The tree in the yard, which wasn’t yet dead, had termites. Once it had been struck by lightning and part of it had died and now that dead part was being eaten by the termites. It was a mahogany tree, and a nice one, old, with vibrant green leaves (on the side that still lived) and a bark that reminded the boy of nothing more than the skin of an ancient reptile, cracked by sunlight and age and perennially on the brink of sloughing off. Now the termites’ tunnels ran like bulging veins across those dead limbs, converging in a large tumescent ball, the nest, at the main fork in the trunk. Sometimes, from his window, especially at dawn and twilight, those in-between times, the boy imagined that nest beating, like a zombie’s heart, pumping old, corrupted blood that the failing body could no longer replenish.
But the boy, thirteen, would not be one much longer: with the deepening of his voice and the scruff on his face had also come a new melancholy. It was the three of them in the house, the boy, his mother, and his father. Now, at his window, looking at the mahogany tree in the sunlight, the boy could hear them in the kitchen, the small noises she made with the pots and pans, and above it all his voice, booming, describing the saltiness of a previous meal and the blandness of the one that followed it. The window, as always, was a temptation, but the return, never discreet despite all efforts, overwhelmed the calculus. It wasn’t worth it. For months the boy had been seized by a single idea—two, really, but it was this one that occupied his thoughts now—that having a mahogany tree was a waste, that they should have planted a fruit-bearing tree, something like mangos or guavas or even avocados—which, though fruits, came off as something for a salad, maybe with salt and lemon juice or a little oil and vinegar. You could even make an avocado sandwich if you wanted, two old pieces of hard bread with that buttery green flesh in the middle. Maybe then, if the tree had been an avocado tree, it would have been worth it; but he wasn’t sure.
The first thing the boy had tried was going to the kitchen at night. There was always bread in a bag that hung from a hook so the rats wouldn’t get at it at night. There was usually butter, rich, salty, so yellow it was almost orange, in a covered dish on the kitchen table. But the father’s hours were hard to predict. The mosquitoes woke him, but the mosquito net, he said, made him hot. So there was a chance that his mother would be up, in the kitchen, making him something, or that she would come in while the boy was there, unhooking the bread bag or slicing off a thick pad of butter (the spreading he could always do once back in his room). Then she would hug the boy for a long time. She didn’t say it always, but he always feared she would: I need you.
The second thing the boy had tried, briefly, was keeping food in his room. He had a table, a chair, a candle, and the space under the bed to keep things. It was pleasant to sit in his room at night with the window open, his bare feet on the cool packed earth of the floor, looking at the mahogany tree under the stars, listening to the chirping of the crickets, the croaking of the frogs, and the hooting of the owls. He imagined that he could smell the night’s dew on the grass outside, except in his mind it was honey—sweet, dense, with fat pieces of honeycomb you could bite into. But with a reason for knocking, her phrase became Can I take your plate?, and then the hugging was in his own room, with a closed door. Here she placed her hand on the back of his head and pressed his head tight against her temple, and she said to him, I feel alone.
The third thing the boy tried was going out of the house. There was a banana tree by the river, and he didn’t mind it if they were green and gave him an upset stomach. That was worth it. If the gnats swarmed over his head, if it got too hot under the noon sun, if he needed to void his bowels or something else, he could go into the river and hide in the cool, dark water. It was a shelter, that river; he would have lived in that watery tunnel, in that flowing vein of shelter, and he cursed his need to come up for air. But when he came to the river he never wanted to leave, so he stayed out too long, so that when he finally did return, there was that new reason. I missed you. I was so worried. I don’t know what I would do without you. The longer he stayed out, the longer it would be once he returned. It was difficult to say if it was worth it. Sometimes, if he didn’t use the window, he got it both coming and going: first a goodbye hug, then, once back, a hello-again hug, or, more often, since he would tarry, the I-was-so-worried one.
The fourth thing the boy planned, but never attempted, was leaving the house altogether. The reason he gave himself for forgoing this was that it would mean leaving her alone with him. He started to think of what it would be like if they both left, he and his mother. But she wouldn’t want to leave, he reasoned: it was, after all, a nice house. The walls were wood and very sturdy; they had withstood two hurricanes. The roof was zinc, without leaks, and it made a pleasant drumming sound when it rained. In the first hurricane, it had flown off in the middle of the night, the roof, but his father had gotten it back, on a night with no moon. From the kitchen, his mother cried out: “Oh!” It was unusual for her to raise her voice, and this Oh! had been loud enough that the boy couldn’t pretend not to have heard it. So he left his room and went to the kitchen. His father, too, appeared to have found it a rare enough occurrence that it had been worth it for him to leave his bed; he stood with one foot inside the kitchen, framed, and barely contained, by the bedroom doorway. He was leaning against that doorway, and the house, sturdy, took his weight without so much as a creak. He was shirtless, and he had crumbs caught in his chest hair and on the top of his belly. Outside, the sun was about to set, and already a few crickets had begun their lament. His mother, in her white apron, with her hair bundled up and a bit of flour on her forehead where she had absently dabbed at beads of sweat, was pointing at the wall, at a spot close to the kitchen window. It was true: there, at the edge of the window, on the wood, was a little raised tunnel, like a brown vein. She pressed the tip of her finger into it, and that spot crumbled into a fine brown dust, and termites began swarming out.
The boy’s stomach grumbled. From his doorway, his father squinted at him rather strangely, the boy thought, the eyes small and black and beady above the fleshy cheeks.
His mother was now scraping the termite tunnels off the wall with her hands. They crumpled at her touch, into that brown dust, leaving the termites exposed, stranded, with no tunnel to shelter and protect them, half-blind in the graying light and directionless, with those monstrous pale hands coming at them, casting them out of their safe, flat, wood-sturdy world.
The boy’s father started to ask her what she was doing. He wasn’t angry yet even, simply puzzled, and the boy had to agree with him. That was no way to deal with termites. The father stepped into the kitchen and edged up to her, extending his hand to her shoulder, his meaty fingers about to touch her. There was genuine concern on his face; the boy could tell by his silence, by the way he was pursing those thick lips of his.
One of the termites was stuck in place on the wall, twitching. Her pale hands had gotten to it, but, like the tree, it was still half alive. The boy reached out to it, thinking he would help it, then at the last moment he brought it up to his mouth, to the tip of his tongue, and swallowed it.
His stomach growled, and his father, he thought, eyed him with something like fear. He registered, as a distant thing, that his mother had gone outside and fetched the axe and that she was now chopping down the termite-infested mahogany tree. The boy was trembling now, and the father stepped back. From outside came the dry, staccato sounds of the axe striking the tree. The boy watched himself advance, occupying the space his father had just vacated. The boy’s hunger was a live creature that crawled through his insides, a thing that was him, pure, and also separate from him, other. His father backed into the kitchen table, and the cover on the butter came off. There it was, rich, salty, so yellow it was almost orange. Outside, his mother had given up on the axe and was, instead, building a fire at the base of the trunk; she would smother them in smoke. In the gathering twilight, he could already see the pale flames and the plumes of smoke. The smell wafted into the house, and it smelled like cooking. The father was nodding, pointing at the butter, even, and the boy snapped to and sank his fingers like claws into the yielding yellow fat. It should have been difficult simply to bring his hand to his mouth; it should have necessitated, at the very least, a calculation. But it was easy now. He extended his buttery hand to his father, and he fed him. The father, tentative at first, finally let himself taste the butter from the boy’s fingers. The boy gave him more. The father’s mouth shone with grease.
It was like a kiss. The boy, who would not remain one much longer, sprang forward and bit into his father’s fleshy, butter-smeared lips, and he ate.
It was worth it.