I had the will to fight.
A couple of days later, Leopoldo stood over me as I swept the kitchen floor. “You complain about sweep the floor? When I was a boy, you know what I get for my birthday?” he barked at me. “My father, him threw the cake to the floor and say ‘Happy birthday, motherfucker!’ ”
“Yeah, but I bet he stood up for you if you were getting beaten by bullies.”
“What you say to me!? Go to you room!”
I dropped the broom and marched off to my room. As I passed the door to his bedroom, I pictured his face in front of me and punched at the door with everything I had. Pain sizzled through my knuckles. I’d busted a hole in the door. Leopoldo was on me like a storm.
“What you do?” He shook me by the collar. “What you do!?” He threw me to the ground and crouched over me, a finger in my face. “You… no… disrespect to me.” I’d gone too far. He was going to kill me.
“It was an accident,” I said meekly. “I’m sorry.”
Leopoldo slammed the front door behind him, and I locked myself in the bathroom to bandage my swollen knuckles. I was still scared of him.
In her dream journal, Claudia wrote: I worry about Josh—having to repress what would seem a natural anger… and then hitting his hand on the back of L’s door (accidentally). Did he inherit his mother’s tendency towards masochism as a solution to inexpressible anger?
Leopoldo didn’t come home that night. He used his one phone call to tell us he was in jail. He had gotten into a fight with the police and kicked a cop. They were making a whole big deal about it.
“Should we go visit him?” I asked.
“We can’t.” Claudia’s face looked funny. “He forgot to tell us what jail he was calling from.” She was almost smiling. “Looks like it’s just you and me for a couple of days.”
Just us. It felt like it had been years since it was just the two of us. Claudia started laughing. “I can’t believe it, Josh. After all we’ve given up for him. I dropped out of school for him, and we wound up living on a stump. Now we’re living in this dump with the rats. The whole time he was promising you he’d be a real father. His self-destructiveness is appalling. Here he is at the edge of legal entry to America after a year and a half of court fights and he destroys his chances by kicking a policeman.”
“Do you think they’ll really send him back to El Salvador?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you really think they’ll shoot him at the airport like he says?”
“I don’t know. You know… I don’t know if I even care anymore.”
They didn’t send him back to El Salvador. They sent him home to enroll in a twelve-step program. But I gained something in the process. I had my mother back.
Leopoldo was no longer a hero of the Revolution in her eyes. It was one thing for her to be beaten by a freedom fighter suffering from memories of oppression, but quite another to be battered by an alcoholic veteran of a US puppet army. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. His spell had been lifted, and Claudia was starting to see clearly again.
I began sneaking over to Inga’s every night, after the old lady had gone to bed, to spend time with Claudia. We were friends again, my mother and me, like old times. And now we were plotting a conspiracy. It was so unthinkable that we whispered, even though Leopoldo was a block away. Could we leave him? And, more importantly, where could we go? Wouldn’t he find us? Leopoldo had done such an effective job of limiting Claudia’s social life that she didn’t have any friends of her own. The only people he didn’t know about were back in San Francisco.
Claudia refused to even consider asking Uncle Tony if we could come live in his one-bedroom apartment. The last thing she wanted was to share her bedroom with another man. But she agreed that Claude’s family might be the solution. His parents owned a big house in the Castro, and they might be willing to let us take refuge with them until we could get back on our feet. Claudia wrote letters to Claude and his family, and I rushed home from school every day to get to the mailbox before Leopoldo. We finally received a letter back from Claude’s father, and I opened it with trembling hands. His reply was “No.” He was having some health issues, and it wasn’t a good time to have a kid around. His daughter, Claude’s twin sister, had added a note saying: “We do not owe you anything!”
There was nowhere to go.
When Leopoldo got home, I slipped past him out the door. “Where you go!?” he demanded to know. I slammed the door behind me and walked into the night. What would Leopoldo do? I thought to myself. If he were me, what would he do? It was obvious. He would kill his stepfather.
Down at Bob’s Market, I ran into one of Ervi’s cousins in the back of the store by the six-packs of beer. He was about twenty and wore his flannel shirt open with only the top button fastened, like a Mexican gangster. He told me Ervi might be coming back to the area in a month or two once spinach season started. I sat with him on the curb while he put back his beers and, when the moment seemed right, I asked him if he knew where I could get a gun.
“How much money you got?”
“How much do I need?”
“At least two hundred.”
“I’ve got about eighty-five saved up.”
“Come back when you got two hundred, and we’ll talk.”
I went to bed that night doing math in my head. I was 42.5 percent of the way to a solution. A mere $115 separated me from a gun. My friend Dorothy had told me she could get me a summer job sorting vegetables on the conveyor belts at Twin City Foods. I’d be making five bucks an hour there. At that rate, I’d have all the money I needed in three days of work, maybe four, depending on what Ervi’s cousin had to offer.
Maybe it would be a rifle. I’d fired long guns before, so that was a plus. But it would be hard to maneuver and fire indoors. I would have to lure Leopoldo outside somehow, and outdoors people were liable to see me shoot him, so that was a minus. A pistol would be better. I could conceal it and get up close to him, inside the apartment. But I had never fired one before. They looked complicated in the movies. I’d have to practice.
If I was going to do it, I had to do it right. Leopoldo had survived being shot before. He even had the scars to prove it. Or did he? How did I know what a bullet scar really looked like? Everything else he said seemed to be a lie. Maybe he wasn’t as tough as he appeared.
The week before, I was a quarter of the way through The Godfather at Video Farm when I began having a sense of déjà vu. Wait a second, I said to myself. I already knew this plotline from somewhere. They duct-tape a pistol to the back of a toilet in a restaurant and the protagonist steps into a waiting car after shooting a mob boss and a policeman in cold blood. Where did I know this from? Oh, yeah. Leopoldo told me he had executed the Mafioso and the chief of police in San Salvador for the FMLN in the same way. He must have seen the movie too and simply expropriated the scene into his autobiography. Something about his bullshit infuriated me worse than his battering.
I dreamt powerful dreams about guns that night. Bullets clicked into magazines and revolving chambers whirled through the dream world. A deep voice reassured me that guns were “the great equalizers,” and I knew this to be true. They tore through muscle as easy as air, and they let the little man take down the big man with the simple pull of a trigger. “Josh, get the fuck over to here!” I heard Leopoldo yell in my dream. I turned on him and drew, and pow! Over and over. Each time smoother than the last, until I awoke with a confident smile.
Claudia was home from Inga’s when Leopoldo came through the door, breathless. He’d been at his friend Augusto’s place and seen on the news that there had been a major meltdown at a nuclear plant in North Carolina. Claudia started to panic, but I flipped on the radio and scanned the news channels. Nothing. Not a word. “Yeah, I don’t think so,” I said.
Claudia and I flipped through the atlas together. “Look at how close North Carolina is to DC,” I reasoned. “There would have to be something on the radio.”
“You no believe me!? I hear it with my own ears and eyes.”
“You’re wrong,” I said.
Leopoldo went on and on, telling us about the meltdown in Spanish, my mother translating the words I couldn’t understand into English. The pumps stopped working, the coolant failed, the reactor exploded. The “good reporter” was trying to let the people know but the “bad guy” from the company was trying to stop her.
“The good reporter?” I snorted. “It must have been a movie.”
“No, Josh. You no listening.”
“Did the news report have a car chase in it?”
“Yes.”
My mother shook her head and closed the atlas. I turned off the radio. “You are such a joke,” I said.
Leopoldo narrowed his eyes. “You say I’m a liar?”
I didn’t answer him. The time wasn’t right.
“You disrespect me, maybe, Josh? Claudia told me you got some complaints about me. That you no tell me ’cause you afraid of me? What you gotta say?”
I wasn’t going to take the bait. “I’m not saying anything to you because I am afraid of you.” Ironically, in that moment, I realized that I was finally no longer afraid of him.
“I no hit you. What you have to say?” Claudia was at his side now, with her hands folded in front of her. She thought she was making some kind of peace.
This was neither the time nor the place. This was not the battlefield of my choosing. But, then again, why should I back down? He wanted to know what I had to say. Fuck him! I rose to my feet and yelled: “I do disrespect you! Everything you touch, you destroy! You ruined our lives! And all you do is take! You’re a monster! You’re scum!”
“¿Qué es esto?” He didn’t know the word scum and turned to my mother for translation.
She pulled at the air, trying her best: “Es un tipo de planta muy pequeña en el agua.” It’s a type of small plant in the water. She wasn’t capturing the point properly, so I continued.
“You’re less than scum. Abajo de scum! You’re nothing without us! You hear me!? You’re nothing!”
Leopoldo stepped forward and punched me in the mouth, almost casually. I was twelve years old, old enough now. I went sailing backward into the couch, but jumped back onto my feet. My upper lip was cut and bleeding, but it felt good. This wasn’t the battlefield of my choosing, but I would make it mine. I was ready to fight.
I bounced on my toes and weaved my head back and forth like a boxer. Leopoldo stood stone still, eyeing me apprehensively. He was stronger and tougher, but I could see it in his eyes: He was scared of me. He was a bully, and he enjoyed punching people who wouldn’t hit back. He wasn’t a fighter.
But I was. I was animated by an unquenchable fire. Power and strength and hatred coursed through my veins. He could knock me down as many times as he wanted, but I’d keep getting back up. I’d come at him again and again until he went down. It was him or me now. If he didn’t leave I would kill him. With my bare hands if I had to.
I raised my right hand in a fist and pointed at the door with my left. “Get out! Get out!” I screamed at him. “Get out right now!”
Leopoldo’s face flickered with a mixture of anger and surprise, his jaw tightening, his eyebrows rising. A ripple of curiosity passed behind his eyes, as if he didn’t recognize the man/boy before him.
We stood there facing one another, frozen in time. The boy in the white T-shirt with the oversized nose and big eyes bounced in anticipation, his fists shaking with rage. A first line of thick hair darkened the boy’s upper lip, and the lip was swollen and bleeding. The blood tasted hot and metallic, and the boy was no longer afraid of the man across from him. The man stood still, a red bandana pinning down his dull black hair, betrayed now by a single strand of white. The man’s face was gray and taut, perched over a muscular frame achy from misuse. His fingers opened and closed, unsure of themselves.
We stood there not saying a thousand different things, and then a slackening of Leopoldo’s jaw and a tightening of his eyes signaled something. He was tired. Leopoldo turned suddenly and stomped out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him.
I was still shaking my fists, ready to fight, until I saw my mother’s eyes. They looked alive and angry, as if a porcelain mask had just been shattered off of her face. “We have to get out of here!” she was repeating to herself. Claudia had found her way back to sanity. Somehow it was alright for him to beat the hell out of her. But not to hit me. Not her boy.
Claudia locked the door and began working the phone, calling the few people she could think of that Leopoldo didn’t know. One of the elderly Quaker women from People for Peace referred her to her friend Susan, another Quaker, who seemed to quickly grasp the urgency of our situation. As the sun began to set, we ran relays to our old green Toyota Corona with armloads of everything worth keeping. We moved skittishly, like bank robbers racing the clock. He might show up at any minute.
But he didn’t show, and we took shelter in the basement of Susan’s house outside of town. I paced back and forth, still expecting Leopoldo to come through the door and finish our fight. But silence and stillness prevailed, and I finally sat down and smiled. I’d won.
That night, my mother and I debated whether I should keep attending school for the last few weeks of seventh grade. What if he found me? I decided to assume the risk. I cared about my grades too much, and I was convinced that Leopoldo had never paid enough attention to even know where I went to school. And, on some level, I secretly hoped that he would come for me so I could stab him in the throat. I finished the year riding the bus with Susan’s children. None of the kids on the bus tried to pick on me, which was a good thing because I had a butcher knife in my backpack.
On the first day of summer, Claudia whooped at me: “We finally found it!”
“It?”
“Community! The intentional community we’ve been looking for all these years.” Her eyes were glowing, and she was gesticulating excitedly with her hands. “It’s called Walker Creek.”
She told me she’d been bagging up bulk brewer’s yeast at the food co-op in Mount Vernon when she received a message from the Spirits. They were going to guide us into the promised land. Just then a woman with a mane of fiery red hair glided by. She was talking loudly about how they needed just one more family for their commune out by Big Lake. We were that family.
In August of 1988, Claudia and I piled ourselves into a decommissioned yellow school bus and drove out into the foothills of the Cascades to start a new life. We slept in the bus at night and cleared trees by day. With hard work, we managed to raise a waterproof roof over our heads before the rains came. And then we kept building. Every day, a little more, until we had constructed a new world for ourselves.
EPILOGUE
The Promised Land
The day after the roof went up at Walker Creek, I boarded a train to San Francisco. It was nighttime when I stepped onto the platform in Oakland. Uncle Tony emerged from the darkness to give me a hug. “Now wasn’t that easy?” he said.
That summer he started taking me to punk rock shows on Gilman Street in Berkeley. The music was angry and tore at my ears. It was just what I needed, and I threw myself with abandon into the gladiatorial pit of slam dancers. I was hit from all sides and thrown back and forth. But I hit back just as hard, driving my shoulder into the man next to me until he went down. And then I helped him back up. Under the strange rules of chivalry in the punk community, if you went down everyone around you stopped to pick you up.
“How old are you?” screamed a curious punk with a mohawk and multiple facial piercings.
“Twelve,” I screamed back.
“That’s fucking awesome that your parents let you do this!”
“I don’t have parents!” I screamed back.
“That’s even fucking awesomer!”
One night Uncle Tony and I stood outside of a Circle Jerks concert to cool off. A skinhead ran out of the club and into the street in front of us, where he was im
mediately struck by a car.
“Somebody call an ambulance!” yelled Uncle Tony as we stepped off the curb to come to his assistance. But before we could get to him, the skinhead jumped back up, pounded himself on the chest, and roared.
“That’s what I’m fucking talking about!” I yelled at him.
“Fuck yeah!” he yelled, and we ran back into the club together, colliding into everyone in our path. After what I had been through, I felt like I had been struck by a car too. The secret was to keep dancing.
When I came back to Washington at the end of the summer I had a shaved head, black clothing adorned with skeletons, and a skateboard under my arm. Claudia didn’t recognize me when she met me at the Amtrak station in Seattle. I’d grown taller than she was, and she said I looked scary.
“Good,” I said. “I am scary.”
I returned to Stanwood Middle School for eighth grade. Over the summer I’d grown from one of the shortest kids in the class to one of the tallest. I carried my skateboard with me wherever I went and toted around a backpack full of weapons. For the first time in my life no one tried to mess with me.
By the end of the year, my hair had grown back, and I had outgrown my black clothing. I didn’t need the punk rock anymore. My hunger to smash and destroy had been sated, and now I wanted to get back to building myself a rewarding future. A future with comfort and certainty, away from the precipice of constant risk. I knew the path out of our subsistence lifestyle led through college. By the glow of the candles I renewed my commitment to academic success each night, calculating cosines and reading Melville in the flickering light. I kept up my study of all things Jewish too, convinced that Judaism was my only path out of spiritual poverty. And I returned to the stage, making second homes for myself in the drama departments at the high school and the local community college. In the summers I drove heavy equipment in the Skagit Valley pea fields on the twelve-hour night shift. The massive pod strippers shook the Earth, rendered me temporarily deaf, but brought in enough extra income to keep our car running.
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