Leopoldo’s body was an essay on people trying to kill him. Knife scars, jagged broken bottle marks, rough patches from being dragged through gravel, and rounded bullet scars. One bullet left a blackened little bowl in his bulging bicep after the Salvadoran nurse pulled it out. The rebel veterinarian who worked on the other bullet couldn’t pull the whole thing out. Underneath the mound of scar tissue on his lower back, lead fragments still reminded him of the war.
With his shirt off and arms cycling through his martial arts routine, Leopoldo looked every bit the black belt in kung fu he claimed to be. Each muscle was rounded and fully defined, firing and retracting with each move. He scooped at the air, lunged gracefully, and ended each movement with a punch or a kick. “Josh,” he instructed me. “This… the big cannon, this… the box punch, this… the back fist. No, Josh, like this…”
I stood next to him, fumbling through poor imitations of his liquid movements, but he was going too fast for me to keep up. He quickly lost interest in the lesson and dropped onto the ground for a flurry of push-ups. I tried to keep pace with him, but he finished his set of fifty before I was at ten. I struggled to twenty with his foot on my butt while he yelled at me: “Straighten to your back! Flat, cabrón!” Then I gave up and sat on his feet while he did his sit-ups.
I never saw him exercise more than that. Five minutes of punches and kicks, fifty push-ups, and fifty sit-ups. No running, no stretching, no breaking a sweat. Somehow this base level of exertion was all he needed to maintain a superhero body, even with all the booze, pot, and cigarettes.
After the sit-ups, we crunched through the snow to my mother’s pottery shed, where Leopoldo had transplanted his marijuana crop. He sang a Spanish children’s song to the little feathery plants and told me that they should have died in the winter cold but his energy kept them alive. On the way back to the cabin, he showed me how to walk noiselessly. “This is how they teach in the army, Josh… look.” He walked in slow motion, stepping gently with the sides of his feet, swiveling his head from side to side on full alert. He was so fully invested in the slow, tense movements that I could see a flash of him picking his way through the jungle, with a pack and rifle, stalking someone. I pulled us out of the moment by saying I could hear the twigs snapping under his feet. Leopoldo shook his head at me. “You not very smart, huh? In the army, they teach how to walk in the jungle, the jungle. No one can walk quiet in the snow.”
We finished out our first day together with Leopoldo showing me how to roll him a joint. His eyes narrowed as the THC hit his brain. I brushed my teeth while he told me how to really make the womens loco. “You just put the maria juana oil on you fingers. And then you shake to they hands or rub to they shoulders. And then they open up the legs for you and give you they pussies.” It had been a strange, perplexing day, and I needed to go to bed.
It was a day full of contradictions. Little contradictions, like the way he kept criticizing me for being lazy when smoking weed and napping seemed to be the highlights of his day. Or the way he could tell me that his spiritual life force nourished plants and then boast about his one-day kill record (sixteen soldiers). Or the way that one story cast him as an army soldier and the next as a rebel fighter.
And then there were the big contradictions. The racism, sexism, homophobia; the glorification of violence. These went against everything my mother had taught me, against everything she stood for. Yet she was hearing the same things I was, and he was still a romantic hero in her eyes. The way Leopoldo talked about black people as stupid animals was so taboo to my ears that I cringed with every reference to “the Blacks,” fully expecting lightning to strike him down.
This was rivaled by his thoughts on the ladies, or “bitches,” as he often called women. To hear him tell it, women primarily walked the Earth “to give you they pussies.” He didn’t have a single female character in any one of his stories who didn’t follow the narrative arc of frigid bitch to horny sex slave. One of his favorite stories was about the time he was kidnapped as a teenager by three uptight businesswomen in San Salvador. They kept him tied to a bed and took turns pleasuring themselves on his ever-rigid cock. He finally escaped after making all three of them climax so hard they passed out.
This blasphemy could only be outdone by his hatred of “the Faggots.” He spent a full ten minutes explaining to me all of the insulting Salvadoran nicknames for Los Maricones. His favorite was Culero, which literally meant “diaper,” so called because “after they ass-rape each other all day, their buttholes don’t close and they have to wear the diapers.”
Why was this man living with us? My mother had explanations.
First of all, it wasn’t racism when black or brown people criticized each other. A black person could call another black person a “nigger,” and, however disturbing that was to us, it wasn’t racism. It was an oppressed person taking back hurtful words from the Man.
Second, Leopoldo didn’t mean it. The words coming out of his mouth were learned behavior from an oppressive patriarchal culture. They didn’t reflect what was inside of him. He had told her stories with eyes full of wonder about the brave campesinas who took up arms beside their menfolk. He had told her, with eyes full of tears, about his father’s cruel and abusive treatment of his sweet mother. His trash-talk was just a thin veneer of machismo holding together a sweet but traumatized refugee who had suffered so much. Oh, the things Leopoldo had experienced. “If only you knew, Joshey.”
Third, he was a hero, a freedom fighter. Violence wasn’t a bad thing when it was brandished against the System. Capitalism was itself a systemized form of violence, therefore resistance to it was, by definition, an expression of anti-violence. As a freedom fighter, you had to cut the man some slack. Serving as a rebel fighter in the guerrilla front of Farabundo Martí’s Liberación Nacional essentially earned you a lifetime credit for crude behavior.
But my mother had glossed over the biggest contradiction in my mind: Leopoldo’s dueling roles as refugee and rebel. The way he switched back and forth so deftly between the two made me think he was intentionally transforming his identity to suit the audience. He was a Transformer. With me, he was a shiny racing car with blazing guns. With my mother, he was a human with feelings. Unless she was in the mood for a ride. Then he was a shiny racing car for her too. Sometimes he would transform in midsentence as he calibrated my mother’s mood.
“Three of us went to rob the bank—Martillo, El Flaco, and me. We had on the masks. It was one of Duarte’s banks, with big bags of dolares from the CIA…”
“Leopoldo, when are you going to get a job?”
“… that they give to the death squads. I saw them once pull up in a white truck, they jump out and grab my friend, an estudiante from the university, a girl. They pull her in, and I never see her again. A week later, we find her arm floating in the river, with the bracelet I give her still around the wrist.”
It wasn’t just the narrative that had changed. It was his face, his voice, his body language—from open and boastful to downcast and pained. He had transformed before my eyes.
I tried to get to the bottom of Leopoldo’s shape-shifting one day by telling him about the Transformers—how the heroic Autobots and evil Decepticons could transform from car to person and back, depending on who was around. “Do you ever feel like a Transformer?” I asked him. He didn’t. Instead he told me that these kinds of robots already existed. The CIA was developing them. In El Salvador they already had a plane that could saturate a square kilometer with bullets in five minutes. He knew because he’d once taken one down with a rocket launcher.
In the end, my mother, Leopoldo—they all got it wrong. The only person that got it right was my friend Eli. He said: “Who cares if it’s a car or a person? What you really want to know is whether it’s an Autobot or a Decepticon.”
TEN
On Bended Knee
It was my turn. I rolled the ten-sided blue crystal die and moved my way through the graph-paper dungeon Eli had spent all day c
onstructing for me. My elf character fumbled his way a few more steps into darkness.
“Who’s that guy that was doing push-ups at your house?” Eli wanted to know.
“That’s Leopoldo, Claudia’s boyfriend.”
“Isn’t your mom in Seattle?”
“Yeah. But he’s staying with us now.”
“Like, living with you?”
“For now.”
“Or for forever.”
“No, he won’t stick around too long.”
“Why not?”
“He’s like ten years younger than Claudia, and he’s from El Salvador and, I don’t know, he just won’t stay.”
“That’s what I said about my stepdad. He’s ten years older than my mom and he just came over for oolong tea one day and then he never left. Now I have to ask his permission to watch TV.”
“At least you have a TV.”
“What are you complaining about? You don’t have a curfew or bath time or even, like, a bedtime.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Heck, yeah.”
Eli’s jealousy of my lifestyle made me feel better. “Eli, you think he’ll stay? None of her other boyfriends lasted very long.”
“You never can tell with these guys. It depends on what they’re looking for.”
Leopoldo finished his fiftieth sit-up and came up frowning.
“Why you go to Eli house all the time? You are a faggot with him?” He grabbed his crotch. “If you want to be a maricón, I show you what it feel like.” He spit on the ground and reached for a cigarette.
It had been three days since Claudia left for school in Seattle, and Leopoldo was growing testy. It wasn’t fair, he told me, for him to be trapped on the mountain with no car and nothing to do but watch over a “pussy” kid like me. I was useless. I was nine years old, and I didn’t know how to cook him dinner. I couldn’t even shine his boots. I was worse than useless. I was weak. So weak I couldn’t split wood. I couldn’t even do push-ups. In El Salvador, he told me, the strong boys would have beaten me to death long ago.
When Claudia got back, Leopoldo gave her a grim assessment. She’d been spoiling me, he said. I was soft. I would start menstruating soon if he didn’t toughen me up. My mother took the news like a man. She admitted she’d been so busy with school and her artwork that she hadn’t stopped to see that I was sliding off the rails. The good news was Leopoldo was there to help me get back on track.
It was already afternoon when Claudia dropped us off by the river in Mount Vernon on her way back to Seattle. Leopoldo had some work lined up, he said, and he was taking me with him. From the river, we followed the train tracks through a part of town I’d never seen before. Little wooden houses drooping with peeling paint and rusting chain-link fences. Little apartment blocks here and there. No trees.
“Where are we going?” I panted, trying to keep up with Leopoldo.
“We go to Rodolfo house. He owe to me money.”
We turned onto a little street, and Leopoldo’s swagger grew more pronounced. He threw his head back, jutted his jaw forward, and worked his shoulders up and down like a boxer at the side of the ring. We stopped at a ramshackle green house, and Leopoldo flicked his cigarette into the patch of weeds that served as a front lawn.
“This Rodolfo,” he pointed, and waved for me to follow his swagger up onto the little porch. Leopoldo paused before the door, clenching and unclenching his fists. The air was sharp and cold. He blew his nose carefully into the clutch of his thumb and first two fingers and wiped the mucus on the door frame in front of him. An airplane droned far overhead. And then action. Leopoldo struck the door with his fist—bam, bam, bam! Not so much knocking as punching. The door rattled on its hinges. Flakes of green paint flurried into the air. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked. But the house remained silent.
Leopoldo backed down from the unanswered door and pulled me around after him. I followed his swagger down the narrow driveway that hugged the side of the house. My feet crunched in the gravel, and Leopoldo turned to scowl at me. He pointed at the band of grass that sprouted like a mohawk between the strips of gravel. This was where I was supposed to walk. Chastened, I tiptoed through the wet grass after him. We rounded the back of the house in silence and stopped and stared at the back door. It was boarded up with sheets of graffiti-smeared plywood.
Suddenly the silence shattered with crazed barking. Snarling, yellow teeth lunged at my face. I fell backward with a girlish shriek. The dog—the monster—was huge and black and muscles, awash in drool. It hurled itself at me, closing in for the kill. But it was stopped short with a clank in midair. It had reached the end of its chain and fell back. In an instant it righted itself, barking and snapping at my feet.
Leopoldo hadn’t flinched. He stood and stared at the snarling dog for a moment and then strode over to a pile of construction debris, beyond the dog’s reach, and selected a length of copper pipe. He tested the weight of the pipe in his hand and then rushed at the dog. It leapt up to meet the challenge, its neck straining against the taut chain. Leopoldo growled back at it, “¡Hijo de puta!” Son of a Whore! and arced the pipe down hard onto the dog’s skull. Its bark cracked in mid-roar and the dog stumbled backward. They stood staring each other down, man and dog. Leopoldo wielded the copper pipe like a slugger at bat. The dog bared its teeth and gave a low growl. Then it convulsed with a bark, and Leopoldo brought the pipe down with a crack onto its back. The dog sat down for a moment and then wobbled back onto its feet. They were frozen, staring at each other again. Every time the dog opened its mouth to bark, Leopoldo waved the pipe and hissed: “Chhhht!” The dog finally conceded defeat and retreated back to its lair under the house.
Leopoldo dropped the pipe where he stood and turned to look at the old, beat-up black Camaro that was parked next to the debris pile. After some contemplation, he pointed at the Camaro and said, “This my car.” My chest was still heaving from the dog attack. Adrenaline was pumping through my veins, still pushing flashing images of the snarling mouth into my brain. But Leopoldo seemed to have forgotten about the dog. Now, all he saw was the car.
The doors of the Camaro were locked, so Leopoldo took a brick and smashed out the little triangular window behind the passenger door. Once inside, Leopoldo fumbled around with the steering column. Then he bent down under the wheel, pulling panels and wires apart.
After an eternity of Leopoldo cursing in Spanish and yanking at wires, I asked him: “How come you don’t have the keys?”
He looked up with the first smile of the day. “I have them right here.” His hands conjured yellow sparks from the darkness, and the slumbering engine of the Camaro came to life with a thunderous howl. Leopoldo grinned and revved the engine several times. We launched down the driveway, leaving the emasculated dog barking behind us.
Now, I figured, we would finally go work at that job Leopoldo had mentioned to Claudia. But we didn’t go to work. Instead we drove to old town Mount Vernon to pay a visit to Leopoldo’s friend Fabricio. He invited us into the cozy little house he shared with his fat wife, Trina. They were in their fifties and held real jobs. Fabricio was a construction manager and Trina worked as a Spanish translator over at the courthouse. It was unclear how or why Leopoldo knew these mainstream people, but Fabricio was also from El Salvador and that seemed to be all the explanation that was needed. Trina was Mexican and, even though he thought Mexicans were the worst, Leopoldo told me she was all right because she worked to support her man. And she made authentic pupusas, a kind of stuffed corn pancake, which we stayed to enjoy for dinner. Leopoldo later told me that pupusa, like nearly every other word in El Salvador, was slang for “pussy.”
After dinner we were joined by two other Salvadoran guys who worked on Fabricio’s crew. The men sat around the table drinking beers and trading stories in incomprehensible Spanish. They were all from El Salvador, but Leopoldo looked as different from them as he did from me. They looked like the weary workers I’d pass in the discount grocery store. Thick
, heavy faces. Wearing jeans with plaid shirts tucked in over their paunches. And then there was Leopoldo, perched at the edge of the table, doing most of the talking. His shaggy hair flaring out from under his red headband. His Andean sweater hanging loosely over his army pants.
Leopoldo drained bottle after bottle of Miller High Life, three beers for every one consumed by his countrymen. It was dark and lightly snowing when he stumbled out of Fabricio’s with me under one arm. Leopoldo started the car and sunk into a paranoid stupor as we pulled onto College Avenue. He was ranting about the policía. He was convinced that every flicker in the rearview mirror was a cop car. “We going trick them, Josh. You see.” We swerved between lanes and braked suddenly every few hundred feet until we hit open farmland at the edge of town. Then Leopoldo turned off the headlights and we surged forward in the dim moonlight, meandering across the roadway without regard for the arbitrary yellow lines the policía had thrown down to control us.
We picked up speed when we got to Highway 9, the rural route that ran north past Cultus Mountain. As we fishtailed through the gravelly shoulder of the road and lurched into the lane reserved for oncoming traffic, I gripped the door handle with both hands and checked and rechecked my seat-belt buckle. An uncontrollable panic welled up inside of me, and I began calculating my survival rate if I were to jump from the moving car. But we were going too fast. The inky roadway hurtling past my window would chew me up on impact. I would have to wait until he slowed to turn up Old Day Creek Road.
We blew through the little town of Clear Lake. The turnoff for Old Day Creek Road was up ahead, but Leopoldo, who was now screaming at no one in particular in Spanish, took the turn without slowing down. The tires shrieked as we slid off the roadway, and then the Camaro kicked and bucked wildly as we churned our way across the lip of a field. Rubber met road again, and we shot up the mountain. The engine clattered and coughed as Leopoldo tried to keep our speed against the winding incline.
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