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  Returning to the dresser, I fingered the box of Succorol. Would the world end if I indulged this once, crossed another boundary, broke one more rule?

  I glanced again over my shoulder before peeling a patch from its backing. I pressed it to my chest as if saluting a flag or anthem. My heart raced under my hand. In the distance, my mother’s laughter rose and fell. But nothing changed as I lay back on the cot. It seemed as if the years of virtue had made a fortress of me, a barricade that human appetites and weakness couldn’t breach.

  Then my bones began to melt. Things happened too quickly, at first, to feel good. The rosary, the notebook, and the fan, unfolding pleat by pleat, rose from the chair and hovered over my father’s bed. The doors swayed. I gripped the edges of the cot, feeling control slip from me inch by inch. Only when the melting reached my fingers, loosening their hold, did I begin to enjoy it. Patches flew out of the box and lined up like a filmstrip in the air, each one a panel with a picture in it, and from there every square inside the house became a screen: song lyrics in the baby monitor; my father’s face in the green computer. Even the windows and the wicket came alive with scenes of bida, kontrabida, and the woman they both claimed. My body sailed up and out of the room like a streamer: through the corridor, the kitchen, the sari-sari. Walls and ceilings yielded to me as they would to a ghost. I heard my mother laughing and my father singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” the sounds and words escaping through the roof into the stars.

  • • •

  I woke the next morning to find my bedsheets balled on the sickroom floor, the Succorol patch still on my chest. Tearing it off, I wondered if my mother had checked in on me and seen it. In the bathroom I tried to soap off the patch’s square footprint, but the adhesive was stubborn. I needed a washcloth to work at the residue.

  Rubbing away the evidence, I looked down. As if I’d never seen my own hand before. I stretched my arm out and stared at the white cloth wrapped around my fingers like a mitten. A bandage.

  I rushed from the sink to the doorway of the sickroom, thinking back to the night he died. Here was where the moonlight had shone over the bed. Here was the step I took before seeing them. Here was where she gasped, stopping me in my tracks, and bent to hide his body. My mind shuffled through the kinds of scenes you saw in those trashy Tagalog melodramas: on-screen villains polishing their guns and planting their poisons; my mother, not ministering to him as she had when I was four years old, but instead waiting for me to fall asleep, kneeling at my father’s bedside, removing his shirt, and applying a patch to his chest. I pictured her adding another patch and then another, a week’s worth, her fingertips blanching his skin briefly at each point of pressure. I could see her laying an ear to his chest. After midnight, when his breath and heartbeat stopped, she must have peeled off the patches, soaked the washcloth, and tackled the sticky residue just as I opened the door for some cold air.

  Now I opened the candy box and counted again: five. Only three should have gone to my father on my second, third, and fourth days home; one to me. I’d seen my mother sell one. Of the other twenty that were missing, how many had she sold? Had she sold some in the nights before as well, while I slept? How many would it take to finish off a dying man?

  I must have known a drug so powerful could end his life. So what? Didn’t I want him gone, hadn’t I always? My mother was better off. But at what cost? I had to ask myself. If she had killed him, I had handed her the weapon. If I’d kept track, a closer eye on the supply, I might have caught it all sooner. What kind of pharmacist lets days go by without taking inventory? Someone incompetent as well as criminal. Like him, in other words.

  • • •

  In spite of what I’d told the staff, my father did not have a vast global fan club traveling to see him. No need to drag the wake on for days, as other Filipino families might for more beloved men: we would bury him later that second day. At the cemetery, a block of earth had been hollowed out for the grave. My aunts cooled themselves with lace fans, or brochures they’d lifted from the funeral parlor and folded into pleats. A priest read from his small black Bible. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. In this kind of heat the valley of the shadow of death sounded inviting.

  My cousins’ children broke flowers from the bouquet set on the coffin. Before the lid was closed and locked for good, I looked for the last time at my father’s face, under its sheet of viewing glass. The mortician had not only restored the color but buoyed up the flesh itself, faking fullness in the hollows and droop. I could almost imagine that face moving again, the mouth stretching backward to spit. Nearby a headstone waited, even simpler than the banner on his flowers: ESTEBAN SANDOVAL, SR. 1935–1998. SON · BROTHER · HUSBAND · FATHER. My head ached, and my mouth felt dry; there was a grit behind my eyelids I couldn’t blink away.

  Now, at his grave, my mother wept into her white handkerchief. She still looked frail, the woman who cleared platters and pulled out chairs, who knelt at my father’s feet and mopped up after him. Her tears affected me the way they always had. I swore to stop them; I’d do anything. I reached for her, then froze—afraid, for the first time in all my years consoling her, that I might cry myself. For years there’d been no question of how much she leaned on me, like any mother on her overseas son. It never dawned on me how much I’d leaned on her: to play her part, stick to the script. Her saintliness was an idea I loved more than I had ever hated him. I put my arms around her, making vow after silent vow. I’d never cut corners again, no matter what the value, who the victim; I would never violate any code, professional or otherwise. I would take her with me to New York. I would never leave her again. I’d bury the patches somewhere no one would find them, so long as she could always remain the mother I knew, not some stranger laughing in the dark.

  My uncles turned a crank to lower their brother into the ground. They picked up shovels and began to bury him scoop by scoop. My mother passed her fan to me, then her handkerchief. It felt damp in my palm, the cloth worn thin and soft from all its time in the wash. She stepped forward to join her in-laws, struggling with the shovel’s weight.

  A smell of grass and earth took me back to the yard that once existed in Mabini Heights, and I half expected an acacia tree to appear beside me, or my mother’s voice to call me to dinner through the kitchen screen. I remembered how I used to climb that tree and sling a branch onto my shoulder, aiming sniper-style at the place in the house where my father might be standing. Another time I stabbed a fallen twig into the grass and twisted it, imagining his blood. But I’d fought tooth and nail to rise above that yard. Even in return for all the harm he’d done my mother, to harm him, to be capable of harm to him, was to honor what was in my blood. His blood. I trained myself into his opposite: competent, restrained. The hero in an old Tagalog movie did not win by stooping to revenge; there was a pristine, fundamental goodness in his soul that radiated out to crush the villain. Character and destiny—I believed in all of that, I guess. My mother raised her foot and staked the spade into the ground. She heaved the dirt into the plot and made a noise, almost a grunt. You don’t know my strength! Through all the melodramas that my family and I had seen over the years, in which the bida and the kontrabida crossed their swords over a woman, I never guessed that she might be the one to watch.

  THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN SPECIAL

  Jason Reynolds

  “SEE?”

  “See, what?” I asked Fortune, snatching the soggy dollar off the bar and dropping it into the tip jar. I wished it required more effort, more than a drop as if dollar were coin, but instead needed to be finagled—stuffed—into a crowded cash pit. But that wasn’t the case. This was the first tip of the night. And it hadn’t come from Fortune. Fortune never tipped.

  “That white man left you a tip,” Fortune said, pointing at the door as if the man he was referring to could be seen through the wall.

  “So.”

  “So, he didn’t have to, and he did.” Fortune shrugged.

  “He left me a dingy
-ass dollar on a twenty-dollar tab.” I cleaned the spot where the single tipper sat, wetting the wood, folding the rag, wiping it dry. “They’ll take whatever they can. He could’ve left two. Ten percent is at least a tithe, and you know better than most that this place might as well be a church.”

  “Oh, is that right? And who you ’posed to be, Jesus?” A smile crossed Fortune’s face. “ ’Cause I ain’t never known Jesus to cry about not being praised enough. See, that’s what’s wrong with us now. We think they owe us something.”

  Fortune adjusted his weight on the stool, his body curved like the handle of an umbrella, leaning into the walnut like a plant to sunlight. He sat on the same stool he’d been sitting on for well over a decade. The keys that always dangled from his belt loop had scraped scratches into the right half of the seat, a marking, a coded inscription that this stool was reserved for the one and only Frank Fortune. Half-man, half-mash, whole mess.

  “Like, just the other day,” Fortune continued, “somebody was giving me some bullshit ’bout white people this and that, white people that and this. All this ’bout white people taking over everything. And I’m like, Taking over what?” Fortune scowled and patted himself as if he was looking for a lighter in his chest pocket, which he couldn’t have been, because he knows it ain’t no smoking in my bar, and furthermore, his shirt didn’t have a chest pocket.

  “Yep, still me.” He smirked. “They ain’t take over me yet. Some young boy talking this smack. What’s his name? You know him, too, ’cause he come in here all the time getting on about how he can barely afford his rent, and it’s getting higher and higher, crying pity in his pint glass. See, that’s the problem. That’s the damn problem right there. We coddled these kids, and now they weak. We done mommy’d they asses to death. Now they don’t got the . . . the . . . the gumption to figure some shit out without blaming everybody else for they problems. What’s his name?” Fortune ticked tongue to teeth. “Lord. I’ll tell you what, getting old ain’t no fun, but if you ask me, being young these days is a damn disability in and of itself. Their brains broke. I swear. These young’uns got broke brains thinking somebody coming to take something from them.”

  “That’s not from having broken brains,” I shot back. “That’s from having broken hearts. A lot of these kids know what it feels like to get a dollar tip on a twenty-dollar tab.” I leaned against the counter, folded my arms. “Trust me, I know. Like a four-year education, a fifty-thousand-dollar debt, all for a job that’ll barely afford them”—I caught the metaphor—“a couple of fish and a few loaves. Meanwhile, the white kids they go to school with, their daddies own the damn bread factory, and . . . you already know they got boats!” I slapped the bar, shook my head, murmured, “And even if they don’t, they do. Yeah . . . a dollar tip.”

  I turned around to make Fortune another drink. I know better than to respond to him. Usually I just keep his tab open and let him rip till he’s ripped, then I ease him off the stool and walk him back to my office—the only place in the bar that don’t smell like sixteen-year-old hormone and sixty-year-old hardship—where he can lie down on the couch and sleep it off. Every night. Same thing. But tonight . . . I don’t know. I just couldn’t resist the banter. The white guy who had just left, who hadn’t really done anything wrong, for some reason was like a shot. Not quite a gunshot, though maybe that too. But I mean a shot as in a swallow of something harsh. An overproofed, overpriced moonshine shoved down my throat, burning all the way to my belly, and now my opinion—which I usually keep to myself—was belching out of me.

  “Anyway, this is pint number three,” I announced, setting Fortune’s drink down in front of him.

  His drink—his concoction—is a simple one, and he’s the only person who drinks it. Kentucky bourbon mixed with a strong Nigerian lager I get sent over here by my wife’s folks. Been doing it for years. All kinds of international beer and spirits before it was a thing. Now people call it craft. Back in the day, I just called it options. Always felt like the folks in my neighborhood deserved the same things as everybody else. Why not have some Nigerian beer? Or maybe something from Trinidad. I don’t know. Let’s mix it up—which, by the way, has always been Fortune’s favorite thing to do.

  “You ain’t gotta tell me what number drink it is. I know what the hell number it is. I can count. I can see. I can do all that. It ain’t me you need to be checking up on, anyway. I don’t care what you say, it’s these young folks like that one I was just talkin’ ’bout. What’s his name? His mama used to run that little fish place ’round the corner. How ’bout that for boats. You know the one. The one with no menu. Just come in and say ‘Plate’ or ‘Sandwich’ and walk out with a little bit of heaven in a big piece of Styrofoam. You know the joint I’m talkin’ ’bout? Right ’round the corner, over where, um, what’s in there now? Shit, I don’t know. Something else in there now, but that woman who used to own the fish spot—it might’ve even been called ’Round the Corner—it’s her son that I saw the other day going on and on about white people. This fool done grew up with a mama who was a businesswoman, and got the nerve to tell me white people buying up property and making it hard for folks ’round here. And you know what I told him? I said, ‘Maybe if we would’ve bought more fish plates, you wouldn’t be whining like this.’ I told him maybe if his mama had them gates up on Sundays, and if they’d figured out how to do breakfast, and stayed open past ten o’clock so that I could slide through there and put some grease over top of the best damn drink on earth, the African-American Special”—Fortune lifted his glass, toasted no one, took a big swig, then continued—“maybe we wouldn’t be having this stupid-ass conversation.”

  “And what he say to that?” I asked.

  “He said his mama died.” Fortune set his glass down. “And to that, I said, well . . . damn. Told him I was sorry to hear it. But as soon as I said I was sorry, you know this chump tore right back into the hides of whites, and I had to stop him again and ask him if he took over the business, ’cause it seemed like the natural follow-up.”

  “And?”

  “And he said he did. Then I asked him what the problem was, ’cause as far as I know, white folks love themselves some fish just as much as we do. And I doubt they were coming in there complaining about not getting their grouper on ciabatta bread or whatever the hell it is, so I don’t wanna hear this bullshit about them taking from us. Not now.”

  Fortune lifted his glass again, took a few more gulps, wiped his mouth, and trapped a burp behind puckered lips. “Now, if we talkin’ ’bout history, then okay, I’ll hear you out. Shit, ain’t no doubt about that. They’ve taken and taken from us in the past. I mean, we built this whole damn place and ain’t get a damn thing for it. I’m old enough to remember some of the things these kids read about in school. Old enough to know what it means to really be taken from. My daddy was murdered by a white man in Georgia, which is how I ended up in DC in the first place. Me and my mama was on the damn run, chased from the red clay by the white sheets. I was at the march.” Fortune pointed at the bar. At the bottles lined along the wall like holy figurines, backlit for effect. He wasn’t actually pointing at the booze, but rather in the direction of the National Mall. Then he continued, “And the riot.” He now pointed in the opposite direction.

  “I joined the Army and got stationed down in Virginia. I remember not being able to be served a beer, and if I was, having to worry about who might’ve done spat in it. I fought in Vietnam, lost my friends, seen their insides on the outsides of their bodies, seen the life disappear from their eyes like their spirits being sucked down a dark hallway, and came home to a parade, a protest, and a warm plate at the fucking back door of a restaurant.” The one hand that was free, the one not clutching the glass, was balled into a fist, Fortune digging his fingers into his own palm, gripping his own hand so tightly that the veins in his wrist pressed lightning patterns through his skin.

  “And I seen the inside of an iron box too,” he stammered on, his eyes wild and
distant. Looking at me but seeing something else. “Served years for some bullshit, trumped-up charge, wrong place, wrong time, caught up in a drug sweep in the late eighties. Some shit I ain’t have nothing to do with but couldn’t afford a lawyer to get out of.” And then he was back. I could tell Fortune was talking to me—to me—again. I had seen him take this trip before. “So if you wanna talk about that—history—then maybe I’ll listen. But that’s fact. That’s what I know is true. That’s real, not a bunch of crying and whining about white people moving into the damn neighborhood. I owned property here, too, so . . . miss me with the nonsense.” He pounded back the last bit of his pint and slammed it down on the bar. “One more ’fore I hit the road.”

  But I knew there was no road to hit. Not for Fortune. That the house he’d owned around here was gone. Long gone. Foreclosed on after he went to prison. But he had this bar. He had this drink—his drink—the African-American Special, a four-count antidote that would lead to his inability to venture out into the street in search of a home that was no longer his. He wore his memory and his anger like a top hat, and that stool, scraped and cut by keys that led to doorless locks, was his stage. This bar, a whiskey-soaked slab of wood, his lectern. The old couch in the back, a post-show respite. And me, though often frustrated by the performance, his biggest fan.

  I made his final drink and set it down in front of him, the foam from the lager oozing down the sides of the glass. And as he dipped his top lip in so that the head foam could make a frothy blond mustache, he mumbled, “White folks these days can’t take nothing we don’t give ’em.”

  LONG ENOUGH TO DROWN

  Glendaliz Camacho

  BRANDON IS A war buff. A few months ago, I joined him on a work trip to Omaha. We drove an hour to a Civil War museum in Nebraska City. We spent the afternoon staring at Springfield rifles encased in glass. A bullet a soldier chewed for lack of anesthesia. Faded draft exemptions. Means of death and ways to cheat it. Nothing makes Brandon feel as alive as picking up what people who died left behind.