One Year of Ugly

by Caroline Mackenzie

  I reached over the bar to grab Chill’s arm. ‘Where’s Sancho?’

  He dropped the glass he’d been drying, letting it shatter, and ran out from behind the bar. ‘I’m getting the hell outta here!’ He shot past me and out through the pink curtains.

  ‘Chill!’ I tried snatching his shirtsleeve but he was too quick.

  I turned to face the main floor head-on. I wanted to barrel through those sparkling black beads, make sure everyone was okay, but fear and common sense held me back – it sounded like a full-fledged riot was underway. The strippers still in the bar area were moving in a single cluster towards the doorway, like moths sussing out just how dangerous a flame might be. I took a few steps forward, heart in my mouth. Sancho and Zulema. The twins. Román. I couldn’t just run away.

  Then bursting through the glittering beads and the tremulous amoeba of strippers, I saw Sancho with my sister and cousins behind him. Alejandra was shrieking, bright fresh blood pouring from a gash at her hairline. Ava was gripping her sister’s gold waistcoat, dragging her roughly. ‘Come on! Come on!’ she screamed. The four of them ran towards me and in that split second I realized: When the time came!

  Sancho was running towards me, yelling. ‘Upstairs! The dressing room! Move your ass!’

  I tugged my skirt up above my hips and ran, glancing over my shoulder only once, just as a chair hurtled through the beads. Two men brawling tumbled out after it. The strippers scattered, screaming. I saw Scarlett’s ankle buckle in her clear heels. She collapsed into the brawl, a fallen gazelle. More screams, a high-pitched howl as Scarlett caught a fist or a foot or God knows what, the other strippers swooping in to pull her out of the tangle of beefy limbs punching and kicking.

  A gunshot from the main floor turned everything momentarily into a film still. Everyone and everything stopped moving for a single endless second – all heads turned towards the shot’s echo reverberating deafeningly beyond the glittering black beads, all breath held in that moment of fear. Then that evanescent moment split starkly from complete silence to a tumult of screams, crashing furniture, the raging of my own blood in my eardrums as we continued running, whipping the pink curtains back as we ran across reception, past my desk. Men’s voices boomed just beyond the security door: ‘ONE! TWO! THREE!’ and what sounded like a battering ram slammed into the door with walloping thuds. Christ, they were coming for us – it had to be a round-up of illegals, a bust of the Pie. Adrenaline and the energy drink surged through me, propelling me like some superhuman force so that I bounded up the stairs to the dressing room, taking them three by three, not feeling the burning in my lungs, in my legs. I could’ve run to the moon, hurdled over treetops.

  The others tore up the stairs behind me, Zulema stumbling in her heels so Sancho had to drag her by the arm to stop her lagging behind, Alejandra screeching that she couldn’t see with all the blood pouring into her eyes from the cut on her head.

  After the mayhem of the main floor, the dressing room was eerily quiet. The eye of the storm. With all the strippers downstairs, the only one there was Mamá, filing her nails and drinking a detoxifying kefir one of the strippers had made for her. Seeing the state of us as we burst through the door, she jumped up, accidentally overturning her table and sending the bottle of kefir flying.

  ‘Alejandra, your head! ¿Qué te pasó?’

  ‘We have to get out of here!’ bellowed Sancho.

  ‘Where’s your father?’ yelled Mamá as Sancho barrelled past her, knocking the shelves of beauty products onto the floor to shove the fire exit open. Mamá clutched Sancho’s shirt. ‘What’s going on? Sancho, tell me! We need to get your father!’

  Sancho grabbed her shoulders. ‘It’s a raid! We need to get out of here or we’re all going to be arrested!’ He pushed her out through the fire exit and motioned for us to follow. ‘Come on! Hurry, hurry!’

  ‘What about Papi?’ yelled Ava as she ran towards Sancho.

  ‘He’ll be fine, we can’t wait for him! Come on!’

  Pelting across the dressing room I snatched a pair of discarded joggers off the floor and pulled them on awkwardly, hopping from foot to foot while I ran. Sancho was shouting at me, but there was no way I was going out into the night bare-assed. Just as I was through the exit, at the top of the fire-escape stairs, I stopped and looked back. Papá, where are you? There was a strange taste of pennies on my tongue. My sweat smelled sharper. Come on, Papá. Then Sancho’s hand was on my arm, tugging me out the door, slamming it shut behind us.

  ‘But Papá!’

  ‘No time, Yola! Román said to get the fuck out right away, no waiting around!’

  We clattered down the metal stairs to an alley behind the club. An immense army-green jeep was idling, waiting for us. Sancho pushed me through the open car door. My sister and cousins were already inside, cowering together on a second backseat row beside Mamá, who was leaning over the seat shouting rambling questions towards the back of the driver. Then as I clambered into the jeep, Sancho following and slamming the door shut behind us, I saw who my mother was yelling at.

  Aunt Milagros. Shrouded in cigarette smoke, hands gripping the steering wheel.

  The second Sancho and I got in, Aunt Milagros flicked her cigarette out the window and the jeep screeched away from the back of the club, racing down the alley like it was a Formula One track.

  ‘Aunt Milagros!’ I didn’t know how else to react, or what else to say. There were too many questions – for starters, what the fuck was she doing there and how had Román known that she would be? – and I was still reeling from the raid too much to put anything into words. But Sancho had leaned forward to stick himself between the front seats and was interrogating her.

  ‘How did you get here? What’s going on inside? Why are you here, Aunt Milagros? Why aren’t you in Venezuela? What’s happening? How did you get this car?’

  ‘Not now!’ she yelled. ‘Light this for me!’ She tossed a cigarette and lighter that hit Sancho in the face just as the jeep ramped over a deep gutter running across the alley, sending us flying up out of our seats and slamming back down with shrieks from Zulema and the twins. I squeezed my eyes shut and gripped the armrest, too light-headed to do anything else. The metallic flavour in my mouth and strangely acrid smell of my skin only made me dizzier. More now than ever, with Aunt Milagros there like an action-hero phoenix risen from the ashes of Venezuela, everything felt wildly surreal – melting clocks oozing over walls and spindle-legged hundred-foot elephants strolling past wouldn’t have surprised me in that moment.

  The jeep charged up to the mouth of the alley, which led onto the bustling Avenue. SWAT cars and TTPS SUVs were flying up the busy main road, swerving between the traffic. Horns and sirens ripped through the party music pumping from the bars and nightclubs while curious partygoers spilled out onto the pavement to see what all the commotion was about. Careening onto the Avenue, the jeep went in the opposite direction of the police cars, away from the Pie. I glanced behind me at the second backseat row. Zulema and Ava were huddled together, looking about as shocked and dazed as I felt. Mamá, on the other hand, despite seeming almost savage with fury when we’d got into the jeep, screaming questions at Aunt Milagros, now looked as though all the energy had been siphoned out of her. Her face had ossified into a hard mask of fear as she held a shirt against the deep gash on Alejandra’s forehead. The white shirt was tie-dyed dark crimson as blood seeped through it, wetting Mamá’s palm.

  ‘¿Mamá, todo bien?’

  Her eyes were blank. She wouldn’t look at me. ‘Your father’s still in there. I left him in there.’

  ‘Román is in there too, Mamá. He’ll take care of Papá. He won’t let anything happen to him. I know it, don’t worry. We can trust Román.’

  She flashed me a look, her eyes scanning my face. I went red, about to lower my eyes when suddenly she leaned forward.

  ‘MILAGROS! We have to go back for Hector!’

  I looked ahead to see Aunt Milagros’s face in the rear-view m
irror, smoking the fresh cigarette Sancho had lit for her. ‘We can’t do that, Yasmin.’

  Mamá dropped the bloodied shirt to grip the back of my seat, leaving a palm print of dark red on the leather. ‘I’m telling you to go back for my husband! GO BACK!’

  Aunt Milagros didn’t shift her gaze from the road. She was weaving between cars at a frightening pace. ‘We cannot go back. Sit down. Hector will be okay.’

  Mamá made a sound between a wail and a growl and threw herself back against the seat. Zulema wrapped an arm around her, but she shrugged it off roughly and snatched up the blood-stained shirt, pressing it against Alejandra’s wound so hard she winced. Her eyes seared into the back of Aunt Milagros’s head, her chin trembling, and I could see how badly she wanted to burst into tears. But she wouldn’t cry. Never. She kept her eyes on Aunt Milagros and sat silent as a stone.

  ‘Aunt Milagros, please,’ I said. ‘We need to know what’s going on. How did you get here? Where are you taking us?’

  ‘We’re heading to a safe house. You can’t go back home tonight, but everything will be okay.’ She took a long drag on her cigarette and exhaled so the rear-view mirror was clouded with her toxic fog. ‘I’ll fill you in on the rest when we get to where we’re going.’

  Sancho kept plying her with questions anyway as the jeep sped along the highway heading east. She kept batting them back with the same dry reply: ‘Everything will be fine.’ Eventually, Sancho gave up and we continued in a heavy silence punctuated only by my mother’s angry sighs, like a bull blowing hard through its nose, scuffing its hooves in the dirt before charging.

  All I could think about were Papá and Román. Were they safe? Román was in the main room – had he been shot, bludgeoned, beaten? A gruesome reel of images unspooled itself in my mind’s eye, each more graphic than the last. Román sprawled across the black carpet on the main floor, shot and bleeding out, being trampled by the spiked heels of fleeing strippers. Román’s face battered and swollen, his skull dented in like crushed papier-mâché. And Papá. He wasn’t in the main room, but had he been picked up in the raid and thrown into jail by Immigration? Had he been humiliated and roughed up by police, dragged out of the Pie by his hair, shackled in handcuffs, tossed into a cell wondering where we’d all gone, why we’d left him, if we were all right?

  After forty minutes of driving, we took an exit into an urban commercial district that quickly turned residential and spacious, then rustic and run-down. It was a Saturday night, so the rum parlours’ doors were flung open, some already festooned with frayed silver tinsel and red-gold-and-green fairy lights though it was only early November. It reminded me of what the previous November had brought us – Ugly’s reign – and only added to my growing pessimism for what might have befallen Papá and Román.

  Paying no mind to our jeep speeding past, customers lolled and boozed on Rubbermaid chairs on the chipped pavement. No prosecco being popped, no electro-house music wafting from recessed speakers. I watched them, village men and women out in the humid night wearing flip-flops and old T-shirts, drinking cheap liquor, but having a better time than all the glammed-up, snooty prosecco drinkers back in Port of Spain.

  Finally the village we were driving through ended abruptly at a dirt road shadowed by tall pine trees on either side. No houses, no streetlights, nothing but darkness and the sound of our tyres rolling over dirt. We bobbled along over dusty stones and potholes, hanging onto whatever we could to stop from being tossed around. The jeep tore past a clearing in the pine trees at the roadside, occupied by an imposing samaan tree that stood like a night watchman. Then a trick of the mind: the dark outline of a body swinging beneath a thick bough. I pictured my father, eyes bulging, tongue out, face purple. I rubbed my eyes. It was only a shadow. But my skin stayed clammy, the rusty taste in my mouth more acute than before.

  Just beyond the samaan tree, the road veered left, the jeep groaning as it climbed a steep incline. Eventually, after driving so far up the hillside my ears were popping, the pines to either side of us began clearing and the road evened out, widening into a broad driveway that led to a large house with a curious gothic steeple rising up out of its centre. It was warmly lit, with pink bougainvillea bushes and fuschia ginger lilies bordering a spacious wraparound porch. Large silver chimes hung from the eaves, glinting in the soft glow of security lights as they knocked together, tinkling. Everything about the property was cosy and inviting. I felt like Hansel and Gretel must have when they finally stumbled upon that gingerbread house in the forest.

  We drove up the long driveway, crunching over white pebbles that presumably served as ostentatious gravel, until at last Aunt Milagros brought the jeep to a halt, hunching over to light another cig before turning to look back at us. ‘This is the safe house. You’ll be in good hands here.’

  ‘You’re not getting out?’ asked Sancho.

  ‘No,’ said Aunt Milagros through a mist of freshly blown smoke. ‘But you need to get out. I don’t have time for this.’

  ‘What about my father and Mauricio?’ said Sancho. ‘They’re still—’

  Mamá had simultaneously piped up from the back, talking over Sancho: ‘Milagros, you said you’d explain when—’

  ‘Dammit!’ Aunt Milagros had swung around in her seat, glowering. ‘GET OUT! I said there’s no time! What don’t you understand? OUT – ALL OF YOU, NOW! I need to go back for Vanessa and the child!’

  Mamá sat back, her face bloodshot with rage, lips pressed together, but Sancho gripped Aunt Milagros’s shoulder. ‘Vanessa and Che aren’t safe? But they’re at home.’

  Aunt Milagros’s face was unreadable. ‘I’m bringing them here,’ she said, giving no indication of whether it was for their safety or not.

  ‘Not without me.’ Sancho wedged himself between the front seats to climb onto the passenger side. Aunt Milagros shrugged and turned forward.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘The rest of you – move!’

  We obeyed like a herd of drugged sheep. The second we got out, the jeep was immediately in action again, peeling out of the driveway, spraying white pebbles in its wake. We stood watching its tail-lights shrink into distant red specks in the darkness. When the jeep was out of sight, Ava turned to me.

  ‘What’s going to happen to Papi and Uncle Hector?’

  The fear in her face made her make-up fade away. She no longer looked like a strip-club waitress, just the frightened teenager she was.

  Not knowing what to say, I looped my arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze.

  ‘It’s a raid,’ said my mother icily, still staring down the driveway. ‘The National Security Ministry has done it before – a whole island-wide crackdown on illegals. Your father and my Hector are probably being deported as we speak.’

  Ava’s face crumpled. ‘What are we supposed to do without our father here? How will we pay the rent or buy food, or—’

  ‘Don’t do that to yourself, Ava,’ I said, surprised at the convincing evenness of my voice. ‘Mauricio’s going to be fine. Mamá’s only guessing at what’s going on.’

  ‘But what if someone shot him accidentally or something at the club? You weren’t on the main floor, Yola. It was terrible! Look at what happened to Aleja!’ Ava was sobbing into my shoulder now.

  ‘Don’t think about that. It’ll be okay,’ I said firmly. ‘Whatever happens, it’ll all be okay.’ Though I had absolutely no clue if it would.

  Then a clinking of chimes and a ‘Yoooo hoo!’ from the house got all our heads to turn in unison.

  Magnificent as ever, wrapped in a crushed velvet robe as she swanned down the front steps: Veneranda Manrique.

  The witch in the gingerbread house.

  IN FREE FALL

  ‘¡Bienvenidos!’ Veneranda swept across the white pebbles in her robe, Cinderella at the royal ball. Vicente had also emerged in a burgundy smoking jacket, a rotund Hugh Hefner scuttling down the stairs on bandy legs, gut heaving with every step as he came alongside Veneranda to greet us.

  �
��So good to see you all!’ purred Veneranda, flitting from person to person, bestowing on each of us an air-kiss. ‘My goodness, look at the attire you ladies have got on. Heavens!’

  Vicente was at the rear, following up Veneranda’s kisses with a warbled, ‘Grand to see you.’ We shook hands with him numbly.

  Everyone duly greeted, Veneranda waved a hand towards the house. ‘Por favor, do come inside.’

  We stood there like a bunch of deaf mutes, gaping at the Manriques. Why in the hell had Aunt Milagros sent us to them? If we were confused before, now we really didn’t have a goddamned clue. It was like having Alzheimer’s. Other people seemed to know what was going on and all you could do was go with it and give up trying to figure out your ass from your elbow.

  * * *

  The house was even bigger than it looked from the outside. Vaulted ceilings, vast windows looking out over hills lush with virgin rainforest, and furnishings straight out of Architectural Digest. The Manriques took us from the porch to a spacious living area, then a grand dining room leading onto a kitchen brimming with stainless steel and marble. Another luxuriously furnished sitting room off the kitchen led to a long hallway warmly illuminated by crystal chandeliers.

  ‘That’s the guest wing, where all our … well, I suppose you could call them refugees … stay,’ said Vicente, pointing down the hallway. ‘You’ll be there, too. Our private wing is to the other side of the house. No need for you to worry about that, but if—’

  ‘Hang on, hang on.’ This was Mamá, squeezing the bridge of her nose. ‘I thought you were the refugees and we were the safe-housers? Can someone please, for the love of Christ, tell me what is going on?’

  ‘Oh my,’ sniffed Veneranda.