by Niyati Keni
The woman watched him go. Still holding Dub’s lunch, I turned to follow him, but she started talking. Even as she talked, she stared into the gloom of the garage, to where Dub and Earl were bent over a bike. ‘I moved in two weeks ago,’ she said, pointing to the building opposite. ‘I told Eddie I wanted the top floor. It’s always cooler on a top floor, right? I get two rooms, a kitchen, my own bathroom. And a balcony. I leave the balcony doors open all day until I have to close them in the evening to keep the bugs out. I open them again later, when the bugs are gone, to let the night air in. I don’t like to feel like I’m in a box. Anyway, fresh air is healthy, don’t you think?’ I looked up at her balcony. She had a clear view of the garage forecourt. Recently Dub had taken to working out there with his shirt off. I wondered why she was talking to me; did she think I was his brother? I stood up a little straighter in what I wore: Benny’s old jeans and a t-shirt that said Sampaguita Chemical Corp, a present from one of Aunt Mary’s friends.
‘It’s a good kitchen,’ she continued, ‘I get it all to myself, but I don’t get to use it that much – only the refrigerator. Meals are sent over ready-made most times. Eddie arranges it. I know when he’s coming because he sends over double, or more if he’s not alone.’ I wondered if Eddie was the name of her husband. I thought if I had a wife that looked like that, I’d be home every night. She said his name as if he were someone familiar to both of us, a mutual friend. ‘It’s mostly from the same restaurant,’ she continued. ‘Rosaline’s. Not real expensive as you might expect with Eddie. He took me there for our first proper date. When I saw it, I thought he was testing me. He said he used to wash dishes there and sweep up when he was a kid. I guess he wanted me to see that part of him.’ I knew the place she was talking about, though I’d never eaten there. It was near the jetty, one of a line of noodle joints and eateries. It had been there for as long as I could recall. I couldn’t imagine a woman like her in it. ‘It’s a rat-hole really, but Eddie says he’ll miss it when it has to close for the first phase. He imagined when he was a kid that it would always be there. But it’s like he always says: change is inevitable. He says he’ll have to make sacrifices like everyone else.’ I didn’t know what she was talking about but I didn’t care to ask; looking at her, it was hard to think straight. She carried on, her voice low, conspiratorial, eager to fill any gaps. ‘I’m a village girl,’ she said, but I didn’t believe her; she looked nothing like the village girls that came through Esperanza on market day. ‘When I first came, I slept on the floor of my friend’s room. There were four of us just on the floor. We had to go for a walk when her boyfriend came.’
When it became clear that Dub wasn’t coming out any time soon, she said, ‘He thinks he’s Elvis, right?’
‘He plays the guitar,’ I said, ‘and sings.’
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘I don’t.’
‘You want to?’
I’d never really thought about it. I tried to picture myself holding a guitar and singing, and it made me laugh out loud. She seemed to like that. ‘What’s your name?’ she said.
‘Joseph.’
‘Maria Luisa. But I get called BabyLu.’
I looked at her smooth brown face, her arched brows that made her eyes look as if they perennially harboured a question. ‘He has long hair,’ I said.
‘Elvis?’
‘Dub.’
‘What kind of a name is Dub?’
I shrugged. ‘He’s a musician.’
She started laughing. She was still smiling as she crossed the street back to her apartment. I watched her go. Even after she’d disappeared into the building, her scent hung over the forecourt.
Dub came back out. ‘Did she ask about me?’ he said.
I held his lunch out and he took it automatically. ‘She said you looked like Elvis.’
He stood looking at her apartment block for a couple of minutes until Earl came out and said, ‘I gotta do all the work by myself today?’
After Dub had gone back inside, I turned to leave and, looking up, I saw BabyLu on her balcony. She waved at me and I waved back. Lucky Eddie, I thought.
Girl in the Hatch of a Sari-Sari Store
‘What are you, a Champion or a Pall Mall man?’ Suelita, the curandero’s daughter, leaned across the counter of her mother’s sari-sari store, her head framed by packets of Crispy Pops and chicharon. Her elbow on the counter, she held up two cigarettes, as if she was displaying a deck of cards, inviting me to choose one. She was weighing me up; was I a big spender or a cheapskate? Already, she’d hijacked our interaction far away from the one I’d rehearsed as I walked down Esperanza to the curandero’s alley, confusing me almost immediately by smiling as I approached. It was an expression she wore infrequently, even less so when serving in the store. Unfortunately her mother, Missy, was also the local midwife, and so Suelita was left to man the store often and at short notice.
She was still smiling as she held up the cigarettes. Her smile was difficult to interpret, as enigmatic as most of her expressions seemed to me, but she wasn’t about to give me time to analyse it; she expected an answer. Champion or Pall Mall? I looked at the cigarettes in her hand, then at the hand itself: slender, tapering fingers but broad at the palm. A hand that might lift sacks, keep children in line, play the piano. I looked at her other hand flat on the counter and she slid it away from me as if conscious of the scrutiny. The movement made me look up at her face, which still contained the question. I didn’t smoke, had never learned to, and besides, Aunt Mary hated it. For a moment I felt relieved that I didn’t have to name my brand when I couldn’t know what Suelita, with her singular way of appraising the world, might make of it.
‘I don’t smoke,’ I felt slightly ashamed as I confessed. Her smile returned, deepened as she shot a closed look at the boys who lounged on the benches to the right of the hatch. Rico and his boys. I knew some of them from school. They were all smoking. ‘Uncle Bee in?’ I said.
‘Sure,’ Suelita said in English. ‘He’s treating a man for importance.’
She watched me closely as she spoke, a spark in her eyes that waned as quickly as it had flared. Then she said, ‘He’ll be out in a minute,’ and I thought she looked disappointed. For the briefest moment I considered the unlikely possibility that her disappointment might have been because I’d come to see her father, not her. I stayed where I was, wondering how I might revive the conversation, but she picked up a pair of scissors and started snipping at a pile of old newspapers, turning her shoulders so gradually against me that it took me several more seconds to realise I’d been dismissed.
Suelita was seventeen and her mother had plans for her to go to nursing school. She could have been anything she wanted; I was sure of it. Watching her now, as she cut out individual words from the newspaper and spread them out over the counter, a bored expression on her features the whole while, it occurred to me that perhaps the reason why she always looked so discontent was because the best she could hope for was nursing college, when maybe what she wanted was something else entirely.
I looked around to see where I might wait. Rico and his boys stretched out a little, closing the gaps between them. I was glad; the store had a liquor license and they looked like they’d been here awhile. I moved round the corner away from the hatch and sat down on the front stoop.
The curandero’s shack squatted in the alley that ran from Primo’s store all the way to the basilica and the Chinese bars that skirted it. It was a single-storey wooden structure that Uncle Bee’s grandfather had built with the help of his neighbours when Esperanza Street was still young; when the older, richer houses perched wide apart on the hillside with a clear view of their lands, the docks and the ocean beyond.
The shack, like countless identical buildings in the neighbourhood, or like the nipa huts that were scattered through the backcountry, had an ageless quality to it. Whenever I saw it, it seemed to me a thing that lay close to the heart of our street, not its geographical heart but its essen
ce. The bones of buildings just like it lay under ever-newer structures like the Coffee Shak with its rain-marked concrete and plate glass, or the forecourt of Earl’s garage, or my father’s apartment block.
Uncle Bee had added the sari-sari store and a consulting room to the shack himself, though he hadn’t had to rebuild anything to do it. Both were just part of the main room that he’d fenced off with nipa panels and were separated from each other by a partitioning curtain. The consulting room contained a fold-down bed and floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with herbs, bundles of dried leaves, dried fruit, oils and balms, cigarette papers, candles. From the rafters, long strips of Sunsilk shampoo, hair conditioner and laundry-detergent pouches hung down like creepers.
From the back of the shack came a chorus of voices and electronic noise. Suelita’s younger brother Fidel and his boys were in. I watched Uncle Bee through the small front window, heard him talking, going over something once, twice, pausing for a response. I couldn’t make out the words.
Beng Beng Bukaykay had been a curandero, a healer, since his teens. He wasn’t really my uncle. Before I went to live at the Bougainvillea, I’d come to his house sometimes with my mother, and so now, whenever I passed that way, the place took on the colour of memory.
Uncle Bee told me when I was a kid how he came to be a curandero. He said that one by one he’d discovered the secret nesting sites of all the birds including, finally, the daklap owl that lays its eggs on the beach. And it was on account of the owl that he’d been given his powers. He told me how he’d stumbled upon her nest as the sun was setting and she’d begged him not to reveal its whereabouts as her children had yet to hatch safely. He promised never to breathe a word and, in return, the spirits gave him his powers on the understanding that if he ever went back on his word he would lose them. That, at any rate, was his story for the children. I liked his version and demanded to hear it every time I saw him, even after my mother told me that Uncle Bee’s grandfather and great-grandfather had both been curanderos and that he’d learned the trade from them. She also said that Uncle Bee’s father alone had broken with tradition and tried to make it big as a musician in Manila, the Big Apple. He’d come back a shadow, she said, fond of his drink, and married Bee’s mother but died not long after Kokoy, Bee’s younger brother, was born. That part she didn’t tell me, but she discussed it with her friends, forgetting, as usual, that I was there to hear it too.
Uncle Bee did a pretty good trade; he was the only curandero in the barrio. From the bottom end of Esperanza almost everyone came to him, apart from Pastor Levi and Father Mulrooney, who both preferred the attentions of the real doctor in the health clinic on Salinas Boulevard. Pastor Levi could afford a real doctor because his brother, Cesar, was a solicitor who worked for Eddie Casama. Father Mulrooney was a foreigner and didn’t trust Uncle Bee’s remedies. At the top end of the street, most families, including Aunt Mary’s, had their own physicians in the centre of town – guys that had trained in Europe or the States and charged by the hour. For everyone else, Uncle Bee could always be relied upon to offer a cure.
Uncle Bee accepted payment in many forms and it wasn’t unusual to see rice, or eggs, or a pile of sweet potatoes left on his stoop. For a long time, I’d wished to be ill enough to be treated by him, an illness so life-threatening I imagined the white-coated doctor on Rizal Avenue at a loss to diagnose it, my only hope being the curandero with his jars of tree barks and dark, oily pastes and Latin prayers. But Aunt Mary would never have heard of it, and so it wasn’t until America came out in a rash and refused to see anyone else that I had a chance to see inside Uncle Bee’s consulting room again.
I was lost in these thoughts when the door opened. I stood up and moved out of the way as a woman came out. I’d expected a man, an important looking one. I glanced in the direction of the hatch where Suelita was chiding Rico as he rapped on the counter with a coin for another cigarette.
Uncle Bee followed his patient down the steps, clapped a hand on my shoulder. ‘Joseph!’ he said. ‘I see you walking past but you never stop by.’ Uncle Bee was of a breed of men whose appearance never seemed to change; he would remain the same weight and young in his face forever. He was a good advertisement for his herbs.
‘Aunt Mary sent payment for America.’
‘Straight to business? No time for a drink even?’ He twitched his fingers, palm up, motioning me indoors after him.
When he built the house, Uncle Bee’s grandfather would have slipped some money into the hole for each corner post, as was customary, to ensure prosperity. He must have stuck some bills down there rather than small change because his grandson was doing well for himself. Outside, the house was shabby from season after season of monsoon rain and inside it was cramped, but squeezed in among the furniture were a TV and hi-fi equipment and a new Frigidaire.
Fidel was playing a video game with his friends. They were perched everywhere like birds in a tree. Fidel lay across the armchair, languidly, as if he were holding court and slightly bored with it. Fidel was nice enough, an average kid, not especially bright or athletic, but the video game had made him popular. I was in the same class and had heard about the game console that Uncle Bee had bought him for his birthday, bought second-hand from one of his patients, but nevertheless one of the first in the barrio. Even Benny didn’t have one, though not for lack of asking. I could still hear Aunt Mary’s voice explaining why he wasn’t going to get one: ‘Just how is a thing like that going to help your development?’
‘Atari Twenty-six hundred,’ Fidel said to me, briefly lifting his eyes from the screen. I nodded as if this meant something significant; it was certainly a phrase that had some effect on our classmates. He shifted his legs along the armrest. I sat down lightly on it and he handed me the controls, like a king bestowing honours, enjoying his own generosity. ‘Pac-Man,’ he said. I was immediately inept. He took the controls from me again to demonstrate, smiling as he did so at my momentary reluctance to let go.
Behind the partition, I heard Uncle Bee moving crates around. He emerged from the store with a Pepsi in each hand, jerked an invitation with his head for me to follow him out onto the stoop. ‘Big mistake buying that thing,’ he said. ‘House is never quiet anymore.’
‘See you, man,’ Fidel said as I left, but he didn’t look up.
In the alley, the recent rains had turned the ground to slurry. I watched passers-by pick their way around the edges of puddles. ‘You’re almost a man,’ said Uncle Bee, settling himself back against the doorpost. ‘You ever think about where you’re heading? What you want?’ I’d heard Aunt Mary ask the same of Dub and Benny, but unlike them I was unprepared with an answer. All I could think of at that moment was going back inside and having another turn at Fidel’s video game, joking around with the boys, feeling for a while like I had my own crowd, maybe having the highest score when Suelita’s shift was up and she passed through the room on her way to help her mother in the yard. I didn’t say anything. Uncle Bee watched me but he didn’t press for an answer.
From inside the shack a clamour erupted. Fidel and the boys were hollering in victory. From somewhere out back Missy Bukaykay yelled, ‘Oy, oy!’ The boys quieted. A few seconds later a jaunty series of beeps was followed by a more subdued murmur.
Uncle Bee tipped his head in the direction of the back yard. ‘Wearer of the Pants,’ he said grandly, as if it were a ceremonial title.
He leaned in to me and said softly, ‘You know Eddie Casama?’ His eyes flitted to the corner of the shack round which Rico and his boys lounged.
‘Sure. Who hasn’t heard of him?’
‘Mary Morelos have any dealings with him?’
‘I guess she knows everyone round here, but he’s never been to the house.’
‘She or America hear of anything big, you’d tell me, right?’ I looked at him and he held my gaze until I looked away again. ‘Cesar Santiago’s been working long into the night for months now. Walking around with a haunted look in his eye,’ he said,
his voice low, close to my ear. ‘Wouldn’t even tell his brother why.’ Cesar Santiago: Pastor Levi’s brother and Eddie Casama’s lawyer. I sat a little looser on the stoop, arms resting on my knees, drink in hand, mimicking the way Uncle Bee sat, like a man rather than a kid, talking about bigger matters than whether it was ok to make chicken three nights running. ‘Levi finally got it out of him yesterday. Application was submitted to redevelop this place.’ I looked up at the eaves of the shack. ‘Not just my place,’ he said and thrust his chin out in a wider arc. I looked up and down the alley. Uncle Bee settled back and watched me. He looked like he had more to say but he waited. I guessed some kind of response was required of me first.
‘Hard not to tell a thing like that to your brother when he’s asking,’ I said.
Uncle Bee shook his head; I was missing the point. ‘For some, money beats blood. They filed the application in February.’
I took this in slowly; it was hard to keep a little secret in Esperanza – a place where everyone knew who was more interested in their brother’s wife than their own, or who’d lied about their son’s school grades, or sold their neighbour’s dog – so to keep a thing like that quiet for months took some cunning. ‘Just after the Pope arrived,’ Uncle Bee said. ‘I guess they figured it would go unnoticed with all the excitement.’ I thought back to the Pope’s visit. Even in Aunt Mary’s house it seemed like the TV had never been switched off. ‘That boy Rico,’ Uncle Bee said. ‘Friend of yours?’ I shook my head. ‘Good. The kind of boy your mother used to call bulok.’ Bulok, rotten. She’d used that word often, for people she’d wanted me to stay away from.
Rico was my age but he’d dropped out of school a long time ago, so I saw him only occasionally, hanging out with his barkada, his gang: street-corner boys. They called their gang the Barracudas. The Barracuda barkada; I guess somebody thought it was funny. It was no secret that Rico ran errands for Eddie Casama, which was as close, I reckoned, as he was ever going to get to real wealth. The rest of the time he and his boys made it their business to keep order in the barrio. In their own way, Rico’s family were as well known in the neighbourhood as Aunt Mary’s; if trouble broke out, it was widely assumed they knew more about it than most. Rico’s brother, Caylo, ran some pool tables, pinball and mah-jong in their yard. His cousin Rolly – after the bodybuilder Roland Dantes; I never knew his real name – ran a gym and Rico and his boys worked out there for free after closing time. In front of the store this afternoon, Rico had left his shirt wide open and anyone could see the working-out was paying off. Rico’s association with Eddie Casama had given him a kind of surly confidence. ‘Been strutting round like a prizefighter for weeks now,’ Uncle Bee said. ‘Like he knows something we don’t.’