I can see the shape of his skull under his hair.
“You’re affecting business,” I say. “Customers are afraid it’s something the hot dogs do to you.”
“What do you know?” John says.
“Your nose is bigger,” I say. “Fuck,” I say, “it’s huge.” John tries to poke me with his tongs.
“Get away,” he says, his bony arm coming out from under his shirt cuff like a stick instead. He plays solitaire across the bin tops after lunch’s rush, the cards humped from the steam of the cooking hot dogs below. John plays and points to the park. “It’s like a heart,” he says.
“The park, a heart?” I say.
“The people are the blood, they go in, they go out. Boom de boom de boom. Hear it?” he says. “Some blood stays in longer. Some blood goes out fast. It’s a bad heart,” he says.
* * *
New neighbors have moved in. A fat older woman and a younger skinny red-haired man. We try not to imagine them as lovers.
“It must be accord,” our mother says. We can always hear the fat woman. Our house shakes when she walks across her floor. We can always smell the red-haired man. In the elevator going up or going down, we hold our hands to our noses. Our mother tells us red-haired people smell, they just do and she doesn’t know why.
Their roaches become our roaches when they bomb. Even our cats are annoyed and flick angry tails when they try to sleep and the roaches climb their fur. We send their roaches back with our own bombs. This works for a week and then their roaches are bombed back to us, so many that there are albinos and ones with deformities, two heads and missing legs.
The fat woman welds. She works at night downtown somewhere on the docks. She wears her helmet with the plastic face shield home, saying more than once it has saved her life more than once. Gang boys with nunchucks have flown at her on late subway rides and they’ve thrown metal stars so hard they stuck into her plastic face shield and she had to pull them out with pliers. Our dog and cats attack her when she comes to our house. The cats hang from her clothes hissing and the dog nips at her rear. She comes through without knocking on our door. She comes and she sits down on our couch in her dirty coveralls and her mask and we stare at her shoes and wonder how she gets her feet into them and we wonder if the skinny red-haired man helps put her clothes on and is that what our mother means by their accord?
We show them the pipe where Jochen killed himself.
“Oh,” they say, and then they are quiet.
They build a room around the area where the pipe is and use it for storage. We hear Jochen at night, we tell them. The fat woman says then she is glad she is down at the docks working at night. The skinny red-haired man says he doesn’t hear, and that he sleeps with headphones on to keep out street noise.
Our mother has fainting spells now. “Oh, merde, it’s just menopause,” she says in the hallway, hitting the wall behind her so that when she falls she slides down the wall as if she were shot by a sniper across the way.
We try to pick her up. “Leave me here,” she says. We all sit on the floor beside her. “Look, more hair,” she says, and pulls it from her head and gives us each a handful.
“Thanks so much,” we say. She puts her arms around us.
“My babies,” she says, she brings us close to her. “Did I ever show you this?” she says. “It’s Chinese. It calls the wild animals.” She slaps a rhythm on the floor with her hands and her fists and shows us how it’s done.
“Will it call our father?” Jody asks. Our mother stops her slapping.
“If we do it right,” she says.
Our brother writes that they have been to consulates and embassies. They have passed through more sets of double doors than they ever have before. They have filled out reports in all the major cities. He has a callus on his finger from holding a pen. He writes our father’s slut can give a perfect description of our father in Spanish, telling officials the color of his eyes, the number of brown stray hairs still remaining on his head, on the inside of his nose, but when it comes to ordering a cup of coffee or asking where the restroom is, their Spanish seems to leave them and they stumble over words, mixing English with the little they have learned.
Tourists sitting next to them on trains look at guidebooks, mapping out their trips, naming museums they will visit and sights they will see, but our brother and the slut sit and look through guidebooks trying to find hotels that are closest to the Guardia Civil, where they will spend their time filing reports.
The process is slow, he writes. There could be a long line out the double doors and into the street and when you get close you see there is only one person in the office behind a desk and just when you are about to be the next person called on, the person behind the desk opens his drawer and pulls out a handmade sign that’s just a folded-over piece of paper. The sign in Spanish reads, “Out to lunch, be back in one hour,” and the person puts the sign on his desk and gets up from his chair. And it’s like watching the show Mr. Rogers, our brother writes, the person’s movements are so slow as he goes to a hook on the wall and takes down his leather coat and puts his arms into the sleeves and walks slowly out the door and disappears. Then you have nothing left to do but hold your place in line and wait while the person behind the desk is down the street at some café, slowly chewing his food and taking small sips of his gaseous water with wine.
Our brother writes that one day the slut made a mistake, she walked into a church instead of the office of the Guardia Civil. He had to follow her in because she couldn’t hear him calling to her, telling her it was the wrong place. He had the map, he tried to show her in the blue-green light coming in from the stained glass how she was wrong, but she kept walking forward, to the altar, as if expecting a desk and an office to appear.
Then only a few days later, our brother writes, he made a mistake himself. He took a wrong turn and they ended up at a public swimming pool. They entered the building anyway. He was curious to see Spanish girls in their swimsuits. The slut said you never know, your father might be here, and she walked forward, following the vapors of hot moist air and chlorine. She said maybe it was time they took matters into their own hands and started looking for him themselves instead of waiting for the authorities to find him.
It was the first time, he said, that the slut had made sense to him. His father was not going to be sitting on a hard bench at the Guardia Civil or the consulate waiting for them to come find him. He would be in bars, in restaurants, he would be enjoying himself. And then it sounded good, all of a sudden, our brother writes, to be in Spain. He looked around. There were girls everywhere with long hair and bright black shining eyes. Then the letters from our brother stop.
I can bend spoons. I learned it from a psychic on TV. I bend all that we have by just thinking about bending them. Our mother moves her chair away from me.
“Oh, merde, and you’re my flesh and blood,” she says.
“Bend this,” Louisa says. She brings me the gun.
“I can only bend so much,” I say, handing it back to her. I can bend things no more than the weight of spoons and sometimes keys. They hand me keys to our father’s parents’ house. The house he used to live in as a boy.
“These are useless,” they say and hand me the keys and I hand them back bent and say they are more than useless now.
Our mother trips on books we have left on the floor and won’t get up.
“I’m hurt,” she says.
“Oh, sure,” Louisa says. Our mother feels her pulse.
“I’m hardly here,” she says. We start to tickle her, we close in by her neck, whisper whistling in her ears, our hair mixing with each others’ and with what’s left of hers. She is laughing, saying she can’t breathe, saying yuck, her ears are wet with all our spit. She pinkie-fingers what she can, little jiggles back and forth in her canals.
“What’s that you say? What’s that you say? You’ve turned me deaf,” she says. “My own children,” she says.
The slut is shopping and thinking how the Spanish salesgirls are dying to rip off her clothes and dress her in new ones.
“No, gracias,” she keeps on saying when they hold the clothes up to her neck, the tops of hanger hooks poking the soft place underneath her chin. The clothes they come at her with are all too young. Short black leather skirts and jerseys with stitched flowers and English words sewn on, words like Energy and Girl and Toxic and Rainbow.
The girls’ dark long hair all smells of flowers and oils and their hair streams down the slut’s shirtfront as they work around her, fastening buttons and clasps, and when the slut looks in the mirror it looks like her own hair and she touches it and tosses it behind her shoulder. The girls stand back exclaiming when they’re done.
“Qué mono, de verdad,” they say.
Mono she knows means monkey. “I am a monkey, really, that’s what they’re saying to me,” she thinks. She takes the clothes off.
The girls bring the clothes to the counter, start to ring them up. The slut pulls out her wallet with the photos of Cal.
“Have you seen him?” she says.
“Su marido? Qué guapo!” they say. They look at the crystal set on the table in the photo and call the other girls over so they can all look at how lovely it is.
“No, not my husband,” the s
lut says. “Have you seen him?” she says again. The long-haired girls nod their heads and smile and take her credit card from her and charge her account and fold up her new clothes and put them in bags with more words on them. Words like Kick and Hot, written in bold slants on pink-colored see-through plastic.
Our brother waits outside on a bench looking at a map of the town. He keeps turning the map in a circle one way, and then the other way, trying to find where they are.
“How do you feel about a brother or sister?” the slut says.
“I’ve found the church, but which one,” our brother says, still at the map his finger on an icon with a steeple.
“I thought it was early menopause, but it’s not, I can feel kicks and bold punches,” she says.
“No, it’s menopause,” our brother says. “You haven’t seen my father for months,” he says. He starts to circle places with a pen, the consulate and passport offices and banks to change money.
“I’m too tired,” she says, when our brother wants to head first for the bank to ask if our father’s been there for transactions. They sit and eat lunch by the water instead, ordering garlic soup and rabbit with mayonnaise. The old stooped-over waiter explained to them what conejo meant on the menu by holding up his liver-spotted hands like paws and taking hops across the patio. He hopped all the way down the street and back and then stopped at their table again and bent over and waved his hand behind him like a wiggling tail.
“How do you say, ‘Whatever they pay you they don’t pay you enough?’” our brother wants to know, so he can say it to the waiter.
“Just say ‘energy,’” the slut says, “or ‘toxic.’ It means something here,” she says.
They stop on a bridge and look out over a fast-running muddy-colored river. They read in a guidebook that the bad smell in the air comes from a paper plant.
Here They Come Page 11