“Next week. June seventh.”
“I’ll get you a bike.” That made me happy. He didn’t throw me a birthday party, but then my mother had never thrown me a party either. And anyway, I didn’t like parties. But I liked the bike. I would ride around with Pete, a friend from school. I asked Pete if he knew how to swim and he said yes. So he taught me how to swim. It was a good summer: swimming, reading and riding my bike. It wasn’t such a bad life.
One afternoon when I got home, there was a man in our living room. “Hi,” I said.
He nodded at me.
I looked at him and asked, “Where’s my dad?”
“He’s getting something for me,” he said.
I turned on the television.
My father came into the room with a package wrapped in brown paper. He handed the man the package and the man handed my father a wad of money. They went outside and talked, then the man left.
When my father came back inside, he looked at me and said, “Never talk about what I do.”
I nodded.
He handed me two twenties and a ten. “I’m giving you fifty dollars a month for your allowance.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“If you’re smart, you won’t spend it all and you’ll put some away.”
“Okay,” I nodded. I wondered if saving money was a rule. It didn’t sound like a rule. It was more like a suggestion. Never talk about what I do. That was a rule. So I started separating suggestions from rules.
After a while, I figured it out. My father was a drug dealer. I don’t think I cared, not really. And what was I supposed to do about it anyway? Some of his customers seemed really normal. Some guys came by in business suits. Some guys looked liked normal college kids. Others, not so normal. I really liked to study the guys who came to do business with my father if they had tattoos. One guy had a tattoo of a mermaid on his shaved head. I had a thing for tattoos.
One morning, I asked my father, “Can I get a tattoo?”
We were eating breakfast. I’d made him a cheese and jalapeño omelet. “No fuckin’ way,” he said.
“Not even if I pay for it with my allowance and the money I save?”
“I said no fuckin’ way.”
“So that’s another rule,” I said.
“You’re goddamned right,” he said.
I guess I must have looked sad or disappointed because he said, “Look, you’re a good kid, and you’re gonna stay a good kid.”
“Dad, what if I’m not really good?”
He smiled. “That’s the first time you’ve ever called me Dad.”
“You want me to call you Eddie?”
“No, Dad works.”
I nodded. “Look, Dad, maybe I’m not a good kid. It’s not like you know me.”
“You’re soft,” he said.
“I’m not.” I hated him for saying that.
He could tell I was mad. He put his hand on my shoulder. He hardly ever touched me. “I know a few things. I know what I see.”
I did hate him. I did.
6.
Sometimes I would take out the picture of my mother and stare at it. I took out my pencil and tried to draw her. I couldn’t remember her first name. But I didn’t want to forget her face.
7.
One day my father came into the room and handed me my birth certificate. I stared at it. I saw the name on the birth certificate: Maximiliano Gonzalez McDonald.
I looked at my father. “Thought I was gonna have to change your name. Turns out you had my name all along.”
I nodded.
“Why’d she name you Maximiliano?”
“She thought the story of Emperor Maximiliano and the Empress Carlota was romantic.”
My father laughed—then shook his head. He looked a little sad. “Carlota was mad. Fucking crazy. Just like your mother.”
8.
I made my first communion when I was eleven. I was about four years older than the other kids. Not that I cared all that much. From the very beginning, I knew that I would never be a very good Catholic. I wasn’t interested in God and I didn’t think he was interested in me either. We sort of just ignored each other. I was going to do the Catholic thing because it was one of my father’s rules. I guess he figured that the church thing would make me a better person. But this was what I didn’t really get: if my dad thought that going to church made you a better person, then why didn’t he go to mass? Maybe he didn’t want to be a better person? But if he didn’t want to be a better person, then why would he want me to be a better person? Maybe I thought too much about things.
On the Saturday before my first communion, my father bought me a new pair of black pants, a new pair of shoes, a new white shirt, my first tie and my first sports coat. He took me to mass that Sunday. It was strange. I was used to going by myself. He was all dressed up, wore a suit and shaved. He looked really handsome. Before he left the house, he handed me a rosary. It was old and worn. He just handed it to me and said, “It belonged to my father.”
I took it and looked at him. He looked sad. “He came over from Ireland when he was a young man. He settled in Guanajuato. Married a woman named Rosario. I was born in San Antonio. And that about sums up what I have to say about my family history.”
I wanted to ask him if he’d loved his father, but I thought he’d hate me for asking the question. I smiled at him, “This is better than an allowance.” I put it my pocket.
After mass, we stood outside the cathedral and one of my friends took a picture of me and my father. My father actually smiled. Then he took me out for breakfast. A woman named Blanca met us at the restaurant. She was pretty and she had a present for me. “I’m a friend of your father’s.”
I shook her hand. “My name’s Maximiliano,” I said. “Most people call me Max.”
“It’s a beautiful name,” she said.
“You can open your present,” she said.
It was a pen. An expensive one. “Your father says you write a lot.” I wondered if he read the things I wrote in my journal. I thought about making a rule that he couldn’t go in my room either. I smiled at her and thanked her. She was nice and she liked to talk and to laugh. We had a really nice breakfast and I wondered if maybe my father would marry her and quit his business and we could maybe live a normal life. Deep down inside I knew it would never happen.
Blanca asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I could tell my father was interested in my answer. “Well, I’d either like to be a musician or an artist.”
She smiled at me. “Do you play an instrument?”
“No.”
“Do you draw?”
“Yes,” I said.
My father was surprised. “What do you draw?” she asked.
“The tree in the backyard. My room. My desk. My dad’s truck.” I didn’t tell her about drawing my mother over and over again.
“You’ve been drawing my truck?”
“Yes,” I said.
He never asked to see that drawing. But a year later, when I was better at drawing, I gave him a charcoal sketch of his truck for Christmas. I framed it and everything.
“It’s good,” he said. He had a strange look on his face. I thought for a moment that he was going to cry, but my father wasn’t a crier—and the look went away. Just like Blanca had gone away.
9.
I was a quiet and serious boy. I was even more serious and quiet when I entered high school. I made friends, but they were school friends. I didn’t want anyone coming over to my house. My dad had too many customers coming in and out at all hours of the day and night. And I guess I had a theory as to why my father had bought a house in this neighborhood. The house next door had burned down and no one had bothered to raze it to the ground. The rest of the houses were rentals and the houses weren’t kept up and half the renters around us all seemed like they were potential customers for my father’s business. It was all perfect.
Our front yard wasn’t kept up and my father wanted to keep it that wa
y. “I like weeds,” he said. “Nothing wrong with weeds. You want a nice lawn in this neighborhood? What’s wrong with you? You want people to notice us?”
I hated weeds. I guess you could say I always liked everything nice and neat—even though I knew that everything was chaos. I decided to make a deal with my father. I fixed the backyard. I planted some bushes and I grew a nice lawn. It wasn’t a big yard. It had a big fence around it and no one could look in. I think my dad liked the backyard. He bought some lawn chairs and sometimes we would both sit out in the evening. I would read a book and he would read the newspaper. My dad had a thing for reading newspapers.
About the same time I entered Cathedral High School, my father began using some of the products he sold. He began to smoke marijuana in his room. I could smell it. A lot of the times he would come out of his room and I could tell he was stoned because he whistled. He always whistled when he was stoned.
One Friday night, I was thinking about meeting some of my school friends at a football game. I was reading a book and eating a sandwich in the kitchen. My father walked in and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator. He sort of smiled at me and patted me on the back. I liked when he did that, but that only happened about twice a year and I would have liked it better if he hadn’t been stoned. “What are you reading?”
“A story by Hemingway,” I said.
“Famous guy,” he said. And then he just nodded. “You know, you can drink if you want. Drinking is okay. Just don’t overdo it. And don’t ever drive when you’re drunk.”
“Okay,” I said. “But you don’t have to worry about me drinking and driving, Dad. I don’t drive.”
“Aren’t you old enough?”
“I’ll be sixteen.”
“June seventh.”
I was glad he remembered my birthday—even though he didn’t remember how old I was.
“You can get a permit.”
“Guess so.”
“I know a guy who teaches people how to drive. He has a little business.”
“Is he one of your customers?”
My father didn’t answer the question. I could tell he didn’t like that I’d asked. I shrugged. “Sorry.”
My father nodded, downed his beer and said, “Just remember that you can drink.” It almost sounded like another rule. It sounded like I was supposed to start.
He didn’t come back for a few days, but by then he’d gotten me a cell phone so I could call or text him if I got too worried. He said people who were worriers never changed. “You can’t help it,” he said. He made it sound like worrying was a sickness.
That Sunday night, I texted him. U ok? A few minutes later, he texted me back. I like wmen. Do ur hmwork. I like women, I like women, I like women. Bullshit, I thought. It’s not just women. It’s women who like to party. By then, I knew from being around my dad’s customers that partying meant drugs plus sex. I knew what he was up to. I tried not to let it upset me, but it did upset me. But what the fuck was I supposed to do about it anyway? I would never rat him out and I would never run away from home. Those were things I just didn’t have in me. I wondered if that made me a good boy or a bad boy. Maybe I was just an afraid boy.
10.
A couple of guys came over one evening. I knew what was happening. My father went into his room. The two guys were smoking cigarettes on the porch and I could hear what they were saying. “This connect has good shit.”
So that’s what my father was—a connect.
After a few months, I realized my father had what other businessmen would call a diversified portfolio. He dealt in marijuana, cocaine, crack, ecstasy, heroin and crystal meth. I looked up all the drugs on the Internet. I knew all about them.
My father came into my room one night. All he said was, “If you ever do drugs, I’ll beat the holy shit out of you and kick your ass out on the street.”
When he left my room, I sort of laughed. He was like fucking Moses writing down the Ten Commandments.
I put the new rule at the top of the list.
11.
My father got a credit card in my name. My allowance increased from fifty dollars a month to a hundred dollars a month—but I was supposed to make the payments on my own credit card. He opened a bank account for me. “How much money have you saved?” he asked me.
“About four hundred dollars,” I said.
He nodded. “Good.”
“You have to learn how to handle your finances.” Another rule.
These are the things my father bought me that year:
1. Driving lessons.
2. An Apple computer.
3. An iPhone.
4. A brand new Volkswagen.
It’s not as if I didn’t know where the money came from. I did wonder how he laundered his money. But I found some lawyer’s name on a business card on the coffee table one day. I didn’t know many things about my father. I knew he didn’t like to talk. And I also knew that he was a very smart man. I guess he was a real businessman.
12.
I had a habit of riding the bus on weekends. I would get on a bus and ride around and think. One Saturday, two women—I guessed they made a living by cleaning houses—were having a conversation. I liked listening to their Spanish and it reminded me of Juárez and of my boyhood. Everything had become so much more complicated since then. I just kept listening to them. One of the women was telling the other woman that the streets of Juárez were becoming rivers of blood. She spoke about a young woman the soldiers took away who was never seen again, and they spoke of the kidnappings and beheadings and houses where people were found tortured. They talked about all the women who had disappeared.
I drifted away from their conversation, wondering what it would be like to take a gun to someone’s head, to kidnap someone, to torture a man. What would it be like to cut someone’s hands off? I knew there was a listserve that counted the bodies because I had joined that listserve. It was all about the dead bodies. The thing was that the bodies didn’t have names. Sometimes I made up names for them.
I had a whole list of names.
This whole thing, I thought, this whole thing was because of men like my father.
I went out with some friends that night. I got drunk and I woke up the next day and discovered I was at Pete’s house. I had never felt that bad.
Pete walked into the living room and laughed. “You really let loose last night.”
Oh shit, I thought. Had I said something about my father? “I don’t remember. What did I do? What did I say?”
“You kissed Sandra.”
“What?”
“No worries, dude, she kissed you back.”
“Really?” That sort of made me a little bit happy.
“Yeah, you sort of made out all night.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“You were really drunk. But what have you got against 420?”
“Why?”
“Dave offered you a joint and I thought you were going to cut his fucking head off. We had to pull you away and cool you off.”
I shrugged. “I just don’t do drugs,” I said.
“420’s cool.”
“I don’t do weed. I don’t do drugs. End of story.”
“Straight-edger, huh?
“Pretty much.”
“Well, that’s cool too.” Pete laughed. “But you really did let loose on that liquor, dude.”
I looked at my phone. I had a text from my father. U ok? That made me happy, that he was wondering where I was. I smiled and texted him back: I like women .
It was the first time I had successfully joked around with my father. I knew it was a joke that would make him smile.
As I drove home that afternoon, I decided to get a passport. I don’t remember what had happened to the one I had. My mother had always kept it in her possession. I wanted to go to Juárez. I wanted to find Marcos and Jorge. I wanted to see what they had become. Or maybe I wanted to find out what I had become.
13.
I
t took me three months to get my passport. When I got it in the mail, it also included my border crossing card. My father intercepted my mail. I didn’t like that—but I never crossed my father. I was afraid of him. I’d seen his temper, and though his temper had never been aimed at me, I knew what could happen. Maybe that’s why I kept all his rules.
He asked me why I wanted a passport.
“To go to Juárez to visit my old friends.”
“Don’t you think it’s been too long?
Don’t you think they’ve moved on?”
“I don’t know,” I said. And I was really mad—and though I never talked back to my father—this time I did. “And you don’t know either.”
“No fuckin’ way you’re going to Juárez. Don’t you read the goddamned newspapers? Don’t you fuckin’ know what’s happening over there?”
“I know.”
“For such a smart kid, you’re something of a dumbass.”
I nodded, and took my passport out of his hand. “I have a rule,” I said. “Never open my mail. And never walk into my room.”
I didn’t bother to study the look on his face. I grabbed my passport out of his hand and turned away from him.
14.
I think I knew something about addiction. I was addicted to drawing my mother. I had hundreds of sketches of her.
I never sketched my father.
15.
I heard my father talking to a man. He was in the kitchen and I was doing my homework on my laptop while I watched television. My father was excited and I noticed his cell phone was on the coffee table. I knew he was using one of those throwaway cells. Once when we were on our way to eat dinner, we took the scenic route. He stopped to toss a cell phone out into the desert. My father was saying something about his fuckin’ ship coming in.
He left on a business trip. “I’ll be back in a couple of weeks,” he said. “I won’t be in touch.” He gave me the business card I’d seen, the one with the lawyer’s name and number and address. “If something happens, call him.”
I nodded.
He must have left early in the morning, because when I got up the next day, he was gone. He left me a note on the kitchen table. Don’t go to Juárez. Don’t go into my room. Don’t fuckin’ do drugs. And start thinking about what college you want to go to. That’s your homework. So every night I would come home from school, do my homework, then get on the Internet and study all the schools I might like to go to. I stayed up until two or three in the morning every night. I got lost in the homework my father gave me. It helped to keep me from worrying. In the end, I made the following list: