by Junot Díaz
He wasn’t listening. When I got close to him, he punched me in the chest.
Hope you like the smell of Hindu, I called after him. And baby shit.
Ma, I said. What are you thinking?
Ask him what he is thinking.
Two days later, when Mami was at work and I was in Old Bridge hanging out with Laura—which amounted to listening to her talking about how much she hated her stepmother—Rafa let himself into the house and grabbed the rest of his stuff. He also helped himself to his bed, to the TV, and to Mami’s bed. The neighbors who saw him told us he had some Indian guy helping him. I was so mad I wanted to call the cops, but my mother forbade it. If that’s how he wants to live his life, I won’t stop him.
Sounds great, Ma, but what the fuck am I going to watch my shows on?
She looked at me grimly. We have another TV.
We did. A ten-inch black-and-white with its volume control permanently locked at 2.
Mami told me to bring down a spare mattress from Doña Rosie’s apartment. This is just terrible what’s happening, Doña Rosie said. It’s nothing, Mami said. You should have seen what we slept on when I was little.
Next time I saw my brother on the street he was with Pura and the kid, looking awful in gear that no longer fit him. I yelled, You asshole, you got Mami sleeping on the fucking floor!
Don’t talk to me, Yunior, he warned. I’ll fucking cut your throat.
Any time, brother, I said. Any time. Now that he weighed a hundred and ten pounds and I had bench-pressed my way up to a hundred and seventy-nine, I could be aguajero, but he just ran his finger across his neck.
Leave him alone, Pura pleaded, trying to keep him from coming after me. Leave us all alone.
Oh, hi, Pura. They ain’t deported you yet?
By then my brother was charging, and, a hundred and ten pounds or not, I decided not to push it. I scrammed.
Never would have predicted it, but Mami hung tough. Went to work. Did her prayer group, spent the rest of her time in her room. He’s made his choice. But she didn’t stop praying for him. I heard her in the group asking God to protect him, to heal him, to give him the power of discernment. Sometimes she sent me over to check up on him under the pretense of bringing him medicine. I was scared, thinking he was going to murder me on the stoop, but my mother insisted. You’ll survive, she said.
First I had to be let into the apartment by the Gujarati guy, and then I had to knock and be let into their room. Pura actually kept the place pretty tight, got herself dolled up for these visits, put her son in his FOB best. She really played it to the hilt. Gave me a big hug. How are you doing, hermanito? Rafa, on the other hand, didn’t seem to give two shits. He lay on the bed in his underwear, didn’t say anything to me, while I sat with Pura on the edge of the bed, dutifully explaining some pill or another, and Pura would nod and nod but not look like she was getting any of it.
And then quietly I’d ask, Has he been eating? Has he been sick at all?
Pura glanced at my brother. He’s been muy fuerte.
No vomiting? No fevers?
Pura shook her head.
OK, then. I got up. Bye, Rafa.
Bye, dickhole.
Doña Rosie was always with my mother when I returned from these missions, to keep Mami from seeming desperate. How did he look? la Doña asked. Did he say anything?
He called me a dickhole. I’d say that was promising.
Once, when Mami and I were heading to the Pathmark, we caught sight of my brother in the distance with Pura and the brat. I turned to watch them to see if they would wave, but my mother kept walking.
—
SEPTEMBER BROUGHT SCHOOL BACK. And Laura, the whitegirl I’d been chasing and giving free weed, disappeared back into her regular friends. She said hi in the halls of course but she suddenly had no more time for me. My boys thought it was hilarious. Guess you ain’t the one. Guess I ain’t, I said.
Officially it was my senior year but even that seemed doubtful. I’d already been demoted from honors to college prep—which was Cedar Ridge’s not-going-to-college track—and all I did was read, and when I was too high to read I stared out the windows.
After a couple weeks of that bullshit, I went back to cutting classes, which was the reason I’d been dumped out of honors in the first place. My mom left for work early, got back late, and couldn’t read a word of English, so it wasn’t as if I was ever in danger of being caught. Which was why I was home the day my brother unlocked the front door and walked into the apartment. He jumped when he saw me sitting on the couch.
What the hell are you doing here?
I laughed. What the hell are you doing here?
He looked awful. He had this black cold sore at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes had sunk into his face.
What the fuck you been doing to yourself? You look terrible.
He ignored me and went into Mami’s room. I stayed seated, heard him rummaging around for a while, and then he walked out.
This happened two more times. It wasn’t until the third time he was crashing around Mami’s room that it dawned on my Cheech and Chong ass what was happening. Rafa was taking the money my mother kept stashed in her room! It was in a little metal box whose location she often changed but which I kept track of just in case I ever needed some bucks on the quick.
I went into her room while Rafa was mucking around in the closet, and slid the box out from one of her drawers, put it snug under my arm.
He came out of the closet. He looked at me, I looked at him. Give it to me, he said.
You ain’t getting shit.
He grabbed me. Any other time of our lives this would have been no contest—he would have broken me in four—but the rules had changed. I couldn’t decide which was greater: the exhilaration of beating him at something physical for the first time in my life or the fear of the same.
We knocked this over and that over, but I kept the box from him and finally he let go. I was ready for a second round, but he was shaking.
That’s fine, he panted. You keep the money. But don’t you worry. I’ll fix you soon enough, Mr. Big Shit.
I’m terrified, I said.
That night I told Mami everything. (Of course, I stressed that it had all gone down after I got home from school.)
She turned the stove on under the beans she had left soaking that morning. Please don’t fight your brother. Let him take whatever he wants.
But he’s stealing our money!
He can have it.
Fuck that, I said. I’m going to change the lock.
No, you are not. This is his apartment, too.
Are you fucking kidding me, Ma? I was about to explode, but then it hit me.
Ma?
Yes, hijo.
How long has he been doing it?
Doing what?
Taking the money.
She turned her back to me, so I put the little metal box on the floor and went out for a smoke.
—
AT THE BEGINNING of October, we got a call from Pura. He’s not feeling well. My mother nodded, and so I went over to check. Talk about an understatement. My brother was straight delusional. Burning up with fever and when I put my hands on him, he looked at me with zero recognition. Pura was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her son, trying to look all worried. Give me the damn keys, I said, but she smiled weakly. We lost them.
She was lying, of course. She knew that if I got the keys to the Monarch she’d never see that car again.
He couldn’t walk. He could barely move his lips. I tried to carry him but I couldn’t do it, not for ten blocks, and first time ever in the history of our nabe there was no one around. By then Rafa had stopped making any kind of sense and I started getting really scared. For real: I started flippin
g. I thought: He’s going to die here. Then I spotted a shopping cart. I dragged him over to it and put him in. We good, I said to him. We great. Pura watched us from the front stoop. I have to take care of Adrian, she explained.
All Mami’s praying must have paid off, because we got one miracle that day. Guess who was parked in front of the apartment, who came running when she saw what I had in the shopping cart, who took Rafa and me and Mami and all the Horsefaces up to Beth Israel?
That’s right: Tammy Franco. Aka Fly Tetas.
—
HE WAS IN for a long long time. A lot happened during and after, but there were no more girls. That part of his life was over. Every now and then Tammy visited him at the hospital, but it was like their old routine; she would just sit there and say nothing and he would say nothing and after a while she would leave. What the fuck is that? I asked my brother, but he never explained it, never said a word.
As for Pura—who visited my brother exactly never while he was in the hospital—she dropped by our apartment one more time. Rafa was still in Beth Israel, so I wasn’t under any obligation to let her ass in, but it seemed stupid not to. Pura sat down on the couch and tried to hold my mother’s hands, but Mami wasn’t having any of it. She had Adrian with her, and the little manganzón immediately started running around and knocking into things, and I had to resist the urge to break my foot off in his ass. Without losing her poor-me look, Pura explained that Rafa had borrowed money from her and she needed it back; otherwise, she was going to lose her apartment.
Oh, por favor, I spat.
My mother eyed her carefully. How much was it?
Two thousand dollars.
Two thousand dollars. In 198—. This bitch was tripping.
My mother nodded thoughtfully. What do you think he did with the money?
I don’t know, Pura whispered. He never explained anything to me.
And then she fucking smiled.
The girl really was a genius. Mami and I both looked like creamed shit, but she sat there as fine as anything and confident to the max—now that the whole thing was over she didn’t even bother hiding it. I would have clapped if I’d had the strength, but I was too depressed.
Mami said nothing for a while, and then she went into her bedroom. I figured she was going to emerge with my father’s Saturday-night special, the one thing of his that she’d kept when he left. To protect us, she claimed, but more likely to shoot my father dead if she ever saw him again. I watched Pura’s kid, happily throwing around the TV Guide. I wondered how much he was going to like being an orphan. And then my mother came out, with a hundred-dollar bill in hand.
Ma, I said weakly.
She gave the bill to Pura but didn’t let go of her end. For a minute they stared at each other, and then Mami let the bill go, the force between them so strong the paper popped.
Que Dios te bendiga, Pura said, fixing her top across her breasts before standing.
None of us saw Pura or her son or our car or our TV or our beds or the X amount of dollars Rafa had stolen for her ever again. She blew out of the Terrace sometime before Christmas to points unknown. The Gujarati guy told me when I ran into him at the Pathmark. He was still pissed because Pura had stiffed him almost two months’ rent.
Last time I ever rent to one of you people.
Amen, I said.
—
SO YOU’D HAVE thought Rafa would be at least a little contrite, when he finally got out. Fat chance. He didn’t say a thing about Pura. Didn’t talk much about anything. I think he knew in a real way that he wasn’t going to get better. He watched a lot of TV and sometimes he took slow walks down to the landfill. He took to wearing a crucifix, but he refused to pray or to give thanks to Jesus, as my mother asked him to. The Horsefaces were back in the apartment almost every day, and my brother would look at them and for kicks say, Fuck Jesu, and that would only get them to pray harder.
I tried to stay out of his way. I had finally hooked up with this girl who wasn’t half as fine as Laura, but who at least liked me. She had introduced me to mushrooms and that was how I was spending the time I was supposed to be in school, shrooming my ass off with her. I was so not thinking about the future.
Every now and then when me and Rafa were alone and the game was on I tried to talk to him, but he never said nothing back. His hair was all gone and he wore a Yankee cap even indoors.
And then about a month after he got out of the hospital I was coming home from the store with a gallon of milk, high and thinking about the new girl, when out of nowhere my face exploded. All the circuits in my brain went lights out. No idea how long I was down, but a dream and a half later I found myself on my knees, my face ablaze, holding in my hands not the milk but a huge Yale padlock.
Wasn’t until I made it home and Mami put a compress on the knot under my cheek that I figured it out. Someone had thrown that lock at me. Someone who, when he was still playing baseball for our high school, had had his fastball clocked at ninety-three miles per hour.
That’s just terrible, Rafa clucked. They could have taken your eye out.
Later, when Mami went to bed, he looked at me evenly: Didn’t I tell you I was going to fix you? Didn’t I?
And then he laughed.
FROM THE TOP OF WESTMINSTER, our main strip, you could see the thinnest sliver of ocean cresting the horizon to the east. My father had been shown that sight—the management showed everyone—but as he drove us in from JFK he didn’t stop to point it out. The ocean might have made us feel better, considering what else there was to see. London Terrace itself was a mess; half the buildings still needed their wiring and in the evening light these structures sprawled about like ships of brick that had run aground. Mud followed gravel everywhere and the grass, planted late in fall, poked out of the snow in dead tufts.
Each building has its own laundry room, Papi explained. Mami looked vaguely out of the snout of her parka and nodded. That’s wonderful, she said. I was watching the snow sift over itself, terrified, and my brother was cracking his knuckles. This was our first day in the States. The world was frozen solid.
Our apartment seemed huge to us. Rafa and I had a room to ourselves and the kitchen, with its refrigerator and stove, was about the size of our house on Sumner Welles. We didn’t stop shivering until Papi set the apartment temperature to about eighty. Beads of water gathered on the windows like bees and we had to wipe the glass to see outside. Rafa and I were stylish in our new clothes and we wanted out, but Papi told us to take off our boots and our parkas. He sat us down in front of the television, his arms lean and surprisingly hairy right up to the short-cut sleeves. He had just shown us how to flush the toilets, run the sinks, and start the shower.
This isn’t a slum, Papi began. I want you to treat everything around you with respect. I don’t want you throwing any of your garbage on the floor or on the street. I don’t want you going to the bathroom in the bushes.
Rafa nudged me. In Santo Domingo I’d pissed everywhere, and the first time Papi had seen me in action, whizzing on a street corner, on the night of his triumphant return, he had screamed, What in carajo are you doing?
Decent people live around here and that’s how we’re going to live. You’re Americans now. He had his Chivas Regal bottle on his knee.
After waiting a few seconds to show that yes, I’d digested everything he’d said, I asked, Can we go out now?
Why don’t you help me unpack? Mami suggested. Her hands were very still; usually they were fussing with a piece of paper, a sleeve, or each other.
We’ll just be out for a little while, I said. I got up and pulled on my boots. Had I known my father even a little I might not have turned my back on him. But I didn’t know him; he’d spent the last five years in the States working, and we’d spent the last five years in Santo Domingo waiting. He grabbed my ear and wrenched me back onto the
couch. He did not look happy.
You’ll go out when I say you’re ready.
I looked over at Rafa, who sat quietly in front of the TV. Back on the Island, the two of us had taken guaguas clear across the capital by ourselves. I looked up at Papi, his narrow face still unfamiliar. Don’t you eye me, he said.
Mami stood up. You kids might as well give me a hand.
I didn’t move. On the TV the newscasters were making small, flat noises at each other. They were repeating one word over and over. Later when I went to school I would learn that the word they were saying was Vietnam.
—
SINCE WE WEREN’T ALLOWED out of the house—it’s too cold, Papi said once but really there was no reason other than that’s what he wanted—we mostly sat in front of the TV or stared out at the snow those first days. Mami cleaned everything about ten times and made us some damn elaborate lunches. We were all bored speechless.
Pretty early on Mami decided that watching TV was beneficial; you could learn the language from it. She saw our young minds as bright, spiky sunflowers in need of light, and arranged us as close to the TV as possible to maximize our exposure. We watched the news, sitcoms, cartoons, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Jonny Quest, The Herculoids, Sesame Street—eight, nine hours of TV a day, but it was Sesame Street that gave us our best lessons. Each word my brother and I learned we passed between ourselves, repeating over and over, and when Mami asked us to show her how to say it, we shook our heads and said, Don’t worry about it.
Just tell me, she said, and when we pronounced the words slowly, forming huge, lazy soap bubbles of sound, she never could duplicate them. Her lips seemed to tug apart even the simplest vowels. That sounds horrible, I said.
What do you know about English? she asked.
At dinner she’d try her English out on Papi, but he just poked at his pernil, which was not my mother’s best dish.
I can’t understand a word you’re saying, he said finally. It’s best if I take care of the English.