Twelve Stories

Carlos Antonio Delgado

Thanksgiving this year is Dad’s year—he picks me up from my mother’s house and we share a hotel room, the night before a Turkey Trot soccer tournament I will play in, in Pismo Beach, a four-hour drive north of our city. The lights are off in the room. He lies on the floor very drunk, after taking some of the team moms out for drinks, and he yawps his stories into the darkness. I liked it dirty maybe, he says. I liked the things in dirty ways. The women and their titties, their lips and fingers. They can do things to you, mijo. You will see.

I listen, not understanding completely because I am only eight, but I hate him anyway for what I do understand. Mijo, he says, slurring, howling, mijo, mijo, mijo. What were these things I have done, mijo. What were these things.

The next morning, when he doesn’t remember the things he said, I do not know if I’m grateful he’s forgotten.

I play in the soccer game, and in the next, and in the next, and we win the tournament in penalty kicks.

****

Fifteen years later I am driving my father home from a bar in Bellflower, after soccer practice (I help him coach a women’s team, and, afterwards, every week, we take them out for calamari and pizza and beer), and my father is so drunk he’s blind, crying, laughing, telling his regrets first as jokes and then as regrets—Sometimes, mijo, I no can believe it.

At a house party in the late 1970s, a few years after my mother and he had married, he noticed my mother’s sister passed out in a back bedroom, sprawled out on the bed. So he walked out the front door saying, I go for more beer, be back soon, where are my keys. And, leaving, he snuck around back to the bedroom, crawled through the window, undid her pants.

She was asleep the whole time, mijo, he says.

And, later, does he remember what he’s said? He does not.

****

In a few years, when I begin writing my novel, I ask him to come with me to Ecuador, to tell me stories about when he was young, and we fly to Guayaquil, staying two weeks. He shows me the whole city, the streets, the parks, the harbor, the seminary. He shows me the building his father worked in, the old house where he grew up, his neighborhood, the little riverbank where he kept the canoe, the whorehouse where he, on his thirteenth birthday, lost his virginity. We eat crabs and ceviche in his favorite restaurant, and we kick around a soccer ball in his old high school’s center courtyard, like when he was a boy. On the last night we drink in the hotel bar all night, and he tells me about his wedding, how he flew to Guayaquil with my mother, an American, for a ceremony his family would approve of. Before they left for the honeymoon they would stay the night in the guestroom of his father’s house. He’d had a crush on the live-in housekeeper, Teresita, for years, even before he’d moved to America, and now here he was, returned from America, returned a man, anybody could see that, even she could see that. After the wedding reception everybody was drunk and sleepy, and my father took my mother to their bedroom. Later, he got up to pee and, on his way back, he entered Teresita’s bedroom, who woke. He moved his fingers to his lips—Shhh. She did not say a word. She let him.

In my country, you do not say no to a man, my father lets me know, his eyes closed.

Come next morning, this time my father remembers, asking, Mijo, you no put that in your novel, right? No, I say. I won’t. I promise.

****

We fly home, through Panama, through Dallas, on toward Los Angeles. I look out the window, sometimes sleeping, sometimes not. Soon I’ll be at home with my wife, and in no time we will have two sons. I will finish the novel and, for six years, I won’t find an agent or a publisher, and when I do it won’t sell. But I will reread the stories in it, my father’s life, his drinking too much, his screaming, his hitting his wives, and rape, and adultery, and loss, and suffering, and regret. I will teach writing at a small university, and I will live quietly, reflectively, prayerfully—passively.

At night, while my wife sleeps, I will, once in a while, walk around to her side of the bed. She won’t ever wake up because I will, very quietly, only watch her sleep.

Her mouth is not moving, her body is still. Her little fingers are beautiful. I close my eyes and I open them, and I imagine I am my father. And I feel the power of his, now of my, drunkenness, and in my mind I act against her. I rape her sleeping sister, slowly, gently—while she is still, not to wake her. And on the night of my wedding, I put myself into another woman, and I prove it: I am a man. Then, after eight years of marriage, I leave her. She alone raises my two sons, and I have them twice a month on weekends, in between soccer games. For thirty years I play soccer and fuck women. I drink, I drink, I drink—I drink until I am blind, until I do not know the difference between English and Spanish, between a joke and a nightmare. And in the darkness, using this excuse, my drunkenness, I confess my sins to my son, this child, he is eight years old, he is in his bed in the hotel, he hears my confessions, my sobs. He cries quietly, afraid of me. And I become a cautionary tale, become his warnings, his sirens, his Do Not Enter—so that his life, my son’s life, becomes a stillness, peaceful, regretless, boring, pitiful, a thing he is ashamed of, from too much being careful, from too much being afraid.

It is dark and quiet in this house, in this bedroom, and my wife sleeps, is calm, is beautiful, is still, not knowing the evil moving around inside my body. I look down and I discover I am aroused. I am tempted, watching her, thinking these things, I am tempted to masturbate, gently—to create a celebration, to join my father—but quietly, so she does not wake to see. My body, in this moment, agrees with him, forgives him, has become him completely.

_______________

Carlos Antonio Delgado is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program. His work has appeared most recently in Akashic Books’ PITTSBURGH NOIR, as well as in The Acentos Review, and Relief Journal, among others. He has won and been nominated for numerous awards, including a K. Leroy Irvis Fellowship, an EIDOS grant, and the Turow-Kinder Prize for Fiction. Carlos and his family live in Los Angeles, in a small yellow house with a big backyard. Over the years, he has taught writing, rhetoric, theology, history, and philosophy to high schoolers and undergraduates. Please find him at CarlosAntonioDelgado.wordpress.com.