Yellowjackets
He woke knowing it was the boy’s birthday.
The sheets were damp, the light at the bedside gray already, brightening toward dawn. He got up and slipped on his robe, pulled the bedside window up and propped it open with the brick he kept on the sill. There was a hint of chill in the air at the screen but not enough for mid-November. The warm spell was holding. The bathroom window he raised as high as it would go—the sash cord frayed but intact. Two windows opposite—kitchen, living room—and he’d be able to get a breath of ventilation through the house.
Midway across the kitchen floor, he stopped. Old man Fuente had beat him out of bed again, blasting his radio from the sleeping porch next door. The neighborhood—hell, every street in this part of San Antonio—was all their kind now. No one seemed to mind the old man’s music. Salsa, they called the stuff. Merengue. Sounded the same to him, all of it. Music from the wrong side of the tracks. Music to cut your throat by. He left the windows shut on that side of the house.
The newspaper was at the curb—the sidewalk and yard sprinkled heavily with pecans. He needed to get out there and bag them, shell some.
The boy had loved them.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“I want a pecan pie for my birthday.” The boy was talking to his mother. “We can put my candles between the pecans. In the shape of a seven.”
“You’ll have a cake like the rest of us,” he said, answering for Phyllis.
She turned—that look of hers—confused, kind of, as if she had no idea what he was doing in her kitchen.
She turned back to the boy. “You can have pecans on your cake.”
“But, Momma, I don’t want a cake.”
“Run along now,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
“You will ruin the boy.” He could taste rancor, like a fragment of spinach stuck between his molars, festering.
“He has a name.”
“Giving in to him. It isn’t right.”
“Our son is fine. Jeannine is fine. I’m fine.” She paused at the sound of voices. The boy had gone to Jeannine’s room. They were giggling in there. He didn’t like that either.
Phyllis cut him off. “You’ve been out of uniform for two years. Stop ordering us around.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Back in the kitchen, he poured coffee left over from the day before and heated it in the microwave—cheap little thing he’d picked up at a pawn shop on West Avenue. He spread the paper at the kitchen table and switched on the fluorescent desk lamp, another pawn shop find. The stories this morning were bad as the nightly news. Coke heads, crack babies, meth labs in every corner of the state. Illegals crossing the river, numberless. He stood, switching off the lamp, crossed to the back door and stepped out.
The music jigged at him, loud and swirly, like the zigzag ribbons they’d worn on their skirts, dancing, when he was young—nothing this morning between him and the noise but chain-link fence and window screen. Old man Fuente’s son stood beyond the fence, beneath an old live oak, stretching. Probably just woke up. Better get his attention. Wouldn’t put it past him, otherwise, to unzip, piss in the dirt.
“Hey, hombre.”
“Hayee, ome-bray back at you,” the man said. “I suppose you’ve forgotten my name.”
Alejandro. It had seemed a simple enough moniker—until they started claiming their names back, with their one-note vowels, their perfectly trilled R. Anytime he tried it their way, the man smiled pity all over him.
Maybe he could get him to turn the music down. He’d ask anyway. “Radio loud enough for you?”
“What’s the matter? You don’t like this station?”
He had to force the words out louder than he wanted. “I like my music so it doesn’t wake the dead. Kind of prefer the words in English, come to think of it.”
“You’re German, aren’t you? You like German polkas?”
“I’ve listened to a few.”
“Words in English or German?”
“Sometimes one, sometimes the other.”
“That song you’re hearing now?” The music circled and twirled. “In Spanish? That’s a Mexican polka.”
As if cued by the music, half a dozen neighborhood roosters erupted into raucous call and response. Despite himself, he smiled hearing them. He’d always liked backyard roosters. When they were done, he went on.
“Maybe you can ask your old man to turn the volume down. Some of us have ears that still work.”
“You got a razor that works? A washing machine?”
“Hold on there. No need to be insulting.”
“You been at us since the day we moved in, acting like we’re not clean enough.” The man paused, spat. “Get a load of you this morning—week’s worth of stubble on your saggy-ass chin. Greasy hair, robe. Look like a refugee from the geriatric ward.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“You’re gonna get it for this.”
The boy was afraid of him and that made him madder still—hot and cold surging in him until his fingers shook. He yanked the boy into the bathroom, soaped a washrag and went to work on his mouth. His mother’s The lipstick—bright as candied apples, poppies, poison—foamed and bubbled in the soapy wash.
“You want something to cry about?” He cupped a hand behind the boy’s head, a terrible elation rising in him, unbearable, tearing to get out. “Here.” With the other hand, he shoved the rag at the boy’s mouth, teeth opening to the pressure of his fist so that he could scrub at tongue and throat, all the words he’d held back spilling out of him. “Pussy-whipped momma’s boy. Panty waist. Limp wrist, queer bait, fairy faggot.” And then—breathless, chanting, “Bunny rabbit, bunny rabbit, bunny rabbit.”
The boy was hysterical. He had to make it stop. He flung the rag at the sink, took the boy by the shoulders and held him at arm’s length. “I’m going out of here. You get ahold of yourself. Stop crying. Then get on out in the back yard. We need to calm down. Both of us.”
He was a mess when he sat down on the bed—couldn’t catch his breath, shaking inside and out. He didn’t know where it had come from, hadn’t expected the boy could make him so mad. The shaking had to stop.
He got up off the bed and, pulling himself to attention, saluted. A voice came up in him, a gruff, whispery echo from the parade ground. “About face,” the voice said. Swiveling, he executed a perfect about face. The voice continued. It was his voice but not. He followed its every pronouncement, meticulously executing each maneuver.
When he left for basic training, the boy had been three, traipsing around the house after his sister, two years older and a bona-fide priss. Jeannine bossed her little brother for two years while he was gone. The wife coddled the both of them. By the time they shipped him home from Korea, the damage was done. The boy couldn’t even hold a bat.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Alejandro had been right about the robe. It was filthy. He tossed it in the hamper and stepped into the shower. Afterwards, he slipped a new razor head into place. At his age, shaving was an ordeal, especially beneath the jawline, where the skin sagged in dewlaps that, otherwise, he had schooled himself not to see.
When he was young, he’d enjoyed mirrors, enjoyed looking himself in the eye while he prepared for shaving, fingertips moving against the grain along his darkly whiskered jawline. He’d ruined all that. In the bathroom with the boy on the day of the lipstick. No pleasure since in the eyes that looked back at him.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
When his calm was complete, he came to parade rest, then shrugged out of his soldier’s posture and lay back on the bed. He felt dazed from what the boy had put him through. “I’ll rest for a minute,” he thought, before sleep claimed him. He’d always dropped off easily—relished the weightless tumble, loved it best when there were no dreams but escape. Erasure. He didn’t know how long he’d been under when he woke to the boy screaming.
“What the hell?” He rushed to the kitchen door and out across the pea gravel of the back yard to the boy, jumping and slapping as yellowjackets swarmed, stinging, out of a boxwood at the back fence.
“Run!” he shouted. Grabbing the boy by the wrist, he ran for the safety of the house, the yellowjackets in angry pursuit, their icy stings jabbing the hand that held the boy.
Inside, he grabbed bicarbonate of soda from the kitchen cabinet, poured some into a cereal bowl, added water from the faucet and stirred a quick paste.
“Get your shirt off,” he said, and helped the boy with his buttons. “Calm down.” The boy was hyperventilating. “Poison spreads faster if you’re scared.”
“Oh, Daddy, it hurts, it hurts.” The boy danced around, heedless, while he applied the cooling paste to his stings. There had to be a dozen on his cheeks and forehead, even more on his chest and torso, whitish welts spreading from the pinprick marks of stingers.
“Why didn’t you run?”
“I tried, Daddy, I tried. But they kept buzzing.” The boy was glassy-eyed.
“Serves you right.” He swabbed the bicarbonate paste on more stings. “You should’ve got out of there.” The boy would not hold still.
“My tongue.”
“Your tongue what?”
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your tongue.”
“Feels swollen.” Thwollen, it sounded like.
He went down on one knee and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Listen to me.” He gave the boy a quick, sharp slap to bring him to attention. “You’re making this worse. You have got to calm down.”
“I feel hot all over.”
“Stop it. Do you hear me? Stop this now.”
“I can’t breathe. Oh, Daddy, Daddy, I’m scared. I can’t breathe.”
The house was empty, the neighborhood quiet. Somewhere Phyllis was helping with a party while Jeannine played with the birthday girl and her friends. He scooped the boy up and ran with him to the pickup truck out front. He drove fast toward the hospital, honking through intersections, rounding corners without stopping, and all the while beside him, the boy’s ragged breathing.
“Pretty fix you got us into,” he said, needing to hear words. “Did this on purpose.” And a few blocks later, just before the boy’s breathing seized, “Won’t get any pity out of me. Want crying over, you’ll have to wait for your momma.”
He was still worked up when they got to the hospital, still in charge—barking orders right and left.
It was too late. They did what they could, but the boy was gone.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The house was thick with shadow when he came out of the bathroom. He set up the ironing board, pressed fresh khakis, a pinstripe shirt. The neighbors nearest the open windows had been up and going since mid-morning—a baffling mix of Spanish and English rising out of the back yard where the children played. He shut the bathroom window, took the brick from the one beside his bed. That dampered the playing voices, but he hated the close, warm air. He switched on the old air conditioner in the other bedroom window. The drone was almost worse than the quiet it filled up, but the cool blowing at him was lovely.
He stripped the bed, put on fresh sheets, started a load of laundry. Waiting for the spin cycle, he lay down and drifted off. The window unit woke him, a loud, shuddering moan that did not bode well. He turned it off, waited a minute, and turned it on again. The motor stalled again, sending vibrations through window and sill. It was an ancient thing, second-hand, never serviced or repaired. A flicker of the old anger lit in him. He turned the dial to off, wrenched the knob free and threw it, clattering, against the wall. Yanking the plug, he wrestled the window up and knocked at the cheap plastic framing that secured the unit. When it came loose, he shoved against the air conditioner, and with a crash, it landed in the flower bed beneath the window. He went to the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room, opening every window that would budge. Sweating, light-headed, he dropped into the old recliner and waited for his breathing to ease.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
During the funeral service, he sat at the core of a stillness that had enclosed him from the moment he realized that the boy would not breathe again. Pews creaked, kinfolk and neighbors fanned themselves, whispering, while the altar boys poured forth in Latin. The priest delivered epistle, gospel, eulogy. None of it touched him—until the offertory, when the priest held the host aloft and the altar boy rang his little cluster of bells. He felt an answer thrumming at the walls of his chest, a spasm there, like a hiccough, but tearing, painful. A sound came out of him, a burst of air, as if he’d been hit in the gut.
“Daddy?” Jeannine whispered from beside him.
Beyond her, Phyllis looked at him.
The spasm came again. He rose and left the church. Half walking, half running, he reached the steps outside and bent double, cries coming out of him like a drunk wracked by dry heaves.
He felt a hand at his shoulder and turned. It was his father-in-law. “I’m here, son,” he said. “I’m with you. You got to let this out.”
And then he understood. They thought it was tears he wanted. Crying. In the instant, the spasms were gone.
“Get your hands off me,” he said, and spun away in a frenzy of loathing.
“Hold on there.”
“Get the fuck away from me.” The tears came now, the rage that loosed them blinding him. Just like the boy, he thought—but corrected himself later. That’s where the boy got it. His softness. From her side—weak men saying don’t bottle it up. It was like an infection. The boy hadn’t had a chance.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Waking, he cranked the recliner upright and walked to the front window. Some kid was picking up pecans beneath his trees. He stepped onto the front porch.
“Hey, muchacho.”
The kid straightened and looked his way—hair like midnight, cheeks brown as an Indian. He looked to be ten or thereabout, a stranger, likely new to the neighborhood.
“What you doing with my pecans?”
By way of answer, the rascal scooped a nut from the ground, cracked it between his teeth, picked out the nutmeats and popped them in his mouth.
“Habla Inglés?”
“Habla Español?”
“Smart one, aren’t you?”
“I know all about you,” the boy said, sass pouring out of him like light.
“There’s not much to know.”
“People say you act mean but you don’t mean it anymore.”
“What’s your name, son?”
“Julian.”
This one was easy. Hoo-lee-yon—accent on the last syllable.
“They got trespassing laws where you come from?”
“I don’t see a sign says I can’t be here. No fence either.” The kid was clearly enjoying himself.
“My yard, my pecans,” he said, trying to put a gruffness he didn’t feel into his voice.
“Tell you what,” Julian said. “I’ll pick up your pecans.” He scooped up several and brandished them in his open palm. “I’ll pick ’em all up, you let me keep half.”
“Deal—long as you get ’em all.”
“You gimme enough grocery bags, I’ll pick up every pecan you got.”
“I got plenty of bags.”
“Wanta shake?”
He took the boy’s extended hand. “I admire your gumption.”
“Say what?”
“It means nerve. Courage, maybe. I don’t know the current slang.”
“Cojones.” Julian’s black eyes glinted. “I got balls is what you’re saying.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” His stomach growled. “Excuse me,” he said. “I forgot to eat lunch.”
“That’s all right. Old men I know, they all got bubbling sounds in their gut.”
“Your momma might ought to teach you some manners.”
“Don’t have a momma. My abuela takes care of me.”
“Well, I’m hungry. Say, you in the market for a bowl of ice cream?”
Julian reached in his pocket and pulled out a fistful of change. “How much you charging?”
“Keep your money. I can afford a dish of ice cream for the both of us.”
“What kind you got?”
“What kind you want?”
“Chocolate.”
“Done.”
Inside, he scooped three dips for each of them, topped their bowls with marshmallow creme and a scattering of pecans. Julian slid onto the built-in bench behind the kitchen table, thick November light washing over him from the window there. He ate hungrily, his back in a curve that minimized the distance between bowl and mouth. Sitting over his own dish, he thought about the pull of hunger when he was young—each mouthful a dizzying temptation, his grandmother standing over him saying, “Slow down, slow down. You’ll ruin your stomach.” He ate and watched the boy eat. The boy said nothing, but his presence filled the empty rooms.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Phyllis cleared out as soon as he was buried. She took Jeannine with her and they didn’t come back. She didn’t ask how their son came to be in the boxwood with a nest of yellowjackets. He didn’t tell her—never told anyone—about the lipstick and the bathroom. But Phyllis was done. He could see it in her eyes.
The day they lost the boy, she emptied her closet, put her shoes and clothes in Jeannine’s room. Until the service was over, and the reception after, she slept in there, dressed in there. Shut him out.
“You did what you could,” they said to him—his grandmother, his pool hall buddies, the men in the neighborhood. He was not to blame, they said. It was an acute allergic reaction, an act of God. No one could have saved the boy. At the house after the funeral, he heard his grandmother babble some nonsense about Jesus calling the boy home. He got up and left the room.
Phyllis moved out. He put his toolbox in the bed of the pickup truck, drove to the house he was helping to build and quit the crew there. He went after jobs he could do on his own—roof repair, chimney removal, kitchen and bathroom facelifts. Turned himself into a topnotch cabinet maker. Paid Phyllis her alimony until that was done, put Jeannine through college. Marked the decades after with table saw, sandpaper, clamps. One day you’re twenty-nine, walking into an empty house that no one but you will come back to, the next you’re eighty—past, even—and the stillness holds.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“Uh-oh,” Julian said. “That’s Adan. He’s my brother.” Their bowls were empty, a voice calling from the front door between the sounds of knocking.
“I’ll invite him in,” he said to the boy, and went to the door. “May I help you?”
“I’m looking for my little brother. The neighbors say he came in here.” This one was seventeen, eighteen, maybe—in athletic shorts and tank top, with a backwards baseball cap. Looked as if he’d just finished a run.
“Come on in.” He unhooked the screen door. “He’s in—”
Adan shoved past him, calling his little brother’s name. Julian appeared in the door between living room and kitchen.
There ensued an angry exchange between the brothers, a mix of English and Spanish peppered with the favored Anglo-Saxon verb. The younger one gave as good as he got.
Preliminaries done with, Adan dropped into a squat—a predatory resilience visible in the muscles of his legs. His voice came husky with suspicion, eagerness too, the way some men salivate over what they oughtn’t.
“Did he touch you?”
He couldn’t let that stand. “Hold on there.”
“Stay out of this, old man.” Adan turned back to his little brother. “Did he touch you?”
“Nobody touches me.”
Again, the brothers bickered and fumed. Pendejo, Adan said. Menso. Baboso. Tarado. Even a little brother ought to have sense enough not to follow some old white man into a house by himself.
Julian stood there red in the face and railed against the unclean intent of Adan’s questions. Cabron was the insult of choice.
“What’re you doing here, then?” the older one asked. “Answer me that. Hunh?”
Julian turned from Adan and looked at him, as if to say, You deal with him. Adan turned too.
“I offered your brother some ice cream,” he said, hating the oily tone that came out of him when he tried to sound reasonable.
“Ice cream,” Adan dead-panned, clearly out of his depth.
“Yeah,” Julian said. “You don’t believe us, look in the kitchen.”
“You want ice cream?” Adan said. “I’ll give you ice cream.” He cuffed his brother upside the head, and when Julian turned on him—thrashing, cursing—picked up the boy and walked from the house.
He followed them out front. Adan stopped in the middle of the yard and tossed his flailing brother to the ground. Julian jumped up, breathing hard.
He had to do something. It was clear the brothers would not stop otherwise, that the younger would pay heavily from what came next.
“That’s enough now,” he said, stepping into the space between them.
“Stay out of this,” Adan said.
“You’ll hurt him. You don’t want that.”
“I’ll hurt you, you don’t back off.”
The three of them stood there like a tableau that should mean something. Into the silence that pooled beneath the pecans, a lone rooster trumpeted his presence. He chuckled. The timing was perfect.
“What’s so funny?” Adan said.
“You, maybe,” he said. “Knocking around on a boy half your size.”
The backhand caught him in the mouth, and he sat down hard. Adan leaned over him, put lips at his ear, whispered, “Maricon,” and then, straightening up, said loud and clear, “No more ice cream.”
That would have been the end of it, except for Julian.
“You hurt him,” he said. “He’s an old man. You made his lip bleed.”
“Men like him, they need a busted lip,” Adan said. “Give ’em something to think about. Let’s get out of here.”
“You get out of here,” Julian said, and turned back. “You okay?” He extended a hand.
With the boy’s help, he stood. “I been worse,” he said.
“Hey,” Adan said. “Old man. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He sounded almost meek—as if a single punch had taken the wind out of his sail. “But you got to see how it looked, you and my little brother alone in there.”
He put a hand to his mouth. There was blood where the lip had come between knuckles and teeth. “You want forgiveness,” he said to Adan, “tell it to a priest.”
“You disrespecting my religion?”
“I’m a Catholic myself. Used to be.”
“Used to be?” This was Julian, claiming his place in the fray again.
“You might call me lapsed.”
Both the brothers looked confused.
“A religious dropout,” he told them.
“Oh,” Adan said, his voice betraying both understanding and disappointment.
“You should go back to church,” Julian said.
“Yeah, man,” Adan added. “Go to confession. Get a fresh start. Even you, old as you are.”
Their enthusiasm was charming. Almost. But it made him tired. “Some things,” he said, “a priest cannot absolve.”
“It’s not the priest,” the one said—and then the other, “The priest is acting for Jesus. He can forgive anything.”
“No,” he said. “Some things cannot be forgiven.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
They left then, their voices fading as they rounded the corner at the end of the block and vanished.
Stepping inside, he turned to hook the screen door and stopped. In the yard, pecan leaves rustled. From the sidewalk beyond came fragments of voices, calling, calling, stripped of all meaning except to say, We are here. And farther still, the traffic on West Avenue, whisking somewhere. He turned to the empty rooms. He walked to the kitchen, opened the paper to the daily crossword, took up his pencil and sat down. The puzzle was vacant, a grid of perfect squares against the framing black, the numbered lists of clues beside, the words biding in his pencil tip. As on afternoons before.
He rose and returned to the front door, unlatched the screen door, and stepped out. The cool of fall seeped in the late-afternoon air. He sat on the porch until dusk, the last of the pecans dropping intermittently onto the sidewalk, light taps in the humming stillness.