‘So, ladies and gent, you all aware that Milagros cause a bit of a problem for me and my operations, yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Papá. He cleared his throat loudly like he usually did when about to tell a lie (I’d figured this out as a kid because he’d clear his throat compulsively when telling my siblings and me about Santa Claus and the like). ‘And we haven’t seen Milagros yet. At the police station, they do not tell us where she has been sent or if she is there. We’re very worried.’
Ugly flashed his movie star’s smile. His mouth stretched clear across his face to meet his ears, each bearing a large diamond stud. That wide, angular grin made him look like an alligator.
‘Milagros well taken care of,’ he said. ‘She just fine. But don’t expect to hear from her any time soon.’
Now Ugly’s grin was so wide his face looked like it’d been sliced clean in half.
‘How you not going and tell me where my own sister gone?’ said Papá, giving it his all with the fake indignation, the damned dialect tic cropping up like it always did. He leaned forward in his chair to drive a finger onto the coffee table. ‘I DEMAND you tell me where Milagros is.’
‘Hector!’ Ugly laughed. ‘I ain’t have to tell you a fucking thing, my man. I could bring Milagros in front your face and slit she open from her chinny-chin-chin right down to her hairy Catholic cunt and you wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. So it best you think before you go making demands like you forget who the fuck I am.’
Mamá made the sign of the cross and started up with the chest-pounding. ‘Ay Milagros.’ I had to hand it to her: it was a credible performance. Even I sort of wondered if Mamá had somehow forgotten Aunt Milagros was safe in Venezuela.
Ugly chuckled. He was flicking his lighter open and closed, squinting at the flame shooting up then disappearing again, like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. ‘Calm yourself, Yasmin. Milagros just fine. Forget about Milagros.’
While he stared at the flame, his smile never wavered. His eyes were two red slits. With those eyes and the reptilian grin, he genuinely looked demonic. I almost couldn’t bear to look at him.
‘Forget about she and worry about all-you own selves. Maybe I getting soft, but usually I’d have shoot every one of you between the eye for what Milagros do. Imagine – nobody come to warn poor old Ugly that Milagros gone mad. Nobody even think, “Hmm, now how this crazy bitch could mess up Ugly business?” Very disappointing. We had such a good run of things since Celia kick the bucket.’
He stood and tucked the lighter in his pocket, then drew a handgun from a holster hidden in his jacket. He held the gun and contemplated it the same way he’d looked at the flame – up close, squinting hard.
‘Fire really something special, eh?’ he said, almost to himself, while examining the gun from all angles. ‘You could do so much with it. Cook a food. Light a fire to cosy up. Burn down house. Make a little ball of lead fly in a straight line till it end up in somebody skull.’
My father got up from his seat while Ugly was saying all this. His shoulders were thrown back, head held at that alpha male angle it took on when he was leading a family meeting or sizing up one of our new boyfriends. Every muscle in my body was suddenly taut. Could he really be insane enough to square up to Ugly? Mamá was staring intently at Papá, fist glued to her chest, face like a frightened rabbit.
Ugly hadn’t picked up on Papá’s confrontational stance. He seemed as relaxed as could be. He even tucked the gun back into its holster and grabbed hold of the cane, resting his hands atop it like some genteel old fogey.
‘I going to give all-you a chance to make up for how you let me down with Milagros,’ he said smoothly. ‘I am a businessman first and foremost, after all. Things could usually be rectified in dollars and cents for me. If we consider things that way, what Milagros did only increase the interest on Celia’s debt. Naturally, all-you now have to pay that interest.’
Saying this, he slowly raised the cane to aim it directly at my father like a professor singling out a student with a pointer. Papá was unfazed. Maybe he thought we had a stronger leg to stand on because Román had two-timed Ugly. Like Román would keep us safe just as he’d kept Aunt Milagros safe.
But Román wasn’t there.
‘How is it that Celia’s debt not paid yet, Ugly?’ My father’s chin was lifted, defiant. ‘Since November we are keeping people in our houses for you. It is July. This have to come to a stop sooner or later.’
Ugly howled and hooted. He was tickled pink by that one.
‘It continue as long as I say, amigo! And I could tell you one thing – it most likely to be later rather than sooner!’
‘I think the debt is paid already.’ My father walked forward until he and Ugly were squared off, separated only by the rigid horizontal cane between them. ‘Enough is enough.’
‘I go agree to disagree on that one, Hector. I also go have to ask you to take a seat.’ He prodded my father once, lightly, in the chest with the cane. ‘Because you in my personal space and I don’t fucking like it.’
Papá didn’t move. Ugly exhaled as though disappointed in him.
Then in one coordinated movement, Ugly lowered the cane, withdrew the gun and aimed it smack in the middle of my father’s forehead. Almost point-blank range. We heard the bullet slide into the chamber with a neat little click as Ugly took off the safety.
There wasn’t a breath in that room.
Papá took two steps backwards but didn’t sit.
‘Thank you, Hector. Now without any further interruption, here how things going to work from now on.’
He re-holstered the gun and perched himself on the couch, folding his hands across the curve of the cane. He then proceeded to tell us about his latest entrepreneurial venture: a gentlemen’s club.
For those not up to speed on their sex-trade jargon, ‘gentlemen’s club’ is a euphemism for strip club. This explained all the dancers who’d been staying with our households. None of them had come to escape Maduro’s bullshit. They came for a specific job opportunity: to work for Ugly in his soon-to-be-opened strip club.
With all the bizarre aplomb of someone pitching to a panel of investors, Ugly informed us that strip clubs were illegal in Trinidad, even though there were a few tucked away behind Chinese restaurants and various seedy establishments. The problem, he said, was that these strip clubs were strip-clubs-cum-brothels. A lap dance could easily turn into a fingerbang or a blow job or whatever the guy had the cash to pay for. While gesturing dramatically with the cane, Ugly explained that he had loftier ambitions for his business.
‘My club go be like all the global strip club franchises, like Spearmint Rhino. No mattress in a back room. No groping up the dancers. No nastiness. This going to be the highest standard of gentlemen’s club. Class, style, exclusive. Not just anybody could get in neither. Only the cream of the crop could cross my threshold to feast they eyes on the most beautiful Latin women in the world.’ His eyes glowed red, his tongue darting feverishly between the corners of his mouth to wet his lips. ‘It go be like in Prohibition, when everybody want to go the speakeasies, where you went to see and be seen. This go be the start of an underground empire!’ He raised the cane with a triumphant flourish then looked around the room as though expecting applause.
Mamá cleared her throat. Zulema looked slightly confused. Papá’s face showed nothing but contempt. I was begrudgingly impressed that Ugly knew about the Prohibition and speakeasies and international gentlemen’s club franchising.
‘So where do we come in?’ asked Papá, weary.
‘I have the dancers,’ Ugly replied, pulling another pre-made joint from his jacket pocket. ‘All you go be staff. And to be clear, your services to be provided free of charge.’
So that was our punishment for Aunt Milagros: in addition to safe-housing, we’d be unremunerated strip-club workers.
My father’s face resembled nothing so much as a scorpion pepper, red and engorged with fury. He cleared the few
feet between him and the couch to stand over Ugly. ‘If you think my daughters go work in a dirty strip club, you mad! I will NEVER allow it!’
Before I could even process the stupidity of what my father had done, Ugly had driven the curved handle of the cane into the base of my father’s nose, breaking it in one clean shot. Papá stumbled backwards, hands over his face. My mother was on her feet, screaming. Zulema and I leapt up from our seats open-mouthed but no screams came out. Ugly had got up, was taking slow steps forward, eyes locked onto my father. Blood streamed over Papá’s mouth and chin. He was disoriented, dazed by the blow. Ugly raised the cane. I shrieked as it came down on the back of my father’s skull. Papá’s knees buckled, he fell forward into a kneel, cradling the back of his head. Fat drops of blood splattered from his nose onto the tiles. Mamá started forward to run to him but Ugly pointed the cane at us and tutted.
‘You see what I have in my hand?’ asked Ugly evenly.
We didn’t answer.
‘I said you see what I have in my hand?’
We nodded, knowing better than to risk no response.
‘This is a rebar that come from a house my father try to build when I was a schoolboy.’ He lowered the cane and walked in a slow circle around Papá, who was still kneeling and hunched over. I think he was concussed. He didn’t move or say a word, but his body swayed slightly like at any second he might flop to the side or flat onto his face.
‘My father was a good, hard-working, honest man. He always tell me be kind. Tell me respect people, think about they feelings. That how my father live he life. He work hard, save up, and finally he have enough money so he could build a nice big house. And you know what happen when that house halfway up? My good, kind, respectful father get rob by a man who not so good or kind or respectful. Not once or twice, but all the time. When them bad-john see he start to earn money, he get rob every fucking payday, and if he try to hide the money, he get beat and I get beat and my sisters get drag in a alley by these men who know it don’t do any good to be kind and have respect. My father lose every cent. We lose the house. We lose everything.
‘I gone to that half-finish house and take a good look at the future my father lose. The future I lose. Then I pick up this piece of rebar from the construction site like a souvenir of everything we lose – a reminder of why I never going to be kind or have respect for no-fucking-body. I make up my mind then and there – kindness and consideration only make you weak. People in the town where I grow up say they could see it in my face the day I gone for that rebar and decide to never be weak like my father. They say my face turn ugly from that day, that all the badness in me come through the pores and twist up my whole face. I never care. I tell them, good, call me Ugly. I could survive ugly in life. Better ugly than weak. If you weak you take licks like a dog and anybody could take away everything from you.
‘So when people like your pappy Hector here feel he could play on my good nature, which allow me to give all-you Vene cunts all kind of different way to repay the debts and fuck-ups of your family members, you could understand why I cannot tolerate that type of disrespect. That would be weakness. And it don’t have no room for weakness in this life. Not my life.’
He’d made a full circle to stand in front of Papá, who was groaning and trying to straighten up, blinking hard to focus.
Ugly tapped the cane on Papá’s shoulder. ‘Get up, Hector.’ He pointed the cane at Mamá. ‘Yasmin, get the man some water. This conversation not over. He have to wake his ass up.’
My mother ran to the kitchen.
Satisfied that he’d made his point, Ugly sat on the couch. He gestured for Zulema and me to sit back down. We did. Zulema was crying but I found myself looking Ugly straight in the face. Anger pushed out my fear. I wanted him to know how much he disgusted me. I wished I were stupid enough to launch myself at him and claw his eyes out. Lucky for me, he didn’t look back at me. He crossed his legs, waving one foot in its white snakeskin brogue, and stared at my father as though daring him to try defying him again.
Mamá blew into the room with a glass of water and kneeled beside my father, murmuring to him. Ugly, meanwhile, was lighting up his second joint.
Finally Papá managed to move my mother aside, and even with two instant black eyes, a busted nose pouring blood, and a probable concussion, he stood up with his chest puffed out like a gladiator.
‘We won’t do it. You hit me as much as you want. My daughters are not strippers.’
‘¡Puta madre, Hector!’ shrieked my mother. ‘SHUT UP!’
Ugly sniggered. ‘Take your wife advice and shut your mouth, Hector. Because I ain’t go hit you again, but I go shoot every fucking tooth out your head if you feel you going to disobey me.’
‘I am trying to do the best for my family,’ said Papá stiffly, his voice all nasal and weird from the broken nose. He was fucking insane. Or maybe it was the concussion messing with him.
‘And that exactly why you should do as I say, amigo.’ Ugly stayed unnervingly cavalier while he finished his joint. ‘I understand your resistance to working in my gentlemen’s club. I not unreasonable, Hector. Not unreasonable at all. But if you don’t work there, if any of your family members feel they not working there, I can promise, hand on heart …’ He put his hand on his heart. ‘… that I go personally gut each and every one of all-you myself. I go sell your organs to recoup my unpaid debts from Celia, and send your skinned hides directly to your father. Maybe he could use them for a lampshade, or to upholster a couch, I ain’t know. I believe his address is Calle Principal, house 104, San Antonio Parish, Libertador Municipality – that right? So you make your decision whether or not you want to disobey what I telling you. That up to you, Hector. But I assume you not stupid enough to make the wrong choice.’
Then, smiling as always, Ugly stood, hooked the cane over his arm, and left.
The following morning, Ugly left us a little something, I guess to prove that his threats weren’t empty and that he did indeed know a thing or two about gutting and skinning living things.
Mamá was the one to discover it when she was heading over to the annex.
Attached to our front door with inexplicably powerful superglue was the grotesquely skinned head of Aunt Milagros’s unnamed spinster cat, its mouth rigidly open and stuffed with a balled-up note.
My father, sister and I ran outside at Mamá’s screams. Papá, lurid violet bruises beneath his eyes, shielded the hideous cat head from my mother’s view, and Zulema and I took her into the house where she beat her chest and wailed. Meanwhile Papá dug the note out of the cat’s mouth and read it aloud, his voice still unnaturally nasal. In neatly printed lettering, it said: ‘Make the right decision for your family, Hector – Best wishes, FEO’.
Papá tossed the note and tried prying the cat head off our door. The thing wouldn’t budge. That superglue worked. Eventually he called Sancho to bring over his toolkit and give him a hand. Then Papá inspected the house’s perimeter and found that the cat’s organs and innards were scattered around our porch, black and shifting with flies. He gathered it all in a trash bag while we watched, gagging, from the living room. Further inspection revealed that other severed cat parts had also been superglued all over the place. The stiff tail was stuck to one of the porch pillars, a hind leg stuck onto the groin of a garden gnome like a disproportionately large, fluffy erection. On the front bumper of Papá’s minivan, the cat’s forelegs were arranged side by side like Frankenstein arms, its white paws like dainty debutante gloves – in any other circumstances it would’ve looked pretty funny.
When Sancho came, he and Papá made the rounds again, trying to remove all the cat bits. No luck. It was the best ad for superglue I’d ever seen. Eventually they Googled how to loosen even the strongest superglue. Turned out the answer had been under their noses all along: acetone. Mamá had litres of the stuff in her annex for acrylic manicures. So they doused the festering skinless cat head in acetone and went around the house anointing the various ca
t parts until our home was no longer a feline necropolis. With their work finally done, believe it or not, everyone went back about their business: Mamá to the annex, Zulema to the spa, and Papá to his new gig as a part-time Spanish tutor. Proof that once enough shit went down – blackmail, breakdowns, beatings – you just got desensitized to it all. There’d be no wallowing over tortured cats at the Palacios house.
Anyway, that left Sancho and me alone. He was at the kitchen sink scrubbing the acetone smell off his hands when I spotted my opportunity to tackle him on Vanessa – I’d never confronted him after that dancer had told me she saw the two of them at it under the mango tree.
‘So,’ I asked, sidling over. ‘How are things with the ladies? Been a while since you brought anyone around.’
‘Not in the mood for women’s whining and bitching these days.’
‘Vanessa doesn’t whine or bitch? Because you’re obviously in the mood for her.’
Silence. The faucet gushing water. Sancho’s face reddening by the second.
‘Mmm? Isn’t that weird that you’d be sleeping with Vanessa if you’re not in the mood for women with all their bitching and whining?’
He closed the tap and leaned over the sink, staring down into it like he wanted to jack-knife down the drain hole and disappear.
I was enjoying myself. ‘Also weird that you’d be sleeping with Vanessa seeing as she’s pregnant for another guy. If she even is pregnant for that douchebag King. Sure it’s not your baby?’
Sancho turned to jam a finger into my chest. ‘Shut the fuck up, talking about shit you know nothing about.’
‘Relax,’ I laughed, swatting his hand away. I’d been affectionately needling Sancho my whole life. His bark had no bite. ‘I’m just trying to tell you I know about you and Vanessa. That dancer chick Andrea saw you and her under the mango tree. She told me about it.’
One Year of Ugly Page 19