Oscar could see that the entranceway was dark, but he shook the bars of the gate anyway. The doorman who had stood here the last time was not here now. “Alo,” Oscar said, and waited, and then he shook the bars again. He could see a boy asleep on a cot just inside the gate. It was three a.m., it was one of San José’s worst neighborhoods, and it had been a long walk to get there. Oscar had no intention of walking back to the centro until he knew if Martín was inside. “Alo,” Oscar said again, and finally the boy pushed the sheet off his legs and padded barefoot to the gate, grinding at his eye sockets. “Is Martín home?” Oscar asked.

“I don’t think so, but come on in if you want to so badly.” The boy opened the gate for Oscar, gave him a little shove to get his slow feet clear of the door, and climbed back into the cot and curled up against the wall. Even those ten-year-old cacheros knew how to push Oscar around.

Oscar had been shuffling, slow to enter, it was true. He knew there was a reason to watch his step. He instinctively covered his nose and mouth with his hand and breathed through his teeth as he looked down. There it was, just like last time: mines of dog feces leading all the way into the house. When he’d come here with Martín, Martín had ushered him into the first room off the hall without mentioning anything about the dogs that must have been under house arrest, and by the time they’d gotten into the room Oscar quickly became preoccupied with the sight of Martín undoing his belt and his own nerves and forgot to pursue it.

“What is this?” Oscar asked through his hand.

“Welcome to Sin Alley,” said the boy, and pulled the sheet over his head. In the gesture of rejection he exposed his feet, which flopped like fish surrendering on the bug-eaten foam rubber mattress.

“I mean the shit.”

“Cinderella says, ‘No cops would ever walk through this much shit.’” The boy’s feet disappeared under the sheet.

“He’s right about that,” Oscar said, and started down the hall.

“Who’s in charge of walking the dogs?” Oscar asked. Lorenzo’s long eyelashes did bat, but to Oscar it did not seem deliberate, just the involuntary actions of a pretty boy. “They’re Cinderella’s. No one messes with them. But I have been known to mop up after them.”

Two large black dogs of an ambiguous breed lay on the kitchen floor. Oscar could hear at least one other scratching against a door that lead to the kitchen. That door had a chain on it.

“There are two other dogs inside that room, they haven’t been out in two years,” Lorenzo told Oscar. “And I don’t mean out of the house. I mean out of that room.” Lorenzo said this with a know-it-all smirk.

“Cinderella keeps them in there? Why?” Oscar was horrified.

“I think they’re guarding his things.”

Lorenzo was eating gallo pinto with a big spoon and taking drags off a joint between bites. Lorenzo was blond-haired and fair, but the way he ate—hunched over, speaking with his mouth full—repelled Oscar, despite the kid’s good looks. Oscar busied himself by checking the soles of his sneakers, then, since he was down there, he rolled up the cuffs of his jeans for the sake of something to do. A mouse skittered along the kitchen counter, followed closely by another.

“This place is truly filthy,” Oscar said.

Lorenzo laughed, shooting a few grains of rice out of his mouth. “You think?”  

“Why doesn’t someone clean it up?”

Lorenzo picked up the last bean from his plate and flicked it towards the counter top, where the mice had passed. “Listen, mae, I’ll give you some advice. If you’re going to be hanging around here, you’d better not say anything about the dogs or how dirty it is or anything else in front of Cinderella, because Cinderella will ream you. I’ve seen him do it before. So watch yourself.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Oscar said. He wasn’t scared. This kid was like fourteen.

“He’ll turn you into a mouse. He’s a witch, you know. Those mice are probably old clients who pissed Cinderella off.”

“Of course,” said Oscar wearily.

“Why don’t you go into the salon?  There are guys in there if that’s what you want. What are you doing in the kitchen, anyway?”

“I’m waiting for Martín.”

“I told you, he might not come in tonight. If you want a handjob, I can do it. I only do handjobs though.”

Oscar thought about it. “How much?”

“Just five thousand. I’m cheap but I’m good.”

“A toucan for a massage! Do you think I’m an idiot?”

Lorenzo shrugged. “You have nice shoes, and you look nervous. And I am very good.”

“It’s not my first time,” Oscar said, “And I worked very hard to pay for these shoes.”

Lorenzo rolled his eyes. “Three thousand.”   

The metal gate out front was silent. Oscar looked towards the hallway anyway, but it was empty. “One thousand,” he told Lorenzo.

“Cinderella takes one thousand just for the room,” Lorenzo said. Oscar went up to two thousand, and Lorenzo snatched up his plastic plate and tossed it in the sink.

“Just wash your hands first,” Oscar said.

Lorenzo led Oscar through the living room, where other boys sat on flimsy crushed velvet couches, looking at the television and holding bottles of Imperial over their crotches in obscene postures. The volume was turned down low, but Oscar could hear the drowned moans of a woman as she performed oral sex on a man who was an actor in a movie but who was actually receiving oral sex all the same.

“Is it better to give or to receive?” Oscar’s mother had often quizzed him when she was alive. Usually before giving him something he did not need but coveted deeply—a new soccer ball, a frozen boli to slurp on, a twenty-colón coin for a snack during school.

And Oscar replied, “To give, to give, to give!,” and meant it.

Oscar’s mouth was the sweet wet gift to be put in the palm of Martín’s hand, around his member, over his eyelids and under his whiskerless chin. Oscar would greedily hand over the money he’d made sloshing around in beer troughs for the permission to make this offering. To give!

The boys in the salon didn’t appear to register Oscar’s presence, nor did they seem alerted to his potential for generosity. They looked too settled in, considering where they were, staring at the screen with fish-like eyes. Most of them wore jeans and t-shirts, though one looked like he walked straight out of the Duckheads store in the San Pedro Mall, all starched and ironed. There were crumpled cigarette packets on the pocked coffee table, and so many Imperial beer bottles to varying degrees of emptiness (or fullness, depending on how you looked at it) that someone could probably line them up and play a little tune on them with a spoon. The boys’ mouths had fallen into the marginal frown of boredom. Oscar didn’t get a second glance as he followed Lorenzo into the empty room off the salon. If Oscar had walked into the salon alone, they would have livened up a bit, hoping to be picked up themselves. Knowing that didn’t make him feel much better about being ignored.

The unoccupied room was lit by a light bulb dangling on a wire. There was a stove that looked like it had never been used, unattached and shoved against the wall like a regular piece of furniture. Someone had placed a board over the stovetop and on top of that, a bottle of lotion, a condom, a roll of toilet paper, and a bottle of Sanipine. There was the overwhelming disinfectant smell of Sanipine braided with the sharp grassy semen smell, and Oscar concentrated hard on not looking at the sheet as he sat down on it. When he looked up, he was confronted with a faded image of Britney Spears squeezed into a red latex bodysuit.

Lorenzo picked up the bottle of lotion without ceremony, squeezed it, rubbed the lotion between his hands to make it warm, and perched next to Oscar, who closed his eyes as Lorenzo’s hand wrapped around him. Oscar tried to remember Martín’s face, but things got fuzzy. Then he stopped thinking. As soon as he came, though, there was Martín’s face again, right where it had been all week, on the backs of his eyelids.

A tear of suffering, triggered by that other release, filled each eye. Lorenzo was wiping his hands with toilet paper.

“What are you crying about, you sissy faggot?” he laughed at Oscar. “Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy that.” Lorenzo shot the baseball-sized wad of toilet paper across the room and made the shot, though Oscar had noticed earlier there was more toilet paper around the trashcan than in it.

“Yes,” Oscar said. “I did enjoy it.” That was a lie he told to avoid hurting Lorenzo’s feelings. He tucked his shirt into his jeans and paid the boy. He went out through the living room, his head down, and hop-scotched through the corridor, wanting out. The doorman had returned to his post, and he held the gate open for Oscar, and the sleeping boy rolled over, disturbed by the click of the gate.

“Until tomorrow,” Oscar said to the doorman, trying to make a joke out of his situation.  The doorman smiled perfunctorily.

Oscar had never solicited sex on the street, and had no intention to do so the night he met Martín. It was two in the morning and Oscar had just finished his shift at the Bar Burbujas, a somewhat upscale bar where he poured drinks and washed glasses and served bocas of fried tortilla and ceviche in order to pay for his tuition at the University. He was studying tourism, and had landed the job at Burbujas because his English was decent, though even the gringos who came into Burbujas hardly taxed his vocabulary. They said little to him beyond “Imperial, por favor,” though once in a while he’d get a young gringo hell-bent on learning Spanish who seemed eager to talk to anyone who’d respond. Oscar held up his end of the conversation with these gringos in English while they spoke Spanish, which helped him learn some, but his English was sloppy; he needed the discipline of grammar texts and tense drills. But by the time he picked up Martín in Parque Morazán, he hadn’t been going to classes for three months.  He had stopped going to University when his sister Vivi found herself pregnant again and needed help. He’d picked up a few extra shifts at the bar.

Vivi had waited a long time to be pregnant again. Her first child, Marielos, was now twelve, and she seemed to be the only soul God would give up for Vivi, which depressed her to no end. Twelve years later, God came through. Vivi had been so desperate for her husband’s Y chromosome to meet up with her X that she couldn’t wait out the last months just to find that her hopes had been dashed, and went to the Clínica Bíblica complaining of stomach pains so they would give her an ultrasound.

It was not a public hospital and it was not cheap, but Vivi was given ultrasound, and the ultrasound did show the little rice-grain of a penis, or whatever it looked like. Oscar couldn’t imagine. Vivi, relieved, thought a son would bait her husband back into the house, full-time.

“Juan Carlos is God knows where,” Vivi, seven months pregnant, said. “He takes his truck to Limón and I don’t see him for days. He says he doesn’t have to go anywhere until Tuesday, and then Sunday morning I wake up and he’s gone and so is the truck! Shouldn’t he just leave me altogether if he’s going to be such a son of a whore?”

“Do you want me to come there?”

“Yes,” she’d said, “And bring some eggs and coffee. He didn’t even leave me a rojo to buy food with.”

Vivi asked for food rather than money, but Oscar gave her money anyway. She was his sister. And little Marielos, who wound up doing at least half of the housework, she’d certainly earned some treats. If Oscar didn’t help them, who would? It wasn’t a lot of money but say something happened and Juan Carlos wasn’t around for the next trip to the clinic?

But so far nothing had happened except trips to the super for rice and beans, lard and Sanipine, batteries for Marielos’ CD player, cherry-flavored gelatin to make Vivi’s fingernails stronger and prevent split ends.  And so when he met Martín in the Parque Morazán, he had some money to burn.

*

He chose to forgo his habitual route through Parque España, and pass, instead, through the tall-treed Parque Morazán, where all sorts of bad things were known to happen at this hour of the night; knowing that, especially because his shoes were nice, he might be the one to feel the knife-edge pressing cold into his throat, Oscar felt the strangest sensation: a total lack of fear. He had avoided this park for years because he was afraid of the people in it, but walking across it as he was now, going inside, he was now one of those people, implicated. And the lack of fear surprised him and was not entirely comforting.

Martín was standing under a tree with his hand behind his back, slick-haired, green-eyed, waiting, watching Oscar walk towards him, and Oscar saw him look down and notice his shoes before his gaze returned to Oscar’s face. But who was afraid? What was Oscar afraid of losing, then, his money? This guy was so beautiful, and so tragic for whatever brought him to this park, that Oscar would gladly have handed him the burning wad had the stranger asked for it.

Instead, he was being offered something for it. “Do you want to go somewhere?”

Oscar didn’t bother to bargain, afraid that a tactical mistake would betray his naïveté, and agreed to Martín’s price of five thousand colones.

“My apartment’s a bus ride away,” he told Martín. This was a lie that Oscar told out of fear. His heart beat under his adam’s apple and his palms were so shiny they looked doll-plastic.

“I know a place,” Martín said. He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and led Oscar south through San José, walking slightly ahead of Oscar, though Oscar did try to keep up.

“Where is it that we’re going?” Oscar asked.

“Just a place I’ve been crashing for a few weeks,” Martín replied without turning his head. They passed through the Plaza de Cultura, where Oscar noticed several other boys about Martín’s age, sixteen or so, standing alone, or sitting on curbs and steps, waiting.

“Where were you born, San José?”

This time Martín did look at Oscar.  “Look,” he said, “I’d prefer not to talk.”

“Okay,” said Oscar, but he was hurt. Then he remembered he was in a position to demand things.

“What am I paying you a toucan for if you can’t meet such a simple request, for conversation?”

Martin looked sideways at him—weary, condescending—and sighed.  “All you playos want is to talk, talk, talk, be told you’ve got a nice ass, well, you can forget it.  I’m going to let you blow me because you’re paying me. And you’d better be good.”

The last comment, combined with the derogatory playo, confused Oscar, but at least he was pretty confident in his oral skill.

“At least tell me where you’re from,” Oscar said.

“San José.  Now callate.”

Oscar did shut up, relieved to hear that Martín was not from Cartago. He wanted to know how long Martín had been prostituting himself, but wondering about that led to speculation about how many men he might have slept with, which made Oscar worry about HIV, so he stopped thinking about that. For some reason, it was his niece Marielos whose image emerged to fill the vacated space in his thoughts. Recently Marielos had cut her waist-long hair into a feathered bob that fell just below her chin, and the haircut seemed to have changed Marielos’ personality completely. Even her smile had changed. She used to show joy with all her teeth, and her china eyes closed into little slits; now she smiled with her mouth closed, which created a puckered dimple in her right cheek that Oscar had never noticed before. Something was going on with Marielos. The hardness in her body and the softness in her soul seemed to be trading places. And Oscar did not like it. He missed the sweet, small Marielos who would jump into his arms.

Martín led him down the street where all the Chinese restaurants stood shoulder to shoulder, their grates down for now. Across the metal slats of Dynasty, someone had spray painted in red, “Chinos eat mice,” and someone else had tried to cross it out in black. One block further south, Martín stopped in front of a door marked with an exhaust-smudged plaque, and a man dressed in a black t-shirt opened the door for them. Oscar held his breath.

Kneeling in front of Martín, Oscar held his hands in the air, and they shook.

“Do you like it?” Martín taunted, holding his penis, which was rather impressive.

“Please let me touch it,” Oscar said.

“You’ll have to beg some more, reina.”

“Please, please, permit me.”

Martín was leaning back on the bed.  He reached down and took his t-shirt by the frayed bottom and pulled it over his chest, revealing a hairless, boyish chest, and purple nipples.

“Do you want to touch my skin?”

“Yes, please, let me touch you.”

“You can’t touch me anywhere except you know where with your mouth,” Martín said, and the minute Oscar took him, with his trembling empty hands, that’s when Oscar was hooked.

*

After his encounter with Lorenzo, Oscar couldn’t shake the feeling of lard grease on his skin, the image of Lorenzo with his mouth full of gray, half-masticated gallo pinto (specks of which had landed awfully close to Oscar’s arm on the table as Lorenzo spoke), and the awareness of the urine that must have been on his shoes. Several times on the way back to his apartment he lifted up his feet to recheck his soles, even stopping once to take off his right shoe and sniff it, which was a mistake. He left his shoes on the welcome mat and went straight to the shower.

The filth of Cinderella’s house had gotten him thinking about his mother. She would have been mortified by the many ways Cinderella’s house defied the laws of cleanliness. Certainly she had never imagined anything like that house. “Imagínate,” Oscar said to himself, shuddering under the cold water stream, working a new bar of Bactex into a violent lather. Not that his mother had been that kind of a fanatic in practice, only in theory. She mopped; she cleaned the toilet and shower with Sanipine, like any other woman, but it was more what she knew about cleanliness that frightened Oscar enough to run under the cold-water stream each childhood morning.

As a child Oscar had been afraid of cockroaches because he once picked one up as it crawled across his bedroom floor, and his mother smacked his hand so hard that the critter flew across the room and wound up behind his bed, where, in Oscar’s mind, it stayed, tormenting him for months. “You’re unclean now!” his mother said, more afraid than angry.  “Go wash in the pila!” That seemed to be a moment of insanity on Oscar’s mother’s part, since there were cockroaches everywhere in Costa Rica, and no one had a problem stepping on them, though it sometimes seemed superfluous. After that outburst, though, fear rode on the backs of the roaches. He was afraid, also, of Jorge, a Cartago kid who had flaky, red skin on his arms and neck, because his mother told him, “In Biblical times, that child would have had to have announced himself, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ every time he walked through town.” Of course, all sexual acts rendered one unclean, which Oscar knew very well without his mother having to tell him. Especially the ones Oscar thought about.

Oscar’s mother considered herself a devout Christian scholar. She sought out Jews and talked to them about their faith, read the Old Testament and marveled at such an insecure God—the one she feared the most; she knew how quickly insecurity gave way to wrath—then reread the New Testament until she could settle back into the comfort of forgiveness. She made the pilgrimage to the church in Cartago every year, but since she already lived in Cartago, it wouldn’t have been much of a sacrifice to do it from home, so she took the bus to Turrialba and walked all the way back barefoot, her shoes in her hand.

She was very overweight and it was always quite hot, and by the time she reached the church, the soles of her feet were bloody from scuffing the pavement.

Oscar and Vivi's mother dropped dead while hanging the clothes on the barbed wire fence behind the house. She was alone when she died. Oscar had just moved into his own apartment in San José, and Vivi was already married to Juan Carlos. When their mother fell, she was holding one of her giantess-sized bras by the strap, a plastic clothespin not far from her other hand where it lay on the ground. Ana Yanci from next door found her clutching the stretched-out elastic, lying face-down in the dirt. It would have upset his mother to know that she would be found this way, grasping at her intimate apparel. But at least she died before finding out her son was gay.

Most uncleanliness was removed simply by bathing. Oscar soaped himself from head to toe with Bactex and missed his mother badly. He’d shared a bed with her until he was seven, Vivi in the bed next to them, resentful. Nights, sometimes, he’d cry against his mother’s softness, wanting to tell her something, but not knowing what it was. “Hush, mi amorcito,” she would say. “There’s nothing to be sad about,” she said, stroking his hair. He cried hot tears in the shower, thinking of her. When he washed his penis, though, he had to think of something else, especially because he spent more time soaping up this body part than any other, and so he thought of Martín, and was hard again.

*

“Don’t cry for me Costa Rica…coño I wish I could leave you...”

Cinderella sang bitterly as he made his way to the gate, where Oscar waited. He emerged from the kitchen wearing a cheap satin bathrobe that had an accidental fringe of loose threads along the bottom, walking like a queen down the hall, which, to Oscar’s great relief, had been mopped. He was followed by two dogs.

“I’m busy cooking, but please come in and make yourself comfortable in the salon,” Cinderella said, opening the gate.

“I was hoping to see Martín.”

Cinderella pursed his lips, and the skin sunk in below his cheekbones dramatically. Oscar could see that Cinderella had been stunningly beautiful in his youth, pretty like a girl. “Martín’s in the pool hall next door. I hate to go outside because of the neighbors, they all hate me. They’re all afraid of me, of course, but they still say nasty things. Would you like me to call him?”

“Well, I can wait here for a while.” Oscar knew that he could go over to the pool hall himself, but he hoped to get Cinderella to tell him a little about Martín. “May I join you in the kitchen?”

“Yes, come have some coffee,” Cinderella said over his shoulder. Behind him, one of the dogs lifted its leg and peed on an ornamental plant.

Cinderella stirred rice and beans in a wok on a two-burner hotplate. “You’re the sexiest man we’ve had around here in days,” Cinderella said. “Why don’t you let them fight over you in the salon? There are five hot boys in there.”

“I’d like to wait for Martín,” Oscar said. Cinderella pushed the gallo pinto around with a spatula, and seemed to have forgotten about the coffee, which was just as well. Oscar didn’t even want to know what the inside of the coffee maker looked like. “Can you tell me anything about Martín?”

“Well, he’s just like all the other boys around here, completely ungrateful, gorgeous, with a nice big dick. Look at this, here I am, slaving away over the stove, spending all my money on them, and do you think one of them will thank me for giving them a hot meal when no one else will? These boys have sucked me dry. At least Lorenzo mopped the hall for me today.”

“Does Martín live here?”

“With his girlfriend, until she gets herself pregnant, and then they’re out.”

“His girlfriend?” Oscar was surprised, more for the fact that a woman lived in such a house than at Martín having a girlfriend.

Cinderella gave Oscar a pitying smile. “Yes, cariño. His girlfriend. All of these cacheros have girlfriends to prove they’re so macho, and then they have to have eleven kids. They don’t even know how gay they are.” Cinderella turned off the hotplate and left the pinto sizzling in the wok. “They can come get their own food when they’re hungry, the bastards, I’m not going to be their mami today.”

It was two-thirty in the afternoon, and Oscar’s shift started at four. “Maybe I’ll go try the pool hall to see if he’s there,” Oscar said.

“Do that. And I’m going back to bed,” Cinderella said.

“Can I ask you another question?”

“Of course, cariño.”

“Why do they call you Cinderella?”

Cinderella smiled wearily and said, “It’s a long story for another time.”  He padded down the hall towards the room where Oscar had been with Martín.

Lorenzo whispered something to Julio. Julio was even younger than Lorenzo, maybe twelve. The contrast between the two boys went beyond the fact that Lorenzo was pale and blond and Julio was blackberry-dark; Lorenzo looked healthy, had all his teeth, and his teeth were white; Julio had a small scar above his eyebrow, was reticent, and his eyes had a yellow glow. Julio looked like a poor kid from the campo, and Lorenzo had the confidence of a city child.

“We think he’s a witch,” Julio told Oscar.

“He says he is, anyway, and he has this altar in the salon,” Lorenzo said.

Oscar had been too preoccupied to notice any altar when he was in the salon. “So what’s the story with his name? Cinderella’s not a very good name for a witch.”

Lorenzo held his hand up to Julio, who had opened his mouth to begin the story. “I’ll tell it,” Lorenzo said. “His mother was a whore in Alajuela. She had twelve children by twelve different men. She abandoned them all except Cinderella.”

“She sold Cinderella,” Julio put in.

Lorenzo nodded. “She sold him to a rich tipo who worked in San José and was never home and his stepmother was wicked.”

“She didn’t let him play at all, not even soccer,” added Julio.

“Which probably is the reason he turned into a fag. She didn’t believe in playing, and made him clean the house all day long.”

An older boy, around Oscar’s age, entered the kitchen and made himself a plate of pinto, and headed back towards the salon.

“But the stepmother had a daughter, and she loved her, but she didn’t love Cinderella.”

“So she bought Cinderella to do the housework,” Oscar said.

“No, they had servants for the housework,” Lorenzo said. “She just didn’t believe people should be lazy. That’s what Cinderella says. One day, the daughter wanted Cinderella to make her pancakes for breakfast, and it was Sunday, and Cinderella wanted to go to the Evangelical service at the crazy lady's house. The daughter told him he couldn't go to some loca's house and grabbed his hand and dragged him all the way across the room. So Cinderella pushes her into the wall and says, Let me go or I’ll break your little chicken neck.  And the daughter went running to her mother and she came out and said, Listen, you little piece of street trash, you’re the son of a whore, and by the way, get out of my house.”

The older one had not gone back into the salon after all. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen, leaning his hip against the doorframe.

“That’s when Cinderella started living on the streets.” The boy was a man, with a deep, grave voice. “And he lived on the streets for five years. Which is also why he spends every last colón on these boys, so they won’t have to live on the streets like he did, eating ugly bread out of a garbage can. Right, Lorenzo?”

“Right,” said Lorenzo. He looked down at his rice and beans, but then looked up at Oscar and smiled. It wasn’t a totally jaded smile, either.

“When you’re done, you should go back into the salon,” he said to the boys, and the dogs followed him in the direction of the room where Cinderella had gone to sleep.

“Cinderella is a stinky queen, but he is like our mother,” Julio said.

“I hate the idea of boys as young as you in a place like this,” Oscar said, though even saying it gave him a secret thrill.

“I only do handjobs,” said Lorenzo.

“I just let them blow me,” said Julio. “That’s all the old men want. I go with the viejos.”

“The viejos are the best to go with,” Lorenzo agreed. It was dawning on Oscar that they were no longer looking at him as a client; Lorenzo hadn’t seemed to even in the beginning.

“Well, if you don’t get out of here soon, you’ll be taking it up the ass,” Oscar said.

Neither of the boys looked scared. “No way,” said Lorenzo. “I’m out of here any day now. And even if I stayed, I would never do that.”

“You’re a liar,” Julio said. “I saw you go with the Russian, and that’s all he comes here for.”

“No I didn’t,” Lorenzo said.

“Yes he did,” Julio said to Oscar.

Lorenzo rolled his eyes. “You’ve been on the other side of a blowjob once or twice yourself.”

“No I haven’t.”

Oscar covered his mouth with his hand, trying not to laugh.

Lorenzo’s mood had turned. “Why are you always sitting here in the kitchen?” he demanded of Oscar. “Are you one of those religious people who comes here to lecture us about how we shouldn’t be doing this, and then asks us how much?”

“No, I’m just waiting for Martín.”

“Martín? He’s in the salon,” Julio said, and Oscar felt the sweat fill up the lines of his palms.

“If you want another handjob sometime, I’ll lower my price for you,” Lorenzo said to Oscar, blinking his long eyelashes, not winking, and began to clear the table.

No matter what anyone had said, did say, would say, Martín was a beauty, and when you believed in beauty as much as Oscar did, you could not help associating it with goodness. Martín was smoking what looked like a basuko, or else it was just plain pot, laughing with another cachero in the salon. His legs were splayed, his jeans tight, and he was wearing a white ribbed tank top that had a small yellow stain in the area of his heart. No—Oscar was wrong.  The heart was on the other side. That was good; Oscar didn’t appreciate obvious signs.

“I remember you,” Martín said, smiling coyly at Oscar and nearly sending him swooning into the doorframe.

“Can we?”  Oscar pointed at the room where Lorenzo had taken him earlier. Above them, the sky opened up all at once, and the rain filled the house with its noise, which reminded Oscar to look at his watch. It was 3:15; he was going to be late to Burbujas.

The other cachero picked up the remote control and a soccer game appeared on the television screen. Martín walked ahead of Oscar into the room, stepping over a pile of dog shit that sat on the floor in front of the unattached stove.

“Ay!” Oscar took a step back. “This is ridiculous! Those dogs shit in every corner of the house!”

“A dog’s got to do what a dog’s got to do.” Martín lay down on the bed and pulled his shirt up to expose his smooth, brown stomach. “Do you want the same deal for five thousand?”

“I want the same thing but I want you to touch me, too.”

“Six thousand.”

“I only have five.” This was a lie Oscar told because he did need the other thousand for bus fare, and to pay for his dinner.

“I’m giving you a break, but don’t ask for anything extra,” Martín said.

“Please let me kiss you on the mouth,” Oscar whispered.

“You can’t kiss me anywhere,” Martín said, shock-serious. “If you try, you will truly regret it.”

“Martín, you shouldn’t stay in this place, it’s disgusting.”

“I don’t notice.” Martín’s green eyes were glazed.  “Do you want to touch me?” he asked.

Oscar did. “Beg,” Martín said, and Oscar begged.

*

Marielos, Oscar’s niece, had never been a very attractive girl in Oscar’s eyes, though he loved her. Her skin was dark in that way that looked charred, and her eyes were too chinita.  Now, at twelve, the trunk of her body had become perfectly rectangular; the two little pyramids of her budding breasts didn’t seem to belong there.  Oscar could tell she was going to be fat someday.

Vivi was fat already. Lipid-filled pockets of skin folded over her knees. She’d grown a second chin and was working on a third. It was in the genes. Vivi and Oscar’s mother had weighed over one hundred kilos when she finally tipped over and died while hanging the clothes.

“She ate too much lard,” the doctor told them later. “All her little tubes were clogged with it.”

Oscar had stopped putting lard in his food. He learned to add oil, instead, to his rice when he cooked it, and he fried his onions and peppers in Salsa de Lizano. 

Old habits died hard with Vivi. Oscar watched her scoop a whopping dollop of lard into the gallo pinto as she stirred it in the frying pan. Gallo pinto was made from last night’s rice and beans, and Oscar was fairly certain that she’d put in plenty of lard last night, too.

“I’d like some cereal,” Oscar said. He picked an ant out of the sugar bowl before scooping sugar into his coffee.

“Marielos!” Vivi shouted, though Marielos was sitting not two meters away from her, writing something in her school notebook. The notebook was covered in plastic and made a crinkling sound under the pressure of Marielos’ ballpoint. Marielos bent further over her work to finish whatever she was writing, then stood up to go to her mother. Marielos had once shot forward like a housedog when she was called. Now, she stood, balanced her weight on her feet, and walked with her hips jutting from side to side, her litheness lost.

This Marielos seemed to bear no relation whatsoever to the Marielos he’d known for eleven years. Oscar couldn’t make sense of it; it wasn’t as if she’d become a woman in all of six months. She was simply another person altogether.

Marielos stood beside her mother, waiting for instructions with her hand on her hip.  It was a gesture just this side of mockery.

“Get some money out of my purse and go down to the pulpería and get your uncle Oscar some cereal.”

Instead of taking money out, Marielos slung her mother’s purse over her shoulder and went out through the open door.

Oscar took a bitter sip of his coffee. “Wait,” he called, and Marielos stopped in the yard.  The sun reflected off her black hair so that the crown of her head shone white. “I’ll accompany you.” He took a minute to finish his cup. Marielos stood in front of a chayote vine, waiting for him, tapping her foot. To Vivi he said, “Don’t worry, I will pay for the cereal. Cereal is very expensive.”

“Get me some soda crackers, too, and cream cheese,” Vivi said.

Oscar and Marielos walked down the dirt road together, silently at first. Marielos had a smile on her face for a reason Oscar couldn’t fathom.

“Uncle Oscar, I want to tell you something.”

“What’s that, china?”

“I have a boyfriend.”

“No, don’t tell me!” Oscar grabbed her around the shoulders, which Marielos seemed to like. Her body became limp in his hands; there was a receptive feeling to her sudden limberness. Then Oscar thought of something. “Tell me about him.  How old is he?”

“Twenty.” Marielos was smiling so hard it hurt to look at her. Oscar was twenty-three.  He did not smile. He took her firmly by the arm.

“Does your mother know about this?”

“She doesn’t see anything. Papi got mad, though. He went to his house and told him to stay away from me.” Marielos pulled away, stepped over the gutter and onto the sidewalk, and kept walking.

“Does he?”

“No.  I see him almost every day. Papi’s never here to notice, and Mami only cares about Papi being here and the baby. And when he is here they just shut themselves into the bedroom and do it and do it, big belly and all.”

Oscar stopped walking and grunted with disgust.

“Uncle?” Marielos turned around.

“China, please do not tell me any more of these things, I don’t want to hear any of these things you’re telling me.”

“Uncle, don’t be upset! Nelson treats me very well. I want to marry him so I can get away from Mami. The only problem I have is Mami. I don’t like being around her anymore.”

“You should honor your mother,” Oscar heard himself say. It was something his mother used to say to Vivi.

“I know, but I’m sorry,” Marielos said.

Oscar stopped and took her by the arm again. “Listen to me, Marielos. You cannot see this Nelson anymore, and not because I’m going to tell your parents, but rather because there is only one thing that he’s after, and I’m afraid to think...”

With a jerk Marielos reclaimed her arm, doing her best to look annoyed and dignified. “Okay, uncle.” She tried to keep her mouth straight, but a smile forced the set line of her mouth to break. All her teeth were showing. The sun shone off her cheeks.

Oscar’s heart leather pulled away from its sole. There were so many people he cared for who would not let themselves be saved. They walked straight away from love, down the dark alley, and he could do so little to bring them back. Were his open arms not enough?

No, Oscar thought; they were not. He needed to use those arms better. To pull with them. To use hands, to hold on.

On his next visit to Cinderella’s house, Oscar brought two toucans—ten thousand, what Martín charged for the works—and a condom from the United States, left behind by his former lover, a gringo named Jim. Oscar hadn't had sex since Jim had returned to the States.

They were in a hotel near the Coca-cola bus station. Oscar couldn’t force himself to look away from the dirty sheets at Cinderella’s anymore. He’d seen blood once. There was semen and there were other dubious dark circles that the flowered sheets couldn’t camouflage. The last time he’d been there to see Martín, he’d gone afterwards into the bathroom to rinse with mouthwash, and when he’d spit into the sink, the mouthwash went right through the tube and landed all over his shoes. That was infuriating, but the sheets were disturbing. When Oscar had asked Martín how often the sheets were changed, he said, “Once a month, unless someone important shows up.”

Oscar and Martín smoked cigarettes on the bed, probably for different reasons. “Listen, Oscar, I’m going back now, so where’s the money.”

“I can walk you back to Cinderella’s.”

Martín buckled his jeans and clenched his jaw. “No, you can’t.”

“I’d like to go visit Cinderella, I like him.”

“Listen, Oscar, you’re good people, but I don’t want to hang out with you all the time. I don’t understand tipos like you. You’re masculine, but you’re gay. You seem all mixed up, and I’m not in a mood to get mixed up myself.”

“I’m not mixed up at all,” Oscar said. “You are more mixed up than I am. You have sex with five men a day and you think you’re the most macho straight man in San José.”

“Hear me. I do it for the money, Oscar, nothing could be more cut and dry.”

Oscar looked at the lips he’d never kissed. He wanted to tell Martín something, but knew he should not.

“Do you like doing it?” Oscar asked.

“No, I hate it, but how else can I make money like this? And I have to live somewhere.  Cinderella lets me live there for free, but I have to work.”

“Where are your parents?”

“My father’s in hell, probably, and my mother kicked me out because she caught me smoking grass and decided it was rock. She doesn’t know the difference between a joint and a crack bottle.”

Oscar had seen Martín smoke off a crack bottle in the salon, but didn’t mention it. Instead he said, “My mother is dead.”

“You’re better off,” Martín said.

“Martín, why don’t you come live with me? I have an extra room.”

“No,” he said, his eyes cold. “Give me the money, stop trying to turn me into a faggot, and don’t follow me home.”

Martín took the money and left, and Oscar did go to Cinderella’s, but Martín did not come back for the rest of the afternoon. Oscar spent his day off in Cinderella’s kitchen, chewing spearmint gum to keep the heartsickness from rising into his mouth.

 

A hamster cage had appeared next to the hotplate. A blond hamster ran maniacally on its wheel. There was the sound of metal squealing and water dripping from the plastic tube in the sink, and, of course, the scratching sounds of the dogs from inside Cinderella’s secret room.

Juan Antonio charged Oscar three hundred colones for a can of Imperial. He was the man who’d been standing in the doorway listening to the Cinderella story, and he told Oscar he was twenty-five, an old man, and not a cachero, but straightforwardly gay. “I’m the only gay here, except for William, who lives in the back room and lives for nothing but to eat, sleep, and whore. He actually seems to enjoy it. He’s strange.”

“Very strange,” agreed Flaco, a cachero eating toast.

Oscar wanted a second beer but he was running low on money.

“And Cinderella,” Oscar said, “with his wicked stepmother who turned him into a playo by not letting him play soccer.”

Juan Antonio took Oscar’s sarcasm as incredulity.  “Everything those boys told you is true,” he said. “Cinderella has had a horrible life, and he’s such a good person. He lived in a tunnel and had to steal off clothes lines when his clothes got too small. All the other playos hated him because he was such a beautiful boy.”

“So,” Oscar said, making light, “Where’s the handsome prince?”

Juan Antonio placed his palms on the greasy tabletop and lowered his chin, glaring at Oscar. His nostrils splayed like those of an animal angered by its own fear. “I’M the handsome prince, you fuckhead,” he said. Oscar realized his mistake too late; he hurried to erase the smile from his face. Juan Antonio stood up and pushed his chair back so hard it fell, and he left the kitchen without righting it.

Flaco smirked behind his Belmont light. “If you don’t watch out, you’ll wake up and find that you’ve been turned into a hamster,” he said to Oscar. Flaco chuckled so hard it turned into a cough.

 

The pool hall next door was a foreboding place. It was a dark room, filled with bad smells, which Oscar knew from the few times he’d ventured into pool halls: they all had the same reek of man-sweat and spilled beer. Oscar hated pool halls because gays were hated in pool halls, as were women. He spat a chewed wad of gum into the street, unwrapped a new stick, and loitered near the doorway, hoping Martín would exit before he started to look too pathetic, waiting there.  

A girl in a leotard sat outside on the step, waiting also, occasionally glancing inside.  The door of the pool hall was open, and they could see a group of boys playing pool and pretending not to be aware of being watched. The girl in the leotard was thin, but she looked like she’d swallowed a small papaya sideways.

“Is your boyfriend inside?” Oscar asked her. She glanced at him suspiciously. If her skin had not been ashy, her eyes not dull, she might have been a pretty girl.

“Is yours?” she bit.

Oscar did look inside when she said that, hoping for a glance of Martín. Martín was there, angry-looking, a cue in his hand. He handed the cue to a friend and walked out to the step.

“Karla,” he said, and took the girl in his arms. Kissing her with the lips that had never kissed Oscar. His hand resting on her belly.

“What were you waiting for?  I need to talk to you inside,” Karla said, and they walked back to Cinderella’s house without a word to Oscar.

Oscar sat where Karla had sat, trying to feel the warmth her body had left on the concrete, but it was cold. He spat his piece of gum towards the street and reached into his pocket for another stick. The gum landed on the sidewalk. Oscar hoped one of the boys from the pool hall would step in it. Then he realized that was a mean thing to wish for, and stood up, considered the grayish gob on the pavement, wondering if he should pick it up, wrap it in the paper it had come in, and throw it in a trash can. But there were no trash cans in this part of town.

He was still standing there, with his thoughts of gum, when Karla flew out of Cinderella’s gate and landed on the sidewalk, falling on her side. She hadn’t been shoved hard, but she had been shoved.

“That’s it!” Cinderella stood in the doorway with his hands full of clothes. Martín struggled to keep him from throwing them on the sidewalk, too, but they slipped out of Cinderella’s grip, article by article. “You stupid slut, you even wore lycra! How stupid do you think I am?”

“Cinderella, those aren’t my clothes, they’re William’s.” Martín had Cinderella by the wrist.

“I don’t believe you.” Cinderella kicked a shirt that had fallen. “Get out, live on the street if you want to, give birth in the gutter. You’re spoiled fruit, go rot someplace else!”  The gate slammed behind him.

Karla, dusting herself off, was nonplused. “You didn’t tell me he’d kick us out if I was pregnant.”

Martín helped her off the ground. “What do you think, he wants a baby to be born in the middle of Sin Alley and eaten by dogs? Why’d you wear lycra, tonta?”

“You're the one who let me walk in there.”

Martín gathered up the clothes from the sidewalk and left them in a pile next to the gate. “William’s going to be pissed when he wakes up.”

“Where are you going to go?” Oscar asked. They both looked up at him, her eyes curious, his nervous and wide. “I ask because I have an extra room, and you can stay in it if you’d like.” He offered them a piece of paper with his address written on it. Karla took it, and looked up at Martín, her brow wrinkled, questioning.

Inside, Oscar found Cinderella crying in front of his altar. Pink and red feathers framed a statue of Changó, the god of fire and thunder. The boys on the couch watched television and ignored Cinderella, or they moved into the kitchen to get away from the sound of his sobs, which distracted them from the pornographic film they’d seen already anyway.

Oscar touched him on the shoulder. Cinderella’s face was stricken with a child’s sorrow. “I give everything to them. I can’t stand to see a kid on the street. And they treat me so badly, they insult me all the time. They hate me just because I want to have nice things and be around beauty. They don’t love me.”

Cinderella smelled like he hadn’t showered in awhile, but Oscar took him into his arms. “There is love, Cinderella,” Oscar said.  Cinderella’s tears sank into his shirt.

Oscar held him. “I will love you,” Oscar said. “I already do.” Oscar’s own eyes filled with tears.

*

Summer came to San José in December. The three o’clock rains no longer fell; the air stayed dry and warm all day. Oscar lay in his own bed with Martín. Now that he was taking care of Martín, he didn’t have to pay him for each session, and Martín accepted it. It was considered normal for a cachero to do this, as long as the money came somehow.

“Do you hate Cinderella?” Oscar asked him. He knew Martín was still whoring there, though Martín pretended not to be.

“Why would I hate him? He’s like a mother and a father to me. He took me in when I had nowhere to go, and he fed me when I had nothing in my belly.”

“But what you’ve had to do.”

“What I do is a sin,” Martín said, “But God forgives sins when you stop doing them.  Isn’t it in the Bible like a thousand times?” 

There was a quote Oscar knew from Isaiah. He knew it well enough to quote it, and so he did. “God says, ‘Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do all evil; Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.’”

Martín asked Oscar to repeat this, and Oscar did, and Martín’s face went blank for a moment. “What does that mean, ‘judge the fatherless’?”

“Call us bastards, I guess,” Oscar said.

“Well, I may be a bastard forever, but I won’t always be a sinner. I’ll have an honest life someday.” Martín glared at Oscar. But his eyes were the stones and his cheekbones the sharp blade against them, and sparks lit for a moment before dying in the coldness of Martín’s face. “Will you be honest, Oscar?”

Oscar didn’t breathe. “I am as honest as I know how to be, Martín.” That was a lie designed to make Oscar look righteous. He believed if you said something untrue, you could convince yourself that it was true, and that this was the same thing as telling the truth.

Martín let Oscar kiss him, because now he had no choice.

On Tuesday, Martín left the apartment without saying goodbye while Oscar was in the middle of scrambling the last of the eggs.

“Where are you going?” Oscar called after him, but Martín did not hear him, or ignored him, Oscar didn’t know which. He spread a small amount of margarine on a piece of Bredy toast and shoveled the eggs into his mouth like a savage, because no one was there to see the bits of egg caught in the stubble on his chin, or hear the digestive process beginning in his noisy, open mouth. Before Martín had moved in with him, Oscar had always been a neat eater, even at home by himself. But now, though Oscar did not know why, he grew wild when he was alone.

The phone rang and Oscar wiped the egg off his face with a paper napkin. It was Marielos, crying. “Mami pushed me into the barbed wire because she heard I was still seeing Nelson. I have cuts all over my arms.”

“Is your father home?”

“Of course he is, that’s why I can call you and mami doesn’t even care.”

“China, why don’t you pack some things and come stay with me for awhile. Do you have money for the bus?”

“I can take some out of mami’s purse. It’s yours, anyway.” Oscar didn’t correct her.  But he hadn’t given Vivi money in months, because he didn’t have extra to give.

He was not thinking of the stranger Marielos had become. What he was thinking about was getting Marielos, the little girl he loved, away from Nelson, and also that he needed some help with the housework, because Martín was a slob. He let Marielos make plans to catch the bus to the city before he called Vivi to tell her he would look after Marielos for a while.

“I don’t really understand what’s happened between you two,” he told his sister, “but I’ll tell you what I do understand. She is still seeing Nelson, and Cartago is no longer a safe place for her.”

Vivi sighed. “Take her if you want her,” she said. “She’ll get tired of hanging around you and all your faggot friends soon enough.” Oscar ignored the slur, feeling immensely satisfied. He knew Vivi would have been enraged by his smile if she could have seen it, but she couldn’t see it, so Oscar gave himself the allowance of a smile.

When Marielos arrived, Oscar poured hydrogen peroxide on her cuts and bandaged them with gauze, even though the wounds were superficial. Marielos went to sleep in the spare bedroom. Martín came home, wobbling and bumping into things, and Oscar grabbed him by the arm before he could open the door to the room where his niece lay, dreaming of bolis and pizzeria restaurants.

“Marielos is asleep in there,” Oscar whispered.

“Your girlfriend?” Martín smirked.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” Oscar asked, knowing that she was at home, with her parents. They’d taken her back in. Martín couldn’t have been out with her; she hated when he drank and smoked drugs. Oscar knew exactly where he had been. Karla still came around sometimes, despite Cinderella’s house, despite Oscar himself. Oscar suspected Martín went and saw her while he was at work, and also that she hated Oscar. But he was feeding Karla too, and the growing child—she took his money, hate or not.

It wasn’t until Oscar was dressing to go out for groceries the next day, while Marielos lay sleeping in one room, and Martín in the other, that Oscar realized there was something he needed to worry about. He pushed open the door to the spare bedroom.

“China,” he whispered, shaking Marielos gently awake. She squinted in the darkness and rolled over, away from him. She looked adorable, her hair messy and strands of it tangled near her ear. “China,” he said, “I’m going to the super. Will you come with me?”

Marielos moaned no.

“Okay, negra, but stay in this room, okay? I want you to stay in this room until I get back.” But Marielos was pretending to be asleep again. Oscar sighed, and shut the door tightly behind him. At the super, he bought more eggs, some cheese, Corn Flakes, and a box of milk. There would be no more lard-greased gallo pinto for his niece; he would feed her better than Vivi had. Maybe she would even slim down some.

When he walked into the apartment, Oscar heard voices coming from his bedroom. He threw the bag on the table, ignoring the fragility of the eggs, and flung open the bedroom door.

Marielos was leaning, hip jutting out, against the wall; Martín was still under the covers, and Oscar hoped that he had his tangas on. They stopped talking when Oscar appeared in the doorway. Martín looked slightly annoyed with both of them, but it was always hard to tell with Martín. He pulled the covers up to his chin and shifted.

Oscar took Marielos by the arm. “Go put on a sweater, it’s cold,” he told her, “and then come help me make the breakfast.” He shut the door to his own bedroom, looking inside at Martín as the door swung. Martín was lazy, sly, and sleepy. But Oscar thought he saw a smirk.

“Ay, uncle,” Marielos said, cheerfully cracking eggs into a bowl, “You’re going to be worse than mami, aren’t you?” She smiled with half her mouth.

“China, you’re walking a dangerous path.”

“No I’m not.”

Oscar snapped. “Listen, girl, I’m trying to take care of you, so you’d better let me. I am the one who cares about you.” He had her by the arm, and was holding her too tight. A bit of eggshell rolled onto the floor. She looked at him with hatred, and tried to pull away, but he wasn’t letting go until he was ready to let go.

He released her only when he realized how tight his grip really was. Freed, Marielos rubbed her arm.

“Uncle, just let me be. All I want is to be let alone.”

“Okay, then, I’ll leave you alone to make breakfast,” Oscar said quietly, and went back into his bedroom. He lay down on the bed and poked Martín with his elbow.

“You’re still whoring and you’re still smoking crack,” Oscar said.

“No I’m not,” Martín said. “And you’re the one walking a dangerous path, not your niece.”

“Just stay away from her,” Oscar said. Martín lazily raised his middle finger.

At work, Oscar broke a glass and cried over it. The path of sin was well-lit, and the mines were easy enough to step over. You got piss on your shoes just from walking down the street. There was no sense in dwelling over it, Oscar realized, and dried his eyes.

They were at home, the two of them, his lover and his niece. Oscar knew that when there were three of them, one would not belong, and he knew which one would have to go.

He arrived home to find them eating buttered saltines at the dinner table. Marielos was wearing the tiniest tank top she owned and leaning over the table towards Martín, which inspired a fresh wave of rage in Oscar, and he realized that would make it easier to do what he had to do. Oscar walked past them to the bathroom and poured hydrogen peroxide over the cut the glass had given him. While the sting lasted, he walked back to the front door, opened it, and fixed his eyes on Marielos.

He pointed to the street and said, “Go.”

 

     This story is dedicated to Jacobo Schifter, with gratitude.

 

 

 

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