What We Are (23 page)

We came upon an old leather-skinned man working over his cock. He whispered to it in foreign yet soothing tones, as if the bird were an infant, the thin, blood-purple, ashy immigrant lips kissing into the epicenter of blood-red wings flapping, and he stroked its smooth blue head in that gentle, somewhat rough manner of earnest, loving, possessive fathers, and the bird leaned back against the man's naked brown chest with trust and maybe even affection and seemed to rub itself calm, as if there were some secret magical balm secreted by the pores of this strange Melanesian wizard.

Tali reached out and I grabbed her hand. The man, now noticing us, put that same paternal gaze upon my sister, and she immediately responded, pushing me off and stupidly reaching out and in toward the cock. The bird murmured from the deepest reaches of its
muscular chest and Tali, stroking it, was saying something like, “Good bird, beautiful bird, the colors of God,” and then the man kind of nodded the both of us away and proceeded to put a cigarette to his lips, light it with one hand, reach back down and clutch tight on the bird's middle and pull back hard on one wing so that the bird, by reflex, pulled back just as hard, and he did this over and over again until I finally lost count. He switched over to the other wing and did the same. I didn't bother counting at all this time because the repetition seemed sinister and sneaky and something we shouldn't be witnessing. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a syringe and injected the bird, still coaxing it with words I didn't understand.

Tali and I headed toward two dim, barely traceable lights in the rear corner of the yard. As we neared, I saw that a giant tarp covered the lights and also the shouting, its volume growing as we neared. It looked in its obvious hidden designs like a sidetent for some hideous circus freakshow out of the nineteenth century. By the time we opened the flap of the tent and fell toward the crowd of shirtless bettors—all squatting like catchers behind the plate, all shouting, the crumpled fans of cash pumping in their tiny brown fists, Asiatic eyes alight, riveted on the two prize birds dancing one around the other in the ring—I was floating. I could feel Tali next to me. We were surrounded by incomprehensible sounds. A strange, nasal tongue I hadn't before heard, unrestrained tones, fired off rapidly. It sounded like the banter of chickens, human chickens, as if the bettors had taken on the linguistic traits of the very animals over which they themselves were lords, a weird case of reverse osmosis. Yet I wasn't surprised by what I saw. I knew, even at nine, that the world held darker, more primitive shades of life in its palm, and this was it. The noise, the energy, the secrecy numbed my very bones. I held Tali in her place.

The birds were beautiful. One was completely white, not a blemish of color on its virgin plumage, dove white even in the bowl of dust, the regal tail feathers twice the height of its chevron head so
that my sister, a decade later in life, would mistell the story as a bout between a peacock and a chicken, ruining our credibility at a Filipino hula competition in Hayward called Hula Halau o Pilipine. The other bird was cobalt-feathered like a pair of Levi's jeans newly bought and its maroon head was the same color as the banner that sagged over the ring and read
SABONG
. Each bird had a blade tied to the heel of its right talon and then a sharpened bone lashed to the end of each wing, their cautious parry predicated by an avian understanding that the contraptions attached to their bodies were put there to expedite murder. Neither bird wore the scars of previous fights and it showed: when one hopped forward the other hopped back, this avoidance of combat happening three times over, until two bettors on opposite sides of the ring reached in with reckless haste and grabbed a bird each, contraptions and all, slapped their respective heads several times, and then threw the birds forward so they collided in an explosion of feathers midair above the ring, the crowd matching the collision with a high-pitched collective battle cry.

Now the birds fought. They moved like boxers, circling each other, moving in, moving out. The blue-and-red cock was more aggressive and as it hopped in to attack, its wings extended to their farthest reaches, a gesture of intimidation. A swift rush in and then a hammering peck with its beak, drawing blood from the other bird's muscular breast the third time through. The blood spot of a wound grew into a star-shaped crest across the clean white feathers, and the crowd, at the sight of blood, threw up more cheers. Tali was squeezing hard on my hand now as if to say, It's no longer pretty, Paul. You've got to save it.

I found myself caught on the first of what would be many destroyed bridges between two worlds: I wanted to jump into the ring and save the white cock but this was more than a matter of courage or cowardice. The red or the yellow badge. The problem was in the fiery eyes of the bettors themselves. I knew they came from a far-off place,
a place like my father's way out in the Pacific, and that the purity of this moment had to do with their own performance in the dusty bowl of the ring, and though I couldn't, at nine, articulate it for what it was, I could identify the code, the story, no different in substance than the springboard from which my father leapt one average suburban Silicon Valley afternoon, straight out the car to slap some Mohawked kid with a
KILL YOU LATER
shirt who'd casually and a propos of nothing flipped us off from the rolling sanctuary, or so the kid had thought, of his skateboard. In the cockfight world my father came from, a gesture like the middle finger was no more or less than a prelude to death, my father's or the kid's; one or the other, someone was going to die. That my father stopped short of killing the kid, or even closing his fist on him, but only snapped the board over his knee and ripped the kid's dog chains from his neck and winged both objects into the bed of the creek, was a sign of his worth here or of his worthlessness there.

All through my childhood I would see it: the great divide between first- and second-generation Americans. The children of immigrants couldn't handle the blood and guts of the old world. Every horror was buffered/negotiated/quelled by an outside agency, across the glass table in the air-conditioned office of the designated bureaucrat at large, whispering our fears from the cloudy pillows of the soiled couch. No gradation of suffering for the fattest people in the world. Where afflictions were always self-administered and always, by the law of relativity, absolutely horrifying. The craziest experiment in the history of man has an orbit of its own, an all-consuming black hole, yes, constantly increasing its mass, yes, its momentum, yes, everything spinning into nothingness, yes, no, it doesn't matter.

And there I was, paralyzed by the in-betweeness I felt, my ability to see the promise of both shores from the bridge. These people were ruthless but tough, and we were compassionate but weak. What to do but jump over the rail and fly down into the rushing water, treasure
that one moment of freedom from thought. And then if you survive the fall, let the unpredictable tide take you to one side or the other.

It was too late. The white cock had lost the use of one leg, the talon dragging. The eye on the other side of the head had been pecked out, slimy fluid mixed into the dirt. The bird hopped crookedly about, desperately trying to adjust to both handicaps. When it found its balance, the other bird pounced like a cat, delivering a vicious peck, a swipe of the wing so swift it left behind blue streaks that dissolved like mirages in the burning light. Then the aggressor seized upon the eye socket itself, pecking at it once, twice, digging in a third time. The hole deepened. Blood geysered out crimson. The blue and red cock switched tactics, brushing its wing along the ground, severing the talon from the leg of the white cock, to lie in the caked dust like the rubber souvenir of a show-and-tell slaughterhouse. Neither bird made a sound. Even the bettors had gone quiet. The white cock took its last stand on one spindly leg, pivoting about in a jerky, almost out-of-body circle.

Suddenly I remembered Tali at my side. She was crying into her hands, covering her eyes. I pried them away from her face and said, “Go outside then. Get out.”

She separated from me immediately and crawled out the flap of the tent on her knees, no one interested in her exit.

The white cock was no longer white. The blue and red cock circled. A few in the squatting crowd shuffled and repositioned their weight, but not one bettor whispered a word. The silver dust in the middle of the ring had browned into mud. The white cock extended its wings, a final salute, and the other cock sprang in decisively. It mangled the crippled white cock in a mad rush of feathers and blades, slicing one wing at the base, the last eye gone. The white cock, blind now, red in its own blood, collapsed on itself, and the crowd erupted. Everywhere in the tent cash was changing hands. Excited banter, praise for the victor.

The winning owner reached into the ring, petting and cooing his bird into calmness in the crook of his arm, removing the blades with the deftness of a surgeon. The loser, still alive, was convulsing in a growing pool of blood. Its owner sliced off the one remaining talon, the cigarette between his lips almost pure ash to the filter, and handed the spastic carcass over to the victor.

I didn't see the second fight. I was yanked out the tent by the elbow. I couldn't see the force behind it but I knew it was my mother. She dragged me across the yard. I was skipping along, my toes barely touching the ground. My father was waiting on the back porch with Tali cradled in one arm, her head on his shoulder like a baby six years her junior. I remember my father's face: expressionless, without contrition or even pity for Tali's condition, which I viewed as bogus. My mother saw this on my face. She grabbed my father's shirt and shouted, “You brought my children to this slaughter!”

In a flash I was sent reeling across the porch. I hadn't been hit, but my mother had. Her face was buried into her hands, just like Tali back in the tent. My sister was suddenly in my arms, pulling the back of my head down by the neck. My father stalked toward my mother, immigrant fury on his face, and I pushed Tali off of me. She fell to her knees, crying.

Does it matter that my father slapped my mother again on the porch, so hard that he bruised her cheek? Or that it took four clucking Filipino men to restrain him? Does it matter that the same thing would happen again elsewhere, repeatedly and worse: my father now determined to reestablish the patriarchal order that he'd lost in the house of his head, so distorted by the placid suburbs in which he held tightly to the old world code, my mother now increasingly secretive and dishonest, shit-talking him behind his back (“You're better than your father, Paulie, don't ever be like him. Promise me that, will you?”), suddenly intensely committed to charities of battered Muslim and African women millions of miles away, nosy now about the private
lives of other men she knew, relatives, neighbors, how they treated their wives, their “infinitely better halves,” as she'd say? Does it matter that Tali, despite her inability to watch the cockfight, would soon preach to everyone she encountered the merits of being “down for the brown,” uniting herself with the Melanesian practitioners of Sabong? Does it matter that my parents would never recover from the episode at the cockfight, that the divide between them would only grow like a crack in concrete that widens from the force of surrounding structures intent on remaining uncracked themselves?

That each of us, however committed, good-hearted, and talented, however blessed, facile, and sharp, wherever we come from, whatever we are—each of us can only peaceably contain so much of the earth's molten fire in our core before we blow.

J
UST FOR THE RECORD
, I've always believed that of course it matters. If either my mother or my father could have held their tongues in that plastic-lined living room, their marriage would have survived. Hindsight is twenty-twenty because you can choose what you want to see, but still it's so damned easy to psychoanalyze. To laugh at the story of the immigrant was to break my father's golden rule:
Never
mock the traits of those who suffered to get here, who've been hungry, who've seen and lived through death, who left family behind for the promise of America. To do so, to laugh at their trial, was despicable to my father. Because the trial
was
my father, immigrant by blood and experience, born of foreign dirt. And I, a little boy with no story then, agreed, the man with no story now, the same. When my mother started in, I was thinking the exact words my father laid on her. “Shut up. Shut up.”

Understand, understand! Erect the bridge between the two worlds! Lay the foundation in the thunderstorm!

But my father also broke a golden rule, that of the modern American woman, my mother: Don't ever issue a canine directive.
Domestic decisions are made by a two-vote, equal-in-weight, equal-in-insight panel. To ignore this meant flouting centuries of suffering going all the way back to the caves and the club. That's the condition from which she and her sisters had triumphantly emerged to forge a new legacy, and nothing was lower than an attempt to reverse the course of progress, however brown and exotic you were to a white American girl raised on the Beatles and
Andy Griffith
. So when my father turned toward my mother, I held my breath in the impossible hope that he'd speak gently to her, cool as a summer day in Frisco, put an index finger to his lips, soothing whisper: “Please, baby.”

Each time I witnessed the problems between them, I said to myself, “Don't do it, don't say it,” but they did it all right, they said it, as if not just our family but everyone, the whole world, was on a churning riverboat that wouldn't dock so its passengers could stop and think about the ride they were on. Because there was an alternative outside the paradigm of their bankrupt nuptials. Maybe there was beauty on the ride, maybe the sights were worth it. I was bright-eyed in love with both my parents, hopeful as I'd ever be, but I knew as sure as simple subtraction that they were done. I was very young when I realized how poorly we manage our gifts.