Cloudburst: An Anthology of Hispanic Canadian Short Stories

Rainy Night

Felipe Quetzalcóatl Quintanilla 157 Rainy Night Mario, in his forties, seated there behind the counter at three in the morning, is still absorbed in the darkness outside and the rain and thunder of the past day. Lately he’s been thinking a great deal about El Salvador, the war, his dead brothers. This job gives him a lot of time to sit and think. Suddenly a car stops opposite the Mac’s, squealing its tires. A man gets out and hurries into the store. This SOB looks like bad news: dirty blue jeans, steel-toed construction boots, baseball bat in his right hand . . . panty hose pulled over his face like a mask. Puta madre! Mario surreptitiously presses the emergency button. “Give me all the fucking money, bitch . . . now!” “No money, este. Today nobody buy no thing.” Mario opens the cash register and takes out forty dollars, which he puts on the counter. The man approaches, snatches the forty dollars and raises the bat, crashing it down on Mario’s head. “I said give me all the fucking money, man!” Again the bat goes up, comes down. In those seconds (such relative spaces of time), Mario thinks fleetingly of his threechildren,hiswife,Dolores.Bloodoozesfromhisforehead. He takes one, two, three blows. And then, like lightning, the hazy image of his dead brother strikes him: the checked shirt that identified him among the bodies in the mass grave. Possessed suddenly by an immense, uncontrollable fury, he snatches away the bat. With the strength of arms that have polished floors now for ten long years here in Canada, it pounds down on the masked giant with torrential rain and uncontainable lightning bolts. Furious, crazed, vengeful, he cries and laughs and finally succeeds in felling the robber. He pulls off the mask to see his face, but there’s only another blurry mask behind. He tries vainly to engrave the robber’s face in his memory, but dizziness defeats him and he falls. Cloudburst 158 Chito had already been arrested for organizing student protests. He’d spent two months in jail. He’d just gotten out and was living in hiding; the police were looking for him. On that rainy night, Chito had decided to leave, but not without first speaking to his little brother. “Mario, cipote, wake up.” Mario, a thin boy with a white complexion and jet black eyes, wakes up. A thunderbolt momentarily lights up the dark adobe shack. Chito leads him outside and another thunderbolt lets him see the boy’s dark eyes. “Listen, vos: I’m leaving. I can’t stay. They might come looking for me and—” Another flash of lightning interrupts him. “I don’t know if I’ll be back, but I woke you up so you could make some promises to me. . . . Did you hear me, mister?” Mario promises to be a good boy (not to touch drugs, to study hard) and watches Chito leave, like so many times before, at midnight, disappearing into the rain of the darkness. Two months later they called in the parents to identify the body. They had Chito on a metal table covered with a stained white sheet. The father, a humble tobacco grower, wept sorrowfully on the mother’s shoulders. And the mother, who very calmly only said: “You’re mistaken, sir. No, sir, that’s not my son.” Chito, however, had to be some mother’s son. The Mac’s store is open twenty-four hours a day and Mario has the night shift. The store has large front windows that face the parking lot. In this place, on the outskirts of the suburbs (the outskirts of the outskirts of the city), no more than ten souls ever turn up at night. It’s two in the morning and Mario is seated behind the Mac’s counter while his three children and wife, Dolores, are sleeping peacefully at home. Mario stares, absorbed in the darkness of the night. He’s just made some coffee; before that he swept the store’s polished Felipe Quetzalcóatl Quintanilla 159 floors. And now he’s sitting down to look at a magazine as the darkness and the rain outside swallow him up. The lights of a vehicle pass slowly through the parking lot, but promptly disappear. Mario gets up. He walks toward the front windows. Five hundred metres away, the red lights of the vehicle . . . now green . . . return...