I collected a total of 4.20 soles. The bus stopped. “Ladies and Gentlemen, good day!” Tonio shouted. We stepped into the morning sun. The whole thing had taken five minutes.
I put a coin in the slot and dialed the number to Elisa’s bodega. It was early afternoon. Tonio and Jhon sat in a café across the street, sharing a cup of tea. We were back downtown, taking a break. We’d been thrown off buses, had change tossed at us, been spat at. But we’d made money. A good day, Tonio assured me, better than usual. They seemed content.
The phone rang and rang in San Juan, and then she answered. She asked me how I was.
I looked at the busy street, the people meandering homeward or workward. “I’m at the office, vecina, I can’t talk long.” I asked her if she’d seen my mother.
“At the funeral, Chino. Why weren’t you there?”
“I had to work. I couldn’t make it. Did she say anything?”
“She misses you, Chino.” I heard Elisa sigh. “She said that everything is good with Carmela. That she might sell the house.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Chino, are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Are you going to visit her?”
Tonio and Jhon were paying with change, haggling for a little extra hot water. They counted the money out in ten-cent coins. The waitress tried to hold back a smile. Jhon leaned over the counter and blew her a kiss. They were charming clowns. “Thank you, vecina,” I said and hung up the phone.
My new nickname both labeled me as dangerous and emasculated me. I was never scary to them. I was a joke. I represented nothing, except a mistake perhaps. A nerdy kid from the ghetto. I was too skinny. Too weak. Even when I played well or ran fast, they hurled insults at me. In San Juan, we’d joked about how I would beat up these pitucos, but the reality was so different. They wielded their power carelessly, sometimes unconsciously. They could cut me out with a comment or simply with silence.
“It’s time for you to start working,” my father announced.
It was my second year at Peruano Británico. I was almost fourteen. In more than a year, I’d never been invited to a classmate’s home. Each day I rode the bus from San Juan to San Isidro in silence.
I’d given my father’s line of work a lot of thought. I’d examined it under rules of ethics and law. It was wrong. Certainly. But when he told me it was time for me to work, my mind gathered a year of scattered insults and wove them together. I savored those injuries, imagined what a delight it would be to go through one of those boys’ houses, to exchange smiles and nods and handshakes. To work there, and then to steal. I began to understand my old man, or to think I did. But I wanted to be sure.
“I want to work,” I said.
“Of course you do. Every man wants to work.”
“Pa, are we going to break into this house?”
He sat back. Frowned. He’d misread me. “Have people been saying things?”
I nodded.
“And what do you think about what they say?” He seemed poised to smile at the slightest hint of approval from me.
“I believe them.”
“Well, Chino,” he said and stopped.
I wanted to tell him it was all right with me. That those rich fucks could complain to God if they didn’t like it. That they could move to Miami and become American. That if they wanted to call me Piraña, then they’d better be good and fucking ready when I came in and repossessed all their treasures.
He ran a finger through his hair and winked. His large black eyes were set close, his mouth was small, comically so, but his broad smile evened everything out, organized the jumble of his features. He kept his black hair meticulously combed back. At rest, he was a caricature of an Indian. In laughter, he was a mestizo Clark Gable. So he laughed and smiled and made that smile the linchpin of his personality. Now he met my gaze, his son — I believed, his only son. “Chino, we’re just men who work. You and I both. Crazy things happen in the city.” He snapped his fingers and laughed. He hugged me. “Okay?”
The wife had a good eye for color. She had decorated the house herself, she told us. She walked us through the expansive suburban mansion, me, my father, and Felipe, pointing out renovations and design touches: a wall they’d knocked down, leaving only painted beams. “See how this adds space to the room? Gives it another feel?” she asked. The three of us nodded, our eyes wide and observant. There were skylights, balconies, a garden with blossoming trees, but we focused on what could be taken away: a computer, a stereo, even a dishwasher. The husband was an executive at a bank, an old friend of Señor Azcárate. They wanted to remodel the second floor, to add a television room, she said. It wouldn’t be that much work, maybe three or four weeks. Some painting. New carpet. A couple of new windows and light fixtures.
I worked on Saturdays, and I saw my father more then than I did at home. During the week, he was mostly gone. His youngest son was still in diapers, and my mother must have known about Carmela by then. When he was home they argued, but I didn’t know why. The construction on our house had stalled, the second floor still open air, a thick plastic sheet tied at the corners of three walls. When they were fighting, I retreated there and watched the ridges of the hills draw lines against the sky.
The family we were working for had a son, Andrés, who was in the class above me at Peruano Británico. At his house he ignored me. At school he let it be known that I had crossed the line. I felt the stares, the judgment. By the time he woke up on Saturdays, I had already been working for three or four hours. His weekends, as far as I could tell, took the shape of an extended yawn. I placed tiles in the hallway. He ate cereal. I sanded down corners and measured for the bookshelves we’d be building. He talked on the phone, loud enough for me to hear. “Yeah, Piraña’s here. You bet I’m watching my shit, huevón.” He made no attempt to hide his disdain for me. I listened to him speculate as to which girl would be the first to let him seduce her there. How far she would spread her legs. With a long phone cord dragging behind him, he paraded through the work area, complained of the dust, asked his mother to tell us that the sanding was hurting his ears. He put on a show of power. I bowed my head at the appropriate times and pretended not to hear.
One Saturday, when we were almost done, the entire family was getting ready for a wedding. The mother flitted about, changing her dress three times. The father came in to tell us that we’d have to leave a little early because they all had to go. We were hurrying our work along, trying to finish, when Andrés called out to his mother, “Mami, tell Piraña to stop with the hammering! I can’t even think!”
He stepped out into the hallway, wearing a gray wool suit and a red tie, still unknotted. He glared at me.
“What did you call him, Andrés?” his mother said sharply, coming into the room. Her hair was styled in a hard, gelled bob. She stood in front of him, waiting for him to speak.
“Piraña,” Andrés muttered.
“What?” she said, surprised, embarrassed. “Why would you call him that?” She turned to me. “Son, what’s your name?”
“Oscar, Señora.”
“Your mother works with the Azcárates, doesn’t she?”
I felt myself turning red. “Yes, Señora.”
“And what year are you in?”