The Affliction

by C. Dale Young

  “But we cannot make it much longer,” Carlitos said without even trying to imitate his mother’s voice in that instance.

  “Well, that’s too fucking bad. I have things to do, woman. Important things.”

  “But how will we ...”

  “Not another word, bitch. Not another word!”

  The boys had tried when they were much younger to construct a telephone with two cans and string, the way they had seen kids do on a television show, but they had no string and used, instead, a wire hanger pried apart and stretched between them; they shoved the ends of the hanger into the small holes they had punctured in the Progresso cans with the points of small gardening sheers. They never so much as removed the labels from the cans. Within days of putting together their phone, they couldn’t find the hanger. Despite a panicked search that could only be panicky for small kids, they never found it. It simply vanished. Sitting cross-legged and hunched over in the basement, the hanger had been missing for years, but they continued to place the cans to their ears and talk to each other out of habit, a strange reflex, sitting close together as if the wire hanger were still there stretched between them. They did this less than when they were younger, but they still found themselves, every so often, in the basement, playing phone call.

  To call it a basement was a stretch. Crawlspace was a better word, this dark and dank space beneath the front porch was where phone call happened. The only light to be found there were the small diamond-shaped beams created by the latticework of wood long since painted white and extending from the lip of the porch down to the hard soil that couldn’t even support weeds much less grass, the beams of light making little diamonds that wavered on the dark ground beneath them. Phone call could happen nowhere else. Such a thing would have been unthinkable to those boys. And that Sunday, like most other Sundays, the conversation that took place was between their mother and father. The conversation always took place between their mother and father, Rosa and Ricardo Blanco.

  “Look woman, I needed space. I just fucking needed to get the hell out of that house.”

  “But Ricardo. I have fixed up the garage so you can have your own space. Your own, no one else’s.”

  Pedro stopped, put the can down, and stared at Carlitos. He was surprised to hear Carlitos use their father’s name. Usually, he would use “Papi” or “Great Vacancy” or “Chicken Head” or something else. That Carlitos used the name “Ricardo” bothered Pedro, bothered him enough to halt the game. It bothered him more than he could even explain to himself. It broke the “rules” of phone call. And phone call, like any other game, had rules. For one, their mother almost never said their father’s name out loud. And secondly, Pedro was old enough to remember his father chastising him when he was small for using his name, his Christian name, instead of simply calling him Papi. Pedro continued staring at his brother with what many of us would call venom in his eyes.

  Carlitos knew he had gone too far. He had disappointed Pedro before. But he was tired of playing the role of his mother in the conversation. He was always Rosa Blanco in this game, and it was difficult being his mother, though he knew he was every bit as anxious as she was, every bit as nervous, too. He wanted to be his father, Ricardo Blanco, whether or not he spoke the name on the phone. He wanted a life of excitement where the rules didn’t matter or at least weren’t enforced. It would be easier for him not to say his father’s name if he got the chance to play his father in the game because folks don’t talk about themselves in third person. It would then be Pedro’s job to leave the name unsaid, to follow the rules.

  In Church that morning, Rosa Blanco insisted her boys go to Confession, something Carlitos hated more than almost anything else. In this, he was very much like his father. In this, he was very much like most men. And like his father, he hated saying Confession more than standing in line for Holy Communion or the repeated kneeling-sitting-standing-kneeling throughout Mass. What Carlitos noted after years of study was the fact that the events of Mass followed so many rules. Everything had to be done in a certain way and in a certain order. It was like a very long and boring game. You can imagine how this could drive a young boy mad, that incessant need for rule and order.

  Because there was only one priest at the Church, Carlitos knew, like everyone did, exactly who was behind the dark screen listening to him reveal his transgressions. Father Happy was in there, rolling his eyes or holding back a sigh. No one could remember Father Happy’s real name. Good old Father Happy, who wasn’t even old, whose attempts at Spanish made it all too clear he had learned it from a set of cassettes and not actual people. But the Church would never send an older priest here. Just like the many islands in the Caribbean, just like the poor towns dotting Mexico and Central America, the Ciudad Juarezes and the Managuas, the easy to ignore towns of southern California with their Spanish names were just other dying outposts of Spain. Holy Mother Church always sent the younger priests here, the ones without seniority, the ones who could endure brown people like us who lived in towns named after angels and saints. And Father Happy wasn’t just young; he tried to act as if he were even younger than he actually was.

  Carlitos guessed Father Happy was in his early thirties, but Father Happy wanted to talk to the young people as if he were twenty. When he spoke English, he tried to do so with a Spanish accent. But he got the accent wrong for the area. He would say, “How you doing, mang?” without any realization his accent sounded like a bad imitation of a boricua loan shark and not remotely like the Mexican-inflected English most spoke in the area. When he came close to using English the way Chicanos in the area did, he came off sounding like an actor playing a vato on a television movie special, a vato who everyone knew would be busted for selling dope and then incarcerated before the final credits. He would ask Carlitos if he listened to Snoop Dogg, or had he seen the new show on MTV. Father Happy was a pretty bad imitation of a twenty-year-old guy. And what twenty-year-old guy would be a priest anyway?

  Carlitos lied that morning in the Confessional. He lied because he was tired and didn’t want to think about his sins. So, as he often did, he made them up on the fly. We have all done this. All men do this. And though we don’t like to think about it, even some women do this. Kneeling at the screened window in the dark cubicle, Father Happy’s shadow shifting behind it, the first thing Carlitos could think to confess was about touching himself inappropriately and having impure thoughts. That was an easy sin to confess. What priest would doubt such a confession from a thirteen-year-old boy? But the reality was that Carlitos had not had impure thoughts, at least not that he could remember. And he had not touched himself in that way, at least not in the past week. The house was small, and he had little time to himself. The shower cubicle in the bathroom had no curtain, just a plexiglass door that, despite being opaque from calcium deposits, was easily seen through. There was always the chance Pedro would walk into the bathroom while he was showering, and had his brother caught him in the shower like that, Carlitos would never have heard the end of it. Despite the fact Pedro had taught Carlitos how to jack off, he would have taunted his little brother mercilessly.

  But there in the Confessional, the sins Carlitos chose to confess got more and more outrageous and ended with him telling the priest how he had beaten his brother with a switch, beaten him until blood ran from his neck. As he told the priest this, his voice trembled like a practiced actor. The words stuttered from his mouth in what could only be called an Oscar-caliber performance. It was so good Carlitos practically convinced himself he had actually done this, beaten Pedro with a switch!

  But what impressed Carlitos the most was the fact this confessed beating required thirty Hail Marys more than the simple admission of masturbation. And in the end, Carlitos only said eight Hail Marys and a single Our Father. He was thinking ahead. He knew that by skimping on the prayers he would have something to confess the following Sunday. And he couldn’t wait to find out how many Hail Marys he would have to say for admitting he hadn’t done the r
equired amount of penance for the terrible sin of beating his brother with a switch. When he rose from kneeling, he had to work hard to erase the smirk from his face before he stepped from the dark little box into the alcove in the back of the Church, speckled as it was then by the light filtered through the stained glass, his upturned hands, as he walked slowly through the shifting colors, yellow then pink then a reddish hue.

  Rosa Blanco called out to her sons, and they dropped the cans and crawled out from under the house. She was tired. Her voice was tired. It had that sound, the one that made them worry. Her voice and its tremulous quality often made them worry, even if they could not identify the feeling as worry to someone else. Neither of those boys could tell with any certainty whether or not the voice was genuine, put on, or put on for so long it had become a habit. But her voice made them nervous at times, made them worry even when they couldn’t place a finger on exactly why. They found her in the kitchen with her head in her hands, sitting under the telephone. It hung there, that awkward yellow phone that made no attempt to match all of the avocado-green things in the kitchen. It did not ring. It just hung there on the wall, its slim body like the body of an exclamation point. She reminded them the tree in the front yard needed pruning, told them that it had become too straggly and terrible looking. She told them they needed to trim it back soon and that she wasn’t going to ask them again. And Pedro watched Carlitos. He watched Carlitos’ eyes and where they focused. He watched Carlitos staring at the phone.

  The boys didn’t prune the tree. Did you really expect them to do as their mother asked when she asked them? They were adolescent boys, and like most their age, their decision not to do something had less to do with shirking responsibility than it did a straight-out lack of focus. They went outside and stared at it, instead. It was, indeed, straggly and unkempt, this tree and its occasional red petals punctuating the shapeless branches with little points of red, a berry red almost like something from a Christmas card. Neither one of them really had any intention of trimming back the tree. The tree almost never seemed to grow. And yet, it became messy, its branches thin, almost like fingers, reaching out in all manner of different directions. Pedro sat on the sidewalk trying to think of ways to get cigarettes from the corner store several blocks away. Pedro was good at getting older guys to give him cigarettes on their way out of the store, could talk the cool talk and be “down” as he put it. Pedro always wanted to smoke. He liked it in a way Carlitos didn’t. Smoking made Carlitos feel light-headed, almost dizzy. It made the muscles in his legs feel tingly and as if someone had stretched them.

  Carlitos became aware then that he and Pedro were being watched. Like any other animal, he had become aware of eyes trained on him, tracking him. Somewhere deep in our genes, this protective instinct had been passed down over millennia. And despite the passage of so much time, this reflex, if you could call it that, still functioned. If anything, it is the living proof that human beings were not always the hunters, that the likely truth is that for ages we were, in fact, the hunted. Carlitos turned then, turned slowly at the neck, to look to the right of their own house. He turned his attention a few houses down the street to check the front porch of Flora Diaz’s house. But this time, to his surprise, the hunter was not Flora Diaz sweeping her front steps while watching them. Instead, standing there that afternoon, was a man with skin as dark as their own, a man Carlitos was sure he had seen before. But before he could think further on it, on where he had seen this man, Carlitos realized Pedro was talking again, his voice more and more agitated.

  “I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here. This place sucks hole.”

  “But Pedro, you’re sixteen ...”

  “Men get girls pregnant at sixteen!”

  “Yeah, but how are you going to make money to live?”

  “I can work in the fields somewhere. I can work in a store.”

  “The corner store?”

  “No, shithead. In a store far away.”

  Carlitos knew Pedro was talking just to talk. So, he ignored him, which was something rare. Carlitos usually hung on every word his brother said. But all of this talk of leaving was just too strange. People in their town never seemed to leave. Except for their father. Their father left, something no one in their small barrio could understand, even if most of them wanted to leave as well. Carlitos sat there and let Pedro go on and on about leaving, about meeting lots of women, about how he would party and have fun, smoke endless amounts of weed. Carlitos knew it was all talk. Pedro didn’t know how to do anything except skip school, smoke cigarettes, and mouth off. Carlitos tried, as hard as he could, to remember when Pedro had become that way. When they were younger, Pedro was always quiet. Their mother had worried Pedro had a speech impediment or some kind of mental problem. The school had put him in a special class, but everyone knew that such a class was anything but special. And what Carlitos knew was that Pedro hated the class, even though he never actually admitted that. Even at that young age, Carlitos knew he did not ever want to be in such a class. That class was nothing but a jail cell for seven hours each weekday.

  “Let’s go back to phone call.”

  “Nah. I don’t want to go down there.”

  “You are such a loser sometimes. You know that?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Loser with a capital fucking ‘L.’”

  “Yeah. Capital ‘L’”.

  Carlitos again felt as if he and his brother were being watched, but when he turned to look at the front of Flora Diaz’s house, the man he had seen earlier was gone, replaced now by Flora Diaz herself, Flora Diaz watching them while sweeping her steps with her small handbroom. The man had neither walked away from the house down toward the corner store or up toward them. No car had driven off. There had been no sound of a screen door creaking open or slamming shut. All that was there now was Flora Diaz swishing her small broom and what Carlitos knew was certainly a look of displeasure on her face. She always had a look of annoyance on her face when she looked at them.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” It had been two weeks since Carlitos had done the lesser penance, but he had forgotten to confess it the previous Sunday. He had confessed, instead, to stealing Twinkies from the corner store, to ignoring his mother, and, the old standby, touching himself. He had not stolen Twinkies, but he had jacked off, and he couldn’t remember if he had ignored his mother or not. So, now, he was excited to confess he had not said all of his Hail Marys or his Our Fathers. This was a true confession, even if it had not happened that week.

  As always, Carlitos could make out the shape of Father Happy’s head even though all he could see was the shadow of it against the screen. Father Happy appeared to be desperately trying to hold still, or maybe he was leaning against his hand with his elbow on a desk or ledge of some kind. Father Happy sighed and tapped at the screen, his one way of telling a sinner to hurry up, spill it, confess.

  “It has been one week since my last confession.”

  “Yes, my son, go on ...” Father Happy sighed.

  “You see, Father, I didn’t do my entire penance last week. I was tired, so I didn’t say all of the Hail Marys or Our Fathers.”

  “But were you sorry for your sins? Did you want to say the prayers?”

  “Yes, but I was tired.”

  Carlitos knew he was lying, but the lying made him even more excited. He knew he hadn’t been tired. He knew he had skimped on his penance because he wanted to confess that later, wanted to test the grand schema of the Sacrament of Confession with all of its rules for penance. But there, in the dark and musty Confessional, the ripeness of the last confessor’s armpits still lingering in the closed box’s air, this new lie took on a greater importance. Yes, he had been so tired, so overworked. He went on and on, the dim light in the priest’s box staining the screen in front of him with Father Happy’s awkward shadow, his neck always appearing longer in shadow, like a small giraffe, like a minor monster of some kind you find in a cartoon.

&
nbsp; “God understands how tired we become. But he also knows when we are truly sorry. So, for taking food from the store, you should say ten Hail Marys. For your inappropriate acts, fifteen Hail Marys and an Our Father.”

  “But I haven’t even confessed to stealing or touching myself yet! How can you give me penances when I haven’t even confessed these things?”

  “Did you not steal from the store this week? Did you not touch yourself?”

  “Well, yeah, I did, Father. I stole a comic book from the corner store on Thursday. And well, I jacked off until I shot my load all over the bathroom tile. I did it several times this week to see how far I could shoot.” Carlitos watched Father Happy’s shadow as he said this, waited to see if there would be a change in his demeanor because of the slightly more vulgar way he described his inappropriate acts. But there was no change, just another sigh from Father Happy.

  “Yeah, each time I came, each time I shot my load, it felt great, Father.”

  “Yes, this is the problem with sin, my son.”

  “But what about my being tired? My not saying the prayers?”

  “God and His Holy Church forgive you, my tired son.”

  “Yes, but how many Hail Marys?”

  “You wanted to say them, so your heart was true. You need not give penance for having a true heart.”

  “Are you serious, Father?”

  “Yes, my son. God’s gift is the gift of understanding.”