|
Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Four kids slept in that small room on mattresses, sagged and piled, a curly-cue spring tarring through the seam, a blanket scrap, a piece of old curtain for a sheet, a rolled-up pair of pants for a pillow or none at all. There were streaks of dirt on their faces. Dark grime crescents under their uncut fingernails. It was a summer night. Dry thunder, and a flash of light buried behind big cumuli moving in from the Gulf, woke the older boy. He stepped over his brother and looked out the window, arms holding himself up on the wood sill. He pressed the limp strip of duct-tape over a screen hole. The bamboos grew high, past the second story where he looked. He saw a car in the drive, on the pea-rock pathway when the flashbulb of lightning went through branches, the finger-long leaves on thin stems. Another rumble and then when a strobe burst at the rolling cloud fringes he tried hard to see if it was a car he knew. Must've been there awhile; the brown rock lizards on the hood and on the windshield, darting, stopping, zig-zag lizard lines within one wink of purple light. "Chris." His brother crawled off the mattress and stood beside him, small for his age, only up to his shoulder. He leaned against him, sleep standing. "Just thunder," he whispered. "I'm thirsty, Chris." "The Plumbing’s still broke. Go back to bed." His baby sisters moved, but didn't wake. One clenched the end of the red velour drape and rolled over. "I'm thirsty." He couldn't see the car clear enough to know whose it was. He thumbed at the falling strip of tape again at the rip in the window screen. Squashed mosquitoes stuck in the adhesive. "You're gonna wake 'em. Go on back now, Jimmy. I'll get you something." He turned his brother around, steadied him, then laid him down. He waited until Jimmy closed his eyes. The door scraped open; mama didn't like them coming out once they were put off to bed. Not when she had a friend over. There were three doors on the second floor landing: the bathroom, their bedroom and across the way mama's door. It was closed with a dim band of amber light at the bottom. He held the wall at the narrow stairs, the sky flashing. He knew which step-boards creaked, and inched his way down, taking time not to sound. The tile was cool on his bare feet down on the ground floor, the stacks of old newspapers near the front door, thick as a tree stump. A brown couch, a recliner too big for the space. He squeezed between and went into the kitchen, pots high in the sink, cups, plates, empty boxes of cereal on the counter. He opened the refrigerator door, its small bulb showing a juice jug spilled on its side. There were frozen drips on the last rack and a sticky orange puddle on the bottom. He went back along the counter, careful not to knock anything over and shook the finished cans of soda to see if he could get more than a sip for Jimmy. He then pushed the slider door to the back porch. He remembered having red punch out there, mama telling them not to spill it - his little sisters making faces at the weak, watered-down taste and leaving their cups on the cable-wheel table. The thunder echoed once more, but far off, moving north. The next lot over, from the bonsai farm, he heard Mr. Miko's dog give a half-bark at it, the faint tingle of its heavy chain. There was a long field behind the house, with grass uncut, six feet high. Half way in, there were big pier pilings, collapsed tar-stained poles that used to stretch vinyl shade-cloth over seedlings when the place was a working nursery. The posts looked spooky the way they leaned and rested upon each other, the shredded screening fabric twisted around like capes. He wished mama were still friendly with the man who used to come with his tractor to cut back there. He didn't like not being able to see in. He couldn't let Jimmy or the girls go play with it so high. It was a breeding ground for rats and snakes. The screen door of the back porch, the frame kinked as it was, remained open enough for him to go out and along the house to get a better look at the car in the drive. He hoped it belonged to one of mama's friends that he knew, so he’d know what to expect in the morning. The towering bamboo had thick bases and made a wall with their bulk a few yards past the side of the house. He got down low and found the break, the cut-over to the drive, and crawled in. He was in the tunnel of stalks when he first saw the light from the shed. The well pump was out there. A light bulb in a cage, like mechanics use, hung from an inside shed beam. The door was half opened, a milk crate of tools keeping it from closing. He saw shadows, not moving too much, a hulking round shadow hunched down and a longer one, thinner, standing over it, joining, making like the letter d. Metal torqueing, a low high-pitched whistle of it tightening and then a muffled thud. "You OK?" His mama, and her shadow moving back, stepping in front of the light and then he saw her back, and the shadow of her grabbed her long brown hair, as if to ponytail it, like she did, and shifted it over her shoulder. She pushed the shed door as open as it'd go and carefully balanced her way past the crate. He saw the glitter reflection from her dangling earrings. "Think I busted my knuckles." A deep man's voice. He didn't know it. He got down lower, peered through the bamboo, digging his heels in better, steadying, not to make noise. "That had to hurt." Mama folded her arms across her chest. She wore a white T-shirt, long to the top of her thighs, no pants and flip-flops on her feet "I ought to just gut it all and change it out with PVC." "Does PVC cost more?" "Cost?" The man, still just shadowed inside the shed, got up and pushed at mama until she was standing two feet out from the milk crate, looking at the shifting pea-rock and finding a place to stand. "You're already getting it for free. How much freer can free be?" His hand reached out and took something from the tool crate. "I just hope you’re not going be too tired when I'm done." Mama tossed her hair over her shoulder and shook like she did after washing it. "You got a cigarette?" she asked him. From the bamboo he saw the man now stepping out, saw him clearly, taking a long stride over the tools, one side of his face in the light from the hanging bulb. Mama leaned against the side of the shed. He was taller than mama by about a foot. About her age, maybe younger. Tight black jeans with a frayed tear at his knee and pointed cowboy boots. He had a dark T-shirt with writing on it. He took a pack of cigarettes from the front pocket, flipped open the lid, gave one to mama and put his mouth to the box pulled one clear with his teeth. He had a thick black goatee and black hair, short, a little curly and flattened on the sides either from sweat or grease. He lit mama's cigarette. She looked up over the shed when she exhaled, the smoke spiraling and folding in the light. He lit up too and cocked his head sideways, looking mama over. "Glad you were able to come, fix this old thing. Just have to have water to clean up my kids." "They get dirty living out here, I bet." "Kids, you know, they're like that," she said. "I wouldn't know." "Hey," mama said, "You're still going out with Darlene, ain't you?" His face changed. He put his head up straight and leaned closer against the shed, bent his leg and placed the sole of one boot flat against it. He waited, took a deeper drag. "She tuned out to be a bitch." "She gave me your number." "Did she?" "She said you still worked for a plumber. She said you could fix this pump like nothing." He took another puff and then flicked the orange eye toward Mr Miko's lot. He crouched near the tool crate, picked up a red wrench. "What else she say?" Mama had long, tan pretty legs. She made them feel how smooth they were sometimes, when she was happy and playful, like she could be, like she was sometimes when the monthly check came in on time, or her hours weren't cut, or after she took a long bath and had her hair wrapped in a sweet soap smelling towel. She was like that when the migrant season was in swing and they let her do longer shifts at Red Hook. She went shopping with the check and came home with all the grocery bags and she laughed and let them eat anything. She sat with a cold beer, and had a full pack of cigarettes on the cable-wheel table on the porch, and the kids had bottled sodas and big bags of potato chips. She would sing along with a song she liked on the radio. She'd let the little girls wear her sets of silver earrings and bead bracelets. He liked when mama was like that. Her legs were, at times, very smooth, very pretty. "I don't know Darlene that good," mama said. "She works on the days I'm off. But I remember Charro talking about her going with a plumber when the sink behind the bar broke, so I called her." The cigarette filter looked like a small candle, the bright orange tip of coal close to her fingers. She took one last sip of smoke from it. "I piped both of the bathrooms over there when Charro was first opening up. Before he called it Red Hook. Used to be called Checkers. I used to drink and play pool in there when it was Checkers." "I remember," she said. "Everything black and white squares then, at the old Checkers." He was tightening a saw blade onto a large, cylinder drill, chucking it with an L-shaped key. "Charro, he changes the price when you're done. After you finish the work he don't want to hear about extras." He looked at mama, gripped the handle of the heavy drill with the short coarse blade, and hung it alongside his leg. "You going to do that? Change the arrangement?" "That's gonna make some noise and wake the kids," she said, nodding at the big Sawzall and then up at the window behind the tops of the bamboo. "The only way is to cut out the rusted pipe and start from scratch." He swung the drill up and caught it in his palm. "I guess so," she said, "but if they wake." "Hell," he said and dumped the drill, blade up in the milk crate. He picked up a wrench and a small white bottle of glue off the pea-rock and threw those in too. "I said I would." Mama grabbed his wrist when he coiled a loose part of the thick black extension cord attached to the light bulb in the wire cage. "We'll get water for sure, right?" She put the other hand over her first hand as he was just about to snake-snap the plug from the end that ran along the drive to someplace in the house. "I said I would." This time soft, almost like a whisper, but with that fooling around way he saw mama do with men. "Free, as in money free," he said, not moving, frozen there with mama's two hands around his wrist like she was holding the lever to a kill switch. He didn't turn his head, but his eyes looked down on her. Her face was turned up toward his. "We have an understanding. Cost you a hundred and fifty dollars, parts and labor, if you want to go another way." "I told you I have no extra money." She slid her clenching down off his wrist to his hand, peeled the extension cord from his fingers and let it drop to the ground. "But I’ve got something better. Sure you heard, or you wouldn't come." "Hearing’s one thing," he said. He reached out to her, not huffing
the way he did when threw the tools back into the crate, but breathing strong.
He took a handful of mama's T-shirt He knew he couldn't get back in the house without them hearing, not with how quiet they got now. Not even Mr. Miko's dog's chain tingling, no thunder rumbling far off. The lizards were night scars on the car on the drive. There were shaved mulch curls between his toes. A speck of a transparent spider crawled slowly, with long double-bent legs, up the unwavering spine of an oblong bamboo leaf. When he looked up, there at the shed, there was the milk crate, and the door ajar, and his mother in the wide rectangular path of light on her knees, the flip-flops fallen off. The man with the goatee stood with one hand at the back of her neck, her long hair puffed up in his grasp. He stood tall as a pole, his back arched and his other hand on the base of his bowed back. His eyes were closed, and his teeth grit. The cool post-storm air with its false vacuum of silence, not even wind, only dew settling. His could hear his own breath and even his own heart as he crouched there seeing the glitter twinkling of mamas earrings between the man’s fingers as he held her head. Her knees: he could hear the shifting grind of pea-rock scrunching. He backed out of the tunnel of bamboo stalks and leaned up against the house, and as if it were a repercussion, he bounced away again and turned, moving, his legs going faster than he wanted, barefoot, not looking, not feeling thistle or briar or sand spurs. He just kept going toward the narrow path, the shield, the blindfold of the path into the middle of the long field behind the house, pushing away the tall grass, uncut, six feet high. And then he stopped, chest swelling, his head hanging down, both hands on his thighs. It was crickets now, a brittle locust wing flutter, a lone cocee from a tree frog. There was a ringing in his ears, but not a true ring, more like a pulsing sound from a reed flute, like the kind Mr. Miko made for them, showing them how to press the tip of the finger lightly on the slanted hole, the lips not touching, only the breath, a good strong lungful, he had said, showing them, sitting on the board bridged on two upsided cinder blocks in front of his bonsai green house. Like this, Mr. Miko had said, and the boy could hear it now, catching his wind, heaving, quivering, his hands sweaty on his legs. He never felt as alone as this before. "More than half way back in the field," he said. To hear his own voice, to get his bearings, make sense of where he was. Which way to return to the house. He was good that way, making sense, he knew not to get too much thought behind something. He took care of Jimmy and the two little sisters when mama was busy talking, carrying the phone and flipping the trailing cord line over the couch and then around the chair; he tried to have sense of things. Or when she was in the bath, the water dripping, the candles she liked flickering, one on the sink, one on the edge of tub, wax caking on the linoleum floor, or out shopping, or sleeping, going right to bed when she came back in, not feeling good. He could make sense of it. He round them up, kept them from wandering, made up games, kept them from rousting, or wailing so that mama would get up and scream at them or just come down and sit on the sofa, her head in her hands, rubbing her temples, crying without sound, overwhelmed. He always had them around him, his brother and sisters. When they all went down the drive and out the gate - so weed tangled it didn't swing closed and along the asphalt road - he kept them close by until he herded them to Mr. Miko's gate, a working gate, and down his thick blue-stone driveway all the way back to the green house. Mr. Miko showed them all how he snips the tiny tree limbs, fluffs up the golden moss, sprays mist from a bottle. His brother and sisters with him then, each getting a freshly hollowed reed flute, Mr. Miko rocking back on his board-bench, holding his ears when everyone made odd, off, flat reed notes at the same time. The big black dog on the chain just looking. "Could go that way," he said, again his own whispering voice making him calm, thinking about cutting to the right, the narrow part of the field to the barbed wire fence separating Mr. Miko's property. But then there was the dog. It had no name, just dog. Better to not to make him friendly, to ruin him by petting. He was there to keep people from coming through the back, stealing as they did, taking bonsai trees. Better not to mess with the dog. It was a different kind of scary going out of the field than when he came in. He kept thinking about snakes, the dead ones, like shredded black and scarlet ribbons, blown tires, among the grass after the sickle blades of the tractor made its pass. Green, iridescent flies hovered on the guts. Crows came for the smaller ones and lifted them away like boot laces. Jimmy and the girls stuck sticks down the empty burrow-holes they found. He caught sight of the leaning posts where once shade cloth had hung, and took his bearing from them. The way they leaned with the twisted screening about their necks made them look about to charge up, or take three running steps and leap into the air. He was getting closer to the house, a small branch in his hand, brushing ahead, scattering, he hoped, what he couldn't see. He wouldn't turn, he promised himself, toward the pump shed, even though he saw the light still there, so very bright now, after coming from the field. He stepped through the porch screen door, with its kink keeping it open and took a plastic cup of punch left by his sisters from the cable-wheel table. The slider door to the kitchen was open and with one hand he silently rolled it closed. He opened the refrigerator door and in its light looked into the cup of red punch. With a tip of his finger he glided the few floating gnats to the side and up the rim. He brushed them away on his shorts. He went around and in between the living room furniture, past the stack of newspapers near the front door and up the stairs. He didn't mind the creaked steps, took no care to avoid them. The amber bar of light at mama's door was as he had seen it. In the kids’ room, they were all asleep still. The girls had tumbled back to back, the hands drooping off the edge of the mattress, knuckles to the floor. Jimmy sat up when he crawled over him. The pipes in the house knocked behind the lath, pulling and swelling at the joints with the passage of water. The well-water pump was fixed. "Chris?" "Here," he said. "Get a good hold of the cup." He steadied his brother's back, made sure he had a grip of the punch. Heard him sip it. "Thanks for getting it, Chris. I know mama don't like us going down." "Shh. Don't worry about that," he said. "Just don't spill it." Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Michael Largo's fiction has appeared in numerous literary and Internet magazines, including the Best of Pif Off-line. He has published three novels, Southern Comfort, Lies Within, and most recently Welcome to Miami. |
||||
