by Joe Jiménez
“She’s mine?”
“If you want her.”
He decides on a beer, cracks it open without thinking.
Lucy, you think. I’m gonna name her Lucy. Or maybe Diamond or Baby Girl. But you don’t know, you aren’t sure.
The final buzzer: the commentators start on the Spurs and their win.
“Grandma, can I . . . ” But when you turn to complete the question, she is already gone.
For the next hour, while your uncle thumbs through his phone at the table, you sit on the floor, playing with Destiny, whom your uncle has given you. Soon you fall asleep with the dog in your bed, her wet nose nuzzled into your chest, her snoring even and soothing, a white noise swamping the tree that scratches the roof and the whizzing of cars crushing their dark tires into the road.
In the morning when you wake, your grandmother hasn’t made breakfast. The house is quiet.
You grandmother’s disapproval stings you.
Because the sun fills the sky, you take a rope from the storeroom and tie the little dog named Destiny to the tree. Out of leftover boards from the old fence, which you helped Becky mend when you were in eighth grade, after half the fence had fallen from a windstorm that knocked down a whole pecan limb, out of these parts and pieces you fashion a little house for the dog. Destiny watches while you build it, the makeshift shelter where she’ll spend her days, you intend, while you’re at school or unable to keep vigil. It’s a sad little doghouse, splintered and uneven, and you worry over its inadequacy, so you wrap a blue tarp like a scarf around the dwelling, hoping it will shun rain, deter hard winds. You figured you might sneak her in at night or something.
“Abram, I have changed my mind.” Your grandmother stands at the door to the back porch, behind you, her words carving a small half smile on the bottom half of her face.
“What do mean?” You pause your work.
“I have changed my mind about the dog.”
“Really?” In the mud you drop the hammer and spit the nail you’ve held in between your teeth. The metal leaves a taste in your mouth that reminds you of nickels.
“Yes. Yes. I know how bad you’ve wanted a dog, and for a long time I have said no, mostly because I don’t want to have to clean up after an animal inside the house, but it’s getting cold now, and I suppose we could keep her in the little laundry room.”
The blue tarp flaps in a gust of wind. The little dog whines and cocks her head sideways, in a tilt, eyeing you fully.
“Can she sleep with me at night?”
“I don’t see why not. But if she makes a mess, you have to clean it. You have to because I’m not cleaning up dog caca.”
You smile big. You can agree to this.
Quickly, you jump on the porch and fly to your grandmother, who stands at the doorway to the little laundry room at the rear of the house. The laundry has piled up, but she holds you and forgets about anything else. Immediately, the dog jumps to her feet and runs to you, squealing. But the rope hinders Destiny.
For the next hour, you keep her with you in the little room at the back of the house. With an old gray towel, you wipe her red fur, and you pick the fleas off her coat, and she licks you and rubs her wet nose against your chest and arms, and you hold her like a baby, so that she falls asleep with her legs tucked into themselves and drools and snores and whimpers from some wonderful dream, whose events you will never know, that is zooming its course inside her little brain. You hold her, and you hear her heartbeat, and you promise, I will never leave you.
19
When you tell Ophelia about the pup in your life, she’s all ears. The next day at school she sits with you at lunch, and this causes the whole table of your school friends, the place where you usually sit, to stare.
“Look at this,” a boy with a muzzle for a mouth says. Large, oversized teeth, a baseball cap pulled backward. He points.
You and Ophelia sit at your own table, an empty spot by a tall window at the end of the long table occupied by the special education kids and their aides.
“She’s with him?” a girl with a flower for a mouth says loud enough for you to hear.
The spot inside you that grows hot, that spoiled spot where the little animal sometimes lives and leaps from, that spot stirs and says its name and menaces, but you do not jump, and you do not react, you don’t say a thing to the muzzle-mouthed boy or the girl with the flower for a mouth, and you hold steady, and you stare at Ophelia’s hands, at her simple wrists and her perfect little hairs, the modest gold ring her mother gave her, which she never takes off, her fingernails, which are unpinned and natural and not painted. They tap on the table easily, her fingernails making a little melody that emanates from their bodies, the light from the sky entering the window and gleaming off her skin that your grandmother describes like warm coffee.
The girls who are her homegirls stare, too. Nice girls, the smartest girls in school. Always neat and well groomed, with their straight A’s and their good teeth. Girls who might not ever give you or your few friends the time of day but who’d never be ugly. Two tables away, their eyes tell a story of worry. The trepidation takes the form of whispers and quick glances, disapproval and head shaking, coupled with the pretense that none of them are judging.
On the other hand, your friends grow excited and mouthy. But they know better than to say shit. They sit with their trays and stuff their jaws and laugh loudly, louder than is necessary, and you know something is different, though you can’t say what it is.
You wonder if her aunt still doesn’t like you.
You remembered to pull out her chair and to ask her about her day.
“Revising my last few college essays,” she tells you. “You’ll be doing this next year,” she adds and sips water from a green bottle. You grab the bottle’s cap as it rolls away.
You smile, and it feels like your mouth is splaying your face, pulling it back and forth and turned toward your ears, making it so that if you’re not careful, everything might come out. You remember to ask if she wants anything else after she’s eaten most of the cherry tomatoes and the sandwich her aunt sends with her from home. “We should be eating more fruits and greens,” she urges you, chomping a red glory and holding the plastic bag open for you to pick from.
And you actually consider it. Eating more veggies. So you grab a red orb and pop it into your mouth, and chewing the sweetness procures a brief glimpse of your life one day, a future where the two of you at the grocery store go aisle through aisle, your basket vibrant and leaf filled, her voice instilling the store with sweetness.
As you’re eating, she says she wants to go the library when you’re done, and you set aside your plan to mess around outside with your friends and a football, and you say, “Yeah. Sounds good.”
Before you know it, she’s chuckling with the librarian and helping you pick out a book.
It’s a book about zombies.
“Why zombies?” you ask.
“Why not?” the librarian, a pretty woman with dark hair to her shoulders and a laugh full of sparks, says back.
“Something else, maybe?” Ophelia suggests.
Ms. P, the librarian, asks about things you are into, and Ophelia recommends a book about dogs. She and Ophelia apparently are friends.
“He just got a new dog. A puppy,” Ophelia tells her.
“Aww. I love dogs. I have two myself. What did you name her?” the librarian asks, leaning in a bit to listen to your voice.
“Destiny,” you tell her, with your hands behind your back, with your voice low and detouring, because you can’t think of what you’ll change it to.
You’ve been at this school three years, and it’s hard to believe this is the first time you’ve ever checked out a book.
“Never too late,” Ms. P chimes. “My neighbor is eighty-six years old, and he just learned to read. He had to leave school when he was young so that he could help work the fields. It was what people did in those days. Now you can’t pry a book or the newspaper out of his hands.” She l
aughs kindly. “For Christmas I think I’m getting him a Kindle.” And smirks. Her eyes are bright. Her blouse is blue, like the color of the pen Ophelia uses to write in her notebook.
“That’s sweet.” Ophelia is touched. “Imagine that,” she’ll tell you as the bell rings and you’re off to your classes, “being eighty years old and barely learning to read. It’s awesome.”
You like this about her, how she’s gentle and gets happy over the simplest things, how she can see the magic in other people’s lives, in the things others would easily overlook. You want this. Think it significant and precious and wonder why there’s not more of it in the world. You want this part of her to be part of your life, and you would to do anything to protect that tenderness so that it always, forever, has a safe place to live. And yet, because or perhaps in spite of this, there is a part of you, too, that questions whether you are good for her, if she’s not out of your league or placing her kindness at risk by being so close to a guy like you.
On the way home you run as fast as you can, through the alleys and across the side roads, which no one drives unless they’re getting off work and heading off to a shift at some odd hour of the day or engaged in wrongdoing. Above you, the power lines heat themselves, their voices quipping and aware in the cold December air. The sky is yellowing, and the trees send their branches like hard chutes, dark trajectories, into the dimming light.
When you walk into your house, your grandmother sits at the kitchen table watching her shows, and she smiles big, glad that you made it home safely. In the laundry room, Destiny has spent the better part of the day gnawing on a soup bone your grandmother gave her, but quickly, upon hearing your voice, she drops the bone and paws at the door for you.
“Welcome home, schoolboy,” your uncle says with a smirk.
He grins like a very muscular grinch, you think. At the sofa, his feet propped up on the little coffee table, he thumbs the remote control, replaying a sports show where an MMA fighter roundhouses a lesser opponent. The vanquished falls flat on his back, and the Octagon erupts. Your uncle leans in, and his face becomes the color of the screen.
“You see that!” he yells. Electricity propels his eyes.
From the kitchen your grandmother shuts her eyes. There is a word search in front of her, the lanyard that holds her reading glasses dangling from her neck like a headache that’s threatening to take hold. You let the little dog in and sit by your grandmother, holding the dog as she bites at your chin and nibbles at your thumbs.
That night you will thumb through the book about dogs, then you will lay in bed for an eternity. Destiny will curl at your feet and sleep. You will replay the events of the recent weeks, from the weight work at the gym to the second it took for you to lay out the guy in the ring and the drama with your uncle at Thanksgiving and the look on Ophelia’s face when she brought over her schoolbag before lunch and said, “May I sit with you?”
You always want to remember that look. Her eyes like two lifetimes, two whole lives, that bright and splendid—it is the sweetest look in the world. Maybe this is how mothers look at their babies when they first see them. Maybe not. Maybe it is a baby’s first glimpse of light or of the whole forest or of the sea. Maybe it’s the moon making herself whole, feeling accomplished and joyful and ready. You scribble some of this down in your journal, jotting ideas about love and what you will do with yourself, with your one wild, precious life.
The world is wonderful, and you think maybe you might love Ophelia, if that is the word for it . . .
But you think of the roundhouse kick, too, wondering how challenging it would be to do that, to learn it, to summon it up during a clash. How much force you’d have to muster from the hip joint and through the long fibers of the leg and the foot. You think of the other guy’s chin, how in slow motion the face loses its place in the world, how it smears like a can of paint thrown against a floor or a wall, how it becomes less than a face, more like a contortion of putty or a cartoon.
But you don’t stay on the roundhouse for long.
You think Ophelia’s is the look of happiness and that every man should have someone to give him this look. And every woman, too. Every child. Everyone. It’s the look that says, I’m glad to see you. I’m glad I know you. I like you. I’m glad you’re here.
Who wouldn’t want to hear those things? Or feel them?
Who wouldn’t want to live immersed in happiness and kind ways?
Beside you, Destiny snores, and she twitches, her nose jerking slightly, so you pull her closer to you, snuggle her to your belly and breathe. You like the idea of Destiny, of holding her near your body and listening to the hour your heartbeat meets hers.
You think, though, perhaps I should change her name.
The bed creaks.
What would you name her?
You put off sleep as long as you can.
Ordinarily, when you think of your uncle, you remember his eyes. Because your uncle has very brown eyes, and his voice is sometimes made of rusted tin or iron, and other times it is heavier, like steel or another hard metal encased in mud. It’s the kind of voice that coils or booms when it has to.
But when he enters your room, your uncle’s voice is a pilot light. So blue. Easy to ignite but calm and steady, floating, full of heat.
“Abraham. Wake up. I need you to hear me,” he mutters and shakes you from your sleep.
Your Destiny doesn’t budge, but you open your eyes and see your uncle, his silhouette, sitting at the far edge of your bed, near your ankles and feet.
“I got it. I got a way for us to win big.”
“Oh. I wanna go back to sleep. Can you tell me this in the morning?” you slur, burying your face in a pillow.
“I can get you a fight. Cash, Papo. Just give me the green light. Tell me you’re down.”
“When?”
“Just give me your word,” he tells you. “Your word. A real man gives his word.”
You hesitate. There’s that part of you that makes itself known when something’s not right, makes itself loud and apparent and full of itself, which is necessary and urging you to trust it. But sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you neglect it, that little noise that presents itself from the gut. Sometimes you turn down its volume or turn up some other volume so that you don’t have to hear out the part of you that warns, that protects, that won’t just go along. And sometimes you just tell it to shut up.
“Do this for me. It’s Christmas, Papo. We need a good Christmas here,” he pleads. “Say you’ll do this.”
So you do. You shut off the inkling inside of yourself that asserts this isn’t good. Your heart in a knot, you agree. You tell him you’ll do it. You don’t really know why, but you give in, and you give him your word.
20
It happens on a Thursday.
The evening has come, knocking its rose claws against the horizon.
Your grandmother stands at the pecan tree with a bed-sheet, which disperses itself onto the grass, a perfect soft square. She stares. Ophelia stands beside her, holding a bucket, wearing your black-gray hoodie for warmth. The bedsheet is white and becomes a square. The tree bark is tough looking, rough to the eye, and the tree is very tall.
“Are you sure, Abramito?” your grandmother asks.
“Be careful,” Ophelia begs.
From the front door, Destiny bangs her paws against the glass and whines. Your grandmother hushes her to no avail.
Full of its unapologetic limbs, the tree towers above the house. Thick, grim appendages stretch across the radiance that is the sky, over the house and over the road, and from these limbs, thinner, slimmer, weak-looking limbs tremble in the breeze. The sun is fierce. The tree appears lit, a silhouette of hot paint.
When you climb, you place each hand in front of the next methodically, decidedly, unafraid to err but precisely aiming for the fullest, steadiest parts. Some branches you avoid, because they tremble too much before your eyes.
“Ay, be careful!” your grandmother yells,
the corners of her mouth wrinkled like a tussle of tissue. She pulls her hands from the pockets of Becky’s Carhartt, and they cover her mouth.
“It’s okay.”
“He climbed like this before. One time. When he was in seventh grade,” she tells Ophelia. “He lost his key and instead of calling me, because I was at work, he climbed the tree to get in the house through the window at the top.”
It’s true. You climbed this tree when you were thirteen, knowing the little, unused window to the attic never shut fully because it didn’t lock right and because the walls of the house had moved. It was the way you could get in. That afternoon, it was the way you made your way in.
Your grandmother points to the small window.
Disapprovingly, Ophelia shakes her head. Her red hair as bright as a kiss.
The bark scratches your palms, and you hold tight enough for the pressure to inflict a modest hurt in your hands. Wind puts shivering into the large pecan. You have not climbed very high, but below, the fabric square stands out against the last vivid greens of the lawn. Your grandmother also appears smaller in her red blouse and her egg-blue skirt covered in Becky’s coat, smaller and frailer, more away from you than you can ever remember her being. From this vantage, the world is minutia. Everything smaller than it could ever really, truly be. But not Ophelia. From so far up, against the whiteness, her red, red hair is the only thing you see.
Swiftly, your heart thumps, the little rhythm inside of it scattering and summoning courage, not revealing that you are nervous climbing this tree, afraid even, and wanting no one in the world to know. When you arrive at the branch your grandmother and you have identified as capable of wielding your weight, your body wraps its girth about the wood. Testing the strength of the branch is necessary. You test it. You wait. Steady yourself, you say. Don’t move too fast. So you press this way and that and trust that what you know about steadiness is enough.
Once you’ve determined it’s good, you give your grandmother a thumbs-up. As your arms gather the wood in their grasp, as you prepare to move farther away from the sureness of the trunk, a few pecans fall, and your grandmother moves quickly to step out of the way. Ophelia gathers a few of the nuts and places them in her bucket. Your grandmother flattens out the corners of the sheet.