UGLY
It was Aunt Celia who got us into the whole mess. The entire Palacios family thrust smack into the middle of a crime ring because of Aunt Celia and her financial wizardry. What a circus. And after everything we did to get out of that socialist cesspit and make a better life in this cracked and broken Promised Land – Trinidad.
Take it from me: greener grass is always a mirage.
Lucky for Aunt Celia, she was dead by the time the shit hit the fan. Or I guess the shit only hit the fan because she was dead. Don’t get me wrong – that miserable bitch Aunt Celia was hands-down my favourite relative. My favourite person, even. In the many weeks since she’d dropped dead of a heart attack, a day hadn’t gone by that I didn’t miss her acid humour and mordant insights, her cocaine-dazzled disco tales of the Eighties. Her wit was lethal as a syringe of cyanide. No one could ever replace her. But in the present moment, shivering with cold sweat under a stark Trinidadian sun while some lunatic held us all to ransom, well, there was only one person to blame for it.
* * *
Crank the clock back only fifteen minutes or so and we’d been enjoying our first Palacios Sunday barbecue since Aunt Celia died. Things were feeling almost back to normal after the shock of that late-night phone call when Mauricio, Aunt Celia’s ex-husband-cum-common-law-partner, told us he’d found her white-lipped and cold on the kitchen floor. We felt it in our bones, the insidious guilt of regularity creeping in. And saw it in the weather – at the time of Aunt Celia’s death the rainy season had soaked the earth, driving the violently vivid green of new life to spread across hills and coastlines and sprout from gutters and pavement cracks like an untameable verdant pestilence, while our own deluge of grief had forced new emotion to sprout from unexpected places in us. Vines of regret, blossoms of nostalgia. But now the rainy season was over. Ours and the island’s. The downpours had dried up and all that aggressive green overgrowing everything was drawing back from the landscape like the sea pulling back from the shoreline. We were drying out too. The fauna of grief was withering up in us, had stopped suffocating us like parasitic strangleweeds. Life was rolling ahead, as it does, and there we were at Aunt Celia’s house – Mauricio’s house – drinking and barbecuing like any old Sunday. Even Aunt Celia’s daughters, Ava and Alejandra, were back to wearing their beauty-pageant make-up and gossiping over boys and tawdry tabloid magazines. They were Irish twins – seventeen and eighteen – but everyone thought of them as actual twins since they were so identically big-breasted, wide-hipped and large-assed, with the same swishy black hair down to their teeny-weeny waists. I watched them flicking their Princess Jasmine manes, cooing over their half-brother Fidel, a rosy-cheeked one-year-old. My younger sister Zulema tittered and cooed with them, poking Fidel’s round belly. Zulema was twenty-two, but huddled up with the twins, they could easily pass for triplets. Same high-pitched squeals, same cleavage, same air of a Miss Universe hopeful.
My brother Sancho jabbed my arm with the meat prongs, pulling my attention back to the smoking barbecue pit.
‘¿Qué te pasa?’ I rubbed the spot where he’d poked me. ‘What’s your problem?’
‘Mmmo barb … cue sau.’
Christ, slurring already. I’d noticed the glassy eyes, the dark curls plastered to his forehead with liquor sweats – but hadn’t realized we’d already got to slurring. Sancho moved quick.
‘Do you mean more barbecue sauce?’
‘Claro, coño.’
I squirted sauce over the rows of patties, trying to think of a way to get Sancho to relinquish barbecuing duty before he burned the meat or blew up the gas grill or accidentally impaled himself on the prongs.
While I slathered the burgers, Sancho slung an arm around my shoulder. Here we go.
‘You ’member Uncle Rubio, Yola? You ’member his barbecues back in Caracas? Verga, Uncle Rubio knew how to party. You ’member?’
Sancho, like most people after they’ve had a few, loved to whip out tales of all our dead relatives, especially his two personal favourites: Uncle Rubio and Uncle Ignacio, legendary for their drinking prowess, imperviousness to hangovers, and acts of unparalleled inebriated lunacy. Sancho thought of them like a blushing young novice thinks of Mother Teresa: with pure doe-eyed aspiration. I thought of them like what they were: a couple of alcoholic pricks.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. ‘Like the time Uncle Rubio thought it would be a riot to shoot Aunt Milagros’s parrot and stick it on the grill? Like that family barbecue?’
‘Ha!’ Sancho doubled over to smack his knees. I winced, half-expecting the prongs to drive into his femur. ‘That was a barbecue for the books! Pedro the Parrot – tasted like chicken!’
‘Yeah. Hilarious. Listen, let me watch the burgers. You go drink some water, go eat a hot dog or something.’
‘Know what was so great about Uncle Ignacio and Uncle Rubio, Yola?’
‘What?’
‘They knew how to party.’
‘Yeah, they partied themselves right off a cliff.’
This was true. Uncles Ignacio and Rubio’s spectacular double demise had been the culmination of an all-night drunken bender with Rubio at the wheel. I pictured them sailing over the edge of that cliff like Thelma and Louise, hands clasped, their matching gold chains rippling in the slipstream while they slurped the final dregs of rum from their flasks.
‘They knew it’s better to leave the party early than hang around until the end when you’re cagando in your pants and pissing in a bag!’ He was properly shouting now, beer bottle aloft like a torch. ‘Aunt Celia knew it too. I’m telling you, better to get out early while the party’s still pumping!’
‘Sancho, shut up and go drink some water.’
‘Don’t think I dunno what you’re tryna do, Yola.’
‘I’m not trying to do anything. It’s hot and you’ve been out here at the grill for hours, you need to hydrate …’
And then a moment like when you’re shouting into your friend’s ear at a club and the music suddenly cuts off. The whole backyard, full of the cacophony of an extended Venezuelan family only a second before, went abruptly silent. Sancho was squinting over my head towards the house. I turned to follow his gaze. A skinny man with a chinstrap beard was standing at the far end of the yard just in front of the back porch, wearing this bizarre get-up – white patent cowboy boots, snug snakeskin trousers, and a billowing purple-and-black striped silk shirt. All he needed was a lick of eyeliner and some mousse and he’d fit right in with an Eighties rock band. Had he been anywhere else but standing oh-so-casually in my family barbecue, I’d have laughed. But there was something about the casualness that was far from reassuring. He had a right to be there, that’s what his stance said. Just you try to kick my ass out. That, the way he looked around with an oil-slick glint in his eye, not moving, not explaining himself – it all made me uneasy. Gave me that sick stomach flip like when you see a man walking towards you on a dark, lonely street. You tell yourself it’s just a man walking on a street, nothing to be afraid of. But that visceral instinct warns you anyhow: this could be trouble.
Then I saw the gun in his hand.
I took a step backwards, the urge to run immediately kicking in, even with my family all around me. Another step back and I knocked into my father without meaning to. I hadn’t even realized he’d been walking up behind me. He kept going, brushing past me. As I looked back, my eyes fell on the picnic table. Zulema and the twins were like mannequins, staring goggle-eyed at the intruder. But where was Fidel? My heart skipped. I scanned the yard behind me, all the empty arms. Who had the baby?