The Affliction by C. Dale Young

Author:C. Dale Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Four Way Books

VII. Jewels

That Carlitos had killed his brother Pedro Blanco was never in dispute. Flora Diaz had predicted it. Javier Castillo felt a great amount of guilt about it. And I am somehow the one charged with remembering it. But what the Court could not decide was whether or not it was premeditated. It is never easy to believe a thirteen-year-old boy could plan his own brother’s death, but so much of what I have told you by now must seem difficult to believe. Not even Carlitos himself could tell you with any certainty whether or not he had planned the whole thing.

What the Court knew was that one afternoon, a very ordinary afternoon, Carlitos struck his brother Pedro in the back of the neck with a branch from the stunted royal poinciana tree growing in his front yard, one with a sharp enough spike to puncture the right carotid artery. That his brother fell to the ground in the front yard with blood squirting from his neck, each beat of his heart propelling the blood across the dying grass in a thin arc, was never discussed. Not even the court knew these additional details. What they knew was that Carlitos struck his brother in the neck and killed him. The blood pulsing, the dying grass, the shak shak tree standing behind them witness to it all, Carlitos standing there holding the branch as if he were paralyzed, the sun disappearing from the sky then, twilight and shimmering, the way he kept yelling at his brother to get up, to stop this crap, to stop it, get up—the court knew none of that.

“Carlos! Get up! I am not going to call you again. You need to get up and do your walk now!” Every morning at 10:30 a.m., the doctor’s assistant would come and fetch Carlitos. The walk lasted exactly thirty minutes, and the path was the same one used each and every day—always the same path, always the same route. This assistant, Bill, was a wiry Asian man who, to Carlitos, looked nothing like a Bill. He was clean, clean-shaven like a Bill, but a Bill was some white guy wearing a preppy shirt, one called Biff by his friends. Some Asian dude should not be named Bill. It wasn’t that the name Bill was too white but that to Carlitos it seemed like a fraudulent name. He, Carlitos, couldn’t escape his own name and the fact of how it marked him, preceded him. Carlos Drogón Blanco, son of Ricardo and Rosa, called Carlitos because he was smaller than he should have been up until about six years of age. Carlos Blanco was a name that one could not escape from the way Carlitos believed the name Bill allowed this Asian man to do. Carlitos wanted desperately to ask if Bill was a nickname, an English name. He wanted to know if fake-Bill had another name, a valid name.

“Get up, Carlos! Get up! I know you can hear me. Doctor says you have to do this, and that is what you have to do.

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