by Tony D'Souza
“Did you find everything all right?” the checkout girl asked without really looking at them, and Sam said, “Yes, very, very well, thank you.” Then there was a commotion in the lot, and everyone in line turned to look.
Even from the doorway, my uncles could sense that something wrong was happening, and they stopped with their paper bags in their arms to take it in. People were streaming past them and out of the store, stock boys in their aprons, the women they had looked at, the checkout girls in their striped uniforms, shoppers from all around. What did my uncles have left to do but step forward slowly, as though in a dream, toward the flashing lights of the police cruiser, toward the gathering crowd, toward the place where this new thing was happening, which was exactly where they needed to go?
The squad car was parked behind their Cutlass, blocking it in, and two officers were working a long metal bar together, trying with all their might to pry open the trunk. Women held their hands to their mouths, men looked on with knitted brows. Cars on the street slowed in a line as their drivers gaped. And because they knew all of this belonged to them, my uncles moved forward like sleepwalkers. The crowd parted for them, each new set of eyes fell on them in their slow march. Then they heard the squealing of the pig exactly as all those other people did: as a human being, a woman, screaming to be let out.
My uncle Sam dropped his grocery bags. He yelled, “It is a pig! It is only a pig!” and sprinted forward.
The policemen drew their guns. The crowd sucked in its breath. Les stood in place with the onions from Sam’s bags bouncing around his feet.
The officers were in shooting stances. They shouted, “Stop!” My uncle stopped and raised his hands. They shouted, “Take out your keys!”
Squad cars peeled into the lot, lights whirling. A helicopter crested the apartment building across the way and choppered overhead. People ran over in groups from across the street, they hung out of the surrounding buildings’ windows. Even a passing bus came to a stop with hands and faces pressed against the glass. My uncle Sam took out his keys, and the cops motioned him toward the trunk. Listening to the pig, he wondered himself if it hadn’t somehow turned into a woman. Had he and Les somehow kidnapped a woman? What would happen to them if they had? Why had he ever gotten involved in this stupidity with the pig? Why had he ever come to this country? His trembling fingers somehow fit the key in the lock, turned it, and the trunk popped open. The pig was still a pig.
Wouldn’t it be nice to think that after that big scene, my uncles could have gotten themselves home, the pig in the basement, the knife wiped across its neck, and that would have been the end of that? It wasn’t.
My father was working in his study, my mother trimming and covering her roses in the garden for the coming winter. My uncles were still trembling from what had happened at the supermarket, my uncle Sam’s ears still burning from his dressing down by the cops. But, too, they had gotten away with one. The police hadn’t written them a ticket.
My mother heard the squealing as soon as my uncles turned into the alley; she took off her gardening gloves and ran to the fence. Of course it had to be my uncles, she knew, she only hoped she could contain whatever they were up to before it managed to upset my father. Any illusions about the Feast of St. Francis long since over, my uncle Sam already knew all the trouble he’d be in once he opened the trunk to show the pig to my mother. When he did, my mother took one look at the furious animal, wrung her hands, and said, “Lawrence isn’t going to like this at all.”
My uncles were exhausted now, on the verge of panic. If they had thought my mother would help them, now she wouldn’t, and the only thing that could save any of this was if they could get the pig into the basement and turn up the music before my father noticed any of it. They pulled the pig out of the trunk by the rope wound around its feet, dumped it in the alley. Its squealing drew the neighbors from their homes, the children running in close, the women with their hands in their jacket pockets and laughing to each other in Spanish. My mother opened the gate and my uncles dragged the pig into the yard. Even in this, their muscles ached. Why had they thought to get a pig so big? And just as my father stepped out onto the back porch because of all of the noise, the pig’s kicking and my uncles’ pulling caused the rope to break. What remained was a hundred-and-fifty-pound bristling razorback with nothing on its mind except hurting something as badly as it itself had been hurt. My mother leaped up onto the fence as the pig banged against it, my uncles dashed onto the porch just as my father stepped inside and locked the door. The pig clambered up the steps; my uncles hopped over the railing. The pig trampled through the trellises of my mother’s garden; my mother whacked at it with a stake. The neighbors leaned their elbows on the fence to watch; my uncle Les ran into the garage and came out with a hammer. “Lead it here, Sam,” my uncle Les called, and my uncle Sam, whom the pig was chasing, ran past his brother. My uncle Les raised the hammer and with the practiced eye of someone who had never swung a hammer like that before, hit the pig in the snout when he’d been aiming between its eyes. So first blood was drawn by the humans, and all the neighbors cheered. But second blood was quickly drawn by the pig because it slammed my uncle Les into the wall of the garage, and when it realized it couldn’t bite him with its tied-off mouth, it reared and pawed my uncle’s head until my uncle Sam rushed in and tackled it, serving his own penance then on his back at its hooves.
I’d like to say that this display went on for a long while, to the vast delight of everyone. And in fact it did for a time, with more running of my uncles, leaping of my mother, furious charges of the pig, mud progressively caking one and all to the cheers of the assembled crowd. Then two loud shots rang out, and Javier stood over the pig with his gun. He nudged its face with his toe to make sure, then put the gun in his pocket and waved everyone home.
My uncles were muddied and bruised, their heads hanging lower than they ever had. From the porch, my father stared down at them. He let the silence gather all around him. Then he said, “Are you happy, Samuel Erasmus? Lesley Wenceslaus, are you happy? It was not hard enough already and now we are fools before all these people? Go and take your pig. Butcher it. I hope you choke on it. Because you are going to eat every last bit of it if you want to go on living in my house.”
My uncles ate very little of that pig. Who knows what the roots of their plan had really been? Certainly it had to do with who they were in America, what they were feeling about themselves in it at that time. But perhaps, too, it was simply their desire to remind themselves that they were Konkans.
They knew as little about butchering a pig as they had about killing one, and so with the help of Javier’s nephews, the pig was hung by its forelegs from the beams of Javier’s garage, gutted and quartered by their deft hands, and while my uncles did curry a shank for the Feast of Francis Xavier, the majority of the meat ended up in tacos and tamales all around the neighborhood. Soon enough, my father told my uncles of his plan to sell the house, to move to the suburbs, and just as soon as he had told them that, my uncle Les joined the navy.
But my uncle Sam didn’t. In time, long after his bruises and pride had healed, he found his own apartment. He visited us once a week, on Saturdays, to hold me in his arms and talk to my mother. My father wasn’t yet ready to speak to him, and my uncle understood that.
My uncle Sam began to move about the city as though it belonged to him. Now and again he’d drive down to Maxwell Street to have a rib sandwich at Walter Johnson’s. The first time that he did, Walter Johnson called him out of line.
“Hey there, Sam, how did it go with that pig?”
“It went okay.”
“I’ve finally decided what it is I’ve got to call you,” Walter Johnson said and winked.
“What is it?” my uncle said back.
“Dot head. Even though I know you aren’t one.”
The Grand Canyon
We moved out to the northern suburbs. I was a baby and didn’t know anything about it. Our neighbors on one si
de were the Colemans, an old retired couple, and on the other were the Firths, who both worked for United Airlines. Our house was nice and cozy with the bedrooms upstairs, and for the first time in his life, my father lived in a place with a sweeping central staircase. Whether he found this to be neat or unusual or a luxury at all, of course he acted as though he’d always lived like that. In the finished basement, he had a wet bar, which he stocked with all his favorite liquors. My father’s drinking blossomed at this time, and many nights he went to sleep down there on the couch carried over from the old house. There was also a large painting on the wall that he’d brought back from a trip he’d taken with my mother some years before I was born, to Puerto Vallarta, which had served as their second honeymoon. It was a dark painting, on wood panels, and he’d kept it in the attic of our old house wrapped in packing paper, waiting for this move up in the world to hang it. It showed a man asleep on the back of a long-eared donkey, the man wearing a shawl and sombrero, the donkey winding them on a long and lonely path through a saguaro-studded desert and toward the setting sun.
My mother was not at all happy to be in the suburbs. Ridge Lawn was an all-white town, prestigious as far as middle managers went, which my father had become, with a country club and library, a small downtown of clothing boutiques and real estate offices. And though in the summer there were block parties and children about on bicycles, there was no loud Mexican music, and the kids did not play jump rope or stickball together in the streets, but stayed on the sidewalks alone on their roller skates in front of their homes, played baseball on the park-district diamonds in their neat Little League uniforms, and my mother did not have any friends. My father began to travel for work, and he took his first golf lessons at the public driving range. Now and again on Sundays after church, he’d drive us past the ivy-covered gates of the country club, and he’d say to my mother, “You know what, Denise? Once we get a handle on the finances, I think I would like to be a member of that club.”
My mother would roll her eyes and shake her head and say, “You want to be a member of that club? Why do you always care about all these things? I’ll tell you what. It’s never going to happen.”
“Money is money, Denise.”
“Money is not just money, Lawrence.”
“What do you know about it?” my father would say, and in saying that, he was really saying a dozen other things to her that he’d collected inside of him, things he knew not to say to avoid a fight. Because, one by one, he had said those things to her over the years until he knew how each one hurt her: “What do you know? In India I only knew you as a white, and to me then, that meant everything. But you are not white like I thought you were. You are a poor girl from a Detroit slum, who got an education by some odd luck. But I’ve since seen your family, and they are nothing here or anywhere, and just because you are white and from here does not mean you know everything about country clubs, or what lies beyond their gates, or who they will let in or who they won’t. I am doing well at my company, I am treated like an equal. They have even sent me to London twice already.”
And my mother did not say, “You are delusional, my poor Lawrence. You are only a token to those people. Why are you the only colored man in the company pictures, why did they put you on the cover of their brochure? And why have you been passed over for promotion twice already for white boys from East Coast colleges who started working there after you? If you didn’t want to be white so badly, maybe you could see it yourself. And you do see it yourself, that’s why you are unhappy and drink yourself to sleep. Country clubs don’t need tokens yet, Lawrence, and they don’t need you. And besides, everyone knows that this country club won’t even let in the Jewish dentist.” All of this was encapsulated in my mother’s sigh when my father said these things to her on those Sunday drives, and so on their marriage went, the disagreements growing inside them until they were set against each other, waiting for the odd days when one drink too many would bring them out of my father, when one mood too edgy would release them from my mother.
“You are nothing but an Indian here, a little brown plaything to make them feel good about themselves.”
“What do you know about anything good, Denise? What are you in this world but gutter trash with a diploma?”
But my father did bring my mother flowers on her birthday, blue tulips, her favorite, the color of her eyes, and she did keep his house and cook his meals.
In those first years in Ridge Lawn, the things my father most looked forward to were going to work on the double-decker Metra commuter train in the mornings, and traveling now and again to New York and London on business. The thing my mother most looked forward to was when I would sleep and she could curl into a paperback thriller on the couch in the living room with the grandfather clock my father had bought from an antique shop in Wicker Park keeping a somber and steady time. Sometimes Mrs. Firth would come over for an evening glass of wine, as well as to hold me because she and Mr. Firth did not have children, and she would regale my mother with the details of their latest trip to Hawaii on their United Airlines benefits. And sometimes Mrs. Coleman would come over to hold me like she did her few grandchildren when her sons came to visit from Davenport and Cleveland, where they had ended up.
But my mother’s favorite times were Saturdays when she knew my uncle Sam would come in his car from his apartment in the city with a package of sweet jalebis for her from the Indian bakery on Devon Avenue. She would put on her blue summer dress with the black-eyed Susans embroidered all over it and nurse me on the couch to make me drowsy. Then my uncle’s shadow would darken the doorway, and even before he could ring the bell, she would have opened the door for him. My father was at his golf lessons at these times, and it was an arrangement they all had. My father was still too injured by the general Indian hullabaloo my uncles had brought into his life in America. So my uncle would arrive just after my father had left and spend a few hours talking about his life in the city and reminiscing about India with my mother, and when the afternoon would turn to evening and the lightning bugs would begin to rise from the front lawn in the settling dark, my uncle would finish his last beer or coffee and kiss my mother’s cheek at the door. Just after he’d back his car into the street and pull away, my father would swing up in his Buick.
“Was Sam here?” my father would ask, rattling through the doorway with his golf clubs.
“You know that he was,” my mother would say, nursing me, the clock’s pendulum swinging.
“How is Samuel?”
“Sam is fine.”
“Has he heard from Les? How is Les?”
“Les is fine as well. Apparently he’s in port. Subic Bay. Did you golf well, Lawrence?”
“I certainly did.”
“Put those things away and change your clothes. Dinner is waiting for you in the oven.”
My uncle Sam learned to dress the way single young men dressed in the city at that time, in tight-fitting bell-bottomed slacks and wide-collared floral-print shirts. He sported a mustache again, neatly clipped, not at all like the Fu Manchu he’d once worn, and he had muttonchop sideburns. He seemed happy when he’d come to see my mother, and he smiled easily at the things she had to tell him, which were always about the quietness of her week, where Babu had traveled to for work, the chocolates from Europe he’d brought home for her that she’d eaten up already. When my uncle Sam would accept one of my father’s bottles of beer that my mother offered him, he didn’t guzzle it the way my father would have, but sipped it at the table while my mother looked at him with eyes that said she was glad he was there. “Did you sell many washing machines this week?” she’d ask, or “Are you still looking to move away from Division?” And he would describe all the places in the city that his life had taken him, the stingy people he’d had to deal with at work. When he would say something funny, she would laugh and touch his hand. She did not say things to him like, “I am so glad that you come to me every Saturday, Samuel,” or “You don’t know how much joy your v
isits bring to me.” She simply smiled as he told her stories from his life in the city, touched his hand now and again. The colors and sounds and smells of Chicago were easy things for my mother to imagine, and more than longing to be a part of it again herself, she was proud of him, this skinny boy who had been too shy to look her in the eye in India, sitting here now with a Konkan man’s mustache, smoking a cigarette casually, alone in America and happy, moving easily through all those raucous neighborhoods she missed so deeply from her fine and quiet house in Ridge Lawn.
“How is Javier?” my mother would ask.
“Always up to a scheme.”
“And the Molinas and Cordovas?”
“Always more children.”
“Do you still see those Puerto Rican girls of yours and Les’s?”
“Their fiancés have come.”
“Are you brokenhearted?”
“Those were young-people things.”
“What about love? Don’t you want to be in love?”
“Ah,” he said, and blushed, tapped the question away with a knock of his cigarette in the ashtray.
“I have an idea, Sam. What about Lenore? How would you like me to call Lenore for you?”
My uncle could have said that his love life wasn’t empty. He could have said that he didn’t need my mother’s help. Instead he said, “Do you think it would make me happy?”
“I think we could try it out, Sam, why not?”