Ismael Cortinas
BY MERCEDES ESTRAMIL, TR. TRAVIS PRICE
Ismael Cortinas, who shared his name with a nearby town, drank his fourth gin of the morning seated in front of his monitor. He was watching a Miyazaki film and checking his phone. While Princess Mononoke kept hell at bay, he waited for the call. In the fridge, some lettuce heads were rotting, and outside, a storm blew against the window screen, making checkered patterns of dust on the glass. For winter, it was more like a rageful summer. School was going badly. He was losing his reputation as a hard-working student and gaining one as a rebel and a degenerate. Some female classmates had forced themselves to look past his all-black incisor tooth and his eyelids that trembled when he was nervous. Lying in his bed, one of them told him the twitch was an emotional response called blepharospasm. He kicked her out and never saw her again.
His grandparents were inconsolable at the funeral. People went by offering their condolences, genuine or not, and when they reached him they settled for some pat expression. Your mom loved you very much. Or Your mom was a wonderful person. Always “your mom.” He would have preferred “Your mother,” or just her name, Jessica, but he understood what that name conveyed: the working poor, shanty towns, a skirt cut too short.
He had called his father when he finally heard from the hospital at 2 a.m. The man was in a deep sleep and couldn’t figure out who was calling. His father didn’t go to the wake or to the funeral, but he sent a pretty wreath of flowers, moderately priced, with an s missing on the card: Rest in peace, dear Jesica.
***
Ismael entered a bodega in one of those interior towns, the kind that are really more like villages, with fewer than two thousand inhabitants. The bodega owner looked at him in disbelief, not because she couldn’t recognize a robbery, but because she’d never been robbed like this: by a normal-seeming young person who announced his intention with a sparkling bit of oratory.
The first time he’d robbed a place, he’d gone in to buy cigarettes and found an elderly and slow-moving woman behind the counter. It was as easy as stretching his hand toward the till and taking what was there. Then he paid as if he hadn’t done anything wrong, and the old woman, who knows why, had simply acquiesced to him and his six-foot, three-inch frame. The second time was at a small grocery about to close for the afternoon siesta. The woman working there was sewing booties for a baby, and he told her he had a gun but didn’t want to hurt her. If she just gave him some food he would leave right away. She filled a cloth bag with supplies. He asked for forgiveness before he left, saying he had never robbed anyone before, that life had been unkind to him, and that he understood he would never enter the kingdom of God.
The robberies were always in tiny towns that he passed through just the once: Rafael Perazza, Cardona, San Bautista, Nico Pérez, Colorado, Ecilda Paullier; places like that, unassuming and forgotten. He would leave Jessica’s Suzuki Alto a few blocks from his target and amble the rest of the way like any other mochilero. Never once had he glimpsed any sign of the cops, not even the transit police. It was as if there were some radar steering law enforcement away from him, or a puppet-master yanking them out of his path. It was true he had a gun, and it was loaded. Its original owner was a man from Jessica’s past, a self-important freemason from Melo. Jessica had always filled their home with items that belonged to others—usually men she briefly dated. When Ismael cleaned out the house, he connected the objects he found with people he’d long forgotten. Finding the Glock had surprised him. Who forgot a Glock? he thought. Later he remembered the man, a hard drinker with an insincere laugh.
***
The speech he gave the bodega owner was literary: “Esteemed madam, I have a gun. I’m a miscreant, just as you yourself are a good person. It is not the fault of society nor you nor anyone else that I’m here, only that I happened to turn out this way. I beg your forgiveness: If you give me all the money you have or that you can spare, you’ll never see me again. Thank you.”
He had other versions of that speech to hand, ranging from pleading to threatening, depending on whom he was robbing. This one was more grandiose because the woman was reading Dostoevsky and seemed distracted. Ismael didn’t know a thing about literature except what he’d learned in high school. A teacher with the surname Bozán had lent him “A Gentle Creature,” a novella he read in one go. He never returned the book.
The bodega owner told him no.
“What do you mean ‘No’?”
“No.”
“I’m robbing you. I’m not kidding. This isn’t a toy.”
He held the Glock sideways so that she could see it and gave her a hyena smile that revealed his bad tooth.
“So what? Maybe it’s not loaded.”
“I promise you it is.”
He knew because he had shot it once at a very strange and solitary flamingo that he saw in Arroyo Grande, just north of Ismael Cortinas, the village that was his namesake. He’d missed, and the bird, deaf or apathetic, hadn’t moved. For days after, though, the flamingo, who itself could have been the product of a dream from another world, had pursued him in his mind. He had quit drinking, so it wasn’t delirium. It was something he couldn’t explain, and he prayed to God that it wasn’t guilt.
Ismael Cortinas kept the pistol pointed at the woman while he looked around the store. There was a fragile wooden shelf, half-eaten by termites, holding various products: soaps, condoms, insect repellent, bandages, batteries, packs of cigarettes. On his right in a cooler he could see sodas that promised happiness. Another cooler had beer and energy drinks. To his left, a tall and narrow display with snacks, cookies, and packaged sweets, all with their own health warnings. Atop a metal stepladder, on the highest rung, dozed a cat.
“Give me the money or I’ll kill you, you old bitch.”
“Oh, what happened to ‘Esteemed Madam?’ Did you forget that part?”
He really looked at her then. She’d lived some 50 miserable years. She had hard eyes, like women from the port, a permanent worry line between her eyebrows, and her hands hidden below the counter. But in this abandoned town, dusty and wild and at the end of the world, it was unthinkable that there could be a gun.
“What happened, asshole? Cat got your tongue?”
“Give me the money—everything you have.” His eyelids danced. He felt the weight of his 18 years, the choices he’d made.
“I think you suffer from an underdeveloped hippocampus. I told you no.”
Where had he heard hippocampus before? It was something mythological, he mused, but he wasn’t sure what exactly. Maybe Jessica had said the word once, reading to him from a children’s book on one of the nights when it was just the two of them—which was many nights before she started drinking. They’d watch anime together and she’d read him all kinds of stories, like mothers and sons do in normal families.
“And you’re not the flamingo.”
“What?”
“Goddammit, you’re done!”
The shot was heard all over town and reverberated through fields not yet sown. When the police arrived, the puddle of blood had congealed atop one of the ancient checkered floor tiles, most of them already puckered, as if the earth were sucking them down. The bodega owner, a retired police officer who was adored in the community, was despondent. She swore she hadn’t shot to kill. She never forgot that day and never went back to Dostoevsky. It took her weeks, months even, to sleep like she had before, through the night and without sudden lurches. And even then, she dreamed of a pink flamingo crossing just in front of her, flying with an unreal splendor.
