I sleep every night in a hot room, seven, eight months out of the year. Sweating into the sheets. Turn the pillow, find the cool side. Every window open and no breeze to be felt. No reprieve in the nighttime, no relief. Crickets in the brush patches, lights of cars, strange screams from the labor camps, like pagan howls. My heart is deceitful and my body is a gullible sap. This hand doesn’t know what’s right and wrong, or it would submit to being hacked off. Above all, dreams are ungodly things, shadows of sins waiting to be committed, maggots feeding on an already rotten brain. Feel them harden and hatch to flies, vomit acid on the childish parts of you, until there is no innocence or ignorance left to hide behind, and you can smell your own wretchedness through the dark, rank and chlorinous in the heat of the room. At night he stalks you for miles across an open terrain, shoulders hard and red from the late day sun, a serpent-skinned Lucifer to ply you with food and drink, and reveal to you the true knowledge about yourself, although it’s too painful and terrible to bear. You wrestle with him all night and through to the break of dawn. Feel the torn sinews of muscle contract deep into your thigh. You wrestle, and you fail to understand. You wrestle, alone and agonized, in the early morning dark. You wrestle until your own breath disgusts you, swamp gas settling low over the moist bedding. None of it matters when morning comes. Just another day until the next worms hatch, until it all starts over anew.
I was skinny, but I was strong. I had big hands, a fighter’s hands. That’s what the PE teacher said. On the school jogging track, in the heat of the summer, and in the freezing mist of the winter, he would have us sprint fifty and one hundred and two hundred yards side by side and measure our performances against one another, and pull the champion out from the pack and shower praise on him, on me, and point out the hard places on my calves and arms where the new muscles stood out, and make me feel like real manhood was within my grasp, and that all life demanded was continued suffering and pain to get me there, to make me great like I imagined I could be. It wasn’t enough just to be a fighter. I had to be something more. I wanted to be a soldier. Chris had been a soldier. I think Dad would have been proud to see me a soldier. A soldier knows what he’s meant for and carries out his duties without hesitation. Resolve. That’s what he has. That’s what I always needed. That’s what Dad said, anyway.
When I was fourteen he showed up out of the blue one day and asked Mom what was for dinner. He had put on weight since the last time we saw him, making him seem more giant to me than he already was. When he reached across the table for a piece of bread, you’d have sworn he planned to crush the basket in his palm and devour the whole thing, wicker and all, in one massive chomp. Nobody could eat like Dad could. The rest of us were burnt out on the bland meals that Mom prepared daily in the kitchen that always smelled of burger grease and aerosol. But Dad ate with the same gusto regardless of whether it was Mom’s cooking or Chinese takeout. At our table his appetite was always healthy, and as a rule we knew to stay quiet until after he’d finished his first serving, and to leave at least one quarter of every dish at the table for him to take or leave at his discretion. Fourteen years old and I was already over six feet tall, and I was hungry as hell all the time, and still I couldn’t take an extra spoonful of chili without permission. Not when he was at the head of the table.
Eventually he killed a belch under his breath and looked up from his demolished first helping. So, he said. What’s going on around here? What’s new with everybody?
He turned his head and zeroed in on me before anyone else had a chance to speak. I could tell right then that he knew. Somehow he knew. I’d been concealing my guilt from the moment he pulled up to the house, and now, by some secret means of intuition, he had smelled me out for the liar I was. Mom tried to preempt what she must have seen coming.
Dad, she said. Anthony’s been—
I don’t believe I was asking you.
My brothers’ eyes shot up from the table. Like no man I’d ever seen, Dad could silence a room without ever raising his voice. Mom sunk back into her chair and rested a hand on her stomach. My new sister or brother was due any day now, and whatever strength she had to resist him was probably eaten up by the same fatigue that drove her to take five minute naps half a dozen times throughout the day. Dad kept his eyes on me until I finally broke down and made eye contact in return.
I got an interesting call the other day, he said. You wouldn’t know this, but I made it clear a long time ago to the school district that they’re supposed to get in touch with me directly if any problems ever arise concerning you and your brothers. It’s my right as a father, after all. To know what’s going on inside my own house. And since I assumed correctly that your mother couldn’t be trusted to keep me in the loop, I had to find other methods of staying informed. That was rather prudent thinking on my part, given the circumstances. Wouldn’t you agree?
Dad, he’s just a boy. This is what boys—
Believe me, you’ll know when I’m ready to hear from you. Until then, kindly keep your damn mouth shut.
Mom lowered her head and stirred the congealed chili on her plate. Mark started to whimper as fat tears rolled down his face. Seizing her moment to escape, Mom got up and carried him and Sebastian to the back bedroom, leaving Dad and me alone at the table. I didn’t blame her for that desertion. The first thing I did whenever Dad was scolding her was take the boys outside. Once the first plumes of smoke appear on the volcano, you have to get to a safe distance before it erupts. Even if that means leaving someone behind.
Well, now, Dad said. I believe you have something to tell me. So quit dancing around it.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—
Until now, no one in my family has ever been suspended from school. I never was. Neither of your grandparents ever were. Do you know what type of person gets suspended? Delinquents. Deadbeats. The type of people who can never hold on to anything, just like the trash you see working out in the orchards for pennies on the hour. Is that your future? Is that what you have planned for yourself after all you’ve been given? After all I’ve given you?
It’s not. I swear it’s not. I’m sorry. What happened was—
I’m not interested in your carefully crafted explanations. Your principal already told me exactly how it went down. I had to squeeze it out of him over the phone, but I got the full picture. I don’t know which is more shameful, that you got suspended, or that you couldn’t even hold your own in a one-on-one fight against a boy a grade below you. You made an ass of yourself and you didn’t even have it in you to stand your ground. That’s what I call a lack of resolve.
Dad pushed his plate away. I said nothing, staring down under the table at my worn and dust-covered tennis shoes. I had to wonder what version of events the principal had given him, if he had stuck to the simple facts of who hit who and when, or if he had explained about the confrontation that preceded the fight. Did Dad know what a creep the other boy was, and how he had spent half the lunch period harassing girls on the yard, snapping their bra straps under their shirts until they ran crying to the restroom? Would he have been proud to know that, of all the boys who’d seen him carrying on like that, I was the only one who stood up and told him to stop? Or was all that rendered meaningless on account of I had lost the fight? Two days later and my side was still sore from where he kept punching me. Short, fierce jabs to the kidney, one after another. Of course he would be psycho enough to read up on the human body, to learn all the weaknesses of our anatomy just so he could put his knowledge to use in a schoolyard bout. I’d barely managed to land a punch across his shoulder when he slid left and started in on my side, seizing my shirt collar with his free hand to keep me from backing off. He even knew to pivot between blows so I couldn’t work my way around him. I never really had a chance. And anyway, it wasn’t long before the alarm sounded and the monitors were swarming in around us.