Thank you for downloading this Scribner eBook.
* * *
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
For my family
ONE
My father was swerving around cars, speeding, honking. I rested my head on the strap of the seat belt, tried to ignore how fast he was driving, unsure if he was outrunning the storm or just angry with me. My mother and I had gotten into a fight. She’d called him to come pick me up from her apartment. He resented any dealings with her. It was midday, spring. A shadow crept across the fields. Crows looked on from power lines. The warning sirens wailed.
“Let me look at you,” he said. He thumbed my earlobe. “Well?”
I looked to the road to remind him he was driving.
“What did she tell you?” I asked.
“You answer a question with a question? She said you were out of control.”
“That’s it?”
“Why is your face so red?” he said.
Embarrassed, I went quiet, kept to myself. He knew I’d been crying. When we pulled into his driveway, I opened the door. He told me to shut it. I slammed it too hard.
“I was supposed to go to the movies,” I said. “I’d made plans.”
“Before the tornado watch?”
I nodded.
He repeated the question.
“Yes, before.”
“Go on.”
“I told her I was leaving, and she blocked the door, so I grabbed the phone and ran to my room.”
“So today’s the day she decides to start being a mother.” He laughed wildly. “She had to hold you down?” he said, almost not a question. “Did she hurt you?”
I tried to remember. She had wrestled me to the bed. Then I was on my stomach. She twisted my fingers, took the phone. I tried throwing her off. That was when her hand holding the phone came down on my head. Now I fingered the tender spot on my skull, pressed it hard, wanting the pain, wishing the bump were visible.
“I don’t know,” I said. “No.”
“Did she hit you?”
“I don’t think she meant to.”
He pulled me close, put his arms around me, patted my back to the rhythm of the wipers. It was an awkward hug. The kind of embrace you give to a grieving stranger. “It’s OK, son,” he said. “It’s OK.” He sat me up. My older brother was standing in front of the Jeep, palms to the sky, shrugging at the rain just now quickening. “Let’s go inside.”
* * *
My father equated the granting of privacy with respect. Even when our bedroom doors were open, he knocked, waited to be invited in. We did not yet know why sometimes, when his door was closed, he did not answer. Since the separation he’d assigned each of us our own bathroom. His was still the master, upstairs, the same one he’d once shared with our mother. My brother’s, the hallway bathroom, was on the same floor as our bedrooms. To decide who would get it our dad had measured the distance with footsteps—my brother’s door was closer than mine. Two floors down next to the basement was my bathroom. Only on those late nights when, staring out my window, cigar tip aglow, my father would whisper me awake, Be my eyes, was I allowed to use the hallway bathroom, and only because he’d entered my bedroom without asking.
Here, in my bathroom, the Weather Channel spoke to us from the television in the basement. My brother looked at the Polaroids developing on the sink top. The ghostly shapes taking my form. My downcast eyes. My messy hair I’d made messier, shirt collar I had stretched to look rougher. My father seemed displeased.
“You look too good,” he said. “You were in much worse shape when I picked you up, weren’t you?”
It was a question meant to convince my brother.
“Yes,” I said.
“Maybe more light?” my brother said.
He brought the lamp from the basement, plugged it in, tilted back the shade.
“Now, son, try to look how you felt when she hit you.”
My father pressed the button. A photo reeled from the mouth of the camera. My brother placed it on the pile. We waited.
“Lamp help?” my father asked.
My brother shook his head.
“Fuck,” my father said.
I held my breath, bit my lip until it bled, then took a bigger bite.
Two more photos.
“What do you think?” my father asked my brother. “What else can we try?”
“Makeup?” my brother suggested.
“You got any?” my father asked.
“Upstairs,” I answered. “Next to his dolls and tampons.”
“I could try slapping him?” my brother joked. “That might work.”
My father turned to me. “How would you feel about that, son?”
My brother started to say something, that he’d been kidding, but my father silenced him. I’d hesitated too long.
“I thought you wanted to come with us,” my father said to me.
“I do.”
“I thought you were one of the boys.”
“I am.”
“Swear to me.”
“I did already.”
My father set down the camera.
“Why don’t you make him swear,” I said, pointing at my brother.
“Because you’re the one who tells your mother everything,” he said.
“Please, just do it,” my brother said. “Just swear.”
“You can stay in Kansas,” my father said. He turned to walk out of the bathroom. “Your brother and I are leaving without you.”
“No, Dad,” my brother said.
“Fine,” I said. “I swear. Again.”
My father came back into the bathroom, picked up the camera. He put his hands on my shoulders, rotated me square with him.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
I closed them.
“I want you to listen to me. Are you listening? When you were born, I mean right after the birth, your mother didn’t want to hold you, either of you. She passed you off to me as soon as the doctor handed you over. I’d never seen anything like it. I mean, what kind of mother doesn’t want to hold her baby? I can deal with the fact that she’s never been much of a wife to me. But the terrible mother she’s been to you? That has burned me for years. Don’t you remember what I was like when you were young? Before the war?” War was the word he used for divorce. “I used to be a kid. We used to play together. The three of us. Remember?” Yes, I thought to myself, I remember. My brother and I are sitting on the carpet watching TV when suddenly we hear a low growl. We look at each other. There is no time to react. My heart quickens the instant before our dad on hands and knees crawls into the living room, roars. We climb all over him, working together to tackle the beast. “Do you remember, son?”
“Yes.”
He squeezed my shoulders.
“This will end the war,” he said. “No custody. No child support. This will get us free. Free to start our lives over. You’ll see. In New Mexico I’ll be a kid again. We’ll all be kids again. How’s that sound? Isn’t that what you want?”
I nodded.
I heard my father load the camera.
My brother, I could feel, stepped toward me.
My eyes still closed, I locked my wrists behind my back. The beast is defeated, sprawled out on the carpet. My brother and I are lying on his stomach, facing each other. My brother’s hair is darker than mine. Skin too. His coloring betrays a natural alliance with our father. They have the same sleepy, smiling eyes, which in sunlight turn brown as a bottle. I’m blond like our mother, with her haz
el eyes. My ears, though, are my dad’s, big like when he was my age. As the beast breathes, our heads rise and fall together, and with a smile he stole from our dad, which our dad probably stole from a movie, my brother’s lips reveal his top row of teeth like a slow-rising curtain. I opened my eyes. My brother’s arm was drawn back, ready to swing. I did not want him to hit me. I did not want him to have to hit me.
“Wait,” I said.
“What?” my father said.
In the mirror I remade my face with sorrow. This will get us free, I told myself. This was what they needed from me. With my right hand I slapped my right cheek. The left cheek with my left hand, then again, harder, alternating sides, following through a little further each time so that eventually my head turned not from the flinch but from the blow. With my right, with my left, with my right, with my left. I faced my father. “Now,” I said. “Take it now.” I showed him my cheek. “This angle.” With my right, my right, my right. “Again,” I said. “Another. Take another.”
My brother pulled each photo from the mouth of the camera. My father kept clicking until the button stuck. After they developed, we chose five of the Polaroids to show Child Protective Services.
* * *
An hour later, rain streaming down the one window, the basement had grown dark. The three of us quietly watched the weather report. The storm, which at first had looked like an amoeba shifting across the screen, had become unmoving bands of red and orange, as if the television had frozen, or the storm had turned sedentary, a new land formation across eastern Kansas. My father was hunched over in his chair, the heels of his shoes clamped to the bottom rung. He was about to spring.
“Let’s go hunt twisters,” he said.
We drove to the water tower.
Darkness advanced, not from the east, but the west. From the clouds at the front of the storm there was lightning. An enormous flock of birds warped in the wind. My father offered a reward to whoever spotted the first tornado. We stayed there for some time, our eyes peeled, closely surveying the horizon. But we saw none and eventually drove off. At home our fence had been torn from the ground. When my father saw the damage, he laughed and said, “Looks like the storm was hunting us,” and after we moved to New Mexico, he referenced this whenever something worked out, and also whenever something did not.
TWO
My brother and I were in the park behind our new apartment, chasing lizards from the shrubs. We’d sold the house in Kansas, moved to Albuquerque. The three of us had driven out in the Jeep. My father had done the sixteen hours straight, except for a stretch in Oklahoma when my brother took over. My brother was starting high school in a few weeks, so our dad had figured it was a good time for him to learn how to drive on a highway. Though I was only going to be a seventh grader, I’d already begun to study how my father worked the clutch. I’d surprise him whenever he decided it was my time to learn.
The moving truck had arrived the day after us, and my brother and I had unpacked our father’s bedroom before our own—the first room we’d ever shared. I’d also done the kitchen: scrubbed the cabinets, stocked the pantry, given everything a place. My brother had set up the office, sectioning it off from the living room with folding screens. My father was a financial advisor. He’d never worked from home before. But he still had the big account back in Kansas, which would keep us out of the red until he collected enough new business out here to justify renting a proper space.
My father yelled down from the window.
We ran upstairs.
Inside, he was standing in his boxers, just out of the shower. “Nivea me,” he said.
Our job was to rub lotion all over his body.
My brother called top. I took his legs and feet.
He was like this, our dad. The television in his room and the coffeemaker in the kitchen were equipped with sleep and start timers, as if he were comforted that someone, or something, was attending to him at all times.
When we finished, he told us we were going for a drive.
“Where we headed?” I asked.
“Load ’em up, cowboys,” he said.
We drove north along the foothills. My brother sat shotgun. From the backseat I stared up at the ugly mountains. The Sandias were not the great bare slabs of rock I’d imagined. I’d been disappointed to find them littered with bramble and cacti. My father veered east, up into the mountains. We were rising. I turned around. Downslope I followed the arroyo until it emptied into the Rio Grande, and farther, beyond the mountain’s shrinking shadow, the earth was flat and white as paper.
“Let’s air it out,” my father said.
We rolled down the windows.
On the other side of Sandia Peak, along a county highway, at the far end of a little town, we came upon a rustic shack. Motorcycles filled the parking lot, twenty or so, lined up neatly like cigarettes in a fresh pack.
“Here we are, boys,” my father said as he pulled in. “A real biker bar.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Cool,” my brother said.
Nobody noticed when we walked through the door, but I pretended they did. I paid special attention to the clap of my father’s soles against the worn floorboards. Last week, on a break from unpacking, my father took us to the Western Store where he bought himself his first pair of cowboy boots. Behind him now, I walked hard. We’re with him, I thought.
“I’ll get us some drinks,” he said.
“I’ll come with you,” I said.
He grabbed my shoulder. “Stay here.”
My brother and I sat down at a table, scanned the room. Barstool straddlers watched a baseball game on a corner set. A woman in a short skirt leaned onto the pool table, aimed her cue. Most everyone smoked, drank from bottles, sipped from short glasses. Sitting at the bar, my father had struck up conversation with a man. Our dad prided himself on his ability to float smoothly between scenes. Social mobility, he called it. My father stood, went to the bathroom. A few seconds later the man he was speaking with followed him. I decided to remain alert until he came back out safely.
“You think he’ll let us order a beer?” my brother said.
“Ask him,” I dared.
I looked at the dirt growing on his upper lip.
“What are you staring at?” he asked.
“It’s just . . .” I laughed. “You look like a Mexican.”
* * *
My father set down our drinks. “One Bud, one Roy Rogers, and one beer with a root to boot. Bartender says one is all we get, says I can’t bring kids in here.” I looked over my father’s shoulder. The bartender was pointing us out to some of his patrons. My father stabbed at his chest with his thumb. “My fucking kids,” he said under his breath.
He swigged back his beer, finished it. He wiped his mustache dry with his thumb and first finger. Then he sat up, scooted in, leaned onto the table. His energy sometimes changed in an instant.
“You boys know that I have a recurring dream, right? Where I’m stuck in a Spanish prison? They beat me, whip me, they threaten to crucify me.”
We nodded.
“And you know that I have done extensive family research, I mean extensive, like really far back, to track our lineage to Spain. I still believe, truly believe, that we are of Spanish descent.” He paused, considered what to say next. “Well, there’s something I want you to mull over, to think about, you don’t have to make your minds up right now. I don’t want to offend you boys. There’s nothing wrong with who we are. But I think there is something we could do to make our transition into this new place easier—a lot easier.”
“Spit it out,” I said.
He smiled, bit open one of his plastic-tipped cigars, lit it.
“What I want, I mean, what I’m suggesting, is that we change the pronunciation of our name to sound more Spanish. If you think about it, half my family pronounced it one way and the other half another way, so what’s the harm? Who really knows, you know?”
“What would we change it to?” my bro
ther asked.
My father called to the bartender, “Hey, pal, you got a pen?”
The bartender took his time, brought over a pen.
“You Mexican?”
“American.”
“You speak Spanish though,” my father said, scrawling our last name onto a napkin, then turning the napkin to show him. “How do you pronounce this?”
The name poured from the bartender’s mouth.
“Isn’t that pretty?” my father asked us.
“Anything else?” the bartender said.
My father didn’t respond, kept his wry eye on his kids.
“How ’bout another Bud?” he finally said.
The bartender laughed, hovered, then walked away.
“Well?” my father said to us. “What do you think?”
I’d loved the liquid way the bartender had pronounced our name. Still, the whole idea felt forced. It wasn’t really necessary, was it? I thought we’d already started our lives over.
“It’s a little weird,” I said.
“Weird how?” my father asked.
“Well, we’ve been using the same last name for so long it might be hard to remember. Like at school, what if we forget and use our old name?”
He turned to my brother. “My youngest loves to pick the fly shit out of the pepper, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t think it’s weird,” my brother responded, “but it will take some adjusting.”
“Everything we’re doing takes adjusting,” my father said. “Listen, I’ve always considered myself a man of routine, not of convenience. Routines can be changed. It just takes a bit of willpower. I say let’s change our routine. Let’s change our name. We can be whoever we want to be down here. We can all be new people.” He slowed himself with a deep breath. He asked me, “Who do you want to be, son?”
That seemed like a difficult question. I didn’t know how to answer.
“Christ, let me put it another way. Why did you decide to come to Albuquerque?”
“To be with you guys,” my brother said.
“Me too,” I said.
“You’re cute,” my father said to me. “Always doing what your brother’s doing.”
One of the Boys Page 1