After the first time, Maritza kept killing Rock Rogan so often and with such gusto that she ended up bringing him back to life.

She bashed his head in again that morning with her baseball bat. Carack, carack, cerrrackack. His by-now shriveled brains shifted with a sibilant sound, like a sigh of pleasure. 

The dead man sat against the wishbone-shaped roots of a mangrove tree on a sand spit in Piñones. Calcified brains spackled the sides of his sand-covered face; his hair, once blond, was now rust colored. The water next to the sand was green as Gatorade, bubbling as if something at the bottom of the swamp was about to rise, a caiman maybe. The air smelled of mud and crabs and the deep rot of the dead man.

Maritza hit the body with the bat when she worried her daughter Taína would flunk out of college her first year or her boyfriend Juancho would grow tired of her problems. Or when she needed to focus her mind. Before, to visualize her goals, she lit candles or tended to her tuberoses, or put honey on a dish for her Eleguá, Orisha of the crossroads and Holy Child of Atocha. This was an oval concrete head with cowries for eyes, nose and mouth, placed on the floor behind the door to the house, the only saint figurine Maritza kept from her old life because Taína claimed the santo would protect the house from robberies.

But bringing the bat down on Rock Rogan’s (formerly) fine head of hair worked much better to soften her mood. 

When she’d murdered Rogan the first time, Maritza was discreet. She had poisoned him. Not with any regular type of poison, such as for rats, alerting store managers who might talk. That’s how people on Law and Order got caught. Maritza was a more purposeful Eve and used manchineels, aka manzanillas de la muerte, aka death apples. She’d collected them with a wooden pole with a can nailed to the top, the kind used for collecting coconuts from high branches. 

The leaf-colored manchineels could pass for small Granny Smith apples. When she cut them up, she wore an RPET face shield over an N-95 mask and latex gloves.

Rock Rogan traveled all over the world but lived in a mega mansion in Dorado East 184 days a year, benefiting from Law 60, which encouraged stateside billionaires to move their companies to the island for tax exemption. The billionaires were mostly young men with messy hair and pimply faces who wore baggy T-shirts and shorts or wizened middle-aged guys in polos and jeans. Or, if they were crypto-crats, they were flamboyant in their cowboy hats, knee-length tunics, and long leather necklaces. 

A few, like Rock Rogan, were fit and liked to surf, leased the beach mansions, and drove up real estate prices. Sure, they hired a few groundskeepers, gardeners, maids, and personal masseuses. But they didn’t include islanders in their businesses. 

They would lie on lounge chairs on the beach like they owned it, even though all island beaches were public, including the ones the Malibu-style houses sat nearby. When islanders climbed over the breaker rocks that divided the area from the rest of the beach, the billionaires told them to leave. Sometimes the gringos had private guards with them who escorted people away. 

There had been protests, of course. Maritza herself had joined one a few months ago, wearing a baseball cap and mask, carrying a sign, shouting at more than the use of public land as private by the billionaires. She was bien encojonada. Fucking angry. 

She couldn’t quite remember shit that happened to her during Hurricane Maria; she’d had to wait six months to see a shrink as most doctors had left the island; had found no work for almost a year after the storm; and every single one of her familia fled stateside and never answered Maritza’s text messages, let alone called. 

And since Maria, the beach sand had been getting as gloppy as oatmeal before shifting into the sea, the waves panting closer to the land, sometimes even slapping the edges of buildings. But the billionaires had been invited to the island by fat cat Fortuñistas in the government and they prevailed against the protesters. Que sorpresa.  

That day in Dorado, the ocean water broke bottle green against the lichen-clad rocks. The air billowed with so much humidity that even the sky looked green. Had Maritza poked the thick air with her finger, water would have gushed from the hole. But she would never do that. Maritza feared the green ocean water all around and the water pulsating in the green air, ready to burst through now, just as it had before.

Her hands trembled under the tray as she approached Rogan. He was lying on his lounge chair, his baseball hat over his eyes, even though it was only 6 a.m. The gold-painted golf cart he rode around the beach was parked next to the lounge chair. He was wearing a smiley face T-shirt over his turquoise swim trunks, which were patterned with pigs and pink poodles.

“Sir, some fruit,” she said.

He sat up with a jolt, as if she’d screamed in his ear. Was he hung over? When he looked up at her, his eyes were as dark and shiny as guanábana seeds. He didn’t recognize her even though they’d met once before. He didn’t notice her shaking tray. He didn’t ask about her N-95 mask or latex gloves. She was his server. He didn’t see she wasn’t the right one—Aida. Maritza had paid Aida to take her place. But, of course, to him she and Aida were interchangeable: short, thin, sallow-skinned, middle-aged, harried locals. 

But Aida was submissive whereas Maritza’s mouth under her mask was twisted in contempt.

She placed the tray on a little table next to the lounge chair. The big dish held cut-up pineapples and mangos. And the sweet-scented manchineels that looked like little green apples. 

“Fork!” Rogan’s muscular thighs splayed in his absurd turquoise trunks and she saw the bulge in his groin. The smiley shirt fit tight over his chest and biceps. 

“How else would I eat this delicious fruit?” He grinned.

He’d been rude and was trying to be nicer. She gave him a fork and a yellow cloth napkin.

“Wow,” he said, “I came out early to look at the sea and make calls, but those tree frogs were throwing kisses at me and I went out like a light. ‘Coquí, coquí’: man is that relaxing.” 

He pronounced “coquí” like any islander would. Smart guy.

“I dig those things,” he added.

“Que bueno,” she said. 

She liked it when non-islanders praised the island and was pleased when tourist couples showed up at Juancho’s café in Río Piedras, well off the beaten track. But everything Rogan said that day sounded insincere. He knew he’d score if he mentioned coquís because islanders were weirdly attached to the singing frogs.

He stretched his arms over his head, a white-haired Viking, but with turbulent (Irish?) eyes. He enjoyed being in his body, being in this fragrant air next to this blood-warm sea, which would never rage against him, oh no. He’d talked in interviews about feeling for what people had gone through in Maria. He spoke fast and his eyes went flat, so she didn’t buy it. He was bright, polite, rich, good looking, and had a popular podcast. Because, hey, what was so bad about paying as little as possible in taxes?

He ate the mangos first, like anybody would, and pushed aside the pineapple chunks, complaining they gave him reflux. She was nervous he wouldn’t eat the manchineels, but he did, stuffing his face, hardly chewing.

He turned orange immediately like there was a fire in him raging to get out. Soft white blisters bloomed on his throat and hands. He tried to scream but he couldn’t because of his swollen throat. He tried to open his eyes wider but the blooming flesh of his face covered them and they seemed to sink in his face. Then the skin closed over them. Forever. 

His face now looked like one of those fatty hams some gringos liked. 

He was dead but his brow was furrowed and his mouth stayed open as if he wanted to say something. Tell Mom I always loved her. I didn’t mean it when I said what I said. She’s no leech. Tell Mom I was just about to buy a ticket for her to come stay with me. Mom, you were a good mom…

Where did his mother live? Did she have other children? Maritza pictured a tall, thin woman with canary-colored hair, skin tanned not from the beach but from something purposeful and practical, like gardening. This mother’s lips curdled with pain. Not just grief for her son’s death but the accumulated pain of his little jibes; his failure to include her in his plans; his blaming her for the divorce; his behavior that went against everything she had tried to teach him…

Maritza felt absolutely exhausted, too tired to do what must be done. She took a breath through her nose, and let it out slowly through her mouth. She would have to leave before the other help arrived at 8 a.m.

Thank God this public beach was so private.

His body was heavy as cement and she struggled to push and shift it from the lounge chair and onto his golf cart. She got into the golf cart and fit his head on her shoulder. In case anybody saw them, he’d appear to be resting. Then she drove the cart to the Landrover she’d borrowed from Juancho and left on a culvert near the mansion. She tipped the body into the back seat so it lay flat. She drove to Piñones, pulled the body out of the car by the arms, dragged it to a mangrove tree and sat him up against the tree. 

Though his eyes were swollen shut, he seemed taken aback. 

She hit him with her bat when the mood took her, usually every three days. First, she crushed his genitals. Even in death, he grimaced. She cracked his skull open, surprised to see that his brain’s lobes looked like balled, chewed-up, gum. 

His torso was at first stiff, surprisingly resistant. It was wonderfully satisfying to bring the bat down on it, encounter that tough hide and hit and hit until she broke skin. But in a few days the body became bloated, the skin blue-green like bad fish, the face swollen, slimy. The face looked less like Rogan and more like John Wayne Gacy in clown makeup. 

There was a hiss of escaping gases and a smell like rotting beef mixed with fruit syrup. 

She threw up on the sand. 

Her need to keep on killing him evened out to once a week. Then she stopped for a couple of weeks. When she went back, his green face was no longer bloated, no longer Gacy-like. His skin had a waxy sheen to it, almost like sausage casing. Skin no longer covered his eyes, which were popping out of his head, the sclera chalky, the colored parts just tiny black dots. 

He looked eternally surprised.

She piled wet sand all over his body, as if she were trying to remake him. She stuck twigs in his hair, put cowrie shells over his eyes, and then clumped algae over his mouth.

She thought, ya se terminó la cosa. It is done. 

On her way home, she threw the bat in a blue garbage can in Loíza, far away enough from the mangrove that nobody would find it. 

But then one week, Maritza was beyond stressed—from working ten hours a day at the café and tending to Taína. The girl had skipped all her classes at la UPI, even the “Philosophy of Nature” class she had at first seemed to love. She stayed in bed all week reading and said not a word when addressed, her heart-shaped face half-covered by her unbrushed curly hair, her once lush lips peeling and dry. So, Maritza went out to Piñones again in the Landrover. 

Rogan’s thighs and legs were partly covered by sand but his green face and torso were completely bare. His nose, which in life had been aquiline and perfect, was bulbous and crooked like a boxer’s. A dead boxer. Then one of the cowries covering his eyes moved. A small crab crawled out of the socket.

Then another one. And another. When no more crabs appeared, Maritza covered up the eye with a different cowrie shell.

She noticed that now that he was past death, despite his malformed look, Rogan’s mouth no longer stretched open, gasping for air, but smiled wide like he was pretending to enjoy himself, feigning fascination and love for the hot swamp as if he were born to it. Now that he was here, he’d get as much as he could out of the place, have more fun than even the crabs.

She could hear him speaking his Tweets, “We were invited down here by Puerto Ricans. We’re here to help you people, we spend our money here; don’t you want that?” 

“OK. Right. You spend money, here,” Maritza muttered.

The sand-covered skin of his throat suddenly jiggled and a sound escaped from him.

More crabs?

The sound came again, deep and rising from his belly. 

It was a laugh. A bit drawn-out, creaky. But still a laugh.

“You like me, hot mama, don’t you?” Rogan said. His voice was a resonant baritone, deeper than when he was alive. “Spending so much time with me now, I kind of like you too. Who knew?” 

Despite missing one eye, both sockets covered by shells, Rogan directed that part of his face toward her. 

She had killed him good yet he wasn’t dead enough. She touched her chest to feel her heart pounding. Nothing. Strange.

“Hijo de puta,” she said softly. “I hate you.” 

“But you keep on coming back to me,” the corpse said.

His remaining eye moved under the shell. And he saw her now for the first time. As if with his buried eye he could see her better than she could see herself.

As if his eye were somehow now buried in her own brain—

“I couldn’t have foreseen this,” Rogan said. “This thing between us. I never liked older chicks, but you, hot mama, you got a little something.”

Maritza had big black-handled steel scissors with her. “I am not your mama.” 

She stabbed his thighs with the scissors. She stabbed him and stabbed him until his sandy, slidey mess of a face contorted in a silent scream that blew all the sand off his body. His cowrie eyes stayed in place. 

She had to put sand on him again, shaping it carefully over his body. She put her hand on her chest again. Finally: a little stuttered beat.

When she got home, Juancho said, “Where were you?”

“Driving around.”

“I asked Teresita to fill in for you.”

“Lo siento. I’ll do two shifts tomorrow.”

He pursed his lips but there was sadness in his amber eyes. She felt bad. Poor Juancho. She almost told him then about Rogan. But she’d put him through a lot already, what with Taína showing up last year out of the blue. At that time, Maritza—who had been found after Hurricane Maria by road rescue workers and had not remembered anything that happened before the storm—did not know her real name, let alone that she had a daughter. She had only started getting better working at Juancho’s café, getting to know Juancho, falling for him. Taína had found her eventually and ended up moving in with them. Except for bringing Taína to live with her and Juancho, Maritza hadn’t wanted to go back to her old life. The only good thing the hurricane gave her was Juancho: the first lover she’d had that she could rely on. But Juancho was still getting used to the fact that Maritza had a kid. She couldn’t burden him with one more thing, especially not something like this. 

“Mami,” Taína called out suddenly from somewhere in the small house. 

Juancho pursed his lips. “She came out of her room just once to eat cornflakes.”

In her room, Taína sat on her bed dressed in an oversized T-shirt with yellow stains, her long hair matted and snarled. There were bruise-colored circles under her eyes.

Maritza sat next to her daughter and tried to hold her hand. Taína snatched it back. “Where were you?” she whined. Like she was seven, not eighteen.

“I drove to Dorado and told them that you had quit that stupid job.” 

A lie. She had just called Elgin Baron’s housekeeper to tell her Taína wasn’t coming back.

Taína sat up, her back straight against the wall. “Are you kidding? I’ll never make money like that anywhere.”

“Mi cielo, listen to me. I was thinking, I saved up, you know, just working at the café, before you found me again. I could give you that money and you could go back to New York, go to college there. SUNY or CUNY or whatever.”

Taína sat there frowning, her hands lifted, her fingers fluttering in the air. She was trying to find fault in the idea. 

And then her frown smoothed. “Ay, Mami, really?”

Maritza nodded.

Taína leaned over and hugged her hard. Maritza gasped. The girl smelled of sweat and earth and blood, nearly as rank as Rock Rogan.

Maritza thought, it is over, it is now, it really is.

But then the following week, after going over her bank statements, Maritza saw that once Taína got to New York, she’d be out of money right away unless… Unless Maritza contacted David, which she hated to do; her ex was still living in his old house in Albany with a girl just a little older than Taína. David hadn’t done a thing for their daughter for years now.

To get up the nerve to call him, Maritza went back to the mangrove. She took Juancho’s Voltkore leaf blower with her. When she got to the tree, Rogan’s face was exposed again. However, his hair was now so clumped with twigs and sand and leaves, and the cowries had become so embedded in his face, that he looked like a cross between Freddy Kruger and her cowrie-eyed Eleguá, the saint of beginnings and opportunities. 

Clearly, also of endings.

With the sand gone from his mouth, though, he was grinning again at Maritza. Incredibly, his brilliant bleached teeth were all intact.

“Did you tell your boyfriend about our thang, girl? Does he know you got a new man?” the corpse said.

Maritza took the Voltkore and smashed the heavy motor part of it into the corpse’s mouth. His teeth flew out like chiclets. She smashed the mouth again. 

Rogan closed his now toothless mouth. He was quite mortified. 

She smiled.

She gathered the teeth and they were as dazzling as the sun. She put them in the pockets of her jeans. Again, she plastered sand on his head and this time she stuffed his mouth with pebbles and glass and fossil fragments from the sand.

She remembered the last time she’d dropped off Taína at Elgin Baron’s mansion on the beach. The house was a two-story concrete structure with massive, flush-mounted windows that took up most of the walls. Royal palms were planted on either side of it and trailed down the driveway, forming a grand avenue like that of some secluded hotel. In the back, facing the ocean, was an infinity pool. Not that she’d seen it. Taína had told her. The girl had been so impressed. In the house there was also an art gallery, a movie theater, and a room where Elgin’s little kid stored all his toys, including a village made of Legos. These people ate their meals in a dining room as big as a restaurant and with its own bar, which is where Taína had worked.

When she stopped the car, Rogan was out in front of the mansion in his golf cart. Maritza found out later that Rogan and Elgin—best buddies—each paid $40,000 a month to lease their houses. Rogan appeared to have taken over the rental agreement on Elgin’s place this month. They did that a lot these guys, played musical chairs with each other’s houses, cars, even their lovers.

Rogan got out of the cart. He was dressed in a hoodie, shorts, long black socks and sneakers, his blonde hair tumbled over his shoulders. 

Taína slipped out of the car, eyes enormous, and she was smiling her most charming smile. Her curly, coiffed, hair fell to her back. She was lean and shapely in her shorts and white polo shirt. 

Rogan stared at Taína in a way that made Maritza want to scream at the girl to get back in the car. 

“I know why we came here now,” Rogan said. “It’s because of all the sweet mamis.”

“Vete a la porra,” Maritza muttered.

“What was that?” The man said.

“Mami please,” Taína whispered. 

“Don’t even think about touching her,” Maritza said to the man in her most careful English.

“Oh, you got your mama with you,” Rogan said. Looking at Maritza and not seeing her. “I don’t touch what don’t want to be touched.”

“Don’t touch her even if she wants to be touched,” Maritza said.

“Mami!” Taína rolled her eyes then batted them at Rogan. 

Maritza wanted to hit the girl.

The man smiled back at the girl with his impossibly perfect teeth. The girl cocked her hip and touched a lock of her hair. Flexing his muscles, the man turned and the girl sashayed after him into the house with its long mirror-like windows that did not seem to reflect the surrounding nature. Not even the sun. 

Maritza felt suddenly very lonely.

With his cowrie eyes, twig hair and pebble-filled mouth, Rock Rogan stared at her now, very put out.

“Are you sorry?” Maritza said. She had a hammer with her today.

The cowries slanted a little sadly in Rogan’s face. He ventured a grin. “I’m not sorry because I have you, my sweet mami.”

Maritza hit him with the hammer on his shoulder and his rotted arm fell right off.

“Are you sorry yet?”

The corpse mumbled something. 

“What was that?” she asked. 

The corpse said nothing.

Before she left the mangrove, she put his arm back on his lap.

That night Juancho made a fried plantain meat pie with a side of rice and pigeon peas and a watercress and tomato salad. Dessert was a dense vanilla flan with plenty of caramel sauce, Maritza’s favorite. Martiza ate voraciously. For the first time in three months, so did Taína. Juancho had a Medalla, Maritza a piña colada, and Taína drank Malta India. Then they watched the pawn shop show, which they all loved. 

Maritza liked the pawn shop guy’s pale, intelligent face, his baldness that made him seem so focused, his respect for the objects and people that came his way. He established that a 1941 copy of Sensation Comics #1, purchased for 10 cents, was now worth $375,000 dollars. The cover featured Wonder Woman with a Victory Roll haircut, her star-sprinkled blue skirt stopping demurely at her thigh. Men in brown suits and sepia fedoras were shooting their guns at her and Wonder Woman was pulling the bullets out of the guns with ropes wrapped around her wrists. 

The comic book caption said, “The sensational new adventure strip character Wonder Woman!”

How easy it was to be Wonder Woman, Maritza thought. Everyone could see and applaud her heroism. Wonder Woman did not have a secret life, guilt, reservations. She did not overthink things. Wonder Woman got rid of her enemies and that was that. Wonder Woman had no compulsion to repeat.

She ran her hand over her jean pocket and felt a protuberance. The teeth. Maritza felt her face flush, relieved that the family was distracted by the show.

Above all, Wonder Woman did not keep trophies.

They all exclaimed on how cool the comic book was, how much it revealed the times. Taína was flabbergasted that Wonder Woman went back to the 1940s. 

“What’s the story behind this?” Pawn Shop Guy asked a man in baggy jeans and a pink polo shirt. The man had hair the color of orange sherbet. His face was freckled and almost as orange as his hair.

“Well, I knew you’d ask, but we don’t know exactly,” the man with the sherbet-colored hair said. “My grandma brought it back one day at dawn in 1942. She’d gone out with some fellow the night before. She didn’t remember nothing about the date. She didn’t have her purse on her or her wallet or nothing. Just the comic. Thing was, her clothes were torn. Her face and arms all bruised up, and she didn’t want to see that comic book no more is what I hear. So, it was hid away. Then one day, we’re up in the attic looking for something, and we see the comic book. We tell grandma, and she hollers and screams. She said she didn’t want to hear nothing more about this comic book, that it had cost her. So, we all knew then that something happened that night.”

Taína got up from the dining table and ran out the door. 

Maritza and Juancho followed her to the patio where the mango, plantain and avocado trees were, their leaves making soughing noises in the night breeze. Taína collapsed on the damp ground, her back against the trunk of the mango tree, just as she had on that night three months ago when she had come home with her white shirt and shorts torn, her body covered with bruises. All she had remembered was the sweet sickly-tasting drink she’d had with Rock Rogan the night before. A Zombie. She’d woken up in a bed in the Elgin mansion with her clothes on but her insides burning. 

They had gone to the police. The police had done a rape kit and had interviewed Rogan. Nothing happened because Taína said she couldn’t remember much. Whoever raped her had used a condom and left no semen, the police said. And, of course, the police chief was a friend of Baron and Rogan, who’d bought everyone with their crypto-babble promises.

Taína’s body shook now like it had that night. Maritza held her. In the higher reaches of the mango tree a bat went click clock, click clock.

The next day Maritza went back to the mangrove. She approached the tree shouting “Que se acabe esto ya! I just want it to stop.” Like in her own way she was storming a fortress.

The corpse was an arresting being now, no longer Rock Rogan exactly, but a figure of sun-baked sand, shell eyes and twiggy hair. Needle-like blades of manatee grass sprouted all over his face and chest, giving him a decidedly green look. The sun-blackened arm in his lap looked like a tree branch.

Rogan sat up straight as she approached. He leaned forward and said, “It’s not over. You know why? You need me to talk to. I know you. What you’re really like. Deep down. You’re furious, a real rager. And you know what? I like that. You should appreciate that I understand the real you. Because, who else could? You’re too passionate for life, sweet mama. And that way we’re kind of the same, aren’t we? We take what we want. I took the girl and you, well… I gotta give it to you. You took me, didn’t you?”

She fell on the body smacking it with her fists, kicking it hard, punting the sand and grass off with her Hokas. She tore off its cowrie eyes with a ripping sound like tight band-aids. She dipped her finger into the socket with the remaining eye and gouged it out. It was heavy as iron. Surprisingly, it smelled only slightly of rot. She threw it over the tangled roots of the mangrove.

Something moved in the water and snatched it up.

The corpse sat there, eyeless, with no expression with which to taunt her. Baked and dry.

But a deep sound rose from its stomach, irrepressibly, a windy laugh. “I like you better every time, don’t you know that, my sweet, fiery mama? I understand you like nobody ever will. You and me, we’re not so different. I accept you just the way you are.”

That night as Juancho slept, Maritza lay in bed, thinking about how she planned to kill Rock Rogan again. Kill him definitively. An ice pick? A shovel? A meat cleaver?

No, no, no. A machete? Oh, that was perfect. A machete to slice his head clean off his body. And what would he do, hold his head in his one still-intact hand and laugh at her? 

Ha ha ha, sweet mama, don’t you realize that it’s only after dying that I’m truly happy with my life? Cut off my head, and I’ll rock it like a baby, the only kid I’ll ever have. You made sure of that, didn’t you? But seriously, babe, I like the mangrove! Water’s like lapis. Air’s a little muddy but no chemicals! I don’t have to try no more. I am what I am here. And there’re all these orange cuckoo birds that keep pecking at the little bit of brain I got left… When that’s gone, I’ll be a part of rocks and stones and trees. That’s not what you were going for, was it now? I’ll never leave this place; this place and I are one. Everything forever…

“What’re you thinking?” Juancho suddenly said. 

She shifted in the bed. She hadn’t known he was awake. 

“I was wondering where the machete is, mijo,” she said. “I thought I’d cut a bunch from the tree and fry up some plantains for us tomorrow.” 

“What?” Juancho’s voice squeaked a little. “Nena, you know my plantain dishes are better than yours.”

“Hmmm,” she said. 

Juancho went back to sleep.

She would buy her own machete. She wanted to see Rock Rogan’s faceless face direct itself toward her when she came at him with a machete. We’d see who laughed then. She could just go to the nearest ferretería and see what they had. There would be a lot of interesting tools she hadn’t paid much attention to before.

Tomorrow, she thought; she’d come up with the perfect way tomorrow.