on Frito Bandito accents, slurring: Pablo, Pablo, Pablo. Remember that? Good times. No doubt Fitzy was only trying to provoke me into a fight so that he could massacre me. I just had to keep my mouth shut, not say a word, and get out of there, that’s all. I slipped out of the kitchen, out of the house without saying goodbye to anyone, walked home in the cold dark.
My stomach just rumbled like wet pebbles inside a shaken bucket. I won’t be able to resist that hero much longer. If I were traveling in the other direction and had bought the exact same sandwich in an Italian deli in Boston, same meats, cheese, and garnishes, same bread, it wouldn’t be called a hero. It would be a submarine sandwich.
I know that some of the distance between Lexi and me, which I do regret, though apparently not enough to do much about it, is rooted in those childhood resentments and rivalries. My mother is always asking me to be a better brother to Lexi, and I’m always promising to try, but then nothing really changes. But when I suggest that I might possibly resent Lexi for other things apart from her having inherited all of our parents’ money and property, what do I mean? What is it that I actually resent? Why should I resent Lexi at all? If it were only the other way around, wouldn’t it be justified? That time when we were small, when Lexi took all the money out of our father’s wallet and planted it around our yard because she thought money trees would grow, it kind of established a pattern. True, Bert was always complaining and ranting about money, and she wanted to help. He must have just collected in cash from his bookie or had a run of winning trifecta boxes at Suffolk Downs or something, because he went totally berserk. It took Lexi a couple of days to own up. They went out and dug in the yard, under the shrubbery, in the vegetable garden, in the dirt around the trees and bushes he’d planted, but they only recovered about half of it. So adorable, right? Something to make any good boy feel even fonder and more protective of his little sister than before. I dumped on Lexi about it like she’d done the stupidest thing in the history of humanity. What, you think if that was how to make money trees grow, you’d know about it and Daddy wouldn’t? You think he wouldn’t have already planted money in the yard? Now look what you did. You’ve made us poorer.
Then there was the incident when I snuck into Lexi’s bedroom and stole the Indian arrowhead she’d found Down Back a few days before. I can still shut my eyes and perfectly recall her running up out of the field that evening, her strong thighs in short pants rising and falling, excitedly shouting, Look what I found! In the palm of her hand she held out a white quartz arrowhead, about three inches long, perfectly shaped, lethally sharp. I’d been desperately searching Down Back and our town’s forests for an Indian arrowhead like that one since about forever. Jealousy rose inside me like a boiling magma that subsided into distilled malice and calculation. Then I played innocent for about a week, probably longer, waiting for the scandal of the missing arrowhead to blow over. If our parents never suspected me, that must be because it just seemed too cruel and far-fetched a thing for a boy to do to his little sister, steal her arrowhead and then do what with it, keep it hidden forever? (But, I’m remembering now, there was a girl I wanted to give it to, I think her name was Beth, though I only met her once, that Sunday afternoon when my father and his friend Herb, her uncle, took us to a Celtics game in the Garden, and to Durgin-Park for dinner after.) Because Lexi was always losing and misplacing things anyway, our parents tried to convince her that maybe she’d taken it to school and left it there and had just forgotten or had dropped it somewhere without noticing. After all she had so much else on her mind, with her violin recital imminent and Aunt Hannah coming twice a week now to give her lessons and coach her. Did she want Aunt Hannah to see her crying over the missing arrowhead instead of concentrating on her music? One evening a week or so later while my father was barbecuing in the backyard, Lexi sitting on the porch steps, I came running up out of Down Back excitedly shouting that I’d found an arrowhead, too, just like the one Lexi had found. Even now, sitting here on the train, I feel what a heavy sack of rotted flour would feel if it were infested and swarming with mealworms of shame. My father moving toward me, that look of revulsion on his face, uncinching his belt and knocking over the grill, the still-raw steaks falling like lopped-off faces to the grass. Those few whacks with a folded belt across the back of my thighs were nothing out of the ordinary, certainly when compared to what lay ahead in coming years. Hearing the commotion, my mother had rushed outside. The real punishment, as I lay there on the grass pretending to whimper from the sting of the belt lashing, was hearing my father explain to Mamita what I’d done and the way she looked at me, lips tightly closed, her narrowed gaze without pity, direct yet somehow absent, as if in reality she was staring inward, forced to face the truth about her life, trapped in a gringo suburb with this alien family, even this son who’d at least provided the reassurance of seemingly taking after her in temperament, who didn’t scream or throw tantrums, whose cheerful disposition rebounded even after those savage boys tried to murder him, now exposed as a conniving little fool who’d just committed an incomprehensible perfidy against his little sister.
While I lay there on the lawn, curled up with my arms over my head, displaying my penitence, Lexi must have recovered her arrowhead and carried it back into her bedroom or wherever it was she took it. I never laid eyes on it again. Thankfully Feli wasn’t with us anymore when that happened and didn’t witness it. By then María Xum had succeeded her.
Feli had come to live with us right after Lexi was born. I’m meeting her for lunch the day after tomorrow. You really had two mothers, she always likes to say, meaning my mother and herself. Yet despite how close I’ve felt to Feli practically all my life, the last time I saw her was nearly two years ago, when I came through Boston promoting my little book on the bishop’s murder and she drove in to meet me for lunch in Coolidge Corner. From when I was three until I was about nine and from when she was fourteen until she was twenty, Feli lived with us. I made up the name Feli, though only my sister and I and sometimes my father called her that. Her real name is Concepción Balbuena. Abuelita, who’d found her in a nuns’ orphanage in Guatemala City, had sent her to help my mother but also to keep her company. All her life, my mother had only lived in cities where she’d always had lots of friends and a social life; now here she was isolated with a tubercular small boy and an infant in a little town outside Boston, in a two-road, mainly working-class neighborhood overlooked by a cemetery, amid rocky field and cold forest. The bedroom my father had built for Feli in the basement, with finished plywood-paneled walls and a smooth linoleum floor, was adjacent to our playroom, separated from it by a curtain of tiny metal rings hung from a brass rod. The first time I saw Feli she was wearing black-frame eyeglasses and a convent haircut, but a year later, she’d grown and fluffed her hair like Patty Duke’s, wore loose sweaters and skinny slacks and eyeglasses with pink frames, and was always playing Top 40 music on the radio. Down in her basement room, Feli twisted, chachacha’d, frugged, and sang along to the radio, to forty-fives on her record player or to Shindig! on TV. Frankycello-Frankycello! she liked to call to me, like I was Annette Funicello’s little brother. Swinging her hips side to side and holding out her hands for me to come and dance, she always smelled damply of detergent and Ajax. When I’d made up the name Feli, was I just mispronouncing feliz or making up a name only for her because she brought so much felicidad into our house? Feli was more fun than anybody I’d ever known. But when she’d get me to march around the basement with her loudly singing “estamos de fiesta hoy, la banda la banda,” I suspect now that was her way of cheering me up, that I was, at least sometimes, a sadder boy than I remember being.
Feli didn’t have parents. She had only one relative that she mentioned, her uncle Rodolfo Sprenger Balbuena, an army colonel fighting in the war against the Communists from Cuba and Russia. Feli and her uncle wrote to each other, his letters arriving in crisp airmail envelopes with red and blue stripes, and like all mail from Guatemala those envelopes had a distinct, stronger smell than American mail, something like a moldy raisin cake. Her uncle’s letters came right from the battlefield, Feli told me; she’d read them out loud. In the mountains and jungles the soldiers ate wild animals, including opossums, iguanas, armadillos, tepezcuintles, jabalís, crocodiles, snakes, and even monkeys roasted over campfires.
About six years after she’d come to live with us, Feli left to marry Oscar, a handsome, languid, arrogant Cuban. We went to eat cake with them in Allston on their
