Shrimps

“Coronavirus May 2020” by Cecilia Martinez

In that in-between year between high school and everything that came next, the problem was not knowing what to call it. I did a lot of thinking in the yard between the trailer and the outhouse. Back straight in a plastic chair, I would stare through the potted lemon trees Ma was selling, the freeway right behind me, over my head. Even when traffic was light, the sound of each car was a constant reminder of this thing I couldn’t name, which was always either on the approach or speeding away.

In every year before graduation, teachers asked the same question: “What are you going to do?”

They didn’t really expect an answer. Some would do it like a challenge, daring you to mess up. They loved to push the idea that anybody could be anything and life was one huge Albertson’s, with eight-hundred flavors in the cereal aisle. Like the only thing to worry about was the Sunday circular and whether or not you remembered the coupons your mom had been clipping since you were in diapers, which apparently no one takes anymore.

Now, a year later, with the DADS and GRADS signs popping up again in the Rite Aid and 7-11, people didn’t ask. Some did in a roundabout way, like the half-strangers at Wally Wings, where I had been working ever since. Most of them didn’t even remember my name.

“What you been up to?” they’d say, like their $5 Friday deal came with rights to my personal business.

Others just gave this vague smile, but I could feel it. People are loud with what they don’t say.

My history teacher used to make this weekly announcement. “The question is,” like he had it from the source, “where do you really wanna be in a few years, McDonalds?”        

The few times I had been to the McDonald’s down the street, I had recognized more than one of my former classmates. We didn’t go often. It was cheaper to buy chicken and tortillas at the market on Euclid.

A year after graduation, I was getting ready for my shift at Wally Wings, coming back from Ma’s house with a basket of folded laundry and a few hangers. Dad was sitting in his usual chair, coffee mug beside him on the table. I’d been doing my own laundry, separating lights from darks and learning what not to put in the dryer.

I wished I could put some other things in neat piles. That year, most of what I tried to think about was like a bunch of clothes getting tangled together in a ball by one loose drawstring. My one semester of community college—the one that every teacher seemed to think I had to do—had ended, in my case, way before the semester was over, and I wasn’t going back. I was having these vague ideas about getting better about cutting hair, and maybe getting my own YouTube channel (“Razor Reel to Real”), but I kept getting distracted by this other thing, this sense that I had to figure something out, quick.

It was the day before Dad’s sixtieth birthday. My parents didn’t talk much since Dad had moved to the trailer, but Ma was throwing a party.

“Javi’s idea,” she had explained, the week before. “You only turn sixty once.” Uncle Javi was always fun to be around. He had been away most of the year.

When I got back, Dad was fully dressed, sitting up straight in a white plastic chair below the trailer awning with both hands on his legs. When you’re still young enough to think that thirty is old, sixty seems ancient. Dad looked his age, except that his hair was still jet black. He moved like he was eighty.

“Mijo, I gotta let you know something,” he said.

The trailer was on blocks on a patch of bare dirt, on the Southside of the property, closest to Fantasyland Adult Video Emporium. There were ladders leaning against the back wall along with tiki torches, five-gallon buckets, some folding chairs and a few plastic tables. There were piles of old boards stacked under blue tarp.

“I’m dying,” he said, like he was commenting on the weather.

“What?”

“No worries,” he said. He sipped from his coffee mug. “Happens to everyone.”

“What?”

“Relax, not now. I still wanna take you out one day when you turn twenty-one.”

I had been having the feeling lately, of being unprepared for most of what adult life would throw at me.

“Eventually,” he added.

Everything was tangled. Words don’t work when it’s like that, so I just sat there, folded over myself.

“Anyway, I put a few things in your name, to get started.”

Dad reached into his pocket and slapped a key on the table next to me, “One’s the truck.”

His GMC had weathered blue paint with a toolbox and a metal rack, once used for work. I had started driving it since I got my license at the end of junior year, but the thrill wore off when I learned it cost about half a paycheck to fill up. Still, it made me feel like a guy who knew how to do things with his hands.

Handing over the spare seemed symbolic for Dad, so I just nodded, making a mental note to remember to put it back in the utility drawer in the trailer where he kept it in case of emergencies.

“The other’s your insurance.” He slapped an envelope on the table and held it there, looking at me. His hand was a lot wider, veiny and calloused from decades of hard work, most of which he didn’t like to talk about.

“And the electric bill.”

“Okay.”

“That one’s a little complicated. You gotta go through your mother. She won’t take your money. Just say it’s from me. She’s been telling me to sign up for this online thing where you pay a person through the phone, but—”

Here he grimaced and moved his hand like he did when he hated an idea, like it was a bunch of mosquitos.

“Venmo?”

“Whatever, I don’t deal with all that. I rather walk over every month with an envelope and the cash, exact. But she keeps saying that I’m bringing”—he set his mug down again to do air quotes—‘unnecessary conflict’ or whatever every time I visit. Now you can handle it.”

He swung his right arm toward the back wall of the property, where the freeway had been for the last fifteen years and shook his head. The way Dad saw it, the freeway was the reason the family was like this, with Ma in one house and him on what now amounted to a whole separate property, even though he hadn’t moved.

“But Dad, you did move.”

“Not officially. Besides. Before this, everything worked.”

I wasn’t always sure whether Dad was referring to the working of his legs or of his family. When he and Ma were “not seeing eye to eye,” as Dad put it, “I’d come out here to get some peace.” Before the freeway went in, the wall was only partial.

“Out there was all lemon groves,” Dad explained, sweeping his arm out toward the freeway. The wall between the homes was for growing blackberries and to give some privacy to whoever lived in the trailer, which was hired help in the good-money years when my grandparents ran it.

“It was all one,” he said.

The construction happened when I was a baby. The road cut right through the back two-thirds of the property. Ma took the settlement to handle the medical bills that had been piling up from when she had her tumor removed.   

“We woulda lost this place without that,” she said, a few years back, before I moved next door. “Routine procedure, though” she added, seeing my alarm.

“Before that came,” Dad said, “it used to be lemon trees all the way.” His hand stretched toward the back wall.

Ma had also purchased a new mailbox and registered a new address for forwarding Dad’s mail. It was the same street address, only his mail now went to the box labeled “B”.

“I got B-listed,” he would say, shaking his head.

Dad used to have a temper before his health issues slowed him down. He would tease me for being a Mama’s boy. Jolene, my older sister, was his baby. Ma has pictures of him giving her rides on his back and his shoulders. He looks happy, excited. The prints are faded.

According to Ma, the year I was born was the year Dad started sleeping in the trailer. Around my second year of high school, the main house was getting crowded with my sister’s boyfriend and their new baby. Ma knew I didn’t much like the boyfriend, but Hector was good for moving heavy things and had a knack for grafting fruit trees, which seemed at odds with his mostly hostile personality.

“Everybody’s got something,” Ma would say, “your dad used to be good at that stuff, too.”

The big house was a full nursery and lemon grove before. After the freeway, Ma sold some lemon trees in pots from what was basically an oversized front yard, along with roses and succulents.

“Not a big operation,” she liked to say, “but it keeps the lights on.”

It was Ma’s idea that I move next door. She was worried about Dad.

“I been thinking about this for a while,” she said. “Why you think I had that little house put next to the trailer?”

“The outhouse?”

“I talked it over with your Dad. More or less. He likes the idea. It would give you a chance to, you know. Father-son time.”

Ma had a way of calling something a suggestion, even if she had already decided. It seemed like a step in the right direction, growing-up wise. Dad had been keeping the place surprisingly neat.

“Cool, huh?” He said, with a big smile. “Like your own place, right?”

At that time, I was thinking how other steps would just fall in line, naturally.

The year after that, when I got my license, Dad gave me the keys to the truck. “I’m done driving, anyway,” he said. So, I started at Wally Wings and stopped at the Albertson’s next door for groceries after payday.

“Why you go there?” Dad would ask. “The market on Euclid is cheaper.”

“Whatever, you’re front of the house guy now,” he said.

“Whatever you decide to do,” Dad would say. It was an expression he used whenever our talk rolled around to next steps and life decisions. The rest of the sentence never came.

The night after Dad announced his impending eventual death, I woke up on the trailer couch again, breathing hard. I had fallen asleep waiting for him to explain something.

I kept having this recurring dream, where I was going into the bank to deposit my paycheck and get cash, where after saying thank you to the teller, the bank floor would open up, carpet and everything, like a sinkhole. I’d fall through and land on the next level in a circle of folding chairs in a little room that looked like a high school gym. There were about a dozen women in the chairs, all about Jolene’s age, and a nervous-looking white guy with a clipboard, glasses, and a few scraps of red-brown hair pasted across the shine of his head. He could hardly get a word in.

When I landed, in the only chair left, all eyes were on me. At first it was silent.

The first one to speak looked like the Instagram version of Mother Earth herself, with long hair and gold hoops. “So now you decide to show up,” she said.

The others chimed in after her, all at once.

“Yeah, but what’s he got? Anything?”

“Not much.”

“You lost, little boy?” Before I could respond, Earth turned to the others, “Bet he’s just looking for the bathroom. You gotta pee-pee?”

In lots of my bad dreams, I would be trying to speak or shout something, but I could never get the words out. Eventually I managed to squeak some version of, “No.”

Then came a round of laughs. “Maybe he’s got somewhere better to go!”

“Look everybody! It’s a flock of pigs flying over Petco Park!”

The tone and its momentum would accelerate with no sign of letting up, until I was awake again on the couch, my T-shirt sticking to my chest.

I got up to get water. Dad had gone to bed. I sat back down on the couch. The TV was still on, late night news playing. Another mother crying in an interview. The caption below her, in all caps, read: “MOTHER OF SUSPECT.” Sometimes I wished someone would take one of these moms aside and let them know: Look, your clip is gonna come on after the incriminating description of the “suspect in custody.” Never before the mug shot from the booking where he’s obviously scared shitless and doing his best hard look for the camera, so he winds up looking like someone who goes in and out of prison easier than getting a haircut. How he’ll be trying so hard to be cool you can practically hear him giving a nonverbal shrug in response to any reporter’s question about his motives. Apparently, no one told the moms these things, so they kept appearing after the crime descriptions and the mug shots, always saying some version of: “My son, he was a good boy.” Then, right when she was trying to clarify, adding, “I am telling you—” the footage would cut to the next story.

According to the news, an unidentified man who was possibly Sicilian, Latino, mixed-race, or possibly of Eastern-European origin had managed to make off with an estimated thirty pounds of shrimp beneath the folds of his sweatpants and jacket, at a rate of about ten pounds per haul from local Safeway outlets, on three different occasions over Memorial Day weekend.

The video was grainy security camera footage. I looked, squinted, sat closer.

“Hey,” I said to the cat, “that guy looks just like Uncle Javi!”

His face alone I might have overlooked. It was grainy, he had a ball cap. But Javi was one of those guys you could spot from two hundred yards away, because of the walk: chucks splayed, neck out, top button buttoned, ribbed undershirt sometimes showing just above the button of his creased khakis. In the video, he had a black sweatshirt. The shrimp had an estimated value of five-hundred dollars.

Like so many late-night impressions, especially that year, the moment evaporated. It’s not like I would have been surprised if Javi’s name had shown up in the text below the image. It was just noticeable, like any other time I saw someone I knew in an unusual setting. It used to trip me out sometimes when I’d see my high school teachers out in the neighborhood. One time I saw Mrs. Ponce in the Smart n Final with about five or six handles of hard liquor, a grip of limes, and some flavored water. It was about an hour after school let out on a Friday.

“I’m having a party,” she said, with a shrug, like she knew how it looked and didn’t really care if I believed her.

I turned the TV off. I wanted to iron my work shirt in the morning and take a shower in the main house before Ma and Jolene got in. I had the afternoon shift with Angelina. She had big eyes and short brown hair cut close to her neck. When we were in high school, she was quiet like me. One time in Chemistry class we did a group project on moles. She was absent one day and I did her part because I was too shy to message her especially if she was sick. “Hey, thanks,” she said, when she got back. When I saw her picking up her uniform at Wally Wings last week, it was hard not to light up like a kid seeing the Good Humor truck. I was determined to do a better job making conversation this time around.

The next morning, when I was putting back the iron, Ma came up with a look that meant she had made another decision.

“Hey,” she said, “I know you don’t like to drive the truck a lot, but I need you to take it to work, okay? I don’t want your Dad to suddenly go missing.”

She pressed a five-dollar bill into my hand. Ma hadn’t driven since Jolene got her license, so her sense of what gas cost was a little outdated. I kissed her on the cheek, brought my shirt back, and drove down Sweetwater. There was an Arco just two blocks away, but the Valero on Broadway was a lot cheaper, even though they were sometimes out of gas.

What made me recognize Javi this time was the Chargers jersey he was wearing over his black hoodie. You used to see these everywhere, even on babies and great-grandmas, but after the team sold out and moved to LA a few years back, a lot of people felt betrayed and made a point of not wearing theirs anymore—myself included—but Javi had a different take. He had even worn his to my graduation, over his white button-down and pressed dickeys.

“So what if they move?” he said, when I asked him. “That’s my team. Their loss, at least I know what I’m about,” and he patted his chest with his flat hand open, hard against his heart.

I was getting the feeling lately that most of the important things didn’t fit inside places where words could get to them—not easily, anyway.  With everyone making announcements and asking questions, it was getting to me.

When I first passed him, he was swaying side to side beneath the overpass with a big black trash bag in each hand, raised on bent elbows about level with his shoulders, I wasn’t thinking about Javi. I had rarely driven that route without seeing somebody walking across that same dirt lot, moving in and out of the shadows. They varied in shape and size and number—with their bags, their carts, their bikes, and their oddly layered clothes—but they were always there.

After I passed him, something tangled started to unwind. Then I knew who he was. 

I had to do a U-turn by the pawn shop, and then I headed back, past the furniture Depot, the license and registration outlet, Charlie’s Burger’s, Anna’s Family, the Jack in the Box, Lin’s donuts and Little Darling’s XXX live Nudes.

Javi was paused halfway up the hill, where the shadow of both freeways was the darkest. He had stopped walking, and the bags in his hands were resting beside him on either side. He was turned in my direction as I turned toward him.

Javi had a way of meeting people that made you wonder who he was looking at for a minute. His whole face would light up like a cartoon squirrel finding the secret stash of acorns and he’d raise his right hand open and wide, across his left shoulder, across his face, and high above him, calling out, “Aaaaaaay!” so loud that it was almost impossible not to look back over your shoulder to see who he really meant to greet like that: in the middle of the street, in the middle of a crowded living room, across a mortuary parking lot at a wake.

As I got closer, he released the bags, raised both hands above his head, fingertips pointing my way, his mouth a wide-open cheer. I pulled off the road.

“Is that you, Razor? Man, I recognized the truck and thought you were your Dad!”

I hadn’t seen Javi in about a year. I had just started learning to cut hair from YouTube when he last saw me, and he offered his own head up for practice. It was just after graduation. Javi’s buzz cut wasn’t hard to maintain. He was happy with the results. After that he called me Razor and he’d bring his friends around sometimes, saying “Eh Razor, can you clean this guy up?” Javi’s friends had names like Sleepy, Joker, and BigMac. I told them no charge, but they’d hand me cash anyway and say, “Lemme know when you get your own place, G. I’ll spread the word.” I’d been chewing on the idea. What I really wanted was my own channel.

I put the truck in park and held my arms open. He smelled like he might have missed a few showers. “Where you coming from?”

He threw his thumb back over his shoulder, down Broadway.

“Bus stop. I was halfway up this hill when I remembered there’s another stop closer. Then you showed up!”

I opened the side door.

“Your Ma tell you I got shrimp?” he said.

“She said the party was your idea.”

“I told her ‘Don’t worry about anything. I got a hookup!’”

“That’s a lot of shrimp.”

“You know, got food, you got a party.”

I pulled back onto the road. A guy with wild hair and a sleeping bag over his back was pushing a shopping cart load covered in a blanket. Javi turned as we passed him.           

“Think I used to know that guy,” he said.

We passed the chain link fence that was always decorated with bears and Our Lady candles from the last fatal crash; then the fruiteria, Lobos Tires, the Arco.

“Your Ma still running the nursery?”

“Always busy.”

“You a still over in the outhouse with your Dad?”

I nodded. “You coming over?”

“Where else I’m going with this?”

We passed the high school.

“I remember your graduation. Can’t believe it’s been a whole year!”

The marquee flashed: “Congrats, Grads! Go Matadors!”

“Go Matadors!” Javi said in his cheerleader impression voice. “Ever notice how they’re always telling you to go somewhere, but they never say where?

“I mean, everybody’s always talking like here isn’t anywhere, you know? Like you’re nowhere unless you’re going someplace else.”

Javi had a way of putting things.

“They’re gonna be so happy,” I said, pulling over. I told him I’d be back after work.

“Gonna cook it all up!” he said. “Where you work at?”

Wally Wings was a few lots past the Rally’s with the curly fries everyone would get after school.

“That’s right there,” Javi said. “Lemme ride, I’ll walk back.”

He hopped out, ran into the nursery with the bags. He half jogged back out, waving and shouting something about being right back. He climbed back in the truck.

“You’re getting paid. Nice!” 

The only problem, I tried to explain, was having to run into so many people I knew from high school—people who I hadn’t even really wanted to talk to before graduation, who now somehow felt entitled to get into my business just because they recognized my face.

“Fuck it,” Javi said, swatting a fly.

My English teacher, Mrs. Creech, was the first person I saw that I knew. This was the lady who had called my Ma about a dozen times senior year to say that she knew I had “tremendous potential” and that she just wished I would “apply” myself more, and who had explained, over numerous different phone conversations, how I might not graduate.

“Listen, mijo,” Ma had told me, after the last one, “I don’t know what this lady’s talking about, but whatever it is, you better get it done. Because I already got plans for your graduation day, and they don’t involve you not walking across that stage. You got it?”

No matter who it was—Mrs. Creech, or what’s-her-name from Algebra with the drawn-on eyebrows and big lashes, or that little bald-headed kid from Algebra, the one with a mouth like an OG who just finished twenty years hard time—the exchange was about the same, every time. Eyebrows acted excited, baldhead tried to play it cool, and Mrs. Creech was somewhere in between. She seemed a little irritated that there was another former student standing between her and her Double Down Deal.

There was almost never a line, so the awkward moment of recognition had a way of playing out in real time, during the five or so seconds between the opened door and the order.

There’d be a flash in their eyes and then they would do this awkwardly surprised and drawn out, “Heeeeey! Whatchou been up to?”

It didn’t take a genius to read. What they didn’t say was, “What are your plans, for real?”

Most of them let the question fall away, like what it was: rhetorical. “It’s when you ask a question but you’re not really looking for an answer,” was one of the few details I remembered from Mrs. Creech’s class.

Javi decided he was gonna go check in on folks in the houses behind the shopping center.

“I’ll hit you up on the way back, Eh?”

I nodded with my best serious face. Javi always talked to me like he talked to the guys he knew. I didn’t want to ruin whatever he saw in me by looking like some eager kid.

“Eh, look!” he said, pointing as Angelina rounded the corner, “Cute girl right there, going where you’re going.”

I did my serious nod, trying not to give anything away.

“You should talk to her!”

“Yeah. I sort of have to.”

“But for real, though! You got her number?”

No, obviously.

“See, that’s what I mean,” he said. “She’s right here; you too!”

I parked the truck.

“Hey. Ma said it was your idea, about the party.”

“Yeah, I knew she needed help, so I called her up.”

“She’s pretty happy. Dad, too.”

“I told her don’t worry, I’ll get some shrimps!”

“Yeah, Javi, I—

“It’s all you gotta do, you know. Hookup the food, everything else comes together.”

It was one of those moments where the drawstring held all the different parts together just long enough for me to look.

I went inside.

There’s more to this afternoon, but let’s just say this: when the shift ended, it was right around sunset. It was the first time that year where I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

I dropped Angelina off at her house, and it took me a minute to remember where I had turned from. I pulled away, smooth as possible with one hand on the wheel.

When I got back home, the whole place looked different. The tiki torches were lit; everyone’s face was glowing like they had just heard something good. The nursery looked big and lush, with young lemon trees in pots and old ones dropping fruit by the back wall.

“Eeeeeeeeey!” Javi called out, “There he is!”

“Check it out! We got shrimps!” I walked over and he named them all. “Garlic, barbecue, ceviche, whatever you want.”

Dad was laughing with his head back in a chair.

“Eh, you only turn sixty once!” Jolene smiled at the baby on her hip. Even Hector, who was usually scowling, looked relaxed, smiling. Ma winked.

Javi hugged like he knew me from the life I hadn’t even found yet.

“You’re here!” His face was wild, lit up, an event in itself. I was.

I saw it all of it for the first time: our place and the people in it as my place and my people. I paused, wanting to save it. Even then, it looked like a faded photograph. I saw everything that was almost gone, and everyone still in it laughing in the dark, under tiki torches.

There was Javi, in the center, winking. “Eh, you see!” he was saying, “See that look! I know that look! He’s been up to something!”

I hadn’t, yet, but Javi knew. In that tiny flash, I saw how different everyone in the frame would look if you switched the lens: outsider, security camera, passenger in one of those cars flying past us on the freeway. The pace of everything was picking up: Dad’s aging, Ma’s tumor, Javi’s comings and goings, and there was no stepping out, no jumping off.

Later, flashes like this would happen more times than I could count, these little freeze-frames that felt stolen when I stood still inside them just long enough to––

“Hang on, kid! Not so fast!” Javi brought me a plate. “Try the garlic one first.”

He waited.

“Damn.”

Laughing, he nodded, squeezing the meat of my shoulder in his grip. Whatever it was that passed between us in that wink, it fit, shining like a jersey over everything I’d been trained not to believe. I was ready to challenge anybody who dared me not to care. 

About the Author

Stacey C. Johnson writes and teaches in San Diego County. She is a graduate of the MFA program at San Diego State University.  Her work appears in Oyster River Pages, Pacific Review, and Fiction International, as well as various other publications. You can find her at staceycjohnson.com and on Twitter @StaceCJohnson. 

about the artist

Cecilia Martinez is an award-winning self taught artist from Jersey City, NJ, USA. She has learned how to manipulate different mediums through patience and practice, trial and error. In the five years she's been in the art scene, Cecilia has already had her work exhibited in more than 80 shows in venues throughout the country, including the National Association of Women Artists Gallery in New York City and the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Additionally, her work has been featured in a segment on Al Jazeera TV, which reaches more than 30 million viewers worldwide. Cecilia’s artwork is also regularly published in art magazines and journals in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe.