“There’s police at the castle house!”
For one long moment nothing happened. Andrew leaned over to wipe oatmeal off Sam’s face, but he could feel Christine staring at him. He wouldn’t meet her gaze. She abruptly stood up and stalked out of the room.
“The police are at the Cantata’s,” she called, confirming what Henry had said. He got up and unhooked Sam from his highchair, swinging him onto his hip and carrying him into the living room. He watched officers at the door speaking to Michael Cantata and all the while could feel the sound of his own heartbeat. He wondered if anyone else could hear it.
“What do you suppose happened?” Christine said, and her voice sounded odd. She was holding Henry’s hand tightly in her own. Then he heard a faint, familiar tinkling and saw, dangling from her wrist, a silver bracelet with tiny silver bells.
Far Beneath
by Carlos Antonio Delgado
Morningside
1
Downstairs in the dining room Mami looks at the table, at the big white poster paper she put there, holding a thick black marker to make thick black lines to make our Chores Chart. It is summertime now, she says, so we all have chores: vacuum, mow, Comet, Windex. She’s showing us golden stickers for when we do our chores and blank spaces for when we don’t. Tomorrow, she says, we start.
Tomorrow comes. I am in the upstairs plugging in the vacuum, in the small room Papi made an office, and Mami all the way in the basement cleans the toilet and the mirror and the sink. Emilio, I don’t know where he is, he’s only seven, so Mami gives him fake chores like separating colors from whites into piles. I am nine, I’ve got the vacuum. The outlets are funny in Papi’s office, small, two holes (not three), both the same size, not one side big and one side little and one on the bottom (like the ends of the plug I’m holding), so I bend down to see can they fit, will they fit, do they fit, bending down then kneeling down, all the way down, leaning and leaning. And this is when I find it: a magazine. A magazine under the bookcase. A magazine I see under the bookcase when I am leaning and leaning and leaning. The one man is wearing a dark coat and a dark hat in the first picture. The other man is wearing no clothes and he has big privates. The one man is opening his dark coat and showing you his big privates. The other man is touching and kissing the one man and licking his privates and putting his privates into his mouth and into his hands and into his butt. Mami is all the way downstairs and Emilio is I don’t know where, and I am right in here, right here with it, here it is, I see it, it is a magazine.
In bed tonight I close my eyes but I see the mayonnaise-water on their faces, on their necks and cheeks and tongues. I see them holding their privates, licking, licking. I see their muscles and their movement. I see their hair brushed perfectly, their white white teeth, their wide-open mouths, their eyes that like me. I see their shining backs, and chests, and legs, and butts, their feeling good touching each other. Inside my body my stomach is flopping again and again and again like water that comes down the rocks. I get hard down there. I do not like it and I do like it. I turn onto my tummy when I am hard down there and I press my face into my bedsheet and I squeeze my pillow between my legs and I press my privates into the mattress. It feels good. I think of the men and their privates and their faces liking me and I do not like it and I do like it and it feels good to feel the mattress.
2
Papi teaches summer school Spanish at Peabody High. In the morning he is already gone. Good. I am glad.
We live in Morningside, on the part of Duffield Street where instead of black asphalt they kept red bricks as the street, like olden days. Mami loves our house, she says it all the time how much, loves the brick look of the front, loves the round-top red front door, the big window over our porch, loves the garden she keeps, loves all those flowers and vines, loves the white-flower dogwood she and Papi planted last year. She loves our neighbors across the street, Dave and Richard, Papi calls them gay-bors and everybody laughs, who plant tulips in November, and she loves the hundreds and hundreds of them in spring when they grow up in all the many colors. She loves the red bricks as the street, the feel you get when you eat cereal on the porch looking at Dave and Richard’s yard, leaning back in your green chair or rocking on the porch swing, saying hello to Garrett and Molly on bicycles, and to little Luci and Luci’s mother Mary-Beth while they walk Elsie the dog. It’s a skinny red and dark-red brick house, it’s a good house, it’s a tall house, and Emilio and I share the tippy-top third story for a bedroom, a bedroom like our very own tiny house. Through the window up there I can see down over all of East Liberty and up to Highland Park, I can see down into Heth’s Park where we go with the Frisbee to help Luci run Elsie, I can see all up and down Duffield Street until it turns into trees, and I can see almost all the way to Peabody where Papi works.
3
Papi who is dark. Papi who is strong. Papi who speaks to me in Spanish. Papi with black hair and wrinkled forehead and thick chest and the big meat fútbol legs. Papi who holds me, wrestles me, teaches me fútbol Saturdays at Heth’s. At night when he puts me to bed he breathes on me and, kissing me, hugging me, he smells like the darkness of his skin, like the darkness of earth.
4
In the mornings after Papi leaves, only when Mami is cleaning other parts of the house far away from me, that’s when I go to the magazine. I look at the faces and bodies. It makes me hard down there and my thing gets bigger. It makes my back tickle inside my skin, up to my shoulders, and down to make my bottom feel good, like I am afraid, like I am happy. My legs twitch up high, close to my thing. My face feels like liquid is filling up my cheeks. My arms are like they are falling off. Only the times when Papi is already gone to teach and Mami cleans the kitchen or windows or downstairs bathroom, then I go to Papi’s office to underneath the bookcase with my fingers pulling out the magazine. And when I’m looking at the magazine the blood moves all throughout my body so so fast it makes my ears stop hearing stuff.
One night in the middle of summer I am in my bed thinking about the men. Emilio is almost falling asleep up in the tippy-top, but not me. Mami and Papi are downstairs watching TV, they have left already from putting us to bed, and I sneak over to Emilio’s bed and my thing is hard and big and I say to him, whispering, No, put your hands down here, like this, like that, watch first how I do it, there, like that. I say, Kiss me here and I will kiss you there too, no, kiss by sticking out your tongue. He gives me his tongue and I give to him mine and pretty soon I feel his body twitching just like my legs that twitch, and he makes a noise like crying mixing with laughing. I tell him, Shut up. They’ll come back if you do that.
5
Emilio and I are upstairs in Papi’s office where I have been bringing him to see the magazine. But I don’t show him where it is. No way. First, I make him stay out in the hallway because, I tell him, it’s a secret, a magic spell I have to chant that makes the magazine come to us. Then I close the door and I pull out the magazine from underneath the bookcase and I look at it and I am already getting hard down there, and the feeling in my mouth is like I am ready to eat soup, my saliva is stingy under my tongue, like I am nervous and hungry-thirsty at the same time. Then I open the door and he is there, saying, Where is it, let me see it, can I hold it, but I tell him, Shut up or I will make it go away, and then we are kneeling on the floor never talking, and I am turning and turning the pages.