The Infinite Plan (12 page)

“Our only son died eleven years ago,” the farmer said. “We are God-fearing, hardworking people. There'll be no time here for play, only school, church, and helping me in the fields. But the food is good, and if you behave we'll treat you well.”

“Tomorrow I'll make you a custard,” his wife said. “You must be tired; I'm sure you want to go to bed. I'll show you your room; it belonged to our son; we haven't changed a thing since he left us.”

For the first time, Gregory had his own room and a bed; up till then he had used a sleeping bag. It was a small, sparsely furnished room with an open window looking out toward the horizon across cultivated fields. On the walls were pictures of veteran baseball players and old warplanes, not at all like those he had seen in the newsreels. He inspected everything without daring to touch, thinking of his father, the boa, Olga's necklaces for invisibility, Inmaculada's kitchen, and Carmen Morales and the sticky-sweet taste of condensed milk, as a painful, icy knot grew in his chest. He sat on the edge of the bed with his modest belongings on his knees; he waited until the house was asleep, then stole out, carefully closing the door. The dogs barked, but he ignored them. He began walking in the direction of the city, returning along the same route he had followed in the bus, which was etched in his mind like a map. He walked all night and early the next morning, totally drained, appeared at his own front door. Oliver welcomed him, barking happily. Nora Reeves came to the door; with one hand she took the bundle of clothes from her son and with the other reached out to pat him, but stopped before the gesture was completed.

“Try to grow up soon,” was all she said.

That afternoon Gregory thought of racing against the train.

I run up the hill with Oliver behind me, looking for the trees, chest heaving; the undergrowth is scratching my legs, I fall and cut my knee, shit, I yell, shit, and let the dog lick the blood; I can scarcely see where to put my feet, but I keep running toward my green refuge, the place where I always hide. I don't have to see the blazes on the trees to find my way; I've been here so many times I could come blindfolded; I know every eucalyptus, every patch of wild blackberries, every boulder. I lift a branch, and the entrance is before me, a narrow tunnel beneath a thorny bush—it must have been a fox's den—just the width of my body. If I drag myself forward on my elbows, snaking along carefully with my face between my arms and calculating the curve correctly, I can slip through without getting scratched; Oliver is waiting outside; he knows the drill. It has rained during the week, and the ground is soft; it's cold, but my whole body has been feverish for hours, ever since this morning in the broom closet, a fire that will never die, I know. Something pricks me from behind, and I yell out; it's only thorns caught in my sweater. That was how Martínez took me, from behind; I still feel the knife blade against my throat, but I don't think I'm bleeding anymore. If you move I'll kill you, you fucking sonofabitch gringo, and I had no way to defend myself, all I could do was cry and curse while he was doing it to me. Now run tell Miss June and I'll cut your sister's face here on the spot, and you already know what I'll do to you, he said when he was through, while he was fastening his pants. He walked away laughing. If anyone finds out, I'm fucked; they'll call me a pansy for the rest of my life. No one must ever find out! But what if Martínez tells? I'd like to kill him! My hands, my clothes, my face, are covered with mud; my mother will be furious; I'd better think up some excuse: I got hit by a car, or the gang worked me over again, but then I remember I don't have to make up any lie because I'm going to die, and when they find my body the dirt won't matter. I'll wait like I am. She'll be grief-stricken, she won't think about the bad things I've done, only my good side, that I wash the dishes and give her almost everything I make shining shoes, and at last she'll realize that I've been a good son and she'll be sorry she wasn't more loving to me, sorry she wanted to give me away to the nuns and the farmers and that she never cooked eggs for my breakfast even once, it's not even hard, Doña Inmaculada does it with her eyes closed, even a retard can fry a couple of eggs. She'll be sorry, but it will be too late because I'll be dead. They'll have an assembly at school and say nice things about me the way they did for Zarate when he drowned in the ocean; they'll say I was their best classmate and that I had a great future, and all the students will have to line up and walk past my coffin to kiss me on the forehead. The first graders will be crying, and I'll bet the girls will faint: women can't stand to see blood; they'll all squeal except for Carmen, who will put her arms around my corpse and never even flinch. I hope Miss June doesn't get the idea to read the letter I wrote her at the funeral, jeez, why did I do that? I can't ever look her in the face again; she's so pretty, as pretty as a fairy princess or a movie actress. If she only knew what I'm thinking in class when she's standing up there at the blackboard going over the arithmetic problems and I'm sitting at my desk staring at her like a moron, with my head in the clouds—who can think about numbers when she's around! Like, for instance, I dream that she tells me, I'll help you with your homework, Greg, your grades are a disaster, so I stay after class and all the others are gone and we're alone in the building, and without me saying a word she goes wild and lies down on the floor, and I peepee between her legs. Never, not in all the days of my life, will I confess to the Padre the dirty things I think up; I'm a pervert, a pig. And I had to go and write that farewell letter to Miss June! What a screwup. Well, at least I won't have to suffer the shame of seeing her again; I'll be dead and gone by the time she reads it. And Carmen, poor Carmen . . . The only reason I feel sad about dying is that I won't ever see her again. If she knew what Martínez did to me she would come here and die with me, but I can't tell anyone, especially her.

This is the worst thing that ever happened in my life, it's the very worst thing that rat Martínez ever did to me, worse than the First Communion when he made me bite off a piece of bread before I took communion, so when I swallowed the host I'd be struck by lightning and go straight to hell. But nothing happened; I didn't feel anything. I guess it was because it wasn't my sin, it was his, and he's the one who'll boil in Satan's caldrons, not me, for leading me to sin—which is a greater offense than the sin itself, that's what Padre Larraguibel explained to us when he told us about Adam and Eve. That time I had to write five hundred times
I must not blaspheme,
because I said that God committed the sin when He put the apple in the Garden of Eden knowing that Adam would eat it one day, anyway, and if that wasn't leading someone to sin, what was? Oh, this is worse than when Martínez stripped me in the gym and hid my clothes; if the cleaning lady hadn't come and helped me, I would have had to spend the night in the shower and the next day the whole school would have seen me stark naked. It's worse than when he shouted to everyone in the schoolyard that he had spied me in the bathroom playing doctor with Ernestina Pereda. I hate him! I hate him from the bottom of my heart! I wish he would die, not just get sick but be killed—but not before someone cuts off his dick. I want that lousy Martínez to pay. I hate him, I hate him!

I'm inside my den now, I whistle to Oliver and listen to him crawling through the tunnel. I put my arms around him, and he lies very still, panting, with his tongue hanging out; he looks at me with his honey-colored eyes, he understands, he's the only one who knows all my secrets. Oliver is a pretty ugly dog; Judy despises him; he's a real mutt and has a long fat tail like a baseball bat. He's bad besides; he eats clothes and rolls in dog shit and then jumps on the beds; he loves fights and sometimes comes home all chewed up, but he's warm and when he hasn't been rolling in anything he smells great. I bury my nose in his neck; his outside hair is short and stiff, but next to his skin it's soft as cotton, and I like to sniff him there—nothing smells better than dog. The sun's gone down, and shadows are everywhere; it's cold, one of those rare winter afternoons, and in spite of the fact that I'm afire, my hands and ears are freezing cold—it feels clean. I've decided not to slit my throat with my pocketknife as I planned to; I'll just die of the cold: I'll slowly freeze through the night, and tomorrow morning I'll be stiff as a board, a slow death but more peaceful than being hit by a train. That was my first idea, but every time I run in front of the train I'm too big a coward and at the last second jump and save myself by a hair. I don't know how many times I tried it, but I've decided not to die that way, it must hurt a lot, and besides, the idea of all the guts makes me sick; I don't want to be scraped up with a shovel or have some smartass keep my fingers for souvenirs. I'm going to push Oliver away, because he keeps me warm and I'll never freeze this way. I'll scratch this hollow in the dirt to get comfortable and turn over on my back and lie perfectly still—oh, that pain there . . . that damn, miserable Martínez
queer
! My head is filled with thoughts and visions and words, but then after a very long time I stop crying and begin to breathe normally and then smell the soft, fresh earth gathering me into her arms the way Doña Inmaculada hugs me; I sink, I let go and think about the planet, round, floating free of gravity in the black abyss of the cosmos, spinning and spinning, and I think of the stars in the Milky Way and how it will be at the end of the world, when everything explodes and particles spray out like fireworks on the Fourth of July, and I feel like I'm a part of the earth, made of the same stuff, and when I die I will disintegrate, crumble like a cake, and be part of the soil, and trees will grow from my body. I start thinking how the world doesn't turn around me, how I'm not anything special—I must be about as important as a hunk of clay—and maybe I don't have a soul of my own; suddenly I wonder if there isn't just one big soul for all living creatures, including Oliver, and no heaven or hell or purgatory, maybe they're just something cooked up by the Padre, who's so old his mind's gone soft, and my father's Logi and Masters don't exist either, and the only one who's anywhere close to the truth is my mother with her Bahai religion, although she gets all wound up with shit that may be fine for Persia but doesn't make much sense here. I like the idea of being a particle, of being a grain of cosmic sand. Miss June says that comets' tails are formed of stellar dust, thousands of tiny little rocks that reflect the light. I'm feeling really calm now, I've forgotten about Martínez, about being afraid, about the pain and the broom closet, I am at peace, I rise up and am flying with my eyes wide open toward the starry void. I'm flying . . . flying with Oliver. . . .

From the time she was a little girl, Carmen Morales had the manual skills that characterized her for the rest of her life; in her hands any object was transformed from its original form. She made necklaces from soup beans, soldiers from toilet paper rolls, toys from spools and matchboxes. One day, playing with three apples, she discovered that she had no trouble at all keeping them in the air at the same time; soon she was juggling five eggs, and from that moved naturally to more exotic objects.

“Shining shoes is a lot of sweat and not much cash, Greg. Learn some trick, and we'll work together,” Carmen suggested to her friend. “I need a partner.”

Dozens of eggs later, Gregory's definitive clumsiness was established. He had no interesting talent to offer other than wiggling his ears and eating live flies, although he did have a good ear for the harmonica. Oliver was more gifted; they taught him to walk on his hind legs with a hat clamped in his jaws and how to select small slips of paper from a box. At first he swallowed them, but he eventually learned to deliver them delicately to the client. Carmen and Gregory assiduously perfected a routine for their show and to escape the scrutiny of friends and neighbors planned to perform as far from home as possible, since they knew that if Pedro or Inmaculada Morales knew what they were doing, nothing could save them; they had already earned one spanking for their idea of posing as beggars in their own barrio. Carmen made a skirt from brightly colored scarves and a bonnet trimmed with chicken feathers, and asked to borrow Olga's yellow boots. Gregory sneaked out the top hat and bow tie his father had worn while preaching, items Nora had preserved as relics. They asked Olga to help them in drafting the slips with fortunes, telling her it was a game for the end-of-school party; she pierced them with one of her looks but without further questions sat down and wrote out a handful of prophecies in the style of Chinese fortune cookies. They rounded out their supplies with eggs, candles, and five kitchen knives, which they hid in a sack because they could not leave their houses carrying such things without raising suspicion. They washed Oliver down with a hose and tied a ribbon around his neck, hoping to make him look a little less like a cur. They chose a street corner far from the barrio, donned their minstrel outfits, and tried out their act. A small crowd soon gathered around the two children and the dog. Carmen, with her petite figure, her eye-catching clothes, and her extraordinary skill in tossing burning candles and sharp knives in the air, was an instant attraction; Gregory devoted himself to playing the harmonica. In pauses between the juggling, he put aside his mouth organ and invited the spectators to buy a fortune. For a small sum, the dog would select a folded slip and carry it to the client—slightly damp with slobber, it is true, but perfectly legible. In an hour or two the children earned as much as a laborer received for a full day's work in any of the area factories. As it began to grow dark, they removed their costumes, packed up their equipment, divided their earnings, and returned home, after swearing that torture could not make them reveal what they had done. Carmen buried her money in a box in her patio, and Gregory doled his out at home, to avoid prying questions, keeping a small share to go to the movies.