Lot Read online

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Bryan Washington

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The following stories were previously published, in slightly different form:

  “Lockwood” in American Short Fiction; “Alief” in Huizache; “Bayou” in One Story; “610 North, 610 West” in Tin House; “Shepherd” (titled “Cousin”) in StoryQuarterly; “Lot” in Transition; “South Congress” in Midnight Breakfast; “Navigation” in Texas Observer; “Waugh” in The New Yorker; and “Peggy Park” in Hobart.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Washington, Bryan, author.

  Title: Lot : stories / Bryan Washington.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018010326 | ISBN 9780525533672 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525533696 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Young gay men—Fiction. | Families—Fiction. | Race relations—Fiction. | Ethnic relations—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | Houston (Tex.)—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.A86737 A6 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010326

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Arlena and Gary

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  LOCKWOOD

  ALIEF

  610 NORTH, 610 WEST

  SHEPHERD

  WAYSIDE

  BAYOU

  LOT

  SOUTH CONGRESS

  NAVIGATION

  PEGGY PARK

  FANNIN

  WAUGH

  ELGIN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  And how did I

  Get back? How did any of us

  Get back when we searched

  For beauty?

  GARY SOTO

  and wouldn’t it be nice / if things fit / the way they were

  supposed to / wouldn’t that be something / worth dying for.

  PAUL ASTA

  LOCKWOOD

  1.

  Roberto was brown and his people lived next door so of course I went over on weekends. They were full Mexican. That made us superior. My father found every opportunity to say it, but not to their faces. So Ma took it upon herself to visit most evenings. She still didn’t have many friends on the block—we were too dark for the blancos, too Latin for the blacks.

  But Roberto’s mother dug the company. She invited us in. Her husband worked construction, pouring cement into Grand Parkway, and they didn’t have any papers so you know how that goes. No one was hiring. She wasn’t about to take chances. What she did with her days was look after Roberto.

  They lived in this shotgun with swollen pipes. It was the house you shook your head at when you drove up the road. Ma brought over yucca and beans from the restaurant, but then my father saw and asked her who the fuck had paid for it. Javi, Jan, and I watched our parents circle the kitchen, until our father grabbed a bowl of rice and threw it on the tile. He said this was what it felt like to watch your money walk. Maybe now Ma’d think before she shit on her familia. And of course it didn’t stop her—if anything, she went more often—but Ma started leaving the meals at home; instead, she brought me and some coffee and tinned crackers.

  Roberto had this pug nose. He was pimply in all the wrong places. He wore his hair like the whiteboys, and when I asked why that was he called it one less thing to worry about. His fam couldn’t afford regular cuts, so whenever they came around the barber clipped off everything. I told him he looked like a rat, like one of the blanquitos biking all over town, and Roberto said that was cool but I was a fat black gorilla.

  He was fifteen, a few years older than me. He told me about the bus he’d taken straight from Monterrey. His father’d left for Houston first, until he could send for the rest of them too, and when I asked Roberto about Mexico he said everything in Texas tasted like sand.

  Roberto didn’t go to school. He spent all day mumbling English back to his mother’s busted TV. Since it was the year of my endless flu, and I didn’t exist to Javi anymore—he’d taken up with the local hoods by then—that meant I spent a fuckton of time next door. They had this table and these candles and a mattress in the living room; when Roberto’s father wasn’t out breaking his back, I usually found him snoring on it.

  His mother was always exhausted. Always crying to Ma. Said it wasn’t that this country was rougher—everything was just so loose.

  Ma told her to wait it out. That’s just what America did to you. They’d learn to adjust, she’d crack the code, but what she had to do was believe in it.

  Meanwhile, Roberto and I walked to the corner of Lockwood, where East End collapses and the warehouses begin. We threw rocks at the cars on Woodvale. Tagged drunks on their porches by Sherman. We watched loose gangs of boys smoking kush on Congress, and I saw Javi among them, and he didn’t even blink at me. But that night he shook me awake on our bunk, mouthing off about how he’d kill me if I spoke up. He smelled burnt and sour, like a dead thing in the road. I thought about warning Roberto to keep quiet until I remembered he had no one to tell.

  Once, I asked Roberto if he liked it in Texas. He looked at me forever. Called it another place with a name.

  Could be worse, I said. You could be back home.

  Home’s wherever you are at the time, said Roberto.

  You’re just talking. That doesn’t even mean anything.

  It would, he said, if you knew you didn’t have one.

  The first time we tugged each other his father was sleeping beside us. They’d cemented the 610 exit and he’d found himself out of work. It was silent except for the flies above us, and Ma on the porch with his mother, promising that they’d figure it out.

  When Roberto finally gasped I covered his mouth with my free hand. We put our ears to the screen door, but nothing’d changed outside. Just our mothers sobbing, and the snores overlaying them, and the Chevys bumping cumbia in the lot across the way.

  He’d gotten it all on his jeans, which cracked us both up—they were the one pair he had. He wasn’t getting another.

  That night Ma told my father about their situation. She said we should help. We’d been fresh once, too. My father said of course we could spot them a loan, and then they could borrow some dishes from the cupboard. We’d lend them some chairs. The bedroom too. Jan laughed from her corner, and Ma said it wasn’t funny, we knew exactly what she meant—we were twisting her words.

  Gradually, things began to evaporate from Roberto’s place. I know because I was there. I watched them walk through the door. His family still didn’t have cash for regular meals, Roberto started skipping breakfast and lunch, and this is the part where I should say my family opened their pantry but we didn’t do any of that shit at all.

  But it didn’t stop the two of us
. We touched in the park on Rusk. By the dumpsters on Lamar. At the pharmacy on Woodleigh and the benches behind it. We tried his parents’ mattress, once, when his mother’d stepped out for a cry, and we’d only just finished zipping up when we heard her jiggling open the lock.

  Eventually, I asked Roberto if maybe this was a bad thing, if maybe his folks were being punished for our sins, and he asked if I was a brujo or a seer or some other shit.

  I said, Shut the fuck up.

  But you’re sitting here talking about curses, said Roberto.

  I don’t know, I said. Just something. It could be us.

  Roberto said he didn’t know anything about that. He’d never been to church.

  2.

  When they finally disappeared it was overnight and without warning. I only knew it happened because Ma hadn’t slapped me awake.

  I palmed open their door, and the mattress was on the floor, but their lamps and their table and the grocery bags were gone. They took the screws off the doorknobs. The lightbulbs too. All I found were some socks in a bathroom cabinet.

  My father said we’d all paid witness to a parable: if you didn’t stay where you belonged, you got yourself evicted.

  Ma sighed. Jan nodded. Javi cheesed from ear to ear. He’d just had his first knife fight, owned the scars on his elbows to prove it, and Roberto’s family could’ve moved to the moon for all he cared.

  The morning before, Roberto’d shown me this crease on my palms. When you folded them a certain way, your hands looked like a star. Some lady on the bus from San Antonio had shown him how, and he’d called her loco then but now he was thinking he’d just missed the point.

  His parents were out. We huddled in his closet. His shorts sat piled on mine, they were the only pair left in the house. He didn’t tell me he was disappearing. He just felt my chin. Rubbed my palms. Then he cupped his hands between us, asked if I’d found the milagro in mine.

  I couldn’t see shit, just the outline of his shadow, but we squeezed our palms together and I called it amazing anyways.

  ALIEF

  Just before they slept together for the final time and before Aja’s lover was tossed by her husband, our neighborhood diplomat, onto the concrete curb outside their apartment complex, and then choked, by that same man, with his bare hands, in front of an audience of streetlights, the corner store, Joaquin, LaNeesh, Isabella, Big A, and the Haitian neighbors, James asked Aja to tell him a story. It didn’t have to be true.

  Before all that, we watched them meet in the market and then wherever they could run into each other. They hadn’t spoken yet. Hadn’t swapped a single syllable. But we watched them meet in the laundromat. We watched them meet at the corner store. We watched them meet on the sidewalk, a quarter mile from the Dollar Tree. They touched eyes taking out the trash on MLK Boulevard. Aja watched from her window as he parked his car—and she imagined her whiteboy looking right back at her. She imagined him calling our girl down, sticking his shitty blue Honda in neutral, and launching it straight down I-10, or straight up I-10, or anywhere that wasn’t the sill she’d perched on for years.

  We watched them bloom like an opera, a telenovela, the sunrise.

  When they finally did cross the mountain of silence (after James knocked on her door, thrice, asking about some sugar and cream) they started seeing each other on purpose every day, speaking to each other every day.

  Sometimes it was as simple as

  Do you have hot water this morning?

  No one ever does.

  or

  So our neighbor, Juana—does she ever put those boys to bed?

  No. And that’s why her man left her, years ago, for a Puerto Rican.

  and even

  You know what, it’s funny, but I haven’t seen the stars since I made it to Houston.

  And no matter how long you stay here, they’ll never touch your eyes.

  They went on like that for months and months. Or maybe it was weeks and weeks.

  We never could figure out how long.

  * * *

  • • •

  James was tall. Pale. Unformed. Like a snow globe or a baker’s son. Hardly handsome, if we’re honest, but boyish, if we squinted. And the fact that he lived with us at all said something unkempt about his cash flow—way up in the North Side, on the outer ends of Alief, in that neighborhood stuffed with the back-door migrants, or one among many, hardly a rarity at all. With our Thais and our Mexicans and our Vietnamese. Some Guatemalans. The Cubans.

  And yet.

  We all knew, just like Aja knew, that he had something. In larval form, maybe. Cocooned inside of him.

  The sort of thing she’d seen in her husband, years ago. Before they left the island. In Jamaica, Aja’s parish sat something like an hour from his, and she’d walked that distance, every day, just to see him. Peasant stock, like the rest of the natives, but she hadn’t cared about that; it hadn’t meant bunk to her at the time.

  She’d been beautiful. The kind of fine that makes you blink. Men all over the coast knew her name, never having seen her, although they’d all heard rumors. And a sideways glance from Aja, along the sandy roads of her town, could send a teenaged boy rocketing home, with his father high-stepping behind him toward his wife or his mistress, to alleviate the beast.

  Aja felt the same thing now for the whiteboy. Tried to will it away, but we knew that shit wouldn’t fly.

  And she found herself on his doormat, knocking on his door.

  And he watched her through his peephole, flustered, shouting Come in, come in.

  * * *

  • • •

  Also, we knew this guy had questions.

  The whiteboy wanted to know what brought her to Texas, what the sand from home felt like on her toes. Whether she missed that feeling once she’d made her place in the city. He wanted to know if the air tasted the same. How Houston’s smog felt in her throat. He wanted to know how the sunrise fell across her part of the world. He wanted to know about her mother, about her father, her aunts and her uncles. He wanted to know why she married her husband (we imagine him actually asking in bed, after they’ve sealed the deal, fish-eyed and sweaty) and it must have been then that Aja told him how she’d made it here—that thing we all share—the story of her crossing.

  She’d met Paul at the market back home, the way everyone meets anyone anywhere. Aja weighed the tomatoes, eyed the chickens in their pens. Used that time to make plans, wanted to get her ass off the island. Knew the thing about the Caribbean is everyone wants to be there, until they finally, eventually, realize they’ll never leave. Our girl knew that like she knew the soles of her feet. So Aja wanted to tweak her English (and not just english, but English english, the language of money, the kind we hear in banks) to pull a job as a librarian, or a secretary, or a hostess up north—although really, truly, she’d have mopped vomit at Burger King—because she’d seen on the TV that our public spaces were quiet, and on her island, at that time, quiet was a commodity.

  Which is when it happened: she was imagining the sound of nothing when Paul finally made his move.

  Her first thought when she saw him wasn’t This is the man I will marry.

  It wasn’t Here is my ticket off.

  She said, Hey, Paul.

  Because she’d known the motherfucker for as long as she could remember. Knew him the way we know the sidewalk dips by the complex, or that if we don’t lock the doors the kids from Sunny Side’ll clean out our apartments.

  Paul had moved across the country the year he turned twelve, after his mother poisoned his father, finally fed up with the cheating. All of the men, on that island, at that time, had a mistress, but this did not stop Mom from cooking Dad’s favorite dish, oxtail stew, one evening, after he’d left the bed of his other woman. He slipped back into his home, and kissed his wife on her cheek, and sat behind his bowl at the table beside them.
Paul’s mother told her son he wouldn’t be sharing, not tonight.

  The incident made an impression. All of a sudden Paul wanted to be a doctor. Hadn’t known the reason why his father started croaking, or why his mother watched, for a solid minute, before she made any moves to help. Or why, at the viewing, they eyed the casket for hours, before she spat on his father’s forehead and snatched Paul’s wrist to leave. But what he did know, or what he thought he knew, was that if there’d been a doctor on the island, a professional who knew what they were doing, maybe someone could’ve saved him.

  Paul could’ve saved him.

  Maybe.

  He was that guy.

  And with that in mind, he made plans: he, too, started plotting his escape. He studied in the evenings, worked the market in the mornings. Saved the money he bagged in the daytime for night school. Steered his mind away from women for the moment—or tried to, at least—but he lingered over Aja, the way we all linger over Aja, and when she came around looking for ackee his was the freshest on the shelf.

  In the plan of his life, he hadn’t seen a ravenous woman. Not really. But he’d seen one who was faithful, and thoughtful, with good posture. And all of these things were in Paul’s head when he asked Aja, one day, timidly, regretfully, if she was busy after her shopping. If he could walk her home.

  * * *

  • • •

  Of course we got all of this after the fact. Charlie told Jacob, who heard it from Adriana. She took it from Rogelio, who’d been sort of fucking Juana, and the two of them copped it to Nikki down the way. The details are tricky, the certainties muddled, but we knew enough of the story to re-create this: Aja on the mattress with James, in that liminal crease between strangers and lovers.

  That’s amazing, he said. His finger would’ve circled her left breast, his chin would’ve sat on her shoulder.