The House of Broken Angels

  Big Angel and his father had forced Spanish on Little Angel with brutal force. Still, he was an English speaker. It was the language he used to speak to his mother, after all. They had wrestled to a draw.

  “I gave you books,” Big Angel noted. “Don’t forget.”

  “I never forget. But then I gave you books too.”

  “Travis McGee mysteries.”

  Little Angel smiled.

  “Perla threw them away because they had girls on the covers.”

  There had been nothing to add to that.

  * * *

  1:00 a.m.

  La Minnie finally crawled onto the couch. Her man was asleep in their bedroom. She didn’t feel it was mean of her to wait till he was snoring. She was too tired to snuggle with him. She sipped her wine. Snoring. Somehow it put her to sleep. So no touching right now, but later, maybe.

  She was tired from a lot of things. She just sat in the dark living room, smoking and thinking and listening to some John Legend and Prince down low. A glass of white wine. One slice of a peach in it. She painted her nails in three shades of purple. Dark, light, and palest lavender. A slender gold bracelet loosely circled her left wrist. It said “Mouse” in old-school cursive script.

  She put “Little Red Corvette” on repeat. La Minnie did not cry. But some nights she wanted nothing but the darkness on her skin.

  * * *

  2:00 a.m.

  The pain awoke him, as it often did.

  Perla was making soft noises in her sleep. She made soft pew sounds with her lips. He reached out in the dark, felt for the codeine pills, and swallowed two with gulps of tepid water. He realized he hated the taste of chlorine. That was one thing he would not miss.

  “Too cheap to buy bottled water,” he said.

  “Pew,” said Perla.

  He listened to the sounds of his house. He would miss it, that was for sure. It was a bit worn down now, true. Needed paint. Needed new carpets and better furniture. Curtains. He was recently surprised to see a sheet thumbtacked over one of the back windows. There were nail holes and scuffs and dings all over the walls. The ceiling in Braulio’s old bedroom was still stained brown over one corner from a leak in the roof.

  Big Angel remembered how he had climbed up there in a storm with a pot of tar and a spackling knife. Back when he could climb. He had hopped up onto the outside water softener and onto the roof of the tiny water heater closet attached to the back of the kitchen. And up top in the rain, filling the hole in the tar-paper shingles until he had been sure the dripping was remedied. He could smell it, lying there in the dark—the scent of California rain, carrying the perfume of wet dirt over the roof, and the smell of the shingles, and the smell of the tar.

  For a moment, he wasn’t in his bed but up there again. Reliving the astonishment of standing astraddle his roof and seeing the world from on high. Seeing the lightning striking the hills of Tijuana. Seeing everything laid before him, nothing but possibilities and opportunities.

  Oh, this humble house had seemed such a palace then. It still felt that way. Every day, in the weariest corner of the house, he could remember that he had snuck north from Tijuana once. And now he owned an American home.

  Silently, he rose out of himself and left the bed. He walked down the hall. The breeze was wonderfully refreshing as it moved through him. It knew to find the tumors and cool them. Such relief. Like fresh water on a sunburn. Very good. Gracias.

  He saw the two couches side by side in the living room. One had been bought long ago on layaway from Montgomery Ward’s, and nobody but he and Perla knew that Minnie had been made there. He knew it was true for the simple reason that they hadn’t had enough beds for everyone in those days, and he and his waifa had shared the couch so Braulio could sleep in a bed so he’d do well in school. But of course he had been kicked out of school. So they had taken their bed back. And now Minnie slept on that couch when she stayed with them. Her body an echo of its own creation.

  The second couch was in bad shape, but that made Big Angel like it more. They had gone to collect it from his father’s sad apartment after he’d died. It had cigarette burns in the arms. They had brought it home to find an old 1967 nudie magazine under one of the pillows. Perla threw it away, but Big Angel rescued it and hid it out in his workshop. He was thirteen again every time he looked through it. Astonished to see white women bared to the world. Tired women on piano benches grimacing up at cameras as if they had forgotten what smiles looked like. Women playing volleyball nude on some scrap of beach, caught forever in mid-levitation, their breasts seeming to yearn for flight. It was a gallery of sorrows. And he had found his father’s thumbprint smeared in the cheap print of the single “Naughty Nightcap” erotic story.

  He liked to sit on the couch and rub the cigarette burns with his fingertips. The back of the couch, along the tops of the pillows, had stains from his father’s hair pomade. Big Angel remembered the brand: Dixie Peach.

  “I remember everything,” he said aloud.

  Like the ornamental iron railing along the edge of the living room, where it dropped a step to the entryway of the house. A useless little fence. He laid his hand on it, and he remembered El Yndio chasing Braulio and poor Lalo through the house, how small they were, and how Lalo had run smack into the railing and split his eyebrow. Oh, the wailing! Blood everywhere. Lalo’s caterwauling had started Minnie crying. The drive with Perla holding paper towels to Lalo’s head. It had been only the first of Big Angel’s many drives to Paradise Valley Hospital’s emergency room. Two stitches, which gave Lalo a devilish split eyebrow he later used as a weapon on the muchachas. And now Lalo drove him there, every time he thought he was dying.

  The patriarch patted the couch. When Little Angel’s American mother threw their father out for sleeping with her best friend in their bed, he had come here. They had sat at that same kitchen table. Drinking coffee and staring at each other.

  Big Angel stood, drifted to the middle of the room, and invited every memory to come to him and clothe him in beauty.

  Then

  (En Aquel Entonces)

  Big Angel was still a boy when he first saw Perla. Barely sixteen. He wore American black jeans and a ridiculous yellow checkered blazer his Tía Cuca had sent from Mazatlán. It came by fishing boat, something that seemed altogether normal in La Paz but would assume mythical proportions later, in San Diego. “Check it, dawg—Pops got his threads off a fishin’ boat, no lie!” The same jacket he would christen on the beach within a year.

  His father always made Angel dress up when he came to the police station with him. “Un caballero,” he told his son, “always dresses well and is always clean-shaven except for his mustache, and that has to be trimmed carefully. And fingernails always short and clean. Otherwise, he’s no gentleman.” He also made Angel call the shoeshine man—with the rag tied on his head and an ugly little wooden box with the footrest on top—“Maestro.”

  Angel was already too old to ride behind his father on the massive police motorcycle. But he no longer had any physical intimacy with him, and Angel took advantage of the rare days when his father felt disposed to allow him to cling as they sped along. Some days were like that. Inexplicable days of grace.

  It was a huge thrill to ride across La Paz with his father. The police uniform was of course intensely dramatic—the shiny badge in bronze and ceramic with its eagle and cactus centerpiece. The mirror-bright black knee boots. The immense pistola in a creaking leather oil-scented holster. And the inscrutable twin pools of nothing when the aviator shades covered his father’s eyes.

  But being perched behind the vast oaken back of his father, the Harley thrumming beneath them as they slanted in and out of traffic—that was the greatest thrill of his days. He watched people slow and pull aside, fearing Don Antonio, seeing the Jefe de Patrullas Motociclistas roaring down the road. His thought, beaming it out to the world like a lighthouse beacon: My father, my father.

  He would shout into the wind, “Siren!”
r />   And his father would hit the button with his thumb. And the shiny silver klaxon mounted on the front fender would yawp hideously, frightening people and animals for a block. These two burning through the city like furious gods.

  Angel might get permission if he had curried favor, but Little Pato and María Luisa were forbidden from even touching the big machine. They all called César El Pato Donald because his rusty voice sounded like Donald Duck, and when he got mad, they laughed until they cried. Their laughter enraged him, so his squawk became more frantic, and they laughed harder. It was his misfortune that, as he grew, his voice lowered into a deep mallard’s squonk, and the name never left him.

  But not even Donald Duck could touch the Harley. Don Antonio kept it spotless, polished. Like many houses in La Paz in those days, theirs had a rickety wooden gate that hid a dirt courtyard with a ciruelo and a coconut palm, a woven palm-frond palapa, and a hammock. The motorcycle rested beneath the palapa and a rainproof tarp like some mythical beast that slept standing, that might awaken and eat any of them at the slightest provocation.

  In the early mornings—when Mamá América was cooking breakfast in the open kitchen, smoke billowing from the wood-burning stove, tortillas heating on the sheet-iron comal over flames, the green parrot and the mourning doves in their wooden cages—the children would pause outside the small chicken coop and watch the Harley sleep. Their father’s snores were loud, even out here, so they knew it was safe to approach his steed.

  He called it El Caballo Mayor.

  Mother was aware of their curiosity but kept her back to them. She feigned deep interest in boiling frijoles and chopping tomatoes and onions. She melted a pond of lard in the huge skillet and dropped beans and soup into it with a savage roaring of fat and a vivid white cloud of steam and smell. The parrot gripped his guano-caked perch and flew in place inside his cage, maniacally beating his wings until the cage wobbled on its nail, shrieking warnings to the world that the fire was out of control. She ignored it.

  She mashed the beans into the lard, spooning the hot lard back over the beans until it had all fried into a viscous mass. The children were on their own. They had chores to do before school: sweeping, feeding the animals, tending the laundry or taking it down. They were also expected to collect the eggs their three hens offered up. She knew they would waste time before school, looking for iguanas or teasing the idiotic turkey, La Chichona.

  They had a fatal interest in the forbidden motorcycle. So she didn’t watch them, and she let them peek. She observed them nonetheless with the supernatural powers of the Mexican mother. Ears that could hear the change in a child’s footstep. That could hear an intake of breath. Or worse, whispering. Her slipper could come off in less than a second, and the dreaded chancla would be flailing at their behinds if they were found misbehaving.

  Angel was skinny. Dark. He was already too old to spank, but that wouldn’t stop the chancla. He looked angry all the time because he had inherited his father’s flagrant eyebrows—a jungle on his brow ridge that grew together above his nose. He had combed his hair into an Elvis pomp, though he couldn’t manage sideburns yet.

  With his finger over his lips, he led the two chiquitos on tiptoes under the palapa and lifted the edge of the tarp so they could see the motorcycle’s great front tire angled jauntily as if it were the foreleg of a steed, hoof tipped in sleep. And the fat fender above it. They sighed.

  “Muchachos!” Mamá said, and they scattered.

  * * *

  The big motorcycle was as loud as a summer storm. Cops in their finned patrol cars with the single red light bubble on top lifted a finger at them or held a hand out the window. Don Antonio merely nodded, his cap at an angle on his head, his hair heavy and plastic with Dixie Peach, imported from Los Angeles or some other exotic gringo place where he had aunts. That Germanic-looking police cap never budged, tipped slightly over his right eye, high peaked, just touching with its gleaming black bill the top of his inscrutable aviator glasses.

  For Angel, La Paz was mostly light and smell.

  The sunlight, bouncing off the sea and the backs of whales, silvered by marlins and waves and sand, ricocheted from bare rock spires and desert shimmers, was as saturating as a flood. Yellow, blue, clear, white, everywhere vibrating, everywhere frank and blunt and without nuance. Red flowers, yellow, blue as plastic. Light. In cataracts.

  Angel also loved the rainy days, when shadows made their mysterious ways around corners and across alleys. And everyone loved sunsets. The light lost its sanity as it fell over the hills and into the Pacific—it went red and deeper red, orange, and even green. The skies seemed to melt, like lava eating black rock into great bite marks of burning. Sometimes all the town stopped and stared west. Shopkeepers came from their rooms to stand in the street. Families brought out their invalids on pallets and in wheelbarrows to wave their bent wrists at the madness consuming their sky. Swirls of gulls and pelicans like God’s own confetti snowed across those sky riots.

  Angel was afraid of falling off the machine. He wrapped his arms around his father’s grand torso, laid his cheek to his back, and only then let his eyelids drop. If he held tight to his father, he would not fall. Even though, with his eyes closed, he almost believed his father had levitated them above the earth and was trying to make him tumble through clouds to the desert below. He believed Father would hold him aloft.

  He breathed deep—for he could really smell the world if he was focused. Utterly focused. He had already formulated many theories, which is why Don Antonio sometimes called him El Filósofo, for his philosophy was already in place. And this was one of his theorems: to know the world in each of its parts, a seeker must shut out the unnecessary senses and focus on the target.

  Today, the day he was destined to meet Perla Castro Trasviña in the Centro police station at eight thirty in the morning in the magical year of 1963, the world was all scents.

  It began with his father’s back. Redolent of cigarette smoke and leather, the wool of his tunic, and the bay rum and shaving soap blowing back from his cheeks. The smell of wind and sun in his uniform, and Mamá’s lye soap. And even a hint of her.

  Behind these smells, and all around them, the sea—the relentless sea. Salt and seaweed and shrimp and distance. The bitter stench of beached dolphins turning to gray swamps on the rocks. The scent of mysterious Sinaloa somehow coming across the gulf. The choking reek of guano, and the delicious scent of a million miles’ worth of clean, rushing wind.

  “Siren!”

  “Mijo! Como chingas!”

  And the smells of the smoke—everywhere, smoke. The world was made of smoke. The sky collected all the burned offerings and built palaces of scents above and around them.

  Cooking smoke was the best. Carne asada. Carnitas. Roasted corn with lime and cheese. Fried fish. Tortillas. Diced nopales in scrambled eggs on a cloud of melted lard. Yeasty bread smoke from the bakeries. Sugar smoke. Shrimp tacos crisp in the breeze.

  Trash fires. Incense from the shops and the old women’s houses and the churches. Cigars.

  And dust.

  If the rain came, the creeping smell of the desert going wet. And diesel and exhaust, especially the big belching trucks and ancient buses. From alleys, the stench of sewage and rotten fruit. Flowers, yes. Flowers. They were not just colorful—but their scents colored the air. There came scents then of onion and tomato, chiles and the faintly soapy strange smell of cilantro. Mint leaves. Charcoal. Perfume and rank old beer in the tepid squalls of air billowing from cantinas.

  Somewhere in that vast tapestry of interwoven odors, Angel was sure he could smell the dead. Not their bodies, but their souls. His newest theory was that the dead came as ghosts in sudden finger-thin wafts of perfume or cigarette or hair’s sweet soap scents when it was drying in the sun…

  * * *

  And then they were just past the center of town with its drooping wires festooned with lights left over from Christmas. Tubas were playing in the plaza—Angel opened his eyes wh
en trumpets sounded a nationalistic fanfare. And the engine’s blat and rip grew massive and reverberant as they went between walls and up the narrower street to the station—bucking as Don Antonio slowed, cobbles and fractured chunks of concrete in the street, and they stopped before the jail and police station complex. Smells of urine escaped from the barred windows in back. Hopeless, flat human voices came from the barred and wired high windows. Don Antonio revved the engine and cut its noise, mid-shriek. They sat as though stunned by their own silence.

  “You will learn,” he said to his son, as if he had been thinking this during the whole trip, “that pink nipples are more intoxicating than brown.”

  Angel looked up to him, his father’s face just a shadow now against the sun, and he thought: What?

  And Don Antonio’s big shiny boot lifted and went over Big Angel’s head as he ducked, and his father stood tall, setting his belt, checking his cap. He pinched his balls through the trousers and shifted his lariat to the left. He looked at the boy and pulled off his dark glasses.

  He winked.

  * * *

  Inside the station, the usual tumult. The stinging smell of ammonia and pine cleaner. Brash echoes off pitiless tiles. Young cops deferred to Don Antonio with shy glances and slightly sideward motions. Their shoes squealed on the floor. Old cops slapped Father’s back and fake-punched Big Angel. He flinched. It infuriated Don Antonio. Flinching! His dark gnome of a son. Didn’t play guitar or baseball. Brooded like some…poet. Yes, he was hard on the boy. That was love. Look at this world.

  He remembered flogging his son. It seemed just yesterday. It had been over a year, but his remorse made it seem fresh, even though he refused to admit to himself that he felt anything but righteousness about it. He was a man, pues. Making a man. He had forced Angel to stand naked in the back room.