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A few weeks later, Tío Mario arrived, and we were happy for his visit. But Tío Crece was not happy. He always felt threatened when other men were around, and his brothers were no exception. During the few days Tío Mario was there, Tío Crece was in a bad mood. He even hit Carlos. In the morning he had made Jell-O cups for Carlos to sell, but my brother didn’t sell many. In the evening, as he was walking home with the tray still full, Carlos, who was terrified of walking
across the bridge in the dark, had run across and tripped, sending the Jell-O flying in different directions. Tío Crece flew into a rage and beat Carlos.

The day before his departure, Tío Mario and Tío Crece went to the local bar. Tío Crece was moody enough when he wasn’t drinking. Didn’t Tío Mario know his brother turned into a demon when he was drunk? Sure enough, that night we woke up hearing a commotion outside. We looked out the door, and in the moonlight we saw Tío Mario and Tío Crece by the train tracks, yelling and shoving each other.

“Calm down. Calm down!” Abuelita Chinta said as she rushed outside. Tío Crece pushed past her and came into the house. He grabbed a machete and ran back out, the blade glinting silver in the moonlight. “I’m going to kill you!” he yelled. As Tío Crece ran with the machete up in the air, Tío Mario put his hands up.

“Brother, calm down,” Tío Mario said. But Tío Crece swung his machete, and Tío Mario pulled out the knife he always carried in his pocket for protection.

“Por el amor de Dios, hijos míos, don’t fight. Please, stop this!” Abuelita Chinta cried.

Carlos said, “Tío Crece, please, put the machete down.”

Tío Crece cursed and spat. I was almost expecting to see foam coming out of his mouth. He reminded me of the dog with rabies Don Lino had killed with his gun a few days before.

The neighbors came out but did nothing to stop my uncles from killing each other. Tío Crece sprang toward Tío Mario. I closed my eyes at the sound of metal against metal, their hard breathing, the shuffling of feet. The dogs barked even louder. Tío Mario cried out. I opened my eyes to see him grab his shoulder. Tío Crece’s machete had torn his shirt, but there was no blood, as far as I could see.

Angry now, Tío Mario lunged at Tío Crece and drew first blood. Tío Crece touched his cheek where the knife had cut him.

Suddenly, Carlos pushed Tío Mario and put himself in between them. “Don’t kill Tío Crece!” he yelled.

Tío Crece’s machete hovered in the air. Mago yelled at Carlos to move out of the way. Tío Mario’s knife pointed at Tío Crece. Abuelita Chinta shoved Carlos aside and stood there with her outstretched
arms looking like La Virgen de Guadalupe herself. “Kill me, kill me, but not my son!” Abuelita Chinta yelled.

They’re going to kill my grandmother! They’re going to kill my brother!
Mago and I rushed to Abuelita’s and Carlos’s side. Finally, Tío Crece seemed to wake up from his drunken hallucination. He dropped his machete to the ground and stumbled away, back to the house.

Carlos rushed after Tío Crece. When we went inside, Tío Crece was passed out in his hammock and Carlos was sitting by his side, looking like a dutiful son.

“Don’t ever do that again!” Mago told Carlos and smacked him hard on the head. “Why would you risk your life for
him
? Are you going crazy, too?”

When we woke up the next morning, Tío Mario was gone. Abuelita Chinta no longer allowed Carlos to go look for work with Tío Crece. Instead, she made him go to school with us. As we were crossing the bridge, Carlos turned around and waved bye to Tío Crece, who was making his way down the dirt road alone, with only his black dog at his side.

14

I
T WAS
J
UNE
of 1983, the end of the school year and the beginning of the rainy season. Mago, Carlos, and I rushed home after school just as the clouds burst and the raindrops started to splash down. The thirsty earth soaked up every drop of rain. Abuelita Chinta greeted us with a cup of hot chocolate, which, though made with water and not milk, was delicious because she was there at home, waiting for us, asking us about our last day of school, about what we learned, smiling at us with her gap-toothed smile that looked just like my own. I breathed in the scent of hot chocolate and wet dirt, the smell
of Abuelita’s almond oil and epazote, and all those scents swirled together with the melted wax and withering flowers on her altar. I took another deep breath and became dizzy with all the smells of home.

She left us drinking our hot chocolate and went out into the rain to visit my aunt, Tía Güera, whose baby girl, Lupita, was ill with the evil eye. Mago, Carlos, Betty, and I sat at the table listening to the rain.

“It sounds as if God is throwing pesos on our roof all the way from Heaven,” I said.

“And what if each raindrop was a coin? What if trees did have money for leaves?” Mago asked. “Papi would still be here with us.”

I imagined him sitting at the table, sipping hot chocolate, sitting so close I could easily reach out and touch his hand.

Carlos turned to Mago and said, “Tell us something about Papi that made you happy. Anything.”

Mago blew into her clay cup and sipped her chocolate. “Well, there’s that one time when we were living at Don Rubén’s house …” she said. She closed her eyes and stayed quiet for a while, as if she was remembering it all and was enjoying the memory, wanting to keep it for herself for just a little bit longer before sharing it with us. “It was the day before the Day of the Three Wise Men. I remember he came home that night looking suspicious. Mami had put us to bed earlier than usual, and of course we had protested. But she insisted that we must be good kids if we wanted Los Reyes Magos to bring us presents. So we jumped into bed and you two fell asleep. But I did not. I pretended to, but I kept my eyes slightly open and waited for Papi. When he came home, he grabbed Mami and took her outside to the backyard. The next day Mami woke us up and took us outside. Papi said that somewhere under the bushes, we would find what the Wise Men had brought us.

“To you, Carlos, they brought a red truck, and to you, Nena, a baby doll that could wink its eyes.”

“And what did they bring you?” Carlos asked.

“To me they brought colored pencils and a drawing pad.”

“And me? What did they bring me?” Betty asked.

“You weren’t born yet,” Mago said. “But maybe on the next Day of the Three Wise Men they will bring you a doll, a beautiful Barbie made in the U.S., just like you.”

Carlos said he imagined Papi driving a big white van all the way from El Otro Lado, and heading back to live with us. “The van would be full of boxes and boxes,” Carlos said. “With lots of clothes, and toys, and a brand-new bicycle for me.”

“What about us?” Mago asked.

“Well, he would bring you dolls and a toy kitchen set.”

Mago waved her arm. “Forget that, I want a bike, too.”

“And I want skates,” I said. I didn’t care if I wouldn’t be able to skate on the dirt roads.

“I want a tricycle,” Betty said.

We were quiet after that. Mago glanced at the Man Behind the Glass and sighed. “He will come back for us. I know he will.”

I clung to Mago’s words. With Mami gone again, our father was the only hope we had, however small that hope was. Despite what had happened between them, we were still his children, weren’t we? He wouldn’t forsake us, would he? We needed to believe in something, for what would happen once we lost our faith in both our parents and had nothing left to hope for?

Abuelita Chinta came back soaking wet, her legs covered in mud. She held her sandals in her hands and told us she had to walk barefoot all the way from the main road because everything had turned to mud, and she didn’t want her sandals getting ruined. Carlos grabbed one of the pots we put under a leak in the roof. It had been raining so hard that the pot was already full of water, perfect for Abuelita Chinta to wash her muddy legs with.

She took some pieces of dried cow dung Tío Crece kept in a sack and lit them on the ground so that the smoke would keep the mosquitoes away. Soon, the house smelled of burnt grass. “They’re going to eat us alive!” she said. We’d been so busy talking we hadn’t even noticed all the mosquitoes in the house. Abuelita Chinta sat at the dining table, and Mago heated up the rest of the hot chocolate for her so that she could warm herself up. Mago turned on the radio just in time to catch another episode of our favorite radio-novela,
Porfirio Cadenas: El Ojo de Vidrio.

“¿Por qué se hizo criminal el Ojo de Vidrio? La borrascosa juventud de
Porfirio Cadenas, cómo perdió uno de sus ojos, y por qué tuvo que seguir la vida criminal, perseguido por sus poderosos enemigos …”
We sat there and listened to the radio. But halfway into the story the power went off and we all groaned. Now the only light we had came from the candles on Abuelita’s altar. And the only thing we could listen to was the harsh sound of the never-ending rain.

I asked Abuelita to tell me a story about Mami. What was she like when she was a child, I wanted to know.

“Your mother was a tough girl,” Abuelita Chinta said. “Tough but also very impulsive. I guess that’s the way she still is.” She laughed at a memory that came to her, and I begged her to share it with us. My grandmother said that there had once been a donkey in the neighborhood that had no owner and was so wild nobody would go near it. My mother, who was twelve at the time, had gotten it into her head that she would tame the donkey, then she would set up her own business delivering water from the community well, as she’d seen other donkey owners do. She and Abuelita Chinta could ride the donkey to the fields to deliver lunch to Abuelito Gertrudis, and so she would spare her poor mother the long walk. They could also use the donkey to carry wood from the hills, and they could sell its dung to the brickmakers or dry them and burn them to keep the mosquitoes away at night. All this she was imagining would happen if she could just tame that donkey.

So as she was walking home from school with her friends one day, she spotted the donkey near her house. It was too busy munching on wild grass to notice her. “I’m going to ride that donkey,” she declared. Her friends laughed and said she couldn’t do it. Many of the boys had tried and hadn’t been able to even get close enough to the donkey, let alone ride it. No girl had ever tried. But my mother had it in her head that she would do it and good things would come of it. And so she did. She rode the donkey for thirty glorious seconds. Thirty seconds of triumph before the donkey reared on its hind legs and sent her flying up into the air. She was still dreaming about the water delivery business she was going to start, so she didn’t feel the pain of the impact as she landed on the ground, her arm twisted at an odd angle.

From then on, her friends teased her about the donkey. Her broken
arm took a long time to mend, but even after it had, they wouldn’t let her forget that she had failed. She wished they would remember those thirty seconds of triumph.

“Your mother thinks she has failed again,” Abuelita Chinta said as she finished her story. “And she thinks everyone else thinks so, too.”