Niyati Keni: Esperanza Street

My father, Jonah and Lando seated themselves on the sea wall. Lottie pulled a pack of Champions out of the depths of the House and tossed them to her husband. Lando fanned out a handful, offering one to each of the jetty boys in turn. Except for my father, none refused. Lottie watched, nodding as if counting the boys, the cigarettes, weighing perhaps the cost in cigarettes against the goodwill and safety they might buy; extra pairs of eyes were always useful. Lando offered me one too, his eyes curious, as if uncertain whether he’d seen me before. My father clicked his tongue and shook his head before I’d even had the chance to refuse.

Lando drew his knees up and propped his elbows upon them, stretching his arms out, hands flopping, his cigarette pointed at the water. Everyone smoked silently, and when they were done, the boys eyed the cart hopefully. But Lottie had already put the packet away and was shaking out the bedding. The boys looked at Jonah, my father and Lando on the wall and, understanding, started to disperse, to shove the last boat into the swell, to light the lamps in Jonah’s office or just to sit, further along the wall, for a final game of poker before leaving for home to eat and return later. I stayed next to my father on the wall, but he never turned to include me.

The sun sat low on the horizon. Now, with the jetty quiet, the sea’s voice reasserted itself throatily. I could hear again the slap of water against the wooden posts of the jetty. The last boat grew small over the water. ‘Yard’s opening up later,’ Jonah said. Lando looked past him to the freight yard gates; one of the yards doubled as a makeshift cockpit once a fortnight, the afternoons when my father seemed more impatient than usual to return me to the boarding house. I looked in the direction of the yard. Men were already gathering, carrying their birds like babies, tenderly. I looked at my father, hopefully.

‘You have any school work left to do?’ he said.

‘No,’ I lied.

‘Let the boy come,’ Jonah said.

‘He’s big enough to stand a little blood,’ Lando said.

My father shook his head. ‘Carmela never liked it.’

I wanted to hang out at the jetty that evening. Lando and Lottie had a way of bringing colour with them; I knew the jetty would be a lively place tonight. I wanted to watch the cock fight, stay up late, drink even one shot of rum or tubo with them, place a few bets at the House tables. Especially now that my father had said my mother’s name, and a few drinks might loosen his tongue further.

‘Just one fight, Pop,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen one.’

‘Time to get you back,’ he said tightly.

Jonah clapped a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You’re getting to be a fine young man. Managing that big house by yourself for Mary Morelos.’ I knew he was just saying it so I wouldn’t look like a kid being dismissed.

As I turned to go, I noticed a woman standing further along the sea wall looking out to sea, at the boats dwindling in the half-light, at a group of boys relaxing in a rowboat, fishing lines tied to their toes. Every now and then the boys jiggled their lines and lit cigarettes from each other’s, red points of light bobbing up and down over the darkening water. The woman stared out, her hands behind her back holding a chicken by its feet as easily as someone might hold a newspaper. I was startled but only for a second. She was the same height as my mother and as slender. My mother used to gaze into the distance, or at nothing, for what seemed like hours at a time. I remembered how, after her funeral, we’d returned by a different route from the cemetery to dissuade her ghost from following us back to the house.

Perhaps aware of being watched, the woman roused herself from her thoughts and walked away. I watched her go and when I turned back to my father he was watching her too. My eyes sought his, and when I found them he flushed angrily. He looked away and even when I said goodbye he didn’t look up.

Aunt Mary had two sons. The youngest, Benny, was only a few months my junior and commandeered me as a playmate soon after my arrival at the boarding house. We played together after school and at weekends, in between my duties and his piano lessons or his math and Spanish tuition. The games were his inventions and he managed to press entire worlds into fragments of time. We were time travellers, sailors, ninjas, flailing manfully at each other in the garden. Benny was always the Admiral, the Master. I suppose I minded it, but I knew my place, and besides, these were adventures I could never have created by myself.

One summer we made amphitheatres in the yard out of stones and trapped insects to battle in them. The smaller, more sluggish creatures were invariably mine, though they mostly just crawled away so there were no actual victories and it became simply which bug could break out of captivity first. When I was called in to work, he continued to play. I watched through the window as the arenas became more elaborate, with galleries, moats, drawbridges and pennants. I saw how the building became the pleasure and the insects were forgotten.

Over the years, as my duties increased and Benny’s interest in drawing and komiks developed, we played together less, but we remained comfortable in each other’s company. Sometimes he sat and read in the kitchen, folded like a seabird on an old stool, his back against the stone wall, reading out loud while I washed pans or ironed clothes. Other times he sketched me as I worked, asking me to stay in a pose until my limbs ached and he was still only half done.

His brother, Dub, was four years older than us and the age gap was enough to make him mysterious. Dub had always been good-looking, but there came a point in his late teens when something inside him just switched on and after that it was hard not to look at him. He filled out, held himself differently. In a room full of people, he was often the centre. ‘Like his father,’ America said, eyeing the girls that had started to dawdle by the gate on the way back from convent school. ‘More cream than coffee.’ If Dub noticed, he didn’t show it. He spent most of his time with a guitar, writing the songs that he was sure were going to make him famous.

When he was sixteen he learned to ride a motorcycle, which caused quite a ripple in the household, impressing Benny and I but dismaying his mother, even though it was a mosquito in comparison to the one he exchanged it for later at Earl’s garage when he turned eighteen and came into a little money. After the bigger, better bike, and after his schoolfriends left for university, Dub’s crowd changed and he started hanging out with the bikers that gathered at Earl’s. They called themselves the Wolf Riders — Dub’s idea, from some komik Earl had brought back from the States for Benny the year before. At nineteen, Dub started working at the garage and the plan for him to go to college just fell away. It happened in a roundabout way, after Earl came back from the States with an electric guitar.

It was the first time Earl had been to the Bougainvillea. I’d never seen him up close before. I knew him by sight, had seen his pale body bent over an engine in the dark interior of his garage, his baseball cap backwards over his greying blond head. He was bigger than I’d expected and white from several months back in his home town. He made the settee look small. ‘Seattle,’ he said, looking straight into my eyes, ‘is our rainiest city. Period.’ He made a cutting motion with the flat of his hand.

Earl’s manner was open; when he talked, he looked at each of us in turn. If he made any distinctions between us, it wasn’t apparent. I struggled to meet his eyes when he was talking to me, but I was sure it only made him stare at me for longer.