The Dead Boy of Ashford Avenue

Mami was downstairs, in La Fortaleza’s formal dining room, having dinner with Abuelo Beto and his guests.

After Abuela Cita passed away, we spent more time in La Fortaleza and often stayed overnight. The bedrooms of the mansion were old, windowless, and dark. They were furnished with antique beds, chairs, and chests of drawers. Ceiling fans kept the rooms cool, but they were never cold.

I did not sleep well.

Papi also preferred to sleep at home. This time, the workers at the family business had threatened to strike and bring the picket lines to the gates of the Ojeda house. Somebody had to man the fort, he said.

Tita joined La Nena, Güicho, and me for dinner. A makeshift table was prepared for us on the third floor of the governor’s mansion.  We sat next to the stained-glass windows overlooking San Juan Bay.

Warm rays of light streamed through glass squares that were colored blue, green, and red, reflecting warm jeweled pendants across the dark tiles of the marble floor. The rays of colored light illuminated the floating particles of dust.

The high ceilings, narrow walls, and marble floors of the corridor amplified the sound of the silver utensils grating against the porcelain. Farther away, at the end of the passage, the grandfather clock chimed. The room was a colorful catacomb, right out of a Vincent Price movie.

Tita cut Güicho’s bistec and onions into small pieces. A little blood oozed from the red meat. La Nena and I sat on two different ends of the table. I faced the jalousies.

From there, I saw the dark silhouette of the Central Mountain range. The brightly lit Palo Seco electric plant was closer, just on the other side of the bay. The moon lighted the sentry-box that was closer still. It was attached to the thick walls of the fortress that were suspended over the water.

“Tell us the story of the jachos, Tita.”

I prepared to listen to the tale of the dead souls condemned to wander the surface of the waters of San Juan Bay with torches in their spirit hands.

“I’ve told you that story too many times already, Noti. You’ll have nightmares,” she warned me.

“Please!”

Tita sucked her teeth. “I’ll tell you another one. It’s the story of ‘la garita del diablo.’ But it’s not the sentry-box you can see out the window from here, mind you.”

I looked for the stone cylinder with the funny bishop’s hat on top. The figure was also on every ad by the Puerto Rico tourism company.

“‘La garita del diablo’ is the haunted sentry-box located beyond the cemetery, outside the city walls,” she said.

I could picture the sentry-box, abandoned, with an imaginary dead body inside. I’d seen a mystery novel in Mami’s library with a sentry-box on the cover. She told me the first wife of the former governor was the author.

“She wrote it right before the governor and his wife divorced,” Mami had said.

“Tell us, Tita.” La Nena pushed the rice and red kidney beans around her plate.

“Una vez y dos son tres. Cúcara, mácara, títere fue,” she began.

I stopped eating.

“The Spaniards who ruled the Island many years ago built sentry-boxes on the walls of the old city to defend against attacks by the English. The devil’s sentry-box was on the farthest wall and the closest to the sea. Every one of the soldiers posted there, vanished into thin air.”

Güicho choked on his bistec. We all froze, worried. Luckily, he spit it out. After Güicho’s quick recovery, Tita continued.

“One night, a young soldier was sent to the sentry-box. He was so delicate and frail that his mates called him Blanquito. Because of the endless attacks by the English buccaneers, it was forbidden to smoke during the night watch. But Blanquito had bad habits.”

Tita gave me a quizzical look.

“He disobeyed orders and lit a match to smoke a cigarette. At that moment, a great wave hit the wall, and water came rushing in through the window of the sentry-box.”

“Did he drown?” La Nena had stopped playing with her food.

“No, but he got wet and upset, and he left his post, and went to a friquitín in La Perla, the poorest neighborhood of the capital. Once in the cantina, he lit his cigarette, drank a caneca of rum, and kissed Dina, the most beautiful girl in San Juan.”

“Yuck!” Güicho disapproved.

Tita ignored him.

“When Blanquito heard the rooster crow, it was too late to go back to the sentry-box. He knew the Spanish would shoot him for leaving his post. But before he had a chance to go AWOL, the devil took him.”

“You see?” La Nena turned to me. “Let that be a lesson to you.”

La Nena knew I liked to explore the rooms of La Fortaleza on my own and without permission. I would run through the dungeon, the Kennedy room, the crypt, the Hall of Mirrors, the music room with the painted martyrs, the secret passageways, the old elevator, the turrets, and through the sentry-box overlooking the bay, with Coco, two souls in the devil’s grip.

Tita was often sent to find me, and the longer the search took, the worse trouble for me.

“Muchachito del diablo,” she would say, “devil’s boy.”

***

Later that night, in bed, I thought about yet another sentry-box.

An eccentric English neighbor had had a garita built into the walls surrounding his house, which was kitty-corner from the Ojeda house. He built the sentry-box for the policemen posted by grandfather to protect us from increasingly regular attacks.

Cuban G2 spies exploded many bombs in Condado’s department stores, banks, and hotels, in protest of the occupation of Puerto Rico by the US.

Anti-Castro groups responded in kind by bombing the headquarters of the pro-Independence Party. They set firebombs in the cars of party leaders.

The Ojeda house was close to the action, in Condado, a wealthy neighborhood turned into a red-light district, now serving the tourists.

Menéndez and Lavoe were policemen posted to our house. But they never used the sentry-box. It was hot, and it reeked of urine from the neighborhood cats and dogs.

Of the two, I liked Menéndez best because he allowed me to sit on his Harley Davidson and turn on the red blinking light and siren when the motorcycle was parked.

I knew Tita was sweet on him. I would spy on them and sometimes heard them talking softly just outside the walls of the Ojeda house.

Tita and Menéndez were both from Mami’s hometown of Ponce.

Tita was Abuela Cita’s godchild, and my grandmother brought Tita to San Juan to help Mami take care of us.

She lived in an annex of the Ojeda house compound, which also included a laundry room and two garages. She was young but had a son, Alexander, with a husband in the US army that I never met and was missing in action.

Perhaps because of her missing husband, Tita indulged our every request for horror stories.

But I also wondered if her stories were about a mysterious foreboding, a feeling that matched the eclipsed lights of La Fortaleza.  

***

The next day, Güicho, la Nena, and I, were allowed to have lunch with the grownups in the formal dining room. Papi had driven us back to the governor’s mansion after mass at the Cathedral around the corner.

The dining room had high vaulted ceilings and windows that also looked out over San Juan Bay. From where I was sitting, I could see the shiny buildings of the town of Cataño across the bay. And farther still, the misty Central Range mountains.

Abuelo Beto, Mami, and Papi argued about the attacks and the bombings of Condado. We kept silent.

“Children are to be seen, not heard.”

Papi was upset about the execution, a few months back, of a US marine by the Armed Commandos of Liberation. They had killed the soldier in retaliation for the death of a young girl during a protest at the University of Puerto Rico. Papi argued with Mami, who was attending the University. She took the side of the students who protested conscription and the Vietnam War.

Papi had been an ROTC officer during the Korean War.

“How can you defend them, honey? Those rabble-rousers had no business attacking and setting fire to our building.” He sat up straight on the wooden chair emblazoned with the code of arms of the old Spanish governors.

“And now, it’s turned into a Communist conflagration. Even the workers in our warehouse are joining in the protest. Just yesterday they were picketing in front of my own house.” He turned to Abuelo Beto, his index finger hitting the table like a chicken pecking for worms.

“It’s a good thing the children were sleeping safely here, at La Fortaleza.”

Some people get red in the face with rage, but Mami’s cheeks turned gray, almost black and bluish, except for the fire in her eyes.

“What I can’t believe, dear, is that you hired those scab rompehuelgas to stop them.”

She also turned to Abuelo Beto. “Can you imagine, Papá, dealing with those hoodlums? Isn’t it enough that I must endure policemen at my own house?”

Mami aimed her laser-look straight at Abuelo Beto.

“And who are they supposed to be keeping an eye on, anyway?”

Abuelo Beto stayed calm. He looked at Papi and then at Mami. Took his napkin from the table and carefully placed it on his lap, smoothing it out.

“Now, now, remember the children.”

He patted Güicho, who was sitting next to him, softly on the head, brushing his unruly hair to one side with his long bony fingers.

“They can hear you.”

And he repeated his favorite saying in his softest voice, “Reason doesn’t scream, it persuades.”

Nobody was persuaded.

***

That night, Tita helped me with my homework. She wrote ten words in English with their Spanish translation on index cards. We went over the deck until I memorized them all.

“How do you say rompehuelgas in English?”

“Scabs.”

“I thought that was the dried blood that covers a wound.”

“Yes, that’s another meaning for the word.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Never mind that, Noti.” Tita sucked her teeth.

“The men who came here yesterday were scabs. They helped Menéndez to break up the strikers.”

Tita shuffled the index cards.

“And your Papi was standing with the police. Telling the strikers to leave.”

She picked a card from the deck.

“He was very brave. I think he was carrying his gun.”

I knew Papi liked to go skeet shooting in the Club Metropolitano de Tiro. He kept five or six shotguns in an armoire of the Ojeda house bedroom. They were under lock and key, but that didn’t stop Mami’s protests and complaints.

I didn’t know he also owned a gun.

“Wait,” “Papi carries a gun? Where does he keep it?”

Tita ignored my question.

“The strikers were having none of it. They were screaming angrily through the gates.”

She looked out the window of my room in the direction of the gate.

“Thank God nothing happened, and they left peacefully at dusk.”

Shaking her head side to side, she said, “I don’t mind telling you, I was scared.”

Tita put an index card on the table.

“Home,” it said.

She waited for my translation.

I had trouble imagining Tita scared. She wasn’t very tall, but she was stout and strong. Her arms and legs were three times the size of mine. When I did something wrong, I ran, and she would aim her chancleta at my head with the accuracy of a nuclear missile. In the unlikely event that she missed, she would simply say, “you can run but you can’t hide.”

I would stop and slowly walk back to her, reconciled to my fate. Better to get it over with. The longer I waited, the harsher the punishment, and Tita could be very harsh.

“Why are Papi’s workers so unhappy?”

I ignored the card on the table. I didn’t know the Spanish word for home, was it “casa,” was it “hogar?” It wasn’t La Fortaleza, that much I knew.

“Mami says that Puerto Ricans have to fight for their rights. Is that why the workers fight? And why would Menéndez be against that? Aren’t policemen on the right side?”

“Yes, but sometimes you have to do the wrong thing to be on the right side.”

Tita’s answer was confusing. But no matter, I had delayed the translation, and the vocabulary lesson was over.

“Anyway, you have school tomorrow. So, stop asking silly questions, and let’s put you to sleep.”

She put away the index cards.

“Would you like me to sing you a song?”

One of Tita’s favorite lullabies was “Al toque de la una.” A song about a sick girl that asked her mother to open the window to her room. She wanted to see the stars at night. But the sereno, the night air, was bad for her, and it killed her. The girl then transformed into a little dog that cried every night, under her bed, at one o’clock in the morning.

The songs were Tita’s way of warning us of the consequences of breaking the Ojeda house rules.

She knew how much I liked getting out of bed in the middle of the night and climbing into the wrought-iron cell that framed my window, to look at the moon and the stars.

I wasn’t in the mood for the haunted dog song, so I turned down her offer and said goodnight.

Tita turned out the light, walked out, and closed the door behind her.

***

The next day, after school I decided to go to Ashford Avenue. I had a craving for a Blackcow at Farmacia Totti’s soda fountain, where I could also buy my favorite DC comics.

I collected The Green Hornet. Kato, his crime-fighting sidekick, was my favorite superhero, after Batman. He wore a smart uniform with black mask and gloves that reminded me of Menéndez and Lavoe.

I went to the kitchen and asked Tita if she would walk me to the drugstore. The pharmacy was beyond my set boundaries.

Tita was busy cooking, so she shood me away without hearing me out.

“Are you hungry, Noti? Well, raise your tail, and lick away.”

I stomped out of the kitchen, pushing open the heavy door on my way out. It was on hinges and didn’t have a latch, so it swung back and forth like the doors of a Western saloon.

I went back upstairs to the bedroom, broke my piggy bank, and headed to the pharmacy by myself in protest.

There was a traffic jam on Ashford Avenue.

As I approached Farmacia Totti, I could see flashing lights, and I heard sirens from police cars and fire trucks. I crossed Cervantes Street, and looked for the store front windows of Blackton Fifth Avenue.

Blackton was Mami’s favorite clothing store in Condado. She kept a stack of long purple boxes from the store in the linen closet of the Ojeda house. The boxes were decorated with black silhouettes of men and women in old fashioned fancy dresses, striking poses with dogs that looked just like Coco. The New York skyline and the Empire State Building were in the background.

Wide yellow tape with “Crime Scene” written on it surrounded the corner of Cervantes and Ashford, where Blackton had once stood. Firemen were hosing down the smoldering ruins of the collapsed building. Radio noise, smoke and dust filled the air. A crowd gathered around the scene. Bright blue and red lights lit their faces.

Officers made a barrier separating the crowd from a boy lying face down on the black top. He was clutching a torn paper bag with a golden imprint of a mortar and pestle, the logo of Farmacia Totti. A pool of coagulated blood surrounded his head with a thick halo.

I turned my back on him, closed my eyes, and tried to stop my ears against the noise of the sirens.

Lavoe must have been on the scene. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I jumped.

I asked what had happened, after I made sure it was him.

“It was a bomb,” he said.

Then he listened to the Sergeant on his Motorola two-way radio.

“You know you shouldn’t be here.” He asked, “Is Tita with you?”

“No, I came alone. Please don’t tell.”

“Come with me.”

He walked over to his commander. They spoke and he turned back to where I was standing.

“Let’s take you home.”

Lavoe put his hand on my head, turned me around, and we walked down Magdalena Street, one block over from Ashford Avenue. As we walked past the church where Papi and Mami took us for Sunday mass, I turned to him.

Lavoe was a tall and thin man. His complexion was dark, and he had a thin moustache that made him look like Captain Hook in Peter Pan. He was evil looking, in a good way.

“Who do you think did it?”

“We don’t know yet.”

Lavoe took long strides. I struggled to keep up.

“But this is the fourth bomb to explode in Condado this hour. They also took down the First National City Bank, International Boutique, and Grand Union. They’re growing more audacious.”

I was sorry to hear about Grand Union Supermarkets. They carried Frankenberry and Count Chocula. Breakfast cereals that Papi sold on the Island. He liked to bring sample boxes home to let us try them first. I liked the cereals better than our daily rations of soft-boiled eggs.

Thinking about the eggs suddenly made me feel sick to my stomach, so I asked more questions to slow Lavoe down.

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“They’re independentista terrorists trying to scare us. They don’t like the US, their government, or their laws.” Lavoe put his hand on the handle of his Billy club, hanging from his police belt.

“They want us to be like Cuba.”

I remembered Tomás, my Cuban friend. He never talked about the island where he was born.

“Why do the independentistas want us to be like Cuba?”

“The bombers go there for vacations. Castro brainwashes them and trains them to be terrorists.”

“Who’s Castro?”

Lavoe’s hand went to the silver snap of the small leather bag where he stored the bullets for his Peacemaker. He wouldn’t let me touch the gun, but he often would let me feel the weight of the slick bullets with their rust-colored tips.

“The independentistas come back home changed.” Lavoe looked me in the eyes.

“Don’t let that happen to you, Noti. Never go to Cuba. Stay close to home for as long as you can. It’s safer here.”

I thought Mami might disagree.

During our trip to Haiti, she taught us that people from the Caribbean should stick together because we were more alike than different.

And, after what I had just seen in front of Farmacia Totti, I had trouble believing that we were safe in Puerto Rico.

We got home when the sun was setting. Mami was worried that something had happened to me. Tita was outside, searching the neighborhood.

Lavoe spilled the beans and told Tita where he found me. She told Mami.

“What possessed you to go to Farmacia Totti on your own? You know the rules. It’s out of bounds! Wait till your Papá gets home.”

I couldn’t explain why I’d gone to Farmacia Totti. I’d forgotten about the Green Hornet and Kato. All I could think about was the boy on the black top, but I wasn’t about to mention him to Mami.

She sent me upstairs without supper.

***

Tita came to my room later that night, to see how I was doing.

I lay awake, staring at the ceiling.

“Would you tell me a story?”

“Una vez y dos son tres. Cúcara, mácara, títere fue.”

I held on to the sheets and covered my mouth.

“Many years ago, before the United States was the United States, there was an Iroquois boy who lived near the Great Lakes.”

Tita put her hand on my head and brushed my hair to the side.

“He was a disobedient boy who went East, against the warning of his Mami. He arrived at the shores of Lake Huron, which looked just like our Atlantic Ocean, except it was filled with piranhas instead of sharks and barracudas.”

I opened my eyes wide and pulled the sheets over my nose.

“There, he met a sorcerer who offered to take him to a magic island, on a boat pulled by swans. When they arrived, the sorcerer pushed the boy out and sailed away.”

I pulled the sheet down long enough to ask, “Was the boy all alone?”

Tita put her finger to her mouth and shushed me quiet.

“The boy explored the island, and found a cave filled with skeletons. One of the skulls called him over.”

Tita gestured to me with her finger to come closer.

“Once, the skeleton had been a boy, and the sorcerer had killed him. But he would tell the boy how to save himself, if he brought him a pipe with tobacco.”

Tita’s story reminded me of a Vincent Price record that Mami had given me for Christmas. I played along because Tita was changing the story in interesting ways.

“Did the mice on the island carry the plague?”

 Tita made like she was getting up to leave.

 “I’ll be quiet.”

“With the help of the skeleton, the boy tricked the sorcerer and managed to escape from the island,” Tita said.

I was reminded of the boy on the pavement, and again I kept quiet.

“The boy returned to the island, found the cave and the skeleton, and brought him fresh tobacco to smoke.”

Tita ran her fingers up and down my arm like little mice feet.

“The boy then held the pipe to the skeleton’s mouth.”

She smoked an imaginary pipe and paused for a moment.

“The skeleton asked the boy if he would pick him up and bring him outside.”

“Won’t the sun and the rain hurt the bones of the skeleton,” I asked.

“That’s the idea. But, forget the skeleton, it’s the boy you should be focused on.”

“I know what you did! You stole the story from Vincent Price!”

I gestured towards my closet where I stored my records.

She ignored my accusation.

“Did the boy return home after the skeleton died?” I asked Tita.

“He lived in the hut on the island, and built a dock for his magic boat. He grew old and learned to smoke.”

I liked Tita’s version better than Vincent Price’s story.

She paused, and then warned, “Of course, smoking gave him cancer and the boy died.”

“So, if he had listened to his Mami, would the boy have lived forever?”

“Probably not, but he might have lived longer.”

Tita started to get up from my bed.

“Anyway, that’s a story for another time.”

She started to walk towards the door.

“For now, the important thing is that when your Mami tells you to stay home, you should listen to her. She worries that something might happen to you.”

“Like the dead boy on Ashford Avenue.”

“What dead boy?”

“Never mind. It’s just another horror story.”

Tita turned out the light and left me lying in the dark.