Dalva Read Free Page B

hugged him and sang a little song children sing in Sonora. He broke down and said he had a crazy uncle who had been fucking him and it hadmade him sick. This wasn’t shocking in itself as I had dealt with the problem, though it almost always concerned girls and their fathers or relatives. Franco (I’ll call him) began to pale and tremble. I checked his pulse and drew him to his feet. The blood was beginning to soak through the paper towels he had stuffed into the back of his pants. I didn’t want to chance a long wait in emergency at the public hospital so I rushed him to the office of a gynecologist friend. The anal injuries turned out to be too severe to be handled in the office, so the gynecologist, who is a compassionate soul, checked the boy into a private hospital where he immediately underwent surgery for repairs. The doctor and I went for a drink and decided to split the costs on the boy. The doctor is an ex-lover and lectured me on the way that I had jumped over all the rules of the case.
    â€œFirst you call the county medical examiner. . . .”
    â€œThen I call the police, suspecting a felony. . . .”
    â€œThen you wait for a doctor from Bombay who got his degree in Bologna, Italy. He’s been awake all night sewing up some kids after a gang fight. The doc is probably wired on speed.”
    â€œAnd the police will need the boy’s middle name, proof of citizenship, photos of his ruptured ass. They’ll want to know if he’s absolutely sure his uncle did this to him.”
    And so on. The doctor stood at the sound of a Japanese alarm clock that was his beeper. He went to the phone and I hoped it wasn’t bad news about the boy. He returned and said no, it was just another baby about to be born backward into the world. The couple was rich and he would charge extra to help make up for his misbegotten generosity to the boy. I had another drink, a margarita because it was a hot day. I looked through the sugar gums and the palms across Ocean Avenue to the Pacific. How could all this happen when there was an ocean? For a long time I thought of every boy I saw as possibly my own son, but I never could properly adjust the ages. I am forty-five now so my son would be twenty-nine, an incomprehensible figure for the small, shriveled red creature I only saw for a few minutes. When I was in college the child was always a kindergartner. When I graduated the child was actually nine, but to me he was still five, one of a group tethered together with yarn on a cold morning waiting for the Minneapolis museumto open. When they got tangled I helped a patient schoolteacher straighten out the line and wipe some noses. I worked in a day-care center one day for a few hours but I couldn’t bear it.
    Two modest drinks made me simple-minded. I walked out into the bright sunlight, got in my car, and checked for an address in the boy’s file which I brought along for hospital information. I thought I’d reason with the mother in the probability that she was ignorant of the rape. It was the beginning of rush hour on the Santa Monica Freeway, and if you are to leave Santa Monica itself you must become a nickel-ante Buddhist. Usually I established a minimal serenity by playing the radio or tapes, but the music didn’t work that day.
    Now there’s a specific banality to rage as a reaction, an unearned sense of cleansing virtue. And what kind of rage led the uncle to abuse the boy? I would do my best to see him locked up but my own rage came from within, from another source, while it was the boy who was sinned against. Only the purest of heart can become murderous for others.
    I parked on a crowded street in front of the barrio address. A group of boys were loitering against a stucco fence in front of the small bungalow. They taunted me in Spanish.
    â€œDid you come to fuck me, beautiful gringo?”
    â€œYou have some growing to do, you miserable little goat turd.”
    â€œI am