American Orphan

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  “I’ll be right back,” Lila says to me. Then, on her way out the door, “Hi Daddy, here he is, love of loves.”

  Mr. Chambers, late-seventies or so—hard to tell—is goat-lean. Lila has written me about how he was born with backwards feet, how the doctor twisted them around. He wears (and by the looks of it has always worn) an oily fedora, khaki pants with suspenders, red Converse high-tops and a frayed casual sport jacket pinned with quilt patches. He’s missing buttons, zippers. He falls into the chair at the table, blows his nose, folds his handkerchief and pockets it. Then he pulls out a pint of cheap Peach wine.

  He gazes out the big window spanning the back kitchen wall, at the churned-up fields. It looks as if vegetable planting and picking have textured him like a barn or barbed-wire fence, year to year, until he has acquired a gnarly grit in his speech and mannerisms. His gray eyes shine like minerals.

  “You a poet fella, uh?”

  His words are small but something makes them wide and deep, resembling something that’s been growing a long time, like a tree or canyon.

  “Orlando Lucero, sir.”

  “Welcome . . . welcome.”

  He turns to glance at the field with the slightest hint of a smile. Gratitude, maybe. And in that moment I recognize the outcome of a life of give, of compromise with weather. I see time spent toddling gingerly about his house and riding on his tractor, he and his dog moseying out to check furrows.

  We sit in silence until the door opens and Lila comes in, but not by herself. Her two sisters, Nancy and Kimberly, step in behind her.

  “I’m taking you with me to Longfield Federal prison,” Nancy says, “where I volunteer as an art teacher. Not right away. Give you a little time to relax, might even make clay mugs or something. I made Lila a cup for her pens.”

  “Oh,” Kimberly says, “and afterwards you get to sit at her house on the porch in the evening and smoke Columbian bud.”

  “It helps my cataracts,” Nancy says.

  “I’m sure. Just eases the pain, don’t it, sis?” Kimberly teases and turns to me. “Honey, I’m a receptionist at the sheriff’s department. If you need a driver’s license without having to show any paperwork or prove identity, come on down, I’ll take care of you.”

  After they leave, I go out to get my box from the car. Her brother Brandon drives up; twenty-six years old, pole man for a surveying company, woodsy, beer-drinking type, sunburned with skin flaking his red nose, leather worn off the toes of his steel-tipped boots, patched plaid shirt with suspenders clipped to the waistline of his Dickies.

  “Welcome to Green Mill,” he says, getting out and pushing his smudged eyeglasses up the sunburned bridge of his nose.

  I shake his hand, dried dirt crumbles from his palm.

  “I’m right across the road if you need anything.”

  On his way out, he turns. “Fish all the ponds you want, but there’s one you can’t catch: The General. He’s mine. We got this thing between us.”

  I learn he means the bigmouth bass in the pond behind his daddy’s house. I hardly ever see Brandon after that. Early mornings, still dark, he pulls out of the yard in his beat-up Ford Ranger with the mud-spattered surveying company logo on the door and doesn’t return until late.

  My first week there, I meet others. Big Foot, a giant of a Black sharecropper, gentle and loving, walks everywhere barefooted. They took his license away for drinking. I learn he went from truck to tractor to lawnmower to feet—snow, mud, blistering-hot black-top, gravel, asphalt—no matter. When he wants a drink, he crosses forest creeks, wades ponds, his sense of smell finding white lightning better than any hound around.

  His wife Fanny Bell is a large black woman as beautiful and muscled and healthy as a field of okra and eggplant. They have a daughter, Opal, toasty and warm as a buckwheat biscuit. She works as a housekeeper for Lila’s parents across the road.

  “Look here.” Lila points to the fridge. “Recognize?”

  I run my index finger along the paper taped to the door and read what I wrote her:

  woman whose touch flames the thing you’ve touched

  and buried hurts rise in my breast,

  you pluck them from my winding arteries

  and throw them into the fire

  I am shy of you, but also, I am wild for you.

  Like a child, I put my hand into your fire.

  On Saturday, Lila wakes up excited about a surprise she has for me. I walk into the kitchen, pour a cup of coffee and put some toast in the toaster. The toast pops up, and I butter it. It’s the first time I’ve ever done that.

  Lila is effusive. She beams a wholesomeness and suggests a drive into Chapel Hill and Raleigh to meet her friends—other poets and writers—and hear them read. I’m excited to do that.

  So, we launch off on our adventure. As we’re driving, her older son Bruce gives me a stare. I’ve known petulant boys in my time in institutions and thought of them as needing bibs and pacifiers. It wasn’t my job to clean the applesauce from their chins or change their diapers. Let Bruce stew.

  Black birds fly up from the red fields bordering the road. Insects cloud around ponds, frogs croak and hop; it seems to be lunch time in the forest. Forest greenery snarls at the neatly mowed, organized lawns as if to say, Watch out, we’re coming.

  Lila says, “He’s fine. Teenagers have problems with everyone. One minute to the next, you never know what they’re thinking.” She gives me a grin to remind me I am not as old, physically or emotionally, as I sometimes act.

  We arrive at this beautiful old red-brick mansion, so old the edges of the brick are rounded from wear. It’s surrounded by sprawling grassy hills and tall evergreen trees. Brown pine needles cover the rooftops and sidewalks, pinecones are scattered in the grass. People casually roam the grounds. Groups, couples, talking intimately with each other. They wear loose, comfortable cotton clothing, nothing formal, but they are refined in their manners.

  Lila and I walk into a theater filled with people, all listening to this one man on stage reading poetry from a book. This is the first formal poetry reading I ever attend. It is wonderful and gives me renewed enthusiasm for books. I vow to read more.

  Outside, we stroll the park-like grounds. I feel as if I have been part of a prayer session. God talked to me in that theater and told me I, too, will one day walk along the sidewalks and sit at one of the many garden benches, discussing literature with others.

  Lila has more surprises.

  We drive over to a house in Chapel Hill, and I can’t quite put my finger on the mystery of the place. I’m sure I feel good vibrations in the air. There is a long dirt driveway crowded in on both sides with bushes and trees. At the end of the driveway is a large, two-story clapboard house with so many coats of peeling paint it’s hard to determine its original color. The whole place has a weathered, ancient look, something like an animal lair. There’s not much detail to it, but lots of a lived-in, eaten-in, slept-in and isolated look to it.

  We go around back, the land expands into a huge field with large circus cages everywhere, holding tigers, leopards, lions, jaguars—all sorts of other big cats I don’t know the name of. I feel excitement rise up in me. A man comes flying out of the back of the house behind us. He wears a white laboratory coat, looks like a scientist who still hasn’t thrown off his hippy days. He has long salt-and-pepper hair, a scruffy beard and the kind of gentle, welcoming smile that comes when you’re high on good bud or have found karmic peace with yourself in your heart.

  He apparently knows Lila well enough to give her a hug that includes rubbing up against her large breasts. I like him. He exudes a serenity that comes from doing what you love. There’s a grounded tranquility there. I like him, and besides, anybody who raises big cats has my admiration. My ancestors—the Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, Mechicas—held big cats in the highest reverence.

  He gives us a tour of the cages, points out at least a dozen different types of cats I’ve never heard of. He claims that this one particular snow l
eopard has suction-cup paws and can walk on ceilings. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I believe him.

  “We were able to rescue these beautiful felines. They were brought to me by plane when they were cubs, and we nursed them until they could be returned to the jungle they came from. But these here could never return, they’d been so severely maimed as cubs, they couldn’t survive in the wild.”

  Then he says, “Hold on a minute,” and he goes back into his house and returns soon with a jaguar cub.

  I’m instantly in love with the kitten. After hugging, kissing and caressing her, I hand her back.

  He totally shocks me when he says, “No, no, she’s yours to take home, but I have to give you instructions on how to care for her. When she gets big enough to fend for herself in the jungles of Oaxaca, bring her back, we’ll return her. Her parents were murdered by poachers.”

  “Give them to Lila,” I say, barely able to contain my joy.

  I turn and walk away. Looking down into my new friend’s eyes, I gasp, “You’re ours!” I keep kissing her, scratching her behind her ears, kneading her beautiful paws, feeling her claws . . . I smell her until I inhale her whole being into my heart.

  She is me in a jaguar body.

  On the drive back, she sleeps curled on my lap. My first poetry reading, my first jaguar—it’s been an incredible day. We name her Griselda, lay down a thick blanket, a dish of water and say goodnight. Then we slide the door closed.

  The best day of my life.

  Friday morning, the third week in August, the heat is oppressive, pushing everything down under its sumo weight. I grab my fishing pole and tackle box in one hand, a lunch and water bottle in the other and head out to the forest behind Chamber’s house.

  I don’t know which I enjoy more, catching a nice large-mouth bass and filleting it or just tramping through the woods, wondering what new pond I might run into next. I put all my stuff down at the side of a pond busy with bass puckering the surface for insects. I roam. I encounter my first cottonmouth nestled in a cool root pit. I see herons, massive bullfrogs and a fox.

  I get home in the early evening as a thick net of gnats, flies, wasps and other insects cover the air just before dark. Waves of heat mirror up from the blacktop in wavering shimmers, making a distant stranger walking toward me seem like a dark mirage.

  I throw myself on the floor and fall asleep. Later, I wake up with Lila on the floor next to me, wrapping her arms around my waist and nodding at my letter excerpt taped to the fridge door.

  “Xeroxed our letters and gave them to a friend to read, and she cut out some of her favorites passages,” she informs me. “She had over two hundred.”

  “You worked late,” I say.

  “I did. Wrote two columns, one on southern poets and the other on the benefits of marijuana.”

  Lila gets up and swirls to the cabinet above the sink. “This calls for drinks.”

  She brings over two glasses and a bottle of vodka and places them on the floor.

  I look out the big window. The full moon lights the night. Hawks circle the broad field and forest behind the house. Lila packs a pipe with weed and smokes. After our second glass of gin, my worries and inhibitions vanish.

  The night grows. We remain sitting on the floor, talking, kissing. Her eyes linger on me, then she lunges at me, making me laugh and spill some of my vodka.

  “Come, my lost little lamb. There’s a surprise I’ve been saving for you. Bring the bottle.”

  I follow her to the car. She’s soon driving like a maniac down the long blacktop road. She doesn’t talk. Her mood is intense, almost somber, but more than that, a giant pulsing possesses her, her body a heartbeat emanating energy. I feel it, feel the energy radiating off her flesh, rippling, changing her.

  In that moment I feel lost, drifting in the space where darkness meets the margin of light, where light blurs and loses its illumination to the overwhelming night, at the boundary where we don’t understand the meaning of ourselves and become afraid because, there, we lose the ability to see with reason and rely on hope. Something like that happens to me, something in the ten-minute ride has changed everything.

  We drive, the country road heavy with tobacco plants on both sides. We turn at the bottom of a mountain with a lake shimmering silvery under the moon. We continue around it, up a dirt road until we come to a cabin. We get out, and I look around: stars, the lake below, and tiny lights from other cabins twinkling in the dark. There are a few moored small boats. The humid evening fills with the sounds of frogs belching and crickets twittering like chopsticks.

  “This is Frog King’s cabin. I wrote you about him, the southern Dixie mafia godfather. He has others in Georgia, Florida, Virginia—lots of them—for gambling in the mountains.”

  I don’t pay attention. I’m blown away looking up at the stars. How clear they are, so many.

  “There ain’t nothing poor about them,” Lila says as she pulls the door open and we go inside.

  The place is rustic, modestly furnished, big round table in the large room. Bookshelves line the wall. There are two bedrooms, a kitchen, a TV, big soft chairs and lots of liquor to drink, weed to smoke.

  Lila comes around the table and puts her face next to mine. “Time to cure your shyness.” She leans in and licks my cheek. “And,” she says, pushing me onto a chair and straddling me, “tell me how much you love me and missed me and how you want to be mine . . . forever. . . .” She unbuckles my jeans and unbuttons her blouse. “. . . How you wanted to take me driving back from the airport. Tell me. I saw you looking at my legs while I was driving.”

  “Guilty on all counts.”

  “Well, I’ve been a bad girl thinking bad thoughts about you, what I want you to do to me.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “I am the judge. . . .”

  She jumps back and laughs, pours another vodka, sits down sideways on my lap and kisses my neck. She stands up, then leads me into the bedroom, pushes me against the wall.

  “I have something special for you. Remember our letters? I asked how far you were willing to go?”

  “I said—”

  “. . . All the way. You did. Did you know what you were getting yourself into?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  She leads me back into the living room. We drink white lightning the Frog King has stored under the kitchen sink in a plastic milk jug. We smoke weed, and she tells me to go wait in the main open area. She closes the bedroom door behind her.

  I sit down in a huge, leather La-Z-Boy, sipping white lightning. I browse the spines of paperbacks lined on a wall shelf next to me. Then I go into the kitchen to check the fridge, the cupboards. I open the front door, step outside, look at the stars. Bullfrogs in the pond below plop and splash in the dark, clouds of insects circle the porch light. This is freedom. It is wonderful Griselda my little Jaguar, fishing, exploring the woods and a beautiful woman that loves me.

  I watch a man paddle out to the middle of the lake to fish. A café’s neon light announces half-priced bait. I realize the area is a resort. There are cabins with their lights on and expensive boats down on the other side of the lake. I see a car coming up the steep, winding lake road. It brings to mind the security guards that circled the perimeter of DYA at night, me inside a dorm, watching them through the bars.

  I wish words stayed on the page. I wish words had no meaning. I wish sometimes I didn’t understand how to write. Or how to speak.

  But I do, knowing how I handle anything in life. I push, provoke to see how far I’ll go. I let the words do their work. No matter what I say before I think, I carry a simple but deep faith that the outcome will be positive. Even as I test the unknown, dismissing consequences, disregarding danger, the thrill to experience the impact words have attracts me, how words can incite, deceive, pacify. The challenge is always to see what happens when it happens.

  It happens when Lila calls my name. I walk into the bedroom, close the door behi
nd me. She is naked on the bed, legs spread, one arm splayed, tied with leather to the four-poster. She’s wearing a neck chain. There are three small whips on the dresser.

  “I wrote you about the master and slave game. Tie this.”

  I lean over her, tie her free hand, then pick up the smallest whip and gently lash her over her thighs and breasts. I feel excited but feel fear too, feel out of place. A wave of nausea sweeps through me. I can’t back away. I whip her harder. She murmurs, “Master. . .”

  I know we wrote about doing this, but it doesn’t feel right. She calls me master, I whip harder, hurtling into the vortex of some primordial pleasure, loathing, mystery of a new unnameable power.

  When I tantalized her in my letters—saying I wanted to be her master—she believed me, offered up my fantasy on a dream platter, ushering me through the door to my illicit desires. But now that I am whipping her harder and harder, it feels like what I am doing is a crime, a sin. By turns, it shocks me, arouses me. I keep going. I whip to show her how much I like her, whip to show her our irreversible collusion. No matter how much I want to stop, I can’t. I have to do it, especially after I wrote how ready and willing I was for any and all sexual indulgence.

  I couldn’t disappoint her. I gave her permission. She came on a search-and-rescue mission, burning the brush of my Catholic upbringing, until my sexual impulses leaped out of the grass like escaped fugitives hidden too long, who fell helplessly on her because she offered me total freedom to avail myself in my descent of the soul, searching for meaning.

  I pick up a longer whip and continue.

  I wrote: “Help free me of past restraints, let my nature develop freely.”

  She said she’d be my prayer, my juju, my salvation. I relied on her to understand and direct me, to accommodate my deprivation with her body cuddling me in her nest of charms; but this is a whole other reality, no longer a twenty-two-year-old in DYA sitting at his library typewriter knocking out a passionate letter. No, now it feels dangerous.

  My whipping gets harder. A dark impulse drives my hand, inflicting pain beyond what she expects. I am losing control. I don’t know how far I will go. Welts flower on her breasts, red stripes leaf over her white thighs, purple feathers quiver over her skin.