American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [123]
Gringo life perplexed him, with its golf-cart weekends, Monday morning ball talk, barbecue aprons and hats. Suits moved through offices disparaging “the Third World,” speaking of us as if we were the back end of civilization, as if he were an invisible man. “Hey, Freddy! Be sure to take gum and cigs when you go down to bananaland. Those cholos will kiss your ass!”
There was a frayed edge to his days on Tulip Street, a slow corrosion of the soul. Long, barren weeks were made bearable by the prospect of Peruvian interludes: The Ariases had invited us to dinner in a suburb two hours away. Carmen Cunningham, who now lived in Irvington, was bringing ceviche, made with corvina she had discovered in some tucked-away fish market. One of Papi’s cousins was coming to town. No Señor de los Milagros, no Santa Rosa de Lima, no apu of San Cristóbal could bless him with greater gifts.
But there were times he’d ride in on a late train and clump upstairs in the wee hours of a Saturday morning, smelling of rum and smoke. In Peru, the bottle had been for simpático men—for high-living gente lijera, as my grandmother had said. In this country it was for the forlorn.
The day finally came when he realized he had to break free from that golf-shirt internment, from the wing-toed chain gang of the 7:25. It happened one Friday night in February. Kit and I had just received a mail-order package from the North Carolina Biological Supply Company: two tree frogs, a lamb’s heart, two lizards, one spotted king snake. (Pickled in formaldehyde. Suspended in clear plastic. Only in America! A middleman ships the remains!) We laid the lamb’s heart out on a wood slab in the basement, poked it with our scalpels, imagined the lamb’s blood coursing through it, then wrapped it back up and stuck it outside in a steep snowy bank between the back stoop and the garage. I smoothed over the snow, said good-bye to Kit, and we left our dissections for another day.
Hours after I went to bed, I awoke to the sounds of Mother moving from door to door, securing the latches from the inside. Thwock. Thwock. Thwock. I figured Papi had come home, and so I pulled up my alpaca blanket and nuzzled into its warmth. In truth, at that very moment, he was riding into the station. The Erie-Lackawanna’s last train chugged in from Hoboken, disgorged him and a few stragglers, then hissed off into the black.
It was still dark when I reawoke to a howl that sounded as if it were rising from a vault under my floorboards. Bah-eeeee! High and urgent, like the wail of a snared animal. Or a loco on the far side of loose.
I shot out of bed and ran to my window. The back-porch light was on, and a yellow bulb threw its lemon glow over the snow. Out where the apple trees marked the frontiers of our garden, out by the hand-wringers of Fair Oaks, there was no trace of a footprint. If a loco were under my room, he had flown there. I peered at the big brown house on my left: No sign of movement there. Then I checked the one on the other side: pitch dark.
Whonk! Whonk! Two loud bangs shook my room and shivered out along the walls of the corridor. I grabbed the sides of my window frame. Was an earthquake shaking the bedrock of New Jersey? I strained to see over the peaked gable, but it blocked my view of the porch. Nothing trembled. Nothing stirred. There was only a terrible silence, and a sulfurous light, like the gleam of a feral eye.
Suddenly, something gray bobbed out from under the gable and pulled in again. It was fast, small, quiet, like the hindquarter of an animal. I hiked myself up to get a better angle, but the overhang prevented me from seeing more. All I could make out were three porch steps, the packed snow on the driveway, the round white shoulder where the laboratory lamb heart lay, and the still of the garden beyond.
Then came a sight