B0061QB04W EBOK

by Reyna Grande

  Then Mago couldn’t hold back anymore and said, “Mami, who was that man?”

  “What man?”

  “The man you were kissing by the main road.”

  Since she was holding Betty on her lap, it was hard for me to see the expression on Mami’s face. She buried her face in Betty’s hair, as if hiding from our accusing eyes.

  “Well, since you already know, I might as well tell you,” she said finally. “He sells car insurance next to the record shop. But at heart he’s a wrestler. He does Lucha Libre on the weekends and he’s very good—”

  “Who cares? What is he to you?”

  “Don’t talk like that to me, Mago,” Mami said, looking over Betty’s head. “Anyway, I might as well tell you now. I’m going away with him.”

  “What?” we all yelled. Betty started to whimper at hearing our angry voices.

  “Juana, what are you saying?” Abuelita Chinta said.

  “Francisco has gotten a contract to fight in Acapulco, and he asked me to go with him. I’ve accepted.”

  “But you can’t go!” Mago yelled. She got up so suddenly, her chair toppled over. “You can’t!”

  “I won’t be gone for long. Now sit down and stop yelling at me.”

  “You said that the last time,” Carlos said. “And you were gone two and a half years.”

  “Mami, don’t leave us again,” I said as I rushed to her side.

  “And what about us?” Mago said. “What’s going to happen to us?”

  “You’ll stay with your abuelita. She’ll watch over you.”

  “Juana, you can’t do this,” Abuelita Chinta said. “It isn’t right.”

  “When Papi hears of this, that you’re leaving us again—” Mago said.

  “Don’t you dare bring up your father. There’s nothing between us anymore. Don’t you kids understand that? He tried to kill me.”

  “You’re making that up,” Mago said. “He wouldn’t have done that. And if he did, maybe, maybe it was all your fault!”

  Mami stood up and headed over to Mago, ready to beat her. Abuelita Chinta quickly got in between them. “Juana, you need to think things through.”

  “I have, Amá,” Mami said. “And I’ve made my decision.”

  When Mami left, she didn’t even have the courage to tell us. When we got home from school the next day, we found Betty in tears. Abuelita Chinta told us that our mother had just left with the wrestler. “They’ve gone to catch a taxi over by La Quinta Castrejón,” she said.

  Betty’s sobs were deafening. Mago, who had always shown her dislike for Betty in many ways, was the one who picked her up and held her. Carlos and I bolted out the door, hoping that Mami and the wrestler might still be waiting by the main road. At seven years old, I found myself running to catch up to my mother and beg her not to leave me for the second time in my life. Carlos ran faster than I did, and by the time I got to the main road, he was bent over, crying. There was no sign of Mami anywhere.

  13

  Tío Crecenciano

  AFTER MY MOTHER left, Carlos became terribly ill. Abuelita Chinta said he was suffering from sorrow. He had fever, headaches, nausea, and vomiting. He lost so much weight he really did look like a skeleton now. I thought about that song Élida liked to sing for him, La calaca, tilica y flaca. La calaca tilica y flaca.

  While Mago and I sat around his cot, watching him wither away, all I could think of was the empty road where my mother had vanished. I wondered if Carlos was thinking about it, too. I wondered if he was replaying that moment in his feverish mind, as I was.

  “It’s all her fault,” Mago said as she reached to hold Carlos’s limp hand. “I hate her.”

  “Mago, don’t say that,” I said, but a part of me felt she was right. I didn’t know what was wrong with my brother, but I also felt sick. Even though I wasn’t physically ill, inside I was burning. I felt as if I had a scorpion inside of me that was stinging my heart again and again. I wanted to reach inside my body and yank the scorpion out. Stomp on it. Or kill it with my bare hands.

  When Carlos was in his thirties, we would finally learn the medical term for what he had—hepatitis. Even if we had known this back then, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Mago would still have blamed it on our mother, and Abuelita Chinta would still have said, “They can call it what they want, sadness in any other form is still sadness.”

  My hot-blooded Scorpio sister would never succumb to something as silly as sadness. She reacted in the only way she knew how.

  A few days before my mother left, Tío Crece’s dog had five puppies we were not allowed to touch. Tío Crece said he was planning to sell them and didn’t want us messing with them. I wondered why anyone would want to buy a dog, since there were so many homeless dogs out in the street you could take home with you for free.

  Tío Crece made a little bed for them in a cardboard box. They were tiny and their eyes were still closed. When we tried to pick them up, the mother dog growled at us. We looked at the puppies snuggling with their mami, and I couldn’t believe that I actually felt jealous of them. Mago looked at the puppies and their mother with the same intense jealousy she had Doña Paula and her two sons. When I reached out to her, the look of yearning on her face was quickly replaced with a scowl.

  After lunch, Tío Crece’s dog went out and didn’t come back right away. The puppies whimpered and cried from hunger.

  “Do you think we can give them a tortilla soaked in bean juice?” I asked Mago as we washed the dishes on the washing stone.

  “Let me see what I can find for them,” she said. She went into the house and left me to wash the dishes by myself. Then she came out and made her way to the back, where the puppies were. I couldn’t see what she had in her hands, but it didn’t look like tortillas to me.

  I dried my hands and went to the back. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Mago was holding a can of jalapeños and was offering a hot pepper to one of the puppies, as if it were a teat. “Stop that!” I yelled. “You’ll kill them.”

  “So what?” she said. “They’re just dogs.”

  “Mago, stop!” I said, crying. Mago pushed me away.

  “You better leave, before I hit you,” she said.

  I turned and ran into the house, yelling for Abuelita Chinta to come. Except she wasn’t there, and I remembered she was going to do a body cleansing for my friend Meche’s mom. I ran to get her, but by the time we got back to the house, it was too late.

  Finding the puppies dead, Tío Crece went into a rage and chased after Mago, ready to beat her. Abuelita Chinta, as usual, grabbed the broom and chased after him. “Leave her alone, leave her alone!” she said, hitting him with the broom.

  Abuelita Chinta and I put the dead puppies in a sack and tossed them into the vacant lot where people burned their trash. For the next several days, on our way to el mercado, we would catch a whiff of the stench of their rotting bodies.

  Because of his illness, Carlos missed over a month of school, and his grades, which were not great to begin with, plummeted.

  “I’m not going back to school,” Carlos said when Abuelita Chinta told him he was well enough to return.

  “Of course you are,” Abuelita Chinta said. “How can you learn otherwise?”

  “I’m not,” Carlos said. “I’m going to flunk fourth grade, anyway. So what’s the point of even trying?”

  “Mijo, don’t talk back. When your mother returns, I don’t want to have to tell her you did not behave.”

  Carlos was sad and angry about failing school, and he did something he had never done before, and he never did again—he yelled at our grandmother. “Your daughter is never coming back! She doesn’t love us!”

  Tío Crece rushed at Carlos, and I thought he was going to hit him. Instead, he grabbed him by the arm and pushed him out the door. “Come on,” my uncle said. “Let’s go find work.”

  “Crece, that isn’t a good idea,” Abuelita Chinta said as my uncle sat on his bike and Carlos climbed
onto the pegs on the back axle.

  Abuelita Chinta, Betty, and I watched my uncle maneuver his way down the dirt road with his black dog at his side and my brother standing on the pegs. Carlos turned to look back and waved. Mago had left early for school to work on a project for her class. I knew she would be angry when she found out where Carlos was. I was scared for my brother. I didn’t want him hanging out with our crazy uncle. I didn’t want him learning to become a man from Tío Crece. But who else would he learn it from, I asked myself as I glanced at the Man Behind the Glass. Not from him.

  The story I heard as a child was that when Tío Crece was eighteen, he had many admirers. One woman in particular was desperately in love with him, but he didn’t feel the same. One day, when he was at work unloading the freight cars at the train station, she had come by with lunch and a gourd of cold water for him. But it wasn’t plain water. She did witchcraft on him by giving him agua de toloache, a drink made of water mixed with jimsom weed and menstrual blood meant to make the person who drinks the water fall desperately in love. My uncle was carried home by his coworkers. He stumbled into the house, talking nonsense, his skin burning hot. He had hallucinations, and Abuelita Chinta spent all night by his side, trying different remedies to counteract the poison. Tío Crece didn’t fall in love with the woman. And he was never the same after that.

  Back then I had never heard of schizophrenia, and so I had believed, without question, that my uncle’s life had been ruined by witchcraft. When we came to live at Abuelita Chinta’s house, my uncle was about to turn thirty, and no woman in town would look at him twice. The handsome young man he’d once been was gone. His curly black hair was often matted and oily from not showering. His teeth were beginning to rot. His clothes were torn and dirty. Instead of a belt, he wore a rope around his thin waist to hold up his pants. The only thing that remained the same were his eyes, beautiful brown eyes the color of syrup, like the kind that covers the pancakes vendors at el zócalo sell. Sometimes, when the craziness left him for brief moments, and he showered and put on his best clothes, I would catch glimpses of the man he could have been, and I would feel sad for him.

  Not even a week after Mami had left, Tío Crece said to me, “Te doy un peso por un beso,” while holding out a shiny coin. A peso for a kiss, he said. His breath reeked of alcohol. I looked at the coin my uncle was holding out to me, and I thought about the candy I could buy with it. My mouth watered at the thought of a pulpa de tamarindo, the candy melting in my mouth in an explosion of bitter, sweet, and tongue-burning hot.

  When I didn’t respond, Tío Crece leaned back and laughed. “My niece is smart. You don’t want a little peso, do you? Está bien, how about this?” He held out four more coins to me. I held my hands behind my back, the fingers tightly laced together, but I didn’t know how long I could resist. I glanced at the outhouse in the farthest corner of the backyard, and I wished Mago would hurry up and pee.

  “Ándale, take them. What’s a little kiss compared to what you can buy with this?” He offered them to me again, and I watched how they sparkled in the sun.

  “Nena, what are you doing?” Mago called out to me.

  “Nothing,” I said right away.

  Tío Crece laughed. “I’m just keeping my niece company,” he said. Then he walked away.

  “Stay away from him, Nena,” Mago said as she took the sponge from me. “He’s crazy.”

  From that moment on, I tried to avoid Tío Crece as much as I could, but it was hard to do so in a small shack that had no interior walls. Mago and I had to be extra careful when he was around. He would lie on his hammock reading a dime novel that had a picture of a woman with big chichis and butt cheeks the size of watermelons. He would stick his hand down his pants and play with himself, not caring that we could see him.

  For the rest of the day, while I was in school, I kept thinking about my brother and Tío Crece. I was imagining the worst. What if Tío Crece went into a crazy rage and beat my brother for no reason? What if he got mad at him and left him stranded somewhere else and Carlos couldn’t find his way back? What if he taught my brother to say dirty things to girls and to drink tequila?

  “Abuelita, you should have stopped him,” Mago told our grandmother as soon as we got home from school and noticed that Carlos wasn’t home yet.

  My grandmother didn’t say anything. We all knew that when it came to Tío Crece, there wasn’t much one could say or do.

  In the evening, Mago, Betty, and I listened to the story of Hansel and Gretel on the radio. I felt sad for the little boy and girl as I imagined them out there in the dark forest all alone, trying to find their way back home. I understood their fear all too perfectly. How could their father leave them out there to fend for themselves?

  Carlos and Tío Crece came into the house looking dirty and sweaty, but with smiles on their faces. Tío Crece handed my grandmother two bags from which she took out five dead turtledoves, an iguana, and ten ears of corn.

  “Where did you get all this food?” Abuelita Chinta said as she set it out on the table.

  “My nephew here is pretty good with his slingshot,” Tío Crece said. Carlos smiled so big, you could see his two front teeth and the tiny one in between them, but he didn’t pull his lips closed and bite them, as he always did to keep himself from smiling big and showing his teeth.

  As Abuelita Chinta and Tío Crece prepared dinner, Carlos sat with us at the table and told us all about his adventures. He said he and Tío Crece found some work at the train station first and loaded and unloaded the cargo from the freight cars for half a day. From there they went all along the highway and side roads picking up dried cow and horse dung and putting it into a sack. Then they went to sell it to the brickmaker. From there they snuck into a cornfield, but my uncle wouldn’t let Carlos pick the corn because of the scorpions that crawl up the stalks. Instead, Carlos’s job was to put the corn into the sack as my uncle cut it.

  “Mago, our uncle is like you,” Carlos said. “He got bitten by a scorpion in the field, but it didn’t do anything to him!”

  From then on, Carlos and Tío Crece became inseparable. As crazy as Tío Crece was, he was the only male role model Carlos had, and he figured a crazy uncle was better than nothing. Unlike Abuelo Augurio, who had wanted nothing to do with Carlos, Tío Crece didn’t say no to Carlos when he asked if he could tag along when Tío Crece ran errands. They went to gather wood together. Tío Crece would put Carlos on the back pegs of his bike, and they would go to the bakery to buy sweet bread for our evening cup of cinnamon tea. Sometimes on weekends they would take day trips together and come home with fish they had caught at the Lagoon of Tuxpan.

  Mago would say, “Don’t spend so much time with him, Carlos.” But Carlos would shrug and happily climb onto my uncle’s bike and wave bye to us as Mago and I headed to school, where all we did was worry about the time Carlos spent with Tío Crece. We didn’t want him picking up any bad habits from him, especially drinking. Mago said that was how little boys begin drinking—when their fathers give them sips of their own beer until eventually they start buying them their own. I would later learn this had happened to my father.

  “Remember, he isn’t your father,” Mago would tell Carlos. “Don’t get too close to him.”

  “Stop telling me what to do,” Carlos would say to Mago sometimes. “You aren’t my mother.”

  Looking back on it now, I realize that this was the beginning of Carlos’s independence from Mago. My mother’s second abandonment had forced him to grow up. And that meant that he no longer needed a little mother. He needed a man to look up to. He needed a father, and the closest thing to that was Tío Crece.

  A few weeks later, Tío Mario arrived, and we were happy for his visit. But Tío Crece was not happy. He always felt threatened when other men were around, and his brothers were no exception. During the few days Tío Mario was there, Tío Crece was in a bad mood. He even hit Carlos. In the morning he had made Jell-O cups for Carlos to sell, but my brother didn’
t sell many. In the evening, as he was walking home with the tray still full, Carlos, who was terrified of walking across the bridge in the dark, had run across and tripped, sending the Jell-O flying in different directions. Tío Crece flew into a rage and beat Carlos.

  The day before his departure, Tío Mario and Tío Crece went to the local bar. Tío Crece was moody enough when he wasn’t drinking. Didn’t Tío Mario know his brother turned into a demon when he was drunk? Sure enough, that night we woke up hearing a commotion outside. We looked out the door, and in the moonlight we saw Tío Mario and Tío Crece by the train tracks, yelling and shoving each other.

  “Calm down. Calm down!” Abuelita Chinta said as she rushed outside. Tío Crece pushed past her and came into the house. He grabbed a machete and ran back out, the blade glinting silver in the moonlight. “I’m going to kill you!” he yelled. As Tío Crece ran with the machete up in the air, Tío Mario put his hands up.

  “Brother, calm down,” Tío Mario said. But Tío Crece swung his machete, and Tío Mario pulled out the knife he always carried in his pocket for protection.

  “Por el amor de Dios, hijos míos, don’t fight. Please, stop this!” Abuelita Chinta cried.

  Carlos said, “Tío Crece, please, put the machete down.”

  Tío Crece cursed and spat. I was almost expecting to see foam coming out of his mouth. He reminded me of the dog with rabies Don Lino had killed with his gun a few days before.

  The neighbors came out but did nothing to stop my uncles from killing each other. Tío Crece sprang toward Tío Mario. I closed my eyes at the sound of metal against metal, their hard breathing, the shuffling of feet. The dogs barked even louder. Tío Mario cried out. I opened my eyes to see him grab his shoulder. Tío Crece’s machete had torn his shirt, but there was no blood, as far as I could see.

  Angry now, Tío Mario lunged at Tío Crece and drew first blood. Tío Crece touched his cheek where the knife had cut him.