The Monster in the Lake

A city boy, I always wanted to go fishing. The DiFilippo brothers brought me

to a secret lake where we cast our lines into the dark, the barbed lures

spinning. I snagged a monster in the lake. I fought the monster and my reel

jammed. One of the DiFilippo brothers said: That’s not a fish. We waded

into the water and dragged a rusty box spring onshore, festooned with

the lures of failed fishermen. We plucked them off the coils and dragged it

back. Whenever we went fishing, we would have more treasures to collect.

Late that night, I felt the monster swimming beneath my feet. I walked

down to the basement and saw my father hunched over a table in his white

T-shirt and boxers. He flinched as if I’d caught him whispering on the phone

to a woman who was not my mother. What are you doing? I asked. I saw

the pages of a Spanish dictionary and a legal pad where he had copied down

the meaning of the words in longhand. I’m learning Spanish, he confessed.

My father the rabble-rouser with the bullhorn, my father the Puerto Rican

who spoke for other Puerto Ricans in the papers, my father who left his island

at age eleven and kissed the runway when he flew home at age thirty-eight,

my father who had the Spanish slapped from his mouth like a dangling

cigarette by teachers and coaches in the city where I grew up, could feel

his Puerto Rican tongue shriveling, coated with gravel, drained of words.

I left him in the basement, riddled with the hooks no one else could see.