Guillermo Rosales - Leapfrog and Other Stories

“Animals!” She screamed. “Is this how you spend your time?”

Silence. The West Side Boys stood up and tried to act respectful. Later, amid the silence, Bones let out a noisy burp.

A chorus of laughter.

Hubert’s wife tried to say something, but the laughter drowned her out. She turned red. Above the laughter, she managed to make an insult heard, and then she left, breathless.

The larger spider had won. With difficulty, it pulled itself away from the dead one and embarked upon a shaky withdrawal toward the stones. Bones let it climb up and then, he slowly crushed it with his foot.

They all fell down on the grass again.

They were happy. They were sweating like wild horses under the tropical sun and they were perfectly happy. Like the times they crucified lizards on the trunks of trees, hammering their legs in with pins.

“A high-level operation.,” Bones would say, slicing open their abdomens with a razor. And then, one by one, he would take out the animal’s organs and put them on the grass.

“Hey, dudes,” he suggested. “Let’s transplant a lizard brain into a spider. ”

They were also happy injecting formaldehyde into frogs and watching them get thinner, eaten away by the poison.

“But the one who’s breaking the record is the lizard I have at home,” Tin Marbán said. “I’ve had it for eleven days in a matchbox without any food and it still sticks out its tongue when I pinch it. I want to see how long it lasts. There are camels that go five years without drinking any water.”

Alex went over to the weeds and bent down to fix himself.

“All eyes on him,” Bones alerted.

So they stayed still, watching Alex, waiting in silence.

“Your thing isn’t coming out today,” Claudio observed.

“Wait a little bit,” Alex said. He moaned forcefully and finally the thing came out. A long organ that hung between his smooth, dark buttocks.

Agar turned his face and felt his insides turning.

“My mom says I have to get operated on,” Alex said. “But with everything she has going on, she always forgets.”

And he shook his organ from one side to another.

“My horse tail,” he said. “My little lizard tail.”

Laughter. Laughter. Laughter.

Agar silently begged for it to be over. It had been a long time since he had left on the olive oil errand and they might be looking for him already. He was afraid that Mrs. Hubert might have gone house to house telling a new tale about the West Side Boys, and that she would get to Papa Lorenzo with the story.

Like the time they urinated on the park benches and Hubert’s wife had foolishly sat on one.

“Do you know what those little animals are doing?” she said, going from house to house. “Urinating on the benches! Where decent people sit down.” And she snorted, furious.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Hubert,” Papa Lorenzo said then. “If I see mine playing that little game, I’ll take a gun and wham! Right down.”

“Animal!” Mama Pepita reproached him later, from behind the pots and pans in the kitchen. “How can you talk that way about your own son?”

“Okay, okay. I didn’t mean to say it like that. Not that way.”

Alex had finished. He put his organ back and cleaned himself up expertly with a malanga leaf.

Kiko Ribs went up to the mare and said: “Hey, dudes. the skin is cracking.”

Bones appeared amid the rosemary with a bunch of dried leaves in his hands. He went up to the animal and placed them around it.

“A crown and everything,” he said. “Dudes. who has a match?”

Excited by the idea, the West Side Boys covered the beast with all the leaves they could find.

“Odin’s pyre,” Speedy said.

“Odin.,” Bones pretended to pray. “God of all that’s broken and of all we have to break in to ‘get in.’ Fire to the can!” he yelled, lighting a match.

“Until the bottom comes out!” The West Side Boys yelled in chorus.

They laughed and howled around the pyre. They listened to the cracking of the mare’s skin and they jumped amid the smoke. Later, their spirits lowered for a moment. Kiko Ribs fell down in exhaustion on the grass.

“On Friday, I’m going to confession,” he said, putting his hand up as a visor. “I’m going to have to tell the priest all about this.”

Agar said: “I get the giggles when I’m in church.”

“The same thing happens to me, dudes,” Bones said, flopping down. “The day Little Mute Guy died. Do you all remember Little Mute Guy?”

The flames grew. Agar watched them, entranced, and remembered Little Mute Guy, sitting in silence on a park bench, wringing his hands until someone called him into the circle.

“Take good care of him for me,” Mrs. Caritina said. “He wants to be one of you.”

Later, in the circle, Bones explained the rules to him.

“To be like us,” he said, “you have to be fearless, mute kid.”

And they all laughed.

“You have to burn down houses, climb trees, piss far and wide and read the Count of Eros and see what you can get away with. Let’s start: do you know how to climb trees?”

“Climb!” The Chorus said. “Make him climb!”

The boy went over to one of the trees in the park and began to climb, holding on to the thick knots. Agar saw him going up and heard behind him: “Go up, mutey, go up, mutey!” And he envied the affection they all felt for Caritina’s little mute guy.

“He’s not mute at all,” Bones said. “He climbs like a chameleon and smokes like a bat. I don’t see anything mute about him.”

The little mute guy reached the top of the tree. From there, he seemed to make an attempt at a pirouette and suddenly they all saw him fall to the ground like a stone.

Agar now remembered the story and thought he saw Caritina’s face bathed in tears. She was there, in the park, surrounded by the crowd, while Dr. Miranda took the boy’s pulse and shook his head.

“He burst a vein in his neck,” Dr. Miranda said. “He made too much effort to climb this damned tree.”

“Always up in the trees!” Mrs. Hubert then said. “Like animals. ”

Caritina didn’t speak. She stood up and looked over at the group of West Side Boys.

That night, they saw her again during the wake. That was where Bones began to laugh, swearing that the Mute Guy had winked at him from his coffin.

“May you be damned a thousand times!” Caritina exploded when she heard them laughing and charged the West Side Boys furiously, issuing curses. Then they really did run away, frightened.

“Do you know what those little animals did at Caritina’s wake?” Aunt Dorita came in saying that night.

“What now?” Mama Pepita listlessly asked. So Aunt Dorita told the story and looked at Agar with her eyes on fire, as if to say: And you know you were a part of it.

Aunt Dorita, Aunt Dorita. why do you hate me?

“The children of the tropics are a bunch of delinquents,” Aunt Dorita insisted. “Cruel and disgusting. You pass through a decent place all relaxed, and there they are laughing under their breaths. You go to a wake and there they are laughing at the deceased. You want to play the piano and there they are saying filthy things. Asses and tits. That’s the only thing they think about! And you can’t have any friends because straightaway they come up with some perverse story about you. And you pretend to ignore it! And you pretend you can’t hear it! And you pretend you can’t see it!”

Agar knew the origins of Aunt Dorita’s hate. It came from the night on which Tin Marbán had come up with the story that she and Poupett had left the rosemary field together.

“That’s enough,” Bones had said. “Can we allow that on a decent beach?”