by Jon Pineda
He and Fely both fell in.
The boat sprang back, righting itself, and then floated away. They both surfaced.
Manny frantically searched the water.
Fely laughed, squealing.
She was happy she had surprised him. He needed that.
“There’s a shark,” he said.
“Where?” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“Somewhere,” he said.
She swam over to him and put her arms around his neck. She whispered into his ear. He nodded, even though he was furious at her. Their boat had floated a good distance. He knew his cousin would spot it and bring it back.
The water was clear. She swam ahead of him. He watched her body, her legs noodling. He rose to take a breath. The shore was far away. He descended. She rose and he paused, floating underneath her, and watched how the cloth of her shirt grew undulant before she surfaced. From the spot where he was now, he could see sparkling lines ahead.
At first, he thought they were ghosts, shapes outlining swaths of silk-like material, shimmering purple and blue and white. Wedding dresses thrown into the sea. Floating in their emptiness. He thought he could see a processional in the way the shapes were lining up. He thought of the stories his lola had told him, ang mga aswang, evil spirits that roamed the islands, vampires and demons waiting to grab you at any moment.
Fely swam ahead of him again.
This time he chased her. He wanted to grab her legs and pull her back.
The shapes, he could see now, were of this world. Box jellyfish, fluffy and translucent. Fely had gone too close. In turning to come back toward him, she had kicked her leg out and grazed one long, beaded strand. Nematocysts anchored her. Though she was able to swim free of the tentacle, the poison drew her back. It pulled her breath into a shallow place.
Manny grabbed her and lifted her into the air. If he were to head toward the shore now, he would have to navigate through the sudden colony. Behind him, the boat was a dash. His cousin and the other boys were mere silhouettes warbling. They could have been gulls buoyant on the surface.
All he knew was that Fely was swallowing water. She was trying to say something, but winced instead, as if the words were barbed, catching in her throat.
She was crying. Manny kissed her face and said, “I’m here, I’m here,” and he thought her breathing was slowing so he screamed toward the distant shadows, lifting one arm as high as it would go, and the distant shadows screamed back.
Mario had just graduated from high school and had taken it upon himself to go alone. It had scared him. His mother and father wanted nothing to do with the man they had taken into their home, who had given them nothing in return but years full of glares from the community. That and hate mail. Crank calls equally venomous and at all hours. Mario remembered those the most.
He went to a parole board interview. He didn’t know the rules. He sat quietly behind a small table in the middle of a poorly lit room as, from a distance, a large black woman with a lazy eye gazed back at him. She smiled to reveal a violent smear of dark lipstick stuck to her tiny front teeth, settled in the grooves.
“Son, what is your relationship to the inmate . . . Exequiel Guzman?” the woman said. She pronounced his uncle’s name Execute All Goosemen.
“I’m his nephew,” Mario said.
The woman shook her head.
“I’m afraid you’re not allowed to . . .”
“I just need to tell you a little bit about my uncle,” he interrupted.
He could feel the words. He had read them countless times, folded and refolded the pages so that they fit into the front pocket of his pants. He ran his finger over the blistered papers where they now rested in case he should need to refer to them again.
“When I was a boy, my uncle Exequiel came to live with us. It won’t mean anything for me to say this now, but he saved my life.”
The woman leaned forward so that the gray foam head of the microphone on the desk covered her mouth completely. Then her voice filled the room with clipped static: “Son, I’m afraid . . .”
Mario didn’t hesitate now.
“A bunch of us were out playing in the street, and this car comes flying around the corner. Its headlights were busted, I think. I don’t know. The point is, you couldn’t see it coming. No one could. Especially me. I was standing there in the middle of the street, and my uncle comes out of nowhere and just pushes me out of the way.”
“That was very brave,” the woman said.
“It was,” he said, looking down. “It was.”
“Son?”
“Yes?” Mario said.
“Are you finished?”
The woman was still smiling, and there was something about her tone that made Mario feel her curiosity was put on. He had known it the moment he walked in the room, when he had shaken her padded hand and the padded hands of the other parole board members. In her, though, he had sensed it immediately, that it wasn’t going to happen, which is why Mario had stopped his rehearsed story halfway through.
He’d had it all planned out, had worked up how the car would have thrown his uncle’s body into the sky, and how the limp each of the parole examiners had surely seen, or would see eventually, might be connected to this moment of sacrifice. It would unfold perfectly. So much so that it was a story Mario felt he could continue to carry with him after this day. It felt real.
It had almost happened that way, he told himself, or if he had truly been standing there and a car had been careening toward him, he knew his uncle would not have hesitated and would have rushed into the street to save him.
“The car missed him,” Mario said finally, wiping his eyes.
“Do you need a minute, son?”
“Thank you,” Mario said.
He rubbed his sleeve across his face.
The woman put her hand over the microphone, but Mario could still hear her words. “He really shouldn’t be here,” she said to a pinkish, splotchy-skinned white man sitting to her left. His eyes fluttered like peeling paint on a fence post, where barbed wire had rusted through. The man lifted his face from the folder he had been inspecting. He had been reading with his eyes close to the words and images, studying the collage of evidence. He kept regarding the picture of a young girl, the clear line of sutures that resembled two continents coming together. Plate tectonics.
He had helped his own daughter with her homework weeks before, and the lesson was fresh in his mind. Then the photo of Exequiel Guzman after he was arrested, his withdrawn glare and the stooped way he held his body within the frame—that and the photocopy of the smudged fingerprints, squiggly lines that appeared to avoid one another for a short time just before their collision. They could have been symbols for water on a map. Rivers bunched together, then running their separate ways into the sea.
Mario went home and told his parents. He had gone to the parole board hearing even though he wasn’t supposed to, and he told them he was sorry. At first, they thought he was talking about how he had lied to them and taken the car so far away when he knew he shouldn’t have.
He could not bring himself to say it at first.
His mother held his face to keep him still.
“You think he had nothing to do with it?” his mother said.
“Had nothing to do with what?” his father said. The man’s eyes widened.
Mario could barely breathe.
“What are you saying, mijo?” his father said.
“I don’t know,” Mario said.
“Yes, you do,” his mother said. “Take it slow. Start from the beginning.”
Mario began to sob, but his father would have none of it. He looked as if he would punch the wall his son was leaning against. He looked as if he would take apart the house with his hands.
“Tell us,” his mother said.
His father said nothing now.
Mario took a breath and told them what neither could believe.
Tom’s original thought had been to take it slow,
wade into the experience before committing to a club or even a major. He thought he might want to be either a lawyer or a doctor of some sort; however, after orientation, he realized the majority of the students he had met had similar aspirations. There would be work to do. To make matters worse, most had been valedictorians or salutatorians of their graduating classes, and common sense dictated that if all of them followed through on this shared dream, there would hardly be room left for him.
His first night on campus, though, had proved too exciting. Just getting ready to go to the dining hall could be an event. He meandered with others who lived in his dormitory. Just a first year in a gang of other first years. They wandered the grounds in new orange or navy-blue T-shirts with clever Wahoo sayings and looked to meet other students, to see what was going on. Around them, a force field of Polo and Drakkar emanated.
There were the numerous, banal questions one had to answer. Questions that felt attached to a rhetorical merry-go-round, specifically designed to accommodate both the person asking the question and the one having to provide a response. Instead of lacquered, colorfully painted horses, there was the inquiry, “So where are you from?” or “What kind of bands do you like?”
Tom met Rachel the first week. When he walked into the party, she pointed right at him and at first, he didn’t get it. Then she walked over and said, “Nice shirt.” She was wearing the same one he had on. Before he could respond, she started in on other questions he had already answered throughout the day. Someone on his floor had thrown together this party, replete with grain punch and stacked cases of Milwaukee’s Beast.
He didn’t tell her he was from Norfolk. He felt it would be better if he just said, “the beach.” Norfolk being close enough in his mind, and she said she thought that was cool. It turned out she was from Northern Virginia, but she called it NoVa, a word he had never heard associated with the region. She had three older brothers, all of whom had graduated from here. With a slight pout, she added she was sad she couldn’t bring her puppy Rufus to live with her. Maybe next year, once she could grab a place off campus. Tom suspected Rufus had been a gift from a boyfriend back in Occoquan.
“What about you?” she said. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
He looked around the room. Everyone was happy, smiling.
“No,” he said evenly. “Only child.”
“That’s sad,” Rachel said and made a point of frowning.
And there it was. His new life.
Tom lay in her loft-style bed and studied a shadow on the ceiling.
A desk lamp had been left on. He thought maybe her roommate was up early, but when he leaned over the side to search the room, he found it empty.
He could tell by Rachel’s steady breathing that she had drifted off. She was still in her jeans and J. Crew blouse, her suede buck shoes and socks the only things she’d discarded. It felt practiced to him, this controlled abandon, but then she started jerking slightly, her legs mostly.
He remembered how he and Teagan, when they were really little, used to sit on the living room floor while their parents huddled together on the couch. The television would be on, and the family dog, a shepherd-hound mix, would be sprawled out near the set, dreaming. The dog’s legs would kick in sleep as if trying to function. To run. Tom and Teagan would cup their mouths to contain the bursts of laughter. With bodies shuddering, they would both look back at their parents on the couch, who would also be holding back. In that moment, there would be a shared secret as they all watched the dog chasing the invisible thing.
Only when the dog became so engrossed that there was yelping did he and Sissy drop their hands and laugh loudly. Tom pounded the floor. He couldn’t help it. The dog looked confused. It had been startled, stunned by the laughter. Teagan would be the one to apologize and nuzzle the dog’s muzzle, rubbing its soft ears and whispering, “We’re sorry, Pilot. We’re sorry,” until the laughter died down and there was still Teagan, consoling for having taken the dog away from its dream. No one in the room spoke; they just wiped their eyes because it had been too much, their happiness.
It was not sadness now. He had felt that before, been consumed by it actually. He watched this girl sleep, the girl whom he had met in the city of his new life.
Days later, on his way to his Introduction to American History class, he was approached on campus by a third year. His name was Chase and he wore a crushed baseball cap sporting Greek letters and covering a spray of sandy blond curls. His blue Oxford had been unbuttoned just so to reveal a tight, surfer necklace of bleached white shells.
Chase was from the same hometown as Tom’s roommate, Landon, somewhere in the western part of the state. Chase asked Tom if he had considered rushing a fraternity, and when Tom just shrugged, not wanting to appear one way or the other, Chase grinned and said he understood and handed Tom a slip of paper with a scrawled address. Tom had just read a chapter on the whaling vessels of the Northeast, could still picture the inset of a piece of scrimshaw.
“A couple of guys are meeting up to watch the Skins,” Chase said. “You and Landon should stop by. But just you two, okay? Is that cool?”
“Cool,” Tom said, and with that, Chase tipped his hat and blended in with the others milling about the crowded corridor.
That evening, Tom went alone. All of the guys there wore similar baseball hats, the same Greek letters. Rather than turning around and leaving, Tom ended up staying and drinking with them, cheering mindlessly whenever Riggins plowed into the end zone. Later in the week, there were more events, more opportunities to get wasted, as Chase liked to scream and the other brothers would holler back in response.
When Tom was given a bid to pledge the fraternity, it was not a surprise. He had expected it. Chase himself delivered the bid in the same spot, outside his Introduction to American History class, the only class so far that Tom was beginning to like.
At the chapter house on Rugby Road, he stood with his new pledge brothers. He couldn’t help thinking about the other guys he had seen during rush events. Those who had tried their hardest to please, it turned out they were the ones who didn’t get a bid. Tom knew it was a game, but he didn’t care.
A kid who announced himself as the pledge master pinned a star on Tom’s T-shirt. Tom wished then he had worn something a little more formal. The other pledges all seemed to have taken note of the same memo explaining the dress code: buttoned-up blue Oxford shirt, woven leather belt, khakis, a frayed UVA baseball hat. When Tom raised his hand like the others and recited the same words, he could feel his voice falling away.
At the first real pledging activity, Tom balanced on top of a metal folding chair. There were his other pledge brothers doing the same thing; the sound of creaking filled the room. Tom then covered his face while the brothers in the fraternity began to shout obscenities and hurl old food at him.
The night before, he had been in the same corner making out with a girl whose hair, even in the smoky atmosphere, smelled like strawberries. Now he was covered in cold oatmeal and pea soup. One of his pledge brothers was smeared with a concoction of cottage cheese and kidney beans, another with mustard and slices of lunchmeat. More food flew past him. It made no sense, which was the point.
“You suck!” the brothers screamed. “You’re worthless!”
Tom began to flinch with each hit.
“You’ll never be a brother!” they said.
And so he never was.
four
Prior offenses? It was not said this way. Those who spoke to him sometimes asked, and Shoe could not list them. Or would not list them. He suffered heavily for not speaking, for not finding the words.
Everywhere he looked there were words.
Scratched on the walls, inside the rims of sinks and steel commodes. Even on the arms of men. Smeared words. Colorful scripts. There was no shortage of language and the bodies of men that carried all forms of phrases, chants, and prayers blended with glistening skin.
He began to read poems in the pris
on library. He committed one to memory.
At any one time the yard was alive with language carried on backs widening with splayed lats, tattooed knuckles tightening over bars wrapped in worn cloth tape. Someone straining to lift the weight, a word there in their hands. A word like his nephew’s name scrawled in the air. It moved from neck to neck, arm to arm, until it landed in Shoe’s mouth and he whispered it to himself before crossing the yard.
Sometimes he made it across without anyone noticing his slow walk, his foot dragging behind him. Sometimes he pretended to be normal, untouched by his circumstances, and in those moments, he was the most scared. It would not last, and he could feel it, this life fading in and out. His prior life.
And sometimes he thought about Elle in Taos, the last time they had spoken, and what had become of her son. He thought about this boy and Mario and himself. And what of his own childhood? Had he done the right thing, ever?
She had not been his first choice, though in the crowded setting he could already tell she was taller than he was and blonde, two features he had discovered he liked in particular, and when she wandered off from the other women in her corner booth and disappeared to the back of the bar, Exequiel left the torn cushioned stool where he had been watching her and slipped among the other stragglers, all red and blue flannel shirts and jeans, bodies shadowy as open water, and went in search of her.
The cigarette machine, with its colorful labels and worn plastic pull levers, resembled a thrown-together robot, angled as it was with its mirrored-finish metal trim catching blue and green lights splashing from the stage where a band was struggling through a cover of The Eagles’ “Take It Easy.” Every so often one of the waitresses would join in on the chorus.
He passed the pool table. Off to the side were two men dressed in the similar stamped country-western attire, flannel and jeans, but with rigid bolo ties and clean cowboy hats as accents. They were sipping on beers and nodding at nothing in particular, pushing around the cue ball like it was bothering them.