After the Hurricane(91)
Yes, he was a sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy with limited resources living two doors down from a pool hall where he had once watched a heavyset Ukrainian man take out a gun and shoot his pool opponent in the face for allegedly “weighing” the balls, while the rest of the bar sipped their drinks, apathetic and unsurprised, but at least he was sane. Junior still saw that man in the hall sometimes, and while he had learned to be excellent at pool early, both as a geometrical exercise and a way to make extra money, he never challenged the Ukrainian. This was further proof of his sanity, and comforted Junior on cold and lonely nights through the winter of 1966 and into the winter of 1967, nights in which he lay awake, swaddled in every sweater he owned, layered under all of the blankets in the apartment and the coat his father had sent him the money for the previous Christmas, a navy wool jacket from the army-navy store.
Still, it made him feel guilty, how neat and comfortable his desperately poor little life was. The guilt prodded him to ask the doctors the same question on the visiting days, twice a month on Wednesdays, when will she be ready to come home, and pricked him again when he felt relief at their lack of answers.
The visits themselves were painful at best. Sometimes she was herself, yes, the sweet woman who had protected and loved him his whole life, the only real kindness he had ever known, the only thing he could trust. Sometimes she was a stranger to him. Sometimes she cried that demons were torturing her, flaying the skin off her flesh, couldn’t he see them? Sometimes she insisted that everyone, including him, was a ghost, that they had come for her but they could not have her yet, she was not ready. Sometimes she had messages to deliver to the world, vital, important information, and why was no one letting her do so? Furious and anxious, she would scream at Santiago, blaming him, sure they would listen to him if he insisted that they let her go. Santiago tried to explain that he had not put her here, in fact, she had checked herself into Bellevue after her neighbor had called the fire department, smelling smoke when Esperanza carefully burned all of his father’s clothing, things Santiago Sr. had left for when his son was old enough to wear them, on their fire escape. The scent of a lambskin coat burning had scented the entire apartment building for weeks, like something roasting and dying at once.
Once his mother was gone, his life fell into patterns. School, afternoons spent bagging groceries, weekends at the nearby Jewish Boys Club, which he had been going to for the last six years, despite being Catholic, where he practiced boxing and competed in mathematical contests. He would have liked to avoid the rest of his family completely, but while they largely left him alone, allowing him, a child, to live untethered, freed by their apathy, he saw them every Sunday, for dinner at his grandmother’s apartment, at which he wondered, every time, if she were trying to poison them all with terrible food. He also saw his grandmother when Esperanza’s welfare check came in, usually at the beginning of every month. Although he hated her, his grandmother was the one who helped Junior cash his mother’s checks, which, along with his pool hall winnings and the pittance he made at Gristedes and the little that Teofila herself, begrudgingly, contributed, grumbling that she still didn’t see why Santiago couldn’t come live with her, was enough for him to scrape by. But they both knew neither wanted that, that his grandmother was relieved that he didn’t live with her and her motley crew of children, that she would have been horrified and horrible to him if he had tried to move in.
Generally speaking, the family avoided the subject of his mother and her absence completely, acting as though she were busy, or merely out of town. His uncles and aunts never brought up the subject; well, they were children themselves, for the most part, and too wrapped up in their own needs and tragedies to care much about his mother. They were a violent lot, who begrudgingly acknowledged him as one of their own, but still found him, his academic interests, his quiet, his round owlish glasses, his disinterest in violence, to be alien, troubling, unmanly, strange.
Such was the population density of the city that his aunts and uncles were in a different school zone than he was, although they lived only blocks apart. They had no interest in school, not like he did. Learning things made sense to him. Especially numbers; they curled into his brain like the birds dressed Cinderella in the morning, in the movie, naturally, comfortably, with no hesitation. Around his family, Santiago hunched low, to make himself shorter, smaller, look weaker, so they would not see him, not notice him, but not, as they thought, because he thought he was better than them. He held himself apart because they stole things from him, they hit him in the shoulder, hard, they broke his glasses. The rest he could live with, but with Esperanza’s medical bills, and the cost of heat in the winter, he couldn’t afford another pair.
They didn’t all live with his grandmother. His oldest uncle, Rodrigo, who was only thirty, and a truck driver, had been married for a few years to Marisol, a sweet woman, or so they had thought. However, one day, off a tip from a friend who had seen Marisol out and about with a dark-skinned man the friend knew from his days running with the Mau Maus out in Brooklyn, Rodrigo ended his shift early and surprised his wife and her lover in a diner in Midtown. She barely had time to get the requisite ay, baby, it’s not what you think out of her mouth before he shot her, twice, in the chest and throat. Known to all as a kind and gentle man, Rodrigo then hit her lover in the face with the butt end of the smoking gun, fracturing his jaw, and then quietly waited for the police to come, Marisol’s dead body bleeding all over the floor of the diner. This had been the past spring, and he was currently serving his two years for manslaughter out in Rikers.