The Gringo Champion

by Aura Xilonen

  I go back inside and start picking up a few bookcases to put a bit of order to the fucking chaos. Just then the missus comes down from the loft with a pile of books I’d taken up to read and didn’t have time to bring back down this morning. She doesn’t say anything. What could she say when Jefe’s vanished amid the shattered glass? She sets the books down on the counter, her trembling somewhat dissipated.

  * * *

  [Sometimes the missus would come to be with Jefe at the bookstore. She’d help him out by manning the cash register. Then she’d go pick up the little misters from school and I wouldn’t see her again until a week later, when she’d bring him something to eat. When Jefe had a bit more trust in me, he’d leave me in charge of the bookstore and go wandering off with his wife at random times.

  “Be back soon, you pigheaded prick! I’m off with the lady who owns my heart!” And he’d blast off, intrepid, like a besmitten astronaut into the fucking heavens.]

  “We have to leave everything exactly how it is so the police will see how it’s all been destroyed.” The missus shreds the silence as her eyes prowl the bedlam of books and toppled bookcases.

  I’ve never heard the missus say a single goddamn word in Spanglish. She either spoke Spanish or she spoke English, nothing in between. And she didn’t curse, either, didn’t use those rude words Jefe uses that aren’t in the wordbook, the dictionary, that fucking dictionary I used to read because I didn’t understand shit of what I was reading; incendiary words that are much clearer than all those muddled respectable words: those goddamn little ladies with sickly-sweet frills, language that is archaic, obsolete, old and priggish. I prefer whores, words that say everything in one fell shitkicker, not little by little. I don’t know why the missus has always been respectable. I don’t know. What I do know is I can’t stay there till the police arrive, at least not till the trouble’s over. The missus meets my eyes, realizing that if the police take me in to make a statement, they’ll immediately launch me to the other side of the world, into the stratosphere, like a goddamn rocket.

  “Here, kid,” she says, her eyes red, and holds out a few bills she’s pulled out of her sweatsuit. “I want you to take off for a few days till this all blows over. But don’t disappear on us—we’re going to need a lot of help putting this store back together. I’m going to call 911 now. Stay close by and make sure you have someone take a look at those injuries.”

  I take the money from her hands. It’s three hundred-dollar bills.

  “All right, ma’am. Jefe’ll be back soon, you’ll see.”

  I turn around and leave as she picks up her cell phone and dials 911.

  And now what the fuck do I do? Cramps clutch my shins. They’re like little windmills whipping hot chocolate in my arteries, atole drained from my veins. My face looks like I’ve been attacked by a giant wasp.

  I cross the street. The cars have started to turn on their headlights. The streetlamps bloom at night. I’ve never seen a star here. In the cities, the trembling stars have been killed by the law of mercury. I look up at the blue sky and try with all my might to inhale the oxygen I’m lacking.

  I’m in an unfamiliar city.

  I don’t have a single fucking friend.

  I used to think the future meant moving forward without lingering on the individual days, on their poisonous hours, their cadaverous seconds that are inexorably destroyed as they accumulate, forming suicidal blocs of sixty. I cross the other street and head toward Wells Park. Before I turn the corner at the chickadee’s building, I hear the ululation of police cars racing toward me. I stick my hands in the pockets of my jeans and hunch forward.

  It’s getting colder, and there’s no loft or spiders to warm up the night.

  Wells Park isn’t ginormous; it’s a medium-sized park with trees and stone benches ringed by a little gravel path. It has three fountains that the grown-ups use to sail little boats with their offal on their days off, after they come out of their various churches—Presbyterian, evangelical, Baptist, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Scientologist, androgynist, bluesist, jazzist, soulist, Arabesque, Jupitertian thermopile, poltergeistal, Orthodox, heterodox, and pedodox Catholics, with reverends, pastors, priests, monks, vicars, doctors, philosophers, musicians, barbiturate cascalytes, jovial, jivial, ojival atheists, lonely atheists, unbelievers, aderenalined intoners, reciters, and hustling charlatans.

  Wells Park was also frequented by scruffs, yups, chickadees, dudebros, and kids. Whites, blacks, yellows, pinks, punks, old apes and young apes. Some people used a fenced-off area at the edge of the park to walk their housepets, carrying little plastic bags to pick up their caramels. Others went jogging in the morning or in the evening, enveloped in their iPods, dangling shackles pressed to their ears so they can swathe themselves in solitude like a shield; the music in their ears, I think, is a mask they use so they can go around without being bothered—and there were a lot of masks in the park.

  * * *

  [The first time I went to Wells Park was on one of the first Sundays off Jefe gave me so I’d have something to do instead of sitting around tormenting ants once I’d finished with my doodies at the bookstore.

  “Get out of here, you goddamn idiot, go get some exercise at Wells Park!”

  “And what the hell am I supposed to do there, when I’m skinnier than your fucking mother?”

  “What did you say, asshole?”

  “Be back soon, boss.”

  That day I went out to the park and sat there all day watching the squirrels, watching the children splashing in the fountain to retrieve a sunken sailboat. Watching the dogs pad across the granite slabs and watching the other people who were sitting and watching without watching anything in particular.

  Over the next few Sundays, I would seize the opportunity to smuggle a book out of the bookstore and read under a tree up on a hill where people would lock up their bikes and from which you could see the entire park, east to west, north to south. There I saw a few rollerbladers, a few rockatonics dancing with their boomboxes turned all the way up like snakes coiling in the air; there were also other street musicians—trombonated, violinitious, guitarified—across the battlefield.

  I imagine a park as an intranquil pyramid where everybody gathers but they never mix.

  That was where I saw the chickadee for the first time. She was walking by with a German shepherd on a leash, wearing black leggings and a sleeveless jumper. Her hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail, linear, like a Greek column, Doric, its capital unvoluted, like a Venus, yes, beautiful. Her nose narrow and her eyes as wide as the sky. I saw her and was stupefied, struck dumb, my heart trickling out of my pores. I couldn’t breathe—right there, airless, dancing, tremulous waves shaking my body. I’ve never known whether fucking love at first sight or whatever, I don’t know, actually exists, but that chickadee drove my peepers wild from the first moment I looked up from the book I was reading. She seared my retinas. I forgot everything I was reading and couldn’t look back down at the fucking book. Standing there like that—bestially, savagely beautiful—she filled the entire park with her astonishing self.

  I imagine she looked at me too as she passed, because I assume chickadees look at everything and see everything, even if they aren’t going apeshit about it and it seems like they’re not looking at anything. I sat gored there, cromalitic, under the tree full of squirrels and caterpillars.

  Ravaged.

  She took two more turns around the park and then crossed the street with the German shepherd on its leash. She disappeared into a crush of cars and people. I was still sitting there, ashen, bruised; the air I was breathing wasn’t entering my body, my despotic, agitated cells.

  I went back the following Sunday, hoping to see her again, my pulse precipitous, but I didn’t see her.

  And the following Sunday, but no dice.

  I should have followed her, I kept kicking myself, beat
ing myself, thinking: yes, if I’d followed her and then what—I’m too cluckatillic to talk to pretty chickadees. My hands sweat, my feet sweat, my ass sweats just thinking about it. And then what, I follow her and what? She notices and calls the police and they throw me in the clink as a murderous sicko who’s violated the chickadee’s personal space; they give me a thrashing and toss me in a hole. But I wouldn’t have cared—so what, I would’ve been happy just to see her. I imagine that love too can be admired as a work of art might be—from afar, without touching it, without belonging to any space, any physical dimension, with the eyes alone, with all the senses that come together to produce butterflies in a person’s fucking guts. Though I don’t know if anyone’s ever fallen in love with a statue; I think they have, pygmalionically I think they have.

  And so no, she didn’t show up at the park, and I didn’t see her again until months later, as I was up in the window of new releases arranging several horrible Spanish novels and saw her walk past in sneakers and a suit, heading toward the bus stop across the street.

  “Watch out, you moron, careful with the damn libros—they don’t grow on trees! I’ll take them out of your paycheck, you tub-blubber!”

  I was pressed up against the glass, feeling the same old pang in my fucking butterflies. She smoothed her hair with one hand. A car passed and honked at her, another passed and honked at her too, five or six more horns until the red bus pulled up and she got on and sat in one of the front rows. The bus pulled out. Without thinking, I jumped to the floor and ran out to the street to watch the bus move off.

  “Again”—and I started running after the bus.

  I caught up with it two streets later and spotted her once more. She was looking straight ahead, beautiful, the most wondrous vision my eyes had ever beheld. When the green light hit us, the bus started off. “Again,” I said, and started running, dodging the people who rose up like befuddled telephone poles in my path. And I followed her for many more streets until they pulled onto the freeway and my breathing was a swarm of trampled and suffocated butterflies. I watched the bus become a fucking crimson blotch of lost love or whatever, carajo. I lost sight of her amid the firmament of vehicles.

  When I got back to the bookstore, Jefe was waiting for me at the door.

  “You piece of shit, you really gave me a scare! I thought you’d been rounded up in a raid by la puta migra or something. You squeezed my soul bone-dry. What the fuckety-fuck happened?”

  “Nada, Jefe.”

  “What do you mean, nothing? Nobody takes off like that for no reason! What happened?”

  “Nada, Jefe.”

  “Out with it, you fucking prick!”

  “O.K., Jefe. My bad, I thought I spotted your goddamn mother herding donkeys.”

  “My ass you did, cocksucker. I’ll show you.”

  “Yes, Jefe, it won’t happen again.”

  But I was brimming over on the inside. If the chickadee caught the bus right here across the street, that must mean she lives or works nearby.

  Most likely she lives nearby because she was walking a dog, but why was she dressed all fancy like she was going to work outside the city? Was she heading home and only works around here?

  I spent the next few days washing all the bookstore’s plate-glass windows again and again, trying to keep one eye on the streaks and the other on the street in case she walked by. I organized the entire stock of Latin American novels, from prickly-pear to penguin. All the damn Spanish novels and the fucking gringo ones translated into Espanish. I organized the books in alphabetical order, from front to back, by title and then by author name, from a to z; then it occurred to me to organize them from back to front, from z to a. I also organized them by color, by size, by number of pages. I organized them by font. Then by subject. Almost all of the books were dull novels I’d already read up in my loft or in Wells Park; they were fettered by the superficial task of effectuating sentence after sentence, soulless, lifeless, simply tossing out pretty words right and left. That’s how I imagined writers thread their novels together, wormy, airless, disemvoweled. But even though I kept my eyes peeled, the chickadee was nowhere to be seen, damn it.

  When I was running out of ideas for rearranging the novels, I started organizing them by the authors’ photos: the ones who seemed like the surliest, most disagreeable scruffs went in the first row so that the few lost souls who strayed into the bookstore would see them first, and the fucking scribblers who looked all prettified and shiny, just like their goddamn respectable words—wearing neckties in the photos, posing like candy-ass intellectualoid yups—I left in the last row, piled on top of one another, the wimps, so not even their mothers would spot them in the hades of books down below.

  On the third day of the last week of summer, I finally saw her again. She was wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals with purple flowers on them and a tank top. Her hair was up in another ponytail, and she wasn’t wearing a trace of makeup.

  In an instant, my heartbeat took off like buzzing flies.

  The chickadee went up the gray stone steps of the brick building across the way and passed through its gleaming wooden door.

  “Please be true, please be true, please be true,” I said to myself. I don’t know if I was whispering or not, but I think not because Jefe yelled at me from behind the counter.

  “You fucking dolt, lay off that praying and let me read the fucking newspaper in peace.”

  I stopped dribbling words and started watching everything that was going on outside, determined not to miss a thing.

  “Jefe, can I go outside for a minute?”

  “No, why?”

  “I’m going to clean the outside of the glass.”

  “Didn’t you just do that?”

  “I’m going to get a soda.”

  “Didn’t you say you were going to wash the windows?”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “We’ve got water right here.”

  “No, I want something bubbly.”

  “Well, whisk a goddamn fork in a fucking glass of water and drink that, you parched parakeet.”

  “Jefe.”

  “What?”

  “Up yours.”

  “What!”

  “I said do you want me to bring you a soda.”

  “I heard you, you fucking prick. Go on, go get your damn soda.”

  Before Jefe was finished speaking, I was already out the door and crossing the street to the brick building. I raced up the stone steps two at a time, ready for anything. Fuck. Anything—well, I was here now, I thought, sweating bullets, might as well keep going. When I opened the fucking door to go inside the building, she was on her way back out. I looked into her eyes and she looked at me—I know she did because I felt a powerful hammering in my peepers. It was a fraction of a second, a giant explosion, as if the universe had been shattered in an instant.

  My throat seized up.

  I opened the door a little, moved aside, bent my head toward the floor, and let her pass. “Thanks,” she said. Just “thanks.” She went down the stairs, her hips swaying, and I felt her expansive waves melting me, millimeter by millimeter, turning my fucking body into jelly. Uncertain what to do, and with my ass clenched up into my neck, I entered the building and closed the door behind me.]

  “Big wasp sting yo’ ass,” says the black woman as she walks past me.

  I’m still slumped on the bench in Wells Park. Night has fallen. I’m feeling listless. The scruffs who overtake the wee hours haven’t shown up yet. At night the park becomes a hotbed of hustlers like me. Shit yes, inexistent howlers from the shadowed margins. The woman guides her shopping cart a little closer to the small fountain, where there are some bushes and the grass is thicker. She pulls a couple of flattened cardboard boxes out from her odds and ends, spreads them on the ground, and then lies down on top of them. She tugs at a threadbare blanket with one hand a
nd covers herself with it.

  “Ass-face,” she repeats, “wasp sting yo’ ass.” She lets out a wild laugh and then grunts, “Sweet dreams.” She closes her eyes.

  As if I could fucking sleep, I think to myself, when I’ve got my soul pendling from my nads.

  I look at a few others who are coming toward me, nodding the night. Tattered. Vagabondious.

  During the daytime, the city’s drowsies are overshadowed by the kilometric frieze of ads, by shiny cars and beautiful people. At night, when only noises remain, the rest of us—druggies, junkies, illegals, scruffs, kids, and yups—materialize like demons crushed by our gaunt impecuniousness.

  “Puta madre, and me busting my ass trying to keep my head above water.”

  I hunch down when a gust of wind rushes through the trees and tweaks my pores.

  “Wassup, vato? This is our bench!” four little snotnose punks inform me. If I were in the mood, I’d be forced to beat the shit out of them to make them show me some respect, but my fucking face is enough of a mess already. I get up and let them crow over their bench. “That’s right, faggot, go screw your mom!” they yell at my retreating back.

  I wozzle along the flagstone path till I spot the tree where I’ve sat reading on so many Sundays. At the base of the trunk, I collapse on the roots. From there I survey the whole park. There are some dudebros rollerblading eastward under the orange glow of the streetlights, which are full of gargoylish moths. You can hear their laughter and their fucks when they fall down and get covered in mud, leaving behind shreds of skin as they pirouette across the earth. Then they get up like nothing happened and race off again. Off in the other direction, where the lights are burned out, are the Spenglerian papasitos, junkies, pot dealers. Cars go by, pause for a few moments to buy dime bags of weed, or eight balls of coke, or methamfuckingphetamines of crack, and then plow into the streets again with speed whetting their nostrils.