By the Lake of Sleeping Children by Luis Urrea

Author:Luis Urrea [Urrea, Luis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Tres: Felix

Felix was the bad street boy whom everyone hated. Von often talked about loving the unlovable, and Felix was that. He reminded me of a dirty alley cat, all knobby with scars and cat scratches, fur full of oil from the cars he lurked under. And when you petted him, he was as likely to scratch you and spit as to purr.

He was only nine or ten when I met him. He appeared regularly at Abigail’s orphanage for baths—though it was his special art to resist being bathed until the last possible minute, and even then he would cuss and shove and parade before the others, making cutting remarks about the other boys’ bodies, the fat bellies and the pitiably tiny pipís.

He also attended Von’s weekly Bible studies, but he resisted these even more strenuously than the baths. He made it very clear that he was there for the doughnuts, the chocolate milk, and the American women. He was the figurehead of a disruptive crew, little dudes with switchblades in their socks and constant insults on their tongues. As Elvis said, “I was born standin’ up and talkin’ back.”

Von proved to be a worthy adversary, though. One night Felix’s pals ate all of Von’s doughnuts, leaving none for the rest of the children. One of the boys wiped his mouth and sneered.

“Your doughnuts taste like monkey shit,” he said.

They laughed wickedly. Felix gave him a cholo handshake.

I translated.

Von didn’t even blink.

He shot back, “Oh? You recognize the taste, do you? You must eat a lot of monkey shit.”

The boy paled and stammered as everyone pointed at him and howled.

Felix was scruffy and thin. He had freckles and lighter hair than all the other boys. They called him Llellé. It could have been an insult or a nickname—I never learned what it meant.

He was always picking fights he had no hope of winning. He was not interested in hugs of any kind, unlike the other street kids. If, after Felix had gotten yet another bloody nose, you tried to hug him, you’d get a flurry of rabbit punches to the gut. (After a few years, though, Felix relented; he learned to accept a brotherly arm draped over his shoulder, but it had to be low-key and almost accidental.)

Then one day, for reasons I never figured out, he decided to tell me his story. He took me aside and we talked in the dirt street that ran in front of Abigail’s. Inside, they were singing. We sat on a low wall, and he dangled his feet.

Both his parents were dead. They had apparently died in an accident of some kind, and he’d been left with an aunt who resented him at first, then hated him. Felix’s aunt beat him regularly, insulted him continually, and often refused to feed him. Finally she threw him out. The kids in the neighborhood thought he had a home—he had told them he did.

One of his favorite stories was that gas station attendants had taken him in and he was able to fix any car, do any mechanical bit of engineering that came his way.

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