Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(42)

The last days of summer also meant that it was the tail end of cockfighting’s peak season. Bird trainers made more than half of their annual revenue at this time, I heard Tony say. He said that late May and early June brought thousands of fighters and gamblers into the larger arenas, temporarily shutting down small-time, back-lot operations like Norman’s. He traveled with Mama and his men to districts such as Cubao and Muntinlupa, and there fought their best birds. And there met with mayors, councilmen, and vice-governors, plotting schemes for the next midterm or term elections.

I came home from the first day of fifth grade, blasting through the front doors, saying, “Babies, I’m home!”

Milo came limping toward me, frantically barking and biting my socks.

“What’s wrong, buddy?” I said, running upstairs with him.

I opened the door to my room and found the cats cowering in the closet. Mama cat had her claws and fangs out, and the kittens were burrowed under her. Milo continued barking, jumping and turning, almost howling and motioning his head toward the door.

“What happened, buddy? Where’s Tweetie?”

He barked again, jumped on my leg, and tugged at my school skirt with his crooked mongrel teeth. Tweetie wasn’t in my room nor my brother’s, not in the sink or tub playing rubber ducky, not in my shoes or slippers. His bowl of chicken feed, which was right outside my bedroom door, was full and untouched.

I started to cry, knowing that something bad had happened to the bird I had grown from a yellow chick to a full-breasted, white-feathered chicken. I ran downstairs to look for Manang Biday, but I didn’t find her. Instead I found, on the kitchen table, roasted poultry—wings, thighs, full breast, and all.

Norman had lost a bet and his most prized gamecock, and he found it only fitting to un-celebrate. After a win, he usually roasted a whole pig to feed himself and his men. But after a loss, or worse, a casualty, he took away something that was precious to Paolo, Mama, or me.

Norman stood against the kitchen sink. He sweated in his safari shirt, contorting his Elvis face to a Joker sneer, and petted his second-best brown-and-crimson derby bird. He clicked his tongue and nodded his head toward the roasted chicken on the kitchen table and said, “Dinner.”





Library





1997


The mansion was dark. Always dark. Always ready to devour me. Always sad. Always filled with men and their women, drinking, smelling of whiskey and San Miguel beer and sticky, quick, heavy-groaning, unfaithful sex. Always filled with fighting chickens—aggressive, unlike my dead Tweetie. Chickens roamed everywhere, pooped everywhere, pecked on everything: the ottoman, the rattan peacock chair, the breakfast table, the record player and turntables, the imperial silk curtains, the Oriental rugs. They laid waste the relics of my parents’ empire.

We hadn’t had power in the mansion since after my pet chicken was butchered and broiled. I’d learned to line my room with leftover crescents of mosquito coil—ones I’d collected from other rooms after they’d been used as a brothel—to ward off bugs and the obscurity of night. The perimeter of the room flickered like a landing strip awaiting a rescue plane.

SOS.

Save our souls! Save my pets! Save me!

My prayers to God. My tear-drenched, heart-wrenched prayers to the God of the nuns at the convent next door, the God of Elma’s family’s charismatic church, the God Paolo and I petitioned to when we were lonely and hungry, the God we sang to at the all-girls school, the God that Papa said blessed the crippled, the meek, and the lowly, the God my country had called out to for hundreds of years. Help for them must mean help for me, I believed. And every night I cried that that God would in turn believe I was in need. SOS. SOS. SOS. Please, please, please.

Good night, coils.

Good night, books.

Good night, bed.

Good night, pets.

Good night, moon.

Good night, Mama and Papa.

Good night, Paolo.

Good night, baby buried in the garden.

Good night, mansion.

Good night, darkness.

Daytime felt less scary than night. Day meant school, and school meant being elsewhere. Day promised friends my age, teachers who gave lessons and enforced routine, a stocked cafeteria, a gymnasium, and a soccer field set for play.

Mama and Norman dropped me off at school before heading out for the day’s shenanigans. In the car, they discussed names of politicians and businessmen and land-owning priests, how each one could be made interested in their hypothetical products or projects. They argued about the most important person in their lives—the sheriff.

“Pay again? We just gave that asshole three thousand pesos, that son of a bitch,” Norman said, slamming his hand against the car door.

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry. It’s not my fault,” Mama said, half-sultry and half-nervous. “We have to pay or he’ll padlock the mansion.”

“Right.” Then he’d reach for Mama’s thighs, then between them, then grab.

It made me squirm in my seat.

Mama pulled a rolled-up stack of paper from her purse. “Which one should we sell today?” she said.

Norman took the documents from her hands, shuffled through them, and said, “This one.”

Sitting in the cargo space, I leaned in and spied from the corner of my eye. The paper read, “TITLE DEED: This is to certify that Estrella Alarcon is registered as the absolute proprietor of the land and edifice at Palos Verdes.”