Night at the Fiestas: Stories (15 page)

“Jesus,” he breathes.

Victor grins proudly. “There’s probably twenty or thirty now. They keep breeding—brothers and sisters, sons and mothers, every which way—but half the time they eat each other. I don’t even have to feed them.”

The rats scramble over one another’s heads, impossible to count. Jeff is riveted. “Jesus,” he says again.

“Disgusting, huh?” Victor says. “You should see them flip their shit when the snake gets near. You gotta wear special gloves or they’ll bite through your hand. Even leather won’t hold them back. I got to stun them”—he demonstrates dashing an imaginary rat against the concrete—“or they try to bite her.”

“What do you mean, snake?” asks Jeff faintly.

Victor leads him to the bedroom, which is even darker and more fetid. Orange light slinks through the slats of the blinds. In the corner, heaped like laundry next to the unmade bed, is an enormous boa constrictor.

“She’s digesting,” says Victor, nudging it with his work boot.

The snake unwinds until it’s stretched to full length. Jeff steps back. The boa constrictor is huge and butter yellow, shining like something moist that lives underground. It watches Jeff and his father through dull pinprick eyes. A black tongue as glossy as plastic flicks in and out.

Jeff has never been afraid of snakes; he’s used to seeing them in the desert. Once he ushered a rattler out of his mother’s garden with the tip of a shovel. But this is a monster.

“Hey there, Sabrina, honey.” Victor squats, rocks on the balls of his feet, and lifts the snake. The muscles in his arms strain. “Want to hold her?”

Jeff shakes his head, a single jerk.

Victor seems hurt. “She’s not going to go and strangle you. She’s not hungry. And besides, she’s gravid. That’s why she’s slow.” He hoists the snake over his head and drapes it around his shoulders, stroking the thick creamy flank. It moves with muscular silkiness, lifting the weight of head and tail, curling itself around Victor’s body. It’s languid and sensual and Jeff is repulsed by the thought of his father and the snake living here together.

All at once he remembers something he hasn’t thought of in years: staying overnight with his father soon after the divorce, being tucked into his father’s bed, and waking in the dark next to him. On his father’s other side lay a woman Jeff had never seen. He sat up, watching his father asleep on his back, belly high and bare, and the woman beside him, whom he knew was naked under the sheets. She opened her eyes and looked right at Jeff until he clamped his eyes shut and lowered his head to the pillow. In the morning she was gone; his father stood at the tiny linoleum counter making coffee, no mention of her at all. Jeff is sweating.

“She’s my new business, Jeffy. Three thousand bucks every time this lady births. More even. You haven’t seen anything cuter than thirty baby snakes.”

Under the anger and revulsion, Jeff can’t deny a thrill of fascination, because Victor is always, always surprising him. The marvel of Victor is that for all his malefactions—and after today, Jeff can safely add criminal trespass and animal cruelty to the catalogue—still he manages to play the role more of fool than villain. Even this scenario—Jeff shoots another glance at the tank full of incestuous, cannibalistic rats—is darkly, appallingly comic. The story would make for excellent entertainment at the bar with Lisa and his graduate school friends, except that telling it would be a public admission of Jeff’s genetic link to this man.

“She’s incredible, I’m telling you, a real miracle of creation. She lays eggs, but
inside
. Ovoviviparous! Shit, I love that word.”

Jeff hears the door push open in the front room. It’s Brooke, blinking in the dark. “Holy crap,” she says.

Victor rushes forward, remarkably nimble under the weight of the boa, his smile almost heartbreakingly eager. “Hey, Brooke, baby. Good to see you.” He makes as if to embrace her, but Brooke backs up in alarm and presses against the door, arms crossed. Victor shakes his head with sad affection. “It’s been forever, girl! When’d you cut your hair so short?” He turns to Jeff. “She’s not a, you know?”

Brooke’s presence shakes Jeff from his stunned inaction. “You’ve got to leave, Victor. Now.” He gestures at the room, the rats.

“But that’s what I’m trying to explain. Your grandma said I could stay.”

“There is no fucking way she said that.”

Brooke laughs.

“Jeffrey, your grandma always liked me. She used to tell me, ‘Victor, you got potential. Victor, you need to make something of your life.’” Victor is talking like he’s about to close a sale. “I’m telling you, every time I ran into her, she inspired me. Over the years we kept in touch on and off. When I saw her in Albertsons maybe six months ago, I’d of recognized her anywhere but she recognized me first, said, ‘Victor, honey, how are you?’ She told me how you two were doing, college and Columbia and everything, and you know, that was real considerate, seeing as you two never tell me nothing, my own kids. She offered to buy my groceries, but I told her, ‘Becky, you keep your money,’ and I carried her bags out to the car. Ever since, it’s been great between us.”

“Does
Mom
know about this?” Brooke steeples her hands over her nose, gaze fixed on the snake. “Oh my God, that thing is so creepy. Can I touch it?”

Victor brightens. “A beauty, isn’t she? They’re America’s fifty-fourth most popular pet.”

Jeff is tempted to slap Brooke’s hand away. She extends an index finger, hovers, then makes contact. The boa regards her coldly and tastes the air.

“You need to leave now. A real estate agent is coming tomorrow. You need to clean this shit up and get out.”

Victor looks stricken. “You’re selling Becky’s house?”

“We haven’t decided,” says Brooke.

Victor massages the snake’s tail, which flicks obscenely between his fingers. After a moment, he says: “Tell you what. You can sell it, man, fine by me. I’ll be your real estate agent, show it to buyers. I know all about property from my cousin Yvette. I’d keep the bathroom and kitchen real clean. I only got to be here until Sabrina has her babies, two months max, and then I can sell them off and get my own place.” Victor is jittery, running his free hand through his hair, over and over. “It’s the ideal setup, Jeff. You go on back to your school, and I’ll take care of everything. You can’t sell the house like this, anyways. It needs work. Have you seen under the kitchen sink? Must’ve been leaking for years.”

“You think someone’s going to buy this house with you and Animal Planet out here? No fucking way.”

“Are you really dying?” asks Brooke.

“Of course I am! Where’m I going to go, Jeff? I don’t have a deposit or nothing.”

Jeff tries to picture the cancer coiled in his father’s abdomen, but he can’t make himself believe it. The man is indestructible.

Victor swivels to Brooke. “You want to know the truth, I’m scared. It was awful seeing your grandma get weak like that. Know what I found in her closet?” Victor lowers his voice to a tragic whisper. “
Depends
. God, poor Becky.”

“I didn’t know that,” Brooke says softly. “That’s so sad.” Her eyes fill, her first real sign of grief, and Jeff is almost annoyed at her for allowing herself grief at a time like this.

“You went inside the house?” Jeff demands.

“The bathroom out here hasn’t been working too good. Would you relax? I didn’t go and sell nothing. I’m no criminal. Listen, Jeff, what you got to understand is that I’m not the same guy I was when you were a kid.”

Jeff is bilious at the thought of Victor in his grandmother’s house, moving with a snake among her belongings. “So you exploited her? You threatened her? Did you punch
her
in the throat?”

Victor is perfectly still for a moment, and when he speaks his voice is careful. “I made mistakes in the past, Jeff. That’s on me. Your grandma
gave
me a key. I helped her out, it wasn’t just a one-way. Dishes, vacuuming, I did it all. Every single day I made her breakfast.”

“I don’t believe you,” Jeff says. His grandmother was supposed to be hardheaded and practical. She used to say, enjoying her own bawdiness, “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.” He supposes she might have been capable of a shrewd calculation: an unused shed for the presence of a grateful man. But what’s more impractical than trusting
Victor
?

“I believe him,” says Brooke. “I do. Grandma loved having a man around worshiping her.”

“Would you stop it, Brooke?” Jeff snaps.

“She never respected me or Mom. You just didn’t want to notice.”

“You’re being a child. She loved you.” Brooke is right, though. His grandmother liked her men. But to allow her daughter’s abusive ex-husband to move in because she
liked
him?

Maybe. Maybe she told herself she was being broad-minded, not letting social conventions or her family’s narrow ideas about loyalty get in her way. It’s horrible imagining his grandmother so weak: so hungry for attention that she would turn to a man thirty years younger, so cruel that she would choose Victor.

Victor puts a hand on Jeff’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, son. She was old.” Jeff can smell his soap and cologne, and he understands that his father showered in preparation for this encounter. “She was sick. Things weren’t easy for her.”

Jeff smacks Victor’s hand away harder than he means to. This is the first time he’s touched his father in years.

Victor grins mirthlessly. He rubs the snake’s head with his thumb. “You think she needed your permission, Jeff? Where were you? Off at your fancy university, with your fancy girlfriend. Oh, Becky had lots to say about you.”

Jeff wants to scroll back to a time—less than an hour ago—when he was mourning the grandmother he knew. Victor is telling the truth, Jeff understands this. His grandmother betrayed him, betrayed all of them. Once, not long after the divorce, he walked in on a conversation between his mother and grandmother. “Maybe he’ll take you back,” his grandmother was saying, and Jeff had known how wrong she was to say it even before he saw his mother’s stricken expression.

“You know, maybe I’m sad, too,” says Victor. “Ever think of that? Ever think how you’re not the only one who lost an important person? Don’t you think I wanted to be at Becky’s funeral? I only stayed away for
you
two. You and your mom.” He turns his attention to the snake, stroking his thumb across the flat shiny skull. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

Brooke’s mouth twists. “You and Grandma, you weren’t, like, in a
relationship,
were you?”

“I’m not going to apologize.” Victor draws himself up, but won’t look at them. “She helped me out. She helped me with my drinking.”

“Not much, she didn’t,” says Jeff viciously. He kicks a beer can harder than he means to, and it rattles across the concrete, bounces off the glass front of the terrarium. The rats freeze, then resume their scrambling.

“You mean you
loved
her?” asks Brooke, and her tone is more wondering than disgusted.

“Brooke,” Jeff says. “Let me handle this.”

“Will you quit bossing everyone?” Her voice is low, her cheeks reddening. “I don’t need you handling things. Always calling me—‘Are you okay, Brooke? Are you dead yet, Brooke?’—fishing around until you find something to handle
.
Mom
doesn’t need you.” She laughs meanly. “And apparently Grandma didn’t need you either. What do you think we did all those years you were off getting your degrees?” She clenches and unclenches her fists, looking helpless and pathetic.

Jeff is stung. Two years ago, when his grandmother phoned with the news that Brooke was in the hospital, Jeff flew home immediately. He can picture his sister exactly, despite the fact that he hadn’t been the one to find her, had in fact been two thousand miles away: unconscious in her giant sleep shirt, cheek pressed into the bathmat, some of the pills undissolved in the Technicolor vomit. The image still pains him.

The animal smell in here is so rich and awful, Jeff thinks he might throw up.

“Oh, that’s right,” Brooke says, “stomp off. Go nurse your precious ego.”

Jeff pushes past her to the door and bursts into the yard and the sun’s assault. Shaking, he gulps at the clean, dry air.

I
N HIS GRANDMOTHER’S KITCHEN
, Jeff circles the table, trying to locate her presence in this house. But she is gone. He feels wet and heavy. Years ago, when his grandmother’s aunt died, he’d caught her here weeping. “Well, I’m up next!” She laughed through her tears and dragged a Kleenex hard across the fragile skin pouched around her eyes. He watched the skin slide back into place, not knowing how to comfort her. “And that’s not the scary part. The scary part is there’s no one to turn to. Who will take care of me?”

Mother, sister, Jeff. His family is just too small. Someone should have foreseen that this would be a problem, someone should have made other arrangements. Jeff senses isolation waiting for him, a yawning, sucking nothingness, a dark wind blowing at the edges of this bright, solid world. He can feel its gust.

When Brooke came home from the hospital, Jeff knew he had to talk to her, but had been too afraid. So instead, his grandmother sat Brooke down and said, “No more of this nonsense. This can’t happen again.” And miraculously, it hasn’t. All the while Jeff lingered in the kitchen, a coward, safe in the knowledge that if he, like his sister, should ever let slip his grip on life, his grandmother would be there to boss him back into shape.

Jeff knows he has to go back out there, deal with Victor, untangle this mess, but instead he wants to cry at the injustice. No one should have to be responsible for these lives. “You love it,” Lisa told him once. “Who would you be if they didn’t need you?”

W
HEN
J
EFF OPENS
the guesthouse door, Victor is on the couch, leaning over his thighs. The snake is on the ground, making her deliberate way across the concrete to the terrarium. Jeff shudders, seeing her in motion like that, and when he steps into the house he positions himself behind one of the vinyl-covered restaurant chairs.

“Jeffrey,” says Victor, his voice subdued. “Your grandma and I didn’t, you know. If it makes you feel any better.”