The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers (19 page)

He continues ambling down Padre Ayala, searching for other young girls whose treats he might sample at a later date, when his eye catches a silvery object sparkling in the dust. He bolts towards it. He’s still a few feet away when he recognizes the distinctive colours of a Pabst Blue Ribbon. He picks up the bottle cap and turns it over, assessing its condition. There’s the usual bend from where it was pried off the bottle, but that’s easy to fix. Otherwise, no scuffs.
The paint is intact and the metal is complete. He takes out his handkerchief from an inside coat pocket and stands in the dusty street for a while, polishing the cap into a brilliant shine and surveying his work when he’s done. Yes, it’s a fine specimen. His sixty-third Blue Ribbon—a slip back into odds. That, of course, changes everything.

He cuts off Padre Ayala and heads towards his home, forgetting the fury of brother Fernando, María’s chunky body and smooth skin, and even the omen of dots and dashes. This bottle cap must be integrated into his collection right away. Appropriate adjustments must be made. A failure to do so properly will cancel out the telegraphic omen, replacing that good portent with a violent and destructive one, which couldn’t be cured by crushed oranges or sprinkled seeds, or any means other than old-fashioned patience, fortitude, and endurance. The prospect of that failure makes him feel sick. A bad omen could mean cancer, tuberculosis, disasters of human or divine origin.

Rafael hurries along a side road darkened by the shade of an enormous mahogany. When he reaches Constitution, he’s only a few feet from his house.

His father, Don Pepé, and his uncle Plinio are sitting and drinking beer in rocking chairs on the front porch, Plinio holding today’s copy of
Listín Diario
, which he’s had imported from Santo Domingo, as he does at least twice a week. There are only a handful of people in all of San Cristóbal who read the newspaper on such a regular basis. Don Pepé stands as Rafael opens the gate and hurries towards the front door.

“Hey, Rafael,” Pepé calls, the anger in his tone undermined
by a grin he can’t quite suppress. “Come here, son.”

Rafael fights the urge to barge past his father and uncle, to hide himself in his bedroom where he can get to work on his collection. He steps onto the porch and stands before his father, his eyes lowered respectfully, his hands pressed to his sides, and his back straight.

Don Pepé grabs Rafael’s tie and yanks it out of hiding from beneath his waistcoat. The boy winces at the affront. Ties do not look proper hanging outside waistcoats.

“Is this the one?” Pepé asks Plinio.

“Yes,” says Plinio as he rocks slowly in his chair, his fat hand resting on the curve of his protruding belly.

“Rafael?”

“Papa.”

“Do I have to tell you this?”

“No.”

Plinio slurps from his bottle of St. Pauli Niña and suppresses his own smile. He burps and hiccups, blowing gas from the corner of his crooked lips.
This is ridiculous
, thinks Rafael.
They’re not even angry at me
.

“Take it off, Rafael.”

Rafael’s shoulders sag as he removes the elegant striped tie from around his neck. “I’m sorry, Uncle Plinio,” he whispers, as his heavy cheeks dip into a frown. He hands the silken treasure to its rightful owner.

“You have to ask me, boy,” says Plinio. “I spent half my morning looking for it.” Plinio folds the tie into quarters and tucks it into his pocket.

“I know, uncle. It was a mistake in my judgment. I am sincerely sorry.”

“As if you didn’t have enough of your own,” Pepé says, grinning openly. He fills his mouth with a swig of beer. “The boy’s got more ties than I do, and he’s only fifteen.”

“Sixteen.”

“I know that,” says Pepé. “You think I don’t know that?”

“I know you know.”

“I know lots of things. I even remember the day I made you. A lot of hard work that was, for sure. I don’t have to tell you how it’s done. I remember the details as if it were yesterday. You’re sixteen, of course—not fifteen at all.” Pepé furrows his brow and twists his lip in a mock expression of consideration. “But I forget which one you are. Not Pedro or Virgilio. Are you the little dark one, Héctor?”

Rafael shakes his head sombrely at his father’s joke. “Héctor’s the baby in the crib.”

“Oh yes. The one who cries all the time. I know him. So you must be the other, Pétan.”

“No, Papa,” says Rafael, shuffling his weight from foot to foot, thinking:
Is this fucking man just going to stand here and tease me all night? Why can’t we end this conversation so I can get back to my room?
It’s infuriating, because there’s a time limit, after all, for the integration of bottle caps into his collection. Not a second to be wasted.

“Not Pétan?” says Pepé as he squints at his son, his drunk eyes glassy and playful. “Are you sure?”

“I’m Rafael.”

“Oh, yes! Rafael. The necktie thief. The powdered boy. The one who always smells like flowers.”

Uncle Plinio laughs and rocks his chair as he takes another sip of beer.

“May I go now, Papa? I have important tasks.”

“Important tasks!” Pepé cries, laughing. “Well, forgive me, son.” He turns to his brother-in-law and adds: “My telegraph son’s got important tasks to do here in San Cristóbal.”

“Oh, he does, then?” says Plinio as he rubs his belly. He then answers his own question with a nonchalant shrug. “At least that makes one of us with important tasks.”

“May I go?” asks Rafael.

“You may go,” Pepé says with a casual wave of his hand. He throws himself back into his chair, which rocks to and fro with the collapse of his weight.

Rafael hurries to the front door.

“Hold it!”

The boy clenches his jaw and faces his father with as much equanimity as he can muster. Don Pepé waves him back. Rafael approaches and stands before the rocking chair. Pepé holds out his clenched hand and indicates with his jaw that he’s got in his grip a precious gift. Rafael lets his father press the sharp contents into his fist, and then opens his hand to reveal two bright new bottle caps: Plinio’s St. Pauli Niña and his father’s Malta Nutrine. Rafael’s head swirls with excitement and dread. Each one of these bottle caps pushes its brand into the opposite category—odds into evens, evens into odds—as well as altering their relative values, which of course affects their positioning with other brands on the
windowsill, and all of this value change needs immediate integration at risk of negating the dots-versus-dashes omen. Rafael’s on the verge of sobs, but neither his father nor his uncle can tell from his placid expression.

“Thank you,” he whispers, tucking the two new bottle caps into his coat.

“No more stealing your uncle’s neckties,
chapita
,” says his father. “All right? Now, Pétan’s got something important he needs to talk to you about. Go inside. He’s been poking his little nose out here every five minutes to see if you’ve come home.” Pepé winks at his son. “Go,
chapita
, go!”

Rafael nods and turns away, secretly enraged by the mockery of that name, and wondering if his father would like those bottle caps shoved down his throat. If Rafael could have his way, he’d banish the word
chapita
from the Spanish language and throw anyone who ever used it into prison for the rest of his life.
By the grace of virgin Altagracia
, he thinks,
how am I ever going to charm an Espaillat, Cabral, or Troncoso—or any one of those fancy girls from the rich families of the Cibao—if everyone in my thick-headed and vulgar clan insists on calling me “Bottle cap”?

As usual, there’s chaos inside the house. The younger boys, Pedro and Pípi, are playing a game derived from baseball in the living room, while their tiny sister Nieves Luisa watches the mischief. The game involves one brother throwing an old tin into the air and the other smashing it across the room with a large stick. Pedro, who’s just had the pleasure of a direct hit, which has ricocheted the tin off the wall, is tackled by his brother Pípi for no discernible reason,
and is now being punched and kicked as Pípi screams about the injustice of Pedro’s play. Another, slightly older brother named Aníbal has dragged a large washing tub, his makeshift terrarium, into the dining room and is trying but failing to force a large snake he’s captured to eat a whole frog.

Rafael speeds by the little ones without saying hello. He passes the closed door of his sisters’ room, where Julieta quietly sobs—probably lying face down on her bed, as she often does. He enters the sheltered kitchen in the backyard and finds his mother, Doña Julia, and his two older sisters preparing supper. In truth, only his eldest sister, Marína, is helping his mother by boiling and mashing the yucca, while the younger one, Japonesa, passes her time stealing bites rather than working. Doña Julia turns away from her vat of red beans and rice when she hears Rafael enter. She offers her son a smile.

“Mama,” says Rafael, holding out his arms.

Doña Julia pulls the teenager into a tight hug and the boy plants a wet kiss on his mother’s round cheek.

“I’m sorry, Mama, but I have to hurry off,” he says. “There is work I must do in my room before supper.”

“All right,” she says. “We’ll eat in fifteen minutes.”

“Perfect.”

He nods briskly at his sisters, who grunt in return. Rafael leaves the outdoor kitchen and enters the house, this time heading straight into the bedroom he shares with Pétan and used to share with his oldest brother, Virgilio, before he left home last year to find work in Santo Domingo. He closes the door, removes the three bottle caps from his coat pocket, and
sits on his bed. Now he can take a closer look at his compete collection displayed on the windowsill. A quick survey of the Pabst Blue Ribbons, stacked in groups of ten, confirms his earlier guess at numbers. There are fewer Malta Nutrines and St. Pauli Niñas, but they are still large piles. Rafael adds the new caps and makes the appropriate adjustments: re-stacking each brand; making sure the new additions are located in the centre of a stack and not at the top or the bottom; reordering each brand’s location on the windowsill if necessary. He mumbles a running commentary as he works, counting out stacks of ten, offering bits of encouragement to the bottle caps as if they were sentient beings. For the first time today, although the heat has slackened, Rafael begins to sweat.

Pétan enters the room, cinching his belt, and shuts the door behind him. Although the boy’s only a year younger than his brother Rafael, he stands a good six inches shorter, a plight he tries to rectify with an exaggerated swagger. He stands by the side of Rafael’s bed and watches his brother work on the bottle caps.

“Hey,
chapita
,” Pétan says. “Stop with that. We need to talk.”

“Quiet,” says Rafael. “Come back later.”

Pétan gives Rafael’s foot a light kick.

Rafael turns his sweaty face against his brother, his teeth bared like a dog with its meal interrupted, and says, “I told you to come back later, asshole.” Rafael’s voice is high and shrill when agitated.

“We’ve got a job. Listen.”

“And don’t ever call me
chapita
again.”

“Hey, Rafael, listen. We can make some money here.”

Pétan sits beside his brother and watches. He knows his brother won’t stop fiddling with his damn bottle caps once he’s started, but then there’s no reason why Rafael can’t also listen to the proposal at the same time.

“So Papa was up in the valley last week,” Pétan begins, “and he came across a rancher who wants to add a few to his herd. A couple of his old cows died last month and the guy let it be known pretty clearly that he’s got some pesos saved. He can buy at a good price, I mean if he gets healthy animals and a good deal. Anyway, I don’t know the specifics, but Papa made it seem like it might be worth our while.”

Rafael nods to let his brother know he’s listening, although most of his attention is channelled towards the bottle caps on the sill. He’s pulling down the Daisys and Holsteins and reordering them in stacks of ten on his bed.

“Papa hinted he could sell the man a few good cows with no questions asked,” Pétan continues. “Papa said the man was not so interested in where the animals might have come from, and his ranch is up at the far end of the valley, so there’s not much chance the new cows’ll be parading along the
malecón
or be giving out their address to any of the lucky girls, if you know what I mean.”

Pétan tries to raise his grin into a smile, but the effort only lifts half his face and makes him feel absurd. He picks at stray threads on Rafael’s old bed quilt.

“So this morning I went for a walk and happened to notice that the Uribe brothers down the river sure have plenty of cows in their field. You ever notice that, Rafi? I sure did this
morning. Nice fat cows. They’re reproducing well over there. I was thinking they might even have a few too many to take care of. I was thinking they might need some help taking care of all those beasts, and I don’t think Papa would ask us any questions if we showed up tomorrow morning with some nice fat animals for him to take up into the valley. What do you think of all that?”

“I don’t know,” says Rafael. “What do you think?”

Pétan grits his teeth and stares at his brother, who still hasn’t even glanced at him. “I think not everyone can find work smacking his dick against an electric line for twenty-five American dollars a month, and that some of us might benefit from a little bit of work every now and then with an older brother’s help.”

“I see,” says Rafael, fitting one cap inside another.

“I think we could borrow a couple horses from Alvarez, then you and me and him could ride out late tonight. That’s what I think. Papa’ll let you take his horse and then we’ll have three.”

“I don’t need the money. I don’t need the risk.”

“Well, I fucking need the money, Rafi.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“All right, fine,” says Pétan. “But hurry up about it, because if we decide to do this thing, I should get over to Alvarez’s place and get those horses lined up before it gets too late.”

Rafael whispers something under his breath, but Pétan has the good sense to realize that his brother’s secret words have nothing to do with his proposal and everything to do with the weird omens and portents he likes to tie up in those
stupid bottle caps. He’s sweating and mumbling to himself like a lunatic, and certainly won’t waste any time in consideration of his brother’s plot. Pétan knows he’s just saying he will. Only drastic measures will shake Rafael from his reverie.