One Year of Ugly

by Caroline Mackenzie

  ‘It doesn’t happen all the time. IT DOES NOT!’

  ‘Aunt Milagros! Shhh! Not so loud!’

  She turned her face to me and her eyes were red, probably from a combination of exhaustion and all the cigarettes. ‘We cannot let these men run amok in our homes. We have to stay vigilant.’

  Nimble as an acrobat, she sprang to her feet and slung the gun strap over her shoulder.

  ‘Everything is in order here.’ Her white linen pants quivered in the breeze as though shaking with laughter at her militant tone. ‘I’m going back to my house to do rounds until dawn.’

  She turned, walking briskly across the garden and around the side of the house, disappearing from view.

  ‘When are you going to sleep?’ I called out, forgetting that I’d shushed her only a second ago.

  She didn’t answer. I don’t even know if she heard me. What I did know was that Aunt Milagros had officially lost her marbles.

  I was too unnerved by the state of Aunt Milagros to sleep. Aside from her linen and paisley armour, everything about her was completely warped – from the hadn’t-been-combed-in-months cave-woman hair to the masculine stride and the smoke perpetually wafting around her like she was carved out of dry ice.

  How could I help her without involving Román? I didn’t know what to do. We’d already lost one aunt that year. I didn’t want to lose another to a full-blown nervous breakdown or accidental suicide by pellet gun. I searched every corner of my mind for some way to soothe my anxiety, but only got more worked up. I remembered then that this wasn’t the first time a pregnancy announcement had tipped Aunt Milagros over the edge. Maybe this was all just a symptom of her wishing she’d had kids herself and it would all blow over, just a temporary blip in sanity. Because according to Aunt Celia’s manuscript, Aunt Milagros hadn’t taken the news of Aunt Celia’s pregnancy too well either.

  It was 1996 and Mauricio had made himself a millionaire again by breeding and skinning Orinoco crocodiles, critically endangered and therefore illegal to ‘harvest’, yet renowned for the unfortunate blessing of having beautiful hides just perfect for crafting high-end suitcases, shoes, bags, wallets and belts that were scattered to luxury stores all around the world, that inimitable Orinoco-croc sheen catching the eye of many an Arab princeling, British aristocrat and brittle-boned supermodel.

  Here we are – more money than the Pope. We could even build ourselves a teeny weeny Vatican City, buy a penthouse anywhere in the world if we didn’t have to stick around in this backwater to keep Mauricio close to the crocs. But at least there’s not a bulb in our house that’s not twinkling in a chandelier, not a bed without four posters and a velvet canopy, or a room without a Persian rug and priceless black-walnut antiques. Plus being stuck in this shithole town means we can rub my parents’ noses in it after all the time we spent cleaning their gutters and mopping and sweeping and raking their fucking leaves in exchange for rent, like we were peasants on a hacienda begging for charity from the Patrón. Let me tell you, those two are still as cold-blooded as when they abandoned me with the goddamned nuns. But who the hell cares, because now we’re rich enough to found our own religion on the Rock of St Mauricio and my parents will never be able to lord themselves over me again.

  This was the state of things when Aunt Celia announced that she was finally pregnant, having convinced Mauricio to lay off the weekly blow binges long enough to at least get his polla back in good working order.

  Everyone’s at my parents’ house for dinner. All my brothers – Hector, good as gold like always, and Ignacio and Rubio, drunk like always. Milagros of course is there, boring us with her usual violin-accompanied whining about joining a nunnery if Prince Valiant doesn’t appear out of thin air.

  Before telling them about the baby, we figure we’ll set the celebratory tone by giving out a few party favours. Gold watches. Cartier. We give them out and I see Milagros’s face go from pink to red to purple like some tie-dyed chameleon. Then you know what the sanctimonious little bitch does? She takes one look at that watch and throws the thing clear across the table. If I’d been as flat-chested as she is, the pendeja would’ve cracked my fucking sternum. I’m about to throw a bowl of scalding soup in her face when I realize what’ll really burn her.

  I stand all martyr-like. ‘Oh, Milagros, I’m sorry you don’t like the gift, but hopefully you’ll be more pleased with my news.’

  I put a hand to my stomach and lay it on her – pregnant! Ignacio and Rubio jump up on the table and start carousing, and the soup bowls are clattering on the floor and Mamá and Papá are hollering at them to get down and stop stamping in the food and Milagros is just sitting there, breathing hard, and I’m watching her and I know it’s coming.

  Then KA-BOOM! She fucking BLOWS. Goes feral.

  Starts screaming that a couple of crass, money-hungry criminals like us don’t deserve a baby, and she’s flinging cutlery everywhere, yelling that she won’t stay in this house a second longer and she’ll leave that same night, and Ignacio and Rubio are dancing some kind of lunatic jig on the table, spattering everyone with stew and beans, shouting that it’s high time Milagros join a nunnery anyway because Prince Valiant ain’t never turning up, and food is all over the place and crockery is tumbling off the table to shatter on the floor, and Hector is tugging at their pant legs trying to get them down from there, and Mauricio is pounding the table and laughing his coked-up head off, and Mamá is crying she’s so happy for a new grandchild, and Papá has his head in his hands, and it’s all fucking magnificent.

  Aunt Milagros moved out the next day. Not to a nunnery, though Uncle Ignacio and Uncle Rubio would’ve shaved her head that same night to get her ready to be a novice if my father hadn’t stopped them, but to a distant relative’s home in Caracas, hours away. She cut herself off from her siblings and parents for six months, returning every letter and ignoring every phone call.

  Still, moving to Caracas and not speaking to anyone for a few months was hardly the same as smoking compulsively, buying a pellet gun and doing late-night patrols. I shivered at the thought of Aunt Milagros catching me sneaking out to meet Román. What would she do – shoot me?

  The next morning I relayed my conversation with Aunt Milagros to my father.

  ‘Okay,’ he sighed, ‘I’ll deal with it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Reassuring!

  In the end, his big solution was to call Aunt Milagros and ‘have a chat’ to try putting her addled mind at ease. He did call. But it was a big fat waste of time: two days after that futile conversation, Mauricio’s entire household was awoken in the middle of the night by the screaming of one of their illegals’ daughters. The little girl had gotten up to use the bathroom and was scared senseless by Aunt Milagros’s face pressed against the window, gun barrel pointed at the glass. It was like a prison riot after the child screamed, with the illegals scampering around in an uproar thinking Immigration had come to haul them back to Venezuela and the twins and Vanessa banging on their doors and rattling their windows, shouting for liberation, thinking the house must be on fire with all that ruckus.

  I went with my parents and Mauricio to see Aunt Milagros the day after the incident. She showed no remorse. When she justified her actions, she had the same strangely militant attitude as when I’d spoken to her that night on the porch, as self-assured as Castro giving interviews from the sierras during the revolution.

  ‘I have every right to patrol my family’s houses and make sure things are in order,’ she said coolly. ‘Just because the men of this family have failed to look out for our family’s wellbeing doesn’t mean I will.’

  ‘Milagros, you’re being ridiculous,’ snapped my mother. ‘Creeping around people’s houses at night with a pellet gun is far from protecting our wellbeing. You could hurt someone.’

  ‘We’re all very mindful of the risks of the situation, Milagros,’ Papá added gently. ‘Mauricio is even locking the girls’ rooms at night.’
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br />   Hearing that, Aunt Milagros slammed her hands onto the dining table. The glass ashtray rattled against the tabletop. ‘WE’RE ALL JUST SITTING DUCKS!’

  She screamed it over and over until her face was purple and Papá had to grab her by the shoulders to get her to hush.

  Meanwhile, Aunt Milagros’s illegals, a woman and her young son, a rare non-Venezuelan pair from the Dominican Republic, were out on her porch. Before the conversation took that crazy turn, Aunt Milagros had shamelessly informed us that she now locked all of her illegals outside during the day while she slept. She left them with a stocked cooler of food and water. Then in the afternoon when she woke up, she’d let them back in. All night every night, she patrolled her house, ours and Mauricio’s, until morning when the illegals were put outside again.

  Back at home after our failed intervention, none of us could come up with a solution. Aunt Milagros had gone off the deep end and no one knew how to save her.

  ‘Maybe we should have Beelzebub warn Ugly,’ suggested Mamá. ‘Milagros is a danger to those poor people staying with her. She has to stop housing illegals for a while.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Papá. ‘I’ll call him tomorrow on the emergency cell.’

  Román never got the call. Papá never got a chance to place it. Because less than twenty-four hours after our talk with Aunt Milagros, she shot that little Dominican kid who was staying with her.

  Luckily it was only a pellet and though she didn’t hit anything major, she did bust a couple ligaments in his shoulder.

  No one was ever really clear on how the whole thing happened, but we did find out that the boy’s mother went absolutely berserk after Aunt Milagros pulled the trigger. So did Aunt Milagros, but more in a PTSD sort of way. Seeing the boy clutching his shoulder that was spurting blood like a sprinkler system, Aunt Milagros dropped the gun and locked herself in her bedroom closet. That’s where the police found her when they eventually turned up in response to a neighbour’s call to report a gunshot and screaming.

  Not long after, Aunt Milagros, the boy and his mother were all carted away in the back of a police car. No ambulance ever came. The police dropped the mother and her son off at the Port of Spain General Hospital, accompanied by a police escort, and Aunt Milagros was left in a holding cell at the police station.

  The shit had hit the fan. Again.

  All of this was relayed to us by a woman who came to see my parents on the night of the shooting. Our illegals had just left that afternoon, so we were celebrating by binge-watching TV and eating Chinese takeout. I was munching on a spring roll when we heard a knock on the door. Papá groaned.

  ‘Por Dios, Ugly must really be making a fortune! More illegals already?’ He pushed himself up off the couch and went to the kitchen in his boxer shorts to grab some clothes off the airing rack that stood atop the now obsolete dryer.

  ‘That’s not illegals,’ I said to my mother. It wasn’t Román’s precise triple knock. We’d also never had a drop-off at night.

  Mamá went to the window to peep out. Papá walked up behind her, wearing a clean but crumpled pair of shorts and a T-shirt. ‘Who is it?’ he whispered.

  ‘No sé. Some lady.’

  Papá opened the front door and after some brief introductions, he invited the woman inside. Zulema was out with friends, but would’ve had a heart attack if she saw her: barefaced with wire-rimmed glasses, androgynously cropped grey hair, dressed in a completely asexual beige polo shirt and khakis. I could just imagine my sister whisking this poor woman into her lair and assigning her swatches of magenta, emerald and midnight blue. ‘You’re a Winter! I can tell right off the bat!’

  The woman came in shyly, fiddling nervously with a wooden rosary bracelet on her wrist. It was clear she hadn’t come on a happy errand.

  My parents guided her into the living room where I was wiping my spring-roll-greased fingers on a napkin in anticipation of having to shake the woman’s hand, but she just nodded at me and said, ‘Hello, hello,’ in a timid little voice, shifting her weight from foot to foot.

  My father gestured to the couch. ‘Please, sit down … Bethan?’

  ‘Yes, Bethan,’ she said with a feeble nod. ‘Thank you.’

  She sat. My parents sat. I kept sitting. We all looked at her, waiting for her to explain.

  ‘Well,’ she ventured at last. ‘As I said, Mr Palacios …’

  ‘Hector, please.’

  ‘As I said, Hector, I work with Milagros down at the Sacred Heart Community Centre, although we haven’t seen her in a while. Something about having her hands tied with night work, I believe, and needing her days for rest?’ If only Bethan knew that Aunt Milagros’s ‘night work’ consisted of armed patrols of her family’s homes. ‘Anyway, you can imagine my surprise then, when out of the blue Milagros calls me up about an hour ago to say she was arrested. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but she accidentally shot a child who was staying with her – the son of a friend, she said? The child is okay, but they’re holding her at the police station down at Four Roads.’

  ‘¡No lo puedo creer!’ Mamá pressed a fist to her chest and threw herself against the backrest of the couch. She’d always had a cinematic flair for drama.

  ‘Oh Lawd,’ said Papá in his faux-Trini accent. He exhaled. ‘Why she didn’t call we?’ The usual nervous-tic Trini dialect.

  ‘I’m not sure. She just asked me to pass the message along. She wouldn’t give me your number, just the address. Sorry again to barge in, but I figured you’d want to know right away.’ Then she told us all the rest, about Aunt Milagros in the closet and the police taking her away. After she’d told everything there was to tell, she stood and smoothed the front of her khakis. ‘I’d better be going. I don’t want to intrude any longer, but I didn’t think you’d want to wait before finding out.’

  ‘We appreciate that you come all the way here,’ said Papá, standing as well. ‘Thank you so much.’

  Mamá was still steadily pounding her fist against her chest, eyes closed. I took her free hand and squeezed it, more to get her to stop with the theatrics than to offer comfort.

  Papá walked Bethan out, but before she left, she turned on the front step and said, ‘Listen, I know Milagros’s residential status here is a little … iffy. But I hope you know she was one of our best, most beloved workers down at Sacred Heart. We’re going to do everything we can to keep her here and make sure this doesn’t become a real problem. I called one of our church brothers who’s a lawyer. Hopefully he can help. Such a sweet woman. I’m sure this is all a terrible mistake.’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ said Papá.

  But he knew it was no mistake. It had been a catastrophe waiting to happen ever since the day Aunt Milagros bought herself that pellet gun.

  We also knew why Aunt Milagros hadn’t called us. In a moment of lucidity she must have realized that the less the police knew about all of us, the better.

  As my father returned to the couch, switched off the TV and put his arm around Mamá, it was all too clear that Aunt Milagros’s fuck-up was a thread that had been pulled from a very tenuous tapestry. What were the police going to ask the illegal mother and the kid who’d been shot? What would they find out about Aunt Milagros’s irregular status and her safe-housing? Where would that lead next? Each of us was a link in a chain that went directly to our lead ball: Ugly. And, of course, Román.

  This was going to be a problem – a big one.

  A TIGRESS NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH

  After Bethan’s visit, there was no family meeting, no grand plan to liberate Aunt Milagros from her holding cell. We didn’t do anything because we couldn’t. We were illegal immigrants housing other illegal immigrants. Our hands were tied, our mouths gagged.

  Our only hope was Bethan, and she wasn’t much help. All she told Papá the day after she came and the day after that and every day the following week until she stopped taking his calls, was: ‘Our church brother is doing all he can.’ Which was apparently nothing.

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sp; Papá called various immigration lawyers, blowing money on consultations, but they all gave the same advice: Don’t go to the police station. Don’t do anything. Not unless we wanted to land up in that holding cell with Aunt Milagros.

  I overheard my parents talking in the kitchen after one of those disheartening consultations. ‘No legal recourse and no loopholes. That’s all he kept saying,’ said Papá. ‘He said if any of us gets caught living here illegally, we’re out. Milagros doesn’t have a chance and there’s nothing we can do to help her. It’s either prison or deportation for her.’

  I felt for him. I felt for Aunt Milagros.

  More than anything, I felt for myself: I hadn’t seen or heard from Román since the day before Aunt Milagros shot the Dominican boy.

  The day after Bethan’s visit, I didn’t expect to see him. I figured he’d have his hands tied sorting out the Aunt Milagros mess. I expected to see him the day after, though.

  And the day after.

  And the day after.

  But nothing.

  Seven days and nothing.

  To anyone else, a week might seem like no time at all, but every day that I didn’t see or hear from him felt slower than the last, like I was living in an hourglass filled with treacle. My mind ran rampant as one week trickled slowly, excruciatingly, into two and then three, with no way to contact him because his only regular cell phone was tapped by Ugly, and he normally called me from untraceable burner phones anyway.

  At first I suspected that Aunt Milagros’s breakdown had driven him away, then when there was still no word, my neuroses really started picking up speed, whirring gyroscopes of panic generating an unbearable anxious energy in me. I convinced myself that it wasn’t Aunt Milagros – that I’d done something to offend or repulse him. I picked apart every second of the last times we’d seen each other. Had he been quieter than usual? Did he hold my hand like he normally did on the drive home? Had he kissed me goodbye? I ran through each memory until they were smeared blurs in my mind, impossible to grasp with any clarity, drained of colour and movement – grainy sepia stills splotched with hurt and confusion.