Lot E-Book

Bryan Washington

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

· · Winner of the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize · · · · Winner of the 2020 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award · · ____________________________________ · One of Barack Obama's "Favourite Books of the Year" · · A New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 · 'A superb book' Max Porter, author of Lanny ____________________________________ Stories of a young man finding his place among family and community in Houston, from a powerful, emerging American voice. In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys. This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston's myriad neighbourhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman's affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra. Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

Leseprobe

LOT

First published in the United States of America in 2019 by Riverhead Books,an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Bryan Washington, 2019

The moral right of Bryan Washington to be identified as the author of this workhas been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 783 3Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 784 0EBook ISBN: 978 1 78649 785 7

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Arlena and Gary

CONTENTS

LOCKWOOD

ALIEF

610 NORTH, 610 WEST

SHEPHERD

WAYSIDE

BAYOU

LOT

SOUTH CONGRESS

NAVIGATION

PEGGY PARK

FANNIN

WAUGH

ELGIN

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Read on for an exclusive extract of Bryan Washington’s stunning debut novel

And how did IGet back? How did any of usGet back when we searchedFor beauty?

GARY SOTO

and wouldn’t it be nice / if things fit / the way they weresupposed to / wouldn’t that be something / worth dying for.

PAUL ASTA

LOT

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 Lock-wood, 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.

Your life’s like something out of a fairy tale, he said. Like something out of a novel.

You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, said Aja.

Their apartments sat stacked, one on top of the other. When James left Aja’s, he took a right toward the staircase, passing four doors, three windows, and the kids—Karl and Dante and Nigel—stroking the fútbol, along with their mothers watching them kick it; and the Guadalajarans on the railing, who leaned, sipping their 40s, reminiscing about adolescence, all lies, mostly; and then there were the delinquents skipping school, smoking cigarettes, nodding along to Joy Division, Ice Cube, and sometimes Selena; until James scaled the staircase, hooked another left, and dipped into the unit adjacent to Benito’s, our resident queer. Aja took the same route in the opposite direction when she left his apartment. That happened less often since he mostly came to her. On her way down the railing, though, she would sit with the cabrones, tapping her foot to “Como la Flor,” kicking the ball across the balcony, before a word with the women huddled over the veranda. They’d riff on whatever gossip was marinating that afternoon, before she slipped back into her own apartment, at the turn of the evening, where she showered, swept, wept, started dinner for Paul.

In this way, Aja’s super-secret liaisons with the whiteboy upstairs weren’t exactly a secret at all. They weren’t even that scandalous. We’re talking about that part of town called Alief, above the sixty-acre mansions, despite ours actually being the worst hood around. The worst. In the years we’ve been here, we’ve seen coke wars, turf realignments, the usual school zoning violence, and shootouts—and that one time, in the nineties, with the cracker offing black folks by the Jack in the Box. Some of us still remember the way people walked, like they all had sticks up their asses, like the guy who’d stuffed them there was just around the corner. Mr. Po could tell you about cops cruising the gates. Esmerelda Rivera has photos of the rats as fat as trees.

But the neighborhood’s changed. With our not-legals shuffling in, people who don’t have time for the violence, people whose only reason for bouncing was to get away from the violence, we’ve mellowed out, found our rhythm. Slowed down. You can raise a kid in the complex. Start a garden or some shit. We make an ugly family, mostly brown and cross-eyed and crippled. Renaldo’s son plays spin-the-bottle with Jameelah’s daughter five doors down, and Bridgette brunches with Lao twice a month on Tuesdays. Kim Su’s niece’s marriage collapsed when it turned out she was a stud, and Peter George’s son, the burnt one, is doing time for packing. All of the Rodriguez daughters are pregnant, the Williams girl is in college, and little Hugo’s hustling for an internship at NASA.