The same way that silence had thudded onto us like a cartoon anvil, a sudden whooshing intake of breath from everyone at the exact same second made me spin around to see what the hell had happened.
While we’d all been distracted by this David-Bowie-inspired stranger in our midst, Fidel had barrelled across the yard with all the amphetamine-grade energy of a toddler newly confident on his feet, and had launched himself at the man’s snakeskin-clad legs. It was your proverbial slow car crash, watching Fidel tug at the edge of those patent boots to get the man’s attention. And before anyone could move to stop it, Fidel was in the man’s arms, propped on his hip. Gun in one hand, baby in the other.
Fidel had only been in our lives a few weeks, a cherubic worm that wriggled out of the woodwork after Aunt Celia died. A Filipina servant for an affluent Syrian family had showed up looking for Mauricio to babysit because her employers said they were paying her to watch their kids, not her own. (We didn’t doubt the kid was Mauricio’s. Only a real political genius like him, with his communist sympathies despite everything we’d been through in Caracas, would name his kid after Fidel Castro.)
Watching the man holding our newly discovered family baby, it was like gravity had gotten stronger. My limbs just couldn’t move. I waited for flight or fight to kick in, for some base instinct to carry me blazing across the yard in a Lara Croft-inspired burst of bad-assery to wrestle Fidel off this armed stranger’s hip. But nothing happened. No one moved a fucking muscle. We were pillars of salt.
Thankfully my father’s made of sturdier stuff than most and my brother is perpetually brimming with drunken fighting gusto. So while the man bounced a giggling Fidel on his hip like a kindly uncle, my father crossed the yard in indignant strides, shoulders thrown back, while Sancho followed (only swaying very slightly) to stand at Papá’s side, gripping the meat prongs. Now, my father has the gentle heart of whatever Taino blood still lingers in his DNA, but the height and wiry brawn of a genocidal Castilian conquistador. Sancho – even drunk – has the same thing going for him, except what he lacks in muscularity he makes up for in soft yet intimidating beefiness. But they might as well have been a couple of ballerinas twirling across the lawn in pink tutus – the guy didn’t look ruffled by the pair of them in the least. In fact, he looked downright amused as he watched them approaching. He was having the time of his life, slowly corkscrewing fear into us.
A wordless stand-off ensued, the kind where Clint Eastwood would be standing there squinting hard, chewing intimidatingly on a toothpick. A dusty tumbleweed rolling by wouldn’t have looked out of place as we all watched on, breathless, the stranger’s lupine grin stretching wider as the tension curdled. In my periphery I saw my mother, normally poised, graceful and emotionless as a ceramic figurine, digging her French-manicured nails into my sister’s arm. Her hand was trembling. This alarmed me almost as much as the stranger’s gun.
Finally my father broke the stand-off. He took a step forward. ‘Brother man, give me the child,’ he said, arms outstretched. ‘Best you explain what you doing at my brother-in-law house, man, before crapaud smoke your pipe.’
(As a school driver for the two years we’d been in Trinidad, Papá listened to Trini talk radio for hours on the road and had picked up more local proverbs and creole dialect than the rest of us. He always whipped it out at inappropriate times, like some absurd nervous tic.)
The man threw his head back and gave such a vaudevillian ha-ha-ha of a laugh that it made little Fidel jump and whimper. ‘You talk like a real Trini, man! Better than Celia. Celia never knew no Trini lingo at all.’
My father’s arms dropped to his sides. This guy knew Aunt Celia? That one had shocked Papá just as much as me. But he caught himself quick. ‘How you know my sister?’
The man scratched the side of his head with the gun barrel as though pondering the question, then gave an exaggerated shrug.
‘Give me the baby,’ Papá repeated.
The man continued ignoring him, smiling down at Fidel whose plump, pink lower lip was quivering, about to break into a wail.
Papá was begging now: ‘Please, what you doing this for, man? Take anything you want. Don’t hurt the child.’
Just then, Mauricio walked out into the yard from the house. Approaching the stranger from behind, he paused in his stride to belch and give the man’s snakeskin-and-silk get-up a derisive once-over. ‘Who’s this maricón – Boy George?’
The man swung around to grin at Mauricio. At the portrait of man, gun and baby, Mauricio let out a string of vergas and stuck his hands up – as if the man would give a shit whether Mauricio was armed or not. He had a baby and a gun. What threat could middle-aged, slack-bellied Mauricio possibly pose?
‘Ah, Mauricio! Is you self I waiting on!’
Fidel reached his arms out towards Mauricio, babbling at him.
‘Mauricio, Mauricio,’ the man continued. ‘Celia tell me so much about you that I recognize you easy. Maybe I even know your face already from a passport photo. Yes, man, heard a lot about you. And I can’t lie – not all good! But you know Celia a’ready. She was like Angostura – bitters! I take everything she say about you with a pinch of salt, don’t worry, man.’
Mauricio hadn’t moved. Fresh sweat shone on his forehead.
The man gestured with his gun for Mauricio to stand beside my father, which he did, hands still in the air. Then the man surveyed the yard, his gaze steamrolling us all. When his eyes landed on me, he said my name – ‘Yo-la’ – slow and sensuous, like it was a truffle he was rolling around on his tongue. My eyes stayed downcast as I heard him identify the twins, my sister, my mother, and my father’s youngest sister Aunt Milagros with the same lecherous precision.
‘Now that I see everybody here,’ he said, ‘I would like to introduce myself. My name is Ugly. You know – feo? Some people call me Mr Ugly, but seeing as how me and Celia was good friends before she die, all you could call me Ugly.’
Fidel was crying now, wriggling in Ugly’s arms, grasping at the air for Mauricio with sausagey little fingers. Ugly bounced him on his hip. ‘What happen, small man? Eh? What you crying for?’ He sucked his teeth. ‘Look, go by your damn father.’
He motioned Mauricio over with the gun. Mauricio didn’t move.
‘Come nah, man, Mauricio, I said take this blasted chile! Slobbering all over me.’ He wiped the gun barrel across a stream of dribble on Fidel’s chin, but Mauricio still didn’t move, hands raised like he was in a stick-up, mouth hanging open. That’s Mauricio for you, the classic chauvinist – always running his mouth about how women ‘should stay on their backs in the bedroom and on their feet in the kitchen and leave the rest of it to the men’, but those big bulging machista balls are the first to shrivel at any sign of trouble.
Clocking Mauricio’s uselessness, my father took a few slow steps forward to take Fidel from Ugly. The second Papá had the baby, Ugly took two quick strides to place the gun at the centre of Mauricio’s forehead. Mauricio blinked – once, twice – as the metal made contact, like he’d been jarred out of a daydream.
‘Mauricio, you going to join me inside for a chat. Celia had a few outstanding business affairs with me when she die. We going to see how we could rectify that. Sound good?’