Bloodline Read online

  When you shake more vigorously, then, then it rains.

  Pecans pelt the white sheet. A meager showing at first. A sprinkling, soon a cascade. Then a deluge. You do this a few more times, and your grandmother and Ophelia catapult their voices and their laughter so that the tree doesn’t seem so daunting.

  After, Ophelia helps your grandmother gather the thin sheet’s corners, the whole fabric bundles with nuts, and your grandmother watches you descend.

  “Do you want the ladder?” she asks.

  You decline.

  Once the descent is manageable, you stare at the ground, and your heart pumps itself softly into the hole in your throat. You look around. The sky is a fury. The sky is orange like the flesh of autumn if autumn had a body and a beating heart and blood and air in its lungs. The sky is listening. The roof of the house glistens. The tree quivers, quakes. You feel a little bit cold again. And then, you jump.

  “This is how we used to collect pecans,” your grandmother says to Ophelia at the sink. “When I was a little girl.”

  In the kitchen, your grandmother rinses the pecans, and you ask where your uncle has gone. She ignores the question.

  The water in the sink makes its metallic din.

  Ophelia prepares sweet tea for your grandmother.

  Destiny chases a pecan that wobbles across the floor. She’ll busy herself with this for a while.

  At first, your grandmother feigns not hearing. So you ask again. “Where is Tío? Do you know where he’s gone?”

  But she shrugs her shoulders and hums, focusing on cleaning the hard brown shells. The water splashes as it hits her hands in so many directions it juts and courses into the drain. She shrugs her shoulders and hums and rinses the pecans and asks you to check the dryer, because she does not want the clothes in it to wrinkle.

  “The hangers. In the long closet. In the hallway.”

  Ophelia plays with Destiny, throws a green teddy bear and waits for the chubby dog to retrieve it, which she does, again and again, over and over. The bear flies, and the dog jumps. The bear squeals and is covered in matted drool.

  Near Saint Michael, you think of the hangers, reaching for the knob of the closet door.

  On most days, your grandmother’s silence is brittle, can be broken, but now it’s grown thicker. It’s a silence much like the trunk of a tree, dense, impassable to most things.

  The truth is, something has happened between you. You can’t say what it is. You can’t name it or grab it with your hands.

  You grab the hangers and fold the T-shirts and socks and your uncle’s underwear on the sofa.

  Ophelia helps you.

  21

  On the day your mother left, you were three. It was the afternoon, and you were sleeping. You can’t recall much, but you know that one day, after a tumult, after exchanging harsh, bitter words with your grandmother, your mother stuffed armfuls of her things into a backpack and a few white kitchen trash bags, which bloated like megamarshmallows as they filled with the quickly gathered belongings your mother would take when she left. You remember this was a time of great sadness, because your father had just died.

  You remember the bags were fat like alabaster Jabba the Hutts, that they grew like plump little ghosts that could not stop themselves from consuming the happiness of the world. You were very young. You wondered if you, too, would fit in those bags. Where would your things go? How could she not want to take you, too?

  You were old enough to know that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

  You were not old enough to know the reasons adults do the things they do.

  You were not old enough to know she was leaving you behind.

  But why you fell asleep you will never be able to say.

  It is a sleep you remember, though you were so young.

  Sometimes you don’t want to fall asleep at all.

  Sometimes you wish you could stay awake forever. But you know that’s unreal. You know that’s unlikely and silly. You recognize sleep is good for you, vital for growth and bones and good, strong skin and clear thoughts, like the health teacher at school made you learn. You scored a 105 on that quiz—the new, improved you. Good Job, he scribbled at the top of your paper in green curled ink, near the score and beside your name.

  God knows you are trying to do good.

  That next morning when you awoke, the moon was still out, and your mother was gone. Like a pilot on a singular mission, you whizzed about the empty sky of the house, searching for her. A frantic trek. A trajectory that bounced the heart off the walls, over the sofas and tables, toward the roof and into the hard linoleum floors. You looked and looked. You sat by the door. You looked out the windows. But you never saw her again.

  “Don’t cry, chiquito,” your grandmother whispered.

  She held you as you cried. You cried hard that morning. Gray clouds cluttered the sky of your little huddled heart and outside, in the rest of the world, too. You didn’t eat, and she had to go to work then, your grandmother, after a few days of watching over your despair. Pokémon played on TV. You were three or three and a half. A cousin, Leticia, came to watch you, and though she tried to get you to play games or watch movies or eat sweets, to do anything that might cause you to abandon your sadness, even if only temporarily, even if only for a minute, you sat plaintively in a wooden chair by the window, your mouth cemented by sobs, holding the red curtain of heaviness in your little fist all afternoon.

  “She’ll be back,” Leticia claimed, rubbing her slim hands through your hair.

  But you knew she was just saying this. Sometimes, no matter who you are or how old you’ve grown, you just know.

  This is what you think of as you lay in bed on the night before your fight.

  22

  When you die, it is nothing like what they say it is like in movies and TV shows and books.

  In fact, it happens much like an eyelid happens to your iris whenever you blink. Why are you blinking? It doesn’t matter, because it just is. Like the last moment you are awake, before the sky becomes dark. In this way, the mind soothes the body into slumber, or the body does so to its thoughts, quells them, dims them into the one moment you are vivid and conscious and able to name things and then, then, you are not.

  For you, it happened on a Thursday.

  For you, it was supposed to be the chance to make something vast and enormous happen.

  For you, it began with the little animal inside your heart, the livid one, the one made of rage and frustration and fear and wonder. What fears? That you were nobody and that there was nothing else in the world meant for you to do but be lonely, but lay in the noisy little bed that once belonged to your dad but not know and not see your reflection in your footsteps or in water. That little animal. It’s the reason your uncle came back to live in your grandmother’s house. It’s the reason he took an interest in who you were and what you could do.

  When you heard about the fight he could set up for you, you thought twice.

  You really did.

  You remembered what Becky had said all those times about earning things, waiting for them, paying your dues through hard work and patience, going without in order to come out good in the end. The other option? Going for broke. Running wild and leaping toward the first sign of fast money and breakneck success. For this reason, Becky decided you wouldn’t work during high school, because if you gained the taste for money too early, it would spoil you, lure you away from schooling and a career and into a dependency that would be difficult later to step away from. “Money will do that,” she said to your grandmother on the day you agreed you would wait until graduation to work.

  When he finds you, you are sitting in your room with Destiny. She is chewing the little green bear Becky and your grandmother bought her on one of their trips to the Dollar Store. Destiny has gnawed off its ear, and the evidence, an amputated ear, sticks between her teeth.

  “You gave me your word, Abraham,” your Uncle Claudio reminds you that night, after the
house has shut down and he has knocked on your door. He stands over you like a shelf with too much emptiness for you to decipher what it means or what it carries, what it offered you, really. You realize in that instant that no matter what you’d been taught, there was always that chance that the world really was better with whirlwind risk and big payoffs, that trying and letting it all hang out might actually get you more than cowardice and caution, the playing it safe and taking it slow that Becky proposed. This is your uncle’s way: quick and fast and brutal. In the middle of December, it is what he is serving you.

  “Shouldn’t you be at work?” you ask.

  “I took the night off. For this. For your chance to start making it big. A fight. A chance,” he explains, his two big hog hands pulled over his face like gloves, wiping at his eye slats, mopping his nose. “On the other side of Elmendorf. A little ranch with men who pay big to watch other men beat the shit out of each other. Only the strong survive. You’re one of the strong, Abraham.”

  You ignore him. At first. It’s what you told yourself to do. Though the idea of money before Christmas—what you might buy Ophelia, how you might alleviate some of your grandmother’s stress over bills—smolders inside you.

  “What you think? You game, Papo? I seen what you can do. You can be a beast.”

  Still, you try to ignore it. You say inside yourself, No. No. No.

  “Eyes on the prize, Daddy. Look at me.”

  You avert your eyes.

  But he pulls your chin toward his, makes you eye him.

  Destiny stops toying with the little green bear, its stomach stitching ripped open, with white stuff jutting outward. She watches you.

  “Eyes. On. The. Prize.”

  It’s when you lock eyes, when you see yourself in those two dark puddles—that’s when you know you are done.

  It happens faster than you’d like to admit. Your acceptance. The deal. But the drive to the ranch, the site of the fights, takes longer than you expect. Though once you’ve arrived, it doesn’t take long to know you’re in very deep.

  There is a fire and accordion music rustling through a thicket. Mesquite and shrubs and thistle grow so heavy you cannot see through them. When he turns off the highway, your uncle checks his phone and drives you down a muddy road, chips of hardened soil flinging upward, striking the windshield and the doors. The sky is dark, each star peering down at the earth of which you are a part, this slick, crooked scene that you are soon to become part of.

  “Today. Today is the beginning of everything we’ve been waiting for.” Your uncle dips into himself for this notion, a consideration that pries itself from his lungs and maybe the liver, even, as internalized as perhaps an idea can become in order to convince you of its veracity. “Some people, Abraham, they’re born with money. Born with opportunities. Born with every chance in the world to make it. But other people, they got to fight for everything they can get. And that’s us. Life gives us a look, and you gotta take it, Papo. Because if you don’t grab it, if you don’t claim what’s yours, somebody else will take your shit. And then you’re left sitting on the sidelines, sucking your thumb, because someone else just took something that could have belonged to you.”

  It’s a grip to your stomach. This way of seeing the world. The fear that he’s right, and if you play your cards wrong, you’re screwed for the rest of your life.

  But nothing is easy, not for people like you. Your uncle says it, and Becky and your grandmother have acknowledged that, too. Some of us just have harder lives.

  As the car approaches the ranch, the music amplifies. A man near a large fire is taking money. A small animal has been cooked, skewered with a long rod, and a man with a fat knife chisels chunks of meat from its flanks. A little goat, you think, as you drive nearer. Its tiny legs poking into the darkness, glowing. When your uncle exits the car, you think for a moment you might seize the keys, head off in the direction of the city and maneuver your way so far from this place. But instead, you wait for your uncle in his car. Your knuckles throb. Your heart quakes. You turn on the radio, spin the dial, nullify the sound inside you that thumps. You look up to the sky, at the salt of the stars, so many grains sprinkled across the blue-black night. You listen for country, and what you find is an old song, one you don’t know.

  But how can the moon be neon? you wonder. You look upward but the moon isn’t even there.

  By a tent, not too far from the little goat being carved, a couple of women drink and laugh vulgarly and show their parts to men, who pursue them into the unlit tent. You see the man taking your uncle’s money point to the other side of the fire, and then he points to the tent and grabs your uncle’s arms, and they both laugh. You hate that laugh. You note the light behind the fire is different, electric and suspended from seemingly endless wires attached to tall wooden posts. There is a house also and a stable for horses and a trailer attached to a dually truck. There is the stench of something burning, and you are afraid a few minutes later as your uncle approaches the car, adjusting himself, grinning big, staring back at the dark tent.

  There was a time when you never would have trusted him. But that time was a hundred million miles away now, though you wish it was nearer, close enough to climb out of this car and run toward it, as fast as you can, no looking back, no regrets, no second thoughts.

  If only . . .

  For a couple hundred dollars, your uncle has bought your entry into a fistfight. In an hour, you’ll vie for another three hundred if you can win.

  “Who’m I fighting?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Some guy. And you’re gonna beat his ass. No mercy, Abraham. And you’re not gonna stop beating his ass until we have our money. That’s what matters.”

  While he’s building these words, you see yourself in the side mirror. It is possible: your lips ripped, your nose smashed, red fluid smothering your chin and purple neck, the whole front side of your torso as if it’d met head on with a tractor trailer, the gash in your forehead like a black hole in the deepest, darkest field of space. A dark sap oozing from this gash. In the mirror, you are not yourself, the old music dampening into the seat cloth, and you feel like generations of lost boys are staring back at you. You hope Ophelia will never see you this way.

  And the fact is you never will see this guy. You’ll never put your fists to his face or knock your knees into his mouth or make him lose teeth. Over time, you’ve wondered if this first guy existed at all, if it wasn’t some ploy to get you in, so that you’d commit, so that you’d be game for what came next.

  “Eleven thirty,” your uncle says authoritatively. “That’s what time you go in.”

  So you wait. You sit in the car and ogle your phone. Think of texting Ophelia, but then she’d ask where you were or what you were doing, and then you’d have to lie. You don’t want to lie. You’ve mulled this over already. How you never want to lie to her. Contemplated it, jotted down the promise to yourself in your journal as you thought about your fight and the money and how everything would be different after this night while you waited for your uncle to shower and grab his shit, before you drove out to this godforsaken ranch. So you type the message, and the screen lights up the inside of the car. But the signal is weak, and it doesn’t send.

  In the car, you stare at the stars and listen to the sound of an accordion.

  “You wanna watch the first fight?” your uncle taps on the window and asks.

  Two guys are going at it underneath the electric lamps on the other side of the horses. You can hear a few cheers, but they do not last long, and then there are jeers and boos, and this, you conclude, is how these things end. A woman stumbles up behind your uncle and peers down at you.

  “Who’s this? What’s your name?” she mumbles. Her lips are candy red.

  But your mouth doesn’t move, and your heart beats very fast. The line in your throat is pumping itself full and pronounced.

  She almost falls over, but your uncle catches her.

  She is drunk and unruly, and parts of h
er hair fall into her mouth.

  “Be ready,” he barks to you, and they laugh and head off into the tents with his hands all over her skin.

  Eventually, your time comes.

  Everyone’s time comes, you have learned.

  But there’s a hindrance, or a possibility, depending on how you view life.

  “What if I told you there’s a bigger payday?” your uncle, gripping the side of the door, leans in to mutter. “A real shot at something big. Bigger than we can imagine, Papo.”

  There isn’t much time to decide. New opportunities are like this. Often you’ve only got seconds to make up your mind. And choices orchestrate life: we live and die by the choices we make, those we do not make.

  “There’s a bigger fight, Abraham, 2K. The guy on after you backed out, and now there’s a slot. I have to tell you that’s two thousand bones, Abraham. Imagine. Imagine what we could do.”

  You hear him out.

  You hear the case that he makes.

  You hear the line pounding in your neck, and you hear yourself say, No. No. No.

  But he insists. But he opens the door and he holds your hand, and his voice is on you like a swarm of ants. You can hear the tears well up in his voice. He pleads. On his knees, he grabs your face, and your eyes go to him, and he lays it all out: “This is our chance.”

  Mud appears on your uncle’s boots. You can see the puddles behind him glint, light from the ranch bouncing back into the sky, toward the clouds and the moon and the stars.

  But this wasn’t part of the deal. You know better than to go for more than you should.

  “Anything you want. I can give you anything you want,” he implores. His face swells and his eyes squint and his voice cracks. “I can tell you about your father.”