Get in the truck, I said, pointing.
What?
I pulled out the ice pick, set it against his chest. Like I said, get in the truck.
He noticed the tinted windows. I pressed the point against his nipple, which was visible through his microfiber shirt, and he obeyed.
What do you want from me? he said. You want my wal-let?
Put on this bandana. Cover your eyes.
In our family, my grandmother’s brothers fought as guerrilla soldiers in the jungled mountains of Laguna and Quezon during the Japanese occupation. Two had been Philippine Scouts and on the American payroll before MacArthur retreated to Australia. I only knew them years later, as old men, drunkards who loved to boast in a mixture of English and Tagalog and Spanish. They visited Los Angeles and stayed with us several times, trying to claim the veterans’ benefits they had been promised. I thought they were losers because they kept asking, even though they never got anybody to listen to them. They struck me as dreamers. Then they got me drunk when I was nine. They told me I took after them, the Laurels (that’s my mother’s maiden name). Indeed, a few years later I grew tall and broad-the conquistador’s barrel chest, they called it.
They don’t seem like soldiers, I told my mother and her sister. We were visiting them in San Pablo, an old Spanish-Malay city among coconut haciendas south of Manila, and they drank San Miguel beers from a crate on their picnic table. I was at a separate table, where the women sat.
That’s only because they’re old, Mom said.
What did they do?
Eduardo and Pedro were the worst, she said. They ran the hacienda like gangsters. They once shot a man for looking at their sister the wrong way.
Wow, I said. What else?
She said, One of their brothers-
What’s a skit?
It’s like a platform made of bamboo, Mom said. It has wheels and a little lawn mower engine. Boys run them over the train tracks like homemade taxis. Anyway,
Why didn’t they find out who did it? I asked. They could have hit anyone. Even a baby.
They weren’t thinking about that, Mom said. They were sending the message that this is what happens if someone hurts our family.
I shook my head, furious, bothered. My mother and aunt spoke with disapproving low voices, almost whispers, shaking their heads with shame. But they were also secretly proud, I sensed.
When I got jumped into a Latino gang, my mother and her sister and their brothers may have been disappointed in me. But on a trip I took back to Manila, my grandmother’s brother Eduardo took one look at me-the broad muscles, the weight-lifter’s shoulders, the tattoos covering my arms and back-and he nodded in approval.
You are a true Laurel, he said.
That night, we got shitfaced on San Miguel gin.
In my church we have an inscription that indicates the bread and wine are not His body and blood, but only symbols, remembrances of the Father. But I have a secret heresy. When I eat from the loaf, when I sip from the cup, I feel in my heart His presence and know I have consumed real flesh and real bodily fluid that is absorbed by my body. It is the Philippine Catholic inside me. I have other secret idolatries. There is a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on my back, from the base of my neck down to the crest of my buttocks; her shoulders spread across my shoulder blades, her feet step on the serpent coiled at my hips. All the other tattoos my congregation knew about, and I removed them by laser-across my arms and shoulders, my neck, my chest. When we went out to the frigid stream for full immersion, I kept two layers of undershirt on so they would not see the Holy Mother beneath.
They would not understand. But about some things I cannot let go.
I took Veronica to my church once. She hadn’t been to Mass in years. She said the rituals were meaningless, rote, hierarchical. I wanted to expose the unborn baby to Jesus, and thought our more spirited evangelical service might rekindle the piety of her childhood. But she looked surprised at the Spartan worship space and asked where the altar was. She puzzled at the aluminum chairs we had instead of pews, scanned the floor for kneelers.
When the Christian rock band played and the clapping started, she moved and swayed, even smiled. Her eyes teared during the witnessing, as a man read a letter from an eleven-year-old boy who had written an autobiographical story about hearing his alcoholic father beating his mother through the bedroom wall, then confessed that this boy was his own son. A feeling passed through the crowd like a cool insuck of breath through our bodies. Veronica looked around with surprise.
She seemed impressed when I showed her the boys’ club facility and explained our drug rehab programs and outreach ministries.
Afterwards I felt hope as we stepped out onto the crunchy gravel, the strip-mall glass glistening across the boulevard.
What did you think? I asked.
I liked it, she said.
You think you might want to come back?
She seemed sad as she smiled at me. I don’t think so, Tomas, she said. She touched my arm, and her fingers lingered.
Well, if you ever change your mind…
She looked sorry. As if I had shown her my ugly baby and expected a compliment.
Veronica kept active even during her pregnancy. She continued to wade in the waves and liked to lie out on the beach. She let me feel her sandy abdomen, the growing baby within. We knew it was a boy from the ultrasound, but had no idea there was anything wrong with him. He kicked beneath her warm skin. With my ear against her taut belly button, I could hear sounds of him-or Veronica-moving. Could hear the muted rumble of collapsing waves.
The boys’ club behind the church building used to be a martial arts studio. It still smelled of Japanese floor pads, bare feet, must, and male sweat. It smelled like an old futon. The blindfolded man sniffed at the change in smell, the warmer temperature. He jerked when I shut the metal door and snapped the lock. I sat him on a chair in the center of the room and bound him there.
I’m going to take off your blindfold now, I told him, after I flipped over the only sign with our congregation’s name on it.
From behind, I pulled off the bandana. He looked around and said, Where am I?
But I was gone. I was in a hallway behind mirrored oneway glass we had installed to observe the group sessions and recovery groups that met in that room.
I turned to Manny, who sat next to me on an aluminum chair against the wall; watching Harley’s father through the one-way glass.
Is that him?
Yeah.
Okay, I said, and pulled the ice pick out of my satchel. Place the tip of the blade on the soft part below the kneecap. Make sure you really punch it through the cartilage. The knee’s like tree bark. If you don’t get below the surface, the tree doesn’t die.
Manny looked at me. You don’t actually expect me to do this…?
