"Donnelly, Marcos - El Hijo De Hernez" - читать интересную книгу автора (Donnelly Marcos)

MARCOS DONNELLY

EL HIJO DE HERNEZ

*
"His fingers, they noticed, were ever straying As if impatient to be playing . .
."

-- Robert Browning

The neighborhood's north boundary was East 82nd Street. When I was growing up,
I'd watch the black kids play basketball there, on the pavement inside the
eight-foot fence around Saint Malachy's church and Catholic school. The priests
left the gate unlocked from sun-up to dinner time. There was never any trouble
there, no drugs, no blades or guns, no gang members showing colors. Not on the
church grounds. The priests just figured there'd be no trouble, and there
wasn't.

I saw Saint Malachy's in the newspaper last week. I think I did. One of those
helicopter photos, and not a real high-up picture like the ones the LAPD
helicopters take. It was low, a Times shot. The crazy-mother journalists feel
it's their life duty to keep taking those pictures. If you ask me, the cops got
the right idea: stay high, real high.

The photo showed seven towers on what used to be the Saint Malachy's grounds.
You could make out the pole for the basketball hoop, still there west of the
rectory. Three of the towers looked finished already, sprouting out of the
skeleton frame of the church like accidental steeples. They're like the hundred
or so other towers around the old neighborhood: tall, rungy, like concrete
spider webs pulled from the middle on up toward the sky, and decorated with
dishes, stop signs, soda cans. Other bizarre stuff.

Bizarre stuff . . . the stuff you mention last. Like the tower at the comer of
10th and Compton, made up all of skulls. That one's forty-five feet high. And
the one at Imperial and Avalon, the one called Las Munecas. Dolls, hundreds and
thousands of them, cemented into the pipe and chicken-wired struts -- stuffed
dolls, rag dolls, china dolls, Cabbage Patch dolls, and every race, shade, color
and creed of plastic Barbies.

I don't know, of course, but I like to think that Mr. Pietr had my brother Luis
help build that one, the tower Las Munecas. That would be fitting. That would
have made Mama proud.

I still hear him sometimes. Not my brother Luis, but Mr. Pietr. And not just at
night, either.

"Jose," he says. "Jose, come build the city." And there's the music, the sweet,
sweet, goddamn music behind his words. And the only thing holding me back is