“The good stuff or the cheap stuff?” I ask Yuri as I pick up the bills.
“The good stuff, goddamnit, since everything’s going so well.”
We hear a man’s voice and a boy’s crying coming from the back room.
Yuri, Héctor, the sergeant, and the animals laugh.
And I laugh too, and go out under the pouring rain to get the bottles, because, truth be told, as often happens when there are men around who know what they’re doing, everything’s going so well.
Translation by Achy Obejas
The red bridge
by Yoss
For Jorge, who knows the red bridge,
both ends of it, and how it feels.
For Angelito, for the story “La Puerca.”
Lawton
From the moment Humbertico the Piranha staggered into the courtyard, Yako knew he’d come for him, cuz of Petra, and that he’d hafta decide once and for all whether to cross the red bridge. Yako glances at me sideways, as if looking for support, or a laugh, a nod, a joke, an I told you so, for being such a trouser snake. But I don’t say anything, and that’s worse. It’s like saying, Go on, this is your battle.
Humbertico: mulatto, skinny, and sinewy, with a toothless smile that makes him look like a carnivorous fish, the scar on his shoulder carved by a machete boasting a crude tattoo, But I Killed Him. For that, he served six years in the tank and he just got out. He’s still got a jailhouse wariness about him though, instinctively walking glued to the walls so as not to ever leave his back exposed, or give his ass away inadvertently. He’s carrying a bottle in his right hand and a stream of curse words on his ragged tongue. He’s looking for that big ol’ useless white s.o.b., so I can cut his balls off for being a dick.
As soon as he walks in, the whole courtyard freezes, everybody well aware of the whole story with Yako and Petra, Humbertico’s sister, cuz in Cuba everybody knows everything, and more so here: The domino pieces fall silent, just like the jokes about how Big-Assed Berta, Dagoberto’s woman, is cheating on him with Yepo’s son, Manolito the Tripod. Everybody folds and swallows dryly.
Nobody knows how Humbertico found out, if somebody snitched or what. That’ll matter later... if it matters at all. The fact is, now he knows and he’s come looking for answers. Blood’ll wash this mulatto convict’s honor clean, defiled when Yako broke his little whore sister’s hymen. An eye for an eye...
When a man comes to force somebody across that red bridge or to drown him in shit, you can smell it in the air. It’s a cold, salty tang, like dried sweat and old pee on dirty fabric. It’s a smell that announces blood without being blood.
Yako and I thought differently about a lot of things. But we grew up together, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Batman and Robin, but without all that faggot crap, watching each others’ backs, the way white boys hafta if they wanna survive in a neighborhood like El Patio. Especially if you’re a scrawny white boy and not a huge mothafucka since you were a kid, like Yako. Yako’s mother baptized him Jacobo but it’s a name he’s always hated cuz it sounds kitschy and stupid. It sounds like shit on a stick, he always said. Together we learned to be men, to fight without backing down, even with guys so big we never knew what was best, to just jump them or run, but in the end we always had to swallow our fears and fight, even if they killed us afterwards, cuz you’ve gotta be a man, and real men don’t chicken out. Not in El Patio, or else you’re a dead fish, a worthless whore, meat for bait, forced to put up with everything. We were so afraid of being afraid, we became men that way, and like it or not, that’s gotta count for something.
Yako was always one step ahead of me, since we were kids. He played ball better than me, he had more luck with the babes; even playing Parcheesi it seemed like the dice smiled up at him while they stuck their tongue out at me. He was destined to win, the bastard. It looked like he was gonna be president of something, everything came so easily to him, effortlessly — while I was always runner-up. Later, I went to college and served my year of compulsory military service in advance, while Yako just did his military tour, tough and pure, and each of us found our path and matured. Or we just got old and started to rot, who knows. Everything was different then. His star dimmed, he stayed in El Patio. The elders say luck gets tired of not being taken advantage of.
Yako knew from the start that this one wasn’t gonna be taken care of with a couple of slaps and yo-mama-you-fuckin-faggot-I-let-you-live-cuz-they-held-me-down, in the old El Patio tradition, playing at big man, being cool and pretending nothing’s happened. This one had come thumbs up or down, blood and balls. He’s probably remembering what we talked about three days before, how only imbeciles fight without being afraid, cuz the smart ones know just how much there is to lose in death and how painful pain really is, and they take care of themselves. But if you take too much care, no matter how smart you are, then you’re a pussy, and there’s nothing worse than that in El Patio. He may even have wondered if Humbertico the Piranha was carrying anything, cuz he was searching his back pocket, where those of us from El Patio carry a blade and our bad intentions.
He did it to be an asshole, to mindfuck, to distract and impress the Piranha. Cuz in fact he doesn’t have shit. He’s never carried a blade. A big guy who carries a blade is just asking to be hunted down, taken by surprise, so they can slice him with a machete, and then he can look like a fool in front of everybody. It’s not a matter of playing clean; it’s about risk, going naked, giving the other guy the blade’s advantage if you’ve got him on size. El Patio’s ethics.
My pal Yako is just over six feet, like a basketball player, pure muscle like tightened cords under milky skin, frecklefaced, blond naps, and sly blue eyes. I’m always telling him he needs to get it together to do weights, to drink less beer and homemade champagne, and to harden the muscles on all that height he won in the lottery of genetics, cuz with a little dedication he could be another Mr. Olympia, like Arnold in his better days. But he’d rather play hoops and spend the day hanging out on the curb talking shit, drinking bad rum, and trying to hit on any stick in a skirt that strolls through El Patio. He laughs and says he can’t get into that whole queer thing with the muscles and the poses, that he doesn’t need to sweat it out on weights or get all purple from taking hits learning karate — he doesn’t need that shit cuz nobody fucks with the big guys, and then he shows me his hands, each one as thick as my two put together.
Those same hands are now tangled nervously behind his back; everybody in El Patio’s looking at him, knowing he’s gotta do something, better just to face the music before Humbertico sees him and there’s no turning back. Maybe better to step up and not look like he’s been corralled, like the orca and the whale in that movie they just showed, the little fish showing balls to the big one. Even if the orca and the whale are both mammals, it’s the same thing: The fish with the biggest balls will eat the more cowardly one, no matter the size. That way, no one can say, He chickened out; or, I can’t believe it, who would have imagined Cachita’s boy coming on so tough and then he turns out to be such a wimp...
You do or don’t cross the red bridge, but nobody does it cuz they wanna. Nobody thinks about it too much, you just fall into it and that’s that. No matter how stupid you are, when you think you can kill you also hafta think you can die. But everybody wants to believe it’s his own decision, and nobody can take away anybody else’s right to play dumb. Yako likes that definition of free wilclass="underline" to pretend to choose what you know is inevitable, to try to think and reflect on what is actually imposed by your own instincts and the moment.