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Back to the Village and Other Stories. [Original writing]

Lopez, Marty, M.F.A.

The American University, 1993

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with with permission permission of the of copyright the copyright owner. owner.Further reproduction Further reproduction prohibited without prohibited permission. without permission. BACK TO THE VILLAGE AND OTHER STORIES

bY

Marty Lopez

submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of The American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree

of

Master of Fine Arts

in

Creative Writing

Signatures of Committee:

Chair:n ( Z z ______

n of the College

DIti------1993

The American University 74 7

SHE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. BACK TO THE VILLAGE AND OTHER STORIES BY

Marty Lopez

ABSTRACT

In these four stories, characters struggle with notions of exile. For instance, in the lead story, the protagonist tries for nine years to work his way

"home," even though geographically he is already there. He realizes that, since having left his village for a university education in the city, he has lost

what he had left behind in the mountains. Culture becomes a barrier to his

return.

It is the struggle to break through barriers that characterizes these stories. The conclusion at first sounds grim: that one can never fully vault over the wall of culture that blocks one's path homeward after living in exile.

Yet, once the characters acknowledge that impossibility, then they can begin to work with what lies on both sides of that wall.

ii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT...... ii

1. BACK TO THE VILLAGE...... 1 2. UNNATURAL ALLIANCES...... 22 3. THE STRUGGLE...... 42 4. YOU REALLY DONT KNOW?...... 63

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. BACK TO THE VILLAGE 1

In our barrio everyone had their own theory about Letty's illness. One man offered, without my even asking, that she had misplaced her spirit among the piles of laundry of the pilgrims who came to touch her tapestries.

The man's wife spat her betel nut. She said that after praying away evil left and right for over eight years, it's no wonder Letty accidentally wished her

spirit out of existence. The village chiropractor butted in. He said that spirits

often shook loose from a chest weakened by anxiety. He said that fatigued

muscles—and what hardworking villager doesn't have them?—become slippery and smooth. He offered us his manipulation techniques and a purple salve to relieve stress and hiccups.

Some nuns had just come up the mountain for the day with a

delivery of donated clothing from Manila. When they saw me, they talked of the angel who came and relieved Letty of her heavy burden. They said this

was the very same angel who had originally brought Letty one-thirty-second

of the sadness of the world. An old man with a lizard clinging to his forearm overheard and agreed. He was the one man in the village well-versed in the

Epistles. When he spoke to us, a tooth vibrated so that I made moves to catch

it if it would fall out. "She's suffered enough," he said. "And the only relief

from such memories would be to take them all away." He meant her mind.

In this view, Letty first accepted the sorrow of the world when she 1

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. became pregnant out of nowhere. Her belly began to swell eight years

ago-two weeks after I returned home from my schooling in Manila. I remember the neighbors treating the pregnancy with self-serving cynicism. Men and women trailed Letty from a distance, with gossiping

heads wagging in her direction. When she brought clothes to the washing

stone, women looked away. But they stared conspicuously from behind

bushes or the fraying corners of their huts.

But they never really considered shunning her from the barrio, as had happened to "harlots" in other villages. On the contrary, with an

illegitimate pregnancy around, everyone could relax; a person no longer needed to worry about the red boil on his ass, knowing that the sins singled out by God for public censure were not his own.

Letty's family distanced themselves more than anyone else. Her six brothers and sisters, all younger than she, stopped talking to her. Her mother left the hut for several weeks.

In the village, her eldest brother was known as the General, ever since their father had been killed during a drinking session when he fell in

the mud and a carabao crushed his skull. When Letty became pregnant, the

General had just turned sixteen. He began bathing three times more often,

washing his arms, feet, and backside, shouting, "Boy, it feels good to be clean!" He started pulling the sideburns of his two brothers to stop them from

scratching their crotches in public. He threw stones at them when he caught

them napping in the sun at midday. He forced his sisters to wait with him for

the nuns' delivery of clothing from the city. The General hand chose olive-

colored, sack-like dresses four sizes too big, which the sisters wore every day

to avoid a spanking from him.

with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 I tried talking the General out of his tyranny. I tried convincing

him that, in these times, a family doesn't need rack itself on old traditions of honor. He began accusing me of things, even though I couldn't have been the one. I'd been away since I was fifteen, and returned only two weeks before Letty started to show. He told me, "Have you been away for so long that you've forgotten: 'You're either wet or dry.'"

I was ready to debate with him there, knowing that he'd revised the proverb. Our river had always been so swift and its banks so steep that, for generations, one "was either pulled by its current or standing on solid ground

above it." But in recent years, the river's flow had slowed to nearly a trickle, filling only during the rainy season. The river declined so quickly that some

were afraid they would wake up one morning and find it a long, empty grave.

A narrow shore has formed in places. And there people lounge with their legs lying in three inches of water.

It seemed obvious to me, when I returned home from Manila with

a B.A., that the river would soon completely dry up. So why would I choose to live in a dying village? I didn't know. I didn't know what Letty would

eventually show me: that I regret my chosen exile. When I'd first left, I'd had

big ideas about speaking Spanish and English in the intellectual circles of

Manila. When the nuns offered a scholarship, they told me the school's name—Ateneo de Manila—Athens in Manila—and I believed they were

delivering me to my destiny. In the limestone and granite halls of the

university, I pored over Virgil, Beowulf. T.S. Eliot, and Joyce. I bought a

camera at the estate sale of an American diplomat, and it proved to be my

passion. Would anyone have believed that a newspaper would pay me a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. salary to capture on film what my eyes were so hungry for already?

The problem, I now realize, is that I traded in my eyes when I left.

The eyes are quite a fee to pay just to leave home, a fee that can't be recouped.

2

When it all started, we at first mistook Letty's mother for a surprisingly cold woman. She left the hut with what appeared to us an uncontrollable shame. She actually just went off by herself to think. She

couldn't make heads or tails of it. As much as she had pushed Letty, her favorite daughter, toward several different suitors, she knew for a fact that she'd refused invitations to sit in the shade of the knotted nipa tree.

Off by herself, Letty's mother stretched her body out on a hot

boulder, plucking the whiskers of her chin, thinking. She lay on that rock

endless hours, not once opening the bible she'd brought with her, trying to

devise a way of saving Letty that would not also jeopardize the honor of her other six children. But days and nights went by. She shifted from buttock to

buttock on the hot rock, and she came up with nothing more than a scabby,

hairless chin. After three weeks, she went home sleepy and emaciated. When she got there, she turned her back for good so she wouldn't burden

Letty with the sight of her tears.

The sorrow lifted for an evening when Letty gave birth to a daughter. Pounding rice that afternoon, with the Southern Cross rising low in the west, Letty's water broke. She crawled over the pebbled path to the city

woman's house. The Pizarans came out of their hut and lifted Letty by the

arm pits. They helped her up the porch steps, flipped the knocker, and ran.

Dopsy, an urban aristocrat and organizer of the regional revolutionary army,

with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5 took Letty in. Outside Dopsy's house, I arrived with the crowd. Most of the

people there mumbled, some prayed, about the aswang. They talked of the

shape-shifting cave monster as if it were looking down at us, hanging from its feet in the trees. In Manila, I had seen a B-movie in which the aswang snaked its long tongue down through the roof of a pregnant woman's house and rooted through her navel into the brain of the fetus. I must admit, my

neighbors were scaring me shitless.

One woman, her head wrapped in a red kerchief, said, 'The aswang

never lets a bastard walk!" She asked us had we seen a dog today, or an old woman we didn't recognize? Of course, we had. 'That was him," she said.

All of our neighbors gathered to see the violence. Harvey Sotanhon, clasping

his infant tightly to his chest, told the crowd he'd seen the aswang fly like a sheet and land like a sack on Letty's roof last night in the storm. Mrs. Pizaran,

with a goiter swollen on her neck, asked what Harvey was doing sneaking

around under a moonless sky. Meeting someone on the sly and running into the devil instead? She asked Harvey to call his wife over to verify the story. Harvey moved on to find someone more appreciative of his information.

Dopsy tended the birth without a problem. She scrubbed her own

hands and then Letty's entire body. She rolled up her two kilim rugs, putting

one under Letty's head. She told Letty a story about the last woman whose

birth she tended. 'The woman hallucinated about a tree that grew oranges the size of pumpkins. When the baby came, she told me, 'Peel and eat. Just

peel and eat.'" The baby came without a hitch, except that Letty fainted with

the pain of her final push. With Letty in a daze, Dopsy took the liberty of

naming the baby Maria Clara, after the wife of a revolutionary in her favorite

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nationalist novel. She cut the cord and took the baby to the window. When

she raised the bloody thing out to the crowd, everyone took three steps back. Dopsy laughed. For all her progressive politics, she could never resist a gag at the expense of the unenlightened.

And so a night passed with the entire village having forgotten their collective scorn of the new mother. But the following morning, Letty's mother was found in a trance, and her sorrow returned more heavily than before.

Letty's mother hadn't shown up at the birth. She was last seen at market, a mile down the mountain, about the time when Letty went into

labor. A farmer there said she'd bought sprouts, obi, and rattan shoots. The

General found her the next morning lying under a tree in the slanted sun light, the basket of shriveling salad at her feet and flies collecting on her lips.

That morning, from inside Dopsy's house, Letty heard her name

screamed over and over. "Come look what you've done, you whore!" she could hear her brother saying. She tried lifting herself off of the floor, but Dopsy eased her back down.

Letty's sisters came to tell her, "You'd better not come home for a

while. Mother's dying, and so will you be if the General gets his hands on you."

When Letty was able, she packed some things and left her baby to the care of Dopsy, who couldn't persuade her to stay. Letty made her home in

a cave in the forest. She had what a person needed to survive-the river for

water, the pond for lily roots, guavas and pinit in the trees. But she fasted the

with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. entire time there, following the curing rites shown to her once by an herbalist some years ago. At night she dreamed she had the doctor's powers, which gave her hope.

I invited Dopsy over for a glass of juice. She brought the baby, and

wouldn't tell me where Letty had gone. She said she didn't know. We had

one of our usual conversations that began with Letty, moved on to poetry, and ended with politics.

"Pulot. not pulubi." she said, scolding me for something I'd gotten

wrong. "Pulot is the farmers right to glean the fields after harvest. Only when absentee landowning came into vogue did you start seeing so many pulubi. which means—"

"I know what it means!" I said. It meant beggar. "It was just a slip of the tongue."

Suddenly, Dopsy set the baby in my arms and walked across the

room. She pulled open a closet door that was part way open. "Ha!" She laughed hysterically at the several Hollywood posters tacked up in there.

"Why don't you keep these pin-up girls out with all the Norman Mailer and

John Updike on your shelves?" For a minute she was fascinated with the images. Then she looked across the room at my photographs on the wall.

They were portraits of women back at school. Turning back and forth from the posters to my photographs, she asked, "Whom do you prefer?"

During her three-month stay in the cave, Letty only allowed herself

to walk about the barrio twice. The first was on the third day of her exile, to see her baby in Dopsy's house. Spying through the curtains, Letty saw Dopsy feeding Maria Clara mango puree with a silver spoon. The baby's face looked

contented. Her tiny hands moved in strong, circular motions. Then Dopsy

with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. laid Maria Clara on the sofa and lit up the baby's eyes, reading from a book of poetry. It was a verse in Spanish that sang of a boat harbored in a gentle bay, drying its nets in the sun. It was then that the sight of book-lined shelves

took on an oppressive majesty in Letty's eyes. The green, red, and brown leather spines seemed to thicken the air with the musk and power of Europe

and America. Letty went back to her cave, resigned that someone else would raise her daughter into womanhood. The other time Letty left the woods, she had been awakened by a dream. She had dreamt of her mother kicking and shoving the General out

of the hut. Letty woke up screaming. She rolled off of her mat of thatched leaves, and bolted through the trees to her family's home.

When she walked in, the stench of diarrhea muffled her, like a

hand over her mouth. She found her brothers and sisters exhausted on the floor. The place was a wreck. Apparently they had slept little through weeks

of their mother's nightmares. Letty stepped over her brothers, who panted in

the hot air. She pressed a hand to her mother's forehead, as the shrunken

pony-of-a-woman lay sweating on a filthy mat. Her mother stared blankly

into a corner, with flies nesting in her hair.

Two sisters stood to greet Letty, their dresses splotched and

wrinkled. The General lay on the floor nearest their mother. His eyes rolled

in his head, as Letty lifted a water bowl. He moved to a crouch, trying to keep Letty away. But their second sister nudged his shoulder with her knee, and he sprawled flat on the floor. "Letty, help Mama," she said. And she

organized the others to pick the General up and carry him outside, so that Letty could go to work.

Letty first toweled her mother from head to toe with a warm oil,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. breaking the dirt and relieving her cracked skin. She cooked her mother's dress in lye, to kill the bugs in the hem. On her mother's white tongue she brushed cane syrup. She pureed a mango to bring down her scurvied gums. She sponged crust from her eyes and picked scabs from her lips. For three months, she spooned rice pap into her mother's mouth and washed liquid stools from her mat, talking to the living, dreaming

corpse. When Letty slept, she held her mother's shriveling hand. She

warmed water for her daily washcloth bath. She straightened her toes on the hour. And she wept when she died.

The General lost his spirit next. When it went, Letty's sisters fell

into a panic. Just before their mother fell into the trance, they had begun drinking juice with suitors. They had just begun prolonging their baths. They had just begun shirking chaperones during morning walks to market and had taken up again chasing fire-flies up the mountain at dusk.

But when their mother took ill, the General cracked down on their social lives.

So, six months later, when the General dropped his fish trap on a rock and fell face down on the sand, Letty's sisters burned their sack dresses with joy. They propped their brother up in a corner and called all of their boy friends for a party.

But they found they couldn't look at their brother's sinking cheeks

without worrying. How would his death's mask and jutting shoulder-points

look to their suitors? The sisters shooed away visitors. When they heard

gossip about him, they responded with rocks and curses. They brainstormed

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. for a place to hide him. At first they put him under the hut with the

chickens. But Letty kept bringing him out, and then he stunk up the place, covered in white shit. They started keeping a pile of clothes on top of him and telling people he had gone to Manila for a factory job. Nearly no one believed them.

The sisters warned each other, when out of ear shot of Letty, about getting too near him. They complained that it was all his fault for worrying

that someone's desire might show in public.

But watching Letty work his crooked limbs every morning, the sisters began to wonder what the General felt like behind his dilated pupils. Did he still scold and rage at them? They had known their brother to have an appetite-for boiled mussels, for his fiance's kiss, for authority. Could his

tongue still taste through its thickened flesh? Was that twitch an attempt to

shake his fist?

The sisters began talking differently about their suitors, whom they'd been able to convince that nothing was wrong. The girls' frustration

turned to urgency. They snuck out one night with intentions of giving of themselves, all.

But as they talked that night, a breeze cooled them. They sat down

together on the roots of the knotted nipa tree. They talked of their dead

mother, and they realized how lucky they were that they had waited. They realized that they had gotten their desire back. Just the desire was enough,

they said. Then they stopped talking together so much. They watched over

each other. When the General died, they made sure each had one of his

tattered gabardine suit coats to wear during cold mornings of the late harvest.

Letty watched as, one by one, her brothers and sisters fell into the

with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. trance. Her brothers and sisters all died completely resigned and passive. Not like their mother, who had thrashed about every night for half a year. Letty

had admired her mother's unconscious fight, especially when it shook the hut down to its stilts. The 24-hour resignation of her sick siblings made Letty want to

pinch them. She wanted to pull their sideburns, to make them yelp or squeal or anything. Letty had taken a jab at the General, now and then, before he

died. "Head of the family, huh!" she'd said, squeezing a wet rag and splashing

water at his oxen expression. The General would work his lips like a sleepy fish--his way of asking for a spoonful of chopped fern shoots-and for the rest of the day, Letty overcame the memories that nagged her, memories that I'm

just now coming to have myself.

While they were dying, Letty kept her sisters in stylish dresses.

These weren't the rags of squatters. On the contrary, the nuns drove their

four-wheel-drive here first because they liked our village best. They brought loads of full skirts, bold-print sun dresses, and toreador trousers of seven colors. With pretty dresses Letty tried bringing her sick sisters back to the

romance they had only begun to know.

Letty washed and laid the newest clothes on a large, flat rock to dry. She walked back to the hut on the foot path she had taken everyday since she

was a small girl. She remembered a time when boys in the barrio flirted with her from a distance. She remembered one especially, who targeted her head with pork rinds, wearing an outlandish, ruffly shirt.

She swallowed hard and thought, had things gone differently, she

and her sisters would now be in slacks, pulling weeds from the rice shoots

alongside all the young men. Instead they were all dying. Had things gone

with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. differently, all four sisters would be at work on the terraces, wearing long sleeves as shields against the sun, like grown women. Instead the childish

pinafore was necessary for Letty's cooking and cleaning. At the end of the day

she should have been able to let out her heavy braid to relax her scalp at night. Instead she only nodded off now and then at night, her hair bundled up, just in case she had to clean up someone's mess in the dark.

Had things gone differently, Letty would have worn a dazzling

outfit, such as the long-sleeved blouse with the lace collar that she slipped

over the arms of her third sister. She toweled the armpits of her second sister

and rubbed oil onto the ashen skin, imitating the stroke of a lover she felt the girl deserved. Letty rubbed the sallow cheeks to raise some of the sepia that

had once been unbearable for several young men. Then, not seeing my long

shadow, Letty turned to the window and found a pond blossom floating in a

coffee can full of water. I watched from behind a tree, watched her come to

the window. I saw the unmistakable look of remembered love in her eyes.

3

After her family died, Letty began weaving everyday. On the trade

of her fabrics, she earned enough to begin feeding a small group of beggars. The fame of her more imagistic tapestries spread, and people began

hiking from valleys away just to get a look at them. They said, "It's the

strength of the sufferer in her own image!" when they saw the sharp, almost photographic quality in her landscapes, the irrigated terraces and emerald cliffs of our village rendered in their truest forms. It was said that, inside the

primary colors, there glowed more subtle hues that were perceptible only to

the faithful. Sometimes it upset me that I only saw the obvious. When I

with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 13 heard people talk about what I couldn't see, I thought they were mystifying some aesthetic skill, one which they could have shared.

A group circled around a chair with a cushion that Letty had

covered for a nun. Off to the side, a beggar played a popular American tune on his guitar. I watched as three pilgrims, two nuns, and a handful of textiles students pointed here and there on the fabric. They talked at length about the in-between tints. One student explained to her friend the physiological

phenomenon-that one stripe of color affected what lay to its right and its left, that the human brain interprets the light's context.

As the guitarist played on, I felt privileged to be one of the few

there who could recognize the melody. I was able to expect its refrains and hummed proudly. Then a scale he lingered over struck me. It matched the

sound of birds in a nipa tree nearby. "Shh!" I said. "Listen." Several of those standing around the chair turned my way. But not the right people. I wanted

to point out how the birds so naturally achieved the tones that the guitarist

strove for. But my explanation would have been lost on the three pilgrims.

They stared at me as if I were crazy. My face felt flushed, and I walked off alone.

Not long after Maria Clara's third birthday, Pilgrims began coming

in larger and larger groups to touch one tapestry especially-a gigantic sarong.

Letty had attached it to a dirndl bodice that the nuns had brought from a

German concerned with rural poverty. On the sarong, Letty had depicted two scenes: a saint spurting milk across the length of her sofa and into an infant's

mouth; and The Last Supper-twelve scruffy Filipinos sitting at a long-board

feast, each recoiling in fear from the Christ at center, his face black and his

pupils dilated. Word spread of the sarong's power to sweep the soul clean of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 14 its blackest ash or to dry up even the most oozing chancre.

At my house one afternoon, Dopsy and I took a break from the crowds. We drank some cooled tea. She brought Maria Clara with her, and

Letty's little girl marched around my living room, stuck on one phrase.

"When the revolution comes, I'll have lots of friends to play with. When the revolution comes, my neighbors will be cured of worms. When the revolution comes, ripe mangoes will fall from their trees."

I suggested to Dopsy that we might submit one of Letty's tapestries to the Museum of Ateneo. "It would be a coup for the village," I said,

thinking she would like that word. "I still have connections with some

campus administrators, you know."

Dopsy set her glass down and laughed at me. "You're so bourgeois," she said. "Imagine that, a barrio boy with 'connections.'"

I don't know what upset me more—that she belittled my museum idea or that I didn't really understand her insult.

Dopsy stood to study my newest photographs hanging on the walls.

She complimented me on my series of river bathers, how the water looked so solid and forceful. But then she qualified her kinder words with a question. "Why the distance?" she asked. Puzzled, I didn't respond. "In composition,"

she continued. "All these images of our neighbors in the river--don't get me

wrong, they're striking." But, as she rightly assumed, they were all taken with

a long lens, from far off, the space between foreground and background compressed.

Indignant, I finally managed to say, "I'm just making use of my equipment. Anything wrong with being a professional?"

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 15

After six years, our village reversed their scorn. They turned her into a hero, as they watched the power of her tapestries remove warts, stop tick bites from itching, and make sinners contrite. They spread the word that

divine grace worked through her perseverance. Soon, the families of lepers,

alcoholics, and masturbation-addicted boys delivered their sick ones from miles around. The pilgrims prayed at the sarong's side and caressed the velvet cups of the dirndl bodice. News spread that if one showed faith, one

was awarded a healing package, complete with two meals a day and a place on

the shady grass to sit while one repented and the other digested.

Letty took the pilgrims in and treated them as children of her own.

She fed and clothed some fifteen dozen, with grain donations from Boy Tinio—Dopsy's father (the maverick hacendero who began bucking the system of absentee ranching when he inherited 20,000 hectares when his eldest

brother was murdered). Strangers lay down everywhere, matless but sated.

They rolled around, with bellies full. They lay near the circle of stones

surrounding the well and on the foot path leading up the mountain. They

napped on the altar of gravel that was stained black, the place where countless pigs had been offered to the gods of grain and good weather—a ritual the

missionaries hadn't been able to supplant with even the most catchy European folk songs.

Before the next rainy season started, Letty built shelters of thatched banana leaves for the pilgrims and moved as many of the men into her hut as she could fit.

I offered to move in with her, to keep an eye on the shiftier of her guests. She refused me, arguing that our neighbors would never approve,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and that the idea would make me even more of an outcast than I already was. An outcast? I didn't pursue it. At that time, she and I still hadn't talked on any personal level. I was also, at that point, still deluding myself that I knew what I was: I was the village's favorite son who had gone away on a church

scholarship, the son whom they were glad to have back. I insisted and moved many of my things into her hut. And, surprisingly, no one in the barrio as much as squawked. On the contrary, in their silence, I could hear sighs of relief. They had been worrying about Letty,

knowing that in every group of men there ran a rapist or two. I halved my own work, letting my house get dusty. Through out

the summer I barely touched my cameras and dark room. I forfeited scenes of

the exploding green in the valley. Inside my closets, the adhesive melted and my Hollywood pin-ups rolled to the floor.

I helped Letty with her countless chores. For hours a day, I stirred the laundry pot, its steam raising sweat pimples on my forehead. I pounded

rice. I sewed torn clothes. But when she asked, one morning, I couldn't bring

myself to slaughter her two pigs.

As we served the dozens around us, several of them really put a strain on Letty and me. Bojo, the beggar who played the guitar, drew a circle

in the dirt around himself with a stick. He kicked up an obscene row if one of

us walked to near him. The leper named Romel sunk into a depression on a

regular schedule-eveiy fourth day. When he was sad, he accepted his bowl of

broth only to wear it on his head, the dripping soup bringing white worms into the sores on his neck.

No matter how hard we tried to be aware at first, Letty and I

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 17

couldn't keep out of Bojo's circle. We accidentally stepped on it at every turn, which caused him to pick up his things and move here, then there, filling the valley with his foul-mouthed run-ons. I endured his abuse alone, without

saying a word to Letty about it. But one day when Letty, her arms full of reeking laundry, couldn't

see she was heading into Bojo's territory, I pinched the shoulder strap of her

pinafore and steered her around him. And later, with a calendar, she stopped me from handing Romel his soup. I saw that together we could better navigate. We became planners,

schemers even. In just a word or two, we shared our pet peeves. She told me that Nicolo, the giant from Ilokos Norte, wasn't one to hold back a fart. So I

played so many games of checkers with him outside that he eventually

stacked his belongings in the yard to stay. I told Letty that I couldn't stand Gito's mad ravings. She fetched the Slinky off of my front porch and, every morning, entranced him, soothing him with its snake-like coiling. For the

first time, Letty and I shook hands. And I became convinced of the efficacy of two.

Over the next two years, with hard work filling her life, Letty didn't notice her daughter coming or going. Having grown accustomed to the sight

of chancres and the smell of gangrene, Letty paid no attention when eight-

year-old Maria Clara came by spattered with blood and smelling of death from

her lizard-hunting romps in the forest. Letty didn't look up from her chores.

She didn't allow herself to regret the sight of Maria Clara bursting at the

seams of her latest dress. Letty worked on into each night, lamp wicks and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 18 jaundiced eyes flickering in her shadow. Her long arms pushed new fabric through her back loom. She stoked the coals to sterilize the next arriving pair of knee pants. Several times a year, I invited Letty to take a break, away from it all

at my house. We drank cane juice, as I showed her volumes of my photographs. By the way her eyes teared, I assumed she was overwhelmed by

the beauty of modern technology. She sat speechless, in awe, when I showed

her the inner mechanism of my reflex cameras. I felt I'd really impressed her. One afternoon, two years to the date that I'd first moved in, more pilgrims arrived than we'd ever seen before. I don't know how much I was

responding to the magic of two. I don't know if seeing that wave of mendicants frightened me into action. Whatever the case, I took Letty aside, and we talked.

We had never had a real conversation before. I was entranced with her eyes. The pupils seemed large enough for me to see clearly inside. We talked of our shared adolescence, the years just before I left for Manila. Or, I should say, she talked.

She told me of things I did and said with other children.

Apparently I had been popular. I'd been the fastest to bring down a young

coconut from the top of a tree and the quickest learner in the nuns' makeshift school. She reminded me of the poet's shirt I wore back then. She said I hadn't been at all disturbed by the teasing it brought me with its floppy cuffs

and ruffled collar. She said it had fit me well, my being an only child and a

maverick. I remembered the shirt, but not the teasing, nor the stories about

me. I didn't tell her so, but I actually didn't remember her very well from that time.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 19

Then I did it. I thought of the magic of two, and I asked her to marry me. And in my question, she could see what I was unconsciously

after~a man in exile desperate to get back home. This is what she said. "When I got pregnant, my brother suspected you, you know that. But what you don't know is he had a reason to. While you were away in the

city, he saw me writing letters. I couldn't count how many I wrote. I buried each one under roots near the river. And each was to you. My mother

worried about me and my lack of interest in boys. She even said to me once,

'I have a dead drunk for a husband, and even that's better than having none at all.' She warned me of the misery of loneliness, which I already knew. At the time, I thought you wouldn't come back. With each letter, before signing

my name at the bottom, I would crumple it up, realizing I hadn't explained

why you should return. I had only written about the river slowing, or that I'd

dreamt of my family falling asleep and never waking up. But how would

that sound to someone living in an air conditioned apartment, reading books on a sofa?

"I thought you would have never come back. And now that you're here, I realize you regret having left. Seeing us from across the stream in that

house of yours, you've lost interest in the world where they speak Spanish

and English. You want so badly to retrieve what you've lost. But, as you can

see, you can't refill our river. Nor can you wake up my family. You want the village to enfold you again. But, since you've been gone, too much has

changed, especially you. My sisters were right: being afraid of what you desire will only bring you rot.

"You think I'm your path home. And now that I know it, it can never happen, as you'll see before too long."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 20 Later in the week, pilgrims lounging on the grass sensed a change come over her. Letty's eyes began to float. She stirred the boiling laundry, the

steam swirling about her body, but she didn't perspire. Her eyes drooped, as if she were feeling the pleasure of a slow lover. When she dropped her giant wooden spoon into the boiling pot,

some around her saw a tongue of fire lapping above her head. I saw a modest

but triumphant smile fade on her face. After eight years of working God's magic, Letty had become so

associated with strength that no one saw it coming. So when the loss did

come, the people—including me, after a few weeks of depression—insisted on seeing it as a gain. All at once, they skipped over noticing her crooked fingers and shouted "Ab3!" "Hallelujah!" or "Wow! she is saved!" We drank up our

stores of cane liquor mixed with langka juice, as if it were the feast of the harvest. Some dragged a block of ice wrapped in salt by carabao sled up the

mountain and made purple-yam ice cream. The barrio began celebrating Letty's muteness as a model of serenity. Between the early and late harvests, when there was little to do but

gossip and sing, my neighbors only hummed softly to themselves. When

spring came, and the disease turned Letty's neck into a striated column of

hypertension, women considered it the new ideal. They exercised their necks

in the river on cold mornings, clenching their teeth for hours in pursuit of more stringy muscles.

When summer came, the village carpenters kissed their wives

after the evening bath, and tangled with them in bed as the day's heat lifted,

the couples laying with an adolescent-like ardor. Then up and off with their

tools, as the carpenters set aside an hour each dusk to add a room onto Letty's

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 21 hut. They hammered and tied bamboo, and they sang stories of their dead fathers fishing in the clouds. Their voices combined with the chorus of swooping, feeding birds, which together sounded orchestrated and more

inspiring than ever a villager had heard before. The bird songs made the men think of having just been in the embrace of their wives' arms and legs. They joked about the soothed look on each other's faces, eyes drooping above satisfied grins. The men remarked each successive evening that the sky had

never looked more on fire. And when the smoldering clouds gave way to the

cold-sea blue, the men packed up their blades and spools of cord. As a group

they gave one last thought to the new life they were offering Letty's daughter, and their clasped hands released each other to the patient calling of their wives.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UNNATURAL ALLIANCES 1 There had been a time when Beng unselfconsciously admired his mother's pretty face.

He often heard compliments from neighbors, from store clerks, from relatives. On Saturday mornings, the Frenchman would park his

delivery van in the driveway. "Ah, so young, so petite," he'd say, as Beng's mother chose melons, berries, and squash from the shelves inside the truck. And countless others—the solid-shouldered seamstress who lived on the

corner, the elderly accountant who refinanced the mortgage-enjoyed politely musing: So delicate, so oriental.

On his tenth birthday, Beng's mother took him shopping for his

first sport coat. They tried on clothes together in the women's dressing room. A narrow-eyed clerk helped his mother into a fitted suit. Beng stood next to his mother, trying to clip a tie onto his collar. "What a doll she is! So petite.

So oriental!" the clerk told him. He and the clerk watched his mother turn

side to side in the tri-angled mirror. Beng admired her heavy curls and her

strong, red nails. He reached an arm around her waist. Standing so tall in his

navy jacket, he saw a young couple in the mirror. With his hand on her hip,

blood rushed to his finger-tips. And it was then that he first realized he had a problem.

That winter, his mother began turning inward. Beng watched as she ate less and less. She began looking gaunt in the face. She stopped fixing

22

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 23 her hair.

It took some time for Beng to decide what to do. At first he just

observed from a short distance. He watched while she prepared her lectures.

He watched while she graded student essays. And more and more often, she pushed them aside to stand at the window.

By watching her, he learned the proportions of the gin martini. From there he developed his plan. A shot of gin, three drops vermouth, a pearl onion.

She took the glass he offered, a little surprised, and said, 'Thanks. Have you been home long?"

At school, he asked the boy with mononucleosis to cough in his

face. At night, he began showering before bed and sleeping on top of the

sheets, naked and his hair wet. When he couldn't wait any longer, he began

clearing his throat often. When his mother asked, he said he was "fine." One

morning, as she packed her satchel with papers, he decided to lie. "I'm sick," he told her.

She looked into the back of his eyes and said, "You're lying." But she was glad to have him home for the day.

She left for the university, but walked back in, twenty minutes

later. "I cancelled class," she said. Beng fixed her a drink.

She took off her blazer and sunk into the sofa. Beng sat across the

coffee table from her, watching her legs slipping over one another in her dark stockings like two oily snakes. "Oh!" Beng said. He shook his head. "Oh, what?" she said.

He looked around himself for a quick answer. "You must be cold. Why don't you put on Dad's warm-ups."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 24 He began staying home from school often. They began dressing identically. His father's jogging suit engulfed her. They both wore woolen footies. They spent hours together in the kitchen, the two gabbing over cups

of jasmine tea. They sat together on stools at the breakfast bar, their legs crossed under them. She drew with crayons. He flipped through Betty Crocker. She stopped wearing lipstick. He stopped wetting down the cowlick in his bangs. She neglected her permanent wave, and it relaxed into the black

shag of a toddler. While Beng's teenage sister was becoming a woman, he was

helping his mother transform into a little girl. And Beng felt that here lay his

opportunity to create a little sister. In December his parents took to separate rooms. Beng and his mother often lay together on her bed, sipping cola and watching the mess pile

up. Together they graded her students' final-exams. "Blah!" or "Hideous!"

they shouted, and crinkled them into balls for a shot at the hoop over the closet door.

In January one evening, Beng knocked on her door. "Glass got a lot of air in it?" he asked. He walked in and found her staring through her feet toward the television, lying between two piles of clothing on the bed. The pile on the left, to be dry cleaned. On the right, to be folded.

"Make way," he said, and she did. He had learned to read her by the way she cleared the bed. A shove and blouses were strewn all about-

frustrated. A brush of her hand and a rumpled dress slumped to the floor- humble. If she were to stand and hang a garment with care it meant, Prepare

for an exceptionally lucid conversation. Only when he found her in this last

mode did he trust her with the big questions: Have you paid the bills?

Where are the dog's heartworm pills?

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 25 On this day, he called out, "Make way." He watched his mother

stand up and drape a blazer on the arm of a chair. So he asked, "Do you want a haircut?" With some thought, she said, "Great idea."

One of the heaviest snows of the year came down outside the

window, as Beng set a typing stool in the middle of the floor. He asked her to sit, and he robed her in his Detroit Lions rain poncho. "You don't seem to be needing these," he said, as he pared down her nails and removed what

remained of the polish. Then with cold cream he swabbed away a work-day's eye shadow. Finally, the dry cutting turned out masterful, considering he'd

never touched office scissors to anyone's hair but his own. With each snip a

dark curl fell away. With each curl she looked more and more like him. "Now for the pearl cream," she said. Beng looked confused. "It's a quote-unquote 'cosmetic' that Philippine ladies use to lighten their skin. A

little lye '11 do ya," she said. She held her arm out next to his, his skin two

shades lighter. "You wouldn't need it, my little mestizo.

"You know, if I could make myself over completely," she told him,

straightening on the stool and filling her chest with air. "I'd turn myself into a general of the Philippine Armed Forces."

"What's new?" Beng asked.

"Hey, my old hairdresser was more affirming."

"OK," Beng said. "Maybe I should go all the way and make you

look like that." Beng pointed to the collage of photos on her desk: her

brothers, uncles, and cousins, all in Philippine uniform and full decoration. He pulled on her hair. 'These thick weeds would make a great crew cut."

It seemed, that week, that the military was invading his house.

With obsession, his mother followed cable-television coverage of the Gulf

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 26 War. In front of the TV, she wore her camo-patterned baseball cap, howling at each exploding image of "surgically precise warheads," especially ones

guided by video and remote. The rockets sent home the sensation of riding a bucking bronco into impact with Iraq. White men with hard hair and clean­

shaven jaws touched pointers to glowing maps. They moved plastic toys across plastic seas. The one bearded expert (the political critic) bore an uncanny likeness to Beng's father. His mother hissed his every appearance. The only news to interrupt the war games, it seemed to Beng, were

the stories of the Church turning a blind eye to pederasty within their ranks; or yet another teacher resigning after standing trial for his alleged sex with

pre-teens; or a social worker recounting the story of a child's innocence lost in the new home of the stepfather. His mother seemed to pay no attention to them, while Beng usually left the room. Tonight, he stayed, burning with discomfort, as a reporter rehashed the week in sex. He cut more hair, faster and faster.

There came a knock at the door, and Beng lay his scissors down.

Since they began to keep separate bedrooms, Beng's father knew to keep clear of his mother's room. The closed door meant "private." This evening,

though, he somehow dared to knock. Opening the door, his father held two

neck ties up against a new sport coat. He seemed not to notice the room had turned salon.

Which tie? his father asked. Beng's mother gave no opinion. But

turning round to Beng, she lit a cigarette and said, "He needs advice on how

to dress for his alembong." Beng knew the word meant "young hussy," or something similar.

His father's hands dropped. He understood very little of the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 27 language, and he wore only a lost look. Not until Beng's mother used the word tang4 did his father get defensive. "She's not 'stupid,'" his father said. "She's a graduate student. I consider her a colleague." Beng ducked, and an

ashtray flew, gouging the sheet rock above his father's head. Beng's father's name was Clyde.

Ignoring his mother's protest, Beng wheeled in the vacuum

cleaner. From her bed she accused him of having ulterior motives-of cleaning so that his father wouldn't be upset with her. She called out, her

raised palm signaling stop. "An angry husband isn't the worst thing a girl can have."

Beng said, "Just watch, Mom. Maybe you'll get the hang of it."

To vacuum the carpet, Beng would have to pick up about the room. He took inventory of the damage done since last he had cleaned. On

the floor, small piles of things bordered her bed in a semi-circle: a tumbler

coated inside with juice pulp; balled-up term papers; a half-dozen rayon blouses; a grading notebook sprawled flat, a banana peel on top of that. Beng

picked up a dress and tossed it into the closet. His mother felt something personal for the mess, she told him.

She said, "Don't pick things up. You'll break the pattern. I'm trying to widen

the circle with yoga postures and powers of the mind." That was a good day,

Beng thought. On bad days, she worked on the circle with Johnny Walker on

the rocks. She wouldn't let anyone but Beng inside the circle once she'd

entrenched herself. When his sister (whom Clyde still called "Daddy's girl") poked her head inside the room, Beng enjoyed watching his mother throw a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 28 hairbrush, an empty hand bag, an apple core, a shoe. Twice more in two weeks did his father dare peek inside. The first was an early evening, when Beng saw a pout that may have been brought on by guilt or sentimentality. The white face looked grieved, peering in just under the cross of the doorjamb. Beng's mother ignored the knocking, the grieved look faded, and his father went away.

The following week, it seemed it was courage that brought a

hardened face into the doorway—courage to once more suggest a divorce. Upon sight of his father, Beng's mother stepped out of bed, put her feet on the circle, and said, "What would I want with a divorce? I like you here." Then

she punched him in the eye.

Beng's father blamed their unhappiness on her household neglect.

She had let the cupboards run empty. She had let the laundry go. He said that the sight of her drinking and depression depressed him, too. "I've got feelings," he said.

When they first began having problems, his father didn't have to

try to make his mother feel guilty. She used to apologize to Beng: "I'm sorry I

can't fix dinner for you." At first, Beng didn't mind. He had always dreamed

of an exclusive diet of Kentucky Fried Chicken coleslaw. But soon the apologies stopped, and his dream food lost its taste. Beng begged for his mother's pork adobo, for its black sauce over rice. He begged for her lo mein

noodles dripping in sesame oil. But she continued to ignore the sink full of

soda bottles and french-fry cartons. 'Too bad," she said. "I don't work here anymore."

Beng began calling in orders to Long Lake Market for deliveries. At first Beng wasn't familiar with tipping etiquette. He didn't understand all the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 29 bad attitudes that came to the door with the groceries. Then his mother

explained, and Beng tipped too much, and for groceries that didn't make much sense. His mother asked, "What can you cook with soy sauce, cola, chocolate syrup, mangoes, and tampons?"

Beng eventually added a solid shopping list to his repertoire of domestic skills. And Beng showed off at the stove. He poached eggs, he

scrambled them. He shirred eggs, he fixed Tex-Mex. He even whipped a bowl

of meringue, though he had no further use for it. "It looks horrible," he said. "What do you think's wrong with it?" His mother sat at the breakfast bar, flipping through the cookbook.

She said, "Betty tells us, 'Humidity or rain may cause the sugar to absorb moisture from the air, resulting in a sticky, spongy texture.' Have that problem?"

Beng opened his palm to the ceiling to feel for rain.

For weeks, Beng fixed all of their meals. So when he came home from school on the first day of spring and was greeted by a smell like

chocolate brownies, he didn't know what to think. He wondered, Who did

this? finding a brown bundt cake swollen and offering itself on a service plate. He quickly reached for a knife. But his mother rounded the corner, looking exceptionally sober, and batted his hand away. She told him she'd made the cake "especially for Professor Dad."

"Mom," Beng said. "You look different."

They heard a car pull up alongside the house. His mother pressed a finger to her lips for secrecy. She nodded toward the walk-in pantry and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 30 pulled him in behind her. The two of them stood face to face, just inside the shelved door. Beng pulled its handle behind him. "What're we doing?" he

whispered. "Shh! Leave it just a crack open," she said. "And kneel down, will you? I can't see."

Beng dropped to his knees with a frown. He regretted having stood so unaware of himself.

Craning his neck around to look up at her, Beng realized that she

looked healthy, she looked beautiful. "Is there something wrong with you?" he asked. "Quiet," she said, cupping her hand over his mouth as she stood

over him from behind. "Here, eat this." In exchange for his silence, she

handed Beng a chocolate bar from an upper shelf where it had lain hidden.

Crouched so near the spice rack in the door, Beng smelled cumin

and turmeric, curry and garlic. The smells brought him back several summers to backyard picnics of chili and hot dogs. But although he mused over the nice memories, he felt he'd never enjoyed his mother more than he had this winter.

"Did you go to work today?" Beng asked.

"No. Be quiet," she said.

Her fingers wandered and tapped across his head in a restless, talkative strum.

"But I'm going tomorrow," she said.

This gave Beng a start. "Really?" he said.

"Really," she said. "Now button up. He's coming."

She sounds serious, he thought. She sounds serious.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 31 A car door shut outside. Beng watched through the slit of light at the cupboard door. The kitchen's side door flung open. Beng's father stepped

in, on dramatically long, soft-toed strides. He set his briefcase in a chair with a

flourishing, fluttering wrist. He whirled out of his topcoat, looked around to see if he were alone, then reached for the phone.

As he dialed a number, he seemed startled by the cake on the counter. His eyes shifted side-to-side as he reached for the butter knife. Then he responded to someone through the phone, "It's me."

In the pantry, Beng's mother tapped him on the ear. She wanted a

piece of the chocolate bar. Beng refused. But she kept tapping, and he gave in. The two of them chewed lightly, their eyes fixed on the crack of the door.

Beng watched from one knee. His mother stood behind him, her fingers

drumming on his head. Once again she tapped him on the ear, and she whispered, "Watch this."

His father cradled the phone between shoulder and ear. He cut

himself several inches of cake, then sliced circles in the air with the knife to the rhythm of his hushed conversation. "I had to come here to get something," he said. "A surprise for you." He did not once look at the bell­

shaped piece of cake before cramming it nearly whole into his mouth.

Partially gagged, he laughed confidentially. "Chocolate cake," he said into the

telephone, and, "I don't know~my wife, I guess." Then, "Right, see you soon."

He hung up the phone and swirled on his topcoat. Softly he hummed a tune, working the cake in his mouth. He began reaching for his briefcase, when he stopped. He opened his mouth and reached thumb and

forefinger back toward his molars. He pulled some small thing from his

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 32 teeth. He studied the tiny object, rotating his hand to get a better look. His eyes suddenly grew intense. He held what was in his fingers up to the overhead light. (In the pantry, Beng and his mother bit back their laughter.)

But then he lost interest and flicked the thing into a corner. He picked up his

case and scratched with a pencil a short note which he left next to the cake. He stopped one last time, searching the ceiling, as if in wonder of the silence. Then more exciting thoughts must have filled his mind, for he turned and jogged out the door a smiling man.

The two were just creeping out, when they retreated at the sound

of the door latch. Beng's mother hid behind him as he pulled the pantry door to. Back in strode his father. He opened a lower cabinet at the crook of counter top and bar. He reached far back into its shadow, beyond the lazy Susan, and retrieved a bottle of champagne that had lain there hidden.

Remaining crouched for a moment, he shook his head at the bottle. As he

left the house, he shook his head, bottle in hand. The two in the cupboard listened as the car backed down the driveway. They burst through the pantry door laughing. "What's the note say?" his mother asked.

Beng read aloud, raising his voice, as his mother stuffed the cake

into the garbage disposal. "It says, 'Don't wait for me for dinner'-dinner with

only one 'n.' Since when do we ever wait for him?" Beng said.

Beng watched his mother work at the sink. She looked stronger and full of color. He wondered what she had put in the cake. He could have

asked her. But asking would have broken the rhythm of the joke. She switched off the disposal, and her voice barely rose above the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 33 airy flow of water in the sink. "Your father has confided in you, hasn't he?" Beng shook his head, but she didn't seem to believe him. "Is she white? No, that's all right. You don't have to say it. I know she is." In a small voice, she

said that she'd seen them together here and there and that she was glad to know.

Then her voice began to project, as she lured Beng into an academic joke. She explained the archaic Western notion of living things

existing in a hierarchy of being: clams at the bottom (since they resembled

stones), apes below black Africans, East Asians below white women, and

white men beneath only the sacred and heavenly. "So you see," she said,

"your father is an ape, moving up the Great Chain through me to a white

lady." And Beng felt that her laughter resounded with a true and healthy tone. Strange, he thought.

The following morning, Beng ate oatmeal he had fixed for himself.

His mother ate fiber cereal across the table from him. He couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten breakfast. He felt unsettled about his mother going to work, but he made no issue of it and just listened as she practiced apologies

to an imaginary audience. "How does this sound?" she asked him. First she

apologized for having taken six weeks to grade her students' papers, then second for returning them dog-eared and wrinkled. "Or how about this," she

said. Beng watched her try to smooth the crinkled pages as she improvised

different versions of groveling self-effacement. She piled leather-bound

volumes four feet high on a stack of essays. She ran a steam iron over

another, melting the lift-off type from page one in a large triangle.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 34 She looked up from her ironing board and told Beng, "The department harassed me last week for inflating grades."

Beng held back his first impression: So what! That's no reason to dress up and kiss their behinds.

Beng had a little time before his school bus would arrive. He

helped his mother hang a clothesline in the bathroom for steaming. She told him what had happened the previous semester when she had tried allying herself with a freshman who had offered a sympathetic ear. The handsome

young man had told her that his parents were splitting up and that therefore

he could empathize with her. She talked with the student candidly about

drinking before, during, and after her lectures. She even showed him her

unsteady hands. She confessed to avoiding student appointments. She

confessed to locking herself in her office with a bottle and a portable black- and-white with earphones. The young man shared several afternoons of

compassion with her, before suggesting she give him an "A" for the course.

"He simply suggested it, as if extortion were the next logical step in

the student-teacher relationship," she said. "He's a pre-med."

Beng hung another rumpled essay on the line with a paper clip. "Did you give him the 'A'?" he asked.

"It doesn't matter," she said. "I gave the whole class an 'A.'"

"Do you have to go?" Beng said. "I'm not feeling so good."

"Honey, I've got to keep my job if we're to get rid of you know who."

Beng woke the following morning to the wonderful smells of fried

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 35 food. On the kitchen table he found a plate of eggs, home-fries, and Chinese sausage. With it, a note: "Gone to get my hair done, on impulse. Then to campus for student appointments and my lecture. You can pat me on the back when I get home. I've excused you from school so we can see a movie

early this afternoon. How's that sound? I think I deserve a little reward for all this self-discipline. By the way, you should see me now-red fitted suit,

fairly racy skirt, flowing scarves. If I must say so myself, not bad." How strange, Beng thought. What's wrong with her? Beng dialed her office number. He left a message on her voice

mail: "I hope you're all right, Mom. Call me after your lecture."

Beng made himself oatmeal and ate it across the table from the plate of eggs. In his mother's bathroom, he found four colors of nail polish

and three of lipstick. He melted the lipstick with a cigarette lighter and poured the polish in the trash. He walked out the kitchen door and into the morning air before even slipping into the sleeves

of his windbreaker. He hiked the five blocks toward the run-down public golf course. How strange, he thought. How strange.

2

The bottom-most layers of blackened snow on the shoulder had melted through in places, exposing patches of wet asphalt. A Michigan Bell

man at the top of a pole appeared to Beng more like an earth worker again,

now that he had shed the winter paper suit.

Reaching the golf course, a safe, anonymous distance from the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 36 street, Beng produced his combat knife from inside his jacket. He clipped it to

a belt loop, snapping, unsnapping, and snapping the sheath. The snap felt good to him. Like the equipment of a special forces commando with a mind for killing. He had bought the knife at a garage sale, bought it with all dimes.

A bloated veteran at the sale had shown him the knife's hollow compartment. "Here, in the handle," the man had said. "Here's where you

put your cyanide." Beng kept the knife hidden in the garage, inside a case of

rusted drill bits, a place he knew his father would never look. He climbed the one healthy tree on the entire golf course for a spring-cleaning of his stash-away box. Inside the rusty, flaking box, Beng kept

his arsenal of grooved nails, buck shot, Gobstoppers (the only rations that

wouldn't melt in the rain), multi-sized rubber bands, a ring of sixteen old keys, a travel package of band-aids, and a seven-year-old, worn copy of Playboy.

Checking off his inventory, Beng realized he'd forgotten to bring

with him the movie section of the newspaper. The last movie his mother

had taken him to had an "R" rating. It had contained two scenes of nudity.

He hoped he could choose one again, one with even more this time. But, he thought, it's a little strange to watch with your mom.

The pages of his magazine peeled apart, damp from melted snow. Some pages left print from one section across on the image facing it. But

Beng could still make out clearly the partly obscured hairdos and hips of the

models he knew so well. Turning the page, though, the one image he had

always refused to look at now offered a new twist. The woman in the

photograph was Korean or Japanese, some kind of Asian, holding a telephone

to her ear. And before this day, her sidelong glance reminded Beng too much

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 37 of his mother for him to look. But now, print from the opposite page stuck

over the face. Now, enraptured, Beng took in the faded scenery: the orange glow of the fireplace on her back, the fragile curve of her elbow, the fingers curled around a bedpost.

"Getting a boner, young sir?" came the voice of a man from below. The accent of a Filipino. The voice of the golf course greens keeper.

A flash of heat surged across Beng's face. 'That's not funny," he said, not looking down.

"Here, catch," the man said. Beng looked, just in time to fumble a cigar flipping into his arms. The cellophane crackled in his hands.

"Go on," he said. "I won't tell, you won't tell." The keeper stood

beneath the tree. He shifted his short cigar side-to-side with his tongue. He

gripped a garden spade in one hand and held a sand rake in the crook of his arm. From that distance, he thought he could smell the putridity of the man's stained teeth. Images of his mother's book, The Philippine

Mountain People, came to mind.

Beng climbed down, and the two together smoked. They toured

the grounds in the keeper's golf cart. The flatness and the sepia wash of the fairways stretched on toward the silo of a dead granary beyond hole five. The keeper asked Beng, "And how have you been, away all winter?"

He had told Beng his name once. Beng didn't remember the name, and, in his embarrassment, he felt unfriendly and distant.

And Beng felt another discomfort, side-by-side with the keeper.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 38 Staring at the brown-faced man, Beng couldn't help but recall what he saw the last time he had had his own hair cut. In the barber's angled, three-way

mirror, Beng saw this profile: the protruding forehead, the inflated lips, the stained and crooked teeth, the flattened nose. Here again with the keeper, Beng couldn't help but conjure images of a text book at school. The book of

his favorite subject, it contained many faces: of archaeologists holding skulls, of bearded anthropologists holding clipboards-faces of scientists with the

handsome, Saxon features of his father. And interspersed throughout photos

of rugged, scholar-gentlemen was the face of a native: a short, dark man, holding a spear in the crook of his arm. They parked at the sixteenth hole where a dry creek hooked around

and turned back the other way. They milled around on the gravel of the

creek bed. There were many marvelous things to find among its loose stones-fossils, smoking spore pods, snail shells, active ant beds. The keeper

spit on a dusty rock to bring out its pattern of shaded discs radiating from its center. Beng said that it looked like a Petosky stone, but the keeper said no, not this far from the Upper Peninsula.

Beng pointed out what had been a spawning bed on the floor of the creek-a shallow bowl, cleared smooth of stones. The keeper crouched to get a

better look. Beng explained that the mother fish knows just when to start clearing the way for eggs. She nudges even the heaviest rocks aside, ever widening the arc to mark her ground. She brushes the bottom clean of plants with her tail, blowing away the loose sediment. On the firmer, bowl-shaped

bottom, she lays her eggs and defends them, charging relentlessly any that swim near, even the father.

"Is that what that is?" the keeper said with wonder.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 39 The keeper took a knife out from under his shirt and levered a stone from out of the packed earth. Beng produced his knife so they could

compare. He explained about the veteran's garage sale. The keeper said he himself had fought in Vietnam, just after he had immigrated from Manila. He rolled up his sleeve and showed Beng a tattoo~an arrow, an eagle, a globe. The government had told him, either you fight or you hand over your

working visa. That had been the first year of the war. He said he had loved this great country, America, until it issued him a knife and a rifle and the

regret for leaving his own. He suggested that Beng keep an eye on things or risk being drafted some day. 'Too late," Beng said. "I've already been drafted. By my mom."

He explained that, as soon as he would start high school, he would enroll in the Junior R.O.T.C. He would then go on to be the first Filipino-

American appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All of his mother's family

had been military men in the Philippines, he said. "It's in our blood. Mom

says, 'When I die, I'll come back as a man. I'll return as Douglas MacArthur.' And my dad says, 'You don't believe in reincarnation.' And she says, 'You have the sense of humor of a professor.' And we all laugh because they're both professors."

'There's no joking with the military," the keeper said. He asked if

Beng had seen the morning newspaper, if he had seen the glaring

typographical error. The World section read, "U.S. PANDERS DICTATOR'S CONTINUING RULE." The paper had meant to print "ponders." But since the journalist was an American covering a military assassination in Central

America, the error fit well. 'The corrupt support the corrupt," he said.

The keeper had barely finished his sentence, when his arm flashed

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 40 over Beng's head. Like a magician plucking a flower from the ear of a new friend, the keeper presented Beng with a blue dragonfly. He showed Beng how to hold it without crippling its wings. Thorny legs clung to Beng's

fingers, as he delicately pinched the segmented abdomen. The fly's body

curled beneath crystalline wings that appeared motionless in their rhythmic strobing. Only then did Beng realize how much he'd missed the keeper and the strip of dry dirt he lived on. Back when the brown grass lay hidden by months of snow, Beng was glad to have forgotten the discomfort, the

embarrassment, of forgetting the keeper's name. But, with the blurring silence of snow, he had also forgotten his longing for their short conversations, meetings that were commonly clipped off by Beng's inability to

distinguish between a social embarrassment and the embarrassment of self- hate.

And Beng found once again this spring that when the snow

thawed he wandered his way back. He found himself once again in the dry creek. He found the sun again baking the dusty stones. Protected from the chill wind by the curving banks of the creek, Beng unzipped his jacket. They climbed out of the bed of loose stones and onto the solid

ground of grass. Beng felt his feet filling each sneaker. He felt his toes

straining the bounds of each shoe. He would need a new pair soon. He

imagined his mother standing over him in the shoe department: tall, a crew cut, pipe in hand; on her breast pocket, the service decorations of the Allied Forces Supreme Commander. He imagined his mother choosing black patent

leather for him. At the checkout counter, he and his mother would stand

towering over the register, which would read $50.00. His mother would

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 41 check her hip pocket and realize she had forgotten her wallet. "Hold these for us, will you?" she would tell the sales clerk. "We shall return."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE STRUGGLE

Carmen and her husband Lito sat in the rear corner of the small church, in the last pew where late-comers were forced to suffer the stench

seeping in from the alley. The couple leaned against each other, their heads bobbing in and out of sleep.

Carmen yawned and hadn't the strength to lift a hand to cover her mouth. Through one eye she watched an old, anemic-looking man plod down the center aisle and poke a cane-woven basket into each pew. She

enjoyed his smile. His several teeth coaxed into the basket little more than a

peso here, three pesos there, and a ten-peso bill from Carmen and Lito. With a bow to them, the man shuffled his feet and worked the basket as if it were a tambourine.

The two walked up to receive communion last. Heading up the aisle, Carmen enjoyed a sentimental dream. (As a janitor, Carmen had

developed the ability to dream while fully awake.) She knelt at the altar steps

and winked at her friend, Fr. Comino, who handed out the sacrament from

behind the railing. When they sat back down, the organist began to play. Carmen nudged Lito. "Let's get out of here," she said.

Their white-sneakers dragged on the sparkling concrete of Ayala

Avenue, the mainline of Manila's financial district. They were only three

blocks from the office tower they had left an hour before, but forty blocks from

their home in the suburb of Navotas. They hailed a jeepney with seven 42

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 43 plastic horses on its hood. The charge to ride was more than they could put

in the church collection basket-they paid fifteen pesos to and from the business district where they shined glass, polished steel, and wiped linoleum stained by the coffee of European investment brokers who, although having

worked in Manila for years, had never learned a word of Tagalog. As they sped out of the financial corridor, a hot wind carried the spirit of a rotting dog into the jeep. Carmen's face soured. "So much for that dream," she said.

"What?" Lito said, without raising his face from his chest. "Never mind," she said, and waved him off. She didn't like the dismissal that came so quickly into her hand.

I'm giving up on him, she thought to herself. That's what that means.

So she spoke up. "I was dreaming that you were on top of me, your

shirt soaked with sweat..." But, no, what a bad idea, she thought. She feared

driving him away. The jeep slowed and slipped into the swirl of Sunday traffic near

what Lito called the Cadillac Cathedral, a church where many Filipinos were stepping down from black limousines, in cowboy boots and linen suits.

Carmen watched teenagers exchange discreet squeezes. The younger children

chewed their last salted tamarind before the Cathedral doors were to shut.

In that crowd, a tattered old couple stood out in Carmen's view. She stretched her neck to get a look past Lito's wide shoulders. The jeep crept

up to the curb where the old couple stood near a pastries vendor. Carmen stared as the old man took coins from his threadbare trousers. He bought a

moon pie and stepped aside to eat. His wife produced money from her

sweater and did the same.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 44 Carmen glared. Her back stiffened as she ground her teeth. She saw that neither the old husband nor his wife shared a word with each other

as they worked the dough in their toothless gums. Carmen saw festering between them the silence so common between husband and wife. Goddamn it! she thought. She scratched at the mole on her chin, infuriated that a fear of talking could ruin a marriage.

The jeep suddenly lurched over potholes and accelerated into an

open space, like a horse into a frightened gallop, shaking Carmen from her

obsession. She turned and took Lito by the shoulders, startling him out of a deep sleep. "We're not ending up like them!" she said, her thumb jacking over

her shoulder. "We're not going to live together but cold and apart. I want you to make me happy." At first, she felt she had a hold on her destiny. But

the usually hard flesh of Lito's shoulders felt like a sponge in her grip, in a

way so strange that Carmen stared at her hands on him. She didn't see the horror in his eyes.

The jeepney slowed at the next corner, and Lito worked free of her

grasp. He leapt from the jeep as it rolled through a stop sign. Carmen screamed after him, "We need to give each other passion, and Father Comino

will teach us." But that only made him run faster up an alley, past a mound

of garbage and out of sight.

The next morning, Father Comino lumbered out of bed. He

opened his bedroom door and lifted the glass of grapefruit juice waiting on a

table there for him. He remembered dreaming of a man skewered over a pit

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 45 of fire and roasting like a pig.

In his boxers shorts, he began his morning exercises. Striking himself on the belly, on the neck, on the thighs, Father Comino conditioned

his body and mind for a full day of client sessions. As he worked up a sweat, he tried to put out of his mind thoughts of the unpaid mortgage. Although his office strangled each month to make the payments, this was only the first

time they would be late, and already the owner of the bank had threatened foreclosure. 'That's who that was," the priest said aloud. It had been the

American banker roasting over the fire in his dream.

During his exercises, the maid and the cook each knocked at his door for instructions. "Special guests for Friday's dinner," he reminded them, wiping moisture from his face. They were to prepare the therapy suite—order

Tibetan oils for the sunken bath; fluff the ostrich-feather beddings; boil votives clean and stuff them with new candles—and start slow-cooking a meal

that would include a souffle risen with the priest's aphrodisiacal baking

powder. The special session would be a piece of professional courtesy that he hoped would buy him some time. The special guests were to be the

daughter and son-in-law of the American banker who held the mortgage on the church therapy office.

Later in the morning, he reviewed notes for his first appointment

of the day. But he needed no reminders, since he always worked long evening hours on his written opinions. Fine, he thought, closing his folio. I know how they hurt.

The priest felt uneasy as a young couple came in and perched,

holding hands, on the edge of the settee. To begin the session, he tried to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 46 convince them that the wife's fantasy of being both a woman and a man in their bed was not necessarily sinful. But a red note on his desk calendar caught his eye. He didn't have

to read it: Appt. at the Bank next week. He then switched to automatic pilot

so he could think things over. Outwardly, he rambled in standard jargon and explained that she so revered her husband that, even at the risk of challenging his virility, she desired to be both herself and a mirror, that she

wanted to overcome distinction and limitation, and not, as the husband

feared, hurt him with unnatural penetration. But, as he spoke, his hands

grasped at air, as if he had his fingers on the banker's throat.

The young husband said, 'That's all well and good, Father. But can't she keep it to herself?"

Across town, Carmen breakfasted alone. She pushed rice from one

side of her plate to the other. She didn't know what to do, since Lito didn't come home after running away near the Cadillac Cathedral. Carmen hadn't expected such resistance from him, though her book The Living Orgasm.

borrowed from Father Comino's library, had warned her of shocking one's

partner with demands.

For several years Carmen had been considering Father Comino's

marriage-counseling service, but she couldn't~for lack of money, not to

mention Lito's squeamishness with the topic of sex—find the courage to suggest therapy to her husband. Yesterday, seeing the old couple on the

sidewalk, Carmen felt it was time to shake things up.

"Good going!" she said, slapping herself in the face, as she spent the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 47 next three days looking for him. She didn't see him at work. Lito arranged a

transfer for himself to the company's other cleaning contract down the street. She asked after him in bars and on every street-corner in the neighborhood.

She talked to so many people about him, she began to lose her voice. His

name seemed to have become poison in her throat. The more she asked about him, the more horse her voice became. Some said that Lito took his meals, caroused, and slept in his mother's neighborhood near the university, although his mother denied

having seen him. Near the university, people said they'd seen him, with his hulking back and sledgehammer hands, hurt several young students' bones

while arm wrestling in the taverns. Rumor had it that he'd taken to wearing reflector glasses. Some said they'd heard him impersonating an Italian- American actor. And he was now asking his friends to call him "Scarface."

'That's ridiculous," Carmen said. "Pock-face maybe ... When I get

my hands on him I'll-" She fantasized about hitting him in the face with her

"Encounter Bat," a sponge-foam club that Father Comino had suggested to

them two years ago, something which they had to abandon after missing

work because of scratched corneas. Wednesday afternoon when she woke up, Carmen untied her

blindfold and went to market, with her hands squeezed into tight balls. With her raspy voice, she barked her orders, like a dog straining at its leash. None

of the vendors could bundle their produce quickly enough for her. And she

wouldn't settle for a single rotten prawn, even when buying from the four- hundred pound fisherman named The Mad Death, of Mad Death Fish and Poultry, whose guillotine tattoos had the effect of heads rolling as he skinned a lingcod.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 48 On the walk home, alongside the drainage ditch, the image of Lito running away from her on the jeep hovered over the street. A neighbor tapped Carmen on the shoulder and said she had seen Lito that afternoon.

"I didn't know he had so many tattoos," the neighbor said.

"Neither did I," Carmen said.

At that point, she had been wandering for four days, confused, caught between, on the one hand, guilt for having bruised Lito's pride and, on the other, rage that he would not face up to his problem. Suddenly, when the

neighbor left her, Carmen came down on the side of rage. She dropped her

basket, spilling shrimp onto the curb, and she climbed down into the ditch,

trampling trash and disemboweling rodents with a sharpened stick. She

returned home with rat hairs in her eye lashes and her clothes spattered with blood. And she had no idea where she had left her dinner.

Father Comino had clients from every corner of the metropolitan

area. He insisted on offering a sliding payment scale, against the advice of

those in the church accounting office, which allowed for dozens of couples who struggled financially as well as emotionally. Unfortunately, his devotion drove their books into the red.

His methods succeeded with over 85% of the couples who finished

the fifteen-session treatment, a fact often cited in his office pamphlets. That

morning he met first with Juana and Julian, of the latest success group. They

had been part of a pilot program called "observable encounters" and were, like a dozen other couples, experiencing their fourth month of weekly love-

making. "In a jeepney is the most sure place," they reported. "But one week

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 49

out of four we're even able to have sex in bed." Later, his ten o'clock appointment turned out to be more of a social call. Jaime walked into his office alone, carrying a box of books. It had been a year since his marriage had ended in divorce, putting him solidly in the bottom fifteenth percentile. But, as the young man had promised, he handed

the priest a signed copy of his first erotic-horror-thriller. Father Comino

remembered Jaime taking copious notes throughout each of his twenty sessions. The priest turned the glossy book in his hands, admiring the

slender neck in the cover photo, wondering how the photographer so

realistically rendered the two holes bitten into the flesh. A drop of red

dripped onto Jaime's publishing name, Jim Baker.

At eleven o'clock, Mary-Chris and Rodi sat across from his desk

with their five-year-old daughter Pinky. It was only their third session, and it ended in complete success. That day the three adults were able to once and

for all distract the child from the crystal-ball snowman on the desk and

convince her that the couple really were her birth parents, and that she could leave them alone at night without admonishing them with graphic

narratives of hell-fire for sins of the flesh. The priest's accounting office

closed their file and refunded one-third of the family's fees. At noon, because it was the Feast of Saint Eusebio, Father Comino had canceled his lunch date and brought a sandwich into the confessional

with him. First off, he heard four terse, run-of-the-mill confessions in twenty

minutes. Then came a bomb.

Five years ago, Father Comino had ordered the bottom of the confessional screen let out and hemmed so he could reach his hand through and physically connect with his spiritual children. The idea began when his

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 50 hand had first punched a small hole in the screen. When he heard more passionate confessions, he often became so overwhelmed, that his hand would shoot out to touch the sufferer in the semi-darkness. The day that he

finally broke through up to his elbow, he decided, "What the hell," and ordered a craftsman's work done on the spot.

Sitting back in the booth, Father Comino chewed his sandwich.

The next voice that asked for a blessing explained that she hoped she

wouldn't find her husband because she planned to murder him. "Carmen?" the priest said, his mouth full of pork and bread. The priest nudged the screen outward with his fingertip. He saw

her dark and muscular thighs. He saw brown flecks on her short pants that

looked like dried blood. "Carmen, are you hurt?" he asked.

"I could tear his eyeballs out," she said.

"My child," he said, stuttering. Somehow he reached his head and both arms through the narrow opening. The screen glided on his face like a silk scarf. He began massaging Carmen's shoulders, as she explained about

the old couple and their moon pies, about her newfound strength at the

tattooed hands of The Mad Death, about Lito arm wrestling in the university bars.

"Father?" she said. "Did I do something wrong?"

The priest straightened up in his booth and said, off the cuff, "It's not everyday that a husband's impotence is exposed in the street."

Carmen dragged herself through each ten-hour shift and lay awake most of the morning. She was alone, more alone than when marriage had at

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 51 least given her a daily ritual, a commuting partner, someone to share gossip

and betel nut with in the break room, someone to look at with plans of someday tapping her sexual floodgates. 'To just crack my back!" she used to say, dreaming aloud to herself.

But at work this week, without dreams, Carmen mopped and sponged with the mindless strength of a carabao, stooping over her thighs made powerful from years of lifting swivel-chairs with straight posture to

protect that back. She distanced herself from the other women and men. The supervisors began to worry that Carmen's patches of gleam on the floors was

disrupting the half-finished look they had cultivated for years. She worked whole shifts without a word to anyone, without even complaining of the pop

in her shoulder when she wiped far across a desk top.

Thursday, just before midnight, Carmen took her coffee break. She

sat alone and pushed aside the vertical blinds. She looked down at the gray-

lit street below. Finding a newspaper left in a dustbin, she read on the front page that, just outside the building two weeks ago, there had been an accident. A bus driver had made a wide right turn, leaving a tempting space at the

corner for the mayor's son to speed through in his red convertible. But the

gap closed, forcing the young man's car onto the sidewalk, through a flower

stand, a muffins vender, and thirty surprised pigeons. The car rammed over and stuck itself on top of a stout, brass sculpture of a television that had been commissioned by the city's most prominent media mogul in memorial of his

dead wife. The mayor's son leapt from the driver's seat unhurt, brandishing a

revolver he had taken from his glove-box. He boarded the city bus and shot

its driver through the neck and skull as the driver tried calling for a tow truck on his radio.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 52 After the police hostage negotiator was able to coax the revolver from his hand, it took five policemen to place the mayor's son in hand cuffs.

The officers handled the young man with kid gloves, since they recognized

the red convertible parked on the bronze TV. He treated them to cuts, bruises, and his foul mouth. In forty-five minutes, the precinct station received a call from the mayor with an order that the chief drive his son home. The police cooperated, and two weeks later county prosecutors set the trial on an upcoming docket.

Civil rights organizers, labor unionists, Metro Transit employees,

gun-control liberals, and activists for lesbian and gay awareness mobilized on the street and on the op-ed pages of the two dailies that weren't under state

control. One column described the bus driver as a dark skinned, homosexual Moslem from an island in the South, brutally slain by the mestizo hand and

blue-steel handgun of the established, homophobic patriarchy which had

been sitting on municipal employee pay raises for eight years. The various activist leaders couldn't have been happier with the mayor's son's choice of victim. With this corpse, not a single group would feel left out of the giant

rally planned for the following evening.

Three years ago, upon his first visit to the suburb of Navotas with

donations of clothes and dried foods, Father Comino was given a sugary dwarf pineapple from a young couple named Carmen and Lito. Only then

did he begin to trace back his lifelong shackles of sexual self-denial, back to his

childhood suburban home where he had knocked his mother's pineapple off

of its living stalk. He had not confessed to the act until his first strands of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 53 pubic hair sprouted during the week his mother died of an aneurysm in the brain. The pineapple plant had been a gift from her mah jong partners. After the boy had decapitated it, it lived fruitless even beyond his years at the

seminary.

Surely, his "special sessions" went beyond his everyday work in the office. But this time, the priest's design of twenty-two dwarf pineapples

ringing the bed made his cook and secretary talk. They said it was an odd choice, "All spiny and frightening to look at." They weren't able to appreciate the fruit's more private history.

Father Comino took their criticism in stride, although, he did take

to heart their insistence that he was acting, if not with simple novelty, in downright strange ways. He had to admit to himself that, at times lately, he

had begun to have violent thoughts. And even though he let himself be caught up in the excitement of designing the special session, he longed for a

different battle ground. His mind wandered to his friends in the streets who

were organizing what would be the year's biggest political march. "Darn it all," he thought to himself. For if he had not had the banker on his back, he'd be out there with the people, screaming, "Laban-laban*."

Early Friday evening, when the banker's daughter and son-in-law

arrived for the dinner, Father Comino took two quail from the bamboo

steamer and sprinkled them with nuts on his plate. He chewed with the

noise of a washing machine, the two servers behind him looking puzzled. Realizing that his guests hadn't touched a thing on the table, he asked why they hadn't. The banker's daughter explained that she'd just expected a priest

* Fight!

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 54 to begin with a blessing.

"Oh, right," Father Comino said. 'The Lord is great. The Lord is good. Thank you Lord for this fud." And they all laughed, but with a

nervous twitch that he regretted. He pursed his lips.

That didn't stop him from fantasizing, though. He daydreamed of poisoning the couple's yams and of spiking their bagoong* with a hallucinatory mushroom.

In his distracted state, Father Comino wasn't aware of the two

servers' talking. The two whispered to each other about their lipstick, their

plans for the evening, and about who they would meet at the political rally

up the street. They argued over who would be the one to ask Father Comino to let them off early. After taking away the quail, the two servers set down a lemon sorbet and continued filling the room with their hushed conversation.

The American couple searched the servers faces for clues as to how

to move on with the session since Father Comino gave them none. After a

few minutes, the banker's daughter threw her napkin into her copper sorbet

cup and stood up. 'This was Dad's quacky idea, and I don't like it one bit," she said.

Her husband held her down by the wrist, saying, "Shhh, honey. Father Comino just has something different in mind for us."

Father Comino watched her sit back down. He wiped his mouth

and threw the napkin onto the table. "Why don't you start, then?" he said, looking the two over.

The couple grabbed each other's hands with a start. They hunched their shoulders, as if awaiting blows to the back of the neck. "Ohh-kay," the

* A pungent shrimp sauce.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 55 banker's daughter said. Father Comino leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. She began by explaining that, through nine months of marriage,

they hadn't gotten to bed without finding some object in their room distracting. She said that she thinks some of the maids in the house set spells

and traps in their bedroom during the evening tea. When the couple would

retire to their bedroom, she would find a handkerchief folded on the bureau or a cigarette lighter from the parlor next to the bed. Father Comino asked what she found "distracting" about them. But the husband interrupted his wife. "I don't find them

distracting. I don't find them interesting at all. 'Distracted' is Elizabeth's code­ word for afraid."

The couple began to shout at each other. "I am not afraid, Donald." "Oh, yeah? Then how come every time I'm ready to stick it in, you

squeeze your knees together and scream."

With all the yelling, the two servers had to raise their whispering to a conversational tone.

"And then what happens, Donald?" the banker's daughter said. 'Tell him what happens next!" Her husband crossed his arms and mumbled. "What, Donald? We can't hear you."

"I lose my hard, God damn it~oh, pardon me, Father." "Not only do you lose it, but it's this big to begin with," she said, offering Father Comino half of her pan de sal*.

"Fuck you!" he said, and the two servers behind him snickered. He turned round in his chair. "Would you two shut up!"

A small dinner roll.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 56

Father Comino stood up. "All right, that's enough, you rich, hateful people. I think you should leave." The couple looked to each other, before the husband glared at the priest and said, "I don't think so, Father. If anyone should leave, it's those who can't make their monthly payments."

"Why you-" The priest stepped back from the table. He pointed at the wife. "If you only had the guts to be a real woman, and you," he said, pointing at the husband. "If you only had the magnum that I'm packing—"

At that, he grabbed a handful of his own crotch. The two servers locked eyes on their priest. One screamed, the other said, "Hmm ..."

When he realized what he'd done, Father Comino bolted for the

door.

"God, thank You, I'm out!" he said in the street, his heels echoing against the storefronts and sidewalk. He could hear the rumble of voices and

drums up ahead. He couldn't remember the last time he ran down Ayala

Avenue. Turning the corner, the sight of the rally hit him full on. The sight

of yellow and red flags brought tears to his eyes. He climbed on the hood of a jeepney parked near the steps of an office supply outlet which advertised

guaranteed shredding of any sensitive documents, NO JOB TOO BIG OR

SMALL. Father Comino scanned the young, fiery faces in the crowd, looking

for his friends from the university.

He recognized some of the masked students, many of them volunteer employees at his church. It made his heart soar to watch them

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 57 paint banners and scream into bullhorns. Transit employees gathered around a tall delegate of the American AFL-CIO who had been rushed over the Pacific in a 747 at the first word of unrest. Dozens of dark skinned men and women chanted to the rhythm of tight-skinned drums in the tradition of their southern islands. A crowd of leather lesbians, without any personal convictions about the bus driver's murder, marched in their black, steel-

studded breast harnesses, chanting in English, "Smash the rich Patriarchy!" as

they had learned from their recent vacations in London, San Francisco, and New York. From behind barricades, Metro Manila police cast an affected stare

toward the throngs of protestors, trying to buck themselves up in their blue

Bermuda shorts and small numbers, longing for national guardsmen and

bayonetted rifles. Never in their lives had they seen so many darkies, nor so

many women with tattoos, all raging together in one place. A high-ranking officer spoke in haughty tones to a journalist. He said, 'This is nothing. You should see what they're doing in the mountains," meaning the revolutionary peasants that were slaughtering rich people in their sleep.

Crowds of brokers, CPA's, and secretaries poured from the canyon

of office buildings. Their heels clicked and smiles flashed, their light conversations barely altered by the novelty of the popular army crowding their avenue. Everyone came out to watch. A postal worker told his partner,

"I had a shitty day. Why couldn't they have started this in the morning?"

Young and old flooded onto the pavement from cafes and basement mah­

jong clubs, from bakeries and high-society escort lounges, having seen their

familiar surroundings on live broadcast, the images juxtaposed with reports of smoke and gunfire in the mountain provinces.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 58 Father Comino watched as some responded in kind, others in

counter emotion, but all met in the hot street with a protestors' passion or the passion of one who wants to get home to dinner. Brokers in power suits rubbed shoulders with oxford preps, and women in transit authority jump suits squeezed passed those in slit skirts and wedgies. The only clear space in

the road was left behind by a tan Toyota van from which ten thugs piled out, pistol whipped some demonstrators, and piled back in to drive to the other side of the square.

On Carmen's commute to work, the jeepney pulled up alongside a set of barricades, its passage blocked a half-mile from her building. She paid

little attention to the rumbling of drums, even though, the closer she came to the front door of her building, the more frequently a shoulder bumped her

aside. And five times within the space of four hundred feet did she see

someone she knew. Each tapped her on the shoulder with news of a Lito sighting.

In the fourth floor lobby of her office building, Carmen found a

temporary supervisor raging with one of the service women. The temp-

super shook her finger in the face of Rosita, Carmen's long-time problem co­ worker. Despite her preoccupied self, Carmen walked over to appreciate the m om ent.

Rosita explained that she didn't much care who was in charge that

day, that she would say the same to the regular supervisor. Rosita said that

the temp-super must have more brains than to fire a crew member before the

work had been done. Otherwise that same temp-super would have to take up

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 59 the slack of a short-handed crew, and on her own time. Rosita said she knew the game: the company underbid to get the contract, not caring that

supervisors would have to work understaffed and with less time. She knew

the game. Why else would she have had eight months seniority over the next janitor and have never accepted the promotion of temp-super. She knew the game.

'Til fire you," the temp-super snapped. "I don't care what extra work it gives me, as long as I make you miserable."

"Miserable? You kid me?" Rosita said, taunting with her chest

pushed out. "You just be giving me the night off. I'll have some drinks, sweat a tussle with some woman's husband—but not with her's," she said, nodding toward Carmen, who let the remark glance off of her. "And, come morning, I just get hired across the street there," she said. She motioned out

the window at the FrancoTech building being consumed by a large, evening

shadow.

Carmen looked out the window. A wave of nausea hit her stomach, and she confused a pang of hunger with shouts coming from the street below. She saw the crowd lurching as a unit. Turning back to the

conflict at hand, she found Rosita's voluptuous body undulating its threat in front of the temp-super.

Rosita continued, "You hire people everyday. You hired them two

this afternoon." Her finger, at the end of her disproportionately long arm, pointed across Carmen's face at a young couple who busied themselves, stirring creamer into their cups. "You think you scare me?"

Carmen last remembered biting the long, knobbed finger stretching in front of her face. She felt the hard, industrial carpet crash up into her

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 60 shoulder as the room turned upside down in her view. Carmen's tongue,

pushed out in a scream, was bitten by her own teeth, as a fist plowed the underside of her chin. Carmen felt the glory of her foot landing well-placed in Rosita's gut and the ecstasy of her shoulder popping as she cracked a pine

mop handle on Rosita's skull. Two temp-supers pinned the two of them to the floor. "You're fired," they screamed. "You'll pay for that broken handle. We know where you live."

Carmen flew out through the building foyer and into the street. A steady flow of blood reminded her of the pain in her mouth. Her vision was

clouded with tears and thoughts of her husband. She shoved her way through the crowd. Her hands thrashed frantically about, failing to keep even a small space free around her. She wished she had a sharpened stick. Striped shirts and checked pant legs scurried by all around, and in the swirl of

synthetic fabric, Carmen believed she saw her husband in every face.

Shoulders knocked her this way, then that. Screams and chanting drummed

in her ears. Then from forty meters away came the voice, metallic in its confidence, of her friend the crying priest, who stood perched on the hood of a jeepney, enrapturing waves of people with calls of revolution and a face wet

with tears.

Carmen edged through, step by step. She scratched at the mole on

her chin, desperate for an embrace. But she lost sight of him as the undertow

of the crowd dragged her a great lateral distance. She was trying to key in on the priest's voice, when she heard her husband's name chanted—"Lito! Lito!" Suddenly, coughed up by the backwaters of the crowd, Carmen found herself

near the curb. She turned toward a peripheral excitement, and there she

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 61 found a group of machos circling round two men. The pair were lying on their stomachs, head-to-head, hands clasped for an arm wrestle on the

sidewalk. The circle of men, some gray and some with smooth chins, waved pesos high in the air with hopes for Lito's success, the success of his broad

back and sledgehammer hands. Carmen opened her mouth, but her

husband's name stuck in her throat, gagged by the beauty of his mustachioed grimace, the muscle-lined mouth and striated neck that school-girls swooned over in Carmen's teenage years.

Father Comino spotted Carmen as she stood on the edge of the

crowd. From fifty meters away, on the hood of the jeepney, he could see that

she stood enraptured with something out of his view. Then the current

tugged her back into its turbulence, tossing her this way and that. The priest slipped down into the crowd and fought through a path of stamping feet and thumping shoulders. There. He wrapped his arms around her from behind.

But by reflex Carmen thrust an elbow into his gut and sent him

sprawling to the concrete. She turned to face her attacker, but found it was a

friend on his knees and holding his middle. She pulled her clenched fists

into her chest, her face as surprised as a wide-eyed sea bass. Father Comino lay on his side, laughing between guttural coughs. His outstretched arm called to Carmen for a lift, as he weathered the light trampling of activist and

commuter alike. Carmen grasped his hand and pulled him to her. They

hugged, each looking beyond the other's shoulder into the crowd, an ecstatic

smile on the face of one, and a twitching frown on the other.

Father Comino squeezed Carmen and buried his face into her hair, as he shouted, "I'm free!"

The twitching in Carmen's lips and the lines around her eyes

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Jose tipped the clay pot upside down. On it, he nearly reached

Jack's first story window. But like a child too small to see into the casket at his grandfather's wake, he could only imagine what it looked like inside. He listened, and this is what he heard.

"Serene. I want serene."

"Give it up, amigo. It's a mood ring. Not a mood enhancer."

"I don't need my mood enhanced, anyway."

"Oh, I know what you need..." "Stop, or leave, Gary." "You stop."

"Get your hands off me. You said we'd just talk." "I don't see anything else going on, you prude."

"I think you should leave."

"Sorry, amigo. I misunderstood. You're one to be misunderstood, you know."

"I said go!"

Jose heard a door open and slam, then a car engine revving to impress. He listened as the car screeched away out front.

Because the sun had begun to dip below the horns of yucca plants

at the far end of the yard, Jose knew it was nearing 7:00. And after hearing the goings on in Jack's apartment, he knew the time would be right to put his

63

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plan into motion. He jumped down without righting the clay pot and ran to his make-shift altar behind the berm in the empty lot down the street. Jose took a small collection of papers from the metal box that he kept hidden in a lilac bush. He read the lines on each sheet. He had scrawled

one-line of nervous print on each of the seven pages, identifying his seven

fears. Two of them he set aside, before finding a pack of matches and a candle in the metal box. The candle completed the incomplete circle he'd drawn on a rotting wooden plank.

With a tall flame flickering on the candle, Jose took several magazine inserts from the box. They were fragrance adds, which he liked to

use even more than flowers for his rituals. He held one up to his nose then

tipped its corner into the flame. The card stock folded onto itself in the heat, and Jose combined it with the two sheets of paper he'd chosen. One read, "October 25, 1993, Jose A. Zavalata's sixteenth birthday," and the other,

"Brown and Co., Harvesters—Cotton, Citrus, and Vegetable." The flames consumed the papers, drawing a straight line of black smoke on the air.

"I deserve better," he said three times aloud. "I've been patient.

I've been good. I deserve to live in Los Angeles with John Cusack and Blossom." Jose had never seen the movies nor the television shows of his heroes, having only gotten to know them through gossip weeklies on the

rack at the convenience store. But he knew he belonged in their world. And tonight he would begin to leave behind the Texas Valley.

He ran the entire half-mile of broken asphalt to the library, trying

to convince himself that he'd succeeded with the first level of his plan. He would have to have faith in the power of his ritual, so that he would be able to concentrate on performing the rest. He felt good about it. And with that,

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he believed he would thwart his parents' plans to withdraw him from school next month and to have him begin work in the orange groves down the freeway.

In the library, he took his usual arm chair in the periodicals room. He leafed through an outdoors magazine without reading, stopping at jogging

shoe ads and admiring the look of determination on the faces of men

climbing mountains. He looked up with every footfall that came through the room's glass door. He sat atop the arm chair as Edward II would have sat high up on

his dead father's gigantic throne. And when Jack finally showed up, Jose envisioned the tall, dark-blond man making some kind of offering at his feet.

Jose recognized Jack's blue knitted shirt as the one he had worn the

first night Jose had followed him home several months ago. 'Tonight," Jose said to himself, as Jack spread his things out on a table nearby. "He must be ready for something new. I'll introduce myself tonight."

One hour slipped past. Then two. Jose let a movie scene play in his mind's eye. The characters were a young couple, driving with their convertible top down, hair blowing casually about their faces.

Jose tried to concentrate on the job he was there to do. But he couldn't keep from daydreaming, setting himself in the back seat of that

convertible as the car wound around the cliffs of the Pacific Coast Highway.

The young man driving said, "We've got to get home." The girl in the front seat moaned her disagreement, and in the back Jose echoed her. "It's late.

We've been driving forever," the driver said. But Jose watched as the girl put

her hand on his thigh. The movie's music grew triumphantly louder, and their ride went on, on a road so far from Texas that Jose's birthday, his school,

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and the valley of Chicano fruit-pickers all but dissolved in his head.

But in that reverie, he didn't make any moves. With his future sitting only fifteen feet away, Jose was afraid he would never leave his chair. He had had to use the men's room when he first sat down. Now he shivered, as he concentrated against the necessity of his body, eyes shut, with the determination to go nowhere before doing what he'd come there to do.

Just as a nausea tingled in his stomach, a man spoke up. "Hello," he said. Jose opened his eyes. As if in another day dream, he saw the man's

hand stretched out in front of him. Jose took it, and he listened as Jack explained.

"I've got an ad in the paper, you see ... looking for an assistant...

well, I can't say it would be much pay .. .to do the grunt work, adding up

receipts on that adding machine on the table over there ... Oh! I almost forgot—I'm an accountant. You'd be working for me."

Jose's mouth ran dry, as he looked up from his chair. He only half­

listened, his eyes blinking with disbelief and blinking back tears of joy. As he

looked up at Jack, Jose thought of God. For only a moment, though. Just long

enough to thank Him. But then he frowned against the idea. "No, way!" he

thought. 'This is happening because of me. Not God, me." "Have I said something wrong?" Jack asked. "You look upset." "No, no. I'm listening," Jose said. And to himself he thought, "Pay attention, you dip head. This man is your god now."

Jack continued explaining that his business was thriving,

relatively. Jack had never passed his certification exams, so he couldn't

charge regular fees and, so, couldn't afford an office. He also taught math at

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the high school, a fact that his ego would never allow him to mention first,

although it was true that that job paid his bills. And since he saw this young man sitting in his "place of work" every night doing-as far as Jack could tell— nothing more than reading for pleasure, wouldn't it be logical to introduce the idea?

Jose accepted the job as the first link in the chain of his destiny. Up

to that point, Jose had only envisioned the details of his plan vaguely: that he

would just make friends with Jack, and that he would eventually convince him that this dingy little town was no place for two strapping young men to have to endure. He had thought the lure of L.A.—Venice Beach, Beverly

Hills, and girls galore-would convince anyone. Now, it seemed that the job

and its pay were simply a bonus that he hadn't foreseen.

They began working together the following evening in the library.

"It was meant to be," he told Jack (a phrase Jose's mother couldn't stand. When she heard it, she pitied its speakers, such as her sister who lived with the extended family in Jose's house. The sister had married a man who loved

and beat her with equal intensity. She used the phrase often).

From there he met with Jack in the periodicals room weeknights at

7:00 sharp and worked until 10:00. Jose found the adding machine to be the

fun part at first. Then he discovered in the work a type of reading experience—one even better than the library's pop weeklies. He sorted receipts of all different sizes. In red, he circled the total for tallying. In black, he

circled purchases that simply interested him. At the end of each worknight, he went back to the black marks, descriptions of "buys" and "services" for his

fantasy shopping spree of the evening. Dry-cleaning: $14.30. Computer

accessories: $72.25. Books: $11.42. Lingerie: $42.10. Gasoline: $17.90. And,

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most useful, airline ticket: $315.00.

A fan inside the drinking fountain on the wall whirred on, and

Jose was taking off in the jumbo jet. His secretary, Wendy, read from her checklist of people to call and meetings to attend once they'd touched down in Los Angeles. She wore the seamed stockings he had bought for her, and she

typed on a lap-top. Jose enjoyed the lobster served with champagne, and, on the sly, took the phone number of a tall and helpful flight attendant.

"Wendy," he said, between mouthfuls of key lime pie. "It doesn't get any

better than this."

In their third week together, the plan didn't seem to be gelling quickly enough for Jose. He had thought they'd have eaten in restaurants

together long before then. He had thought they would have taken long,

contemplative walks around the neighborhood with thoughts of moving on consuming their imaginations.

With Jack deep into a sheet of figures, Jose interrupted and asked

why they didn't work in Jack's apartment. Jack said that he needed to escape

his apartment. "It's practically a closet," he said. But Jose didn't believe him.

Jose had eavesdropped at three, sometimes four different windows at the

place, with the span between them larger than the biggest room in his family's three-bedroom house. He felt entitled to work there, even to sleep there. How rude of Jack not to have offered.

This evening, the work went badly for Jose. He couldn't help

thinking of his birthday that lay just ahead. Once, when his age came up in

conversation, Jack had said, "At least you'll be one year closer to being legally

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in my employ." Jose could usually convince himself of the lie—that he would turn fifteen. When he could believe it, he felt fine, liberated even. But

tonight he fidgeted with a sense of urgency.

October 25th, the beginning of the late harvest. It would be just another autumn day, were it not for a conversation his parents had had over the summer. This time, it would be his sixteenth birthday, and his parents

would withdraw him from school. They had talked that summer Sunday

about what to do. Jose had failed to pass the eighth grade once again. They'd

been made aware of how regularly he cut class. They had tried to convince

him that spending his afternoons reading magazines and watching Jacques Cousteau videos in the library wouldn't get him very far. Ultimately, his

parents decided that a day longer in school would mean nothing, while a day of minimum wage earnings in the valley would at least be something.

"You're honest," his mother had told him. "And you've got a good heart.

But you just weren't cut out for the life of an educated man. Let's go to

church."

At 10:02, Jack and Jose packed up their things. In the parking lot, where they usually parted ways, an idea came to Jose. He stopped Jack by the

arm and said, "We should celebrate." "Celebrate what?"

'The third-week anniversary of our partnership."

"I don't know if 'partnership' is the right word for it," Jack said. "But fine. Let's get a shake."

At the malt shop, they took a booth by the front window and sat

across the narrow table from each other. They had chocolate malts with a straw and a long spoon in each mug.

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"How do you feel about what we're doing?" Jack asked. "What are we doing?" Jose said. "I'm getting something from you and you're getting something from me."

Jose's eyes searched Jack's face for more information. While Jack spoke, it seemed he was talking to the plastic table cloth. He set his eyes in a down-turned stare, in a self-absorption that Jose hadn't seen there before.

Jack talked on. He asked questions, answering them himself.

What do people do when they think they know themselves but find out

they've been off target? They look at others. They ask their friends, their

coworkers, their family, their heroes, Do I look good to you? Haven't I been doing this right? Jack said that a jazz musician who performs his favorite melody will have heard other people play it in ways that they know they've

reached their audience. The musician tonight wants to experience that. He

may be in an unfamiliar room, one in which the air-conditioning has blown too hard and for too long in anticipation of a larger crowd than what has

turned up. He may wish he had worn a different colored suit. He may have second thoughts about where he's chosen to stand on the stage. But, once he sends the notes out to the several people scattered around the room, just

those few people filling the air with smoke, if the performer recognizes himself in those watching and listening, nothing comes between him and

whom he thought he was before ever picking up his instrument.

Just then, a boy outside the window pounded his fist on the glass, and both Jose and Jack leapt in their booth.

"Faggots!" the boy said. Another said, "Child molester!" The

second stood back and lit a cigarette. A third stood with his thumbs hooked

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in his pockets, leaning forward at the window as if moving forward against a wind.

Jack made the door in seemingly two steps. Jose chased after him.

The three boys backed off several steps, though they motioned toward their back pockets, as if they had something hidden there.

Jack walked on measured strides. Without warning, he lurched at the tallest of the three, but stopped short of him, as the boys retreated a safe distance. He stood over a head taller than each of them. He yelled foul things

at them, about their concert T-shirts looking stupid, about illusions of toughness.

Jose pulled Jack by the arm. "Don't," he said. 'They're just

nobodies from school." The three boys puffed smoke and screamed for several moments in Spanish. Then they were gone. Jack let himself be turned. "I know who they are, I've seen them in the hallways."

The two left without finishing their malts. Jack suggested that he walk Jose home, and Jose agreed.

He led Jack four blocks, neither of them saying a word, until Jack

picked his head up from staring at his feet. He looked around himself once. "I thought you lived across on Yuma," Jack said.

"I do," Jose said. "I thought you might want to show me your place."

"No, uh-uh. Not a good idea."

"Why not?" Jose said. "Is it messy?"

"You don't understand," Jack said. 'That could look really bad." "What? We work together. What's the problem?"

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Jack spoke of vague problems, of appearances, of neighbors. "Come on, I'll drop you off." Jose said, "I can't go home! There's something I haven't told you about home."

He had shouted. Although it was pure spontaneity, it was based on

a lie. Still, something magical happened. Jack hesitated, his brows rising and

his lips pushing together, seemingly wavering over who was really in control. Jose couldn't see exactly what it meant. But his partial understanding would be enough: the move belonged to Jose.

Jose now spoke slowly. "I'll tell you why when we get to your place."

When Jack opened the door, Jose ran past, under his arm. "Wow," he said, trying to hide his disappointment. He'd been expecting more

fumiture-a big desk, a dining room set, fish tanks.

"Why don't we get down to business," Jose said.

Jack suddenly looked frightened. He stood holding the knob on the

door, as if ready to let in someone who would help. Or let someone out.

Jose led him by the hand to the sofa. "I'm going to tell you why I can't go home, remember?"

Jack sat, as stiff as a corpse that had been propped up on the edge of

the sofa, its arms on its knees when rigor mortis set in. And on this sofa, it

seemed the dead spoke with the fear of not making it to heaven. With a

quiver in his voice, Jack asked, "Is it because you don't have a home?"

"Oh, I've got a home, all right. If you can call it that." Jose

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motioned to a narrow door. "Is that where you keep the extra beddings?"

Without any sign that he'd heard the question, Jack told Jose to open the closet door. Jose found sheets and pillow cases, while he continued explaining. Nearly none of what he told Jack was true. He took out two sheets and said that he had refused to bring home a report card last week. It had a "B" on it,

he said. "Last time he saw a 'B/ my father slapped me until I'd convinced

him that I would fix it." He put a pillow into a blue case that had lain folded

on the bottom shelf, and he said that the school had mailed a copy home that likely arrived there that afternoon. His parents had picked fruit and

vegetables in the valley for over fifteen years (that much was true), and they weren't going to let any son of theirs ruin the future with mediocre grades.

Jose arranged the sheets on the sofa. He asked Jack to stand so he could finish

the job. For the finishing touch, Jose said that his birthday next month would

probably go uncelebrated because of all the trouble, and that really upset him. The doorbell rang.

Jack leapt to his feet, as if to run from the room. Jose stood with a pillow in his hands and watched. Jack turned this way, then that. Finally, he

wrung his hands together, pursed his lips, and opened the door.

Gary walked right in. He said, "The operator told me there was trouble with your line, so I—" Seeing Jose, Gary nearly dropped the grocery sack in his arms. "So I thought I'd better come see if you were OK. I thought

you'd kicked over the phone as you stepped off the chair with a rope around your neck."

Jose looked from one man to the other. He hated for adults to talk

over his head.

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"He means," Jack said, "that I must be suicidally miserable after kicking him out of my apartment yesterday."

"Well, aren't you?" Gary said.

Jose could take no more of it. He held his hand out to the heavy waisted Texan and spoke up. "I'm Jack's new partner," he said.

Gary leaned down toward him, their noses all but touching. "Is that what you are?" he said, his voice a snarl, and his eyes visibly vibrating in their sockets.

"Gary, this is Jose," Jack said. "Jose, Gary. And as you can see, we were just about to turn in for the night." Jose sensed Jack's relief that they had set the couch with sheets. "Jack and I are accountants," Jose said. "I just started, almost a month ago, but—"

Gary interrupted, turning to Jack. He apologized for stopping by at

their bed time. He would go away, he said, but he had left his ring in the

bedroom, not yesterday, but some time before. Jose watched as Gary walked into the bedroom and stooped to pick up a ring off of the nightstand there.

And, out of Jack's field of vision, Gary casually turned the lock on one of the bedroom windows.

On his way out the front door, Gary wished Jose pleasant dreams.

The door closed behind Gary. The two looked at each other, and, just as quickly, they looked away.

Not much was said, other than goodnight. Jose felt he deserved an explanation, but he also felt he shouldn't push his luck.

He watched Jack retreat to his bedroom. He heard the lock twist and click. "What did I do wrong?" he thought. And instantly he began

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thinking of his birthday. He imagined himself in denim and heavy gardening gloves. He hated cowboy hats, but put one on his imagined head.

He grabbed his father's outstretched hand and let himself be pulled onto the

flatbed truck to join a dozen other Chicano men.

The following morning at home, the memory of Gary at Jack's window dominated his thoughts. Jose imagined himself crawling through that window and moving in. He imagined what it would be to like to live

there. Inside, he would act out the life of a successful bachelor, a life like

those of the men in Hitchcock films at the library. In his apartment, Jose would smoke cigarettes. He would type letters to friends overseas. He would

cook, or better yet, have his blonde girl friend order out and bring him

gourmet dishes. He might even kill someone, just to see if he could get away with it.

He had skipped breakfast and parked himself in the periodicals room at the library with a stack of fashion monthlies on his lap. He read a cover story: 'TEN WAYS TO GET YOURMAN... AND KEEP HIM." Later

he watched a video, a "shark-u-mentary" he had scene twice before. Its

highlight: a diver being shocked into unconsciousness by an electric eel.

Early in the afternoon, Jose decided he would sneak into Jack's

apartment. He didn't see a single person on his walk over. Not having eaten all day, he felt woozy, and that didn't help the nausea that was more primarily the result of nerves. What if Jack were to catch him?

The clay pot lay tumbled on its side. The sight of it gave Jose a start.

He hadn't remembered being careless with it. Tipping it upside down, he

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realized that, if here wasn't able to even see in before, then how would he be

able to hoist his entire body up over the ledge? He would have to find something taller than the clay pot. He

looked around him. He looked across the yard. He stepped down off of the

clay pot and walked around the corner. There he bumped into Gary who was pressing his body against the brick in a crouch.

Jose tried to run. He seemed to be getting away, running for two,

three, four streets without hearing anyone behind him. Gary showed up in front of him, having circled around the block.

With just a few strides, he caught Jose around the waist and carried him to a

blue four-by-four parked just across the street. Gary opened the door and threw Jose inside. "Shut up, shut up, you little bitch. I don't know what you're trying to pull here-"

"Nothing-nothing. I just wanted a job." He lay on the seat, curling

his knees onto himself, as if trying to hide in his shirt which had ridden up to his chest.

"Shut up! I knew you were watching me in Jack's bedroom. That's

why I unlocked the window." Gary went on. What Jose had remembered as

a Texas drawl in his voice was now sharpened to a point. First he asked Jose how old he was. When Jose tried to answer, Gary told him to be quiet. He

told Jose that today wasn't the first time he'd seen him sneaking around by

Jack's windows. That's right, he said. He'd seen him before. Jack had as well. They'd both seen the top of Jose's head poking up just visible at the base of the different windows. The two men hadn't known what to think. But when

they'd caught on to the little head outside the windows, they did some

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sneaking of their own, and Jack had recognized Jose as a little bookworm from the library. They were able, at least, to dismiss the notion of danger, since they assumed Jose couldn't be older than nine years old.

They sat in Gary's truck, this large man's hand holding him completely still by squeezing Jose's wrist whenever he tried to move. Jose's

face became beaded with sweat. He listened, as Gary talked on.

"I don't know exactly what you've got in mind for my friend Jack," he said. "But I know what you are. He might not be treating me very well, lately, but I'll be damned if I let some little con-artist pull one on a friend of

mine." He tightened his grip on Jose's arm, and Jose felt it would snap off and drop into the space between the seats.

"You're hurting me!"

"All right," Gary said. "But listen to me. Jack's just a boy. More than you. I think you can see that. He's also self-destructive. But what could you know," he said. He questioned whether Jose had for even a minute

wondered what a smart, good-looking workaholic like Jack would be doing in

their little town. He asked Jose why such a skillful businessman would need

a teaching job to pay his bills, when he should obviously be brokering on

Wall Street. His eyes softened as he spoke. And as he finished, his voice dropped back into the good natured sound of a concerned cowboy. He let go of Jose's arm completely. His shoulders sloped, and he began sliding

downward on his seat. But then something in his mind caught fire again. "You just lay off. Entiendes?"

Jose looked at the wrist that had been nearly crushed. He now

spoke in slow, measured words. "You speak Spanish well," he said. He straightened on the springy seat and pushed the waist of his shirt down. "Do

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you know how to say 'Fuck you'?"

Gary leaned over Jose and threw open the door. He shoved, and Jose tumbled onto the hot asphalt. He ran the four blocks straight home. After slamming the front

door, he could hear his heart beat. He ran in past photographs on the wall, images of his parents and grandparents, the six of them wearing cowboy hats

and thick, canvass gloves. He dove onto one of the two queen-sized beds in

his cramped room. He lay there, just breathing, making up for all the air he'd lost while in Gary's car. He gulped gallons of air, before he realized he'd heard something out front. From where he lay, he could see Gary's truck

lingering by the curb, and, as if the driver were satisfied with what he saw, the truck rolled leisurely away.

Two things at once occupied his head, one on top of the other. He

recalled the hand that gripped his wrist in Gary's truck. That twisting pain. It meant, You're caught. We know what you're up to, and now the game's over.

By concentrating on that shame, Jose tried to mask the other, more serious misfortune, the real one that would scorch his insides if he failed to

forget it. Gary's aggression, his fingers tightening around Jose's wrist, the fist

that thrust into his ribs-Jose endured it all for Jack.

Jose lay in bed for hours afterward, his mind a tense machine. He often slept through anxiety attacks, and this proved no exception. When his

parents returned home and called him to dinner, he dreamed of them as

talking yucca plants, their tongues green and pointed. After dark, when his

four brothers and sisters climbed into the two beds, he moved over without a

word to them. His oldest sister, a year younger than he, set the alarm clock

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and talked to the others in Spanish, and even to Jose, who answered only yes or no, in English. He thought their senseless jabber would never end.

Hearing about their day at school, Jose wasn't able to do the thinking he needed to do. "Would you all please shut up!" he said.

His two sisters mimicked him, his two brothers cursed. They went

on talking until the hands of the clock passed 10:30. When the heaviness of

breath finally blended together in a white noise that drowned out even the

ticking of the clock, Jose's thoughts drifted where he'd wanted them to go. He lay fully conscious, now. As he did every night in bed since beginning to work with Jack, Jose revised his future. Over the span of three

hours, he would recall the narratives that he'd put together in the periodicals

room while tallying receipts. Tonight he was on the beach, in between classes

at the university. Malibu. What a life. He splashed water at a girl standing in

the shallows of clear water with him. Only good things were said when she

opened her mouth. No mention of his dark skin. No thread bare clothing to be made fun of. No church, no fruit pickers, no pill-popping bullies. The

streets beyond the sand were paved in white cement. Not a single lot stood

empty around the two-room apartment where they shook the sand from

their towels. Jack opened a bottle of wine for the three of them to share in the

breeze on their porch. And when they began feeling a tipsy, they laughed about Gary languishing in the heat of the Texas Valley.

And during these three hours in bed, Jose's hands found his every

pubic hair. He pulled each one out, until nothing remained but smooth, uncomplicated boyhood.

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The following evening, Jose went to meet Jack at the library. On

his way there, he planned to tell Jack that he'd seen Gary unlock a window and that he went to Jack's apartment the following afternoon to keep an eye on it.

But at 6:45, waiting outside the library's front doors, Jose saw a man

creeping onto the parking lot at its fenced edge. In the slanted light, Jose recognized Jack. He was limping and holding an arm bent across his middle.

At first, Jose couldn't tell whether Jack stooped forward out of pain or in a clumsy act of stealth. He ran to him and found both to be the case. Jack's mouth hung open, as if he couldn't place Jose's face. Jose saw blood dried at the corner of Jack's mouth, like a rusty hinge.

"Let's go to my place," Jack said. "I've got something to tell you." Inside the apartment, Jose soaked a dishrag under the kitchen

faucet. He pressed it on the several open scratches he found, one on Jack's neck, several on his wrist and on his shoulder where his shirt was torn. Sitting on the edge of the sofa, Jack stiffened, and once again spoke with the voice of the dead.

"I think I may have killed him. I at least left him not talking any

more. He's lying in the bed of his truck, in the school parking lot. 'Hey,

how's it going' he asked me, as I came out of my office at school. The halls were empty. It was 5:30, and everyone had gone home. He said he thinks I'm

out of control. Those were his words. I think he just wants me back in his

bed, is what I think. What do you think?" He didn't turn to see Jose's response.

"What do you mean, 'Back in his bed?"' Jose asked.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Now, Jack faced him. "You really don't know, do you?" he said. "I really don't," Jose said.

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