Benny Quinto
My name is Benny Quinto. I came from Nicaragua, baby. The Land of Lakes and Volcanoes. Been here eight years almost to the day.
Back in Nicaragua I was studying to be in the priesthood. I thought I heard God calling my name from up in the clouds somewhere, man, and I thought he was telling me I was the chosen one. This deep, booming voice. I wasn’t even high. Drugs hadn’t come into my life yet. But I think I must have been hallucinating or something, because I’ve had conversations with God since then and He’s like, Nope, don’t know what you’re talking about, Benny. Never said all that about you being the one. Sorry to disappoint.
A few buddies of mine left Nicaragua to come make some real bones over here. Wasn’t no money for pinoleros like us back home. Politically, you know, it wasn’t so bad anymore. Somoza was long gone, the contras were nothing but a memory. But leaving the poverty of Nicaragua to go to the richest country in the world didn’t take much convincing.
I left when I was twenty. Told a dude I would pay him two thousand dollars to bring me over, three hundred up front. Took me a while to scrape it together. Three hundred dollars! In Nicaragua you could live off that for a while. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I stole some of it from the church. Stuffed the offering envelopes up under my shirt one week when I was supposed to be doing my Eucharistic Minister duties and walked out with it. I was gonna do what I had to. I’m like that. Get something in my head and it’s like some kind of block. No way to get around it. I just have to bulldoze through.
I got shunted into this house in Arizona until I could pay the rest of the money. I mean, they told us we were in Arizona. It was me and twelve other guys. But we coulda been in Russia for all we knew. We coulda still been in México, which is where we had to come up through to get over. It’s like a funnel. Woulda been nice if Nicaragua bordered with the U.S. but it doesn’t, so up through México I went.
That house in Arizona, that place was intense. I didn’t see the sun for, like, weeks, and Arizona is one of those places that might as well be on the sun, that’s how sunny it is, so it’s nuts that we never saw it. The blinds were shut and there were heavy bedspreads over all the windows. And me and those guys, we were like cockroaches, crawling over each other at all hours of the day. There was no room to move. Just sit tight, keep the faith. I don’t even know why we had to pay so much money. I mean, it wasn’t no Ritz-Carlton. Wasn’t even no Ritz cracker box. But that’s the thing. It’s just extortion. Top to bottom.
I wanted to get the hell out of there, so I called an uncle I used to be close with—I mean he used to come to my birthday parties when I was a kid and he would take me to the beach sometimes and let me play in the water while he smoked and hit on girls—but he didn’t have the funds. I didn’t even bother to ask my mom and pop. Those two never had nothing. You know how the gringos say it? No dee-nair-oh moo-chah-choh. If that weren’t the truth, I never would have left Nicaragua to begin with.
One of the guys in the house started dealing for the smugglers. He earned out his fee in two weeks. I didn’t know how else I was gonna get out of there, so I signed up, too. Figured I’d burn through it, you know, just get it done, until I had enough to leave, and then I’d be on to bigger and better things. Problem is, you get a taste for that kind of money and it’s hard to go back to anything else.
I was out on the streets in Phoenix. We had certain places we always hit up. White kids who wanted to score. Came with their parents’ money rolled up in their fists, acting all sly as they handed it over, thinking they were so street, but the truth was you could name your price with those kids and whatever you told them, they would pay. They didn’t know any better, most of them. There were some real junkies who came by, too. Some pretty hard dudes. I got tangled up with a few of them once—just a stupid fight—and the next thing I knew, I woke up one morning busted out of my mind, bleeding out my side. I’d been stabbed and didn’t even know it. That’s when I decided it had to end.
I hitched a ride out of Arizona with a guy who was driving to Baltimore. But the drug scene there was wicked. Ten times worse than in Arizona. I was trying so hard to be on the straight and narrow. I was talking to God about it all the time. I was like, Where’s your deep voice now, God, when I really need help? And then I swear I heard it. He told me to split. To where? I asked Him. Funny thing about God, though. He doesn’t always give you the answers, not right when you ask for them anyway. ’Cause I didn’t hear nothing. But I knew. I gotta leave. So I went down to the Greyhound station and said, Here’s how much money I have. Give me a ticket. And the bus brought me to Delaware. It’s not paradise, but at least here I can be at peace. It was never like that for me in Nicaragua. And not at my first few stops here neither. I flip burgers now at the King. Used to be at Wendy’s but they gave me, oh, man, the worst shifts, so I switched it up. A person needs regular sleep, you know! I ain’t getting any younger! But I feel settled here. I took a couple nasty turns, but I ended up all right.
Alma
Maribel took achievement tests and cognitive tests. She went through evaluations with both a psychologist and an educational diagnostician. They gave her written exams in Spanish to see whether she could write a sentence, whether she could write a paragraph, whether she could do certain math problems. We had a meeting where the psychologist asked if there had been any complications while I was pregnant with Maribel. She asked if Maribel had met her developmental milestones as a child. When did she start to talk? When did she start to walk? Phyllis sat next to me, translating everything. Frustrated, I replied, “She wasn’t born like this. It’s all just because of the accident. Don’t you see it in the reports?” And the psychologist said yes, yes, she saw it, but these were standard questions that she was required to ask.
And then, after everything, the district told us what we already knew: Maribel had a traumatic brain injury that was classified as mild, but it was severe enough that she was eligible for special education services. She would be transferred to Evers.
I nearly wept with joy when I heard the news. Now, I thought—finally!—we would move forward.
They sent a different bus to get her, one that was stumpy and brown. I saw her off the first day and was waiting for her when she came home that afternoon.
“How was it?” I asked.
“What?”
“How was school?”
“Fine.”
“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“I’m tired,” she said, and I nodded, deflated because I had expected more. I had expected her to come home full of energy, gushing about the other students and her teacher and how much she had learned. I had wanted the school to act like a switch, something that would turn her on again from the second she walked through the door.
“Give it time,” Arturo told me later that night when he detected the disappointment in my voice. “You’re always so impatient. It was only the first day.”
Every afternoon Maribel brought home reports from the school that Phyllis translated into Spanish. They were formal and brief and said things like “Maribel is unresponsive and unengaged, even when she is directly addressed in Spanish.” “She is withdrawn and rarely interacts with other students, even in activities that require no verbal communication.” “Maribel has a limited attention span and often fiddles with her pencil or other desk supplies during class time.”
Day after day I read the letters, hoping for better news, trying to believe that eventually it would come.
After school, I sat with Maribel at the kitchen table and helped her with her homework. In addition to everything else, she was expected to learn English, and one day the teacher sent home an English worksheet with nine boxes, each filled with a drawing of a face making a different expression. At the top of the sheet was a story in Spanish about a young Chinese boy, Yu Li.
“Do you know who this is?” I asked Maribel.
She shook her head.
“Can you read the story?”
“Okay.”
I waited while she stared at the paper. Was she reading? I wondered. Or just looking at the words? I said, “Why don’t you read it out loud?”
She did, although haltingly. I had to help her with any word longer than four letters. It was a story about how Yu Li came to the United States from China with his parents. He went to school one day and some of the kids taunted him and some of them were kind. But Yu Li didn’t know English, so he was bewildered.
When Maribel was finished, I said, “Now you need to write down words that describe how Yu Li was feeling in the story.” Maribel looked at me. There was an eyelash on her cheek. I picked it off and held it on the tip of my finger, then blew it away. “Do you remember what happened in the story? What was one emotion Yu Li felt?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you read the story to me.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Do you need to read it again?”
“I already read it.”
“I know. But you said you didn’t remember anything.”
“Okay.”
“Maribel, how did Yu Li feel in the story?”
She shrugged.
“Do you remember when he went to school?”
“Yes.”
“And what happened to him at school?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were the kids nice to him?”
“Yes.”
“And how do you think that made Yu Li feel?”
“Who is Yu Li?”
I took a deep breath. It’s okay, Alma, I told myself. It’s only the beginning of the year. She’s just getting started.
When Arturo came home later and kicked off his boots, he asked what we were working on.
“I don’t know,” Maribel said.
“Math?” he guessed.
“Yes,” she said.
“We’re working on English today,” I said.
“?Inglés!” Arturo beamed. “Once you learn English, you can teach it to me, too. Here, does this sound like something? Howdy dere, pardner.” He made a clownish face, and I knew he was trying to get Maribel to laugh, trying to extract the tiniest hint of the girl she used to be. It was something we both did. We cast lines out again and again hoping to reel something in, anything to sustain us, but she never bit.