The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico (3 page)

“You kept me in there longer than ten minutes!” he said.

“Ocho.”
I smiled. “You lost.”

“Only eight! Did you time it right?”

“Sí
, look for yourself.” I pointed toward the hallway clock.

“You cheated. That felt longer.”

I shrugged and grinned. “No.
Mire
, the clock.” Time couldn’t lie, even if we could.

“Fine. Now it’s my turn to dare,” he said. “
You
stay in there for ten minutes.”

I hadn’t anticipated this. My palms went sweaty, but I wasn’t about to let on. I turned the knob and entered, eyeing the roosters on the shelf, daring them to move. Omar shut the door behind me.

The first few minutes were easy. I took a seat on the floor, sucking and picking at my fingernails, cleaning the bits of green papaya rind from beneath. As I finished my left pinky, the first blurry shadow shifted. Turning my head up to the dead trio, I willed them to move when I could see, and at the same time my heart sped up, afraid that they actually would.

“Gallos estúpidos,”
I whispered.

Getting angry helped. I wouldn’t let them scare me. It wasn’t my fault they were dead—that they were weak and lost their fights. Cockfighting was the national sport of Puerto Rico. My whole life I’d seen weekly posters tacked to the walls of the stores in town. Papi only talked with his friends about the fights. And just that summer he’d asked Omar if he wanted to go with him to one. He didn’t ask
Mamá or me. She told me it was a blood sport for men only, but I wanted to go. Papi put ten-dollar bills inside an old razor case in his room, and whenever there was a cock-fight, the money disappeared. Mamá didn’t know.

He used to raise fighting roosters, but stopped when Tío Orlando moved to the States. He said he couldn’t train any winners without him. Occasionally I’d see Papi in the study alone, dusting the dead with a cloth, running his fingers slowly over their feathers. They were his prize cocks—won every fight but their last. Mamá said it was God’s will that the roosters died and Tío moved. Gambling was a terrible sin. We were Catholics, but I didn’t think gambling was so wrong. Not like murder or adultery. Papi said he only watched the sport now.

At the edge of my vision, a rooster moved its head. I stopped breathing. Sweat trickled down my sides. With the door closed, the air felt thick and hot, like inhaling a bowl of
asopao
soup. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the
Navidad parrandas
, the smell of the gardenia bush in the front yard, my
abuelo
’s tobacco-stained hands on mine, anything but the unblinking black eyes that I knew were watching me.

There was a scrape up along the ceiling ridge. They were coming, their stiff wings batting the air just behind my head, and I turned in circles trying to face them, to catch a glimpse. Panic tightened my chest. I imagined the hallway clock, tried to read it through the door. I had to beat Omar!

There was another creak. This time in the wooden shelving. I put my hands over my ears. Then I thought I saw something swift and dark move across the small, high window above the desk. I stood, my breath coming quickly, my eyes watering.

“Omar!” I pounded on the door. “How long?” I waited a moment, my hand on the knob, my stomach cramping. He didn’t answer. “Omar!” I screamed louder and banged with my fist. There was only silence. No click of the key. No rattle of the knob.

“Help me! Omar! Open!”

The roosters were coming for me. Their stiff feathers brushed the back of my neck, their claws tangled my hair.

“Por favor!”
My voice broke and I slid to my knees, staring into the dark keyhole. “Omar! Please, open the door!” I bit my lip to hold in the screams. I didn’t care anymore how long it had been. I just wanted out.

“Papi!” I yelled.

Then, from the other side, a giggle.

I slammed my fists against the door and swore to myself that I’d knock it down if I had to. The key clicked, and Omar leaned in with a grin. I rushed at him and shoved all my panic right into his gut. He fell backwards on the concrete, and I stood over him. His eyes were wide.

“I was just playing around, Verdita,” he said, and I could hear it in his voice: he was scared of me.

I didn’t say a word. Instead, I left him there, next to the study where the roosters’ ghosts were climbing back onto
their stiff perches. I opened the door to the veranda. The hall clock chimed the hour.

I’d get him back.

E
VEN WITH
O
MAR
there, things were strained between Mamá and me. I tried not to talk to her at all. That was easy. I just spoke English. She didn’t understand. It was a language only Papi, Omar, and I shared, and that suited me perfect. For a little bit she tried to learn, using words that Omar taught her: “Verdita, please.” “Verdita, come.” “Verdita, need.” But I didn’t want her to learn, so I laughed at her pronunciation and told her in Spanish that she was saying it all wrong, even though she wasn’t. I did that until she finally gave up. I told Omar to stop teaching her or I’d put hot peppers in his bed.

When Mamá spoke to me in Spanish, I answered in English. It made her so mad. She stomped around in a stream of
Ay, Dios Mio
-es and pleas to God to help her deal with her burdens. I ignored her. Papi was working on the
finca
a lot and staying out late at the
jíbaros
bar, talking politics. When he was home, I played innocent, pretending not to understand why Mamá was so upset. She insisted I was misbehaving and should be punished, but I made my eyes real big and said, “No, Papi. I’ve been good.” I even sounded more “good” in English. Papi, confused, simply threw up his hands and said he didn’t understand women.
Then he told me, “I have my eye on you,” and it made me nervous because I knew he did.

One afternoon the heat forced Omar and me outside, where there was a little bit of an island breeze. Omar pulled out the dominoes and lined them up on their ends. There was nothing else to do, so I helped him. But after a while I got bored with the lines of black and white dots, their neat rows forming mazes on the terra-cotta tiles.

“Hey,” I whispered. The windows were open to the kitchen, where Mamá was already making a
mixta
of
arroz con pollo
for dinner. Olive oil and cilantro
sofrito
simmering with the chicken in the pot. It made me hungry. “You want to get some sesame seed candy at the bar?” I asked Omar, and jingled the coins in my pocket. The
jíbaros
bar down the road sold it, but Papi forbade us to go there.

Of all the stuff Omar forgot about Puerto Rico, he hadn’t forgotten Papi’s rules. “Tío Faro said we can’t.”

Obviously he only forgot the everyday stuff, like that you
eat
the slippery seeds in passionfruit, you don’t spit them out, and of course, what
con-flei
was. Sometimes I wondered if he was just pretending, but couldn’t understand why anybody would do that.

“I dare you.”

“Tío said no.”

“I know.
Pero, soy aburrido”
I whined.

“Huh? What’d you say?”

“This is
boring”
I repeated in English, and pushed over a domino, sending a part of his column into a cascade.

“Ay! Verdita! I was setting them up.”

I stood and kicked over the rest.
“Careculo.”
Buttface.

“What did you call me?” Omar asked.

“What? You forgot your name?
Ay Dios mio, lo siento
.”

“Maybe I’ll just go inside and ask Titi Venusa what you said.”

Through the horizontal window slats, slivers of Mamá moving around the kitchen gathering ingredients for supper.
“Mamaguebo,”
I whispered under my breath.

“You suck balls too,” said Omar.

“Oh! You
do
know what I’m saying. I’m glad to see you’re remembering again.”

Down the gravel road from our house, the Lopezes’ purple-painted home bordered the tarred main street. Señora Lopez had just finished peeling her plantains on the porch and had gone inside. There was no one around to see us. Omar stood up and followed my gaze. “Candy, huh?”

“Sí. Sometimes Papi brings sesame bars home when he stops for a drink after work. It’s the best. Better than the stuff we buy in town. Crunchy. Sweet.” I almost had him. “And, you know, I dared you.”

The brown edges of his eyes glinted gold.

“They don’t have them in D.C.,” Omar admitted. “Well, not the good kind. There’s one Latino store that sells them, but they’re always stale.”

“Stale!” I shook my head for effect. “Not ours. They’re fresh here.”

“Okay. I’ll take your dare.”

I knew he would.

After checking to make sure Mamá was still busy stirring and chopping, Omar and I jumped off the porch and sprinted toward the street. We didn’t look back or speak or stop to breathe until we rounded the bend and my pink house was nowhere to be seen. Then we stopped, gulped in the humid air, and relished the panic in our chests.

“Think she saw us?” Omar asked.

I shook my head. “We’d have heard her by now if she had.” Mamá could yell my name across the whole
barrio
if she put her mind to it, especially if she saw us running in the direction of the bar. “I think we’re safe, but we got to hurry.”

We had to walk single file along the crooked roads of our mountain town. Though two-way, the street was just wide enough for a single car. Tangled, wet bush framed the unmarked tar. The thick vines curled around the tree trunks like plaits of wet hair. I led the way. We couldn’t talk because I had to listen for cars rounding the curves. From walking with Mamá to buy loaves of
pan de agua
, I had an ear for the coming whine of an engine making its fast climb up the tilted streets. When I heard it, I knew I had less than five seconds to move off the road into the bush. I stopped and gave Omar a push to his chest. “Get back.
Cheby
coming.”

“What? I don’t see anything,” Omar said, but the whirring and grinding of gears came closer. I pushed him into a poinciana tree. The prickly blossoms stuck hard. “Ow! Verdita!”

A car zoomed past. The air seemed to collect the hot dust and brush it brown over my skin. Island dirt, it stained me as much as the sun.

“Told you,” I said, and continued. Omar’s eyes looked like they did when I unlocked the study door after hearing him pound and scream.

We went on. A few early coquis began to sing.
Co-qui, co-qui, co-qui
. It was a slow song by a handful of frogs. I wondered what time it was. I’d forgotten to look at the clock before we left. Five o’clock? Six, maybe? We usually ate at seven; the rice was already on the stove. Sweat beaded on my upper lip, and I licked the salt away. If we were late for supper, I’d get the belt for sure, but I’d make sure Omar got half the spanks. I’d remind Papi that he was older and a boy.

The
jíbaros
bar had a red neon sign above the door that said Schlitz. The bulb of the
l
had gone out at some point, so for as long as I could remember, the sign said Schitz, which I knew was a bad word on the mainland. Shits. I used it around Mamá because she didn’t know “shits” from “sheets,” but Papi was a different story. This is shits, I said once when Mamá made me wash the banana leaves for the
pasteles
. Papi heard and spanked me hard with his
belt folded in half. I made sure never to say it again in front of him. I turned to Omar. “This place is the shits.”

He didn’t laugh, so I laughed for him.

That night there were so many cars parked outside that a few burrowed holes right into the jungle bush. Stacks of candy stood by the counter just inside the bar’s open doorway:
dulces de ajonjolí, batata, coco-leche
, and
naranja
. My mouth watered. As we entered, I dug deep in my pocket for the coins.

“Look,” Omar whispered.

The bar was packed full of men standing in a circle, their faces twisted in jagged smiles and squinty eyes. The loud cries of “Kill him!” and “Hit him again!” made something inside my stomach cramp. The men drank from small silver beer cans that fit snugly in their palms and looked like hand grenades I had seen in the movies. Their shouts and gazes were fixed on something in the middle of the circle. And while they screamed for blood, it was different from the angry feeling I got when the older boys at school fist-fought. It felt like that moment when the study lock clicked open after sitting with the dead.

“Come on.” I pulled on Omar’s arm, but he didn’t move. I wanted to see what they saw, but didn’t want to go alone. “You too scared?” His body slowly shifted forward.

We pushed into the crowd. In the center of the
gallera
, two roosters rolled in the dust, covered in black ooze, and pocked with holes in their feathers. Strange pieces of metal
tied to their feet gave them ghoulish, bloody claws. They sprang into the air, aiming the spurs at each other. The eyeball of one swung on its purple-blue thread. The comb atop the other’s brow was completely torn off. A rainbow of feathers stuck to blood clots and matted the concrete.

The men’s laughter popped the air like bubbles rising in a boiling soup. Then, across the circle, I saw him—Papi. He sat with a handful of men, cards in his hand, green bills piled high. He crushed a cigar into the table ledge, looked up, and our eyes met. I couldn’t run or hide or look away. The men around the
gallera
cheered in low growls; wings beat hard against the heat; spurs splintered bone; bodies moved in dark shadows. Papi started toward us, but the circle of men and the fighting roosters stood between.

Omar pulled my arm. He yanked hard, but my legs wouldn’t move. “Come!” he shouted above the men’s voices.

I didn’t follow. The roosters jumped and pecked, clawed and bled. I couldn’t stop watching.

Then Papi squeezed my shoulder. “What are you doing here?”

“We wanted candy.”

“Is Omar with you?” he asked.