Free Carry Me Like Water by Benjamin Alire Sáenz Page A

back into the past. “You arrogant sonofabitch!” That’s what he’d yelled at him. Joaquin hadn’t even bothered to turn around and acknowledge his presence. He remembered how he’d just sat there and gotten drunk and picked some guy up and took him home—and forgot him almost as soon as their sex was finished.
    A week later, he had seen Joaquin sitting on a park bench, drinking a cup of coffee from a Styrofoam cup and smoking a cigarette. He pretended to himself that all he wanted to do was hit the sonofabitch. He walked by him, and pretended not to notice he was sitting there. “Hey, gringo,” Joaquin said, “want to get laid?”
    “What’s the difference between now and the other night?” he’d muttered.
    “The difference is that I need the money.”
    He’d walked away without answering. Joaquin had run after him, smiled at him, and laughed, “Gringo, how come you let people push your buttons?” He remembered grabbing him by the collar: “My name is Jake—you got that?”
    Joaquin had simply smiled, unafraid of the physical strength of the man that had him by the collar. Jake had grabbed him by the arm and pulled him home. He remembered undressing him, he remembered everything about the first time he’d held Joaquin’s body, and how he had wanted to be violent, but wound up touching him softly as if he were a rare and fragile thing, “How old are you?” Joaquin had asked him. “I’m thirty,” Jake said. “How old are you?” “Nineteen.” After a few weeks of endless sex and endless talk, Joaquin disappeared back into the city. After two months, Jacob had given up looking for him; he swore to himself that if Joaquin ever showed up on his doorstep again he’d kick his ass all the way back to Mexico. About six months later, Joaquin knocked at his door.
    “Where the fuck have you been?” Jake said. He was more hurt than angry—but no matter how much he tried, his hurt always came out as anger.
    “My mother was sick,” he said. “I went back to Mexico to see her.” Joaquin swallowed hard and looked down at the floor. “I had to bury her,” he whispered. He sat down on the stairway outside his house. When Jacob had reached out to touch him, he began to shake and say things as if he might die if he did not say them. Jake was not sure Joaquin was aware of the words that were coming out of his mouth: “As long as she was alive, Mexico was still mine—somehow it was still mine. Now, it’s not mine, but here is not mine either. So where do I go, gringo? Cuando uno está perdido ¿dónde se va? I used to send her money. Soy huérfano ¿sabes? Soy huérfano.” Jake had not understood what the word huérfano meant, but he understood that the word carried a weight and a sadness that he had also carried, and he understood that Joaquin was lost, and when he began to cry, he held him, and the young man in his arms howled as if he were nothing more than an animal, an alien being who, despite losing his capacity for speech, had not lost his capacityto feel pain. Jacob had carried him inside as if he were a baby, and when at last Joaquin had been able to speak, all he was able to say was: “Gringo, don’t hurt me.”
    They had been together for twelve years and Jake no longer knew what it was about Joaquin that had made him such a necessary part of his life—whether it was his lover’s body, his intelligence, his sense of humor, his awful pride. When they had met, he was still something of a boy—and he had remained something of a boy. He had never stopped attending Mass on Sundays, had refused to give God over to the straights and the gringos and the Protestants because he said, “They don’t own him—he is not theirs.” Jacob had never understood that side of him. Once, while watching his lover nurse a dying friend, it occurred to him that the man he had fallen in love with was good, was decent. He had never consciously thought about “good” until then, and since becoming aware of it,