Cornered (19 page)

As they neared the elementary school, Jean-Carlos heard laughter from a different realm rising up around him. Children's voices that triggered a maddening memory, that released a violent urge. So as Norman walked the little shrub-lined path leading to the school, Jean-Carlos came at him from behind and tackled him—just out of sight from the teachers and crossing guards—pushing him onto his back into the snow.

And as he did, Jean-Carlos felt his now-slender body grow thick again, his belly blossoming as it had as a child when he devoured crinkly bags of oily pork rinds and half-stale blocks of fudge.

But he is better than that now. He can pick locks and throw bricks through cars windows. At thirteen, Jean-Carlos already has a mustache so thick and lustrous a junior with giant gazungas named Lisa-Mo Leesa once told him she thought he was
sixteen—while baby-fat, one-eyed Norman has no mustache at all. It doesn't matter that Norman's mom scrawls him notes every single morning that say the same thing, over and over again, because now his face is half-broken, his glass eye stuck into a raw socket of his skull.

So.
Kick.
Smart.
Kick.
So.
Kick.
Good.
Kick.
So good, Norman.
Kick.
So smart.
Kick.

“No,” Norman gurgles. “Jean-Carlos, please. W-why? Stop . . . why are you—” His mouth is slung open. He cannot form words that sound like words.

How can Jean-Carlos explain as he kicks Norman's face in that you do things because you can?
Because once, I couldn't. Because, once, these things were done to me.
But Jean-Carlos does not tell him; instead he says everything with the frozen tip of his tennis shoe. Kick, kick, kick. He tries not to return to that memory—tries to kick his way out of it, but it finds him anyway—that day in the third grade at the Claude E. Williams School for the Potentially Future Gifted. It was the single day everything he used to be was burned out of him, and he got to choose what kind of boy he would become when he emerged from the ash, rebuilt.

• • •

That morning he woke from a dream which felt very, very long. An underwater dream that sometimes repeated itself and which he enjoyed because, otherwise, he had no opportunities to swim or speak with sharks. He remembers creeping into the
cold bathroom, brushing his teeth and dressing, kissing his mother lightly on each of her cheeks before walking to school.

Classes at the C. E. Williams School for the P.F.G. crept gently on.

The art project that day involved silhouettes of clown-jesters. Construction paper and glue. Jean-Carlos's more closely resembled a bug-eyed monster with one large, front tooth. His teacher declared it abstract and hung it proudly on the blackboard. It started out a good day. He was praised, patted on the head like a puppy dog, and he liked the way that felt.

He was eight years old and chubby. He wore high-waisted jeans his mother dug out of the one-dollar bin at the Salvation Army. When class time transitioned into recess, he could not be concerned about the kickball game going on without him, though he would not have been invited to participate even if he were.

It always went the same way: him standing, kicking up gravel on the side of the wide field, waiting to be picked and not being picked. He'd be the only one left—walking backward, away, into the corner of the playground where he could return to his book and read in the heavy shadows of tall, lurking trees. There was a group of boys who would jeer as he retreated, who'd puff out their cheeks and wobble side-to-side like fat little penguin-boys, because this is what Jean-Carlos was to them. A fat little penguin-boy. They wanted to be sure he knew he was another species, a less-than-human one. And so he would sit there, alone in the grass, badly wishing that
the words inside of his book might grow huge and swallow him up.

She worried in private, his mother. She worried about the seeds of anger that root when children are young, before they understand what is growing up inside of them, filling the open space of their bodies like weeds. Thick and impossible to cut down. It'd happened to Jean-Carlos's father when he was young—the short dark man who'd pushed himself inside of her in an alley outside of Mexico City, who'd dutifully married her two months later. He always came home late, sweaty and slurring, and died, selfishly, when Jean-Carlos was three-and-a-half. His mother had part-time work at a grocery store but nothing more.

But the young Jean-Carlos was not angry yet. He barely remembered the man, even if he looked like him, even if he'd inherited his softness around the middle and his long, feminine eyelashes. He loved his mother. He loved gummy candy. He loved episodes of
Jeopardy!
He loved doing next week's math homework as he licked candy-sugar from his stubby fingers.

• • •

Jean-Carlos's white shoes turn from red to brown as the blood starts to dry, caking up in the little air holes of his sneakers. Norman's good eye is shut, and his glass eye stares blankly up, like a paperweight stuffed into his face.

“Faggot,” Jean-Carlos spits, “faggot-faggot-faggot.” He says this without knowing if chubby, one-eyed Norman has actual
sexual inclinations toward other boys, but it doesn't matter because either way he's a capital-F
Faggot
. And so he keeps saying it as he kicks, and Norman thrashes, slurring and bleeding.

Norman's fingers dig into the dirt beside him. His face does not look like a face.

Jean-Carlos bends down over him and digs change out of the pockets of his Faggot coat. Three quarters, one dime, one crusty nickel. Not even enough for a pack of gummy worms.

• • •

After recess, after kickball, after bathroom-stall-skulking, there'd been a math quiz. While his classmates grumbled and sweated, the young Jean-Carlos finished early. He sat fingering the holes near the hem of his favorite ill-fitting turtleneck, remembering the bag of gummy candy he had secreted away in the back of the pantry.

He ate tons of the shit. Hoovered it down his throat. He would run to it when the final bell rang, belly jiggling, heart thump-thumping, saliva gathering in a thick pool beneath his tongue. His mother would not be home from work for two hours, and he would gorge himself, smacking his lips and licking each finger, alone. Alone. Alone.

He had liberated his fingers from the holes of his turtleneck, thinking of how it might be to dip gummy candy in a cold glass of Cola. Would the sugar soften and fall to the bottom of the glass, or would it simply absorb the additional sweetness of the Cola, making the gummy candy even more
appealing? Then:
the Thing
escaped him, out of his ass and into the world.

It began as something like a raucous howl and ended like the high-pitched scream of a small child. The fart had been surprising—a startling, bewildering thing, ripping through the near-silence of the classroom. Before that there had only been the calm of pencils scratching paper, the occasional shuffle, sniffle, sigh.

Had he been paying attention to the state of his stomach that afternoon, he may have noticed a low bubbling curving its way around his intestines, preparing to tear through the cool sweetness of classroom air and destroy it. But he had not.

And when It untrapped itself into the classroom air, the fallout was a silence so icy and still it could only be qualified as utter, dumbfounded horror. He was already the chubby outcast of his third-grade class, and they required no further reason to torment him. But this, this would go beyond torment.

The other children sat frozen for several moments in the aftermath until the lot of them became like a single cell, suddenly spliced, bumping like mad against the walls of the classroom.

• • •

Norman stops squirming, his flap-lips like two lazy donkey tongues, melded to the cold ground. Jean-Carlos is bored and leaves as the school bell rings; children pour out across the grounds. Norman's little sister sits waiting on the steps for a
very long time, head rested against her prayer-folded palms. As Jean-Carlos walks back up the path he looks away when he sees her hug her princess book bag tight into her chest, her mouth starting to wobble.

• • •

Miguel, Jean-Carlos's father, is watching his son from high-up and far-away. From the Realm of the Dead. Miguel is not some heavenly creature in white; he does not know what he is, but he watches. He watched as his son's hands dug in the pockets of the boy with the bloody face, and he watches now as Jean-Carlos walks away, the boyish parts of his son's face changing to something blank of humanity.

And through the mess of blood and faces he remembers Juan, his Juan, and how they'd been together in a mucky pit behind Juan's father's farm so many years ago. The heat rushed up around their muddy clumsiness and burst through his fingers and toes as they kissed. Pigs gathered nearby, snorting their disapproval, but he could not stop. Miguel remembers this as the single best thing that ever happened to him, because in these moments he did not ever have to question that this was true. It just was.

He remembers his anticipation the next morning as he walked the rocky path to the classroom, wondering if they would eat lunch together, somewhere apart from the other boys. Miguel pictured Juan's fingers moving slowly to the dirt just beside his knee—so close he could feel the vibration of
Juan's skin beside his own—drumming the pulse of the secret they shared. But when he arrived that morning, Juan refused to look at him.

And when it was time for lunch, they did not go somewhere private.

No. Juan chased him—with every other dirty-kneed, adrenaline-wasted boy in their classroom—across the dusty field glutted with scrap metal and other discarded things. Chased him straight into the outhouse on the other end of that field where in the dark, rank box, Juan dunked Miguel's whole face into the steaming reek of other people's bowels. “You come back here, you die,
Cabroncito
,” he warned him.

He never returned to school or ever saw Juan again. Instead he kissed women and did not feel the burst of heat-light through every inch of his skin, the wildness through his chest as he touched them. Felt nothing except a slow closing up of his insides, a spreading deafness, contaminating every other sense.

Miguel watches as Jean-Carlos retreats. A little fountain of blood erupts from between the boy's lips that his son has left lying on the ground, but Jean-Carlos is too far away to notice it now.

• • •

That day, that horrible day, Jean-Carlos remained glued to his too-small plastic chair. His belly was pressed hard up against the edge of the attached desk. He had been too terrified to
move and the teacher did nothing to stop the children as they crumpled up their tests and slung them (with an accompanying symphony of mouth and armpit fart-noises) at Jean-Carlos—who shielded his face with his hands. His math test was still intact, and he stared at it with a devoted intensity as though it was a solar eclipse—the last very bright, perfect, dangerous thing he would ever see again before his corneas burned away to nothing.

• • •

In the griddle-heat of his memories, Jean-Carlos's father is transported. No longer a long-dead man but a boy, plugged firmly into Mexican earth and mud and other people's shit. He remembers his childhood dog—
Cabroncito
—a white and brown mutt with long, furry ears. The dog his own father had dragged from an alleyway one rainy Easter, brought home, and let him name. Miguel chose
Cabroncito
because it was the last word Juan had ever spoken to him.
Cabroncito.
That one stupid word and how it stuck to him. How one word can superglue itself to your skull and not even the strongest, ungodliest hands can rip it from the Velcro of your brain—
Cabroncito
—

• • •

The teacher must have noticed, but barely tried to intervene when the classroom devolved into a simian landscape of howling and mimed fecal-flinging. Their cruel taunts directed at the stoic but crumbling figure of chubby Jean-Carlos—slow-limbed,
farty creature—still seated, head-bowed, shielding his eyes to prevent the other children from seeing tears begin to mow their hot way down his face. She rapped at the blackboard several times with the sturdy silver ring on her pointer finger and cleared her throat twice before she yelled, “Children! Calm DOWN!” Miss was distressed, always distressed. She looked down and rubbed the drippy folds of her face with both hands and sighed heavily.

Jean-Carlos retreated back into the isolation of his own skull and listed the things he loved. As long as he repeated this list he did not have time to worry about the relentless surge of crumpled-up paper. He moved his hands to cup his ears and let the paper continue to ping his skull.
Ping ping ping ping.

He loved his mother. He loved gummy candy. He loved licking sugar from his fingers, watching
Jeopardy!
, and wearing soft turtlenecks with holes in the hem. He loved. He loved.

He stared at his math test until the blackness of numbers became like ants, until the whiteness seemed to besiege the little insects and they simply marched off the page. Some flew, without wings, rising into space because they willed it so. And when they had all ascended or crept or spiraled from the page, he had been left with a terrible whiteness that made his eyes feel marble-hard. His brain forgot, just plain forgot, to see anything at all. Likewise, his ears had shut off, and his body sort of flattened into itself, like how tap water must feel when introduced to the ocean, swallowed into something that is itself and is not.