by Beth Kephart
Matias looked up. He turned to see me—real. He wrinkled his brow and rolled his eyes, packed up his paints, his brush, his book—a napkin blotting the still-wet landscape. He left his egg where it was and lowered himself from the red leatherette to the shiny silver stool. From the stool he lowered himself to the floor. He walked toward me. One floor tile by the next floor tile. Slow.
“Matias Bondanza,” he said, looking up.
“Lizzie,” I told him, looking down.
“David D’Erasio,” my uncle said. “But call me Uncle Davy.”
“Uncle Davy,” Matias said, reaching out to shake his hand. He had New York’s whitest teeth. And the world’s best smile.
I knew all at once: Matias and I would be friends. At Timber and at Herbalish. In the woods, by the stream, beneath the trees as tall as sky. Matias would be part of us.
That was the summer before this one.
One year ago from now.
A lifetime.
9
SUMMER FRIEND. YOU KNOW THAT kind? Like: You’re at school, and there are these people you know, the people of “wassup,” “hey,” “yo,” “guess,” and you know them all right, they’re friends enough, you vote them into student council, you trade apples for bananas, you partner up. School friends. That’s one thing.
And then there are the friends of summer. The ones from the pool or the camp or the adventure. Matias was my summer friend, but he wasn’t only that. He was my all-year-round friend thanks to the postcards that he’d send. One-of-a-kinders. Beautiful. Rare. Watercolors painted on one side. My name and address on the other. That mark he’d make: MB, inside a flourish of a circle.
More perfect than there are words for, and, like I said, I’m good with words. Uncle Davy called those watercolors first-class collectibles.
Finds.
“Why do we need words when we have pictures like these?” he would say. And he would mean it.
That one. There. See? Right here by my bed. It’s a little bent, but I don’t mind. That’s Rockefeller Center all lit up for Christmas Eve, as brought to watercolor life by my friend Matias. A million points of light and a star somebody grabbed from the sky.
Facts that you could Wiki: Matias Bondanza was born in Santa Tecla, which is in El Salvador, a long way from here. Born the year of an earthquake that crashed the jungle from its cliff shelves, knocked the city to its knees, swallowed people and the sound of birds. Hundreds of people. Uncountable birds. Born that year. Check Wiki. Matias Bondanza. A kid born not just the year of the earthquake, but also that very same day.
You’d be shaken up too if you’d been born that way.
But maybe you wouldn’t have what Matias has, which goes by the name of proportionate dwarfism. I looked that up too; Mr. Genzler helped. Proportionate dwarfism is a short-stature condition, often the result of a hormonal deficiency, or a pituitary gland problem, or maybe even stress, and I’ve always guessed, but I wouldn’t know for sure, that being born during an earthquake and a million aftershocks was probably a little stressful.
I asked Matias once. He doesn’t remember.
You know how everyone who is your friend right now was a stranger to begin with? How everyone seems strange at first, and then (you’ll defend this with your life) they are most clearly not? Matias was a stranger once, but pretty soon he wasn’t. He was someone unusual until he was the most good-usual of all, and we were friends, that is my story, that is what you came to hear, that is what I’m telling. We were two kids in the six million acres where the houses were far apart and where the stores were Herbalish and Timber and where the roads were full of gravel and where there was this vending machine nobody used parked by the side of the road. We were four, five, six, seven times of coincidence until we made our plans. Breakfast at the schoolhouse. Hike to the woods. Put a line into the ponds. Sit there. Friends.
He was a painter and I wasn’t. He was short and I was tall. We could do anything together. Wherever we were, we were him with his colors and me with my specimens. (Rocks. Feathers. Stilled butterflies, if I could find them.) We were me in my sneakers and tick-fighter socks, and him with his silver stool, which he tied to his back like a backpack. He’d look up and I’d look down. We’d eat tomatoes from my uncle’s garden like the tomatoes were fresh apples. He brought me Santa Tecla guac. He asked about the meesterstuks. We watched my uncle on TV—the two of us staring straight ahead and my uncle staring back, through the TV glass, in black and white and vintage.
“There’s our uncle,” we said.
“There he goes again.”
Matias would sit on the mission chair and I’d sit on the trundle. Matias would paint and I would look for butterflies. No questions asked. Just stories. And then our first summer ended and Matias went back to Manhattan and I went back home to Mom, and then what we had were postcards—his paintings, my words; his hoping, my thinking. Then my mother got her news and it was summer again and time for the adventure. “Choose,” my mother said, because the doctors had said that she needed quiet and because she could not bear to call my uncle herself and ask him for the favor, and because why would I not choose the place I loved best?
I would call my uncle. I would ask him.
Choose.
Everything, when you get to be thirteen, has complications to it.
Matias had his canes by now and not his stool. He’d sent a postcard with an SOS—“Meet me here.” A painting of the stream, and beside the stream the esker, and beside the esker the glacial rock, and above the rock an arrow painted pink as the Ralph Lauren my uncle wore, and then, not the customary thing, a couple of watercolored words.
And then his mark: MB.
* * *
Thursday, after breakfast, after the Cream of Wheat made perfectly right in a brand-new pot, after the bowls were stacked in the cast-iron sink that still had a ring of black in it from the fire, I said, “Time for my rendezvous with Matias.”
“You need a ride?” Uncle Davy asked.
“Nope.”
“You’ve got it covered?”
I touched the postcard with the rock. I packed my backpack with my Keppy and my book of words and my pencil and an empty specimen box and also my headlamp, and a thermos full of melting cubes, and a bag of M&M’S, a box of granola bars, and a pocketknife, thanks to Uncle Davy. I hitched it on. I nodded.
“You tell Matias his uncle Davy says hello.”
I tugged at my cap, roger-that style.
“You tell him . . .”
My uncle thought for a bit.
“That next time I see him, I’ll find him a find. You make sure, all right? I’ll have something waiting here for when he comes around.”
I tugged at my socks. I opened the door. I went down the steps, across the drive, across the street, and up. Straight into the bio world of leaves and frogs and squish.
There are the rules of the six million acres. Landscapes and myths. There is what you should be on the lookout for, and there is what you’ll never see, or maybe see but only once. The bear. The bobcat. The coyote. The fox. The wild turkeys that will snap at your hand, and the snakes that will sizz and the parts of the forest that will leave you with an itch if you have not read your Keppy, if you are not worth your salt, and also, there are rare birds out there, like the least bittern, which is a heron you can fit in the palm of your hand like a bunch of emergency facts if you are lucky enough to find one, if you are on guard, if you are a biologist, if you are brave. I always was.
Spoiler alert: I never found the least bittern.
10
SIX MILLION ACRES. SIX MILLION. That’s wide and that’s so far. I had my sneakers on and my socks stretched to my knees, the perfumery of bug spray all upon me. I had my P turned back on my head. I was prepared. I had crossed the road and cut up beneath the trees toward the nearest stream. I was moving my hand like a windshield wiper to distract the no-see-ums that weren’t distracted by the spray. I was watching for roots and looking up into the trees, which seemed like
sky because there was nothing I could see above them. I had gone I don’t know how far, but I wasn’t lost, I knew. Just find the stream and the gravelly ridge beside the stream, then follow up. Keep going until you find him.
“Meet me here,” Matias had written. That whale of the rock beside the best nook of stream.
And there, right there, he was.
High up on that rock that we liked the most because it was shaped like a rock with stairs. High up with his two new canes, nicely polished and crossed. He was wearing the pink cap Uncle Davy had given him once, to make him a member of the family. His hair was a black gloss. Steam was rising from the stream and from a leather bag beside him, and on his lap, small as it seemed, was the book of paper and the tray of color and the squirrel-hair brush I’d given him last birthday.
He had heard me coming and he smiled.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
You can’t run fast with a backpack like my backpack on your back, but I hurried my Field Day best up the last part of the hill.
He wore a saint around his neck, a polo shirt, a pair of green-and-purple plaid madras shorts, and in the precise place that he was sitting it was like someone had turned a spotlight on. He didn’t stand up. He smiled his piano-whites smile. I got real close, then stopped.
“Matias,” I said.
He said, “Pupusas.” With a dip of his chin.
National dish of the Salvadoran. Masa de maíz. Chicharrón. Queso. Cooked on a griddle in that white house down the road and carried out to the rock by the stream in a pouch that held steam, and there he was, where he said he’d be, and there I was. Both of us ten months older than we’d been, and both of us keeping our promise.
I stepped up to the rock and I climbed. Fit my sneaks into the rocky stairs, scurried to the flat top, plunked down beside Matias, plenty of room for us both. He’d crossed his canes into an X. He was making a watercolor, pretty and green. There was that superior smell of those pupusas.
“I knew you’d come,” he said.
“Fast as I could.”
High fives.
“I knew you’d be taller.”
“I’m not that much taller.”
“You are,” he said. “I’m not.”
“You’re still cool as a mule,” I said.
“Mules are cool?”
“Mules are stronger than horses,” I said. “They’re also more independent.”
“Is that another Mr. Genzler fact?”
“It’s our fact now,” I said. “We own it.”
He put the paints and the paper and the brush off to one side. He opened the pouch and unwrapped the foil. One pupusa for us each. A third one for us to share.
Middle of morning. In the woods.
You never ate such a dream.
The stream sang. The birds did. The bugs minded their own business. When the sun from far away broke through the sky of trees, the glitter on the big rock shone. On the stone beside us Matias’s watercolor was drying in the air. He leaned back and closed his eyes.
It was the last week of June. Soon it’d be the first week of July.
“Ready for anything,” I’d told my mom.
He was the world’s best best friend, and the weather that day was so good.
11
SO YOU LEFT AND THEN you came back. So the stars came in by their ones and then went fizz, like someone had popped the top off a can of Mountain Dew. So you could say I slept, and when I slept, I dreamed, and now the morning has come in through the skylight, and we’re past yellow, we’re past pink, we’re into the first blues of the day.
Wild blues.
And you’re here.
It’s our third day.
The daisies are still standing straight in their cup, the yellow melting the petals.
They have all the power to them.
Pupusas.
Right.
And Day-Glo.
I said it. I said “Matias.” I said he was “the world’s best best friend.” I meant every word. And now you are here and you want more, but I’m in charge. I will be getting to it. I’m just going to sit here. I’m going to sit here and be quiet.
12
ALL RIGHT.
Maybe.
I’ll tell you something you already know. The parts of the story you’re a part of.
Everybody called it Little Siberia. Little Siberia. The prison down the road. Little Siberia. Like it was a whole other country.
Everybody figured we were safe.
But that’s not what you had figured.
You knew that something bad was starting.
You were out there. Waiting. You were, in fact, part of the bad.
I hate my father for many things. But I’m so glad he taught me courage.
13
THREE THOUSAND PRISONERS. FOURTEEN HUNDRED guards. Thirty feet of concrete walls between crimes and freedom.
It was miles away. It was summer. But it was no other country.
This is what you came for, right? This is the heart of your story?
Tell it fast, and tell it straight. Tell you what we thought we knew. Tell you how it was.
That’s what you want? That heals? That’s what you think?
Hear this:
The thing about history is that it’s still ahead of us. Every day, and the day after that: History is what we’re making.
See?
I lie here looking back and there is me with my backpack and there is Matias with his pupusas and there is our first day together in our second summer, and for all my words and all my thinking, I don’t have describing power. What I want you to know is who Matias was—the stories he told with the roll of his r’s and the stories that came through the mail and the greens and the browns and the brights of his country.
His myths.
I want you to know who he was, because without that, nothing else here matters.
14
FOR EXAMPLE:
According to Matias in the stories he would tell, he would never have left his country, except for the gangs. He would never have gone away, except his parents said they had to, and he was nine, after all, and his country was hurting.
Gangs stopping people in their cars as they drove. Gangs yanking necklaces right off people’s necks. Gangs scouting people out for kidnap. Gangs holding the coffee farms for ransom.
Once, Matias’s mother swallowed her diamond ring so the gangs couldn’t take it, and once, two men climbed up onto the red tiles of the roof of their house and through the bougainvillea and into the courtyard and then into the house and stole silver trays and silverware, certificates, Matias’s jar of coins, and even with the guards he was not safe, even with the man with the machete who walked beside him to the school, to the market, walked as slow as Matias had to, on legs that couldn’t go.
So Matias needed protection, and Tiburcio was his machete man. Tiburcio, who had spent four years in jail once on account of that machete. Tiburcio was not a part of any gang. Tiburcio was a kind and gentle man, a kind and gentle murderer. Tiburcio was Matias’s best friend, his personal protection, but even then Matias was not safe, so the family left.
They packed, they drove, they flew away. The Bondanzas left their country.
That is their story, but so is this. There was beauty in El Salvador that no gang could ever take.
Black sand beaches.
Parakeets like flowers.
Waterfalls in jungles.
Butterflies the size of bats.
Moonlight like dew and daisies.
Going swimming naked.
The white blooms on the coffee trees in spring and the red beans at picking time, the beans rumbling inside the burlap coffee sacks.
The good and the hard. The bad and the missed. By the time Matias was ten, Manhattan was his city. By the time he was twelve, he owned a piece of the rock in a six-million-acre summer and remembered Santa Tecla with pupusas, and I was sitting beside him, his best friend, and Little Siberia was far away; it
was not part of our story.
It wasn’t from Matias that I first heard the words “proportionate dwarfism.” It was not from Mr. Genzler. It was from my uncle Davy, the man who believed that difference makes us gorgeous. The man who taught me that for absolute fact.
If I don’t tell you the before of what happened after, if I don’t explain it all, this true, none of anything will matter.
So the time goes by. Tocks in the clock.
15
YEAH. I KNOW. THAT PART about Tiburcio. Murderer and heart of gold. Exactly what I said, because it’s possible.
Just not possible for everyone.
Just not always true.
You have to know the difference.
Tiburrrrrcio—you roll the r’s. You imagine that whale of a rock with the pupusas steaming. Imagine the stream that ran like a hook in a nose, that stream that carried gold leaves on its back. Imagine Matias and me, watching the stream and watching the bugs buzz in, then slam against our protective perfumery. Imagine me imagining Matias, and remembering.
I wish I had the r’s to tell it.
I wish it were Matias telling.
If.
Tiburrrrrcio was born of the Pipiles, which is like being born of a myth. Tiburcio had his own little one-room house with its cool dirt floor and thatched-up roof in the coffee cliffs. He’d been a coffee picker in the hills and a gardener of birds in the city. He’d polished the silver for Matias’s mother, cut the tangerines from the tree, helped the maid, her name was Nicha, on cleaning day. He was short and also strong. His skin was walnuts. He wore a braided hat on his head and a guitar on his back, and he was wearing that hat and that guitar but also his machete strung from a beaded sash and dipped into a leather pouch on the day of the murder that put him into jail for four long, wrong years. His machete with the polished tip. His machete, which he touched to the heart of the man who had hurt his daughter, bad; what choice did Tiburcio have?