the bullring

Katherine walked straight along Iris Avenue until she got to where she was going. She stopped in the shadow of the great elm tree in front of the old Becker house. Its trunk was gnarled and knotted with age. The tree had stood in that spot since before the Beckers owned the house, probably planted by some campesino or dirt farmer back when the whites in Imperial Beach were Spanish, not German as they later became, nor just anglo, in opposition to the Mexicans. It was late August and the sun had reached its highest point in the sky. Katherine felt it through the thin soles of her shoes. She preferred to go barefoot, like most children in Imperial Beach, but today the sun seemed to radiate out from the innards of the earth. 

The Beckers had bought the two story craftsman home on Iris Avenue when Friedrich had come back from the Pacific and moved out of the barracks just a mile north. The elm tree was already there. Less than a year after the war had finished, Gerda stood at the bottom happy and fat, one hand on her stomach and the other holding onto the tall ladder Friedrich had leaned across the trunk as he screwed in two hooks to a thick branch from which he would hang a swing. After he finished, his wife sat on the plywood seat and screamed as he gently pushed her, begging him in between her laughter to not push so high, to think of the child.

Some forty years after that day, there were no children in the Becker household as Katherine stared at the facade. There never were any children in the Becker house, for that matter. The elm tree was the only natural life on the entire street, which faced south towards Tijuana, only separated from the Spanish speaking world by the dusty stables of a horse ranch and the chain link fence the teenagers from Mar Vista High had cut a hole through once they had tired of climbing over. 

Katherine walked to the front door of the Becker house and knocked. The older children in the neighborhood had told stories about the house that nobody quite believed, in order to frighten the young ones. They said that the old lady turned children into fleischkuechle. It was understood to be a myth, even among the most gullible children, but the windows were always covered and dark, and Katherine began to recall the stories as she waited at the door. 

She never received an answer. Katherine turned to leave. As she turned, she felt her face grow warm, like she had been slapped. Emboldened, she stopped at the tree and sat on the naked two-by-four that hung from a high branch. She had watched the swing sit unused for the whole of her short life, and she had finally worked up the courage to ask to use it, only to be ignored, as if she wasn’t even worth denying. 

She looked south and her eyes scanned until she saw the bullring. She imagined herself as a matador, the audience cheering as she so artfully chose the right moment to administer death to the lonesome beast. Her soles razed the dust from the earth as she swung. She imagined the smell of the bull and the steam that blew from its nostrils. She leaned her head back and thought of the future. Her reverie was so great she didn’t notice she had fallen until she had already regained her breath, lying in the dust staring at the branches of the elm. 

Friedrich Becker called Katherine’s father from the hospital. They knew each other as strangers in Imperial Beach all knew each other, through rumor that had disseminated through the ranks of enlisted men and grew sordid as it spread throughout civilian life. Everett Canney had felt embarrassed for a moment upon entering the room where his daughter sat with the man she had so inconvenienced, but decided shortly that it was unbecoming for an officer to feel such a way, so he stopped. 

At home, with her head wrapped in gauze, Katherine had hardly entered the living room before her father opened the back door, and with an undeniable motion of the wrist told her to go into the yard and get a switch.

When Katherine entered Mar Vista the next year, she walked past the Becker house every day on her way  and was reminded of the day she had been caught trespassing and doubly punished for it. Now that her father was no longer around to blame, she turned her ire towards Friedrich Becker. She thought of his selfishness, the swing that sat unused for decades beneath  the only tree visible on the blighted street. It was as if it accentuated her own poverty to see that he could have something of such importance to her sit empty, guarded against the enjoyment of the children of the neighborhood. 

Katherine would pass the house every day that she went to Mar Vista and Becker’s selfishness would remain with her throughout the day until something else captured her attention. She thought about how someday she would have a swing in her yard and it would be full of children, not just her own but those of the neighbors, those belonging to people she hadn’t met. 

Slowly, the memory of Becker and his tree faded from her mind, leaving only a lingering resentment that took the shape of a desire for independence. She wanted a place of her own, where she wouldn’t have to hide her poverty from child protective services, where nobody could tell her she had to run from the window in the early hours of the morning. Her mind didn’t wander to the bullring across the river during class anymore, but stayed acutely focused on her task at hand.

Years later, when Katherine returned to Imperial Beach with her teenage son, she hung the pennant of some faraway northeastern college from the porch of the Becker house. Friedrich Becker had died, long after his wife had done so trying to give him an heir. The stables were gone, replaced by square adobe condos that tested the meaning of the term ‘beachfront’. The dirt road had been paved for years, and August was hotter than ever. The bullring, now defunct except for the weekly flea market, was still visible from the apex of the swing’s arc that still hung from the elm tree in the front yard.

When they moved to Imperial Beach, Katherine told her son, 15 years old then, about the day she had sustained a concussion falling from the swing, and how cruel Friedrich Becker had been, keeping the swing unused for so many years. He listened silently, and she couldn’t decide if he was just bored or if she hadn’t chosen her words correctly. She tried to convince him to let her push him on the swing several times, but he had finally reached the age where public association with his mother—even in the front yard of their own property—was too much to bear even in private. Girls had become much more interesting to him than any swingset could be, so the two-by-four continued to sit unused.

Michael had grown into a sullen youth and was entering the age where everything his mother said seemed utterly and obviously stupid. He dressed in black every day and regarded his mother as too simple to even quarrel with. He no longer made an attempt to stifle his contempt, and the house on Iris Avenue had taken on the atmosphere of a place of business, where open rivals met to achieve their own goals. Katherine reminded herself often that this was a phase, but began to relish in twisting the knife when her son erred or spoke out of place. One day, looking from the window from the living room, she thought she saw Michael underneath the shade of the elm talk, talking to a girl in a dirty white dress. Katherine went to put on her glasses to confirm her suspicion, but by the time she pulled them from her purse Michael had begun to walk back across the lawn towards the front door. 

The Saturday after Katherine had moved into the Becker house, a young man, no older than 19, had knocked on the door and spoken with a wavering voice about the benefit of solar panels. Katherine watched the sweat bead on his brow, not much listening to what he had to say. She invited him in, gave him a glass of lemonade and took his pamphlets. The house was in shade two thirds of the day, she said when he pushed her for a commitment, I don’t know how much solar we’d get from the old place. He had been trained not to take no for an answer, and he suggested trimming the leaves of the tree. He offered her the number of  a tree trimming service. She said she would think about it, and put the pamphlet on the kitchen counter. Katherine watched his knobby adam’s apple move as he drank. Sugar stuck to the few stray hairs that grew from his lip, and he smiled, embarrassed, as he caught his breath. She thought about how hot that road could be, remembering how it felt hat August day thirty years prior. She watched a drop of lemonade rest on the boy’s wet upper lip and smiled. 

After they had settled in, Katherine threw a party. The purpose was to ingratiate herself back into the  fabric of the neighborhood, to let people know she was back in Imperial Beach. Few members of the old neighborhood were still alive, but those who had escaped the riptide or the pull of the penitentiary  still lived within three blocks of the boardwalk, as they always had. She placed coolers full of canned Mexican beer on the lawn and waited for her former friends to arrive. 

Everyone that had remained in the neighborhood seemed to be fraying around the edges. They had been married and divorced, and time had sunken their figures into what Katherine recognized as the ghosts of their parents. As guests arrived, the lawn filled out, and soon she was surrounded by talismans of her youth. She was the center of attention. The former surfers who had survived years of drug abuse and made it to the other side of forty with most of their teeth jockeyed for the closest position to their host, who slipped back into the habits of a disaffected teenage beauty, allowing them to flit about her like flies in the summer. The party got collectively more and more drunk. After the sun fell, they moved inside. Marijuana leaked through the windows. Somebody fashioned a ouija board from the entrails of a box of Tecate and attempted to exorcise the Beckers from the walls of their former home. The party waxed on into the early hours of morning. Katherine was in the middle of dancing with the former homecoming king around 2 AM when she saw a figure in white sitting on the swing beneath the elm. 

She excused herself and placed her hands against the glass, staring out at the lawn. The girl’s blonde hair fell over her shoulders in ringlets, her breasts exposed to the first cool breeze of fall, pale and barely distinguishable from the folds of the dress. She rocked slowly back and forth as if pushed by the wind, unaware of the eyes trained on her from the window. Her head fell behind her, spilling her hair over her back. The partygoers slowly began to notice Katherine at the window, fixed on something. They called out but were unable to break her focus, and she stood inert, hands still pressed against the glass. A circle formed around her. They argued among themselves about what the figure was, until the homecoming king, blessed with 20/20 vision even at this age, called out over the fray. “Yeah but who’s that underneath her?”

The party poured out the front door. Someone switched the porchlight on. The girl covered herself. Michael turned his head and threw the girl off, buttoning his dark pants as quickly as his shaking hands would allow. As the party began to recognize this man as Katherine’s son, the jeers turned encouraging, each man in a contest to laugh louder than the others. The girl’s dress ended at her dirty, pink knees, but she kept smoothing it down as if trying to cover herself completely. Katherine looked at her. In her eyes was the cold, hard glint of a trapped animal. Her upturned nose was pierced through the septum with a small gold ring. The men took turns clapping Michael on the back. Finally, Katherine made her way through the crowd, and with a short overhand motion, slashed at his face with a branch that had fallen from the tree. The group of men parted and she stood over her son, bending over with the effort of each blow. She cried out and those closest to her held her arms back. She let the branch drop to the grass. The girl was nowhere to be found, and must have run off into the night during the beating. Nothing was visible in the moonlight that fell through the leaves of the elm, save for the outline of that weeping woman, her arms held outstretched from behind, still lurching towards the youth beneath her, his knees held tight to his chest. 

A week later, the elm tree was gone, with only a stump to mark where it once stood. Katherine sat there while she watched the workmen on the roof installing her new solar panels. They would pay for themselves within the year, considering how much light fell on Iris Avenue this close to the mouth of the river. She began to feel hot, sweat pooling on her brow. She looked towards the house and saw Michael looking out the window at her. She walked across the lawn and through the front door but he had already shut himself in his room. Katherine looked through the window from the living room at where the elm stood just the day before. She covered her eyes. The sun was beating down directly into her home, where in its past, the rays were blocked by the thick leaves of the elm. She squinted out across the river, hand over her eyes, but even with her glasses she couldn’t make out the outline of the bullring.