Drown

In this story, the character Ysrael returns—as the protagonist. Although he is never out rightly named, we recognize his description from the story “Ysrael”. The story is told in third-person point of view. It takes place in the Dominican Republic.

In the morning, Ysrael pulls on his mask and grinds his fist into a palm. He goes to the guanábana tree and does nearly fifty pull-ups. He then picks up a coffee dehuller and holds it to his chest for forty counts. The narrator remarks: “His arms, chest and neck bulge and the skin around his temple draws tight, about to split, But no! He’s unbeatable and drops the dehuller with a fat Yes” (153).

Ysrael knows that he should go but the morning fog is thick, so he listens to the roosters for a while. When he hears his family stirring he hurries himself along. He runs past his uncle’s land. With a glance, he can count how many beans are growing there. He continues running, says “FLIGHT,” and jumps up. His shadow cuts across the top of the trees and he can see his mother washing his four-year-old brother’s face and feet.

He runs past the storekeepers tossing water on the road to keep the dust down. A few yell at him—“No Face!”—but he has no time for them. He goes to the bars and searches the ground for dropped change. He gingerly steps over urine-holes and vomit. Today, he finds enough money to buy a soda or a johnnycake. As he holds the coins tightly, he smiles under his mask.

When the hottest part of the day has been reached, Father Lou lets him into the broken-down church. Lou gives him café con leche and two hours of reading and writing. All of the educational materials have been donated by the local school. Lou teaches him the English that Ysrael will need up north, phrases like “I’m hungry. Where’s the bathroom? I come from the Dominican Republic. Don’t be scared” (154).

After his lessons, Ysrael buys Chiclets and goes to the house across from the church. The house has orange trees and a cobblestone path. A TV is on inside of it. He waits for a girl who normally comes out to see him. She usually signals the idea of a TV with her hands. Both of them speak with their hands. She usually asks him inside to watch TV with her, and he usually refuses, saying that he likes being outside. He usually stays until the cleaning woman yells from the kitchen, telling him to stay away and asking him if he has any shame. Then, he grips the bars of the gate and pulls them apart ferociously, to show her who she is messing with.

Every week, Padre Lou lets Ysrael buy a comic book. Lou takes him to the bookseller and stands guard while Ysrael chooses one. The narrator intimates: “Today [Ysrael] buys Kaliman, who takes no shit and wears a turban. If his face were covered it’d be perfect” (155).

Ysrael watches for opportunities from corners, hidden away from view. The narrator says: “[Ysrael] has the power of INVISIBILITY and no one can touch him” (155). He even evades the view of his uncle, who guards the dams. Dogs, though, can smell him, and he quickly pushes a few who nuzzle his feet away: “they can betray his location to his enemies. So many wish him to fall. So many wish him gone” (155).

Ysrael observes his surroundings. An elderly man needs help pushing his cart. A cat needs to be brought across the street. “Hey No Face! a motor driver yells. What the hell are you doing? You haven’t started eating cats, have you?” (155). Another person joins in, saying that Ysrael will be eating kids next. Ysrael runs. It’s late in the day and the shops are closing.

While he’s trying to figure out if he can buy another johnnycake, a group of four boys ambushes him. They tackle him and the coins go spilling out of his hands. A fat boy with a unibrow sits on his chest, driving the air from his lungs. The others stand over him, and he is scared. The fat boy says that they are going to make Ysrael a girl. They taunt him. Ysrael says “STRENGTH” and the fat boy flies off of him. The gang goes running down the street. “You better leave him alone, the owner of the beauty shop says but no one ever listens to her, not since her husband left her for a Haitian” (156).

Ysrael makes it back to the church, where he slips in and hides. The boys throw rocks against the door, but Eliseo, the groundskeeper, threatens them with a machete. Once everything outside goes quiet, Ysrael sits down under a pew and waits for nightfall, when he can go home to the smokehouse to sleep. Ysrael rubs the blood on his shorts and spits on his cut to get the dirt out.

Padre Lou asks him if he is okay. Ysrael tells him that he’s been running out of energy. Padre Lou, in his shorts and a guayabera hat, reminds Ysrael of a Cuban shopkeeper. Padre Lou tells Ysrael that he has been thinking about Ysrael up north, and trying to imagine him in the snow. Ysrael says he likes snow, and asks if they have wrestling up north. Padre Lou laughs and answers that they like it up north almost as much as they do in the Dominican Republic—except that, there, no one gets seriously injured anymore. He coaxes Ysrael into letting him tend to his wound.

The narrator intimates that no one has ever hidden the story of how Ysrael’s face came to be the way that it is from him: a pig ate it. Ysrael has recurring nightmares about the pig. In them, the pig is “always huge and pale. Its hooves peg his chest down and he can smell the curdled bananas on its breath. Blunt teeth rip a strip from under his eye and the muscle revealed is delicious, like lechosa” (157). In his dreams, he turns his head to save one side of his face. Sometimes, he saves either side of his face—but in his worst nightmares, he cannot turn his head. He often wakes up screaming as blood drips down his neck because he has bitten his tongue. During these times, he cannot sleep again until he has told himself to be a man.

Padre Lou borrows a Honda motorcycle and he and Ysrael set out to Ocoa early the next morning. When Ysrael leans into the turns, Lou chastises him, saying that he will cause the bike to tip. Ysrael yells, “Nothing will happen to us!” (158). Ysrael surveys the abandoned road and farmsteads, espying a lone black horse with a garza (English: heron) perched on its back.

They arrive at the clinic, which is crowded with bleeding people. The doctor asks him how he is, and Ysrael replies that he is fine. He asks the doctor when he is being sent away. The doctor merely smiles, and then makes Ysrael remove his mask. He massages his face with his thumbs, and asks Ysrael if he has had trouble swallowing or breathing. He asks Ysrael if he has had any headaches, if his throat ever hurts, or if he is ever dizzy. Ysrael answers all of his questions with a no. The doctor checks Ysrael’s eyes, ears, and breathing. He tells Padre Lou that everything looks good. Padre Lou asks the doctor if he has an estimate about when Ysrael will be going north. The doctor vaguely answers that they will get him there eventually.

Ysrael is scared of the operations, and also scared that nothing will change. He is afraid that “the Canadian doctors will fail like the santeras his mother hired, who called every spirit in the celestial directory for help” (159). He wishes that he could leave the hot room and lie under a table where no one can see him: “In the next room he met a boy whose skull plates had not closed all the way and a girl who didn’t have any arms and a baby whose face was huge and swollen and whose eyes were dripping pus” (159). The boy told him that people could see right into his brain.

The next morning, Ysrael wakes up hurting from both the fight and the doctor’s visit. He goes outside and leans against the guanabana tree. He observes his brother, named Pesao, as he flicks beans at the chickens. He observes that his brother’s body is perfect and bowed. “When he rubs the four-year-old’s head he feels the sores that have healed into yellow crusts. He aches to pick at them but the last time the blood had gushed and Pesao had screamed” (159).

Pesao asks Ysrael where he has been. Ysrael answers that he has been out fighting evil. When Pesao says that he’d like to do that, Ysrael tells him that he won’t like it. Pesao looks at Ysrael’s face, giggles, and flicks a pebble at the hens.

Ysrael watches the sun burn the fog away from the fields. Despite the heat, the beans are “thick and green and flexible in the breeze” (160). His mother sees him on the way back from the outhouse, and she goes to get his mask:“He’s tired and aching but he looks out over the valley, and the way the land curves away to hide itself reminds him of the way Lou hides his dominoes when they play” (160). His mother tells Ysrael to go before his father comes out. Ysrael, knowing what happens when his father comes out, pulls on his mask. He can feel fleas moving in the cloth. When his mother turns her back, Ysrael disappears into the weeds. He watches his mother bathe Pesao’s head. Pesao reacts with glee. Ysrael “runs, down towards town, never slipping or stumbling. Nobody’s faster” (160).