One Year of Ugly

by Caroline Mackenzie

  I propped myself up on his chest, anger tugging at me. ‘And if he doesn’t listen?’

  ‘I won’t set out to hurt Sancho. But be realistic about our circumstances. It’ll raise suspicions if I don’t do my job properly. There could be conseque—’

  I rolled off and away from him, reaching for my clothes. Feeling my temper writhing and spitting, and yet aware that I was putting Román in a difficult position, I knew the only thing I should do was distance myself, get dressed, get back in the jeep, cool it before I said or did something I’d wish I hadn’t.

  His fingertips stroked my lower back. ‘Amor, I won’t do anything I don’t have to. Easy with the drama.’

  I turned to glare at him. ‘Drama? You’re talking about physically harming my brother and I’m being a drama queen?’

  Román stood in one smooth movement. I stood as well. I wasn’t going to cower under him.

  ‘You knew what this was when it started, Yola. Don’t make things more complicated than they need to be.’ That sobering Al Pacino voice. I fucking hated it sometimes.

  ‘You think you’re Sonny Corleone?’ I spat. ‘What are you gonna do, smash his skull in with a baseball bat? Sancho’s going through a hard time. Talk to the guy, he’s not stupid. And don’t you dare make veiled threats that you might hurt my brother and expect me to be okay with that shit.’

  Román’s jaw clenched. I knew he was grappling with his anger. He didn’t like to shout or yell or show he was upset. Thought it was a sign of weakness. Our stare-off went on for a solid thirty seconds before at last he exhaled, running his hands over the back of his neck.

  ‘I won’t hurt him.’

  ‘Promise me,’ I said.

  He tugged his jeans on. ‘I said I wouldn’t. Do you know me to be a liar?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then don’t ask me to make promises like some twelve-year-old. I’ll talk to him, but so will you. Make it clear that there is no option but to listen to what I say.’

  Moments like that, when I got a real reminder of who Román was in relation to my family, the guilt would really get to me, shooting up like a geyser of heartburn. But by the time we pulled up at my house, though the guilt was still festering, my anger had waned – after all, Román had agreed to put his neck on the line for me with his lenience.

  He pulled the handbrake up to look at me. I could see he wasn’t worked up any more either. I wondered if he was relieved in his own way for an excuse not to do his job the way Ugly expected. I slid across the seat to put my arms around his neck. He resisted for a split second before leaning in to kiss me. ‘I knew you’d be trouble,’ he said as he pulled back. But he gave me a half-smile.

  ‘I’ll talk to Sancho, I promise,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure he understands how dangerous his behaviour is. It’ll be fine.’

  ‘It better be.’

  In the end Román and I each had separate cautionary chats with Sancho. And fortunately, it worked. After three months of one-night stands, endless flings, and demented masochistic drinking, Sancho finally cooled down. Vanessa’s stomach was now a big oval pod housing King’s baby (which I hadn’t yet had the balls to jokingly suggest she name Prince), her nose had broadened, dimpled saddlebags hung from her hips, and she was bloated as a bullfrog. Even her hugely engorged breasts had taken on a bovine look. Pregnancy just didn’t agree with her. It was exactly the panacea Sancho needed. He stopped drinking from the moment he woke up and returned to the comparatively stable drinking routine of all functional alcoholics: from six p.m. until KO. The stream of random women came to a halt, and he resumed twice-daily showers, much to the relief of his illegals who’d been miserably tolerating the sour rum-and-sweat stink that clung to him like a remora fish. It was just as much of a relief to the rest of us, especially me. If Román had hurt my brother at his lowest point, I wouldn’t have been able to stick around.

  And therein lay my unresolvable conflict when it came to Román – the very man I’d have to give up if he pushed the limits of hardship inflicted on my family was the same man I couldn’t bear that hardship without.

  LOOSE SCREWS

  Sancho wasn’t the only family member hit hard by the news of Vanessa’s pregnancy. While Sancho was boozing and whoring it up for those three months, Mauricio was watching the twins like a hawk, terrified that another King De Oruña Willoughby would waltz into his home, gonads bulging, just waiting for the opportunity to impregnate another of his daughters.

  ‘He even put latches on our bedroom doors so he can padlock us in when we go to bed!’ Sequestered in her room at night, Alejandra reported on Mauricio’s paranoia like a gossipy Anne Frank, texting me updates on whatever new security measures he’d taken. ‘He keeps the padlock keys on a piece of twine around his neck. He doesn’t even take it off to sleep! ¿Qué carajo?’

  At a Sunday barbecue I asked him if it was a good idea locking the girls in at night like that – ‘What if there’s a fire?’ – and he said he’d rather the twins went up in smoke as well-secured virgins than have his house turn into a brothel full of pregnant teens. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the twins’ hymens were about as intact as a piñata at the end of a Mexican birthday party.

  Lucky for Mauricio, though, none of the illegals who came to our respective households during the months following Vanessa’s insemination posed any risk of seducing his daughters. All we’d been getting lately were more ‘dancers’. Still, his paranoia persisted and Alejandra got callouses on her thumbs from texting me all night.

  Aunt Milagros took the news of Vanessa’s pregnancy just as badly as Mauricio. Worse, even. Not long after our eventful Easter lunch, where we’d already noticed the screws of her mind loosening, she was having coffee with Mamá and me. ‘It’s such a betrayal of trust,’ she was saying, blinking furiously. The vague smell of old smoke around her was even stronger now, like she was using cigarette ash as talcum powder. ‘You let these people into your home thinking you’re helping them, and then they go and do something like this, after everything we do to help.’

  ‘But Vanessa willingly let Kingsley put a bun in her oven. He didn’t force himself on her.’

  Aunt Milagros rounded on me, eyes fiery. ‘Well, that’s a fine view to take! Blame the victim! Blame the poor girl who’s been seduced by a worldly, smooth-talking soldier!’

  It was like trying to reason with a coconut. Any time she brought up Vanessa’s pregnancy (which was often), she’d flip out on anyone who didn’t see eye-to-eye with her. Whenever she saw that growing belly at family gatherings, she’d shake her head in lament and clutch the crucifix dangling from the rosary beads permanently wrapped around her wrist. She just couldn’t let go of the idea of another illegal stealthily seducing and knocking up one of our own. Then in May, while Sancho’s liver was still screaming for salvation and he was hopping from woman to woman, we finally got to the bottom of why Aunt Milagros had been stinking of smoke for months.

  Zulema, the twins and I were at her house for a movie night, midway through a corny chick flick and a jug of frozen daiquiri mix, when I smelled smoke – fresh this time, not the stale day-old smell that had become Aunt Milagros’s signature scent. One by one we all smelled it, sitting up and sniffing like a bunch of meerkats. I turned towards the smell and there was Aunt Milagros in the doorway, a full ashtray in hand, a cigarette in her mouth. I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise given the stink of her clothes and hair for the past few months – and come to think of it, her teeth and fingertips had taken on a yellow tinge, too – but you have to understand, this was the woman who caught Zulema smoking when she was twelve and force-fed her a pack of cigarettes as punishment until Zulema threw up everywhere. Now she was sucking on back-to-back cigs like they were her sole source of oxygen. She blazed through half a pack that same night, right in front of us, without a care in the world for all our jaws grazing the floor.

  When my parents saw her smoking at our family barbecue the following Sunday, they were equally sh
ocked. It was so out of character for Aunt Milagros to sit there puffing away, aureoled in smoke instead of her usual saintly halo, that it was actually awkward to talk to her about it, as if she’d slipped into some act of senility and it would be cruel to point it out. My father was the only one who didn’t feel awkward confronting her. While everyone was sucking ribs clean and Aunt Milagros was sucking on cigarette number eleven, he broached the topic.

  ‘Hermanita, those things will kill you. You must be stressed. Talk to us, tell us what’s wrong.’

  She gave a gravelly laugh, ashed her cigarette into a glass of water. ‘How to help? None of you seem the least bit concerned about what’s going on under our noses. You can’t help anything if you can’t even see the problems we have to fix.’

  She took a hard drag on the cigarette, so hard all the fine lines around her mouth stood rigid, forming a miniature mountain range. When she exhaled, Mamá coughed pointedly and fanned the air in front of her even though Aunt Milagros was on the other side of the dining table, blowing smoke in the opposite direction.

  ‘I’ll help myself, thank you very much, Hector,’ said Aunt Milagros. ‘That’s why I bought the gun.’

  At that, Mamá threw her hands up in angry disbelief, her pork rib clattering onto her plate. Everyone paused, faces smeared with barbecue sauce, fingers sticky, to gape at Aunt Milagros. A gun?

  She went on to tell us that she’d purchased an automatic air rifle. It was only a pellet gun, but according to her it looked like an AK-47, the real deal. She said it all very casually while puffing on her cigarette, unruffled by the shock on all our faces and by Sancho and Mauricio’s tipsy sniggering.

  ‘What are you going to do, Milagros? Shoot someone if you think they’re suspicious?’ asked my father, brow knit in concern.

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I need to feel safe under my own roof and I can’t trust the animals Beelzebub keeps forcing into my home. Remember, Hector, it’s just me on my own in that house. I have no husband to protect me.’

  Papá dropped the subject. Even he couldn’t withstand the discomfort of the spinster card being played.

  At the next Sunday barbecue, when we were all on safe-house duty, one of Aunt Milagros’s illegals told Papá that he’d seen her patrolling the house in the dead of night with the gun hoisted onto her shoulder, a lit cigarette clamped between her teeth. When this story was eventually relayed to me, I couldn’t imagine it was true. Aunt Milagros prowling around the house like some linen-clad, rosary-wielding Rambo? But the next time I saw her, a living, walking pillar of smoke, voice husky with cigarette phlegm, I believed it.

  I toyed with talking to Román, asking him to maybe leave Aunt Milagros out of the rotation for a while, give her a breather. After I heard the story of her prowling, I nearly did tell him. We were driving along the isolated Arima Road, no houses, no streetlights, only dark rainforest to either side of the slim ribbon of asphalt as we sped along it, Román’s hand in its familiar spot on my thigh. I’d been on the verge of telling him then, had actually started – ‘There’s something I need to talk …’ – when he slammed the brakes, crossing my body with his arm to stop me lunging forward.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, whipping off his seat belt.

  He didn’t give me time to ask why he’d stopped. He was already out in the road, kneeling, scooping up what looked like an exceptionally large, round-bottomed guinea pig. I got out, too.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘An agouti. It’s hurt.’

  I watched him take the quivering animal to the roadside, walk a few feet into the bush and gently place it on the ground, covering it with a large fallen balisier leaf.

  ‘Hopefully no predators will spot it. Didn’t see any blood or anything so maybe it’ll recover by morning.’

  When we got back into the jeep and his hand resumed its post on my thigh, I squeezed it in lieu of telling him I’d never seen anything so sweet as what he’d just done. I didn’t say anything about Aunt Milagros, either, because I saw the man he was – hardened and calloused by experience but not by nature. If I told him about Aunt Milagros he’d want to help and then I’d be putting him in a position where he’d have to counteract Ugly’s orders. I didn’t want him to have to deal with that on top of the angst he already felt over his job, putting him between a rock and a hard place like I’d done when Sancho was having his meltdown. Our relationship was complicated and dangerous enough. Why make things even stickier?

  I said nothing and no one did anything, collectively turning a blind eye to the changes in Aunt Milagros, and hoping – if not fully believing – that the only collateral damage of her mental unravelling would be to her lungs.

  With the way our familial luck had been since Aunt Celia’s death, we should’ve known better.

  SAME FAN, MORE SHIT

  Though I’d decided not to discuss the conundrum of Aunt Milagros’s precarious mental state with Román, my time with him was still a source of respite, from the stress of Aunt Milagros and everything else. With my family, all we spoke about was our situation, our illegals, our trials and tribulations. We’d become pathological complainers, especially because we couldn’t complain to anyone but each other – no one on the outside could know what was going on. With Román, there was none of that. There were only childhood anecdotes, vigorous debates about the merits of this book or that movie or that dubbed-over Nineties sitcom (though Román knew hardly any of those). Whenever an Executive Relocation Package apartment was available, we’d get to play house, too. Fully stocked with everything to meet the affluent, high-paying illegal immigrant’s needs, these apartments were handled solely by Roman, so we were safe from the threat of Ugly. There, I could pretend that was what it felt like to wake up next to Román, to be his live-in girlfriend, to bitch about his dirty boxers on the floor, his hair wrapped around the soap, the fact that he never did the dishes – all those mundane aggravations that add up to domestic intimacy.

  Lying on my back on the plush neutral-hued duvet of one of the exec apartments one night, inhaling the fragrant THC of local high-grade weed and watching as Román did back twists on the hardwood floor in his boxers, I marvelled at how good it felt to step into this imagined life with him. Would this fantasy ever really come true, though? Would Román ever be able to stop working for Ugly? Would we ever be able to actually take this thing we had into the realm of daylight and real life? The weed anxiety spread its thorny branches and I took another drag to shake it off, watching as Román lay supine, arms stretched out to the sides with one bent leg crossed over his body, exhaling and deepening the stretch. When he twisted the other way, his head turned towards me. I flipped over onto my stomach, arching my back into a posture I hoped would convey the wanton minx thing I was going for. He crooked a come-hither finger at me.

  ‘I’m very comfortable here, thank you,’ I said with a toss of my head.

  ‘I don’t care. Get your ass over here.’

  ‘I don’t want to interrupt your stretching.’

  ‘That’s exactly why I want you here. I wanna see how limber you are.’

  ‘Oh I’m very limber I’ll have you know.’

  ‘You not gonna come down here and show me?’

  ‘Not good to stretch unless I’m warmed up.’

  He leapt onto the balls of his feet. ‘Oh I’ll warm your ass up.’

  As I jumped up from the bed, letting him chase me until we collapsed back into the soft duvet, I knew then that it didn’t matter what happened with us in the end. The future wasn’t important when we had this present.

  Shortly before daybreak, I tiptoed back into the house, shutting the door softly behind me so I wouldn’t wake the illegals staying with us – a batch of men for a change: three guys in their late twenties planning to island-hop their way to Florida. Good luck, hombres!

  As I made my way towards the bedroom hallway, past the pull-out couch and futon where the guys were sleeping, I noticed the dark outline of a figure sitting on the e
dge of our back porch. I froze, heart thudding.

  Ugly?

  I took two tremulous steps towards the porch doors, squinting through the glass panes. Then I saw the grey curls, the paisley shirt, the thin stream of cigarette smoke. Aunt Milagros.

  As I eased the door open to go out to the porch, I glanced at my watch. It was going on four-thirty in the morning. Aunt Milagros started as I put a hand on her shoulder. Her air rifle was resting across her lap, a dozen cigarette butts scattered in the grass around her feet. ‘Hello, querida,’ she said, as though there was nothing out of the ordinary about her sitting with an automatic pellet gun on our porch at four a.m.

  I sat next to her, coughing slightly as she blew a stream of smoke.

  ‘What are you doing here, Tía? Is everything all right?’

  ‘Ha!’ she flicked the cigarette butt into the yard. I watched the glowing tip soar in an arc to land in the unruly grass that Papá no longer had time to mow. ‘Everything is all right. Not that any of you would know it.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘All fast asleep with a bunch of strange men in your house. How do you know they’re not just waiting to strike in the middle of the night? Who’s keeping a goddamned watch here? Everything’s all right because I came to make sure it was all right.’

  ‘Aunt Milagros, we’ve had illegals staying with us for like six months now. They’ve all been fine. We’ve never “kept watch” and there’s never been a problem.’

  ‘Oh really? So Vanessa isn’t pregnant by some filthy illegal? I’d say that’s a problem, Yola, wouldn’t you?’

  She lit up another cig.

  I shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t say it’s a problem. Not my problem, anyway. Vanessa thought Kingsley was cute, so she slept with him and got pregnant. What’s the big shocker in that? Happens all the time.’

  Aunt Milagros squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head like a dog shaking water from its fur. For a second I thought she might stomp her feet and throw a tantrum.