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Just to be clear, my name’s Benny, not Wheezy—a nickname Farty invented for two reasons: the first being the busted lungs God saw fit to give me, and the second being Farty’s need for a pithy way to remind everyone that, sure as I was shorter than him, I’d always be lower too.
Until then, I hung San Cristóbal back around my neck and blew on my fingers, grateful for a place where I could forget I was a man without a country.
“You can’t let ’em get the better of you, you know,”
“I was a smithy on the coast, but I grew up in the mountains. Couldn’t really swim in those rivers.”
“So, tell me. How does a Porto Rican join up with a bunch of Ulstermen in Red Hook, instead of the rest of his compadres in East Harlem?”
“Yes,” he said, his eyes glittering. “After tonight, Morgan’s Menagerie will finally have its very own mermaid!”
Pain looks the same in merpeople as it does in humans.
“Luna Park is the standard-bearer of seaside entertainment, however much Reynolds thinks he can put us out of business.”
“Welcome to the Menagerie, Benny.”
Parasite, he’d called me. Even mermen thought I was a leech.
“To give you my name is to give you the last of myself, and humanity has taken enough from me. My name is my own. You may not have it.”
“How ’bout ‘Río’?” “Río.” He mimicked my rolled R like a native boricua. “Why that name?” A river can be both devastating and beautiful. I shrugged. “It suits you.”
“To Ekaterina, I was devoted husband,” he said. “Not giant.”
“Humans are such vulnerable creatures,” he mused, frowning. “I cannot understand how your fragile kind persists in blighting the globe with such rigor.”
“It is the simple truth of every creature with a soul. You are not your body, Benigno.”
“And kindness is its own food.”
He and his mother had believed humans deserved saving, and humanity had punished them cruelly for it.
I’d never known a love like that—the kind that paved a road through Hell and motored you to freedom.
“Yes. Revealing your truth is like swimming, Benigno. It may not come naturally or easily. But in still waters, it can be learned,”
“Safe,” I repeated, looking down at his conviction with envy. “In my whole dumb life, I’ve never felt as safe anywhere as I feel sitting on a metal grate twenty feet above the ground with you.”
Despite the wisdom of my harmony, despite everything I believed possible, my heart is cultivating a pearl. For a human. And the more I learn about Benigno, the more he teaches me to swim.
“Salt water has healing properties. That is why our tears are made of it. Why should you hold them in?”
“It brings me pleasure to look at you.”
“One day, I shall tell you how beautiful you are and why it is so. And on that day, you must believe it.”
But there’s no adage or saying for a man who falls in love with another man, let alone un tritón. A story like that only ends with a broken heart and God’s judgment.
“Life ain’t taken away our choices, even when we been tricked into thinking it has. Way I see it, you can spend the rest of your dreary days hammering metal or painting walls ’cause that’s what the world’s told you you’re good for. Or you can ask yourself what you really want.”
“You and I know fire, Benny. Don’t waste your damn life trying to smother a spark what wants to be a blaze.”
“I cannot take your burdens,” he went on. “But if you let me, I can bear them with you for a while.”
“Benigno, I will not let you drown.”
“’Cause the prettiest girl in Brooklyn wants me, but my heart wants someone else. Someone who knows me better than any human alive—including me. And I don’t even know his name.” Tears were forcing their way into my eyes again. “All I know is that he misses the moon. If I could, I’d ride a roller coaster to the sky just to steal it for him.”
“Your heart in my keeping,” he whispered, “would always be safe.”
“Río,” I whispered, out of breath, and not from wheezing. “You make me feel like I’m kissing the tides.” “Benigno,” he whispered back. “You make me feel like I am holding the moon.”
Men sweet on other men, ladies sweet on ladies, folks sweet on nobody at all—who cares so long as everyone’s living happy and hurtin’ no one?”
But there ain’t no being free on the outside if you ain’t free on the inside, and that starts with accepting reality.
“Benigno, surely you know,” he breathed. “You are my heartsong.”
“But if there’s anything I’ve learned just being human in this lousy, jacked-up world, it’s that love and hate—they got something in common. They put blinders on you, so’s you can’t see nothing but whatever it tells you to see.
