Puti
by Patria Rivera

If he hadn’t been so thin, I would have imagined him

as the young man who took the leading lady into

the sunset, out of the dark, cavernous stage of Liz Theatre.

This was the late ’50s, and in my nine-year-old mind’s eye,

his pale white skin, dirt-blond hair, tall nose

cut him above the other guys in our shantytown.

He never played with the neighborhood gang.

His aunts, Creole women from Zamboanga, spoke English

and Chabacano. We never saw his mama or papa.

Thought he came with the Reparations goods,

with the cheese and dried milk served at school recess.

I had always dreamt of war. Bazookas and bayonets.

Human bodies as fodder for cannons. In the Readers’ Digest

I saw his relatives, and stories and pictures of “Life

in These United States.” Was his father one of those guys

in “Humor in Uniform”? In my dream, salvation came

in a barrel of green apples, hoarded up Mt. Arayat,

snow falling on the Quonset huts of Clark Air Base.

If he knew where he came from, it must have caused him

a lot of grief. My mother once said,

“Beware of boys who can’t look at you in the eye.”

My white boy, he had a sideways glance. His flinty

eyes darted when he spoke. It was as if he didn’t want you

to capture their moment, like a bird that’d feed off

your palm but fly at a moment’s notice. He got into scrapes,

robbed people’s homes, was jailed for many hold-ups

and petty thievery. He was in and out of jail.

He was on the edge of something darker than he knew.


© Patria Rivera