The twenty-dollar bill Dad took from me went into his drinking bankroll. Once he started a binge, he wouldn’t stop until every cent drained from his pockets. For two days he didn’t come home. On the second day, while we were sitting around the dinner table in front of some potatoes in red chili sauce and corn tortillas, our necks stiff, staring at the walls as if looking for scratches, Mom finally said we better go get him.
Having eaten only cornmeal that morning, my stomach gritting like hungry teeth, I sure wasn’t in any mood to go to Rico’s again. But I knew Mom. Until the problem of Dad was solved, she wouldn’t let anybody eat. Already, the red chili sauce was thickening in the potatoes, and the corn tortillas were warping like records in the sun.
“Could you take care of the baby while we’re gone?” Mom asked Magda, whose eyes stabbed angrily back at her. They’d been arguing all morning, and had established a polite buffer of silence between them.
At the pool hall, when Mom and I walked in through the doors, Dad’s friends lifted their heads and rolled their eyes, pushing back their hair. Rico, who was always fidgeting with his collar, dropped his hands and cleared his throat. He had his hair combed in a pompadour and had the look of a finicky barber. Mom asked about Dad, and Rico, tapping his finger on the counter, said he’d gone home.
It was the way he said it, too nonchalant, too nervously offhand, too guilty, actually, that made Mom suspicious right away. She began roving her eyes around the bar in a slow wandering arc, then walked straight as a divining rod into the men’s restroom. There she found Dad hiding in a toilet stall.
Although she really didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his cronies, and even though Dad came out looking cool and unfluttered, you could tell he’d been cut down a notch. He went to the counter proud as possible and ordered a beer. Rico said he couldn’t spare any more credit.
Hearing this, and turning around on his bar stool, Mr. Sanchez, our neighbor from the projects, said, “Mano, I’ll buy you beer.” He was sitting at the bar, and when he pulled out his money he almost flopped off his bar stool.
Rico twirled a quarter that spilled out of Sanchez’s pocket. “Keep your money,” he said, “Manuel has to go home.”
“No, no, I want to buy him a drink,” Mr. Sanchez said sincerely, as only someone who’d been drinking can.
“No, he is going home with his wife,” Rico said, mildly insistent. In the light of the pool hall, the waves of his brilliantined hair shone like glints of tar. He strained a smile of apology at Mom, who touched her hair like it was a mess. Then Dad slapped his hand hard on the counter, startling them both, and shouted, “If I want a beer, I can have a beer!”
Rico just stared at him, unblinking.
Dad was sore, but not stoked enough to start shoving anybody around. At worst maybe he’d throw a few fake tomahawk chops at me. He turned to me like he was going to do just that, but stopped himself. “Ahhh, el perico. How are you doing today, Perico?”
Perico, or parrot, was what Dad called me sometimes. It was from a Mexican saying about a parrot that complains how hot it is in the shade, while all along he’s sitting inside an oven. People usually say this when talking about ignorant people who don’t know where they’re at in the world. I didn’t mind it so much, actually, because Dad didn’t say it because he thought I was dumb, but because I trusted everything too much, because I’d go right into the oven trusting people all the way—brains or no brains.
That’s when Mom began to sense that Dad was angrier than he was letting on. She grabbed me by the shoulder and steered me out the door. Some girls were coming out of the Azteca Theater down the street, giggling, pulling on each other’s braids, and there was a station wagon parked on the curb loaded with about ten noisy kids. When I looked back I saw Dad through the window lean forward on the counter, rubbing his chin like it was sore.
Mom hurried me along, whisking her head back every once in a while to see if Dad was following. Her lips were twisting funny and churning on words I couldn’t hear above the hum of car tires. Stretching my T-shirt, she hurried me along with shoves, a couple of times even punching me on the shoulder. Each car grinding its gears on the street I thought was Dad pulling up beside us and ordering us inside the car. Tiny splinters of light were flittering away from the grass when we got back to the projects.
Right away Mom told Magda, who was putting cold cream on her face, to go visit Linda, her girlfriend who lived down the block. She didn’t have to tell her twice. It took about three seconds for Magda to rush out the door, wiping cold cream off her face with a towel.
Mom figured Dad would come home in a lousy mood, but that he wouldn’t do anything to me, since really, deep down Dad liked me. She told me to stay home and watch over Pedi, who was asleep, then wrote something on a piece of paper, folded it, and laid it on the table.
When he came home, Dad threw his cigarette on the porch and stubbed it with his heel. The evening air must have built back the balance in his legs, because he was walking straighter. He was swishing and slapping a chinaberry branch against his pant leg. He pulled out another cigarette, but left it dead and bobbing on his lips.
Because Mom sometimes polished the floor in the late afternoon, he was careful to not step into any scary, heart-fluttering slides. Once inside the door, he strained to see in the half light, then leveled the stick under his eye, signaling that I should go to my room.
When he was working for the city, every payday Dad used to come home lugging in boxes of groceries. He’d walk into the living room, and all the pictures, tiny statues and glass animals Mom collected would sparkle from the light rushing in through the door. It was like his coming home made them sparkle. Now he came home late, usually, with nothing—no rent money, no car money, no food money, no sparkle. And mostly he came home drunk, his face drowsy with booze, rambling about how he lost his job, or how the pain in his back felt like a broken-tooth gear, cranking and cranking.
Dad tossed the stick onto the couch. He began talking to himself in this polite, official voice. He sometimes unlocked this voice from under his tongue when he wanted to pump his words up to impress himself. It also meant he wanted to distance himself from us, to make us all strangers, so that nothing we said could touch him.
“I’m home!” he announced, loudly. “I said, ‘I’m home.’ Did you hear me?” He looked at the floor, and although it was scrubbed clean, acted like there was a surf of dirt rising to his ankles. “What is this? What is this mess? How can a man come home to a mess like this?”
He roamed his eyes around the kitchen, opening his arms as if expecting the walls to agree with him. He took a step toward me, then changed his mind and sat down at the yellow Formica table. The paper on the table was still creased but folded open, because I’d read it.
“What the hell is this, goddamn it?” he said. He flicked down his unlit cigarette and picked up the paper. “She wants to leave me. That’s what she wants to do,” he said, glancing at the paper and tossing it back on the table.
“No, she doesn’t, Dad,” I said. “She says she went to get her hair done at Sophie’s.”
Burying his hands in his pockets and cradling in his shoulders, like he was cold, Dad said, “That pinche Sophie, filling her head with ideas.” His face, which he’d kept alert since walking through the door, softened, and his eyes floated around the kitchen. Then he got up and veered down the hallway, a skirt of hair oil, beer and cigarette smoke wafting in the ammonia air. He paused at the door of his room. “I’ll fix her,” he said.
Dad pulled out his rifle from the shelf of his closet, and after checking the loader began searching for bullets, waking up Pedi, who groaned and rubbed her eyes. He swung open the bathroom cabinet, his drunk hand shoveling and knocking over toothbrushes, shaving cream, half-empty bottles of cologne that he’d always buy and never finish. Remembering all the places where Mom hid his liquor bottles, he stumbled around opening cupboards, reaching far back into shelves and behind pipes under the kitchen sink. He scattered Mom’s animal collection, slapping her little glass and ceramic cows, pigs, donkeys, even rhinos and an elephant off the shelves. With one swoosh of his arm, he thrashed to the floor my green plastic tyrannosaurus.
I was behind him all the way, picking up and putting things back the best I could, trying not to trample over Pedi, awake and helping Dad look for the bullets. I was begging him to please respect reason, but quickly found myself saying, “But Dad, if you shoot Mom, they’ll only throw you in jail. Then what will happen to us?”
“I don’t care what happens to you,” Dad clipped, “only Pedi. Isn’t that right, mija?” he said to Pedi. “You’re the only one your dad cares about?”
Pedi was really awake now, and excited, working her legs and stabbing her chubby hands in the air. In the pantry, she tipped over cans of tomatoes and string beans. She thought Daddy was playing a game, that he was going to show her how to shoot the gun. She wanted to hear it go khurrr, like in the movies. She wanted to see something collapse at the end of the barrel when the sound trailed off.
“Pedi, cut that out!” I said.
“You shut up! My mija is helping me, not you!” Dad said, kicking away clothes that he’d flung out of the closet.
“Dad,” I said, trying to be calm. “You have to understand, you’ll only get in trouble….”
My words weren’t worth a penny in his ears.
“I don’t care about trouble,” he said. “It’s that bruja, that witch, I’ve had it up to here with her.” He jerked the rifle up to show how high he’d had it up to with my mom and smacked the barrel against his forehead. He shifted the rifle to his other hand and touched the hurt, relieved when his fingers came away clean.
He found some bullets, finally, inside Mom’s dresser drawer, knotted up in one of her old bras. In his anxiousness to untie the straps, he scattered the bullets all over the floor. Rocking a little on his heels, he waited for Pedi to pick them up. She could get into corners and at one that spun like a pinwheel under the bed. I also picked up a bullet, but stashed it in my pocket.
“Here you go, Daddy, here,” Pedi gushed, handing him three copper-headed .22 bullets. She ducked her head down and was about to scurry for more when Dad stepped out the door. “Wait, Daddy, wait for me!” Pedi yelled, running down the hall after him. At the door, Dad strained the hydraulic screen wide, and when it sprung back, it slammed against Pedi’s face. She fell back on her butt and began to cry.
“Oh, Pedi, you stupid!” I said, then rushed out searching for Dad.
The sky was a soft glow, pushing the houses, trees and electric posts forward in relief. I found Dad hammering on the kitchen door of Sophie’s house, swearing at Sophie and Mom to quit being cowards and let him in. The lights of the kitchen blinked off, blacking the house, but then turned on again and another weaker light came on in the living room.
I rushed over to the front just in time to see Mom bolt across the porch, scared out of her mind. She had pink roller sponges cinched into her hair and an apron tied clumsily around her neck. Bobby pins dangled from her half-finished curls. She knew Dad was angry. She was just trying to blossom herself up, but Dad didn’t understand that. He didn’t know how awful she felt about embarrassing him at the pool hall. She ran toward the crowd of maple trees where the trunks were thick and black against the soft night.
I yelled, “Mom!” and realized my mistake right away. Dad heard me, and came swerving around the corner. He was trying to slide a bullet into the chamber of the rifle, but it slipped through his fingers onto the ground. He left it there in a dark cradle of dirt and tried another, but that one got stuck in the loader. He wrestled with the bolt arm. “Where? Where’s your mother?” he said, stumbling.
“Over there!” I yelled, pointing to the other side of Sophie’s house.
Dad didn’t even turn to where I pointed. From the corner of his eye, he caught the dark clump of Mom running, and ran after her. When she disappeared behind a tree, he froze, shifting his knees, the barrel of the rifle alert and ready. For an instant I caught a glimpse of her tiptoeing away from a tree. Dad saw her too and banged on the bolt arm. She started with a jolt and began running again, ducking and dodging from tree to tree, as Dad, frustrated with the loader because it wouldn’t eat the bullet, and not wanting her to escape, pretended to lock a bullet in the chamber and level aim. He even lifted the barrel and made a shooting noise with his lips. Kapow. Kapow. Mom flinched her shoulders every time he did it, too.
Then I heard the police. Not the siren of the police or the blink blink of quick lights, but the hush of deep-threaded tires pressing against asphalt, an engine that wound and gathered like a powerful animal. I felt a pressure in my throat, and my legs were full of cement. “Get back to the house,” I yelled in a thick voice. “Get back to the house!”
Dad stopped and turned around. He saw the police car pulling up from the street bordering our projects, then the lights, flash flash, and rushed back toward the house.
“Come on, Mom,” I shouted, waving her in like into home plate. “The police are coming!” She started bustling toward me. When she passed me, she was breathing fast and her hair smelled of perm solution.
When we got back to the house, Dad was standing in the middle of the living room like he was lost, the rifle dangling in his right hand. Mom snatched up Pedi, still whimpering, and smacked her on the butt to get her moving. She splashed the curtains shut, and turned off the lamp, then headed for the hallway. Before reaching it, we all heard police shoes grating on the sidewalk, and Mom turned quickly toward Dad, who was holding the rifle like it was too much weight for him. I thought she was going to slap him, but instead she wrestled the rifle out of his hands and ran with it down the hallway.
That’s when the two cops arrived. Seeing Dad through the screen door, they stiffened, pressing their hands against their leather holsters. But then they loosened their shoulders when they saw that he was just standing there. They slowly stretched back the hydraulic door and came into the room, crouching at the knees, just to be safe, their eyes roving around.
Unfortunately, they also saw Mom’s shadow against the hallway wall, shoved out by the light of Magda’s room. She must have been frozen there, wondering what to do with the rifle. I thought the police were going to panic and start shooting, thinking maybe Mom was there to ambush them, but they seemed to guess right away what was going on.
When Mom moved away, the cop in front asked Dad about the rifle. He was a large man with burly arms, soft with a yellow fur of hair. The two stomach buttons on his shirt were open wide enough to stick a softball through.
“What rifle?” Dad said, trying to straighten himself to appear sober.
“Are you Mr. Hernandez?”
“Yes, officer, I am,” Dad said, tossing his hand in the air.
“Well, sir,” said the policeman. “We have a report here that a man from this house was pointing a weapon around the neighborhood.” He switched on a flashlight, and flicked the beam around the room, lighting a moon on Mom’s glass-top table and pausing on the large picture of the Last Supper, framed in gold plastic and with cherub angels mounted on each corner. Then he relaxed his wrist and crossed the beam from Dad to me with a careless flicker.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dad said.
“The report we received, Mr. Hernandez, claims you were trying to shoot your wife.”
“That’s crazy! My wife’s over there.” He pointed to Mom, who came down the hallway with Pedi, her eyes big as wheels, clutching at her skirt.
“Mrs. Hernandez?” the officer asked, as if trying to make her out in the dark.
Mom nodded, shielding her hair. She pressed at a drooping curl near her ear and glanced over at Dad, who dropped his eyes.
“Mrs. Hernandez,” the officer said again, lifting his fist to his mouth and letting out a loud, ratchety cough, “as I was explaining to your husband, we received a report that a man was trying to shoot his wife. The report mentions this address and both your names.”
Mom didn’t say anything. Instead, she raised her eyes to the ceiling, breathing deep, as if gathering enough air to blow up a balloon. She stood like that for a while, hands on her hips, holding in her lungs. Her face appeared calm and lifted, as if she were listening to soft guitar music from far away.
Both officers studied her curiously and exchanged glances, the one in back still alert, his hand stiff on his holster and thumb cocked like a talon over the gun hammer.
Mom’s curious silence nudged Dad into a small panic. “We don’t know what you’re talking about, officer,” he said, shuffling toward her. “No one is trying to do anything here. Besides, we don’t have a gun. Rebecca, tell him we don’t have a gun.”
Her eyes, which had opened wide from holding in her breath, blinked and glazed over, then she released the air from her lungs and began breathing deeply, evenly, fingering a curl of hair near her ear. Dad egged her again with his palm to please say something, but she only stared at a blank spot on the wall.
“You can see nothing’s wrong here, officer,” Dad said, nervously.
“Well, Mr. Hernandez, the truth is, that when we came in through the door, we saw your wife here taking away what looked to us like a firearm.”
“But we don’t have a firearm,” Dad said again, trying to staunch their worries.
The first officer grimaced suspiciously, then he raised his flashlight and nodded to the other who, with eyes shifting and hand still braced on his pistol, walked past Mom and disappeared down the hallway. We all stood there—Dad, Mom, Pedi, the first officer, and me—looking, not looking at each other. A moment later, the other officer came out holding the .22.
“I found it in the last room, under the bed,” he said, waving it in the air in reluctant triumph.
The first officer slowly shook his head and sighed, rubbing his finger reflectively along a deep crease on his forehead. “Now, Mr. Hernandez. I don’t want to hear any more about how we don’t have a rifle, because there’s obviously a rifle here. And I don’t want to hear anything about this particular rifle not being yours, because I’m fairly sure that it is.” He sighed again and with a slow shake of his head took the rifle from the other officer’s hand. He shined the flashlight on it, inspecting it, turning it over in his hand and squinching his eyes at a mark under the barrel.
“Mr. Hernandez,” he said, finally, straightening his shoulders. “I don’t want to have to tell you this, but I’m sorry, we’re going to have to confiscate this rifle.”
I saw ice freeze around Dad’s eyes. “You can’t take my rifle,” he said abruptly, in a voice I knew meant trouble.
“Mr. Hernandez,” the officer said, unbinding his shoulders some more, “there doesn’t seem to be any registration number on this rifle. It’s against the law to have an unregistered firearm.”
That’s when Mom, dragging Pedi along with her, went over and stuck her finger inside Dad’s belt loop.
Seeing this, the first officer waved a cautious hand at her and stepped over to his partner. He leaned into his ear, nodded and turned back to Dad. “Mr. Hernandez, we’re taking the rifle. If you want it back, you’ll have to come to the station. But I don’t advise you do that, sir. I really don’t. I’m sure the Chief will want to ask a lot more questions about this rifle.”
“Don’t take it,” Dad said. His voice was thick, and he was beginning to breathe harder. I saw a redness flow up the vein of his neck and gather in a puddle of wine under his ear.
That’s when Mom pulled on his belt loop, enough to bend him a bit at the waist, and to my relief Dad loosened a little. “Look,” he said, more calmly, “you can’t take it. I wasn’t doing anything.”
The officer narrowed his eyes and lowered the rifle along his leg. He tucked his chin into his shoulder and signaled with one eye to the other officer, who instantly became alert. “I’m sorry then, Mr. Hernandez,” he said, “we’re going to have to take you in for possession of an illegal firearm.”
Before any more talk, and moving as if studying his own movements, the second officer walked over to Mom and slowly, as if trying to be polite, lifted her hand away from Dad’s belt loop. Then with a smooth, relaxed quickness, he took hold of Dad’s arms and just like that handcuffed him. Dad seemed to be stunned into feebleness by the speed in which the officer worked. All he could say was “You can’t take my rifle…you can’t take my rifle,” his voice sinking into a plea.
The first officer turned to Mom and raised a hand of apology. “Mrs. Hernandez, I sure am sorry about this. I sure am, believe me.”
But Mom wasn’t listening. She seemed to still be hearing something in the air. Then her face became more alert, and she turned to the officer leading Dad out of the door. “Take him,” she said, softly at first, then with decided anger. “Go ahead, take him!”
After the police had gone, Mom sat on the couch a long time staring at the floor. I noticed that she didn’t appear tired, but more like the muscles needed to move her face were numb. The curtains were closed, and there were no lights, but my eyes adjusted to the dark. The walls of the room, like in all the houses in our neighborhood, were Sheetrock, painted white, but in the darkness everything looked gray. The frame of the Last Supper, with its gold-colored flange and cherub angels, looked as gray as a plastic-model battleship. Even the glass-top table mirrored a reflection of gray.
Seeing a dark spot on the floor, Mom bent over and picked up a little donkey, staring at it, and delicately turning it over in her fingers as if expecting a hoof to suddenly click off. “You know,” she said, “I don’t even have a vacuum cleaner. Sophie has a vacuum cleaner. So does Mrs. Lopez. When the police came, I heard Mrs. Lopez’s vacuum cleaner. It sounded like it was really picking up dirt.”
Ever since seeing a demonstration by a plaid-suited man who came to our door, Mom had always wanted a vacuum cleaner. The man threw dirt and cigarette ash on our bathroom drop rug and to our amazed eyes sucked it all away. “There’s an attachment you can hold in your hand,” he had said. “That way you can get into cabinets and corners. You don’t need any cloth rags. You don’t need a broom. It does all the work for you.”
My legs weakened, like someone had pulled a plug from my ankles and drained all my energy, so I sat down on the couch. “Mom,” I said, “Mom….”
She wasn’t listening. She lay back on the couch and lifted her arm, resting it on her forehead, as if the heat were unbearable.
“Mom,” I said again. “When do you think they’re going to let Dad out?”
“When I go pay the bail.”
“How much is the bail?”
“I don’t know. But it’s too much, I know that.” Her voice sounded muffled, as though she were talking through stuffed cotton. She carefully placed the donkey on the glass table. “They’ll just have to let him out when they decide to let him out.”
After sitting quietly there with Mom for a while, I got up and went into Pedi’s room. Her face was moist and fevery, and she was whimpering. All the excitement had opened up something bad inside her, and with her two fists pressed tightly against her chest, she was trying to close it. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the bullet I’d picked up earlier and wedged it between her fingers. That seemed to quiet her a little.