A Fierce and Subtle Poison

  A

  Fierce

  and

  Subtle

  Poison

  Samantha Mabry

  Algonquin 2016

  These pages are dedicated to the memory

  of my granddaddy, Theron Wesley Mabry Sr., who fell

  in love with a woman from Puerto Rico, and who would have been tickled to have seen his name in a book.

  Contents

  Green Skin and Grass For Hair

  Part One

  One

  Three

  Four

  Six

  Seven

  Part Two

  Eight

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Part Three

  Seventeen

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Strange and Uncertain Gods

  Acknowledgments

  Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  About Algonquin

  Green Skin and Grass For Hair

  THE HOUSE AT the end of the street is full of bad air.

  That’s what the señoras always told us. They stuck their fingers in our faces and warned us not to get too close. They said it wasn’t right that the shutters on the windows remained closed, even after rainstorms when the air was so thick it would rest on your skin and stick in the back of your throat. They said that the house had been cursed by the woman who once lived there. She hadn’t always been bad, the señoras said, but her husband’s constant neglect had left her hollow and wicked.

  According to the old ladies, no one had ever trusted that man: he was white and a scientist. He was never in church. He walked the streets in the rain. He’d leave Old San Juan for weeks at a time and go out to the forests around Rincón, where he’d tear the legs off frogs, dissect live snakes to see their hearts beat out, or do whatever else it was that scientists did.

  While he was gone, his wife was confined to the house. She spent her days behind the three-foot-thick plaster walls tending to the plants in the courtyard and caring for the scientist’s prized macaw. Everyone in town hated that bird. It never shut up. Every morning, it would jump onto one particular limb of a banyan tree and let out its ungodly screeches while its green and red feathers flickered like a pinwheel in the sun. Whenever someone walked by, the bird would slowly cock its head to an absurd angle, stare silently for a second or two, and then begin clucking blasphemous phrases, reciting lines from Borges stories, and singing songs nobody had ever heard before.

  When I asked the señoras which lines from which Borges stories the gringo scientist taught his bird, they said they didn’t know. It wasn’t important. They curled their lips and asked why I would care about such a thing.

  What was important, the señoras stressed with wags of their wrinkled fingers, was that the scientist was a very, very bad man. Somehow, somewhere, he’d lost all the beauty in his life, and that—that loss—was what caused him to rob his wife of all the beauty in hers. Everyone knew a Puerto Rican woman needed sun and wind and ocean water. But the scientist didn’t care. He treated his wife like a creature under glass. He treated her like . . . the señoras always paused here for a moment . . . un especimén.

  That’s how life was for the woman who lived in the house at the end of Calle Sol until one summer, during which five hurricanes ravaged the island, battering the coastlines and tossing around telephone poles, a summer during which the scientist had again disappeared to the forests near Rincón to do whatever it was a scientist did. That was the summer things began to break apart.

  The cracks in the exterior plaster walls came first, thick and meandering like the veins in an old woman’s legs. Then the concrete of the sidewalk in front of the courtyard split, causing a mighty fissure a foot and a half wide. Aphids took over the garden. The macaw, perched up on its banyan tree, would spend hours plucking out his red and green feathers, letting them fall into the street one by one.

  The woman’s spirit was crumbling. And, as if out of sympathy, the house and the garden and the bird began to crumble along with her.

  Around this same time, the people of Old San Juan all started having the same nightmare about a green-skinned little girl who would stand in front of them and throw stones at their faces. After waking from fitful sleeps, they suffered further by having to listen to that tonto bird curse and croak out songs all day long. For months, they never had any peace. Then, one night in early December, the little green-skinned girl stopped haunting everyone’s dreams. The following morning the scientist came home from Rincón to find his wife and his bird gone. The woman had taken nothing and left a curse. The bird’s green and red feathers were scattered across the house. Only the plants in the courtyard remained.

  That was the day the man closed all the shutters and never opened them again, and that was the day all the birds in Old San Juan stopped flying over the house. They knew better than to get their wings tangled up in curses.

  Over the years, my friends and I came up with our own stories about the house at the end of Calle Sol. Rico said the scientist’s wife died after giving birth. She’d been in labor for five days, and after her husband held her green-skinned baby girl up to her face, she mumbled some prayers up to the saints. Then she kicked the bucket.

  Ruben had a better version. He claimed the woman had been so upset by the fact that her husband was never around that she’d thrown herself off the highest of the stone walls of the massive old fort known as El Morro. It happened in the middle of the day, as dozens of people were out steering their kites through the wide blue sky. The last thing anyone saw was the woman’s long black hair and the thin white fabric of her dress as she took a running leap. When the kite-flyers rushed over, expecting to see her broken body on the ledge many feet below, all they saw was a hibiscus bush with a single flower the color of fruit punch.

  Carlos said he didn’t know what happened to that pinche woman. All he knew was that every single one of the street cats knew better than to walk in front of that pinche house. Once, however, a tiny kitten, its eyes barely open, got separated from its mother and found itself alone on the sidewalk in front of the courtyard. The kitten mewed and mewed all night. The next morning someone found it curled up into a ball, dead from chewing on a leaf that had fallen from the one of the tall bushes.

  “Everybody knows,” Carlos claimed, “that the plants in that courtyard are full of poison. If you touch them, they’ll make your nightmares come true. Then you’ll burn with fever. Then you’ll die.”

  I thought the kitten story was bullshit. There are thousands of cats prowling around Old San Juan, and they could die for any number of reasons. The kitten could’ve been born sick and cast away by its mother. It could’ve had rabies. It could’ve eaten some of the chicken scraps Señor Guzmán mixes with glass and leaves out on the street in small piles to try to kill the ferals.

  The summer I turned eleven, while we were sitting on a pier watching the cruise ships go by in the twilight, was when Rico claimed the scientist who’d lived in the house at the end of the street had a daughter and that she still lived there. He’d seen her. She was a little girl with green skin and grass for hair. He said he’d even talked to her. She’d told him she was a witch who could grant wishes.

  We ran from the pier to my room at the hotel as fast as we could to scribble our wishes on the stationery the housekeepers kept stocked on my nightstand. It took Ruben the longest to figure out what his wish would be, but I knew mine right away. I wanted to lift the curse from the house, so that birds would fly over it again and the woman with the long dark hair would come home and throw op
en her shutters.

  Once Ruben finally decided that his wish would be for his dead dog Pepé to come back to life, we folded our wishes in half, sprinted down to the end of Calle Sol, and tossed those wishes over the courtyard wall. The paper fluttered into the bad air and disappeared.

  While my friends raced each other back to the pier, I stayed. I waited in front of the house to see if a bird would fly over and to listen for the sound of a woman crying. Nothing happened. And, as far as I know, none of our wishes ever came true.

  One summer soon after, the stories stopped. Of course, the house at the end of Calle Sol was still there, still crumbling. The broken sidewalk had never been fixed. The blue paint was still chipped and faded, and the tops of plants still waved over the courtyard walls, trying to tempt me, but my friends and I had gotten too old to care about wishes, curses, and green-skinned little girls.

  That’s because there were other girls—real girls—whose bodies we could press against the walls of buildings in alleyways late at night. Up close, their skin smelled like warm, wet sand, and their mouths tasted like coconut water. They wore the thinnest cotton dresses with the tiniest straps we could slip off their shoulders, and their long dark hair was always curled from all the moisture in the air.

  I was kissing one of those girls when the witch who grants wishes first threw stones at my face.

  Part One

  The Disappeared Girls

  One

  I MET MARISOL on a Sunday night, two days before her body washed up on Condado Beach. We were sitting across from one another in a field near El Morro drinking rum from a bottle I’d lifted from the hotel. She was one of Ruben’s cousins, and he was there, too, along with Rico, Carlos, and some girls they all knew from school.

  This is how things typically went: A girl would come over and run her fingertips across the back of my hand or the top of my knee. She’d look at me, her eyelids heavy, and say something about how her older brother or her uncle would kill me if they knew that she was hanging out with me. She’d mention my blond hair, my dad, and how she and the other locals didn’t know whether or not he was saving their island or ruining it. She’d give me some version of some lesson she learned from her cousin in New York or Chicago or wherever about how white guys really know what it meant to treat a girl the way she deserves to be treated.

  Eventually, I’d take her by the hand and lead her either into one of the narrow alleys between the Spanish-style buildings or down to the footpaths outside of El Morro near the ancient mangrove trees that reminded me of the gray ghosts of giants. In the attempt to convince her that I was cultured and interesting, I’d tell this girl about all the places I’d traveled and sights I’d seen. I’d tuck the stray hairs that fell in her face behind her ear. I’d be gentle, my touch featherlight. I’d look her in the eye and ask permission to kiss her.

  She’d always say yes.

  Marisol was different, though. She didn’t mention anything about my blond hair or developer dad. She did come and sit by me, but after telling me her name, she said she remembered me from last summer, when she and Ruth—a giggling girl who was currently pawing at Rico—saw me at a party. She asked if I remembered her. I told her I did even though I didn’t. Which was a shame. I should’ve. Marisol had a generous, loud laugh, a distinctive heart-shaped face, and straight, waist-length coffee-colored hair, the shade of which almost exactly matched her eyes.

  She shifted onto her knees and nervously plucked at a blade of grass.

  “I was hoping you’d come back,” she said.

  My head was already swirling from the rum, and I was only half listening. The way Marisol was sitting caused her butter-yellow dress to ride up high on her thighs. I wanted to reach out and touch the place where hem met skin.

  “Let’s take a walk,” I suggested.

  We snuck away and stumbled down a steep path that would lead us closer to the water. We faced a murky expanse of sea. Behind us was a section of the original walls of the city, built hundreds of years ago to protect San Juan from invaders. Forty feet up and on the other side of that wall was the dark and silent courtyard belonging to the house at the end of Calle Sol.

  This spot was a favorite of mine, quiet and isolated. I could stand there for hours and wonder if I had the nerve to jump into that inky water and start swimming. When my arms got tired, I’d float. I sometimes couldn’t imagine anything better than being alone in the ocean, carried along by the currents, with my arms out wide and the light from the moon and the sun bathing my face.

  I never told any of the girls about my dreams of floating in the ocean. I also never mentioned how I always wondered if the wish on a scrap of paper I’d tossed into that nearby courtyard five summers ago was still up there, waiting to be granted.

  “I grew up in Ponce.”

  Marisol’s voice startled me, and I turned. She was leaning against the stone wall. Her fingers were lifted to her throat, where she was twirling a gold charm. It glinted twice in the moonlight. The rest of her was in shadow.

  “My mom moved me and my little sister out here last May. I don’t know if Ruben told you that or not.” She shrugged. “I like it here, I guess.”

  Marisol dropped her charm as I approached her. I put my hand on her waist and felt the soft flesh under her dress give into my slight pressure. With my free hand, I brushed a strand of her hair away from her face and then ran my fingertips over one of the straps of her dress.

  “So,” I whispered, “you’ve been waiting for me?”

  Marisol didn’t even let the last word leave my lips before she grabbed the sides of my face and pulled my mouth to hers. Our rum-soaked lips collided and slid against each other’s. Her hands were frantic and everywhere: in my hair, on my stomach, up the front of my T-shirt. I gasped as she raked her nails across the skin of my chest. When I threw my hands to the wall behind her to brace myself, she pressed her hips into mine and ran her teeth along the edge of my jaw.

  I reeled back, needing a second to catch my breath.

  Marisol’s dark eyes were shimmering from the liquor and the moonlight, but I only caught a glimpse of them before she came crashing down on me again.

  It was only seconds later, as I was grasping for the hem of Marisol’s dress, when I felt something small and sharp run across my cheek. I thought it was one of Marisol’s nails, until I realized her fingers were tugging at my belt loops. Something else pelted me on the shoulder, another on the top of my head.

  I made the mistake of glancing up and was struck twice in quick succession, once in the center of my forehead and then again in the tender spot between my eyebrow and eye. Marisol shrieked and dodged away. I ducked and covered my head just as several tiny pellets showered down on me.

  And then, everything was quiet. I knelt down, picked up a couple of the projectiles from around my feet, and rolled them around in my palm. They were stones, rough-edged and the size of small marbles.

  I hurled them back up to their source and shouted. “Hey!” The stones came up short and rattled back down the wall. “Who’s up there?”

  I craned my head and was just able to make out the dark shapes of leaves swaying against a dark sky. Behind those leaves was something else, shadowed and stationary. There was a rustling noise, but that could’ve been from anything: the wind, a bird, a cat chasing a bird.

  “That house is cursed,” Marisol said, her voice slurred.

  I lowered my gaze and gaped at her. She was still leaning against the stones. A strap of her dress had slipped down and was hanging loosely around her upper arm. Much of her dark hair had fallen like a curtain in front her face, and neither of us made an effort to sweep it back.

  “That house is cursed,” she said louder, as if I didn’t hear her the first time. “That’s what everyone says. Didn’t you know that?” She swayed to the side and let out a short burst of laughter.

  Again, I peered up to the top of the wall. It was the same as before, as it always had been, dark objects against a dark sky, le
aves and branches bending in the breeze. I shivered as an unexpected rash of goose bumps rippled up my arms.

  “Come on.” I extended my hand to Marisol. “Let’s go.”

  “You’re bleeding,” Marisol replied, pointing at my forehead. “Like, a lot.”

  I swiped at my eyebrow, and sure enough, my trembling fingers came away slick. I wiped them off on my jeans and snatched Marisol’s hand.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Cuts like these always look worse than they actually are.” There was a wobble in my voice; I hoped she didn’t notice.

  I could feel the blood from the cut trailing down the middle of my face and dripping from the tip of my nose, and going up the steep steps while drunk was giving me the spins. Once Marisol and I got back to the field, I could just make out Rico in the near distance, acting the carefree clown as usual, trying to dance to nonexistent music and continuously toppling over. Everyone was laughing, except for Carlos, who was sprawled out on the grass, snoring with his mouth wide open.

  When we got close enough for Ruben to see my face, he sneered and asked what I’d done to make Marisol sock me. I rolled my eyes and Marisol erupted into a fit of giggles. Neither of us mentioned the rain of stones.

  I drank more rum as the night went on. I acted as if Rico’s antics were the most hilarious thing I’d ever seen and that Marisol’s attention was all I’d ever need. I acted this way because I didn’t want to let on how I couldn’t stop thinking about that one dark shape I’d seen on top of that courtyard wall, the one I didn’t mention to Marisol, the one that didn’t sway like the leaves but that seemed focused solely on me and was poised in a motionless crouch, ready for a reason to jump.

  Two

  “ROUGH NIGHT?”

  My dad was talking at me from behind the pages of the morning’s El Nuevo Día. It wasn’t even seven o’clock, but he was already up and dressed for what my mom used to refer to as the “island life.” His outfit consisted of a white linen suit, a light blue dress shirt, and tan boat shoes. His graying hair was slicked back with pomade. His wide-brimmed hat was balanced on his knee. He thought he looked debonair. I thought the only thing missing from the picture was a cigar and a mountain of cocaine on the table in front of him. Behind his back, my friends would snicker and refer to him as el patrón or, when they were feeling particularly brutal, el conquistador.