by Ron Arias
Nan shouted for Ricardo to stop. Delirious, she waved her arms about wildly, screaming that she wanted to go back. Men in the forest. Scorpions. Rapists.
“Come back!” she screamed, falling to the ground. “Where are you going?”
She cried in great sobs for a long while, begging Ricardo to help her. Then she grew quiet. She wished she knew the time, but she had left her watch on the beach in her backpack. Thinking they had trapped her into staying behind, she stood and stumbled after them.
The trail dipped and Ricardo urged his aching muscles into a run. Then he walked for what seemed an hour. The shade came in patches from the few trees that hung over the tall yellow grass. Long ago he lost sight of Elena but found her wool knit dress thrown carelessly on a dead branch. He wrapped it around the coconut and carried it in the crook of one arm.
Elena saw him stagger into the small clearing where she lay on a bed of dark-green moss in the shade of a big, leafy tree.
“I’m over here, Ricardo.”
He steered his body toward the tree, stopped and sank to his knees. Ricardo set the coconut and dress on the moss while he caught his breath. But he was still too tired to pretend casualness, staring hard at Elena’s naked body, which was stretched before him like a gift. Her skin glistened and her long, black hair fell loosely to one side next to the tiny pile of crumpled underwear.
“Why did you run off like that?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
Suddenly, Elena’s almost diaphanous whiteness moved. Ricardo flushed and turned his head. Stay the way you are.
“You know,” she said, pointing a finger at his shirt, “naked is the best way to cool off.”
Ricardo fidgeted with his buttons, and Elena helped him remove the shirt and the rest of his clothes. They were quiet as he touched her with tentative, respectful hands. Then she grasped his shoulders and jerked him to one side, leading him on top of her, guiding him, forcing him closer.
Nearby, Nan watched the two figures, their flesh now glistening.
“No,” she thought, “this is not happening.”
She had wandered crazily down the slope and had fallen just before entering the clearing. After crawling close, so close she could hear their breathing, she pulled at the moss with her hands and wrenched out great chunks with her fingers. She had not seen them until she had almost touched them.
“Is this what you want?”
“Yes,” Elena said.
“You really want me?”
Nan watched Ricardo’s back arch as he raised up on his arms.
“Does it matter? Right now we’re fine for each other. No one’s around. We’re far away from all men.”
Nan glanced around. Beyond the two bodies more trees and grass. The sky not as blue now. Afternoon blue. Pale, a few clouds. She turned, her fists tightened. Elena constantly moved under his weight.
“What are you staring at?” he said.
Elena was peering over his shoulder. “The birds,” she said. “They’re watching us. See their outlines in the sky? They’re watching all this moving flesh. Imagine if they could think like us.”
“Hey, concentrate.”
“I am, Ricardo. I am.”
Nan wept in silence. What could she do? What things could she say to that bitch? The story about the house ended here. No house, no goddamn house. Never was. What’s her excuse? A poem. “Let’s go to my house, Nan. No more class, Nan. I’ll tell you about my father’s island. And the music, the music, Nan. Did you understand it? Have some coconut. It’s fresh. More rum? The record’s ending. Could you turn it over, Nan? How’s your drink, Ricardo? Finished yet?”
“Well,” Ricardo said to Elena in the clearing.
“Well what?”
“I’m done. Were you?”
“Not really . . . but that’s okay.”
“It’s been a while.”
Nan heard them clearly: “Don’t worry. Just stay with me a little longer. Stay the way you are.”
Nan crawled away, hurt and limp. Elena had sensed her near. Throughout. And Ricardo had seen her briefly. Later he left Elena to search for Nan. As it grew dark he followed the stream to its mouth. There, Nan waved to him on the beach. Before returning by the trail she had circled the clearing, castigating herself, slapping at tree trunks and branches, once painfully falling into a thorny bush.
Ricardo stumbled across the darkened sand. As he drew near, Nan rubbed the late-afternoon chill from her bare arms. Neither of the two students would look closely at the other, nor would they touch. Without a word they slumped down in the first and third rows. Bitten, bodies sore and sunburned, they closed their books, looked at the wall clock and quietly counted the seconds to the end of class.
The Castle
Lisa screamed and dropped the telephone receiver when a neighbor had told her that Carlos was out in the street playing with a tarantula. In seconds, she was running across the lawn. When she reached her son, she yanked him onto the sidewalk and gave him a swat on the butt. “If only your father were here,” she muttered, wincing from the sciatica pain in her right leg.
The tarantula began jumping, not high, not far, but enough so that the curious kids backed away. A gangly, red-haired boy, taller than the other children, ran off, saying he would get a shovel.
Lisa gave Carlos a shove toward the house.
“Idiota,” she said. “It could’ve bit you.”
“No, it wouldn’t. It just wanted to get across the street.”
Just then the red-haired boy returned in a pickup truck seated next to a freckle-faced man who looked like the boy’s father. The man shouted for everyone to stay back and slowly drove over where the big insect was, though he missed on the first, noisy pass. Returning in reverse, the right-side tires hit their target with two squishing sounds. The fascinated group of kids, who had watched it all in silence, now erupted with Wows! Ooohs! and at least one Awesome! As for Carlos, when the pickup flattened the hairy mound, he squeezed his mother’s hand and closed his eyes.
Then the red-haired boy got out of the truck and retrieved a square-end shovel from the back of the truck. He handed it to the man, who in one swift motion scraped the wet mess from the asphalt.
“Come on,” Lisa said and led him into the house, down the hallway and to his room. His punishment was to stay in his room until she called him for lunch.
For a while, Carlos lay on his bed with his head under the pillow and thought how nice it would have been if the tarantula had lived. He’d still be pushing it across the street, letting it touch the stick, nudging it, coaxing it. He knew he would play until his mother’s pain had stopped; then she would call him and they would eat lunch together.
In the kitchen, Lisa lit her cigarette with nervous hands. The room was stuffy and the reflection on the white table hurt her eyes. Removing her sunglasses from the apron pocket, she again begged her husband to return. A prisoner of war for three years, he knew nothing of the problems at home, the car accident, her sciatica, the hours on her feet at the beauty salon, the monotony and silence at home, the scares Carlos gave her, knew nothing of the effort to wake in the morning, to speak, to smile, to keep the house as it was, ready for his return. Carlitos, your daddy went away but he’ll be back. It won’t be long. . .
And to fill the emptiness, to make it seem her husband was gone for a few days, for only a few weeks or months, Lisa assumed nothing would change, not even Carlos. For almost a year she would not cut her son’s hair. She let it grow long and curly, despite what the other children said. Then on the day she received the telegram that he was missing-in-action, she told Carlos she would cut his hair. She had him sit on a stool, put an apron around his neck and began to snip with a pair of scissors.
“Daddy wants you looking like a boy,” she said, eventually collecting the hair that fell to the floor and placing it in a large manila envelope.
“When is he coming home?” Carlos asked.
“Soon,” Lisa said. “Someday soon. Would you
like to write him another letter? You can tell him all about your new teacher and about the picnic in the park.”
Carlos nodded and watched his mother rub her eyes as if she were trying not to see something. Even then he sensed his father would not be home for a long time, if at all, since his and his mother’s letters to him were never answered. But Lisa told Carlos that at least now she knew he was alive, not “killed in action,” as some of the other mothers and wives learned of their men.
“I know he’s alive now,” she told her son. “He’s a prisoner, I just know he is.”
Lisa said she loved going to sleep because that’s when she could look for his father and talk to him in her dreams.
It wasn’t long before Carlos discovered he could look for his father in his own way. It was only a game but it was more fun than waiting for letters that never came.
Often after school he would find his mother in bed fully clothed, reading her books in the wan afternoon light. Or she would be pulling weeds by the oleander bushes that bordered the backyard. Or listening to her Mexican ranchera records in the cool darkness of the den, sometimes crying.
Carlos would take her hand and say, “He’s coming home, he’ll be back,” remembering only the scent of his father’s cologne, his adenoidal laugh, his soft, kinky-wool polo shirt.
“M’ijito, go take your nap,” Lisa would say. “Maybe you’ll dream of your daddy.”
“Okay, I’ll go take my nap,” Carlos would say and skip off to his room, close the door and change into his hidden clothes. He called them his daddy clothes and he used them only when he went into the hills to look for his father. He would put the pillow, his football and pajamas under the blanket so she wouldn’t notice he was gone; then he’d slip out the side door of his bedroom, close it quietly and tiptoe along the side of the house. Once on the sidewalk, he would head to the dead-end of the street and go up the trail to the structure at the top of the hill.
Today, a Saturday, not long after the tarantula had been killed, Carlos decided his mother would keep him in his room long after his naptime. It was his punishment. He opened the door slightly and peeked into the hallway. His mother was talking to someone but it wasn’t telephone talk. Probably reading her diary out loud, most likely an account of the tarantula episode. The diaries, so far three of them, were for his father to read when he returned.
Carlos sat on the edge of the bed, knowing his father wouldn’t have minded that he played with a big spider. His father liked spiders and snakes and dark places. He wouldn’t have punished him.
He opened the blinds and felt the warm sunlight on his forearms. The roses were in bloom and he could smell the jasmine beneath the windowsill. His temples swelled, his skin grew tiny bumps like football leather and finally he decided to leave. Maybe she’d forget him, maybe she wouldn’t call him until dinnertime.
He leaned into the dry wind as he rushed up the slope at the end of the block. Beyond the dead-end was an even steeper climb. He leaped over the weeds in the ditch and headed into the tall, yellow-brown grass. He hoped the others weren’t there, especially the red-haired kid who chased him into the tunnel the first time he had gone to the castle. He remembered the tunnel had been cool and hollow-sounding. Later, when he found Sam, the old man said it was the best place to be on a hot day, although you had to be careful where you stepped. Animals bite only when you bother them. But Carlos didn’t know that then; he only knew the redhead and the others were outside waiting for him. So he crept forward, following the shafts of light that came through the small windows of one wall.
“The devil’s gonna get you!” one of them shouted into the darkness. “Gonna eat you!”
Another voice added: “Gonna eat you like an enchilada!”
And a third voice: “Come on back! We ain’t going to hurt you.”
The voices echoed, pushing him blindly, further into the tunnel, making him stand up and stumble. Then something ahead of him moved. Carlos stepped back, but the voices again pushed him. It seemed the boys were right behind him. “The devil’s in there! Gonna get yoooou, yooou, you . . . ”
At the end of the tunnel, when he could go no further and could only touch solid rock or concrete, he turned to the left. After moving forward for several minutes, stumbling twice on what felt like rocks in his path, he began to see straws of light ahead. As he got closer, he saw that there were jagged holes in the tunnel’s roof. Now it was warmer and he could see fallen chunks of concrete and twisted metal rods on the floor.
The voices were gone. He continued to the end of the passage and again turned to the light, trailing one arm along the concrete wall. Feeling helpless in the darkness and thinking the boys were right about meeting the devil, he began to cry. That’s when he tripped on something soft.
Falling forward, he heard a deep, raspy voice call out, “Who’s that?”
Carlos came down hands first on the concrete. Then he felt a touch on his back.
“Speak up! Who are you?”
“Carlos.”
“Carlos, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, Carlos, this ain’t no sidewalk. This here’s my bedroom. Actually, my bed chamber. And you don’t come in without knocking first.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t have to say sir.”
“Yes, sir. I mean, yes.”
“And stop crying. Only babies cry. Now, what’re ya here for?”
“Some boys were chasing me.”
“Well, don’t you worry about them. Nobody comes in here. They always stay up top. You wait here. They’ll be going pretty soon.”
“I gotta get home. My mom’ll be looking for me.”
“Let’s go over where there’s some light.”
He led Carlos around another turn where the sunlight tipped his long white hair. Carlos drew back from the darkened face in the shadows, wondering if he was the devil.
“I’m Sam, king of this castle.”
“King?”
“What did they tell you?”
“That . . . that you were the devil.”
Sam laughed and said he’d rather be king of the hill than the devil. “They told you that so you wouldn’t come in here.”
Carlos could make out an old face with wrinkly skin and glints of curious eyes.
“Take my hand,” Sam said.
Carlos held the long fingers, and the two began to walk.
“Watch your step. These rocks keep the marauders from coming in.”
After a short distance, Sam pointed into the gloom to a shadowy stairway cluttered with twisted pieces of more concrete chunks.
“You go on up top,” Sam said. “Make a run for it. And don’t fall into no traps. I got them all over the castle roof.”
For a moment Carlos was unable to move. Then he felt the old man’s hand on his back.
“Only fools get caught, and you ain’t no fool, Carlos. Get up there and show them you ain’t afraid.”
Carlos emerged from Sam’s castle and escaped without the boys chasing him. Since then, he refused to cry.
That first summer, he and Sam would spend their brief afternoons together on the tower, on the battlements or on the courtyard wall, counting houses or cars, standing guard or planning defenses against attack. And Sam would use strange words: marauders, parapet, fortification, forage. Once Carlos found his friend in the East Dungeon, as Sam called it, peeling a grapefruit. Sam had just returned from a foraging expedition.
“Want some?” he asked.
“No, thanks.”
“Amazing what the peasantry throws away.”
“I’ll get you some forage from my house.”
Sam refused the offer, saying it wouldn’t be right. “A king gives charity,” he said, “he never gets it.”
Soon Carlos was named the king’s apprentice. In a brief ceremony witnessed only by a dun-colored rabbit below a rock-pile battlement, Sam pronounced the boy’s new title with slow and lofty language: “I hereby present to you . .
. the special office . . . of royal apprentice honoris . . . in per-pa-too-ee-tee.”
Most of the time the lessons were fun and easy. The hard part was in seeing the same things the king saw. The gargoyles always hid and the gnomes seemed to appear only in dark places where all they did was giggle. The king would laugh and say you had to try looking for these creatures in a special way; you had to concentrate and maybe catch them off-guard. Carlos squinted, he shielded his eyes, he looked out of the corners of his eyes, he closed his eyes, he blinked. Finally he gave up and said he might have seen them.
The king’s lectures began wherever they happened to be. “Do ya believe in dragons?” he said one afternoon while relieving himself against the outer castle wall. “Ain’t no such thing, Carlos. That’s only in fairy tales.”
But the tigers, the marauders and an occasional black knight would visit the castle from time to time. For some reason the king would always forget his plans for defense and he and his apprentice would hurry to the arena stairs and descend into the cool safety of the bedchamber.
In the front yard one morning, Carlos asked his mother what the old place on the hill used to be. Lisa was lifting leaves with a rake to drop into a big wicker basket.
“Don’t you go up there!”
Carlos knew she would say that and calmly observed, “It looks a little like a castle.”
“You hear me? I’ve told you before.”
“Don’t worry.”
Lisa dropped the rake. “It was going to be a country club . . . for movie stars, I think. But they ran out of money and stopped building it. Now help me put the leaves in the basket. When we’re finished, maybe we’ll go to the plunge. Would you like that?”
“Do country clubs have plunges?”
“Pools, they call them swimming pools.”
Carlos looked up at the king’s castle, thinking that’s why the courtyard goes down at one end. But why a tunnel around the sides? Sam says the marauders use the arena to fight in . . . but how come I never see them? Maybe if I look through my fingers like he does, maybe next time I’ll see them.