“My girls will be good mothers and wives, or go to the convent,” Pedro Morales boasted every time someone came to him with the story of a girl who found herself pregnant before she left school.
“Oh, blessed Saint Anthony, find them good husbands!” Inmaculada Morales implored, hanging her statue of the saint upside down to oblige him to hear her modest pleas. It was obvious to her that neither of her girls had the calling to be a nun, and she did not want even to think of the tragedy of watching them turn out like the easy girls who played around before they were married, the ones who left a trail of condoms in the cemetery.
But all that came much later. During the years of primary school, when Carmen and Gregory had sealed their pact of undying friendship, those questions were still to be raised, and no one preached virtue to prevent them from playing together unsupervised. Everyone was so accustomed to seeing them together that later, as they became adolescents, the Moraleses trusted Gregory to look after Carmen more than they did their own sons. When Carmen asked permission to go to a party, they first ascertained that Gregory would go too, in which case the parents felt secure. From the day he first walked into their house, they had welcomed him without reservation, and through the following years, convinced against all logic and experience of the purity of Gregory and Carmen’s sentiments, they turned a deaf ear to the inevitable gossiping of the neighbor women. Thirteen years later, when Gregory left that city forever, he was homesick for only one thing: the Morales household.
Gregory’s shoeshine box contained black, brown, yellow, and oxblood polish, but it lacked neutral saddle soap for the gray and blue leathers that were also in vogue, and black dye to run around the edge of the soles. He always meant to put his earnings toward completing his supplies, but that determination faltered the minute a new movie came to town. Movies were his secret addiction; in the dark he was but one of a horde of noisy kids. He never missed a show in the barrio, where they ran Mexican films, and on Saturdays he went into the city with Juan José and Carmen to see the American serials. The episode seemed always to end with the protagonist bound hand and foot in a shed filled with dynamite and the villain lighting the fuse; at the climactic moment the screen would go black and a voice would invite the audience to come back in a week for the next installment. Sometimes Gregory was so miserable he wanted to die but postponed his suicide until the following week: how could he quit this world without knowing how the devil his hero had escaped the trap? And escape he always did; it was truly amazing how he could drag himself through the flames and emerge unscathed, with his ten-gallon hat in place and his clothes clean as new. The film transported Gregory to another dimension; for an hour or two he became El Zorro or the Lone Ranger and all his dreams were fulfilled. By magic, the hero recovered from contusions and wounds, freed himself from ropes and bonds, triumphed over his enemies by virtue of his superior abilities, and won the girl. To the soft strains of strings and woodwinds, they kissed in the foreground, silhouetted against the sun or the moon. Gregory could relax; the movies were not like his barrio; the only surprises were agreeable ones, and the bad guy was always bested by the hero and paid for his crimes with prison or his life. Sometimes he repented, and following the inevitable humiliation confessed the error of his ways and was led off to music that sounded a warning, usually trumpets and kettledrums. Life was beautiful, and America was truly “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” a land where someone like Gregory could become President; all you had to do was stay pure of heart, love God and your mother, be forever faithful to one girl, respect the law, defend the weak, and scorn money—because heroes never expected to be compensated. Gregory’s uncertainties vanished into the air of that formidable universe of black and white. He walked out of the theater reconciled with life, brimming with admirable intentions that lasted at least a couple of minutes, until the shock of being outside restored his sense of reality. Olga took it upon herself to inform him that the films were made in Hollywood, only a short distance from her house, and that it was all a monumental lie; only the songs and dances of the musical comedies were what they seemed, everything else was a trick of the camera; Gregory, however, did not let that revelation disturb him.
He worked his trade a long way from home in a district of offices, bars, and small businesses. He covered a five-block radius of action, walking back and forth, offering his modest services, eyes to the ground, observing shoes as worn and shapeless as those of his Latin neighbors. As in the barrio, no one wore new footwear except for a few gangsters and drug dealers, who sported patent-leather moccasins, boots with silver studs, and two-tone shoes that were hell to shine. He could guess people’s faces by their way of walking and by their shoes: Hispanics wore red with a stacked heel, blacks and mulattoes preferred sharp-toed yellow, the Chinese had tiny feet, and whites had turned-up toes and rundown heels. The shine was the easy part; what was difficult was finding clients ready to pay a dime and give up five minutes for the sake of their shoes. “A good shine, a good impression!” Gregory shouted at the top of his lungs, but very few listened. With luck he would make fifty cents in an afternoon, the price of one marijuana cigarette. The few times he smoked grass he concluded it was not worth working so many hours only to blow it on crap that turned his stomach and left his head throbbing like a drum, but not to seem a fool, he pretended to be high. The Mexicans who had seen marijuana growing like a weed in fields of their homeland thought it really was like grass, but gringos smoked it as a sign of manhood. To imitate them, and to impress the blondes, the boys in the barrio smoked all they could get. Given his meager success with marijuana, Gregory’s affectation was to dangle a cigarette from the corner of his mouth, movie-villain style. He was so good at it that he could talk and chew gum and never lose his smoke. When he wanted to act the macho before his friends, he would pull out a homemade pipe and fill it with a mixture of his invention: tobacco from salvaged butts, a little sawdust, and powdered aspirin, which according to popular belief got you as high as any drug known. On Saturdays he worked all day, usually earning a little over a dollar; he handed almost all of it to his mother, keeping only a dime for the weekly movie and sometimes a nickel for the collection box for missionaries in China. If he could save five dollars, the priest would give him a certificate of adoption for a Chinese baby girl, but the real trick was to earn ten, which would give him the right to a boy child. May God bless you, the priest said every time Gregory brought his nickel for the collection box, and once God more than blessed him, He rewarded him with a billfold containing fifteen dollars that He had put in the cemetery for Gregory to find. The cemetery was the favorite spot for couples to go after dark; there they hid among the tombs to make love at their ease—although spied on by the children from the barrio, who followed every gambol and gallop of the tempestuous spectacle. Ay, I’m so afraid! I hear a lost soul, the girls would whimper, mistaking the choked laughter of the voyeurs for the moaning of spirits, but at the same time letting their skirts be slipped higher and higher for the roll among the tombstones and crosses. “Our cemetery is the best in the city, much prettier than the one the millionaires and Hollywood actresses have; theirs is nothing but trees and grass and looks more like a golf course than holy ground. Did you ever see a cemetery where the dead hadn’t a single statue to keep them company?” Inmaculada Morales would ask, even though in truth only the wealthy could afford mausoleums and stone angels; immigrants could barely pay for a headstone with a simple inscription. In November, to celebrate the Day of the Dead, Mexicans visited the relatives they had not been able to take back to their villages, bringing offerings of music, paper flowers, and sweets. From early morning the air was filled with ranchera songs, guitars, and toasts, and by nighttime everyone was tipsy, including the souls in purgatory, who were drunk from the tequila liberally sprinkled into the ground. The Reeves children went to the cemetery with Olga, who bought them candy skulls and skeletons to eat at their father’s grave. Nora always stayed home; she said she disliked
pagan festivals, that they were merely a pretext for drunkenness and vice, but Gregory suspected that the real reason was her wish to avoid meeting Olga. Or perhaps she was denying that her husband was dead and buried, because for her Charles Reeves was somewhere on a different plane, busily administering The Infinite Plan. The billfold with the fifteen dollars was half hidden beneath some bushes. Gregory was looking for trap-door spiders; at his age, he was still more attracted by the fantastic insect-catching trap the spiders wove and their egg sacs, containing a hundred tiny young, than he was by the clumsy bucking and incomprehensible moans of the couples. He also collected the scattered white rubber balloons that after they were blown up looked like long sausages. It was as he bent down to a spider hole that he saw the billfold and felt a jolt in his heart and temples; he had never found anything valuable and now was unsure whether this was a gift from heaven or the devil’s temptation. He glanced quickly around him to be sure he was alone, snatched up the wallet, and ran to hide behind a mausoleum to examine his treasure. He opened it with trembling hands and extracted three brand-new five-dollar bills, more money than he had ever seen at one time. He thought of Padre Larraguibel, who would tell him God had placed the money there to test him and to observe whether he kept the windfall or deposited it in the missionary box, thereby adopting two children at one stroke. No one in the entire school was rich enough to sponsor a Chinese infant of each sex; that would make him a celebrity. Even so, he decided that a bicycle was much more practical than two babies in far-off China, beneficiaries he would never meet in any case. He had had his eye on a bicycle for months; one of Olga’s neighbors had offered to sell it to him for twenty dollars, an exorbitant price, but Gregory hoped that the man could not refuse the money in hand. The vehicle was primitive and in ruinous condition but still functional. The owner was an Indian debased by a lifetime of unspeakable practices; Gregory was afraid of him because once, under a variety of pretexts, he had taken him to a garage, where he tried to put his hands inside Gregory’s pants—so he asked Olga to go with him.
“Don’t show your money, don’t open your mouth, just let me handle everything,” she told him. She bargained so well that for twelve dollars and an amulet to ward off the evil eye, the bicycle was his. “You give the three dollars you have left to your mother, you hear me?” Olga commanded as they said goodbye.
Gregory set off pedaling down the middle of the street, too happy to see the soft-drink truck coming in the opposite direction. They met head-on. Miraculously, Gregory was not crushed; there was nothing left of the bicycle, however, but a few pieces of twisted steel and the spokes of the wheels. Cursing, the driver jumped from the truck, grabbed Gregory’s shirt, jerked him to his feet, shook him like a feather duster, and sent him home with a dollar as consolation.
“Look, you damned brat!” the man rumbled, more frightened than his victim. “Be glad I don’t have you arrested for not looking where the hell you’re going!”
“I’ve never seen anyone as stupid as you! You should have got two dollars, at least!” Judy scolded when she learned what had happened.
“That’s what you get for being disobedient. I’ve told you a thousand times not to go into that cemetery. Nothing good comes of ill-gotten gains,” was Nora Reeves’s analysis, as she sponged whiskey onto scraped knees and elbows.
“Blessed Jesus, be thankful you’re alive,” said Inmaculada Morales, hugging him.
Earning money became an obsession with Gregory. He was willing to do any job, even shelling the corn for making tortillas, a tedious process that skinned his knuckles and left him nauseated for hours from the smell. Then he decided he would take up stealing, although it never occurred to him to steal money—his was an adventure, a sport, not a way to earn a living. At night he would crawl through a hole in the school fence, climb onto the roof of the ice cream stand, pry up a sheet of zinc, and slip inside to steal ice cream bars; after he ate two or three, he would take one to give to Carmen. Those nocturnal excursions provided a blend of excitement and guilt; the rigid norms of honesty learned from his mother pounded in his head. He felt perverse, not so much for defying her as because the owner of the stand was a nice old lady who favored him among all the boys and was always treating him to ice cream. One night she returned to look for something she had forgotten, opened the door, switched on the light before he could flee, and caught him with evidence of the crime in his hand. He stood frozen in his tracks, while she moaned, How could you do this to me? I’ve been good to you! Gregory burst into tears, begging her to forgive him and swearing to pay back everything he had stolen. What! This isn’t the first time? Gregory had to confess that he owed her more than six dollars’ worth of ice cream bars. From then on, he went near her only to pay back a little of his debt. Even though she forgave him, he never again felt comfortable in her presence. He was less fortunate in the army-navy surplus store, where he shoplifted war castoffs that were of absolutely no use to him: canteens, buttons, caps, even an enormous pair of boots he carried out of the store in his schoolbag, never suspecting that the owner had his eye on him. One afternoon he picked up a flashlight, stuffed it under his shirt, and was going out the door as a police car pulled to a stop. There was no way to escape; he was taken to jail and locked in a cell where he witnessed the ferocious beating of a dark-skinned youth. In terror, he waited his turn; he was well treated, however: the police merely booked him, reprimanded him, and told him to return everything he had hidden at home. They went to talk with Nora Reeves, despite Gregory’s nearly hysterical pleas not to, that it would break her heart. She came to the jail wearing her blue dress with the lace collar, looking like a ghost from an old daguerreotype; she signed for his release, listened to the charges in silence, and, no less silent, departed, followed by her son. Be grateful you’re white, Greg, said Inmaculada Morales when she learned of the incident. If you were the color of my sons, you’d have been in for it. Nora was so embarrassed that for several weeks she did not speak, and when finally she did, it was to tell Gregory to bathe and put on his only suit, the one that he had worn to his father’s funeral and was now too small, because they had an important errand. She took him to the orphanage run by the nuns and begged the mother superior to accept him because she felt she could no longer cope with a son who was such a troublemaker. Standing behind his mother, staring at his shoes, muttering, I won’t cry, I won’t cry, while tears poured down his face, Gregory swore that if she left him there he would climb the church steeple and leap off headfirst. Such dramatic measures were fortunately unnecessary because the nuns refused to take him; they already had too many orphans to house, and he had a family. He lived in his own house, and his mother received welfare payments; he could not qualify as an orphan. Four days later Nora bundled up his things and took him by bus to the house of a farming couple who had agreed to adopt him. She bade her son goodbye with a sad kiss on his forehead, promised him she would write, and left without a backward glance. That night Gregory sat down to eat with his new family, not speaking, not looking up, worried that no one would feed Oliver, that he would never see Carmen Morales again, and that he had left his pocketknife in the shed.
“Our only son died eleven years ago,” the farmer said. “We are God-fearing, hardworking people. There’ll be no time here for play, only school, church, and helping me in the fields. But the food is good, and if you behave we’ll treat you well.”
“Tomorrow I’ll make you a custard,” his wife said. “You must be tired; I’m sure you want to go to bed. I’ll show you your room; it belonged to our son; we haven’t changed a thing since he left us.”
For the first time, Gregory had his own room and a bed; up till then he had used a sleeping bag. It was a small, sparsely furnished room with an open window looking out toward the horizon across cultivated fields. On the walls were pictures of veteran baseball players and old warplanes, not at all like those he had seen in the newsreels. He inspected everything without daring to touch, thinking of his father, the boa, Olga??
?s necklaces for invisibility, Inmaculada’s kitchen, and Carmen Morales and the sticky-sweet taste of condensed milk, as a painful, icy knot grew in his chest. He sat on the edge of the bed with his modest belongings on his knees; he waited until the house was asleep, then stole out, carefully closing the door. The dogs barked, but he ignored them. He began walking in the direction of the city, returning along the same route he had followed in the bus, which was etched in his mind like a map. He walked all night and early the next morning, totally drained, appeared at his own front door. Oliver welcomed him, barking happily. Nora Reeves came to the door; with one hand she took the bundle of clothes from her son and with the other reached out to pat him, but stopped before the gesture was completed.
“Try to grow up soon,” was all she said.
That afternoon Gregory thought of racing against the train.
I run up the hill with Oliver behind me, looking for the trees, chest heaving; the undergrowth is scratching my legs, I fall and cut my knee, shit, I yell, shit, and let the dog lick the blood; I can scarcely see where to put my feet, but I keep running toward my green refuge, the place where I always hide. I don’t have to see the blazes on the trees to find my way; I’ve been here so many times I could come blindfolded; I know every eucalyptus, every patch of wild blackberries, every boulder. I lift a branch, and the entrance is before me, a narrow tunnel beneath a thorny bush—it must have been a fox’s den—just the width of my body. If I drag myself forward on my elbows, snaking along carefully with my face between my arms and calculating the curve correctly, I can slip through without getting scratched; Oliver is waiting outside; he knows the drill. It has rained during the week, and the ground is soft; it’s cold, but my whole body has been feverish for hours, ever since this morning in the broom closet, a fire that will never die, I know. Something pricks me from behind, and I yell out; it’s only thorns caught in my sweater. That was how Martínez took me, from behind; I still feel the knife blade against my throat, but I don’t think I’m bleeding anymore. If you move I’ll kill you, you fucking sonofabitch gringo, and I had no way to defend myself, all I could do was cry and curse while he was doing it to me. Now run tell Miss June and I’ll cut your sister’s face here on the spot, and you already know what I’ll do to you, he said when he was through, while he was fastening his pants. He walked away laughing. If anyone finds out, I’m fucked; they’ll call me a pansy for the rest of my life. No one must ever find out! But what if Martínez tells? I’d like to kill him! My hands, my clothes, my face, are covered with mud; my mother will be furious; I’d better think up some excuse: I got hit by a car, or the gang worked me over again, but then I remember I don’t have to make up any lie because I’m going to die, and when they find my body the dirt won’t matter. I’ll wait like I am. She’ll be grief-stricken, she won’t think about the bad things I’ve done, only my good side, that I wash the dishes and give her almost everything I make shining shoes, and at last she’ll realize that I’ve been a good son and she’ll be sorry she wasn’t more loving to me, sorry she wanted to give me away to the nuns and the farmers and that she never cooked eggs for my breakfast even once, it’s not even hard, Doña Inmaculada does it with her eyes closed, even a retard can fry a couple of eggs. She’ll be sorry, but it will be too late because I’ll be dead. They’ll have an assembly at school and say nice things about me the way they did for Zarate when he drowned in the ocean; they’ll say I was their best classmate and that I had a great future, and all the students will have to line up and walk past my coffin to kiss me on the forehead. The first graders will be crying, and I’ll bet the girls will faint: women can’t stand to see blood; they’ll all squeal except for Carmen, who will put her arms around my corpse and never even flinch. I hope Miss June doesn’t get the idea to read the letter I wrote her at the funeral, jeez, why did I do that? I can’t ever look her in the face again; she’s so pretty, as pretty as a fairy princess or a movie actress. If she only knew what I’m thinking in class when she’s standing up there at the blackboard going over the arithmetic problems and I’m sitting at my desk staring at her like a moron, with my head in the clouds—who can think about numbers when she’s around! Like, for instance, I dream that she tells me, I’ll help you with your homework, Greg, your grades are a disaster, so I stay after class and all the others are gone and we’re alone in the building, and without me saying a word she goes wild and lies down on the floor, and I peepee between her legs. Never, not in all the days of my life, will I confess to the Padre the dirty things I think up; I’m a pervert, a pig. And I had to go and write that farewell letter to Miss June! What a screwup. Well, at least I won’t have to suffer the shame of seeing her again; I’ll be dead and gone by the time she reads it. And Carmen, poor Carmen . . . The only reason I feel sad about dying is that I won’t ever see her again. If she knew what Martínez did to me she would come here and die with me, but I can’t tell anyone, especially her.