by Niyati Keni
‘Aw, they’re all right,’ Jonah said. Lando nodded. Lottie patted her husband’s back and then rapped her knuckles on the wood of the cart and smiled round at the boys. ‘We bought our mansion, but we prefer life on the road,’ she said.
‘Really?’ Subong said.
Lottie threw him an incredulous look. I looked at the House kids. Their clothes were grey from the street and patched. Lorna’s dress was thin, the print faded. She’d left it partly unfastened at the back to accommodate her pregnancy. Lottie, ignoring Subong now, turned to Jonah, who said, ‘We didn’t expect you back so soon.’
‘We don’t stay so long in each place now. Better to move on before we get conspicuous,’ Lottie said.
‘There’s always someone who notices when somebody’s making a little money,’ Lando said. ‘Last night we were down near the ferry terminal. You know, close by the twenty-four-hour café.’
‘Eddie Casama’s place,’ Jonah said.
‘Sure, him. There was talk. About this place being demolished. Some big development. You heard anything?’
Jonah puffed his lower lip out, gave a harsh sigh. I imagined his Margie: You can’t stem the tide of progress. And almost immediately I imagined Pepe Pimentel and then, for no reason, a Pomeranian with Pepe Pimentel’s hair.
‘Drinking talk maybe,’ Jonah said hopefully.
‘Maybe. We didn’t stick around to find out. Lottie didn’t like the look of a couple of the customers. Drunk, you know. Looked like they’d be happy to find trouble.’
‘Who’d we go to if anything happened?’ Lottie said. ‘The police?’
‘They probably were the police,’ Subong said. My father hissed under his breath.
‘Got enough to worry about right now.’ Lottie stared at her daughter, who pouted and looked away over the water. ‘Who’d know to miss us?’
‘It’s a big ocean,’ Subong said. Everyone shot a look at the horizon. ‘Full of secrets,’ he added and giggled self-consciously.
My father looked at Lorna’s belly and frowned at Subong. ‘It’s not good to talk like that around unborn children,’ he said. There was a silence while people considered, perhaps, what kind of mischief might come as a result of careless talk in the earshot of foetuses.
‘So, any new ideas for that house you plan to build?’ Jonah said at last to Lando.
‘Some,’ Lando said. ‘Still saving up for the land right now.’
‘Been saving for that for a long time,’ Subong said earnestly and whistled through his teeth. My father made a grab for Subong’s cap and, as he ducked away, caught it by the neck guard, whipping him with it softly before tossing it back to him.
‘Cheaper out in the country,’ Lando said doubtfully, but somehow I couldn’t imagine him and Lottie in a field, pulling up sweet potatoes or picking beans. I could only see them in the House-on-Wheels. ‘Maybe next year,’ he added. He slapped the side of the House and said, ‘I was thinking of renaming her “The Las Vegas”. What do you boys think?’
‘American,’ added Lottie. ‘Better for business.’ My father snorted. Apart from Sam Cooke and maybe Elvis Presley, he was unconvinced about most things American.
‘How about “The Full House”?’ Subong said, looking at Lorna. My father reached an arm out towards him but this time Subong ducked right away and my father’s hand grasped at empty air. ‘It’s a gambling term,’ Subong protested.
Lorna threw him a look and moved to the cart to wedge herself in among her younger siblings on the foot-rail but, unable to get comfortable, rose to her feet again and stalked down to the water’s edge. Her defection seemed to break things up and now Jonah set one of the jetty boys running around to look for mats and sacking so the kids could make up a bed for themselves later on his office floor. Lottie dispatched her sons to the water pump in the market with pails and a kettle and dire warnings of what she’d do to them if they dawdled. Lenora went down to where her sister kicked at the surf as it rolled in and the two girls squatted down and washed the road dust from their arms and faces.
My father, Jonah and Lando seated themselves on the sea wall. Lottie pulled a pack of Champions out of the depths of the House and tossed them to her husband. Lando fanned out a handful, offering one to each of the jetty boys in turn. Except for my father, none refused. Lottie watched, nodding as if counting the boys, the cigarettes, weighing perhaps the cost in cigarettes against the goodwill and safety they might buy; extra pairs of eyes were always useful. Lando offered me one too, his eyes curious, as if uncertain whether he’d seen me before. My father clicked his tongue and shook his head before I’d even had the chance to refuse.
Lando drew his knees up and propped his elbows upon them, stretching his arms out, hands flopping, his cigarette pointed at the water. Everyone smoked silently, and when they were done, the boys eyed the cart hopefully. But Lottie had already put the packet away and was shaking out the bedding. The boys looked at Jonah, my father and Lando on the wall and, understanding, started to disperse, to shove the last boat into the swell, to light the lamps in Jonah’s office or just to sit, further along the wall, for a final game of poker before leaving for home to eat and return later. I stayed next to my father on the wall, but he never turned to include me.
The sun sat low on the horizon. Now, with the jetty quiet, the sea’s voice reasserted itself throatily. I could hear again the slap of water against the wooden posts of the jetty. The last boat grew small over the water. ‘Yard’s opening up later,’ Jonah said. Lando looked past him to the freight yard gates; one of the yards doubled as a makeshift cockpit once a fortnight, the afternoons when my father seemed more impatient than usual to return me to the boarding house. I looked in the direction of the yard. Men were already gathering, carrying their birds like babies, tenderly. I looked at my father, hopefully.
‘You have any school work left to do?’ he said.
‘No,’ I lied.
‘Let the boy come,’ Jonah said.
‘He’s big enough to stand a little blood,’ Lando said.
My father shook his head. ‘Carmela never liked it.’
I wanted to hang out at the jetty that evening. Lando and Lottie had a way of bringing colour with them; I knew the jetty would be a lively place tonight. I wanted to watch the cock fight, stay up late, drink even one shot of rum or tubo with them, place a few bets at the House tables. Especially now that my father had said my mother’s name, and a few drinks might loosen his tongue further.
‘Just one fight, Pop,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen one.’
‘Time to get you back,’ he said tightly.
Jonah clapped a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You’re getting to be a fine young man. Managing that big house by yourself for Mary Morelos.’ I knew he was just saying it so I wouldn’t look like a kid being dismissed.
As I turned to go, I noticed a woman standing further along the sea wall looking out to sea, at the boats dwindling in the half-light, at a group of boys relaxing in a rowboat, fishing lines tied to their toes. Every now and then the boys jiggled their lines and lit cigarettes from each other’s, red points of light bobbing up and down over the darkening water. The woman stared out, her hands behind her back holding a chicken by its feet as easily as someone might hold a newspaper. I was startled but only for a second. She was the same height as my mother and as slender. My mother used to gaze into the distance, or at nothing, for what seemed like hours at a time. I remembered how, after her funeral, we’d returned by a different route from the cemetery to dissuade her ghost from following us back to the house.
Perhaps aware of being watched, the woman roused herself from her thoughts and walked away. I watched her go and when I turned back to my father he was watching her too. My eyes sought his, and when I found them he flushed angrily. He looked away and even when I said goodbye he didn’t look up.
Snapshots
Aunt Mary had two sons. The youngest, Benny, was only a few months my junior and commandeered me as a playmate soon after m
y arrival at the boarding house. We played together after school and at weekends, in between my duties and his piano lessons or his math and Spanish tuition. The games were his inventions and he managed to press entire worlds into fragments of time. We were time travellers, sailors, ninjas, flailing manfully at each other in the garden. Benny was always the Admiral, the Master. I suppose I minded it, but I knew my place, and besides, these were adventures I could never have created by myself.
One summer we made amphitheatres in the yard out of stones and trapped insects to battle in them. The smaller, more sluggish creatures were invariably mine, though they mostly just crawled away so there were no actual victories and it became simply which bug could break out of captivity first. When I was called in to work, he continued to play. I watched through the window as the arenas became more elaborate, with galleries, moats, drawbridges and pennants. I saw how the building became the pleasure and the insects were forgotten.
Over the years, as my duties increased and Benny’s interest in drawing and komiks developed, we played together less, but we remained comfortable in each other’s company. Sometimes he sat and read in the kitchen, folded like a seabird on an old stool, his back against the stone wall, reading out loud while I washed pans or ironed clothes. Other times he sketched me as I worked, asking me to stay in a pose until my limbs ached and he was still only half done.
His brother, Dub, was four years older than us and the age gap was enough to make him mysterious. Dub had always been good-looking, but there came a point in his late teens when something inside him just switched on and after that it was hard not to look at him. He filled out, held himself differently. In a room full of people, he was often the centre. ‘Like his father,’ America said, eyeing the girls that had started to dawdle by the gate on the way back from convent school. ‘More cream than coffee.’ If Dub noticed, he didn’t show it. He spent most of his time with a guitar, writing the songs that he was sure were going to make him famous.
When he was sixteen he learned to ride a motorcycle, which caused quite a ripple in the household, impressing Benny and I but dismaying his mother, even though it was a mosquito in comparison to the one he exchanged it for later at Earl’s garage when he turned eighteen and came into a little money. After the bigger, better bike, and after his schoolfriends left for university, Dub’s crowd changed and he started hanging out with the bikers that gathered at Earl’s. They called themselves the Wolf Riders – Dub’s idea, from some komik Earl had brought back from the States for Benny the year before. At nineteen, Dub started working at the garage and the plan for him to go to college just fell away. It happened in a roundabout way, after Earl came back from the States with an electric guitar.
It was the first time Earl had been to the Bougainvillea. I’d never seen him up close before. I knew him by sight, had seen his pale body bent over an engine in the dark interior of his garage, his baseball cap backwards over his greying blond head. He was bigger than I’d expected and white from several months back in his home town. He made the settee look small. ‘Seattle,’ he said, looking straight into my eyes, ‘is our rainiest city. Period.’ He made a cutting motion with the flat of his hand.
Earl’s manner was open; when he talked, he looked at each of us in turn. If he made any distinctions between us, it wasn’t apparent. I struggled to meet his eyes when he was talking to me, but I was sure it only made him stare at me for longer.
Aunt Mary greeted Earl politely and sat in the sala while he and Dub talked. Earl was a kind of American she wasn’t so familiar with. ‘An ex-USMC mechanic, ma’am,’ he said, and I thought he sounded rueful. ‘I went home after my discharge, but kind of drifted back and wandered round your fine archipelago for a few years before finally running aground here.’ He slapped the upholstery, at which Aunt Mary looked alarmed. ‘In Puerto,’ he added and stretched his arm out across the back of the seat again. Aunt Mary smiled at him. There were a lot of Earls in the Philippines. They often ate and drank in the same places and could be overheard sometimes complaining about how Puerto wasn’t like Pittsburgh or Reno because you couldn’t get this or that.
Earl leaned forward and pushed the guitar towards Dub. ‘The exact same model,’ he said. It was a beauty. A second-hand Stratocaster; warm, dark wood with a high gloss. I would have loved to touch it. It was that sort of object, asking to be picked up to complete itself, but I knew it was off-limits to me. It wasn’t like the piano, a piece of furniture that required polishing; it was a part of the body. I’d never seen anything like it, but when Dub picked it up it looked to me like he’d always held it. I watched him as I served out the coffee and calamansi juice, loitering afterwards in the doorway as Benny ran a careful, supervised finger along the guitar’s neck.
‘It was very expensive, Earl?’ Aunt Mary said doubtfully.
‘Sure,’ whistled Earl. Then, understanding, he said to Dub, ‘You can work it off at the garage.’ He turned to Aunt Mary and, smiling, said, ‘He’s not bad with a spanner. A little training and he could make a career of it.’
Aunt Mary laughed carefully. Dub said, ‘You bet,’ his fingers already forming chords, picking quietly at the strings.
‘Dominic is due to go to college soon,’ Aunt Mary said.
‘Just till I’ve paid Earl back for her, Mom,’ Dub said without looking up. Aunt Mary folded her hands on her lap. This wasn’t a negotiation she would attempt in front of an audience.
Dub didn’t move from the sala for the rest of the afternoon and, in between my chores, I watched him. By the evening, he had a notepad in front of him and a pencil behind one ear, and he sang softly to himself as he scribbled things down.
He started to grow his hair long, down to his shoulders. He’d run his hands through it when he took off his motorcycle helmet, or smooth it down with the shell-handled comb that he kept at the ready in his jeans pocket. Other times, he’d lean over and shake the entire top half of his body before throwing his head back to let his hair fall into place. One day Aunt Mary, tired of reminding him to trim it at least, turned her attentions to mine instead, at which America sat me down firmly on a kitchen stool and took the scissors to it. ‘Not too short,’ I said as she wrapped a sheet round my shoulders.
‘You want me to leave it longer here, maybe a nice fringe?’ she said, and I knew she just meant to cut it as short as she could so as to leave the longest interval before she had to do it again. She pushed my head forward and I felt the cool metal of the scissors at the nape of my neck. From the sala came the sound of Dub singing. His voice was a little rough at the edges. Maybe he sang that way on purpose because the music he liked best was what was huge in London and the States, he said, and it was called punk. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. In our house, my father had mostly played Sam Cooke, Rey Valera, Elvis Presley.
‘You like that?’ America said, waving the scissors in the direction of the sala.
I hesitated. ‘Sure.’
‘What do you know? You never had any taste. That’s why you don’t know that your hair suits you short.’
We didn’t have to endure Dub’s punk for much longer. A month after he started work at the garage, he took to writing love songs.
A View of Prosperidad
Earl’s garage occupied the corner of Esperanza and Prosperidad, only a couple of blocks from the jetty. Prosperidad was an old, narrow street, shabby but still respectable, where the bustle of Esperanza was abruptly curtailed by dense wooden apartment blocks just like my father’s, within which lived families whose children might become kindergarten teachers, factory foremen, tour guides. After Dub started work at the garage, I found myself there often, dispatched by America with another of his forgotten lunch parcels or a message from his mother.
It was late morning, the sun high, as I made my way there yet again, America’s reheated fish and rice warm in my hands. I walked quickly. I was due at the curandero’s afterwards to deliver payment to him for treating America’s latest ailment and I was looki
ng forward to it: the curandero’s shop was interesting; his daughter, Suelita, even more so. Besides, he’d also known my mother and, unlike my father, talked about her freely when we met.
When I arrived at the garage, Dub was on the forecourt talking to a woman. I couldn’t see her face; she was wearing a headscarf and sunglasses like the middle-aged rich women at the top of Esperanza. Dub was smiling, but a little uncomfortably, so I figured she was giving him a hard time over her car repairs, reminding him that she knew his mother. My thoughts were full of Suelita, and it wasn’t until the woman spoke that I realised she was young. ‘You think you’re Jimmy Dean?’ she leaned forward, looking over her sunglasses at Dub. ‘You know who Jimmy Dean is, right?’ Her voice was like water on a hot day.
Dub didn’t reply. He just stood there staring at her and, because I felt affronted on his behalf – even I knew who Jimmy Dean was – and because her voice made me feel like an intruder, I thrust the food parcel at him and said quickly, without thinking, ‘Your mother sent lunch.’ He looked at me as if he’d only just seen me and reddened.
‘Mommy’s little boy, huh?’ the woman said. ‘She cut the crusts off too?’
‘Fish,’ I said, feeling the need to defend Dub, ‘and rice. No crusts.’
The woman smiled at me, a little uncertainly perhaps, and I felt like I’d been wrong-footed. Dub made no move to take his lunch parcel. I waited for a signal from him that would let me leave but he was looking at her. ‘So when will the car be ready?’ she said.
Dub recovered enough to ask, ‘Will you be coming every day to remind me until it’s done?’
‘Will it make any difference?’ she asked.
‘Well now,’ he said smoothly, ‘it’ll take a whole lot longer then, my lady.’
Earl came out looking for Dub, but when he saw the woman and the look on Dub’s face he retreated, smiling to himself. After a minute, he came out again and said, ‘A little help.’ Maybe he’d decided Dub could flirt on his own time. Dub walked back inside, but from the way he moved, every step as soft as a cat’s, I could see he was conscious of the woman’s gaze.