The Moths and Other Stories (14 page)

He pounded on the door. “Please!” She pressed her hands against her ears until his howl was abruptly silenced by a dull thud. When the two policemen dragged him down the porch steps, she could hear the creak of their thick leather belts rubbing against their bullets. She began to cry.

It was not until way into the night, after she locked each window, each door, after her neighbors had retreated behind their T.V.s leaving her alone once again, that she remembered the last thing Rubén yelled as the patrol cars drove off, the last words he said as he struggled with the handcuffs.

“We'll get you,” he said. “You'll see.”

For several days the brooding clouds began to form into animal and plant shapes until they finally burst, pelting her windows with rain. Fearful of her light bulbs attracting lightning, she turned them off and was content to sit in the dark next to the stove while the gas burners flickered blue and yellow fire upon the wall. She sat there quietly with a quilt over her shoulders, her shadow a wavering outline of a woman intimidated by natural forces. Aura sat and listened to the monotony of seconds, the thunderclaps, the pelting against her windows. It was only after the rain had subsided that a faint nasal melody playing against a rusty needle penetrated her darkness, and she cocked her head to listen. Aura carried her chair to the washroom window. She seated herself, pulled up the Venetian blind slats and sought the source of the music.

The music was faint, barely an audible tune, but she recognized it just the same. She pressed her face against the coldness of the window glass and tried to remember why the song seemed so familiar. The Hallmark dance floor. She remembered the Hallmark dance floor and smiled. The toilet tank had been broken, and for a few dollars, plus tips, she was hired to fill buckets of water and pour them in the tank after every flush. She was thirteen years old, and the manager, a round stout man who wore a bulky gold diamond ring
on his small finger, warned her against peaking out the door. She remembered sitting next to the sinks with her buckets full, tapping her feet to the rhythm of the music, as she did now, listening intently. And she imagined, as she imagined then, the prism ball encircling the couples with pieces of diamond specks. She recalled the glitter, the laughter, conversations, the thick level of cigarette smoke which hovered over the dancers so that it seemed they were dancing in clouds. It was nice to hear the laughter again, and mist collected on the window from her slow breathing. As night filtered in, Aura made out a silhouette against the shade of Fierro's room, and she recognized the massive shape immediately. The woman was dancing, slow lazy movements like those of a Sunday summer breeze teasing a field of tall grass. She held a scarf and slowly manipulated it as though it were a serpent. Fierro was laughing. The laugh was an unfamiliar sound to Aura's ears, as if a screw had loosened somewhere inside his body and began to rattle. But he continued to laugh a laugh that came from deep within and surfaced to express a genuine enjoyment of living.

Aura felt like an intruder, peering into their bedroom window and witnessing their intimacy. Although she hated herself for spying, she could not pry herself away from the window, away from the intimacies, away from the tune she had buried so far down that she had forgotten its existence. She listened way into the night, keeping the rhythm of the music with her foot, until the record finished with a scratch and Aura went to bed, cold under the bleached, white sheets.

Aura was in the mood to dance, to loosen her inhibitions from the tight confines of shoes and explore a barefoot freedom she had never experienced in her wakeful hours. But she awoke to stare at her feet, to inspect the swelling, to let reality slowly sink in, and she was thankful and quite satisfied simply to be able to walk.

She dressed slowly because she felt weak and uneasy, and at first attributed the hollowness of her stomach to the medication she had taken throughout those endless nights. But when she lifted the blinds to the washroom window and saw the woman standing barefoot on the porch, tossing bread
crumbs to the pigeons while her bracelets clinked with every toss, Aura knew it was not the medication. She watched the woman scratch beneath her huge breasts while she yawned, then turn towards the door, closing it with a loud slam. Aura's heart sank like an anchor into an ocean of silence. She drew the blinds quietly.

In the kitchen Aura flipped up the lid of the coffee can, spooned the grinds into the percolator, dropped in a stick of cinnamon, and put the pot to boil. When the coffee was done, she poured herself a cup. It was bitter, and the more she thought about the woman, the more bitter the coffee became. She heard the children of Bixby Street, who were especially happy to see the storm pass. Having been imprisoned by the rains, they were now freed from behind their doors and allowed to run the streets under the bright sun. Aura heard their shouts, their laughter, and she yearned to feel right again.

She collected a sunbonnet, gloves and garden tools. Since the rainfall had soaked the soil, she could not pass up the opportunity to weed out her garden, and even though her movements were sluggish, she prepared herself for a day's work.

Once outside and under the bright sun, Aura was blinded for a moment. She bit her fist in disbelief. Most of the graffiti was sprayed on her front porch with black paint, but some of it was written with excrement. As she slowly stepped down, she inspected the windows, steps, walkway, pillars, all defaced with placas, symbols, vulgarities. She rushed over the chayote vine and made a feeble attempt to replant it, but everything, her flowers, chayotes, gardenias, rose bushes, were uprooted and cast aside. Some of her bushes were twenty years old, having begun as cuttings from her mother's garden. She had spent years guiding and pruning and nurturing them until they blossomed their gratitude. She tried unsuccessfully to restore them, the thorns scratching her face, her bare hands bleeding. When she fell to her knees and began clawing away at the mud in hopes of saving some of her bushes, she failed to notice that the children had stopped their play and stood in front of her yard, their red, puffy faces peering from between her wrought-iron bars. It was their look of bewilderment and pity that made her realize the hopelessness of her actions.

“Leave me alone!” Aura screamed at the children, raising her arms like a menacing bird. “Leave me alone or I'll…,” she shouted, and the children scattered in all directions like cockroaches. She stood up, her knees trembling, and took one last look at her plants. All that remained intact was her chinaberry tree. Aura slowly returned to the house, her hands dangling uselessly at her side. “I'm so glad,” she thought, fighting back the tears as the mutilated bushes began shriveling under the morning sun. “I'm so glad I'm going to die soon.”

She closed the door behind her, made sure all the locks were locked, unrolled the Venetian blinds, closed the drapes. She heard Rubén's voice: “We'll get you.” Picking up the phone, she decided against calling the police and making another mistake. Fierro? She was totally alone. “We'll get you, you'll see.” She would have to take care of herself. She was marked, proof to other neighbors that indeed the “BIXBY BOYS RULE,” as they had sprayed the neighborhood in huge bold letters. NO. She refused to be their sacrificial lamb. She shook her head as she got a candlestick out of the linen closet. She pushed the kitchen table aside, grunting under its weight, then rolled up the carpet. She lit the candlestick and opened the cellar door because she refused to be helpless.

Cupping the faint flicker of the candle, she slowly descended into the gut of the cellar, grasping at the spider webs which blocked the way to her destination. She ignored the distorted shadows of the undisturbed furniture, ignored the scent of moistened, decayed years, and moved towards the pile of boxes stacked in the corner. She opened the first box with little difficulty, the motes of dust dancing around her until they settled once again to begin a new accumulation of years. She dug her hands into the box, groping, feeling beneath the objects, kitchen utensils, books, photographs, but found nothing. She threw the box aside and opened another. And another. With each box her anger and desperation rose so that the search became frantic, almost obsessive. Finally, in the last of the boxes, her fingers froze to the cool touch. She blew the dust away and examined it like the foreign object that it was. It felt cold and clumsy in her small hand. Nonetheless, she triumphantly placed the gun in her apron pocket and blew out the last of the candlestick.

As the days passed, Fierro knew little of what went on in the neighborhood. When he heard the sirens and screams and CB radios spitting out messages, he refused to go outside for fear of finding Chuy's body limp and bloody once again. Then, this morning as he turned from his side of the bed to examine the woman's slow breathing, he couldn't imagine what had caused Aura to scream so loudly that it startled him out of a sleepy daze, though he wore no hearing aid. All that Fierro knew was that he awoke one morning to find the warm mass of a woman sleeping beside him, and this was enough to silence any curiosity. He also knew never to ask a question if he wasn't prepared for the answer, and so he was content to let her stay for as long as she wanted without even asking her name.

Fierro sat up in bed, rubbed his eyes, palmed his hair back, yawned the last of his sleep away. As though in thoughtful meditation, he allowed his body to slowly return to consciousness, allowed the circulation to drive away the numbness from his limbs. Only then was he ready to make the walk across the room to the bathroom. He winced as he walked on the cold floor, and he took one last look at the woman before he closed the door.

Inside the bathroom, Fierro urinated, washed his hands and face in cool water, inspected the day's growth of beard in the mirror. He rinsed his dentures under running water, then slipped them into his mouth, clacking his jaws twice to make sure they fell securely in place. Not until he had almost finished his shave did it occur to him that he had been humming. While he stood in front of the mirror, his raspy voice vibrated a tune. A ballroom-dancing, nice-smelling-women tune. He hummed louder as he shook some Wildroot into his hands and palmed his hair a second time. He combed it into a glossy ducktail, smoothed his mustache, smiled. He was about to slap on some cologne when Chuy stopped him.

“Can I do it,” his young son asked eagerly. As he had done every morning, the boy stood on the toilet seat to watch his father's daily shave. He was small and thin, and the crotch of his underwear hung to his knees. “Can I?” Chuy repeated.

The boy had great respect for the daily shave. He would watch his father maneuver the single blade across his cheek with the same admiration he felt watching a performer swallow a sword. But Chuy knew that, unlike sword swallowing, shaving would be accessible if only he studied it with the watchful eye of an apprentice. So it was a ritual each morning to spend the time necessary to stare at the blade, apply the cologne, and touch his own cheek for hair growth.

“Ay, qué Mi'jo. ¿Por qué no?” Fierro poked his son's belly with the bottle. He handed it to Chuy and tugged up his calzones. While the boy shook a few drops onto his palm, Fierro noticed how dirty his son's fingernails were. He would bathe him when he returned home.

“Ready?” Chuy asked. He kept his eyes on the palm of his hand, then when Fierro was close enough, he slapped his father's face as hard as he could. Fierro's exaggerated wince made the boy laugh.

“Now your turn.” The boy enjoyed this part of the ritual because his father's scent would be with him all day. Fierro shook the scented rose water onto his cement-burned hand. But time had a way of passing so that the few seconds it took to shake out some of his son's favorite cologne turned into years, and the admiration in the boy's eyes had disappeared.

“I'm 19. I think I can do it myself.” Fierro felt the rose water dripping through his fingers. It seemed like only yesterday…The bathroom seemed too small now, and they both elbowed one another. Fierro finally won over the mirror, but the defeat did not keep Chuy from trying to catch a glimpse of himself from behind his father's shoulders.

“Where do you think you're going?” Fierro asked, looking at Chuy's reflection, his face threatening a mustache. The answer was automatic: “Out.”

“Don't get smart, Chuy.” Fierro was becoming increasingly disturbed that Chuy was running the streets. “Hijo, you're not a dog. You have a home to live, to sleep, to eat in.”

“Listen, Jefe,” Chuy replied, tired of the same Saturday-night dialogue. “I'm old enough to know what I'm doing.”

“Then why don't you act like it?”

“Shit, Jefe. Lay off for once.”

“Qué lay off, ni qué ojo de hacha,” Fierro replied angrily. “And don't be using that language with me, you understand?” There was an icy silence. Chuy combed his hair back. He
waited patiently for the right time to break the silence and still save face. Finally: “Listen, Apá. I'm not going cruising, if that's what you want to know.”

Fierro thought for a moment. Finally: “Good, mijito. Good. It's just that those chavalos are a bunch of good-for-nothings. Thieves. Murderers and thieves.”

“You forgot tecatos.”

“That, too.”

“They're my friends.”

“Bah! Qué friends! Look what they did to the Reyes boy.”

Chuy bent over to smooth out the creases of his khaki pants, unconcerned by the accusation. When he looked up, he was face to face with his father. Barely whispering he said, “He had it coming to him.”

“Do you really, really believe that?” In disbelief he looked into his son's eyes and realized how little he really knew him. How could anyone deserve to be murdered? It grieved him to think that Chuy was no different than the rest. But he was; Chuy, his son, his boy, had a good heart, and that made him different. Bad ways, but a good heart. Chuy defiantly returned his father's stare until his face broke into a smile.