Authors: Justin Torres
Ducks
P
APS CAME HOME
WITH
sleepy eyes and blood-flushed ears and started leaning against Ma, pressing her into the counter, kissing her, pinching her in different places, and Ma, who had been about to leave for the brewery, said, "Stop, stop, stop."
But he didn't stop; he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her toward the bedroom. She dragged her feet, tried to hold on to the counter, the wall, the door frame, saying, "Stop, baby, I'm serious," her voice lowering, deepening. "Stop." He lifted her feet off the ground and pulled her up the stairs, laughing at her anger. She gripped the banister, and he tugged at her from behind until she let go. He couldn't see her expression, but we could. Her eyes searched, wild and desperate, for something to grab, and for just an instant she looked at us with that same pleading look—she looked to us for help, but we stood there, out of her reach, watching. Then her face flattened and calmed some; she even smiled a sad, halfway smile. What did we see there? Disappointment? Forgiveness? All of this passed in a moment, and only a moment, before Paps kicked the door shut.
We boys pulled the blankets from our beds and the cushions from the sofa and made a nest in front of the television. We would not sleep upstairs. We fell asleep with the flash of blue across our eyelids and the moans and whispers of late-night advertisements filling our dreams.
Ma eventually left, worked her graveyard shift, and came home again. She shook us awake, saying, "Get yourselves in that truck, and don't question me. I won't be questioned."
Ma called it that truck, or your father's truck; Paps had never returned the truck like he had promised, and we knew he never would.
We drove out to a park where there was a stepped white gazebo and upside-down canoes half submerged in the river. There were swings with black rubber seats, most of them broken and dangling from their chains into the dirt ruts below. There was a wide and patchy lawn sloping up from the water to the road, and there was our truck parked half on the grass and half on the shoulder. There were no children; all the children were in school.
Inside the bed of the truck were garbage bags stuffed tight with our clothing, the white plastic stretched to a milky translucence and here and there ripped through by the angled edges of letters and envelopes and pictures. Inside the cab was Ma, who had lain across the bench seat and said she needed a nap, pulling her forearm across her eyes to block out the bright day—and all across the lawn was the dew, breaking the sun into specks of light, like a million baby suns clinging to the grass.
The three of us boys trampled around the park, keeping one eye on the truck. We found a sapling bordered by a chicken-wire fence, and we bent the tree to the ground until it snapped into shreds near the base of the trunk—the yellow flesh was moist inside the bark, and sad. Two of us ganged up on the other, then one suddenly switched allegiance and a new brother was bullied and ostracized, then another betrayal, another. We spent the long hours of morning and early afternoon this way, talking nothing but dares and putdowns, saying "Oh,
yeah?
" and cursing. We didn't talk about what might happen next; we were tough guys, and brave.
On the seesaw, Joel held me hostage in the air.
"Let me go," I said.
"Girl, I ain't never gonna let you go," said Joel—but then he did. He jumped off and sent me crashing. My tailbone bucked and vibrated and tried to explode. Still, I got on again, saying, "Promise you won't do it this time?"
And he promised.
And again.
And again.
We made our way along the river's edge, pushing through the brambles. There was a spot up ahead where the highway bridged the water, and we decided to climb the embankment. The dirt was loose and steep, and there wasn't much to grab on to, but we made our way up, me in the middle, getting pushed from behind by Joel and pulled by Manny once he made it to the top. We walked on the side of the big four-lane road, single file, halfway across the bridge, then we sat so that our feet dangled over the edge and our arms rested on the guardrail. We could feel the air on the back of our necks as the cars whizzed and hummed past. People honked and yelled out of windows to get off the road, and one lady pulled over into the weeds on the other side of the overpass, hollering that this was no place for little boys to sit. We ignored her, but she walked shakily over and offered to drive us wherever we needed to be. We refused politely, looking down at our feet, but she kept insisting that she could not, in good conscience, leave us there, until finally Manny stood and said, "Listen, bitch," and picked up a chunk of pavement, and then Joel and I followed suit, saying "Bitchy-bitch," picking up whatever debris we could find. The lady walked backward to her van.
After we got back to the park and checked to see that Ma was still sleeping in the truck, Joel asked, "The fuck we doing here?" But the question barely registered, spoken, as it was, so softly, and stupid to ask in the first place.
We tipped a canoe upright, tied it to a tree, and climbed in. We fell asleep listening to the soft lap of the water and feeling the dull push of the afternoon sun on our faces. We woke later to the tap of pretzels hitting the fiberglass bottom of the canoe and plunking into the river around us. The sun was gone and the sky was bleeding pink. Ducks paddled over and silently picked the pretzel bits out of the water. Ma, on a bench, smiled at us and laughed.
"I thought you were kidnapped!" she yelled, digging in her purse and tossing more pretzels our way. We flapped our elbows and quacked, and she tried to land the pretzels in our mouths, but she was no good at feeding us.
"Onward!" Ma said, and we followed her back to the truck, clattering on about our day, tattling on each other for all the mean things that had been said and fighting over who got to sit near the window. We peeked into her purse; it was half full with beer pretzels, and we asked where she got them from.
"Your mother," she said, "is a pretty crafty woman."
It was odd to hear her say
your mother,
and for a while I allowed myself to believe that we had a different mother, who tried to help Ma, who filled Ma's purse with snacks.
In the truck, not moving, the four of us crunched the pretzels into dry wads, forcing them down even after our mouths had dried. It was the only food we'd had all day.
"Spain," Ma said, "I've always wanted to go to Spain. We could do that."
I was pretty sure you couldn't drive to Spain, but I couldn't be positive, so when Ma talked about the bullfights and how all the kids would look like us, with brown curls, tan and skinny, and when she talked about cobblestone streets and the life we would build selling bread from wicker baskets in the market, I thought anything was possible. We listened, adding what we could, and made a life.
Dusk settled down, we hadn't driven anywhere, all the lights were off in the truck, and darkness deepened the spaces between us. Ma talked and talked about Spain; she came up with a name for the little dog we would adopt, a dog that would follow us home from school, because in Spain dogs were everywhere, nipping at ankles and begging for crumbs.
On the street, the lampposts blinked on their orange bulbs. The green numbers of the digital clock came to life. A car passed now and then, but overall it was a very quiet road and then suddenly very dark. The lampposts were T-shaped, and they loomed like palm trees, and the circles of light they projected were like small lonesome islands.
The sea of dark reminded me of something Paps was always saying, "Easier to sink than swim." He loved saying that.
The talk slowed, and there were pauses when each of us detached from the others; maybe we were thinking about food or trying to figure out if we were afraid, and if we were, then what we were afraid of, or maybe we were thinking about Paps. Ma tried to keep talking, tried to keep all of it—the silence and hunger and the idea of Paps—at bay, but she was running out of words.
"Honestly," she finally asked, "what should we do?"
She waited.
"We can go home, but we don't have to. We don't ever have to go home again. We can leave him. We can do that. But I need you to tell me what to do."
No one spoke. I tried to listen to faraway noises and guess what they were—animals, satellites. The up-close noises were easy, Ma choking on words, the croak in her throat, the controlled breathing of my brothers.
"Jesus!" Ma whispered. "Say something! You think this is easy?"
"Something," Joel said, and Manny reached across the seat and punched him.
Ma flipped the ignition, and the engine jumped to life. We drove back the way we came, and eventually we pulled into the driveway, home again. We had been terrified she might actually take us away from him this time but also thrilled with the wild possibility of change. Now, at the sight of our house, when it was safe to feel let down, we did. I could feel the bitterness in my brothers' silence; I wondered if Ma felt it too.
"I bet you're hungry," she said. We wouldn't allow ourselves to answer her; we wouldn't allow ourselves to be hungry.
Without another word, she got out and went around to the back to get our bags. A lamp was on in the living room, but the shades were drawn. Ma slammed the door of the truck bed and Paps appeared in the window, parting the curtains and cupping his hand over his eyes and leaning against the glass. The light inside the house was warm and fell around Paps and spilled outside onto the grass, and when Ma opened the door she disappeared in light.
We boys stayed in the truck a bit longer, then we got out and walked away from the house, into the street.
"I thought something was actually going to happen," Joel said. "I thought we were
going
somewhere."
"We should have killed that fucking woman," said Manny. "Taken her keys and driven off."
"Which woman?" I asked, but no one answered me.
"Hell yeah," Joel said. "We should have smashed her fucking skull open. We should have scooped out her brain and fed pieces to the ducks."
"Which woman?"
"Will you listen to this baby?" Joel said to Manny. "
Which woman?
We only seen two women all day, that woman on the bridge and Ma. Unless he's counting himself."
Manny laughed. "It don't matter who, the point's the same. Them ducks wouldn't eat no brains."
"Sure they would. Why not, if they were hungry enough?"
I tried not to listen. I wondered if someone would come along and bandage the tree we had snapped, a park ranger or some kind of doctor who knew about veins and roots, someone who could put it back together.
"They'd get sick. They'd die."
"Did you look at them nasty things? Looked like some hungry-ass ducks to me."
Manny stopped at the lamppost, turned to square off. He had his arms crossed and his head cocked to one side—so Joel crossed his own arms and cocked his head right back.
"I'm telling you," Manny said, "them ducks are too smart to eat them bitches' brains."
Trench
W
E WOKE TO THE
sound of Paps digging out back, his grunt, his heave, his shovel hack. We pushed open the upstairs window and leaned out into the early morning sky, sleepy and confused, still in our underwear, our skin one shade of deep summer brown. If Paps had looked up, we would have appeared to him like a three-torsoed beast, but he didn't look up, and we didn't call down to him.
For the past few weeks we had been dressing in oversize camouflage from a box of hand-me-downs Ma had brought home from work. Someone had died, someone army. We cut the sleeves and the length from the shirts; we wore cargo shorts as pants. We fastened everything with green canvas belts and sliding army buckles. There were caps and bandannas and exactly three olive-mesh tank tops that shrank in on themselves and were meant to be worn tight but draped on us, the shoulder holes opening down to our waists. The mesh shirts were our favorite, like wearing nothing at all.
Manny smeared a thumb's worth of shoe polish under our eyes, then we stepped out quietly through the door and crept along the side of the house, slipping underneath a hedge, army spies. For the past few weeks, we had been at war.
"He's digging a grave," whispered Joel.
"Whose grave?" I asked.
"Nah," whispered Manny, "that there's a trench."
"That ain't no trench," Joel replied. "That's a grave."
"But whose grave?"
"How am I supposed to know? Ma's grave, I guess. Maybe it's your grave."
"No way," I said. "No way that's my grave."
Paps kept digging and digging, shovels full of dirt; dirt stuck to the sweat on his back and smudged across his cheeks and forehead. Grunt, heave, hack. The dirt cleaved away in dark, cool cuts. He dug faster and faster, until eventually he tossed the shovel, fell to his knees, and dug with his hands. We crawled closer, unnoticed, until we could see the bobbing shape of his head and shoulders as he scooped and flung dirt from the hole. He dug until he could barely breathe, until he collapsed, wheezing, in the dirt.
We walked over and stood around the edge and peered down inside.
"I'll never get out of here," Paps said. The dirt had crumbled down and powdered him brown all over, except for the blood that was seeping from his knuckles and the tips of his fingers, and the red of his mouth, which was busy licking and spitting dirt and breathing hard. I wasn't sure if he meant he couldn't get up out of the hole he had dug, or if he was trying to escape our yard through a tunnel to somewhere else, like China.
Joel must have thought the same thing, because he asked, "Where you trying to get to?" But Manny only flicked his ear and called him a dipshit.
"Give your ol' man a hand, why don't ya?"
We lay down on the grass outside the hole and took hold of his wrists and tugged and tugged, but he didn't budge; instead he pulled us in with him and held us there in his big arms, us laughing and screaming and flailing about. We kicked the walls of the hole, and more dirt rained in, so that everyone was spitting and choking, but no one could get away—he was a strong man, our Paps, and he knew just how to hold on to all three at once.
When we were finally outside the hole, Paps slapped at himself, dusting the dirt from his clothes. We followed him back into the house, sneaking up and slapping him on the ass, over and over, yelling, "You missed a spot! You missed a spot!" He shook his fist and took a couple of blind swings, but he didn't hit us.
"Be good," he said. "I'm going to pick your mother up from work." But he must have gotten distracted by something on the way to the brewery, because Ma came home hours later—she had worked through the night, and now it was a little after noon, and she was all alone and drunk and mad as hell.
"Where is he? Where's the truck?" She looked at each one of us, at our empty faces, then she closed her eyes and leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor. She unlaced her steel-toed boots and hurled them across the room.
"He dug a trench," Joel said.
Ma took pains peeling down her white socks. Little bits of white lint stuck to her feet, and she blew them away with long, drawn-out gusts. She focused all of her attention on the process, like she was unwrapping a fragile mummy. She curled and uncurled her toes. Then she began on the buttons of her heavy cotton men's shirt, which had her name embroidered onto a tag on the front.
"A trench?"
"Out back."
"What do you know about trenches?" Ma asked, wrestling with her buttons.
"Joel thinks it's a grave," I said and felt Joel's fist hit the small of my back.
Ma stopped and looked at each one of our faces. Her shirttails were pulled out and unbuttoned from the bottom, splitting open toward her heart.
"Naps," she said, "all of you. Right now."
We didn't sleep. We lay, the three of us in one bed, fanning ourselves with paper fans, our black polish melting in the sweat. We listened to Ma in the kitchen, opening and closing the cupboards. Joel joked about her painted toenails, their pinkness wrapped up inside those sweat socks and work boots all day.
"You see how excited she is to come home and see them toes again?" he asked. "She's toe proud. Toe crazy."
The back door creaked open and we went to the window. We didn't risk leaning out, but we could see Ma clear enough. She was standing at the edge of the hole, smoking and peering down inside. Then she stepped in and disappeared from view; she lay herself down in that hole, and not more than a minute later, the sky cracked, and the rain dropped down—pouring rain, sheets of it sliding down the window like at the car wash.
"It's like she did that," Manny whispered.
"Did what?"
"Made it rain."
"Shut up."
"That hole's magic."
We went to the bathroom and grabbed two towels off the floor, then sat at the kitchen table and waited until Ma came in, streaked with mud, her hair wet and webbed across her forehead. She plopped her clothes onto the linoleum. She wasn't crying, and she wasn't angry to see us up out of bed. She took the towels and covered herself, and we followed her into the living room, where she sighed and fell down onto the couch. We got more towels and swiped at the leftover mud and wet. When we ran out, we used paper napkins until she was as clean and dry as we could get her, then we covered her with a blanket.
"Does he think I'll just take this?" she asked, but she wasn't asking us.
Sitting on the floor in front of the couch, with our knees held to our chests, we dared each other to go out into the hole. The rain had tapered off, a summer storm, but it would still be wet, and in our imagination the hole had filled up with worms and maggots and drowned moles. We had decided not to let Paps near her, not today—we had plastic guns and camo, we were Ma's militia—so we could go out to the hole only one at a time.
Manny was first. He came back mud slicked like Ma, but we didn't move to help him clean up.
"That's a magic hole," he said, smiling. He shook like a dog and sprinkled us with filth. Joel, of course, didn't believe Manny's magic-hole bullshit, but he spent a long time out there, longer than Manny, and when he came back, his clothes were dry.
"What'd you take your clothes off or something?" Manny asked.
"Sure I did."
"And?"
Joel shrugged. "Could be. Could be magic. We'll see."
I was squeamish about mud, and even though the day was muggy and hot, I thought the mud in the hole would be cold, and I was squeamish about that as well, and worms—I could see one worm, and I knew there would be more. I took off my clothes like Joel had, all of them, and once I was naked there was nothing for it but to climb in.
It was a grave. It was my grave. Paps had dug my grave. Those were my first thoughts, and when I was fully horizontal, half submerged in puddle muck, stories about people being buried alive rushed into my mind—avalanches, mudslides, suffocation—but I had a wish, and so I stayed to wish it. I could see a squarish patch of sky, framed by the walls of the hole, and that sky calmed me some, the clouds, the blue; it would not rain again today. I felt a great distance from the house, from Ma on the couch and my brothers and Paps. The clouds seemed to move faster than I had ever known them to, and if I concentrated, if I let go enough, an understanding would blur inside of me and I could trick my body into feeling that it was moving and the clouds were still—and then I was certain that I was moving, and the hole was magic. I closed my eyes and stayed quiet and motionless but felt movement, sometimes sinking, sometimes floating away, or stretching or shrinking. I allowed myself to lose all bearings, and a long, long time passed before I wished my wish.
What pulled me out was their laughter. All four of them, Ma and Manny and Joel and Paps, growing up out of the mud above me and swaying with laughter, like trees. My brothers grabbed each other's shoulders and shook and pointed, weeping with laughter, saying, "Look at him, just look at him! Just look at that baby!"
And Ma was saying that it was OK, that I could come out now. "You come on out of that trench," she was saying.
And Paps was leaning down and reaching to help me up; he was telling me that the war was over.