The Lacuna (11 page)

Bull’s Eye pinches newspapers and cigarettes from the Officers’ Mess. When he pulls the papers out of his jacket in the lavatory, the boys crowd around. They can’t wait for him to read his made-up head
lines in the loud voice of a news hawker:
EXTREY, HEXTREY! CHICKEN LIVER HOOVER CRAWLS UNDER PRESIDENTIAL BED! MRS. HOOVER TO GET SOME PEACE AT LAST
!

The real name of Bull’s Eye is Billy Boorzai. He isn’t a regular student. He was, until his pop lost his job at a radio shop and his mam lost her marbles. Now he takes classes only half the day, then works in the kitchen and mops the lavs. At night he reads what he has swiped from teachers’ desks, getting his education on the lam, he says.

Bull’s Eye has admirers but no friends in here, he says, his friends are all on the outside. He gets to leave the grounds because of his job in the kitchen (
the mess
). The cooks send him to the butcher’s, the canvas man’s, even the gunsmith’s sometimes. He says the cooks need firearms for self-defense, the food is that bad.

February 28

A logic problem: is the tedium of maths class better or worse than the tedium of maths detention? Being held prisoner in the library with an algebra book is not improving. But, that great hall full of books is not punishment, either. For certain it is safer than outdoors with boys shoulder-banging at American football, screaming in the language of Gee Whiz and Your Old Man.

March 13

Every morning Bull’s Eye stands naked in the lav, shaving his face. He looks twenty. He says he’s only the same age as everybody else here, plus a few hard knocks. He says you grow up fast when the South Sea Bubble bursts and your dad gets the boot. He doesn’t go home either. We have that in common: dads who won’t look a son in the eye. He says it’s good as any reason for friendship.

It’s the only one so far. The boy called Pencil in the next bed will talk if no one else is around. The Greek boy named Damos says, “Hey Mexico, comeer,” but he also says, “Hey Brush Ape.” Bull’s Eye
told them to watch out, the kid from Mexico is ace at firearms, maybe he used to ride with Pancho Villa.

Now they use that name: Pancho Villa. It took a while to recognize it because they pronounce it something like Pants Ville:
Hey, Pantsville, comeer!
It sounds like a location, one of the hanging-laundry neighborhoods you see from the train to Huichapan.

March 14

Lucky Lindy’s baby is kidnapped, and everyone is afraid, even boys locked up in a brick school. For the hero who flew across the ocean, a terrible crash. The newspapers say any child is in danger if Lindbergh could be that unlucky. But this country already had bad-luck people everywhere, sleeping in the parks, wearing newspapers for coats. The people who have good cloth coats look out the trolley windows and say,
Those bums need to buck up
. Unlucky Lindy makes them afraid because it happened to a hero.

March 20

Bull’s Eye smells like peeled potatoes, cigarettes, and the mop bucket. When the others go home on Saturday, he says, “Hey-Pancho-Villa, you are cor-di-ally invited to assist me with my labors.” These include scrubbing the lunch mess, running with the wet mop in the commissary, jumping on it, and sliding across the floor between the long tables. And so forth. The assistant receives no pay except getting his head squeezed inside Bull’s Eye’s elbow and his hair scrubbed with knuckles. That is how boys touch here, Bull’s Eye especially.

March 27

Military strategy is interesting. Running an army is similar to running a household of servants. Mother is good at that kind of warfare, she has instincts for reconnaissance and the surprise attack. Officer Ostrain says the United States has the sixteenth largest army in the world, ranking leagues behind Great Britain, Spain, Turkey,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and many others. (Mexico was not mentioned.) Our poorly equipped military seems to offend Officer Ostrain to the limits of his brass-buttoned endurance. He says it’s a disgrace that General MacArthur and Major Eisenhower have to stand on Pennsylvania Avenue waiting like common citizens for the Mt. Pleasant trolley car, to get to the Senate chambers.

The boys say they have seen them and Major Patton also, playing polo on Saturdays at Myer Field. They want to grow up to have ponies like the generals, and sport them around polo fields on Saturdays with Sally Rand riding behind, her breasts bouncing like footballs. That is why they never plot an escape from the academy.

April 10

The K Street market is like a piece of Mexico. The fish hawkers sing the same as on the
malecón
, but in a kind of English:
four-bits a mack-rel, la-yay-dies!
Old women with teas and herbs promise to cure any ailment. The air smells like home: charred meat, salt fish, horse dung. Going there today was like bursting through the surface of water and finally breathing. After being in a tunnel of dark, for thirteen Sundays.

The outer part of the market has stalls selling leather goods, teakettles, every earthly thing for anyone that still has a nickel to rub against a dime. Inedibles are sold on the outside of the market, comestibles in the interior. The knife grinders with big naked arms stand at the entrance to the butchers’ avenue. Oystermen in white aprons wheel full carts up from the wharves. The
cilindro
man has one missing ear, and a monkey in a blue cap to dance to his organ music. Women sell figs and roses, eggs and sausages, chickens and cheese, racks of dressed rabbits, even live birds in cages like the market in Coyoacán. One woman sells
conejillos de Indias
. Bull’s Eye says they are not called Indian rabbits here, but Guinean pigs. He has no good explanation for it, and agrees they are probably more rabbit than pig.

This morning he told the head cook he needed an assistant for his errands at the market. Have a heart, Bull’s Eye told her, you’re asking for more than one poor sod can carry. His first destination is the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, which he calls the A and P, and which sells more than tea. The week’s supply of rice, beef, flour, coffee, and fifty more things for the Potomac Academy go into crates from there onto a horse-truck every Saturday. The week’s changes to the list have to be brought in person, the shop men want a boy to help with the boxing up. Other things are purchased from the rest of the market. The boy for the errand is Bull’s Eye, and now his assistant Pancho Villa.

It took hours to get to the A and P. With so many swell things to look at on the way, dogs to be fed, friends to cuff on the shoulder. Blue-black workmen to be stared at as they pick open a trench as long as Pennsylvania Avenue. Where do they come from?

“Africa acourse,” was Bull’s Eye’s reply.

“From Africa, all that way, just for the job of digging ditches?”

“No, you lob. They were slaves first. Before they all got put free by Abe Lincoln. Didn’t you ever hear of the slaves?”

“Maybe. But not like these. Mexico didn’t have them.”

A lob is a
pendejo
. But Bull’s Eye will answer questions that can’t be asked of other boys. Those dark men and their wives can’t shop here or ride the trolleys, he said, it’s against the law. Even to get lunch in a restaurant. If one of them needs to make water whilst digging the ditch on Pennsylvania Avenue, or get a drink, he has to walk two miles out Seventh Street to find a restaurant that will let him touch a glass or use the lav.

It’s a strange way. Being a servant, making a bad wage, that is no puzzle. All the richest men in Mexico were once lifted from the cradle by servants. But they all drink from the same water jar that fills the master’s glass, and they use the same chamber pot, still warm from the piss of the
patrón
. In Mexico nobody ever thought to keep those streams flowing separately.

April 17

School is closing two weeks for Easter holiday. Then comes the end of the term soon, and summer. Most of the boys will go home, but not all. Some have to stay for remedial maths and repeating Virginia history in the sweat of July. Living here in the sock-stinking dormitory, and not with Father. He clearly explained that, in his letter about coming to visit while school is closed for Easter holiday. That will be swell, he says, a visit with old Dad. Swell enough for two weeks, not the whole summer.

Nothing here counts for anything now but Saturdays. Going to the market with Billy Boorzai. The rest is just coasting with half-closed eyes through another week.

May 3

Father’s explanations made no mention of a lady. She must have cleared out of his apartment in a hurry, to make way for the Easter visitor. On the Q.T., Father is putting on the feedbag with a dame. Dust-colored stockings hang like cobwebs on the bathroom radiator, a lipstick winks like gossip on the bureau. Why would he hide her? Does he not know about Mother and her swains? He should listen through her wall some night, if he thinks his son is unacquainted with bedroom jolly-ups and pig fights.

Or he would lose some bargaining score if the Dame is reported back to Mexico. He and Mother are still not divorced because of the Mexican paperwork. “Divorce,” he pronounces like a taste of soup with too much salt. Her name, he says like the Lord’s taken in vain. Sometimes he says “Mexico,” and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it.

May 5

A Trip to the Museum with the Father Figure. The weather has gone from freezing to broiling, with some talk of cherry blossoms in between. People on the trolley press against you in a crush, men in
white linen suits, girls in sailor dresses and felt turbans. The smell of perspiration is different here. Cortés could write about that also: Most Excellent Empress, the sweat of the Northern People has a redolent stench. Maybe because of so many layers of clothes. Father’s white suit hangs limp from his shoulders, wilting by the minute, like the moonflowers in the garden in Isla Pixol.

Smith Sonian is the name of the museum, a brick castle containing the stuffed, dead skins of every species but our own. Why not a few humans too? Father laughed at that one, like a man in some kind of a show, with an audience. His mood has shifted. Now he seems to take his son as a joke, rather than a serious offense. The museum had rooms of things from Tenochtitlan and other ancient sites of Mexico, fabulous artworks in gold that Cortés did not manage to carry off. Now in Washington, instead.

On the ride back to Father’s apartment the trolley passed a long park, a row of warehouses, and then the most amazing spectacle: a city of tents and shacks roiling with people. Cooking fires, children, laundry hanging on lines, like a Mexican village of the very poorest kind set down in the middle of Washington City, surrounded by office buildings. A hand-lettered sign said:
BONUS EXPEDITIONARY ENCAMPMENT
. The American flag hung about in multiples over the shacks like laundry, blending in with the laundry really. The flags were as sun-faded as the upside-down trousers on the lines. The size of the camp was astonishing, a whole nation of beggars arrived in the capital. “That lot,” Father spat through his moustache. “They’ve run their hobo jungle all the way down Pennsylvania. I have to pass through all that to get to work every morning.”

A woman in a headscarf held up a naked baby toward our trolley. The baby waved its arms. A hobo jungle is unlike other jungles, where monkeys howl through the leafy air. “What do they all want?”

“What does anybody want? Something for nothing acourse.” In that moment Father sounded like Bull’s Eye.

“But why so many of them? And all the flags?”

“They’re war veterans. Or so they say, because vets are entitled to a soldier’s bonus. They want their bonus.”

Ragged men stood at military attention every few meters, like fence posts all along the edge of the camp facing the street. Veteran soldiers, you could tell it from the placement of feet and shoulders. But their eyes searched the passing trolley with a terrifying hunger. “They’ve been here all week? What do the families live on?”

“Shoe leather soup, I’d say.”

“Those men fought in France, with mustard gas and everything?”

Father nodded.

“We studied the Argonne. In Military Strategy. It was very bad.”

Another nod.

“So, can’t they get their money now, if they fought in the war?”

“I’d have been there too, in the Argonne,” he said, suddenly turning pinkish, “if I could have been. Did your mother tell you I wouldn’t fight in the war?”

A subject to steer around. “What’s the soldier’s bonus supposed to be?”

Surprisingly, Father knew the answer: $500 a man. He is a bean counter for the government. Five hundred bucks for risking a life in the war, so they could begin a new one here. Congress turned them down, decided to pay out the bonus later when these men are old. So they’ve come here from everywhere, wishing to take the matter up with the president.

“Does Mr. Hoover mean to meet with them?”

“Not on your life. If they want to talk to him, they better use the telephone.”

May 14

Going with Bull’s Eye to the market, that first time, was like Mother’s first cigarette in the morning. Now every minute is a long piece of waiting, fidgeting out the minutes, pecking the desk, trying to
think of something else until Saturday. Living in dread of not being asked again. On Friday nights the boys raise a cloud of stink in the barracks, throwing dirty drawers in satchels to get ready for the weekend, and then they fall down asleep. Leaving only the sound of one cricket ratcheting, a slant of puny moonlight. An hour or two for thinking: Billy Boorzai. Will he ask tomorrow? Or not?

Who cares. A person could prowl the library instead, in peace for once. Find some book that’s better than noisy K Street. Keeping up with that big rough-elbowed dodger is worse than American football. It takes forever to get anywhere, Bull’s Eye knows every third fellow he sees, not just boys but men of all sorts. And then has to renew the acquaintance with shoulder jabs and insults while the tagalong stands watching, like a pet dog. What does it matter if he asks or not?