The Poison Eaters and Other Stories (11 page)

I've got to admit it, I'm finding myself strangely full of Wallingford pride.

Of course, Mike and Xavier and all the rest of the Latin Club glare at me when we pass in the halls. I don't think they're all that mad though. Whatever blackmail scheme they got going is probably kicking into high gear. I'm sure they'll all be buying new computers by the end of the week.

Still, I'm a little nervous as I roll into Latin.

Danny's already there and he grins as I sit down next to him. “Dude,” he says. “Want to go to Western Plaguelands tonight for a raid? I heard about a sunken temple in Caer Darrow with lots of purple drops."

"I'm on it like a bonnet,” I say.

All things considered, he's a good best friend. Maybe better than me.

Ms. Esposito walks by my desk, holding her coffee. “
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad nece
,” she says, which I think means that if we were back in the good old days, I'd be left out on a windswept crag to die.

She smiles.

I'm so registering for German next year.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Rafael Santiago hated going home. Home meant his parents making a big fuss and a special dinner and him having to smile and hide all his secret vices, like the cigarettes he had smoked for almost sixteen years now. He hated that they always had the radio blaring salsa and the windows open and that his cousins would come by and try to drag him out to bars. He hated that his mother would tell him how Father Joe had asked after him at Mass. He especially hated the familiarity of it, the memories that each visit stirred up.

That morning he stood in front of his dressing table for half an hour, looking at the wigs and hats and masks—early versions or copies of costumes he'd designed. There were drooping feathers, paper roses, crystal dangles, and leather coiled into horns, each item displayed on green glass heads that stood in front of a large, broken mirror. He had settled on wearing a white tank-top tucked into bland gray Dockers, but when he stood himself next to all his treasures, he felt unfinished. He clipped on black suspenders and looked at himself again. That was better, almost a compromise. A fedora, a cane, and a swirl of eyeliner would have finished off the look, but he left it alone.

"What do you think?” he asked the mirror, but it did not answer. He looked at the unpainted plaster face casts resting on a nearby shelf; their hollow eyes told him nothing either.

Rafe tucked his little phone into his front left pocket with his wallet and keys. He would call his father from the train. He glanced at the wall, at one of the sketches of costumes he'd done for a postmodern ballet production of
Hamlet
. An award hung beside it. This sketch was of a faceless woman in a white gown appliqued with leaves and berries. He remembered how dancers had held the girl up while others pulled on the red ribbons he had had hidden in her sleeves. Yards and yards of red ribbon had come from her wrists. The stage had been swathed in red. The dancers had been covered in red. The whole world had become one dripping gash of ribbon.

The train ride was dull. He felt guilty that the green landscapes that blurred outside the window did not stir him. He only loved leaves if they were crafted from velvet.

Rafael's father waited at the station in the same old blue truck he'd had since before Rafe had left Jersey for good. Each trip his father would ask him careful questions about his job, the city, Rafe's apartment. Certain assumptions were made. His father would tell him about some cousin getting into trouble, or lately, about how Mary was going to leave Marco. Rafe's father was sure Marco was messing around with another girl. With Marco, there was always another girl.

Rafe leaned back in the passenger seat, feeling the heat of the sun wash away the last of the goose bumps on his arms. He had forgotten how cold the air conditioning was on the train. His father's skin, sun-darkened to deep mahogany, made his own seem sickly pale. A string-tied box of crystallized ginger pastries sat at his feet. He always brought something for his parents: a bottle of wine, a tarte tatin, a jar of truffle oil from Balducci's. Something to remind him that his ticket was round-trip, bought and paid for.

"Mary's getting a divorce,” Rafe's father said once he'd pulled out of the parking lot. “She's been staying in your old room. I had to move your sewing stuff."

"Does Marco know yet?” Rafe had already heard about the divorce; his sister had called him a week ago at three in the morning from Cherry Hill, asking for money so she and her son Victor could take a bus home. She had talked in heaving breaths and he'd guessed she'd been crying. He had wired the money to her from the corner store where he often went for green tea ice cream. Now, this detail stuck in his throat.

"He sure does. He wants to see his son. I told him if he comes around the house again, your cousin's gonna break probation but he's also gonna break that loco sonofabitch's neck."

No one, of course, thought that spindly Rafe was going to break Marco's neck.

The truck passed people dragging lawn chairs into their front yards for a better view of the coming fireworks. Although it was still many hours until dark, neighbors milled around, drinking lemonade and beer. In the back of the Santiago house, smoke pillared up from the grill where cousin Gabriel scorched hamburger patties smothered in hot sauce. Mary lay on the blue couch in front of the TV, an ice mask covering her eyes. Rafael walked by as quietly as he could. The house was dark and the radio was turned way down. For once, his greeting was subdued. Only his nephew, Victor, a sparkler twirling in his hand, seemed oblivious to the somber mood.

They ate watermelon so cold that it was better than drinking water; hot dogs and hamburgers off the grill with more hot sauce and tomatoes; rice and beans; corn salad; and ice cream. They drank beer and instant iced tea and the decent tequila that Gabriel had brought. Mary joined them halfway through the meal and Rafe was only half-surprised to see the blue and yellow bruise darkening her jaw. Mostly, he was surprised how much her face, angry and suspicious of pity, reminded him of Lyle.

When Rafe and Lyle were thirteen, they had been best friends. Lyle had lived across town with his grandparents and three sisters in a house far too small for all of them. His grandmother told the kids terrible stories to keep them from going near the river that ran through the woods behind their yard. There was the one about phooka, who appeared like a goat with sulfurous yellow eyes and great curling horns and who shat on the blackberries on the first of November. There was the kelpie that swam in the river and wanted to carry off Lyle and his sisters to drown and devour. And there were the trooping faeries that would steal them all away to their underground hills for a hundred years.

Lyle and Rafe snuck out to the woods anyway. They would stretch out on an old, bug-infested mattress and “practice” sex.

Lyle had forbidden certain conversations. There were never to be conversations about the practicing, no conversations about the bruises on his back and arms, and no conversations about his grandfather, ever, at all. Rafe thought about that, about all the conversations he had learned not to have, all the conversations he was still avoiding.

As fireworks lit up the black sky, Rafe listened to his sister fight with Marco on the phone. He must have been accusing her about getting the money from a lover because he heard his name said over and over. “Rafael sent it,” she shouted. “My fucking brother sent it.” Finally, she screamed that if he didn't stop threatening her she was going to call the police. She said her cousin was a cop. And it was true; Teo Santiago was a cop. But Teo was also in jail.

When she got off the phone, Rafe said nothing. He didn't want her to think he'd overheard.

She came over anyway. “Thanks for everything, you know? The money and all."

He looked up at her and couldn't help but touch the side of her face with the bruise. She looked at the ground but he could see that her eyes had grown wet.

"You're gonna be okay,” he said. “You're gonna be happier."

"I know,” she said. One of the tears tumbled from her eye and shattered across the toe of his expensive leather shoe, tiny fragments sparkling with reflected light. “I didn't want you to hear all this shit. Your life is always so together."

"Not really,” he said, smiling. Mary had seen his apartment only once, when she and Marco had brought Victor up to see the Lion King. Rafe had sent her tickets; they were hard to get so he thought that she might want them. They hadn't stayed long in his apartment; the costumes that hung on the walls had frightened Victor.

She smiled too. “Have you ever had a boyfriend this bad?"

Her words hung in the air a moment. It was the first time any of them had ventured a guess. “Worse,” he said, “and girlfriends, too. I have terrible taste."

Mary sat down next to him on the bench. “Girlfriends, too?"

He nodded and lifted a glass of iced tea to his mouth. “When you don't know what you're searching for,” he said, “you have to look absolutely everywhere."

The summer that they were fourteen, a guy had gone down on Rafe in one of the public showers at the beach and he gloried in the fact that for the first time he had a story of almost endless interest to Lyle. It was the summer that they almost ran away.

"I saw grandma's faeries,” Lyle had said the week before they were supposed to go. He told Rafe plainly, like he'd spotted a robin outside the window.

"How do you know?” Rafe had been making a list of things they needed to bring. The pen in his hand had stopped writing in the middle of spelling “colored pencils.” For a moment, all Rafe felt was resentment that his blowjob story had been trumped.

"They were just the way she said they'd be. Dancing in a circle and they glowed a little, like their skin could reflect the moonlight. One of them looked at me and her face was as beautiful as the stars."

Rafe scowled. “I want to see them too."

"Before we get on the train we'll go down to where I saw them dancing."

Rafe added “peanut butter” to his list. It was the same list he was double checking six days later, when Lyle's grandmother called. Lyle was dead. He had slit his wrists in a tub of warm water the night before they were supposed to leave for forever.

Rafe had stumbled to the viewing, cut off a lock of Lyle's blond hair right in front of his pissed-off family, stumbled to the funeral, slept stretched out on the freshly filled grave. It hadn't made sense. He wouldn't accept it. He wouldn't go home.

Rafe took out his wallet and unfolded the train schedule from the billfold. He had a little time. He was always careful not to miss the last train. He looked at the small onyx and silver ring on his pinkie. It had a secret compartment inside, so well hidden that you could barely see the hinge. When Lyle had given it to him, Rafe's fingers had been so slender that it had fit on his ring finger as easily as the curl of Lyle's hair fit inside of it.

As Rafe rose to kiss his mother and warn his father that he would have to be leaving, Mary thrust open the screen door so hard it banged against the plastic trashcan behind it.

"Where's Victor? Is he inside with you? He's supposed to be in bed."

Rafe shook his head. His mother immediately put down the plate she was drying and walked through the house, still holding the dishrag and calling Victor's name. Mary showed them how his bed was stuffed with pillows that formed a small boy-shape under the blankets.

Mary stared at Rafe as though he was hiding her son from her. “He's not here. He's gone."

"Maybe he snuck out to see some friends,” Rafe said, but it didn't seem right. Victor was only ten.

"Marco couldn't have come here without us seeing him,” Rafe's father protested.

” He's
gone
,” Mary repeated, as though that explained everything. She slumped down in one of the kitchen chairs and covered her face with her hands. “You don't know what he might do to that kid. O God.
Madre de Dios
."

Rafe's mother came back in the room and punched numbers into the phone. There was no answer at Marco's apartment. She dialed the cousins next. They had mixed opinions on what to do. They had kids of their own and some thought that Mary didn't have the right to take Victor away from his father. Soon everyone in the kitchen was shouting.

Rafe got up and went to the window, looking out into the dark backyard. Kids made up their own games and wound up straying farther than they meant to.

"Victor!” he called, walking across the lawn. “Victor!"

But he wasn't there, and when Rafe walked out to the street, he could not find the boy along the hot asphalt length. Although it was night, the sky was bright with a full moon and clouds enough to reflect the city lights.

A car slowed as it came down the street. It sped away once it was past the house and Rafe let out the breath he didn't even realize that he had held. His brother-in-law had never seemed crazy to him, just bored and maybe a little resentful that he had a wife and a kid. But then, Lyle's grandfather had seemed normal, too.

Rafe thought about the train schedule in his pocket and the unfinished sketches on his desk. It was getting late. The last train would be along soon and if he wasn't there to meet it, he would have to spend the night with his memories. There was nothing he could do here. In the city, he could call around and find her the number of a good lawyer—a lawyer that Marco couldn't afford. That was the best thing, he thought. But he'd turned despite himself, his shoes clicking like beetles on the pavement.

His oldest cousin had come out to talk to him in the graveyard the night after Lyle's funeral. It had clearly creeped Teo to find his little cousin sleeping in the cemetery, but Rafael's mother had sent him to bring Rafael home and Teo was used to the obligations of family.

"He's gone.” Teo had squatted down in his blue policeman uniform. He sounded a little impatient and very awkward.

"The faeries took him,” Rafe had said. “They stole him away to Faerieland and left something else in his place."