It was ten days after Hurricane Irma, and the halls of the rundown school smelled like fungus and air freshener. Tree branches were scattered all over the grounds, sticking up like claws. Classes had ended early. Students stood in groups, waiting for their parents to pick them up, eating pastelitos and drinking Malta Indias. A couple of middle-aged male teachers in jeans and guayaberas watched out for drug dealers, thugs, or the confused caimans that sometimes swaggered out of the river after storms. The teachers held their cell phones at hip level like weapons. Just outside the rusty gate, under the only Ceiba tree on the grounds, stripped of most of its leaves, stood Reina Morales in tight pink jeans that would have looked ridiculous on anybody else. But Reina—with her long legs, gold eyes of a cat, and hair as iridescent as a grackle—never looked ridiculous. Especially because since the first week of school she was almost always with the boy she was with right now: Pito Ávila. Pito, a senior, was a basketball player and all-around athlete. He had copper skin and quick-moving eyes, and his hair was so black it looked wet; it made you want to touch it to see if it was or . . . just to touch it.
Tani was across the parking lot looking, when Pito suddenly squeezed Reina’s butt. It made Tani’s stomach sink to see them together. Reina stumbled and laughed, and her eyes darted toward Tani, who pretended she was looking at something else. After a moment, Tani turned and walked away.
Her real name was Taína, but she found the name, which basically meant “female Indian,” too generic. She preferred being called Tani. She was sixteen. When she had moved to La Vega a year and a half ago, she had been shy, disappearing behind her glasses and her fat to live in novels about alt-vampires and warring angels. She had also liked wowing her teachers with her knowledge of Caribbean history. Lately, though, that bookish girl had made room for a new Tani, proud that in the last six months she had traded her glasses for contact lenses and lost the fat—nearly twenty-five pounds. Now the boys, men, and even the old women of the town stared at her when she walked the hilly, narrow, almond-tree-lined streets. She unbuttoned her polo shirts to show her cleavage and slicked coconut oil on her skin. When people told her how “linda” or “guapa” she looked, she would smile, but not too wide. “Ay, gracias,” she would say, her eyes fluttering away from her admirer. She herself could scarcely believe her transformation. Today when she got home, Tani buttoned her shirt to the top. She took off her Pumas so that if Mami were home, she might not hear her.
The living room window faced a patio shared with other ground-floor units in the complex. The curtains were made of some crosshatched beige fabric and were drawn together because Mami didn’t like people staring in. The cushions of the rattan sofa and chair were also kind of beigey; the colorful patterns had been too expensive. On the top right shelf of a plywood curio stand were two framed photos. One was of a four-year-old Tani with crossed eyes. She’d done eye-straightening exercises after the photo was taken, not that she remembered.
The other photo showed a teenager with eyes the color of trees reflected in water and a cloud misting round her naked shoulders. It was hard to reconcile this picture with the way Mami looked now. Only lately had it occurred to Tani that she herself could get to be this pretty.
On the top left shelf of the curio stand were the only things that soothed Tani’s dislike of the bland room and the tiny apartment: a clay jug and a stone pestle. They were supposed to be ancient Taino artifacts. Mami’s great-uncle, Ángel Sandín, a teacher and former mayor of La Vega, had left them to her. The old, ugly school, and even a whole barrio, had been named after old dead Ángel. Mami said that all the Sandíns had left town for San Juan or the States. The jug was about a foot high and heart-shaped with a bruise-colored patina on its lobes and no other markings. Because it had no cracks or chips in it, Tani doubted its authenticity.
The pestle was another matter. It was made of river basalt. On its knob was a figure-eight-shaped head with holes for eyes and a sunken-in mouth. The family had owned this since Tani was six but only last year had she realized the face was a skull. A concave half-circle jutted from one side of the head. It looked like a bat’s ear. What should have been a matching ear on the other side had broken off. There were two bumps below the face, which had to be breasts. Tani had discovered that if she looked at the knob upside down, there was yet another set of eyes, a nubby nose, a tiny jaw; what had looked like breasts became frog legs. Tani had seen a Taino pestle online, valued at over fifteen thousand dollars, and not even half as interesting as this one. When she missed her dad, the way he used to be, and the firewoody smell of the house in Albany, Tani would clasp the pestle in both hands, knowing from its dusty graininess that it was very old. She held the pestle to the curve between her sweaty neck and aching shoulder; it was not as cold as she had expected. It was more pliably cool, almost like something alive.
She put it back on the shelf and stared at it, willing it to ever so slowly quiver. She’d read about Taino objects with carved animal and human features that crawled or flew at night to the forests and waters of the land. They were invested with the energies of the divine beings they were consecrated to. Not a lot was known about Taino beliefs, so Tani had no idea what deity ruled the pestle. All she knew was that it made her feel like she owned at least one valuable thing.
Then one of the skull sockets gleamed wetly at her. Her heart quickened before she realized it was just her own sweat that had poured onto the eye.
In her room she closed the door, threw her knapsack on the bed, and looked into the mirror of her dresser. She put her trembly hands on her breasts and closed her eyes. It was as if there were little trees in each breast and their branches made her nipples pulse and itch. This sensation could be alleviated only when Tani took off her bra, stiff as a helmet, and commanded a boy to suck on her breasts.
The door of her bedroom opened. “You think you such a big deal because you got big tetas now?” Tani’s mother said.
Tani gasped. “Can’t you knock?” She let her hands fall to her sides.
“I forgot.” Mami shrugged. She was wearing a powder-blue shirt with a cloth patch in the shape of La Vega’s green and yellow coat of arms and a belt that gripped her middle so tightly her stomach bulged over her navy pants. Her blue policeman’s hat, with its metal badge, completely covered her hair. Mami’s cheeks were flushed. They got that way when she was happy or, as in this instance, still wound up from a busy day.
Mami pulled off her hat, revealing what Tani hadn’t noticed before: plasticky, orange-red hair in a short, shaggy cut.
“Ea rayo, what did you do to your hair?” Tani asked.
“You don’ like?” Mami yanked a wig-cap off to reveal her graying hair caught in a ponytail, and then put the wig and the hat back on. The fiery color and smoothness of the wig hair, so stark against the sagging skin of Mami’s face, reminded Tani of annatto oil.
But with the hat back on Mami’s head, the wig was passable.
Mami suddenly came close and sniffed at Tani’s neck. “¡Hueles mal!” Mami shook her fist. “Don’t tell me you been smoking pasto? I catch you, I promise I take you straight to the cuártel!”
Tani looked down at the floor, feeling her mother’s eyes on her. In Albany, Tani knew her mom had smoked pasto, too. Her dad had one fling too many, and Mami had dragged Tani to La Vega, Mami’s hometown that was an hour or so by car from San Juan. At first, Tani felt out of place: nerdy, with a gringa aura because of her slight accent when speaking Spanish and her last name: O’Farrell. For a while Mami had only a part-time job planting yuca at Casa Pueblo, the center for locals who believed in raising their own food and using solar panels. They were hippies—OK, maybe not; that was Daddy’s voice in her head.
When she and Mami first came to La Vega, things were tight, and all they ate were yuca, plantain, okra, and potatoes with a little dried codfish or rice and Goya beans. But because so many people had cut and run from La Vega because of the money crisis, Mami had been able to get a job with the police. Unbelievably, she was fucking important now, always on her cell talking to the chief, even when she was off duty.
“Does his wife know you talk to him so much?” Tani asked once.
“Without a godfather you cannot be baptized.” This island truism was a favorite of Mami’s. She also liked: “Eso es así,”—that’s the way things are. If Tani didn’t do some stupid house chore, Mami said, “Learn to do things because I’m not going to last you forever.”
After Irma, when the Cibuco River flooded nearby houses, Mami said, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Tani had to admit Mami lived up to that one. She drove displaced people to shelters and took them cans of food and bottled water. Every other day she brought over a displaced person to sleep on the sofa, even giving them some of her few non-police-type clothes. These people were usually single women or old. One eighty-pound old woman named Idalia had bones so soft she was unable to raise her neck and look people in the eyes. The only lively thing about her was her hair, coiled like a bunch of carob pods. For two nights Tani had to give her bed to Idalia and sleep with Mami, who honked and hissed in her sleep. When Tani complained, Mami said, “Desperate times require drastic measures.” The chief praised Mami in a town hall meeting. Now Mami walked with her chest stuck out, yelling orders at Tani all the time. She had bought herself blue silk shirts for the town hall meetings and a pair of Merrell tactical waterproof boots. And now the wig.
“Where did you go after school?” Mami asked. She plopped her big butt on Tani’s bed with a boom.
Oh God, not this again. Tani looked up with her lips pressed tight. Lately, she never said what she felt. Feeble conversation was for people like Mami, driven by what others demanded. Such people held no hidden reserves, no strong, private, and original insights.
Her cell phone dinged with a text message. Tani grabbed it from the dresser.
“I miss your mouth,” Pito’s text said.
Tani’s cheeks flushed, but she didn’t answer him. After seeing Pito grab Reina’s ass like that today, she wondered if Reina were with him right now. But then he texted her a lip emoji, followed by a heart emoji, followed by a crazy-eyed smiley with its tongue hanging out, and she had to laugh.
“¿Quién es?” Mami looked at the phone. Tani covered the exchange with her hand.
“It’s Yael,” Tani lied.
“Me alegro. I like that boy.” Mami’s smile exposed her silver eyetooth but also highlighted her river-colored eyes. Tani saw suddenly that she and her mother had the same crooked yet pretty smile. “Es tan bueno.”
Yeah, that was the problem with Yael. He was too good. He wanted to stay in La Vega forever and teach history at the school. Tani liked to study, but she didn’t want ever to teach. And definitely not here. This was not the life she was meant to live, Tani knew. None of this was real, having to deal with Mami and her teachers and all the viejitos working in the few stores left open in town. Few things seemed real to Tani these days. Maybe just the secret kisses that she shared about once a week with Pito. The pasto helped and the music they danced to, boleros and trap and reggaeton. “Despacito,” Fonsi’s lilting song, they could never get enough of. The pasto and music loosened the tight web of small-town reality.
Tani’s aunt, Titi Lulú, had offered a way out. She was the only Sandín Tani knew. She lived in San Juan, in a big one-story cement house painted the color of a tongue, with fuchsia and coral bouganvillea planted round the windows. Titi Lulú had hooded, beatific eyes like the Virgin Mary and wore old-fashioned lacy slips under knee-length dresses. She had told Tani to come live with her, get her GED, and then enroll at UPR.
Mami said no.
Tani would not ask her dad if she could live with him because he was with some ho who was maybe four years older than Tani.
La Vega’s natural beauty almost made up for its sleepiness. At the beach huge limestone rocks buffered corncake-colored sand from the violent Atlantic swells. At low tide you could see Taino petroglyphs of spirals and frogs and squatting women, their stylized breasts placed like balls on their shoulders. These were images of a time when trees and shells, rivers and carved stones, spoke as gods. The Cibuco River flowed from the purple mountains of the Cordillera south of town down to the beach. The river had spit out gold for the Indians and Spaniards. Runaway slaves had swum it at night to freedom or death. In rain, the Cibuco devoured dirt and rocks and trees. Tani loved the river best on calm days when it was turquoise green and palpitated with mystery.
Tani unzipped the knapsack and took out a thick book with a red library binding. “I went to Casa Portela.” This was only a partial lie; she had been at Casa Portela, the local museum and library, but yesterday not today. She showed the book to Mami. “It’s about the Spaniards and the Tainos.”
Mami patted the bed. “Tell me, mi cielo.”
Tani sat down and told her about how the Cacique Cibuco convinced the soldier Diego Salcedo to help Cibuco steal all the Indian women and take them to a smaller island so they could both have sex with them. It was a strange story, and she herself didn’t really understand it. They set off in a canoe in the ocean, she told Mami. But then Cibuco told Salcedo to look at a special type of shell in the water.
“Yeah?” Mami said.
“And then Cibuco drowned Salcedo,” Tani said. “And he took all the women and left his people.”
“Oh, I think I heard about this,” Mami said.
“Not this version.” She told Mami that the women Cibuco took off with all drowned and then he got sores all over his body. “He couldn’t get away from the Spaniards after all.” Tani concluded her story abruptly. “This was transcribed by a monk working for Columbus.”
“Oh.” Mami frowned. Then she deflected from her confusion by praising Tani. “Que bien! So interesting. I’m so glad you keeping up with school.”
As if they taught this stuff in school. Tani felt a little sorry for Mami. Mami’s instincts were good. After she left her last class, Tani had indeed smoked a little pasto that she had saved from the last time she saw Pito.
It was good to have a boy around that Mami liked because Mami would let her go to the local hangouts with Yael. In the summer Mami drove the two of them in her police cruiser from where they lived at the edge of the town’s main street south to the beach. But now that school had started again after being closed down, Mami said she would take them only to the river.
Nobody actually swam there, so they had to do their homework. Or so Mami thought.
Today they picked Yael up at Casa Portela. It was a brick, cement, and plaster building in the old Spanish style, with a white architrave and orange facade, the only one among all the old, worn-out town buildings that had been painted in the last few years.
Yael hopped into the back seat and straight off complimented Mami on the wig. Mami again flashed that heartbreaking smile. Yael and Mami chatted. Tani’s other friends fell silent with Mami; only Yael seemed to like her. He was so tall his T-shirts always looked too short and tight. His shoulders stooped a little, and he was pale and wore glasses. Other girls called him up all the time on his cell phone, and he would apologize to Tani for it. He thought these calls made him seem popular. But she knew that he wanted only her. Every week he bought her pizza empanadas and ice cream and little trinkets like headbands or leather bracelets with crude Taino symbols on them. He would even do her math homework for her. He spoke to her in English. That was good because, although she liked that she was finally getting to be truly bilingual, at the end of a school day her voice would creak as she tried to come up with words in Spanish. But Yael didn’t do the most important thing. She would take off her harness of a bra when they were in her room or his and practically shove Yael’s mouth on her breasts. He would give them little polite kisses. Abandon was sadly lacking in Yael. When it came to her breasts with their achy tips, courtesy was not what Tani was looking for.
To sidestep an area of road blocked with fallen trees, Mami took them on the river road going south, which they didn’t usually take. They passed the river on their right. On their left, a few feet from the road, were two-story cement houses, most of them boarded up. They slowed down as they approached the speed bump next to a cement house with peeling paint of an indeterminate color between beige and peach. There were black vertical lines of soot on the house’s facade. An old, white refrigerator and a stained, soggy mattress lay in the overgrown yard, surrounded by empty plastic water bottles, beer and soda cans, and an open, wet-looking diaper. In the depths of the first-story garage Tani could see more junk: a linoleum-top table missing a leg, bases of lamps without shades, and a sofa of rotted rattan with only one cushion in it.
From a knotted rope on a hook in the ceiling of the balcony on the second story hung a five-foot caiman. Despite the long gash in its belly, its corrugated skin looked made of stone. Its open eyes lay at the top of its conical head, and they still held a starlit sheen. Next to the caiman stood a dark-skinned man in a muscle shirt. His shoulders were hairy, his arms covered with tattoos, and he had a paunch. This man, Rafael, rented bridles and horses to kids from Tani’s school. He sold people some of his chickens and ducks. He stood there, looking at the road as if it were scenery. Tani had been here once with another boy from school who wanted her to ride a horse with him. Rafael kept the horses in a small stable on the other side of the road along with his pens of ducks, chickens, dwarf pigs, geese, and a gander that constantly brayed warnings. Tani had felt sorry for the bony horses. She convinced her would-be admirer not to ride them and just give Rafael the money.
Rafael waved at them and shouted something. Tani rolled down her window glass so she could hear what he was saying.
“Puma, puma,” she thought she heard.
Mami stepped on the gas, and they left Rafael and his house behind.
“Was he yelling ‘puma’?” Tani asked.
“Must like your sneakers,” Mami said with uncharacteristic wit.
“Bionic eyes.” Tani tried to decide whether she’d had her Pumas that time she’d been to Rafael’s stable.
They got to a part of the river where local kids hung out. Tani and Yael got out of the car. Mami told them not to go too near the water.
Yael looked down at Mami in the car. “Wasn’t that guy yelling ‘prima, prima’?”
Mami gaped at Yael. Her neck flushed red.
Tani tilted her head. “Prima? Wait, what? Is he our cousin?” Tani’s voice went high. “I thought we didn’t have family here. Why didn’t you stop to talk to him?”
“You seen the place and you gotta ask?”
“We should ask him why he doesn’t throw his trash out,” Tani said. “There must be—”
“He’s a savage.” Mami’s face was red. “Nothing he does makes sense.” Then she sped away, a woman who barely ever drove over forty miles an hour, unless it was on police business.
There was a pause. “She didn’t want me to know the Sandín blood ran thin,” Tani said.
“I can see her point.”
Tani could see that Yael was embarrassed for her. She was surprised not to be embarrassed herself. “That guy wrestles caimans. That’s actually cool,” she said.
“Probably to eat them.” Yael grimaced.
“Yeah,” Tani said. “He’s really of this place.”
“I’m really of this place.” Yael’s shoulders stooped more than ever. “I’ve lived here all my life.”
She put her hand on his back, and he straightened right up.
They walked from the road down to where there were flat-topped rocks on a promontory east of the river. The river was narrow here with frequent turns like a snake. It was lime green, smooth as a mirror, and had gone back to its normal, shallow level. It was safe as it ever could be because the caimans preferred deep water. On both sides of the river many of the wild cane and bamboo were broken and sharp as swords. Only a few rose apple bushes still had fruit. On the opposite side, beyond the bamboo and cane, were trees that still stood tall: palm, maga, almond, flamboyant, and pee trees, so-called because when in fruit their spongy pods squirted out a clear liquid.
Tani and Yael sat on a rock under a guava tree stripped bare. It was black with rot and looked like a corpse. Yael tried to hold her hand. Tani moved it away. After awhile Tani and Yael walked near a spot where the Guinea grass had started to spring back. In the middle of the river a translucent blue crab scuttled under a basalt rock. Some other kids showed up then and started gathering the few rose apples left on bushes. In the green water Tani saw a ribbon of coppery sediment mud as if something were lying in wait under the surface. But she saw no slide or drag marks that would indicate that caimans were around. A three-foot iguana waddled into view. It was the kind brought to the island as pets. Their owners had grown tired of them and had dumped them near the rivers, just as had happened with the caimans. They were called “gallinas de palo” because they climbed up into even the highest trees to eat the leaves. They ate anything vegetal and things not vegetal at all. They particularly enjoyed soft plastics like baggies and Saran wrap. They were so confident that they didn’t run from oncoming cars and, not surprisingly, were found squashed all over the roads.
Tani sat up and watched. “They have so many spikes,” she said. “So regal.”
“They’re eating up the island,” Yael said.
“You sound like Mami.”
“Thanks.” Yael’s nose twitched.
“I thought you liked talking to Mami.”
“Don’t say it like that. Yeah, I do. But—”
Tani felt a little pang for Mami. She looked away. Yael took her hand. His fingers were warm. She let her hand rest in his but didn’t squeeze back.
He got up and went down to the edge of dirt between the undergrowth and river. He crouched and peered down.
“What are you looking for?” Tani asked.
Yael looked up. “Shells or stones carved by the Tainos.”
Tani sniffed. The best shells were found at the beach. Everybody knew that.
Yael spoke but Tani was distracted by two new kids who had joined the other three by the river. It was Pito in his green satin basketball jacket with the number 11 stitched on it in yellow. Next to him was Reina, still wearing the pink jeans. Her long hair was now caught in a ponytail. Pito looked even more deeply bronzed than earlier. Probably he’d gone running after his basketball practice. Tani stared at Pito and Reina, and even Yael looked at them and then snuck a glance at Tani.
She noticed that she and Reina looked alike, except she had to admit that Reina was prettier, with her black hair that reflected rainbows, and her yellow eyes. Tani’s black hair was fuller, and her breasts were much bigger, but Tani’s eyes were an earthy shade of brown like almost everyone else’s. Unlike Tani, who’d been as chubby as the next girl until six months ago, Reina had the litheness of a runner. Probably she’d run with Pito today. That thought made Tani swallow hard. Even more than the fact they were having sex all the time, she envied their everyday companionability.
Reina sat down with the three kids, now eating rose apples on another of the large flat-topped rocks, but Pito turned around and went back to the road. He crossed and cut east through to the opposite side where there was a line of tall Ceiba trees with massive trunks.
Yael shouted and crouched to pick up something from the sand.
Tani’s cell phone rang, and she retreated to the rock under the guava tree and took the phone out of her pocket. Luckily, Yael was distracted by what he had just found. Tani saw a text message from Pito. “Meet me now outside la Cueva de las Golondrinas.”
“Mira que cool.” Yael held out a rock.
The message dinged a second time, and Tani felt a melty sensation in her pelvis. Her nipples throbbed. It took all her effort not to respond, not to quickly text back that she would go meet Pito. Instead she stepped down to the river’s edge. On Yael’s outstretched palm was a round stone about an inch long, grayish white.
“It looks old, like it’s been in the river a long time.” Yael brushed his fingers against Tani’s. “I wanted to find a shell shaped like a spiral, like that story about Cibuco. But this is even better, because it’s been carved into.”
Tani peered at the stone. There was the faint gray tracing of a circle on it. For a moment she forgot Pito. Yael tried to close his fingers on hers. She pulled her hand back from Yael’s. But she followed her policy of not saying what she felt and said, “Que cool. I hope it really is Taino.”
“Like the pestle,” Yael said.
“I’ve gotta go pee.” She touched her pelvis.
Tani walked away from Yael. “I think I should go with you—” Yael called out.
“I’m not letting you watch me pee.” She didn’t bother to turn to look at him as she walked.
He said something, but she couldn’t hear him anymore. She climbed up the grassy incline and then quickly crossed the road. When she got to the other side of the road, she cut her way through the silvery-barked tall Ceibas. The liquid honey richness spread inside her. She felt the sun on her face and smelled the deep green of grasses that had not yet pushed through the soil and the sweetness of the guavas and rose apples that had fallen to the ground and were mushy and swollen, almost rotten.
Tani’s thighs felt hard and hot. Minutes later, she ran past the blue wooden shack on stilts where she met Pito when it rained. It had been abandoned years ago, and no longer had shutters or screens on the windows, but there was a cot in it, with a moldy mattress and an old oil lamp with its brass base and holder. Even though the glass shade had cracked off, Pito had lit the lamp once last week, the first time she’d ever let him completely undress her. He’d wanted to push her down on the shack’s dirt floor, but she hadn’t let it go that far. Today, they met at the giant tree whose roots coiled over the mouth of a cave. Once you climbed down into la Cueva de las Golondrinas and made your way to the north side, it was open with a view over the eastern valley and small hills. The swallows the cave was named for floated into the cave but flew back out in spirals, sometimes against the screeling arcs of the bats.
Tani had been in this cave just once years ago with her dad when her parents were still together. Even though she had loved the view of the valley and the way the swallows looped back to the cave, she had noticed that on one of the dark holes that led deeper into the mountain proper there were spiders like she’d never seen before, with legs so long they were bigger than the bats. Yael went into that cave sometimes with groups from Casa Portela, but Tani had never gone into the cave again.
It didn’t matter that Tani didn’t like the cave because right now next to it stood Pito, furiously texting. She bit her lip. Was he texting Reina?
When she was next to him, she pulled the cell phone out of his hand without looking at it and put her nose to his neck. She breathed in sesame candy, bay rum, and spit. He put his arms around her waist. They’d met secretly like this for six weeks now. At first they would just chat. Pito would complain about Reina, how possessive she was and how her parents were so strict. Like Yael, he spoke to Tani in English but for a different reason. Yael did it to make Tani feel comfortable. Pito, unlike Yael, wanted to move to the States. He was practicing his English for later use. They didn’t talk about much, just some computer game he liked in which he was a knight but the dungeon master always killed him before he got to be a paladin. He played music that she liked on his iPod, usually stuff by Bad Bunny, La Vega’s music star. It was right around the time “Despacito” got to be such a megahit that Pito first pressed his lips to her neck and gave her slow kisses, “pasito a pasito,” like Fonsi sang it. They admittedly had not much in common except smashing into each other so hard they almost broke their teeth. Pito’s kiss now was hot and wet. When he touched her, every inch of her skin got prickly and sensitive.
In a high branch of a Ceiba that blocked her view of the river she saw a gallina de palo. It had probably been eating leaves but was now still as if it knew she was watching it. It was craggy as a pterodactyl. At her back she felt the raspy tree roots that reached into the hill and the cave. Pito pushed her against the hill’s flank, and she opened her mouth. He ground his pelvis against hers; he was hard like the stone against her back. He put his hand on one of her breasts and squeezed. Her chest ached with softness and hardness and their mouths shuddered together.
He pulled her to the ground and they took their shirts off—God, look at his muscles like tree branches!—and, finally she did what she’d been wanting to, unstuck her bra from her breasts and offered him her nipple. She held his head while he suckled her. “Harder,” she said. Of course it was then that her diabolical cell phone pinged. Then it rang.
“Don’t take it,” Pito murmured.
The phone vibrated again as she read the message. “You must have peed for the whole week,” Yael said. She tapped a key, about to answer Yael, when Pito reached out and pinched the nipple that had just been sucked soft and it got hard. “Yael can’t do that.”
She moved away from him and put her bra back on. One of her breasts was still taut and achy. She pulled down her T-shirt. “What about Reina?”
“Kissing you is like kissing a flamethrower.”
She thought of a flamethrower he’d shown her in a game that shot endless, twisting, ropes of fire, and she was pleased. He’d read beyond her mask of cool to where her resentments festered about so many things, especially her parents’ divorce. Suddenly, her anger grew. Why didn’t Pito just leave Reina for her? She tilted her head. She was suddenly glad she had never told him how much her carved pestle was worth.
Her phone dinged again. “Your boyfriend has no clue what you’re up to, does he?” Pito said.
“He’s not really my boyfriend.” She took a breath.
“Reina knows,” he said.
“What?”
“She likes it,” he said. “She asks me what you taste like.”
“You’re fucking with me!” She tried to slap him, but he moved his face and grabbed her hand and held it. “Meet me tomorrow at the shack,” Pito said.
“There’s a storm coming the day after tomorrow.”
“Exactly. There’ll be wind and rain. Fucking cool.”
She should punch him in the face, or at least tell him to go fuck himself. “Irma was bad for the river people,” she said without conviction.
“Everybody’ll be scared. We can stay a long time.” He let her hand go, and his warm fingers touched her neck. Her legs almost buckled under her.
No, it was the old, fat Tani whose legs were soft. This new girl was smart and brave, even a little savage. Like her river kin.
Was this all bluster, which was, after all, a big part of Pito’s personality, or did Reina really know Pito was seeing Tani on the side? If this storm really came, it might be the perfect time to finally fuck Pito. Yes. Tani’s heart roared in her ears like the source stream of the trees in her breasts.
Because then she knew that after she had sex with him, she would try to leave La Vega. “OK,” she said, and looked up. It was already starting to rain.
• •
It was midafternoon when Tani and Mami got back to the apartment with fifteen bags of food and other supplies. The sky was a velvet indigo, and the royal palms in front of the apartment building swayed in a wind that smelled of clay and tuberoses and so much iron it was like blood in Tani’s nose. Some of the forecasters said that when the storm came in the early morning it would be a swipe, just like Irma, lots of rain and some wind but not a direct hit. But others said that Maria would come in through the southeast like a raging beast.
They took off the hoodies that they’d worn outside in the fine, mesh-like rain and threw them on the sofa. Mami wore one of her blue shirts and her work pants even though she was off today.
Then there was a knock on the door.
“Is that Yael?” Mami held a can of Goya canary beans, the only kind that had been left in the supermarket.
Tani knew it wasn’t.
She went into the living room. Her mother followed her. There were storm shutters on the windows. Tani had to open the door that led from the house to the patio to see out.
When she opened the door, Rafael was standing there in the billowing webs of rain. He was wearing an open Old Navy–type hoodie, and the drops of water on his face were like opals. He wore peach-colored hiking sneakers with coral-colored heel counters.
Tani told Rafael in Spanish that she liked his shoes.
Rafael stepped inside. Mami narrowed her eyes at him. He stood between Mami and Tani, unzipped his jacket and let down the hood. His old T-shirt had a greenish stain on the belly like a patina. His almost-buzz-cut hair was pigeon blue with specks of white all over and bristly where it met his forehead and cheekbones.
Mami asked him what in coño’s sake he was doing in her house.
“Prima, how you doing?” Rafael had bold, dark eyebrows like Mami and Tani. “Your nena invite me for Maria. Here is safe.” To avoid her mother’s gaze, Tani directed Rafael to the objects in the curio shelf.
At that moment Tani’s telephone chimed.
“Tío Ángel give you?” Rafael cupped his hands over the pestle as if warming them. “Is dead for dead?”
Mami’s nostrils flared, and she shook her head.
Tani broke out in a smile. “A spirit of the dead? That’s what I thought, too.”
“Is hungry,” Rafael said. “Need agua. More, need honey, need sangre.”
“What?”
Mami grabbed Tani by the arm at that moment and yelled at her to get into the kitchen where she yanked Tani’s hair so that her chin was almost parallel to the floor. “You ask this basura into my house?” she yelled.
“He needed a place to stay.” Tani pulled away from Mami, a muscle snapping in her neck. “That old woman slept on my bed. Why not our family?”
“Family? I was a girl and that man grabbed me from behind and put his hand in my parts. Es un monstruo. And you didn’t even tell me nothing!”
“Desperate times require desperate measures,” Tani spit.
“Pendeja brat!” Mami slammed the heel of her hand into Tani’s face, and it hit Tani on the jawbone, making her bite her cheek.
Tani cried out, touched her hand to her cheek, swallowed the salty sweetness in her mouth and ran into the living room. Rafael was gone. And so was the pestle. She opened her mouth to scream but nothing came. She held her face in her hands and closed her eyes. At that moment, Pito called her. “Come on, Tani, I’ll pick you up. We’ll drive around. The coquís are singing like crazy, really partiseando, man.”
Minutes later she grabbed her hoodie from the sofa and slipped outside into the misty rain and then into Pito’s dad’s gray Wrangler. Tears were streaming down her face.
“What’s wrong, princesa?”
“Mami hit me.” She thought of Rafael with her precious delicate artifact in his hands that he said needed to be fed with blood. She wanted to kill him.
“I just want to have something, something for myself,” she said. “That’s all.”
Pito looked at her, his Indian shiny hair hanging over his eyes, which were bloodshot. He was high. He leaned in, and she opened her lips for his kiss but instead he stroked her cheek. “Nena linda, you got me.”
She threw the jacket in the back seat and told Pito to drive south. There were no cars on the road. Over bay laurel and acacia trees on her right side, all Tani could see of the sun was orange cracks in the cloud-smeared sky. She opened the window. It was true that the coquís were singing and that was weird because they sang only at night or at dawn. She heard the feisty fuck-it-all pi-ti-rre sound of the Gray Kingbirds against the wind, which in response seemed to blow a little harder. She tasted just a little of the Sahara dust that had become so common, the bitterness of crushed almonds, the orangey sweetness of acacia flowers. When they came to the speed bump, Tani told Pito to stop the car, and they looked out the window at the beige house. The garbage and old furniture were gone, and so was the poor butchered caiman. The windows on the top and bottom floors were boarded up.
Tani said she needed to get something and got out of the car. She felt the fine needles of rain on her face as she ran up the concrete steps, and when she got to the second floor, she screamed Rafael’s name and hit the plywood door until her knuckles stiffened. She saw two fist-sized rocks on the tiles of the balcony and for a moment she thought she saw the bat ear of the skull-faced pestle. But when she touched the rock, it was just a rock, not the most valuable object she might ever own. She cried in bursts that made her head ache and ran back down the stairs. At the bottom she saw the world was green with rain. She could hear the river murmuring.
In the car Tani’s phone rang, and she ignored it. She knew it was Mami. Mami would probably call all her police friends on them. “Let’s go back. Mami will drive around until she finds us.”
“Your mom better not fuck with me,” Pito said. “Hey, you want a moto?”
Goose bumps sprang up on her arms, the little hairs stood straight up. A voice inside her said, There’s a storm coming, pendejo. But what she rasped was “OK.” When he passed her the joint and lighter, she lit up and took a drag. He took one, too, but then she took his and stubbed it out in the console’s ashtray. On the right side of the road now, on somewhat higher ground, were some boarded-up cement block houses next to a wreck of branches and pieces of broken tables and chairs. Pito made a turn on the road. As he sped up, she could see that they were headed to the old bridge on the river, which was really just some cement pilings painted green and yellow. At the end of the bridge near a grassy slope that led down to the river, Pito stopped the car with a jolt, and before she could say anything he kissed her neck. She breathed in his special odor of candy, cologne, and spit, now mixed with the pasto, and started to feel floaty. That Reina knew about her was still in her mind, but it felt like a distant worry. Because through the car window she saw low and fast clouds, and there were weird, circular-green lights above, almost like eyes. Tani thought of the hungry eyes and circling arms of Guabancex, the Taino mother of hurricanes.
Now her phone was ding-ding-dinging with texts, and she looked down. A text from Mami said, “Ven ahora. Yael says you’re not with him.” There were more texts from Mami and Yael. And then Pito’s phone rang and rang. He glanced at it and laughed.
“Let’s leave the phones in the car,” he said.
She could smell the sweetness of night-blooming jasmine and a green, sappy smell mixed with the red smell of the earth. From the deep, rushing sound of the river, she knew that today’s rain had made the current high. Hundreds of coquís and cicadas sang in a crescendo that almost matched the thundering water. She looked through the open window and distinguished from the descending dark the darker shape of the shack through the trees, and beyond it, the oily sheen of the river, so mobile and alive that it seemed not to just widen in volume but to slide upward into the sky, which now buzzed and pulsated like the river. Her nostrils flared, and she took her hand off Pito’s thigh.
“I don’t want to go to the shack,” she said.
“You said your mom was gonna hunt us.” Pito put his hand up her shirt and squeezed a breast, waking up the deep ache inside her, and she wanted to fuck him. Then when the storm was over, she and Pito would leave La Vega together.
They got out of the car and stumbled through the grass. The rain was coming down hard and slick now. When she tripped over a rock and Pito held out his hand to steady her, she held on because he’d never actually held her hand before. The tenderness of it made her breathless. So did the way he flicked his wrist when he lit the oil lamp once they were in the shack. He placed the lamp near the cot. There were pebbles on the cot. She tried to roll away from them. The mattress was wetter than usual from the rain that slanted through the shutterless windows. The smell of mold was strong, and a headache started to pulse in her temple. But it didn’t matter because Pito stroked her face with his fingers. He’d never done that either. She was about to ask him about Reina, but then he held her face in both hands. When he pulled off her jeans and panties, Tani felt more relaxed. She pulled off her shirt herself. He unhooked her bra and sucked one breast hard and thrust himself between her legs. He still had his pants on, but she was naked and soft and liquidy, and spread her legs. The river whirred louder, and for the first time she pulled down Pito’s zipper, tore his shirt off of him.
“Show me,” she commanded him. With both hands he offered what he had, glistening like clay. She wanted it more than just some object and more than being pretty. He was on top of her and then he entered her, and his first thrust made her grab onto his bottom and help rock him into her flow and ebb.
But then he pulled out from deep inside her and started thrusting too fast and shallow with a shout. It was like when he downed an opponent in one of his video games.
“Come in deeper, Despacito,” she joked.
His mouth and cheeks hung slackly over hers, and his eyes were glassy. “Déjame,” he said, and thrust faster. It still felt kind of good but also hurt. After all, her body was moving to his fastness now, too, wasn’t it? She tried to parry his quick thrusts.
“Coño,” he yelled. “Puta!” OK, that was enough noise from him. She stuck her fingers between his teeth. There was a hissing like a steam engine outside the shack, which seemed to sway with her hips. The river roared as it rose and rose and rose. She tightened and came loose at the same time. Her head spun as she watched the boy, just a clumsy nene, slippery and melty like mud. She could hear a throng of coquís churr on the sill of the open window. But when she looked at the sill, the big-eyed faces of the frogs became distorted, and the frogs looked like they had tiny human heads and hands. They waved at her, like they were doll-sized children crying for Borinquén, their beloved Puerto Rico.
She gasped, pushed against Pito’s body, and tried to get out from under him. But his body pummeled hers like stones. She closed her eyes, but she could still hear the voices of the singing frogs that were like children. Then she heard a sound like a woman wailing at the top of her lungs. She was being shaken, and she opened her eyes. Mami was there. She shouted at Pito to get off her daughter, spanked his naked ass, and finally pushed him off Tani. “Maldito hijo de puta!” Mami yelled.
Tani sat up. She tried to cover her nakedness with her hands
“Carajo, the river is coming for all of us. Levántate, pendejita, y corre,” Mami said.
Tani got up from the cot, her body at first slow and wobbly as Jello. Rain sliced through the window. She no longer saw any coquís. In an instant the mattress went from damp to soaking wet, and a gust of wind knocked over the oil lamp. The floor was already so wet that the lamp went out immediately. Now there was a sound like gigantic trucks driving round and round the shack. They came closer, then closed in, ready to knock down the flimsy walls. Then she and Pito ran out of the shack. Mami panted just behind them.
Gusts of wind jabbed and hookercut at Tani’s body. She could hardly keep on moving; she squinted through the rain, and her body bent like a palm tree. As he ran beside her, Pito tried to grasp her hand. But her body was a marionette with limbs dragged and pulled apart. The wind, more angry than any mother, tore them from each other. She could not see where he and Mami were because it was dark as night now. The sound of grinding rock and splitting trees multiplied the noise of the wind and rain. She had to make it to where the cars were, but the water, now level with her butt, pulled at her body. Her lungs burned and shrank in her chest as she tried to dodge things exploding past her: branches, a door with rattling hinges, the orange eyes and razor teeth of a caiman. She grabbed onto a tilted, branchless tree that still held in the water and wrapped herself around it. She was now nothing but the raggedness of her scratched-up body. She felt a scream of vibrations from under the ground, from up above, and through her and the tree. Then somehow she was moving again and she felt, in her heaviness, barely different from the swirl. She thought she could hear another unearthly sound, too, in counterpoint to the shrieking wind, a long, high, chanting and sobbing. The green eye-like lights she earlier thought she saw in the sky and imagined as the eyes of a Taino goddess were really reflections: the luminescent, shell-crusted eyelids of something that had slept under the river for centuries. Cibuco—who did not remember his human life but was awakened now from the centuries of pain and just opening his eyes. Tani waded through air like water and water that tried to end her and make her flow forever with it. Close behind her the enormousness was in pursuit. She heard it shake off wetness, as if from an immense pelt. She kept going but couldn’t say how or where until she found herself next to Pito, wading up the grade toward Mami’s car, which was closer than Pito’s. She imagined that the inhuman eyes were more distant yet still watched her. As more of her naked body rose from the water, she felt the stinging of welts and cuts on her stomach and legs. Her breasts swung like pieces of raw meat.
Then Mami was there. She opened the cruiser’s back door and shouted at her to get in, then opened the driver’s door and sat down. The water started flowing into the cruiser.
Pito just stood there, leaning against the car. His teeth clattered, and he didn’t seem to really notice her. He had managed to put on a T-shirt, but it was half torn off his body. He was naked from the waist down, his penis a slug against his thighs. A blade of blackened elephant grass pressed into his torso. A gray lizard had bitten his earlobe and hung from it, and a giant centipede was wrapped around his wrist.
Tani cursed and yanked the dangerous-looking thing from Pito’s wrist. Pito’s mouth opened, his jaws moved. He spoke, but she didn’t know what he was saying.
“Carajo, Taína, get into the car.” Mami pulled something from her belt. “But not you.” She twisted around in her seat with her taser in her hand and aimed it at Pito.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing? ¡Bruta!” Tani stepped between Mami and Pito. She slammed the car door on Mami. Just as the door clicked shut, there was a blue flash inside the car. Water passed over the car quickly like a giant tongue and knocked Tani and Pito sideways.
Underwater, Tani’s lungs were wrung tight. She called on her rage that was now not so different from the river. When she forced her head up through the water, her head stayed above it.
She was still choking on clay when she saw Pito’s head bob just above the water.
Her mother and the car were gone. So was Pito’s car. Where the cars had been there churned a mess of grass, palm branches, a dead rat with open eyes, and Mami’s police hat.
And tangled in the hat’s metal badge was a locket of plasticky hair. The hair was no longer red, and the hat was no longer blue. Even the colors had blown away.