Authors: Tom Connolly
When they pass by a stand cooking churrasco, Chunk sees a large drum of kerosene off to the side of the stand. He quickly grabs the dog by the scruff of his neck, lifts him up and dunks him just short of his mouth in the drum. The dog howls, a screeching agony, as the open sores are filled with the oil.
“What in hell are you doing,” the man cooking in the stand says as he opens a side door to witness the dousing.
“Dog’s got the mange,” Chunk says.
“Yeah, that will kill the fleas alright and the dog too. What are you kids thinking of. Get the hell out of here,” he says dismissively but not angrily.
Chunk puts the dog down, and he runs off, barking at anyone who comes near him. When the boys last see him, he is running towards the water.
“Well, there goes one member of our gang,” the twin Paco says.
“Nah,” says Chunk, “he’ll be back, and he’ll thank us for it.”
“You’re crazy,” Carlos tells Chunk admirably.
“Crazy like a garota,” Chunk replies.
“Like a girl?” Pedro smiles.
“Yes, they’re very clever,” Chunk replies.
Later in the evening as the five boys walk along the beach, they talk of their dreams for their gang. As a couple passes by them, suddenly, Carlos and Raphael hit the man to the ground and begin to pummel him.
“Give me your money,” Carlos screams at him as the man’s girl-friend looks on horrified.
As the man reaches in his pocket from the prone position, Chunk grabs Carlos’ arm and pushes him aside. “No, this is not the way.”
Chunk leans down to help the man up, “I am sorry. My friend has lost his mind. Please forgive us.” He brushes the sand off the back of the man’s pants and gently urges him on his way. The terrified couple’s pace picks up as they headed up off the beach.
Chunk slaps Carlos hard on the head, and Carlos put up his hands as if to box. Chunk promptly punches him hard in the stomach with his right hand and as he bends forward, hits him in the head with his left hand. Carlos falls to the sand; with a hand outstretched, he pleads with his attacker, “Please, boss, do not hit me again.”
Chunk bends down to help Carlos up. The other three gang members hold their ground, not sure what is going on.
“Carlos, my friend, if I am to be your leader, you cannot go attacking people when I am not aware. We do things by planning them. We do not act like retarded people, just jumping on anyone passing by.”
“I’m sorry, Chunk,” Carlos says remorsefully.
Still later in the evening they discuss holding up a beach concession stand that will be far more profitable. Once the plan is worked out, they decide to try it out on a coco-frio stand. The person working the stand would be up front with the machete and coconuts. The twins Paco and Pedro would approach the stand from the front, appearing to buy a coco-frio. Raphael would keep an eye out, one eye. Carlos and Chunk, the two strongest, would come up from behind the stand and grab the vendor, forcing him to the ground and taking the machete. Then they would take money from his pants and from under the counter. They would take the machete, and all five would flee into the darkness of the beach.
The plan works perfectly, and as they are all running for the beach, with Chunk bringing up the rear, an arm goes around Chunk’s neck. It is a police officer who has witnessed the end of the robbery and waited beside a small outbuilding to grab at least one of the robbers. He has Chunk in a choke hold as he calls for help from a partner across the beach boulevard. Just as the other partner is crossing the street and the officer with the choke hold on Chunk is pulling him out towards the street, the officer screams in pain and reaches for his leg. In that second Chunk breaks free and heads toward the dark of the beach, noticing that a small dog has clamped his teeth onto the officer’s calf.
“My little dog,” Chunk calls out. And with the officer now on the ground, the dog releases him and run off after Chunk.
The five boys and the dog run in the black night toward the piers. There will be no catching them now.
Under the pier they are all patting the hero of the night—the long short dog with the mange, or less of it now.
“We must have a name for a dog like you,” Carlos says
“He looks like a hot dog; let’s call him hot dog,” Raphael says.
“We’ll call him Shorty, Cortito,” Chunk says naming his dog, “Come here Cortito,” now looking at the animal, who moved next to him.
“And we’ll call our gang, Rei de Praia, Beach Kings,” Chunk raises his hands up and begins a small dance, and the other boys follow, dancing merrily not in their poverty, but in their newfound wealth: the fraternity of the gang. And Cortito wags his tail and barks with his gang.
The following day the five boys, dressed only in their shorts, and one short dog, enter the San Francisco hospital. They go to the emergencia entrance and are told to wait along with the huddled mass of poor seeking help.
After two hours pass and no one calls Raphael’s name, Chunk rises to get some attention. “No, Chunk, we must wait our turn,” Raphael tells him.
“You sit down, Raphael; I’ll be right back,” Chunk says as he walks through the doors where other patients have advanced for treatment.
After several minutes Chunk emerges with a doctor standing beside him. He waves Raphael forward and then puts his hand up indicating that the others should wait there.
Chunk accompanies Raphael and the doctor to the triage area as the doctor pulls the curtain behind them. He examines Raphael, calls for a nurse, and tells her several things. She brings a few instruments and places them on a metal table beside the doctor. The doctor takes a magnifying glass and a long, thin metal instrument and has Raphael lay back. He turns on a bright overhead light and proceeds to look in Raphael’s injured eye.
After a couple of minutes of probing, he steps back and turns the light off and says to Chunk, “Raphael has a very serious infection under his eye. We need to do a small procedure, get what is in there out, put some antibiotics in, and clean it up. We can do this later this afternoon.”
“Good, we’ll wait outside.” Chunk says.
“No, I need you to leave. Your friend needs to spend the night in the hospital to make sure the infection is reducing. You can come back tomorrow,” the doctor concludes.
“I will come back for him tomorrow at noon time.” Chunk says. He walks over to the table, puts his arm around Raphael who was now sitting up, and says, “You’ll be fine. This is a good doctor. He will make your eye better. Do everything he says and do not be afraid.”
“Yes, Chunk. Thank you,” a grateful Raphael says.
The doctor says, “Raphael, you stay here, and I’ll get you ready in a little while.” And the doctor leaves.
As the boys rise to leave, Raphael asks, “What did you say to the doctor, Chunk? They have never taken this much time to find out what was wrong with my eye before.”
Chunk reaches into the canvas bag he is carrying and shows Raphael the machete they had stolen from the coco-frio stand the night before. “I told him you were very sick, that you had come here many times and no one had resolved your injury. I said I was here to make sure that this was fixed today. I took the machete out and showed it to him, and I said, “I will cut off the hand of the doctor who refuses to help my friend get better.”
That night as the boys prepared to sleep, Carlos asked Chunk to tell them about Puerto Rico, and Chunk began, “It’s a beautiful island, but I have no one left there now but my sister, Silvana.”
“That’s a pretty name, Chunk,” Paco said. “Is she beautiful in all the right places?” he finished with a wry smile.
Chunk reached across Pablo and wacked Paco in the head. “She’s a nice girl; she’s not like the pigs you go after.”
Chapter 17
“I thought I would go mad last night. It was so hot; there was no breeze. I was having trouble sleeping. But it wasn’t the heat of the day driving me crazy. It must have been just after midnight—a dog started barking. He was up in the hills somewhere. He kept barking and then another dog joined him in the noise. Then off in the distance other dogs woke up and started barking. Many of them all at once. They made so much noise they woke the roosters, and they started cock–a-doodle, doodling. I thought I would go mad—it was so hot and there was so much noise so late at night. I needed to sleep; I have so much work to do today.”
Silvana DeLuna finished the entry in her diary and got out of bed, placing the diary and pen on the small night stand next to her bed.
In the barrio of San Diego, part of the mountain town of San Blas de Illescas de Coamo, Puerto Rico, she has a three-room home. It is made up of a bedroom, a bathroom, and a pantry and two rooms connected that make up work space and kitchen, although more work space than kitchen. The house sits in the Y of two streets becoming one—Avenue Rio de Janeiro and State Road 744, with 744 the surviving road. The doors on either side of the house are always open during the day, so that it gives you a view through the house from either road. The main door opens onto Avenue Rio, and Silvana can be seen ironing from sunrise to sunset. She does the laundry of many citizens of the barrio—their underwear, shirts, blouses, pants, and skirts. It all comes through to her.
On their way to work, the citizens of the barrio stop and drop their clothes off and pick them up on their way home at night. The washer woman of San Blas labors over these garments with two air fans, one at each door. She is a stunning woman, with no fat, only beautiful round curves. Her skin is olive, her shoulder length hair black as coal, and her smile is the smile of your first love. But she smiles little now.
Silvana’s three-year-old daughter plays in and out of the house during the day. There is no husband. He is dead. She is lost.
Oh, but there was a time he was here on this earth. She smiles at this, the thought of her dear, her love, the man who gave her the precious girl playing by her feet. She cries as she thinks of the joy her running man gave her.
She moves across the room and takes a paper from a tin box. It is a letter. As she irons, she reads it.
“I am Juan. I run. I left this place of my birth ten years ago, this barrio de San Diego, this Coamo. Now, I am running the hills of my youth once again.
“My father is seventy-six, and he asked me to return. He gave me land by his house, and over the last two years, my cousin Julio has been in charge of building my home. I would return every six months and watch the progress and pay him. It is done, and it is wonderful.
“I know why my father wanted me home. He knows he is dying, and he wants me to care for Lola. She is the same age as him, healthier, but almost blind.
“Life has to have meaning. My life in the states didn’t mean much to me. I ran an envelope-making machine for eight years. I made twenty-nine million envelopes. I did that. And I ran. Sometimes I played the guitar in my room. And I played softball on Wednesday nights and drank a few beers. But mostly I made envelopes. That wasn’t meaningful. The running kept me alive.
“So now maybe helping my father and mother will be more meaningful. I read books once and awhile. I read that President John Adams said you only need to do two things—be a good man and lead a useful life.
“I’ve always been a good man. Now maybe I can lead a more useful life, be more important in others’ lives.
“And the other day, as I was running by, I saw you—my beautiful washer woman of San Blas.”
Silvana wiped the tears from her eyes. The running man had been too shy; he left the letter under her door. On that morning four years ago, she found the letter. She knew who he was; she would glance up as he ran by. She knew he lived up on the mountain—he always came from that way and returned that way. It kept her mind busy during the day to catch fleeting glimpses of her neighbors and imagine what they were up to. The running man was easy—he was running, he was always running. And he sweat, he sweat more than she did. He had less fat than she did.
Later, on the day she got the letter, he ran by. Silvana put the iron down, walked to the door, and called after him. “Hi, Juan the runner!”
He turned, smiled and kept running.
A little while later he stopped at the door. “Hola, beautiful washer woman of San Blas.”
And his life became much more meaningful. And his beautiful, exotic, olive skinned, sweetheart of a girl found joy. And between them they conceived their daughter. And one night before their daughter was one, Silvana became the widow of Coamo.
He was running at dusk, and he was hit by a car. It came around a corner too fast, and he was gone.
She folded the letter, placing it back in the tin.
“Come here, Sweetie, give Mama a hug.” Her daughter Mare came over smiling and hugged her mother’s leg. Silvana bent down and wrapped the child in her arms.
She straightened up, the girl went back to her play, and Silvana returned to ironing.
This winter we had a lot of rain, she thinks to herself. Everything is so green. The grass by the roadside is tall.
I would like to have time to go up the mountain, to look over the valley, and see the green in the hills. When I was a girl, I remember it being like it is now only a few times. The northern part of the island is always green from lots of rain. But once you come here across the mountains and face the hotter sun from the south, it is more parched and brown. I always remember that. I wish I were a girl again, to run the hills and play again. Ah, but who would iron the clothes of San Blas; who would take care of my baby!