Clap When You Land(7)
as strict as he pretended.
I don’t mess with dudes from the barrio who love gossiping at the domino bars
about the girls that they’ve slept with.
I usually only flirt
with the international boys from school.
The ones with American accents,
their blue passports & blue blood
both stamped with prestige & money; those are the boys I switch my hips at.
Not because they’re cute or interesting— they’re often obnoxious & only want a taste of my gutter-slick tongue & brownness; they act as if they could elevate my life with a taste of their powder-milk-tinged pomp.
No, I date those boys because they are safe.
They can’t dance bachata or sing Juan Luis Guerra, can’t recite Salomé Ure?a or even name the forefathers; they wrap their flag around their shoulders like a safety blanket, & if a heart has topography,
I know none of these boys know the coordinates to navigate & survive mine’s rough terrain.
In other words, these boys would be no distraction.
Papi was a tiguerazo.
A hustler. A no-nonsense street-smart guy.
He could sell water to a fire hydrant,
sell a lit match to a burning gas station.
Papi comes from here: Sosúa, Puerto Plata, República Dominicana. & he’s always said he never wanted me or my tía
to polish boots or sell lottery tickets, to know hunger or the anger of going without.
& so our poor isn’t as poor as our neighbors’.
But it definitely isn’t as rich as my classmates’.
It’s the poor of an American sponsorship.
The poor of relying on Western Union
& a busy father & money that mostly goes to tuition; the poor of secondhand Nikes, leather repainted to look new.
Papi was a hustler: a first cousin to sweat, a criado of hard work. A king who built an empire so I’d have a throne to inherit.
El Cero is not the kind of hustler Papi was.
El Cero hustles bodies; eagle-eyes young girls from the time they are ten & gets them in his pocket with groceries & a kind word.
When those girls develop & show the
bud of a blossom, he plucks them for his team.
& although most people here won’t admit they think like me, a woman should be able to sell whatever she wants to sell.
But not if it’s at the insistence of a man. This man.
Word on the street is El Cero always gets a first taste of the girls who work for him. Before he gussies them up & takes them by the resort beach in cut-off tanks & short shorts so the men from all over the world who come here for sun & sex can give thumbs-up or -down to his wares. His women.
Not women, yet. Girls.
So, no. El Cero is not the kind of hustler Papi was.
He has no code.
The sweat that makes his money is not his own.
Even now, as I stare at the setting sun & walk away, he calls out, “Camino, you know, I’m here for you.
Whatever you need. Some extra money, or a shoulder to cry on. Just let me know. Your father’s life, it’s such a loss.”
It is a warm evening. But my skin feels kissed by cold.
Whatever Papi was paying him each year I think El Cero is still expecting. Even though I don’t have a dime to my name. I know there are other ways he’d accept payment.
I know he would love nothing more
than to have me further
in his debt.
I know what El Cero sees when he looks at me: This hair, the curls down my back,
lightened by sun & always tangled.
This thin body, better fed than most, curved softly in the places that elicit dog whistles & piropos; swimming has kept this body honed like Tía’s oft-sharpened machete.
I am pointy angles: knees & elbows,
sharp cheekbones & jaw, jagged tongue— although the last is not the water’s fault.
My skin is the same color as Tía’s, as Mamá’s.
If Papi’s photo was shot in black & white, I would be cast in soft sepia: shades of golden brown.
I am a girl who does not look like a woman.
I am a girl who looks like a girl.
I am a girl who is not full-fledged yet.
& that’s exactly what El Cero counts on.
A girl, easy to convince into a trade she doesn’t want, easy to sell to the men who do.
I used to go to school with El Cero’s little sister.
Back then he wasn’t El Cero yet. He was just skinny Alejandro, Emily’s older brother.
Back before the fever that swept in with a hurricane.
Back before the deaths, the illness.
Back before Papi put me in private school. Back before it all.
Cero’s little sister had a big gap-toothed smile, a gap that wasn’t just because we were both seven & missing teeth.
Cero’s little sister was my friend.
The first to raise her hand in class, to volunteer to read out loud. She waved at everyone & everything: the pregnant gutter cats, the women
who sold ointments & socks, the drunkards on the corner singing off-key.
The dengue fever came with the rain.
Tía didn’t have enough hands to try to heal them all.