Yes, he will be angry; this she knows, but he must understand how much she loves him. And how it’s the right thing to do. His weight needs to be addressed. If she’s to be a good wife, then she must take the bull by the horns. Or, in this case, the Meeper Cheeper Chocolate Peepers by the paper edges of their sack!
“We can’t have lies between us, baby,” she proclaims as the door swings open.
Ajeno, still trying to extract his key from the lock with only one hand, stops in the open doorway, the overnight bag stolen from Jones clutched to his chest.
“Our relationship can’t survive it.” She brushes aside a lock of hair that’s fallen across her eyes. “And to be honest, neither can I.”
His eyes get very large as he takes a step forward. “You can die from this?”
“Baby,” she says solemnly, “you need to . . . to go on a diet.” Her arm sweeps around toward the kitchen’s totally bare counters. “I’ve done it, Ajeno.” She meets the panicky hurt in his expression. “No more cookies. No more junk food.”
“No cookies? What will we eat?”
“Vegetables.” She pivots on her foot cast to reveal the kitchen table, piled high with bags of produce. “I bought us broccoli, cauliflower, peas, beans—”
Ajeno, his lips drawn back in disgust, interrupts, “But what ’bout real food?”
“Baby, this is real food. You’ve just brainwashed your tongue into not tasting it.”
“Really?”
“Of course! And after a week of eating healthy, you’ll find it’s just as easy to fill up on Brussels sprouts as on cookies!”
“But, what about till then? Won’t I be hungry?”
Reluctantly, Crystal nods. “Afraid so, baby. But you’ll just need to be very brave. And you have to promise me,” she holds her arm up, palm out like the boy scouts taught her, “promise me you won’t sneak snacks. Okay?”
With an eyebrow arched speculatively at the overnight bag, the fat man suddenly shakes his head, deflating. He hangs his head in defeat. “Okaaaay.”
“Oh,” Crystal embraces one of his arms, “you’re just the best fiancé ever!” She stares up at him, her eyes shining with unshed, happy tears. “So now, you just rest on your mattress, and I’ll get dinner started.”
He nods. “Good, but first I gotta go to the bathroom.” Moving toward the nearby door, he stiffens when she speaks.
“You’re taking that bag in there with you? Where did you get it anyhow? I don’t remember seeing it before.”
“Huh? Oh, this?” He stares down at the bag. “It’s my manager’s at the diner. It’s got—”
She pats his arm. “Oh, that’s right! You were supposed to get your uniform today. Go try it on while I start cooking.”
“Okaaay.”
Pots and pans start banging as, inside the bathroom, Ajeno sets the bag on the sink and unzips it fully. “Hey, little man,” he coos to the wiggling infant, “you wanna bottle?” He fumbles in one of his voluminous pants pockets for the supplies Ruiz smuggled to him after he left the diner. “Well, let’s just get this—”
“Ajeno?” Silence follows this single word spoken through the wood door. Then comes a loud knocking. “What are you doing in there?”
“Uh, trying on my uniform?”
“Who are you talking to? You haven’t gotten into the cotton swabs again, have you?”
“Nope.” Ajeno holds his finger to his lips since the baby looks about to cry. “Whatcha making for dinner?”
“Steamed vegetables with whitefish.”
The fat man makes a face at the baby, who starts smiling. “Sounds yummy, but I gotta get back to what I was doing.”
Still sounding suspicious, Crystal’s voice moves away from the door. “All right, but don’t take too long.”
“Okeydokey.”
Thankfully for Ajeno, the baby falls fast asleep after gulping a bottle of synthetic mother’s milk.
The fat man eats at the table, careful to keep the bag near his feet.
“So,” says Crystal, “how did it fit?” At his look of confusion, she clarifies, “The uniform.”
“Oh, yeah.” He glances at the ceiling. “Like a uniform.”
She puts another spoonful of cauliflower on his plate. “Isn’t that just typical? They churn out these smocks as if everyone’s shaped the same!” Her glance dips inquisitively to the overnight bag. “You want me to rip it apart and put it back together?”
“No!” Ajeno’s eyes grow very large and wide. “I’ll take care of it. Yep, that’s my job.”
She looks a little hurt. “Well, if that’s what you want.”
After dinner, he says he has to leave.
“But why?” asks Crystal skeptically. “You don’t have the late shift tonight, do you?”
“Nope, but I, uh . . .,” he breathes heavily, “gotta get the uniform back to Mr. Jones.” The overnight bag’s already in his large beefy hand. And judging by its smell, someone’s diaper needs changing. “Muy pronto,” he says with emphasis.
He’s halfway out the door when he hears a sniffle. Crystal asks in small voice, “I was just wondering what you thought of supper? I mean, was it okay?”
“Yeah,” he nods, “it was good. Real good.”
Her smile is tremulous. “Really? You liked it?”
With his free hand, he rubs his stomach. “Yummy!”
“You don’t know what that means to me,” Crystal confesses as the door swings shut in her face.
Shockingly, it then pops open again with Ajeno peering around its edge. “A baby,” he says matter-of-factly, “would be happy, real happy, if you were its mommy.”
Her breath catches at this unexpected compliment. “Thanks.”
Ajeno’s lips pucker and then, with a head shake, he’s gone. Clasping the bag to his chest, he walks through darkened streets. He stops at the corner of Tenth and Vine to change a very full, smelly diaper. Consequently, the diner’s already closed and deserted when he reaches it. A double-check of the back alley shows no Ruiz, only a dog scavenging through the trash cans. It takes one look at Ajeno and runs, yelping, into the night.
The fat man stands, irresolute. He doesn’t know what to do. But then a thought comes to him of La Vivienda Temporal. Ah, yes, he thinks. Mama and Papa can tell me what to do! They have raised babies themselves. He is comforted and excited by having these experts to turn to. They will help him. Unerringly, he turns 127 degrees, toward his destination.
Thirty minutes later, the door to the trailer with the pink shutters pops open. Light from within illuminates the fat man standing on the bottom step with the baby. “Hiya!” He lifts the baby up high for Maria to take.
Chaos ensues. For several minutes, the old woman shrieks, neighbors curse, Fernando coughs, and the baby begins to cry.
“If he needs help with the child,” gasps the old man finally with all four of them staring at each other, “why should we not help him? We were wrong to do what we did before. We had no right to abandon him when he needed us.”
“You are a fool!” screams Maria, her rage ricocheting within the trailer’s brightly lit living room. “How do we know who that baby is and where he comes from?”
Fernando tries to reason with her. “He is a baby, that is what he is. And what does it matter where he has come from?”
“How can you say this to me . . . again?” Maria’s expression is stricken. “Again! You say this to me almost thirty years ago,” she spits on Ajeno’s shoes, “and look, look what has happened to our lives!”
Her husband reaches out a hand. “Are our lives so terrible? We have each other. We have Alejandro. We have our daughters—Marisol, Agraciana, and Esmeralda—who have blessed us with many beautiful grandchildren.” His glance at Ajeno is affectionate. “And we have—”
“No!” She holds up her palm to stop him. “No, do not utter a blasphemy such as this. Do not thank God for what the devil has given!”
“Maria, you are overexcited. Why do you not lie down while Ajeno and I discuss the
problem?”
“Are you loco? You want that he should spend one more minute in our home? Just having him here is to call down bad luck.” She approaches the fat man as if he were a loathsome burden. Pursing her lips in a cringe, she grabs his chin so Ajeno must stand very still. “Please, Fernando,” she pleads, “for me, you must finally see him! Look at him. LOOK! Now tell me, what do you see?”
A hacking cough shakes the older man’s frailty. “What do you mean, what do I see?” With a brief glance at Ajeno, he wipes the back of his hand across the blood speckling his lips. “I see my son. A boy I raised.”
“No,” she cries, slapping Ajeno’s cheek hard. “Look closer. What do you see?”
Fear colors Fernando’s expression at her vehemence. “You are tired. We should go now. ¿Entiende, Ajeno?”
“Sure, Papa.” Ajeno gently pats Maria on the back. “Feel better, Mama. Next time I will bring you flowers, not a baby. You like flowers, I know. You are a woman, and Crystal says every woman likes flowers.”
When Fernando makes to follow him out the trailer door, Maria’s screams begin, echoing endlessly in the aluminum box, as if they’ll never stop.
***
The next morning, limping out the lobby doors, Crystal is shocked to find Jackman whistling. Perched alertly on the stoop, third step up from the sidewalk, he’s laughing and talking with most folks passing by on the sidewalk. “Noah,” she taps his shoulder, “are you all right?”
“Never better! Isn’t it wonderful?”
“That’s . . . uh, great,” she concedes. “I mean, yes, that’s wonderful!” Wishing him a good day, to which he just laughs, she stumbles off the bottom step of the stoop, still confused by his euphoria. She then turns away only to be brought up short. “Oh my G—”
“Howdy!” Sally Howie stretches out her doughy white hand. “Crystal, my friend,” she pats the girl on the arm, “you have a good day!”
Crystal sputters, “But, Sally, where’s your notebook? How did you . . . ? I mean, I didn’t hear you counting.”
“Huh? Oh, the notebook.” The older woman digs it out of her pocket. “No need no more.” She giggles while throwing it into the nearby garbage can. A deep inhalation takes the bag lady as she complacently stares over cars and pedestrians whizzing past. “Sally fine. Knows where she is now.”
The girl shoots an anxious glance back to Jackman. “That’s . . . uh, great. I . . . I gotta go now, okay?”
“Sure, sure. No problemo.”
“What did you just say?”
Sally giggles. “Ajeno teaches me.” She waves and skips across traffic toward the trash cans of the Chinese joint on the corner. “See ya, Crystal!”
The girl shakes her head and hurries on to the bus stop. Events are taking her down some pretty weird streets. First there’s Beth being committed, then Ajeno agrees to go on a diet, then there’s his newfound fascination with the overnight bag, which he constantly whispers to, and now here’s Jackman and Sally Howie having apparently either gone crazy or are smoking something! What the heck, she wonders, is going on with everybody?
A few hours later, just after lunch, Crystal stands at her classroom window. The expanse of glass overlooks the playground behind the school. She can see, two stories down, a gray square of crumbling blacktop that holds at least a hundred children, ages six to nine.
It reminds the girl of her own youth on this same playground, her best girlfriends squealing as they were chased by little boys, or how they’d dissolve into giggles bunched into best-friend groupings of two or three, or how she’d jump up and down to the smacks of jump ropes hitting pavement to the tiny roars of boys playing ball and to the general earsplitting din of children making noise.
But now, frowning, she rubs a clean spot on the glass. She stares as her fingers fumble for the window latch. Ah, release! She lifts the sash just enough to clarify the sounds of the playground. She even bends slightly. But nothing. She hears almost no sound. No sound rises from the children standing, each to themselves, down below. Complete silence rings through the playground—a soundlessness more pervasive than if the playground were as empty as it sounds at this moment.
***
“Waaaaaah!” Ajeno is climbing the front steps to the Eden Palace’s double doors. The baby, taking a breather from the bag, is held in his arms, bawling. “Waaaaah!”
Noah Jackman sits midway up the stairs.
“Sorry,” says the fat man, “but can you hold this? Least till Crystal gets home from school?” He stretches out his arms, offering Jackman the screaming baby, but the middle-aged black man ignores him. His eyes are fixed on Dayville’s horizon, just where Second Street meets the docks.
After a moment, Jackman lifts his eyes, full of wonder, to meet Ajeno’s gaze. “I just took a nap,” he says haltingly, “and, honest to God, I dreamed someone was in my room. But I couldn’t see ’em cause I was lying on my stomach. I could hear them, though, kinda breathing. You know what I mean? I mean, air was shivering, literally shivering, on my skin. I mean, it felt so real. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Huh.”
“Waaah, waaah, waaaaah!”
“Exactly.” Nodding, Jackman licks his lips. “Then I heard a footstep and another and another. I mean, someone was there, and they were getting closer and closer to where I lay, terrified. My heart was racing so fast I thought I’d have a heart attack. Then,” his hands fly up as if fending off the other’s doubt, “now I know this sounds nuts . . . but then whoever it was gave me . . . gave me . . .”
Ajeno leans closer. “Yeah?”
“Gave me the best damn back massage I’ve ever gotten.” His dark face glows with wonderment. “God’s truth.”
Ajeno starts swinging the baby in the air, his big hands gripping it under its tiny arms. Cries turn to laughter; the baby’s toes brush Jackman’s graying hair. “Can you hold this,” repeats the fat man, “till Crystal gets home from school?”
“Yeah, sure.” Jackman nods but retreats again into his own thoughts. He makes no move to take the squirming infant.
Sighing, Ajeno glances across the street at the bank’s digital clock. It shows there’s still two hours before Crystal’s return. Leaving Jackman sitting, bemused, on the apartment steps, the fat man wanders down Tenth Street, the baby now tucked under his arm like a woman’s pocketbook.
Plodding down the sidewalk, he reflects on how babies are not nearly as much fun as Crystal has led him to believe. It can’t talk. It has very poor conceptual skills. And while Ajeno shares its fascination for eating and pooping, he finds it difficult to get past its self-absorption. Not at all, he thinks, what having a dog must be like! A dog, he thinks, would know how to be a friend, not like a baby, who thinks only of itself.
When the child begins again crying, Ajeno reluctantly untucks it from under his arm. “Whatcha want?” He stares into the little one’s face. “You bored again?”
Across the street is Mom’s Diner, Ajeno’s destination. He begins crossing asphalt when he stops, struck by the germ of an idea. Thinking very hard, he stands in the middle of the busy thoroughfare, cars blaring their horns while whizzing past.
Maybe, he thinks, the baby will like having its face blown upon! Ajeno’s fat cheeks, swollen with air, pump in and out like a someone blowing up a balloon.
Somewhere, nearby, begins the roar of approaching motorcycles. Engines disturb the air as in the distance, bikes top the hill, several motorbikes actually going airborne. But then, dropped by the incline of the street, the bikes draw closer and closer; an added menace being felt in their more-than-usual-defiant-expulsion of exhaust. This, most onlookers instinctively feel, is not an everyday pleasure ride for the gang. On the other side of the street, Ruiz, drawn by the noise, emerges again from the diner, looking up and down Tenth.
The fat man continues blowing, “Whoo, whoo, whoo . . .”
Motorcycles, ridden by gang members, grow closer with surreal speed. Pedestrians, jerked out of petty concerns, begin scatte
ring. They run into shops and alleyways—anywhere to keep from being called as witnesses.
Ruiz, initially confused, abruptly sees their target. Blood pumping, he looks around for something, anything, to stop the inevitable.
“Look, baby,” yells Ajeno calmly into the noise, “whoo, whoo, whoo!”
The tall man sees his chance. A slim chance, but a chance. An empty dumpster from the clothing factory next door is perched perilously on the curb. With all his strength, he gets behind it, pushing, as the engine roar gets louder and louder and . . . there! He drops it off the curb where, with all the grease from the diner, the slippery road surface sends it sailing into the street, where it grinds to a halt. “Ajeno,” he shouts at the top of his lungs, “get behind it—el contenedor!” He points at the dumpster. “Now!”
Then nothing else exists but noise. Engines consume existence as a fat man mouthing “okeydokey” placidly steps behind the metal box. “Whoo, whoo, whoo . . .” Bikes swerve, engine noise faltering as tires try to grip asphalt. Two bikers go flying as they hit the dumpster head-on. Screams and metal clanging accompany the mad flipping of motorbikes into the air.
Jumping over bodies, Ruiz runs to the fat man’s side. “Are you all right?” He makes a quick visual inventory of both Ajeno and the baby.
Sighing, the fat man hands Ruiz the child. “Air is funny, but he won’t laugh. I don’t understand.”
It is at this moment, when the Mexican is holding the baby, that someone in the crowd must have taken his picture. The next morning, a photo of his scowling face is emblazoned over the headline Good Samaritan Saves Two! A photo of the baby with Ajeno is also included, but all that’s visible is a swaddled infant against an enormous background of denim.
In the alley, behind the diner, just after the breakfast shift the next morning, Ruiz contemplates this article. Jones was obviously interviewed since all his employment data is included. He reads with mounting fury. Its writer might as well have drawn a target on Ruiz’s forehead.
The tall man was sent here for a job. No one is supposed to have noticed him. The cartel meant for him to slip into Dayville for a few weeks and then slip quietly out. One Mexican among many. Being invisible is part of his job. But here, in fully digitized clarity, is a picture of his face.
So Special in Dayville Page 20