Taína Page 7

  Hunting was what Salvador called it. He said that it was okay because we were not hurting anything or anyone and those rich people living on Park or Fifth Avenue were old-money people. They had money to burn, and most likely their grandparents or great-grandparents had destroyed lives, killed some part of the planet, in order to acquire their wealth. All I was doing was taking a little bit back from what once belonged to “the people” whom the city was not taking care of and so we had to fend for ourselves.

  And I wanted Doña Flores to let me visit again.

  “You want to go hunting?” I asked BD.

  “Fuck’s that?” he said, knowing it wasn’t really what it sounded like.

  “We take a laundry bag, okay, and a knife and pace the streets of the Upper East Side on the lookout for a lapdog that’s leashed to a lamppost or something, while the owner is inside somewhere drinking coffee or something.” I said it exactly the way Salvador had explained it to me. “Outside beauty salons are good, so are cafés, and post offices are good, too.”

  “So?” BD shrugged his shoulders.

  “We unleash the dog or cut the leather leash and stuff the small dog in the laundry bag and run,” I said. BD took out a Jolly Rancher with his real arm and starting sucking on it. He didn’t give me one. “I take the dog home, feed it, walk it, and groom it. Two or three days later, you and me go comb the same streets where we took the dog and look for the reward flyers.” When BD heard this he stopped sucking his Jolly Rancher and his face lit up, his tongue blue like the sky.

  “Yo, that’s crazy. Will it work?”

  “Of course it’ll work. Those people love their dogs.”

  “Dogs bite, Julio. I don’t know.”

  “We ain’t gonna take a German shepherd. A lapdog, stupid.”

  “How much can we get?”

  I was happy BD had agreed. “I don’t know. Five hundred, three hundred and fifty dollars a dog, maybe?”

  BD liked that idea.

  “Okay,” I said, “but you know my mom or anyone can’t ever find out.”

  “Who am I going to tell? The cops?” Like it was stupid of me to have even mentioned it. “Hey, so how it turned out the other day, did you see that bitch?”

  “Come on, BD.” I made a face.

  “All right, all right.” He took out a Jolly Rancher and gave it to me. “Did you see Taína?”

  “A little bit.”

  “Did she talk?”

  “She cursed.”

  “Did she sing?”

  “No. But she will.”

  “I think you crazy. She can’t get pregnant without someone jamming her.”

  “Then why,” I said, rolling my candy to the side of my mouth, “do you go with your mother to church every Sunday?”

  “I told you, God is a man, and like all dudes he likes to jam girls, too. Why is it hard for you to understand that?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “So you in on this, right?”

  “Yeah, sounds like fun.” BD nodded. “I’m in.”

  “All right. But wait, there is more.”

  “Yeah, yeah, more money?” BD said, as if he were already thinking what he was going to buy with his share.

  “We’re gonna need your little brother, Ralphy.”

  * * *

  —

  BD AND I did exactly what Salvador had instructed me to do. We combed the wealthy streets of the Upper East Side on the lookout for a lapdog that was left outside unattended. When we found this cute little black dog outside a Victoria’s Secret on 86th Street and Third Avenue, BD cut the leash. I grabbed the dog and we ran.

  * * *

  —

  LATER AT HOME.

  “Whose dog is that?” my father asked in Spanish.

  Salvador had told me exactly what to say to my parents.

  “I got a job as a dog sitter,” I said in English, because my father does understand English; he just doesn’t like to speak it. I gave the dog water and fed it. Then my mother walked in from work.

  “Look,” my father told her in Spanish, “Julio has a found a job. I cannot find a job, but my son has found a job.”

  “Job? What job?” Mom took off her shoes, the first thing she always does. She had that day’s mail in hand. There was a letter from Lincoln Hospital. I was glad when she didn’t open it and just dropped the entire mail on the table. “Whose dog is that? It’s cute,” she said, and then turned the radio on low volume.

  “I’m babysitting dogs while their owners are on vacation,” I said in English, because Mom talks in both depending on her mood and sometimes mixes the languages.

  “You don’t babysit dogs, you babysit babies,” Mom said. “How much they are paying you?”

  I gave them the number that Salvador had said they would usually ask for.

  “About five hundred dollars!”

  My father whistled to himself. Leonardo Favio sang on the wire.

  “I don’t believe this,” Mom said, humming just a bit to the melody. “You have a job, really happy. Good.”

  “Ma, those rich blanquitos on the Upper East Side love their dogs, so they rather pay me to take care of it than to put it in a kennel for days. So they pay me.”

  “Está bien.” Then Mom finally kissed the top of my head hello.

  Pops got ready to serve us dinner. My father always cooked, but he never served. This began years ago when my mother was cleaning and Pops offered to help. Pops did such a bad job washing dishes that Mom had to do them over again. So she said to him, “The best way a man can help a woman is by not doing anything at all.” My father didn’t like that and he said, “From now on I will cook, but you will have to serve yourself.” And once even right before dinner, when my parents thought I wasn’t listening, I heard my father say to her in Spanish, “I want you to serve me with your work uniform on.” Mom said she did hospital laundry and was not a French maid. My father then said that he had taken one of her uniforms from the closet and cut it up a certain way and that he wanted his dinner served with her wearing that. And by some miracle, Mom gave me five dollars that day and told me to go outside and get pizza so they can be alone. So that’s how it’s been, my Ecuadorian father cooks but my Puerto Rican mother serves the food.

  “Now that you work you can help me with the bills,” Mom said, getting the dishes ready and placing them on the table and humming to Leonardo Favio on the radio. They both sang about a woman who might one day hear a song and be enraptured by it, and she will cry but won’t be able to go back in time, back to that affair.

  Pops had made rice and beans and what smelled like chuletas. “You know it better not bark too loud and wake me.” Mom placed the dishes on the table.

  “I just have to feed it and walk it three times a day for three days, Ma.” Because Salvador had told me it takes about that long before the owner has gone through all venues like the ASPCA and the cops to finally posting reward flyers. “I’ll keep the dog in my room and walk it before and after school and feed it. No problems.”

  “ ’Tá lindo,” Mom said, looking at the dog, who barked in the cutest way.

  “This is the most wasteful country.” My father sat at the dinner table, shaking his head in disbelief. “In Ecuador who would imagine paying a kid to take care of a dog.”

  “Shut up, Silvio,” Mom said. “Thank Jehovah your son has a job.”

  “What a wasteful country,” my father said again.

  No puedo enfrentar esta realidad / De no verte más, de mi soledad…

  “Did I tell you what your father did when we first got married?”

  “Yes, many times,” I said, though I knew she’d tell it again.

  “Your father goes to the supermarket and comes back all happy, saying he found a bargain. Your father says, ‘I bought us ten cans of tuna for a dollar. Ten cans of
tuna, we’ll save money and eat tuna for a week.’ ” She tried hard not to laugh. “And I tell him, ‘You dummy, that’s cat food.’ ”

  “What did I know?” my father defended himself. “What did I know? I had been in this country for only a few weeks! I did not think that people bought cats food. In Ecuador, who would buy a cat food? The cat eats what you throw away.” But my mother was laughing up a storm and the dog liked it because he jumped on her lap and began to bark at her for attention. The dog seemed not to miss his owner as long as he was fed, walked, and loved.

  “Didn’t the picture of the cat on the can tell you something?” Mom laughed harder.

  “I thought that was the brand.” Pops shrugged. “At least Ecuador is not a colony of the United States, we are our own country.”

  “Don’t start that,” Mom said, annoyed, and raised the volume of the radio so that Leonardo Favio could drown out Pops instead of her.

  “I’ll be back in ten.” And I leashed the dog.

  My father, hearing that I was leaving, went over to the radio and turned it down into a whisper and in an apologetic low tone, asked Mom, “Are you going to serve me dinner wearing your laundry uniform?” I took a deep breath and went to walk the little dog that was going to bring me closer to Taína as my mother went to get changed, singing.

  Verse 2

  I WOKE UP, yawned, and grabbed myself with such a natural security. The first image of the day that entered my mind was Taína singing in the shower. I was happy. Smiling, I pictured Taína’s stomach, how the shampoo’s foam slid off her wet body. I was not there. I was not doing anything to Taína. I simply saw the image of her naked body on the ceiling as I lay flat on my bed. It was like a white shadow similar to the images of her looking out her window. Then I thought about the few times I had heard her voice, and it seemed as if she were there in my room, singing. Electricity exploded inside me. A stunning display of sparks skidded upward. I felt no shame or regret. I got up, found a sock on the floor, and wiped myself clean. When I went to get some clean clothes, I slid the drawer and there in plain sight was a Watchtower magazine. The title had to do with drugs and how they affect the mind. I knew my mother had planted it there for me. In our conversations, neither Mom nor Pops had the courage to ask me if I was doing any drugs. I was only smoking pot with BD and not even regularly. I had few friends, and those that spoke to me were not the ones that were cool enough to smoke. I didn’t plan on reading The Watchtower. I did open the magazine, making sure that its spine got creased, so hopefully my mother would think that I had read it.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE SCHOOL entrance two white guys wearing jewelry and with too much bass on their radio parked by the curb. They turned the engine off but not the booming radio. One of them got out of the car, gold chains slapping his chest as he bopped and weaved like he was shadowboxing. It was Mario, and he was coming straight at me. I took my eyes away from the car to look at anything else but him. I waited for the slap or the insult, but he walked past me as if he were too cool to pick on me. This was fine with me.

  Ms. Cahill started her class by handing out old science textbooks that smelled like milk from a cow whose insides were fading. She noticed everyone wrinkling their noses. Ms. Cahill was disgusted, too.

  “I know these are a bit old, but they were the best books I could find.”

  “Yo, like these books are so old, Ms. Cahill,” someone called out, “they knew Burger King when he was a prince.”

  The class laughed.

  “Central Park when it was a plant,” someone joined in.

  The class laughed louder.

  “Shut up,” someone shouted.

  “You shut up.”

  “No, you shut up.”

  “No, you whose mother is so poor, she went to McDonald’s to put a Big Mac on layaway.”

  Now it was a free-for-all.

  “Yeah? Well, your mother is so poor, she sewed rubber pockets to your coat so you can steal soup.”

  “Please, girlfriend. When your Dominican mother hears the weatherman say, ‘It’s chilly outside,’ she sends you out with a bowl.”

  Ms. Cahill did her best to restore order, but sometimes, when she found the snaps funny, she couldn’t help laughing. So the chaos continued.

  “Well, your mother thinks ‘menopause’ is a button on the DVD player.”

  “Yours thinks ‘manual labor’ is the president of Panama.”

  “Yours thinks ‘illegitimate’ means you can’t read.”

  Ms. Cahill stopped laughing and said, “Okay, enough, enough.”

  “Well, your mother is so fat and stupid, she tore up your computer looking for cookies.”

  “Enough”—though Ms. Cahill was laughing again at full speed—“enough.”

  “Yeah, well, your mother is so stupid, she got fired from a blow job.”

  “Yeah, well, you know the difference between a joke and ten black guys? Your mother can’t take a joke.”

  “Enough!” Ms. Cahill stopped laughing. She bit her cheeks so she wouldn’t laugh again. “I hate it as much as you,” she said in that sweet and lovely voice of hers, “but some of the material in these books can still be used.”

  “Yeah, for wrapping fish,” Mario said, drinking a Yoo-hoo milk drink and reading a comic book.

  “Listen!” Ms. Cahill was now annoyed and she looked at Mario. “Let’s not start these jokes again, okay?” The class quieted down.

  “Chemistry is about life….” Ms. Cahill began her lesson. “Electrons change their orbits, molecules change their bonds. Elements combine and change their compounds. That’s life right there. Change. Life and death and life again. All happening in a place so small we can never really see, much less visit, but know what is happening there.”

  I was happy when I saw BD out by the classroom door, waving. I raised my hand and asked for permission to go to the bathroom. Ms. Cahill gave it after she said she needed to talk to me about my college essay. I nodded and took the pass and met BD out by the hallway.

  “Yo, I found it, I found it.” He gave me the flyer. I was surprised, because it had been only two days and Salvador had said it took about three or four for the dog owners to put up flyers. I read the flyer and it was our dog.

  REWARD FOR LOST DOG.

  Last seen on 86th Street and Third Avenue.

  If you’ve seen my pet, please contact L. Sloan at

  212-555-8612. Reacts to the name Cosmo.

  “And check it out, see, it was last seen on the same block, near the Victoria’s Secret where we stole it. No doubt, Julio, it’s the same dog,” BD said.

  “We didn’t steal it,” I said. “We are borrowing it.”

  “If that’s what you need to tell yourself. I just want the money,” BD said.

  “Don’t forget Ralphy.” I folded the flyer and put it in my back pocket.

  * * *

  —

  AT HOME I took the dog for a walk and fed it. I got dressed up, combed my hair, and shined my shoes with baby oil. I then met BD and his six-year-old brother, Ralphy, the cutest little kid ever, outside my project. I made the call from a pay phone. I knew words held power and for some reason practiced saying the word “aimlessly” as best as I could sounding like a white kid. So when the person on the other line picked up, I said, “Lady, I think we have found your dog, he was walking aim-less-ly in Central Park.”

  “Are you sure it’s my Cosmo?” A woman’s voice was overjoyed.

  “Yes, is that his name?” As if I didn’t know. “We can bring him over.”

  * * *

  —

  THOUGH WE ALREADY knew it from the flyer, she gave us her address. And we took off for the Upper East Side. We arrived and the doorman called the lady from a phone in the lobby and she said to send us up. The elevator walls were all brass, though
they looked like gold, and the smell of piss or beer was nowhere to be found. Riding up in the elevator, BD told his little brother to cry. Ralphy, who held the little dog in his arms, cried like he was headed toward the dentist. The elevator let us off right into her apartment. I thought it was amazing, an elevator inside your house.

  “Lady, is this your dog? My little brother here loves him, but when we found out he was lost, we brought him back,” I said, and the young, very pretty white lady’s face was aglow. She inhaled loudly and reached to take her dog from little Ralphy, who held on to it tighter and continued to cry his eyes out.

  “I’ll get you another one, one that looks just like that one,” I said to Ralphy.

  “Yeah, Ralphy, come on, we’ll get you another dog. This one is the lady’s,” BD said to his little brother.

  “It’s my dog, Ralphy,” she said, calling BD’s little brother by his name as if she knew him. “I’m sorry, but it’s my dog, Ralphy.” Her face had fallen. She sweetly and sadly knelt down to take the dog. Ralphy let go of the dog, who quickly jumped on the lady like she was his mother. The lady had a jeweled necklace dangling from her neck like Saturn. Her nails were really sparkling and her teeth were dove white. She cooed at her dog, who returned her love with a laughing bark.

  “Bye,” I said, as Ralphy buried his crying face in BD’s arms.