by Joe Jiménez
“Is it possible, really, for the genes in our bodies to instruct us to be bad? To do bad things?” the teacher, with her pebble voice and hair like an oil spill, asked.
In class, seated by the window that overlooked the city, you imagined the millions of tiny cells in your body amassing in a mob, conspiring and chanting and propelling you toward fighting and hitting things, defending yourself and the ones you loved.
But the class quickly grew too loud, the brief discussion spinning beyond the teacher’s control. Instead of the lab, instead of the lesson on the warrior gene, the teacher assigned bookwork, definitions and reading and note-taking, because, “If you guys can’t behave during a warm-up, how will y’all act during a lab?”
By the time your grandmother calls you for breakfast, you’ve defeated sleep, pushing it away from your body like a plate of food you don’t want. You think of the warrior gene ticking inside you, if it’s there, if the past parts of your father are there, too, and you are grateful for every good thing your grandmother is—the food and cariños, the roof over your head, the fact that she still believes, even if only a little bit, that you can do this.
When your grandmother knocks on your door, she says, “Ven. Come eat.”
You stir.
“Abram, get up. You can’t go to school today, but Becky is coming to take you to get your hair cut, and then you can help her do the yard.”
It’s unlike your grandmother to slam any door, and though she doesn’t slam your door when she orders you up, she shuts it firmly, maybe in frustration, and now you know that something is different.
You kick off the bedsheets, wadding them up at the bottom of the bed with your toes.
“¡Ya voy!” you yell. I’m coming.
The street on which your grandmother lives is quiet, although, from time to time, a car will screech by with its loud bass or its sad accordions rattling the glass. Beside your room, a mighty pecan takes its long fingers and scrapes the roof. You are accustomed to this scratching.
Enough times, a day has wrapped around you like a fist, bandaged, taut and stiff, and enough times you have resisted the sleep that settles over you like a burdensome mist. You think of your father, and Becky waits for you to put on your shoes. You wonder if there is anything in the world you can do, or if it’s true that some people are really just born bad, born to enact badness, born to punch and kick and scream and fight and destroy shit, because the genes in your body have selected you for it.
Perhaps this was true for your father.
Perhaps this is true for your uncle, with his slick ways and his fat police sheet, his visits that usually end in conflict, a stream of tears left staining your grandmother’s cheeks.
With the darkness around you, you lay very still, the heavy animal of sleep dragging its fur over your eyes, and you fear that perhaps this may also be true for you: a hole in the ground. One in your head. A hole in the very middle of the heart. Another hole breaching the lungs, making them split.
Too many times your Uncle Claudio has done your grandmother wrong. But he’s coming back, and sometimes, you just wish you had a good dad. And a mom. And a house in the north side of the city with three cars and family barbecues and Netflix nights, board games and a swimming pool . . .
That morning, you’re sitting in the chair at Fonseca’s Cuts when you hear Becky say it.
Chonch is doing your fade, and the subzero blade is full of your stubble, so Chonch bangs the clippers, and the black fuzz falls to the floor, cascades, slow-motion-like and all of it happening because Becky has said your uncle’s coming back and she doesn’t want him there.
“No way,” Becky admits, telling Chonch because maybe Chonch knows about this kind of trouble, because maybe Chonch and Becky know what it’s like, the hard knocks of the world, the way things go bad, the true things about digging oneself a hole, then digging oneself out with your own teeth and your hands.
“I love Trudy, you know. Love her with everything I am, but this is bad.”
“Maybe he needs to learn the hard way,” Chonch says, looking you deadeye in the mirror. “Maybe he needs life to knock the shit outta him a couple of times. Maybe that’s how he’ll learn.” Chonch presses the clippers hard against your scalp, near your ear.
You don’t want Chonch to see your eyes. So you duck your head and just listen.
The light from the room gleams when it hits Chonch’s hair, which is smoothed back and dark. “Some of us need to take it the hard way,” Chonch adds and splashes your scalp with the green aftershave that burns. “Some of us make it out better, stronger.”
With one knuckle, Chonch pries your chin upward, so that you have no choice but to look straight into the mirror, straight ahead into Chonch’s stare. “Some of us, well, you know how it goes. Some go the hard way, and that’s all she wrote. Another one bites the dust. Se acabó.”
As talc soothes the places where the blade took hair from your neck, the thought of the end sinks in. You don’t want to die. You don’t want a bad life. You don’t want to walk any hard path.
Chonch’s knuckles are hot when they graze your neck to untie the smock.
Se acabó. It ends. It ends. It ends.
You hear it again and again and again. All morning, the blade buzzes in your head.
3
“You see stars,” you tell Ophelia, the really smart girl with the long red hair sitting next to you in front of the school on the morning of the day they let you come back. “The very first time. Not really stars, like from a bulletin board, all perfect, but like if stars were smaller, real small, like flies. Moving around. A herd of them.”
Because she wants to know what it’s like. What it feels like the first time you take a fist. Under the mesquite tree in front of the school, its arm low and bending, reaching upward and across the lawn and toward you, you hold her hand before the first bell rings.
She looks at your pale red knuckles and wants to know why you do it.
Her hand is soft. In your hand she is something you don’t fully grasp, a softness you won’t understand for the rest of your life.
“What’s the point?” Ophelia asks. She pops a wedge of waffle into her mouth and chews. “You get kicked out of school. Nobody wins.”
When a fist finds its mark on your body, what happens in your face, in the pink mass of cheek muscle or the round fibers of the chin, is much like a fire, like maybe the marvelous moment when the sun was first born, and its redness rises up like a hurt only another sun might be able to understand. How can you make words to show this? For one whole moment, for that long of an eternity, all the muscles of your body go limp—and there is clarity and noise and fire. Then, then, they swarm, the muscles, with a heat unbeknownst to anyone else. What happens next is hard for you to explain.
And so you are silent.
You nod.
You clasp her hand as if it was a feather or made of eggshell.
No words emerge from your mouth, which has parted like a bird letting its wings feel open and light and holy with sun. Buses line up, and you watch students exit them in orderly queues, like ants trekking across the pavement. Everything around you is bright. Methodically, the ants pass by, their notebooks and tattered backpacks and earbuds streaming in quick motion.
Nearby, a whistle busts the crispness in the air.
“I don’t think you should fight anymore,” Ophelia insists and offers you a piece of her waffle. Her hand is a bird, one made in autumn, dark and wonderful, coated—a promise of things soon to be.
Tiredness draws on your eyes, because you do not sleep very much or well. You stare at her hands and then at the trees at the far part of the schoolyard. The branches rise up from trunks like so many paths a living thing might follow.
“This will end badly,” she says. Her voice has grown as thin as a leaf. “If you keep fighting . . . Nothing good can come from this, Abraham.”
The way her head shakes disapprovingly puts a splinter in your throat.
Ophelia squeezes your hand. Her smile dwells on her face flatly, a mile of unquiet.
Is this an ultimatum? If you don’t do what she says, then she’s done?
“You don’t understand.” It’s not enough to budge her. Staring at the ground, your eyes blink. They grow fat, burdened.
But her voice is no longer a leaf.
From the shame that you feel for not being how she wishes you to be, your eyes squat. You stare at the ground, and you tell yourself: Be hard. Don’t say anything mean. Let her talk.
Because you’re still holding her hand. And your hand trembles like something weak and unrooted. You fear the warmth in your palm will reveal itself and that she’ll retract, pull back, run off into the sun.
“Fighting? Abraham, just stop.”
It isn’t as easy as that, you want to say.
I can’t explain it, you wish you could utter.
It’s how I protect myself. It’s part of who I am, you could tell her.
But it sticks in the hollowest part of your throat. You wish you could just take her hand and put it behind your eyes or deep into your brain and say, See. Look. This is what it’s like.
The warmth she would see. The taste of ideas. The little animal and the tangled strings of your DNA, the noises she’d hear . . .
There in the courtyard, the school day imposing its heaviness, her hand in yours, you want to crack open your ribs and show her the fat or thin whispers of your heart. Let Ophelia see you for all that you are, that sometimes you can’t control what you feel, like now, or then, when you stare at her hair, which is red like a maple in the loveliest days of autumn, as its leaves say adieu to the limbs and journey into fate, into dissolution, into the dampness of the solid earth that awaits. When you stare at her eyes, you feel it, too, the warmth, for her eyes are dark like belonging and simple like all the words you know and the ones you still don’t.
“It’s hard,” you say, finally. “Maybe one day I will find a way to tell you why.” It’s all you can create from the parts of your life that you don’t yet know how to explain.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
Her hand leaps to your shoulder. Slowly. Tenderness, soundlessness.
In her eyes sometimes the brown speckles turn green. You see that her hand also trembles, each of her fingers like reeds trembling in the wind.
You nod.
“What does it feel like? To get hit?”
“I can’t say. I’ll have to think.”
The bell rings. Students make their way to the school doors. A teacher with a bullhorn waves to Ophelia.
“Move it! Let’s go!” you can hear an administrator begin to holler.
Your ankle quivers, and your legs begin to shake.
Ophelia sees this. Trembling. Weakness. A part of you wants to stuff it down inside. You turn it off and cast it away, so that you won’t feel embarrassed, so that she’ll never see you weaker or less than sturdy.
“It’s okay.” She nods. And she holds your hand. “Tell me later, then.” She smiles.
The sun has lifted itself into the sky. You walk toward the doors, bodies shuffling past you hurriedly. Later, years later, Ophelia will confess that for a while she thought she might actually save you; however, how wrong that is, the want to save a man, as if he were some wounded, imperiled dog, as if anyone else might have saved you if not yourself.
“Do your work,” she tells you. “Be good.”
The teachers begin to clear their throats, and the hallways swell. In the distance, you hear the clatter of onlookers as you stand in the very middle of the hall and reach into Ophelia, holding her, your arms wrapping around her fondly, like bold, fortunate ropes. “Like a truck. A Mack truck hitting a wall. That’s what it feels like,” you mutter, and you wonder if perhaps you’re holding her longer and maybe even tighter than you should.
As they course by, the cheerleaders pause, their pompoms hissing. A trickle of students trudge through the halls, around you, like slow, tall birds, and some like star-ships zooming into other dimensions—everything spins, especially your heart.
Especially your heart.
You text Ophelia. As she parts ways with you and heads up the stairs, behind her the length of her hair summons you.
walk home after school?
text me. if you get bored.
For the rest of the morning and even after lunch you will smell her sweetness cling to your shirt. It’s gardenia and mint and a shampoo whose name you will never remember, but God, it smells good. For a moment, the world is perfect, and it is yours. And one day, far from now, when the whole world as you know it has changed, she will think of you one afternoon, with fondness, with a simple and genuine sadness, the kind of noise that rivals sand dunes and quagmires of mud and entire forests of fallen trees, and she will write, This is what I always loved about him. “Can I walk you home?” And she will mean it.
4
Your grandmother’s laughter. From deep inside, a fountain-like dribble at first, a spurt like a waterwheel that soon, suddenly, erupts into huge, spewing laughter. You never thought you’d hear it. Not like this. Like a ribbon of birds emerging from a marvelous grove of cypress trees. You wake to the sound of her joy, the smell of bacon and hot coffee. It’s Saturday morning, and there’s a newspaper on the table in which your Uncle Claudio has buried his face.
“Abraham. Good to see you,” he spits, rustling the paper. His eyes course over the edge of the gray sheet.
“He’s looking for a job,” your grandmother informs you, pointing proudly at your uncle with his face covered in words.
As you make your way across the room to your grandmother, who is busying herself at the sink, you think this scene is imagined and unreal. Are you dreaming? Snagged in some alternate version of how things might be?
Beneath your feet, the floor is luminescent, cold underneath your sockless soles and your toes. In her grip your grandmother holds a yellow dishrag, and when she hugs you, her hands smell of lemon rind and Comet.
“Amá. Leave it there. I’ll clean,” your uncle grunts, chewing sloppily. “My turn,” he says, turning to you, his grin sharp over the goatee peppered with crumbs. From behind the newspaper his knuckles jut out. Rough, worn. You’ve seen them before, these proven parts of a man’s body that have gone through things—walls and doors, faces and ribs.
Leaning back in his chair, your uncle, in his gray sweats and his undershirt, opens himself to you for a hug, arms stretched like two giant tongs. His arms are covered in tattoos. Intricate black and gray swirls, women in bikinis, sporting magnificent Aztec headdresses, watchtowers and proud peacocks with their splendid tail feathers and webs. Before you step into him, before the arms pull you in. Smeared with gray, his thumbs press into your back and cause it to fold. From his neck bone a rosary dangles in the ink of his chest. He hugs you and leaves his dark thumb smudges on your neck and shirt, and something inside the folded parts of your heart stifles itself, halts its motions and dents.
Pulled back, the kitchen’s red curtains show the sky, which is gray and hard and without light, behind the behemoth pecans, behind your grandmother shaking off her wet hands and her face aglow with an unremitting lunge into today and the next and the way she wished, faithfully and with will, the rest of life would be.
The pot on the stove whistles.
The water in the sink sings.
The kitchen is yellow.
The heart inside you is yellow, then, too.
And when your uncle touches you, everything comes to an abrupt stop. For the entirety of a moment it does—you hear the earth and the voice of your bones, and you walk slowly out of your uncle, toward the sink. The kitchen, how it will mark your mind, just like this: A tender downcast square of a room, idled, snared. The room standing as still as an arm bone, one left to bleach in an open field under a heavyweight sun or in a dead creek with its cumbersome limestone. This kitchen, with its white little stove of blue gas flowerets and its low popcorn ceiling, its awkward Formica ta
ble that glares too harshly without a tablecloth, that never stands upright or balanced unless paper is folded into a fat square and shoved beneath the table’s unwieldy leg. At night, the sparse light of the little room emerges from a simple bulb, but by day, like now, over the cluttered countertop, during the long hours, through the long, wide window above the white sink—the sun sneaks in, just a nettle, a thin ray, maybe, but enough to shed light on the cooking, the eating, the rinsing, the people waiting—these are the echoes you’ll remember, these friends.
“I made eggs and papas,” your grandmother tells you, and this brings you back. A glass dish on the table holds the mix, covered by a green towel neatly tucked into the bowl’s white rim.
When your uncle pulls your body to him, you stand very still, because his arms feel like ropes. Both knotted and smooth at once, they are large, like missiles, and as they squeeze you, your lungs struggle for air so that you cough.
“Come on, now. I heard you were tough,” he jeers, gripping your shoulder tightly. The words come out of a place in his mouth that no one can see.
You cough, and the cough sits in the air like a duck that has forgotten how to fly. It falters, zags, dives . . .
At the table, your grandmother joins two tortillas for you. Smeared with yolk, her plate is piled on top of Claudio’s. She wears her hair in a modest gray braid, a long tail of neatness that parallels her spine. Her pills rattle against a blue saucer as she sets them on the table near her coffee. They have already eaten.
“Don’t you want to eat?” she asks.
She is smiling, and you ask yourself, Is this real?
“So Grandma tells me you’re in high school. A junior. How you like high school?”
“It’s okay.”
“Just okay? You play any sports? Got a girlfriend?”
“I used to play football. But I had to get out.”
Your grandmother reaches over, rubs your arm.
Your eyes are pennies.
“So why no chick? You got my blood, so I know you good with the ladies.” When he smirks, his teeth glint. A smirk like a rut etched in plywood.