Hypothermia

by Enrigue, Alvaro

  Then thunder shattered the silence. It wasn’t the usual deafening sound as it might be heard by ears outside my electric womb, but a soft, precise crack, like a handclap. Still, I was able to see the two trees nearest the path get blown to pieces before collapsing in clouds of smoke. Blackened and burning from the lightning, their limbs fell around me in a perfect circle. Dismounting from my bicycle I sensed, for the first time in my life, the astonishing firmness and solidity of the ground. I touched one of the branches and felt its embers burn my fingertips. Hoisting my bike to my shoulder, I removed the leaves, bark, and branches, and checked to make sure it was all in one piece. Then, despite having been just struck by lightning, I proposed that we keep riding toward the airport.

  Once we reached the meadow we were disappointed to see that the stormy weather had forced a change in the runway patterns. Now we couldn’t watch the planes landing. Instead, as we lay on our backs in the wet grass, we could only see their departures, which are always anticlimactic.

  Saving Face

  TOILET

  . . . gentle fatherland, pantry and aviary.

  RAMÓN LÓPEZ VELARDE

  It was Sunday and Jordan Marcus was peering out the window of his fourth floor apartment at the corner of 15th and Fuller. The telephone rang. He was wearing a T-shirt, elbows resting on the windowsill, hoping for a breeze off the Potomac that wasn’t going to blow till autumn. Methodically scanning the row of windows in the building across the street, he checked on his neighbors as though they were birds in cages. Over the years, with patient effort, he had been able to glimpse some fabulous, indeed lubricious, scenes within the shadows of those apartments. On the fourth floor, the same little old insomniac lady who was always there stood with her face pointed at the rising sun; her burned-out eyes, long-covered with cataracts, staring opaquely from behind Coke-bottle lenses. Lower down, to the left, a fat man dunked bread into his coffee, tits slipping out from behind his tank top. The other apartments were still dark or had their blinds lowered.

  A woman’s voice reached his ears, distorted by the grating noise of the fan blowing hot air onto the back of his neck. It’s for you, she said. What. The telephone. What telephone. The phone, they’re calling you about some emergency. Marcus got up from his chair slowly, taking advantage of the angle afforded by standing to steal one last look at the windows across the way, then turned back into the apartment and walked down the sky-blue hallway. He’d painted it that color during one of the ferocious bouts of perfectionism that periodically drove him to lead a more dignified life. He didn’t bother getting the phone in the kitchen where it was waiting off the hook: the receiver was so greasy that it always slipped from his fingers in the muggy heat. In the living room—painted green in an earlier outburst of energy—he plopped onto the couch with a sigh, as he did every night to watch TV after the last curtain was drawn in the building across the street. Using the hem of his shirt to wipe the sweat off his face, he picked up the receiver. Hello? The answer was drowned out by the sound of bacon sizzling in a frying pan. Just a moment please, he said. Covering the mouthpiece, he shouted at the woman to hang up, that he’d picked up. He waited for the line to quiet down to ask what the matter was. A polite voice with an Hispanic accent apologized for calling him so early, but the electricity was off and needed to be repaired before eight A.M. He’d been recommended, the caller said, because he lived near the restaurant, and they needed power before the first customers showed up. Which restaurant? Marcus asked. Guadalupe’s, at 13th and Harvard. They told me it’s not too far from your house. Only three blocks, Marcus answered. He excused himself for a moment to check his work orders for the day, then just sat for a moment on the couch, the receiver muffled against his belly. He scratched his scraggly beard with his free hand and thought about his captive birds in the building across the street. When he figured that a reasonable amount of time had passed, he answered: I’m gonna have to cancel a job I’ve got at eight-thirty.

  In the kitchen, his woman was at the stove frying eggs. I have to go out, Marcus told her, right now, and he poured himself some coffee. It’s an emergency. She turned away from the stove to stare at him, then set down the spatula on the stovetop, and put her hands in the pockets of her pink terrycloth robe: in the four or five months they had been together, she’d never seen him in a hurry.

  He ate his breakfast standing up, then clattered the plates into the dishwasher. Going to his bedroom he took his coveralls out of a closet with missing doors. His clothes smelled like mildew. He picked up yesterday’s socks from the floor and sat down by the window to get ready. All the while, slipping on one sock, then another, and then the coveralls, he kept looking out the window for some freshly opened curtain. He put his boots on, carefully snugging the laces at each turn. He was working on the second boot when something moved in the building across the street. Dickey bird, he thought, and froze, keeping his eyes riveted to the spot until he felt sure the blind wasn’t going to go up after all. Back in the hallway he paused to take his toolbox out of the linen closet where it was buried between packages wrapped in polyethylene bags. He was about to leave without saying good-bye when the woman grasped his arm. Well? she asked. What? What’s the big hurry? It’s an emergency. And since when do you accept emergency jobs? Don’t I bring home enough money for you? I’ve never been inside Guadalupe’s he said, slamming the door.

  Marcus stepped decisively from his building’s vestibule, then recoiled as he turned to walk north. He took courage from waving hello to some of the neighbors. They were still awake, reeking of sweat, sitting out on their front stoops where they’d been lazily talking all night long. He’d stopped going north of Fuller Street after the Hispanics began moving into that part of the neighborhood. To get to the Metro now he would normally head south a few blocks and then turn and walk back north by way of 12th Street, no-man’s-land. He’d also changed supermarkets, and now shopped at one farther away which didn’t sell such strange, monstrous fruit.

  The Cuban exiles from the Mariel Boatlift were the first birds to land, basking in the glow of positive press; and there had been a certain romance to the new and different smells on the street. Then came the Dominicans, the Salvadorans, the Ecuadorians, and the Peruvians. In the last few years the Mexicans had shown up: the gringos’ evil twin.

  He shook hands with the filthiest of his neighbors and then headed up the street. He crossed Fuller without looking to either side. Staring at the ground, he passed by the building on the opposite corner as fast as he could. He was walking like someone who doesn’t want to be recognized, but there was nobody sitting in the doorway. It might have been the sticky August heat, or the memory of his birds in their shadows, but the faster he walked the more trapped he felt. It was the same feeling he’d had as a boy, if it was getting late and he took a shortcut home through the muddy backstreets to avoid a beating from his father, the pastor. He’d always been, and still was, the black sheep of the family. The third son of a Baptist minister, Marcus was the only bad apple. Still walking north, he quickened his step and thought that the Spanish he heard spoken beyond Fuller—so lacking in consonants—sounded like pigeons cooing. He was out of breath by the time he reached the corner of Harvard. Turning east he found that he didn’t recognize the street. In another lifetime, before going to prison, before the Cubans, he’d had a steady girlfriend from this neighborhood. She’d lived in one of the stone houses on the left side of the street but he couldn’t remember exactly which one. In those days, now faded and all but forgotten, the pastor still believed that Marcus might be reformed. He didn’t have to walk much further before he could make out the sign on Guadalupe’s up ahead. He covered the last stretch almost running, the toolbox knocking against his knee.

  It’s not that Marcus had turned out to be bad, not exactly, but he had never been able to rise to the pastor’s expectations. So he had early on succumbed to the notion that any flaw or weakness in himself meant that he was, as a whole, irredeemable. During the four ye
ars of his first prison stint no one ever came to visit him, not once. Even so, he spent his time thinking of going home, about regaining his dignity by playing the role of the prodigal son.

  They let him out on an icy Friday in February. To better stage his dramatic return to the world of the living, Marcus spent his first two nights in a hotel, waiting to appear at his father’s church during Sunday services. In order to proclaim his rebirth as loudly as possible, he paid more than he could afford for a brand new blue suit. On Sunday he arrived at the church ahead of schedule, then hid out in a café, killing time so the whole congregation would be there to witness his return. As they were singing the opening hymns he came walking up the aisle with a slow, humble step dogged by the worshippers’ murmuring. He sat down just a few rows from the altar, in the pews opposite those occupied by his mother and brothers, his sisters-in-law, his older nephews, and the children born while he’d been away. Before the pastor appeared to deliver his sermon from the pulpit, one of the ushers was sent to escort Marcus out of the church.

  The front door to Guadalupe’s was still locked, so Marcus went round to the service entrance and knocked hard. He was already soaked in sweat and hadn’t even started working yet. It must have been about a year now since his last outbreak of perfectionism; he remembered painting his room canary yellow one day during an equally unpleasant heat wave. When he’d come back to the apartment with the can of paint, the young girl who was turning tricks for him at the time was asleep. He punched and slapped her awake and, in no time at all, had kicked her out with all her belongings. Then he cleaned the corners, emptied out the closet, pushed all the furniture into the center of the room, and covered it all with a sheet. He finished painting the four walls quickly and thought that he might continue with the kitchen. Instead, while the first coat dried, he got a chair out from under the sheet and sat down to do some bird-watching. The bedroom was impeccable for half the afternoon—floor mopped, furniture dusted, window washed—but then he didn’t have the strength to continue. All the satisfaction he required came from observing his neighbors’ squalor from a sterile vantage. He called the contractor to let him know he was ready to take on some new jobs.

  Although he wasn’t wearing a watch, he knew from the angle of the sun that it was no longer so early, so he knocked harder. The door opened abruptly. A young woman—slight shoulders, sinewy arms and legs—stared out at him with a confused mixture of surprise and fear. She said something to him in Spanish. Marcus thought he could probably pick her up off the ground with one hand. In English, he said that he had come to fix the electricity. She told him to come inside, that her husband would be right back. He stroked his scraggly beard, bit his lower lip, and crossed the threshold with professional resolve.

  He found the semidarkness inside the restaurant quite disorienting. A silent tremor shook the air and something moved among the furniture. The woman noticed that he was uneasy. It’s the kids, she told him, then shouted at them in a threatening voice. They instantly bolted for the stairs and he only managed to get a good look at the last one: about ten years old, barefoot, shorts, no shirt—a long scrawny torso like a plucked chicken. The woman screamed at them again and their laughter answered from a back room. Then she led Marcus to the dining room and showed him the fuse box. The cooks get here at eight-thirty, she said. See if you can fix the problem before then. I’ll be upstairs if you need me.

  The restaurant fit the typical TV image he’d gotten of Mexico: large windows, bright colors, mismatched tables. The relative familiarity of the place allowed him to concentrate on the job at hand. He dismantled the fuse box, checked the circuit, and quickly located the socket causing the short. Working very calmly, he isolated the zone, replaced the burned-out pieces, upgraded the wiring, and cleaned the insulators. Every so often he turned to look toward the door that led from the dining room to the house, with the hope of catching sight of some bird—any bird at all.

  As the restaurant owner didn’t return, and there was no one to keep an eye on him, he left the fuse box hanging open so that he could charge them for a second hour of service. He gathered up his tools, walked between the tables, looked out the windows, and scanned the inside of the empty kitchen leisurely through the porthole on the door. He thought that if he’d known that the job was going to be so easy he’d have bought himself a newspaper to have something to pass the time with. At last, he sat down at a table next to the restroom, facing the doorway in case anybody stuck their head in. He closed his eyes for a catnap, thinking that he could be doing exactly the same thing at home.

  He was on the verge of falling asleep when he heard a very faint voice. It was calling, with a certain insistence, from inside the restroom. He got up and cracked the door open so that he could listen closely without seeing inside. The voice, he confirmed, was speaking to him, and in Spanish. A chill ran down his spine and he broke out in a cold sweat. Yes? he asked in English. The voice said something else to him he couldn’t understand. Then, with his heart in his mouth, he stuck his head inside. Whoever it was, he saw, was calling to him from inside the closed toilet stall. The tremulous voice could have belonged to anybody except a man. Probably a child. Yes? Marcus asked again. He didn’t understand the answer, which now seemed to come from a young woman. He couldn’t even say if it had spoken to him in English—he was too busy thinking that the rest of the family flock was back inside the house, a good distance away, and he was here alone, on the verge of glory. He touched the stall door with his fingertips and felt it give slightly; it wasn’t bolted. He swallowed and asked again what the person needed. The voice, perhaps an old woman’s, repeated in English that it needed napkins. He went out, got a handful of paper napkins from the counter, and went back inside. He steadied himself with his left hand on the upper part of the stall—he could see his own sweat dripping onto the paper napkin, and said: Here they are. The voice thanked him, said that he could pass them over the top. Still undecided, he rested his head against his forearm. A moment later, with his eyes closed, he raised the handful of napkins and felt them snatched out of his hand. He said, You’re welcome, and spun around. He closed up the fuse box as fast as he could, grabbed his things and left the dining room. Before leaving the restaurant he shouted to the whole bunch of them that he’d be back later for his money.

  The harsh sunlight now flooding Harvard Street was a tremendous relief. He thought that with the amount he was going to charge them, and the money he could squeeze out of his latest whore before he ran her out the door, he could buy himself a new suit and three cans of white paint, enough to redecorate his whole apartment.

  OUTRAGE

  Why do I want a life without honor

  If I already bet everything I had?

  A. ESPARZA OTEO

  A highway can be like the high seas. The sun burning on your face, the fresh cleansing breeze in your lungs, your hands tightly gripping the rails along the steel deck, the rotten stench rising from the bilge. Drake Horowitz believed this for quite some time without being able to test it out for himself. Being the newest crew member aboard the Outrageous Fortune, he had to sit in the middle of the front seat, between Verrazano and the driver. Company regulations prohibited riding outside the cabin when the truck was moving at high speeds. So, with growing resentment, he stayed put, poring over the latest American League scores in the sports section of the Baltimore Sun. Drake leaned forward slightly to keep his head out of the way, hardly paying any attention to the two men as they chattered and gossiped, trading thoughts, comments, and insults.

  The idea of christening the truck came from a photo in a National Geographic they fished out of a black plastic garbage bag. All sorts of things drifted to their ship in that way, as if following the course of a secret tide. Hefting the trash bag, fat Verrazano noticed the dead ballast of printed material inside. He weighed it a moment, raising and lowering the bag clenched in his fist, eyes narrowed, lips drawn tight. Then he dropped it to the ground and squatted down, prodding and squeezing t
he contents: Those sons of bitches think they can fool a man who’s been collecting trash for fifteen years! he said to his coworkers. After every squeeze his expert nose pondered the smells emanating from the bag: They’re magazines, he continued, recent issues, good condition, perfectly recyclable. He didn’t throw the bag into the trash compactor. Later, as they were heading back to the plant, he opened the sack and saw that it contained shopping catalogs and issues of National Geographic. Nary a hint of pornography. The driver, who according to the company hierarchy held the rank of ship’s captain, proposed that they file a formal complaint about the customer—not for violating the recycling rule, but because it was, well, unbelievable. The goddamned white man’s hypocrisy! he said in a low, dense, cavernous voice. Verrazano snorted in disgust and let the bag tumble to the floor of the cab. Drake, who had already finished the sports section, grabbed one of the magazines and began to flip through it. During their lunch break he showed them the photo. They’d stopped at a park and were seated at a picnic table, sharing a package of fish jerky and some crackers. Look, he told them, south of the border they name their trucks. The picture showed a dump truck, its rear license plate frame inscribed with a Spanish phrase in red letters: No Me Olvides. The next day, before reaching their assigned neighborhood, Drake proposed that they write Outrageous Fortune on the truck’s rear bumper. Verrazano agreed immediately; he liked the idea of a personalized workspace: his own car sported various decorations that made it unique and, in his eyes, elegant. The Captain didn’t even turn to look at them while they discussed it. Drake pointed out that they could also attach a flag to the truck, a black one, he said. Verrazano thought the idea strange but ballsy. It took them weeks to persuade the old man to let them paint the name on. He finally gave in, provided they would quit asking for the flag: company regulations prohibited exterior fixtures and any hanging objects. Fat Verrazano tried one last time, reminding him that the flag would be black. Like your ass, he added. The Captain told him to shut up. If not, he was going to throw the rosary out the window that Verrazano’d had the nerve to hang from the mirror on their first run together.