So he took a bus north. Express to Tijuana. It would be twenty-seven hours sitting there, smelling of gasoline. He couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking about the throbbing bloom of orange flame visible from the window as the bus had pulled away into the night.
It was 1965, and he felt he had already lived a hundred years.
For decades, he told his mother that he had run away. That he had no idea what happened to El Guatabampo or Tío Chente. He repeated his lie so many times that he almost convinced himself: he had gotten fed up with the work and the bullying, and had saved up his money and caught the bus. He assumed that Chentebent discovered his escape and got drunk and somehow set fire to the boat.
He had thought it was over. But the guilt and the lie burned steadily through all of his life.
* * *
Big Angel stood in the shadows of the living room, buffeted by stories of the past, things he remembered and things he had learned. Or maybe things he had dreamed. He could no longer tell the difference. The stories flew in like wind through an open window and whirled around him. He could feel them almost pull him off his feet. They seemed to come by their own volition, leaping over years, ignoring the decades. Big Angel found himself in a time storm. He saw it all as if the past were a movie in the Las Pulgas theater.
* * *
Little Angel was born in 1967.
Big Angel lived with his mother and siblings in Colonia Obrera in Tijuana until he snuck across the border to join his father after one of the old man’s infrequent visits to their house. It seemed easy to him. People either crept through the shallow brown Tijuana River down near the coast or joined the crowds running out of Colonia Libertad in Otay to the east. There were regular corridors in those days, and day workers often commuted through the dirt canyons. Big Angel refused to see any other girls. He sent postcards to Perla, which she never answered.
Yndio was born in 1970. By then, Big Angel was camping out at his father’s house and working as a donut cooker on night shift with payments made strictly under the table. One of his first American phrases: “under the table.” It seemed so elegant.
Braulio was born in 1971. Big Angel didn’t know any of this, but he wrote Perla a letter that same year, begging her to come north. Though the letter was later lost, they both remembered the line “Come to me while we still have life and we can wrestle with destiny.” It was the noblest thing Perla had ever heard. And she came, throwing everything away to join him.
Braulio grew up fast. He had them all fooled. Minnie was just a dumb kid—she worshipped all three of her brothers. But El Yndio knew, and Lalo knew what the deal was. And as she got older, Minnie made believe she didn’t know. Mamá Perla—well, Braulio was her angel. Pops took his standard noble route. Sometimes the boys laughed at him when he wasn’t around—so snooty, nose in the air. Making a big show of claiming Yndio and Braulio as his sons. The wisest man in the world, by his own estimation, remained blind to these two. Pinche Braulio—his nickname, Snickers, should have said it all.
Yndio could not stand Big Angel. He was the one who remembered his birth father. Braulio had been too young. Their father had dived for pearls. He shucked oysters with a fat, curved blade and slurped them down with lime juice and red hot sauce. He laughed loud, and when he laughed, his gold tooth shone. And one day, he dove into the waters east of La Paz and never surfaced. Yndio remembered that.
This Angel appeared one day as if he’d always been there. Yndio was so shocked that his mother had some romantic secret. Some filthy little past life. He wrestled with rage—thinking Whore some days when he looked at her.
Not Braulio. He was a prankster. And when he hooked up with Gloriosa’s boy, Guillermo, it was some kind of perfection. They were the same age, the same size. They could have been twins. And the girlies called Guillermo “Joker.” There was a clear theme. Snickers and Joker, down por vida homies. 4LIFE. When poor Lalo came along, he never could penetrate their society of two.
Things weren’t always middle class for the family. They didn’t always live in Lomas Doradas, in the happy barrios of Dago town. And in those years of struggle, when Big Angel would not allow anyone to get government help—no welfare, no food stamps—there were lots of boiled beans and fried beans and bean soups. Braulio’s favorite breakfast was cold fried beans smeared on a slice of Wonder Bread. Eaten while standing in the sad, tiny kitchen of their first apartment behind a garage in San Ysidro, not fifty yards from the border’s barbed wire. Pretty ballsy, since Ma and Pops were both illegal as hell back then.
Nights filled with helicopters and sirens and running feet and break-ins. Days watching out for gangbangers and stealthy Mexican bandits who snuck into the country to steal what little that immigrants like Angel and Perla had. They beat people and stole their watches and were reabsorbed by Tijuana before anybody noticed.
The kids all walked down to Oscar’s Drive-In and pooled their pennies to buy a chocolate malt and share it. Snickers, Yndio, Lalo, and Li’l Mouse. She was funny—no front teeth back then. Yndio mocked her, calling her “Moush.” She chewed the paper straws with her gums and wrecked them, and the boys smacked her on the head.
Later, Snickers came through for her, getting Minnie to school in Pops’s old station wagon. Braulio liked to drive her. He knew he could stab any culero who stepped up to her in a disrespectful way. Everybody was afraid of him, except his family. It felt good for Minnie. No matter where she went in her school, she got respect, because they all believed Braulio would come and set them on fire if they talked shit to the cutie.
Everybody said he had done that very thing to some Mexican outlaw on Otay Mesa. Minnie didn’t believe those stories. Not at first.
* * *
In those days, when Big Angel worked two jobs, sometimes three, poor Perla suffered in that dim apartment. She wanted only to return to Mexico. She did not understand his obsession with the U.S. This was not a better life. At home, at least, there was community, laughter. Even hope. In Tijuana, if you wanted to party, you could build a bonfire in the middle of the street.
Here, she found loneliness and worse hunger than in Mexico—worse, because all around her people were rolling like pigs in huge piles of food and clothes and liquor and nice underwear and cigarettes and money and chocolate and fruit. And she struggled to find new ways to stretch a thin chicken and a handful of rice to feed three growing boys and her man. Minnie? She could go hungry like Perla. It wouldn’t do to be a fat Mexican girl anyway.
Snickers and Joker rescued her days. They were wild, hilarious. Joker flirted with her most inappropriately—when she was feeling fat and sagging and old. He’d get up behind her and whisper-growl in her ear. “Tía, me tienes tan caliente!” She laughed and smacked him, but she also felt the hot tickles when he was against her. Oh no. Bad boy. Though she might have pushed back on him once or twice with her bottom.
The boys charged into that place as if it were some palace, blasted the TV too loud, lounged on the couches, and shouted compliments. They always had cigarettes for her. Then chocolates. Then money, which she’d hide from Angel. When Braulio turned sixteen and had gas money, he dragged her out to the car and drove her around. She couldn’t understand where they kept getting so many cigarettes.
* * *
Yndio was different. He was always stoic. Iron faced and strict with the little ones. He was always furious with Big Angel for some reason. He never understood his stepfather’s indulgence of the young ones, because Big Angel had been so hard on him. Big Angel tried to be Don Antonio at first—what else did he know? And he had used the belt on Yndio’s back. Yndio was already as tall as he was, and the second time Big Angel thought a whipping was in order, Yndio punched him in the face.
“I am your father!” Angel shouted.
“You sleep with my mother, old man. I don’t have a father.”
When Angel grabbed his arm, Yndio spit in his face.
* * *
When Big Angel rented the house in Lomas Doradas, it wa
s a surprise for Perla. He told her he needed to go for a drive to pick something up from his boss. He was working day shifts pushing a broom, and night shifts he learned to sell real estate. One of his million jobs. She didn’t like to leave the apartment, but he cajoled until she agreed to ride with him. The kids were inside the house, waiting for them. When she realized what was happening, she collapsed. The boys had to drag her to a chair and hold her up.
“Ay Dios! Flaco! Ay Dios!”
It didn’t take long for Yndio to spend more time away with “friends.”
Then Gloriosa and Joker moved in with them. And Lalo began to learn what Snickers and Joker were really like. First they had tattoos. Then they had money. Then they hid guns in the bedroom. They liked to catch him and stuff him in the cabinet under the sink and stick a broom handle through the door pulls to leave him trapped. They filled socks with glue and breathed the vapors.
All the boys were skinny except for Yndio. He was born with that body. But he never missed a chance to build strength. He had arms that anyone would kill for. He did two hundred sit-ups a day. Push-ups when he came for weekend visits, with Minnie kneeling on his back.
The house started to feel impossible. There were so many bodies crammed in there, they could hardly breathe. There didn’t seem to be any air. They had no idea how busy the little house would always be. When Big Angel came home from his jobs, he sat on the slumpy couch with Lalo and Braulio. Minnie sat on the floor between his bare feet, rubbing Quinsana powder between his toes. Gloriosa sat in the used easy chair. The only place left was in the corner, on the floor with the dog that Snickers had rescued in the rail yards. So Yndio sat there and just stared at the TV, never looking at Big Angel. Joker tended to hang in the back room, reading comic books. Perla stood in the kitchen, leaning against a counter. Drinking instant coffee. Fretting and smoking. They all smoked, except Minnie. But she would learn fast.
Big Angel grew dark, brooding, as he worked extra hours. He worked now in a bakery up in National City, so he was able to bring home stale donuts. The kids thought donuts made them rich. Snickers and Joker had never tasted jelly donuts before. As soon as he had changed his bakery uniform, Angel was out the door to clean business buildings in downtown San Diego. He came home and studied to sell term life insurance. And then came night classes in computer programming. He crawled into bed after midnight, to the sound of his wife and daughter snoring, then was up again before 6:00 a.m. to make more donuts.
But he bought the house for $18,000 through the real estate brokers he used to work for.
And that’s when Grandpa Antonio moved in, thrown out of his own house by Little Angel’s mother, Betty. Big Angel never thought he would end up making peace with his father and certainly never thought he would give him shelter. But once Gramps was installed, Yndio never came back. Perla and Minnie had to meet him at the Pancake House when they wanted to see him. His hair! He had an earring.
One day Perla took his hands in hers across the table and said, “My son. Are you a queer?”
He and Minnie stared at each other and fell over laughing.
* * *
Angel and Don Antonio spent many tense hours at the kitchen table, elaborately ignoring each other and sipping black coffee. In Don Antonio’s view, coffee with cream and sugar was dessert, not a drink for men. Angel felt superior at last to his father. He knew the old man had been thrown out for sleeping with American women in his wife’s bed.
“I loved your mother,” Don Antonio said, though whenever América came over, he hid in the back room.
“Why did you leave us, then?”
“I don’t know.”
Another cigarette lit. Perla keeping out of it. Fearing the old man. Fearing he’d come for her one night, and she would be afraid to fight him off because she didn’t want her Flaco to suffer another heartbreak. She kept Minnie out of his reach.
“Son, the more I learn, the less I know.”
“Oh?”
“I thought getting old made you wise. You only find out how pendejo you are. But when I get too pendejo to drive, put me in my grave.”
“Padre, it isn’t that bad.”
“Well, mijo, I can still get upstairs to a lady’s apartment. But my pecker won’t stand up to do anything about it.”
“I see,” Angel replied.
But he would not really see until he was dying, and he’d replay this chat in his bed when he couldn’t sleep. I am just learning how stupid I am.
* * *
Easing back into his body.
She snored beside him. Flung across the mattress as if she were running downhill, arms and legs akimbo. He patted her rump. He liked the edge of the sheet over his lips. All tucked in. Tight. Safe.
Early morning before dawn was best, when he didn’t remember he was dying. For a moment, he thought he had a future. And he savored his past.
Today, it tasted of butterscotch.
Celebration Day
The Morning of the Party
8:00 a.m.
It was time to get ready.
Little Angel lay on the couch, watching morning light creep across MaryLú’s living room. Everything smelled of sweet, powdery perfume.
The sibs all thought Little Angel was cheating the system somehow. A culture thief. A fake Mexican. More gringo than anything. He knew that. He had heard his sister call him a “gringo-Mex.” As if being any kind of Mexican had scored him points in the Grand Game. As if being any kind of Mexican in California was a ride in the Rose Parade. But what was he going to say? Tell them all the times he had been called “taco bender” or “wetback”? “Burrito breath”? They would laugh at him. Should he make lists of the Mexican girls he dated when he was a kid? Show them poems he’d written in Spanish?
Spanish! His family didn’t even like speaking Spanish to him. He tried, and they insisted on answering him in English. Though they knew perfectly well that he spoke Spanish as well as they did and better than their children did. Each side had something to prove, and none of them knew what it was.
They didn’t like his ease with that world of fancy pale bastards up north.
They thought he had it made, growing up with English and Spanish together. And he didn’t have an accent in either one. And was probably rich. Everything had come so easily to him. Anything he wanted. Including their father.
They imagined his Christmas mornings as orgies of bright toys and radios and bicycles.
They had seen his class lectures on YouTube. Talking about Chicano authors they’d never heard of. They knew he mocked their accents. They found him disrespectful of their father. Well, perhaps calling him “The Sperm Donor” in his Fatherhood in Latina/o Literature course was ill-advised. He owned that.
He believed he was celebrating them when he shared stories of their foibles. He felt the burden of being their living witness. Somehow the silliest details of their days were, to him, sacred. And he believed that if only the dominant culture could see these small moments, they would see their own human lives reflected in the other.
Unbeknownst to him, across town, Big Angel had again reentered his body after visiting their father’s grave in Tijuana and a visit to their family home in La Paz—fallen now and full of tumbleweeds. And a voyeuristic moment in La Gloriosa’s bedroom to watch her dream.
* * *
La Gloriosa was up early. She didn’t know why everybody thought she was late to everything. Cabrones. She was usually up before almost everybody else. It took time to be this fine—you didn’t just jump out of bed looking like the living legend of the family. Ay no. So maybe she didn’t get where she was supposed to go when they wanted her there, but she made sure they would remember forever the moment she arrived.
Even though she slept alone, she always wore beautiful things to bed. This morning, she was in a red teddy with black lace trim. All silk and soft. So tender that she loved to run her hands over her own ribs.
Her hair was a mess, and she liked it messy. But she had taken off her
face last night, like she did every night, and she didn’t like the look of herself without her makeup and eyes put back in place. They looked puffy and small without her attentions. Her skin was splotchy in the morning light. And her lips vanished every night. It took two levels of lipstick to bring out their ravishing power. The delicious center of her kiss and the suggestive darker edges. Men should feel like they were going to topple into her mouth.
“El lippi-sticky.”
She knew that her own beauty was aided yet not diminished by artifice. The Mona Lisa was in a beautiful frame, qué no? The true nature of her face was enhanced when she allowed the artifice to focus the viewer’s eye. And her beauty would show them the pure gold inside her.
A touch of copper on the eyelids and some precise eyeliner craft really worked their magic on her eyes. The nearly invisible blue line above the black. And that eyelash thickener. That was her real secret weapon. Aside from her general wonderfulness. It was hard, some days, to get started. It would be fun to just tie a scarf over her hair, put on sunglasses, and run free along the seashore.
“Buenota,” she told herself, for she found herself very good. It was her job to tell herself. She stretched. Her biceps were beautiful—but that floppy back of the arm stuff made her crazy.
“All righty,” she said en inglés, though she rolled the r. Rrrrighty.
Before her makeup session, of course, her long shower. Sorry about the drought. But the shower had to be long and hot. Leg razor, French shampoo, L’Occitane conditioning cream, clear bar of peach-almond soap, bottle of milky face cleanser. No soap on the face! Exfoliant and moisture scrub. She wasn’t going to look old like those other family girls. She may be aging, but she was going to make sure everyone remembered she was the youngest of the sisters.
When she was a kid, they called cute girls “mangos.” She was still juicy. Who wouldn’t love fresh mango on their tongue?