El Salvador

When Bobby was twenty-one and newly arrived in America, he met a girl from El Salvador. Her name was Rebecca, and she was young, too young for him really, still in high school. Sixteen going on seventeen like that song from that old movie.

Rebecca was short with straight black hair that hung down past her waist and left loose so that it flew about when she walked down the streets of Fort Lee.  Her mother was a housekeeper: the employers had sponsored her and then Rebecca and her little sister. Rebecca had a green card that was actually more blue: Bobby did not.

He was from Venezuela. Rebecca was from the surfing town of El Tunco. “I will take you there,” she promised. “One day.” She had a smile so bright that lit up Bobby’s face as well as her own. “You will love it.”

Bobby had never surfed, kind of doubted he had the balance for it: he was from Caracas and even though that was less than an hour from the sea if you had a car, he did not have a car, and he had never been there. Never even thought about it, but when Rebecca talked about catching waves, he could almost taste the salt and feel the water spray into his face. She’d been surfing since she was small; her father had taught her: he had been a surfing instructor before he was a soldier.

Bobby was working as a porter in a big condo; the super was the uncle of a friend of Bobby’s and hadn’t asked for papers. Bobby and Rebecca used to go to the boiler room and kiss for hours. Only kisses though because she was too young, too precious, too religious. She worse a gold cross round her neck at all times. Her kisses tasted of the ocean and he could feel the swell of the waves when they embraced.

Bobby got a tattoo: B & R and something that was supposed to be a surfboard, but could have been anything.  Their romance hadn’t lasted: Rebecca had big plans for herself—college, teaching—and some surfing.  And Bobby had a harder and harder time holding onto regular jobs. He drank a bit too much. He smoked weed late into the night. He started working day labor jobs where no one asked anything except if he was strong. He still sent as much money as possible home to his grandmother and younger brothers. And he got married to a woman from Colombia: Melisa, who worked as a domestic and wore a huge cross around her neck.

“Are you that religious?” Bobby finally asked. The cross was as big as a hand.

“I’m not religious at all,” she said and tossed her hair: hers was short and dyed blonde, but she tossed it like a pro. She never explained the cross to him except to make statements that might (or might not) have been a joke. “My cross to bear,” Melisa had said as she bore him two children: Gabriel and Melanie. American children. Children Bobby had barely seen grow up. Melisa had left him for a Puerto Rican with brilliant blue eyes, brilliantined hair and a fiancee Visa. Bobby hadn’t much missed her, but he did miss the kids. Or the idea of them as he sat in his 1994 Chevy pick-up truck, smoking, sometimes with a woman he’d picked-up on his way home because he was still a very handsome man with his own 80-watt smile.

Lots of days he’d been the one taking care of his kids while Melisa cleaned houses and danced in clubs. Bobby would stand in the Home Depot parking lot and hope someone would need an extra pair of hands, a strong back, someone who’d work for peanuts. Like a circus elephant. Like an animal. In the summers he nearly broke his back in the cranberry bogs in south Jersey, his hands so stained they stayed red through Halloween. After the divorce, he tried to see the kids every month, give them the toys they begged for, get his fill of their tales. But they’d grown up American and busy, and he hadn’t seen them in five or six years.

Sometimes Bobby dreamed of going back to Venezuela, imagined life there couldn’t possibly be worse, but then he’d meet some young guys just up filled with their desire to grab the suena Americano. “It’s no good there, friend,” they all said. “There’s no work. The gangs. The crime.” So he’d stayed, stayed back in the shadows.

He was surprised when he was found: he’d thought he was a ghost, invisible. He tried talking to them, but even after twenty-five years, his English was still poor, and they weren’t listening anyway. They looked at his tattoo and nodded and next thing he knew he was on a plane.

“We going back home?” someone else asked, and Bobby imagined arriving back in Caracas. But they didn’t go home, and now he was here. If this place could be called here.

Now his hands were stained with the egg from yesterday’s breakfast: they weren’t even given spoons or mattresses or a last phone call. Bobby wondered if Rebecca came back to El Salvador maybe for a vacation with the family she surely had. When he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine her on a surfboard, her long black hair flying in the wind as she rode one perfect wave after another.