After the Hurricane(99)
On the island, Junior tried to forget about New York. He tried to pretend it did not exist, despite the fact that in his heart he knew it to be the center of the world. He knew many people there, but he was always alone, as isolated by his brain as his mother was in escaping hers. He had a curse, too, like she did. He was smart. Not like his uncles, who were the kind of smart that makes you a good getaway driver, a good lookout, a good man to have in a fight, men who could count and break someone’s limb at the same time. No, Junior was smart like a whip, smart like a knife.
He lived in books, in his mind, in mathematical calculations and iambic pentameter. His grandmother spat at him, when he passed, her rage a familiar and a foreign thing, constant but confusing, and told him he was showing off when he sat, silently reading. Perhaps it was because she couldn’t read at all. She thought he taunted her. As a small child he had asked why, and been slapped for his trouble. Now, he rarely spoke anymore, worried that something he knew would come out, escape his brain, and he would never get it back.
The boil on his back had grown throughout the winter. His young body was sleek and taut and lightly tanned, growing more so each day on the island as he worked in his father’s garden without his shirt on, or lay in the Caribbean sun, which is the same sun as everywhere else on Earth, only it feels different. Through the year, small cysts occasionally gathered, fatty pustules, harmless but bulging, across his shoulders and cresting over his buttocks. He left them alone at home, but here, sleeping on his stomach shirtless, they were visible to the world. The one just above his tailbone had grown, and grown, becoming angry, swelling with rage at the New York cold, at the long days spent in thin coats, at the task of caring for Esperanza, finding her when her body followed her mind, when she stopped taking her pills, when the prayers to Jesus and Mary and the five great orishas and anyone else listening weren’t enough. Now, Goli’s aim was true, her weapon ready, and the boil, so plump and proud, found itself attacked by a force much greater than itself, its clear foul-smelling liquid mixing with Junior’s blood as his uncle held him down, as he muffled his screams in the pillow.
“Good,” Goli said in Spanish, satisfied. Junior looked up at her, his eyes plaintive. “Better this way.” She soaked a clean piece of fabric in something that smelled like Junior’s father did by 6:00 p.m. every day, and dabbed it on the incision, which sent fresh flames running along his nerves. He winced. “Baby. I did this for your father when we were growing up. He never even woke.”
Junior nodded. To not agree about the superiority of his father would cause more trouble than it was worth. Next to him, his uncle Luis stretched, his bones cracking. It was late at night, but Luis worked odd hours at the Maidenform factory that had recently opened on the island and he had just gotten home from work, right in time to help Goli with her operation.
“Late for you,” Goli observed, washing her hands and giving Luis a plate of rice and beans, drowning in sofrito, the mixture of peppers, culantro, and onions and garlic that Goli blended in the morning and used for most of what she cooked. Junior slept on the couch in their living room, which led into their kitchen, and he sat up, wearily, to give Luis room to sit.
“Thanks,” Luis responded in Spanish, the s at the end of gracias almost inaudible. When Junior spoke Spanish in New York with non-islanders, they told him that in Puerto Rico even the Spanish was lazy, lopping off the ends of things, swallowing syllables, assigning genders at will. But why shouldn’t things be both man and woman? Junior wondered. In New York men met in secret in the bathrooms of subway tunnels, or in the park, paying each other for affection. Who knew what women did. But on the island, things were less fixed, no matter how they were repented on Sunday. El agua, la agua, surely the water could be both?
“You want?” Luis asked, gesturing to the plate. Junior smiled, guiltily. He did want. He always wanted. His mother, when she cooked, was a terrible cook. Everyone said his grandmother poisoned her food, and besides, she rarely did anything for anyone, let alone some kind of labor. He was always hungry; they had always been poor. Working daily out in the sun had only made him hungrier. And Goli was a very good cook. Luis gestured to Goli, who smiled.
“Where do you put it all?” she wondered. She, like her husband, like Junior’s father, had the stout bodies of most of their family, gravity sinking its way into her hips, the hint of Taino tribesman spicing their blood, drawing them down to the equator. Those long-lost tribespeople left their mark on Puerto Ricans in square middles, blunt foreheads, black hair, brown skins, cheering on the arena where Spanish blood vied with African in the faces and bodies of each islander. In Junior’s family, their skins made a spectrum of color, from the pale olive tones his mother carried, her fair beauty disguising her madness, to his aunt Marisol, who they called Mariche, who had been, they joked, baked in the womb, emerging earth brown.
He shrugged, his mouth already full.
“This is why your father has you stay with me. He knows only I can keep you fed like this. Chavela would have given up years ago.” Junior looked up at Goli quickly before looking back at his food. They never discussed the fact that he spent at least a week, year after year, in her home instead of his father’s. Goli and Luis didn’t have children. After years of trying, they had put the image of an infant beaten out of tin next to the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe on their home altar and decided that they would accept God’s will in their lives. Goli laid out bowls of food for the neighborhood cats daily, and cooed at them as they wove their way around her legs, purring with gratitude, and Luis called the birds who came in the evenings his children. When Junior came, they treated him as their son, proud of his presence, bragging about his grades in school, his many accomplishments.