But I had written it. I know why now.
I rise, stretch and walk into the forest. I cry every tear I never did, I feel all the pain I buried. I stare at the water, so brilliant, flashing with sunlight. I see Ghost Boy sitting in a room, bleeding from his anus. He looks at me with hatred in his eyes, with vengeance. I see him slowly rise, turn the doorknob and walk around the pond toward me. He sits down next to me on the pond bank, a lock of thick black hair waving over his forehead and cheek. He is ten, never smiles; at fifteen he smiles a lot, sneaks under bunks at night to stick his pecker into a kid’s butthole. His black hair is now slicked back. Copper complexion, thick eye lashes, his dark eyes linger on me with a deep compassion in them.
“It’s time to let me go, Orlando,” he says.
I know it too. I raise my hand at him, he nods, jutting his chin up like a macho, knowing that without him I would be dead, that I wouldn’t have had the courage to stand up for myself and fight the predators. He knows he taught me the meaning of self-sacrifice, integrity, courage. Our goodbye is quiet, modest, filled with an ominous sense, as if the morning air is the interior of a cathedral, like somewhere up high an organ plays our goodbye music.
He leaps up off the bank, wearing jeans, a T-shirt and black and white Converse high-top lace-ups. He walks on water across the pond, showing off like he likes to do. When he gets to the other side, he turns and waves, a big smile creasing his face, eyes shining with the rising sun.
I watch Ghost Boy vanish into the mist hovering over the forest, into the fog that clings to the pine trees. I watch him disappear as snow from a pine branch above him sprinkles the air with flake-shards that burn a diamond blue and glitter in the air.
When I get back to the house I see Lila has placed the letter in the mailbox by the road.
A day later snow blankets the land. It is beautiful and the sky is blue. My sister calls to tell me they have a job for me. I think about it for a while, then decide to take it. It snows lightly the day I take my last walk, following the banks above the pond, my head clears from all the misgivings and doubts I’ve had recently. I enjoy stumbling through snow drifts, feeling my leg muscles contract to balance me, I go on breaking off icicles with a stick I carry.
I end my walk with a visit to Mr. Chambers. I thank him for his generosity, wish him a Merry Christmas. In the afternoon, I drive up to the cabin, find Frog King there with a bunch of boozy, drugged, tobacco-chewing cowboys in a high-stakes poker game with their dogs lounging around their feet: pit bulls, blue heelers, corsos and catahoulas. There are young, naked college women lounging about. They all drink white lightning from mason jars and plastic milk jugs. Piles of money crowd the tabletop.
Frog King and I go into the bedroom, sit and talk a bit. He begrudges me nothing, compliments my loyalty, says if I ever need him, he’ll be there for me.
The next day, after my first cup of coffee, I call Beto and Chuy and tell them I’m out of the game. I call and give my goodbyes to Brandon, Nancy and Kimberly, then I go look for Lila. I find her wrapped in a heavy coat and fur cap sitting on a log by the pond behind her father’s house. I sit down beside her.
“Love this pond, fished it a lot,” I say. I look up at the blue sky and sigh.
“I was just thinking how you caught the old General here.” She takes a hit on her joint, flicks it into the water where I watch it float. “You’re leaving.” She lets out a stream of smoke and looks at me. “Won’t cry, won’t criticize, won’t stop you. You were right, you know.”
“About?”
“Our letters. They created a world you could never live up to.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I wanted you to be everything you said in your letters you wanted to be . . . but you were a disappointment. It was all about sex, crazy sex you learned from that goddamn priest, and I was willing to do it with you. All those beautiful words on wanting to be the poet, the college student, but you went right back to your old ways. I was sad to see that happen.”
“Criminal habits are hard to break, Lila.”
The sun breaks through the clouds, I look at her long red hair, admire how the sun makes it shimmer. I want to kiss her, want to walk right out on the half-frozen pond, prove my love for her will keep me from falling in.
She shoves her hands into her coat pockets. “Men and their damn problems with their mothers, or lack thereof . . . either way, you all have obsessions of the heart, and that’s what our letters were: your obsessions. Sex. Porn. Crazy stuff you dreamed of doing with a woman because of all that shit you went through. This way, that way, spanking, whipping, slapping. When it comes to obsessions of the heart, there’s no room for two.”
She looks up at me. I expect her to smile, but she doesn’t. I am afraid of what she is going to say next.
“Jeezuz, just my luck to land right in the middle of love with a man who never had a healthy relationship with a woman.”
I don’t know what to say.
“The women in your life were authorities,” she says, “. . . nuns, grandmas, aunts, strict ladies who thought the flesh was a sin, sex was bad, something that would send you to hell for even thinking about it. They made a tangled mess of you when it comes to sex.” She lights another cigarette, drags long and exhales. “But all is not lost . . . you’ve shown yourself to be noble, Orlando—that you have.”
“Anything but,” I say and mean it.
I feel like I made this whole affair a disaster. I look across the pond, remembering the day I saw a white heron land on a log. I wonder if it was Ghost Boy turned into a white bird.
“I got a question.”
“Yeah?”
“What happened that night at the cabin? What made you freak and run?”
“I lost it, don’t know why.”
“I couldn’t understand that, especially with how excited you were in your letters . . . how you rehearsed it so many times, what you would do to me. I did it to make you happy. No matter the content, to me they were the most beautiful words I ever read. You and your letters . . . so, so different once you got out here.”
“Yeah,” I say, getting up and walking to the edge of the water to look at my reflection in the ice. Lost for words, all I can come up with is, “I’m going.”
“You try to compensate for a lifetime of deprivation. Try to free yourself from all that childhood hurt.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You turn and flip and maneuver into a dozen positions to love, hoping it might free you. . . . I went along with you, searching for a way to help you out of yourself, using all the magic I had to break through that blockage and pour out a lifetime of rejection and arouse in you a feeling of love.
“There were times when reading your letters I thought for sure you’d elevated me to a place where I dissolved and merged with something higher. Your words had that way of replacing reality with your fantasy, hoping your obsession with wild sex would solve your problems.”
I can see fish under the ice. I remember the countless times Peter and I tramped through the woods, day after day, for weeks.
“By conjuring my sexual ceremonies with you in letters, I hoped to exorcise the shame I’d been subjected to.”
She crushes her cigarette in the dirt with her hand and lights another. “Boy . . . I’ll tell you this: you got a beautiful way of talking. It’s like someone else is talking.”
“I know, I don’t know how or why, but I use words, sentences that don’t belong to me. Maybe I’m channeling something.”
“Wouldn’t doubt it . . . I’ve often thought about that possibility.”
We stare across the pond at nothing.
“For days after that happened at the cabin, the word ‘trauma’ kept clinging to my brain. Clung to my brain like a tick I couldn’t pull off, sucking the blood from me. ‘Trauma,’ ‘trauma,’ ‘trauma,’ the word repeated itself like some signal received by a satellite dish from space.”
Why’d I freak? Why’d I go along? W
hy couldn’t I stop? Why’d I increase the pain? My counselors at DYA always used the word “trauma” to describe my anger, my temper. When I got into trouble. I mocked them, bragged that nothing could hurt me. No matter what anyone did to me, it didn’t hurt.
“But it wasn’t true,” Lila says. “I could see how much you hurt when you saw your brother. I could see how scared you were when you flew out here. You were a scared little boy.”
“I was afraid the counselor would send me away to the nut house. I wanted nothing to do with that word, ‘trauma.’ So, I played it off and always put on a show, denying anything could get to me.”
“Trauma,” she says, “is a bone-marrow stillness and a frightening loss of emotional control. It happens where one’s emotions twist up and choke you.”
“I always saw it like a rag a killer wipes his bloody hands on after a crime. . . . Yes, I am traumatized. I am a problem. So what? I’m not the only one. I can’t change that.”
“Just ’cause you string sweet words together doesn’t mean you get a free pass from life’s problems.”
“Means I have to use it. . .”
“And that’s the very thing you didn’t do, Orlando. You don’t even respect your gift.”
“It’s ’cuz when I write, sometimes I get this feeling I’m cracking up. I don’t trust no doctor or shrink messing around with me. I seen what they do to kids they diagnose as sick. They end up zombies.”
She stands up, looks down at her boots and says, “Strange.”
“What?”
“That after all this time, you talk about it now. After there isn’t a thing we can do about it.” She shakes her head sadly. “Isn’t that life?!”
“Yeah,” I agree.
She hugs me and whispers, “Don’t be afraid.”
I try to keep my voice from breaking, “Okay, okay.”
She rocks me in her arms. “Orlando. You want to go back to sleep and be tucked in and kissed by a mother, but you can’t. You’re all grown up.” She pulls away, takes my hands in hers. “One way or another, we each get to where we need to get. When it comes to women, your journey has just started. You belong to the world now.”
I push against her.
She pushes back, holds me at arm’s length. “I have a favor to ask. . . . Will you grant me one request?”
“Anything.”
“Read one.”
She reaches into the canvas satchel on the ground beside her, pulls out some letters rolled into a baton, held with rubber bands. “Read what’s highlighted in yellow. Just one. I want to remember your voice.”
I take a page, read half-way down, hand it back.
“Your voice. Yes, you have it, Orlando. Use it.”
A breeze flutters over the pond. A bigmouth bass or a catfish nibbles the water surface.
“I better get back to the house.”
“Can we write?” I ask.
“Oh, Orlando . . . sometimes you have to learn to live with that hole in your heart, fill it with purpose, which is as close to love as we ever get.”
A white egret flies in on the opposite bank, perches on log branches half in the water. She squeezes my hand, looks at me. “I think you better go talk to Peter.”
I find Peter in the forest, watch him stop to look at rocks and study them. He picks up a branch, feels the bark, smells it, licks it, shakes it, snatches twigs off the ground, swats his Levis and walks on.
I have a primitive loyalty to him. “Hey you, what you doing?” I say, huffing as I approach him.
His eyes are ahead on the pond. “What’d you go to prison for?”
“What brought that up? . . . Smuggling weed. Never made any money, just a bunch of wild kids working for the bosses, loading up trucks, making enough to buy sneakers, clothes, food.”
“Mom says you’re leaving, I thought maybe they’re after you. Kill anyone in there?”
“Cockroaches.”
“Where you going?”
“New Mexico.”
“You scared?”
“Kinda. New beginnings always make me nervous.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“Me too.”
“You should believe in God. He helps.”
“I went to mass with my grandma. I used to hold her hand ’cuz she was blind, some bomb test at White Sands made her eyes go white as egg shells. Not really religious, though.”
We walked. It felt good to walk with him.
“I like the smell,” Peter says staring at the water, “. . . the candles, incense, the sound of rosary beads and people praying. You think if we pray . . . me here, you there . . . we could talk through God, use him like a telephone wire?”
“I think he’d be cool with that.”
“Then we can talk in our prayers to each other, and God will carry mine to you, yours to me.”
“I think so.”
“Me too.”
“I love you, Peter.”
“Me too.”
6
I WAS ONE OF those homeless guys you sometimes see during Christmas at truck stops hitching a ride, or rest areas, or climbing some mountain trail by themselves. You’d see me in a bus seat, at a bus window, looking out at all the lit up Christmas trees, families together driving by, holiday bunting, sparkling bulbs and Santas along the way. For me it was my heart, lit up with bulbs and gifts you could not unwrap: gifts of understanding, a sense of peacefulness I had never experienced before.
It’s the end of January 1981, when I arrive in Albuquerque by bus. You could not dream of a more beautiful blue sky, cleaner air than what greets me. My sister picks me up, gives me a room. After a meal of blue corn enchiladas, I sleep the sleep of a pine cone in its pine branch.
The next day, I ride in with my sister and her husband to a big construction project. I am assigned to Mr. Martínez, an iron worker. I am to be his helper. I do the grunt work, physical labor. I carry lengths of rebar to him, lay them out, hold them while Mr. Martínez ties them with baling wire. When the work slows we wait for a truck to arrive with a new shipment of rebar. I sit down in the scoop of a front-end loader, read a postcard from Denise. She advises me that when I write her back, to take care with the use of commas, to choose words carefully. (I used to be dreadful when it came to commas and spelling.)
After work I shower, put on some new jeans, a nice plaid shirt. I borrow my sister’s car and drive down to the Turquoise Lodge, the rehab in the South Valley where my brother is. I ask for him, but they say they’ve never heard of him. I explain his drug problem, his AIDS . . . they don’t know. I have them double-check to make sure. I even walk to the back of the large communal room where an AA meeting is in session.
I leave pissed. I swing by his pad. It looks abandoned. For the next two weeks, I keep going by his place, but there’s no sign of him. Despite feeling plagued with worry about his whereabouts, I decide that’s it: Whenever he decides to get real, he knows where to find me.
The next day, still feeling irritated as hell, I stay ahead of my boss laying the rebar in as he comes behind me to tie it. We have our system down. I stop to take a breather, get a drink from the water bucket and look around. Hundreds of workers are busy erecting bomb shelters for the military. It’s a big union job. Cement trucks roar in hourly, the mason boys with their big rubber boots slosh in, trowel the slab and foundation in the laid forms. After them come carpenters to lay more forms, then iron workers to lay the rebar. Next are the electricians and so forth. Foremen come and go, yelling orders and commands. Whistles blow, tractor-trailers drop and load supplies, iron workers scale thirty-foot scaffolds to tie the iron, engineers pace around with plans spread out on truck hoods, study them with the foremen.
One afternoon, Mr. Martínez is behind me, off to my right, I see him slow down, clutch his chest. He says something about pain. I shoulder him to the shade, sit him down on the dirt and tell him to rest.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take over.”
“No, you can’t, you’ll get in trouble.
”
It makes no sense to me. I attribute his warning to his dizziness, some kind of spell that brings him in and out of consciousness. But as soon as I put on his belt, which has tools for tying wire, some jerk on the crew—must have been about forty of us on this platform all working this wide expanse of wire and rebar—orders me to take the belt off. I guess he’s a kind of boss over his crew, but not my boss. So I ignore him. He keeps hassling me, so I finally tell him to take the belt off me himself or shut up. I pull out a hammer from Mr. Martínez’s belt—one end pick-sharp, the other flat like a pry-bar. I stare at the guy, he turns away.
I go back to tying rebar. It’s wasn’t good enough for that guy, he walks off the platform, then another foreman approaches me. Now, that guy orders me to take off the belt.
“No, man, just leave me alone.”
He leaves.
I keep working until a white pick-up pulls up. It turns out to be the project manager. He strides over to me with a kind of John Wayne arrogance, looms over me and says, “Think of Karina and Leo and the opportunity you’re getting.”
I am too deep to back off, so I tell him leave me alone. He walks back to his truck, sits in the cab with the door open, holding a walkie-talkie and speaking into it.
MPs ride up, four in military uniforms and white hard hats, two armed with M-16s. They escort me to their open-air canvas truck, order me to sit on a plank bench in the back. Still wearing Mr. Martínez’s belt and my hard hat, I’m driven off base and ordered not to return. On the ride out, I worry about Mr. Martínez. I want to say something about giving him his belt back and when I start to, the MP tells me to shut up.
After showering and eating, I decide to hit the pavement the next day and find me another job. Even if it’s washing dishes at Kentucky Fried Chicken, I don’t care. The phone rings. I expect my sister to cuss me out, tell me what a worthless piece of crap I am. It turns out to be Chuy. He says Lila gave him my number, invites me down to Las Cruces, three hours south of Albuquerque. He misses me, says we should get together in Ciudad Juárez and party.
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