Guillermo Rosales - Leapfrog and Other Stories

“That has to do with what they’ve eaten,” Papa Lorenzo would say. “Chickpeas are bad for you.”

But now Agar was falling just the same. He had eaten lentils that night and was falling just the same into the void, kicking at nothing, trying to grasp at invisible branches.

“Wood, Wood!” Tommy Tomorrow’s voice carried across 6,000 miles.

“Wood here.”

“Wood, I think we’re crashing. We’ve fallen into a bottomless abyss and we’re being dragged by a meteorite belt — ”

It was always like that: falling, falling, and then the abrupt awakening. Sometimes he saw the beach’s lights from afar and heard the roaring of the sea and fell from the Coney Island Ferris wheel.

He fell toward the white floor of the amusement park and he could see the operator’s stupefied mouth opening like an immense red O and the frightened eyes of the children in the bumper cars. He would fall and never reach the floor. When there were just a few inches to go he’d awake abruptly, in the darkness of his room bathed in sweat. Outside, stray dogs barked. In the distance, he could hear the noise of waves breaking and then dragging over the sharp rocks: splashhh !

He saw a shadow move on the other side of the door. Then steps and the red light: click !

It was Papa Lorenzo. He was asleep, dragging his hands along the bathroom wall tiles for balance. He walked naked in his sleep, and now he was going to urinate asleep over the toilet. Agar half saw him and turned his head away. It shamed him to see his father urinate and then shudder with the last drop.

Papa Lorenzo urinated for a long while, leaning on the wall, and Agar thought he would never finish. Then he shuddered, turned off the lights, and staggered on in the darkness. At last, Agar heard him fall like a dead weight on the bed and kick furiously against the sheets. Then all was absolutely dark again.

Behind the window, out came the old witch from “The Black Cat” to look at Agar, smiling sadistically. Twin vampires waited in the yard for their wooden stakes. A large spider web came down, like a fisherman’s net, from the ceiling. Around his bed jumped the bug-eyed imps from the Cantarranas River. A donkey with a man’s head galloped through the park.

He felt someone touching the sole of his foot with long yellow fingers, and he covered himself completely with the sheet. He must have looked like a dead man in a London morgue.

The old night watchman turned his head to better hear Big Ben’s bells: clang, clang, clang !

“It’s twelve,” Count Dracula said, touching Agar’s back with a long nail. The count’s claw. The count’s fang.

Agar was shaking. The witches surrounded him from all the corners of his room. Every crack in the wall became a monster skinned alive by a uranium bath: “If I open my eyes, I’ll see them, I’ll see them, I’ll see them. My God, when will the night end!”

The night was crushing him. Full of visions — white like a ghost’s sheet.

Then silence.

“Your cousin Genovevo was a terrible boy,” Grandma Hazel said, suddenly appearing in his memory. “Spoiled like you, he even raised his hand to his mother. May God forgive him!”

Mama Pepita stared at him coldly from the sofa. Aunt Dorita and Hubert’s wife also stared.

“The last time Genovevo raised his hand to his mother, do you know what happened?”

Agar was trembling. He didn’t want to hear Genovevo’s story.

“Genovevo was a shithead!” he screamed inside his head.

“His whole arm froze,” Grandma Hazel said seriously: “Frozen like a stick. And when he died, they had to saw it off to bury him in a box as God decrees.”

That was the story of Genovevo. Although it was also the story of Basilio, the boy from Tia Dorita’s town whose tongue reached his navel. All because one day he yelled at his sick mother. Mama Pepita nodded her head.

“Sick,” she reiterated bitterly. “And tell him, too, that whoever says filthy things, his tongue will also turn purple for the rest of his life. Purple and long.”

Agar touched his tongue in the darkness.

It was there.

It seemed harder and longer than usual. He tried to speak and a hoarse sound came out. He would have cried for help — women and children first — but Papa Lorenzo would have gotten up, staggering, and said, “What in the hell is wrong with the damned kid? Can’t I even sleep in this house?”

Agar held back his scream and felt himself sweating under the blanket. He knew that if he uncovered himself, Genovevo would be there, with his sawed-off arm, right next to Count Dracula, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Spider Queen.

At Two, My Shoe

“Get up!”

Mama Pepita woke him up abruptly. He greeted the day without any covers, legs spread wide, and everything coming out of his underwear.

He felt embarrassed.

Before, he didn’t care and was even a bit of an exhibitionist, but now, with that hair there, he had left innocence behind. He knew it.

“You urinated again on the toilet seat last night, huh?” Mama Pepita reproached him. “Then I sit down and get myself all wet, huh? But the boy doesn’t care about that, huh? He just cares” — she shook him by the shoulder — “about him, him, him!”

It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me . “Oh! My God, what an idiot! Yes, it was me.”

She looked at him severely.

“Get up already,” she said, and turned her hunched back to him.

Now the day begins. Get up and look for your shoes. You have a terrible urge to spit. Dry tongue, but pasty around the mouth like horse’s drool. As if you had spent all night running around.

“Get up. Put your pants on.”

I don’t want wide-legged pants. My clothes move around me like I’m wearing a barrel. I like them really tight, like Red Ryder or The Headless Horseman.

I like the Headless Horseman. But I like Bat Masterson more. Although I think I would also like to be Bat’s son with a big dog to defend me. And pity anyone who tried to.

“Now Rin Tin.!”

“What are you saying?” Mama Pepita yelled from the kitchen. “Get up already, I told you. You have to take the food to your grandmother’s house. And then, you’re going to get me Sensat cooking oil. And then. ”

They will be so jealous of me. My God, how jealous they will be! Papa Lorenzo popped his head out the bathroom door.

“I’m in here,” he warned. “So no one come in.”

It was very different when Agar was inside, sitting on the toilet or under the shower. If anyone came in he had to curl into a ball and feel as if he were being pricked by a thousand pins.

Papa Lorenzo is full of mystery. He has false teeth, but takes great care so no one knows. Now he’s fat and bald, but before he was thin.

Before , Grandma Hazel says, your father used to dream about Russia.

He went to jail because of Russia. He got shot in the shin because of Russia. He was obsessed. I have a picture around here of the 1940 strike. Thin and well-groomed. Wrapped in a red flag, with his eyes looking up to the heavens and his finger raised: Saint Gregory, announcing the gospels. Russia is there, in the Heavens!

From behind the door, Agar could hear Papa Lorenzo gargling.

“He’s a monster,” Agar thought. “Like that, when he’s just gotten up, he’s horrible. But he’s more horrible when he hits me. Then I’d like to kill him. Although one day he’ll pay for it all.”

“Hey, dude,” the West Side Boys say at the park, “Who here hasn’t thought about killing his father, even if just once?”

I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him! I swear to . (to whom would he swear?) I can’t swear to God. I don’t believe in Him .