The Lion Head Belt Buckle

My father bought it for me as a gift in the Madrid rastro

near where we lived, new immigrants from Cuba.

The eyes and mane carved deep into the metal, the tip of the nose

already thin with the blush of wear. My mother found a brown

leather strap and made it into a belt with enough slack and holes

to see me wearing it in Los Angeles where we landed next.

My father worked at Los Dos Toros, a meat market run by Papito,

a heavyset man with a quick smile, and when I would visit

the market after school to wait for my father to bring me home,

Papito always talked to me about baseball and his favorite

Cincinnati Reds players. It was there one of his employees,

a skinny man with deepset eyes and crow-feather black

hair would stop me in the narrow hallway by the produce tables

and grab the belt buckle and praise it. All along passing his hand

over my penis. “You are strong,” he would whisper, “like this lion.”

I would recoil from his touch and move away back to the front

where Papito would ask me about what bases I intended

to play next season on Los Cubanitos team. I never told my father,

or anyone, but the afternoon I showed up and the Fire Department

and police and ambulances huddled in the alleyway behind

Los Dos Toros, I knew something terrible had happened. Some

other kid had uttered the man’s groping and insisting on a kiss

in the almacén, the darkened storage room past the meat locker.

And another father had taken matters into his own hands.

But instead I found my father hosing the back door entrance,

washing the blood down to the alleyway. He told me to wait for him

in the car. The paramedics rolled out Papito, shot and dead on a stretcher,

victim of a holdup. The dark Cuban man who’d felt me up time

and again stood in the shade of a tree weeping and kicking the dirt

with blood-encrusted shoes. I found out later he was the one who

slammed the assailant against the wall, and beat him unconscious.

Fuerte como un león. The words fluttered like cowbirds in the back

of my mind. Scattershot and ringing like the violence among the men.