The Cucuy
It was midnight. Everyone was asleep in the three bedroom housing unit of the Penumbras Projects. I had the top bunk-bed where I could look out the window to the comings and goings of the graveyard shift workers. I had tried to sleep, but the snoring from the bunkbed underneath mine kept me up. I knew I wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight, so I sneaked out the window and sought out my companions for a late night trek. There was Willo, the youngest of the three at fifteen years of age, Andre, who just turned sixteen, and BB, the oldest at seventeen. BB was short for Bob Blake. We gathered when the Shadows, as we fondly called the projects, were at their darkest. At midnight, police and gang member alike feared the projects; they feared running into old ghosts, victims of the bullet and blade, the trail left by a blood-feud between the hoods. We wore our dark clothing to blend in with the Shadows under the new moon tonight.
When I got to BB’s unit, Willo and Andre were already there. BB was playing some Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company softly on the stereo. The clicks and pops of the vinyl crackled over the hiss of the worn out record. BB loved his Janis. The wall over the stereo was covered with family pictures. There were baby pictures of BB at age eight or nine with his mom and a guy in a Marine outfit. Since he never mentioned or discussed his dad, I assumed that’s who the soldier in the picture was.
Suddenly, the stench of death entered the room. Even though the factories were miles away, the smell of cows and pigs being slaughtered wafted into the projects late at night. BB’s mom worked the late shift at some meat packing factory on the southside of Downtown. I closed the door and sat on the sofa by Andre.
BB passed me a Michelob. I twisted off the cap and tossed it on the coffee table with the Soldier of Fortune magazines. He loved those mags and often bought handguns from their catalog, using his mother’s credit card. Since he paid the bills for his mom, she never knew about the guns in his room. It’s safe to say that I felt safe at BB’s place. He had no dad or siblings to worry about and his mom wouldn’t be home till morning. It was the one bright spot in the projects that even the darkest of nights could not touch.
Once we got a good buzz going, we chipped in to replace the beer that belonged to BB’s mom and turned the conversation to topics worthy of the night.
Willo started, “Oldies but Goodies kick Rock and Roll’s ass.”
BB shot back, “Fuck your oldies. Janis rules. Hendrix is god. Zeppelin is bigger than all the oldies put together.”
Andre added, “Zeppelin! Sabbath! Blue Cheer!”
I nodded my head and said, “Fuck that shit. What’s your favorite monster movie?”
Willo raised his hand.
“Just say it, stupid,” I said loudly. “You don’t have to raise your hand. This isn’t school.”
Willo used his raised hand to throw me the middle finger before lowering it. Then he said, “Frankenstein.”
Andre laughed, “Compared to Blood Feast, Frankenstein’s a pussy.”
BB shook his head, “That’s not a monster movie.”
“Kinda,” I said. “He puts that girl together from dead body parts, like Frankenstein. I say it’s monster.”
“What do you know?” BB scolded me. “Godzilla’s a monster. None of this dead body crap counts. Night of the Living Dead ain’t monster.”
“What about ghosts?” asked Willo. “Are they monsters?”
“Depends on what you consider a ghost,” I offered.
“Ghosts,” Andre explained, “are the spirits of people that die. It’s like the soul leaving the body and floating around the earth until God takes it up to Heaven or sends it down to Hell with the Devil. They usually hang around their old neighborhoods and watch what their old friends and family are up to. If the ghost scares someone on purpose, then the Devil gets to have its soul, but if it does a good deed, then God takes him to Heaven.”
“You’re drunk,” I said sharply.
“No way, man,” Andre said defensively, “it’s in the bible.”
“What bible you been reading?” spat Willo. “But that’s kinda right. A ghost is a dead person’s soul, but it doesn’t do good or bad deeds. Only an idiot would believe something like that. Ghosts can’t tell the difference between good and bad. God decides that stuff. There is a place called Limbo, where the new souls hang out until they are called to Heaven or Hell. It’s like a big waiting room. But Limbo is not on Earth, that’s for sure. The ghosts that are on Earth cannot find Limbo. They’re confused and think they’re still alive; they don’t know where to go, so they go around acting like they’re still alive. I think they’re like poltergeists or something like that.”
BB exploded in anger and stood to speak, “You guys are full of shit. “Ghosts aren’t anything but projections of ourselves, our memories, the residue of life-particles left in space over a period of time. It’s like when you have a clock on your dresser for a long time and one day someone moved it, but you see it for a moment like it’s still there. You see the residue of its former presence. The image is the ghost of the clock.”
“And you say I’m drunk,” Andre said, shaking his head.
BB continued, “I once read that people who saw ghosts always said the same thing, that the ghost was only visible at the periphery of your eyes, but when you looked at it square on, it vanished. The same thing happens when people live in a house a real long time. They leave particles of themselves behind. The longer they lived there, the more particles that are left behind. It never leaves enough particles to be looked at straight on. It evaporates. That’s why you can only see it at the corners of your eyes. Years after the people move out of a house, the new tenants begin to see the old tenants walking around the house at the periphery. They’re washing dishes or watching TV or just sitting around the spot where they always sat. The old tenants aren’t dead. They just moved somewhere else. It’s their residue in the house. But if they died, it’s the same thing. It’s just residue. No God. No soul. No Heaven or Hell. Just people who left their image behind.”
After he finished speaking, BB looked at each of us, anxious for one of us to disagree with him. Cautiously, I spoke up, “I don’t believe in myths, whether it’s Odin, God, or Superman. When a person’s dead, that’s it; they’re dead. The mind and the brain are the same thing. They both die at the same time. It’s chemical death. The body and the spirit are the same thing. When life is over, they all rot equally. There are no ghosts of people, or of rocks, or of trees. Superstitious people made up the bogeyman, the cucuy, to scare kids who wouldn’t go to sleep. We’re not kids anymore. There is no cucuy.”
The Janis Joplin record had finished, and the phonograph needle slid across the record label screechingly. Rather than turn the record over and play the other side, BB turned off the player and returned to the conversation with a seriousness that I had never seen on his face before tonight. “Go on,” he told me.
“Alright,” I agreed. “No spirits like religions teach. There are just too many religious points of view of what ghosts are, you can’t just pick one and say that’s the right one. If you want to believe that we have a soul, like Willo and Andre say, that’s cool, but I say we’re just live meat getting ready to be dead meat. The chemicals and electrical impulses stop churning. It’s over. You’re dead. You’re not handed a harp as your spirits ascends your corpse like in the cartoons. Maggot time, bro. Not even residue. Nothing.”
Willo shook his head disapprovingly. “You’re going straight to Hell for talking like that.”
Andre nodded in agreement. They were both joking, of course, but they were taught by the priests to fear God more than love him, so there was some particle of belief in their jest.
“I know one thing,” Andre said, “if I ran into a ghost, I wouldn’t care if it were a lost soul, a residue being, or a figment of my imagination. I’d run the shit outta there.”
“That’s for sure,” Willo agreed.
BB shook his head and asked, “Why run? Residue can’t hurt you anymore than a memory can.”
“You’re wrong,” Willo added. “Some ghosts can hurt you, and the ones that do turn into demons in Hell.”
“That’s fairy tale crap,” I argued.
“You’re going to Hell,” Willo said with mock seriousness, “and I won’t be able to visit you while I’m in Heaven, so you better behave.”
BB, however, fended off the humorous direction the conversation was taking. “When you die, I’ll still see you guys sitting in this room because you’ve done it so many times you’ve left enough residue to create an image of yourselves. You will be sitting there by the door like you always do.Andre, you’ll be there between the speakers so you can hear the stereo effect of the music. And Willo will be at the refrigerator looking for something to munchie.”
“I know when I’m being criticized,” Willo tried to joke.
“There’s only one way to settle this argument,” Andre cut in. “There’s an empty unit a few rows down from my place where moaning and groaning can be heard at night. I overheard the maintenance men telling my mom about the noises. They said that a few nights after the old tenants moved out, the noises started coming from the place at night. Some of the neighbors complained about it, but the guy that they sent to investigate says that there weren’t any noises. Why don’t we go over there right now and see if we can find out what it is. Maybe we’ll find the residue of the old tenants or the ghost of some dead gang banger, or maybe nothing at all.”
We all agreed to go. We finished the beer and headed for the haunted unit of the Shadows.
#
Tonight, for the first time since we started hanging around at midnight, we were leaving our block to visit another. We may as well have been heading for another planet as we drunkenly crossed the streets into territory unknown.
BB was the only one who carried a gun. He offered us a gun each, but we refused. Andre said that a bullet can’t kill a ghost. BB retorted, “It’s not ghosts I’m worried about when we step off our turf. Willo nodded in agreement. But we did agree to carry some sort of weapon. Willo carried a steak knife from BB’s kitchen. BB warned him not to lose it or his mom would kill both of them. Andre had a crow-bar slung over his shoulder. I warned him that he’d probably need a tetanus shot with that rusty piece of metal. He said it was better than the short toilet pipe with a nail sticking out of one end that I was carrying. I considered the weapon for a throw and run encounter than for face to face combat since we’d experienced more of the former than the latter on our midnight treks.
When we reached the haunted unit in question, we assigned Andre to the look-out post, which he was glad to accept since he didn’t want to be the first one to enter the place. He was still under the impression that an evil spirit bucking for a demon’s role in Hell was waiting behind the wooden planks that boarded up the windows. He wholeheartedly believed that the odds were against us meeting a good spirit because only bad people died in the projects. Forget that innocent bystander crap. If you were in the line of fire, you were up to no good, he reasoned.
To get into the unit, we had to remove the boards the maintenance men nailed over the windows to keep young punks like us out. Not tonight.
It took BB a couple of minutes to remove the two planks to the rear bedroom window, using Andre’s crowbar. He seemed very anxious to get inside and find his residue beings. I tiptoed and peered through the window into the darkened room, and seeing nothing, pushed open the window. With Andre bringing up the rear, we entered the unit.
Once inside, Willo struck a wooden match and held it up. The room lit up. I blew out the flame and admonished him, “What if someone sees the light. Wait for your eyes to adjust to the dark. Just wait, like at the movies.”
After a few minutes, we could see the room was filled with painters’ equipment: paint cans, brushes and rollers, a small scaffold, and rolled up tarps covered with droplets of white paint. Half of the room had been freshly painted; the other half still had the old paint yellowed by cigarette smoke and nicotine.
“Now what do we do?” I asked, not wanting to take the leadership role.
“We wait for the moaning to start,” BB said matter of factly, “and then we follow it to its source. Simple”
“But what if ghosts are invisible?” Willo asked. “Have you ever thought of that? There might be one here right now in front of us and we don’t even see it.”
“We’d probably here it,” I said.
“Or smell it,” suggested Andre.
“Maybe we should just go home,” Willo sighed, probably feeling the buzz of beer wearing off. “Maybe we’re just wasting our ti—“
“No way,” BB interrupted. “We’re staying until the moaning starts. Then I can prove to you that ghosts are nothing more than the residue of living people. The people who lived here before lived here a long time. They must have left enough residue for us to see them.”
“Maybe enough to hear something,” I said. “Concentrate on the periphery. If they did leave some trace, we should be able to see them at the corners of our eyes.”
“Right,” agreed BB. “Concentrate on the corners of your eyes.”
Andre and Willo made cross-eyes and giggled till BB shushed them. I participated with some reluctance. I figured that if I didn’t try to see a ghost, I wouldn’t see one. But deep inside I kind of hoped that I would see something. BB, on the other hand, truly expected to see one. There was not a single trace of doubt on his face, which was tense with concentration.
“I’m starting to get a headache,” joked Willo.
No one laughed.
Suddenly a flash lit up the room for a split second, and we saw ourselves standing there bug-eyed like frogs, smiling at ourselves self-consciously. Then the darkness returned.
“Maybe it’s a residue being,” Willo mocked BB.
“Shh,” I hushed him. “There’s someone outside.”
Something at the window cast a shadow against the tarps on the floor. Then there were voices, low and whispery sounds that vanished into the gust of wind that pushed its way into the open window. We shivered but remained still. Again the voices outside sounded, this time low and rapid, then loud and forceful. I couldn’t make out the exact words, but I thought it was a good time for us to move to another room, away from the view from the windows. We edged along the wall and slipped quietly into the long hallway where the voices were acoustically louder and clearer.
Outside two people were in a heated discussion. “There’s no one in there, babe. Some stoners must’ve took off the boards just to look inside to see if there was anything to steal. But I checked inside with my flashlight and all my equipment and paint are still there. You know how expensive that white paint is. If someone did break in, they would’ve stole a few cans of the white stuff for sure. Now come on, girl, let’s go inside. I got the key again to get in, and our sleeping bag should be just where we left it last night in the front room.”
“Okay,” agreed the girl, “but first make sure and check again.”
The older guy searched the room with the paint cans with the flashlight until the girl was satisfied that the room was empty. Then we heard the boards being nailed back in place. We were trapped inside.
Seconds later, the front door creaked open and slammed closed. The clack of the bolt slid shut, locking the door. BB pulled the gun from his waist as we gripped our weapons, expecting to be confronted by the couple. The sleeping bag’s zipper chirped open and the girl giggled.
Then the moaning started. There were a series of grunts, a rhythmic thumping, more giggles, and the sound the cross between a siren and a brat’s whining. “You know what they’re doing?” Willo asked innocently, although we all knew the answer. The old dude was forking the teenaged girl.
We tip-toed back into the paint room.
“We should sneak out now while they’re busy. They won’t notice us,” Andre suggested.
“Sure,” I whispered sarcastically. “How could four guys walking by bother a screwing couple?!”
Willo grinned his most mischievous grin and said, “Why don’t we just scare them out of here?”
“How?” BB asked.
“Like this,” he said, quietly prying open a paint can with the steak knife and brushing a coat of white paint on his face. “We’ll pretend to be cucuys.”
We slopped on the paint until we each covered enough of our face to pass for a ghost. We used the tarp to cover ourselves so that only our ghostly faces were showing. We looked each other over and nodded in approval. We slid our weapons under our belts and walked into the front room where the moaning had reached its highest levels. We had to be quick.
“Ooooo, ooooo, ooooo” we chorused, one hand holding up the tarp, our faces bearing expressions as scary as our limited imaginations could come up with. And there they were. Naked and coupled. And they knew we weren’t ghosts.
“Fucken punks,” the old guy screamed as he rushed us with his boner still glistening in the weak light in the room. “That’s my fucken paint.”
He rammed us and we fell together bundled in the tarp. BB’s gun fell away. The naked guy picked it up and ordered us to stay down and not to move. He rushed on his pants, released the safety on the gun and aimed it at us.
“Get up,” he growled. “You broke in to steal my stuff. I saw you and followed you in. You attacked me and I shot you. I’ve worked here for over ten years. They’ll believe me. Your stupid punks. Who’s going to believe you?”
Then he laughed. “What am I saying? You’ll be dead. Who’s going to believe dead thieves? Get up!”
He told the girl to leave, that he didn’t want her to see him do what he had to do. The tarp slid off our shoulders and we stood there like stupid cows waiting to be butchered, our weapons useless in our hands. “Perfect,” he said. “You attacked me with those toys. Idiots. You think you can fuck me up? Do you?”
We nodded no. Willo started to weep. Andre looked down in shame. BB was staring at the gun. I followed his line of vision. He was looking at some writing on the side of the gun: HELL FROM ABOVE, it read. The girl dressed quickly, unlocked the door, and opened it to leave.
“Which of you wants it first?” the old dude asked us in all seriousness.
Then the girl gasped.
In the doorway stood a guy in a Marine outfit. It was the guy from the picture on BB’s wall of photos.
The girl screamed and ran past him.
The painter turned to face the soldier. “Benny? I thought you were in Nam.”
“That’s my gun. That’s my brother. You still a child-molester, Eddie?” the Marine asked with a stern accusation that sounded more like a threat than a warning.
Eddie aimed the gun at the soldier. “You got no right to be here. I know about you. All the gang knows about you.” He leveled the gun at the sharply dressed military man who walked toward him. His gun hand shook. Then he pissed himself. And then he fired the gun. We heard the sound of a rock hitting a side of beef.
The soldier smiled. “With my own gun, Eddie?”
He fired again and again. He ran out of bullets just as Benny reached him and removed the gun from his hand. He passed his other hand into the painter’s chest and twisted his wrist about, as if he were fishing for something. Eddie’s head bobbled like a broken toy. Then Benny found what he was looking for. Eddie dropped to the floor, his face frozen in fear and death.
“Bobby,” Benny said to BB, “you have to be good people. Mom needs you now. I’ll see you later at home. Take my gun.” Then he walked out the door.
I walked quickly to the doorway. There was no one outside. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said. And we did just that.
#
We washed off the paint from our faces with warm water from the hose in BB’s backyard. Most of the stiff, dry paint came off easily, but a few flecks stuck in our hair. We tried combing them out but quit after painfully yanking out small clumps of hair. BB sat off to one side of us, silent and sad. Willo made a few attempts at making fun of the painter and his girlfriend, who didn’t even bother to cover up her tits while we were threatened, but no one cared to pursue the topic. It didn’t seem like the time for joking about what just happened. So we simply stopped talking for a while and let the whole thing sink in.
Minutes later, Andre said to BB, “I thought you were an only child. I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“His real name was Benjamin. He used to take a lot of acid and mushrooms, so everyone in his unit called him “Peyote’.”
“Used to?” I asked.
“Yeah. He died in Viet Nam about a year ago of an overdose. It was before I knew you guys. Anyway, you guys are like brothers to me now.”
“But I saw him. We saw him,” said Andre. There were tears in his eyes. “He saved us. He said you’ll see him at home.”
“And I will,” BB agreed. “so I guess I’d better head home. See you.”
“Yeah, see you tomorrow, BB,” Andre said. It was doubtful that BB heard him since he went inside his house so fast.
#
As I walked home, I thought about the words, HELL FROM ABOVE. I thought about how the police would ignore the painter’s death. Just another dead homeboy in the projects. I sneaked back into my bedroom through the open window and undressed for bed. I slipped between the covers. The snoring returned from the bunk under mine. I looked down at the empty bunk-bed and listened to the steady snores coming from the pillow area. “Goodnight, you residue being,” I whispered, choking back a sob. As I turned down my eyelids and drifted off to sleep, a final thought nudged me: ‘Just another dead homeboy in the projects’.
