Bonedead

Mad Dog

THE FIRST time I killed a cad, the first time the dead walked, in the flesh, I was on the island.

Laid out on my back, a shadow folded across my face the way Marcos would cover cadavers with a cold sheet. And when my eyelids broke open, a million years of dust on my eyelashes, a soldier was there, hovering. Sun rays fanned his silhouette like the gilt carving of San Benedicto mi madré carried on a rosary in her dress pocket, only, bigger. The pressure of fingertips plying my neck for a pulse startled me. One beat. Two. I pushed away the hands that touched my shoulders and my waist. I'd stand on my own, gerddamnit. I was alive, after all. The day someone carried me, I'd be laid out in a six-foot box.

They checked my bloody wounds.

I was the doctor; I didn't have any.

Next came folding chairs and tepid tea. My body aged sitting, rooting to the hard chair seat and its brutal back. A blanket hung on my shoulders, crunchy and unrequited. The sting of stale ciggies poisoned the wool. Mouths moved, but I couldn't hear through the cottonseed in my ears. I listed underwater. My head vibrated with phantom sounds:

The Flyers' craww, crawww.

The percussive whomp of Gatling guns.

Me, screaming.

Seated in a corner, I watched the room slant and dribble like melted candles on a mirror. Tattered remnants of the Blackwell Flyers, Red Aviars—men and women in crimson, blue-braided, uniforms—scittered across the waxed gymnasium floor, ducking under the steady rings suspended from the ceiling, doling out blankets and canned food and calm words. They'd gathered us here, to wait. For help, I guessed. And so we waited. Stacked along the wall with the grass mats and the heavy weights. All around us, giant, arched windows put the grim landscape on display. A plebian exhibit from the Metropolitan Museum that anyone could see, free of charge. The kind of exhibit Abuela funded—by-gone fragments and bones in glass cases.

No calm word. No cup of tea. Nothing could vanish the corpses outside. People discarded, no better than bruised apples left to ferment on the sidewalk.

Nothing could make me forget.

Left shoulder, head, upper thorax—gone.

He deserved it, something whispered in my heart.

My teacup nicked the saucer. I had to stop pinching the delicate handle.

A woman occupied a stool across the way. Her hair glimmered silver in places; flickery minnows drowned in mud. The strands were snarly at her temples. The day's careful coiffe had unraveled like my senses. I heard her, barely, through the cotton. She murmured to a small girl on her lap, singing words I'd learned from the flower sellers in the streets back home. Girls like me, who huddled under the elevated train tracks, cradling a basket a piece:

"...rain, rain go away, come again another day, Little Mary wants to play."

I used to say "Rosita wants to play" whenever thunder walloped our tenement, echoing off the stones, making her chin crinkle.