Authors: Justin Torres
Us Proper
W
HEN WE WERE
brothers, when we were all three together, we made a woman. We stacked up on one another's shoulders and wrapped ourselves in Ma's long winter coat. Manny was the bottom, the legs, and Joel was the stomach, and I was the lightest, so I was the woman's head. We used a ladder to keep from tipping over, but Manny's knees buckled under our weight, so we had to lie down on the ground and do it that way; we were a fallen woman who could not get back up, a helpless woman, flat on her back.
When we were brothers, we were Musketeers.
"Three for all! And free for all!" we shouted and stabbed at each other with forks.
We were monsters—Frankenstein, the bride of Frankenstein, the baby of Frankenstein. We fashioned slingshots out of butter knives and rubber bands, crouched under cars, and flung pebbles at white women—we were the Three Bears, taking revenge on Goldilocks for our missing porridge.
The magic of God is three.
We were the magic of God.
Manny was the Father, Joel the Son, and I the Holy Spirit. The Father tied the Son to the basketball post and whipped him with switches while the Son asked, "Why, Paps, why?"
And the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit hovered and had to watch—there and not there—waiting for a new game.
When we were three together, we spoke in unison, one voice for all, our cave language.
"Us hungry," we said to Ma when she finally came through the door.
"Us burglars," we said to Paps the time he caught us on the roof, getting ready to rappel—and later, when Paps had us on the ground and was laying into Manny, I whispered to Joel, "Us scared," and Joel nodded his chin toward Paps, who was unfastening his belt, and whispered back, "Us fucked."
When we were three together, we stuck our fingers into each other's eyes and pulled chairs out from underneath. The Stooges were three, the Chipmunks. We pinched our noses and sang Chipmunk Christmas carols. We perfected the human pyramid—not the lazy, kneeling pyramid, but the standing kind. We took turns at being world champions, one paraded on the shoulders of the other two, blowing kisses and shaking fists.
We were the Three Billy Goats Gruff crossing the bridge; we were the trolls that lived under the bridge. But after we learned about sex—after Ma sat us down on the carpet and opened the encyclopedia to "Reproductive Systems," after she showed us cross-section diagrams of penises and vaginas and explained how they fit, after all that—we played a new game. No one had explained sex to Ma when she was a kid—not the nuns at school and not her own mother. So when she asked Paps, "Can't I get pregnant from this?" Paps had lied; he had laughed and asked, "This?" And then there was Manny, all up in Ma's stomach, growing, heart ticking like a bomb (Ma's words,
heart ticking like a bomb
), and her only fourteen years old, and Paps only sixteen, both in the ninth grade, and then both dropping out. Ma had to convince Paps to do the right thing, which was to take her on a bus to Texas and marry her. She told us how she was eight months fat by then, and Paps was dark and Afroed. The two of them were so Brooklyn and baby faced and mixed up that the politest thing people could think to do was stare, and the world is full of people who ain't polite—but it had to be Texas, Ma explained, on account of Ma's being too young to marry in New York. So then they were married, so then came Joel, so then came me. All three born in Ma's teenage years ("my teenage years," Ma repeated, as if that meant something to us)—after we learned about all that, we were no longer Three Billy Goats Gruff crossing the bridge, we were no longer the three trolls that lived under the bridge.
After that, we played a new game where the trolls tricked sex on the goats and we were the babies—half gruff, half troll.
We walked out, all three together, far from the house, to the drugstore. We planted ourselves on the concrete and held out fistfuls of change and asked strangers to buy us troll things—cigarettes or beers or whiskeys—but no one would. They told us to scram, or they said things like "Whiskeys? Shit, y'all are just babies."
"Troll babies!" we screamed. "Gruff babies!"
When a pregnant woman waddled up, Manny shot to his feet, pointing his finger and shouting, "Hey, lady, you got a bomb in there?"
We kicked our sneakers against the concrete and howled. Joel threw the change up in the air, and it rained down silver jingles. We laughed and laughed, saying, "A bomb! Oh God, a bomb!"
The lady didn't walk away; she tilted her head, curious, rubbing her palms slowly all over her belly, waiting for us to calm, before saying, "
This?
This is a baby. This is my baby."
Her eyes were wet, black-hole eyes—no fear there, no disgust, no pity—she was wide open, this lady. She was drinking us in.
When she said "Stand up," we did just that. Same with "Come here."
She squatted a little and took our wrists, one at a time, and placed them on her belly.
"You just gotta wait," she said—but we didn't have to wait for long.
"Hot damn!" said Joel. "It's trying to get out!"
"Does it got a daddy?"
"All babies got daddies."
"He trick you?"
"Trick me?"
"How old are you?"
"Mind your p's and q's."
"You fourteen?"
"Fourteen? God, no."
"Does it hurt?"
"Some. It'll hurt real bad when they take him out."
"It'll hurt your vagina."
"Don't you all know how to be proper?"
We looked at our sneakers. Manny swept up the change from the ground and pressed it into her hand.
"Here," he said, "give this to your baby. Tell him it's from us."
"Us who?"
"Us three."
"Us brothers."
"Us Musketeers."
"Us tricks."
And after that—after we left that lady holding our small fortune and tinkling it around in her palm—we raced home, pulled Ma down onto the sofa, and lifted her shirt, kissing and blowing raspberries onto her belly—so thin and tight now, no room for us—asking, "Us hurt you?" knowing that we had lived there once, in Ma's belly, before we were three together, before we were brothers.
And Ma? She didn't question, she just let herself be pulled down, flat on her back, laughing; she just gave in, our Ma, raising her arms above her head, surrender style; she just gave herself up.
Lina
P
APS DISAPPEARED
for a while, and Ma stopped showing up for work, stopped eating, stopped cooking for us, stopped flushing cigarette butts down the toilet, and let them pile up instead, inside of empty bottles and in teacups; wet cigarette butts clogged the drain of the sink. She stopped sleeping in her bed and took to the couch instead, or the floor, or sometimes she slept at the kitchen table, with her head in one arm and the other arm dangling down toward the linoleum, where little heaps of cigarette butts and empty packs and ash piled up around her.
We tiptoed. We ate peanut butter on saltine crackers and angel hair pasta coated in vegetable oil and grated cheese. We ate things from the back of the refrigerator, long-forgotten things, Harry and David orange marmalades, with the rinds floating inside like insects trapped in amber. We ate instant stuffing and white rice with soy sauce or ketchup.
Lina, Ma's supervisor, called to check up.
"This makes six shifts in a row," she said. "What's going on over there?"
Machinery buzzed and clanked around her. There was the piercing clatter of bottles being hustled down an assembly line.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Speak up, honey," she hollered. "It's louder than hell where I am."
"
What do you mean?
"
"I mean it's loud here! I can barely hear you. Fuck it. I guess I'll just have to come over and see for myself." The line went dead, and I waited for the dial tone and then that other noise, the one that means that you've forgotten to hang up the phone.
Lina came straight from the brewery, still in her long white lab coat, her safety goggles perched on top of her head. She was born in China; she was tall and thick, with high cheekbones that stuck out like handlebars below her eyes.
"You're huge," we said. "There's no room for you. You'll bump your head on the ceiling."
We tried to close the door on her, but she muscled it open and held up one of her legs, pointing to her boot.
"I'm shorter without these."
She took off her coat, talking about how there was a part of China where all the women were built like her, "like Cadillacs," she said and laughed, holding out her big hands on either side of her in a motion that was meant to imply hugeness. She handed us a brown paper grocery bag, bent down to unlace her boots, and said, "Don't open that just yet, just set it on the table and fetch me your mother from wherever she's hiding."
"She's sleeping," Manny grunted. We didn't bother taking the groceries into the kitchen. We dumped everything onto the living room carpet and tore into the sliced bread and cheese, jamming fistfuls into our mouths, drinking the milk out of the carton, looking straight into Lina's eyes, the three of us, daring her. She flashed her long, wide horse teeth at us. She tossed her boots into the corner.
"You'll choke," she warned, "if you're not careful.
"
Comrade!"
she hollered, stepping over us, and Ma came running, throwing herself into Lina's big arms, burying her face in Lina's silky black hair, and crying.
Lina stood there for a while, then reached into her smock and pulled out a tissue, taking our mother's face in her hands and wiping it down, tucking wisps of hair behind Ma's ears. We were kneeling on the floor, not two feet away from them, and the longer Lina stood there, grooming Ma, the less we paid attention to the groceries. Then Lina started kissing Ma all over, little soft kisses, covering Ma's whole face with them, even her nose and eyebrows. Then she put her lips on Ma's lips and held them there, soft and still, and nobody—not me, not Ma, not Joel or Manny, nobody—said a word. There wasn't a word to say.
Other Locusts
W
E GOT INTO
Old Man's garden and helped ourselves. Old Man had a high hedge and lived down a dirt road almost too rough and rutted for our bikes, but we forged the road, pushed through the hedge, got into the garden, and helped ourselves. We tasted and trampled and laid waste, and when we looked up, Old Man was watching us from the porch, just watching.
"Animals," he hissed. He looked as if he could spit. "Locusts."
We were ashamed before him. He was very old.
"This your garden?" Manny asked. Joel let a tomato fall from his hand, then wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist.
Old Man opened the screen door and came down the steps toward us. He dropped to his knees in the dirt and fingered the broken stalks. He picked up a half-eaten cucumber and brushed away the dirt, then flipped open a pocketknife and cleaved away the bite marks. The plants we had pulled up from the roots were pushed back into the earth. He crawled stiffly around on hands and knees, and we stood above watching.
Old Man pushed the salvaged vegetable parts into our arms, then herded us onto the porch. We dumped the pieces onto a fold-out card table.
"What's locusts?" Joel asked.
"What the locust swarm left, the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left, the young locusts have eaten; what the young locusts have left"—Old Man paused to narrow his eyes at each one of us—"other locusts have eaten."
Then he called us invaders, marauders, scavengers, the devil's army on earth.
Old Man spoke crooked and singsong—a Missouri accent, it turned out—and we didn't understand half the words he used, but locusts, the threat and possibility of locusts, seized our imaginations, and we made Old Man tell us about them over and over again until we understood. We even made him draw us a picture of locusts, a flurry of black marker dashes near the top of the page, the sky, more and more dashes, one on top of the other, until the top half of the page was filled with black.
"That there's locusts," he said. "You'll see, by the by, you'll see."
This was all on the porch; he never invited us any farther into his home than that, but neither did he ask us to leave. It was late afternoon, sunset, dusk, into evening; the late summer air cooled quickly but didn't chill. The porch was screened in; the screens had bits of fabric sewn right into their mesh to patch up the holes and keep out the mosquitoes, but the mosquitoes found their way in anyhow. Old Man called them skeeters.
We sat around that fold-out table and slapped them skeeters dead on the tabletop or on each other's exposed calves or forearms—we made a game of it, slapping at each other and laughing, but if a skeeter landed on Old Man, we didn't slap or smack but brushed his dry skin with our fingers. Once I stood and blew a gust of air across the back of Old Man's neck, where a skeeter perched to bite, and Old Man winked and nudged me in the ribs.
"Best medicine for a skeeter bite is to cut a cross, like this," he said and carved a tiny cross onto my arm with his thumbnail. "That way you break up the poison and kill the itch."
Old Man was from the Ozarks, which was a place in Missouri with sinkholes and caves and backward lightning that rose up from the earth and stretched into the sky.
Old Man told us we were on the lam. He had all kinds of names for us, castaways, stowaways, hideaways, fugitives, punks, city slickers, bastards. Manny told him we had run away and weren't ever going back, and Joel added that our mother was dead, so there wasn't nobody to call anyhow. He was very old, and he didn't seem to care to call anyone or do anything. He also called us sweets, babies, innocents, poor pitiful creatures, God's own. He strung the words together, and talked mostly to himself, all the while chopping those vegetables into smaller and smaller pieces on the table; what he was doing was this: making us a salad.
He got up and went into the house to fetch a bowl and plates and forks. He moved very slowly.
"Old Man's all right," said Manny.
"He is too," said Joel.
Joel spotted the yellow of a plastic wiffle-ball bat among some rakes and brooms and shovels, all leaning in a corner.
"What's he got this for?"
He dug out the bat and looked around, but there was no ball. He faked a slow home-run swing, filling his cheeks with air and exhaling the moment he imagined making contact.
"And don't tell lies about Ma being dead," Manny said to Joel. "That shit ain't right."
It had gotten so dark that the light from the porch prevented us from seeing into the yard beyond. Our Ma was still broken, still dead-eyed, but she was not dead. She'd even returned to the brewery. She'd be there now, working. And our Paps was still disappeared. Manny said he'd picked up with another woman.
Joel took another home-run swing, then faked the roaring of a crowd. Soon we would have to walk our bikes home in the dark, down that rutted-up dirt road without any streetlights.
"You hear?"
"You think you know everything," Joel said, pointing the tip of the bat close to Manny's nose. Manny flared and tensed and Joel smiled. "But you don't know shit."
"The fuck I don't," Manny said, and the words were barely spoken before the bat was swung, snapping Manny's head sideways. Then they were on the ground, fighting in the worst way—kennel style, Paps called it, all teeth and tearing and snot and blood.
I yelled for them to stop, that's all I did, yelled that one word over and over,
stop, stop, stop.
I thought of Ma, whispering that same
stop, stop, stop
to our father. Manny sucked down the snot from his nose into his throat and spat a lugie in Joel's face, and the mucus slid off, like egg yolk.
"Animals," said Old Man, "
animals.
"
Then Manny and Joel did stop. They stood and panted and pulled their clothes back into shape. Old Man stayed in the doorway to his house and ordered us off his porch, into all that dark. The air buzzed with insects. There was no moon. Summer nights seemed the wildest nights of all.
There were still millions of questions, about God, and locusts, and the Ozarks, about getting old and dying. Old Man held our bowls in his hand, and because we could not look him in the eye, we looked at those empty bowls. We looked so silently, we looked so hard, that he turned from us and set the bowls down somewhere inside the house.
"Go on," he said, "scram."
Millions of questions. Like, how come animals aren't afraid of the dark? Especially the tiny ones, the bunnies and little birds that are skittish enough during the day—what do they make of the night? How do they understand it? How can they sleep out there, alone? Were the trees and bushes and rabbit holes all filled with ears listening, listening, and eyes never daring to shut?
And the other locusts, what's wrong with them, why do they come last, and what's left for them to eat?