‘See you, man,’ Fidel said as I left, but he didn’t look up.
In the alley, the recent rains had turned the ground to slurry. I watched passers-by pick their way around the edges of puddles. ‘You’re almost a man,’ said Uncle Bee, settling himself back against the doorpost. ‘You ever think about where you’re heading? What you want?’ I’d heard Aunt Mary ask the same of Dub and Benny, but unlike them I was unprepared with an answer. All I could think of at that moment was going back inside and having another turn at Fidel’s video game, joking around with the boys, feeling for a while like I had my own crowd, maybe having the highest score when Suelita’s shift was up and she passed through the room on her way to help her mother in the yard. I didn’t say anything. Uncle Bee watched me but he didn’t press for an answer.
From inside the shack a clamour erupted. Fidel and the boys were hollering in victory. From somewhere out back Missy Bukaykay yelled, ‘Oy, oy!’ The boys quieted. A few seconds later a jaunty series of beeps was followed by a more subdued murmur.
Uncle Bee tipped his head in the direction of the back yard. ‘Wearer of the Pants,’ he said grandly, as if it were a ceremonial title.
He leaned in to me and said softly, ‘You know Eddie Casama?’ His eyes flitted to the corner of the shack round which Rico and his boys lounged.
‘Sure. Who hasn’t heard of him?’
‘Mary Morelos have any dealings with him?’
‘I guess she knows everyone round here, but he’s never been to the house.’
‘She or America hear of anything big, you’d tell me, right?’ I looked at him and he held my gaze until I looked away again. ‘Cesar Santiago’s been working long into the night for months now. Walking around with a haunted look in his eye,’ he said, his voice low, close to my ear. ‘Wouldn’t even tell his brother why.’ Cesar Santiago: Pastor Levi’s brother and Eddie Casama’s lawyer. I sat a little looser on the stoop, arms resting on my knees, drink in hand, mimicking the way Uncle Bee sat, like a man rather than a kid, talking about bigger matters than whether it was ok to make chicken three nights running. ‘Levi finally got it out of him yesterday. Application was submitted to redevelop this place.’ I looked up at the eaves of the shack. ‘Not just my place,’ he said and thrust his chin out in a wider arc. I looked up and down the alley. Uncle Bee settled back and watched me. He looked like he had more to say but he waited. I guessed some kind of response was required of me first.
‘Hard not to tell a thing like that to your brother when he’s asking,’ I said.
Uncle Bee shook his head; I was missing the point. ‘For some, money beats blood. They filed the application in February.’
I took this in slowly; it was hard to keep a little secret in Esperanza — a place where everyone knew who was more interested in their brother’s wife than their own, or who’d lied about their son’s school grades, or sold their neighbour’s dog — so to keep a thing like that quiet for months took some cunning. ‘Just after the Pope arrived,’ Uncle Bee said. ‘I guess they figured it would go unnoticed with all the excitement.’ I thought back to the Pope’s visit. Even in Aunt Mary’s house it seemed like the TV had never been switched off. ‘That boy Rico,’ Uncle Bee said. ‘Friend of yours?’ I shook my head. ‘Good. The kind of boy your mother used to call bulok.’ Bulok, rotten. She’d used that word often, for people she’d wanted me to stay away from.
Rico was my age but he’d dropped out of school a long time ago, so I saw him only occasionally, hanging out with his barkada, his gang: street-corner boys. They called their gang the Barracudas. The Barracuda barkada; I guess somebody thought it was funny. It was no secret that Rico ran errands for Eddie Casama, which was as close, I reckoned, as he was ever going to get to real wealth. The rest of the time he and his boys made it their business to keep order in the barrio. In their own way, Rico’s family were as well known in the neighbourhood as Aunt Mary’s; if trouble broke out, it was widely assumed they knew more about it than most. Rico’s brother, Caylo, ran some pool tables, pinball and mah-jong in their yard. His cousin Rolly — after the bodybuilder Roland Dantes; I never knew his real name — ran a gym and Rico and his boys worked out there for free after closing time. In front of the store this afternoon, Rico had left his shirt wide open and anyone could see the working-out was paying off. Rico’s association with Eddie Casama had given him a kind of surly confidence. ‘Been strutting round like a prizefighter for weeks now,’ Uncle Bee said. ‘Like he knows something we don’t.’
‘I could ask Aunt Mary if she knows any more,’ I said, dropping the pitch of my voice to match his. I wouldn’t ask her, of course. I’d ask America instead and she’d probably just tell me off, like she always did, for being inquisitive.
‘Naw. You keep it close to you just for now, ok?’
‘Sure,’ but I was disappointed, a kid again.
‘Levi’s going up there this week to check the facts.’ He nodded uptown. ‘Maybe it’s nothing, eh?’ But he said it too carefully.
‘I hear anything, I’ll let you know.’
Uncle Bee smiled. ‘Ok, tough guy,’ he said.
He told me to wait and called to Suelita to wrap a couple of biscuits for me. After a minute we heard her knock on the counter to let us know they were ready. I stood up and reached out to shake his hand. He smiled at me again, raising his eyebrows when Suelita rapped, more loudly, a second time. He shook my hand, placing his other hand on my shoulder. It felt affectionate, easy, the kind of thing a father would do when his son might feel too old to be embraced.
At the hatch, Suelita held the parcel out to me without so much as a glance in my direction, continuing to stare down at the newsprint clippings spread over the counter. She’d knotted her hair back, secured it with an array of pencils. She tapped the handle of her scissors against her lower lip with her other hand, pouting slightly as she concentrated. I took the parcel and her hand folded in again like a makahiya leaf touched by rain. I stood there a little too long after taking the biscuits, imagining unfolding the newspaper to find a message from her, decoded slowly from the words she’d cut away — nothing obvious or sentimental, but something that would make me feel like an accomplice. Of course I knew the paper would contain no such thing, but I also knew I’d check anyway and consider keeping the paper, if only because she’d thought to press the top of the parcel into a handle. Then, for no reason, I pictured her handing a secret message to Rico instead and I flushed. She chose that moment to look at me, and gave me a questioning look: why are you still here?
I turned to go, stuffing the biscuits self-consciously into my mouth like a child. I crumpled the wrapper and pushed it into my pocket, to keep for the boarding house trash can, Aunt Mary’s voice in my head reminding me how uncouth it was to drop litter. I thought I caught Suelita’s smile as I started off but when I looked back she’d turned away again and was frowning down at her newsprint words, the luckiest scissors in the world tapping her plump lower lip.
Hen-Coops and Fish Baskets
The curandero’s alley split in two as it moved away from Esperanza Street. To the right, it widened and finally grew a sidewalk before leading to the basilica, the Chinese shops and restaurants and, eventually, the expensive apartment blocks higher on the hill. To the left, the alley led into the heart of Greenhills, so called by the inhabitants, though it was the colour of dirt and was flat, in mockery of the circumstances in which they lived: in Manila, Greenhills was where the rich lived; in Puerto it was a slum. If one continued walking through Greenhills in the direction of the sea, one came to Colon Market, quiet only at night, its stench declaring its presence long before and after its boundaries.