The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (9 page)

But it wasn’t Mamá who would bring about the demise of the chickens. That would be Caridad. Her bedroom window faced my bedroom window, and at least once a week, usually just before my bedtime, Caridad and Pedrito would scream at each other, firing off cuss words in Spanish like my
tío
Emilio when he got drunk:
¡Papayua! ¡Hijo de la gran puta! ¡Singa’o!
Like gossipy old ladies, Caco and I would turn off the lights, then crouch under my window to eavesdrop on the spectacle. Shushing each other, we’d try unsuccessfully to hold back our giggles, exchanging wide-eyed
Oh my God
looks after each bad word, the last even more vulgar than the one before it. And in between the insults: shattering glass, wall pounding, door slamming, even an occasional slap. Caridad and Pedrito’s epic fights were more titillating than any R-rated movie we’d ever sneaked into or any of Mamá’s telenovelas on the Spanish channel.

Compelled by the ruckus from next door, so loud it echoed down the hallway, the rest of the family would eventually trickle into my room and take a seat by the window. It was a weird kind of family night for us, sitting around in slippers and pajamas as if we were watching TV, whispering comments to each other: Ay, Dios mío
. . . That’s true. I saw her
. . . No lo creo
. . . How can he be so mean?
Then someone, usually Abuelo, would feel guilty for setting a bad example for Caco and
me; he’d put on a half-serious tone and then coax everyone to go to bed. It was during one of those nights that we all heard Caridad scream at Pedrito, “You’re as annoying as that goddamned rooster next door, waking me up every morning at dawn to get you this and that and make your damn breakfast.
¡Cómo jodes!
You’ll be making your own breakfast if you keep it up, you lazy bastard! Why don’t you go live next door with those filthy chickens and those dumb
guajiros
you love so much!”

When the officer from Animal Control showed up a week later, we knew it must have been Caridad who called in the complaint. At first, when Mamá peered through the peephole she thought a police officer was at the door and feared the worst. “
Ay, Dios,
Riqui come—
apúrate,
” she called me, pale with panic. “Open the door. Something must’ve happened to Papá and Caco.” The officer greeted us with a “good afternoon,” but as soon as Mamá returned his greeting with her formal, night-class English, “Yes, how do you do, sir,” he began speaking to her in Spanish. He introduced himself as Officer Ramirez and explained, “No,
señora,
I’m not a
policía,
no one is dead,
no ha pasado nada
. I’m from Miami-Dade Animal Control. We received a complaint about chickens in your backyard.” Ecstatic to learn that Papá and Caco weren’t dead after all, Mamá clutched her neck, letting out a soap-opera sigh, and grabbed the officer by the hand, insisting he step inside, “
Ven, entra mi’jo,
sit, I’ll make you
un cafecito
.”

She was so flustered she hadn’t really grasped what the officer had said or why he had come. Topping the inner basket of the espresso maker with coffee, she called out to Abuelo, “There’s
un hombre
here to see you.
Algo
about the chickens, I think.” Abuelo clonked down the hall in his oxfords. He looked blankly at the officer sitting at the kitchen table, sipping his
cafecito
.
“¿Qué pasó?”
he asked, and the officer explained himself a second time. “
¿Cómo? Un
animal
qué
officer?
¿Qué’s eso?”
Abuelo still did not understand the predicament. “I need to look in your backyard,
¿está bien?
” Officer Ramirez asked, fastening a form to his clipboard and pulling a red pen from his shirt pocket. “
Sí
. Come.” Abuelo motioned to the officer, leading him politely out the back door, asking if he wanted a beer. The officer said he couldn’t drink on the job. “What job?” Abuelo asked, still clueless.

I followed them into the yard. Officer Ramirez marched right over to the chicken coop: “You know this is against the law?” he asked Abuelo without lifting his eyes from the clipboard, scribbling notes and checking boxes on the form. “
Qué’s
against the law?” Abuelo asked, perplexed. “Raising fowl in an R-zoned area,” Officer Ramirez answered, as if quoting from the county ordinance. Abuelo still didn’t get it. “Foul? What do you mean?
Un
foul play?” The officer began getting short with him, “No. No chickens. No
gallinas
.
¿Comprende?
You have one week to get rid of the chickens, the rooster, and the coop,” he told Abuelo, tearing off a carbon copy of the form and handing it to him without looking at Abuelo, who was still complaining. “
¿Qué? No gallinas
in my own backyard? That’s
imposible
. Aren’t you Cuban?” Abuelo asked, as if the problem were simply a cultural misunderstanding.

Perhaps realizing the gravity of the situation, Abuelo straightened up, hiked his Bermuda shorts up above his belly button, crossed his arms over his gray-haired chest, and raised his voice: “
¡Qué carajo!
What do you mean I can’t have chickens? I can have all the chickens I want—
cojones
—this is a free country. That’s why I came here from Cuba and now you tell me I can’t have chickens.
¡Le ronca el mango!
” Trying to defuse Abuelo, Officer Ramirez kept repeating, “
Señor, cálmese
. Calm down,
señor,
” as he stepped backward along the side of the house, adding, “I’ll be back next week to inspect and close the case,” when he was clear of Abuelo’s reach. Abuelo picked up one of Mamá’s potted bougainvillea, ready to hurl it at the officer, before he calmed down and mumbled to himself, “
Esto nunca hubiera pasado en
Cuba
—this would have never happened in Cuba.” Standing motionless in the backyard, he scanned the citation, trying to decipher the English. “FINE? That means
good,
no? If I pay him fifty dollars everything will be FINE? What does that mean?” I had to translate the bad news for him, “No, Abuelo, FINE
quiere decir
that you’ll have to pay fifty dollars a day if we don’t get rid of the chickens.”

I thought we’d just return the chickens to Ignacio, but no. Two days later the massacre began. I couldn’t stand hearing the desperate clucks of the chickens or the sound of their necks snapping in Abuela’s hands as Abuelo handed them to her one by one. But I couldn’t stand
not
watching the massacre. So I sat on the floor behind the Florida room’s sliding glass door, watching Abuela toss the strangled chickens onto the terrace, their bodies still quivering until she finished off each one with a knife clean across the neck, decapitating them, their white feathers turning red and redder, then dunking the headless chickens into a vat of boiling water to scald the skin and loosen the feathers off.

That night Abuela made one of my favorite dishes—
fricasé de pollo
. She set down the platter with pride, the talon scratches on her hands and forearms still raw. I took only rice and fried plantains, though I could barely eat even those. I was sickened by the sight of the chicken swimming in garlic sauce studded with carrots and raisins. Perhaps because Mamá could sense her son’s horror or simply because she too was repulsed, she passed the platter to Papá without taking a piece of chicken. But no one else seemed to care: Abuelo claimed it was just as tasty as the chicken he used to raise in Cuba; Papá ate two drumsticks and a breast; Abuela said the bland chicken from
el Winn Deezee
couldn’t compare, and Caco agreed, as if he had ever tasted anything that hadn’t been store-bought. I wasn’t sure I could ever love an animal or my family again. Who were these merciless people, these murderers, especially Abuelo? Didn’t he love the chickens as much as I did? Who would be next: Bonny or Bernie? Their bunnies as appetizers? My sorrow boiled into outrage until I shoved my plate aside and blurted out, “Hey, why don’t we just eat Tiger next week? I hear dogs are delicious!” Then I got up from the table, stomped to my room, and slammed the door shut.

Maybe Caridad was right, I thought, maybe my family was nothing more than dumb country bumpkins. They had killed and eaten my pets. For days I avoided Abuelo’s eyes across the dinner table. I didn’t speak to him either, until finally, one afternoon, he offered to help me feed Bonny and Bernie. “Are you okay,
mi’jo
?” he asked me. “I guess so,” I mumbled. “What’s going to happen to Rey?” I asked. “Ignacio said he’ll take him back—he could always use another
gallo
at his
finca,
” Abuelo said, which made me feel a little more at ease.

“
Mira, mi’jo,
” Abuelo started, “
lo siento,
but don’t be so upset. I never told you this, but I didn’t leave Papo in Cuba. I lost him at the dog fights in Palmira when I was a
muchacho
. He was a real
campeón,
but his day finally came against a pit bull.” “What! You did that to Papo?” I shouted, horrified all over again. “You killed him too? You don’t love anything!” Abuelo’s face changed; he became a shamed little boy. “No, no—that’s not true,
mi’jo,
” he said. “I still think of him all the time. I adored Papo, but I swore I’d never get close to an animal again.
¿Comprendes?
” “Not really—I don’t get it. Why, Abuelo, why?” I pleaded for an explanation.

He stared straight into my eyes and then took me in his arms. It was the first time the man had ever hugged me. “I don’t know,
mi’jo,
I don’t know. That’s just the way it is—
así es la vida,
” he said without letting go. In his embrace, my pain and confusion connected with that of his past. Though I wasn’t sure how to forgive him entirely, I knew that I would. He was my Abuelo, my
compadre,
my confidant, after all.

I asked if he needed any help taking apart the coop.
“Sí, claro,”
he said, placing his hand on
top of my head. “Let’s go.” With the same tools we’d used to build the coop, we pulled apart the timbers, snipping the chicken wire loose and winding it back into rolls. Within a couple hours the only evidence left of the chickens was a few cold eggs in a nest and the dirt patch where they had once scratched and pecked all day long. “
No te preocupes,
the grass will grow back soon. Everything will be as it was—back to normal. That’s the way it is,” Abuelo said.

I began fearing something terrible would happen to Bonny and Bernie and the bunnies: Would they get sick and die? Maybe there was a law against rabbits too. Maybe they would escape from their cage and never come back. A few weeks later, our principal asked students to donate items for that year’s Easter Fair. I decided to donate Bonny and Bernie and the bunnies. The day of the fair, I watched as Enriquito Moreno won the Musical Roulette Walk and collected his prize. Luckily I knew him; he had sat next to me for a while in Sister Pancretila’s class the previous year. And I liked him; he always let me borrow loose-leaf paper and his scented markers. I was glad he would be taking care of Bonny—but did he know how?

I walked over to him. He was already holding Bonny in his hands. “Hey, look, isn’t he cool?” he said to me. “Yeah, but
he
is really a
she
. Her name is Bonny.” “How do you know?” he asked. “She used to be mine, but my mom wouldn’t let me keep her,” I lied, and went on to explain that Bonny needed to eat three different vegetables a day, how much she loved strawberries, and that he could get boxes of lettuce leaves for free at El Milagro, just like Abuelo taught me. Number by number during the Musical Roulette, I watched as Bernie and the rest of the bunnies were given away, silently saying good-bye as they were carried off by strangers.

After losing the chickens and rabbits, I lost Tiger to Caco. He became possessive of
his
dog again, claiming Tiger was never mine, and forbade me from grooming or walking him. He took Tiger everywhere and showed him off to his friends as if he had trained him. Tiger became
his
pal, and I returned to my usual after-school routine: homework, reruns of
I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch,
and
Bewitched,
then an hour of coloring or playing with my Legos before dinner. But I couldn’t forget our backyard farm. Every time I gazed through the sliding glass window, I’d see Bernie and Bonny snuggled in their cage; whenever I stepped out back to call in Misu, I’d hear the chickens clucking and pecking. The backyard felt like a place of memory and imagination, my own version of Abuelo’s lost Cuba.

A few weeks after Abuelo took Rey back to Ignacio’s farm, Mamá and Papá, Abuela and Abuelo, and Caco and I were in the Florida room watching TV when we heard a slight disturbance from next door. To me, it sounded like little more than the clang of a garbage can. But Abuelo knew the pop of a gun quite well from his years in
la milicia
. “
Voy a ver
what that noise was,” he said nervously, but without making much of a fuss. He put on his slippers and walked out the front door. Unalarmed, we kept watching TV, but about ten minutes after Abuelo left, we heard a siren blaring down the street. Instead of fading away, the sound grew louder, then ended abruptly, seemingly in front of our house. Mamá became hysterical:
“¡Alabao sea Dios! ¿Qué habrá pasado, madre mía?”
She ran into the street in her housecoat, chased by Papá and the rest of us.

A police car and ambulance were parked in front of Caridad and Pedrito’s home. Papá dashed down their walkway, but was stopped by a police officer at the front door just when Abuelo emerged. He had a distant gaze and could barely move. Papá wrapped his arm around him, helped him down the steps and toward us. “
¡Ave María!
What happened?
¿Qué pasó?
” Mamá and Abuela both demanded. “
Pedrito se ha vuelto loco
—he’s gone crazy, completely crazy,” Abuelo said, his eyes glazed over, his pajama shirt and cheek smeared with bloody handprints.
“¡Qué
barbaridad!
How could he—his own wife and then himself.
¿Por qué,
Pedrito,
por qué?
” The red and blue lights spun in Abuelo’s eyes and washed over us, over the street and palm trees, over the mailboxes and lawns, over all of Güecheste, terrifyingly quiet and still.