Bang Page 2

At this, Araceli imagines the near future: ripped blankets, chewed up wiring, frayed wooden table legs, shredded shoes.

  “If she doesn’t have a name, she’s not ours yet,” says Araceli as if to settle the matter.

  The dog squirms in her arms. She jumps up and licks Araceli across the lips. Araceli arches her head back, disgusted, before spitting into the grove dirt.

  “Dog’s mouth is cleaner than your mouth,” says Cuauhtémoc laughing. “It’s science.”

  “I don’t eat my own shit,” says Araceli, feeling the dog’s saliva drying tight over her skin.

  She looks the puppy in the eyes. No denying, now, how cute it is. Even Araceli can admit this. The puppy yawns and then digs her nose into the space between Araceli’s arm and her ribs.

  “Let’s go inside,” she says, turning toward the cabin with Roo in her arms.

  She waits for Cuauhtémoc to follow, but he stays where he is, spraying down the engine block.

  Araceli sets Roo down just inside the threshold of the door. The puppy sniffs around where she’s been placed. Roo does a circle and lays on her paws. Araceli looks into her sad, sleepy eyes as she hobbles toward the stove. “Roo,” she says to her. The dog doesn’t respond.

  In the kitchen, Araceli fills a pot with hot water. Above the sink, she looks out the window at Cuauhtémoc trying to cool the pickup. She wishes he’d come inside but she knows he needs to be alone sometimes, just in the way her husband needed to be alone. She wonders, occasionally, if her husband planned to get deported on purpose. But she always shuts those thoughts away almost as soon as they come.

  She puts the pot of water to boil and opens the window to listen to the dark summer of Harlingen, Texas. The sound of cicadas.

  In the air there’s the smell of nosebleeds, which is to say the smell of fertilizer and pesticides. It all mingles with the burnt fetor that comes from the glowing coil stovetop, the crusting remnants of Araceli’s past dishes pouring in spicy, humid waves from the screened windows of her trailer home parked in the creeping, darkness of the groves, the pesticide pouring into her home.

  From just behind the window, she keeps an eye out for her husband in the twilight, in the distance, as if he might sprout up from that place the sun is going toward.

  She looks again in that space on the horizon where the dirt is dry-clapped by the wind into the culvert off the highway before ricocheting up into the sky, setting the blackened night ablaze with neon, the dirty air holding the last striations of light long after the sun is gone. To Araceli, it’s as if the earth is conspiring with her. The sky holding light like ransom before the dark completely snuffs it out. It’s only then—when the sky goes completely black—that she stops waiting.

  When the sun is gone, the wind shifts directions and curls in toward the house. There’s a brief moment when the air goes static as if time has stopped for Araceli. Just the smell of the dusty sky and the smell, too, of the kitchen air pulled from the screened window by the negative pressure of the changing breeze. The smell of the hot coils, again, but also the smell of cake and melted ice cream. The smell of Uli’s birthday, which she’s trying so desperately to put together.

  Uli is sixteen today, which more or less makes him a man in America, though there are no rites of passage for young brown men in this country. None that Araceli knows of anyway. None like the kind you read about in old books or like the kind Uli’s friend, Craig, went through that made him a man at thirteen. She thinks I could teach him to drive. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d taught her boys things she had to learn all by herself. But Araceli hasn’t driven in years. She’s not sure she could teach him the legal way, teach him the rules of the road in this country, though she knows the complexities of the gear boxes, fuse boxes, wiring and crankshaft. She knows how to keep the truck going.

  Uli’s father was supposed to teach him to drive before he was deported. She’d let Cuauhtémoc do it but she doesn’t trust him—not the both of them together anyway.

  She hopes Cuauhtémoc can get the truck running again. She decides that if he can’t, then she will. The truck only appears to be overheated, but Araceli knows that you can never really tell with American vehicles. One visible problem might be the symptom of three other invisible ones.

  All of a sudden, there’s the tang of blood in her nose. She shuts the window to keep out the pesticides. She puts a dishrag to her face. A steady flow of bright red beading down from her sinuses.

  As Araceli puts pressure to her nose, she feels sweat breaking from her pores, a rush of hot blood to the head. She knows what’s coming next. She’s become all too familiar with the spins the pesticides bring on. She holds onto the kitchen sink. She stares up at the ceiling to slow the blood.

  In the center of the ceiling, the incandescent bulb paints everything in lacquered shades of gold. Everything pulses as the pressure builds up behind her eyes. She tries, so hard, to stare at a fixed point to keep her world from spinning. There are good objects and bad objects. Good objects stay still. Bad objects make you vomit.

  Araceli’s eyes shift toward the door. In the yellow light, the outline of boots stepping across the threshold. That’s the last thing she sees right before her legs give out from under her, blood pouring steady from her head.

  Araceli wakes to the rip of duct tape as Cuauhtémoc pulls long strips from the roll. He seals off the space between the bedroom door and the ground first and then the space between the door and the upper threshold before sealing the sides of the door.

  From the corner of her eye she sees Uli throwing a stack of bloody towels into a steaming PVC bucket of water. He’s still in his track clothes. It’s only June—track season hasn’t even begun—but he’s looking leaner already, the way Araceli remembers boys in the mountains of Guerrero used to look in the rainy season when the crickets multiplied by the thousands. Crickets were all any of those boys ate: dipped in chocolate, fried over a comal, eaten with a pinch of salt and lime and a swig of beer. All protein and brine. The smell of her own blood brings those memories back. The sight of her son too: sinewy muscles in his arms and legs, that close-cropped head of hair, that slightness of his frame as if a strong breeze could carry him away.

  Uli flips on the window unit to suck out the rotten air from the room and filter in fresh air. In Uli, Araceli sees her own eyes looking back at her. Her husband’s flat head. Her sister’s wide mouth. She looks down at the puppy curled up at the foot of the bed, his mouth stained pink from lapping up Araceli’s blood.

  “She’s awake,” Uli says to Cuauhtémoc.

  Araceli tilts her head back. She knows the drill.

  “Did you turn off the stove?” she asks Uli.

  “It’s off. Everything’s fine.”

  “How long was I out?” she asks.

  “Just a little bit,” says Uli.

  A lie. She knows by the warmth of the sheets against her body. She hates her body for being weak, for breaking down, for ruining her son’s birthday. She knows the groves did this to her. She dreams of the day she can finally leave.

  “Crazy wind came in from the north. Shook all the pesticides from the trees,” says Uli.

  “Just washed that damn truck too,” says Cuauhtémoc, looking out the window. “About an eighth-inch coat of dust on it now. I thought northern winds only came in the winter.”

  “There’s a hurricane in the Gulf,” says Uli.

  “Probably some low pressure stuff,” says Cuauhtémoc. “I wouldn’t know nothing about that, ’cause I never graduated high school.”

  Uli ignores the comment. He puts his hands out in front of the window unit to make sure it’s blowing in cool air. “Maybe some tape on the edges of the window,” he says.

  “No. The window is fine,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “Just humor me,” says Uli, wiping away the whitish buildup of pesticide along the accordion flap that seals the window unit against the pane.

  “You act like it’s your birthday or something,” says Cuauhtémoc with a sm
ile.

  He rips a segment of tape with his teeth and lays it shoddily over the accordion flap.

  The nausea hits Araceli again. See-saw, see-saw goes everything in the world. Araceli closes her eyes. The taste of cool water at her lips. In her right hand, she can feel Uli pushing a cigarette between her slender fingers. Nicotine to open up the capillaries.

  Her blood runs cold in her veins. An explosion of geometrical shapes behind her eyelids—a migraine building, bright pain.

  “Easy,” goes Uli.

  Araceli hears him take the cigarette from between her fingers and stick it in his mouth. He lights it to get it going before pushing the wet filter between Araceli’s fingers again.

  “Get the lights,” she hears him say to Cuauhtémoc.

  The bedroom lights go out. Just a single incandescent bulb shining from under the lampshade on her nightstand.

  “Is he back?” says Araceli.

  A pregnant silence. The air cooling between her sons and herself. Everyone pretends the question was never asked.

  The wave of nausea passes. Araceli keeps her eyes closed for fear of crying. She wills herself not to do it.

  Araceli alternates between taking sips of water and smoke. The taste of ash on her tongue. The smell of it in her hair too.

  She looks out of the small sliver of glass above the window unit, her gaze fixed on the road outside. Nothing. I’ll find him, she thinks. In her mind she goes over the cities she’d pass along the way. Harlingen-Matamoros-Reynosa-Monterrey-Torreón-Delicias-San Miguel. She can feel, in her muscles, the memory of how to drive. She closes her eyes. The darkness swirls like velvet.

  Uli puts a damp, warm towel over Araceli’s eyes to keep them from swelling. He waits until she’s asleep, holding his new puppy with its mouth stained with his mother’s blood. He sits at the foot of the bed and wipes the dog’s mouth clean. He looks out the window. Cuauhtémoc taking a push broom to his father’s old pickup, trying to wipe the pesticide dust away.

  His mother snores. The puppy too. Uli leaves the puppy at the foot of the bed and eases out of the room, pulling the door tight to reseal the duct tape against the frame of the door, not that it’s needed anymore. The pesticide winds have come and gone. There’s a stillness in the air as Uli steps out onto the porch. It’s still warm but the sweat in his Lycra tracksuit cools his skin so that he’s shivering. He slips off his track shoes and feels his bare feet against the dry grass. Dark summer in Harlingen. The orange groves are abuzz with cicadas scarring the trees, their collective hum sharp in the night air like the razor edge of his mother’s scissors. That Spanish steel she slick-slacks every now and then over a whetstone just to hear it, just to drown out the sounds of the groves at night.

  Between his toes, Uli feels the heat gushing up from the earth. He hears all those insects going angry.

  From the pocket of his tracksuit, the one his mother had sown in to carry a little square of satin for good luck, Uli pulls out one of his mother’s cornhusk cigarettes—the kind she rolls herself with molasses soaked-tobacco that burns hot and spicy on the tongue. From the same pocket he produces the lighter his mother bought him last year from the Texaco. It says CUNT PUNISHER on it in neon pink letters. Last year, his mother asked for something masculine, so the cashier sold her this. A cruel joke. Neither son had the heart to tell her what it meant. Araceli can understand English, but she has trouble reading it.

  Uli lights the cigarette with his cunt punisher Zippo and takes a deep drag, easing himself onto the porch steps. He keeps the Zippo lit and stares into the flame for a while before blowing it out. He makes a wish. Sixteen, he thinks. He takes the Valley Morning Star newspaper from the place on the step where his mother left it all marked up. Subjects circled in blue, predicates underlined in green.

  Cuauhtémoc rounds the corner of the house with the push broom in his hand. He sees Uli with the newspaper and gets this grin across his face.

  “Me first,” he says, snatching the newspaper from Uli’s grip. “Don’t stand a goddamned chance.”

  “You’re outclassed,” says Uli to his older brother, laughing while trying to keep his voice down. He adjusts the Lycra strap over his shoulder.

  “I’ve got a better brain than you. I’ve got a better ear too.” Since Uli can remember, they’d always done impressions of white people. They’d pick a headline from the newspaper— something about subprime mortgages, crop yields, Texas Long-horns football—and they’d riff from there. Their father would always be the judge whenever he was around. The winner got a can of beer.

  “We playing for booze?” asks Uli, eager to be like his brother if only in small ways. His brother would bet on booze.

  Cuauhtémoc cuts a smile before bending at the knee to reach his long arm between the porch steps. He pulls out an unopened bottle of Willet bourbon. The skinny neck of the bottle glows dark amber in the moonlight. Cuauhtémoc holds the bottle by the neck like he’s holding a hammer. Uli’s reminded, just then, that Cuauhtémoc has two sides to him. There’s the Cuauhtémoc that he knows and then the other one rattling away inside those eyes when he’s about to drink. That Cuauhtémoc scares Uli, if only by knowing that the same man inside Cuauhtémoc is inside Uli too—in his genes, anyway. All of them are cursed to be the same man.

  Just then, overhead, a small plane banks hard over the groves. Both brothers look up into the sky. A Cessna 152, by the looks of it, but they can’t be sure. It’s dark and the plane’s strobe lights are out.

  The flaps are lowered. The plane creeps by in slow flight. From the pilot’s window, a large gunnysack-like package drops. It lands with a thud somewhere in the groves. Almost as fast as it comes, it’s gone again. Flaps up, engine at full throttle. The engine drones on until it’s replaced by the angry noise of the cicadas.

  “The fuck was that?” asks Uli.

  “One of Ronnie’s packages, I guess,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “We should get it,” says Uli.

  “We should leave it. You don’t want any part of that.”

  “What do you think’s in it?”

  “I know what’s in it,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “How would you know that?” asks Uli.

  “Somebody has to translate for Ronnie.”

  “You’re lying,” says Uli.

  “So, I’m lying. Give me a cigarette.”

  Uli reaches into his little Lycra pocket and hands one over. He puts the cigarette between his lips. Shoots Uli a look like how-fucking-pathetic.

  “What’s in it then?”

  “Grass,” says Cuauhtémoc, cutting the seal from the neck of the bottle of bourbon. He spits out some loose tobacco before popping the cap to the Willet. The sweet smell of whiskey in the air. Cinnamon and charcoal and molasses.

  “You ever tried it?” asks Uli.

  “The Willet?” says Cuauhtémoc. “Of course. I bought it for you.”

  Uli takes the bottle into his hands. He smells the mouth. The smell of their father’s breath. It brings from the back of the mind other smells too. The briny, vinegary smell of his sweat. The smell of Chlorpyrifos pesticide in his hair. The smell of hot blood that would pour from his nose in thick, dark streams that covered his moustache and turned him green, that same shade they’d all turn in winter when the sun was weak and their blood was too. Cuauhtémoc remembers when his father used to get the spins. His face would bloat, his eyes would sink into his head. Every week he got the spins and every week there was a washcloth black and heavy with blood between his fingers. When Cuauhtémoc was little, it was his job to set the washcloth out on the porch until it turned brown under the white sun. Araceli hated this. The flies would come for the blood. She would set out jars of sugar-water with borax to kill the flies, and stray dogs would always lap it up in the heat. The dogs would shit for weeks, and then the flies would come for the shit. Flies find death like bees find honey.

  The brothers each take a swig. Then a second. Then a third. Cuauhtémoc drops his cigarette and searches for it in
a soggy patch of earth. When he finds it, it’s damper on one side than the other. He puts it to his lips again and lights it. He’s slow and deliberate with each movement, the way some drunks are.

  He says to Uli, through squinted eyes, “Can’t believe that fucker was dumb enough to fly at night. You never fly at night if you can help it—not by the Gulf. You ever flown a plane at night before?”

  “You know the answer to that,” says Uli, putting his lips to the bottle.

  “I did one time. Over water when I was training.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Scary,” says Cuauhtémoc. “Can’t tell what’s a boat and what’s a star. All the boats have lights, and the ocean, the Gulf, is pitch-black. I mean black-black. And when there isn’t a cloud in the sky, who’s to say the water isn’t the sky? Ever heard of JFK Jr.?”

  “No,” says Uli

  “Look him up,” he says, sipping smoke from his cigarette.

  Cuauhtémoc can feel his brother’s jealousy growing brighter. He stokes it, goading him for no other reason than to goad him, though each word is laced with love and jest. Cuauhtémoc hurts his little brother in small ways. I am the older and you are the younger. He never lets Uli forget it. As long as Uli exists, Cuauhtémoc will always be the older brother and Uli will be the younger. Their mutual existence is what keeps them brothers. And that natural order too.

  “So, how do you not crash in the ocean?” asks Uli, breaking the long silence.

  “You pitch down,” he says, “and check the altimeter first. Then the artificial horizon. Then the climbing speed. That’s how you don’t crash. But flying over land is worse. Radio towers, birds, telephone poles. Did you know birds fly at night?”

  “No way,” says Uli.

  “Sí, güey. They fly way up there. Ride the thermals in circles like buzzards, you know?”

  “I’d kill to see that,” says Uli.

  At this, Cuauhtémoc looks out at the darkness of the groves. “You want to go up?” he asks Uli.

  “Right now?”

  “Tonight,” says Cuauhtémoc.