“Goddamn kids, stop screwing around and set your racers on the tracks! Helpers, put out the sugar!” Diosdado thunders in his rum-soaked bass, an incongruously deep tone for someone as short and thin as him, while he hobbles over on his bullwood crutch.
“Josué, guess what: Diosdado has a ‘hey, man’ body and a ‘yes, sir’ voice!” Evita whispers mischievously into my ear, clever as always. She plants a wet kiss on my cheek before adding, “I want Atevi to win. I know you named her after me.”
Evita, Atevi. Obvious, isn’t it? Even a six-year-old girl could figure it out.
I don’t answer her, just place the cage holding my hopes of victory on the starting line. Across the way, at other end of the galvanized steel tracks, my buddy Abel, who is serving as my helper today, is spreading the sugar to attract my racer and her rival.
“For the first race: place your bets!” Diosdado bellows, and the roar of the crowd redoubles.
Yotuel Fullmouth, moving with a dancer’s grace not to dirty his unsullied white clothes, silently takes his place next to Abel. All the other kids point and laugh when he pulls on a pair of long rubber gloves, just in case.
Yamil’s younger brother has never been able to take these races. It’s almost a phobia with him. He still screams sometimes when one of the creatures gets too close to him. Acting as his brother’s helper in this race is the best proof he could give of his love for him. He’s obsessed with cleanliness: he’s the only person in the neighborhood who bathes two or three times a day and throws off his clothes as soon as they start to stink.
I understand now that he didn’t do it just to appear attractive to his “clients.” It was because his work made him feel dirty all the time.
The champ to beat in Rubble City for the past few months, and therefore the first to compete, is Centella, Yamil’s racer. Some say he shares his steroids with her, and maybe it’s true: she’s not as big as my Atevi, but her legs are long and she runs like she’s got fire in her belly.
“Six CUCs on my Centella!” howls Yamil Check-My-Biceps, proudly tossing his Afro and waving a muscle-bound fist full of old debit cards and subcutaneous chips, stolen or found in the trash, as if they held millions of CUCs and not a few miserable pennies. Six CUCs is a respectable amount in Rubble City, though. People have been killed for less. A lot less. Who will accept his challenge?
As if he didn’t know. As if he didn’t see Abel standing next to Yamil’s brother. As if I didn’t exist.
Murmuring. Everybody looks at me; they know what I promised, I can’t take it back now, but…
“Go ahead, Josué. If you lose, I’ll loan you the money. My papá leaves more than that on his chips when he changes them at the end of every month,” Evita whispers. And from the finish line, Abel smiles and winks at me: Atevi is as ready as she’ll ever be. It’s now or never.
I swallow hard and say simply, “You’re on.”
“This little kid? Josué?” Yamil smirks, cocky, as if he hadn’t seen me until now and hadn’t known for weeks about my plan to challenge his supremacy. “A little bleached-out mulatto like you? Such a nobody that even your friends call you Zero? You’re planning to beat my champ with that albino monster of yours?” He laughs, and half the neighborhood laughs with him, starting with his quiet little brother. “Drop it, bro. I don’t have waste to time on your bullshit. Take your white bug and come back here and bet with the men when you and your bug have grown up a little—and gotten some color, too. Zero.”
Ruthless laughter. Again I swallow hard; it’s true that they call me Zero, but that’s because I got lice when I was five and Diosdado decided to deal with it by shaving me bald, “to cure me healthy.”
Like so many other kids in the neighborhood, you know. Except with me, the nickname stuck.
“If I lose, I’ll pay up,” I say in a thin voice, cursing the day I lost the genetic lottery by not being born with a bass baritone like Diosdado’s—or skin as tan as the two brothers with their Afros, not to mention almost everyone else in the neighborhood. “With real money.”
“Real money?” Yamil Check-My-Biceps continues showing off. His green eyes glint almost maliciously under his implausibly scraggly blond Afro. “I don’t doubt it, Zero. If I had a blue-eyed goose that lays the golden egg like the bird standing by your side, a daddy’s little girl, I’d also have me some real money. But what if I don’t want your CUCs after I beat your albino? What if I want the goose herself?”
I drape my arm protectively across Evita’s shoulders. No. No way. She isn’t part of the deal. I don’t even want to think about what Yamil might do to her. Fuck, things are spinning out of control.
According to the pitiless rules of the neighborhood, the champion can decide on the bet, and the challenger can refuse to accept it—up to three times. If he refuses a fourth offer, he’s considered to have lost the challenge without contest.
“Yamil, that’s enough,” my black brother Abel quietly says from the other side of the tracks, his voice low but firm, so everyone can hear him. “Six CUCs aren’t worth one of Evita’s snot balls. Ask for something else.”
“Something else? Okay, let’s see.” He pretends to think it over, ostentatiously running his fingers through his bushy, blond, exuberant Afro. “Let’s see. How about, if his bleached bug loses, little Josué Zero will have to fuck whoever I choose?”
“Sounds fair—so long as the other person wants it, too,” Abel snarls, apparently more certain of our victory than I am, and everybody laughs.
My friend, always so good at manipulating people, has worked his miracle again with just a few words. Now the crowd doesn’t want to watch Check-My-Biceps humiliate me again; they’re on my side, rooting for the underdog, siding with David against Goliath. That’s always the story of my island.
For all the good it’ll do me. Even with everybody cheering him on, David wouldn’t have brought down Goliath if he had left his sling at home. Is my cheering section going to help Atevi run faster? Or, if I lose (hope not! but it’s a possibility, for sure), will their tears keep me safe from Yamil?
And what does Check-My-Biceps have in mind for me, anyway? I’ve been here before. I already know where this dream is heading, but I still can’t believe he’d want me to…
Better not think about it, if you don’t want it to happen, Diosdado always says.
“Sure,” Yamil agrees, biting his lips in spite. It isn’t what he had hoped for, but he knows the rules of the race give him no choice. “Otherwise it would be rape, and I don’t think our little friend Zero could rape his own shadow. We gonna race, then?”