by John Rechy
Then she was well!
She presented them with her bright, clear smile. Yes, presented it to them—because it was clearly a present to them, the silent promise that she would not die this day.
She kept the promise given by that lovely smile. Sometimes she would be well for months—for months no harrowing “spell”—and that would seem a short period, because soon they measured time by the apprehensive interlude between each illness: They existed on the edge of a precipice—the cliff, her health; the sharp decline, her sudden illnesses—those illnesses which, with the harsh reminder of swallowing death, threatened to withdraw what had come to seem to them the sustaining force of their very lives: her love. And the illnesses might occur every three months—every four; but always, always they came.
On his first day of school, equally anxious as he was reticent to go, Jim asked his mother—calmly but feeling terror slashing him: “But who’ll take care of you if the house burns or the robbers come?”
“You will,” she answered. “You’ll know somehow and you’ll come back to save me.”
Mrs. Girard’s first daughter—Esperanza—died of pneumonia at the age of twelve and before Estela and Jim were born. Mrs. Girard wore only black for years. Her first son, Salvador, was killed six years later in the second world war. Running into the street and howling with the sense of double loss, his mother was hysterical for weeks and had to be hospitalized. The only one in the family with an Anglicized name—as if the mother had so intended to separate him (unsuccessfully after Salvador’s death) from the older son, Jim feels haunted by his brother’s presence—as Estela does by Esperanza’s: a feeling strongly augmented by the fact that hardly a day passes that their mother doesn’t call them or refer to them by the names of the dead children.
And did only love bind Jim and his mother so powerfully?
No. More.
What? Who?
Jim’s father.
As much a presence in the house as their mother’s love was the weeks-long, sulking, seething, sullen, moody, black, furious, contained, finally erupting black rage of their father.
Her French husband—son, only son of a wealthy lawyer and his wife, who were both born and raised in Mexico though of French parents: a dashing, handsome, romantic, brilliant man—himself giving every indication of becoming a highly respected attorney in Mexico—that had been Jim’s father, who married his beautiful Mexican wife in Chihuahua and, driven by motivations which would be buried with him, left Mexico expecting to practice in the United States—and entered the bare periphery of law in Texas. At first, still rich, he carried a jeweled cane as a prop. Then, like hers now, it became a physical necessity, something required to support his once-erect, elegant, later sagging frame—when all the love in his life drained mysteriously—as mysteriously as his wife’s illnesses came; and the world he had inhabited so prominently vanished, without even the mild blessing of slowness, of degrees to accustom him gradually to the fall; no, there was no slow gradation downward—it was a swift plunge: Viciously, one day in Texas (which he came to hate)—one day it was all gone: his money evaporated, his peripheral work for a lawfirm was gone. The large two-story house he had owned in El Paso, and where all his children were born, was soon abandoned for a rented one—decaying, dark, grassless. All, all gone: and he was old and poor. Like that: or so Jim viewed it from the uncertainly located pieces of the unfinished puzzle his father was to him.
Like the threat of his mother’s illness—a threat more terrifying (then) than the actual illness because the threat extended much, much longer—there constantly existed the threat of his father’s explosive anger: after intense periods of silence, it burst. Insanely he cursed his wife, Jim, Estela. Soon he came to accuse them irrationally of having deliberately brought about his downfall, holding them responsible for the fact that he had come now to peddle kitchenware from door to door. The family which he could now hardly provide for—and the gray house they had moved into—became a daily judgment to his crushed pride, and he flailed against them. Fearing him—the enraged stranger he had suddenly turned into—his wife listened in frozen silence, restraining Jim—who hated him for turning every awake moment of their lives into a nightmare; Estela would flee crying out of the house. When he, their father, could no longer express his loss in the curses and accusations against them, the verbal rampage would tumble over into physical wreckage: With the jeweled cane once a symbol of his elegance, now of his dependency, he smashed at objects about the house, wiping away the frail figurines his wife collected, breaking windows with his fists: smashing the world.
But he never, never, struck his wife, nor Estela, nor Jim.
After the furious outbursts, he would repentantly bring flowers for his wife, and replacements for the broken figurines; for the children he would bring presents—which he could not afford. But the flowers wilted, unwatered, the substitute figurines were never put up, the boxes for his son and daughter remained unopened. Once again their father was a menacing shadow.
He developed diabetes. His wife would inject him with insulin. As the needle plunged into his flesh, he didn’t wince. (Jim watched the daily occurrence, knowing that that needle and that fluid, which she gave him, sustained his father’s life; wishing that one day— . . .) Then his wife—still beautiful and incredibly young-looking—would draw out the needle, and she and her husband would stand strangely together for long moments.
Soon Estela Escaped: At the age of seventeen, she married, was quickly divorced; fleeing even farther: to Los Angeles, where she married again, was divorced once more; returned to El Paso, went back to Los Angeles; married a third time, divorced again, never having children.
His last year of highschool, the day he received his first pay from the drugstore for which he delivered (though he had worked before, never had he made so much money), Jim rushed home braced by that check; and he blurted to his mother:
“Leave him, I can support you now, look, I’ve got enough money, and I’ll quit school and work full-time, and I’ll take care of you!”
She branded him with a look of horror.
“He’s your father, he’s my husband,” she said.
He was able to say: “You love that man?”
“He’s my husband,” she insisted quietly.
“You love him?” he demanded.
“He’s your father!” she said.
And did she really love him? Or did she choose to remain with him because of the stifling Mexican Catholicism that painfully extracted from her an arbitrary devotion to her husband?—a Catholicism from whose hollowness Jim had all but extricated himself already.
That night, two violent incidents (and a third: which he remembers like pieces of a scattered dream ending as if at a suddenly locked door with these words: “What the hell do you want?”) occurred in Jim’s life.
Finally it flared into fury between him and his father. As if he sensed Jim’s earlier exhortation to his mother to leave him, suddenly at the silent dinner table his father lunged at Jim with a sharp table knife.
Moving back swiftly—as if he had been preparing for this attack for many years—a knife now in his own hand, Jim faced his father, each ready to slice into the other’s flesh.
All movement had been executed wordlessly, there had been no preparatory threat, not a curse. A mechanism within them had finally uncoiled. Poised coolly in the terrible positions of wrath and murder, they could have been preparing to engage in an act of love.
Rising quickly from the table, Jim’s mother collapsed between son and father, shattering the binding spell between them—perhaps the closest they had ever been to each other. Both laid their weapons down, quietly as if any sound they made would acknowledge their already passing reality.
His father carried his wife to her room. Jim followed closely, remaining by her until he was certain she was breathing normally. His father sat on a chair in the dark room.
From that day Jim never again spoke to his father, nor he to Jim. The vi
olence drowned in waves of silence.
THAT NIGHT OF THE POISED ENCOUNTER BETWEEN HIM and his father, Jim had walked out of the somber house staring back at it as one would at a prison one is walking away from on parole. He sought out three of the boys who constituted his immediate group—all belonging to that slick, hip, slender, hair-over-forehead, moody breed of sensual-looking youngmen.
Jim had a reputation of being wild, rebellious (rash or courageous)—and so the natural leader of other restive boys his age and older. An excellent and highly competitive gymnast—loving the challenge of his body to space—he developed great physical skill and an agile, muscular body; and though his body was muscular and strong, his handsome face retained a lean sensuality. Very goodlooking, therefore, and possessing an ingratiating way, he was much admired. Though he was clearly intelligent, his grades, because of his vast indifference then, barely got him through each term.
Among girls he had a reputation of being aloof though friendly toward them; this coolness intensified their interest in him, and he was much sought after. The fact is that like others of his age and group Jim was afraid of a situation which he wanted eagerly—and pretended to know much more about than he did.
One of that ubiquitous band of highschool girls about whom youngmen construct their reputations as men—most often only verbally—an extravagantly developed pretty blond girl named Caroline, who laughed a lot, and giddily, pursued Jim to the point of making her interest in him common joking knowledge. Less obviously to most, Jim was shadowed by a wiry boy—Emory Carter—tolerated by the others in Jim’s group only because he had a new car and would drive them anywhere Jim wanted.
Thoughts roiling with images of his mother, his father, his mother, his mother, Jim infected the others with his restlessness that night. Impulsively, he announced they would go get Emory Carter to drive them to Caroline’s. Instantly they were caught in a mood of tense euphoria. Emory was only too glad to see Jim, although as always he was disappointed to see the others. Like Emory, Caroline was obviously delighted to see him—and asked him to take a walk with her, alone. But Jim said no.
Sitting in front between Jim, now driving, and another youngman (Emory now in the back seat), Caroline began to giggle. Soon they were all swept along by loud, deep, aroused, humorless laughter.
At the darkened school they all went to, they pried open a loose window into a basement room. Caroline hesitated, Jim coaxed her, the others echoed his encouragement.
On the floor, amid broken chairs, blackboards, other discarded school objects: Floating on a mood of challenge and burgeoning excitement (the act, witnessed, a test not to be failed): Clumsily, cruelly (and she was reticent—resisting—perhaps even inexperienced), like predators hovering over her flesh: They twisted Caroline’s clothes, pulled them, tore at them—not even removing them entirely, just enough to expose her breasts, thighs, hips—while she began to whimper as she continued to laugh that strange laughter, and squirmed, uttering choked, unheard gasps of pain; prematurely rejecting what she knew would follow quickly: the pushing, ramming, shoving as they took turns on her.
Jim was the first out of the tight cluster to actually mount her—and because she wanted him, her twisting all but stopped; but when she felt him enter her with swift, selfish brutality, she yelled, and her body jerked —but someone was pinioning her legs; and as Jim pumped into her, she became still again. Then his cock began to explode within her; and in his urgency to ride the flood of excitement fully, it slid out of her, the white cum jetting on her, not in her.
When she felt him withdrawing, the first time, she tried to hold him back, not wanting to surrender to the others who waited anxiously about her. But already, despite her protests, the others were preparing to fuck her, their pants open, their hands grasping their own impatient cocks like weapons to slaughter her; and as she protested, she continued giggling, and she made a sound like laughter, because it was closer to a gurgle, the sound she made, something choked. Another boy was on her, in her, then a third, the fourth.
Mixture of sweat and sex, the sound of moist flesh sliding on moist flesh, into it, out, the cluster of bared thighs and erect cocks surrounding the squirming girl—her arms tangled in her dress now; breasts red, bruised. And still tossing in the turbulence of newly realized sex, feeling that it had to continue, Jim was on her again. Then another of the youngmen. And through it all: her curious laughter, broken, and a sound, a word, repeated: “Honey”—except that through clenched teeth she said it more like: “Hummie.”
Ignored completely by the others, Emory had held back entirely—a shadow. Now perversely the boy who had just removed himself from within Caroline pushed him forward; and the ritual heckling began. Still, Emory wouldn’t advance. He looked down in horror at the girl, who continued the previous movements as if someone was still in her—but, now, her legs, open, waited; and she continued the broken laughter and the same strange word: “Hummie. . . .”
“Screw her, Emory!” a boy yelled.
“Go on, man!” said another, pushing him.
“He’s scared!” another taunted, shoving him roughly.
Emory remained petrified, staring down at the naked squirming hips of the girl.
“Fuck her, Emory!” Jim heard his voice command the frightened boy.
Forcing himself, Emory threw his body rashly downward—but quickly he tossed to one side, flung himself on the floor instead—not on the girl—next to her.
Suddenly he put his hand between her legs, blocking her cunt—forever—as an entrance to him, blocking it completely from his sight.
He turned to Jim, tried pitifully to whisper—but the words came out in loud imploring gasps: “You go ahead, Jim, go ahead, and I’ll go right after you this time, I promise, Jim, I’ll go right after you, I promise, I want to go right after you—I promise!” And his hand still blocked the girl’s cunt.
Assaulted by Emory’s terror: perhaps that; or perhaps only this: still riding the current of newly discovered sexual excitement, Jim fucked the girl again. Emory lay beside them on the floor, jerking himself off urgently, trying to come before he would be forced on the girl or before Jim removed himself from his sight.
This time Jim came in her. For the first time he heard clearly the word which had punctuated the girl’s shattered laughter—not “honey,” not “hummie.”
“Mommie,” Caroline had been crying.
“Mommie,” she had whimpered between the crazy giggling, the sounds of sexual pain, the laughter.
“Mommie!”
Jim withdrew from her instantly. Contracting his body fitfully, Emory was coming. Jim turned away. Two others were over Caroline.
Now her laughter stopped—had stopped unnoticed, had turned into sobs indicating more than physical pain: unnoticed by the boy pushing his cock clumsily between her bloodied legs.
To end the scene he had precipitated, Jim pretended to hear a hostile noise. “The janitor!” Adjusting their clothes, they moved out.
They drove the girl, still crying, home. Her lower lip was bleeding, where either she or someone else had bitten it. Her clothes were soiled—with dirt, cum, their perspiration.
When he saw her walking away from them—and she stooped pitifully trying to cover the rips in her dress—Jim was accosted violently by what he saw clearly as the cowardly initiation.
The car stopped at a red light, he opened the door, got out, leaving the others wordlessly.
He walked alone to downtown El Paso.
After that, Jim was only occasionally, and less and less often, with the same group. Though he was kind to Caroline, he preferred not to see her; and he was never alone with her again. He avoided Emory altogether.
By then, incongruously, he had become friends with Mrs. Maxwell. Responding to her friendly concern, he tried, for the first time and very hard, to verbalize his longing to leave home, and—an equally strong, opposing feeling—his reticence, the powerful tie to his mother.
Mrs. Maxwell listened attentiv
ely—as if in his confusion he were bringing her answers.
Since the violence between him and his father—and throughout the throttled silence that followed between them—Jim’s mother seemed determined to pretend that the horror between father and son did not exist. And her love continued to spin a wired web about Jim.
Though it had finally turned repugnant after the savage excitement of that night, the scene with Caroline had nevertheless tapped a wild sexuality in Jim. He was aware of conquest through penetration—the symbolic slaughter of the sex act—rape with consent, that was sex for him. And since that penetration was his only object in his relation with the girl of the same often-used breed who followed Caroline, he was never with her again either after that. It was as if the sexual act transformed him—from the youngman capable of kindness and gentleness—who sat for long talking to Mrs. Maxwell, concerned for her—into the violent youngman for whom sex was rage and anger.
And so he had thought it would be with Barbara Lewis.
He met her one late afternoon in Memorial Park, a small, hilly, grassy, heavily treed park in the city. Occasionally—to get away from his father’s presence—he would go there and lie on the grass. At night the park provided secluded pools of dark for couples.
Barbara was sitting on the grass, a book open on her lap. It was rare for a girl to be in that park alone, although it was still not dark. And so Jim misunderstood her purpose in being there.
“What are you reading?” he asked her, though he didn’t really care.
“Yerma,” she said. “By Garcia Lorca.”
He tried to think of something knowledgeable to say to her about the book or the author, but he hadn’t heard of either. “I’m Mexican too,” he tried to fake knowledge of the author’s name. “And French,” he added, stabbing wildly at luck, suspecting he had blundered.
She smiled.
Quickly attracted to her—the long blonde hair, the beautifully featured face, the slender wonderfully shaped body, amber eyes—Jim lay on the grass nearby. Playing the wild, confused youngman—which he was—he charmed her, just as she—playing the beautiful, enigmatic young girl—which she was—charmed him.